Labor’s decline over the past half century has devastated working-class communities, undermined democracy, and deepened the grip of big business over our work lives, our political system, and our planet,” Eric Blanc writes in his new book, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. “To turn this around, we need tens of millions more people forming, joining, and transforming unions”; however, to achieve that level of growth, “a new unionization model is necessary because the only way to build power at scale is by relying less on paid full-timers and more on workers.” In this episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore in Baltimore on March 27, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Blanc about his book and how worker-to-worker organizing campaigns at companies like Starbucks and Amazon are breathing life back into the labor movement.

Eric Blanc is Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University, an organizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics, and director of the Worker to Worker Collaborative.

Additional links/info:

• Eric Blanc website, Facebook page, and X page
• Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) website
• Red Emma’s website, Facebook page, X page, and Instagram
• Eric Blanc, University of California Press, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big
• Eric Blanc, Jacobin, “Bet on Worker-to-Worker Organizing”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “Want to unionize your workplace? These worker-organizers have some advice”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, thank you so much, Analysis. Thank you as always to the great Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore cafe gathering space. Please, please, please support Red Emma’s however you can. We need spaces like this and many more now more than ever. And thank you all for coming out tonight. It’s a real shot to the heart to see your faces in these dark times. And we are here to talk about fighting the bosses, fighting the oligarchs, building worker power, and taking our world back. Does that sound all right to you guys? Oh, come on. I said who wants to talk about building worker power? Hell yeah. And we are here to jump into that discussion with a really, really vital new book by brother Eric Blanc. It is called We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, which you can buy right over there.

Our goal here is not to try to condense this book into a 30 minute talk. Our goal is to try to get you to read it, to think about it, to let Eric know what you think about it, use what’s usable in it, build on it. Alright, so Eric, I’m going to shut up and I want to toss things to you. There’s so much that I could ask you about here, but I wanted to start, since both of our books grew out of Covid—and the book that I’ve got over there, that Analysis mentioned, was interviews with 10 workers during the first year of Covid. And you have a really, I think, touching part in this book where you talk about the first call that you took as a member of what would become EWOC (Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee). And you talk about Enrique. I wanted to first ask if you could just tell us a little bit about that call, and you have a line here where you said, “without the resistance of workers like Enrique,” and I’ll let you tell what that resistance was, “many thousands more people would likely have died across the US.” I wanted to ask if you could take us to that moment: what was happening with Enrique, your involvement with it, and how this book grew out of it, but also, in that telling, can you say a little bit about how the story of Covid—when we’re not talking about government policy and total death tolls… What does that story look like when we look at it from the ground, through the stories of working people like the ones you spoke to in the book?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, thanks. That’s a great question and thanks to all you for being here. Thanks Maximillian for discussing, thanks to Red Emma’s. And yeah, going back, it’s interesting going back to that moment of crisis, I felt like the last few months I’ve had this visceral sense of almost deja vu of this very intense crisis. And trying to think what that looked like in early 2020, I had been labor organizer for the Bernie campaign. And what ended up happening is once Covid hit, we started getting inundated with workers reaching out from all over the country just saying, my boss is making me go in. Nobody has masks. My coworkers are being forced to come in because, so just give a concrete example. So Enrique is a meat packing worker in Pennsylvania and reached out because he knew that his coworker had covid had to keep on coming in because at that factory, if they had missed more than three days total, they would just get the boot.

There was no job protection. And so there was just a level of fear for people’s lives. That was a crisis for all of them. There’s hundreds of workers at this meat packing plant. And so they reached out to the Bernie campaign. And because I spoke Spanish, I ended up talking to Enrique and helping him for weeks and eventually months and trying to build a fight back campaign. And they ended up doing some really brave actions, including not showing up to work. They wrote an open letter and got over WhatsApp chat and got a huge number of their workers not to show up until basic safety demands were met. They won many of those through this struggle. So yeah, exactly that courage, that heroism because it was terrifying for them. A lot of were undocumented and they had no idea what was going to happen to them.

And so I just think about so many stories. You got no press, nobody ever heard about it. And we don’t even know the numbers of workers that did that basic level of collective action and militancy all over the country and frankly just saved so many people’s lives. And it’s exactly what you said. And it seems to me, again, just to bring it back to this moment, that there is a similar thing going on right now where people, the labor movement, we talk about it in general, but it does ultimately come down to these initial acts, the first people who are willing to speak out when other people aren’t. And it’s risky and it’s something I think is worth celebrating though in the hindsight when things seem impossible and things seem like everything is against us, you can see that those actions did make a real difference.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I know that obviously this story goes back before Covid and your first book, and you talk about this in your current book, you talk about the sort of lineage going to the red bread teacher strikes. You can trace that lineage even further back with the sort of revitalization of the Chicago Teachers Union. It depends on where you want to start the clock. But sticking with Covid for a moment, I wanted to ask if you could just condense a little bit, I don’t think we fully reckoned as a society with how much Covid fucked our brains and our society. Pardon my friends. But there are parts of that story that can get lost easily if we’re not looking at the shop floor struggles that emerged in response to it. So I wanted to ask first, since you talked about some of the major struggles that working people were facing in the midst of a deadly pandemic, so what was the organizing response to that that sort of led to this book in this argument that you make in it? And how was that sort of changing what had been the dominant trends in organized labor up until Covid?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, it’s a good question. And you’re right that the thrust of worker to worker organizing in some ways predates the pandemic. I would really would say this sort of wide scale worker led organizing. The first really big instance of it in recent memory we have was the 2018 teacher strikes that were initiated over these viral Facebook groups. And a lot of the dynamics we’ve seen in recent years were presaged there. But the pandemic sort of supercharged this all over the country because it showed overnight that the bosses didn’t care whether you died. And the organizing and the questions that led to this book, frankly as you mentioned, came out of that the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee emerged literally as a Google form that we had to set up because we were getting so many workers reaching out like Enrique who were just saying, give us any help.

Well, how can we fight back? And so we set up a Google form and connected these workers reaching out with volunteer organizers, a lot of people coming out of Bernie World, out of Democratic Socialists of America, out of United Electrical Left Union. And we were able to start building a really interesting project to help workers start. And the book in many ways comes out of this direct organizing experience. We’re just trying to figure out, well, how do you organize and help support large numbers of workers when you have very few staff? We were just volunteers, right? We didn’t have any staff at first. And then the question becomes, well, what kind of organizing matters are possible when you’re giving workers the tools to start self-organizing in a way that doesn’t require the traditional model where you have a full-time staff organizer, very intensely coaching every worker because that actually can be very effective, but we just didn’t have the staff to do it.

And I think we’ve seen that similar dynamic with a lot of the other early covid sparks. So Starbucks would be a classic example. Late 2021, they win one union election in Buffalo, New York to their great surprise, because this wasn’t a plan to organize Starbucks nationally. They had no plan on doing that. They were just trying to organize very modestly upstate New York, see if you could get some Starbucks, get other coffee shops at upstate New York. Well, to their great surprise, hundreds and then thousands of workers start reaching out nationally and saying, we want to do what you did. And if they had tried to do a staff intensive model, they just literally wouldn’t have had the ability to talk to so many workers. There weren’t enough staff, they had a couple staff barely. And so they had to have workers jump on Zoom to talk to all of their coworkers nationally. So you do get a sense then of the question of scale. How do you get enough workers? Organizing is not possible. These moments of crisis of urg through a very staff intensive way.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s unpack that just a little bit more, right? You have a great line, many great lines, and I think one of the real strengths of this book is your ability to articulate very clearly. I mean these three points of analysis that help us, I think move past what have been very slow moving debates. And you succinctly put that Labor’s powerful approaches haven’t been scalable and labor’s scalable approaches haven’t been very powerful. So I wanted ask if you could unpack that statement a little more and then give us some sort of more of the concrete details about what a worker to worker organizing camp, what makes it different from say a staff model. I mean, you give the example of Bessemer, Alabama that was workers at Amazon leading a campaign, but with the help of an established union didn’t win. Then Amazon workers in Staten Island do a more work of the worker model and they win. So maybe we could use that as sort of the concrete example to show people what we’re talking about.

Eric Blanc:

Sure. So yeah, the argument is that both for labor and frankly for social movements more generally, I try to say that we’re in this impasse where the most powerful methods we have are too small scale. And so you have real, very strong unions that have been able to win very important gains for their members across the country. And so I actually don’t try to diminish the importance of staff or the importance of this model. The problem is that there hasn’t been a way to generalize that for reasons essentially of costs too expensive and takes too much time through staff intensive ways to organize tens of millions of workers that way. It’s true frankly for community organizing as well. You have a lot of really smart, deep base building organizations that haven’t had the mechanisms to build that power widely. On the other hand, you’ve had had then as a response to that scale issue attempts to go really big.

So you have things like our Walmart or Fight for 15, which in the labor world did make, they made some differences. They were able to get wage increases for a large number of workers, but they weren’t trying to do the traditional power building of deep organizing in which the ideas, the union is built from the workers from below by talking to your coworkers, building solidarity, having an organized committee. These basic building blocks of worker organizing were sort of dropped because the assumption is you couldn’t do that on a nationwide level. And so what you see in the recent period is the merging of this national scalable meeting, the moment using digital tools type ethos and structure, but combining that with really classic structures and tactics of deep labor organizing. And that’s really exciting. And I think the example I would give is maybe not Bessemer and Amazon because a little messy, all these are a little bit messy.

But just to give one other example of a worker to worker drive that I think is really, really sort of emblematic beyond Starbucks is the news. So not everybody follows the news guild, but this is one of the main unions that organizes in media and there’s been massive wins against really evil hedge funds that have taken over media companies. And the News Guild over the last five years has organized hundreds of newspapers in very intense battles. These are not easy fights by any means. You have people who’ve been striking for over a year in some cases currently as we speak. And they won through a thing called the Member Organizing program in which their ethos is every worker leader should be trained to do anything a staff person normally does. And so this is in some ways the thesis of the book is that it turns out worker leaders can do many of these things that traditionally we assume that only full-time staff could do.

So that’s concretely initiating campaigns. Crucially, it’s coaching other workers. Normally it’ll be a staff person has to coach another worker and how to build power. We hear workers are coaching other workers and there’s some staff in the background, staff and resources play a big role, but really it’s workers talking to other workers and then strategizing who’s making the big decisions over the campaign. Well, staff can be in there, but are workers going to have a decisive say? And that turns out it makes a big difference for workers’ ownership over their drives for their ability to not get burnt out. They feel it truly, the union is us. We are the union unions always say this. This is a classic thing that unions say. The question is actually how do you do it and how do you make it feel real and how do you make it be real? And I think that the recent worker to worker drives have put the meat on that in a way that traditional organizing hasn’t to the same extent.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that creates sort of opportunities for success that maybe we didn’t anticipate ourselves three years ago. I think a lot of what’s happened in that time has been surprising even to folks in the neighborhood world or I know so, but you are also very careful in this book to sort of make it clear. Don’t hear what I’m not saying. Don’t take away the wrong lesson here that union staffers are evil, bad, stupid people. Just flip the ways that we’re looking at this, understanding it. And in that vein, I wanted to sort of ask about the particular challenges that come with a worker to worker organizing model, what that lack of institutional support along with a labor law that’s stacked so heavily in favor of the bosses and anemic NLRB that now is I’m dysfunctional at the current moment. So what are some of the real drawbacks to a work of the worker model or what have we learned from the past couple of years about those?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, it’s a really good question. And I would say that the first thing is there’s really different varieties of worker, worker unions going as much to completely independent unions like in the Amazon JFK eight where they had no institutional backing or very little to worker to worker drives like Starbucks or the News Guild in which you have really driving things and having this worker to worker approach but with serious resources. And I think that one of the lessons of the book and the research and recent experience is that if you’re going up against the biggest companies, you do need actually this sweet spot of combined resources with the worker leadership that it’s very hard to win and to sustain your organizing without some level of institutional backend for basic reasons that you can imagine organizing is so hard. It’s so labor intensive that it’s easy to get burnt out.

It frankly is easy to get burnt out. And so I would say that this is both the power of the new model is that it depends on workers’ leadership, but then people have jobs, people have families. And so you have to have a realistic assessment of how far you can ask people to go. And it turns out they can go very far, but there’s still limits. There’s still limits to what you can do without any staff and union backing. So I think that’s one big lesson. And then I would say that one of the things we’re seeing right now is it’s a very open question about what new organizing in the private sector looks like under Trump. And I’m actually very optimistic about that labor can keep up its momentum. It might be through fighting defensive battles, you can win and defeat Musk and Trump.

That would be a historic victory, whether that will mean we’re going to get tens of millions of new workers in unions under the next four years. Those are separate questions. So I do think that we need to be sober about the ability to organize tens of millions of workers, doesn’t just depend on having the right models. There has to be some combination of right strategy, good organizing, and frankly favorable conditions, whether it’s in the political sphere or things like the covid crisis that can galvanize people. And so it’s not just a question of putting out the right ideas and then inevitably you’ll win. You have to have the meeting of the various conditions, and that’s not always clear how far you can go at a given moment. It’s an open question. Right now

Maximillian Alvarez:

We got about, let’s say 10 more minutes and then we want to open it up to q and a, but I thought it was really eyeopening for me and helpful for me to read in this book how you’re showing how this applies beyond later, and these are lessons that can be learned and implemented and built on in other social movements. I wanted to ask if you could unpack that a little more. What does Worker to worker organizing teach us about how we can improve on our existing social movements and build the ones that we don’t have, but also you give Sunrise movement as also another example of a different kind of model that doesn’t have the worker to worker ethos and actually suffered from that. So I was wondering if you could touch on that as well.

Eric Blanc:

Yeah. This goes to the earlier question of wide but shallow or a small, but deep, right? You have this impasse. The really big things aren’t powerful enough. And we’ve seen that in social movements in part because the big national campaigns we’ve had are still for the most part, imbued with kind of a nonprofit top down type structure in which you’re not building membership organizations. There’s not really a truly democratic structure to which people can sustain themselves. And it doesn’t mean that these aren’t effective. In some ways, the Bernie campaign was tremendously effective, but then Bernie closed up shop and the organizing went home. And similar with the Sunrise and some of these other distributed campaigns, it’s not to say what they did was unimportant, but if you’re not building membership democratic organizations in the process of these national campaigns, you’re really limiting your ability to build sustained power because people don’t keep on dedicating themselves.

They don’t keep on showing up unless they feel real ownership and have real ownership over the organizing. And so just to give a concrete example, as we speak, as we speak, you might be aware that there’s an authoritarian coup in our country and they’re trying to destroy all public services and they are rounding up people off the street. Did you see this at Tufts yesterday just for speaking out on Palestine? So it’s a pretty intense moment we’re in, and it’s worth thinking through. Well concretely, what does this mean for that? Because frankly, if we’re not talking about this moment, then I am not sure why we’re here. So I just want to be really specific about naming that. And to me, one of the limitations we’ve seen right now is that there’s so many people who are angry about what’s going on but don’t know how to get plugged in.

There’s not a clear onboarding mechanism to get literally the millions of people right now who are up in arms against what’s happening with social security or around democracy or free speech, any of these things. You need to have a mechanism to train up hundreds of thousands of new organizers. So to be really concrete, for instance, I love Bernie and AOCs rallies, they’ve been amazing. They show that people want to fight back. But the thing that was missing there, and this goes to your question, is a direct ask of people to get involved and organized. And that’s different than just showing up for another action. You basically need to give all the people who went to that rally to know that they need to get their coworkers and their friends and their family members to go to the next action. In other words, they need to become an organizer.

And you need to have a structure for those organizers to keep on organizing. That is the missing thing we have. We just tell people to go from one action to another, and then people go home and they don’t know how to develop themselves, and we’re not building sustained power. So one of the things that I’m working on now, there’s other people in this room who are even more involved, is the Federal Unionist Network, which is building this type of bottom up worker to Warrior Shout out to fund, which is building this kind of worker to worker network and the federal unionist to overcome these divisions and to really train up workers to fight back in conjunction with the community. And so that I think is a type of model that hopefully we can see replicated more widely. And one shout out is if you want to get involved, you should go to save public services.com. And I’m getting into it. And in Baltimore specifically, there’s a signup sheet there that everyone should sign up for it because the organizing starts now, if you’re not already involved, now is the moment. So please sign up. There’s an upcoming action that will get announced in the q and a.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, you anticipated me, brother. That was going to be my last question. But I’m really, you’re absolutely right. If we’re not talking about what we can do right now to stop what’s happening and what alternative future we’re fighting for that we’re not having the right conversation, we’re not in the game, and we need to get our heads in the game yesterday. And with the final sort of minutes that we’ve got, before we open up the q and a, I wanted to kind of hook that urgency to the other urgent question you’re addressing here, which is before the technical fascist takeover really got supercharged in this new administration, we were already facing the crisis that produced this monstrous administration and our monster politics, which is decades of neoliberal rot, corporate consolidation, mass inequality, climate destroying economics and politics, collapse in popular faith in the institutions of government to represent the people.

I could go on and on and on. And with that, a corresponding and even causative decline in organized labor power. So the less unions we have, the less organized workers are, the more the bosses win and the more the bosses start taking over society and making it such. And we’ve ended up here. So the urgency in your book, which you couldn’t fully anticipate the urgency that we’re feeling right this second, was like we are in a society destroying crisis that needs to be fixed by workers getting organized and in the millions, the tens of millions. And this is the model that can actually help us scale to that number. So I wanted to ask if you could drive home that point, why do we need to organize so many workers? Why does this model help us, and what does an organized working class mean for saving democracy and society?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, that’s a great question slash maybe you also gave the answer in the question, but it’s the question. And I would say that the graph that is the graph to understand this is the relationship between income inequality and union density. The income inequality goes up when union density goes down. And that’s one reflection of the basic question of power. Do working people have power? Do corporations have power? And what is the relationship between these two? How much power do workers have? And we frankly had our power decline, decline and decline for decade. And that is why we’re in the crisis we’re in across the board. It’s why Trump was able to get elected. It’s why we’re in climate catastrophes, why we don’t have the power yet to stop the genocide and Gaza and Palestine. And so the urgency of this is no matter what question you feel most strongly about, no matter what issue it is, that is deeply rooted in the power imbalance between working people and the bosses.

And our best way to turn that around is through organizing ourselves as working people by the millions. And so that is a scale question. It’s a question of how you get to power that can actually defeat the fascists and the millionaires. And I think that one of the things I didn’t fully even anticipate in the book, and we was just talking about this earlier over dinner, is the extent to which this model turns out to be extremely important, even for the defensive battles. So if you just think about what is going to stop, what is it going to take to stop Musk in Trump’s coup, essentially, right? Well, it turns out there’s not enough staff in the labor movement to organize tens of millions of federal workers, right? If you’re going to organize tens of millions of workers generally, and millions of workers to fight back, the only mechanism to do that is workers start organizing each other.

Obviously you need to support the unions. We need the labor movement to be doing a lot more. So again, this isn’t to say we don’t need the unions, we need ’em doing a lot more. But I think the model to how we win in this moment, it’s going to look a lot more like the 2018 teacher strikes where when the workers lead from below, then the leaders in quotes of the official unions will follow if we do our organizing and we have to get to that kind of scale. And I’m personally optimistic. I was saying just before I’m actually, this is the least depressed I’ve been for a couple months because A, I’ve just been too busy organizing to doom scroll. But then there is actually, I think something about the moment we’re in where Musk and Trump are overreaching, what they’re doing is extremely unpopular.

It’s not a popular thing. It turns out to destroy people’s social security to take away their Medicaid. These, they’re playing with fire, they’re frankly playing with fire, and it’s up to us to make them pay and not just pay in the short term. They make it so that this movement that they have goes away for good. And I think that we can do that, but it’s going to require, at this moment, a leap of faith for everybody out there to go all in on organizing. Because the major obstacle we still have at this moment is so many people feel a sense of resignation and a sense of despair. That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think nothing can be done, if you think Trump is all powerful, then you don’t go out and you don’t spend all your time organizing. And so you just have to, I think, believe that it’s possible. It is go all in and then history will would be made. And I think actually we in a very good position to defeat these bastards, but it’s going to take a lot of organizing and I hope that we do it all together.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Give it up, give it up for Eric.

While state officials and legislators have positioned Texas to be “the bitcoin mining capital of the world,” in small towns like Granbury, working-class residents living next to giant, loud, environmentally destructive data centers are the ones paying the price for Texas’s crypto boom. “None of us are sleeping,” Cheryl Shadden, a Granbury resident who lives across the street from a 300-megawatt bitcoin mining data center owned by Marathon Digital, tells TRNN. “We can’t get rid of this alien invasion in our homes…This is like being a prisoner of war. It’s like being tortured with loud sounds and bright lights and being sleep deprived.”

In this episode of Working People, we dive deeper into the reality of living next to crypto mining data centers like the one in Granbury, the unseen threats they pose to human and nonhuman life, and what residents in Granbury are doing to fight back. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with: Cheryl Shadden, a registered nurse anesthetist and resident of Granbury, who lives right next to the site of the Marathon bitcoin mining operation; Dr. Shannon Wolf, Precinct Chair in Hood County, who lives about 3 miles from the bitcoin mine; and Nannette Samuelson, County Commissioner for Precinct 2 in Hood County.

Additional links/info:

• Protect Hood County website
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “A bitcoin mine in Texas is “killing us slowly,” local residents say”
• Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “‘We’re living in a nightmare:’ Inside the health crisis of a Texas bitcoin town”
• Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “Noisy neighbor: Bitcoin’s hidden health cost” (Video Report)
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “TRNN wins 2025 Izzy Award for coverage of East Palestine, OH, trainwreck & chemical disaster”
• Keaton Peters, Inside Climate News, “Texas leaders worry that bitcoin mines threaten to crash the state power grid”
• NBC News, “Inside the Texas bitcoin mine reportedly making residents sick”
• James Pollard, The Texas Tribune, “Texas Republicans want to make the state the center of the cryptocurrency universe”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are diving back into a new sacrifice zone investigation that we began two weeks ago, and we’re returning to the small rural town of Granbury, Texas, which is about an hour southwest of Fort Worth. In the first episode that we did on this, I spoke with Danny Lakey, Karen Pearson, and Karen’s parents, Nick and Virginia Browning, four residents of Granbury who all lived near the site of a giant 300 megawatt Bitcoin mining operation.

I mean, Danny, Nick, and Virginia literally live right across the street from that thing. And the Bitcoin mine itself, which is owned by Marathon Digital, a Florida based cryptocurrency company uses a mix of liquid immersion and industrial fans to prevent the over 20,000 computers there from overheating on a daily basis. And many residents say that it’s the constant sound from those fans that has made life increasingly unbearable in their town, that they are developing negative health effects like hypertension, heart palpitations, tinnitus, migraines and more. And they say that their concerns are going ignored by the company and government officials. And speaking of government officials, let’s not forget that Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz said in 2021, I would like to see Texas become the center of the universe for Bitcoin and crypto and quote, and it was Republican governor Greg Abbott who said in 2024 that Texas wears the crown as the Bitcoin mining capital of the world.

But in small towns like Granbury residents are the ones paying the price for Texas’s crypto boom. In today’s episode, we dive deeper into the reality of living next door to crypto mining data centers like the one in Granbury, Texas, and the unseen but not unheard threats that they pose to human and non-human life and what residents in Granbury are doing to fight back. I was extremely grateful to get a chance to sit down and talk with Cheryl Shadden, a registered nurse anesthetist and resident of Granbury who lives right next to the site of the Marathon Bitcoin Mining operation, Dr. Shannon Wolf, precinct chair in Hood County, who lives about three miles from the Bitcoin mine and Nannette Samuelson County Commissioner for Precinct two in Hood County. Here’s our conversation recorded on April 27th, 2025.

Well, Cheryl, Dr. Wolf, Nannette, thank you all so much for joining us today. And as I told your neighbors in our last episode, it’s really great to connect with you, but I really truly wish we were connecting under les horrifying circumstances, but I’m really grateful to y’all for joining us today to help us and our listeners understand this situation on a deeper level and to show how it’s not even just the marathon Bitcoin mine that we’re talking about here. So we’ve got a lot to dig into here. And Cheryl, I wanted to start by asking if we could first get just a little introduction to you. You live right across the street from this Bitcoin mine, like the folks we talked to in the last episode. So could you tell us just a little more about yourself, where you live, what you do, and how your life has changed since this Bitcoin mining operation moved in right next door to you?

Cheryl Shadden:

Absolutely. Thank you, max. We really appreciate this opportunity. My name is Cheryl Shadden. I’m a certified registered nurse anesthetist. So I work in healthcare when I’ve been here for over 30 years. My home was here long before crypto. Mine came in long before the power plants that they’re plugged into came in. So I’m living out here in the country with my horses and my dogs, and I just want a peaceful life. I want to be able to do my job, take care of patients, have my horses, ride them around and have a peaceful country life. In the fall of 23, I hear all of this noise. This isn’t just a little bit of the power plant noise. This is standing on the edge of Niagara Falls. This is sleeping with a vacuum cleaner. This is laying on a flight deck where jets are taking off, but the jets don’t take off.

They stay there and they keep running. And so when we first started hearing this noise, we thought, well, they’re just building onto the power plant here. That’s what all of this humming is. And it was just a slight hum in the background. And then the hum got worse and worse and worse. It felt like an airline invasion. None of us in this area knew what a crypto mine is. Nobody knew what a data center was. Nobody had any idea. And then as the initial owners sold out to somebody else and then sold out to somebody else, the noise got worse and worse and worse. Finally, by the fall of 23, we didn’t know what this was. Now the sound is invading our homes. It’s inside of my house with ceiling fans on and TVs on. You can’t think you’re motion’s sick, nauseated, you’re dizzy. You have a hard time getting out of bed.

You feel like you’ve got a concussion. And so then we realized that this is a crypto mine. Well, we didn’t know what that was, so we started looking it up and the process of all of that, I had family come to visit and they asked me their mom, what is this? And I said, well, it’s a crypto mine. They’re like, why are you living like this? What’s going on? How can you live this way? And I thought, well, how can my family come and see me from out of state and be appalled? Why am I not more appalled? Why am I not doing anything about this? So I started calling my commissioner and I talked to my constable and I said, what can I do? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what this is. What do we do? And so my constable said, you’re going to have to get community involvement.

If you want anybody to be aware of this, you’re going to have to get the community involved. I thought, well, I have no idea how to do that. So I started reaching out on social media and I was telling everybody what’s going on and posting videos and asking if everybody was sick or if anybody was ill. Next thing you know, neighbor, after neighbor, after neighbor in our county and the county south of it is telling me the same things that are going on with me and some are sicker and some are less sick and children are sick. And I thought, oh my God, it’s not just me. It’s so many people in this area. So I started reaching out and collecting health information on everybody. And when this happened in the fall, commissioner Samuelson said Yes, she’d already started getting complaints about all of this.

She was planning on having a town hall in January. And so I thought, well, I dunno how many people in this area are on social media. So I started driving house to house, house to house and knocking on doors and telling people, this is what’s going on. We have to do something. We’re having a town hall. Please come. I’m Cheryl. I’m standing up. I’m here. We have to do something. Oh my God. And so then Commissioner Samuelson had a town hall. It was well attended. There was standing room only and story after story of community member after community member after community member of the horrific things that they’re having to live with on a daily basis. Wildlife that’s gone, dogs that are having seizures, people that can’t sleep. One person said he lives near Shannon and the noise was so bad in his driveway at night, he said it would drop him to his knees.

None of us are sleeping. We have sleep disturbances. We can’t get rid of this alien invasion in our homes. We didn’t know what to do about it. And so it was a pretty heated town hall meeting. We had media there and we started reaching and from connection to connection to connection, I got in touch with Texas Coalition Against Crypto Mining and they got me in touch with Andrew Chow with Time Magazine. He did the first article we had here and got us some national interest and people are shocked that we’re living this way. And then with all of the media coming out and doing videos and interviews, it was horrific what we’re living through. This is like being a prisoner of war. It’s like being tortured with loud sounds and bright lights and being sleep deprived until you crack and you talk. It feels like being a prisoner of war, but I get the feeling that prisoners of war are treated better than we are here. This is not Okay.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and Commissioner Samuelson, I’d love to bring you in here and ask like what the hell this was all looking like from your side, both as a resident and elected official. Could you help our audience understand a bit more where this crypto came from and I guess what the regulation situation is over there that has allowed such loud operation to operate so close to residents homes?

Nannette Samuelson:

Right. Thank you again for getting us all together. And again, I’m Nannette Samuelson. I’m the commissioner for Precinct two, which includes the unincorporated area that Shannon, Dr. Wolf and Cheryl and all the people that you’ve mentioned live in as well as the cryptocurrency data center. So I took office in January of 23 and almost immediately started getting phone calls about what is this noise I’m hearing out here? And I asked the person, well, tell me more about it. Do you have a decibel meter? What are the decibels? And so we just started collecting information. I started researching what the noise regulations were in the state of Texas and what we could do about it. And so the state of Texas does not give counties very much regulatory authority at all. If you live in a city, you can have a noise ordinance, you can have zoning for residential or commercial.

But in unincorporated parts of the counties in Texas, you have very little, we don’t regulate zoning. We don’t regulate noise. So all we have is to rely on is what the state calls a noise nuisance, which is 85 decibels or higher. That is industrial level noise. That’s not something that someone should be subjected to 24 hours a day, seven days a week without hearing protection. And that’s what I tell people that ask about this. I said, it’s like putting a leaf blower next to your bed and never turning it off and trying to live with that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, people go, if you go to NASCAR or something loud, you wear hearing protection and you know that in a little while you’re going to leave and go home to peace and quiet. These people cannot do that. They are subjected to this 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

So I started looking into it. So back to the history, and Constable Shirley and I, he bought a what I’d call an industrial grade decibel meter because there are decibel meters that you can download on your phone with an app, but those aren’t necessarily that scientific. So we bought an industrial grade commercial decibel meter and started taking readings all over this area all the way six miles away to right across the street right next door, Cheryl’s house, the neighborhood that’s right next door. And we contacted the owners at that time was generate capital, and then it was operated by us Bitcoin, so we started contacting them. So maybe I should back up and talk to you about how it started. You asked me that. That was before I took office, but let me go back to that. So as I mentioned, the county does have platting authority, but unless something is infringing on us, I’m sorry, a TDOT road, not us, but a TDOT road or it’s in a floodplain, there’s really not anything that the county can do to deny it as long as they have proper sewage and water.

So if you’re going to build a housing addition, you have to provide sewage and water, but this isn’t a housing. So as long as they have enough water for the two or three workers that are there and sewage for the two or three workers that are there, and it’s not in a floodplain, there was nothing that the county could do to deny it from being built. That’s how it got there. But when it came it, I was sitting in court, not a member of the court, but I was there as an audience member. And when they brought that to court, it was just Compute North, which is out of North Dakota where the original owners, and it was just called a data center and it was just going to have nine containers. And then they brought back the second development and it had more containers, but it was still called a data center.

The commissioners at the time didn’t really know what a data center was or cryptocurrency. What they said was they were going to harvest unused power to power a data center is what they were telling the court. So when I got there, it had already been well on the way actually Compute North went bankrupt in 2022, I believe, early 2022, and then generate capital, bought it out of bankruptcy, hired us Bitcoin to operate it and complete the development of it. And they went live in either late 2022 or early 2023, but it wasn’t totally built out. But that’s when I started getting the complaints. So we started working with US Bitcoin and they were actually very wanting to be good neighbors. They met with us. They came down here several times. Constable Shirley and I drove them around with our decibel meter and said, look how we’re six miles away and look at the readings that we’re getting.

And they were very open to whatever it is that we have to do to be good neighbors, we want to do it. They did build a wall, but as Cheryl knows, that wall ended up, it wasn’t a wall all the way around. It was a partial wall on the southeast side of the building of the plant right next to the neighborhood there. But all it did was cause the sound to ricochet off that wall and head straight to Cheryl’s house, and it just really amplified it. So I called, this is still US Bitcoin. I emailed or called him back and I said, did you get a performance bond on that or a performance requirement on that wall? Because if whatever they told you it was going to do to the sound, it’s not working, you need to get your money back because I’m getting more complaints now than I did before you built the wall.

And so they actually came back out, we drove around again, and then they said, okay, we’re committed to getting a new sound study. We’re going to do whatever it is we need to do. About two weeks later, he emailed me back and said, well, this was December of 23. We just found out we’re being put up for sale. So I really can’t do anything until I know who the new owners are. So it kind of just drug out until January. The sale closed, really kind of coincidentally, right before I had that town hall. So the new owners marathon, a couple of the people from Marathon actually came to our town hall and listened to heart wrenching Heart, heart-wrenching stories from all of these residents about what it’s like to live with this noise and the illness that they’re going. I don’t know if anyone’s brought up from the previous discussions that you had, but the doctor out of Portugal, Dr. Marina Alvez. Have you heard that name yet?

I have not. Okay. She is an expert in infrasound, which is sound waves that your ear can’t hear, but your body can. Your body is absorbing these sound waves, but your ear cannot detect them. So when you think about the 85 decibels, the 85 decibels is what your ear can hear. It’s not taking any measurement about what your body is absorbing that your ear can’t hear. So we started listening to getting more information from her studies and marathon after that town hall pretty much. That’s really the last conversations that I’ve had with them. They pretty much went radio silent. They did hire PR person. They said, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to first hire a PR person, then we’re going to put all these containers in dielectric fluid, which should decrease the noise and two or three other things. Well, they hired the PR person and that person has never called me, has never emailed me, has never even tried to get in touch with me, and they had an open house last Good Friday.

So that’s another story is they decided to have a town hall in April and they last year they announced it on Wednesday on social media for Friday, which was Good Friday, which didn’t give people very much notice. Plus it’s on Good Friday. So we all went because we were not going to miss an opportunity to speak to the marathon people. And I met the PR person and I asked her, I said, I’m the commissioner for precinct too. I’m kind of surprised that you haven’t tried to call me or contact me. And she said, well, no one told me I was supposed to, and she still hasn’t since then. My phone number’s on the county website, I don’t remember for sure, but I’m sure I gave her my card. I always do when I introduce myself, but still nothing. But so that’s been kind of the history of what’s happened.

And we tried. So one of the things that we did, because the counties don’t have regulatory authority, we started working with our two legislators, our Senator Birdwell and Shelby Slawson about getting something changed in the Texas law that would allow us more ability to put sound, noise, regulation, noise wouldn’t be called an ordinance because that’s what cities do. Counties don’t have ordinances in Texas. But some ability to allow our constable or our sheriff’s department to do something to monitor this noise level for the people that live there. Even if it was like at airports where it’s after eight o’clock at night and before eight o’clock morning, which doesn’t help Cheryl that much. She gets up at like three in the morning. But something that we could do, and we started last summer, we drafted a resolution at Commissioner’s Court, passed five zero. I took it down to a hearing last summer about the grid because the other thing that these cryptocurrency, as you probably know, the cryptocurrency data centers are a huge draw on the grid.

And so that was what the hearing was about. But I used that opportunity to say, in addition to the draw on the grid, this is what it’s doing to people’s lives. And I talked about the illnesses, but I said, which I don’t know if anybody’s mentioned yet, but I said, the people that live around here, their property is not just worth less. It’s worthless. They cannot sell their property even if they wanted to because nobody wants to live next to this constant noise. So we started working with our legislatures. I was on the phone with other senators, Senator Cole Kirst, who’s on the Health and Human Services Committee, Senator May Middleton, again, Brian Birdwell, they are just now here. We are almost at the end of the legislative session and nothing has been changed. So all of our efforts to work with the senator and the legislature and our representative, I don’t think that any bill is going to see the light of day that’s going to give us any more ability to help the people that live here live around this cryptocurrency data center. I don’t have a good feeling for it at all.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Well, I want to pick up on the Good Friday meeting. As Nanette said, we were all there and the first thing that happened was they demanded that we all sign in, give our email addresses and our phone number. So they were gathering information from all of us, and I refused to sign. And I was telling people, you don’t have to do that. And the marathon folks were saying, oh, yes you do. And I just walked in without signing. And a couple of other people did. But the other thing they did was they had plants that were standing in line as people were kind of waiting for others to sign in to get into the town hall. So they had planted attorneys and other that were officials at Marathon were all in line without telling us that that’s who they were. I just happened to recognize an attorney that I knew represented Marathon in line, and then they demanded that we sit at tables where one of their representatives was at.

And so they were wanting to gain information without telling us that they were trying to gain information from us. They wanted to know what the symptoms were. They wanted us to tell them what exactly our grievances were, but not for the purpose of helping us. It was for the purpose of just gaining information, probably to try to lessen the impact of the community’s outcry. That’s my belief from that town hall. They have done nothing. They presented information that could have been pulled, and actually I think it was pulled right off the internet. It was nothing that was thought out, but they made all these promises, this is what we’re doing. We’re in the process of doing this. Fill in the blank, whatever that was. And I don’t think they have done any of that. I might be wrong, Nanette and Cheryl, correct me if I’m wrong on that one, but it did not foster goodwill.

It actually made the majority of us highly suspicious of them. And remember, this is a multi-billion dollar company, and the folks that live out here in this precinct, they are good people, but they are really normal working class kinds of people. So we cannot fight in the court system, these kinds of these problems because they’re drowning us in all kinds of paperwork, all kinds of demands, and they refuse to give information, but they demand it from us. It is just a mess out here. But I have walked with Cheryl and Annette and others that are living out here since what, January of 23? Is that right? Cheryl? January of 24 was when I first became aware of what was going on out there. And I just remember standing outside. My husband and I drove out there and I stood across the street and it gave me an immediate headache.

My head was just pounding. And I had been out there maybe just a few seconds. I stood outside my car. My husband was also feeling it. He said that it was pounding on his chest, he said, and so we ended up leaving and my thought was, surely if somebody knew about this, they would be able to correct it, whoever this somebody was. And as I talked to people, our Constable, Shirley, Nanette, other people, Nanette, and I sat down in a meeting with our representative, Shelby Slauson, and I thought, okay, yes, now, now something’s going to happen. And nothing did, nothing did. And I think for people to understand Texas, Texas is really a live and let live kind of a place. We’re not going to tell somebody else how to live their lives. We just don’t want them to tell us how to live ours.

And so people really like to live in rural areas so that if we want to raise chickens or if we want to ride horses, or if we want to do whatever we want to do, it’s an okay thing as long as we’re not bothering other people. So I understand why people move into the rural areas. It’s a beautiful place out here. I also saw, just skipping a little bit, I also saw an interview, I think it was a B, C news where Marathon said, this is a well-established industrial zone. And that is a lie. That is a lie. This is not an industrial zone. This area out here, we’ve got all kinds of wildlife. We have bald eagles, we have golden eagles, we have endangered species out here. We’ve got horses and cows and farms and orchards and all kinds of stuff. It is a wonderful place to be out here. And as Cheryl said, they moved in on top of us. This is not an industrial zone, but they’re lying to people to justify them being out here. The other thing that I would say that your listeners probably would find interesting, the energy plant that owns the property that Marathon sits on was not running at full capacity when Marathon moved in. Cheryl, correct me if I’m wrong, they were running at two thirds capacity. Is that right?

Cheryl Shadden:

Correct. 66% capacity,

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

66% capacity. And when Marathon moved in, all of a sudden they are running at full capacity. And so Constellation Energy has petitioned our state to build a new energy plant out here. So yet again, they are wanting to buy up ranches and other places in order to build more industry that the community does not want. And quite frankly, it’s making us sicker.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Cheryl Nanette, Dr. Wolf, I wanted to ask about, this is something that high up politicians in Texas have been championing for years. I mean, Ted Cruz said in 2021 that he wanted to see Texas become the center of the universe for Bitcoin and crypto, and Governor Abbott said that wears the crown as the Bitcoin mining capital of the world last year. I wanted to ask y’all, when they were saying stuff like that, were regular working folks around the state, you all, did they give you any sense of what that was going to look like? Did they tell you that this is going to be the reality of making Texas a Bitcoin mining capital of the world, the things that you and your neighbors are going through? Is that something people want? I mean, this isn’t like it’s a manufacturing operation providing jobs. This is a massive data center like creating massive amounts of noise and using massive amounts of water for something that’s harder to grab your hands around than a bigger industrial operation. So I just wanted to ask if you could just say a little bit more from your vantage points about the promise versus the reality of making Texas this crypto capital of the world.

Cheryl Shadden:

For me personally, living this life and living with this barrage of problems here, I feel like I’ve been sold out. So I notice that these crypto mines aren’t next door to probably Ted Cruz’s home or next door to Governor Abbott’s home. And when we started this initial battle and we’re emailing all of the regulatory agencies here in the Texas legislature and state, they’re like, well, nobody could help us. Nobody cared. Nobody wanted to listen. And so when you stop and think about it, technically we’re subsidizing this. Taxpayers are subsidizing this. The infrastructure that it takes to build electric lines to all of these crypto mines that’s subsidized by taxpayers and by you paying your electric bill, all of our electricity out here has gone up.

Now here in the state of Texas, crypto Mars don’t have to rate back when we’re struggling with excessive heat or excessive cold, or when a hurricane comes up through the Gulf of Mexico, they don’t have to regulate back. They don’t have to ramp back. But if they do, they buy their electricity on the cheap bargain, basement, bulk pricing, not what I pay, not what Commissioner Samuelson pays or Shannon or anybody in this area. So they buy their electricity on the cheap. Now if they sell it back to the grid by their own choosing, they don’t have to. This mine here is behind the meter so they can do whatever they want. They sell it back to the grid at inflated prices. And so who takes that in? The fanny is me, taxpayers and people that are paying their electric bills every day, consumers. So we’re actually paying the state of Texas to torture us.

That’s not okay. That’s not remotely, okay, come out here, stay the night at my house, sleep in my house, listen to this noise through shut doors and windows camp out in my backyard. I’d love to have you come stay with me and see what it’s like. It’s not just me, it’s everybody in this area. So you can tell us that this is going to be the crypto mine capital mecca of the United States, but the reality is they don’t care. This is big business in Texas. So that’s all they care about. And reality here, they’re taking a third of the power from this 1200 megawatt power plant, which is Constellation Energy’s Willo two, it’s a gas steam plant constellation doesn’t own the other power plant, which is Willo one, which is a gas turbine plant. So now that they’re drawing all of this power off of Constellation energies, Willo two, now they’re running at 99 6% capacity.

So since this has happened, now we experience valve blows on a regular basis. We had a valve blow that happened last week that went on for three days. And it’s not just extreme noise, honest to God makes you feel like you’ve lost their mind. So everybody in this area has hearing loss. One family had a child that was having seizures. They took a second mortgage and moved out. And so they’re struggling. People here have cardiovascular disease. One of my neighbors, the electrical system in his ventricle shorted out. He had to be resuscitated multiple times. Now he’s in the hospital right now having had a stroke. So it’s not just the noise, it’s the damage to our soft tissues, the damage to our blood vessels. Like Dr. Alvarez says, there’s so much damage here. And Governor Abbott doesn’t care. Ted Cruz doesn’t care. It’s big business in Texas.

Who cares if working class people like me get mowed over? It’s not next to their home. And so the reality is how do we fight that? So we’ve tried everything. We have a lawsuit with Earth Justice right now. That’s an injunctive lawsuit. Some of the people in this area have hired personal attorneys to fight for all of the detriment that’s occurred. My property values have decreased. So going through the checklist, I’ve gone to the Hood County Appraisal District and I’m contesting my property taxes again this year. So my property taxes were dropped 25% and a previous year they were dropped 25%. You’re going, wow, that’s great. Your property taxes have dropped 50%. The reality is that’s drop in the bucket of my property. I have absolutely no value at all. So people say, go ahead and move. You can move. How can I move? I’ve been here for 30 years. My home and my property are paid off. Nobody would buy this property. Nobody.

Nannette Samuelson:

And that just puts an exclamation point on what I told the Senate committee last summer is their property is not just worth less. It’s worthless. So one of the things that the reason that Senate committee had a meeting in summer, so in Texas, the legislature only once every two years. So they went into session in January of 25, and they’re about to be finished unless they call special sessions, they’ll be finished at end of May. But to get prepare for the legislative session, they had hearings last summer. And the hearing that this one was regarding was the grid because the head of the PUC had made a statement last June saying that the demand for electricity in Texas is going to double by 2030 due to data centers and Bitcoin. And so they started having meetings with the legislature to figure out, okay, how do we address this?

So yes, you want all this business to come here, but your infrastructure isn’t able to do that. Hold on, my husband is joining us. So the Texas legislature started trying to figure out how to address the impact to the grid from the Bitcoin and the data centers. One of the things that the legislature needs to do is, and I hope that some legislation will pass this legislative session that will put some type of, it’s called bring your own power kind of thing. But what that’s going to do is require battery energy storage systems to be installed with data centers and cryptocurrency, which those bring their own risks. Battery energy storage systems are at this point in time, lithium ion batteries. And just like with a Tesla or some other electric vehicle, if they start on fire, they cannot be put out with water. They have to just burn out.

And if you have acres and acres and acres of battery energy storage systems with lithium ion batteries, if a fire starts, it’s called a thermal runaway and it just heats up and heats up and while it’s heating up, it’s putting off all kinds of toxins into the air. So one, as Cheryl said, they’re currently drawing from gas powered power plants energy, but the legislature possibly if this bill passes, is going to require crypto and data centers to bring their own power, which means battery energy storage systems, or they can have small gas powered power plants on property. One of the things that is unique, sadly unique about our little precinct is that we have gas pipelines running through our precinct and we have access to the grid very close together. So that is why these projects are coming to our little part of Hood County is because of the gas pipelines and the grid, and so they can get the energy and they can dispatch the energy very quickly. I think that when Governor Abbott and Ted Cruz and all of the legislators that are talking about Texas becoming the crypto and the data center capital of the United States, I don’t think they realize the impact to people’s lives. And if this data center was out surrounded by 500 acres of industrial area or non-residential area, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But that’s not what’s happening. Texas in enjoys businesses. We are a pro business state, but not at the expense of people’s lives or their property. And that’s what is happening in this little community here.

Cheryl Shadden:

So here across the street from where I live, if you think about being on the streets south Baltimore, so Constellation Energy owns this property across the street. They’re the slumlord, the drug dealer on the street corners, marathon Digital. They own all that property there. They’re leasing their property to Marathon Digital, marathon Digital doesn’t own the property that they’re sitting on. So now you have Marathon Digital causing problems with the community, making us sick, dropped our property values, not allowing us to sleep at night. You have Constellation Energy who holds the lease, who is leasing this property. They don’t care that they have a harmful renter on their property. They don’t care. They haven’t done anything to mitigate the noise that it’s there. Now you have Constellation Energy wanting to put in eight turbine gas power plant right in the middle of all of this to cause more problems. So you start looking at all of the air pollution, sulfuric acid, sulfur, hexa, fluoride, ozone, greenhouse gases, and then you have the first power plant here, Wolf Hollow one wanting to extend their air permit and drop some more acid rain on us. So this is a huge problem here. This isn’t just a little bit of a noise problem. This is a huge industrial pollution problem that’s ruining people’s lives here.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

I would also add to this, that regulation usually follows a problem. So regulation’s going to have to catch up with what’s going on out here. Now, as far as Bitcoin goes, I am pro-business as long as they’re not hurting people. I don’t really care if they have a Bitcoin plant, but they’re hurting people. So I’m not angry at Bitcoin itself. It could be any industry that’s doing this, and I would have a problem with ’em, Ted Cruz and Abbott. I’m with Cheryl. I’m frustrated with them, but I also agree with Nanette. I really want to believe that they have no clue the damage that they are encouraging out here. Now, perhaps they are aware, and if that’s the truth of that, then I have lost all respect for them. I do think that they need to hear people because we’re not quiet about this. They have to know that something’s going on out here, and I think that they need to come out here and talk to us.

I think this is a big enough deal that they need to come out here. I want to talk about the valves that are blowing and explain for some of your listeners that may be unaware, and Cheryl, you jump into because you understand this really well. Those valves are a safety mechanism that takes a lot of the pollutants, those really dangerous kinds of things from getting into the air. So when that valve blows, that means that safety measure that is in that particular place is not working. So when a series of valves blow, that means that we are getting contaminants into our air and we’re breathing them. Our animals are breathing them, they’re in the ground. These things are really important to understand. It’s not just the sound, it’s what is being released and we’re breathing it and it’s on our skin. And this is dangerous. I also want to talk about,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Can I ask really quick, is that from the cooling operation that’s at the Bitcoin mine or is this from,

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

This is the plant power plant. Its the power plant. So as Marathon is demanding more and more power, in order for them to do whatever it is that they do, the power plant right next door to it cannot keep up with it. And so it’s blowing their valves, which is the safety mechanism that keeps the pollutants from reaching the air and the people around us. So we are having this more and more and more, and now they want to build Constellation Energy, wants to build another bigger power plant. And we’re talking about an area that, goodness, I don’t even think it’s a mile around this. So we’re going to have three power plants and a Bitcoin mine. And there is talk about moving in another data center within a mile. So I cannot even imagine what this area is going to look like if they are successful.

Nannette Samuelson:

Dr. Wolf, what is the name of the California Battery Energy storage system that

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Was on fire? I looked that up today. And I want to say it was the one out of Monterey, but I don’t remember the actual name of it, but I think it was in Monterey, California, the one that caught on fire back in January of this year. Yes, hit that.

Nannette Samuelson:

Just look up battery energy storage system, fire California. And you’ll be able to see how the toxins that were in the air, the toxins that then were into the soil, the radius of the people that had to evacuate because of that. And that’s one thing, as I was saying, is snowballing into the other. The cryptocurrency is pulling and data centers are pulling so much power from the grid. One of the answers that the Texas legislature may do, or they may, the data centers themselves, may do it on their own. If their business model says this is cheaper or more cost effective is to bring those battery energy storage systems on their own property to how electricity markets work. When the demand goes up, the price goes up, demand goes down, the price goes down. So if I have a business that uses a lot of energy, then one of the things I can do to hedge that is to store my own power in these battery cells.

And then when the demand goes up, when Wolf Hollow can make more money selling their energy to the grid than selling it to me cryptocurrency marathon, I can offset that by storing my own power on my own property. And now I can keep running at full capacity because I’ve stored my own power in batteries. So then we have the add onto that, the risk of the fires with the battery energy storage system. So one of the things we’re looking into as a county is implementing some national fire safety protocols called NFPA 8 85 or 8 55. I’m sorry, I have to look that up to be sure exactly which one it is. But our fire marshal is in the process of working on that because we see this coming next. First, we have the regulation really lack of any regulation to do with noise. And now we have really lack of any regulation to do with fighting the dangers of fires or other situations that are caused by the batteries that are going to start being used to store the energy

Cheryl Shadden:

Well. And then let’s put these battery systems right next to a gas power plant, really make the explosion great,

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Right? Right. Talk about dangerous and then add that we have a volunteer fire department out here, the closest volunteer fire department to the existing best system that’s out here, battery energy storage system that’s already here. The closest fire department is 14 miles away. Their backup is 23 miles away. So imagine putting one of these right next to a gas powered electrical system or energy plant. Imagine what this is going to do to the community. This would be catastrophic. This is inhumane.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is. I mean there’s so many other words that I have for it, but at base it is inhumane, it’s cruel. It is absurd. And the thing that is really just pummeling my heart right now is how often I hear stories like these around the country, and this should be an exception. This should be the kind of thing we write about in history books as a really awful accident that happened one time and we learned our lesson.

Nannette Samuelson:

Like Aaron Brockovich comes, right,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right. Yeah. It should not be the kind of thing that I’m interviewing people about every week from all over the country, from Red Hill in Hawaii to Cancer Alley in Louisiana to South Baltimore, 20 minutes from where I am to East Palestinian, Ohio to Granbury, Texas. This crap is everywhere. And that goes to, I wanted to, we only have a few minutes left here with each other and we’re going to have to do more follows. There’s so much more to talk about here. But I wanted to, in the last 10 minutes that we have here, talk about a few of these larger connecting points. And we’re talking directly to the audience here and to people who may hear this because I hear the same refrain that y’all have heard all the time. People say, why don’t they just move first and foremost, most people can’t do that.

You listening to this, do you have the money to just pick up and move somewhere? What if the house that you live in, you couldn’t sell? Like the people in East Palestine not only have their property values plummeted, they don’t want to sell them because they can’t in good conscience pass off a toxic home to another family. So what are they supposed to do? How could Cheryl pass off her home to someone who’s going to have to live across from this massive power plant and data center? So that’s the kind of situation that folks are in in terms of why don’t people just move? First of all, it’s a real huge burden that most working people can’t take on, but if they have to flee and become refugees from their own hometowns to save their lives, like the people we’ve talked to in Conyers, Georgia who had to flee the Biolab fire in September, that’s what they’re going to have to do.

But also as we’re pointing out here, where are you going to go? Because this stuff is everywhere. And if you’re fleeing one sacrifice zone, you may find yourself living next to a toxic landfill. You may find yourself living underneath the side of a mountaintop removal operation. And so when heavy rains come, you’re going to be getting flooded. Like the folks in Asheville, North Carolina we spoke to during Hurricane Helene. So there’s almost nowhere to escape to because we’ve let this stuff pervade our homes all around this country. But the other thing that I always hear that I wanted to give you all a chance to respond to, but I don’t want to make you responsible for it, so I want to really clarify that because it’s something that drives me nuts. As an admittedly, I am a lefty nut job. I grew up very conservative and it’s been a long road to the socialist that you see before you.

But I don’t care about any of that. When I go to towns and talk to people who are suffering through things that they did not cause, they did not ask for whether they’re Trump voters, non voters, Biden voters, anybody and people on the internet will say, well, they deserved it. They voted for this. Or their Republicans, who cares. Or when the fires in my home of Southern California burn whole neighborhoods, people say, well, they’re Democrats. Who cares? We got to stop thinking like this or we’re going to keep dying and our communities are going to keep getting destroyed while the rich assholes, pardon my French, who are causing all this pain are getting off. So that’s my little tirade here. I wanted to ask y’all if you just had any thoughts on that or on how to correct the thinking for people listening to this, knowing that these are the times that we’re in, people are going to say stuff like this and we here are trying to get people to cut through that noise and just care about the fact that flesh and blood, fellow working people, red state, blue state, whatever it is, our people, our neighbors, our fellow workers are hurting and we are being hurt as well.

That is what we should care about. If a car is on fire and someone’s inside you don’t go and ask who they voted for before you pull ’em out. If you guys could just talk to people out there who should be listening to what you’re saying, but are letting stuff like this get in the way, what would you say to them?

Cheryl Shadden:

Where is your humanity? If your family is hurt? Wouldn’t you want me to help take care of them? If you were broken down on the side of the road and you needed a hand, do you care who I vote for when I stopped to help you? When I’m doing your anesthesia and we’re taking your gallbladder out or your kid’s going to emergency surgery, I don’t check your voting status before I take care of you. We take care of people because we, that’s who we all are Now. I don’t care if my neighbors are pink with purple polka dots, I don’t care who they voted for. My community is suffering. I will do anything that I can to help the people in this area that are suffering. Some of these people can’t stand up. They are so sick. And you know what? Step up. Put your money where your mouth is, step up and be a human.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Yeah, I think for me it’s that you look at another human being and you have compassion for another human being. I don’t care where you go to church or if you go to church, you’re a human being. And I think that we need to be more mindful. I think the United States used to be like that some time ago. We just cared about people. And I think that we need to get back to that place where people are more important than industry. People are more important than your thoughts. People are just important and we need to stand up for each other, especially those who cannot stand up for themselves.

Nannette Samuelson:

Yeah, very well said. Both of you. There’s, I think Cheryl or Dr. Wolf said this early on is that the peaceful enjoyment of one’s property is a right that we have and that is not happening in this. They’re not able to peacefully enjoy their property and the respect business needs to respect individual’s rights as well as both of them said so. Well, we are humans. We all care about protecting each other and making sure that each other is safe. And when I became the commissioner, I had no idea that this was going to be part of what I was doing. I thought it was budget and making sure that the county offices are running smoothly and figuring ways to cut taxes and those types of things. And this became front and center right away. And like I said earlier, the stories that people told at that first town hall, what they’re dealing with, it’s just not right. I mean, industries should not be able to impact people’s health and their property without any consequences. Agreed.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, we’re going to have to have y’all back on. And to our listeners, we are going to continue our investigation into not just the Bitcoin mine in Granbury, Texas, but looking at the larger surrounds that includes other toxic polluters that folks are also dealing with. Just like here in South Baltimore, as you guys have heard listening to this show, it’s not just the CSX rail terminal that’s getting coal dust over everyone’s houses and in their lungs, they’re also breathing in the toxic pollutants from the medical waste incinerator and all the other toxic polluters concentrated in that part of the city. So we are going to do more follow-ups on and with folks from Granbury, but with the last minute or two that I have y’all, I just wanted to do a quick round around the table and ask if y’all could say, in terms of the struggle to hold marathon accountable and to protect people in Hood County, where do things stand now and what can folks listening do to help?

Cheryl Shadden:

For me personally, we thought we were battling. And so we have more and more battles every day. We thought we were fighting one arm of this octopus. No, there’s eight arms on this octopus that we’re fighting. Stand up for your next door neighbor, knock on their door, see how they’re doing. If you’re suffering from problems, your neighbors all are suffering as well. Stand up, take a stand. Tell them. No, it’s a shame you should have to fight for your life. But when I first started this, it was just a few of us standing here. Now I’m standing with a mighty, mighty group of warriors that actually care about one another. And so it’s not ideal. No, but now I’m not standing by myself.

Nannette Samuelson:

And Cheryl, did you talk about the incorporation already?

Cheryl Shadden:

I started off doing that. So one of the things that we’re trying to do is we’re trying to incorporate this area, this community, into a township so that we can develop statutes and taxation and environmental impact fees. So we’re giving this a really good, hard, strong try, trying to get control over our area. We need some control of our lives and what’s happening to all the people here.

Nannette Samuelson:

So what that will do, as I mentioned at the beginning, because cities have regulatory authority, zoning, ordinance, authority that counties don’t have, so that if they’re successful incorporating, they will be able to have ordinances and regulations, zoning because they will be a municipality inside of the county. So then that will take precedence over the lack of authority or ability that the county, we don’t have what, like I was saying earlier, it’s pretty much water, sewer, and that’s about it.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

I think with the incorporation, just know that it’s not a done deal. I wish it was an easy thing, but we have a couple of hurdles and we have a person that can say no to us. So we’re a little nervous about that. That’s going to happen this coming week. And yeah, we could use prayer if you pray we could use your good thoughts. If you don’t, that’s okay. But one of the things that I do want to encourage everyone is if you see something coming in your neighborhood, tackle it early. Don’t let it get a foothold because then you’ve got a battle on your hands.

Nannette Samuelson:

And if you live in Texas, call your senator, your state senator, call your state representative, send them emails, call ours, call Senator Birdwell, call Representative Slauson and tell ’em you heard about this that’s happening in their area of responsibility and that their constituents are suffering and that they would support any change to the noise ordinance, regulation or setback requirements, things that would help the residents that live there. That’s what I would say. Call your state rep and your state senator. Call Shelby Slauson. Call Senator Birdwell. Tell him you heard about it. Here’s an ironic thing as Granberry just for what the third or fourth year in a row was, just voted the best historic small town in the United States we’re also the celebration capital of Texas.

Cheryl Shadden:

We’re celebrating air pollution.

Nannette Samuelson:

So that happened and here we are, this whole community of people that live around don’t live in the city limits of Granbury but live very close to in Hood County that are going through this struggle. And because like I said earlier, the proximity of gas lines, the proximity of the access to the grid, low property values, it’s coming. This isn’t the last project that we have in our little precinct.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests from Granbury, Texas. Cheryl Shedden, hood County Precinct Chair, Dr. Shannon Wolf and Hood County Commissioner Nanette Samuelson. And I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The Trump administration continues to escalate its authoritarian assault on higher education, free speech, and political dissent—and university administrators and state government officials are willingly aiding that assault. On the morning of April 23, at the direction of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, law enforcement officers, including FBI agents, raided the homes of multiple student organizers connected to Palestine solidarity protests at the University of Michigan. “According to the group Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), agents seized the students’ electronics and a number of personal items,” Michael Arria reports at Mondoweiss. “Four individuals were detained, but eventually released.” In this urgent episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of graduate student workers from the University of Michigan and Columbia University about how they and their unions are fighting back against ICE abductions, FBI raids, and top-down political repression, all while trying to carry on with their day-to-day work.

Panelists include: Lavinia, a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information and an officer in the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO); Ember McCoy, a PhD candidate in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and a rank-and-file member of GEO and the TAHRIR Coalition; Jessie Rubin, a PhD student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University and a rank-and-file member of Student Workers of Columbia (SWC); and Conlan Olson, a PhD student in Computer Science at Columbia and a member of the SWC bargaining committee.

Additional links/info:

• Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), University of Michigan website, Instagram, Facebook page, and X page
• Student Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2710 website, Instagram, Facebook page, and X page
• TAHRIR Coalition UMich X page
• Legal Fund of Michigan Students for Palestine
• GEO Worker Solidarity Fund
• GEO Press Release: FBI and police raid homes of pro-Palestine activists, including a GEO member
• Mahmoud Khalil statement from ICE detention: “My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner”
• Allie Wong, The Intercept, “This is not about antisemitism, Palestine, or Columbia. It’s Trump dismantling the American dream“
• Grant Miner, The Nation, “Columbia expelled me for my palestine activism, but I won’t be silenced”
• Michael Arria, Mondoweiss, “FBI and police raid homes of Palestine activists in Michigan”
• Alvin Powell, The Harvard Gazette, “Harvard files lawsuit against Trump administration”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘Worse’ than McCarthyism: Trump’s war on higher education, free speech, and political dissent”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘A tremendous chilling effect’: Columbia students describe dystopian reality on campus amid Trump attacks”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘People are hiding in their apartments’: Inside Trump’s assault on universities”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are continuing our ongoing coverage of the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. Things have continued to escalate since we published our episodes earlier in April where I first interviewed Todd Wolfson in Chen Akua of the American Association of University Professors, and then interviewed graduate student workers at Columbia University, Ali Wong and Caitlyn Liss. Now many since then have praised the development of Harvard University standing up and challenging Trump’s attacks in a public statement titled, upholding Our Values, defending Our University.

Harvard’s president Alan m Garber wrote Dear members of the Harvard Community. Over the course of the past week, the federal government has taken several actions following Harvard’s refusal to comply with its illegal demands. Although some members of the administration have said their April 11th letter was sent by mistake. Other statements and their actions suggest otherwise doubling down on the letters, sweeping and intrusive demands which would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university. The government has, in addition to the initial freeze of $2.2 billion in funding, considered taking steps to freeze an additional $1 billion in grants initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 5 0 1 C3 tax exempt status. These actions have stark real life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world. Moments ago, we filed a lawsuit to halt the funding freeze because it is unlawful and beyond the government’s authority.

Now at the same time at the University of Michigan, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies raided multiple homes of student activists connected to Gaza solidarity protests as Michael Aria reports at Monde Weiss. On the morning of April 23rd, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies executed search warrants at multiple homes in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Canton Township, Michigan. The raids reportedly targeted a number of student organizers who were connected to Gaza protests at the University of Michigan. According to the group, students allied for Freedom and Equality or safe agents seized the students’ electronics and a number of personal items. Four individuals were detained but eventually released to rear coalition. A student led movement calling for divestment from Israel said that officers initially refused to present warrants at the Ypsilanti raid. They were unable to confirm whether ICE was present at the raid. A Detroit FBI office spokesman declined to explain why the warrants were executed, but confirmed that the matter was being handled by the Office of Michigan.

Attorney General Dana Nessel. Nessel has refused to confirm whether the raids were connected to Palestine activism thus far, but her office has aggressively targeted the movement. Last fall, Nestle introduced criminal charges against at least 11 protestors involved in the University of Michigan Gaza encampment. An investigation by the Guardian revealed that members of University of Michigan’s governing board had pressed Nestle to bring charges against the students. The report notes that six of eight Regents donated more than $33,000 combined to Nestle’s campaigns after the regents called for action. Nestle took the cases over from local district attorney Ellie Savitt, an extremely rare move as local prosecutors typically handle such cases. Listen, as we’ve been saying repeatedly on this show and across the Real news, the battle on and over are institutions of higher education have been and will continue to be a critical front where the future of democracy and the Trump Administration’s agenda will be decided.

And it will be decided not just by what Trump does and how university administrators and boards of regents respond, but by how faculty respond students, grad students, staff, campus communities, and the public writ large. And today we are very grateful to be joined by four guests who are on the front lines of that fight. We’re joined today by Lavinia, a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information and an officer in the Graduate Employees organization or GEO, which full disclosure is my old union. Ember McCoy is also joining us. Ember is a PhD candidate in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and a rank and file member of GEO and the Tare Coalition. And we are also joined today by Jesse Rubin, a PhD student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University and a rank and file member of Student Workers of Columbia.

We are also joined by Conlin Olson, a PhD student in computer science at Columbia, and a member of the Bargaining Committee for Student Workers of Columbia, Lavinia Ember, Jesse Conlin. Thank you all so much for joining us today, especially amidst this terrifying reality that we all find ourselves in. I wanted to just jump right in and start there because since we have y’all and you are new voices in this ongoing coverage that we’re trying to do of these authoritarian attacks on higher ed, I wanted to start by just going around the table and asking if y’all could briefly introduce yourselves and tell us about what your life and work have been like these past few weeks and months as all of this Orwellian nightmare has been unfolding.

Lavinia:

Yeah. Hi everyone. Thank you so much, max for putting this together. So by and large, my life just continues to revolve around research. I’m actually on an NSF fellowship and that means that I basically spend all of my time in the office doing research. That being said, over the past couple of months, especially sort of in the context of organizing, a lot of what I and other grad workers at the University of Michigan have been working on is safety planning and mutual aid efforts related to immigration. And then of course in the past couple of weeks there’s been sort of this really alarming, as you said, escalation in repression by the state government of pro-Palestine protestors. So recently a lot of organizing work has also been related to that, but just to personalize it, the people who are affected by this repression, our friends, they’re coworkers and it’s just been extremely scary recently even just sort of trying to navigate being on campus in this really kind of tense political environment.

Ember McCoy:

So for me, this is kind a continuation of the organizing that I’ve been doing throughout the PhD and before I was vice president of the grad union during our 2023 strike, and there was a lot of infrastructure that we built and organizing models that we’ve changed, that we’ve talked about. Even I think on this podcast leading into the strike, which I think then we got a contract in September of 2023 and then pretty much right away ended up transitioning our work to be very focused on Palestine Pro Palestine organizing in collaboration with undergrad students after October 7th, which I think is really important for some of the infrastructure we built and organizing models we built, thinking about how we’ve been able to transition from labor organizing to pro-Palestine organizing to ICE organizing and all the way back around and in between. On a personal level, this week, Monday morning, I had a meeting with my advisor.

I told him, I promised him I was going to lock in. I was like, I’m going to do it. I need to finish. By August, two hours later, I found out my NSF grant was terminated. I study environmental justice, I have a doctoral dissertation research grant, and then I spent Tuesday trying to do paperwork around that. And Monday morning I woke up to my friend’s houses being rated by the FBI and safe to say, I’ve not worked on my dissertation the rest of the week. So yeah, I think it’s just important like Lavinia said, to think about how, I don’t know, we’re all operating in this space of navigating, trying to continue thinking about our work and the obligations we have as workers for students at the University of Michigan. It is finals week, so the raids happen Wednesdays finals started Thursday. And also not only continuing the fight for pre Palestine, but also making sure our comrades are okay and that they’re safe.

Jessie Rubin:

Hi everyone. It’s really nice to meet you Lavinia and Ember, and thank you so much Max for inviting us to be a part of this. My name is Jessie and I’m a PhD candidate at Columbia in the music department and also a rank and file member of Student Workers of Columbia. I guess to start off with the more personal side with my own research, I guess I’m lucky in that my research has not been threatened with funding cuts the same way that embers has been, and I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now. Ember much love and solidarity to you, but my research does engage Palestine. I researched the Palestine Solidarity movement in Ireland and this past year has definitely been a whirlwind of being scared that I could get in trouble even for just talking about my own research on campus, scared that if I share my research with my students, that might be grounds for discipline.

So it’s definitely been this large existential fight of trying to write my dissertation and write it well while also feeling like Columbia doesn’t want me to be doing the dissertation that I am doing. At the same time, I’ve been really invigorated and motivated through working with my fellow union members. I’m a member of our communications committee, which has obviously taken off a ton in the past few months with social media, internal communications and press, and figuring out how we as a union can sort of express our demands to a broader audience in America and around the globe. I’m also a member of our political education and solidarity committee, and that has been really moving, I mean really exciting to see how different members of our community and also the broader union work with other groups on campus through mutual aid efforts, through actions, through all sorts of activity to fight against this attack on higher ed. And lastly, I also joined our Palestine working group last year. Our union passed a BDS resolution, which then sort of necessitated the formation of our working group. And our working group has been working to think about what Palestine might look like in our upcoming bargaining. We are just entering bargaining and Conlin who’s here with us today can probably talk more about what that’s been looking like as they’re a member of our bargaining team.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it should also be remembered from listeners from our previous episode with members of Student workers of Columbia. Don’t forget that the university expelled and functionally fired Grant Minor, the former president of Student Workers of Columbia, right before bargaining sessions opened with the university.

Conlan Olson:

Yeah, that’s right. This is Conlin. Like Jesse said, I’m a member of the bargaining committee at Student Workers of Columbia. I’m also a PhD student in computer science. I study algorithmic fairness and data privacy, which are sort of terrifyingly relevant right now. And in addition to our current contract campaign, just on a day-to-day organizing level, and we’re all really trying hard to build the left and build the labor movement among tech workers and STEM workers, which is an uphill battle, but I think is really important work. And I think there is a lot of potential for solidarity and labor power in those areas, even if at Columbia right now they feel under organized.

And in our contract campaign, we are currently, we have contract articles ready. We have a comprehensive health and safety article that includes protections for international students. We have articles about keeping federal law enforcement off our campus. And of course we have all the usual articles that you would see in a union contract. We have a non-discrimination and harassment article that provides real recourse in a way that we don’t have right now. And so we are ready to bargain and we have our unit standing behind us and the university really has refused to meet us in good faith. As Max said, they’ve fired our president and then we still brought our president because he’s still our president to bargaining. And the next time we went to schedule a bargaining session, they declared him persona non grata from campus. And so we said, well, we can’t meet you on campus because we need our president. Here’s a zoom link. And Columbia, of course refused to show up on Zoom. So we are frustrated. We are ready to bargain. We have the power, we have the contract articles and the universities refusing to meet us. So we are building a powerful campaign to ask them to meet us and to try to get them to the table and work on reaching a fair contract for all of our workers. Yeah, I think that’s most of my day-to-day these days is working on our contract campaign.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I just want to say speaking only for myself and full disclosure, I am a former GEO member at the University of Michigan. I got my PhDs there as well, and I remember after already leaving the university to come work at the Chronicle of Higher Education, but I was still a BD, meaning I hadn’t fully finished my dissertation and defended it. Then COD hit in 2020 and our university was doing the same thing of amidst this chaotic nightmare that we were all living through. My professors and administrators were saying, Hey, finish that dissertation. And I think I rightly said, I rightly expressed what many of us were feeling, which was, Hey man, I’ve earned that goddamn thing at this point. Just give me the degree. I can’t imagine how y’all are still trying to write and defend your dissertations amidst these funding cuts amidst when the future of higher education itself is in doubt. So I would just say for myself and for no one else, just give PhD candidates their goddamn doctorates at this point, man, what are you doing? But anyway, ember Lavinia, I want to go to y’all and ask if you could help us break down the FBI and police raids out there in Ann Arbor Ypsilanti all around the University of Michigan. Can you tell us more about what happened, how the people who were detained are doing, how folks on campus are responding and just where the hell things stand now?

Ember McCoy:

And you did a really thorough job covering the timeline of what happened on Wednesday morning. So on Wednesday between six and 9:00 AM the FBI, along with Michigan State police and local police officers in the three different cities and University of Michigan police conducted a coordinated raid in unmarked vehicles at the home of homes of multiple University of Michigan pro-Palestine activists. And I think that’s very important to name because the attorney general who a democrat who signed these warrants that have no probable cause is saying that in their press release that the raids don’t have anything to do with University of Michigan campus activism, and they don’t have anything to do with the encampments, but the people whose home berated are prominent pro-Palestine activists at the University of Michigan. So trying to say those things aren’t connected is not at all, and there’s no charges, right? There’s no charges that has happened for these folks whose homes have been rated. And so it’s just a crazy situation to say the least. I would say people are doing as well as they can be. Some of their immediate thoughts were like, I need to figure out my finals and I no longer have my devices or access to my university meme Michigan accounts because of duo two factor authentication.

Yeah. So I mean, I think the organizing of course is still continuing. Another big thing that’s happened. I guess to scale out a little bit, what happened Wednesday is just another thing that has happened in this year long campaign where the Attorney General of Michigan, Dana Nessel, is really targeting University of Michigan activists Ann Arbor activists for pro-Palestine free speech. So as you alluded to, there are 11 people facing felony charges from the Attorney general related to the encampment raid. There’s another four people facing charges as a result of a die-in that we did in the fall. And so that is also all still ongoing and very much a part of this. So there’s almost 40 different activists that they’re targeting across these different attacks. And we actually had Thursday, we had a court date coincidentally for the encampment 11, and it was the intention of it was to file a motion to ask the judge to recuse Dana Nessel, the Attorney General.

She has already had to recuse herself from a different case due to perceived Islamic Islamic phobic bias. And she’s a prominent Zionist in the state. And so our argument is kind of like if she’s had to recuse herself from that case, she should also have to recuse herself from this case. They would fall under similar intent. However, when we were at that court case, one of the encampment 11 also was accused of violating his bond. So as a part of their bond, they’re not allowed to be on campus unless for class or for work, though most of them have been fired from their jobs at this point. And he was accused of being, he was surveilled on campus 20 minutes after his class ended and he was walking through and stopped allegedly to say hi to friends. So he was sent to jail for four days right then and there.

The judge and the prosecutor originally said they were trying to put him in jail for 10 days, but they didn’t want him to miss his graduation and wax poetic about how they didn’t want his parents to have to miss his graduation. So instead, they sent him to jail for four days and he got out Sunday morning. And so yeah, it’s been a lot, right? There’s all these different things that are happening, but I think the organizing still continues. People are very mobilized. People are probably more agitated than they were before. And after this, a bunch of us are heading to a rally at Dana Nestle’s office in Lansing. So I would say that it definitely hasn’t curtailed the movement for a free Palestine and the movement for free speech broadly in the state of Michigan. That was long-winded, but lots going on.

Lavinia:

That was such a great summary, Amber. Great. Yeah. I also just want to add that there has been a lot of repression on campus that doesn’t rise to the level of criminal charges or legal actions. Instead, it’s stuff like, for instance, one of my friends was pulled into a disciplinary meeting because he sent a mass email about Palestine or there have been many instances of police deploying pepper spray on campus against protesters. So there’s also just kind of this general climate of fear, which is reinforced in many different contexts on campus, specifically surrounding Palestine.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and Conlin. Jesse, I wanted to bring you in here because as we discussed in the recent episode with two other members of your union, Trump’s administration really set the template for this broader assault on higher ed by first going after Columbia. So what is your message to workers and students on other campuses like Michigan who are facing similar attacks? What can we learn from Columbia that may help people at other universities be better prepared for what’s coming?

Jessie Rubin:

Great question. First and foremost, I would say the biggest takeaway is that we help us. It’s us who take care of each other. We can’t expect the university or the administration to protect the most vulnerable among us to protect our international students, to protect our research. It’s us who has to create the infrastructure to keep us safe. For example, it was the union that provided the most robust know your rights trainings and detailed information to support international students on our campus. While the university has pretty much stayed silent and offered completely hollow support, I mean, we saw this with our fellow union member, Ron Boston, who had her visa revoked for totally no reason at all, and the university immediately dis-enrolled her from her program and from her housing. So it’s really clear that the university does not have our safety as a top priority. And if anything, I mean the university’s response to the Trump administration has made it clear that they’re not just capitulating, but they are active collaborators. And I would say that we can expect the same from other universities. And through their collaboration with the Trump administration, through their appeasement, we haven’t gotten anything. Columbia has gone above and beyond here, and even still our programs are getting hit with funding cuts and this continued federal overreach.

Conlan Olson:

And I think this lesson that appeasement gets us, nothing also has a parallel lesson for activists. So as a union, as activists, we can’t just sit this tight or wait this out, we can’t stay quiet in order to survive. And I really feel that if we start appeasing or hedging our bets, we’re going to lose our values and just get beat one step at a time. And this is why our union has really not backed down from fighting for Ranjani, why we’ve not backed down from fighting for a grant minor. And it’s why we’re fighting for such a strong contract with really unprecedented articles to protect non-citizens, to keep cops off our campus, to provide for parents to ensure financial transparency and justice in Columbia’s financial investments. And of course, to get paid a living wage. I think as a union, we could have backed down or softened our position, but I really think this would’ve meant losing before we even start.

We are labor unionists. We are people fighting for justice. If we start backing off, we’re just going to get beat one step at a time. And I do think that our activism is starting to work. So yesterday, Columbia, for the first time named Mah Halil and most of madi for the first time in public communications, and they offered slightly more support for non-citizens. And so to be clear, it’s still absolutely ridiculous that they’re not doing more and really despicable that they’re only now naming those people by name. But we are starting to see the needle moved because of activist campaigns by our union, both to pressure the university and to just provide, as Jesse said, know your rights training and outreach to students on our campus.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Ember, Lavinia, I wanted to bring you all back in as well and ask if you had any kind of thoughts or messages to folks at Columbia or people on other campuses right now. I mean, of course this looks differently depending on what state people are in and what university they’re at. But I guess for folks out there who are listening to this and preparing for what may happen on their campuses, did you have any sort of messages you wanted to let folks know?

Lavinia:

Yeah, so I kind of want to echo Jesse’s point that really we keep us safe. Many of these university administrations I think historically are intransigent in their negotiations with students. So for instance, with go, we had a 2022 to 2023 bargaining cycle where the university didn’t really budget all. And I think that in some way sort of set the precedent for what’s happening now, but I think we know in general, sort of the incentive structures for these academic institutions are really not set up to support what protects grad workers or students or really people who are just in the community. So that’s why things like safety planning or for instance within NGEO, we have an immigration hotline, those sort of community infrastructures are so important. So I just really want to advocate for thinking about how you as a community can support each other, especially in the face of new or more exaggerated threats from the government and the university.

Ember McCoy:

And if I could just add quickly too, I think one, I want to name that part of the reason we were so prepared this week is because we are following the footsteps of Columbia and our Columbia comrades. We’ve been able to do similar safety planning and set up these hotlines because we witnessed first the horrors that happened to you all. And I think that’s really important to be able to directly connect with you all which we had been previously, and to help other people do the same. And as Livinia mentioned, the reason we knew the raids were happening at 6:00 AM on Wednesday is because one of the people called our hotline called our ice hotline and our ICE hotline as Jail support hotline and we’re able to get people out because that’s an infrastructure that they knew about to try to suddenly get people’s attention.

And another one of the homes we knew they were being rated because we have a group in collaboration with community partners where there’s an ice watch group and people put in the group chat that there was FBI staging nearby, and then they watched people raid someone’s homes. And that brought out tons of people immediately to the scene. And so those infrastructures, many of them were actually for ice, and there was not ice in collaboration in the FBI raid. But I think it’s really important how those infrastructures which build off each other originally were able to protect us and us safe on Wednesday.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Gang, I wanted to sort of talk about the signs of life that we’re seeing. And y’all mentioned some on your campuses, like amidst all of this darkness and repression, and as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of folks around the country, a lot of folks that I’ve talked to in higher ed have been really galvanized by seeing the news that Harvard of all places is fighting Donald Trump’s attacks. It may not be perfect, but it’s something right. And I wanted to ask if there are more efforts that you’re seeing on your campus or other campuses that are giving you hope right now?

Conlan Olson:

I just want to say, so I happen to be a Harvard alum also, and I don’t want to be too down here, but I think that the way that we should think about Harvard’s efforts are really what Max called them, which is just a sign of life. I don’t have that much faith in our institutions. I appreciate the Big 10 movement and that we need a diversity of tactics here. But we should also keep in mind that yesterday Harvard renamed its diversity office and cut all of its affinity graduation celebrations in response to pressure from the federal government. Harvard remains invested in Israeli genocide and continues to suppress student protest. They fired the leadership of the Center for Middle East Studies last month. And so while I appreciate this sort of sign of life, I really feel that our institutions are not going to save us.

And so these days looking for inspiration, I’m far more inspired by activist movements by students, staff, professors, community members. So for example, yesterday just the same day that Harvard canceled these affinity graduation celebrations, students responded committing to holding their own, and we’re still seeing student protests, we’re seeing increasing faculty support for student protests, which is really important to me. We’re seeing mutual aid projects. We’re seeing legal movements to fight against visa ramifications. And so I think these places really from the ground up and from activism by the people at these universities are much more the things that are inspiring me these days.

Jessie Rubin:

I completely agree with Conland that it’s been so heartwarming to see the power of student movements, the power of working people movements on our campuses. It’s been heartwarming to see encampments starting to pop up again around the country even though the stakes are much higher than they’ve been than ever. Students are putting their bodies on the line, they’re risking expulsion, they’re risking arrest, they’re risking physical injury. And it’s really clear that no matter how hard our administrations try to stamp out dissent, including by expelling core organizers, that students keep coming out in and greater force and developing new tools to keep each other safe. And we see that this student pressure works. Just a few days ago, MIT was forced to cut ties with Elbit systems after a targeted campaign by a BDS group on campus. EL I is an Israeli arms company and has been a target in many BDS campaigns across the globe.

Ember McCoy:

Yeah, one thing I similarly, I similarly don’t want to be a downer, but one thing I think for us that’s been really present on my mind at least this week is the importance of also making connections between not just what the Trump administration is doing to facilitate the targeting of pro-Palestine activists, but what Democrat elected officials are doing in the state of Michigan to help support that. Dana Nessel, who is our attorney general is there’s all these articles and things and she’s coming out being like, oh, she’s a big anti-Trump democrat. She’s taking an aggressive approach to these ICE and these lawsuits. But at the same time, she sent Trump’s FBI to our houses on Wednesday, and she’s continuing to prosecute our free speech in a way that is really important to connect the criminalization of international students or international community members who are then that platform is then going to be able to be used, potentially could be used to by Trump’s administration.

And so there’s all these really important connections that I think need to be made. And for me, obviously what the Trump administration is doing is horrible, but it’s also really, really important that to name that this did not start or end with the Trump administration and it’s being actively facilitated by democratic elected officials across the United States. But I think one thing that’s a bright spot is I do think that activists at the University of Michigan and in our community are doing a really good job of trying to name that and to have really concrete political education for our community members. And I’m really inspired by the ways in which our community showed up for us on Wednesday and the rest of the week and the ways in which people were able to galvanize around us and act quickly and kind of test our infrastructures as successful in that way.

Lavinia:

Yeah, I think the threats to academic freedom through things like grant withholding or threatening DEI offices or what have you, are I think waking up faculty in particular to sort the broader power structures which govern universities. And those power structures frequently don’t include faculty. So a lot of them are, I think being, I wouldn’t say radicalized, but awakened to the kind of undemocratic nature of these institutions and specifically how they can threaten their students. I mean, I know especially as PhD students, we do tend to work closely with a lot of faculty. And I think there is sort of an inspiring change happening there as well.

Ember McCoy:

One additional thing about Harvard is I would say I agree with everything Conlin said, and the University of Michigan has the largest public endowment in the country. We now have a 20 billion endowment. It’s $3 billion more than it was in 2023 when we were doing our strike. And part of I think why Harvard is able to make the statement so that they can around resisting Trump’s funding is because they have the resources to do so, and a lot of institutions do not. University of Michigan is one that absolutely does. And so I do think it helps us try to leverage that argument that what is the 20 billion endowment for if it’s not for right now, why are we just immediately bending the knee to the Trump administration, especially on a campus that is known to have a long legacy of anti-war divestment and all of these other really important things.

And two weeks ago, I think it was time is nothing right now, but we got an email from President Ono saying that the NIH is requiring that institutions who get grants from the NIH certify that they don’t have diversity, equity and inclusion programs. And this was a new thing, do not have BDS campaigns, that they’re not divesting from Israel, which is not only obviously one of the main demands of the TER Coalition, but has also been a demand that students on campus that geo has taken stand for decades for over 20 years at the University of Michigan. And so seeing that all being facilitated is really, really scary, and I think it’s really frustrating that the University of Michigan administration is doing what they’re doing. So I think for me, there’s just a little teeny glimmer of hope to be able to use that as leverage more than anything.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and as we’ve mentioned on this call and in previous episodes, I mean the Trump administration is using multiple things to justify these attacks, including the notion that universities are just overrun with woke ideology embodied in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, trans student athletes participating in sports. But really the tip of this authoritarian spear has been the charge that this administration is protecting campuses from a scourge of antisemitism that is rampant across institutions of higher education around the country. And of course, like plenty of university administrations have gone along with that framing and have even adopted policies that accept the premise that criticism of the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism is tantamount to anti-Semitism, including Harvard. And so I wanted to just ask y’all, if you had a chance to talk to people out there who are buying this, what is the reality on campuses? Are they overrun with antisemitism and wokeness the way people are being told? What do you want people to know about the reality on campus versus what they’re hearing from the White House and on Fox News and stuff?

Jessie Rubin:

Yeah, I mean, I can start by answering as an anti-Zionist Jew, I would say that the schools are of course not overrun by antisemitism, but instead we’re seeing growing mass movements that are anti genocide movements, that are Palestine liberation movements, and that is by no means antisemitic. And on top of that, these new definitions of antisemitism that are getting adopted on campuses actually make me feel less safe. They completely invalidate my identity as an anti-Zionist Jew and say that my religion or my culture is somehow at odds with my politics.

Ember McCoy:

I mean, I would just echo what Jesse said. I think that’s something we’re definitely being accused of, right at the University of Michigan, like you said, the elected officials are Zionists, right? And so they’re weaponizing this argument of antisemitism on campus and while also persecuting and charging anti-Zionist Jews with felony charges for speaking out for pro-Palestine. I think for those listening really all, it seems so simple, but I feel like it’s just you have to really listen to the people who are part of these movements and look as who’s a part of it. Because I think, as Jesse said, it’s really an intergenerational interfaith group that have shared politics. And it’s really important to understand that distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism that is being inflated in really, really terrifying ways.

Conlan Olson:

And I would just say the encampments, especially last spring and now again this spring and student movements really community spaces and spaces where people are taking care of each other, and that is what it feels like being in campus activism these days. I feel cared for by my comrades and the people I organize with. And I think that when we say solidarity, it’s not just a political statement, it’s also something that we really feel. And so yeah, I would invite people worried about antisemitism or other divisive ideologies on college campuses to just listen to the students who feel cared for and who are doing the work to care for each other.

Lavinia:

Yeah, I think one thing that was really wonderful, at least about the encampment at U of M is that there were lots of people who I think did have this misconception that there was some relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and then upon visiting the encampment and seeing the kind of solidarity that was being displayed there, they sort of potentially were a bit disabused of that notion. Unfortunately, I think that’s part of why the encampments in particular were so threatening to university administrations and Zionist officials, et cetera.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now, Lavinia, Ember, Jesse Conlin, there’s so much more that we could talk about here. But with the final minutes that I have, I wanted to focus in on the fact that y’all are unions and union members, and this is a show about and for workers. And I wanted to round things off by sort of talking about what role unions and collective labor power have to play in this terrifying moment. How can graduate student unions like yours and other unions like faculty unions and unions representing staff workers on campuses, what can labor organizations do to work together to fight this?

Jessie Rubin:

Sure. Thank you for your question. The first thing that I want to say is as workers, the most powerful tool that we have is our labor, and we have the power to withhold labor. We have to remember that we’re not just bystanders who the Trump administration can cross with no consequences. Graduate students, we produce their research that saves lives in human health. We write books that shape American life and we invent the things that America is so proud of. We also teach undergraduates, the university would just simply not run without its graduate students. So a strike poses a threat that simply cannot be ignored.

Conlan Olson:

And in addition to our work in higher education, the whole point is that we believe in solidarity, and that includes solidarity across sectors and across borders. And of course, mobilizing in this way is a huge task, but we’re seeing really inspiring work. For example, UIW Labor for Palestine is a coalition of workers in manufacturing to legal services to higher education, all fighting together against investment in Israeli genocide. And so I think that cross sectoral organizing both between grad students and other unions on campuses, but even unions, not on campuses at all, is really important. And I think working to connect people is a huge part of the work that needs to be done now.

Ember McCoy:

So I think we already little mentioned a little bit at the University of Michigan, what we built during our strike and the organizing model and the networks and community that we built at that time has directly supported our pro-Palestine activism and our ICE organizing and the combination of the two through things like safety planning department meetings, and then literally being the institutions that have resources to do things like set up a hotline or to have bodies that are mobilized and already connected to each other. And so a lot of it is, I don’t feel that we’re even reinventing the real wheel right now, right? It’s like unions are this space where this collective organizing and this solidarity and financial and physical and legal resources already exist. And so we should absolutely be leveraging those to protect ourselves and our comrades. And at the University of Michigan, I know this is not the case everywhere, including Columbia, but until two weeks ago anyways, there hadn’t been a unionized staff member who was fired. So while undergrad research assistants were getting hiring bands and being fired from their jobs, they’re not unionized, grad workers were not being fired. And I think a lot of that is in part because we have an incredibly strong contract. And it would’ve been really hard to fire someone who was a graduate teaching instructor last two weeks ago. There was a full-time staff member who was fired for something or for allegedly participating in a protest that happened before she was even hired or applied to the job.

She is a part of our new United Staff University staff United Union. Is that right? Vidia? Did I? Yeah, I think it’s university. Okay. Yeah. So she’s a part of our university staff, United Union. They don’t have a contract yet though. So she is in a position where she has people that can start to try to fight for her, but then they don’t have a contract. And so I think also for workers who are not yet unionized, this is a really critical time to be able to use that type of institution to protect workers because we are seeing it work in many places.

Conlan Olson:

And just to build on that, I think one troubling pattern that we’ve seen recently is people who are nervous to sign a union card because they’re worried about retaliation for being involved with labor organizing. And just to start, I think that fear is totally understandable, and I don’t think it’s silly or invalid, but I also think that we need to remember that people are far safer in a union than they are without a union. And so in addition to our power to withhold labor, we’re also just a group of people who keep each other safe. So we have mutual aid collectives, we run campaigns to defend each other, like the one that we’re running for Rani. And so lying low is just not going to work, especially in this political moment. And so yeah, I really want people to remember that unions keep you safe.

Lavinia:

I think empirically there has been sort of a duality in the organizing conversations that we’re having for GEO as well where people both see how dangerous the situation is right now and want to be involved, but at the same time, especially if they’re not a citizen, they don’t necessarily feel comfortable exposing themselves, I guess. So I think one thing that’s just important in general for unions right now is providing avenues for people who are in that situation to get involved and contribute, even if that’s not necessarily going to the media or speaking out in a very public way.

Maximillian Alvarez:

With the last couple minutes that we have here, I wanted to end on that note and just acknowledge the reality that this podcast is going to be listened to by students, grad students, faculty, non university affiliated folks who are terrified right now, people who are self-censoring, people who are going back in their Facebook feeds and Instagram feeds and deleting past posts because they’re terrified of the government surveilling them and scrubbing them. And people are worried about getting abducted on the street by agents of the state losing their jobs, their livelihoods, their research. This is a very terrifying moment, and the more filled with terror we are, the more immobilized we are and the easier we are to control. So I wanted to ask y’all if you just had any final messages to folks out there on your campus or beyond your campus who are feeling this way, what would you say to them about ways they could get involved in this effort to fight back or any sort of parting messages that you wanted to leave listeners with before we break?

Lavinia:

I think doubt is a wonderful time to plug in. So for people who maybe previously hadn’t been thinking about unions especially as sort of an important part of their lives or thought, oh, the union on my campus is just doing whatever it needs to do, but I don’t necessarily need to have any personal involvement in their activities, I think right now is when we need all hands on deck given the level of political repression that’s happening. And also just to maybe bring in that old Martin Eller quote about first they came for the communist and I did not speak up because I was not a communist, et cetera. I think it’s also just really important to emphasize that I don’t think any of this is going to stop here. And even within the context of pro-Palestine organizing at the university, it is basically escalated in terms of the severity of the legal charges that are being brought. Obviously bringing in the FB is kind of really crazy, et cetera. So I don’t think that this is going to stop here or there’s any reason to assume that if you are not taking action right now, that means that you’re going to be safe ultimately. Yeah,

Ember McCoy:

And I think I would add, like many of us had said in the call, I think it’s very clear that we keep each other safe. The institutions that we’ve built, the organizing communities that we’ve built are very much actively keeping each other safe. And I think we’re seeing that in many different ways. And it’s important to acknowledge that and see that we’re much stronger fighting together as a part of these networks than that we are alone.

Conlan Olson:

I think as a closing thought, I also just want to say I think it’s really essential that we expand our view beyond just higher education. And so let me say why I think that’s true. So people know about Mahmud and Mosen and Ru Mesa, but I also want people to know about Alfredo Juarez, also known as Lelo, who’s a worker and labor organizer with the Independent Farm Workers Union in Washington state. And Lelo was kidnapped by ice from his car on his way to work in the tulip fields about a month ago. He’s an incredibly powerful labor organizer. He’s known especially for his ability to organize his fellow indigenous mixed deco speaking workers, and he was targeted by the state for this organizing. I think it’s important to keep this in mind and to learn from campaigns that are going on elsewhere and also to contribute to them.

And also I want people to remember that it’s not all dark. And so one story that was really inspiring to me recently was that in early April, a mother and her three young children living in a small town on the shore of Lake Ontario and upstate New York were taken by ice. And in response, the town, which keep in mind is a predominantly Republican voting town, turned out a thousand out of 1300 people in the town to a rally, and the family’s free now. And so we’re all labor organizers. Turning out a thousand out of 1300 people is some seriously impressive organizing. And I think learning from these lessons and keeping these victories in mind is really important. Not only as just an intellectual exercise, but also solidarity is something that we do every day. So it’s for example, why we fight for divestment from genocide. It’s why we do mutual aid. It’s why we engage with the neighborhoods that our universities are in. It’s why we don’t just defend our comrades who are highly educated, who have high earning potential, but we also defend our comrades who are taken, whose names we don’t even know yet. And so I just think expanding our view beyond just higher education is both a source of wisdom and something that we can learn from and also a source of hope for me

Jessie Rubin:

Really beautifully said Conlin. And I just want to add that expanding our view beyond higher education also includes the communities that our campuses reside on. I mean, I’m coming from a Columbia perspective where my university is consistently displacing people in Harlem who have been there for decades in this project of expanding Columbia’s campus continues to this day, and it’s something that we must fight back against. It’s really important that we protect our neighbors, not just on campus but also off campus. It’s important that we get to know our neighbors, that we are truly fully members of our greater community.

Ember McCoy:

If folks listening are interested in supporting us here at the University of Michigan, and I hope our Columbia colleagues can do the same, we have a legal slash mutual aid fund for our comrades who are facing charges and who are rated by the FBI. It is Bitly, BIT ly slash legal fund, and that is all lowercase, which matters. And we’re also happy to take solidarity statements and Columbia SWC did a great one for us and we’re happy to do the same. Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Ember McCoy and Lavinia from the University of Michigan Graduate Employees Organization and Jessie Rubin and Conlan Olson from Student Workers of Columbia University. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

“I would like to see Texas become the center of the universe for bitcoin and crypto,” US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in 2021. In 2024, Republican Governor Greg Abbott said Texas “wears the crown as the bitcoin mining capital of the world.” But in small towns like Granbury, TX, about an hour southwest of Fort Worth, residents are the ones paying the price for Texas’ crypto boom. Granbury’s 300-megawatt bitcoin mine, which is owned by Marathon Digital, a Florida-based cryptocurrency company, uses a mix of liquid immersion and industrial fans to prevent over 20,000 computers from overheating. Many residents say that it’s the constant sound from those fans that has made life increasingly unbearable in their small town—and that their concerns are going ignored by the company and government officials. In this episode of Working People, we speak with four residents of Granbury living near the Marathon bitcoin mine: Danny Lakey, Karen Pearson, Nick Browning, and Virginia Browning.

Additional links/info:

• Protect Hood County website
• Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “‘We’re living in a nightmare:’ Inside the health crisis of a Texas bitcoin town”
• Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “Noisy neighbor: Bitcoin’s hidden health cost” (Video Report)
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “TRNN wins 2025 Izzy Award for coverage of East Palestine, OH, trainwreck & chemical disaster”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘I had to move away from everything that I ever had’: Chemically exposed residents of East Palestine, OH, and Conyers, GA, have been left behind”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘This is murder!’: Industrially poisoned South Baltimore residents march on state capitol, demand help from Gov. Moore”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Steve Mellon, & Mike Balonek, The Real News Network, “Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH (DOCUMENTARY)”
• Keaton Peters, Inside Climate News, “Texas leaders worry that bitcoin mines threaten to crash the state power grid”
• NBC News, “Inside the Texas bitcoin mine reportedly making residents sick”
• James Pollard, The Texas Tribune, “Texas Republicans want to make the state the center of the cryptocurrency universe”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, welcome, everyone, to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are beginning a new investigation in our ongoing series where we speak with working-class people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones. As you know from listening to the voices and stories in this series, sacrifice zones are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that harm and even threaten life itself.

Sacrifice zones, as ghoulish of a term as that is, they can look a lot of different ways, and the sources of toxic pollution or environmental devastation don’t all look the same, either. It can look like the mushroom cloud that exploded from the derailed Norfolk Southern bomb train in the sleepy rust belt town of East Palestine, Ohio. It can look like the black coal dust covering the windows and porches and the wheezing lungs of urban residents like here in South Baltimore.

It can also sound different. And as we’ll discuss in today’s episode, sound itself and the entity producing it, intense, relentless, torturous noise can be the main thing that’s actually hurting people. And that’s what Andrew R. Chow, a technology correspondent for TIME magazine, found in the town of Granbury, Texas, about an hour southwest of Fort Worth.

“On an evening in December 2023,” Chow writes, “43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas, and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. ‘It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed,’ she says. ‘That pain was worse than childbirth.’

“Rosenkranz’s migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz’s five-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a ‘red beam behind her eardrums.’ 

“It didn’t occur to Sarah that symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses. None of them knew what, exactly, was causing their symptoms, but they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area — And was exceeding legal noise ordinances on a daily basis.

“The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one. But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage. And one local doctor — ears, nose, and throat specialist Salim Bhaloo — says he sees patients with symptoms potentially stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an almost weekly basis.”

So you guys should definitely read this excellent piece by Andrew Chow in TIME, and you should watch the companion video report, both of which we’ve linked to in the show notes. And I want to thank brother Andrew for helping me to connect with our guests today, who are all residents of Granbury themselves and who have all been affected by the massive 300 megawatt Bitcoin mining operation near their homes.

Now, the mine, which is owned by Marathon Digital, a Florida-based cryptocurrency company, uses a mix of liquid immersion and industrial fans to prevent the over 20,000 computers from overheating there. Many residents have said that it’s the constant sound from those fans that has made life increasingly unbearable in their small town.

In a statement to NBC News for a report that they did six months ago on the Bitcoin mine, Marathon said what companies, frankly, always say when I’m investigating stories like these: that they are doing nothing wrong, that they’re the best of corporate neighbors, that they’re abiding by existing laws, and that there’s no proof they’re the ones causing harm to the community.

“Since [Marathon] took operational control of the data center in April 2024,” the company said, “we have gone above and beyond what is required in a well-established industrial zone to ensure our facility is best in industry, including engaging third-party experts to evaluate sound levels and investing millions of dollars to reduce the perceived loudness of the facility. As a result, all levels measured around the facility are well below state and county law sound limits. There is no established link, medical or otherwise, between [Marathon’s] operations and the ailments that are being alleged,” the company stated.

So with all of that upfront, let’s do what we do best and take you right to the front lines of the struggle and get the story firsthand from the people who are living it. I am so grateful to be joined today by our four guests. Danny Lakey is a resident of Granbury, and he joins us today along with Karen Pearson, and her parents, Nick and Virginia Browning, all long-time residents of Granbury.

Danny, Karen, Nick, Virginia, thank you all so much for joining us today. I really wish we were connecting under better circumstances, but I’m really, really grateful to all of you for joining us and sharing your stories with us. And I wanted to start by asking if we could go around the table and have y’all tell us a bit more about who you are and what you do and what your life was like before this Bitcoin mine came to your town.

Danny Lakey:  So I’m Danny Lakey. I’m originally from Arlington, which is east of Fort Worth, and it’s about an hour and 10 minutes from where I live now. I am the newest Granbury resident. My wife and I, four years ago, sold everything we had, wanted to move out to the country, get someplace where it was quiet and get away from the big city. Little did I know that it would be louder where I live now than where I came from. So in the middle of 8 million people in the DFW metroplex, I had about a third the noise that I have in an area where I’ve got 30 people within 200 acres, 300 acres. You can’t imagine what it is.

I will admit, because they want to say that they’re not violating any state laws. That’s a lie. Texas has a nuisance law that says if somebody does anything that hinders you from using your property as you intended to use it, which in my case was a retirement place for me and my wife to enjoy life, they’ve taken that from us. That is a violation of state law. So when they say that they’re not in violation of any laws, they’re not — But that’s a civil law. They are not currently in violation of any state laws, but the state laws are inefficient in Texas, anything under 85 decibels — In most cities [it’s] limited to about 40 decibels, to put it in that perspective. Airports are regulated to 65 decibels during the day, if you want to know how high the threshold is for us on the noise violations. And they’ve gotten very, very close, and we have readings where they’ve exceeded it. But we’ve not been able to prove it in court, so they can say they’re not in violation of criminal law. When they say they’re not in violation of state law, they are misleading people.

Nick Browning:  Well, when we came here, that’s what we wanted to do. We sold our place in Santa Fe, Texas right out of Galveston because this was nice and quiet out here. They moved in on top of us. We didn’t move in on them, and they moved. That thing is right across, the Bitcoin mine is right across the street from my property, and I’ve had decibels, 83 on my front porch, and sometimes at night I’ve had more than 83. And a vacuum cleaner’s only 55, and who in the world is going to go to sleep with a vacuum cleaner running all night long in their house? And that’s what it’s like.

I’ve been in and out of the hospital with all kinds of problems. I never had a problem before — And they think I’m old, but I’m seasoned. We’re not old. And my wife has been in and out of the hospital. They said it was a brain tumor, but, as it turned out, it was not a tumor. All the stuff was sent to the University of Michigan, and they still don’t know what it is. It’s not a tumor, it’s not cancer. And a month or so after I had her there the first time, we had to go back again and stay another five days.

So they are lying. They put a wall up, but that sound goes right over top of that wall. And a sound expert said, if you live right beside that wall, it wouldn’t bother you as bad. Well, we don’t live beside that wall. So they’re trying to get in good with Granbury. They furnished money for the 4th of July fireworks, and they furnished money for the parades, and this and that, and they gave the sheriff’s department a big barbecue. But they’re trash. They’re not good neighbors at all. And Constellation, the fire plant, is not either.

Virginia Browning:  Out here where we are, we’re in the middle of the country. We have wild animals every place, and we enjoy every one of them. Even the coyotes we don’t mind because we know where we live, but they have ran away the birds, all the animals. We don’t even have snakes. So you can see how the sound is destroying the environment out here with the little animals.

Besides our health, our health is terrible right now, but it is what it is at the moment. We can’t do too much about it. We’re fighting it. Everybody out here is fighting it. But big corporations, they seem to be able to just get their way and we are left behind in the rubble of everything, but we don’t like it. We came out here, our children lived here. We wanted to be here with our children and our grandchildren and grandchildren, but we don’t get that peace anymore. So it’s miserable. It’s absolutely miserable. And when we have to go in and out of the hospital all the time, doctors all the time, that’s an invasion on us too.

Nick Browning:  There’s a big water line that comes from Lake Granbury all the way to the Constellation power plant. And that steam, they take that water and they make steam to turn those turbines. Well, when they put some of that steam up in the air, it has all kinds of chemicals in it. It has lead, mercury, carbon monoxide, a mist of acid and everything. Well, some of the water that they send over the top and to go back through their [inaudible] fans and stuff, they condense that steam back to water, and they have a holding pond. That water goes in that holding pond. And then from there, when they get so much, it’s dumped into the Brazos River. Well, that Brazos River comes right around. It comes right back to Lake Granbury again, where there’s already been a content… They did a sample and there was lead content in there, but they don’t want that to get out.

So eventually, if they keep on doing what they’re doing now, Lake Granbury won’t be a good lake at all to fish in. You won’t be able to eat the fish because they’ll have lead content in it and they’ll have a mercury content in it, but they don’t want nobody to know any of that. They keep all that hush.

Karen Pearson:  So just to dovetail a little bit off of what mom and dad have said, being out here for me, and to have to watch what they go through is extremely stressful too. I know that oftentimes at night they don’t sleep. Their bedroom is upstairs, and so that noise just penetrates their bedroom at night. So that makes their days rough. Cognitively, it causes issues, the stress of every day, day in and day out task when you’re tired and you don’t have sleep, and then it’s so fragmented or interrupted throughout many days, it causes a lot of stress and wear and tear on them emotionally, and also their physical health.

Part of what I wanted to do in their last part of their life… They’ll say they’re seasoned, and they are. They’re very seasoned and very independent, as much as they can be. But over the last two and a half years, their independence has definitely declined. And so then I come in as some of their being their caregiver for different things. It makes it very difficult to watch what they go through because this is not what they intended for the second part of their life.

I was given a great part in the first part of my life by my parents, and part of my goal was to give them the best quality of life in their second part. That’s not happening out here. Like mom said, a lot of the wildlife has gone away. That’s something that they enjoy every day, is to feed the birds and the deer and different things out here, take off on the golf cart and go feed. But that’s becoming less and less.

So many other things as far as their health. Dad with respiratory issues. Going back to mom’s, the complications of the brain issue. It is true there’s not a lot of data, not a lot of research out there, bnd so they fall back on that. But the odd thing is that while they say we might can prove that they’re causing this harm, there’s so many people in the area that are having many of the same similar things going on. And here’s my question back is while we might not can prove it, but you can’t prove that it’s not either.

And to mom’s issue, that biopsy, I saw a 1.3 centimeter creature in her brain. It was there. And they did a brain biopsy, and the University of Michigan could not — It wasn’t cancer, thank God — It doesn’t have the cell tissue of a tumor, it didn’t have the cell tissue of a mass. And then back in December — That was in July of this last year — December of this year, she had another episode. And the tumors, that creature, whatever it was, it’s gone. So it’s not there. But now the doctor is saying, but there was seizure activity in her brain. We don’t have seizures in our family, and my mom has never had a seizure in her life.

And then in our community, we have had a little child that started having unexpected seizures, and they had to move out of the area. So there’s just so many, they’re not coincidences. There’s so many things that are going on around here that are impacting our community, and we are trying to stand up and fight, again, big companies as best we can with what we have.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Danny, Karen, Nick, Virginia, I wanted to go back around the table and ask if you could tell that story a bit more about how things have unfolded in your lives from the time that you first heard about this Bitcoin mine to now. When did you start sensing that something was deeply wrong here?

Danny Lakey:  Well, I think for me, and probably for most of us, we started hearing some things late 2023, November, December, and it was getting louder, it was intermittent. We saw what was going up over at the plant. Everybody was debating on, is it batteries? Nobody really knew what it was. And then somebody finally took a picture and said it’s Bitcoin, and then showed another mine from another area of the same type of machine. So then we knew what it was and we started paying a little more direct attention to where the noise was coming from because up until then, we just thought that the electric plant that had never had a noise problem was having these crazy fluctuations and didn’t know what to think about it.

It continued to get worse. The Brownings say that they registered 82 on their property, or 80, higher than 82 on their property. The highest I’ve ever gotten is 82. The day it was 82, I was walking in my backyard, and I just looked at the plant, and I’m like, what in the heck is that? And then I felt like I got punched in the chest. For the next two days I had a heart arrhythmia and I was having some issues with my heart. I work in the medical field, and so I have doctors that I can call at a whim. I called my PCP and he said no — Because my wife was like, he needs to go to the hospital. And my PCP said, no, I think this is sound related.

Basically, judging from my history, I’d only had that once before I got a steroid injection and found out that I’m allergic to steroids. And so an allergic reaction to a steroid caused that heart palpitation. But when I had my heart checked out then, my heart is in perfect condition. So this was way out of the ordinary and it was completely from the sound. And that day I registered 82 decibels on my property, and you could actually feel the ground shake.

My wife started having blackouts. She wrecked her car six times in four months, lost her job, wasn’t able to work. She’s still not working, which has been about seven months now, just because of all the issues that it’s caused her within her body.

The strangest thing for me is, on any given day, if you just want to see something funny, just take me to any public place or whatever. Let me sit for about 10 minutes, and I’ll fall asleep. And it doesn’t matter if I just woke up, it doesn’t matter what time of the day it is, when it is, I can fall asleep within 10 minutes because I don’t ever sleep. I used to sleep through the night, through trains, dogs, it didn’t matter. Nothing was waking me up. And now I’m up two, three times a night. I don’t sleep well at all.

You don’t understand what kind of an impact that has on you, the constant barrage of noise. But if you look at work rules from any OSHA, if you’re exposed to certain amount of noise levels, the louder it is, the shorter time of exposure, and the longer time of exposure, the longer you have to be away from it. Well, we exceed all of that on a daily basis, 24/7, and unfortunately we can’t get away from it. And because of what’s going on, they’ve plummeted our property value so much I can no longer get from our property what I put in it. And that’s just ridiculous.

Nick Browning:  We noticed it in 2022 and 2023 and right on up till today. I’ve never in my life had any heart trouble and I started having high blood pressure. So I went to her doctor because she has a pacemaker, and her doctor told me there wasn’t a thing in the world wrong with my heart, but I take high blood pressure medicine every night that he gave me. And a lot of the doctors around here, they don’t want to get involved in none of this stuff. But it’s done a number on us.

And not only us, all of our neighbors [are] the same way. We got neighbors around here, people you wouldn’t believe that had a heart trouble. And I’ve been in a hospital, I had to go to the emergency room one time with my ears, give me a ear infection. I’ve been in the hospital twice for flu. They said flu and pneumonia. So man, it’s been something else. And we’re not the only ones around here. There’s people all around us in this area.

There’s a school about three or four miles over from us, and even they’ve had kids in school. It affects their hearing and art and everything else. And it’s really done a number on us. They say they’re not doing anything but they’re lying. It is.

Karen Pearson:  Like what Danny said, we heard noises, couldn’t identify exactly what it was. And at first too, when you hear something like that and you think it might be the gas plant, that’s a bit alarming too because we weren’t sure if something was about to blow up, take off or what. So then as time continues to progress, and if the wind changes, it blows from the south, or nighttime it’s louder than daytime, there’s so many different factors that cause the noise to ramp up more than others — And really depending on where you’re sitting in reference to the facility, too, and what portion of the mines that they have going at the time.

But once we started realizing that it was actually coming from the mine, we were a bit surprised that they were allowed to even come into the area without us even knowing what was going on. None of us had been notified publicly that anything was going to take place, or they were going to be expanding to a Bitcoin mine company. We had no idea. All of a sudden it’s just upon us, and then we are having to deal with what’s happening.

And then at that point, it was more about we started noticing people getting sick, and then we started getting sick in our own homes. And I work from home, so I’m here 24/7. And over the last year and a half, I’ve seen decline in my dad’s hearing. Again, all these things that have started to come about. And then when you start hearing about your neighbor having some of the same stuff that you’re having, again, it’s not a coincidence. There’s too many people out here just within a couple mile radius that’s all experiencing some of the same stuff.

You know, the best thing about all this, we didn’t know a lot of our neighbors. I didn’t know Danny, I didn’t know Cheryl, I didn’t know a lot of our neighbors. This has brought the community together very rapidly for us to join together. Because, I shared this earlier with you, it’s like environmental euthanasia. We’re all out here in this together. We hear when one person, one of our friends had a pulmonary embolism and he was fine. When things like that start happening or if we don’t hear from somebody in a few days, we’re like, OK, is everybody OK? We hear ambulance come down the road, we’re texting each other. Hey, is that going to your house? We never had to do that before. We are now on such hypervigilant alert about things. Fire trucks go by. Is there anything going on out at the plant? Again, we can’t live peacefully anymore. They’ve invaded that peace, and we all stay just hypervigilant all the time. And like Danny said, you don’t sleep. So the community out here is like a war zone, is what I also equate it to. And you never know what bomb’s going to go off next.

Virginia Browning:  I was just going to say when she said you don’t know what bomb’s going to go off next, and we know it’s going to go off and it’s going to hit one of our friends, even [if] the ones we don’t know personally. But the thing of it is when we speak, when we’re talking to you, we’re talking for all of us out here. Our voice is what you hear, but we’re speaking for them too. So it’s not just a few of us. It’s all of us. And we don’t know how to get out of this. It is just like she said, it’s a war zone, and we don’t have any kind of backup, and that’s what we want. We want backup, and then we want it cleared out.

Nick Browning:  Another thing we have is she and I are retired. We live on a fixed income, and we’re not the only ones. There’s a lot of retired people out here. They try to say that this is an industrial area, it’s not an industrial area, it’s home sites. That’s it. There’s no industrial area out here. But they moved in on top of us anyway. And when they got people coming out here to work on that plant, they shut that plant down. They’re not even running with those people working inside there. And another thing, when they find out if there’s a reporter or something coming, I don’t know where they get their information, but they’ll shut down. They won’t be running. But it’s extremely loud over at Danny’s house. It’s louder at this house than it is at our house. I don’t know if they live down in the valley.

And then we also have a whole bunch of Spanish people that live across the road from it. They live right next to that thing. And some of them have been getting sick, but they won’t say anything because they scared they’ll get in trouble because I don’t know if they’re legal or illegal, but they’ve been here for 30-some years so they’re my neighbors.

And when we first started feeding all the — I feed the deer, the squirrels, the animals. Starting off, I had anywhere from eight to 10 squirrels. Well, I had one squirrel left today. I don’t have any squirrels, and only just a few deer, and just about everything else is gone. There’s just very few animals around here. But when they find out a news reporter or somebody’s coming, they’ll shut down for two or three days and some of the animals have come back. But still no snakes, no, the bird population is way down. And I’ve been feeding them every day for the last 25 years out of here. And it’s just not happening. They’re just, they’re ruining everything.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I cannot help but hear the echoes of other sacrifice zones and other working-class residents who have been poisoned, polluted, abandoned, and are dealing with different circumstances, but very similar situations to what you guys are dealing with. It’s harrowing how similar these stories sound, and it’s so mind blowing how different the causes can be.

But I’ve heard from so many residents who live near concentrated animal feeding operations, chickens, cows. And they look at that and they know that the waste that these animals are producing and being housed in these massive lagoons and being sprayed over their neighbor’s farmlands, they can see that that’s all getting into their water.

The folks here in South Baltimore, I’ve seen the uncovered coal cars, car after car after car for miles on these CSX trains not covered, and the wind is just blowing this toxic coal dust all over the place. I’ve seen residents wipe it off their windows. And yet all the while they’re being told, oh, how do you know it’s coal? It’s not us. That could be any kind of black dust. Oh, you have respiratory problems? It’s probably because you smoked a cigarette two decades ago. The burden is always put on the residents, and it’s never put on the big, fat, obvious polluters at the center of these stories. It’s just maddening to hear another community going through something like this.

But I think one thing I wanted to ask about is when I’m talking to folks in these other areas and the industries involved, there’s always something that they can at least grasp about those industries. Like, OK, coal, yeah, it’s dirty, but we need it for energy and metallurgical processes. The chicken CAFO down the street, yeah, it’s gross and dirty, but people gotta eat chickens. I’ve heard these kinds of things. I wanted to ask, as you and your other neighbors started realizing what was happening in your town, what did you think all of this was for? Did you know anything about Bitcoin? What is it like to know that you’re going through all this for something like Bitcoin mining?

Danny Lakey:  That was a pretty hard pill for me to swallow at the beginning. It’s really rough because all it is is it’s profiting a corporation — And, obviously, the people who are in Bitcoin. But the Bitcoin mining people, they’re processing transactions. They’re doing data calculations at phenomenal rates and encoding and [decoding] and encrypting. It’s crazy. But that’s how they’re making their money. So it is just to enrich a corporation. Has no play on anything else.

It was more disheartening in Texas, obviously Texas is, we like to be the wild Wild West and we don’t want anybody bothering with our land and let us do our thing, but that’s if it doesn’t encroach on other people. And this does. And then the Bitcoin mining is part of Greg Abbott’s grand plan to get enough power to cover the state anytime we have peak issues, so we don’t have one of the snow issues like we had a few years back, that’s part of his plan. If they bring in the Bitcoin mines that drive the power, then they build more power plants that get to sell their power on a regular basis, but then they have more power on the grid for when there’s an emergency.

So I understand the process, but to do that, you have opened up a state that doesn’t have any regulations on this, so now they can move in. In Texas, if you are not in an incorporated city of some kind, there are no regulations. And so they don’t have any regulations. They don’t have to ask permission.

It’s why they say that they are in an industrial zone. They’re not in an industrial zone. They’re on a piece of property owned by the electric plant, and every square inch that borders that electric plant is either residential, farmland, agricultural, or used for cows or goats. It is an agricultural or a residential piece of property, every inch of it. And then they want to say, oh, it’s in a well-known industrial area. No, it’s on the grounds of an electric plant and you’re there so you don’t have to pay distribution fees to power running through somebody’s power lines to get to you and you can buy it by the gigawatt on the open market in Texas.

It was very disheartening because you’re no longer fighting the Bitcoin company, you’re fighting Greg Abbott’s master plan. And then we found out it was data centers now, which does AI, and they’re tying AI into our national defense. So now we’re fighting the federal government, the state government, and these stupid mining companies.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Do they say it’s going to bring jobs and economic stimulus or what? What is it that they’re actually… What are they doing besides using a shit ton of water — Pardon my French — And creating a shit ton of sound pollution right next to your homes and generating a shit ton of money for people who are not you?

Danny Lakey:  Well, and now with the more power, they’re about to build a third power plant, which is going to generate more air pollution. So we have water pollution, air pollution, noise pollution, so we got the good trifecta going on. They also recently built a solar farm, and as great as good energy is, that heats the air up around it and it’s killing all the birds. So we’ve got increased temperature, increased air pollution, increased noise pollution, and increased water pollution. And what we’re getting out of it is about $8 million a year to the Granbury school districts. And when we appeal to Granbury and ask them to do it because we’re in the county, they have made it very clear we are not part of Granbury.

Virginia Browning:  The day that we read in the newspaper that all of this out here didn’t concern Granbury because we were not in the Granbury city limits, that was a slap in the face. They let us know we’re out here by ourselves, and they really don’t care about, Granbury doesn’t care about the country around the city. They don’t care about the part of Hood County that doesn’t say Granbury city limits. They just don’t care. And that’s where we are. We are out here floundering by ourselves. It’s like you’re in the boat in the middle of the ocean with no oars. That’s what we feel like.

Karen Pearson:  Danny says it a little more elegant than what we can as far as, I guess, some of the stuff that I think that the people in Texas are not really realizing. We have had so much ridicule and people saying that we’re just doing this because we want money and this and that. We’re doing this because we want our peace, but we’re also doing this because for future generations. And also in Texas, like what he mentioned, the Bitcoin plants are buying kilowatts at very, very low cost per kilowatt, saving it up, and then when the grid starts weakening and there needs to be more, they then go to the Bitcoin companies and buy it back from them at the consumer’s expense. We are the ones that have to pay for that extra kilowatts or whatever that they’re selling back.

Why is it that these companies who — And again, they’re not contributing to jobs in the area, they’re not contributing to the local economy out here where they’re located. I beg to differ that, I bet not even five of their employees even live here in Granbury or Hood County.

So all at our expense, they’re making money. The people in Texas are buying the electricity back at probably double or better rates whenever the grid goes down. And that’s what I don’t think people understand. It’s almost like the great Ponzi scheme is what it seems like.

It’s people like you that get the word out for us. That’s been what has helped us tremendously in this fight. Like mom said, we’re out here floundering all on our own, all together, sick as some of us are, trying to just be heard and give us our peace back.

Nick Browning:  They’re not allowed in China. They were run out of China, and so why did they come to Texas? It’s just a scheme is all it is, and we’re sick and tired of it. I don’t know what we can do about it. But they keep saying that they’re not harming us, but they are, every one of them. I think that people in town, their palms were padded and that’s why they said we’re not part of Granbury. We’re out here in Hood County out in the country out on our own. It’s a scheme. It’s just a scheme. That’s it.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Now I wanted to ask you guys with just the last few minutes that we have together — And again, this will not be the only time we cover this story, I promise y’all we are going to do follow-ups and I want to get y’all on panels with folks that we’ve spoken to from other areas of the country where they’re dealing with industrial pollution or other awful things that have upended their lives. So we promise everyone listening that we are going to stay on this story.

But with the time we have left in this episode, I wanted to ask if you guys could bring us up to speed on where things stand now and what, if anything, is being done to address your concerns. Have you gotten any help from local officials? Is that help coming from local organizations, community-led groups? What is being done and what needs to be done to help you guys get out of this hell that you’re living in?

Danny Lakey:  Well, we’ve had some help. We have a couple of county commissioners that are on our side that have helped us out. They helped get a study, but all we could get was about $6,000, so it was a very small study. We were glad to have it, but you need a bigger sound study in a bigger area than what you can do with six grand and we wouldn’t have been able to get any more out of it. So we were glad to get that.

We’ve gotten a lot of help from national media, some international media, and anybody that wants to come out and talk to us. We really, really, really appreciate people putting eyes on it because that’s about the only place we’re going to get some help.

We’re not going to get it from our county judge, kind of holds all the cards. He gets his little party paid for by people. Senator Birdwell, who is our state senator, he’s of no help. I had a 45-minute conversation trying to get them to not give a grant to the electric plant to expand the electric planning larger, and I thought he was on our side, and then 45 minutes later he voted against us. So he is not help. Our local congresswoman, she is not of any help.

We are getting some help out of Somervell County, which is our neighboring county, because they are impacted too. And everybody down in Somervell has been very, very helpful. So we want to put that out. There’s a lady by the name of Cheryl Shedden who is the driver of our bus. She lives a little bit closer to the plant than I do, so she gets it even worse than I do. And she’s been here quite a while. She is the leader of our ring. She keeps everybody motivated. So you gotta give a shout out to Cheryl for all the work she’s done.

We’ve got some good news. We’ve been in enough contact with people for litigation about various different things. One, we were fighting to get an injunction to try to get Marathon to stop the noise, bury it, put a building over it, move it out, I don’t care, but just stop the noise. You can do all the Bitcoin mining you want over there, I don’t care, but stop killing me with the noise. Earthjustice came on board to help us with that suit, and that is in progress right now, and we’re very grateful to them because they’re doing that free of charge. And so they heard about us and offered us our services.

We started a nonprofit called Protect Hood County. We had to do that because of litigation. They needed a leadership group. They needed a name. And so we got a 501(c)(3) status. We are currently trying to raise $5,000 to fight building a third power plant. Like I said, the state granted them money to build it. We were able to get enough people and enough written documents to where it’s the first time in the state of Texas that an air permit was not issued to a gas power plant. So they held off on issuing the permit, which made them forfeit their grant.

Now they’re going to reapply. And the permit has not been [inaudible]. It’s just going through a hearing process. We’ve got a meeting coming up with the state, and if we survive that, then we have to go in front of a judge and plead our case for a final ruling on it. We’ve had quotes from 25 to $75,000 when we finally found an attorney that says, if you get there, I’ll take it for five grand and get you in there.

But none of us are independently wealthy. I mean, we may have some land, but land in Texas is not expensive, and these are our retirement homes. We’re not sitting on millions and millions of dollars. I think the Bitcoin mine’s worth about 5 or $6 billion, and the electric company’s worth about $60 or $70 billion. So they’ve got some deep pockets and we’re having to fight ’em. But we did get that injunction to hold off on the air permit, which was a huge win. And we’re hoping that we have a meeting with Marathon, and we’re hoping we can have a little bit of a win before the end of the month.

But anything anybody can do, if you just want to read about it, you can go to protecthoodcounty.com. There’s a lot of information on it. Like I said, we have a 501(c)(3) status that, if anybody wants to help donate, we can’t thank you enough.

Again, other communities, other states, other areas are going to be fighting this because it’s no longer Bitcoin. It’s now data centers. And the federal government is leaking the power of AI as to how we’re going to fight China in the future and they want to stay ahead of ’em. And we have to have power to do it, we’ve got to have it all over the country.

So these things are not going away, and we need some fight to get some regulation on it. Let’s find a happy way to do it. It was mentioned before that China kicked them out, their data centers, they’re bearing in the South Sea because it cools ’em. And of course there’s no noise down there. So they’re burying them down in the ocean and then running the power to it, to their AI centers are coming back. I’m not saying we go that extreme, but there’s got to be a compromise in ruining all of our lives, and killing us slowly is not the answer.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that was powerfully put. And Karen, Nick, Virginia, I wanted to just toss it to you to round us out. I think Danny really underlined the most important point here. When I talk to people about why we do this coverage on this show, because for years, and even still, we talk to union workers. We talk to people organizing their workplaces. We talk to people in non-union shops about their lives and their jobs. It’s a show by and for working-class people.

And so some people will ask, well, why are you talking about a Bitcoin mine in rural Texas? And I’m like, well, who do you think are the people living around this place? They are our fellow workers. They are the people whose lives and ability to make a living are being upended by this. We haven’t even talked about what this is doing to the farmers who live around there or to anyone who’s trying to work the land around this Bitcoin mine and the way it’s impacting them.

But we’ve talked about how you all, as flesh and blood people, working people, retirees, how this is impacting you and your daily lives. So for everyone listening, just think about what it’s like to try to get through your day-to-day life, make a living while enduring this level of sound pollution, stress, and all the gaslighting that comes with it. That’s why we’re talking about it. Because this is wrong, and working people standing together is the only way that we’re going to get out of it.

I wanted to let you guys have the last word and ask if you had any final messages to the working people who listen to this show, the folks in other sacrifice zones who listen to this show, any final messages you wanted to send from out there in Granbury to the folks listening.

Karen Pearson:  We’re out here fighting for everyone, and there is a handful of us that are not giving up. We have big voices, and we have a lot of spunk in us. And like he said, Cheryl Shedden, she’s our rockstar team leader in all of this, and we’re motivated to stand toe to toe with them. We might not have the money for attorneys or whatever we would like to.

It’s kind of funny, those of us who, like Danny said, we own property and stuff, but they’re on a fixed income. I work 40 hours a week to make ends meet myself. And even when we are needing funds for small projects that we have to keep going with, I come to mom and dad and ask them, do you have $10? Mom will usually give me $20. I’m like, well, just give me $10. That’s all I need. She’s like, no, you just take this. Even on their fixed income, they still find it necessary to give into this because, again, mom’s been in the hospital several times and she still worries about her neighbor. She thinks there’s somebody else that’s worse off than what she is. So the sacrifices that we are all making to try to take care of each other is huge.

Like Danny said, go to the website, read on there, join, get on the mailing list. You can keep up with things there. We’re not attorneys, but you know what? We’re fighting this as if we are, there’s five of us that are going toe to toe up against this air permit and to try to, if we can’t block it, then we want to come in with some mediation and we want to put up some safeguards. We’re not stopping and we’re not giving up. And you can intimidate us as big as you want with your money or your corporation, but we’re not going to go away.

And I would say that to any community that’s fighting like we are. Stand up for your life because no one else is going to do it for you. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re standing up for our lives, the quality of our lives that we wanted and laid out for ourselves, and then also for the others who can’t fight for themselves. We’re not quitting and we’re not going away. So one way another, we’re going to keep plugging.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests from Granbury, Texas: Danny Lakey, Karen Pearson, and her parents, Nick and Virginia Browning. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People.

And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference.

I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

One year ago, Columbia University became ground zero for the student-led Gaza solidarity encampment movement that spread to campuses across the country and around the world. Now, Columbia has become ground zero for the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on higher education, academic freedom, and the right to free speech and free assembly—all under the McCarthyist guise of rooting out “anti-semitism.” From Trump’s threats to cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts with Columbia to the abduction of international students like Mahmoud Khalil by ICE agents, to the university’s firing and expulsion of Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers union president Grant Miner, “a tremendous chilling effect” has gripped Columbia’s campus community. In this urgent episode of Working People, we speak with: Caitlin Liss, a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University and a member of Student Workers of Columbia-UAW (SWC); and Allie Wong, a PhD student at the Columbia Journalism School and a SWC member who was arrested and beaten by police during the second raid on the Gaza solidarity protests at Columbia on April 30, 2024.

Additional links/info:

• Student Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2710 website
• April 17: Day of Action to Defend Higher Ed website
• Mahmoud Khalil statement from ICE detention: “My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner”
• Allie Wong, The Intercept, “This is not about antisemitism, Palestine, or Columbia. It’s Trump dismantling the American dream“
• Grant Miner, The Nation, “Columbia expelled me for my palestine activism, but I won’t be silenced”
• Jonah E. Bromwich & Hamed Aleaziz, The New York Times, “Columbia student hunted by ICE sues to prevent deportation”
• AAUP letter to college and university legal offices: “Institutions Should Not Provide Student and Faculty Info To Enable Deportations”
• Alan Blinder, The New York Times, “Trump Has Targeted These Universities. Why?”
• Oliver Laughland, The Guardian, “‘Detention Alley’: inside the Ice centres in the US south where foreign students and undocumented migrants languish”
• Alice Speri, The Guardian, “‘A huge cudgel’: alarm as Trump’s war on universities could target accreditors”
• Annie Ma, Makiya Seminera, & Christopher L. Keller, Associated Press, “Visa cancellations sow panic for international students, with hundreds fearing deportation”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘People are hiding in their apartments’: Inside Trump’s assault on universities”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘Kill these cuts before they kill us’: Federally funded researchers warn DOGE cuts will be fatal”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are continuing our urgent coverage of the Trump Administration’s all out assault on our institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn and work there. Today we are going deeper into the heart of authoritarian darkness that has gripped colleges and universities across the country and we’re talking with two graduate student workers at Columbia University. Columbia has become ground zero for the administration’s gangster government style moves to hold billions of dollars of federal funding hostage in order to bend universities to Donald Trump’s will to reshape the curricula culture and research infrastructure of American higher ed as such and to squash our constitutionally protected rights to free speech and free assembly, all under the McCarthy’s guise of rooting out supposed antisemitism, which the administration has recategorized to mean virtually any criticism of an opposition to the state of Israel.

The political ideology of Zionism and Israel’s US backed genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians just one year ago. Columbia University was also ground zero for the student-led Palestine solidarity protests and encampments that spread to campuses across the country and even around the world. It was exactly one year ago that the first Gaza solidarity encampment began at Columbia on April 17th, 2024 and that same month on more than one occasion, Columbia’s own president at the time minutia authorized the NYPD to descend on campus like an occupying force, beat an arrest protestors and dismantle the camps. Now fast forward to March of this year. On Friday, March 7th, the Trump administration announced that it was canceling $400 million in federal grants and contracts with Columbia claiming that the move was due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students. The very next day, March 8th Mahmud, Khalil was abducted by ICE agents at his New York City apartment building in front of his pregnant wife and disappeared to a Louisiana immigration jail.

Khalil, a Palestinian born legal resident with a green card had just completed his master’s program and was set to graduate in May. He had served as a key negotiator with the university administration and spokesperson for the student encampment last year. He’s not accused of breaking any laws during that time, but the Trump administration has weaponized a rarely used section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, invoking the Secretary of States power to deport non-citizens if they supposedly believed their presence in the country could negatively affect US foreign policy. Just days after Khalil’s abduction, the university also expelled grant minor president of the Student Workers of Columbia Union, a local of the United Auto Workers, and that was just one day before contract negotiations were set to open between the union and the university. On March 13th, I was expelled from Columbia University for participating in the protest movement against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, minor rights in an op-ed for the nation.

I was not the only one. He continues, 22 students, all of whom like me had been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, were either expelled, suspended for years or had their hard earned degrees revoked on the same day all for allegedly occupying a building that has been occupied at least four times throughout Columbia’s history. And then there’s Y Sao Chung, a 21-year-old undergraduate and legal permanent resident who is suing the government after ICE moved to deport her, following her arrest on March 5th while protesting Columbia’s disciplinary actions against student protestors. I mean, this is just a small, terrifying snapshot of the broader Orwellian nightmare that has become all too real, all too quickly at Columbia University and it is increasingly becoming reality around the country and things got even darker last week with the latest development in Mahmood Khalil’s case as the American Civil Liberties Union stated on Friday in a decision that appeared to be pre-written, an immigration judge ruled immediately after a hearing today that Mahmud Khalil is removable under US immigration law. This comes less than 48 hours after the US government handed over the evidence they have on Mr. Khalil, which included nothing more than a letter from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that made clear Mr. Khalil had not committed a crime and was being targeted solely based on his speech. He’s not yet scheduled for deportation.

Listen, this isn’t just a redux of McCarthyism and the red scare. It has elements of that absolutely, but it is also monstrously terrifyingly new. I don’t know how far down this road we’re going to go. All I know is that whatever comes next will depend on what people of conscience do now or what they don’t do. Will other universities cave and capitulate to Trump as quickly as Columbia has? Will we see instead faculty, staff, students, grad students, parents, community members and others coming together on campuses across the country to fight this or will fear submission silence and self-censorship went out? What is it even like to be living, working and studying at Columbia University right now? Well, today you’ll hear all about that firsthand from our two guests. With all of this going on, I got to speak with Caitlin Liss, a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University and a member of Student workers of Columbia, and I also spoke with Alie Wong, a PhD student at the Columbia Journalism School, and a student workers of Columbia member who was arrested and beaten by police during the second raid on the Gaza solidarity protests at Columbia on April 30th, 2024.

Here’s my conversation with Caitlin and Allie recorded on Saturday April 12th. Well, Caitlin, Allie, thank you both so much for joining us today on the show. I really appreciate it, especially in the midst of everything going on right now. And I basically wanted to start there and ask if you could tell us from your own firsthand experience as student workers at Columbia, like what is the mood on campus and in your life right now, especially in light of the latest ruling on Mahmud Khalil’s case?

Caitlin Liss:

Okay. Yeah, so thank you for having us. I’m happy to be here. The mood on campus has been, you probably won’t be surprised to hear pretty bleak, pretty bad. We found out yesterday that Mahmood Kalila is not going to be released from jail in Louisiana. I think a lot of us were hoping that this ruling that was coming up was going to be in his favor and he would be released and be back home in time to be there for the birth of his baby. And it didn’t happen. And I think it’s just another horrible thing that has happened in a month, two months of just unrelenting bad news on campus. So stuff is feeling pretty bad. People are afraid, especially international students are afraid to leave their house. They’re afraid to speak up in class. I hear from people who are afraid to go to a union meeting and even those of us who are citizens feel afraid as well.

I mean, I wake up every day and I look at my phone to see if I’ve gotten a text message telling me that one of my friends has been abducted. It’s really scary. And on top of the sort of personal relationships with our friends and comrades who are at risk, there’s the sense that also our careers are industry are at risk. So, and many other members of student workers of Columbia have spent many years dedicated to getting a PhD and being in academia and it’s increasingly starting to feel like academia might not exist for that much longer. So it’s feeling pretty bleak.

Allie Wong:

Yeah, I would definitely agree. And again, thank you so much Max for having us here. It’s a real pleasure to be able to share our stories and have a platform to do that. Yeah, I would agree. I think that there is a tremendous chilling effect that’s sunk in across the campus. And on one hand it’s not terribly surprising considering that’s the strategy of the Trump administration on the other. It is really a defeating feeling to see the momentum that we had last year, the ways that we were not only telling the story but telling it across the world that all eyes were on Columbia and we had this really incredible momentum. And so to see not just that lack of momentum, but the actual fear that has saturated the entire campus that has indiscriminately permeated people’s attitudes, whether you’re an American citizen or not, whether you’re light-skinned or not, has been something that’s been incredibly harrowing.

I know that after Mahmood, I at least had the anticipation of quite a bit of activity, but between that ranjani the other students and Columbia’s capitulation, it actually has gone the opposite way in that while I expected there to be tons of masks on campus after Columbia agreed to have a total mask ban, there was no one when I expected to see different vigils or protests or the breakdown of silos that have emerged across the campus of different groups, whether they’re student groups or faculty groups, I’m just hoping to see some kind of solidarity there. It hasn’t, and I think it’s largely because of the chilling effect because that this is the strategy of the Trump administration and unfortunately it’s such a dire situation that I think it’s really squashed a lot of the fervor and a lot of the fearlessness that many of us had prior to this moment.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It feels like a ice pick to the heart to hear that, especially knowing not just what we saw on campuses across the country just a year ago, but also the long tradition of campus protests and universities and higher education being a place of free speech, free thought free debate and the right to protest and lead with a moral consciousness like movements that help direct the whole of society to see that this is what is happening here now in front of all of us. And since I have so much more, I want to ask about the past month for you both on campus, but while we’re on that subject that Allie just brought up about the expectation right now, which I have heard echoed a lot of places online and offline of why aren’t there mass protests across higher ed in every state in the country right now, you would think that the generation of the sixties would do just that if Nixon had tried such a thing. And a lot of folks have been asking us why aren’t we seeing that right now? And so I wanted to ask if y’all had any thoughts on that and also if that would in your mind change things like if you saw other campuses that weren’t being targeted as intently as Columbia is, if you saw students and faculty and others protesting on behalf of what’s happening to you, would that change the mood on campus you think?

Caitlin Liss:

I mean that there’s a few things going on. Part of it is, like Allie said, the chilling effect of what’s been happening is making a really large percentage of our members and people in our community afraid to publicly take action. International student workers make up a really big percentage of our membership, and a lot of those people are afraid to even sign their name to a petition. In my departments. We sent a joint letter to the departments about what was going on, and a bunch of students didn’t want their names appearing on this letter that was just being sent the chair of the departments. So the chilling effect is real and very strong, and I think that that’s preventing a lot of people from showing up in ways that they might have done otherwise. I think that another part of it is just the kind of unrelenting nature of what’s been happening.

It has been one horrible thing after another and trying to react to everything as it comes in is difficult, but I don’t think it’s the case that we’re not doing anything. We are doing quite a bit and really trying through many different avenues to use our power as a union to fight back against what’s happening. We are talking with other unions on campus, we talk to other higher ed unions across the country, and so I think that there is quite a lot going on, but it does sometimes feel like we can’t keep up with the pace of the things that are happening just because they are happening so quickly and accumulating so fast.

Allie Wong:

Yeah, I mean I would definitely agree. I think that it’s the fire hose strategy, which has proven to be effective not just on Columbia but across the nation with the dismantling of the federal government attack on institutions, the arts, the legal processes and legal entities. And so I think that again, that that’s part of the strategy is to just overwhelm people with the number of issues that would require attention. And I think that’s happening on Columbia’s campus as well. If we take even divestment as an example where it was a pretty straightforward ask last year, but now we’re seeing an issue on campus where it’s no longer about Palestine, Israel divestment, it’s about immigration reform and law enforcement. It’s about the American dream class consciousness. So many of these different things that are happening not just to the student body, but to faculty and the administration.

And so I think that in terms of trying to galvanize people, it’s a really difficult ask when you have so many different things that are coming apart at the seams. And that’s not to say it’s an insurmountable task. As Caitlin mentioned, we are moving forward, we are putting infrastructure in place and asks in place, but I think it’s difficult to mobilize people around so many different issues when everyone already feels not only powerless but cynical about the ability to change things when again, that momentum that we had last year has waned and the issues have broadened.

Caitlin Liss:

Just in terms of your question about support or solidarity from other campuses, I think that one of the things that has been most dispiriting about being at Columbia right now is that it’s clear that Columbia is essentially a test case for the Trump administration. We were the first school to be and are still in many ways kind of the center of attention, but it’s not just us, but it feels like the way that Columbia is reacting is kind of setting the tone for what other universities and colleges can do across the country. And what Columbia is doing is folding, so they are setting an example that is just rolling over and giving up in terms of what other colleges can do. I think we’re seeing other universities are reacting to these kinds of attacks in ways that are much better than Columbia has done. We just saw that Tufts, I think filed some legal documents in support of Ru Mesa Ozturk because she is a student there.

Columbia has done no such thing for Ranjani, for Uno, for Mahmood. They haven’t even mentioned them. And so we can see other universities are reacting in ways that are better. And I think that that gives us hope and not only gives us hope, but it gives us also something to point to when people at Columbia say, well, Columbia can’t do things any differently. It’s like, well, clearly it can because these other universities are doing something. Columbia doesn’t have to be doing this. It is making a choice to completely give in to everything that Trump is demanding.

Allie Wong:

And I would also add to that point, and going back to your question about Mahmood and sort of how either us individually or collectively are feeling about that, to Caitlin’s point, I think there’s so much that’s symbolic about Columbia, whether it has to do with Trump’s personal pettiness or the fact that it was kind of the epicenter of the encampments list last year. I think what happened with Mahmood is incredibly symbolic. If you look at particularly him and Ranjani, the first two that were targeted by the university, so much of their situations are almost comical in how they planned the ambiguity of policy and antisemitism where you look at Mahmud and he, it’s almost funny that he was the person who was targeted because he’s an incredibly calm, gentle person. He provided a sense of peace during the chaos of last year. He’s unequivocally condemned, Hamas, very publicly condemned terrorism, condemned antisemitism.

So if you were looking for someone who would be a great example, he’s not really one considering they don’t have any evidence on him. And the same thing for Ranjani who literally wasn’t even in the country when October 7th happened in that entire year, had never participated in the protests at most, had kind of engaged with social media by liking things, but two really good examples of people who don’t actually quite fit the bill in terms of trying to root out antisemitism. But in my mind it’s really strategic because it really communicates that nobody is safe. Whether you’ve participated in protests or not, you’re not safe, whether you’ve condemned antisemitism or not, you’re not safe. And I think that plays into the symbolic nature of Columbia as well, where Trump is trying to make an example out of Columbia and out of Columbia students. And we see that very clearly in the ruling yesterday with Mahmud.

Again, that’s not to say that it’s not an insurmountable thing, but it’s disappointing and it’s frankly embarrassing to be a part of an institution that brags about its long history of protests, its long history of social change through student movements. When you look at 1968 and Columbia called the NYPD on students arrested 700 students, and yet it kind of enshrines that moment in history as a place of pride, and I see that happening right now as well where 20, 30, 50 years from now, we’ll be looking at this moment and Columbia will be proud of it when really they’re the perpetrators of violence and hatred and bigotry and kind of turning the gun on their own students. So yeah, it’s a really precarious time to be a Columbia student and to be advocating for ourselves and our friends, our brothers and sisters who are experiencing this kind of oppression and persecution from our own country.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Allie, Caitlin, I want to ask if we could again take that step back to the beginning of March where things were this terrifying new reality was really ramping up with the Trump administration’s freezing and threatening of completely withholding $400 million in federal funds and grants to Columbia just one day before Mahmood Khalil was abducted by ice agents and disappeared to a jail in Louisiana thousands of miles away. So from that point to now, I wanted to ask, as self-identified student workers at Columbia University, how have you and others been feeling throughout all of this as it’s been unfolding and trying to get through your day-to-day work? What does that even look like? Teaching and researching under these terrifying circumstances?

Allie Wong:

For me, it has been incredibly scary. As you mentioned, I was someone who was arrested and beaten last year after the second Gaza solidarity encampment raid and have spoken quite publicly about it. I authored a number of pieces around that time and since then and have been pretty open about my involvement being okay serving as a lightning rod for a lot of that PR stuff. And so for me, coming into this iteration of students battles with the university, it’s been really scary to kind see how many of the students that I was arrested with, many of my friends and colleagues are now either being targeted because of their involvement or living in the fear of being targeted because there is an opacity around what those policies are and how they’re being enforced and implemented. So it really does feel quite McCarthys in the sense that you don’t really know what the dangers are, but you know that they’re there, you’re looking over your shoulder all the time.

I don’t leave my house without wearing a mask just because through this whole process, many students have been doxed. Both Caitlin and myself have been doxed quite heavily through Canary mission and other groups online, and many folks have experienced offline behavior that has been threatening or scary to their own physical emotional security. And so that’s been a big piece for me is just being aware of my surroundings, being mindful of when I leave the house. In many respects, it does feel like I am growing in paranoia, but at the same time I consider it a moral obligation to be on the front lines as a light-skinned US citizen to be serving as a literal and figurative shield for my international brothers and sisters. And so it’s an interesting place as particularly a US citizen to say, what is my responsibility to the people around me?

What’s my responsibility to myself and keeping myself and my home safe? What’s my responsibility for sticking up for those who are targeted as someone who has the privilege of being able to be a citizen? And so I think it’s kind of a confusing time for those of us on the ground wanting to do more, wanting to help, wanting to offer our assistance with the privileges that we have and everyone’s level of comfort is different, and so my expectation is not that other people would take the kinds of risks I’m taking, but everyone has a part to play and whether that’s a visual part or a non-visual part, being in the public, it doesn’t really matter. We all have a part to play. And so given what we talked about just about the strategy of the Trump administration and the objectives to make us fearful and make us not speak out, I think it’s more important now than ever for those of us who are able to have the covering of US citizenship, to be doing everything in our power with the resources we’ve been given to take those risks because it’s much more important now in this administration than it’s ever been.

Caitlin Liss:

And I think on top of the stuff allie’s talking about, we do still have to continue doing our jobs. So for me, that is teaching. I’m teaching a class this semester and that has been very challenging to do, having to continue going in and talking about the subject matter, which is stuff that is very interesting to me personally and that I’m very excited to be teaching about in the classroom, but at the same time, there’s so much going on campus, it just feels impossible to be turning our attention to Ana and I hear from my students are scared, so part of my job has become having to help my students through that. I have heard lots of people who are trying to move their classes off campus because students don’t want to be on campus right now.

ICE is crawling all over campus. The NYPD is all over the place. I don’t know if you saw this, but Columbia has agreed to hire these 36 quote peace officers who are going to be on campus and have arresting power. So now essentially we have cops on campus full time and then on top of all of that, you have to wait in these horrible security lines to even get onto campus so the environment on campus doesn’t feel safe, so my students don’t feel safe. I don’t think anyone’s students feel safe right now. My colleagues who are international students don’t feel safe. I had a friend ask me what to do because she was TAing for a class and she wasn’t allowed to move it off campus or onto Zoom, and she said, I don’t feel safe on campus because I’m an international student and what am I going to do if ice comes to the door?

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in that situation. And so the students are scared, my colleagues are scared. I’ve even heard from a lot of professors who are feeling like they have to watch their words in the classroom because they don’t want to end up on Canary mission for having said something. So that’s quite difficult. Teaching in this environment is very difficult and I think that the students are having a really hard time. And then on top of that, I am in the sixth year of my PhD, so I’m supposed to be writing a dissertation right now, and that is also quite difficult to be keeping up with my research, which is supposed to be a big part of the PhD is producing research and it’s really hard to do right now because it feels like we have, my friends and my colleagues are at risk right now, so that’s quite difficult to maintain your attention in all those different places.

Allie Wong:

Just one more piece to add because I know that we’ve been pretty negative and it is a pretty negative situation, so I don’t want to silver line things. That being said, I do feel as though it’s been really beautiful to see people step up and really beautiful to see this kind of symbiotic relationship happening between US students and international students. I’m at the journalism school, which is overwhelmingly international, and I was really discouraged when there was a report that came out from the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about a closed town hall that we had where our dean, Jelani Cobb more or less said to students, we can’t protect you as much as I would love to be able to say here are the processes and protocols and the ways to keep yourself safe and the ways that we’re here to support you, but he just said we can’t.

And he got a lot of flack for that because that’s a pretty horrible thing for a dean to say. But I actually really appreciated it because it was the most honest and direct thing he could have said to students when the university itself was just sending us barrages of emails with these empty platitudes about values and a 270 year history of freethinking and all this nonsense. That being said, I think that it was a really difficult story to read, but at the same time it’s been really beautiful to see community gather around and clinging together when there are unknowns, people taking notes for each other when students don’t feel comfortable going to campus, students starting to host off campus happy hour groups and sit-ins together and things of that nature that have been really, again, amazing to see happen under such terrible circumstances and people just wanting to help each other out in the ways that they can.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Caitlyn, Allie, you were just giving us a pretty harrowing view of your day-to-day reality there as student workers of Columbia PhD working on your PhDs and dealing with all of this Orwellian madness that we’ve been talking about today. When I was listening to you both, I was hearing so many kind of resonances from my own experience, just one sort of decade back, right? I mean, because I remember being a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan during the first Trump administration and co-founding for full disclosure, I was a member of the grad union there. I was a co-founder of the campus anti-fascist network. I was doing a lot of public writing. I started this podcast in that sort of era, and there were so many things that y’all were talking about that sounded similar from the fear of websites like Canary Mission, putting people’s names out there and encouraging them to be doxed and disciplined and even deported.

That resonated with me because it just ate nine years ago. That was groups like Turning Point USA, they were the ones trying to film professors in class and then send it to Breitbart and hopefully get it into the Fox News outrage cycle. And I experienced some of that. But what I’m hearing also is just that the things we were dealing with during the first Trump administration are not what y’all are dealing with now. There is first and foremost a fully, the state is now part of it. The state is now sort of leading that. It’s not just the sort of far right groups and people online and that kind of thing, but also it feels like the mechanisms of surveillance and punishment are entirely different as well. I wanted to ask if y’all could speak a little more to that side of things. It’s not just the university administration that you’re contending with, you’re contending with a lot of different forces here that are converging on you and your rights at this very moment.

Caitlin Liss:

Yeah, I mean I think the one thing that has been coming up a lot for us, we’re used to fighting Columbia, the institution for our rights in the workplace for fair pay. And Columbia has always been a very stubborn adversary, very difficult to get anything out of them. Our first contract fight lasted for years, and now we’re looking at not just Columbia as someone to be fighting with, but at the federal government as a whole. And it’s quite scary. I think we talked about this a little bit, about international students being afraid to participate in protests, being afraid to go to union meetings. We’re hearing a lot of fear from people who aren’t citizens about to what extent participating in the union is safe for them right now. And on the one hand you want to say participating in a union is a protected activity.

There’s nothing illegal about it. You can’t get in trouble. In fact, it’s illegal to retaliate against you for being in a union. But on the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily feel like the law is being that protective right now. So it’s a very scary place to be in. And I think that from our point of view, the main tool we have in this moment is just our solidarity with one another and labor power as a union because the federal governments does not seem that interested in protecting our rights as a union. And so we have to rely on each other in order to fight for what we need and what will make our workplace safe.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I was wondering, Allie, if I could also toss it to you there, because this makes me think of something you said earlier about how the conditions at Columbia, the structure of Columbia, how Columbia’s run, have sort of made it vulnerable to what’s happening now or the ways that Columbia talks about itself versus what Columbia actually is, are quite stark here. And connecting that to what Caitlin just said, I think it should also be understood as someone who has covered grad student campaigns, contract campaigns at Columbia and elsewhere, that when these sorts of strikes are happening when graduate student workers are taking action against the administration, the first ones that are threatened by the administration with punitive measures including potentially the revocation of their visas are international students. They have always been the most vulnerable members of grad student unions that administrations have actually used as leverage to compel unions to bend to their demand. So I make that point speaking only for myself here as a journalist who has observed this in many other times, that this precedent of going after international students in the way the Trump administration is like didn’t just come out of nowhere.

Allie Wong:

Exactly. Yeah. So I mean I think if you even look at how Trump campaigned, he really doubled down on immigration policy. I mean, it’s the most obvious statement I can say, but the high hyperbole, the hatred, the racism, you see that as a direct map onto what’s happening right now. And I think that’s part of what maybe isn’t unique about Columbia, but as we’re starting to see other universities take a stand, Caitlin mentioned Tufts. I know Princeton also recently kind said that they would not capitulate. So there is precedent for something different from how Columbia has behaved, and I think you see them just playing exactly into Trump’s hands folding to his kind of proxy policy of wanting to make Colombian example. And it’s a really disappointing thing from a university that prides itself on its liberal values, prides itself on its diversity on protecting students.

When you actually see quite the opposite, not only is Columbia not just doing anything, it’s actively participating in what’s happening on campus, the fact that they have yet to even name the students who have very publicly been abducted or chased out of the country because of their complicity, the fact that they will send emails or make these statements about values, but actually not tell us anything that’s going to be helpful, like how policies will be implemented when they’re going to be implemented, what these ice agents look like, things of that nature that could be done to protect students. And also obviously not negotiating in good faith. The fact that Grant was expelled and fired the day before we had a collective bargaining meeting right before we were about to talk about protections for international students, just communicates that the university is not operating in good faith, they’re not interested in the wellbeing of their students or doing anything within their power, which is quite a tremendous power to say to the Trump administration, our students come first. Our students are an entity of us and we’re going to do whatever we can in our power to block you from demonizing and targeting international students who, as you said, are the most vulnerable people on our campus, but also those who bring so much diversity and brilliance and life to our university and our country.

Caitlin Liss:

And I think on the subject of international students, you, you’re right that they have always been in a more precarious position in higher ed unions. But on the other hand, I think that that shows us what power we do have as a union. I’m thinking. So we’ve been talking a lot about to what extent it’s safe for international workers to stay involved in the union, and our contract is expiring in June, which is why we’re having these bargaining sessions and we’re talking about going on strike next fall potentially. And there’s a lot of questions about to what extent can international students participate now because who knows what kind of protections they’re going to have? And I’ve been thinking about the last time we went on strike, it was a 10 week strike and we were striking through the end of the semester. It was the fall semester and we were still on strike when the semester ended.

And Columbia said that if we didn’t come off strike that they weren’t going to rehire the workers who were striking for the next semester. So anyone who was on strike wouldn’t get hired for a position in the spring semester and for international students that was going to affect their visa status. So it was very scary for them. And we of course said, that’s illegal. You can, that’s retaliation for us for going on strike. You can’t do that. And they said, it’s not illegal because we’re just not rehiring you. And it was this real moment of risk even though we felt much more confident in the legal protection because it felt like they could still do it and our recourse would have to be going to court and winning the case that this was illegal. So it was still very scary for international students, but we voted together to stay on strike and we held the line and Columbia did not in fact want to fire all of us who were on strike, and we won a contract anyway, even though there was this scary moment for international students even back then. And I have been telling people this story when we are thinking about protections for international students now, because I think that the moral of the story is that even under a situation where there’s a lot more legal security and legal protection, it’s still scary. And the way that you get over it being scary is by trusting that everyone coming together and standing together is what’s going to win and rather than whatever the legal protection might be.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Caitlin and Allie, I have so many more thoughts and questions, but I know that we only have about 10 minutes left here and I want to use the time that we have left with y’all to sort of tug on the thread that you were just pulling there. Caitlin, looking at this through the union’s perspective or through a labor perspective, can you frame these attacks on higher ed and the people who live, learn and work there through a labor and working workers’ rights perspective, and talk about what your message is to other union members and other people who listen to this show who are working people, union and non-union, why this is important, why they need to care and what people can do about it.

Caitlin Liss:

It’s very clear why it’s important and why other workers should care. The funding cuts to Columbia University and other universities really threaten not just the university, but the whole ecosystem of research. So these are people’s careers that are at risk and careers that not only they have an interest in having, but careers that benefit everyone in our society, people who do public health research, people who do medical research, people who do research about climate change. These are really important jobs that the opportunities to pursue them are vanishing. And so that obviously is important. And then when we’re looking at the attacks on international students, if m kil can be abducted for speaking out in support of Palestine and against the genocide and Gaza, then none of us are safe. No worker is safe if the governments can just abduct you and deport you for something like that.

On the one hand, even people who aren’t citizens are protected by the first amendments, but also it’s not clear that that’s where they’re going to stop. I think that this is a moment that we should all take very seriously. I mean, it’s very serious for the future of higher education as a whole. I feel like we are in sort of an existential fight here. And at the moment, Columbia is just completely welcoming this fascist takeover with open arms and it threatens higher ed as an institution. What kind of university is this? If the Middle Eastern studies department is being controlled by some outside force who says what they can and can’t teach, and now Trump is threatening to put all of Columbia under some consent decree, so we’re going to have to be beholden to whatever the Trump administration says we’re allowed to do on campus. So it is a major threat to higher education, but it’s also a threat I think, in a much larger sense to workers all over the country because it is sending the message that none of us are safe. No one is safe to express ourselves. We can’t expect to be safe in the workplace. And it’s really important that as a labor union that we take a stand here because it is not just destroying our workplaces, but sort of it’s threatening everyone’s workplace.

Allie Wong:

Exactly. That’s exactly what I was thinking too. I know it’s such an overused word at this point, but I think a huge aspect of this has to do with precedent and how, as we were mentioning, Columbia is so symbolic for a lot of reasons, including the fact that all eyes are on Columbia. And so when Columbia sets a precedent for what can and cannot not be done by University of Administration in caving to the federal government, I think that sets a precedent for not just academic institutions, but institutions writ large and the workers that work in those institutions. Because what happens here is happening across the federal government and will happen to institutions everywhere. And so I think it’s really critical that we bake trust back into our systems, both trust in administrations by having them prove that they do have our backs and they do care about student workers, but also that they trust student workers.

They trust us to do the really important research that keeps the heartbeat of this university alive. And I think that it’s going to crumble not just Columbia, but other academic institutions if really critical research gets defunded. Research that doesn’t just affect right now, but affects our country in perpetuity, in the kinds of opportunities that will be presented later in the future, the kinds of research that will be instrumental in making our society healthier and more equitable place in the future. And so this isn’t just a moment in time, but it’s one that absolutely will ripple out into history.

Caitlin Liss:

And we happen right now to be sort of fortunately bargaining a new contract as we speak. So like I said before, our contract is expiring in June. And so for us, obviously these kinds of issues are the top of mind when we’re thinking about what we can get in the contract. So in what way is this contract that we’re bargaining for going to be able to help us? So we’re fighting for Columbia to restore the funding cuts we’re fighting for them to instate a sanctuary campus and to reinstate grant minor, our president who was expelled, and Ronan who was enrolled, and everyone else who has been expelled or experienced sanctions because of their protests for Palestine. And so in a lot of ways, I think that the contract fight is a big part of what we’re concentrating on right now. But there’s also, there’s many unions on Columbia’s campus.

There’s the postdoc union, UAW 4,100, there’s the support staff and the Barnard contingent faculty who are UAW 2110. There’s building service employees, I think they’re 32 BJ and the maintenance staff is TW. So there’s many unions on campus. And I think about this a lot because I think what we’re seeing is we haven’t mentioned the trustees yet, I don’t think, but recently our interim president, Katrina Armstrong stepped down and was replaced by an acting president, was the former co-chair of the board of trustees Claire Shipman. And in many ways, I think what we’ve been seeing happening at Columbia is the result of the board of trustees not caving, but welcoming the things that Trump is demanding. I think that they’re complicit in this, but the board of trustees is like 21 people. There’s not very many of them. And there’s thousands of us at Columbia who actually are the people who make the university work, the students, the faculty, the staff, thousands of people in unions, thousands of non-unionized students and workers on campus as well.

And we outnumber the trustees by such a huge amount. And I think that thinking about the power we have when we all come together as the thousands of people who do the actual work of the university as opposed to these 21 people who are making decisions for us without consulting us that we don’t want, and that’s the way we have to think about reclaiming the university. I think we have to try and take back the power as workers, as students, as faculty from the board of trustees and start thinking about how we can make decisions that are in our interests.

Allie Wong:

One more thing that I wanted to call out, I’m not sure where this fits in. I think Caitlin talking about the board of trustees made me think of it is just the fact that I think that another big issue is the fact that there’s this very amorphous idea of antisemitism that all of this is being done under the banner of, and I think that it’s incredibly problematic because first of all, what is antisemitism? It’s this catchall phrase that is used to weaponize against dissent. And I think that when you look at the track record of these now three presidents that we’ve had in the past year, each of them has condemned antisemitism but has not condemned other forms of racism, including an especially Islamophobia that has permeated our campus. And because everything is done under the banner of antisemitism and you have folks like Claire Shipman who have been aligned with Zionist organizations, it also erodes the trust in of the student body, but then especially student workers, many of whom are Jewish and many of whom are having their research be threatened under the banner of antisemitism being done in their name. And yet it’s the thing that is stunting their ability to thrive at this university. And so I think that as we talk about the administration and board of trustees, just calling out the hypocrisy there of how they are behaving on campus, the ways that they’re capitulating and doing it under the guise of protecting Jewish students, but in the process of actually made Jewish students and faculty a target by not only withholding their funding but also saying that this is all to protect Jewish students but have created a more threatening environment than existed before.

Caitlin Liss:

Yeah, I mean, as a Jewish student personally, I’m about to go to my family’s Seder to talk about celebrating liberation from oppression while our friends and colleagues are sitting in jail. It’s quite depressing and quite horrific to see people saying that they’re doing this to protect Jews when it’s so clearly not the case.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I wanted to ask in just this final two minutes that we got here, I want to bring it back down to that level to again remind folks listening that you both are student workers, you are working people just like everyone else that we talk to on this show. And I as a former graduate student worker can’t help but identify with the situation that y’all are in. But it makes me think about the conversations I had with my family when I was on the job market and I was trying to go from being a PhD student to a faculty member somewhere and hearing that maybe my political activism or my public writing would be like a mark against me in my quest to get that career that I had worked so many years for and just having that in the back of my mind. But that still seems so far away and so minuscule in comparison to what y’all are dealing with. And I just wanted to ask as act scholars, as people working on your careers as well, how are you talking to your families about this and what future in or outside of academia do you feel is still open to you and people, graduate student workers like yourselves in today’s higher ed?

Caitlin Liss:

I mean the job market for history, PhDs has been quite bad for a long time even before this. So I mean, when I started the PhD program, I think I knew that I might not get a job in academia. And it’s sad because I really love it. I love teaching especially, but at the end of the day, I don’t feel like it’s a choice to stop speaking up about what’s happening, to stop condemning what’s happening in Gaza, to stop condemning the fascist takeover of our government and the attacks on our colleagues. It’s just I can’t not say something about it. I can’t do nothing, and if it means I can’t get a job after this, that will be very sad. But I don’t think that that is a choice that I can or should make to do nothing or say nothing so that I can try and preserve my career if I have to. I’ll get another kind of job.

Allie Wong:

Yeah, I completely agree. How dare I try to protect some nice job that I could potentially have in the future when there are friends and students on campus who are running for their lives. It just is not something that’s even comparable. And so I just feel like it’s an argument a lot of folks have made that if in the future there’s a job that decides not to hire me based off of my advocacy, I don’t want that job. I want a job based off of my skills and qualifications and experience, not my opinions about a genocide that’s happening halfway across the world, that any person should feel strongly against the slaughtering of tens of thousands of children and innocent folks. If that’s an inhibitor of a potential job, then that’s not the kind of environment I want to work in anyway. And that’s a really privileged position to have. I recognize that. But I think it’s incredibly crucial to be able to couch that issue in the broader perspective of not just this horrific genocide that’s happening, but also the future of our democracy and how critical it is to be someone who is willing to take a risk for the future of this country and the future of our basic civil liberties and freedoms.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Caitlin Liss and Allie Wong of Student Workers of Columbia, and I want to thank you for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you Allall back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. And we need to hear those voices now more than ever. Sign up for the real new newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.

International students are being abducted and disappeared by ICE in broad daylight. Life-saving research projects across the academy are being halted or thrown into disarray by seismic cuts to federal grants. Dozens of universities are under federal investigation for their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, their allowance of trans athletes to compete in college sports, and their tolerance of constitutionally protected Palestine solidarity protests. In today’s urgent episode of Working People, we get a harrowing, on-the-ground view of the Trump administration’s all-out assault on institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors, Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, and co-director of the Media, Inequality and Change Center; and Chenjerai Kumanyika, Assistant Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, AAUP Council Member, and Peabody-award winning host of Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD.

Additional links/info:

• April 17: Day of Action to Defend Higher Ed website
• American Association of University Professors (AAUP) website
• Federal Unionists Network website
• AAUP letter to college and university legal offices: “Institutions Should Not Provide Student and Faculty Info To Enable Deportations”
• Alan Blinder, The New York Times, “Trump Has Targeted These Universities. Why?”
• Oliver Laughland, The Guardian, “‘Detention Alley’: inside the Ice centres in the US south where foreign students and undocumented migrants languish”
• Alice Speri, The Guardian, “‘A huge cudgel’: alarm as Trump’s war on universities could target accreditors”
• Joy Connolly, Chronicle Review, “Colleges must stand together to resist Trump”
• Collin Binkley, Associated Press, “More than 50 universities face federal investigations as part of Trump’s anti-DEI campaign”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘Kill these cuts before they kill us’: Federally funded researchers warn DOGE cuts will be fatal”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, welcome, everyone, to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are taking an urgent look at the Trump administration’s all-out assault on institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. As we’ve been covering here on the show and across The Real News Network, the Trump-Musk administration’s attacks on workers, workers’ rights, and on democracy as such are, frankly, so broad, wide-ranging, and destructive that it’s hard to really sum it all up here. But colleges and universities have become a key target of Trump’s administration and a key battlefront for enacting his agenda.

The world of higher ed looks and feels a lot different today than it did when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and then an editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education just a few short years ago. International students like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University and Rümeysa Öztürk at Tufts are being hunted, abducted, and disappeared by ICE for speaking out against Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians.

Hundreds of international students have had their visas and their ability to stay in the country abruptly revoked. Dozens of investigations into different universities have been launched by the administration because of their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, their allowance of trans athletes to compete in college sports, and their tolerance of constitutionally protected Palestine solidarity protests, which the administration has dangerously deemed antisemitic and grounds for denial of federal funding.

And the administration has, indeed, frozen federal funding as a means to bend universities to Trump’s will. So far, Alan Blinder reports this week at The New York Times, “Seven universities have been singled out for punitive funding cuts or have been explicitly notified that their funding is in serious jeopardy. They are: Brown University, which the Trump administration said stood to lose $510 million; Columbia, which is hoping to regain about $400 million in canceled grants and contracts after it bowed to a list of demands from the federal government; Cornell University, the target of a cut of at least $1 billion; Harvard University, which has approximately $9 billion at stake; Northwestern, which Trump administration officials said would be stripped of $790 million; The University of Pennsylvania, which saw $175 million in federal funding suspended [in response to] its approach to a transgender athlete’s participation in 2022; and Princeton University, which said ‘dozens’ of grants have been suspended. The White House indicated that $210 million was at risk.”

The battle on and over our institutions of higher education have been and will continue to be a critical front where the future of democracy and the Trump administration’s agenda will be decided. And it will be decided not just by what Trump does and how university administrators and boards of regents respond. It will be decided by how faculty respond, how students and grad students respond, staff, campus communities, and you in the public writ large.

We’re going to be covering that fight continuously here on Working People and at The Real News Network in the coming months and years. And we’re taking it head on in today’s episode with two guests who are on the front lines of that fight. I’m honored to have them joining us together. Returning to the podcast, we’ve got Todd Wolfson, who currently serves as president of the American Association of University Professors. Todd is associate professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, and he’s the co-director of the Media Inequality and Change Center, a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School [for] Communication and Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information.

We are also joined today by Chenjerai Kumanyika, assistant professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, who serves as a council member for the AAUP. You likely already know Chenjerai’s voice. The man is a radio and podcast legend. He’s a Peabody award-winning host of Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD. He’s the co-creator, co-executive producer, and co-host of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s podcast on the Civil War, and so, so much more.

Brother Todd, brother Chenj, thank you both so much for joining us on the show today. I really appreciate it. And I want to just dive right in. I want to start by asking you both to keep pulling on the thread from my introduction to the show just now. I tried to pack in as much information as I could, but really this is just scratching the surface of things. So can you both help our listeners better understand the full scope of what is actually happening across higher ed in the United States right now?

So Todd, let’s start with you, and then Chenjerai, please hop in after.

Todd Wolfson:  You did a pretty good job packing in a lot of information in the short bit, Max. And yeah, it’s like drinking from a fire hose right now. I characterize the main attacks as there’s about five streams of main frontal assaults on higher ed. One is an absolute attempt at the destruction of our biomedical research infrastructure and then our broader research infrastructure from there. And National Endowments of the Humanities just announced a 70% cancellation of all their grants.

But the biggest funding agency that’s taken the biggest hit is the NIH, which is the biggest biomedical research funding organization in the world. In the world. And at this point in 2024, they’d given out $6 billion in grants to do research on cancer and to do research on the Alzheimer’s and strokes and pediatric oncology and diabetes and all the things we all need so that when we go to the doctor they have cutting edge therapies to save the lives of ourselves and our parents. Now that $6 billion is $2.7 billion. That’s how much they’ve given out in 2025, less than half. So if we project that out, the NIH gives out $40 billion in funding for research on issues, biomedical health research, we expect something like $20 billion. So a $20 billion cut in research is what we’re looking at. And again, it’s primarily targeted at the biomedical infrastructure, but this is also National Science Foundation grants, it’s National Endowment of Humanities grants. It’s all the critical things that we need. So that’s one bucket.

The second bucket is extreme attacks on our students. You flagged it: abductions of students in broad daylight, Mahmoud Khalil, who you mentioned, I think there’s about eight or nine students now that have been abducted in broad daylight and whisked into an ICE underground prison system, usually hundreds of miles from their home, often with no charge, maybe the slightest charge of some pro-Palestinian organizing or protest work or even editorial work — Which is their right of freedom of speech, absolute right, and getting whisked off.

But those folks who they’ve abducted are just scratching the surface. Over the weekend, over this past weekend, the number is something like 600 visas were revoked across the country. We think at least a hundred of them were college, graduate, and undergraduate students. So not all of that’s hitting our colleges and universities, it’s bigger than that, but it’s probably the largest sector taking this hit, and we’re trying to figure it out.

At Rutgers, my home institution, 12 students got their visas revoked. And the folks who got their visas revoked this past weekend, they’re not on record for anything. We think it’s country of origin and connected to the Muslim ban 2.0, but we’re not even sure. So that’s a second.

And just to be clear about these attacks on our students, the goal is to outlaw protest. This is the first step in the strategy. They’re weaponizing antisemitism to go after pro-Palestinian protestors. This is a first step, and they want to see, they’re testing the water, and they want to see how far they can take this. Just yesterday they floated deporting US citizens. So they’re going to keep pushing this, and the goal is to shut us up.

The other things I’ll just flag really quickly that should be on folks’ radar as also happening, as we know, they’re also attacking universities for DEI-related grants and programs, and that’s been a massive attack. It was one of the first executive orders.

So for instance, we have a researcher who is doing research on the diversity of wheat crops, the genome in wheat crops. That research? Canceled, because the word “diversity” is in it, and they don’t want diversity, any sort of DEI. And so plant genome diversity is part of DEI now, and it’s ’cause of the Keystone Cops, and they’re doing this through keyword searches.

But it gets more serious than that. They’re also canceling research on infant mortality rates. We want to understand why there are differing infant mortality rates in urban or suburban or rural settings, in Black communities and white communities and Latinx communities. They won’t allow that research anymore. Or literacy rates, they don’t allow differing literacy rates in urban, suburban, rural communities because that’s diversity research. So there’s DEI attacks.

And then the last attack I’ll flag, and I’ll let Chenjerai come in, is the attack on our institutions writ large, and that’s the stuff that we’re seeing at Columbia and we’re seeing at all these other universities that you laid out. It’s not simply to weaponize antisemitism, to threaten cuts in the biomedical research and weaponize antisemitism. It’s bigger than that. They want to be able to control these institutions, and the first step is Columbia bowing. And so now they expect these next six to bow, and on and on from there. The goal is for them to come in and tell us what we can research, what we can teach, what our students can say and learn. So it’s a real attempt at massive control. And again, they’re looking at Hungary in Europe, and they’re getting much of their strategy here. So those are four major buckets of attacks going on. I’m sorry, get in there, Chenjerai.

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  First of all, I think you laid it out real well. And also I’ll just say, much respect to you, Max, to Working People pod. I’ve been a longtime fan, real excited to be here.

So I just want to step back a little bit and talk about, we have to really look at why this is happening, and if you look at these cuts, it points to a little bit about why they’re doing this. First of all, they’re lying about what higher education is, and I think that’s really important. They want to cast higher education as a place that is only for a certain kind of elites, but that’s not true. Higher education is where so many families in America, across America, different communities, not just in rural communities, cities, where people are sending their kids because they want to have a fair shot, their family members because they want to have a fair shot. So that’s one component.

They also want to actually restrict higher education to people, imagine a certain kind of classes that they think don’t matter. But we have to understand [that] higher education is a lot of things. Higher education [is] healthcare facilities, not just places where health research is being done, but also where health workers are working, in places where people are nurses, doctors, people who are nurses’ aides and doctors’ aides. All those kinds are working at healthcare facilities that are a part of higher education. And in some communities, those are the only healthcare facilities, and they reach out into the community.

And like I said, speaking of labor, universities are places where people of all kinds of different folks work. They want you to think about this caricature of the woke student and then the woke, out of touch, elite professor. But, of course, a lot of people working in universities are contingent faculty, people who are teaching an incredible load and do not have the kind of job security that we would like them to have. You have staff, you have food facilities, cafeteria workers. So in many places, universities are public, universities are [a] huge employer for the state, a huge amount of that is happening. So they are really central.

This is not to say at all that higher education doesn’t have problems, but I think with everything with this administration — And if you look at the AAUP and some of the incredible, exciting coalitions we’ve been building around labor and higher education, we were already trying to address some of these changes that these outside agitators would like to do to control our institutions and make them places, [in some] cases with administrators being complicit with that.

So that’s just one thing. But I want to say that they’re lying about what it is, but also when you look at what they’re attacking, so for example, if you look at these cuts to the NIH, this is not some kind of austerity where they’re doing this because they want to help taxpayers. This is ideological. They want to replace public science with corporate science and they want to defund fields that they can’t control, especially ones that address systemic health disparities or things like the social determinants of health, reproductive research, things like gun violence, climate health, mental health.

Look at these cuts that happened yesterday. I think Cornell and Northwestern are not verifying everything, they’re still trying to figure out what’s going on in these cuts that happen. But you just look at it and go, some of the stuff that’s being cut is cancer research. They received stop work orders to stop cancer research. So when we say these cuts kill, it’s serious. It’s not hyperbole. And I think that that’s really important for folks to understand.

And just one other thing I’ll say is, but not only in the STEM fields. Why are they so obsessed with, for example, gender and queer studies in the humanities? Partially because they understand that when people study those fields, they expose how gender gets used as a political category to maintain state control using sexuality and kinship and labor. They understand that in the humanities, the research around race, around the real history of America, they understand that when people understand that, when people understand history, they’re like, oh, then they’re less vulnerable to some of the moves that they want to make and the ways that their policies harm people both here and abroad.

So I think disabilities. They don’t want people studying disability studies and really understand how some of these market logics harm people who are disabled or people who are chronically ill, and then what that has to mean for health infrastructure because, again, they want to reformulate this society according to what profits billionaires.

So I think that when we look at these cuts, part of our battle is that — And I think what’s happening now in an unfortunate way, is we’re seeing people come together around a real understanding of why it’s important for this research to continue, why it’s important for it to be protected from Elon Musk or people like RFK or whatever, and what higher education really is.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Todd, Chenjerai, I want to ask if you could take us even further into your lifeworld and your experience of all this chaos that’s happening in higher ed right now at the hands of the Trump administration. We were talking in that first section about the scope of this attack. I want to ask if you could tell us about the experience of the attacks. How have you both personally been processing this as it’s been unfolding in your capacities as professors, but also as representatives of and leaders of the AAUP? What are you hearing from your colleagues in the faculty? How are students responding to this, and other members of the community?

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  Well, I guess I’ll jump in. There’s so much. One thing I’ll say is that there are Todd and a number of other leaders in organizations like Higher Ed Labor United, some people in the AAUP who are not necessarily positioned in the leadership in the way that we are now, and other folks who are working in a coalition which we now have called Labor for Higher Education. So many people, and people at different AAUP locals were already in a fight about the direction higher education is going in.

As someone who just came into the academy… As a professor, I started my first appointment around 2013. What I saw was I worked at universities where the whole faculty had been casualized and didn’t have the ability to speak up. And I saw what the effects of that were. I saw they were living in fear because the way the contract structure had been set up, they had to beg for their jobs every year. They didn’t have protections, they didn’t have the benefits they needed, and in the Southern states, they had real obstacles to organizing around collective bargaining.

So I saw what that meant for people, though. I saw what that meant, for example, with the custodial workers [at the] university, they didn’t have a place they could go to appeal and push back on things that the administration might be doing with them. And then I moved through to different institutions — I was at Rutgers, for full disclosure, briefly — And I saw the opposite of what it means when you have a wall-to-wall union and what it means actually to go through those struggles and all those other kinds of things. So I just want to say that it was really interesting that so many of us were in this battle. I was still learning and getting involved with it.

When these cuts hit, what you saw was everything that we had already been talking about escalate to a whole new level, and then with these new pieces involved. And for me, it looks like talking to colleagues who were doing HIV research or cancer research, seeing them at an informal event and they’re almost in tears because their whole research infrastructure, they have to figure out if they’re going to fire people. There’s a diverse array of postdoc students [for] who not only their education but their jobs are in flux. They’re thinking about the people that they serve, and they’re in a panic state.

It is not easy to get an NEH grant or an NIH grant. You put a lot of work into doing that, and then that work sustains both the communities and some of those institutions. I’m seeing people, some of these grants, for example, are grants that function at multiple institutions, so they helped to create an infrastructure for people to do powerful, important research.

A lot of research, by the way — And this is, I think, also if you look at it, is one way people tend to think about a place like Cornell — But you gotta understand some of that research was in innovation. Some of it was even in national security stuff. So that’s the kind of stuff that I was seeing be people say, oh my God, how do I keep this work going? What do I do? Scrambling, panicking. And the idea that the Trump administration is doing this to somehow make America more competitive, to protect working-class, vulnerable people, is absurd.

And then to talk about the DEI stuff that was coming down, we’re in the discussion now about the cuts, I would say… It’s fascinating and very clarifying to watch these folks try to roll back a hundred years of civil rights progress in the most flagrant and obvious ways. There’s no way I can say it. How, as a journalist, your job usually is to try to translate something that’s not quite clear. This is so crystal clear. People see it. They see what you’re not allowed to talk about. They see who’s getting fired.

And then the final thing I’ll say is that when it comes to the issue of the free right to protest. Students who stood up on the issue of Palestine, I’ve been in meetings with colleagues who are talking about students and colleagues hiding in their apartments. People are being advised by their lawyers to hide in their apartment because they’re not sure what’s going to happen if they come out. I’m at NYU. Any time those ICE vehicles or certain kinds of police vehicles pull up, you see a wave of terror go across the [campus], snatching people off the street.

So to try to function every day in that context and do the work that we want to do, as a faculty member, I want to tell my colleagues and my students that it’s going to be OK, but the only way that we can actually make it is to organize. And it’s good ’cause we are organizing, but it’s horrifying.

Todd Wolfson:  Thank you, Chenjerai. I want to start where you left off. It doesn’t perfectly answer your question, Max, but it needs to be said here, which is the 60 to 70 years of divestment from higher ed and the fascist threats to higher ed in this moment are deeply entangled, and that’s something that needs to be clearly understood and discussed more.

Divestment started at the moment when schools like the University of California system and CUNY were free. They were free in the ’70s, in the ’60s into the early ’70s, and people of color were getting access to free higher ed for the first time — Or a highly subsidized higher ed — For the first time in this country’s history. And in the same moment, those same universities around the country were the backbone of the ’60s in the protests, whether it’s the protests against Vietnam or for the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panther Party, each one of these had — The Berkeley free speech movement — Was deeply… Universities were critical to them.

So at first it was a racialized and political attack on our universities that started in the ’60s and ’70s. Reagan was governor of California, and he said, quite directly, we can’t let the working class get educated for free. That was said. And that led to divestment from our institutions, first in California — Again, Reagan was like, we got to do something about those radicals, radical hippies in Berkeley. And so they divested and they forced students to start paying for their higher ed. So that happened.

And lo and behold, the right-wing attack on higher ed led to a full-scale neoliberal corporate ideology within higher ed, where our institutions became more and more dependent on a corporate logic, a neoliberal logic to run themselves. Which meant, to Chenjerai’s point, more contingent faculty, higher tuition rates, higher and higher and higher tuition rates, $2 trillion student debt, bureaucrats running our institutions, and, importantly, mission drift. They don’t remember what the institution is for because they’re so tied to corporate America ideology. And so no longer are these institutions the bedrock of a public system, a common good system.

And so fast forward to the fascist attacks on our institution which we’re outlining right now. They had already hollowed out the core. They had already hollowed out the core. And that’s why Columbia bows the knee in one second flat. That’s why our presidents go down to Washington DC when they’re called by the Educational Workforce Committee and they cannot respond with a clear vision of what higher ed is about, and they get end run by right-wing ideologues in the Senate and in Congress.

So it’s important to flag that there’s a deeply entwined relationship between fascism, right-wing ideology, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism, which isn’t really well talked about, which is what has put us in this situation. I’m sorry, I just want to go into that. It’s got to be flagged.

Now, to your question, I have never seen a climate of fear like this in my life anywhere, anywhere in my experience. We’re getting hundreds of emails every single day from faculty, from staff, from students. I need a safe place to stay, to Chenjerai’s point, I need a safe place to stay. That’s half of our discussions right now is people need safe places to stay; I don’t know if my research project is going to be cut; I’m not going to get tenure; I’m going to have to change careers because [of] a loss of funding; I’m going to be sent home and I’m not going to be able to come back and finish my degree.

These are the kind of discussions we’re having, and it’s not like once in a while. It’s every single day, multiple times a day. The fear is palpable and it’s purposeful. It’s purposeful. They’re trying to destabilize us, they’re trying to make us fearful, and they’re trying to get us all to bow down to what is a fascist threat to our institutions. So that’s the situation we’re in.

But I’m seeing something else too, and this is what gives me a lot of hope, is that fear is turning into anger, and that anger is turning into action, and we need more of that. We need the people who are the least vulnerable, US-born citizens, people with tenure, to stand up and step into this battle full-throated, not only for ourselves but for all of us, for higher education, for democracy, but also for the vulnerable students who dared to speak out for a free Palestine and now are getting dragged away in handcuffs by ICE agents. It’s on us to do that and continue building that power.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Guys, we were just talking about how the long path to turning universities into their contemporary neoliberal corporatized versions of themselves, that all predated these attacks. And it has, as you both pointed out, made institutions of higher ed especially vulnerable to these sorts of attacks from the Trump administration.

I wanted to tug on that thread a bit more by asking about the workforce and what the campus community looks like after decades of neoliberal reforms. Because this was something that I dealt with as a graduate student and political organizer at the University of Michigan during the first Trump administration. We were trying to rally members of the campus community, and in so doing had to come up against the fact that you have students who, unlike the student activists of the 1960s, who now having to make the calculation of whether or not they could afford to get suspended or even miss a class because they are paying tens of thousands of dollars for this tuition. So that right there is already a complicating factor in the political minds of people on campus, especially students.

But you also have, Chenjerai mentioned the ways that faculty in higher ed over the past 40 years, we used to have around 75% of the faculty be tenured or tenure track and only 25% being non-tenure track and “contingent” faculty, adjuncts, lecturers, so on and so forth. That ratio is completely flipped, and the vast bulk of the teaching workforce in higher ed is made up of so-called contingent faculty, and that puts a lot more pressure on those faculty members to not get involved in political activity for fear that their paychecks and livelihoods and professional reputations will be tarnished and they’ll be out of a job.

So these are just some of the realities that one has to deal with trying to organize on a campus in the 21st century. I wanted to ask if you could, for folks listening, talk about that more and what it looks like from the faculty side. So as you all on your campuses are trying to respond to this moment, what role is the AAUP playing in that? For folks listening, could you just say what the AAUP is, but also what the difference is between, say, a tenured professor and an adjunct professor and their involvement in this fight right now?

Todd Wolfson:  So I’ll just lay out what the AAUP is real brief. So AAUP is over 100 years old. John Dewey, one of the great US scholars, was one of the founders of it. And when it was first — And this is why it’s a complicated organization — When it was first established, it was a professional association for faculty, and it probably was like that for its first 50 years. But in 1970, or about that time, it also started unionizing and building collective bargaining units. And so it has been a layered history of first a professional association, layered on top of that, a union, a national union for faculty in particular.

And so today it is both of those things, but from my vantage as the president who comes out of a strong union at Rutgers, I think, in this moment in time, it needs to act less like a professional association and more like a union. It needs to build power, it needs to organize, and it needs to fight, fight not only up against the threats we face right now with the Trump administration, but also fight to reimagine what higher education is for and about — Which I’d love to get to, but I’ll say one other thing about this and then quickly talk about faculty and then kick it to Chenjerai, which is we have 500 chapters across this country on every type of university, in community colleges, two-year institutions, at four-year publics, four-year privates, in Ivy League institutions, every type of institution. Out of those 500, about 400 of our chapters are called advocacy chapters, they don’t have collective bargaining rights, and about 100 are unions.

An important thing for your listeners to know is in private universities, faculty, tenured faculty, do not have the right to unionize, but in public universities, they do. So it’s a strange bifurcation. And so there are a few places where faculty have unions in private institutions, but almost the entirety of tenure-stream faculty that are unionized are unionized at our public institutions.

So then I’ll just say one other thing for folks to know, which is, unfortunately, AAUP used to primarily cater to tenure-stream faculty. Our leadership, we do not believe in that. We believe in everyone fights together, wall-to-wall, coast to coast. And so we’re really fighting to reframe that. It’s not just about faculty. We need to build with faculty. We need to build with our postdocs, our grad workers. We need to build with our undergrads, we need to build with our custodial staff, professional staff, tech, across the board, our medical workers. That’s the only way forward. That’s the only way we build the power necessary to fight back.

And the last thing I’ll say is that the professoriate, the faculty in this country, you flagged it, and it’s important to know, it is not what they say it is. The majority, at least the plurality of faculty, are contingent. Most of them are adjunct faculty, which means part-time. And most of them are applying for their jobs semester after semester every semester with no benefits, zero benefits. And so we have adjunct faculty that are teaching six classes in a semester at six different institutions up and down the Eastern Seaboard. So the teacher is one day in a school in upstate New York and the next day teaching in Philadelphia. That’s the situation. And they’re lucky to scrape by with 60 grand a year and no benefits.

So the story they tell about what the professoriate is and the reality of the professoriate couldn’t be more different. And it’s important to understand that when we think about our institutions today. But I’ll let Chenjerai get in there and talk a little bit more about that.

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  I want to go back to something Todd says. I can’t help but make this a little historical. This is not actually not unprecedented, and it’s really important for people to understand that this is part of a historical trajectory that has to do with neoliberalism.

I was reading recently and talking, actually, with Ryann Liebenthal, incredible book called Burdened. One of the things that lays out is that in 1979, some conservatives got together at the Heritage Foundation and were like, we’re going to start to lay out a plan. And they laid out a plan, what ultimately became a series of publications called Mandate for Leadership. They launched the first one in 1980.

That did a lot of things. Mandate for Leadership was broad, it didn’t just focus on higher education. But actually the first thing you gotta understand is Project 2025 was a part in that series. So people talk about Project 2025 like it came out of nowhere. No, it was a part of things that started, and it’s not like they never had a chance to implement it. The attacks, cuts, similar types of things that were implemented that were planned out in this early ’80s version of Project 2025 were actually implemented [under the] Reagan administration.

Now, one of the many things that did was it gutted federal support for higher education, including things like student loans, and actually transformed a lot of, I would say, including student support. Because one of the things that happened during that period was that a lot of the federal grants… I think if you would’ve looked going back to the ’40s, only like 20% of the federal money that came in was targeted toward a loan structure where people would have to repay it. After the ’80s where they realized that they could actually turn student debt into a product, it became like a centerpiece. But that was just one of many ways in which you started to see this divestment of states, of the federal government from public education support.

And so yes, to your point, that has meant that all these people, that has meant that our faculty, so many of the faculty, are insecure. And I want to be clear, the reason, part of why I bring that up is that they were very intentional about the idea that people who are insecure are going to be less political. People who are in debt are going to be less political. They’re not going to be sure and they’re going to have to make very careful decisions about how they can fight, if they can fight. And some of it is even just being overloaded with work. As you try to pay back this debt, as you try to do it, you might not even have time to get your mind around it, if that sounds familiar to anybody.

And for this reason, this is one of the ways, I just want to be clear that these attacks don’t just touch people currently in the academy, they touch both the cuts to funding — I’m hearing from parents who are unsure what disciplines their folks should go into. So they’re actually trying to shape it where, at a time when we need massive amounts of doctors, we have emerging health threats that are happening. People are like, I don’t know if I want to go be a doctor because I’m seeing the funding being cut at the elite places where I would’ve done that. So it affects things [at] that level. And then the funding available affects families who have to say, am I going to be able to get that support I need? So how do we fight? So that’s more and more [why] people are being drawn into this fight in this way.

You’re seeing all these people being attacked and, in a way, they are taking a step toward building our coalition for us because I think they’re overreaching. When you hear all about all these people being affected, all these people feeling insecure, for me, that’s the coalition that we want to organize.

Now, on a note of organizing, let me say a few things. Higher education is, on the one hand, higher education is like any other kind of workplace. You have some people who are very engaged, who’ve been pulling their weight, who’ve been leading the fight, and you have some people who maybe are just focused on their jobs and haven’t yet seen themselves as organizers.

But I would say, in this situation, what we’re trying to do across workplaces, including, and what our organizations are doing, is inviting people in and saying, hey, see how these battles that you’re fighting at an individual level, at a department level, whether you’re a parent, whether you’re a community member who doesn’t want to see that medical research cut, see how this is part of a larger fight.

And where I think higher education, interestingly, isn’t a place to lead is that the way I’ve been learning from leaders like Todd, leaders from Labor for Higher Ed, HELU, even leaders at AFT, people who have a long history of organizing, labor has a set of strategies that we can use that is not the same as people coming out into the street. I was excited to see people at our days of action all over the country. I was excited to see people at the hands-off protests, hundreds of thousands of people in the street, but coming out into the street is not enough. We need a repertoire of strategies which include things that can create real leverage, things people cannot ignore.

And so, in a way, what the AAUP is leading is we’re actually showing people that repertoire of strategies. We have a legal strategy, incredible legal counsel, it has been rolling out lawsuits that are moving through the system. We know that the legal strategy by itself is not going to be the thing that does it, but it buys us time. It slows things down, and it shows people that we know how to throw a punch. And at the same time where we’re building the power that we need to take real labor action, we’re doing educations and teachings.

So in that way, what I’ve seen is that there’s times when people don’t necessarily know really what I do as a professor or they’re like, oh, you off and a professor in the books. Now I’m seeing people who are outside of the academy saying, we love the way that higher education is leading at a time when folks don’t know what to do, or maybe they don’t know what to do beyond simply coming out into the street. Which, again, I encourage. You ain’t going to hear me be one of these people talking about people… Well, I don’t know, the demands weren’t clear enough.

No, listen, this is a time, honestly, to think like an organizer, not like — I’m just going to say it — Not like a social media influencer. Social media influencers build currency because you just point out, you dunk on people. Look, if there’s somebody who voted for Trump and they see it’s wrong now and they’re like, I want to get involved in changing it ’cause I don’t like what I’m seeing, I want to welcome that person in. I’m not here to dunk on you. I don’t get nothing but dunking on you on clicks and likes. But if you join our coalition and become part of it and spread the movement to your people, we get stronger and we can fight this.

That’s what we’re trying to show people, our version of that with the way that we’re organizing. And again, I’m learning this. In a way, I’m newer to this than other people, but it’s really exciting to me to feel like there’s something we can do.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Todd, Chenj, I have so much more I want to talk to you about, but I know we only have a few more minutes here before we have to wrap up, and so I want to make them count. I wanted to, in this last 10 minutes or so, focus in on three key questions: One, if the Trump administration is not stopped, thwarted, frustrated in its efforts to remake higher education in this country, what is the end game there? What are our colleges and universities and our higher ed system going to look like if they get what they want?

The next question is, and then on top of that, the situation that people are in is needing to defend institutions that already had deep problems with them, as we’ve been talking about here. And you can’t just galvanize people by saying, we got to defend the norms and institutions that were already in place. That’s the same university system that saddled people like me with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, that we’re not exactly chomping at the bit to save that system in its current form. So what is the alternate vision? What is the future of higher education that y’all are fighting for and rallying people around?

Then the last question is how do we get there? What can folks listening do to be part of this, and why should they get involved before it’s too late?

Todd Wolfson:  Look, I think it’s really clear what the Trump administration’s goals are here. And they’ve taken this out of hundreds of years, a hundred years of history of authoritarian and fascist regimes. And one of the key sectors that these regimes always target is higher education, always. I think most recently it is Viktor Orbán in Hungary. But you can peel back our history and you’ll see it has happened before in many different moments when fascist forces are on the march.

And so the reason why higher ed is targeted is because it’s an independent formation that can offer — Not always, and imperfect — But can offer a counter political ideology, and it needs to come under control of the state because otherwise it is a danger to the state’s ability to push forward fascism, in particular, an educated populace. And so there is a real goal here at the biggest level to slow down enrollment numbers, take over the way higher education is done so that we are not a counterforce to fascism in this country. And so it is a clear path towards that. This is not the only institution that they’re going to target and go after, but it’s one of the key institutions that they will go after and target.

Labor’s another, which is why labor unions in higher ed are at such a critical crosshair. Another is college students and protests from college students, who have always led this country, have always been the mirror, showing a mirror to us and showing us what we look like and been a moral beacon for us. There are real aspects of higher ed that are really, really dangerous or threatening to a Trump administration and what they want to achieve.

And so if they get rid of higher ed or they take control of it, I think it is a step towards, it’s not the entirety of, but a critical step towards authoritarianism. We could call it fascism, we could call it postfascism, we could call it an illiberal democracy. There’s a lot of ideas going around about what exactly we’re in, and I think it’s a complex merger of a host of things, but I think wherever they’re trying to go, it means less voice, less power for all working people, and getting rid of the higher ed is a way to get there.

And so I’ll just say two other things in this short time to you, which is, one, higher ed has never been perfect. Let’s just be clear about some of its worst moments in history. Our great land grant institutions — Which are great, one of the great things about America, American higher ed system, which Lincoln dubbed the people’s colleges, or along those lines, were all based on taking off stolen land from Indigenous people. That’s clear. That happened. And those same Indigenous Native folks didn’t get to enjoy and use those universities to advance their lives. So they merely were extractive from the people who were here first. But then also post World War II, the GI program, Black people didn’t get access to it the same way white soldiers coming back did.

And so always at the heart of this institution has been racism and classism and sexism has been coded into our higher ed. So we should be clear about that. And we don’t want to build a new higher ed that replicates those problems. We need to reimagine it. But we need to reimagine it building off what we have now. We can’t just say tomorrow we want something wholly new. We have to take steps. People are getting their livelihoods from these institutions, they’re finding ways to have social mobility through these institutions, so we need to build through them.

And what our vision is is a fully funded public higher education system. Fully funded. Nobody should be going to college and coming out in debt. Nobody. And there needs to be an end to student debt. We need to end the debt that has already been accrued. That’s better for all the people who have that debt, but it’s also better for our economy writ large, for you, Max. We gotta get rid of your debt too.

And then we have to make sure that people who work on our campuses work with dignity. Right now, that is not the case. Too many people, as we already discussed, are working across six institutions, scraping together a living, and we have to end that. We have to make sure everyone who works can have long-term, dignified employment. And we have to make sure that we fully fund and increase our funding to our HBCUs, our minority-serving institutions, our Tribal colleges and universities.

And we forgot to say this, the attack on the Department of Education defunds those institutions, so that also is another line of attack that I forgot to mention. So we want more funding for those groups, and we want more funding for science, more funding for arts.

And so that’s the kind of higher ed we want to build. We want to build that higher ed as one which has shared governance so that the students and the faculty and the staff of our institutions govern our institutions, not business bureaucrats that now control them. So that’s a vision we want to put forward.

And the last thing I want to say is we have a way to get there, but the first step has got to be responding to Trump. We can’t build the vision of higher ed that we all want without first standing up to fascism.

Chenjerai said this, and my heart sings when he says this, because we’re on the same page: Protests are great — They are not going to stop fascism. They will not stop fascism. The courts are great. Thank God. They’ve done a good job for us so far in holding up some of the worst aspects of Trump’s illegal moves — They will not stop fascism. We are going to have to scale up our organizing. Higher ed is going to have to build with other sectors, federal workers, K-12 workers, healthcare workers, immigrant workers, all under attack in different ways. And we’re going to have to figure out the demands we need to make and the militancy we’re going to have to take, the militant moves we’re going to have to take to force them to stop.

And that’s going to mean risk, but there is no other way forward. And so that’s what AAUP’s committed to. That’s what Labor for Higher Ed’s committed to, and that’s where we’re trying to go, and we need other sectors to join us to get there.

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  Todd really said it. I would just add two points to that. When you see what’s being cut and what’s being attacked, you’re getting a glimpse of the future of what it is. You could go to places like Hungary, you could go to a lot of places where these things are a little bit more developed and see what this looks like there, and I guarantee it’s not something that we want.

But there’s two points I want to make, which is that one of the things about worker power across sectors is that workers, when they’re in control, can say, this is what we want the institutions that we work in to do, and this is what we don’t want them to do. Workers can govern the direction of institutions. When you see Amazon workers and tech workers who are stepping up saying, we don’t want to be involved in making technology that’s supporting genocide or that’s supporting oppression or data extraction here at home. That’s worker power, workers saying, let’s get together and dictate what happens. As opposed to administrator or, I would say, billionaire executive power, which is organized around a completely different set of priorities.

And the same is true in the academy. One of the dangers is that if you look at the various org parts of labor at the university, folks are also saying, this is what we want, our universities to be on the right side of history, doing powerful and important work. We do not want them to be involved in suppression. And if you don’t like what you see at Columbia, where you see them bending the knee and then you see them actually becoming complicit, in a way teaching the Trump administration what they can do, what they’re allowed to do, that’s a consequence of not having sufficient worker power. And you’re going to see more of that. So you’re imagining not just what’s going to get removed, but now imagine that universities are really deployed as an arm of fascism in all its different formations. So that’s one thing that I think is at stake.

The second thing I would bring up is that higher education battles are so important because everything that we want to try to make this world a better place is interwoven with higher education. So if we want to defeat the urgent threat of climate change, that takes research, people who are finding the solutions, precisely the kind of research that’s being taken. So that’s not just about what’s happening at universities, it’s about the climate stakes for everybody. And most of the people that affects are not in the university, but the university research and making sure you’re having real research on that, is central to that.

When you talk about healthcare, fighting for a world where we do have healthcare for all and understanding what that healthcare needs to look like, the university is crucial for that. Todd already mentioned the NIH was responsible for almost, I think, basically all the therapies that came out that were useful in the last decade, really. So you can’t talk about healthcare without talking about it.

When you talk about labor and this emerging regime where labor protections and technology, trying to understand what is this actually going to look like. People producing real research like our colleague Veena Dubal, who’s looking at what actually is happening with these algorithms for real and how are those algorithms going to affect things as these people try to Uberize the entire planet and create a situation where people don’t have benefits and all that, that research is also being done at the university.

I just laid out three right there: Working conditions, healthcare, climate change, and we could go on. What about art? What about the things that bring us joy in life? Where people have the room outside of the corporate factory to actually explore and produce wonderful things, art and music and culture, all those things.

So to me, what’s at stake is literally that future. And as higher education workers, it’s up to us to make sure that, as Todd is saying, we want to fight for the conditions of education, that it really is working for the common good, but also we have to fight back this monster. And I’m terrified right now, I gotta say. It is OK to say you’re scared by what I’m seeing, but I’m also encouraged. And when you’re scared, you gotta lock arms with your people and walk forward anyway, and that’s what I’m seeing people stepping up and doing.

Todd Wolfson:  We have actions on April 17 throughout the country. I think over about a hundred institutions across the country are taking part in our April 17 actions. So please come out or organize your own action. It’s being driven by the Coalition for Action in Higher ed, which is a lot of amazing AAUP leaders. We will also be engaging in Mayday organizing. And then this summer we want you to come to your AAUP chapter, your UAW local, your CWA local, your AFT local, your NEA local, your SEIU local, whatever it is, however you can plug in, and then you need to reach out to us. We’re going to do a summer of training that’s going to prepare us for what needs to get done in the fall, and we need every single higher ed worker.

And one other thing, if you aren’t a member of AAUP, now is the time to become a member and join us in this fight. And if you don’t have a chapter, you need to build a chapter on your campus, and we will be there with you every step of the way. We have a campaign called Organize Every Campus, and we will help you build your campus chapter and build your power so you can fight back at the campus level while we collectively fight back at the state and national level together. So join AAUP today. If you’re already in a union, get involved in your union, and we’ll see you on the front lines.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Professors Todd Wolfson and Chenjerai Kumanyika of the American Association of University Professors, and I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People.

And if you cannot wait that long, then please go explore all the great work we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you, it really makes a difference.

I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.

On Tuesday, April 8, unions, unionized federal workers, and their supporters around the country mobilized for a national “Kill the Cuts” day of action to protest the Trump administration’s cuts to life-saving research, healthcare, and education programs. As organizers stated on the Kill The Cuts website:

“By cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care, the Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. These cuts are dangerous to our health, and dangerous to our economy. On Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 workers across the country are standing up and demanding NO cuts to education and life-saving research.”

In this on-the-ground edition of Working People, we take you to the front lines of the Kill the Cuts rally that took place in Washington, DC, and we speak with workers and union representatives whose lives and work have already been affected by these cuts.

Speakers include: Margaret Cook, Vice President of the Public, Healthcare, and Education Workers sector of the Communications Workers of America (CWA); Matt Brown, Recording Secretary of NIH Fellows United (United Auto Workers Local 2750); Rakshita Balaji, a post-baccalaureate researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and Amanda Dykema, shop steward for American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1072 at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Additional links/info:

• Kill the Cuts website
• NIH Fellows United website
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “What’s really behind Trump’s war on federal unions?”
• Jocelyn Kaiser, Science, “NIH under orders to cancel $2.6 billion in contracts”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Speaker 1:

I got work. Who protects us? We protects us. Who protects us, who protects us, who protects us? We protects us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to another on the Ground edition of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and I’m here in Washington DC right in front of the US Capitol Building where dozens of local union members and union leaders just held a rally as part of a national Kill The Cuts Day of Action. Similar protest rallies were held today from California to Illinois to New York. Organizers called for the National Day of Action to raise awareness and fight against the Trump Musk administration’s cuts and proposed cuts to federal research, health and education. As the homepage of the Kill the Cuts website states by cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care.

The Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. These cuts are dangerous to our health and dangerous to our economy. On Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 workers across the country are standing up and demanding no cuts to education and lifesaving research. The National Day of Action is sponsored by a plethora of labor unions, including the United Auto Workers, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of University Professors, the Communications Workers of America, ame, SEIU, the Debt Collective and more. I came down to the DC action to talk to union members about this fight and what their message is to the Trump administration, to the labor movement and to the public.

Speaker 3:

Alright, we’re our last speaker. We have got Margaret Cook, who is the vice president of the Public Healthcare and Education Workers Sector of the Communication Workers of America. Let’s give it.

Margaret Cook:

I am a little short. Let me move this back a bit. Good afternoon everybody. Yes, I am your last speaker and I promise I won’t be like a Baptist preacher. I’m not going to keep you for another hour. My name is Margaret Cook and I am the public healthcare and education worker sector Vice President of Communication Workers of America representing over 130,000 state municipal and higher education workers across the country in Puerto Rico, including thousands of researchers, lab technicians, public healthcare clinicians and nurses, and thousands of additional support and wraparound staff, many of whom have seen their work shut down, cut off, and possibly killed by these cuts. You’ve heard from all of these people about today. Cuts that are illegal, cuts that are unethical, cuts that are immoral cuts that are unacceptable, cuts that are fatal. And I don’t mean just figuratively

Speaker 1:

Because

Margaret Cook:

As you’ve heard today, these cuts to research that will, these are cuts to research that will save lives. And so our message is pretty clear today. Kill these cuts before they kill us. I’m proud to stand here today with all these other members and leaders from labor who are going to work each day to deliver care and discover solutions for each and every one of us, which is a lot more than you can say for the people who are doing the cutting. You got the world’s richest man on one hand and the world’s most arrogant man on the other.

These men are living in a fantasy world, which may explain one of the reasons why they are so hostile to science. I’ve sat back and I’ve listened to them talk about how they need to cut back on the size of our federal government and to do so by going on a rampage against these workers who are doing some of the most critical and vital work that our government does. Well, what they aren’t telling you because they’re liars and cheats is that today the size of the federal workforce is the smallest it has been since the Great Depression at just over 1.5% of the jobs in this country, years of plundering public dollars for corporate greed, decades of austerity and slashing and burning the public good has left our government smaller than it has ever been, and these jackals aren’t done tearing away at it. And for what? Let’s cut the crap on the racist dog whistles about DEI, setting aside for the sake of argument, the fact that we do need to address inequality and injustice. Are you really telling me that the cuts to people working on cancer research is about DEI, that the cuts to people working to deliver vital aid and care is about DEII see right through it and I know you do too.

The reality is we need more public investment, not less because what is it that our investments really do? What these workers do is they discover, they educate, they provide care, and they prevent and act in emergencies, in labs and research settings across this country, these workers are discovering cures and treatments for diseases that threaten all of us. My grandfather died two days ago from stage four cancer, and my mother currently has stage two in campuses and schools. They’re educating and helping elevate the knowledge of future generations in clinics and hospitals and public service facilities. They’re delivering care to people who need it and in dire straits from outbreaks of viruses like measles. Measles, y’all.

These are people who put themselves at risk to protect the rest of us, and that’s who Trump and Musk and a bunch of kids without any real world knowledge and experience are trying to fire Trump and Musk whose genius lies and putting their name on work and breakthroughs of other people and then have the nerve to charge rent for it well enough. This money is the public’s and we demand that it be used for the public good. Not one penny less. No. I firmly believe for us to meet the incredible challenges and realize the potential of our country, we need so much more public investment. That’s why we’ve got to unite across our unions, across all kinds of work and across our communities to stand up, speak out, resist these attacks, and defend the services and work we do for the people we serve and work for. Lives are on the line. These cuts are wrong. So I say again, kill these cuts or they’ll end up killing us. Thank you.

Matt Brown:

My name is Matt Brown and I’m the recording secretary for NIH Fellows United. We’re a local of the UAW number 27 50.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Matt, thank you so much for talking to me, man. The kill cuts rally just concluded here. The Senate building is right behind us, but for folks who aren’t here right now and are listening to this, can you just say a little bit about what we just witnessed? What brought you guys out here today?

Matt Brown:

Of course. Yeah, max, I really appreciate the opportunity to be on the pod and what brought us out here is saving the completely devastating cuts that are currently happening to publicly funded research here in the US at NIH Fellows United. We’re members of the intramural scientific team at the NIH that are working on things like carrying cancer and making treatments for diabetes, and we’re partnering up with all the folks that are being affected by the cuts to the extramural side of the NIH. So all of the universities and other institutions that receive grants to work on those same things outside of the NIH. And yeah, it’s been really great to see all of these people come together to save the life-saving work that we’re all doing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Say more about the extent of these cuts and the impact on research intra and extramural. I guess give listeners a sense of how deep this goes and what the impacts are really going to be.

Matt Brown:

This is truly an existential crisis for biomedical research in America. Flat out the cuts to the intramural program have seen thousands of jobs cut from the people that support the science that we do. And on the extramural side, the cuts that we’re seeing to grants these so-called indirect costs, it’s a bit of a jargon term that can be hard to parse, but really that goes towards supporting the life-saving research that we do. The cuts that we’re seeing are going to decimate the amount of research that we can get done on these awful diseases that people face. And like I said, this is an existential question, do we want biomedical research to continue or not?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what about, let’s talk about the flesh and blood workers who are making this research happen and the working people who benefit from that research. Who are these cuts actually hurting right now?

Matt Brown:

These cuts are going to affect every single person. Historically, scientists and researchers have been considered somewhat apolitical quote because, hey, who doesn’t know somebody that’s been affected by cancer? Right? It’s pretty easy to fund cancer research because it can be so devastating. And so yeah, everybody’s going to be affected by this. It’s not just the researchers here at NIH and Bethesda. It’s not just the researchers at universities, but it’s going to be every single person who has or has known someone with a really awful life altering disease.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what’s the message? What was the rallying message that we heard here today for folks in attendance and folks who aren’t in attendance? What are these unions doing to fight back and what are you saying to other folks about how they can get involved?

Matt Brown:

Well, really what I think the rallying call is, is to look around us. It’s look at who are the people that are trying to save each other’s lives. Here it’s the organized workers that are involved in biomedical research around the country. We’re not hearing things from NIH leadership. We’re not hearing things from university leadership. We’re hearing things from the organized researchers who are getting their butts out here to try to save what we do. And that’s really what this is, is it’s about getting as many people out here as possible and all moving in the same direction to not just save our jobs and not just save science, but to save lives around the country.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And last question. I mean, there were a number of different unions present here and represented here. What does it mean that this is such a crisis, that it is bringing together different sides of the labor movement and uniting around a common fight?

Matt Brown:

Absolutely. And actually that’s a very special question to me because as NIH Fellows United we’re one of the unions that was part of organizing this as well as reaching out to other universities, one of them being my former bargaining unit with teachers and researchers United, which is local of UE 1 97. And so

Yeah, it’s been really special to see people come together and not just start organizing the workers in their own workplaces, but reaching out to everybody else in their own regions, in their own careers and making sure that we’re all pointed at the same thing, which is saving lives. This is obviously not some sort of move towards government efficiency, that everything that the Trump and Musk administration is doing right now is entirely done to antagonize workers and make us feel like we’re hopeless. But things like today show us that we’re not and we need to continue doing things like this along in the future to make sure that they can’t move on with their destructive agenda.

Rakshita Balaji:

So hi, my name is Rakshita Balaji Currently I’m a post-baccalaureate fellow, a researcher at the NIH. So what that means is I’ve been spending the last almost two years now post-graduation from getting my undergrad degree working at the NIH and getting training in order to prepare myself for success in my next step of my career stage, which is to go to graduate school and I’ll be a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania coming this fall. So what I’m interested in is neuroscience research, and that’s what my career trajectory has been so far.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Well, congratulations on your acceptance and good luck. We need you out there. For folks who are listening to this who only see an acronym when they hear NIH, I’m not asking you to sort of describe everything that goes on there, but could you just give folks a sense of who actually works in the NIH and what kind of work is being done there?

Rakshita Balaji:

Yeah, this is a great question and a question. I actually had myself when I was young and going into the NIH or the National Institute of Health, I was 22 when I joined, and I actually also had no idea what goes on behind those gates. And it turns out what I’ve learned so far is that the N NIH is full of awesome people who are passionate about their work, but they’re also not, maybe the scientists you think of in the media that work isolated in a lab in an ivory tower doing crazy experiments. These are people who have families, people who have loved ones who have been affected by diseases and people who really want to make a difference in healthcare in America. And so I just want to first make the point that the NIH is full of regular people who just happen to love what they do and love science, just like everyone in this country is passionate about what they work on.

And so National Institute of Health is comprised by a bunch of different sub institutes. So they’ll work on things like allergies and diseases, cancer, pain, neuroscience, looking at neurodegenerative diseases, looking at aging. There’s a bunch of different types of research that’s going on in order to serve every subset of someone’s health profile and all of the different types of diseases or different afflictions that people can have throughout the us. And what’s also really special about the NIH in particular is their ability to use their knowledge and their resources to target diseases and conditions that are not necessarily as prevalent. So for example, rare diseases where people oftentimes don’t always find care in their own physician settings or don’t always find the right answers, just going to the doctor that doesn’t have the research or the exploratory privileges that people do at NIH. So for example, we look at diseases where the population of people that suffer from them can be so small, yet they don’t go ignored because our clinical center has people who are specialized in learning about specific genetic mutations or specific, I think that’s, yeah, specific genetic mutations for example, or specific diseases that don’t always get studied.

And so the NIH not only tries to serve the general public in terms of looking at complete profiles of people’s health, but they also can target their resources to looking at things that oftentimes go under the radar and give care to people who oftentimes don’t find answers whenever they go to the doctor and they actually find those answers in possible treatments at the NIH.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Could you tell folks listening what these cuts, everything Doge and the Trump administration are doing, what does this all look like from your side of things and how are you and your colleagues been responding to it? What do you want folks on the outside to know about what it looks like on the inside?

Rakshita Balaji:

Yeah, so the first thing that really comes to mind when I was thinking about these cuts, especially what’s happened February 14th, April 1st, it’s almost like a trap door. You’re sort of walking into work, you’re getting prepared. Maybe you got your kids ready for the day, maybe you got up and made breakfast and lunch and you made sure that everyone was ready, you got into work and suddenly the four just falls apart beneath you because you no longer have access to your work email. You no longer have access to your data. You are no longer as appreciated as you thought you once were as a federal employee, and all of a sudden you are left stranded without a job, maybe on administrative leave, not knowing if you’d have the chance to come back. And it sort of is almost like a disappearing act is what it really felt like for no apparent reason.

And that’s the worst part to hear that the numbers are the most important thing. How many people can they get rid of? How many people can they actually eliminate? Rather than thinking about how many lives are actually just being torn from underneath people? That’s kind of all I can describe it as. It’s a really strange disappearing act. You don’t know, we had the manager of our building, someone who takes care of our building when we have leaks or have issues with our labs, be fired on this random day and then reinstated the next. It’s all very chaotic. And this chaos is preventing us from actually being able to move forward with our work, which might’ve been the goal, but actually ends up harming way more people than just us doing the work, but the people that we’re trying to serve. So that’s the best way I can describe it. It was immediate, it was forceful, and it was completely and utterly uncalled for. I mean, we had people who were dedicated employees for over 10 years, 20 years, just suddenly say, I’m no longer able to come in. People who couldn’t even email anyone telling anyone that they were fired and had to shoot texts to people that they knew because they were immediately locked out of their computer. I mean completely. It just felt like a huge slap in the face.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think the response from so many people has been fear and shock, and it’s almost been immobilizing because there’s so many executive orders, so many cuts, so much bad news hitting us day after day, which we know is part of the quote, flood the zone strategy. But what we are seeing, especially in recent weeks is anger, mobilization, organizing and the coming together like today of different unions. So there are different kinds of actions that folks are taking, whether it be going to these town halls and screaming at their elected officials or writing emails or doing mass protests. What we’re seeing here today is more about what unions and what workers can do when they come together with their labor power to fight this. So I was wondering if you could just talk a bit about that. What is the message here about what workers and unions in these agencies and what the labor movement can do to fight back against the Trump agenda?

Rakshita Balaji:

Yeah, so I think the first word that comes to mind is solidarity. I mean, we’ve now seen that an ultimate betrayal take place from our own employers and from our own administration showing us that we’re not valued. And so the only solace and the primary solace that I think is the most powerful has been within one another. We come into work, the morale has been extremely low. It feels like you’re trudging through molasses just trying to get one day to the other. And really all you can do with all that pent up frustration in order to not let it implode you is to actually share it with others and to bring community about it. And I think the most important thing that our union has brought about is that sense of solidarity, that sense of information, connection, network, especially when the actual protocol for all of these things has been so unclear going from a fork in the road to a riff, more acronyms might I add. The only place that we can really get answers is by sharing information and having open lines of communication with one another. And so the community that we fostered, I think that’s our strength and that’s what we want to preserve through all of our labor movements and unions is to understand that knowledge is power and we’re not afraid to share it with one another. We’re not afraid to speak the truth time and time again and to talk about our experiences and we will not be shut behind a door and left out of this conversation anymore.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what comes next? I guess for folks listening to this, what’s your message about why this is the time to get involved and what they can do?

Rakshita Balaji:

I think with regards to when is the time, my only answer would be when else is the time? This whole period of time since the inauguration has felt like an avalanche, like you mentioned, it’s a barrage of information that usually makes little to no sense and has harmed so many people. So what other time do we have? I think because the only question I’d have, when else do we come out and do this as we need to be active and keep pushing back in the moments that things are happening and that’s how change occurs, what people can do. I think if you’re hopefully angry just like we are, you can call your representatives, keep telling them the stories, especially if you have been a victim of these removals from your job or a victim of the lack of funding for your research or even how this administration has been shaking up your life.

Those are important stories. Your story is as important as everyone else’s, and to not undervalue the power of your voice, whether it’s calling your representative, showing up to these protests, being in unison and harmony with other people, because not only will you find solace in that, but you’ll create strength and to look and try to plug into your local communities as well because typically you’re not the only one who’s going through this. And you can definitely find people who are willing to help you, willing to give you information and speak up. Don’t be afraid to ask questions whether it’s about, regardless of, for example, if you’re worried about things related to your immigration status, if you’re worried about things related to how your funding’s going to work, how you’re going to receive, are you going to receive a pension? These questions that have gone unanswered, echo it as much as you can because through those echoes, you’ll find answers within other people and eventually those echoes will be heard by people who can do more to help make a change and actually protect us from these kinds of ridiculous actions.

And again, if you’re angry, I think anger only will boil up inside of you if you let it fester. So the best thing to do is to release it at places like this, find local movements, do some searching, and look for places you can actually get your voice heard. And I promise that you don’t, don’t feel like you need to be someone special with the name or an acronym that helps you move forward. Just let yourself be heard and give yourself grace during this time too. And I hope that together we’ll be able to make this change together. Don’t lose sight of the power we have within one another when it feels like we’re being towered over. We actually are on an even playing field if we have each other, and we can begin to even that out in numbers if not in position.

Amanda Dykema:

My name is Amanda Dykema and I am a shop steward with AFSCME Local 10 72 at the University of Maryland College Park.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Amanda, thank you so much for talking to me today. I know you got a lot going on and the crowd is dispersing, but I wanted to ask if you could just tell us a bit about what we just witnessed here and what brought all these folks out here to DC today?

Amanda Dykema:

Yeah, well, I think you saw people from all kinds of different unions and different kinds of workplaces who are all impacted by the same thing, which is these cuts that are happening to research and medicine and scientific innovation and education, and they’re hitting all sectors. And what we’re seeing is at the University of Maryland, faculty’s grants that were approved and have been ongoing for years being abruptly terminated with no cause. We’re seeing faculty grants that went in last year not being reviewed on review panels and we’re seeing cancellation of programs that have had huge impacts for things like expanding the STEM pipeline to people who have been historically excluded from it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What’s on the ground impact of this? What would you want folks to know who are maybe just hearing about that and they’re saying, oh, that’s good. That’s eliminating waste. It’s getting rid of woke programs. What do you want folks to know about what these cuts are actually doing to your members and the people who benefit from their work?

Amanda Dykema:

So my members at the University of Maryland, we support all university services. You can see my t-shirt says we run this university. And so what it does for our members is those of us who work for research centers are concerned about the futures of their jobs. And for our students, we’re seeing student workers who are being let go because the funding’s not there anymore. For students who were looking for careers in these sectors who came to the University of Maryland to learn how to do this kind of research, if a research lab gets shut down, they’re not able to learn how to do that. They’re not able to prepare for grad school, they’re not able to go on. But mainly what we’re seeing is a chilling effect that faculty, students, and staff really have to work together and get organized to fight against. They want people to stop this kind of research. They want people to be scared, and we are here to get organized and work together so that we can fight against that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What are the long term effects? If that doesn’t happen, if these things go through unchallenged, what are the long-term effects going to be for the University of Maryland specifically and higher ed in the United States more broadly?

Amanda Dykema:

That’s a big question. I’ll give it my best shot. The University of Maryland is a preeminent public research university. It’s the flagship of the state, and we have hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding every single year, and it funds all kinds of work. We heard today from a climate scientist. I work really closely with a lot of people in the College of Education who do work on K 12, and we have researchers in the humanities, in history, in museums, in data science. All of those agencies that fund that type of work have been subject to significant cuts, and those people will not be able to do their jobs or there’ll be a greatly reduced scope and the trickle down effect or the very obvious effect of their research. And when it comes to broader impacts on society, we’re not going to see those things. We’re not going to learn what is the best way to teach kids what is the best way to create climate resilient communities? We’re not going to learn those things if we don’t have this research funding.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So what was the message today about how workers and unions can fight back? I mean, it was really powerful to see so many different unions represented

Amanda Dykema:

Here,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And so that in itself seems significant. But I guess where does it go from here? What can rank and file folks listening to this do to get involved?

Amanda Dykema:

Yeah. Well, the number one thing, I’m going to say it every time is get organized. If you have a union at your workplace, join it. We’re more powerful together. If you don’t have a union at your workplace, work on getting one because we’re not going to be relying on whether it’s the president or whether it’s university administrators. We can’t rely on them to protect us. We have to work together to protect ourselves. But otherwise, the thing I really heard today was a lot about medical advances and people’s health. We’re going to see, if someone is not familiar with a research university, they might not know what this means, but if they go to their doctor and there’s not a clinical trial available for their diagnosis, they’re going to see what it means. And so I think what we’re trying to do now is reach out to our legislators who, the thing I haven’t said so far is that research is a huge economic driver for every state in this country.

And so we’re reaching out to our legislators to say, not only on its merits should this research be funded, but this is going to gut communities. This is people work in these labs and then they go and they spend their paychecks in their hometowns. And so what we’re asking is for people to understand that this isn’t a kind of an ivory tower thing that only impacts universities. It’s a thing that impacts everyone in this country. Senator Markey talked about health doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, and so people need to realize how this will impact them and their loved ones.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I was a PhD student at the University of Michigan, which is like the largest or one of the largest employers of that entire state.

Amanda Dykema:

Exactly. I’m from Michigan.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah,

Amanda Dykema:

Now that you’re listeners will care, but yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and any final messages that you have because we are also at the same time that these cuts are being pushed through experiencing a violent, vicious state crackdown on the very right to dissent against such things to speak out against such things, and universities are becoming the flashpoint for that war on free speech.

Amanda Dykema:

Well, I think the other reason we’re all here today, the people who came to this rally, we work at agencies like NIH and institutions like the University of Maryland, and we have to pressure our administrators to stand strong in the face of this. Trump clearly wants to stifle free speech, but what is a university, if not a place where people learn and grow through free speech expression and exposure to ideas. And so if that’s really our value, we have to call upon not only our legislators, but our administrators at these institutions to stand strong.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank the guests who spoke with me today. It’s cold out here in DC and I’m about to head back home to Baltimore. But I also want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you cannot wait that long, then please go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism like this that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez reporting from Washington DC. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever

Last week, President Trump escalated his administration’s war on the federal workforce and workers’ rights when he signed an executive order to end collective bargaining with federal labor unions across the government. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 government employees, has sued the Trump administration over the executive order.

In response to these intensifying assaults on federal workers, agencies, and critical programs like Social Security, unions, social justice and community organizations, veterans groups, and people of conscience will be participating in protest actions in locales across the US on Saturday, April 5. In this episode, we speak with James Jones, a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service, a veteran, and a member of the Federal Unionists Network, to get a firsthand account of the Trump administration’s attacks on federal workers, agencies, and the people who depend on their services.

Additional links/info:

• Federal Unionists Network website
• Indivisible website
• “Hands Off!” National Day of Action (April 5) website
• Joe DeManuelle-Hall, Labor Notes, “Trump Goes Nuclear on the Federal Workforce”
• Tyler Pager, The New York Times, “Trump Moves to End Union Protections Across Broad Swath of Government”
• Daniel Weissner, Reuters, “Union Sues to Block Trump from Ending Collective Bargaining for Many federal workers”
• Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica, “Curious How Trump’s Cost Cutting Could Affect Your National Park Visit? You Might Not Get a Straight Answer”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘It’s not Elon versus government, it’s Elon versus everyone’: A dire warning from fired federal workers”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximilian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’ll be hosting new episodes this month and my co-host Mel er, will be hosting again in May. Today. We continue our coverage of the Trump Musk administration’s all out assault on federal workers in the United States Constitution and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. In the last episode that I hosted at the end of February, I spoke with current and illegally fired employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the CFPB, as well as the USDA Agricultural Research Service, and we spoke in that episode about what was then a newly launched assault on federal workers, government agencies, and the people who depend on them by President Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, and the unelected head of the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge Musk has been granted immense power to cut government agencies and their federal workforce and unprecedented access to sensitive government and citizen data.

Now that assault has continued, it’s hard to sum up the scale and scope of the damage that Trump and Musk are wrecking upon our government and our government workers and contractors right now, all ostensibly in the name of increasing efficiency and rooting out so-called wokeness. But to give you a sense at the top of the show, here’s the latest report from Newsweek. Tens of thousands of job losses have been announced across numerous federal agencies. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it will eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a major restructuring plan. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research office and could fire more than a thousand scientists and other employees according to the Associated Press. It has also been reported that the Internal Revenue Service or IRS plans to lose about 18,000 employees, about 20% of its workforce.

Meanwhile, former postmaster General Lewis DeJoy told Congress that 10,000 workers at the United States Postal Service would be cut. The Department of Education has announced plans to lay off more than 1300 employees while the Department of Veterans Affairs is planning a reorganization that includes cutting 80,000 jobs. According to an internal memo obtained by the AP in March, the Pentagon reportedly plans to cut its civilian workforce by about 50,000 to 60,000 people. At least 24,000 probationary workers have been terminated since Trump took office, according to a lawsuit filed by nearly 20 states alleging the mass firings are illegal. In March two, federal judges ordered 19 federal agencies to reinstate fired probationary workers. Meanwhile, about 75,000 federal workers accepted the offer to quit in return for receiving pay and benefits. Until September 30th and last week, president Trump escalated his war on the federal workforce when he signed an executive order to end collective bargaining with federal labor unions and agencies with national security missions across the federal government citing authority granted to Trump under a 1978 law.

And as the AP reports affected, agencies could include the Department of State Defense, veterans Affairs, energy, health and Human Services, the Treasury, justice and Commerce, and the part of Homeland Security responsible for border security. Now, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 government employees, has already sued the Trump administration over the executive order to end collective bargaining across the federal workforce. In response to these attacks, union’s, social justice and community organizations, veterans groups and people of conscience around the country are also showing up to local and national protest actions. They’re showing up to town halls with elected officials and making their voices heard, signing petitions and writing letters to their representatives. And one such engaged group includes the Federal Unionist Network, an informal association of federal unionists and their allies on their website. The Federal Unionist Network say plainly that Elon Musk is trying to steal the federal government slashing public services, firing essential workers, and handing power to billionaires like himself.

It’s illegal, it’s dangerous, and we won’t stand for it. Through a mass action campaign, federal workers and community supporters will challenge every illegitimate and unjustified layoff. Instead of letting Musk steal their jobs, they’ll show up for duty with a clear message. Let me work. I serve the American people, not the richest man on earth who nobody elected to be my boss. To get an inside view of the Trump Musk administration’s attacks on the federal government and the federal workforce and why you and every working person should care about it, and to talk about who’s fighting back, how they’re fighting back, and what people can do to get involved. I’m honored to be joined today by James Jones. James is a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service based in North Carolina. He’s a veteran and a member of the Federal Unionist Network. James, thank you so much for joining us today on the show. Man, I really appreciate it.

James Jones:

Hey, it’s my pleasure, max. Thanks for inviting me.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, it’s an honor to be connected to you, although of course, I wish we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances, which we’re going to dig into over the next 50 minutes. But I wanted to just start here at the top, just getting your response to all this, especially since we’re talking just days after Trump’s executive order to end collective bargaining rights for workers like yourself across the federal government.

James Jones:

Well, I think as far as my union, I’m an A FG member with local 4 4 6 out of Asheville, North Carolina. I live in Boone. We expected a lot to happen from Trump’s first term. He did things to attack our union the first time, and we expected him to do it again, albeit maybe not on this level, but I think maybe some people at the national level of a FG would probably, they probably counted on what was going to happen even with some of the atrocious things he’s done already, a FG and my local both. We’ve been fighting a FG national, they’ve sued the Trump administration over several of these illegal acts he’s done after he came on after his inauguration, like firing a bunch of probationary workers and some other things. And the courts have sided with the unions a FG, especially over some of these illegal acts.

And I think if you read the order, I didn’t read it closely, but it did mention a FG in that order is EO banning collective bargaining for these agencies that are so-called entwined with national security. So to me, it sounds like it’s retaliatory against the unions, the NTEU, the FFE and a FG for bringing suit against Trump because they’re fighting back and we’re fighting back at the local level. We’ve held several rallies in Asheville. We had a town hall here in Boone. Our representative Virginia Fox never showed up. We had a packed house of 165 people and she never showed up to address the constituents in her district, which was expected because we’re a dot of blue and a sea of red here in Boone, North Carolina. So she usually avoids meeting with her constituents in Watauga County. And this Saturday, April 5th we’re we have a mass march in rally in downtown Boone to address the attacks on all these agencies and what it means for the American people. So I’ll be there at that as well.

Maximilian Alvarez:

I definitely want to make sure that we talk a bit more later in the show about the attempt to repeal collective bargaining rights as if you could just sign that kind of thing away and talk about the fight back in more detail ending with the day of action coming up at this weekend. But I guess before we get there, let’s take a step back because so much as I read in the intro, so many federal workers are being impacted by this and the amount of people who depend on their labor is incalculable at this point. But when you start reading just the thousands, the numbers and the thousands of folks who are losing their jobs or getting fired or what have you, it’s really easy to lose sight of the human beings behind every single one of those numbers. And I wanted to ask for folks who are hearing those numbers, but they’re not hearing the human beings behind them. If we could just talk a bit more about your time working as a federal worker and in the National Park Service. Could you tell us a bit more about yourself, how you got into doing that work and what up until, I guess recently that work entailed?

James Jones:

Yeah, so I started working with the Park Service in 2002. I served in the military prior to that, went to college, got two degrees and decided I didn’t want to do what I had gone to college for, a lot of folks do, I guess, and just took a job with the park service doing maintenance work, and I’ve worked here on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina my whole career. So yeah, I started out as a wage grade eight employee. I worked my way up to a wage grade 10. I’m still a wage grade 10 today, and I enjoy taking care of the park. I enjoy where I work. We have, it’s called the Moses Cone Estate. It’s about a 4,000 acres state that’s part of the parkway proper. There’s 26 miles of historic carriage trails that I maintain. And then there’s some other areas that we try to do historic preservation work to keep the facilities up like the cone manor and the carriage barn and the historic apple barn and that sort of thing.

Over the years, I mean since I’ve been there in 2002, there’s just been a steady decline of money. The budget basically has remained static over that timeframe. It’s increased a little bit over the course of say, 23 years. The budget has remained static, which is basically a budget reduction, cost of living, cost of doing business keeps going up, but your budget remains static. When you lose people to retirement, you’re really not able to cover that position sometimes because you’ve got to cover the cost of living raises, the cost of insurance, and all these other things go up. So over that span of time, we’ve actually lost employees in great numbers. And if you remember back in 2013 when they passed that sequestration bill, the Park service I think in general lost about 30% of the workforce then, and we’ve really never retained that number of employees back since that time.

And so now we’re faced again with a possible 30% cut under DO’S proposal to cut the park service. We’re already lean. I always joke and say, we’re not down to the bone anymore, we’re down to the marrow. We can’t really operate anymore unless we get more money and people and equipment and things to do our job. So it’s been a struggle, especially for the last 12 years, and people are noticing with the proposed doge cuts and what they’re saying about the park service people here in this area, most people love the outdoors. We’re in the mountains. They’re turning out, they’re turning out and protesting this stuff. They don’t want to see their parks decline further than what they already are. They want their parks to be taken care of. And when you still, I think the maintenance backlog now is something like 16 billion for the whole park service. They just don’t have any money to maintain a lot of the facilities and trails and roads and such. So this is just another blow. It’s another gut punch to an agency that’s already suffering from a lot.

Maximilian Alvarez:

James, I wanted to ask a little more about what you were just talking about, right, because I think this is really important for folks to understand that it’s not as if Elon Musk and Donald Trump have come with their axes and hatchets and started making cuts to fully funded agencies. Like you were describing how your agency has been losing budget and people for your entire time working there. And I wanted to ask if you could say a little more about what that translates to on a day-to-day level for folks who are still working for the Park service when they have to now deal with an underfunded, understaffed agency and what that looks like for folks who are coming to take advantage of the parks and enjoy them.

James Jones:

Well, I’m sure President Trump and Elon Musk don’t visit national parks and some of the other billionaires that he’s appointed in his cabinet, I am sure they don’t visit those areas public lands because they own their own land. They probably own as much land as some national parks having capacity as far as acreage. But yeah, so any given day in the park service at my park particularly, and I’m sure it’s park wide, I know people that work in different parks around the country, you just don’t get all the work done. I mean, things that need to be tended to, there’s a priority list. Obviously. You got to do the things that take priority over other things. So if you don’t have enough people to take care of what needs to be taken care of, that gets put to the wayside. And then the important things like cleaning restrooms, cutting trees out of the roads so people don’t get the trees driving 50 miles an hour through the park.

I mean, picking up trash. I mean, I don’t do those things, but I do more of the skilled labor. But even then, you’ve got these systems, these infrastructure systems in the park service that are outdated and most of ’em need to be replaced. Water systems, sewer systems, electrical systems. Most of the park service have antiquated systems. I mean, they’re running, some of these systems are probably 60, 70 years old. I mean, they’ve been upgraded some over the years, but a lot of these systems just need a total replacement. And so when more people visit the parks, which is the case year after year, population increases, more people come. We’re not upgrading these systems. We’re not building newer facilities, bigger facilities. We’re not making more parking lots for people because there’s no money. Then it takes a hit, and we have to shut these systems down sometimes because they’re overwhelmed. The water system can’t keep up. Our sewer systems can’t keep up. People park all over the place now they’re beating the sides of the road down the shoulders of the road with their vehicles, and we don’t have enough rangers to enforce a lot of the rules and regs on the parking anymore. We’ve lost a significant number of law enforcement people. So yeah, it’s a problem, and it’s going to get worse if we don’t change course and protect our parks.

Maximilian Alvarez:

I want to ask kind of a follow-up question to that. That is really for anyone listening who is still sort of buying into the justifications for this that are coming out of the Trump administration all over Fox News, all over Musk’s, social media, platform X, all that stuff, what would you say to folks out there who are still convincing themselves that, oh, it’s a park. You don’t need that many people. I can just go and walk around. What do I need all these government aid workers for or beyond that, people who are pretending that flesh and blood working people like yourself, maintaining our parks are somehow like this part of this evil deep state bureaucracy?

James Jones:

Well, we’re not. We’re working people. We live in the same communities as these people do. Our kids go to the same schools, they go to the same churches. We go to the same grocery store, whatever. I mean, we’re all part of the community. We’re not some sort of evil sect or cult that we have ulterior motives in the Park Service or any other federal agency for that matter, to do harm to people. And this notion that government workers are lazy, that one always floors me because I know plenty of people in government service that work hard and they’re dedicated to their missions. I sometimes think the public may not understand the depth of some of the work government workers do, because a lot of it is different than the private sector. Government doesn’t operate to make profit. We’re here to serve people. This notion that we should run government like a business, I don’t buy that.

We’re not a business. We provide services. And since we’re not in the business of making a profit, then maybe some people see that as they’re not motivated enough to work hard because they’re not making money. Well, that’s not true. I myself, and I know a lot of other people that could quit government tomorrow and go to work in the private sector and make more money, but we don’t because we enjoy public service. We enjoy providing. Me personally, I enjoy, I take pride in my work I do at Mile Park. I know people come there, they enjoy my area of the park. They tell me a lot. I know people in the community and blowing rock where I work. They tell me, you do great work here. This place is nice. I mean, I take a lot of pride in that, and to me that’s more important than making another $10 an hour somewhere. That’s my take on it. And I think I can speak for a lot of other federal employees and a FG members too that work in different agencies with that.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, I’m curious, again, given that you’ve been doing that work for decades and you’ve seen so many kind of changes in American politics and the ways that the population talks about government workers. I mean, I remember what was it like over 10 years ago in Wisconsin, like Scott Walker and the Republicans really rammed through a lot of these same anti-labor policies, including eventually turning Wisconsin into a right to work state in a large part based on vilifying government workers in the ways that you’re talking about. So this problem is not new. I mean, I grew up conservative. I remember us talking about government workers this way when I was a kid. I wanted to ask if you could say a little more about how deep that goes and how it’s impacted you and other government workers and what we need to correct in the ways that we understand the work and lives of our federal workforce to stop falling into these traps that lead to us just not caring when we slash budgets year after year, we lay off more people year after year. It feels like this has been a slow building crisis that’s now just reached a critical point, but the roots of that run deep all the way through your career.

James Jones:

Well, max as well as I do, a lot of politicians hate labor unions. And it’s pretty obvious why, because unions traditionally have always been the tip of the spear to fight corruption. Greed read these businesses that prey and exploit on people’s vulnerabilities. I mean, it’s been going on for well over a century. Labor unions have had to fight and scratch for everything for their members. As Frederick Douglass said back in the 1850s, power concedes nothing without demand. And it’s true. They’re not going to give up anything. The billionaire class, they’re not going to give up anything. They’re just going to keep taking. And it is just sheer greed. It seems to me like a disease. I think the message needs to be that these people, and I think Bernie Sanders does a good job of messaging when it comes. He’s always harping on the billionaire class, these people are greedy.

They want everything you have. They can’t ever get enough. I think he was on the Senate floor yesterday and maybe the day before addressing the Senate, how he’s traveled the country and how so many Americans are fed up with the economy. You have two Americas, the ones with everything and the ones with nothing. I think that has to be the message. And as far as government workers go, we need to be in that category. We’re working people. We are not special people. I think the other problem is too, the government has to abide by the law.

President Obama, when he was in office, he had the standing that the federal government was a model employer, that we did everything by law, by Reg, did the right thing. And I think that we need to get back to that. But in order to do that, there is a lot of, sometimes what people perceive as waste is just the government doing what they’re supposed to be doing. A lot of private companies, I’ve worked in the private sector, they don’t always do what they should be doing. They try every which way in the world to circumvent the law. Cause it costs ’em money if they have to abide by all these policies that the government imposes on ’em. But a lot of these policies are for good reason. They protect people health and safety. Look at osha. When I was a local president, I worked closely with OSHA because when you work for an agency like mine and even the va, and I know people that work at the va, the VA try to cut corners on safety and health, and you’ve got to have some sort of safeguard and check on that. And some people might view that as waste for one example, that it shuts down production so the OSHA guy can come in and check out on everything. But I mean, it’s just the way things have to work.

Yeah, the messaging’s just got to change with federal workers and state workers and local workers. We’re not lazy people. A lot of it’s just things we have to go by through legislative action and law and that sort of thing.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, and it makes me think about what you were saying earlier, right, about the fallacy of wanting government to be run a business. That may sound good to certain people in theory, but as someone who my entire job is interviewing workers in the public and private sector, I can tell you that most workplaces are dictatorships where your working person does not have any rights, let alone the right to make any demands on their employers without losing their livelihoods. And so why would we want that to be the model of our government? I think there’s really something missing for folks who really aren’t making the connection between this is how businesses are run and this is how they treat their workers in America, and this is how it’s going to look if that takes over government entirely.

James Jones:

Yeah. To me, corporations are tyrannies. There’s no democratic process with corporations private power. They have a board of directors. They make the decisions. I mean, there are some companies like the automotive industry, the big three where they’re unionized and the UAW has a lot of power and they have good collective bargaining agreements, but if they didn’t, they wouldn’t enjoy those benefits and privileges that they have now through a contract. So at least with the government and in unionized workplaces, you have due process with the federal government. It’s a little more restrictive. We can’t bargain over certain things like wages, healthcare, that sort of thing, but we can still bargain over a lot of things that affect our working conditions. And if that’s taken away, then these agencies, a lot of ’em run just like a corporation. They’re a top down. You have no rights. I mean, you have certain rights. I mean, I shouldn’t say that you still have certain rights as a federal worker without a union, but I would prefer to have a union contract over any kind of administrative procedure that I’m granted. I’ll put it that way, because I’ve seen both. I’ve seen how both work. I’ll take my union any day over that.

Maximilian Alvarez:

James, I wanted to ask if you could just follow up on what we were just talking about. For folks out there listening who may not fully grasp the differences between unions representing government workers and other unions that they may have heard of the Teamsters, UAW. Could you just say a little more for folks out there about what the role of a union is for a federal workforce like the National Park Service where you work?

James Jones:

Yeah, so federal unions, they’re like private sector unions, trade unions. They’re there to protect the workers. They’re there to promote better working conditions and that sort of thing that we’re no different in that regard. A FGE, my union, I’m sure NTEU and FFE, they’re there to bargain collectively bargain with their respective agencies, better working conditions. And that can be everything from a grievance procedure to disciplinary adverse actions over time. Your lunch break, when you’re going to take that, your 15 minute breaks. And I want to say something real quick there. Some people don’t realize this. The federal government does not have to give you two breaks during your workday. We have that in our contract. We get a 15 minute break between the start of the shift and lunch and get another 15 minute break between the end of lunch and the end of the workday.

A lot of people don’t realize that they don’t have to give you that. We have that in our contract. I mean, it’s those little things like that that make a difference. And I’m not saying some of these agencies might be very good and it doesn’t matter, but management comes and goes, and believe me, their solicitor and their HR departments tell ’em what they can get by with than what they can’t get by with. I would much rather have that contract that outlines how they’re going to treat their workers and not having that at all. So generally speaking, most unions, that’s what they’re looking to do is to promote good ties with management, improve the working conditions. We just can’t do certain things. Like the big one is strike. We can’t strike, which is, I get it, you’re a public servant. You go on strike. I mean, the taxpayers, basically, they’re paying you to work. So that was laid out in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

The other ones are we can’t negotiate pay, we can’t negotiate the amount of leave we get all that is set by Congress. Congress. You probably, a lot of people realize that every year the president presents a budget, Congress approves the budget or they go back and forth until they get a budget. Federal employees usually get, depending on inflation, we usually get two, three, 4% cost of living raise at the end of the year for the following year. That’s set by Congress and the president. We can’t negotiate over that. A lot of private sector unions can, the UAW, the Teamsters, those big unions, they can strike their employer. If they don’t lock what’s happening, their membership votes to strike, they go out on strike. We can’t do that. So we don’t have a lot of power as related to some of those private sector unions. But we still have power as far as establishing certain things, certain rights in the workplace.

And the billionaire class can’t stand that. They pretty much destroyed the private sector unions. I think union density now in the private sector is 7% the last number I looked at or somewhere hovering around that. So we’re now, yeah, it’s probably lower. North Carolina is one of the lowest states. I think it is the lowest state when it comes to union density. The state I’m in, the public sector, unions are up, I think around 30 some percent, maybe close to 40, and they want to get rid of that power. These billionaires, they want to take that away. Just two years ago, we had a decertification drive at my park where a disgruntled employee brought in the National Right to Work Foundation to represent her to decertify the union at my park, and we beat it. And these people, I think the National Right to Work Foundation, they’re backed by the Koch brothers and other big money interest. It doesn’t even matter if these federal employee unions are part of their company, which they’re not. But they know if they can keep undermining that power structure, it helps their cause. And that’s why it’s so important that we fight this and win it.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, and there’s clearly some power on top of that that has been frustrating, the Trump administration in terms of the power of federal unions to stall or stop or challenge or reverse these decisions coming from the White House and through Trump’s administration. I wanted to ask from your vantage point from your union, why is he going after the unions and your collective bargaining rights? Trump is claiming that this is a national security issue. Do you believe that?

James Jones:

No, I don’t. It is already in the Civil Service Reform Act. Certain agencies can’t unionize that are involved with National Security, FBI, the CIA, national Security Agency. And then there’s some other smaller agencies out there that kind of fall under that umbrella. Maybe I think some of the department homeland security folks, law enforcement types, I’m not sure, but I think there’s some of those that are excluded. Yeah, I mean, it’s the same old playbook. They use this broad umbrella of saying, alright, all these agencies, I’m going to declare part of national security. They’re not part of national security. I mean, already in the law that there’s certain agencies excluded from unionization because they’re already involved with that. And I fought my own agency over this a few years ago. We had a guy, he was an IT when I was the local president, and they had him mislabeled as non bargaining unit as a non bargaining unit employee like management or HR employee.

And he asked me one day, he’s like, Hey James. He said, I want to join the union, but they say I can’t because I’m non bargaining unit status. And I’m like, no, you’re not. You’re in it. So when I inquired about why they had him labeled as such, they said, well, he sees sensitive information because he’s an IT guy. Well, so what? He’s still eligible to join the union. So I had to file an unfair labor practice and enforce the agency to classify him as union eligible. And so he joined the union, but I mean, they come up with all these, I mean, it’s no different than what Trump’s doing. They come up with all these excuses, these legal arguments that, oh, well, we got to exclude all these people now from collective bargaining, I mean wasn, that wasn’t the reasoning. The reasoning was because a FG and other unions have beat him already on two big cases.

One was the TSA, the other was the probationary people that were getting fired, I’m sorry, the TSA people. That’s still pending, but the probationary employees, and then they filed the suit on the deferred resignation program, which they had to backpedal on that quite a bit. So it is retaliatory for sure. I mean, I would think any judge or judicial panel would see that and say basically what you’re saying about national security, it’s overly broad. It doesn’t apply here because we’ve already got that in the, it’s already covered by, and secondly, it’s clear retaliation. They even mentioned A FGE in the order that they’re thwarting Mr. Trump’s agenda. Well, that’s just too bad. That’s what unions do, protect their members, right? I mean, yeah, it’s insane. It is, but we’ll still be here.

Maximilian Alvarez:

And the thwarting of Trump’s agenda thing, two kind questions on that one. If this executive order just sort of became totally the law of the land and collective bargaining rights were gone from these federal agencies, what would that look like for workers like you and what would that mean for executing Trump’s agenda without the unions getting in the way? Why are they doing this?

James Jones:

Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I think there’s so much animosity at this point. Unions are still going to do what they’re going to do and they would still fight. You would just have to keep filing actions against the government, against his administration, still follow your contract, still file grievances, whatever you needed to do, LPs, et cetera, on fair labor practices. And then wait it out until he’s out and then have your day in court then and bring it all back. I mean, of course I’m not an attorney. I don’t know if they outlaw collective bargaining for these agencies. I don’t know how that would work as far as getting any kind of recourse or being made whole. It probably wouldn’t even happen, but I think they would would still be a lot of resistance toward that. Another thing is, if he’s successful at this, that’s going to be a green light for big corporations to basically go after their unions.

Just like the PATCO strike in 81. I’m old enough to remember that strike. I was 10 years old and I remember watching it on tv and my dad, he was a factory worker, unionized factory worker, and he said, we’ll never get another contract, a good contract because of this. And he was right. That company, he worked for the union basically. Every time they’d go to negotiate a new contract, they just kept losing. They had to concede things. The company would say, they’re going to shut the plant down. They’re going to do this, they’re going to do that. And it’s just been a steady decline since the PATCO strike. Basically, the Reagan administration said, we’re going to turn a blind eye. You guys want to break labor law. Go ahead. We’re not going to do anything about it. And that would be the same thing today, if they’re successful with this EO that he just signed s strip away collective bargaining rights. But much worse, I think

Maximilian Alvarez:

I work in the news and it’s impossible to keep up with all these executive orders, right? We’ve talked about on this show, I mean, that’s very much part of the strategy. The flood, the zone overwhelm. People hit people with so much bad news that we just become immobilized and unions may challenge some of them while others get through. It’s been a very dizzying couple months. I wanted to ask what the last two months have looked like from your vantage point in Boone as a government worker in a union that represents workers across different agencies, like from Trump’s to now. Could you just give us a bit of a play by play on how this has all unfolded in your life and how folks are reacting to it?

James Jones:

Yeah, obviously there’s been a lot of uncertainty, especially for folks that probationary folks after he was inaugurated and they first proposed firing all the probationary workers because they were easy to get rid of, easier to get rid of, and that hasn’t worked for him. But still, even these folks that are probationary, they’re still hesitant because they don’t know. Even though a lot of ’em got reinstated, they’re still going to do a RIF probably down the road. Who knows? I mean, I’m sure they will with certain agencies. I can’t speak for my agency. I know they’ve offered another round of voluntary buyouts and voluntary early retirement. But yeah, it’s been stressful. Even folks like me that have a lot of time, and I could have taken that first round of deferred resignation program when they offered it, but I don’t want to retire right now. I’m just 53 years old.

I’ve still got a lot of years left, and I’ll retire on my terms, not their terms. That’s the way I look at it. But yeah, I can’t imagine some of these folks, these folks that are just now getting into the government, they’re scared. They’re scared they can’t plan. I mean, I’ve heard of stories where people moved all the way across the country to take another job. These are people that have 5, 10, 15 years with the government. They took a new job. They were put into, they accepted a new job series, which basically your probationary period starts over. Anytime you leave a job series, go into another job series, you still have a one year probationary period. And then to get fired after you’ve had that many years in to say, well, you’re no longer needed, even though you’ve been a good worker and you’ve had good performance ratings, I mean, it’s crushing for those people, I’m sure.

And not all those people got their job back either. I think out of that 24,000, I think only 16,000 were ordered reinstated. So I can’t imagine having to moving into a new job, federal job, two 3000 miles away where I was at and then told You’re fired after you’re trying to resettle in an area. I mean, it is just cruel, inhumane. It’s just unbelievable. But yeah, as far as my agency goes, we don’t have a lot of people anyway. As I mentioned earlier, we’re down to the marrow. I call it the marrow instead of down to the bone, but I think we lost one probationary worker. That’s all we had when that order was signed. And that person is reinstated, to my knowledge, has been reinstated, but I don’t know what’s to happen with this Vera. The voluntary early retirement authority that came back out and the vsip, the Voluntary Separation Incentive payment Department of Interior offered that.

They excluded my job series on maintenance. The Department of Interior excluded a bunch of jobs from that where you couldn’t retire early law enforcement, firefighting, wildland firefighting, and then the park service excluded just about all the maintenance positions. So I couldn’t take it. I wouldn’t have taken it anyway, so I tend to think with maintenance, the reason they did that is because we don’t have many people anyway, so if they get rid of all the maintenance, just close the parks because you’re not going to be able to go in the park because nobody’s going to be there to do anything. Yeah, but there’s a lot of other jobs I’m worried about that they’re going to try, try to riff. They’ll try to do a riff. If they don’t get the so-called 30% reduction, which nobody seems to know what that means, there’s been no guidance issued. 30% of watt, 30% of this park, 30% across the board, 30% of a certain cap of money that they need to cut. I mean, who nobody knows. It’s kind like one of those things they, they’re just flying by the seat of their pants and doing things, whatever they feel like when they feel like it. So that’s the uncertainty of it too. You don’t know,

Maximilian Alvarez:

James, we talked at the top of this episode about the fact that you yourself are a veteran, right? That you’re union local. A FGE also represents workers at the VA over there in North Carolina where you are near Boone. I wanted to ask just a little bit about that, how all of this is hitting you as a veteran who has served your country and also served your country like working for the Park Service while we’re also seeing these devastating cuts to the VA and so many veterans who are being affected by these cuts outside of the VA even as well.

James Jones:

Yeah, the va, I’m disabled, so I use the VA for all my healthcare, dental, health, vision, the gamut. And one of my providers, I do telehealth quite often just because it saves me from having to drive to Asheville, which is an hour and a half drive and Hickory’s about an hour drive. So I’ve been doing a lot of telehealth appointments over the years and now that a lot of that’s gone because of the return to office mandate. A lot of these counselors and some other people were able to telework at home to treat veterans, especially with mental illness stuff, therapists, certified mental health counselors, that sort of thing. They were working at home and even some of the people in admin that I know that work at the VA national that do billing, they were able to work at home and do billing and this notion that we got to get everybody back in the office because they’re not doing anything.

Well, that’s a total lie and a myth. The VA uses tracking software on these folks that do telehealth. They know when they’re working, they know when they’re not working. They’re not at home doing nothing or doing the laundry or on the treadmill or whatever these people think. I mean, they’re being tracked. They have to meet their production quotas. But now since they’re back in the office, especially like with the care with Veterans Care, now I’m having to wait longer to get an appointment for my mental health counselor because now he has to drive 45 minutes to work to the nearest facility. And you say, well, that’s not much. Well, that’s time. He could be at home working, helping another veteran. I mean, I don’t understand where they get this, that people that telework or work remotely don’t do anything because I’m pretty sure most of the federal government, especially the bigger agency, well even the Park service, we had some folks at Telework, they have tracking software.

They know what they’re doing. I mean, if they’re not working, if they’re down less than more than 10 minutes, they get a text or an email. What are you doing? I mean, I don’t know how it works. I don’t telework, but I’ve been told that by many employees that our union represent. There is accountability with that system. But yeah, that’s just one thing. The other thing with Veterans Care, I think President Biden ordered about 60,000 people hired after the PACT Act was signed in 2022. They needed those people to file more claims to help process claims that veterans were filing after the war in Afghanistan ended in sometime in 20 21, 20 22, I can’t remember right after Biden took office, there’s been a flood of veterans from that era, from Iraq, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have come into the VA fold. Thousands of veterans, tens of thousands of veterans, and this administration’s proposing to go back to the 2020 levels of VA staffing.

Are you kidding me? You’ve grown the veteran population tenfold since then. It is not like Secretary Collins. The VA secretary said something the other day on TV about the VA’s not an employment agent. See, dude, dude, you’ve got all these veterans coming back from Afghanistan that are filing even veterans like myself. I filed on the PACT Act. I’m a Gulf War vet. I filed on the PACT Act as soon as it was passed. There’s some Vietnam era veterans that have filed under it. I mean, you’ve got a flood of claims being filed and plus people with real health issues, me included. I’ve got breathing problems. I’ve got all kinds of issues from my surface in the Gulf floor. It’s all connected. And for them to propose to reduce 80,000 positions in the VA system, they call it bloat or waste. It’s a farce. They’re basically sticking their nose up in the air to all of America’s veterans, the people that went over and served their country and sacrificed everything.

Maximilian Alvarez:

I mean, even just hearing that it’s my blood boiling, I can only imagine what it feels like for you and other people who have actually served in the military. I have not. Right, and it really brings us to the point that we’re at now, right? Where I think the rage is really setting in. For the past two months, there’s been a lot of fear, understandable fear. I am a brown tattooed man in the state of Maryland where someone who looks like me just got abducted and disappeared to a fascist colony in El Salvador under a administrative error by the Trump administration, and now he’s going to sit there and languish for who knows how long. I mean, the terror is real. We’re all feeling it in different ways, but I think after two months, the anger is really starting to boil up as well, the need to do something, the need to fight back, the need to speak out, and also the developments that have frustrated the Trump administration’s agenda both in the courts and elsewhere.

So we find ourselves at a very critical moment here at the beginning of April, and I wanted us to sort of end the discussion on that. I could talk to you for hours, but I know I got to let you go, but I wanted to ask if you could say more about how you got involved in the Federal Unionist Network, what local unions like yours are doing to fight back and what folks out there listening, whether they work for the government or not, whether they’re in a union or not. What’s your message to folks out there about why they should care about this and what they can do to get involved in the pushback?

James Jones:

Yeah, it’s not just an attack on federal workers. I mean, when the administration attacks, federal workers are basically attacking the American people because federal workers serve the American people. We’ve heard this over and over and over again, but it has to be said again, if you don’t have federal workers, you’re not going to have clean air and water. You’re not going to have safe food. You might not get your social security check. You might get it delayed. I mean, all this is up in the air. Your national parks close or they’ll be restricted to where you can’t access all parts of the park BVA services for Veterans Healthcare Benefit claim processing. That’s going to be reduced, and this is for people that don’t even work for the government, the FAA, they keep our airline, our airways safe, our border people that keep, hopefully they’re keeping the border safe and vetting people that are actually dangerous, that this stereotypical myth that everybody that comes across our border is some kind of criminal is just insane.

That’s scary too. Well, just like you mentioned earlier about the person that they arrested, I think it was in New York the other day, or the El Salvadorian guy, they took what’s next? They’re going to arrest American people, American citizens because they think you might be linked to the Venezuelan gang or something, and like you said, they’ll languish and you sit there in jail without any kind of due process. I mean, it’s just a matter of time if people don’t start fighting this, and I think they are. I mean, it is really, I think in the last two months we’ve seen the tides start shifting. People are starting to get involved, and I work with a group here, it’s called Indivisible Watauga, and I think it’s a nationwide group, indivisible. They’re kind of organizing these marches I think for April 5th, one of the many groups. And I’ve talked with a lot of my friends in Indivisible and in the county where I live, and we’ve been doing a lot of grassroots organizing.

I mean, I’ve been doing it through my union, through these people, but I think that’s what it takes is a collective effort. The united front across the community, your community and the nation to fight this. And I think we’re going to be okay, but it’s going to be a fight. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but we can’t rest. We can’t rest. We’ve got to keep the pressure mounted for as long as it takes. I don’t think the courts alone are going to be our savior. I think they’re important and I think they’ll keep things somewhat between the guardrails, but I think the major power here is going to be us. We the people. If you can get out on April 5th, I think it’s a nationwide effort. Find out where April 5th rally is going to be a hands-off rally march slash rally. I think they’re happening everywhere and I think there’s going to be a huge turnout, and I think it’s going to send a direct message to Trump and Elon Musk that we’re not going to take it. You want to try to be a dictator or king or whatever you’re wanting to try to be. It’s not going to work out for you because we live in a democracy and Americans like their democracy and they will fight to keep it.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guest, James Jones, veteran and a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

As we’ve mentioned many times before on the show, movements today are a part of a legacy of extraordinary actions taken by ordinary people. Tapping into our own labor history provides us with a blueprint for action in today’s turbulent world.

On March 25th, 1911, a fire began in the scrap bins under a cutter’s table on the 8th floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Within minutes, the entire floor was engulfed in flames, spreading to the ninth floor and 10th floors–where 200+ workers were just finishing up to go home for the night. By the time workers were alerted to the conflagration, options for escaping the fire were few. By the time the fire was brought under control, 146 workers were dead. New York City saw sweeping reforms in the aftermath of the fire, catapulting some pro-reform lobbyists like Francis Perkins all the way to the highest halls of government with the introduction of the New Deal 20 years later. 

Near the 114th anniversary of this tragedy, Mel sat down with labor historian Dr. Erik Loomis, professor at the University of Rhode Island and author of his forthcoming book, Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice to talk about the struggle for better working conditions in the garment industry in New York City, the fire itself and the reforms enacted afterwards, and why it’s important to learn from our own labor history in this current moment.

Additional links/info:

• Cornell University – ILR School: Remembering the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire
• Dr. Erik Loomis on Bluesky
• More information about Dr. Loomis’s forthcoming book, Organizing America

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
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Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mel Buer:

Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Mel Buer and I’ve been your host for the month of March. Next week, max will be back at the helm for the month of April, bringing you more stories from the working class today for the last episode of this month, we’re taking a moment to train an eye on the past. As I’ve mentioned many times before, movements today are part of a legacy of extraordinary actions taken by ordinary people. Tapping into our own labor history provides us with a blueprint for action in today’s turbulent world.

With that in mind, we’re talking about the triangle shirt, waist Factory fire. Today on March 25th, 1911, a fire began in the scrap bins under a cutter’s table on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory in New York City. Within minutes, the entire floor was engulfed in flames spreading to the ninth and 10th floors where 200 plus workers were just finishing up to go home for the night. By the time workers were alerted to the conflagration options for escaping the fire were few, by the time the fire was brought under control, 146 workers were dead. New York City saw sweeping reforms in the aftermath of the fire, even catapulting some pro reform lobbyists like Francis Perkins all the way to the highest halls of government. With the introduction of the New Deal, 20 years later near the a hundred and 14th anniversary of this tragedy, I’m sitting down with labor historian Dr. Erik Loomis, professor at the University of Rhode Island, an author of his forthcoming book, organizing America Stories of Americans who Fought for Justice to talk about the struggle for better working conditions in the garment industry in New York City, the fire itself and the reforms enacted afterwards, and why it’s important to learn from our own labor history in this current moment. Thanks for coming on the show, Dr. Loomis. I really appreciate you taking some time this morning to talk about a very important piece of our labor history.

Erik Loomis:

Thanks for having me. I’m very happy to be here.

Mel Buer:

To start off this conversation, I just want to give our listeners a little bit of a chance to get to know you and who you are. So who are you, where do you teach? What kind of work do you do?

Erik Loomis:

Sure. So my name is Erik Loomis. I am a history professor at the University of Rhode Island. I focus on labor history. I’m also environmental history, so I teach a lot of courses at my university. I kind of cover a lot of ground in US history that people don’t necessarily otherwise would be able to take. So I try to offer things that students need or want, but I make sure I teach a lot of labor history. I’m teaching labor history right now and super awesome, a great group of students, and so that’s been a lot of fun. And then I write about these issues in any number of different ways. Everything from I write at the liberal blog, lawyers, guns of Money, a lot of that’s about labor history. I have this day labor history series that I started there that I also syndicate do threads on Blue Sky to give a lesson almost every day. Not quite every day, but almost every day I have a lesson about labor history that’s out there. So yeah, so I do what I can to publicize our labor history basically.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, I think that’s actually a good place to start with our conversation. One thing that I like to do when I am hosting this podcast is sort of pull back the curtain on what it means to organize within the labor movement and to kind of give folks a sense of the nuts and bolts of what that looks like, but also to really help our listeners tap into the legacy of organizing in the United States, which is long storied, often violent, and really important to ground ourselves in this space. So to start this conversation, let’s just talk about what it means to learn about our own labor and movement history. And as a historian, why is it important to pay attention to and learn about this?

Erik Loomis:

Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about that and this book have coming out in the fall or I guess late summer Organizing America kind of gets into this a lot because I am very interested in sort of like what do we do with our past? Every American, everybody probably in the world tell stories about the past for themselves, and those stories often reflect what they need in the present. So why do we could tell all of these different stories about all of these different moments in time, and that includes in our labor history. So triangle is a horrible fire, one of the worst things that have ever happened. Of course, we’re going to get into this, but it’s far from the only mass death incident in American labor history. Why do we tell that story? So I’m really interested in why do we tell these stories that we tell and what do they do for us?

And for me anyway as a labor historian, and I think different historians would have different answers for this question. I don’t represent the historical community on this. For me, there’s a combination of things. Some of it’s inspiration, and I think that would be something a lot of people would say, right? We could be inspired by these movements in the past. And I agree with that. But I also think, and maybe we’ll get into this as we talk about triangle, that sometimes when we tell stories that are strictly inspirational, we actually lose something that I have this idea of our movement history and the way we teach it is a Mount Rushmore sort of thing, which in my world is not a compliment. It’s like I know how I have a great idea how to represent the past. Let’s blow some faces into a mountain in South Dakota.

What a great idea. And everybody could come gaze, and I’m like, oh, it George Washington. Oh, he’s so wonderful. But we kind of do that with our movement history. We sort of gaze up as Malcolm and King and Chavez and Rosa and Debs, and we kind of look up. It was like, wow, if only we could have those leaders today. And I would try to counter that a little bit because if you get into the details of what they were doing, they didn’t really know what they were doing at the time either. And I think in some ways learning our labor history is really useful to sort of ground ourselves not only in what they achieved, but the fact that we’re not really that different than them. We can be them. We can become that person. And I think that’s a really important piece of it that I really try to emphasize is the humanity, the mistakes and the realization that there’s not that big of a difference between our struggles and the struggles that they had.

Mel Buer:

And we’ll talk about this a little bit later in the conversation, but I read David Re’s Triangle in preparation of this episode and beyond the book, the book itself is kind of a monumental achievement in really kind of laying out the conditions leading up to the fire, the minute by minute details of the fire, which are harrowing and horrifying, and the reform movement that was born out of the fire plus the manslaughter trial. And we’ll talk all about this here in a moment, but the thing that strikes me the most about reading these books, and this is something that I come across often when I read labor history, is that good historians, good journalists through their archive work, resurrect these people in a way that makes them far more real than just a photo on a labor website or a story about these monumental achievements.

As you say, these are human beings who could have at another time been my neighbor or I could have been sitting next to them at a factory table, and their lives are full of the same sort of quiet dignity and indignities that we suffer and enjoy as working class people today. So I feel my background is in, I have a master’s degree and in literature, I did a lot of work within archives for my own work research when I was in grad school. And I’m always struck by the ability to take what is just a little short newspaper clipping or a receipt or some sort of bit of detritus that makes its way forward into our current moment and to really kind of build life from it and depth from it and memory and to sort of share in that humanity. And so I agree, I think that especially with labor history, not only does it provide the playbook for how to potentially tackle some of these similar problems that we are experiencing with Triangle and with the shirt, waist Factory workers strike that happened a year prior to the fire, they’re going up against the same sort of political machine that we have now.

They’re going up against the same sort of exploitation and indignities that workers are experiencing now. And you can learn a lot from the ways in which they organized and often their failures to be able to have a sense of what you can do in this moment.

Erik Loomis:

Yeah, and I think it’s also worth noting, while you don’t want to overdraw the lessons from the past, I mean the past and the present are not exactly the same thing, but within, we live just thinking here of American labor history, we live in a society that is shaped by a series of political and economic constructs, and by looking at our labor history, we can also get a sense of in our present debates around anything from the relationship of labor unions to democratic party or issues of democratic unionism or strikes or whatever it may be, a really deep dive examination into our labor history can really do a lot to suggest the potentials or limits of various contemporary issues that we’re talking about. Again, not that the past necessarily is a restriction on what’s possible in the present, but the basic structure of our economy and government has not changed a lot over the centuries. And even with Trumpism, I mean, everything that’s happening right now is basically a return to the conditions of the Triangle fire that we’re talking about. And some of those strategies used back then may become more valuable again with the destruction of labor law and the other horrible things that are happening right now. So I think that those deeper dives into our labor history, real discussions of our labor history as opposed to just snippets, but really help us move conversations at the contemporary labor and movement building world forward in some very concrete and useful ways.

Mel Buer:

Right. Well, I think that’s a good segue into getting into the meat of the discussion today, which is to talk about the triangle shirt, waste Factory Fire, which happened on March 25th, 1911. First, I kind of want to put it in a bit of wider context about what was going on in New York City at the time. So in the early 20th century, garment production was the largest manufacturing business in America. In the decades leading up to the early 20th century, there was this popularization of standardized off the rack fashion during the Industrial Revolution. It meant that instead of making clothing at home or via various sort of cottage industries, the Industrial Revolution standardized that entire process and turned it into the ability to walk into a clothing store like Nordstrom’s or something and to pull a sized garment off the rack. And prior to more mechanized processes that didn’t require as many hands in the process, these garment production factories were staffed by hundreds and thousands of workers. And the largest piece of that was in New York City, in the east end of the city. So just to give our readers, our listeners a sense here, what do these conditions look like for workers at the time who worked in specifically the garment industry in New York?

Erik Loomis:

Sure. Yeah, it’s rough work. You had a mostly immigrant workforce, particularly Jewish immigrants, some Italians as well. And that was working in clothing was something that quite a few of these immigrants had brought over from particularly Russia where there had been a lot of tailors and cutters and things like this. They enter into a growing American garment workforce that you accurately described, and that is happening at a moment in the late 19th and into the early 20th century. We’re beginning to see a shift so that a lot of the early sweatshop industry in New York was home-based. Basically, this contractor would move things out through these subcontracting systems and put things in people’s homes. And so you think about a tiny little New York apartment on say the Lower East side where a lot of this was taking place and people might complain today of their studio apartment, how small it’s, but there could be 10 to 15 people living in that at the time.

And then during the day, they’re working in it right there. They’re basically moving, what they have is for furniture to the side and putting the sewing machines in there. By the 1905 or so, that’s beginning to shift pretty heavily to what we would think of more of as a modern sweatshop, that it becomes more efficient for contractors to have the work in a particular place such as the location of the factory that would become notable for the triangle fire. And that was a very exploitative workforce. They hired mostly women thinking that they could control ’em. Work weeks could be 65 to 75 hours a week, but also tremendously unstable. And so you’d be working those 65, 75 hours a week if there was work, but then if the orders dried up, you went to nothing. So rather than have a consistent 40 hour week or even more than that, but consistent, it was either all the time or nothing at all. The women worked basically between three to $10 a week for all of these hours, which was poverty wages, even at that higher level. And factory owners really tried to control workers’ movements. Locking doors was super common. Fear of these workers stealing cloth and things like that would lead to searches requesting permission to use very unsanitary and disgusting bathrooms, fines all the time at work being required, supply your own supplies such as needles and things like this. Sexual harassment of these workers was a real problem. It’s a rough way to work,

Mel Buer:

And I kind of want to draw a parallel. It’s not a one-to-one, but I do want to draw a parallel from these sort of sweat up conditions that lead into this sort of wider factories that come through in the mid 19 aughts to sort of gig work that we see in some industries today where it is truly a race to the bottom in terms of payment wages and conditions and in these sort of sweatshop conditions. Absolutely. You would find that these contractors were a dime a dozen, and if you were the type of person who wanted to ask more for more wages for what you were working, they could throw you out and find someone within 15 minutes by walking to a market down the street. We see these conditions a lot in the sort of gig economy, certainly in some of the white collar industries like writing or things of that nature where people are making pennies on the dollar for some of the work that they do. And you can sort of see those parallels. And it didn’t just because these factories then establish themselves within a garment district and start employing 500 to a thousand workers per factory or what have you, doesn’t necessarily mean that those conditions improved much.

Erik Loomis:

Oh, absolutely not. I mean, in many cases they became worse. I mean, homework is not a great thing by any stretch of the imagination, but you had a certain control over your, no one’s sexually harassing you, no one’s locking the door, no one’s saying you can’t go to the bathroom. So conditions were probably even worse. I mean, the whole point of centralizing it is of course to maximize profit and you are continuing to maximize profit by exploiting this very frankly, easily exploited workforce for the reason that you discuss in that you have masses and masses of people coming to the United States at this time. And there was a lot of people desperate for work.

Mel Buer:

I think I read a statistic that was like Ellis Island was processing upwards of like 5,000 people a week at the height of peak of that piece of immigration. So you can imagine streams of individuals coming in after spending a week in the bow of a ship, making it through the sort of gauntlet that is Ellis Island and then ending up in the streets of New York and wanting to engage in some sort of employment that they can have skills for.

Erik Loomis:

And a lot of times part of the reason they’re willing to accept these horrible wages other than not having a whole lot of other options is that the first thing they’re trying to do is get their families over.

And so the more people that are working even in exploitative conditions, the more money they can save to get the cousins over or get, A lot of times a father would go first, save money, get their family over, and then they’d kind of collectively get that extended family over. And given that these were Jewish immigrants in Russia at this time, a lot of that is desperately escaping the state sponsored antisemitism that’s going on at that time. So there was very real reasons for these workers to sacrifice a lot, even knowing that they’re working in a terrible job because they had higher calling at that point.

Mel Buer:

Right. Well, and this kind of brings us to a remarkable sort of labor action that happened in 1909. So we have at this point 20 to 40,000 garment workers in New York City who are working in various factories, the triangle fame factory, I think they had what four other locations that were making various items. They’re called shirt waste. They’re, or essentially blouses varying sort of degrees of fashion with lace and other things. But there were also factories all over the lower East side and the east side of New York that were doing some of the same stuff. And in 1909, in response to worsening conditions, there was a massive strike in the garment district that lasted close to a year, I believe, that was led primarily by women over 20,000 garment workers took to the streets and they walked out of dozens of factories in the garment district on strike.

And something that kind of gets missed a little bit in history, maybe this is just me loving a good name for it, but they called it the uprising of the 20,000 and it was considered an opening salvo and a new struggle for better working conditions in the industrialized sort of industries in New York City. So maybe we can kind of start with the strike itself and really kind of underscore how revolutionary it was to see a militant fighting union of primarily women leading this particular labor action and sort of how those impacts reverberated into the following years and decades.

Erik Loomis:

The union they had that was in that industry, it was called the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, or the ILG as it’s commonly known. But ironically, the leadership of the union was basically all men and men had taken over that union, and a lot of these men were skilled cutters and things like this. And even despite the name, they weren’t really that comfortable with masses of women in the workforce. I mean, they brought over gender ideologies as well. And so in New York, you have in those weeks and months leading up to this strike, which begins in November of 1909, you have young organizers, again, mostly Jewish women, some of whom who will become pretty famous in the future, Clara Lemick, Roche Schneiderman, Pauly Newman, all of which will become pretty famous names in American labor and reform history are organizing and the factories to say, we don’t have to live this way.

It’s not necessary that our conditions are so exploitative. Some of them came from families who had brought radical politics with them, which was a growing thing in the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe at the time through the Jewish fund. Others did not. Lelet came from quite politically conservative families who were outraged that their daughter was engaging in such radical activities. But it all begins to come to a head that fall. And there’s a big meeting in New York, I think a Cooper Union. And the point of the meeting in part is for labor leaders to try to cut the strike off. So the ILG member, the president’s there and other leading figures are there, American Federation of Labor Head, Samuel GOPer shows up and basically urges caution. And you have these, you can almost imagine it, it’s like two hours of these guys getting up and talking and going on and on and trying to kill time and trying to really undermine what they saw as a rebellion of low skilled workers that they feared would undermine the very limited gains that they had made in other parts of the garment industry.

And finally, after listening to this Lemick, who is this very small woman, the very tiny young woman gets up and basically marches up to the stage. And in Yiddish says, and I’m going to quote what she says here, I am a working girl, one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers. You talk in general terms, what we are here to decide is whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now. And she simply overwhelmed all those men on the stage. The workers walked out the day

Mel Buer:

Right standing ovation for that, the whole place just, and they had overflow for that as well. It was a very, very large meeting of workers, I think. And Clara Lemick specifically is unique in that she is probably in my reading over the last couple of years of labor history, a really solid example of what happens when you can successfully salt workplaces. She would hop from factory to factory, get hired on and salt the crap out of the workplace, organize those workers and bring them out on strike. And inevitably for some reason, she would either leave the job or get fired from the job and she would move on to the next one. And her organizing was so dangerous to the factory owners that they actually had her followed and she got the crap beaten out of her in the street and the next day and for the following weeks, you could see her on street corners displaying the bruises on her face. And using that as a rhetorical sort of example to say, we’re onto something, join us. And I dunno, as a woman in the labor movement, I find those examples to be really meaningful to anyone who’s listening to these sort of stories is that you may not even know who Clara Le is, but she is truly a revolutionary spirit in the labor movement.

Erik Loomis:

And I think that learning about people like that, I think there’s this whole, people like to say history repeats itself, which it doesn’t. Don’t ever say that to a historian, but there is these lessons out there. There are these people out there that you can be like, wow, they really did this amazing work and they suffered for it. I mean, getting the shit beat out of you is not a great story. That sucks. And she will be during the strike itself, lime Lake is beaten by a cop and suffer six broken ribs. She’s arrested 17 times during the strike. So it’s not, and these stories from the past, it’s not great. But I think that in a moment in which I think you see a lot of activism out there, or the beginnings of whatever we’re trying to do to stop Trump and all this horrible stuff. And there seems to me to be a lot of, I want something to happen, but I don’t actually want anything to happen to me.

I’m scared of something happening to me. And the reality is things are probably going to be happening to us. And learning that you can take that and build from it, I think is a critically important thing. It is a little bit of a side note, but I was just, yesterday in my labor history class, we were reading oral history from Harry Bridges, the great organizer of the longshoreman. And my students were struck because he talks in this oral history. He’s like, yeah, every day the cops would beat the shit out of us, and then the next day we would just come back and keep doing the same thing. And it blew their mind that you could do that. And I think these are the things that are important to understand, to bring from that past to the present. Lelet can be very inspiring this way.

Mel Buer:

So what was the outcome of the strike? So they were on strike for quite some time. A lot of these young women were arrested, sent to the workhouse for a brief period of time. You had some really interesting cross class solidarity and fundraising. Even JP Morgan’s own daughter was fundraising for the strike at one point. Funnily enough, they kind of moved away from support of the strike after some pretty hefty socialism and socialist rhetoric entered the sort of demand structure of the strike. But what was the outcome? What happened to these workers?

Erik Loomis:

Yeah, I mean, the answer is in a sense, it is both a win and a lush. I mean, the cross class stuff is fascinating. These wealthy women come out, some of which would be big players in the future. I mean Francis Perkins, we’ll get into later is one of them, right? And this is a moment, this progressive era is a moment in which middle and upper class, particularly younger people are looking at society and they’re saying the things our fathers created in this era of uncontrolled capitalism, they’re just way out of control. And maybe these workers have a point. So there’d be these tentative alliances, which as you described, it’s one of the things that happen. What will happen to the strike itself is that by and large, the owners very much including the men who would own the triangle fire, were definitely there to resist as much as they could.

And after about 11 weeks, workers begin to, they start trickling back. I mean, because the international, the ILG, they still didn’t really support the strike, and they didn’t have the ability to have a big strike fund or anything like that anyway, so they don’t win a union shop. They don’t win a lot of workplace safety gains. But the manufacturers do agree to some real concessions. The work week drops to 52 hours in most of these factories that were four paid holidays a year. You don’t have to buy your own work materials anymore. And there’s kind of a vague agreement to negotiate pay rates, which is not really followed that much in the aftermath, but there were real material wins. What there was not were material wins about the conditions of work, which will be a huge problem going forward for the union, though that ILG local, local 25 really expands to become a big power player in New York for the next several years. And so the workers themselves feel very empowered by what happened to them. It’s a victory,

Mel Buer:

Right? And many of these workers who picketed outside the Triangle Factory are some of the ones who walked into work on March 25th, the 1911 and did not come out. And now on to sort of the hard conversation here. So this is a year after the strike workers have gone back to work. March 25th, 1911 workers walk into the ASH building, the Lower East Side. They took the elevators up to the upper floors to the triangle shirt, waist factory, which occupies the eighth, ninth, and 10th floors of the Ash building, which is now owned by cuny, right? It’s a science building, university science building.

Erik Loomis:

I think it’s N-Y-U-N-Y-U,

Mel Buer:

Yeah,

Erik Loomis:

NYU.

Mel Buer:

Yeah. So as I said earlier, I read Triangle, which is a very good book that kind of digs into the conditions of the garment workers, and it gives a minute by minute accounting of the triangle fire itself. I’d never really taken the time to learn the details of the fire. I found that there’s those sections of the book to be frankly harrowing, openly crying while reading it. It is, I don’t want to get into really the hardcore details of it because it is really upsetting and maybe for a lot of folks, but suffice to say, so the conditions in these couple of floors, eight and nine are floors where the factory work is being done. The 10th floor is kind of where the owners sit. They have a showroom. There is some tables for packaging and shipping the items that are put together, but the vast majority of materials are being worked on on those two lower floors.

So the fire begins right around the time of the closing bell. Folks were getting up to leave right around what 5:00 PM And something to note about these particular setups is that the cutters who are the ones who do the sort of precision cutting of the materials that are then sewn together in a sort of assembly line style at various parts in the factory are dropping scraps of highly flammable cotton materials into a bin underneath their cutting tables. And we learn later during the manslaughter trial that those bins are only emptied like four times a year. And so you can imagine that what’s underneath these tables is tons and tons of extremely flammable cotton and lace materials that just pile up. And obviously there’s a no smoking sign in every floor because this is a highly flammable workplace environment. Some of these cutters still smoked at the tables. And on the evening of March 25th, we’re not quite sure exactly what got thrown into the bucket, but it was probably a still lit match or a cigarette butt or a cigar butt that gets thrown into one of the buckets under the table and it lights a fire within what, I think it’s like less than 10 minutes. That entire floor is on fire.

Erik Loomis:

Yeah, I mean, so it starts on the eighth floor

And everybody on the eighth floor gets out. They call up to the 10th floor as you point out that the office or the owners are, and those guys are all able to get out. You have those close New York buildings and you can kind of hot from building to building in that area, but in the panic sort of people forgot to call the ninth floor. And within just a few minutes, you have this raging fire on the eighth floor smoke coming up to the ninth, and the doors are locked to get out and there’s an elevator and some workers do get out via the elevator. About a hundred are able to get out in those few minutes before the elevator becomes non-functional. But then you have 146 workers still stuck up there and there’s nothing that they can do. They try to open the door, they’re looking for the key, nobody can find it, and they end up facing a choice of burning the death or jumping from the ninth floor,

And then they all die. So you have 146 dead workers. This was not particularly uncommon. I mean the numbers were high, but you had more workers than that die in coal mines pretty frequently. And you also had other garment fires that were hardly uncommon. There had just been one the year before in Newark, across the bay from New York, but no one sees that. The thing about these sweatshops is that it’s a very low capital industry. All you really need is some sewing machines and a few other things. So you can set these up anywhere. So as you pointed out, it’s an afternoon. It is a nice day. We’re in March right now, and there’s been a couple of nice days, and everyone including myself is like, oh my God, I’m so happy to be outside. It’s sunny, including I look outside the day. It’s a beautiful day here in Rhode Island. And so that’s how people were, right? And so it’s late afternoon. People are strolling around. It’s the lower East side, but it’s kind of on the border of more prosperous areas. So people are just walking around and all of a sudden plumes of smoke will rise up and all these people head over to see what’s up and what’s up is a mass death incident.

And what made this different was honestly for our American history is not the numbers, it’s the fact that this became a public event. People saw this, people saw the people making their clothes die, and that makes an enormous difference in the response of a nation that had traditionally been quite indifferent to workplace death.

Mel Buer:

And there were a number of things that might have made this less of a mass casualty sort of incident. The owners of the Triangle Factory could have at any time updated their factories with fire suppression systems. This was not something that was particularly new. Fire safe factories had been a thing for a number of decades prior to this horrible tragedy. There is an interesting note in Von Dre’s book that suggests that perhaps the two owners were setting fire to their previous, trying to essentially commit insurance fraud in order to get rid of some of their previous stock in previous years. There’s no indication that this was anything other than accident. I want to make that clear. But the way that the building was designed was not designed very well for escape. There were no fire drills that were happening with any sort of regularity that would’ve made it easier for workers to have a direction to go.

And yes, there is. There were two exits, two doors. One door was kept locked in order to reduce the amount of stealing that was happening. Whether that’s true or not, doesn’t really matter. Folks had to go through essentially a carousel at the other door in order to get their things searched before they could leave, which obviously is leading to serious bottlenecking in times of panic. And even the fire escape didn’t really have, it wasn’t really a fire escape. It wasn’t quite rated for the amount of people to run down the steps, and it did not lead to anywhere. There was no clear egress to the street at the bottom of the fire escape. And unfortunately, it was just a rickety thing and it collapsed. And 35 people died plunging to their desks because the fire escape collapsed. So we have all of these things, these things that contributed to a really horrendous workplace accident.

And you’re right, tens of thousands of folks were on the streets watching on buildings nearby. There’s dozens and dozens of sort of accounts of the fire. And even Francis Perkins, who figures a little bit later was standing on the street watching this happen, and they’re watching workers hold each other outside of the windows of the ninth floor and drop their friends onto the concrete, and they’re seeing others who are flying out of the windows on fire. This is a really horrendous thing for a lot of people to witness. And to your point, there is a testament to how affecting it was for folks to witness this and hear about this happening in the days after the event when they lined the victims up for identification at the pier, sort of a coroner’s warehouse. There were tens of thousands of people there who were thousands of people who just wanted to walk through and potentially pay their respects, but also family members who were trying to find their loved ones. And even in the days afterward during these funeral processions, you have folks standing out for hours in the rain watching these funeral processions as folks are identified and then taken to various cemeteries around the city. So we can kind of start there in terms of just beyond the real sort of impact of this and how this moved into answering the question, what are we going to do about this in the years leading after the tragedy?

Erik Loomis:

Yeah. Well, it’s a mixed bag. I mean, first as you point out, the owners blanket Harris were incredibly negligent. They had been really the most anti-union of all of the major garment worker owners or garment factory owners in the uprising. They really don’t get any serious legal punishment for it. In fact, they just, what? They kind of disappeared from the record, but we know that they at least attempt to open up another factory. They don’t even seem to care after all these workers die. They’re really indifferent. But part of the legacy of Triangle, we’re moving in that direction. And it is interesting because it kind of shifts from a worker story to a middle class performer story

Because Perkins is there and she’s already involved in some of these issues, but she gets really motivated to become a much more active labor reformer, and of course later will become the first female cabinet member Secretary of Labor under FDR for his 12 years. And really a truly remarkable human being. But the changes that come are not really about workplace activism. What happens is that Perkins, Robert Wagner, who’s a rising politician in the New York legislature who will later be the sponsor of the National Labor Relations Act, that creates the system of labor negotiation that we sort of still have today, although it’s probably disappearing soon, thanks to our lovely Supreme Court. But the union election process is something that kind of has some things that come out of this. But in the immediate aftermath, there’s serious investigations that happen. And what it leads to are important things around fire safety, building safety, things like this.

So the New York Fire Department could only really handle fires up to the seventh floor of a building. This starts on the eighth floor. There’s changes around that. There’s changes around the kinds of conditions that are allowed in a workplace around issues of flammability, for instance. And these are truly important advances. And New York becomes a leader in creating a safer workplace. But the flip side of that is that at almost the very same time that’s happening, the textile industry begins to leave places like New York, and so they don’t have to deal with Claral LEC anymore. They begin to move to North Carolina, to Alabama, to Tennessee. And you have a whole nother generation of, because again, I mean part of the reason that people like Blank and Harris don’t hardly care where you had other industries that are taking these issues more seriously is that the capital investment needed to open a sweatshop is so they’re not protecting a serious level of investment. And so you could recreate these factories in east Tennessee and Western North Carolina and avoid immigrants, avoid socialists, avoid any union traditions. And so by the twenties and thirties, that’s all shifted down there and you have a new generation of labor organizing that takes place down there, new generations of violence in a industry that proves quite resistant to changing its fundamental ways that it operates, including to the present.

Mel Buer:

Right. So I mean, what’s the sort of antidote to that? I mean, I know that particularly with Francis Perkins and the sort of committees that were born out of the Triangle Fire, they didn’t just stop with garment factories is my understanding. They spent a lot of time, energy, and they had the political will because Tammany’s political machine sort of backed this as they’re moving into the mid-teens to really sort of begin to look at places like candy factories and bakeries and the various sort of industrial places that are also in need of reform. And so we see this sort of new decade or so of real, the political will is there essentially to support these sort of this reform movement that then brings us into what ultimately becomes FDRs new deal and things of that nature. But I guess my question is if the political will didn’t exist, if Tammany wasn’t willing to back these sort of plays because they are sort of seeing the writing on the wall, they’re seeing that there is enormous among voters, enormous need and want for increased oversight things, more progressive working conditions, things of that nature, would we have the same sort of, I guess you could call them policy wins within the labor movement?

Erik Loomis:

Probably not. I mean, I think the political atmosphere is very, very important. And I think that we sometimes ignore that in our contemporary conversations too, our peril. It really is a matter of kind of a combination of worker activism and a particular moment in time in which the politics are ready to act, in which people who have more access to power are willing to do what workers want them to do, either because they support it genuinely or they’re afraid of the worker power.

And this really leads into the New Deal. I mean, these things, the rise of Perkins and the creation of National Labor Relations Act and all of this is a part of two decades, really 25 years by that point, consistent working class struggle to try to pressure the political world to create these changes. Tammany needed to do it because Tammany was relying on working class voters as its core. They had a heavy, they were very heavily involved in the immigrant communities and providing services and things like that. And if those people weren’t going to come out and vote for Tammany politicians, then Tammany was potentially going to lose out. It was in their interest to see this through. New York had a far from universal, but it had a lot of capital, progressive politicians like these middle class people who saw needs for legitimate reform. And that begins to, of course, then influence the Democratic Party.

The Republican party remains tremendously hostile to almost all of this and create, thanks to the Great Depression and other conditions, the ability of this to go relatively national in 1930s, the rise of Perkins, the rise of Wagner, the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, all of that stuff is super critical. So yes, I mean the political side of it is real. And this is the thing is you see other worker struggles. It’s not like when these factories say textiles move to Tennessee and North Carolina that all workers acquiesce to this system, they struggle too. But the problem there is that the governors are just willing to call the National Guard to shoot them, and there’s not the political will there. And that is still a problem that we see in when we’re talking even before we get into issues of globalization, which if we’re talking about this industry, we have to talk about the reality is that the United States, even today, the politics of New York or the politics of Tennessee, let’s just say they’re a little different, and workers have a lot more power in a place like New York City in part because politicians will listen to them. We’re in Tennessee where I used to live as well and was working in labor issues. They don’t care what you have to say.

Mel Buer:

How do you get folks to have such, to have a heel turn on that? How do you start to begin to pull those threats in service of the labor movement? What are some ways in your experience that workers can kind of with a clear eye see as a sort of pathway towards really engendering more political will for better worker legislation?

Erik Loomis:

Honestly, I think a lot of it has to, I think there needs to be a lot more internal political organizing within unions. I think this is a serious problem in the contemporary framework is that a lot of unions are not really doing a lot of political education in their rank and file. And we see this in the kinds of the ways in which Trump has made inroads in the working class and things like this. At the time back then you had the level of political education. If you read union newsletters just as an example, they’re engaging. It could be even relatively conservative unions like say the Carpenter’s Union.

They’re engaging in very significant political education, like helping workers understand their position in society, helping them figure out how they’re going, what their proper action is. As a carpenter or as a wobbly or as a member of a communist union later, it really goes across the political spectrum. What is your role as a worker in this society? And that was in states where those conditions kind of lent themselves to that could lead to serious political action supporting candidates. And that’s going to become really crucial. So if we’re thinking if we move forward to the thirties and we think about the Flint Sitdown strike, a big reason why the Flint Sitdown Strike Succeeds is that the governor of Michigan, Frank Murphy, has been elected by workers and had pledged as part of his platform to never use the national guard against workers. So workers had elected this person who then does what he says he’s going to do, will not forcibly evict these sit down strikers from that GM plant in Flynn and in GM at that point has no other options. They were relying on state power to crush those workers, which had been the standard way of the past.

And so that stuff can make just an enormous serious difference. But in some ways, it has to start with unions doing the work themselves to be like, we are going to engage in a serious political education aspect for our members. And that does not just mean showing up two weeks before the election and telling you who to vote for, but actually building worker power by getting an everyday person who’s a busy person, who’s got kids and soccer practice or wants to hang out at the bar or whatever they want to do to get them to take that time that they don’t really have and to understand their position in society. And I think that’s really critical.

Mel Buer:

I think as we kind of round out this conversation, I think also are living in a time where there’s like what 9% union density we are and have been for quite some time sort of fighting this rear guard battle against the interests of capital and the exploitation of the workforce. And rightfully, I think a lot of unions have spent a lot of their time and energy and money on trying to continue to bring in new organizing is a way to stop the slow bleed that is union organizing in this country. The problem is it feels like this needs to be, this is becoming or has always been a sort of multi-front fight struggle here. And in the last couple of years, especially as I’ve been working as a labor reporter, I’ve been feeling pretty heartened by the amount of new independent organizing that has been happening. And I really hope that it’ll continue and there’s ways in which we can kind of maybe begin to become more militant in a new generation and to allow these more militant, younger folks to really kind of push forward policy and education that they’re bringing into as the sort of shot in the arm to the labor movement. But yeah, we have an uphill battle quite a bit.

Erik Loomis:

Well, I think it’s worth noting Claire Lemick had an uphill battle too, right? I mean, what you’re describing is a lot of what Lemick and Newman and Schneiderman and these other leaders were facing, right? A union leadership that was pretty fat and happy with what they had. They were really nervous about young people coming and taking over the movement and they didn’t really support them when they did, and it just didn’t matter, right? Lemlich did it anyway, and she spent the rest of her life as this incredible organizer doing all sorts of things, ending her life, actually helping the nursing home workers out in California where she was by the time she was an older woman, helping them organize into their own union and forcing the nursing home to honor the United Farm workers. Great boycott. So she continued organizing forever, but never really, actually never with the support of the international lady garment workers union leadership, I mean, she had to fight for a pension from them in the fifties and they were like, oh no, it’s that woman again.

I think it’s important to understand for younger organizers that the idea that the power structure, even within the labor movement’s just going to roll over for you. They’re not going to do that. You just do it anyway. They just create a scenario where they don’t actually matter anymore. And I think that’s important. And we’ve seen that to some extent. I mean, some of the things that say that the Starbucks workers have done, for example, which is regenerated a lot of energy, but at the same time, because of these larger political conditions, has not led to a growth in the actual overall labor movement, which is part of our story too.

Mel Buer:

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Eric. We’re going to have to end it here. Please come back on anytime to talk about your forthcoming book, come back anytime to talk about history. I mean, I’ll be doing some history episodes when I come back here to host in May and hoping to do one on the Memorial Day massacre here in Chicago and hopefully something about Mayday. So if you’d like to come back on and chat about that, I’d love to have you.

Erik Loomis:

I’m always happy to chat about labor history, so anytime you want.

Mel Buer:

Great. Thank you so much.

Erik Loomis:

Hey, thank you.

Mel Buer:

That’s it for us here at Working People. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode, and if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Mel Buer and thanks so much for sticking around. We’ll see you next time.

This week, we’re taking a more national focus, and checking in with the National Association of Letter Carriers, who have been embroiled in a years-long contract negotiation with the US Postal Service.

In our episode today, I’m sitting down with Melissa Rakestraw, member of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Branch 825 in Chicago, IL, to discuss the state of negotiations with our nation’s letter carriers, the unprecedented rejection of the recent Tentative Agreement and what happens next, and what would happen if the US Postal Service was privatized.

As a short editorial note before we begin, the interest arbitration process between USPS and the Letter Carriers began on March 17th, with Dennis R. Nolan set as the neutral arbitrator. This episode was recorded at the end of February, before those dates had been set.

Postal workers are also set to hit the streets this weekend–“Fight Like Hell!” rallies are scheduled for March 23 across the country to protest the proposed privatization of the US Postal Service.

Additional links/info:

• March 13, 2025: NALC statement on DeJoy’s agreement with DOGE
• “Fight like hell! Say ‘Hell No!’ to a privatized USPS!” – Find a Rally Near You
• Joe Demanuelle-Hall: “Federal Workers Organize Against Billionaire Power Grab”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mel Buer:

I got work. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Mel Er and I’m your host for the month of March. Continue to stay tuned this month as we share the mic with workers from all over this country and discuss pressing issues central to today’s labor movement. In these last two weeks, we’ve spoken with workers at multiple unions in Southern California who are working diligently on breaking Deadlocks in their own negotiations. If you haven’t checked those out, you can find those episodes@therealnews.com under our podcast page. This week we’re taking a more national focus and checking in with the National Association of Letter Carriers who have themselves been embroiled in a year’s long contract negotiation with United States Postal Service.

In our episode today, I’m sitting down with Melissa Rakestraw, member of the National Association of Letter Carriers Branch 8 2 5 in Chicago, Illinois, and we’re discussing the state of negotiations with our nation’s letter carriers, the unprecedented rejection of the recent tentative agreement and what happens next and what would happen if the US Postal Service was privatized. As a short editorial note before we begin, this episode was recorded at the end of February before interest arbitration dates had been set. Those interest arbitration dates began on March 17th with Dennis R. Nolan set as the neutral arbitrator in this situation with me today to discuss their current negotiations and the threat of a privatized postal service is Melissa Rastro, member of the National Association of Letter Carriers Branch 8 2 5 in Chicago, Illinois. Thanks for coming on, Melissa.

Melissa Rakestraw:

Thanks a lot. I appreciate you having me.

Mel Buer:

I’m glad you’re here. I’d like to kick off this conversation first by giving our listeners a chance to get to know a bit more about you, your work, your organizing, and your union. So what is na? The Association of Letter Carriers, right? National Association of Letter Carriers and who do they represent? How many members do you have, that kind of stuff.

Melissa Rakestraw:

Right. So the NALC is a national association of letter carriers. We’ve existed since the 1890s. We didn’t have collective bargaining rights with the post office until after the great postal strike of 1970 largest wildcat strike in US history. And at that point too, that’s when they moved the post office out of the cabinet and into its own organization. The NALC. I personally have carried mail since 1995. I’m a letter carrier. The last two years I’ve been a full-time officer for my local branch 8 25. We have a lot of offices that we represent all throughout Chicago suburbs. We also represent some smaller offices throughout the state of Illinois. We represent around 1800 active letter carriers and we have around 3000 members total in our branch. So I’m also on the executive council for the Illinois State Association of Letter Carriers. We represent all letter carriers throughout the state of Illinois in our region within the NALC, there’s 15 regions and we’re one of 15.

Mel Buer:

How many members nationally do you have whereabouts?

Melissa Rakestraw:

Yeah, I think it’s around 200,000 in that range. It varies. It might be 189,000, but it does vary. And then around 60% of that would be active carriers because we have a large pool of retirees

Mel Buer:

And these are the folks who are outside of the mail handling post office who are delivering your mail to on route to your house every day.

Melissa Rakestraw:

So yeah, we’re the people that everybody sees as their mailman, the person in the truck in funny little truck where we drive on the wrong side and we’re coming to your doorstep hopefully every day to deliver your mail Monday through Saturday and we are one of the most beloved group of workers out there. Most people love their mailman. We call ourselves letter carriers, but I don’t have any problem with the term mailman myself again and again in pollings you see that the American public is very happy with their letter carrier and their mail service. Over the last few years we’ve seen some of that get deteriorated because of a postmaster general who was slowing down service and increasing rates. But letter carriers are out there every day watching kids grow up, checking on elderly residents who greet them at their mailbox every day. I’ve worked with people who have saved people from burning homes who have donated kidneys to their customers on their route. We are embedded in our communities. We aren’t just out there to do a job. We are out there to look out for the people who live on our routes.

Mel Buer:

I mean, I just certainly in my lifetime have had numerous friendships with letter carriers on the various routes that I’ve lived on, and so I definitely see that. One thing that I would like to kind of draw in our listeners’ attention to is you’ve been in the midst of bargaining a national contract for quite some time, a couple of years at this point, and just recently members voted to reject a tentative agreement with the postal service. For the benefit of our listeners, can you give us a bit of an overview about these negotiations, what’s been going on, what’s at stake and what the demands are for where members across the country, and then maybe we can kind of discuss why this tentative agreement was rejected.

Melissa Rakestraw:

Sure. So right before covid hit, we negotiated a contract and it was set to expire in May of 2023. Throughout covid letter carriers kept working every day. We made sure our customers got all the things that they needed to order online because they couldn’t go to stores. We delivered testing kits for covid, we delivered everything. We kept the economy running in a lot of senses. We were told we were essential workers. We were not paid hazard pay, we were not paid anything extra. We were told by our national leadership that we would get our pay and we would get what we deserve for being so crucial to the US public. When our contract expired, our contract expired in May of 2023. Our national president has pretty much full control over bargaining. He doesn’t have to include any of the rest of the elected officers, so he runs it.

He was negotiating with the postal service throughout the summer. He was giving us updates at different wrap sessions saying that he was planning on seeing seven to 9% salary increases for us year wage wise, our wages were the worst of any. If you look up wages with the rate of inflation, the letter carrier or postal workers’ wages suffered the worst in comparison to inflation over the last five years. So even though we actually have cost of living allowance adjustments, we don’t get full call. So our national president was telling us he’s trying to get seven to 9% increases and people expected that We’re seeing UPS, which we feel is comparable to us, same industry. They don’t actually have to walk house to house like we do, and their top of scale is $49 an hour. Right now our top of scale is under $37 an hour.

So it’s a huge gap and the law actually says that the postal service is supposed to pay us wages that are comparable to the private sector. We are nowhere near that, nowhere close to it. It takes 13 years for letter carrier to get to the top of the pay scale, which is interminably too long. We’ve had problems staffing post offices ever since Covid because the starting pay and the conditions are too low, the conditions are terrible, people are abused by management, they have low wages and we can’t keep people. And so we’re having very high expectations out of this contract to get considerable pay increases and to address poor working conditions, management’s refusal to comply with the contract, violating the same things over and over, forced mandatory overtime all across the country. Here in Chicago, the post office has paid out millions of dollars to the local NALC branch for not complying with contract settlements.

Now it is ludicrous if you think that them just failing to abide by the agreements they’ve already signed, that alone is costing them millions of dollars. Nobody in management does anything about it. We wanted some resolutions through our contract to force management to comply with our settlements, to give carriers the right to say, when I’m done with my shift, I can go home. You can’t keep me here. 12, 13, 14, 15 hours. You’re seeing people forced to work 16 hours. And it’s so dangerous because our jobs are mainly on the street all day. You’re dealing with traffic, you’re dealing with so many unknown things. We’ve seen crimes against letter carriers skyrocket at one point every day in Chicago, there were numerous robberies of letter carriers out on their route. We’re like sitting ducks out there and nobody’s doing anything to help us. So we had such high expectations of this contract.

We finally were handed tentative agreement in October of 2024, well past 500 days, and it was 1.3% increase per year. A pitance and insult, quite frankly, no protections around the mandatory overtime for people who don’t want to work overtime, no protections in regards to enforcing our contract and management compliance with our contract. And we actually had giveaways where we were agreeing to lower our fixed office time. We have certain things we have to do every morning and they give us credit for that amount of time and they were trying to take back some of that time arbitrarily.

It wasn’t just that the monetary amount of 1.3% was so insulting, which it was also the fact that we’re getting work rules that don’t make sense for us either and make our jobs worse and harder and more difficult, which should not be the goal of a collective bargaining situation. So there were a record amount of people who voted in the vote for the tentative agreement. We at least have that right to vote it up or down. It was rejected by two thirds of the people who voted, which was also something that was historic. A tentative agreement hasn’t been voted down in the NALC since the early eighties, and we organized a vote no campaign. It went across the country. There were folks that started kind of a caucus that you call Build a Fighting NALC, that originated up in Minnesota that was talking about open bargaining and letting the membership know exactly what’s going on during bargaining because our national president wasn’t letting us know that there have been other groups too that have formed around these demands for open bargaining so we know what’s being bargained for and we can hold our leadership accountable.

And these same groups that had fought for open bargaining, like Build A Fighting NALC, the Care for President campaign and the concerned letter carriers group all said when we got this tentative agreement, well now this is an insult and we’re going to have to build a vote no campaign, which was very successful and it was a relief to see that the membership said, this is not sufficient. We will not accept this. You have to do better.

Mel Buer:

Right. I want to take a moment to talk about the historic nature of this vote no campaign. As you said, a contract hasn’t been voted down since the eighties, and there have been a number of labor reporters in the last couple of weeks who have really kind of underscored the sort of unprecedented nature of that. Does that sort of speak to the ways in which conditions either under this current postmaster, general Louis Dejo who may be leaving soon or the sort of deterioration of these conditions and what it means to work as a letter carrier, which historically has been a pretty stable career position? Right,

Melissa Rakestraw:

Right. Yeah, absolutely. So when people take a job in the post office, historically it was looked at as a career. It was looked as something that you’re working towards a pension, particularly with letter carriers. After we reach a minimum retirement age of around 57 and we have 30 years in, we can retire. And by that point your body’s been through enough that you really can’t, in a lot of cases work longer than that. We have the highest rate of injury of any federal worker just because of the physical nature of our job. So people’s expectations with this contract coming out of Covid, seeing what’s going on around us with other unions having historic wins with UPS, with UAW and their standup strikes, it was so invigorating to see those victories and what those workers were able to win. And then feeling like, Hey, it’s our turn now and we were made this promise that you are going to be rewarded for sticking with it, for sticking through covid, for putting up with all the mandatory overtime and now is your time.

That’s how letter carriers felt like now is our time. And when we saw this tentative agreement, it felt like it was an insult from management. Number one, they’ve just given themselves raises. And then it was also an insult from our national president that he would think this was an acceptable deal to try to get us to accept. He went around and campaigned for this deal all over the country and had wrap sessions where he would tell people how wonderful it was and when we’re like, no, it’s not wonderful. We’re not stupid. Don’t try to force feed us this nonsense. And he did everything he could to try to get it to be accepted and people still said no. And that’s not been over the last four decades since the early eighties. It’s not been the type of union where leadership was opposed and leadership was seen as not having fought for us for a very long time. Our national president was one of the people that had led the wildcat stripe, then Sobrato out of New York City, and he was a fighter and he won a lot of advances for letter carriers and we maybe slept on that tradition and got to a point where it was just a business unionist approach that the head of our union thought he could sit down with the head of management and they could figure out a deal and it would be fair and it was anything but

Mel Buer:

Right. Well now you’ve reached the tentative agreement has been rejected and the executive council voted unanimously on February 19th not to agree to terms with a postal service that would’ve given you a modified tentative agreement to vote on. So now technically we’ve reached the point where US Postal Service officials have been notified that they are at impasse, which for the benefit of our listeners really means that there is a stalemate that cannot really be sort of adjudicated between the two parties. They need to bring in a third party to kind of talk about this. And so coming up, this is being recorded on February 28th, likely we will hear dates about hearings that will be coming up in the coming weeks and months in what’s called an interest arbitration process. The proposals on both sides will be considered by a three person panel and then hopefully that means that there will be an agreement that can be reached through this arbitration process. My question for you, watching all of this, being a part of this vote no campaign and hearing from membership over the last months and really years, how do you feel about this development? Do you feel like this is moving in a positive direction? Is it something that is frustrating because you wish it hadn’t gotten to this point? How do you feel?

Melissa Rakestraw:

Well, it’s very frustrating because it’s been over 600 days now since our contract expired, and that means no raises for anybody, no cost of living increases, nothing flat, stagnant wages that we’re already behind. So that’s extremely frustrating. The other aspect of it that’s really frustrating is the union could have forced this negotiation to go into interest arbitration in the fall of 2023. Our national president could have said, then listen, you guys are not anywhere near offering us what we deserve. We’re sending it to the interest arbitration panel and we’ll take our chances. We feel like we have a good argument. And that didn’t happen. He allowed management to drop the plow and slow negotiations and not, and draw this out to the point that where we’re at now and this interest arbitration process, normally both sides will present briefs and witnesses and go through all aspects of the contract.

We present economic issues, work related issues, all of that. But now with the threat of the postal service being moved in the Department of Commerce, having our independent authority taken away, not being run by the Board of Governors anymore, realizing that we may not have anyone in management to negotiate with if those things happen, the union has decided to agree with management to go to an expedited process wherein the union is only going to present economic issues or pay scale management is entitled to put forward what they would like, but the union will put forward our issues. We are not going to be doing briefs, so the membership isn’t going to know after the fact what was asked for on our side, which is very disappointing and it’s a process that lacks transparency and quite frankly needs to be changed. So we’re going to put forward our economic proposals to the arbitrator.

The arbitration panel is three arbitrators, one picked by the union, one picked by management, and then one who we both agree on who’s the tiebreaker. And it sounds to me like in the expedited process, we basically play our case out to the mutually agreed upon arbitrator. He’ll go back and forth and talk to both sides and try to make an expedited ruling. We’re not putting forward as many things as we normally would. Now our national president is telling us that he wants to keep some of the work rules that they agreed on with management. He thinks they’re good even though the membership didn’t just vote down the contract because of the economic issues. People aren’t happy with the work rule issues either. He seems to think they’re a quote win so he can agree to memos with management to put a lot of these work issues into the contract. People are trying to push back on that in the union and say, Hey, let’s leave the work rules how they are right now in the current contract, extend that out and just simply deal with the pay because we know we can work with the current rules we have and how to navigate those,

But we think that your new work rules are not going to be helpful to us. So that fight now is playing itself out as well. And the threats, it’s not existential. I guess it’s an actual real threat from this current administration to attack and get the postal service and invalidate our collective bargaining agreements. So we’ve waited over 600 days for a raise and the longer this plays out, the worse we feel it will be for us. So

Mel Buer:

Yeah, it sounds like to me you waited till the house was on fire before you turned on the hose. And now with these threat, we will talk more when we come back from the break specifically about privatizing the postal service and what that would do to both workers and consumers. But it seems like at this point there’s not enough runway left to be able to get a decent contract out of this current contract period. And again, I want to underscore here that the contract expired in May of 2023. So the contract that is currently being negotiated to a stalemate at this point is supposed to run from 2023 to 2026. And we ran into this with the railroad unions a couple of years back where two and a half years of contract negotiations, we almost went to a national rail strike. The real news reported on this at the time, by the time that it was all said and done and the ink was dry, they were two and a half months out from negotiating the next contract because the periods expire. And so there’s this bottlenecking here that seems to be pretty pronounced, particularly in the NALC that is making it difficult for workers to get paid and also to plan for a much more uncertain future.

Melissa Rakestraw:

And it’s not always been standard that it takes over 600 days for us to negotiate a contract.

There have been some that we might not get an agreement until maybe a year after the contract has expired, but it’s been particularly exacerbated in this process. And after the tentative agreement was voted down, the union went into a 15 day period with management where they could try to renegotiate some of the specifics. Management offered 1.3% and 1.4% and 1.7% increases, which our executive counsel said, no, that’s not sufficient either. We’re not even going to send it back out to the membership for another vote because it’s so paltry at that point. Due to the NALC constitution, our national president does have the authority to call a work stoppage. Now it’s illegal. We have a no strike clause in our expired contract that we agree to abide by. And part of the reason it goes before this arbitration process is that the arbitrator is supposed to give us something that’s halfway decent to keep us happy, so we don’t want to strike. And it really undercuts the rights of the workers to be able to get a decent wage, which we’re not getting, and we also can’t strike or walk off the job and in this current, and we don’t want to have to do that. We don’t want to have to hurt the communities we serve and our customers. It’s not what we want to do, but it also puts our backs against the wall. There aren’t a lot of options open to us, quite frankly.

Mel Buer:

Right, and this is a common theme among many, many collective bargaining agreements and unions across this country. It’s sort of a thorn in the side of most organizers is that these no strike clauses are often very standard in contracts, which removes really the sort of the one real bargaining chip that you have to withhold your labor in order to forced through an agreement that is actually beneficial to workers. I want to turn now to developments at the federal level where the current administration seems to be laying the groundwork for total privatization of the US Postal Service. In February, multiple media outlets reported on the plan saying, president Donald Trump plans to disband the US Postal Services Board of Governors and place the agency under direct control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick. Can you, Melissa, can you just give us a sense for listeners who really aren’t quite sure what this means, what would this plan look like the postal service as it is now and how it would be changed?

Melissa Rakestraw:

So the plan is a bad deal for customers and for workers. It’s not going to be good for the American public or the postal worker, either one. It’s going to create an environment if the privatization is able to move forward the way that they’ve planned it, where they could sell off access to your mailbox to private companies right now, for security reasons and a lot of reasons, the only people that have the legal right to access your mailbox is your letter carrier. Other people can’t be coming around digging around in there, seeing what’s in there, taking things out, messing with your mailbox. It’s a federal crime, so there is that protection. They want to sell off mailbox access to private companies so that they can have their own low wage workforce delivering items into people’s mailboxes. In addition to that, it would put it in, if the post office is privatized and you don’t have that lower rate universal service that the postal service provides, it’s not going to have, well, what’s going to happen is private companies are going to be able to raise their prices through the roof.

UPS FedEx, Amazon is not going to have the competition of the efficient postal service delivery standards where you can get things fairly quickly and at a very affordable rate once you don’t have the post office’s lower rates there, those private companies are going to have an even bigger monopoly than they already do. For instance, for some things, the same exact package sent through the post office might be $30 and it’s going to cost you a hundred to send it through UPS. And it’s the same exact service. Local businesses and especially people who run businesses out of their homes and send things through the mail service, if they had to send everything through UPS or FedEx, they would go out of business. It’s just that simple. And the other process of this is too, it’s already started to happen where they’re slowing down the mail service and the customers, it’s hard for them to rely upon timely delivery, which was intentional by postal management.

The Trump appointed postmaster, general Louis DeJoy who prioritized just the delivery of packages, he was consolidating sorting centers. There’s a huge backup. They’re not hiring enough people to timely sort the mail. So you create a situation to make customers less reliant upon the postal service, then you say, well, now we’re going to sell off these services to the highest bidder, right? So that’s going to crush small businesses, independent people who rely on the postal service to send out whatever products they sell, and the consumer, so many people, it is part of their process now to order everything online and the post office is the only delivery service that’s really affordable, quite frankly, and the competition we provide there. The other huge aspect of this is they want to invalidate our collective bargaining agreements. If they’re able to move us into commerce, they want to make it illegal to even have a union.

It would be the way things were pre 1970, pre Wildcat strike where the workers weren’t allowed to organize. They had to go to Congress to beg for wage increases and benefits. It was a very unfair system, quite frankly. There were people that had to live on public assistance to get by. And we’re actually seeing a situation now where even though we are unionized workforce, our new hires have such a low wage scale that a lot of them are getting public assistance as well. They’re finding themselves in situations they can’t afford rent in the communities where they work. A lot of cities where there’s a high cost of San Francisco, for example, they can’t find letter carriers to work in those cities because nobody can afford to live near where they work. That’s going to be deteriorated even further under the plan that’s being put forward.

This plan was put out in 2018 by then Secretary Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, talking about their ideas of making the post office a privatized entity, getting rid of the pensions that we receive, making the people who are already locked into a pension have a longer term before they can qualify. Right now, we can retire after 30 years and believe me, your body is ready after carrying mail for 30 years. They want to make it so that doesn’t matter anymore. Of course, we have a social security gap payment. I could retire when I’m 57 and between 57 and 62 when I can collect social security, I’d receive a gap payment to make up for the fact that I can’t get social security yet. They would get rid of that. They want us to pay a higher percentage of our wages into our pensions, of course a higher percentage of our wages into our healthcare. And they claim that, well, this is justified because the private sector doesn’t necessarily have the same sort of pension benefits. And my answer to that would be, well, that’s because of 40 years of union busting and destroying unions in this country, and the private sector deserves those benefits too. Allowing them to come in and attack our unions and take those things away would be a huge hit for the entire working class, not just for letter carriers. We should be fighting for these same benefits in all unions

As opposed to saying, well, you shouldn’t be getting it because private sector workers may not have it.

Mel Buer:

So what’s the recourse then? Let’s spend some time on this because we’ve talked a little bit about if we see a privatized US Postal service and we see these sort of collective bargaining agreements become null and void, it dovetails into the conversation that I think a lot of folks in union organizing are having about what happens when they remove the rest of the teeth from the NLRA and what recourse do unions have to begin organizing. Now, my personal opinion as a union journalist should have happened, should have started maybe like a year or a couple or five, 10 years ago. The minute that we started seeing these flashing red lights that this is what they were trying to dismantle, especially with the SpaceX case and what’s going on with Elon Musk’s companies and Google and Waffle House of all places suing to make parts of the NLRA and Noll and void. What does that look like for workers in this country and especially for letter carriers in your own context? Right,

Melissa Rakestraw:

Right. So let me backtrack a little bit because something you talked about there. At first when we’re talking about how the attacks on the postal workers affect our communities and other folks, we do the last mile of delivery for other companies. We go where they don’t go. There’s a lot of inner city neighborhoods, the Amazon UPS, they opt out, they’re not going there. Rural areas, we’re not going there. We’ll give it to the post office, let them deliver it. Those folks aren’t going to have a service or what service they may get is going to be terrible and very high priced. So that kind of attack on our jobs attacks our communities as well. And when we talk about moving forward, what’s it look like? That’s why I’m so adamant that we have settled for a terrible contract and that we have to fight these privatization efforts because we are the largest unionized workforce in a civilian workforce outside of the federal government directly.

Anything that they can do and attack us and our unions, they can do to anybody else, if not worse. And if you’re talking about having, they want to create a workplace non-unionized, take us back. We should be going the opposite direction with trying to unionize the places that aren’t unionized, whether it be the Amazon delivery drivers, Amazon warehouses, all of these networks going forward. We’ve seen some gains in non-unionized workplaces unionizing, and at the same token, you’ve seen unionized workers attacked as well. So I truly believe our only way forward is through solidarity. It’s what has sustained the labor movement from day one and the birth of the labor movement came out of the Great Depression. And then we see the robber Baron era. I think we’re looking at a modern robber baron era where you’re allowing someone, the richest man in the world who is a union buster, who has done everything he can to keep unions out of his workplaces now come into our realm and say, I’m going after the big dogs.

I’m going after these folks who’ve been unionized for decades and are implanted across the whole entire country. So it’s time that all of us have to stick together and fight back. And I’ve seen this across the federal workforce as well. When you see people attacked in the national parks, even in the IRS Social Security Administration, his attacks on the OPM and the Social Security Administration are going to impact all of us who rely upon the services of those departments. Like right now, OPM administers our pensions. They deal with a lot of the administration of our healthcare plans. It’s whenever you have an issue, it already takes forever to find someone to help you with your problem, and it’s going to be even worse and even more exacerbated now that those folks’ jobs are going to be cut and these are people that actually provide a worthwhile service to workers, to the American public at large. And all of us have to step forward and demand better because no one’s coming to save us. The courts aren’t going to save us. No elected officials are going to save us. It’s going to be our own fight back that wins this.

It’s the only thing that’s ever won anything significant for workers in the past, and we have to get back to that one-on-one organizing with their coworkers and within our unions, within our branches than in our communities, in other unions, in our communities, and we’re all in this together. The attacks that have gone on on the immigrant community, on the trans community, L-G-B-T-Q community, it’s all related. We can’t step back and say, well, maybe I’m not in that community or does it impact me directly? So it’s not my fight well wrong, it is our fight and we’ve got to figure out how not to let them divide us because there’s more of us than there are of them, and solidarity is our way forward.

Mel Buer:

If there’s one thing that even a sort of half-hearted study of labor history can teach you is that we’ve been here before and we were very successful as American activists, as folks who have inherited the legacy of the labor movement of the feminist movement, of the civil rights movement, that we’ve been through much worse conditions and we won everything that we have today because of the work that we as members of the working class have done in this country, which is an amazing thing to think about and internalize when if any of my listeners are sitting here absolutely overwhelmed by the last two and a half months, two months of really intense not great things coming out of this administration, there is a way forward, as some of my friends like to say, we’re not cooked yet. There is a space for us to be able to organize, and especially in the federal workforce, what we’re seeing is the boss is the best organizer because a lot of people are joining unions when they previously didn’t think they needed to or decided not to.

And this is kind of a radicalizing moment for a lot of folks. And so it’s a reminder to just be where your hands are at and do something that will help you feel less helpless if you can get out of your house to kind of engage in something that’s going to help you. And that really kind of takes me to my last question here, which is something to do as we are experiencing threats against the postal service and NALC has recently put out a call to all branches of the union to organize rallies in opposition to this privatization. They are to be scheduled for March 23rd. This episode will be out on March 19th to say hell no to a private postal service. So just want to read a little bit from a statement by NALC President Brian Renfro who said these local rallies nationwide will bring together NALC members and the public to show their support for letter carriers, all postal employees and the postal service at a crucial time. This is an opportunity to educate our customers about everything at stake if the postal service is privatized or restructured. So really I want to give us a moment to talk about what are these things that you’re hoping to communicate to the American public with these rallies and how can our listeners show support for letter carriers and to get more engaged in through these rallies and other various actions that they can take?

Melissa Rakestraw:

Right. So one of the things I would suggest is look for the rallies in your communities on March 23rd. Ask your letter carrier, Hey, where’s the local rally that you guys are having? Because most likely every branch in the country is going to be organizing something. So I would encourage folks to ask their letter carrier, what is your local planning? And I’d like to show up with your sign that says, I love my post office and hands off hell no to dismantling the postal service. I think that kind of support with four letter carriers and seeing our community support us is so invigorating and gives us the kind of energy to realize we are not alone in this fight. That’s one thing I’ve tried to express with my membership is that we have a huge fight on our hands. Don’t underestimate it. However, we are not helpless and we are not going to be anybody’s victim because we can fight this and we can win.

And like you said, the blueprints are there from the labor movement of the past. So I’m going to love to see customers come out and support us. Talk to your letter carrier about what’s going on, ask them questions to educate yourself too of what you can do to help out. We run the largest food drive in the country is run by the letter carriers union every Saturday before the second Saturday in May. And we take what we gather from every door that we deliver to and we deliver it to our local food banks because we know that there’s need this need in our communities. We’ve done this for over 30 years and it’s something that we take very seriously. We take a lot of pride in and when we see the customers then appreciating us, showing up to our rallies, honking when they drive by one of our protests, it makes us realize that they appreciate us too.

They appreciate what we do for them, that they appreciate us being there. They appreciate us checking on their elderly neighbor if she or he hasn’t picked up their mail for a couple days and finding out what’s going on and also knowing that we aren’t alone. We can get together with other folks in our community who are also wanting to fight back. I was really encouraged because last Saturday here in a suburban area outside Chicago, the town’s called Lyle, Illinois, there’s a Tesla dealership and there were over 400 people who showed up outside of it to protest just random people from the community. And this is not a hotbed of activism, right? In the city of Chicago, you expect to see a lot of protests and that kind of thing out in the suburban areas. Not so much usually, but it showed me that people want to fight. People do not want to take this line down. People know that there’s a lot at stake here and that they are coming after all of us. The entire working class is under attack here. It’s not just this group or that group. It’s all of us.

Mel Buer:

Agreed, agreed. And again, really to underscore this last couple of minutes, really just to remind folks that are listening to this that are feeling dismayed by how things are going for us, and it’s been kind of a precipitous drop. It’s been going pretty bad for a while. Certainly through the last couple of administrations we’ve been feeling this kind of squeeze, especially since 2008, but it is getting, I dunno, I suppose I could say it has to get worse before it gets better. But the thing is is that this is also allowing folks to kind of reach a place where they can reach into these movements in a way that maybe they didn’t feel they had a way to before. And to engage in a very simple act of solidarity is a very radicalizing thing and a very positive thing. There’s nothing quite like it really.

And being able to kind of remind yourself that, especially with the letter carriers, these are members of your community that come to your house every day that know you, your family, your neighbors, and are often neighbors themselves. So these are the things to think about is that if you’re feeling like there’s just too much going on, then this is a really important piece where you can just get out of the house and in Chicago it’ll be nicer than it has been in terms of weather for the last couple of weeks. Be able to stand out in the warmth and get to know the folks that you see driving around your neighborhood every day. Before I let you go though, I just want to ask if you have any final parting thoughts for the folks listening either to continue to show support for letter carriers or how to feel more connected to their community or if you have some thoughts about folks who are looking to organize and don’t know where to start, what are some things to keep in mind for anyone who’s getting into this and who’s new to it?

Melissa Rakestraw:

So I think one of the things would be if you’re aware of something going on, go to it. Go to an organizing meeting, go introduce yourself. Say, Hey, I’ve never done this before, but I want to get involved because the people who have been organizing for years, upon years upon years, love to see new people come to the door and say, Hey, what can I do to help? You mentioned that the feeling that people get when you engage in a collective action, it’s really hard to explain if you haven’t done it. I can remember in 2012 when the CTU Chicago Teachers Union went on strike and the odds were pitted against them with Rah Emanuel being the mayor of the 1% trying to crush their union quite frankly, and when we surrounded city hall on every side, it’s a huge block in downtown Chicago and it was just a sea of red and thousands of people and you’re all on the same wavelength and realize we all want the same thing and they’re going to have to give it to us and just sporadic things that happen of that nature.

We’ve seen starting from Occupy even before that in Wisconsin when public workers fought back the Black Lives Matter movement where people took to the streets and said, this is not okay and we deserve better and we’re not in the prep with it anymore. The Standing Rock show down that went on and I think over the last few years we haven’t seen as much of people in the streets and fighting back and we’re going to have to get back into that and not just being on the streets, but being organized off the streets and getting into organizing meetings, getting into spaces, whether it be in our unions, our community groups where we can discuss strategy and a path forward and what are our demands and what can we all agree on. There’s a lot of things we can agree on and we should put those as our things that we all want to bring us together in our union.

Yeah, we have been fighting for a better contract for ourselves and now we realize we have to take that fight out into the community for the very survival of the post office itself. The US’ oldest institution that predates the Constitution that Benjamin Franklin founded before the signing of the Constitution of this country that established an infrastructure in this country literally was established through the post office. The history is incredible and this is the history that belongs to the working people of the us. It’s not something that we can allow the oligarchs and the billionaires to come in and take away from us and dismantle and destroy because once they’ve crushed it, it’s going to be a lot harder to build it back. So we have to meet them and show them we aren’t backing down, that we’re all willing to fight for it and there’s more of us than there are of them. We always have to keep that in mind and you’re going to lose every battle you don’t fight. The only way we can win is to fight and when we fight, we win.

Mel Buer:

Well said. Melissa, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it. Thanks

Melissa Rakestraw:

A lot for having me.

Mel Buer:

That’s it for us here at Working People. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode and if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Mel er and thanks so much for sticking around. We’ll see you next time.

This week, we’re staying in Southern California, where the workers of Touchstone Climbing Gym in Los Angeles have been negotiating their first contract with their employer. Touchstone Climbing, a regional climbing gym with over a dozen locations in California, experienced a wave of unionization in its Los Angeles locations early last year. The successful campaign with Workers United created a wall-to-wall union at each of the company’s five locations in the Los Angeles area. Members of the LA-based gym are often themselves union members, and the response from the climbing community has been overwhelmingly positive.

However, workers have been navigating a frustrating negotiation in order to reach an agreement on a first contract. Chief among workers’ demands is better communications, higher safety standards, and better pay. 

With me today to discuss their unionization, and their negotiations are Ryan Barkauskas, PT desk staff at the Post in Pasadena and Jess Kim, former desk staff at the Post in Pasadena, now FT Workers United organizer. 

Additional links/info: 

• Touchstone Workers United Instagram
• Climbing Business Journal – “Touchstone Workers United Win Union Election – First Southern California Climbing Gyms to Unionize”
• Eaton Fire Gofundme for Sam, 10+ year Yoga Instructor
• Eaton Fire Gofundme for Martell, Front Desk Worker at The Post in Pasadena

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mel Buer:

I got work. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Mel Buer and I’m your host for the month of March. Stay tuned this month as we share the mic with workers from all over this country and discuss pressing issues central to today’s labor movement. Last week we checked in with behavioral healthcare workers in Southern California as they entered their 20th week on strike. If you haven’t checked out that episode, be sure to head on over to our channels and take a listen. This week, we’re staying in Southern California where the workers of Touchstone climbing gym in Los Angeles have been negotiating their first contract with their employer.

Touchstone Climbing, a regional climbing gym with over a dozen locations in California experienced a wave of unionization in its Los Angeles locations. Early last year, successful campaign with Workers United created a wall to Wall Union at each of the company’s five locations in the Los Angeles area. And members of the LA based gym are often themselves union members, and the response from the climbing community has been overwhelmingly positive. However, workers have been navigating a frustrating negotiation in order to reach an agreement on a first contract. Chief among workers demands is better communication, higher safety standards, and better pay with me today to discuss their unionization. Their negotiations are Ryan Markowski, part-time desk staff at the Post in Pasadena, and Jess Kim, former desk staff at the Post in Pasadena, and now full-time Workers United organizer. Welcome to the show guys. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us.

Ryan Barkauskas:

Yeah, thank you.

Mel Buer:

Yeah. Okay, so to kick things off, we got a lot to talk about. I really kind of just wanted to start by giving our listeners a bit of background on this current struggle that you’re engaged in. Jess, if you would like just to start this conversation, can you tell me a little bit about the climbing gyms that you used to work at, that the bargaining unit works at? How many locations does Touchstone own in California, in Los Angeles? What is the sort of makeup of this particular shop?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, of course. So there’s Touchstone Climbing, which is where our story originated. They are a chain just in California that’s fairly large. They have five locations in the Los Angeles area. They have Burbank, Hollywood, Pasadena, Culver City, and downtown. And last year they opened one in Torrance as well, so it five are in our bargaining unit because that’s when we organized. And there’s one more in Torrance Class five that has not been added. And then up north they have another big clump of gyms, especially around the Bay Area. I think it’s about 10 more gyms, Ryan, I think, and then they’re opening a couple more this year up there.

Mel Buer:

How big is the bargaining unit? How many employees?

Jess Kim:

It’s about 170 employees inside the unit. We did organize wall to wall, which means everyone inside of the building who is not a supervisor is included, so that’s disc staff, route setters, safety staff coaches, yoga instructors, janitorial and maintenance employees.

Mel Buer:

Ryan, what are the sort of jobs that folks are doing at a climbing gym? For our listeners who maybe aren’t in the climbing community, they may have never set foot inside of a climbing gym, don’t even know what it looks like or what the sort of space is. Could you kind of clue us in on what that is?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Absolutely. There’s a lot of kind of guest relations because it is a gym that requires servicing and some customer facing. So me personally, being a desk staff, I greet people, I check them in. I assist people with their memberships. I do instruction as well. And besides just the general maintenance and the upkeep of the gym, a large part of our responsibility is the interaction with the community. There’s additional roles such as safety staff that largely their position is meant to just facilitate those lessons, get people first acclimated with climbing, and then be keeping everybody safe. But something that’s usually encouraged and that we really appreciate about the job is walking the floor, being there with the climbers, letting them know about community events, how to be active in this great community, but really, yeah, again, that’s just a couple of the small roles. There’s coaches, there are youth teams that we foster. There are yoga instructors, separate fitness instructors past that, and just as Jess said, there’s janitorial, there’s maintenance, there’s everything that requires this building to continue to function.

Mel Buer:

Would you say, Jess, that these gyms are sort of situated and interfacing really well with the community, just as Ryan has said, but give us an idea of what the climbing community looks like in Los Angeles or in the United States? What does it feel like to you?

Jess Kim:

Yeah. Well, the climbing community is legendary, perhaps just among ourselves for our comradeship and our support. I’ll drop a little hint that when we form a local, we’ll be local 69 because we believe in mutual care. So I started climbing actually on the east coast, and when I was over there, I got in because my friend in college wanted to learn how to escape the zombie apocalypse, and this seemed like the best route for her, and I am a adamant people pleaser, so I was like, sure, let’s go. We got sucked into the climate community there, and everyone is just so supportive, kind, no matter what you look like, if you’ve ever do other sports before, people don’t care. Everyone can get on there and touch those colorful holds on the wall, and we love to see it. So I love being part of that community.

There is a rash of a bros, as in many of the sports, and I feel like that’s just entertainment for other people who come to the gym. You see a man grunting on the wall, just let that go. He’s doing his business up there, he’s getting his emotions out. In California, we are lucky because in LA we have such a strong union community, and so many of our climbers work in industries that are prolific within the working class and organizing within the working class. So we have Hollywood, all those entertainment unions, which I’m a part of. Ryan works in Hollywood as well. We have teachers unions. We’re so active, so we have a very strong community that sees each other in and outside of the gym. And we’re lucky actually at Touchstone, we have groups called Affinity Groups, and these are specialized meetups for people of color, for queer folks. We have lager, thes, brew crush, Eskimos, hair cliff hangers for disabled climbers. We have lots of ways for people to find their people in the gym, and that’s what we love about it.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, I’m new to climbing just recently started in the last couple of months, and I would say that it’s the same experience for me. It seems like there’s a very low barrier to entry and that everyone is welcome. And it seems like that’s kind of baked into the community that you have lived and worked in for as many years as you have. One thing that I do want to ask though is you formed this union in the end of 2023, and there was some issues that were happening at your gyms in LA that kind of pushed you to really collectively organize. Ryan, do you just kind of want to tell us what the issues were and why it was important that folks came together and filed for a union?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Yeah, there were a few errors, a few omissions and inconsistencies. We were seeing pay being different from location to location. You could work someone else’s coverage and be expected to not be paid their same rate. There wasn’t proper a ladder of seniority, there weren’t establish ways to really protect yourself and have look a path to advancement, better checking in with our bosses, they touched on kind of had this mentality of, oh, we’re so mom and pop. We so easily can just directly work with you. And that works to an extent. But when there can be things that come up that jeopardize our safety that worry us, and that we feel like, Hey, we’d like to have more communication with you every now and then we’ll just get a little bit of like, no, I think we’re doing okay though. That sparked, I think a lot of that organizing us feeling like, but this is our opinion, and wouldn’t you like to hear that? And to just kind of be told, no, I think we know best.

Mel Buer:

We’re a family here. Take your pizza party and walk out the door kind of experience.

Jess Kim:

We didn’t even get pizza that rough.

Mel Buer:

So you tried to solve these problems and tried to open up lines of communication with management ahead of organizing, and they just weren’t receptive at all.

Ryan Barkauskas:

It’s a very short progression and still what they encourage is very informal means of we just go to our direct manager and our direct managers are then supposed to be the go-between, but that puts a lot on that middleman. If they make a failure in communication or if it just escalates there and our remote admins just deem it not necessary. We feel like we don’t have any direct say, and it can make us really feel powerless, especially if we don’t, unfortunately might not have the best relationship with our managers. We can hope for the best, but that can only do so much when they’re always like, oh, let’s just talk about it. Let’s make it informal. It doesn’t always work.

Mel Buer:

It doesn’t seem like there’s, when things are informal like that, A, there’s a lot of bottlenecking that happens because there’s a lot of people who are passing messages along in a game of telephone, the worst game of telephone ever, people’s livelihoods, and B, it seems like there’s no documentation for you to be able to track solutions. Does that sound accurate in this situation?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Yeah, I think we’ve struggled in that way for sure. There can be some paper trails of emails, but past that, they even changed our communication systems when they changed programs on us to Slack, which I’m sure many people are on, but just simple requests that we have of just like, Hey, can we just put this in writing? Can it be more consistent? Can you include this group in the Slack? Maybe there’s a certain job title that isn’t even on the team communications yet, and they miss announcements. They’re resistant to do even that, and we’re like, why should it be so hard to even just share information?

Mel Buer:

Right. Well, Jess, how did folks come together in January? What was the process for really coming to start collectively organizing and forming this union? One thing that I like to do, especially on this show, is that many of our listeners aren’t really familiar with how unions come together, and a lot of these episodes that I do is really the aim is to sort of pull back the curtain a little bit on what that organizing looks like. So what did that look like for you and the bargaining unit here with Touchstone Workers United?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, of course. So when I had started working at Touchstone, I feel like people joked about forming a union like, oh, we should do that, but there wasn’t any real action despite all these frustrations that Ryan had described. And we had a really unfortunate incident that made the LA Times in October and November of 2023 where there was a threat made against the gym that was very specific, and there was an FBI investigation started, and the company communicated so poorly that the workers and the customers were put in danger, and obviously that doesn’t go over well. And the response from the company was not apologetic. It was very much a little blamey to be honest, and didn’t make people feel comfortable in the workplace. And because of that, like Ryan said, we had a centralized system for most employees to talk to each other with management prior to this.

And because so many people were documenting the status of the threat at these different locations and talking Touchstone did shut down that method of communication, but we had already exchanged emails, so we had a big email thread going with mostly employees and had already signed a petition to help with that situation. So because many of us were talking already, it was pretty simple to be like, you know what? We’re going to really organize. We also are fortunate that at Touchstone, we cover each other’s shifts frequently for desk staff, so we travel to other locations, we get to talk to each other, and then our setters and coaches and instructors, most of ’em work at multiple locations as well. So there’s a good flow of communication. Plus we all hang out. We hang out after hours, we climb, we hang out outside to climb. We have the unifier of being addicted to climbing.

So once we have the comms going, just like classic union campaigns, but if the listeners aren’t familiar, we live in America and in America, you do not want to talk about the union campaign openly, unfortunately, because it is really difficult to protect someone from being fired or retaliated against at this stage in the campaign. So if you’re organizing, you want to use non-work emails, you want to meet offsite, you want to talk in person, and you want to make sure that everyone who’s involved knows that they don’t want to just be talking about the union at this specific workplace out at the grocery store. You never know who’s around. So unfortunately, that’s the reality. So yeah, we just got people talking. We had the emails and then we distributed what are called the NLRB. There are cards indicating your interest in a union, you want 30% of the workforce to sign to file for an election, but kind of the gold standard in most unions now is getting more than 70% of workers to sign because you need a bigger majority to win an election. And so we were able to get that very easily and very quickly because we had the impetus from people feeling very unsafe, even with the security guards that were hired by Touchstone for a brief period of time who were not the best. I will say.

Mel Buer:

Oh, yeah, I mean, yes. One thing to also note here too is when you’re talking about a majority that’s 70% or more is what people call a super majority of cards signed. It’s essentially alerting the NL rrb that if you were to have an election, say for example, you file and your employer doesn’t voluntarily recognize your union, it then goes to a union election that is put on by the NLRB. You’re essentially telling them with confidence that you will win that election because more than a majority, a super majority of your eligible bargaining unit has signed cards saying, yes, I will vote yes. Right. It’s also really good when you file and you present this information to your management, to your boss, you can say, I don’t know, man, 80% of us are already for this. It might just be easier. It’s going to happen.

You might as well just say, yes, let’s get this party rolling. And oftentimes if they’re receptive, they will voluntarily recognize and then your union can be certified and then you can really start the process of negotiations for first contract. So if any of our listeners are feeling the opaqueness of that, that’s the general sort of gist of how unions can be certified in this country. And Jess, you are right. Oftentimes what happens with organizing situations is you really kind of have to plan and prepare for how you’re going to approach people in order to get them interested in the union. I have certainly been in situations in the service industry where I’m from in Nebraska where we tried to organize unions at the bars that we worked at, and unfortunately the organizing was happening in places that got overheard by management. And so they will begin to do things like captive audience meetings, like leaning on certain members to say no to this process.

All of this is technically illegal or there’s a line there. But oftentimes management is not interested in seeing workers collectively organize. They view it as a loss of power in the workplace because often, especially with Touchstone or Ryan, I’m sure you can kind of note this as well, it seems like they have enough of a profit in order to handle anything in terms, and we’ll talk about negotiations after our break here in 15 minutes or so, but it would seem that they have enough money in their pockets to be able to handle you asking for a raise. You know what I mean? So I don’t know if you feel the same way, but it seems to me, especially in all of my reporting, when we have a struggle like a bargaining that goes sideways or a picket line that forms or a strike, oftentimes it’s a question of power. Who wants to have power in the workplace? And Ryan, what are your thoughts on that? What has it felt like to kind of collectively come into your own power as a worker with Touchstone Workers United?

Ryan Barkauskas:

It feels, I mean, it feels empowering or dare I say, nothing really great comes that easy. It’s just really frustrating to recognize how much work and resistance this will involve. Like you said, companies might sit you down and try to talk you out of it. We had that moment. I remember when our CEO and one of the other CFOs came in, and that’s their last little ditch effort to say, Hey, we think we could serve you better if you don’t do this. And at that little meeting, our CEO promises to us, and this feels almost like a little bit of manipulation, how he says, I will not be a union busting CEO if you choose to ratify, I will accept that. Okay. I guess that’s what the majority of my work was wanted. I thought I knew better, but if you tell me this, that’s what I’ll hear.

So what we’ve seen is the opposite of that. I felt inspired to propose to put myself on this bargaining committee only as a part-time staff as well. Most of the people that I’m really trying to fight for are my full-time friends that are more invested in this company that really want to make this like their homes. And I just saw the failings of the communication that what we were getting from our higher ups, and I was like, well, maybe I could lend a part of that. I think maybe I’m a little bit wishful in my thinking when negotiations are a little bit more red and very protected. Everything is said through one lawyer and it’s been frustrating, but really what it’s shown is the need for this was like, wow, I guess. Yeah, his words weren’t exactly true when he said that.

Mel Buer:

No, I think you bring a good point in here, Ryan, is that oftentimes management does feel, it feels a little squeaky talking to him when you’re talking about organizing a union. What’s that one meme? All the questions you have are answered by my t-shirt that says, I’m not going to union bust. You know what I mean? It feels weird, but I will say, you did the thing you filed for election. Did they voluntarily recognize the union? No, they did not. Okay. Absolutely

Jess Kim:

Not. They didn’t even answer or voluntarily.

Mel Buer:

So yes, it was all bs. Them sitting you down and saying, oh, we will. We’ll hear that answer. No. And so you went through the election. What was the results of the election?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, I don’t remember the exact numbers. It was fairly close. We had a number of issues. We had a lot of union busting from the employer. Like Ryan said, we had those captive audience meetings, which again are illegal if you’re in the US currently anywhere in the US it is illegal, but especially in California, it was already illegal to have those meetings, which is when the employer comes in and tells you not to accept the union or try to persuade you to not unionize. We also had people like managers threatening that if you unionize, your benefits will be taken away or you won’t be able to talk to your manager anymore. And we received, which is my favorite daily mail to our house in just stacks from the company that was these big, bold, why unions are terrible headlines saying they’re going to come into our homes.

And it was like Scooby Doo investigation out there. It was rough. It was not factual. And then we got an apology letter actually from the CEO mark that was like, oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize that there were so many mailings because people were so angry about getting this pile of mail at their house. And I think there’s something there too in that the anti-union efforts can become from the employer can be so annoying and out of touch and irritating that actually drives more people to want to unionize. We’ve had folks who went to a captive audience meeting undecided, and they came out being like, man, those assholes, I want to be with you guys. We’re like, yeah, that makes sense.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, the best organizers, often the boss. We’ve seen that certainly in the federal worker unions in the last month or so, folks who never would’ve joined the union have seen what’s been going on at the federal level and they’re like, ah, actually, give me a card. Let me sign. I am tired of this. One more thing before we go to the break here, and then when we come back, we’re going to talk about the negotiations themselves and how things have been going since then because all of this has happened in early 2024 or so. But how has the climbing community responded to your unionizing effort, Ryan?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Geez, overwhelming support. It really is, like you said, how accepting the community is. The motto is the crag is for everybody outdoors. We take care of nature, we take care of it all. We just want to continue to enjoy this. We want everything that’s left behind to be shared and loved by all. And yeah, like Jess said, so many people are a member of II are working freelance in so many different disciplines and jobs, and so they hear about this and every time I’ve told someone that what’s happened, they say, that’s amazing. I’m happy for you guys. And they’re checking in. They want to know how to support. So really the community is really behind us and these are the relationships that we have. We talk to these people every single day. We have become really good friends and we are around them constantly and we’re all invested in each other. So to have the behind us really, really means a lot.

Mel Buer:

Jess, from your position as an organizer, how have you sort of seen the sort of community response to both the union effort that was successful? And now as you’re getting into deep into your negotiations at this point, how has the community response been in terms of support, in terms of reaching out to Workers United and wanting to share their experiences with the unionized gyms? What has that been like for you on your end?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, I agree with Brian. Completely overwhelming support. I was only recently fired from Touchstone in, I want to say October. So I’ve only been a full-time organizer with Workers United a few months, but we have an Instagram account for our workers. It’s at Touchstone Workers United. We get a ton of dms from people offering support from high profile climbers to local people in our community to people across the US who want to support, and they’re a part of their local climbing community. We also get interest from other gyms in the US who are asking, how do we organize? Can you walk us through it? And of course, we’re very happy to. It’s been truly wonderful. We haven’t gotten a single negative dm. What also really gets me is I discovered some Reddit threads yesterday about the organizing and wow. People in there are so supportive and so petty. There’s some memes on there that absolutely sent me. It was just, wow, I love the support, what the level of petty is, just That’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, you got to laugh at it when things are so frustrating. So we’ve kind of talked about how the organizing was last year. How long have you guys been in negotiation process? When did you start bargaining for your first contract?

Jess Kim:

We started our first session in September, 2024.

Mel Buer:

Okay, so it’s been, what is that, four months? No longer, five months, six months of bargaining.

Jess Kim:

Yep. A long time.

Mel Buer:

Not. Great. Okay. Let’s kind of break it down a little bit. So just overall, Ryan, you’ve spoken about some of the frustration in the organizing prior to the election and probably in the aftermath as well, and you are on the bargaining committee overall. Let’s start there broadly. How have the negotiations been going?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Like pulling teeth? Yeah, me going into that with some hope that, oh, I could just start a real good line of communication. I could just appeal to reason. And what we’re met with is a lawyer from a notoriously anti-union firm who does all of the speaking. We are faced with three other representatives of our company, none of which really add anything to the conversation unless he has a question. Simple things that we would love to just be able the flow of information and to be able to actually go back and forth across the table are usually met with, oh, I guess I’ll have to look into that, and maybe we won’t hear back until six weeks later when the next meeting is right. And so it’s really frustrating to see this wall that I think has been put up by the company to say, Hey, this is us just really worried about our self-interests and we’re going to hold onto this as best as we can and give you as little as we can. In the six months that we’ve been meeting, we have two or three tentative TAs on the contract, and they’re very basic, the ones that we have. So it’s really been a struggle.

Mel Buer:

What are some of the main bargaining priorities that you went in there with? Obviously you’re talking about parody and wages, you’re talking about better safety conditions. What are some of the specifics of that that you really are really pushing for as you continue these negotiations with the company?

Jess Kim:

Yeah. Well, we based our campaign on three kind of pillars, which is safety, equity, and empowerment. Ryan spoke before about difference in wages between employees doing the same job. We’ve been there the same amount of time. The only difference could be gender, it could be anything. It’s just not unfair, it’s not fair. So our contract has a series of articles in our non economics. Most of our articles regard safety issues that we have in the gym. So a lot of it’s just compliance with general federal and state law. There’s a lot of things that are not compliant with law. We’ve had OSHA come in several times for different violations, and it’s simply just not an environment where you feel safe as a worker or where customers feel safe. And it’s very frustrating that there is no mechanism in America to really have companies comply with different laws.

For example, we have the workplace violence prevention law in California, which can law in July of last year of 2024. And in that employers are supposed to design blueprints with the employees, with the employees, like a collaborative effort on how to react to active shooters and how to react to different violent scenarios in the workplace. And given our history in 2023 of having issues related to this, it’s incredible that we not only don’t have a plan, but we have requested a plan many, many times in bargaining via email, people in person to our HR director. And there’s, there’s no compliance with that, and there’s nothing you can do. So outside of the union contract, what path you’re going to pursue with the contract, we can put that through the grievance and arbitration procedure, get that amended, get anything reparations back into it, because it’s not fair that workers want to simply go to work and not fear for their safety, and they want to comply with basic, the most basic laws that we have, which aren’t even that strong in America for safety protections.

And we don’t have those. So safety’s a big thing. Wages for sure, we have a lot of issues with the wages in the climbing community. There’s this history, this beautiful romantic dirtbag history of climbers who are living off the earth and they’re climbing outside. And in the past, they would just work at a gym for six months to get enough money for the whole rest of the year. Then they’d go climb and work on their projects, which is beautiful. But no one can build a savings on what is out here at the climbing gyms. We’re chasing minimum wage. They’re highly skilled positions. Our route setters have to use power tools at heights of 40 feet. They have to communicate with each other and use all these safety measures, and they design routes every single day that are different on three different styles of terrain. And they also take in consideration people who might be vi or visually impaired, people who have different abilities.

So there’s certifications involved. There’s a lot of factors. So to be offering people basically minimum wage, especially in a city like Los Angeles or up in the Bay Area is also not acceptable for us. It’s just not livable. And we do have staff who can’t afford housing and things like that. So that is a huge factor for us. And then the final thing is, as Ryan touched on some of our most basic asks are respect, like building communication structures within the company. We asked for a joint labor management committee, which could meet whenever there’s large safety issues. We asked for to bring back that centralized communication platform that people, everyone was able to use to get notices on new policies or talk about issues that are affecting all of the gyms. And we built in structure as well for what to do when someone receives warning when someone gets disciplined or is leading toward discipline.

And another big issue in our community is sexual harassment. We work in the fitness industry. We ask for different levels of how are we addressing issues in our gyms, these that are very prolific. And so our biggest issues are not building a new handbook or building a new code of conduct. It’s like we’re asking for basic compliance with laws. We’re asking for livable wages for folks, and we’re asking for basic safety protections both legally and mentally and with sexual harassment and ways to address these issues because Touchstone does not have an internal structure, an internal path for these problems. And in the past when people report discrimination or sexual harassment, they can just go unanswered or the answer is deal with it yourself. And that’s not okay. That’s not a safe environment for people to be working.

Mel Buer:

You want to make sure that people stay at their jobs. And these are basic sort of protocols and structures. The cool thing about a union for many of our listeners who maybe aren’t aware is that within the collective bargaining agreement that you ultimately agree on, it is a binding document that both sides sign. So when you ask for these things and they agree to them instead of this pie in the sky, yeah, we’ll get to it, trust us, you now have a binding legal contract that you can point to that says, actually, you said you’d get this to us six months ago. We gave you some time. Now we’re going to start pulling on this thread so that we can actually bring you to do this thing so that you are compliant or we’ll grieve you, we’ll file a grievance. We’ll bring in these mediators to say they haven’t done their side of the bargain, and we have.

And so the things that you’re asking for, you’ve touched a little bit, just some clarity for any of our listeners who maybe aren’t familiar. When you are negotiating, you’re negotiating both non-economic and economic proposals. The non-economic ones fit in the realm of these protocols that you’re talking about, these communication structures, safety plans and things of that nature. And then the economics is going to be obviously your wages, potential benefits, retirement health insurance, things that you may be a pension, perhaps, things that these that deal with the material conditions of the workers who will then be receiving those benefits. So oftentimes during bargaining, you will ta a small piece of that means a tentative agreement. It means you’ve come to an agreement on one provision in your contract, and then you can move on to the next. And sometimes it takes a while, but six months is a long time.

However, there are folks who have been bargaining for years and years and haven’t reached a conclusion. And oftentimes it leads to this frustration that you’re talking about, Ryan, where the assumption is, and maybe this is just me being idealistic, but the assumption is that you would come to the table in what’s called good faith, meaning you are willing to work towards a solution, you’re willing to make compromises and to have a collaborative sort of conversation that ultimately ends in the better working conditions for all happier workers means more profits oftentimes. And for whatever reason, oftentimes the company just decides to throw that out the window the second that you start asking for these things. So I want to ask, you’ve laid out a lot of these proposals, Ryan, you’ve already talked about the frustration, but what has been the sort of response to these demands?

Ryan Barkauskas:

It’s been a lot of legal jargon and slowing down the process really gumming it up. A large contention right now is something that we’ve had to call out and that we might be filing an unfair labor practice for this as well, is we’re arguing that they’re not in good faith for the fact that we have not received counter proposals on our economic proposals

Mel Buer:

Yet,

Ryan Barkauskas:

Ever. When did

Mel Buer:

You introduce them? When was the first time you introduced

Ryan Barkauskas:

’em? Those? A couple months ago.

Mel Buer:

So they should have something by

Ryan Barkauskas:

Now. Yeah, yeah. We had a change in our healthcare that was presented to us with very limited notice that then we had to see if we could bargain, which in itself is unfair labor practice. They’re changing conditions on us. And we very quickly were like, okay, we need to talk about this because this is affecting our bottom line. We’re met with a response of, well, if you would like to keep your same health insurance, maybe you’ll all just take a pay cut. And you can imagine when that was at the table, our reaction and how much that hurt to hear. And yeah, since then there has been just a real slowness on the non economics. They’re feeling like they’re just doing the bare minimum and their argument, which is truly just holding that bargaining chip against us saying, Hey, we want to see more movement on the non economics before we even talk to you about economics. Their justification saying Maybe we don’t know what you’re really going to be wanting to hold onto, but that’s trying to take all the power for themselves to say, we want to see you sacrifice more and to know what you’re willing to give when we should be bargaining the entire agreement when everything should be open to discussion. So it’s been frustrating as always to just receive lots of words and have to comb through them and say, oh, okay, what do they even mean by this?

Mel Buer:

And

Jess Kim:

It’s like homies, they ask for our economic proposals, we delivered them, and then they were like, actually, we’re not going to look at them. They’re like, oh, are you sure? Because we’re bargaining health insurance. They’re like, yeah, I don’t think it’s appropriate at this time. We’ll come back to it. And it’s been four months and we’re like, you asked for it, so we delivered. You got to response. I mean, it’s a long time.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, so it feels like it’s just completely fallen off the rails a little bit. You’re not really getting the movement, even the conversation towards the movement that you’ve been hoping for. And yeah, I can see how that would be an extremely frustrating experience. When’s your next bargaining session? When are you supposed to meet next?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Yeah, we have the next one about two weeks, March 10th.

Mel Buer:

What’s next? Just keep doing it. Keep doing the deal and see if you can make it work. I mean, I know that you’ve been pretty open about the frustrations with the negotiations on your social media and your town halls that you do. And really just kind of trying to gather more support from the community to really puts a pressure on management to come back to the table in good faith and to really kind of come to a solution because no one wants to be bargaining a contract for six months, for a year for however long you just want it done. You want to be able to sign the thing and get back to work. Some gym goers have put together a request for a boycott of the gym calling for people to cancel memberships and to send in letters of support. I’ve seen action networks that were put together in the last couple of months for this. One big question. I do want to ask, especially about something as important as calling for a boycott. Has the union itself called for a boycott as these negotiations have continued? And if not, what can supporters do to support the union and their negotiations to continue that sort of pressure for management to do the bare minimum, the right thing instead of canceling their membership? What are some thoughts that you have?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, so regarding the boycott, we as the union did not call the boycott. We don’t sanction the boycott. We appreciate the intention of the people who are calling for it, and it is a very powerful move for customers to make. For the union, we mostly just reserve our power to call a strike. So a boycott is when customers choose not to patronize a business. And a strike is when workers will not be working and they ask. Customers also do not come to the business, but we saw on social media there’s been some interchange of the terms, so we just want to be a little bit clearer there. And we found, first of all, the support from the community as always is incredible. And for people who are thinking of organizing, I think one of the most powerful tools that we have is communication because Touchstone is not great at communicating either consistently or clearly or responding in general to messages.

So for us, it was very important in our campaign to always have a weekly update. Every Wednesday we send an email to every employee in the unit with what’s going on, even if nothing big is going on that week. And then of course we have our social media. So if customers or members or community members want to support, we have a couple ways at our gym front desks right now, we have what are called union support cards. They look like a belay card for your harness, but they have a little pledge that you are amazing first of all, and second, you support the union and you support the workers. So get a little ego boost and a little color and add it to your harness two. We also have car signs. So these signs say, I support a unionized gym workers, or I demand better pay and benefits for touchstone workers.

You can leave them in your car around town in the parking lots. We’ve seen them in the wild, which is really cool the last couple of weeks here in la, and we also have a rally coming up. I don’t know when this episode is going to be released, but we have a rally coming up on March 7th in city at 6:00 PM It’ll be outside of our gym location, cliff Seve along the street, but it’s going to be a huge party. We’re going to have music, other unions are coming in, they’re bringing their soundtracks. It’s going to be a delight. It’s only going to be for an hour. If you are a worker, as we sent our email, do not walk off the job. We are not closing the gym down. If you’re on break, come on out and join us. It’ll be a great time. And we also have union pins people can wear. You can put on your chalk bag, put it on your gear, also wear it on your shirt. And we have union, so we only have a little bit of those left, but we are partnering with a local lining brand that people love. I don’t want to announce it yet, but let me just say people love this brand and they’re designing our next round of shirts, which will be available not only for our staff, but we’ll also be available to the public.

Mel Buer:

This episode is going to be out on March 12th. So when you have your rally, grab some video, send me some links, we’ll put some links in the description. We’ll put some photos up at the rally to see how much of a party it was so that folks can kind of see that. We’ve got a couple of minutes left here. Ryan, I want to start with you to the folks that are thinking of organizing in any capacity, their shop, whether with attaching themselves to a large union like the Teamsters for example, or doing it themselves, what words of advice, support, solidarity would you start with? What would you tell them if they were in your email inbox today?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Consider your most basic needs and your coworkers. This is clearly what we need for ourselves, but what we believe our community needs, what our friends and coworkers need. So considering them, we I think are very good at checking in and working as a team, but to be organized in such a way means really understanding, oh, I don’t need the same thing that they need there, but have these conversations, right? Understand if that’s going to be that necessary step for you guys, what it means. Ask other unions, understand the process. It can be scary. There was a lot of disinformation. There’s a lot of saying like, oh, are we going to be paying dues before we even have a contract? No, that could be something that could be thrown at you and made you worried. You can wonder if it’s all going to be worth it, and then just be patient. Nothing that great. Is that easy?

Mel Buer:

Do you think it’s worth it, Ryan?

Ryan Barkauskas:

I think so. I mean, again, the evidence of how much we’ve struggled against this makes me feel like the fight, it has really become worth it. And to have the support of everybody to just make, I just want this community to be the best it can be. When I moved out to la, I knew right away I was going to climb it touchstone. It had the name and the relationships I formed with some of the employees was what got me in as an employee myself. And so it’s always had this relationship with the company and I want the best for it, and I’ll continue to want that and have to fight for it.

Mel Buer:

What about you, Jess? What would you say to someone, I know you’ve already talked about folks coming into the dms and asking about how to organize, but to anyone who’s looking to organize, what are some thoughts that you have that you would like to share?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, I want to echo what you said earlier, actually, Mel, is that when you are organizing for the company, it’s not about money, it’s about power. People do not want to see the power be taken away from them. And you as the worker, you have the power. You keep the company going every day. You are on the floor, you’re facing the customers. If you and your coworkers chose not to work, to slow down work, to not comply with different policies, you truly have the power. The people who are giving you, not orders but directions and new policies, they don’t know how to do your job. They can’t do it like you. So be brave. It’s scary. But you as a group have power. And there’s an image on social media that I love of a big fish chasing a school of fish. But when the school of fish turn around together, they chase off that big fish. Kind of like finding Nemo when they all get out of the net. Okay, so swim together, just keep swimming. Don’t come from me, Pixar. And that is the message I want to be.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, I mean, I want to reiterate that for my listeners. Folks have been listening to me on this podcast and other podcast for many a year talking about union organizing specifically. But really what it comes down to really is just you collectively have power and also you are an expert in your own workplace. These CEOs sitting in their nice houses up in San Francisco or wherever the hell they’re sitting with, their very deep velvet lined pockets are not standing there on the shop floor with you. They don’t necessarily know what’s going on. You do. You are an expert at your job. You’ve spent many, many years building skills. It doesn’t matter where you work. If you’re working in a call center, if you’re working at a climbing gym, if you’re working as a barista, if you’re in the steel manufacturing business, it doesn’t matter, right?

Anytime that you’ve put into this vocation, this work experience, this wage labor that we spend so much of our time doing, eventually you become an expert in it. And so you know what you need and you know what will make the job better. And final thought for me before I let you folks go and let you have the rest of your night is really just do it anyways. Even if you’re freaked out, as my mom likes to say, walk through the fear and see what happens on the other side. Because oftentimes what you’ll end up with is a better place to work and a sense of security and a sense of belonging. And I will tell you, and anyone who has experienced it will tell you that feelings, true solidarity for the first time is better than anything that you could possibly imagine. And we’re living through some really harsh times right now.

So if you can build that solidarity with yourself in the workplace, with your friends that you spend so much time trauma bonding over behind a bar or a desk or wherever you are, and you can also, I don’t know, kick management in the pants a little bit, I think it’s probably worth it. So Jess, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the show today and for giving us really an interesting sort of look into this independent union organizing that you are doing and Godspeed with your negotiations. Hopefully this is one of the things that’ll help kick management in the pants to just get moving. And you are welcome back on the show anytime to talk about updates, to talk about events that you’re doing. And yeah, thanks so much for coming on.

Ryan Barkauskas:

Thanks Mel. We appreciate the platform.

Jess Kim:

Thank you. So good to meet you. Come climb. We will catch

Ryan Barkauskas:

You. Yes. Welcome to the cult as I always tell our members.

Mel Buer:

One thing to note before we end our episode for the day after we finished recording, Ryan and Jess let me know that multiple members of their bargaining unit were deeply impacted by the Eaton Fire in Altadena this past January. If you’d like to support them, I have shared GoFundMe links in the description for those members. That’s it for us here at Working People. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode, and if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Mel er and thanks so much for sticking around. We’ll see you next time.

A strike by Southern California healthcare workers at Kaiser organized under the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) has now carried on for 20 weeks, prompting the intervention of California Governor Gavin Newsom. After months of deadlock, Kaiser refused to yield to workers’ demands for pensions and adequate time to attend to patient care duties. Over a month after Newsom’s office offered to bring both sides into mediation, Kaiser finally agreed to sit down with the Governor’s mediators, with sessions beginning on March 10. Mental health patients in particular have been left in the lurch by Kaiser’s intransigence, and the crisis is only worsening as the aftermath of the recent Los Angeles wildfires takes its toll on the area’s residents. Working People co-host Mel Buer investigates the ongoing strike in this interview with Kaiser workers Jessica Rentz and Adriana Webb.

Editor’s note: this episode was recorded on February 25, 2025, before Kaiser agreed to mediation on March 3, 2025.

Additional links/info: 

• Previous coverage of the strike from The Real News:
  • ‘What they’re offering is stabilization, not care’: Kaiser Strands Patients in Limbo as Strike Approaches Fourth Month
  • Kaiser workers’ strike enters second week in Southern California
• ABC7, February 7: “Kaiser Permanente mental health workers strike can end with help of a mediator, Gov. Newsom suggests”

Links to support the strike:

• Mutual Aid: “Adopt a Striking Worker”
• Strike GoFundMe 
• Picket Line Locations 
• NUHW Strike Page 

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

In this urgent episode of Working People, we focus on the Trump-Musk administration’s all-out assault on federal workers and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. “At least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration,” Ed Pilkington and Chris Stein report in The Guardian, “most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections. In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations. The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest job cutting rounds in US history, which could have a powerful knock-on effect on the American economy.” In today’s episode, we take you to the front lines of struggle and hear directly from three federal workers about what is happening inside the federal government, why it concerns all of us, and how federal workers and concerned citizens of all stripes are fighting back. Panelists include: Cat Farman, president of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Union, Local 335 of the National Treasury Employees Union; Jasmine McAllister, a rank-and-file CFPB Union member and data scientist who was illegally fired two weeks ago; and Will Munger, a rangeland scientist who works across the intermountain west and who, until this month, served as a postdoctoral researcher with the USDA Agricultural Research Service. 

Additional links/info: 

• CFPB Union website, 
• Federal Unionists Network website, Bluesky page, and Instagram  
• 5Calls.Org website 
• Ed Pilkington & Chris Stein, The Guardian, “US personnel office walks back email ultimatum from Musk to workers”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Elon Musk is making technofascism a reality before our eyes”
• Democracy Now!, “‘Grand Theft Government’: Federal workers send SOS over Musk’s DOGE, mass firings & service cuts”
• Emily Anthes & Apoorva Mandavilli, The New York Times, “Mass federal firings may imperil crops, cattle and pets”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all. Today we are focusing on the Trump Musk administration’s all out assault on federal workers in the United States Constitution and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. We are recording today’s episode on Monday, February 24th, and things just keep getting more hectic, absurd, and terrifying by the minute. As Ed Pilkington and Chris Stein reported this morning in the Guardian quote, at least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration, most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections.

In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations. The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest job cutting rounds in US history, which could have a powerful knock on effect on the American economy. Now, this already chaotic situation got even more chaotic this weekend when as Pilkington and Stein continue, Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire turned White House sanctioned cost cutter demanded federal workers detail what they do at their jobs in bullet points or faced dismissal. The Saturday email sent to millions of employees was the latest salvo in Musk’s campaign authorized by Donald Trump to dramatically downsize the federal government. Musk’s Ultimatum was sent out on Saturday in a mass email to federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management, one of the first federal organs, Musk and his team on the so-called Department of Government Efficiency infiltrated after Trump was sworn in, the message gave all the US governments more than 2 million workers, barely 48 hours to itemize their accomplishments in the past week in five bullet points and in a post on X Musk indicated that failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.

The order provoked instant chaos across the government with Trump’s own appointed leadership in federal agencies responding in starkly different ways, workers in the Social Security Administration and the Health and Human Services Department were told to comply with the email. And CNN reported that the Department of Transportation ordered all of its employees to respond to the musk email by its deadline that included air traffic controllers who are currently struggling with severe understaffing and a spate of recent accidents. Several other agencies told their employees to refrain, including the FBI, where the new director Trump Loyalist Cash Patel asked agents to please pause any responses. Now, this is a fast moving crisis with long-term consequences that concern all of us, but we cannot understand this crisis if we are swimming in seas of misinformation and if our mainstream media channels and our social media feeds are just not giving us the information that we need, or they’re actively suppressing our access to the voices of current and former federal workers who are on the front lines of struggle right now and on this show and across the Real News Network, we are doing everything we can to counteract that.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing today to help us navigate this mess and to help us figure out how we can fight back before it’s too late, not as red or blue or non-voters, but as fellow working people, the working class of this country, I’m honored to be joined today on the show by three guests. Kat Farman is president of the CFPB Union, which is local 3 3 5 of the National Treasury Employees Union, and they represent workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the CFPB, the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage lending scandal, an agency that was effectively shut down by the Trump Musk administration two weeks ago after having clawed back over $21 billion from Wall Street banks and credit card companies for defrauded customers. We are also joined by Jasmine McAllister, a rank and file CFPB Union member and a data scientist before she was illegally fired two weeks ago, along with around 180 employees at the CFPB.

And last but not least, we are joined by Will Munger. Will is a rangeland scientist who works across the Intermountain West and around the world. Before the Valentine’s Day massacre, he served as postdoctoral researcher with the USDA Agricultural Research Service. Kat Jasmine will thank you all so much for joining us today, and I really, really wish that we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances, but I’m so grateful to have you all here with us and in the first 15 minutes here, I want to start with where we are right now as of this recording on Monday, February 24th. By the time this episode comes out later this week, we’ll presumably know more about the fallout from Musk’s absurd mandate to federal workers this weekend and about who complied and who didn’t. I wish it could be taken for granted that people see right through all of this, that they see federal workers like yourselves as human beings and understand the incalculable impact that this techno fascist coup and all these firings are going to have on all of us that they see Musk and his drugged out, neo-Nazi insane clown, CEO posts and nakedly self-serving corrupt behavior, and they see him for what he is and that they see the Trump administration and all this oligarch led destruction and reordering of our government, our economy, and our society to serve their profit and power motives.

But we know that we can’t take that for granted because Musk Trump, Fox News and the entire ripe wing media apparatus, the social media algorithms controlling our feeds, they’re all pushing the narrative that this is righteous vengeance against the anti-American deep state against wokeness and waste, and a lot of people are buying it. So can we start by going around the table, having y’all briefly introduce yourselves and walk listeners through what this has all looked like for you three over the past week or so and what you want people to know about what’s actually happening to our government in real life in real time?

Cat Farman:

Yeah, thank you, max. Thanks for having us and thanks for being a voice for working people and for the working people who are under attack, specifically in public services working for our federal government. And that includes not just federal workers, but people who work at contractors. There are a lot of private contracting businesses that people are losing their jobs there because Musk is attacking those jobs too. There’s a lot of working people under attack right now. So I’ve been working at the CFPB now for 10 years, and when I got this job, I was excited because I had been working in tech before that, going from small company to small company, just trying to get my foot in the door and prove myself and also get compensated for the work that I do. And one of the things that I struggled with working in the private sector was I wasn’t really finding a lot of opportunities where I live in Philadelphia and the opportunities that did exist were very corporate in nature.

It was a lot of building websites and application software for companies like Ben and Jerry’s or Papa John’s, and those are kind of cool, fun projects to do. But it felt like what it was, which is I’m just being exploited to create something for someone else’s profit, and I’m spending a lot of my life and my time building and crafting very detail oriented code bases and designs for someone to just sell pizza, and it didn’t feel very useful. So I was really excited to find that the folks at CFPB were hiring and that it was to do work using my skills and my technology background to actually provide a socially useful service to the public. So I’ve worked on projects like the consumer complaint database website, which is where before two weeks ago, any person in the USA who had an issue with your big bank, your financial service provider, your mortgage lender or servicer, your student loan servicer, if they were not responding to you because they don’t, right?

They have bad customer service experiences on purpose. They want you to give up. Instead, you can come to the CFPB, you used to be able to submit a complaint or call us, do it on our website and we would require a response from the company in two weeks. That is not happening anymore, but that’s the kind of service that I got to work on and use my skills for good. So we were talking about someone like me who grew up in small town in East Texas, and I was lucky to have internet growing up in that small town. And then to get to use those skills and have a career in that, but find the jobs are wanting few and far between, don’t pay as well as we were told tech skills can get and they’re kind of miserable. And then to be able to come into public service and actually give something back with those skills and know that all the time and effort I’m putting, working 40 hour work weeks or longer, it’s actually doing something useful for society.

That was just a huge shift in my career that I was so excited about and coming into working at the bureau, been there for 10 years, and then realizing also a lot of the benefits that I in my head always ascribe to a government job, stability, security, a decent pay, even if it’s not as high as a private sector, but it’s going to be enough benefits like retirement. We have a pension. These things that I associated with government jobs, they come from unions. It was actually our union contract that got us those and unions fought and won those and have protected those. And unions remain under attack for decades. And in the federal work sector, it’s one of the last sectors that’s got higher than average numbers of unionization. I think it’s still only a third of the sector that’s unionized though, right? So it’s like 34% instead of 10% of Americans in general, but it’s still a higher percentage.

So I learned a lot about unions. This is the first union job I had all the things that made my family from Texas really excited that here I was. I moved to the big city far away and then I was able to get a good stable government job. They knew what that meant, all those things that represents to them. They come from unions and union contracts. So having that for the first time too had been just a total shift and getting involved in our union to fight to protect those things under the first Trump administration and then since to expand on them when we’ve had opportunities to, and then now here we are where the entire sector is under attack. It’s been eyeopening and it’s also been quite a joy to realize we rest on all this labor history that brought us here to where we are today, but also to see that we still have much to learn from that past if we’re going to be able to even survive the current moment.

We have this revived labor movement in this country and federal workers have been a part of that. CFPB union is a part of that. And I believe that is one reason we’re under attack right now. And that’s something that I hope listeners understand that we’re being targeted because we’re unions, because we’re labor and that these attacks are on the right wing that are trying to paint us as faceless DC bureaucrats or suits in Washington are lies meant to obscure the reality, which is where are your neighbors, where your family, your friends, where your community members who are working people and our services that we provide serve working people. We provide those services to the public for free funded by the government. And that means Elon Musk can’t make a buck off of it. And so when he comes in to shut down the CPB to steal our data and to fire our workers illegally when we are the ones who would be regulating his payment processing plans for x.com, it’s because he doesn’t want us standing in the way of him making a buck. And he has no need for any public services for people who are just working, people who want public goods to be provided to them so that they can have a little bit of a shot against the big that we regulate or the financial companies, what Elon wants to be.

That is what he’s doing. He’s seeing no value in the public services that federal workers provide, and if he can’t make a buck off it, then he’s going to find a way. Yeah.

Jasmine McAllister:

Thanks Max. Thanks for having us. Yeah, I wanted to address the first part of what you were asking. So you had mentioned this language that it’s like anti wokeness and the deep state and waste and all of that. And to be honest, I think that’s a distraction and that’s just excuses that they’re using to do what they really want. When you think about who these people are, they have dedicated their whole lives to accumulating wealth and power. They want to keep doing that. It’s like a machine that can’t be satisfied and they’re bad bosses. They’ll make people work in factories in a natural disaster. You think of tech jobs as being cushy, but then once people start to get more bold and organize and try to start unions at their tech companies like mass layoffs, no, it’s not stable. So yeah, I think that they do really want to attack the idea that you can have a stable, dignified job.

It might not make as much money as you could elsewhere, but it’s stable contributes to public life. That idea is threatening to who they are as bosses and what they are in the labor market. So I think that’s threatening to them as well as just organized labor in general. So their strategy to execute on destroying organized labor, destroying the federal services, destroying the federal workforce and making them the only big bad bosses in town. Their strategy to do that is to cause chaos and confusion. So you’d mentioned some headlines from this weekend and yeah, I think maybe you also mentioned that I was legally fired two weeks ago that firing was illegal. I feel like the news is covering it as layoffs. It’s something that’s allowed to happen as routine. It is possible to have a reduction in force in the federal government, but it needs to be thoughtful.

There’s rules and processes for how this is normally followed. If you want to take that kind of action and do it thoughtfully, which they’re completely ignoring, and in terms of what it looks like on the ground, it does feel chaotic and confusing, especially when it’s kind of hard to sort your attention because I feel like I’ll try to be like, okay, a lot’s happening, but I’m going to focus on what I can do and what’s in front of me and what’s in my control. But then I’ll get texts from like, oh, my parents, they saw a headline and they’re like, oh, did you know Elon Musk is saying people resign if they don’t reply to this email? But Elon Musk is not in our chain of command. That’s something that I think is being covered as just a fact when that’s not anyone’s boss. And you’ve seen a diversity in responses from different agencies. And

Maximillian Alvarez:

In fact, if this were in a bizarro world where Republicans did not have a trifecta control of the government, you would have folks on the other side of the aisle screaming about the illegality of all of this. But essentially what the culmination of that GOP trifecta is, is that no one in Congress is doing anything about the blatantly illegal actions of the unelected richest man in the world taking a meat cleaver to our government agencies.

Jasmine McAllister:

Exactly. Yeah. And I think in the absence of leadership from Congress, I think it’s really on each of us as individuals either as federal workers or just American citizens, to do what’s within each of our individual power. So one thing that our union has been really good about is reminding people their rights and their obligations in terms of legal orders. And so one thing that we’ll say is there’s all these rules about what sort of information can be shared where and who gets access to what. And there’s a lot of details there, but if you’re a federal worker listening to this, just remembering I do what my boss tells me to do, and if I’m getting an order from someone who’s not at my agency or not in my chain of command, I ask my boss, is this an order? And I think it violates x, y, Z rules and they can correct you, but don’t do anything that’s illegal and don’t comply. Don’t be scared into complying just because you’re scared. They’re trying to cause chaos and confusion. It’s working, but we need to remain clear-eyed about what our processes are to make our democracy work.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Will I want to bring you in here. We had Kat and Jasmine giving their on the ground accounts of the past couple weeks. I’m wondering what that looked like from your vantage point, not being in DC, but being directly impacted by this same top-down takeover.

Will Munger:

Sure. Well, thanks for having us on Max and Jasmine and Kat, my heart goes out too. And solidarity, this has been a really hard week for everyone. We’re definitely all in this together. I want to paint you a picture of the landscape where I work. I work and live in rural Idaho and Montana. I work with mostly ranchers who are working on public lands as well as the public land managers who are responsible for those public lands, as well as a number of scientists who are doing research and science for the betterment and management of those public lands. And so in my day-to-day job, I talk with ranchers about the issues that are facing them. These are complex issues in the west, there’s multiple jurisdictions, and it’s not just about producing food and fiber for the American people, but also there’s a number of new ask that are being asked of farmers and ranchers to conserve biodiversity, to help mitigate climate change, to deal with rapidly changing rural communities and land fragmentation.

So the challenges facing America’s farmers and ranchers are numerous, and having a federal agricultural research service is so important because we can do public interest research that the private sector isn’t able to do. And so me and my team were actually on our way back from the Society for Range Management meeting where we had been talking with ranchers and public land managers from around the country when we got the call that we were getting fired. And we were actually really shocked and surprised is so many people were. But one thing that I think is unique about my experience is I’m a young scientist. This is my first year in the service. I defended my dissertation in April of last year. And like Kat was talking about, to come from a rural community be able to have a federal job is and be able to serve your community is something that’s really important.

And a lot of young people are really excited to be here because day in day out, we hear from our stakeholders about how important the work that we do is. And when we got the news that we had been fired, it was just a real shock for us because we had been at this conference where we were getting really great feedback while we were hearing from our stakeholders that we were performing at a very high level and actually addressing a lot of the challenges that they’re facing. So it’s pretty dispiriting. But I think the thing I really want to uphold and really call attention to is the impact that these mass terminations have on rural communities out west. A lot of these communities are public lands communities where the people that were fired in this live and work in their livelihoods are interwoven with these lands, these rangers, firefighters, and also locksmiths, mule packers, educators. It’s a real range of people that have been hit by these. And some ranger districts that I’ve heard from have lost 50% of their crews, entire trail crews have been decimated. And over the last week, there’ve been a number of protests in these small towns. This is McCall, Idaho, Flagstaff, Arizona, my hometown of Logan, Utah. Hundreds and thousands of people are coming out in these small towns to say, Hey, these are public servants who serve our interest, who are taking care of our public lands, and we’re going to stand up for them.

Our stakeholders have been really active in making calls to the higher powers it be. And I think this is important because these are no democrats. These are mostly red states. These are mostly conservative agricultural communities, and they feel like projects that they have put a lot of time and effort into are being attacked here. And I think that that’s really important to recognize is that this is a moment where we can really bridge the urban rural divide and listen to each other and really think about what is the point of public science, of public service and what are the goods that brings? And I think this is a real clarifying moment. And the other thing I want to really highlight is the impact to young workers. I coached the range team at Utah State. I’m in contact with a number of young workers around the west, and they are really feeling decimated where these entry level jobs, these probationary positions that were terminated, this is our pathway where young people find their place in the world and can be compensated and rewarded for serving their communities.

And to cut that off is really cruel and not efficient at all. And here’s the real deep irony about calling this governmental efficiency is that so many of these programs are because of years of experience that this works. We responded to the Dust Bowl by creating conservation districts and watershed science so that we don’t have the impact of the Dust Bowl anymore. And our public land servants who are working on the range of issues that our communities are facing are really public servants who deserve to be supported. And that’s why I think it’s so important that we’re raising our voice and making these connections between rural America and what’s happening back east and in our cities.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s take a quick step back and help listeners hear what we’ve been trying to get them to hear since the very first episode of this podcast that your fellow workers doing the unsung work that makes our whole society and economy run are human beings just like you. Can we go back around the table and have each of you just talk a bit more about how you personally got into doing this work, what that day-to-day work entailed before all of this madness with the second Trump administration and how that work contributed directly and indirectly to the public Good. I

Cat Farman:

Came into CFPB 10 years ago now as a web developer and technologist and looking for purpose. And I think that’s really common for people of the millennial generation. And we grew up in a time when we were told, if you go to college and find meaning and passion, there will be jobs and a good life waiting for you on the other side. And then we saw the lie of the 2008 financial crash and the great recession, and that was not the case and that there was no magical great American dream waiting for us after all. And in fact, to the extent that it ever existed, they were doing everything they needed and wanted to do to take away any of the foundations of that. And that includes bailing out corporations and big banks instead of American homeowners who lost their houses in that crisis and lost their jobs.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I feel I got to state, just as a disclaimer, as folks who listen to this show know my family was one of those, the very first interview I ever did on this show was with my dad, Jesus Alvarez, talking about what it was like for our family to lose the house that I grew up in. So I feel like I have to say that for if nothing else, to make the disclaimer, but also to make the point that this impacts millions and millions of us.

Cat Farman:

Yes. And so I hear Will speaking about how the fact that these jobs exist that we’re talking about, that will and Jasmine have been unjustly legally fired from now that these careers exist, that these services exist for the public good is because we’ve learned from past disasters, like you said, the Dust Bowl, that’s the Great Depression. And then with the Great Recession, one of the lessons was there needs to be actual oversight in a central agency of government of these Wall Street banks that they don’t crash the economy and screw over the American people on such a scale again. And that includes regulating the mortgage market and auto loan market lenders and financial products. And that’s what CFPB was created to do. So I hear a lot of patterns, a lot of these services. There were a reason that we were created was because there was a moment, a history of greed and disaster resulting from that greed. And so here we are again. Greed is attacking these and creating disastrous economic effects already on American people. So we already know this history, it’s repeating. We’re in this new gilded age where the billionaires are running away with everything again and seeing if they’ll get away with it. So I think it’s important to remember that history and look back and see what’s going to be necessary for us to put a stop to this coup that’s happening and this corporate takeover of public good.

But yeah, so came to work at CFPB, it was in that context of the sort of disillusionment of being a working person realizing I’m going to have to work the rest of how long of my life and seeing the fallout of the economic, the great recession, and that impact on me and my generation friends and family members too. And again, Jasmine and Will talking about too, and then seeing opportunity in finding a public service job that’s got some security behind it, and that is meant to actually provide a social counterbalance, these forces of greed, corruption, corporate malfeasance, fraud by the billionaire and CEO class. So I’m still very proud to be able to do that work and it is motivating in a way that getting up in the morning to sell pizza every day is not and never was in those previous private sector jobs that I had.

One of the other differences I found too is that the small business tyrant experience is real. I worked for the small business tyrants at previous jobs and they have these little fiefdoms and there are not a lot of protections for workers in those kinds of jobs in this country. The difference is vast between working at those kinds of workplaces and going and working in public sector. And something too, and this is something shameful about some of these places I worked in technology, they shut out people of color, women of color, people like me from these industries, and I had never worked with a black coworker until I worked at the CFPB in technology. I never had a technology job where I had a black colleague in Philadelphia. So that kind of shameful discrimination and industry-wide creating hass and have nots who has access to certain kinds of work and salaries that come along with that, right? That’s something that in the public sector there are a lot more rules, regulations, and there’s a lot less segregation because of that. And I think that’s really key too, to keep in mind a part of the reason that we’re under attack right now is this is federal workforce is one of the more diverse and representative of the American people generally in all areas of demographics. And that is something that billionaires don’t want and certainly racist people like Musk and Trump are against too.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jasmine, I want to come to you and ask if you could pick up where we left off and just say more about how you got into working at the CFPB, what that work entailed and how that work contributed to the public good.

Jasmine McAllister:

Yeah, so I was doing pretty similar work at the state level before coming to CFPB. So I was at the New York State Attorney General’s office similar to CFPB. CFPB has a law enforcement function among other functions. So I was doing law enforcement at the state level for all types of laws in New York state. So like labor laws, voting rights access or some of the things I worked on as well as consumer financial protection. So an everyday person when they interact with their auto lender, what sort of rice do they have and how do they make sure they’re not getting cheated? So that was the type of work I was doing beforehand and I spent many years building those skills up. It’s pretty complicated work. I’m a data scientist and when you investigate these companies, it’s not like they’re sitting around saying, yeah, sure, this is how we’re breaking the law.

It’s pretty complicated. The lawyers have to develop their legal theories and then they talk to us and we say, okay, what type of data might exist? If we look at that data, how can we tell what’s really happening? It’s usually millions of rows of data that we have to link together. So yeah, it’s a pretty specialized skillset that I developed elsewhere and it was pretty competitive to get the job. More than a thousand people applied to my posting and my team had four people hired from that thousand. So yeah, so it’s pretty complicated work and it’s pretty hard to find the skills for this. And all four of us, me and my coworkers, we had to take a technical test that was pretty difficult. We all hit the ground running right away, but then I talk about it being an illegal firing. The excuse that they gave is that it’s performance based. So for new hires, it is possible to fire them for performance based issues, but they fired all new hires in one day at 9:00 PM and it’s just not possible that all of us we’re not performing our jobs, and that’s really just a loophole that they’re trying to use to bully people, and it is illegal. What happened,

Cat Farman:

We have supervisors too who had no say in these firings, right? So your supervisor didn’t say your performance was bad. They didn’t even ask your supervisor because that wasn’t one. Yeah.

Jasmine McAllister:

Well, and my specific supervisor saw this coming. So my specific supervisor was proactively thought that this administration would do this and was sending emails up his chain of command all the way to the director saying, Hey, I know they’re going to try this tactic. These people I would vouch for. It was very difficult to hire them. His supervisor, supervisor agreed. Everyone who would normally have the power in a decision like this to evaluate performance has said no. The performance was extraordinary for these four people. And I think that’s true for all 180 of us who were fired. We have in writing, I have a proactive supervisor, but other people, there’s supervisors now are saying, I would be a reference. Their supervisors are posting on LinkedIn trying to help people get jobs. It’s clearly not performance based and they’re just trying to bully us.

So anyways, that was a tangent. But yeah, I’ve always been interested in holding power to account. I’ve always been interested in balancing out the power imbalances that exist in the world. And yeah, I’ve been doing that data work for a long time. I started doing it in CF PB six months ago. Some of the cases I’ve worked on since joining have to do with illegal overdraft fees. So one such case, it’s the biggest credit union in the country. They provide services to military families and they were doing this thing with illegal overdraft fees where it would say one balance in your account when you make the payment. So you’re like, okay, I’m at the grocery store, I’m looking at my basket. Can I afford this extra item? Oh, cool, I have $40 in my account. I’m going to make sure I’m under that $40. You pay your grocery bill and then the next day you see that actually the way that the transactions were posted in the order that they came in means that by the time that your $35 grocery bill hits your account, actually it was less than that by that time, and now you get an illegal overdraft fee.

So that’s not supposed to happen. That’s deceptive. And that’s something that CF PB got them to stop doing. And we won money for people who were cheated in this way. There were other things happening at this company too where you’re like, okay, cool, I need to buy something, but my friend owes me money. They send me a Zelle payment and then I buy the thing I need to buy, but actually the Zelle payment won’t be posted until the next business day. And that’s something that they were not forthcoming about disclosing. And these are military families. I think that that’s something that is a pretty sympathetic, I think that this sort of thing happens to people across the country and that’s why CPB exists to protect anyone. But the fact that this was happening to military families is an extra layer of they’ve served their country and now the institution that would protect them from this sort of predatory behaviors being abolished.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I mean it really underlines a point that we’ve been making throughout the conversation here that will brought up even earlier, right? It is like maybe people are cheering this kind of top-down government destruction on for partisan reasons, but it is going to have fully nonpartisan effects for all working people regardless of what state they live in. And will, I wanted to bring you back in here and ask if you could talk a bit more about the communities you serve, the work that you do there and how that work is as much in the public interest as what we’re talking about here with the CFPB, even if it’s not something that folks know about or see if they don’t live in a rural redder district.

Will Munger:

So the constituency that I work with are mostly ranchers who are working on a mix of both private and public lands. And on these public lands are multiple resources that are public. And so for example, there’s a huge demand for restoration of species like grizzly bears and wolves and bighorn sheep, which puts sometimes that into conflict with ranching families. So for example, there’s a disease transmission issue that happens between domestic and wild sheep that causes a pneumonia that can destroy wild sheep populations. And so doing really important genetic research, epidemiological research as well as community-based research to figure out how can we restore bighorn populations and have domestic sheep grazing, what’s the right combination? That’s one example of a lot of these complicated, both agricultural and public lands management issues, and obviously wolves and grizzly bears and the introduction of large carnivores in the Intermountain West is another huge issue that are impacting people.

And I think I also want to recognize that a lot of my stakeholders who I’ve been talking to and I’ve been doing qualitative research, interviewing a lot of people, so have a little bit of a grounds to stand on. They do see that there have been too many regulations. They do see their livelihoods diminished and they do want to see some reform. And so that is really important to acknowledge that that demand is out there as well. However, the group that I was working in was specifically created to address these complex public lines challenges by organizing collaborative science efforts rather than having a top-down loading dock model of science where a scientists say, oh, we have the silver bullet. Here’s what these communities have to do. We’re working with ranchers saying, what are the issues that are important to you and how can we work together to make science that is relevant to your livelihoods, to public lands, conservation issues, and be able to find that sweet spot?

And so our project has been years in the making. It takes a lot of work to build relationships both with livestock producers as well as environmental groups who have had conflict with those public land agencies and ranchers. So it takes a lot of time to build that trust and then it takes a really specialized set of specialized team that has geneticists, fire ecologists, social scientists, collaborative experts and facilitators to make these things happen. So these efforts take years and a lot of public investment to turn a page on these issues. And so when you come in and decimate that, that has a real impact on people.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing letters from different wool grower organizations, different stockman’s organizations, different public lands, employee unions who are saying a very similar thing, which is these public servants are serving our interests, our livelihoods, our public lands, and we want to stand up for them because these projects have direct impact on our livelihood. And I think that’s the really important thing to drive home here, is that this is not a political game in the rural west. These are operators who are working on thin margins. These are wildlife populations that have been endangered and are in a route to recovery, and we need really innovative science to keep those things happening. The other part I think that is really important that goes back to some of the larger political economic changes, is that we’re seeing changes in public land ownership out west.

We’re seeing efforts to take over public land, and we are also seeing billionaires buying up working ranches and turning it into resorts, and it’s third and fourth and fifth and 14th homes. And so that both destroys working ranch livelihoods, but then also destroys that wildlife habitat. And so there’s I think, an opportunity to combine some convergences. Where can we build new political coalitions that can bring forth a vision of what might unite us, what might really help take care of rural communities going into the future? And so both Kat and Jasmine were talking earlier about it’s a little disorienting right now. There’s just so much new, so much feed, and that’s the flood the zone strategy, right? It’s the shock and awe that makes us just forget that we are in a web of relationships that are connected and responsible to each other. And so I think what I really want to emphasize is that our relationships make us strong. And whether that’s a union working in a big city, whether that’s a community group working out in the rural west, we need to uplift that next generation and continue to take care of each other during this hard time.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Kat, Jasmine will, there’s so much more I want to talk to you about, but I know we only have a little time left. And in that time I wanted to go back around the table and ask if you could say a little more about who’s fighting back right now and how, right? Is it unions, your unions, other unions will mentioned earlier that the stakeholders that you work with on a day-to-day basis or writing letters to the federal government urging them to not continue with these cuts, these layoffs, this top-down destruction. Are there elected officials who are leading a fight? Can you tell folks more about who’s fighting back and how? And I also wanted to ask by way of rounding out if you had any parting messages that you wanted to leave listeners with about why they need to care about all of this, how they can get involved in that fight, but also who and what we’re fighting against and who or what we’re fighting for here.

Cat Farman:

Well, thank you, max. We’re fighting for ourselves. One of my union comrades today put it perfectly. It’s not Elon versus government, it’s Elon versus everyone. This is about a billionaire and his rich buddies seizing power and getting rid of anything they cannot profit off of no matter the collateral damage because it does not personally affect him. What he doesn’t care. So that’s what’s at stake. And we’re not exaggerating when we say that. I think who’s organizing, who’s fighting back, who’s doing what, definitely I’ve seen workers being the first to sound the alarm, and we’ve tried to do that as well at CFUB Union. We know we’re under attack. We’ve been under attack since we were created because we regulate the biggest banks in the world and we give Americans money back when they get ripped off by these banks. We are the agency that sued Wells Fargo and got people money back from Wells Fargo fraud.

So of course we were under attack again under this second Trump administration. And so what’s gratifying is to see workers are still and continue to be fighting back every day and sounding the alarm about the implications for all of us not waiting for us to lose all these services before we sound the alarm and warn people. Now we know that social security, Medicare, Medicaid, these pillars of what’s left of a welfare state in this country that provides some security for people in old age or in ill health, that these are under attack and they’ll be in the next on the chopping block. So we have to fight back. We don’t really have a choice, right? People subsist on government public services because they’re public good. That was democratically created by the people for the people. That’s not to say that everything in government matches that ideal, and we’re always going to have to work hard to reach full democracy in this country and everywhere.

And that battle always seems to come down to the people versus the greedy, wealthy business owners who don’t care about democracy or public good because they can’t make money off of it. So what we’re doing is continuing to be in the streets and in the courts and everywhere where we need to be on the podcast, on the radio shows to sound the alarm, fight back, get people to join our fight. So CPB Union, we’re hosting pickets multiple times a week all over the country. One of the things that people don’t realize about this fight is that federal workers, most of us are outside of dc. It’s 80% of federal workers that work and live outside of the capital of Washington. So I think all of us on this show right now, we work and live outside of DC so we are representative of that and we are doing actions all across the country too.

So CFPB Union, we have workers in 40 states. We have a lot of folks who are the ones that go into banks to make sure that they’re following the law that live in rural communities, small towns, small cities, big cities all across the country if someone in Hawaii. So we have people everywhere. And what we’re doing along with our pickets DC and New York on Thursday is we’re also having events outside of our regional offices. That’s Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco. We are also going to Tesla dealerships where those are to bring the picket and the union and the fight to where Musk makes his money too. And we are going outside of the big banks. So everyone’s got a big bank in your town, no matter how small or there’s a big bank probably near you, you can go outside and info picket and tell people what’s going on.

Just tell people, did you know that this bank is operating lawlessly for the last two weeks because of Musk and this government corporate takeover that’s happening? That means that no one’s watching the big banks to make sure that they’re following the law. So if are you really going to trust your paychecks and your savings and your dollars with a bank that has zero oversight right now? That is what’s happening. The biggest banks in the country are not being supervised. The laws are not being enforced at those banks. We’ve been told to stop working. So for two weeks they’re operating without any oversight or accountability to the American public. So we invite folks to join us and post on social media. When you do that, spread the heat around where it belongs, do town halls and wherever you are, your local congress member needs to feel the heat bully your local Congress person, bully your local Republican. They need to take the heat for this and answer to what’s happening. What are they doing to stop it? Bully your local Democrat too.

Jasmine McAllister:

They all need to stop it.

Yeah, I definitely agree, Kat, you said that it’s not Elon Musk fighting the government. It’s really all of us fighting for ourselves. One thing that someone had mentioned to me this morning that I knew but kind of forgot just how many people are directly impacted by this, there’s us who work in the federal government, but also a lot of local state, local government, state government and nonprofits for land on federal funding as well. So in my role at the union, I’ve been trying to just build as many connections as possible either within the union or since I live in New York with other federal workers who live in New York, or after the conversation this morning, I’m like, I should try to figure out a way to build a relationship with people who are at these other levels of government or nonprofits that also their jobs are also on the line and their work is on the line and the services they provide to people might go away without this.

Yeah, and I think that’s related to what Will had said about our web of relationships making us strong. I think thinking about, okay, whose interests are aligned with mine? Who can be my allies, who can be in my coalition? And at a very broad level, I think that’s the whole 99%. I think they try to distract us with these different social issues and the different buzzwords, but it’s actually the 99% against the 1% or even the 0.01%. It’s a handful of guys versus the rest of us. So I think that, yeah, and this is maybe a tangent, but I feel like after the 2016 election in my more liberal leftist community, there was kind of a lot of chatter of talk to your racist uncle at Thanksgiving. And it’s like, that’s not what relationship building looks like and you’re just going to further push each other away if you have a big fight at Thanksgiving, I think about who you have access to and who you can influence and do that in a way that’s true and respectful to the relationship you have and the love that you hold for each other. I think that’s really important. And yeah, I mean I think there’s some of us who are in unions and can go through that bridge or our jobs are aligned, but there’s also people where it’s just like your family, whether or not they realize it does have interest aligned with you if they have to have a job to pay rent or a mortgage and eat food. So I think also just thinking about your relationships and then one quick plug, five calls.org makes it really easy to call your congress people and other representatives

Cat Farman:

Five calls.org to bully your local congress person.

Will Munger:

Well, I think those are some great steps and the town hall thing I think is really important right now, particularly in rural communities for folks who are impacted out west, showing up at these protests down at the courthouse, talking to your coworkers, talking to the folks at the bar, talking to the folks at your church. I just think we got to have this conversation from the bottom up. I’ve been reading a really great book by Robin Wall Kimer called The Service Ferrets about reciprocity and abundance in the natural world, and she’s a Potawatomi ecologist and really kind of brings a lot of indigenous science and to the table. And one thing that has really struck me in this web of relationships is whether it’s responding to climate change attacks by billionaires, pandemics, bottom up mutual aid where we’re taking care of each other, making sure no one falls through really, I think is that’s the jam in this social movement that’s got to come and whatever the political outcome, the more we can build relations with each other, with people who are different than us, who might speak a different language, who might have a job that’s different than ours.

I just think the powers that be these billionaires, they want us separated, they want us hating on each other and any way that we can find solidarity from the bottom up to reimagine how we get through this period together, but then also continue to thrive together in the face of all the challenges that we’re up against, I think that that’s something that we can be able to practice day in and day out and we’ve got to stick together on this one, I think.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guest, KA Farman, Jasmine McAllister and Will Munger. I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever

We kick off the new season of Working People with another crucial installment of our ongoing series where we speak with the people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s “sacrifice zones.” In this episode, TRNN editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with a panel of guests about the ongoing public health crises in East Palestine, OH, where a Norfolk Southern train derailment in Feb. 2023 changed residents’ lives forever, and in Conyers, GA, where residents continue to deal with the toxic fallout of a chemical fire that broke out in Sept. 2024 at a facility owned by pool chemical company BioLab. Panelists include: Ashley McCollom, a displaced resident of East Palestine; Hannah Loyd, a displaced resident of Conyers; and Kristina Baehr, a community safety lawyer with Just Well Law. 

Additional links/info: 

• Ashley’s Facebook page
• Ashley’s GoFundMe page
• Hannah’s Facebook page
• Just Well Law website 
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘Everytime we come back, we all get sick’: GA residents affected by September BioLab fire are still going through hell”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH (DOCUMENTARY)”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “One year later, East Palestine residents want Norfolk-Southern held accountable”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, ““Let’s unite!”: Poisoned residents of America’s sacrifice zones are banding together”
• Steve Mellon, Pittsburgh Union Progress, “Vance visit on derailment’s second anniversary leaves residents wondering, ‘Who has our backs?’”
• Grace Gibson, The Georgetown Environmental Law Review, “Hawaiʻi’s Red Hill Water Crisis Isn’t Over”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. We’re broadcasting today’s show on 89.3 WPFW out of Washington dc, the home of jazz and justice. For folks across the DMV, my name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’ll be hosting new episodes for the month of February and my co-host Mel er will be hosting next month. Today we are kicking off our new season with another crucial installment of our ongoing series where we speak with people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones. Now, more working people live in sacrifice zones today than we realize and more of us are being set up for sacrifice than we’d care to admit.

And unless we start banding together and doing something to stop it, the best that we can do is sit and hope that our community won’t be the next one to be upended by an explosive train derailment or a toxic chemical fire. The best that we can hope for is that our homes are not the next to be destroyed by evermore frequent wildfires and evermore destructive hurricanes that we and our families won’t be made sick by some massive waste incinerator or petrochemical plant, some industrial hog farm or fracking operation landfill or military base near our homes. You may think it won’t happen to you, but neither did so many of the residents that we’ve spoken to over the past couple of years. This ongoing investigation began two years ago when I started speaking with the chemically poisoned residents living in and around East Palestinian, Ohio, a small working class town about an hour outside of Pittsburgh, February 3rd, marked the two year anniversary of the day that changed their lives forever when a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed in their backyard on a frigid Friday night, followed three days later by the disastrous criminal and unnecessary decision by Norfolk Southern to pressure emergency responders and contractors to empty five cars worth of toxic vinyl chloride and set them on fire, releasing a massive black death plume and exposing residents to toxins that have been making them sick ever since, like carbon monoxide, hydrogen chloride, and even phosgene gas.

And late last year, I began speaking with residents living in and around Conyers, Georgia, who have been living through a hellish situation that is both distinct from and eerily similar to East Palestine. At the end of our last season, I interviewed three local residents who have all been affected by the nightmare inducing chemical fire at the Biolab facility in Conyers, which is about half an hour outside of Atlanta. And the fire broke out on September 29th, 2024. The fire was pool chemical company Biolabs fourth in the last two decades, and residents have described experiencing breathing difficulties, headaches, dizziness, skin rashes, and other negative health effects after being exposed to the fumes from the fire. Ashley McCollum is the very first resident of East Palestine that I connected with two years ago, and Hannah Lloyd is the first Conyers resident I connected with. Today I am truly honored to have both Ashley and Hannah with us on the show together. And we are also so grateful to be joined by Kristina Baehr. Kristina is a community safety lawyer with Just Well Law. Thank you all so much for joining us, and as always, I wish we were speaking under less horrifying circumstances and we are sending all of our love and solidarity to you and your communities. Ashley, I want to come to you first here. We just crossed the two year anniversary of the derailment. How are you and your family doing what has happened since we last spoke?

Ashley McCollom:

Well, first Max, I’d like to say thank you for having myself and others on here to be able to speak. It’s been a long stressful ride. Nothing has changed that. It feels like the town is basically the same, the reactions, the uncomfortable feeling, the stress you walk in, you can clearly smell something’s not right. So it has been going consistently the same and it feels like we don’t know what safe is and everyone’s confused and running a mile a minute and we’re getting nowhere.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Ashley, you yourself, you had to move, right? I mean since we last spoke, you had to get out of your home, is that right?

Ashley McCollom:

Yeah, but you still have to deal with the burden of what happened your forever home that you don’t want to put that forever problem on someone because we don’t have clear answers of what we can do. But I mean, I continue to pay a tax on something that I don’t want to put on someone else, and I don’t know if I’m okay doing so and haven’t had the right directive from anyone involved in the incident that happened on February 3rd.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man. And I want to dig into this more and we will over the next hour. But Hannah, I want to come to you because you are one of the voices that our listeners last heard at the end of last season. And I wanted to just ask if you could tell our listeners about what’s been happening in your life and in Coner since we last spoke a few months ago.

Hannah Loyd:

Well, one thing that has recently happened is the fire chief resigned and we’re not sure why. And they are still running, but they’re not manufacturing is what they’re stating. Since we talked last I up and left my house and I had to move away from everything that I ever had, and I’m better, but I’m not, if that makes sense.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It does. I mean, could you tell people a little bit about what that was like? I can only imagine what you’re going through leaving your home. We talked about the health effects that you were feeling living near Conyers. I mean, have those lifted since you’ve left? I mean, I guess, yeah. What wait are you carrying now that you’ve had to leave your home to escape this tragedy that you did not cause?

Hannah Loyd:

So since we’ve left, yes, we’re better, but every time we go back to get more stuff that we need, we get re-exposed and we get sick again. The last time we went, me and my daughter went up and within a couple of hours she was vomiting. She had a surgery performed when she was six weeks old. She’s not even supposed to vomit. So if she does vomit, that means something serious. So that means that whatever it is is still there and it’s almost like it’s getting worse. So not only was she sick, I was sick. So trying to pack more stuff up and be sick and all that stuff, it’s just hard. And you know what you have to do for your family and your kid, but you also know that there’s just no one holding any accountability still. So you just have to figure out what you have to do somehow get it done and just do it. That’s the only way I had three doctors tell me plus her, so four, to leave the state that that’s all that I could do to get better. And we did because we had no other choice. My daughter was sick and she’s three. So when a three-year-old can’t really express things but say, I’m sad, I’m itchy, I hurt. And then you go somewhere else and she’s happy and she’s laughing and she’s fine. That tells you right there, something’s not right.

Maximillian Alvarez:

God, I’m like,

Hannah Loyd:

That’s the big two changes since I talked to you last.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m just, again, I’m getting really emotional here because as a father, I can’t imagine what’s going through your heart in that situation. And of course you got to do what you got to do to protect your family. But Christina, I want to kind of bring you in here on this because escaping danger is not accountability for the people who have caused residents like Hannah and Ashley to leave their homes. I want to ask first if you could say a little more about the kind of work that you do and about your involvement in the case of East Palestine. What have you been seeing from your side as a community safety lawyer about the situation that folks in East Palestinian are really facing right now?

Kristina Baehr:

Well, I’m a survivor of toxic exposure myself, and so I started a little law firm called Justwell Law to help other families, and now I get called into sick communities all around the country and I help them unite and rise up and take on the bad guys. And I’ve done that now in Hawaii representing the Red Hill victims against the United States Navy. We won that case. We had a trial in May, and now we’re waiting on the judgment so that those people can get paid and move on with their lives. And then while that case was on hold, I got a call from an expert in East Palestine and invited me to come and meet Ashley and some of her comrades in arms. And I heard a familiar story. I heard about doctors not treating people. I heard about the EPA lying to people and telling them that it was safe when it wasn’t.

I heard about tests not being done properly and not testing for the right things, which drives me insane. And I got fired up. And when I went that December night, I had not a single client, but I was willing to represent any one of them, just any one of them. And I started talking to more people and more people. And now I represent 744 of them. And we filed on Monday in an enormous case, first in Ohio, and we’re seeking a jury trial and then separately in DC claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the EPA and the CDC because the EPA and the CDC have to stop coming to communities and telling people that it’s safe when it’s not, and looking at sick people and telling them that they’re not sick. There’s a movement of families around the country, including Hannah and Ashley and many, many others who are standing up and saying, no more, we’re not going to do this anymore.

We are not going to allow you to poison our families and we’re going to stand up not just for ourselves and our community, but for the next community. And one of the things that I think is so beautiful is seeing Ashley and Hannah’s relationship, and likewise, my clients in Hawaii knew the clients at Camp Lejeune, knew the families at Camp Lejeune. There is this club that none of us ever wanted to join, but it is a fierce and loyal community and people are ready to take a stand against institutions, and I’m just here to help them. It’s their movement.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I feel intense solidarity with you on that front as a journalist who’s been connecting with these folks that way, but hearing the same things that you’re hearing, I keep telling people it feels like I’m investigating a serial killer because I keep hearing the same things from communities across the country, whether it be causes of the pollution, the gaslighting about how it’s all in their heads, the sort of ways that communities are split apart between the people who are feeling the effects and the people who are not all that stuff. You can only interview so many people from what feel like disparate, disconnected communities and start hearing them describe the same things before you start putting these connections together. And I guess before we have our first break, I wanted to ask if just on that point, what you would want folks listening to this to know as someone who has spoken with community members in Red Hill, spoken with community members in East Palestine, I guess what’s the sort of big message folks need to understand here about how widespread this is or what the real kind of situation we’re facing is in this country?

Kristina Baehr:

It is very real, and that’s what I want people to know. I looked at my own testimony recently. I testified before a jury about the people who poisoned my family. And when I looked back at what I wanted that jury to know is I wanted them to know that it happened, that it’s real and it can happen to you. And I just had this. And when this happened to me, I had never, for me, it was toxic mold, but I had never heard of Stacky. I never, I have two Ivy League degrees, my husband has three, and neither of us have even heard the words. And there is a reason for that. There is a massive coverup in this country. There are people who are trying to influence, there are people who say that there are acceptable limits of whatever X is, right? And so you just talked about the gaslighting, but this is how it plays out. The federal lawyers at Red Hill stood up in front of a judge and said, judge, there was never enough fuel in the water to make anybody sick. It was always within acceptable limits, and it didn’t even affect half of the waterline. Therefore, anybody who says that they were sick or believes them to be themselves To have been sick were psychosomatic. I mean, These are federal officers [who] called my 7,000 clients who had rashes, vomiting, diarrhea, kids who had welts on them, esophagus that were burned, pets that were throwing up. All of them are psychosomatic, all of them. And of course, that’s what they said about me in my own case. I was just as stressed out mom during C, right? In every case, they say the same thing. It’s all within acceptable limits. And therefore, anyone who says they’re sick really is suffering from a lot of stress. Well, what caused the stress, dude, right? It makes me so angry because I hear that same thing day in and day out, this BS about acceptable limits. And no, I know that Ashley and people in East Palestine are sick because I hear the same symptoms, the brain fog, the short-term memory loss, the intense sweating in the middle of the night night. My clients in Hawaii had migraines, and now the United States is finally issuing the paper that says, oh yeah, according to our own data, there were more migraines amongst Red Hill families and there was more burning of the esophagus. This is true. This is historical fact. And when you come in and you hire experts to say otherwise, you are denying a historical event and it’s deeply unsettling. And the EPA and the CDC in particular have to stop looking at sick people and telling them they’re crazy.

That’s my soapbox, but I will continue to proclaim it from the mountaintops that this is real and it really affects people. And why can’t we show up in East Palestine with people to help? Why do we have to show up at Red Hill and take tests of water and say that it’s all non-detect when we just didn’t test for the right thing? Right? Literally, the Navy and Hawaii stood up and said, there’s no indication the water is not safe. People could smell the fuel. They knew there had been a fuel release right next to the well, but the officers in charge had the audacity to tell the people at town halls that there was no indication the water was not safe. So I get these people at deposition and I say, well, tell me sir, is the smell of gasoline, is that an indication? It’s not safe?

Of course it is. And what I think you’re doing, and I’m doing, and everyone here is doing, is we are bringing common sense to these issues. We are speaking in plain English about what is actually happening and we need to continue to do it. And so you’re doing God’s work by bringing these issues to light, by bringing these stories to light because they’re real. And it can happen to us and we are next, unless the people in charge follow their own safety rules, unless the institutions actually follow their own rules, it will happen again. And so I’m proud of the families that are rising up and saying not on our watch.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ashley, I want to come back to you here for a second because as folks know, vice President JD Vance just visited your town this month on the anniversary of the derailment, and as a Senator Vance teamed up with Democrat Sherrod Brown to put forward the Railway Safety Act in response to what Norfolk Southern did to you and your town. Now, that Bill effectively went nowhere, but when Vance was in East Palestine earlier this month, he did vow to the cameras that more action would be taken particularly on holding Norfolk Southern accountable and implementing new rail safety measures. So let’s take a listen

Vice President JD Vance:

And you can be damn sure that over the next six months you’re going to hear a lot from the vice president of the United States and the entire administration. If Norfolk Southern doesn’t keep these promises, we are going to talk about it and we are going to fight for it. And so certainly I think that we can say with confidence, the president shares my view that we need some common sense rail safety. And yes, that is something that we’re going to work on over the next couple of years.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So that’s what Vance said. Ashley, how did that trip go? How did folks in town respond to the vice president being in East Palestine?

Ashley McCollom:

He has been here multiple times before. Any help is good help to the community. I mean, people look at different colors, different sides, it doesn’t matter. Anyone that’s willing to help and hopefully things can go through a lot and they should be because we’re just one example as to why these should have been put in place beforehand. And I hope that he comes back and makes as many visits as he did before to help us and get these things put in place because we were all just people sitting in our town enjoying our normal evening. And because this wasn’t there and things weren’t done correctly, we’re now here in this situation talking to you. And granted, all of us enjoy talking to you, but it shouldn’t be a situation that it should come to this and we should be going through it because we already see this big disaster. So it would be a good idea for things to be put forward quicker if possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

As we’ve talked about ad nauseum on the show with residents of East Palestine, with residents here in South Baltimore who are also being polluted by another rail company that’s CSX transportation, we’ve spoken with them on the show, so I’m not going to go into the whole kind of explanation here, but you guys who listen to the show know that when we say the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine was avoidable, it’s because we’ve heard directly from railroad workers that they are chronically understaffed, overworked. There aren’t enough guys to check the cars to make sure that faulty systems like the one that the train had with its bearings don’t end up with trains on the track that shouldn’t be there. You have people in place to make sure that doesn’t happen. You have safety layers done by union workers across the rail industry who have been getting laid off having more work piled onto fewer people for years, right?

All of these top-down corporate and Wall Street minded decisions to cut costs and boost profits have translated to a railroad system that has over a thousand derailments a year, and workers fleeing the industry on mass because they can’t take this anymore. And they keep warning that more catastrophes like this are going to happen. And so of course we would be hypocrites if we didn’t say we were in favor of more rail safety of more accountability for these companies. And frankly, I don’t give a crap if the person helping residents of East Palestine has a D or an R next to their names, just help. These people need help. That’s all we care about right now. But to this point, it’s not just rail safety that community members need. And Christina, I wanted to ask if you could say a little bit about the other needs that folks in town and around, let’s not forget, it’s not just East Palestinian, Ohio, it’s the Pennsylvania side, it’s folks from miles around. What do folks need that are not going to be addressed by more rail safety and more accountability from Norfolk Southern?

Kristina Baehr:

I think more than anything, they need healthcare. When a disaster like this happens, why can’t we come in and teach doctors how to treat toxic exposure? Why can’t we talk about how to detox the body? Why can’t we talk about some of the signs that you might look out for, things that might happen down the road instead, the EPA comes in and says it’s going to be in and out of your body in 48 hours. I don’t know if you have heard this Max, but I’ve heard that at every site, okay, well, vinyl chloride in and out of your body in 48 hours, jet fuel in and out of your body in 48 hours, where is this 48 hours coming from?

What scientific ground is there for this 48 hours vs. That’s not true and people are sick and let’s help them get better. We know how to treat toxic exposure. We know for example, that there are people who are exposed to these chemicals in their vocations. What are the treatment protocols we’ve developed for those people? What are the blood tests we have had them take? How about just c, b, C count for people? Can we help them get better? And instead, we come into these places and we tell the doctors not to help anybody. So I think that we need some real medical care and from doctors who care, from doctors who care.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it should really be noted that this is explicitly what residents have been asking for demanding. There are coalitions like the Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers Coalition, folks from in town calling for the President Biden and now President Trump to issue an emergency declaration for East Palestine, which would unlock a suite of federal resources including guaranteed healthcare for all affected residents who are bioaccumulation these toxins in their bodies. They’re feeling the effects of them. I was standing in East Palestine last year, I could smell the damn chemicals. I could taste the metallic stuff in my mouth. Imagine living in that stuff for two years and being told, ah, it’s all washed out of your system. I mean, this is the kind of gaslighting that we’re talking about here, but you can feel the lie just by standing in the middle of the street if you’re there in East Palestine. And Hannah, before we go to another break, I wanted to ask you what if anything has been done to address the causes of the Biolab fire and the impacts that it’s been having on your community?

Hannah Loyd:

I mean, everything is real. Kind of like we can’t talk about it until the lawsuit or whatever because the county turned around and sued by a lab, so they say, oh, we can’t have any updates or anything to say until this is resolved.

Kristina Baehr:

Sorry. No, after Hannah talks, I want to answer that. That is bs.

Hannah Loyd:

So we’re just here every day living in it. In the beginning we had updates and this that, and we all knew it wasn’t right, and then it was like radio silence. And then the new commissioner came in and she was worried about the jobs of the people that were there. And now something’s been put out about the people that work there have the option to either retire with some kind of guaranteed salary forever. Everything’s real hush hush. So to be honest with you, I don’t know because we don’t know because they haven’t said anything. But it’s toxic there. Nothing’s changed. It’s toxic.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Christina, we got to go to a break in a second, but yeah, I know you add something you want to hop in on to follow up on that.

Kristina Baehr:

There is no legal basis to stop communicating and speaking truth to the people who are there. And what happens is the bad guys always do that. They say, well, their investigation’s pending, and therefore everyone has to be silent. And that is, there’s no legal basis for that. And it’s unfair to the communities that litigation is about accountability and truth and transparency. And for the bad guys to come in and say, we’re going to shut it all down just makes it even worse.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to, in this second half gang, talk a bit about the special and important circumstances that have led Hannah and Ashley to you guys have actually connected over social media and it’s really incredible that we have you both on together. Having interviewed you separately in East Palestine and in Conyers, I wanted to ask if Hannah, you could just tell us a bit more about that. How did you and Ashley find each other? What was it like for you to be going through what you’ve been going through in Conyers and then find someone like Ashley, who knows what it’s like to go through that and what have you guys been talking about in that time?

Hannah Loyd:

Well, honestly, once I started learning things about different disaster areas and started hearing about East Palestine, east Palestine, I started watching YouTube videos. I think it was one, it may have been, I don’t remember who did it, but it was, I watched some on here there and I was like, I’m literally going through the same exact thing as her everything. And so I just messaged her and just kind of went from there. And she has been the biggest mentor, helper how to get bring pop out of my kids’ hair. I have literally been so honored to have met her even though I’ve never met her in person because she has helped me through some of the hardest days that I never thought that I was going to have to go through things that she learned in her area with kids and her own kid that she was able to teach me that I had no idea why my kid was screaming. And she told me why. And it was right. And I mean, She’s become family to me, to be honest. And I am just so thankful that I was able to connect with her just through social media from a disaster that literally uprooted all of our lives. And we talk sometimes every day. Sometimes we go weeks without talking. You just never know. And we don’t always talk about disasters. We talk about stuff to do with my kid that I never even thought of how to make something simple for dinner. I mean, we talk about it all, so it’s not always disaster related. But she taught me about chemicals, dioxin, what to ask my doctor to test me for what? To ask my doctor. Things that I never thought I would have to ask anyone or my doctor. And so I’ll say again, it’s literally been an honor her to be my friend.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ashley, what is it like to get a message like that having gone through what you’ve gone, I have to imagine it’s both bittersweet because it’s like it’s happening again, but you can hear how much it means to someone like Hannah. What is it like for you to get a message like that?

Ashley McCollom:

It’s emotional because a lot of what she mentioned, I remember those times and going through that and being confused with everyone else, and I had people reach out to me that became my mentors the same and help me through it. And even like how she said, we can just talk about normal things because it’s nice to know that we went through similar things and have that break away to still be people, still be moms, still take care of a family out of every curve ball. This has thrown both of us from watching an entire plant catch on fire and not knowing is it safe, is what is going on normal. Hey, I went through that. Don’t be ashamed to ask. A lot of people need that need to understand we were there. I mean, the community understands. We understand each other and it is a privilege to meet Hannah and so many people and to be there and have that support because it feels like you have no other support but each other.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I guess if there are folks watching this right now who are living near a landfill that they suspect is making their contaminating their water, making them sick, if there are folks listening to this who are saying they are describing what I’m feeling the same way. Hannah, you felt that when you watched Ashley. I guess what would be your message to folks out there right now who maybe believe that it’s nothing or maybe it’s all in their heads? What would you advise them to do?

Hannah Loyd:

Well, I mean, some people it didn’t affect and some people it did, and some people still are unsure. I mean, if you are really unsure Or you’re on the fence, message me. I’ll talk to you. I mean, I have no shame in anything. I lost everything I ever had. I mean, can’t. I’ll be here. I’m here. I’ll talk to you. I may have to call Ashley and ask her. I may not know, but I’ll talk to you. I’m here. I have people in Max, Christina on our other interview, we talk to her. So I mean, we all kind of help each other I guess. So if you’re in doubt, just reach out because even though you may Not be for sure, think it’s in your head, just if you want to know, just ask Ash.

Ashley McCollom:

Don’t ever be ashamed to ask anything, especially in this, don’t ever be ashamed or don’t ever feel like you’re the only one because you’re not. Just remember that you’re not the only one. And it does get hard and it gets lonely and it gets tough.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Christina, I want to kind of toss that to you as well. Again, as someone who’s seen this from your side working as a lawyer, but hearing these stories from folks in affected communities as far away as Hawaii to here in Ohio or anywhere else, what would you say to folks who are maybe feeling that or thinking that as they’re hearing us talk right now, what would you advise folks to do if they suspect they are also being contaminated poison, lied to about this stuff,

Kristina Baehr:

Look for The helpers and look for the truth tellers, and they’re always there. And when I was in Hawaii, I showed up in the midst of it. I mean, not November, it happened in November, but I was there the first week of January. And so I was there to help point people to the test that Ashley’s talking about to say, here’s what you need to ask your doctor. I’m showing up in East Palestine a little bit late just because I was invited late and these events kind of happened around the same time, so I was focused on Hawaii. But in each case, there are truth tellers. There is someone who worked for the railroad who tried to get on neighborhood pages and warn people about what they were being exposed to. There are good people and there are people who are telling the truth and find them and then follow them and ask questions and find each other, find the helpers, find the truth tellers, and find each other.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And on that, I think again, this is really important, powerful lessons for folks listening in Washington take to heart. And before we go to our break, Christina, I have one more question that you sort of referred to earlier in our conversation. I think it’s still really hard for a lot of average Americans to confront the reality that their government is not looking out for them. I’ve heard it from affected communities who trusted the EPA when agents were telling ’em, you’re fine. And then they keep accumulating the evidence in their bodies that they’re not fine. So before we go to our final break, do you have any other kind of thoughts you wanted to share on that, about folks who are still trusting of the agency that was set up to protect us against things like this? How do we manage the sort of the truth tellers, the whistleblowers, the folks who are there who want to help residents mixed in with all these other interests that maybe don’t?

Kristina Baehr:

It was hard for me to come to terms with as I was, I used to represent the United States, and I believed I was one of the good guys and I think I was charged with doing the right thing. And so when I had people standing up in federal court, these lawyers saying that it basically didn’t happen. I was personally upset because our country is supposed to represent us. Our country is supposed to do the right thing in those circumstances, our federal officers are supposed to tell the truth. And then I learned, actually, that was a really good for me from a litigation perspective. I’m so glad they took that approach. And I hope that the railroad does the same thing because a jury and a judge, it doesn’t go far with them. But I think you’re going to learn when you’re faced with this to start trusting yourself too.

So I said find the truth tellers, find the helpers, find each other, but also find yourself because you know your mama heart or your dad a heart knows. And so trust yourself over the institutions around you, and then trust the people that you trust. And what we’re finding when I gave the example of it’s like kids are in a school and they’re smelling smoke, and the firemen came and said, stay where you are, you’re fine. That’s how the Navy acted in Hawaii. That’s what’s happening when the EPA shows up to these communities. They’re more interested in getting the economic world back on track than they are in protecting the people. And I think all of us have a lot of distrust after everything that happened with Covid. And we all learned a little bit to trust ourselves over institutions. And that’s not a bad lesson, but I also believe that these institutions can change, and I think that there are good people within them. So when you look for the helpers, you can look for the helpers in the institutions too. They’re there.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ashley, Hannah, Christina, in the final kind of 10 minutes that we have to, I wanted to focus in on where we are as of now, February, 2025. What do you, your families and your communities still need? What are the needs that are not being met? Right? Yeah. We mentioned earlier in the episode that JD Vance went and visited East Palestine on the two year anniversary of the derailment, promising that there will be more developments in terms of the Trump administration’s focus on railway safety, on holding Norfolk Southern accountable. But Vance also explicitly said that a disaster declaration, and I quote may have been very helpful 18 months ago. I don’t know that it’s still helpful today. Let’s talk about what your community still need, who is trying to meet those needs and what people watching and listening can do to help. So Ashley, I want to start with you and then Hannah, we’ll go to you

Ashley McCollom:

For how long we’ve been doing this and it doesn’t get easier. I remember doing the first interview with you and I feel like I’m not as emotional as I was in the beginning because now I’m really getting into that reality and it’s stagnant it, and there’s no help. We need either a disaster declaration or we need to be put on the national priority list because people shouldn’t still be sick. People shouldn’t feel uncomfortable in their home. Home is where you feel safe and comfortable and no one’s feeling safe and comfortable. If you’re questioning, is this from that health insurance, great, we could do that. But when you treat those things and you put those people right back into those places, how much good is that going to do? I mean, some of us are still displaced. I feel like we need help for those people that are struggling. I don’t know how to do that. I mean, there are some great people that are doing food drives for people that are less fortunate and really put everything out there for the people in town. I mean, this is a little bit bigger than what we could even anticipate.

I don’t think it’s safe. If I get sick in my house, if I go into my house, I’m sick. I mean, I’d love to move forward. Our animals get sick. They stayed in there for a day, they’d come back vomiting, they come back with excessive bowel movements, almost like when you change a dog’s dog food or they’re really sick. I mean, these are serious issues. We’re seeing serious things go on and for where we were in the beginning to now, it’s just progressing. I mean, we need some things. Looked at again and looked at more thoroughly and looked into these residents homes because we are a part of the environment. No matter what disaster you’re in, no matter how long time has passed, we are a part of that environment. We make the impact. And these people need to live there. We need to live there. And if you can’t, it’s not an environment anymore for humans.

Hannah, how about you?

Hannah Loyd:

That was pretty powerful. So I mean, like I said, I mean they earlier, they’re just kind of there and they’re not, they briefly address things. They have never ever even said they’re sorry or hold accountability or any of that. So that’s out the window, whatever. I just think that the county, the company, everyone just needs to take accountability for what happened. This isn’t the first time, it’s the fourth time people are there that are deathly sick. I mean, they’re sick and they have no other choice but to stay there unless someone just comes and rescues. I mean, we we’re almost like silence. Now it’s not really a big topic anymore. Nobody’s really talking about it. When I had to meet with a new doctor because I’m having new issues with my liver, which is very, very scary. And he said, oh yeah, I remember when that happened. My eyes were burning and all this. And I said, yeah, imagine being three years old and that happening. No one is understanding or taking accountability. They just want us almost to

Speaker 4:

Be quiet. Quit talking about it. But I mean, honestly, I think

Hannah Loyd:

That the citizens there now that are still there, they don’t know what to do. They don’t know where to go. They don’t know how to even seek legal counsel with getting out because a lot of people are elderly people. They have nothing but their little social security check. And these are people that I grew up knowing and to see them so sick, it’s just heartbreaking and knowing I got up and left my house. So it’s almost like we just need help somewhere for these people that can’t get the help or have the means or anything. I mean, there’s a couple little different groups that are having meetings and going to churches and meetings and all this, but I mean, I don’t think that anyone is really hearing them, if that makes sense. So we just need to be heard. Again, doctors need to be guided in what and how to treat the patients because they’re the ER doctor to know that day how to treat me. And then all these other doctors don’t know what’s going on. Something doesn’t make sense. So the doctors need to know how to do the care. They need to know how to treat people. They need to know what to help people get out. Like me, my kid, get out.

So we just need to and know what’s going on. Don’t tell us that we can’t talk about it because the county’s suing and we can’t tell you why or any kind of progress. Just give us an update. Y’all did that in the beginning. Why can’t we have it now? What happened to where we can’t know anything, if that makes sense.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It does. It makes grim necessary sense, right? I mean, it’s the bare minimum of what people should expect. And we can’t even get,

Hannah Loyd:

I say, like I said at the first show with you, max, even just, I’m sorry, still haven’t even gotten that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And again, by all appearances, it looks like we’re heading in the exact opposite direction of where we need to go in because when we use the term sacrifice zone, which is a horrible ghoulish term in a just world, that term would not exist. But when we’re saying that, what we mean is what you’ve just heard Ashley and Hannah describe it is an area where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself and have been left to flounder there to either move if they have the ability to or stay, wait and die. And that is unacceptable, and that is how we are treating more and more of our communities, whether they be in the path of toxic industrial pollution or like in intensifying weather events through manmade climate change.

The thing that is consistent is that working class communities, working people just living their lives are having their lives obliterated and having no help when they need it most. And we as a people, as a class, as humanity need to do something to band together and say, enough is enough. In the final minute or two that I have you guys, I wanted to just go around the table and ask if you had any final messages on that front to people listening to this and watching this, whether they live in a sacrifice zone or not. What do you want folks to take away from this conversation? How can we fight back and what’s going to happen if we don’t? So I guess, Ashley, let’s start with you, Hannah, and then Christina, please close us out.

Ashley McCollom:

It doesn’t hurt people that are sitting there and do not have a disaster or aren’t aware of a superfund around you. It would be good to be knowledgeable of those things. It would be good to get your water tested, your well tested, get your house tested, make sure that your heirs clean because if this happens, there’s no basis for you to have a guideline to refer back to. There’s nothing that helped us. Now, if we would’ve had our soil tested, who does that? But maybe it might not be a bad idea to spend that little extra money to have that safeguard. If this does, and it more than likely will, depending on how close you live to a rail site, a big factory, any truck could be driving down the road and spill and your normal evening could be like mine, and one minute it was there and the next it’s gone.

And as much as I like the connections I’ve made, I don’t want someone to have to reach out to me and be another Hannah. I appreciate these relationships I’ve made and I’d like to make more, but not on these circumstances. And I don’t want to see anyone else suffer and be confused and lost and be two years in a camper, not knowing where you’re going to go. This should not be anyone’s lives. Prepare yourself if you can do it, it doesn’t hurt. And be considerate of other people. Understand we’re not all going through the same things. Be kind to your neighbors because one day everything could change.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I mean, just

Hannah Loyd:

What she said, just be kind. We live in this world full of hate and it’s just getting worse, unfortunately. But yeah, just don’t ever hesitate to do things that you may think if you’re a mama, trust your mama gut because it’s always going to be right. If you think you’re crazy, you’re not. It’s real. It’s very real and it’s very scary. And I don’t wish this on anyone ever. I don’t wish this on any kid. I don’t wish this on any animal. I don’t wish this on anyone. But unfortunately it happens due to the negligence of people that are either not trained correctly or being short-staffed or other things that can have accidents, but just do your research if you’re going to move. Ashley helped me when I was moving. She’s like, make sure you look so you search Superfund sites, stuff like that. Make sure you know where you’re going because you don’t want to move from one disaster zone to another disaster zone. Well, who would’ve that? Because I didn’t. I just was trying to get out. So I mean, yeah, she said just connect with people, make friends be nice. Everyone is going through something you don’t know what someone’s going through. Just be nice. And there’s people out there that have gone through it or are going through it and can help you and will be there for you. I will.

Kristina Baehr:

I think that there’s a role for the law here too. I still believe in the rule of law. I still believe in our American jury system and American juries are entrusted with enforcing the safety rules. But the system only works if the people are brave enough if to bring the claims. And so I hope that one way we can help these communities is to show up and help them bring the claims because the law is about compensation for people who have been victims of negligence or worse of fraud. There’s more than just negligence here and deterrence of the bad conduct in the first place, prevention, and you can’t have one without the other. I hope that the law can be one tool in these communities for people to come together and demand change and demand truth, and demand accountability and demand the compensation that they need to get out of the contamination.

Because if you are in a contaminated house, I promise you, please make plans to leave. Do whatever you can to leave. And I know some of you think you can’t afford to leave, but you can’t afford to stay. I’ve had clients who have died in the house is I told them to leave. So one of my firm is called just well, because I truly want people to be well. And my hope and prayer for all of you who are affected from exposures is that you would get well enough to get help and to help others and to get out.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week, and I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to our three incredible guests today, Ashley McCollum, Hannah Lloyd, and Christina Bear. We’re going to see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the other great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for our newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

“I did not start out as a writer interested in organized labor,” Hamilton Nolan writes in The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor; “I started out as a writer interested in why America was so fucked up. Why did we have such gargantuan levels of inequality? Why were thousands of homeless people living in the streets of cities where billionaires frolicked in penthouses? Why was it that certain classes of people worked hard their entire lives and stayed poor, just as their parents had been, and just as their children seemed doomed to be? Even while labor unions had fallen almost completely out of the public mind, it turned out that they were central to all our most fundamental problems.” In this live episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore on Dec. 6, 2024, Max speaks with Nolan about his new book, what the ongoing war on workers’ rights and unions tells us about the “fucked up” society we’re living in, and what lessons labor can teach us now about how to fight and win, even in the darkest of times. Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL–CIO, also makes a special guest appearance in the second half of the episode.

Additional links/info below…

• Hamilton’s website, Facebook page, and X page
• Hamilton Nolan, Hachette Books, The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor
• Red Emma’s website, Facebook page, and Instagram
• David Dayen, In These Times, “Meet the militant flight attendant leader who threatened a strike—and helped stop Trump’s shutdown”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Analysis:

Mic check. Mic check. We’re going to go ahead and get started with tonight’s event. It is always, always, always good to see you at Red Emma’s bookstore Coffeehouse. There are many things you could be doing. The weather cleared up nicely, cold as hell, but it was a beautiful afternoon, so you might’ve been somewhere else. You chose to be here with us in community and in the struggle capitals, and that is never lost upon us. I’m the poet known as analysis. Welcome on behalf of the entire team Hamilton. Nolan is a longtime labor journalist who was written about labor, politics and class war for publications such as Gawker in these Times, the Guardian and More. Speaking of Gawker Media, he helped organize them in 2015. That became the first yes, yes, yes. First online media company to unionize. He’s based in Brooklyn, New York has a publication called How Things Work, and you can find that at his website, hamilton nolan.com, Hamilton nolan.com.

We are joined in conversation this evening by Red Emmas fan. Max Alvarez is the editor in chief of the Real News Network, the host of the podcast, working people, PhD in history and comparative literature from University of Michigan and does so much more, writes for so many things. Speaking of writing, we have one copy. How many copies did I say? One copy of Max’s book, the Work of Living. Where can people talk about their lives and dreams and the year That World ended This right over there. So you should get that along with tonight’s book. We are so glad to get into this labor history. It is very important. I need y’all to give up some real radical roof rays and red ass noise for in conversation with Max Alvarez and presenting the hammer power. I love this subtitle. Listen to this Power inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Y’all make some noise for Hamilton Nolan.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, thank you so much analysis. Thank you once again to the great Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore coffee house and gathering space. This is a really important space for our community, so just wanted as always to thank our hosts and encourage y’all to please support Red Emma’s because we need places like this to plan the next steps, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in the second part of our conversation today. And I couldn’t be more grateful to be in conversation with my man, Hamilton Nolan about that because I often find myself looking to Hamilton for answers or guidance or even just a little dose of strength that I can kind of get to help me get out of bed and keep fighting. Hamilton is a role model for so many of us in the labor journalism and labor media world, and I’m so proud of him and everything that he’s done, especially this incredible new book that we’re here to talk about today, which as analysis said is called The Hammer Power Inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Hamilton, thank you so much for joining me today and Baltimore brother and welcome.

Hamilton Nolan:

Thank you and thank you Red Emmas. This is my first time at Red Emmas and I love everything about this place already, so I’ll definitely be back and thank you all for coming and thank you Max, who by the way, if you all don’t know, is definitely one of the best labor journalists in the United States America, and we are lucky to have him here in Baltimore, so thank you for having me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you, brother. That means the world to me and who boy do we got a lot to talk about, right? I mean, I’m thinking we’re never going to be able to sum up the richness and depth and importance of this book in a 60 minute talk, right? That’s an unfair aim to have in any book talk. So I want to encourage everyone first and foremost to please buy and read this book. If you are finding yourself, like me feeling overwhelmed by anxiety, fear, anger, resentment, all these heavy feelings that you don’t know what to do with, but you are looking for something to do, you were looking for more that you can do to fight back and to keep us from falling further into the abyss. I would highly recommend that you start with this book and you’ll find a lot of hard truths and a lot of warm comfort in it through the stories of our fellow workers, past and present and through Hamilton’s fierce and righteous perspective.

And so Hamilton, I want to by way of introducing the book sort of jump into the moment that we’re in right now because everyone is sort of looking at the past eight to 10 years to try to understand what the hell happened in this country that not only led us to elect Donald Trump president the first time, but now a second time with a fully magnified GOP controlling effectively all branches of government. And there are a lot of different narratives about the last eight to 10 years that cherry pick stories about the working class and their politics, our politics and so on. I wanted to ask you, Hamilton Nolan, what does the last eight to 10 years in this country look like through the lens of labor and through the lives of the working people that you report on for a living?

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah, thank you, man. It’s a great question and obviously one I’ve thought about a lot and you’ve thought about a lot, probably everybody in this room has thought about a lot. I think I’m going to cheat a little bit because I’m going to go back a little bit farther because I think you have to go back a little bit farther to really answer that question. And I will go back to the end of World War II 1950s in America. It’s going to be short though. I’m not going to talk that one, but the context being that after World War II in this country, one in three working people in America was a union member, and what did that produce that produced what is looked back on now as the golden age of America? Ironically, look back on by Republicans in particular, I was like, wow, that’s the time we need to get back to one in three working people in this country was a union member and America was prosperous, but that level of unionization in this country meant that the prosperity that America had was widely shared.

So we had the greatest shared prosperity for a good 20 to 30 year period. It was really a golden age in the history of America. All that prosperity was widely shared because working people in this country had the power to take their share of that wealth thanks to high levels of unionization. And over time the decline of unions in America in the mid 1950s about one in three workers was union member. Today it’s one in 10, and that’s been a slow downward decline for all those years, and particularly beginning in 1980 with the Reagan era. I was born in 1979. So this kind of the story of my lifetime is that we saw this inequality, crisis, economic inequality, crisis in particular start to rise up in America. And of course Reagan’s assault on unions and worker power was a big part of enabling that. And there’s a really famous chart that a lot of you probably seen, and one line is the decline of union density in America.

It goes down like that. And then the other line is the rise of the wealth held by the top 10% in America and it goes up like that and it’s perfect mirror images, perfect mirror images. So those two things are not coincidental. Those two things are one enabled the other. And so I think to bring it up to today, I think that it’s just the nature of societies that inequality can only rise for so long before stuff starts to break and stuff starts to break down, the social contract starts to break down, the political system starts to break down. People stop believing in the American dream because it becomes increasingly obvious that the American dream is kind of a sham. And I think that is the environment that fostered a guy like Trump who is not only a Republican, but also like a conman and just clearly a scam artist and all the sort of worst qualities come to the fore.

But I remember I covered Trump when he was running in 2016 and 2015, and one thing that always stuck with me from the 2016 election was that in West Virginia, which was one of the highest states in America for voting for Trump in the democratic primary, Bernie won every county in West Virginia. So what is that? That’s people being like, we need something different. We need the most different thing that we can find. And I think that is what’s led us to Trump the hollowness of what neoliberalism produced in this country, the failure of America to share his prosperity, crushing unions crushing working people’s ability to get their fair share of the wealth that this country produces, which is still, by the way, the most wealth any nation in the history of the world has ever produced we’re rich as hell. It’s just that all the money goes to the very top. All those things I think conspire to form atmosphere where a guy like Trump can rise up. And I guess the story of the last election is that in those eight years, the opposition did not rally itself to fix the underlying problems that contributed to Trump getting in the first place. So here we are.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I want to tease that out just a bit more, right? Since it’s, again, this is in the air that we’re breathing right now, it’s everywhere, especially if anyone’s like, I understand why you would maybe not be following the news so closely these days because exhausting. So I do understand that, but it’s all that anyone’s talking about right now. So I do want to sort of ask you if you could also take this and respond to the discussions and debates that are being had right now from mainstream news all the way to independent channels like ours all across social media, Democrats abandoning the working class and reaping what they’ve sown, Republicans having this quote, great realignment and a lot of working people supporting Trump and maga. And you really, I think helped us understand some of the complex reasons that might happen. But I want to ask you if you have, what you feel is missing from those debates right now, especially in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory.

Hamilton Nolan:

I mean, I do think one thing that’s not getting really enunciated enough or made clear enough, especially in the discussion after the election of the sort of alleged working class shift to Republicans, and some of it was real. I mean, there has been a real certain amount of shift of lower income votes to Trump, but one thing that didn’t get brought up, and especially in the ways that the Democrats panic about that, and a democratic political consultant is probably the least equipped person in the world to solve that problem. They’re all millionaires who live in dc. But I mean, what I think didn’t get talked about enough specifically was that the union votes still went to Democrats by the same healthy margin that it had in the past. So actual union members did not shift to Trump, not that Harris was so great or anything, but the actual union vote stayed to the left.

And so I think that, and I’m a broken record maybe, but when we talk about, oh, the working class, how are we going to bring the working class back, raise union density, get more people into unions, and you get people into organizations that actually can do political education, people’s relationship with politics can’t just be seen ads on tv. I mean, that’s not politics. And politics is being in an organization that can help people fight for their own interests, whether it’s electorally, whether it’s in the workplace or anywhere else. Unions are the foundation of that in America. The labor movement is the foundation of that. Even though it’s gotten very weak, it’s still demonstrated even in the last election when working class people shifted to the right union members didn’t. So unions are an essential ingredient to American democracy. And when we talk about the declining in unions, it’s not just a story about economics. It’s not just people aren’t earning enough money anymore. It is a story of the loss of power, the loss of regular people’s ability to exercise power, political power in particular. And so I think that’s something that has not been discussed enough, at least in the mainstream news though I’m sure on real news. Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, we got you baby. And I want to come back to the union question in a second, but I think you make a tremendously important point, right? Given the sort of post World War II context that you gave us in the beginning all the way up till now, and like you said, our lifetimes are effectively the arc of this decline. We are sort of like and bear the living imprints of Neoliberalism’s like rise and fall, and we bear in our family stories and experiences like the effects of a failed ideology, well failed for us. But for the past 40 years, that has been what working people across the board have experienced, and whether they are joining unions or trying to form unions in larger numbers than we’ve seen in a generation in recent years or going on strike, whether they’re burning down police precincts or voting for explicitly anti-establishment politicians like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, that being the linkage that there’s an anti-establishment rage harnessed in there, all of those things are sort of different and even interlocking responses to a crisis that’s been building for our entire lifetimes.

And I think that’s what drives me so nuts about the ways that the media talks about politics and then those of us who consume the media learn to think about politics and it limits the scope of how we can think. George Orwell wrote this a century ago, I’m not saying anything new here, but I think that’s such an important point because if you don’t have that deeper historical context, if you don’t understand that what people are responding to every two to four years, they’re responding to a crisis that’s been building for 40 or 50. And so in fact, what’s more telling about our political situation, not just here in the US but around the world, is that we are in what many analysts are calling an anti incumbent period. Because again, what we just lived through the past three election cycles we haven’t seen in our lifetime where the incumbent party was voted out each time.

Hamilton Nolan:

I mean a two party system which we have, which unfortunately, and I think the older I get, the more I realize how bad a two party system is shitty system. But in a two party system, every election is a referendum on reality. And so if reality sucks, you get that pendulum nature that we see in America and that we’ve seen for much of the 20th century and into this century as well where the ping pong and back in America, we don’t have parties that have 40 year runs on top of the government. Why is that? Because all the dissatisfaction with the status quo is always going to be channeled to kicking out the party in power.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And again, traced along that timeline from when you were born to now, not only has union density just plummeted down to barely 10% in this country, but with that is all the neoliberal poison that has eroded the very foundations of our society, our democracy, everything, corporate consolidation, deregulation, privatization, globalization. These processes have been building up and accumulating. And it’s not that it’s anything new, it’s just that it’s taken this long for so many working people to feel it at this level, I think. And so that, sorry, did you have something to jump in on? No go. Because I think that leads us to where and why unions became such a central point for you, and in the same way that they become a central point for so many people in recent years looking for hope. Yeah. So talk about your path to understanding unions as an important institution. You didn’t start there. You didn’t set out to be a union guy

Hamilton Nolan:

And both of us, the fact that we sit here and talk about union so much is weird in media, in politics, unions are still considered this sort of niche story off to the side. And when I started and became a journalist, I didn’t start out to be a labor reporter. I was just like, I want to write about why is America fucked up? Why the rich get richer in the poor, get poorer? Why is there homeless people sleeping on the street and then there’s rich people in the penthouse, basic super basic stuff that all of us are like, why is that so broken? And over the years as I reported on all those things, I found myself repeatedly being drawn back to issues, to labor issues, to worker power, to the decline of worker power and the consequences of that and the ripple effects of that, and learned about the history of unions and the history of labor and the way that that had affected our economy, the way that that had affected our politics.

And over the years, just pursuing the threads of those really basic questions. Why is America broken in the ways that it’s broken today? I ended up becoming a full-time labor reporter because I found over and over again that labor issues were at the center of all those questions. The inequality crisis was directly spawned by the attack on labor power in this country. And the inequality crisis is the thing that was destabilizing our country in all the ways that manifest in a million different ways, including Donald Trump and a lot of other things. So I mean, I just sort of increasingly covered labor over the years because I was like, wow, this stuff is so important, so important, so important. And at the same time as I was looking around the media and being like, nobody’s really talking about this that much. I mean, people cover politics in really stupid ways, and there’s not that much attention on things that are actually more, in many cases, a union election is more consequential than a political election in the sense of the impact that it’s going to have not just on the lives of those workers, but the ripple effects going to have through the economy, the way it’s going to change the balance of power economically in a city, in an industry.

Those things have long-term ripple effects down through years and through generations, and they change families and they change people’s lives, and it’s a very, very undercover aspect of America in the media, in journalism. And so I think one of the reasons I kept on writing about labor over the years was just like nobody else was. Not nobody you were doing it, but relatively speaking, not that many people are writing about this stuff. That was actually really important, and that’s still true today, unfortunately.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Just a small aside, please, please support any and all labor journalists that you follow. Support Hamilton Substack. Please support the real news support freelance writers like Kim Kelly, support great labor writers. Publishing for places in these times, Jacobin all over the place, local papers, the people doing the beats in their local area, they’re the only person covering labor stories. Support it, please. Otherwise it goes away.

Hamilton Nolan:

Max, how did you get into labor?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I’ll sort of give a condensed version that hooks into the union question for the same reasons that you do. I feel a little weird when people ask my opinion about unions or I’ve become known as a union guy or someone who knows a lot about unions because I interview a shit ton of union workers and cover a lot of labor stories, but that is not where I started covering labor. I started the podcast that I’m still doing working people. Years ago when I was still a broke grad student, we were living in Ann Arbor, and I say a joke that I almost started the show as a ruse to get my dad to talk about losing our house and losing everything that I had grown up with, losing the American dream in his mind because for years it had just eaten our family away.

It had taken my father away from me, the lights rum, but no one was there. My parents’ marriage was on the rocks, and that was so stunning to all of us. I was working at warehouses as a temp worker 12 years ago when this was all happening. It was really bad. And we grew up deeply conservative Republicans pro capitalists. The crash was a huge ideological crash for us because we saw how much the system we believed in and that we believed we could work within to make a good life for ourselves was so nakedly rigged in favor of the very people who had caused millions of families like ours to lose everything. And it was our going government bailing them out, and it was our media saying, Hey, the economy’s great while I’m sitting there on a couch with my dad in the house we were going to lose in two years.

So I started doing labor journalism on my podcast because I did not want my father to go to his grave feeling like a failure. And I kept doing the podcast because I saw how much, and I knew how much pain you accrue as a human being in such an inhuman system that chews us up and spits us out until we have nothing left to give that gets us accustomed to being paid so little and treated so poorly and what that does to your heart and your psyche. I wanted people to have a space to talk about that and to tell the stories of labor through the human stories of regular people. And it was years in the making that I came to understand a, people don’t deserve this. Well, I mean, I knew that from the beginning, but there’s something they could do about it. And that’s how I came to understand, oh shit, they had unions. I am seeing people come to the same conclusion. I’m seeing how they’re improving their lives by struggling together to exercise that, right?

Hamilton Nolan:

It’s really like one of the best parts of being a labor journalist. The stuff that we do, and you would probably agree with this, I don’t want to speak for you, but it is just like when I was at Gawker during the recession out of 2008, 2009, I did this series of unemployment stories. So I just had people who had become unemployed right in and tell their story. We published this every week for 40 weeks, 40 week long series, hundreds and hundreds of people telling their own stories. I got more thank you notes from people about that than probably anything I’ve ever written. And I didn’t write any of it. It was all their stories. And just giving people the ability to tell their own stories is such a blessing. And in unions, when I’ve been on book tour most of this year, I’ve been like all over the country and everywhere I go, I meet people who would just be like somebody who has worked in their union for 20 years, 30 years, been a member, been active, been elected, been a shop steward, whatever it is, and nobody’s ever told that person that was important that you did that it was actually important.

And so I think that’s what we do. We’re very lucky because in a sense you get to let people speak and you also get to tell people that they’re legitimately important in a way that they might have never even heard before.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put. I mean, I am reminded of it week in and week out, just how much we all need that and how little we all get it. And there’s a hopeful note in that because that’s a gift that we can all give one another, listening to each other and talking to each other, showing your scars, telling your stories. That’s how workers learn that they’re being paid different rates all the way up to, again, the raw human stuff. That is, that’s what labor journalism is about. It’s not about unions, it’s about people struggling for a better life, a good life, and that manifests in the need that you can’t move anymore because of a work-related injury. So you can’t play T-ball with your kids, the life quality of life you lose because of someone else’s greed and negligence. I mean, it comes through in stories like that.

And there’s so many in Hamilton’s book, there’s so many in the work, in the articles he’s written, the interviews that I’ve done. And I think we all have a duty to sort of try to reconnect with each other on that human level for nothing else, to remind one another that we’re not alone. We’re not worthless. We deserve better than this. And every life is beautiful, and people need to be seen that way before they can see themselves that way and believe that they can even fight for a better world and that they deserve one. And so in that regard, I wanted to bring, I actually brought a prop, which was like, I didn’t expect this to be so relevant, but I have here in my hand for those listening to this, a cup from Tudor’s Biscuit World in West Virginia. I won’t go into the backstory of how I got this cup, but I found myself in Huntington, West Virginia and saw this restaurant that looked like a throwback to the eighties.

And I was like, oh, shit, I want to get a biscuit and I’m going to get a cup. But then I read your book and I was like, I wanted to throw the cup at the wall. So I wanted to ask, just by way of, again, really bringing us back to the book, there’s a really important story here about Tudor’s biscuit world. I wanted to ask if you could tell us a bit about that, the incredible person at the center of it, and also what this story says about everything you’re talking about, both the need for unions and also the reality that working people are up against when they try to exercise their rights.

Hamilton Nolan:

So the book is about, as you said, the gap between the potential that unions have to really, and I completely still believe today, and the seed of this book was being a labor reporter and getting involved in unions myself, organizing my workplace and all this stuff. And you’re like, wow, unions are so powerful. Unions are the tool. All these things that were broken, here’s the tool that can fix ’em all. This is so great. We just need to give everybody unions and we’re going to fix all these problems. And then you get involved in the actual labor movement and you start looking around, you’re like, this shit is broken, and that shit’s broken and they’re not organizing and nobody has unions and people don’t know about you. And it’s like it’s all a mess. So the gap between the potential of unions to sort of save this country innocence, and then the reality of the labor movement and organized labor being broken in a lot of ways is kind of the seed of this book.

So one of the chapters in the book I want to write about just something which should be one of the most basic things that anybody can do, which is a person organizing their own workplace. Every union started somewhere. And generally it started with one person who’s like, we should have a union here. So I went to West Virginia. Tudor’s Biscuit world is like, if any of you’re from West Virginia, you already know what it is, but it’s like West Virginia’s homegrown fast food chain biscuits and breakfast and stuff like that. People love it. In West Virginia, there was a woman named Cynthia who worked at a Tudor’s biscuit world, tiny town called View West Virginia. She had grown up in a union family. Her dad was in a union. So she, like many people in West Virginia, which has really strong union culture, knew about unions, had connections to unions.

And after she retired, she got a job at Tudors of Biscuit World. She was there for a while and she was like, these people aren’t paying our overtime. My colleagues aren’t getting their time off. The manager’s abusing us all. And she was like, we need a union. Her dad was in a union to her, it was a very natural thought to have. So she was like, I’m going to unionize this tutor’s biscuit world. She called her husband’s union, which was like the operating engineers. They were like, we don’t really do Tudor’s Biscuit world, but eventually put her in touch with the guy at UFCW who agreed to help her out with this organizing campaign, came out there to Elk View, helped her run a union campaign inside tutors, which little did she know at the time was one of the only fast food union campaigns in the United States of America.

I mean, you could count on one hand the number of even organizing drives at fast food stores in the United States at that time. So very, very unique thing that she was doing, even though to her it seemed completely natural and normal. And as she went to organize this workplace, which probably had 25 workers at this tutors, tutors sent in the union busting team, the corporate union busting team arrived, and new managers start showing up at work. And this is a very, very small town, LVUS Virginia. And so people start getting threats. Some people start getting bribes, we’ll give you a watch, we’ll give you a promotion, vote against the union. One person at one point, somebody knocked on their door and their kid was getting ready to go to I think the University of West Virginia, and they were like, the scholarship might be in danger if you vote for this union.

That was the kind of thing that was happening at a freaking fast food restaurant. And so when the vote came around and people got fired, of course, and they lost the vote by only a couple of votes, and failed to successfully unionize this tutors and filed a bunch of unfair labor practice charges, which got upheld, but everybody went and got new jobs because you’re getting paid $8 an hour, $9 an hour at this job in the first place. So it’s just such a story of an uphill battle. And the thing that she set out to do was so basic. It’s something that ideally really, you should be able to do that in a day. You work at a bookstore, you talk to the people that you’re like, we should have a union set up the election. Bam. That’s how easy it should be to form a union at your workplace. And the reality of what a struggle was for her, I think is illuminating story for us and also for the labor movement itself and for the labor movement to look at and be like, why are we unable to provide the resources that people need to successfully accomplish this thing at a fucking 25 person fast food restaurant, much less a 2,500 person factory or on and on.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to drill down on that for a second because I think there are two crucial points there. One, about the reality of the past few years and the uptick in organizing, the increasing militancy, the creativity of strike strategies, the voting in of more democratic caucuses and major unions like the UAW and Teamsters and so on and so forth. So there’s been a lot of movement in the movement over the past few years, and we’ve been there covering it, and it’s exciting, and that’s how a lot of people know who we are. But one of the things that constantly freaks me out and stresses me out and bums me out is that we are still living in a kind of time and place and media ecosystem that conditions us to have no long-term memories, no long-term commitment to struggles that even we deeply care about.

And we see the results of that when strikes the Pittsburgh Post Gazette are still going on, and people have forgotten about ’em, just like we forgot about the coal miners in Alabama. And they effectively lost just like everyone loved the Starbucks drive, but they’re still fighting for first contracts. A lot of those stores that got closed aren’t reopened. A lot of people’s lives have changed and they moved on. We keep talking about the labor wave as if it’s still going unabated, but we’re not dealing with the reality of that people trying to exercise that right, have run into over these past few years. But then there’s also, and this is what I wanted to ask you about on the larger labor, organized labor side, all the way up to the leadership of the a Ffl CIO, current president, Liz Schueller said at the convention that our goal is to organize a million new workers in 10 years. That is such a small dream for such a big crisis. So I wanted to ask you for your thoughts on that. And also we need to be dreaming bigger. What are the bigger dreams that workers and the movement need to be having right now?

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah, I mean, today 10% of workers in America are union members. That’s the last stop before single digits,

And there’s no stop after single digits. That’s the last stop on the elevator. So we are in a fucking crisis, man. And the first thing is the world of organized labor, which still, by the way, has 16 million people in America and unions have billions of dollars. And there is a considerable amount of resources in organized labor, even though it’s been weakened for many decades. They need to see it as a crisis. First of all, the leadership of the institutions of organized labor, and I compare it a lot to climate change because it’s like this slow moving crisis. It gets a little bit worse every year, but it goes slow enough that you can kind of ignore it. So it gets a little bit warmer every year and the water comes up this much, but you can kind of ignore, it’s not in your house yet.

And the same way union density goes down every year, 0.2%, 0.3%. If you’re running a union, you can kind of ignore that. It’s not really destroying what you have, but over time, that leads you to oblivion. The first thing we really need is a sense of urgency among the leaders of the labor movement. And then we need them to open the checkbooks and start from the premise that we need to double the amount of union members in this country. We need to organize the next 10 million people. What you touched on the story of Liz Schuler, the A-F-L-C-O convey, I went to the a Ffl CO convention in 2022, which is like the presidential convention of the labor movement. And there was a new president taking over the Scheller, and she made a big splashy announcement for her introductory speech taking over the A-F-L-C-O. And her big announcement was, we are going to commit to organize a million new workers in 10 years.

And everybody clapped, it’s like a million sounds big. And so I pulled out a calculator and did about one minute worth of math. And it turns out that if you unionize a million new workers in 10 years, union density will continue to go down because it’s not even enough to keep up with the new jobs that will be created in that time. So the goal, the aspiration of the biggest institution in the union world was to keep declining. And that to me is so emblematic of the fucking problem at the center of organized labor. And it’s interesting because at the same time as a labor reporter, you can go all over the country and meet the most inspiring people you ever met in your whole life in unions, in the labor movement, organizers, local presidents, activists, workers, all these people, brave people, smart people fighting, dedicating their life to this cause. I mean, there’s a bazillion incredibly inspiring stories and incredibly inspiring people inside the labor movement, but the farther up you go, the less inspiring it tends to get. And one of the things I read about in my book is I followed Sarah Nelson, who’s a great labor leader, the head of the Association of Attendants, and she sort of wrestled with the question of how to be a leader of this movement. She’s sitting right there, by the way, she’s in the house tonight.

But I think the importance of that was sort how do we wrestled the leadership of this movement into the right place, tons of great people in the labor movement, and yet the leadership is so disappointing and it’s hurting us and it hurts us every year continually until we figure out how to fix it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, you anticipated my final question before we open it up to q and a, but if I can, I actually wanted to pose my final question to both you and Sara. A) because, yeah, Sara Nelson features heavily in this book and you learn a lot about Sara, her career and just what an incredible human being and fighter she is and what she’s fighting for. But also, if we recall, we saw this woman on the news a few years ago during the first Trump administration, during the government shutdown saying, fuck this. We’re going to general strike till you assholes get back to work. And that’s what stopped the government shutdown. So I really don’t want to put you on the spots here, but I kind of do and kind of already have. I wanted to ask both of you guys, what can we take from the first Trump administration to really get our heads and hearts right for the fight ahead, moving into a second Trump administration, but also again, in the vein of dreaming bigger, what do we need to correct or expand in this next dark period that we didn’t do in the last administration?

And then I’ll ask everyone to applaud and we’ll open up to audience questions. But yeah, Sara, I would love if you could answer that question as well.

Hamilton Nolan:

Alright, I’ll give a quick answer and then you can give a more inspiring answer or whatnot. I mean, we got to get more. The response to where we’re going is to get more hardcore. And the thing that makes me fearful in this moment is not, and I don’t think the people in this room are going to be the problem. I mean, if you’re sitting in this room, we’re probably fairly copacetic in the sense of when you’re faced with fascism, you have to organize more, build the labor movements stronger, fight more or fight back harder. But I think that the Democratic Party, for example, and the portion of this country that coalesces around the Democratic party, there’s going to be a big section of that whose impulse is going to be to compromise this time and to the way that strong men like Trump work is like he makes it so pleasing him is the only way to get anything done.

And so there’s a very powerful incentive for people in the world of politics on all sides to start kissing his ass, start licking his boots, start compromising. You see the president of the Teamsters taking buddy buddy pictures with him. Why is that? It’s because it’s like, well, this is how you get things done in this. But all that does is empower him more. And so it’s like a downward spiral where you give the strong man more and more power. So I think we got to fight harder. I don’t know if we will, but Sarah, what do you think?

Sara Nelson:

All right. Glad I had some bourbon for this. No. Okay, so Max, I could give a lot of answers to this question. First of all, I just want to say that I was back here getting emotional because these two men were sharing very personally and very openly about why this shit matters. And anyway, that was some good stuff, max. That was some good stuff. Okay. So what I’m going to say though is that of course, we got to organize more. We got to take this on. We got to fight, fight, fight. We got to do what Mother Jones said. She said she told the ludlow strikers after they had been gunned down and their tent, that they were sleeping in the cold depths of the Colorado winter while they were on strike against the co barons. And their intensity was burned and women and children were burned in the process.

She came to Ludlow and she said, you will fight and win. You will fight and lose, but you must fight. And part of the story that’s not ever told is that actually minors came with guns and a lot of spirit in their hearts to chase the militia out to chase the Colorado National Guard out, and they set up their own government there in Ludlow for the next six weeks, and they had their funerals and they took care of each other. And ultimately that went away. But that part of the story is never told. And so that is the power of our solidarity. But what did those people learn from that fight? I mean, they were out in that tent city to start with because the coal company was not even following the laws of the state at that time. They were, in some ways, they were just fighting to just enforce the law because they were all immigrants who spoke 28 different languages in that tent city.

And one of the reasons for that is because the co Barrons thought we’re going to hire people from different countries who won’t be able to communicate with each other because that is also going to be a way to make sure that we don’t have a union come in. And what they don’t understand at that level, and I’ve met these people, right? I’ve been in a lot of board rooms. They do not have the corner market on smarts, let me just tell you. But what they don’t understand is that when there’s a mine explosion and the mothers are left to tell their children that not only are their fathers not coming back, but they’re not sure how they’re going to be able to take care of them because none of the mothers can get work. They’re going to have to find another man in order to survive, and they’re trying to comfort their kids and figure out how they’re going to put their lives back together.

You don’t have to speak the same language to understand what’s going on in the heart. So that’s how the union was built. And I think about the last Trump administration, and I’ve really worked at not saying his name, no, it’s really fucking important. Let me just be clear, because our union learned after Carl Icahn fired all the TWA strikers in 1989, that we had to have a different way of striking. And so we looked at creative tactics and we created this strike tactic called chaos, create havoc around our system. And the idea was that we were using this provision of the railway Labor Act that had never been used, that allowed for intermittent strikes to go on strike and off strike. And we decided we would add an element to this, the element of surprise, we were not going to tell you when or where we were going to strike.

And so at Alaska Airlines in 1993, we struck seven flights and brought this deeply anti-union company to its knees who wanted to settle a contract overnight by fax machine that gave the flight attendants a 60% raise. We asked them if they wanted to meet and talk about it. They said, no, no, no. Every time we meet with you, something bad happens. We just want this over with. And so when I’m watching the government shutdown and seeing what’s going on there, and they’re saying that this is because Trump wants to build his southern border wall for security, for national security for our country, that was a bunch of bullshit. It was a 50 year campaign by the GOP to try to privatize everything in our country because if there had been a terrorist attack, that would’ve accrued incredible power to the executive to say, I’ll take care of it.

We’re going to make all these changes. If there had been an aircraft accident, same thing would’ve happened. If nothing had happened, they would’ve said, see, it’s a bunch of bureaucracy that we don’t need, and so we’re going to privatize. And so that was really what was at stake. And once we understood that this was not a political discussion between Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, this was actually an attempt to try to distract people’s so much with the racist fearmongering, xenophobic, racist fearmongering, and keep people focused on all of that and create his own chaos campaign. I’m like, I know this one. We’re going to create a little chaos too. And so we set about talking about a safety strike for flight attendants, and we called on the rest of the labor movement to talk about a general strike because there were 800,000 people either out of work or forced to come to work for free, and another million contract workers who were just out of work with no hope getting anything in return.

This was a crisis and everyone could see it. And the cab driver in DC as I’m talking about this from one place to another, and I’m getting out of my cab and handing him the money, he turns around and grabs my hand. He’s got a tear going down his cheek and he says, thank you. You’re fighting for me too. You don’t think about this shit. But there was no work going on in DC so he didn’t have any cab fairs, so he couldn’t make a living for his family. So it’s all connected and we’re all connected, and if one person is mistreated, we’re all mistreated. But what we have to understand with this next incoming administration is that we cannot talk about Trump. We need to talk about the people who created Trump, the people who are going to give Trump power like you were talking about, and we need to hold them accountable, every one of them.

And we can’t think people think about this stuff in terms of red states and blue states. That’s bullshit. There’s working people everywhere, working people to be organized everywhere, working people to defend everywhere. And that’s how we need to approach this next administration. So the one thing I will say is that during that time, people were like, oh my God, which is what always happens in chaos campaigns. They don’t know where the ball is. So they’re like, oh my God, this is amazing. And one thing we learned is that instead of the typical strike coverage where it will say, how long can the union hold out? People are going to start crossing the line the next day, or people are not going to be able to hold out. They couldn’t say that because we weren’t telling ’em when or where we were going to strike, and they didn’t have their normal playbook. So all of a sudden they had to report on the issues that the workers were fighting for. And so we took control of the narrative, we took control of the schedule, we took control of the situation, and that’s what we as working people can do if we understand that this is all of our fight. But during that time, all these reporters were covering this and they were like, wow, this is amazing. And the one person who asked the question, yeah, but how are you fucking going to really do this was Hamilton Nolan.

So when he said, I’d like to write a book and I’d like to follow you around for a year, I was like, I don’t know. I is. This guy’s going to see right through me. And you did follow me for the worst year of my life. Thanks very much for doing that. But no, I mean, this is a really important book, and if all you do is read the intro and the last chapter, you’re going to know how to fight this next administration and how to take this on. But if you also want to hear some really inspiring stories about people who are trying to make this work and people who have won fights against all odds, read this book. And then the last thing I’ll just say is that laws do not give us power. We have power when we decide to come together and use it. Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for Sarah Nelson and Hamilton, Nolan, yo

Sara Nelson:

And

Hamilton Nolan:

Max Alvarez.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, man. I’m like, I’m crying, I’m cheering. I’m like, there’s a roller coaster here. So we want to open this up to questions. We know you all have questions for Hamilton, please, yeah, flag analysis down so we can get your questions and everyone can hear ’em also. Yeah, the recorder is going. We will have the audio for this published at the Real News. So if you’d prefer to ask a question but not on recording, Hamilton and I will be available afterwards.

Analysis:

And there’s so much to get into, so much thank you for such a rich discussion that we could talk for hours. Guess what, we don’t have ours. So we want to keep our questions and comments relatively brief and truncated so that we can get a few in. And we have one question here, and then we’re going to take a couple more hands.

Audience Member 1:

And I apologize because usually I don’t do this and I talk shit about people who do. But I’ve got three questions and you don’t have to take, I’m going to ask them, but you don’t have to take any of them. We can take one. So there are not red states and blue states, but there are red counties and blue counties. How do you do the organizing in those red counties? Two is that we’ve had a number of folk like Susan, but also high powered folk like feign at UAW, who’ve actually taken a different approach to labor. Could you talk about their approach to organizing? And then there are three different identities that we’re trying to navigate as workers. So one is our identities as consumers, the other is our gender identity. And then finally, and I think it’s most important actually, is our racial identity because all those things are related to organizing and how we think about ourselves as workers. How do you think about how our successful unions navigating those identity dynamics? Again, you don’t have to take any of them, but the questions are still important.

Hamilton Nolan:

I try to give a sort of broad answer that maybe touches on most of them at least. I think the thing about red states and blue states and red counties and blue counties goes to the heart of why this stuff is so important, particularly in this time that we’re in, where that is held up as such a strong divide in this country. And every election gets stronger. The two sides of the media, the two sides of politics, the two sides of everything. And people think that that is an unbridgeable gap, that this country is going down a road that we’re going down that is actually getting worse and worse, and the divide is getting starker and starker between red and blue. And when, to me, the one thing that can bridge that gap and that can close that gap and erase the distinction between red and blue is the labor movement.

Because I’ve been all over the country, I’ve been in red states and blue states and red counties and blue counties, and working people have common interests. And the fact that the labor movement is weak and that people don’t have access to unions is why they don’t think about that. And they don’t think in those terms. They think in terms of Fox News and CNN and M-S-N-B-C, and that’s not the real story, and that’s not the real story of politics is not Democrats and Republicans. It is working people building their power. And so I think the labor movement gets more important, the starker that red and blue divide gets, because it is the one thing that can bridge that gap and bring working people together. I always think of when the Warrior met coal strike was going on in Alabama, which was the longest strike in America, they had a big rally in Brookwood, Alabama, way out in country Alabama.

Sarah Nelson was there, a bunch of labor leaders were there, and thousands of united mine workers were there. This is country ass Alabama, and it was the most integrated event that I have ever been to in my life. I grew up in the south. I’ve never been to an event that integrated apart from maybe a football game. And this was everybody in that community there. And they were all talking about the evil private equity firm that was stepping on the necks of the workers. And I guarantee that most of those people were probably Trump voters. Oh, no,

Sara Nelson:

I’m sorry. I went to the first week of that strike, and at that first rally, people were real skeptical about the union. They were pissed, so they were out on strike, but they were not sure that they liked their union. And it was not an integrated event. The black workers were over here, the white workers were over here. They were all staying about as far as they could from the union stage where we were having this rally. And they were not talking about who the villain was either. They were just mad. And so after being on strike for six months, I’ll hand it back to Hamilton because that’s what we have to recognize too, is that when we’re out on the picket line and we are defining our issues together, suddenly what our differences are don’t matter as much anymore because we’re all human beings fighting for the same thing.

And you suddenly start to see people differently and you start to hear their stories too. You start to understand those stories better, so you start to understand why the strike matters to them, and then you start to feel connected to why you’re not just fighting for yourself, but you’re fighting for the person next to you too. And so this is where we have the opportunity to break through these gender identities and race identities, and not to wash them away, but to celebrate them and find the strength in that. Because I’m telling you, max, I’m going to fight fucking harder because I heard your story about your dad. That’s what this is about.

Maximillian Alvarez:

There you go. I mean, yeah, give it up and to pile on here, I mean, I can’t stress enough that this is the conclusion that you come to doing the work that we do at the Real News, right? I mean, you hear these stories week in, week out. You can’t help but be affected by them, and you can’t help but feel a duty to not give up on people and to help them fight the fight that needs to be had so that this kind of shit doesn’t happen on the regular. And this is by way of addressing a question about red counties, blue counties, and where the rural urban divide really kind of comes into that. Because like Hamilton has for this book, I mean, we are out there not just interviewing union workers in dense urban areas. We are out there reporting on family farmers in Wisconsin who are the last few hanging on as big agriculture has taken over the entire rural landscape and wipe generations of knowledge, of pride, of land ownership off the board and swallowed it up into the gaping maw of corporate America.

It’s still there. It just looks a little different. And the names on the sides of the trucks are different in rural America, but the same monster is destroying the fabric of our society, whether you live in a red county or a blue county, I see it all the time, not just in the conditions that workers are living under the declining quality of life and access to basic public services and higher cost of living, yada, yada, yada. But I’ve been in deep red Trump country, places like East Palestinian, Ohio, sitting on the stoops of deep red Trump voting Republicans who will say to me, he is like, yeah, look, I don’t care that you’re a socialist weirdo from Baltimore, but because you’ve been there talking about our stories, you’ve been interviewing us, you’ve heard what we’re going through and you keep showing up. And then we got unions to show up and we got environmental justice groups to show up.

We got residents from other sacrifice zones or people living near other rail lines who didn’t want to happen to their communities. What happened to East Palestine? And it was like when, to Sarah’s point, the Hamilton’s point when we’re all there standing in a room talking about the shit that is impacting all of us and how we are all effectively fighting off different tentacles of the same corporate monsters and Wall Street vampires and bought off like corrupt government systems and bureaucrats. I mean, we realized very quickly how much all the shit that they used to divide us and how it all comes down to that human connection and sharing stories that melts that shit away like that. And then when you work in common struggle to address those things, you build the working class consciousness and movement that everyone keeps talking about. There’s some great recipe.

What’s the messaging that we got to get to get a working class movement? There’s no fucking message. Just go and be there for each other, fight for one another, struggle together. See one another as human beings who deserve better than this and who are in fact the solution that we are waiting for all of us, right? You do that, you learn more about each other. You become less scary to your coworkers who look different from you, right? I mean, you’re forced to stand next to a burn barrel and talk stories about your kids in school and you realize that they’re friends and you deal with a lot of the same shit. You build solidarity through struggle, not through carefully curated messaging that I think you got to touch grass to do that. You got to talk to people to do that. You can’t just do that all online.

You can’t do it in your own little reality bubbles. We’re all living in those reality bubbles. So whatever we do, it has to help people break out of them because our social worlds have gotten so much smaller over the past 50, 60, 70 years, and that went into hyperdrive with Covid. More people went underground or socially distanced and more of their connection to the outside world was being mediated by a screen. And so we’re seeing people sharing the same physical plane, but they’re not living on the same plane of reality. And that is a big reason why Grifters like Trump and the GOP are so able to convince working people that their neighbors are their enemy. You break that through struggle. You break that through being there. You break that through being the face behind the headline and behind the kind of scary archetypes that people are fearful of. Sorry, that was a long answer.

Analysis:

I’m watching our time, so let me just take, I know we had a couple hands, I just wanted to see what the hands were in the room. So one, two. So I’m going to come here and then I’m going to move right that way.

Audience Member 2:

Thanks for this inspiring discussion. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is kind of related to what we’re talking about is that we’re in a moment of record distrust with the government and with media and the Trump administration has made clear their plan to demolish what’s left of our social safety net. And so I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what the next steps are going to be. It was a poll that found that people, people’s leading source of election news is other people, they’re not going, people are avoiding the news, they’re not trusting the news, they’re going to social media. So you’ve talked about the of organizing and unionizing and building solidarity. What I want you to dig into more is how can we use that to actually reach people and educate people and build trust and actually get information out to people who need it to hear it.

Hamilton Nolan:

I don’t know if you figured that out. Let me know because journalism is, that’s what journalism tries to do. That’s what journalism is. That’s what Max does every day. That’s what I do every day. And you have a career in journalism and you’re constantly thinking about the very question, well, we got all these great super important stories. How do we make everybody listen to ’em? How do we make people care about this? How do we make people read this? How do you make people see this? The only answer I know I could make up an answer, the only answer I know is just keep doing the work. Just keep doing the work. Just keep writing the stories. Just keep recording the interviews. Just keep publishing the podcast. Just keep putting it out, keep putting it out. And over years it will come to people. And I’ve been in a million, just like Max has panel discussions and meetings and blah blah where people are like, what’s the magical solution to make these story make everybody learn about the Starbucks union and blah blah?

You just got to keep telling the stories and telling the stories and telling the stories and write this story and write this book and write the next book and do this podcast and do the next podcast and keep talking. And for us, and that goes for everybody. If you think this stuff is important, tell somebody else. Talk to somebody else. You write the story, you do the story you tell the people. This spreads by word of mouth, it spreads through the media, spreads through independent media. There’s not a magical solution. But the thing we have going for us is that this shit actually is important and it actually is dramatic and actually is a good story and actually is something that people want to know about and need to know about. And that spreads through the power of itself.

Analysis:

See, we’re going to take two more right here and here.

Audience Member 3:

Alright, I’m going to steal 30 seconds for a quick relevant announcement. I work with the Baltimore Amazon Workers Support Network and organizing campaigns are one on the inside. Often what a support committee can do is kind of minimal, so we chip away as best we can. But there’s one thing that I want to let you guys know about tonight. We’re trying to find people who might be salts at Amazon. Assault is a person who takes the job in order to help with organizing a union. We have some friends on the inside, especially down at Sparrow’s Point. So if anybody here is interested in the work of our committee or might be assault or might know somebody who’s looking for a job or labor sympathetic or whatever, we’re trying to find people to get our friends on the inside some support. And I have one quick question and I’ll get right to it.

It’s pertinent to Amazon. To Amazon. And what about your title? I’m surprised that you guys have never gotten around to talking about why that title The hammer. Yeah, we do have a lot of different identities to work with, but some of us believe that working people should be at the heart of the matter and there’s a reason for that. The potential power of working people. Amazon, for example, fits into the whole discussion about what they call choke points, which is mainly a transportation warehousing. Amazon calls ’em fulfillment centers. Were just off the longshoreman strike. There was the railroad workers. The postal service, it seems to me has been just a scratch away from something breaking there. Old thirties song that the farmer is the man that feeds them all, but the transportation workers are the people who move it all. So that’s one kind of pressure point. I’d like to get you on that topic of choke points or any other pressure points.

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah, thank you. First of all, it’s salting Amazon, a noble thing to do with your life. I hope somebody here does that. And then when you finish, you call me a max and we’ll write a story about it. So thank you for that announcement. The book is called The Hammer because a union is a tool, a union is a tool that you wield to express your own power that you already have. When you give people the means to have a union, you’re not telling ’em what to do. I’m not telling you what position you should have. I’m not telling you what you should ask for. I’m not telling you what you want, what you should fight for. It’s giving people the means to exercise their own power. And all workers have labor power inherently. We all have power as workers because we can all not work. That’s the heart of our labor power. But the only way to exercise that power is to have the union. You got to have the hammer to do the work. And so the labor movement is a hammer to me. It’s a tool that we need to give everybody to exercise their own power.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think there’s a really, that dovetails with how I was going to respond to your question, right? Because I think I want to get to the choke points point in a second. But I think one of the pitfalls there, which you obviously know about, you guys are strategizing about this, but I’m more talking about the average person who’s cheering this on but doesn’t know a lot about how it works. I think that people who don’t know how organizing works and don’t talk about it, but they see it and they cheer it on and they see the power that we all see in unions in the labor movement, but again, have less first person contact with the realities of that, it becomes more of a strategy that forsakes the human reality that everyone needs to, we need to organize everyone everywhere. I mean there’s a moral political and in fact a self-fulfilling need to have that mentality that can be forsaken if we only focus on the most strategic points and people can then lower in their head the priority of someone organizing it.

Tudor’s biscuit world, obviously if we’re trying to take down capitalism, yeah, the choke points are more important for the amount of damage we can do. But in terms of the people harnessing the power that has been left slumbering inside of us or wasted away for our employers, the power that we actually have to make the world and to remake the world again into something better. I mean, that’s the power that you see in the eyes of people who take that fateful step in their workplaces to say, we deserve better than this and we’re going to be the ones to do something about it. We are going to change our circumstances and not just be, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, the listless play things of enormous forces. We take that step into our own power. And I see every day Hamilton sees, Sarah sees, you guys see in Amazon, when people start doing that shit themselves and they start working together, they see in fact the power that they always had.

But that if so many of us feel powerless, it’s because we’ve never experienced that. Maybe we’ve never exercised it. Maybe we’ve been, I didn’t know about unionization when I was a warehouse worker. I thought you either quit and find another job or you stay and take it. So that step, getting people to take that step into believing that they have power and that they do have power, like every working person, everyone needs to feel that be part of it. We need to fan those flames anywhere and everywhere they are because that is the larger necessity for building a grassroots working class movement of movements. People like leading the charge. That’s how we put the working class at the center. Now to quickly return to your question about choke points, again, I think there is such a huge argument for why salting at Amazon is such a noble and necessary calling right now.

And it’s what we were talking to workers about in Bessemer, Alabama when they were trying to unionize on Staten Island when they were unionizing is that look at Amazon, look at them taking everything over. I watch who watches football. Has anyone seen how much Amazon’s got its tentacles into the NFL? I mean, this is the second largest private employer in the country. This is one of the biggest international behemoths that’s only getting bigger and bigger and bigger owned by one of the most wealthy people in the history of the world. And we as working people have fucking no say over what they do. They just keep encroaching more and more into our lives. And so it was a band of workers in Bessemer, Alabama, hollowed out de-industrialized majority black, like twice the national poverty rate, Bessemer, Alabama, who were leading this charge to bring Amazon to the table and say, we are going to have a say in what you do. That’s why this is fucking important. It’s a testament to the very thesis of Hamilton’s book. You want to wield that hammer against Jeb Bezos, go salted Amazon, build that power. And then my larger point is that we just need to build it anywhere and everywhere that we can.

Analysis:

Let’s take this last question.

Audience Member 4:

Good evening. And I want to thank you first for the message and I’m seeking tools because we already have a union, but we have the public sector and the private sector. And because of the Janus rule, you have people that work with us that don’t pay the union dues. So I’m looking for tools to fight that, to fight the people that don’t want to pay into the union. But because we are union representatives, we still have to represent them. And I don’t mind representing everybody, but we can’t fight in the public sector. Does that make any sense?

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah.

Audience Member 4:

And I probably wouldn’t be here tonight if it wasn’t for my coworker here who’s very young and so excited about coming here tonight because she wants to be in the neighbor movement, but we don’t have any tools to fight with. So we here to find tools.

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah, it’s a great question. And Janice, what you mentioned is the Supreme Court ruling that made the whole public sector right to work. Meaning that if you have a union or workplace, you can’t force anybody to pay union dues. So you get a situation where you can have a union and people can choose not to pay dues and they become what we call free riders and they’re basically, they get the union contract and they don’t pay their fair share and it can eat away the power of the union. And that’s what you’re experiencing and what people like you in public sector unions all over the country experience. I think one aspect is, one thing you see is that people who go through an organizing campaign and they go through that struggle to win the union, they tend to be really jazzed up and fired up about the power of the union.

But sometimes when there’s a union that’s been in a workplace for a long time and people just get hired into it, they kind of take it for granted. They take that contract for granted. They don’t really appreciate the struggle that went into building that and winning that and maintaining that. The work that people like you got to do just to maintain the power of that union. And so it can become hard to inspire people. And what I saw reporting in my book and reporting all over the place is that unions in right to work states, unions that are successful in right to work situations. They just do a shit load of internal organizing all the time. Meaning that they are constantly talking to the members of that union about what the union is doing, why it’s important, why you need to come to this meeting, what the meeting’s about, what issues are facing us, what issues is the union fighting on.

Everything. You have to constantly be talking and internally organizing the people in that workplace. There’s a chapter in my book about the culinary union, Las Vegas, which is a private sector union, but it’s in a right to work state. Nevada’s a right to work state, and yet this union has managed to successfully organize the entire casino industry in Nevada, the entire Vegas strip. They’re one of the most powerful unions in Nevada. And how do they do it even though it’s right to work and people could choose not to pay dues. They do it by constantly, constantly, constantly talking to all the members in that union. They got lists, they’re coming to your apartment and knocking on your door, hi, I’m here from the union, I’m here. We’re having a citywide meeting four times a year. We’re getting everybody together in the union. We’re talking about our issues. So it’s just work, work, work, work, work. Constant, constant talking to people. And I don’t think there are any shortcuts to that process. And it can be a real pain in the ass as you know if you’re doing that work is hard. But just talking to people about what the union is, what is it doing, why it’s important, and why they need to pay those dues and what they’re getting for those dues is the path that I see work in unions that make that work. Powerful,

Powerful.

Analysis:

I was trying to figure out what word I wanted to choose, but your words are the right coda for this discussion that has been very, very necessary. Loved all the questions they were necessary questions and the beginning, not the end of a conversation this evening, but certainly the beginning. Some more convos and organized. I need you all to give up a final red Emmas round of applause for Max Alvarez and Hamilton Nolan.

Hamilton Nolan:

Thank you Red Emma’s. Thank you, Max Alvarez.

“In late September,” Timothy Pratt writes in Capital & Main, “a massive billow of smoke from a chemical fire spread over metro Atlanta, lingering for weeks and prompting national news coverage. The smoke has cleared, but the anger has not dissipated in Conyers, the city of 20,000 where the fire occurred, and in surrounding areas… Smoke from the blaze left some residents with breathing difficulties, headaches, dizziness and skin rashes in the days that followed, along with a deepening worry about their community’s safety… The fire was pool-chemical company BioLab’s fourth in the last two decades, a track record that has created what one observer described as “generational rage” among residents.” In this installment of our ongoing series Sacrificed—where we speak to people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s “sacrifice zones”—we speak with Hannah Loyd, Christina O’Connor, and Jeramie Julian: three residents who live near, and have been directly affected by, the September fire at the Conyers BioLab facility.

Additional links/info below…

• Christina’s Facebook page and TikTok
• Hannah’s Facebook page
• Conyers, GA, Facebook group: Helping Our Health
• Timothy Pratt, Capital & Main, “Chemical fire at Atlanta-area plant sparks local movement against BioLab”
• Holly Yan, CNN, “Weeks after a chemical plant inferno, nearby residents say they’re suffering prolonged illnesses and financial upheaval”
• Status Coup News, “POISONED Georgians DEMAND toxic chemical plant close after chlorine gas inferno”
• Joi Dukes, FOX 5 Atlanta, “EPA whistleblower on BioLab debris testing: ‘You can’t find what you don’t look for’”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, ““Let’s unite!”: Poisoned residents of America’s sacrifice zones are banding together”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH (DOCUMENTARY)”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘Towns are gone’: In Helene-devastated Asheville, NC, volunteers battle misinformation and ‘apocalyptic’ wreckage”
• Maximillian Alvarez, In These Times / The Real News Network, “Scenes from a sacrifice zone: South Baltimore residents fight back against industrial pollution”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Hannah Loyd:

I am Hannah. I’m originally from Conyers, Georgia. I grew up there and went to school there and graduated there. When I graduated, we moved to Oxford, Georgia, and then when I got married, my husband and I moved to Walnut Grove, Georgia, and we have a 3-year-old daughter and we were affected on the day of the fire with the chemical cloud shifting with the weather. And the fire was said to have been put out, but the cloud was said to have shifted and it was coming in our direction. So we knew then that something wasn’t right after we had already planned to just stay inside for the day anyways, we had planned to go to some festivals and stuff, but we saw on social media and on the news about them being on fire again. So we just decided to stay inside and did not know that the cloud was going to shift in our direction until we were made aware on the news that it had shifted.

Christina O’Connor:

My name is Christina and I did not grow up in Conyers, Covington area, but I moved to Covington in about the first week in August. I saw it was going to be a fresh start for me and kind of where I’m at in my life and my rebuild season. And so I found a beautiful seven acre home and was able to rent that and was just living life and enjoying my piece. When on September 29th, the biolab explosion happened and it was just me renting. I had roommates, I had my kitty cat there at the house in Covington, but I had left to go to work had, at the time I owned a cleaning company and I heard about the fire at 5:00 AM I saw something about it and I thought, Biolab, what’s that? I was that a science thing? What is the biolab? I didn’t even know what that was really.

But I went out and I went to work and it was close to Conyers. It was in Covington, but closer to Conyers. But I was still kind of unaware. I was unaware of what happened. And so I went to work and my clients and I left. And on the way home, I stopped at Publix and this was in Covington, and I got out and I could just feel like people were just looking in the sky. And then I got out of the car and I’m like, someone just feel weird. And I got out and I could smell the smell that I couldn’t really place what exactly it was. And I was like, well, that’s odd. And I still didn’t really realize, okay, what is this? What’s going on? And so I went home and my roommates were outside. There were a couple of dogs that were actually lost, and we were walking around the neighborhood trying to find their home.

They were walking around, so we were walking around outside, unbeknownst to us in these chemicals, they were coming because were coming towards the section of Covington, and I’m closer to Hannah over in that area, and I’m probably, I don’t know, 20 miles. So yeah, so after we walked around outside, tried to find the dogs at home, I got back inside and a couple of hours went by and I was hearing things I guess on the news or social media. I don’t really watch the news, but I was hearing about this chemical fire, and then I started hearing people, okay, turn off your air. And so we did that. We turned off our air, but by this point it was very strong outside. The smell was strong and by this point I could taste and feel it inside the home, inside the home. And so I told my roommate, we got to get out of here.

They were telling people shelter in place. They were telling people, I think to evacuate, but my instincts told me, we got to go. This is in the house. I can’t stay here. And so we ended up leaving and it kind of goes from there. I evacuated and I can tell more from my perspective as far as driving through it. I can tell you what happened to my car. I can tell you trying to find a city to escape to because it was kind of like back and forth. I tried to go to McDonough to my daughter’s, but it kind of followed me the way that the chemical plume, the chemical, they moved around. They’re not just contained to Rockdale County. So they moved all around. And so I tried to go back actually, but it was just too bad. I couldn’t stay there.

Jeramie Julian:

Hi, my name is Jeremy. I remember hearing about, I don’t watch the news, but I remember hearing about the fire and I grew up in Rockdale, graduated high school, and all I could think was, oh, well, here we go again. It is something that’s happened three or four times before, and I live far enough away that it didn’t really affect me the day of, but I kept seeing it on social media that I followed the progress of it and people were having to evacuate their homes, and it was just like this horrible scenario. But again, I didn’t live close enough that it affected me at the moment until one morning I was outside when there was a comet that was close enough that you could see it as one of those, see it every 80,000 years from Earth kind of things. And my eyes started burning after a while and I can’t smell from a previous injury that I’ve sustained, I can’t smell, and I didn’t really think too much of it then just dry eyes for whatever reason. But the burn didn’t go away, it just stayed with me. So I wound up digging around on Facebook and one of the Morgan County Facebook pages and started seeing multiple people talking about being able to smell the chemicals and smell the chemicals. And that’s basically where the beginning of my issues, health issues started from it. And I’m a good 40 to 45 mile drive away from Biolab and it got here and it’s affected me

Maximillian Alvarez:

All. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers and friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to or stories you’d like us to investigate, and please support the work that we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we’ve got another crucial installment of our ongoing series sacrificed where we speak with people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones. Now, sacrifice zones broadly understood are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself from toxic industrial pollution to the deadly intensifying effects of manmade climate change in a more just and less cruel society. The very concept of a sacrifice zone would not exist, and yet in America in the 21st century, after decades of deregulation and public disinvestment, more working class communities are becoming sacrifice zones, and more of us are being set up for sacrifice at the altars of corporate greed and systematized government abandonment. If you’ve been listening to our reporting over the past year and a half, you already know this. You’ve heard it in the interviews that we’ve done with the chemically poisoned residents living in and around East Palestinian, Ohio where a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed two years ago.

You’ve heard it in the stories of working class residents of Curtis Bay and other South Baltimore neighborhoods that have been poisoned for generations by rail giant CSX transportation, as well as dozens of other toxic polluters concentrated in their part of the city. You’ve heard it in the firsthand accounts of people on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina, whose lives have been forever changed by the devastation of Hurricane Helene in September. And in this episode, you’re going to hear it from three folks living near Conyers, Georgia and who have all been affected by the disastrous and frankly, nightmare inducing chemical fire at the Biolab facility in Conyers, which is about a half hour outside of Atlanta. Now, I know you all saw the photos and videos of the fire when it first happened back in September because as soon as the fire broke out on September 29th, so many of you sent me emails and dms about it.

And I just want to say I really appreciate you guys doing that. And please, please continue to send us tips and possible connections so that we can keep reporting on vital stories like this. As always, the most important thing here is that people out there hear directly from affected residents themselves and that we are lifting up their stories and their voices, and we’re going to turn back to our incredible panel of residents in a minute. But before we do that, just to make sure that you have all the background context you need on the fire, I’m going to read at length from a great piece that will link in the show notes that Timothy Pratt recently published in the publication, capital and Maine. Now in the piece, which is titled Chemical Fire at Atlanta Area Plant Sparks Local Movement against Biolab. Pratt writes, in late September, a massive billow of smoke from a chemical fire spread over metro Atlanta lingering for weeks and prompting national news coverage.

The smoke has cleared, but the anger has not dissipated. In Conyers, the city of 20,000 where the fire occurred and in surrounding areas, smoke from the blaze left some residents with breathing difficulties, headaches, dizziness, and skin rashes in the days that followed along with a deepening worry about their community safety. The fire was pool chemical company Biolabs forth in the last two decades, a track record that has created what one observer described as generational rage among residents. Some are now turning to activism for the first time joined by Atlanta area, mostly black led community groups. The population of Coner is nearly two thirds black, causing some in the community to argue that the repeated industrial accidents at the Biolab facility are an example of environmental racism. The result, an unusually fast-growing grassroots movement led by residents fed up with a company that they say has jeopardized their health and the environment for decades.

They also blame local, state, and federal authorities for failing to inform the community about the accident’s cause and impact in a timely or transparent manner. Many residents want to see the Biolab facility, which is one of the largest employers in town permanently shut down. Short of that, they seek to prevent future accidents. Biolab declined to comment directing capital in Maine to its website, which asserted the company’s commitment to supporting affected residents. The cause of the most recent fire was still under investigation as of November 1st. According to the company’s website, the response of the company and environmental regulators to the fire has been cold comfort to residents of Conyers and surrounding areas who are demanding to know if their health is at risk. Locals have been confused about the accidents, reach and immediate and long-term impacts. Rockdale County where Biolab is located, lifted shelter-in-place, orders in mid-October after the US Environmental Protection Agency reported that the accident site had been cleaned and levels of chlorine in the community’s air met federal standards.

In the days following the fire, Sally ing professor at the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering reported high levels of chlorine and bromine in the air galvanized by the incident. Residents of the small city and surrounding counties have gathered more than 11,000 signatures supporting a shutdown of Biolab, nearly two thirds from the Conyers area, a Facebook group called Stand Against Biolab. In Rockdale County, Georgia has attracted 1600 members. Local farmers are organizing amongst themselves, and residents are connecting with people in other communities affected by industrial disasters, including East Palestine, Ohio, which was exposed to toxic fumes after last year’s Norfolk Southern train wreck. So to talk about all of this, I sat down with Christina, Jeremy and Hannah, three residents living near the side of the Biolab Fire in Georgia. Here’s our conversation, which we recorded on December 1st, 2024.

Well, Hannah, Christina, Jeremy, I can’t thank you three enough for joining us today on the show. And I cannot express enough how truly sorry I am that you, your families and your community are going through this. As I’ve mentioned to you three already, as I mentioned in the intro, the number of people that I am connecting with, who are dealing with circumstances like the horrific circumstances you’re dealing with, the people in East Palestine, Ohio are dealing with the people in South Baltimore are dealing with. It just absolutely breaks my heart. And I just wanted to say from all of us to all of you, we are with you and we are sorry you’re going through this, but our listeners want to know what you’re going through and how they can help. And that’s what we’re going to do here today as we’ve had our listeners asking us about this since it happened in September.

And I’m so grateful to the three of you for joining us on the show and helping our listeners understand what’s really going on over there in and around Conyers, Georgia. And to just sort of extend what y’all were talking about in your introductions at the top of the episode, I wanted to go back around and ask if you could just tell us more about the day of the fire or the week of the fire. I know y’all were saying some of you live closer, some of you live farther away, but just from your vantage point when this was all first going down, could you just sort of narrate for our listeners what it was like to live through this, what you were seeing, feeling, hearing, experiencing? Hannah, let’s go back to you.

Hannah Loyd:

All right, thank you so much for having us on. So the day of the fire, I actually had gotten up kind of early and was just looking on social media and saw people posting about Biolabs on fire. And honestly, I was just thinking kind of Jeremy was like, oh gosh, they’re on fire again. What could be on fire now? So I was just kind of like, okay, this is a little bit bigger than their normal kind of little fires. So we got up and it was a Sunday and we had planned to go and do some kind of, it was the beginning of fall, so there were some fall festivals that were starting that day. And after I saw that, I was just like, we probably need to hold off on that and let’s just stay inside. This seems to be a bigger fire, so I don’t know how far this is going to spread, so we probably should stay inside.

So we stayed inside. That was in the morning, that was around nine or 10, but the fire had started around five, and I had already known about it. And then my daughter, she’s three, she needed milk. So this was around three. I was like, I’m just going to ride to the gas station real quick in Walnut Grove, and we’re about eight or nine miles from Biolab. So I got in the car and I went to the gas station, but when I got to the stop sign, I looked up and I saw the cloud kind of in front of me, and I was like, okay, that’s the chemical cloud. So I knew I needed to get home quick, and I ran in the store, and at that point, I kind of started having some shortness of breath and felt dizzy, but I didn’t think anything about it.

I didn’t want to over stress myself. So I went in the store and I got in the milk and I drove home, which was in a three or four minute drive. So I came back home and I started having a lot of shortness of breath. I started feeling like there was mucus building up in my esophagus and in my throat. And at that point, I was able to look at my husband and kind of show him I needed help, but I couldn’t verbally tell him that I needed help. So at that point, he had already called 9 1 1. So 9 1 1 got there to my house and they came in, I was in my bedroom and they came in there and they took my oxygen and my oxygen was okay, but I was having trouble breathing. So the paramedics came because the firemen came first, and then the paramedics came and they were like, if your breathing treatment isn’t working, you should probably go to the ER room.

So I really didn’t want to because I didn’t think that it was that big of a deal, but I decided at that point it was probably best that I go because I never really had that feeling before where it felt like I was suffocating. So I got to the er and then the ER doctor came over to me and I was just kind of talking to him. They had given me an IV in the ambulance, and it was the IV Benadryl that they gave me. So by the time I got to the emergency room, I was able to talk to the doctor and I was just talking to him. And he told me that he told me at least two of the chemicals that were in that cloud, which was the chlorine and the bromine. And he did say that last one, which is, I can’t think of the name right at this moment, but it’s some kind of acid, some chemical.

And I asked him how he knew exactly what was in the cloud, and he said, because the patients from Piedmont Rockdale were going to be transferred to Piedmont Walton because they were going to have to shut down the hospital. But then they decided this was about four o’clock. So they decided at that point that it wasn’t safe to take the patients out of the hospital in Rockdale and transfer them to Walton, which is Piedmont Walton, which is in, that’s in Monroe, which is the next county kind of up to. They kept saying the cloud went to the northeast. That was the hospital kind of to the no northeast area. So the doctor, I talked to him about the chemicals that were in the cloud, and he treated me. And then I talked to another doctor who’s on the board up there at the hospital, and he’s actually the one that told me they were going to send the patients from the one hospital to that hospital.

And then they sent me home that day because there wasn’t really much they could do for me. And then two days after that, my daughter, who’s three became affected and she started showing signs of having basically what they consider a chemical attack because there’s no real way to diagnose what’s really happening. I mean, he basically told me if you were a person that was having an asthma attack, but refer it to a person who’s having an attack with chemicals. And so since then, it’s been over two months now of us having to go back and forth because tried to leave a couple different times to get away, but every time we come back, we all get sick. And when I say all, I say, me, my husband and my daughter, because I mean just the chemicals they’re on, I just say on our stuff. I mean, they’re all over our stuff. And so basically that night when the cloud set, when it became dark, it kind of sat on top of all of our stuff. And so my daughter who has mild eczema, she became affected two days later because when you have eczema, you’re sensitive to certain stuff. Anyways,

Christina O’Connor:

Okay, so let’s see. Well, so that night, because I was smelling and smelling what was in the air and I was tasting and feeling it in the house, even with the air off and I was getting phone calls from concerned friends, I decided that I needed to evacuate. And so my roommate, I took one of my roommates, she’s younger and she left. We ended up leaving, packing up what we could, and we left and went to my daughter’s in McDonough, which is south. It’s probably, I don’t know, maybe an hour south of that location. And my eyes by that point, they were burning. They were burning and itching, and I could just feel it, I could taste it. It’s just almost undescribable, these chemicals and this chemical burn. And so we were driving, we had to drive kind of through Conyers to get down there, and I was just getting a headache.

It developed that night, and I had that headache for days and days after, and my eyes burned for days after I kept washing my eyes out and I just couldn’t get relief, couldn’t get relief. And I just started feeling I kind of dizzy, just kind of bad, just feeling fatigue and just I knew it was just a bad feeling. But the next morning I just started getting fearful and I was I having some car trouble? So I was like, well, let me run out and get some breakfast tan. Maybe I just need to go trade in my car. I don’t know what’s going to happen. So I drove down Terra Boulevard in McDonough and I could see the chemical cloud and it was terrifying because I thought, I’m trying to get away from this, and it’s followed me to my daughter’s house, and it was terrifying.

And so I just began, it just was very anxiety producing to know that, okay, where do you go to escape this? First of all, I can’t go home or is it safe to go back home? Do I stay here? Where do I go? How do you run from a chemical plume because you don’t know which way the wind blows. And so at some point, I think the following day we went back home, but again, we had to drive kind of through Conyers and the smell just absolutely overpowering. And I believe that driving through there, that’s when the chemicals got into my car, my hvac, because we didn’t have the air on or anything, but I think that my HVAC system, I think that’s when it got exposed. And it was just even with masks on, it was just over overpowering just to be around that.

But we went back home and my sister at one point, my sister came and she spent the night and she’s like, no, you’re not crazy. Not, I can definitely tell this is in this house. I can feel it. I can taste it. At that point, I’m like, okay, maybe I’m just being paranoid, maybe I’m not really, it’s not really as bad in the house. But she confirmed to me that yes, it was. And so from there, we just had to leave. I just had to leave again, and I packed up what I could, but I left some belongings. I couldn’t take everything. And so at that point, I just had to leave and find fresher air. And so I came up to Cherokee County area, but by that point I was very sick. I had to end up going to the ER because I was dizzy and I was fatigued.

Some of the same systems symptoms, my eyes were burning and I was passing out, actually passed out at one point and then I was hospitalized after that because after I went to the er, they didn’t really know how to treat that. She didn’t really know what to give me. So she prescribed me an anxiety pill and she prescribed me a steroid at the urgent care. And then I just had some trouble with my insurance getting the prescriptions. And by that point I was just very anxious and very upset. And then no one really would take it seriously because I was in another county and they didn’t experience that. So the fact of walking through that alone basically because besides my sister, she knew, yeah, this is really what’s going on, but to explain to somebody that’s not really experiencing that or walking through that, they don’t really understand what you’re going through.

And so I kept feeling bad, kept feeling bad, and finally I was like, I need to go to the emergency room. I need to go to the hospital. Something is not right. These headaches, they won’t stop. And so my sister took me to the hospital and when I got there, they thought that I was having a stroke. And so they ended up keeping me for three days. And of course the MRI didn’t show a stroke, but they still did not really, they didn’t really do anything for me. They were like, okay, you’re not dying. You didn’t have a stroke. You might’ve had an exposure to the chemicals or whatever, but they didn’t really helpful. And so they discharged me and at that point I had to figure out, all right, where am I going to live, first of all, and I had nowhere to go.

And so I was able to stay with family, luckily until I wasn’t, and then I just had to scramble and figure out, okay, where am I going to live? And it affected my work because I didn’t know I was trying to work, but I was sick and I didn’t know where am I going to live. And so it was just a nightmare to walk through. When I was having PTSD, I was having nightmares about chemical plumes and it was terrible. It was honestly the worst thing to have to go through. And so I still am not able to go home. I’m still temporarily homeless, displaced. I have another family member that I’m staying with currently, but I just had to decide that I can’t stay there. So I told my landlord, I put in my notice and I went back for my things, and that was a couple weeks ago.

And like Hannah was talking about the chemicals, they’re floating around and if they’re floating around, they’re in your clothes, they’re on your things. So when I went there to move them, I was even itching when I picked up these things that had been sitting there since September 29th and they were making me itch. They made a rash. I remember my arms having a rash on them when I was just even moving my things out. I ended up having to throw away a lot of things. I ended up just leaving some things because it just affected, it affected me, but I don’t right here, I want to go into the fact that it didn’t affect some people. And I don’t know if you guys, Hannah guys experienced that too because it didn’t affect everybody that way. They might’ve had some symptoms, but for other people it affected people way worse.

Jeramie Julian:

I was affected a week or so after the initial fire there, which never seemed to go out magically, and I was overexposed because I can’t smell, and it was dark outside the morning that I was out there and I was looking for this comment and I was just breathing this stuff in, and because it was dark, I couldn’t see what would look like a normal fog, but it obviously was the chemicals in the air until I started really, really getting concerned about my eyes burning so bad. And then I started looking around on Facebook, saw in a Morgan County group, there was multiple people talking about it and the sun comes out and boom, you can see it. It’s obvious that it’s there. It’s just floating like a fog. And that lasted for half the day, and later that day, the sensation never really went away. I noticed that my breathing started getting worse throughout the day. I have asthma, but it doesn’t really bother me that bad, but just really, it was really hard for me to catch my breath. And eventually I wound up having to go to the emergency room from what felt like an anaphylactic shock sensation. I couldn’t even swallow as my throat was so raw. I had eaten some crushed glass kind of sensation, and they gave me the Benadryl steroid shot and the IV

Speaker 5:

Drip for dehydration and sent me home

Jeramie Julian:

With, they all recognized at the hospital here in Morgan County what was going on, and they were all very familiar with the fire and they sent me home. I had some prednisone to take, and then was it the next day or the day after that, I went right back to the hospital because my blood pressure in my heart rate worked head shot through the roof. I saw a different doctor there in the emergency room, but they were all, again, very familiar with what’s going on and the side effects from all these things. They let me go. Then after everything had calmed back down, let me go home. And I looked at my release form and it said anxiety attack, and I couldn’t help but just laugh. And I went and found the doctor that we had just had this conversation about all these side effects from the chemicals in the atmosphere and cardiac dysrhythmia is a side effect. And he said, oh, well, I’ll change it in the system. So it’s almost like they didn’t want to admit it or talk about it or just act like it didn’t exist, even though I just spent the last few hours there talking to them about it

Speaker 5:

And they were all in agreement with it. Then

Jeramie Julian:

I came home and luckily I live far enough away where it didn’t affect me continuously. It was amazing that the wind was able to blow it after that far out from the date of the fire, that there was still enough of it and the atmosphere that it was able to come 45 ish miles away and affect me that day. And that was basically just kind of the beginning of the problems. There was the itchiness, the dry eyes, which leading to vision issues, the heart issues, random rapid heart rate and blood pressure issues, shortness of breath, blood in my nose. It’s just been this crazy debilitating thing. And like Christina was saying, it doesn’t affect everybody because people obviously still live in Con and they’re doing okay-ish for the most part. I mean, I do know some person that’s slightly homeless living in a little shed, and she’s saying her skin is on fire

Speaker 5:

All the time, but it’s been

Jeramie Julian:

Incredibly debilitating and every time I go back to Conyers or even Covington to church or the doctors there, the gastroenterologist, that was another thing. I was just feeling really sick a lot, sick to my stomach, fatigue, muscle fatigue, tired, drunk, the drunk sensation. It’s very disorienting, kind of a vertigo sensation that I get and a weakness where I feel like I’m walking through water. I feel weighted down hard to lift my legs or even lift my hands while I’m sitting in a chair and

Speaker 5:

Is just been really, really bad. And

Jeramie Julian:

None of the doctors really want to dig into it or take it seriously again or do the right tests for anything. They just, oh, well, here, you’ll be fine. Try

Speaker 5:

This, that or the other. And I don’t know what to

Jeramie Julian:

Do. I don’t know how to make these symptoms go away. Like I said, every time I go back anywhere near there, it kind of magnifies the symptoms all over again. And I just feel like I’m constantly starting over from ground zero,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man. Man, first of all, I want to thank you all for being so honest and open and sharing all that with us. It’s really hard to hear, and for everyone out there listening who’s having as hard a time as I am listening to it, just try to imagine what it’s like living through it and no one should be subjected to this. This kind of thing should be a chapter in worst case scenarios in our history. And yet it feels like a recurring segment in American history where we’re like, we’re hearing these kinds of stories over and over again. And I want to be careful not to equate every situation, every community’s different, every source of contamination is different as we’ve been trying to cover on this show, but I’m sure everyone listening to you guys is hearing the same echoes that I am of what folks in East Palestine and around East Palestine, Ohio have told us over the past year and a half, right?

All the way down to that last point, Jeremy, that you brought up Christina, about people experiencing symptoms differently. This is a thousand percent what has also happened in and around East Palestine. Some people can smell the chemicals. Some people, some people are experiencing all kinds of symptoms. Some people appear to be fine. And that’s really played into a lot of the division, a lot that the company has helped sow in the town itself because it’s like you’re pitting people who feel fine against people who don’t, and then people who don’t feel fine are bullied by their neighbors even for faking it. I mean,

Christina O’Connor:

Sometimes their family also have to throw that in there.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I mean, I hope and pray that out of these constant catastrophes that we as a society, as a people can start to understand that human beings are different. That’s what makes us beautiful and complex. But that’s what also makes situations like these so tough because I mean, it was like covid for some people. Covid was a small cold. For some people it was the thing that killed them. We know this.

Jeramie Julian:

My mom got it, and they sent her home basically with vitamin CD and zinc and said, here, boost your immune system. She coughed for a day and then that was it. And then other people, according to the media, I don’t personally know anybody myself that has died from it, but apparently it was really, really bad for some people. Covid was,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I bring this up to just because what you guys are describing that creates a powder cake situation where folks who are experiencing symptoms like you are really in a difficult position, not just because of what you are feeling and trying to get answers from your doctor, but also because some people are not feeling it. I have just seen in so many of these different instances where the companies that are at fault are going to try to leverage that against you.

Jeramie Julian:

Oh yeah, the minority now or the black sheep. And it’s not just that, and it’s not just the physical ailments, but the financial ailments as well. Those who can’t work because of it, who basically can’t lost their houses temporarily because of it. The multiple doctors hospital trips I’m taking was prescribed something from the neuro-ophthalmologist called X dvy, I believe is what it’s called. And it’s over $700 for a little bottle of eye drops to help my eyes not be dry anymore. And it’s an experimental drug. I can’t just go down the street to the pharmacy and get it. I had to wait, and then they would ship it in the mail after I go through this process and this process.

Christina O’Connor:

Jeremy, I have a question for you. Have you tried any type of holistic treatment that actually worked for me? I did activated charcoal and some other supplements and things like that, that actually made me feel better. Eventually,

Jeramie Julian:

I’ve just been using the normal little eye drops from Walgreens and stuff, but it’s like that worked for about five minutes. And even these things, I’m supposed to use these for six weeks, these eyedrops, and I’m in about week one and a half, and I’m really not telling all that much progress, honestly. And like I said, every time that I go back towards Conyers Covington, it just, and I went to Honey Baked Ham in Coner to get Thanksgiving stuff, and my eyes have just continuously gotten worse since then. My vision has just been getting worse and drier and more of a tunnel vision kind aspect and very grainy.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Can I ask if I could bring the rest of y’all in here and let’s keep kind of filling this in for listeners. Could you say a bit more what’s happened or not happened since the original fire in late September? I guess, what have you been told by government agencies, by the company itself? How are you and others in your community doing after this? Are people trying to put it in their rear view mirror? Are they dealing with health effects? I just wanted to ask you if you could say a little more, and Hannah, let’s jump back to you and kind of go back around the table, but anything else that you guys want to let listeners know about what the fall at has been since the fire was in our newsfeeds and in the headlines in September, it kind of faded away, but obviously the reality has not faded away and you guys are still living through it,

Hannah Loyd:

So they really aren’t talking about it much anymore. In our local media that I’ve seen or heard, I mean they talked about it for probably the first couple of weeks maybe, and then they just quit talking about it. I would say primarily I’ve gone over and seen more about it on TikTok more than anything and just where people are starting to post their personal experiences of it because it has just gone back to business as usual. There ain’t nothing. There’s nothing to see. Everything’s okay, which it’s not and it’s not okay. We had to leave the area at least three times, three different weekends we left the area and I would say just coming back each time within the hour, I could personally tell a difference. My daughter, she’s three, so she can’t really tell me. I have to kind of just go by her actions and how she’s acting. I can definitely tell that when we are away from the area she acts, she feels better. But when we get close to the area, she’s kind of irritated, I guess you would say. But there’s not really much I can do because I can only leave town so many times.

And when you were saying earlier about just things being said about by your neighbors and stuff like that, I’ve definitely had things said about me by my neighbors. I know for a fact, which is really sad. People you don’t even know, just saying things that they don’t know the full circumstance about why I had to call 9 1 1 that day, or why I had to call 9 1 1 a couple days later. It shouldn’t be anybody’s real concern unless they’re really actually concerned. My parents live eight minutes from me and only eight miles from Biolab, but the way that the chemical cloud went and then it shifted, it kind of went up and around their area, so their area isn’t as affected. So it’s kind of different over there, if that even makes sense. So when you have a chemical cloud that’s going in a certain area and it’s going in that area, when the day is ending, those chemicals are going to start to set to the ground.

So then when you wake up the next day, those chemicals are going to be right there on top of the ground. And then there’s going to be people that understand it and people that don’t understand it. People in my family don’t understand it as much as I understand it because I actually have been through it. So it’s a hard thing to try to navigate through because you yourself are going through it, but you have someone else in your family that lives only eight minutes up the road and they’re not going through it as much as you’re going through it because of the way that the cloud went and the way that it didn’t go over their house as much as it went over your house. So like I said, we’ve left the area just three different times, three different weekends just to try to get away to try to get some kind of relief in a sense.

But that was in the beginning, that was, it’s been about two months now since the actual fire. So that was in the beginning. So the first couple of weekends we left town, but since then we’ve been back and now it’s getting cold. And it seems like for some reason, as it’s getting colder, it’s making things worse. Our symptoms are getting worse, our breathing is getting worse, things are getting worse. And I don’t know the scientific meaning behind that. I’m sure there’s a scientist that could come on here and say, Hey, this is why that’s happening. And if there’s someone out there that could tell me that, that would be great because it’s something when the climate changes, things are different. When it’s hotter outside, its things are worse as far as symptoms. When it’s cold outside, things are worse. So there’s no real happy medium, I guess. And when I say things are worse, things are kind of worse in a different way. And I don’t know, it’s something to do with the time of day and the way I guess the chemicals set in certain areas. I’m not sure. But it’s been about two months going over two months now, and things are still the same in my area. I know for sure. So I know things are different for different people.

Christina O’Connor:

So what’s happened since, okay, so I mean for me initially the bad feelings that I was having, the eyes and just the headaches, a lot of that subsided. I think that treating it holistically and naturally, I think that that helped me. I still have a little bit of tingly and a little bit of dizziness, but I do follow with my doctor on that. But I know so many people that are still suffering, that are still sick that I talked to that live down there. And Hannah was talking about how some people are affected and some aren’t. I know I had other roommates that lived in the same house that were like, we’re fine. We’re not affected. What are you talking about? Not. And they were younger, and I’m a little bit older, but it’s so crazy until you actually experience that yourself to walk through that.

So just the anxiety and just the PTSD from the whole experience and then not being able to go back to your home, the home that you love and that you found so much peace in that just ripped away from you. It’s just been hard. And to have to just rebuild and start over and your work is affected. So then your bills start piling up and those chemicals that are in your car, you don’t have to drive around with a mask on and my car and my window’s down and it’s like, this is insane. And I talked to a lawyer and they’re like, well, go rent a car. Well, I can’t do that because that’s expensive. How long would I have to rent a car for? That’s crazy. And I don’t know if we’re talking about lawsuits or whatever, I know some people are doing the class actions and all of that because I see a lot of people, they’re jumping on the class actions and that’s fine, whatever, to each his own, whatever you feel like you need to do.

I have contacted one, I have contacted a lawyer and I’ll be pursuing what I can, but really it’s not about money for me. Yes, I have suffered so much. I’ve had a lot of loss. I lost the place that I live. There’s cost and car repairs. I’ve replaced my air filter, I’ve replaced cabin filters. I have to go get a quote to figure out, okay, how do I remediate these chemicals out of my car so that I can drive around and not be subjected to more toxic chemicals? That’s making myself even sicker. It’s like there’s cost in that. I would love to go get another car, but I can’t afford that.

So yes, I’ve contacted a lawyer, yes, I got sick. I’m not about the money though. It’s not for me about the money. It’s just about raising awareness and the fact that maybe you don’t have symptoms now, but who knows down the road you might have symptoms. And yeah, our friends in East Palestine, I’ve made friends with people in East Palestine, probably we know some of the same people. I know Christina has been a very big support for me walking through that. And she’s still suffering a year or over a year later, she’s still suffering. So I’m saying that to say just because you’re sick now doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be sick down the road. And I think that the media has downplayed and downplayed. They didn’t even tell us what the chemicals were for. I mean, it took Scott investigating and coming on the ground like he did in East Palestine to tell us like, okay, this is actually what we’re dealing with. Let’s not cover that up. And the whole EPA thing, it’s like, I guess so deep. It really goes so deep and it’s like I’m just so tired of these companies putting profits over people. It’s just not right. And so I’m honored and I’m happy to be a part of bringing awareness to this tragedy and it’s happening all over. So I just have to say that,

Jeramie Julian:

And I’m in agreement. Thank you for the opportunity to bring awareness to stuff. And I always try to, the half glass full thing, there’s always a silver lining and I always try to look for the good in something, even if it’s bad. And that’s what this could be, could turn into is some way to stop companies like this from just bulldozing over

Speaker 5:

The common people who are the ones that are really suffering. It

Jeramie Julian:

Is been crazy. Luckily, like I said, I live far enough away where me and the people around me aren’t really, don’t seem to be affected anymore. I need to get my water tested because I have well water and there’s a possibility that there’s some slight trace minerals in something that could just kind of be underlying or prolonging condition. And yes, definitely going to be looking for a lawyer. I’m not trying to get rich. I don’t think anybody’s going to get a million dollars out of it, but it is a financial burden on those who were seriously affected by it and who continue to be. And that’s the thing is we don’t know how long out into the future or these symptoms going to last. How bad can they get? How bad is this really for your heart or your eyes or your lungs? Who knows what it could turn into in the future.

I’m thankful for the doctors that I’ve seen. I’m thankful for the medication and trying to get well, but it just doesn’t stop though. From my point of view, it’s just this ever occurring thing because it’s still in the atmosphere. There’s still something there. And who knows what all there was, who knows? How does that ever get out of the atmosphere, out of the air? Hannah, like you’re talking about, that’s I think they did the curfew at nights was because during the day when it was warmer, it all rose into all the chemicals and everything rose up into the atmosphere. Then at night when it cooled down, they all lowered back down. It’s just a tragedy on so many different levels, but everybody want to act like it didn’t happen. There’s petitions to have the place closed down. Well, obviously hasn’t worked yet. What do we have to do to force these incredibly dangerous companies to shut down or to move to a much, much safer location that’s close enough to Atlanta where it could affect millions of peaks of people probably, or possibly.

Speaker 5:

It’s really sad

Jeramie Julian:

For us, for the ones who have to suffer and we don’t have a voice so much in the big scheme of things. I’m not trying to sound political, but the buddy buddy thing, I won’t say government’s involved in any of it, but I don’t know. I mean, what do you do? What can you do against something like this to prevent it from happening again or the suffering of other people?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it’s like we mentioned already, this is not the first fire that has happened at this one facility. They’ve had multiple fires as we mentioned in the introduction. Same way that after East Palestine, people are realizing there are over a thousand train derailments every year, just like they could happen in a major population center.

Jeramie Julian:

This, we need the need to start talking about it to continuously bring light to it and bring awareness to it because for people who don’t know somebody personally involved, it’s just kind of, oh, that stinks for them. Out of sight, out of mind.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I really can’t thank you three enough for after all you’ve gone through and all you continue to go through for being willing to come on, talk to us, share your story so openly and vulnerably. And like I said in the beginning, like we are sending nothing but love and solidarity to you all and everyone down there, and we’re not going to give up on y’all. And so I want to assure listeners that this is not the last time that we’re going to be talking with Hannah, Christina, and Jeremy talking about Conyers and the bio lab fire. We want to do more follow-ups on this. And I know I got to let you guys go here in a minute and there’s still so much to talk about. So I want to save some more for the next time that we have you on. And I want to make that sooner rather than later.

But for this kind of final round in the last few minutes that I’ve got you three, I wanted to ask kind of two questions. One, as we try to do with every episode of this show, we want to tell folks who are listening what they can do to help. We don’t want people to just listen to a sad story, feel bad, and then move on. We are trying to get our fellow workers off the sidelines and get involved and be part of the solution because it’s us. It’s the working people who are being impacted by all this crap in communities around the country and around the world who are going to need to stand up to the companies, to their bought off officials and the government. I mean, we’re going up against Goliath here, and it’s going to take solidarity among working people who are on the front lines of this corporate malfeasance, this government malfeasance, this media silence.

We need to band together and stick together and fight for one another. And so I wanted to ask if we could end by just, if there’s anything folks can do to help, even if it’s just continuing to spread the word or anything that you guys in your community need that they can act on. I wanted to ask if we could end on that note and also wrapping a second question into this final section, which is really important for me, and I imagine for all of you, but whenever we do a new investigation into another sacrifice zone or another industrial accident or something horrific that has put our fellow workers in the kind of hell that you guys are living through, we don’t want to reduce you and your communities to this awful tragedy that happened to you. We want to remind folks, this is a whole community.

These are lives, these are generations that have been turned upside down because of something that was not your fault. And so I wanted to ask in this final round, if you could a start by just telling listeners a little bit about your life, the community there, what you want folks to know about your community that they’re not hearing when we are only talking about this horrible chemical fire. What do you want people to know about your life there in and around Conyers? And then as a kind of final note, what can folks listening do to help? So Hannah, let’s start back with you. Christina. Jeremy round us out.

Hannah Loyd:

So I mean, just the community around here. We’re small town people. We’re just, every weekend there’s usually some kind of small festival going on, or with the holidays now, there’s a bunch of probably parades and stuff like that going on. So I mean, there’s people that are able to attend those things and be okay, but then there’s people like me that cannot partake in stuff like that because of the risk of just being outside. And to be honest, it just sucks. So I mean, the holidays, I’m trying to make the best of it because supposed to be a good time and a fun time and all that, but it’s just having to deal with the, we’re still having effects from everything we’re still having right now as I’m talking. I’m itching. So we’re still having side effects and we’re still having issues because of the fire as we go into a holiday season. But we’re all trying to move on and make sure that life goes on as it should. But as Christina said, we had Scott down here testing, and I actually had Scott at my house doing testing on my pool water. He took one of my pool floats that basically melted almost. And

Maximillian Alvarez:

This is Scott Smith, correct?

Hannah Loyd:

Scott Smith, yeah, Scott Smith. Sorry. This is Scott Smith. So he tested my pool water. He tested my soil. He took one of my pool floats that, like I said, basically melted, which those are made to withstand these chemicals. So when it melted, and I didn’t even know who Scott Smith was until I saw a post of him at the local VFW pond testing the pond water, which he already brought back the preliminary results of it being chloroform and chlorine, and it has a whole list of stuff. So I can only imagine what just my preliminary results are going to be when he gets those back. So I just contacted him via Facebook and he just happened to message me back. And he came out here and he tested that and he took my pull foot with him and he told me he’d get back in touch with me when he got the results.

And that was probably the end of October-ish. So it takes a while to get those back because those tests just by themselves, those cost a lot of money. So for someone to come down here and just be willing to voluntarily test our stuff is just amazing. So as far as what people can do now, I really honestly, I don’t know, I guess just spread, share this out, spread the news. There’s a lot of different groups that have tried to come together and there’s a lot of division that has been made, like you said, max, a lot of division in the community that has been made because of this catastrophic event. And that’s okay because at the end of the day, I’m only here to spread awareness. I’m not here to try to create any kind of chaos or any kind of drama or anything like that.

I’m here to share what I’ve been through. I’m here to share what’s helping me. I’m here basically what they call DIY, do it yourself stuff that has helped my kid with, well, her doctor says she has mild eczema, but he doesn’t really know if she does or doesn’t. So he’s just treating it as that. So just different things that I’ve done to try to help my kid get through it, which it’s more of an emotional thing than it is. There’s a lot of physical that goes to it, but it’s a lot of more emotional stuff than it is actual physical. So I mean, this isn’t over, and it’s a long way from being over, especially like I said, when I knew that there was possibly still offgassing going on. And then I saw a video of it actually going on a couple days, either before or after Thanksgiving. So they still have the chemicals on site and they’re still trying to get rid of them, and there’s a lot of them that they have to get rid of. So I mean, basically just keep listening for updates. Hopefully we’ll have more better information next time. Don’t know. I hope it’s not worse information. I don’t know.

Christina O’Connor:

I just wanted to say it starts with just understanding and raising that awareness and just educating people. I know people right now that are still having symptoms. They’re still suffering and they don’t even really know what to do. I don’t know, doctors, they don’t know. So just educating. We’ve got two come together as people and just have some understanding and some compassion. I don’t know what that looks like exactly, but educating, do the research. If you’re a doctor to determine how do I treat these people or the mental health side of it, like Hannah mentioned, it was traumatic to go through these things. Traumatic and people don’t even realize the trauma that they went through. They don’t even know, and so just really educating people and just bringing awareness to the situation, just being the change you want to see. I don’t know what that looks like across the board, but I just think we need to stop putting profits before people and just be kind human beings.

It just starts with kindness. I don’t know what that looks like as far as organizing things that we could do, just like social media pages that we’ve organized and just ways that we can speak out. Hannah mentioned TikTok. I’ve started speaking out on TikTok actually, and I would love to do YouTube. I would love to learn any way that I can to help be an advocate for people and speak for people that can’t speak up. I’m very blessed that I had family to help me and take me in because if not, I would be on the street somewhere because I couldn’t stay in those chemicals. It was killing me literally. And so I don’t know the long-term effects of what that exposure is going to do to me.

Hopefully I pray that that’s, I’m not going to get sick. I’m not going to have long-term exposure and side effects, but a lot of people do. A lot of people are. A lot of people are still going through it, so just raising awareness like Hannah was talking about, just pushing it out to as many people as we can to make, to change, to reach. I don’t know if our senators, some of that’s been organized a little bit, so who are the people that we need to get in front of to talk to that’s going to listen to us? That’s what needs to happen.

Jeramie Julian:

It needs to get out there. It needs to get out there. Call your local politicians. I live in a small rural town. There’s a ton of farmers around me. There’s no telling what effect that this has had on the cattle. There’s a ton of testing that needs to be done on more than just humans at this point. Is it somehow going to be leached into the meat after they’re processed in the big picture? How broad is the harm or destruction from this one chemical fire? There’s a whole lot of stuff that needs to be done.

Speaker 5:

Oh, yeah. I need

Jeramie Julian:

To send Scott some of my well water. I need to get some bottles for that, but yeah, that’s all I can say is call your local politicians. Sign the petitions, share your stories and make your voice heard on any outlet that you can.

Christina O’Connor:

I don’t want to induce fear, but with people speaking out, I know friends of people in East Palestine and sometimes people that are speaking out, I don’t know. I have a bit of fear about being so vocal about it because I see people being shut down and sometimes alive, and so it’s kind of scary, but I’m ready to sign up for that because I believe in standing up for this cause and yeah, like Jeremy said, what are the other effects of the livestock and the frogs that are dying in the pond that Scott was testing? Well, it’s in the water and we’re drinking. It is just like, it goes so deep. It goes so deeply. People need to stand up. Stand up, stand up.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Christina, Jeremy and Hannah for trusting us and our listeners with their heartbreaking and enraging stories and for sharing their experiences so openly with us. Please, I’m begging you all, don’t forget about them. Don’t forget about East Palestine. Don’t forget about South Baltimore. Don’t forget about Asheville and other areas impacted by this year’s hurricanes. Don’t forget, don’t wait for something like this to happen in your community and it may already be happening. Don’t roll over and accept this unacceptable status quo. Fight back. We have to fight back because we are the only ones who can stop this. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring and I want to thank you for being the change that we are all waiting for.

We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People, and if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real new newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

“During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the US economy almost completely collapsed,” historian Dana Frank writes in her new book, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? “By 1933 a third of all those who’d had jobs were unemployed; another third were scraping by with lesser work. Racism, far from collapsing, festered and metastasized as insecurity rippled through the country, pushing people of color even further downward… As we face our own crises today—a precarious economy, outrageous inequality and poverty, growing racism, climate change—and lie awake at night, facing our own fears, these stories from the Great Depression offer us new and often surprising insights into our own time, our own choices.” In this live episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Frank about her new book and what taking a fresh look at poor and working people’s struggles in the dark 1930s can teach us about how to navigate our own perilous moment in history.

Additional links/info below…

• Dana Frank, Beacon Press, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression?: Stories of Ordinary People & Collective Action in Hard Times
• Dana Frank website
• Red Emma’s website, Facebook page, and Instagram
• Dana Frank, The Los Angeles Times, “Trump Says He’ll Expel a Million Immigrants. Believe Him–It Happened Before”
• Dana Frank, History News Network, “Ohio’s Little-Known Fascist Member of Congress”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

Analysis:  Good evening, everybody. Welcome, as always, to Red Emma’s bookstore coffeehouse, and we are always glad to see you. There are many places you could have been this evening. You chose to be here with us in community and in struggle, and it is never thought of lightly.

I’m the poet known as Analysis. On behalf of the entire team, we’re glad you’re here, and we want you to know a few things. I look around the room and I believe all of you are Red Emma’s fam, I’m not sure we have any first time visitors to this space. But I want to remind you that you are welcome and encouraged to get something to eat or drink and bring it down during our discussion. Keep in mind that the last orders are taken at 8:00 PM. The stove will cut off at 8:00 PM, so you want to get in an order before that.

The bookstore is open until 8:00 and I may reopen it after our event just so that folks have some time to get in it. 12,000 volumes of a radical left independent bookstore, so it is worth your while always to spend some time in there.

Don’t forget about the Baltimore Free School classroom. That’s your place where you can teach a workshop to uplift the community or perhaps your rad org would like to rent it for a staff meeting and have us cater an event. There are all kinds of things you can do with the Free School classroom.

Where can you find out everything? As always, on redemmas.org, R-E-D-E-M-M-A-S.org. You can find out about the history and philosophy of the project. You can tell your family and friends that they can order books from us, and we mail within the US.

And you can see all of the great events that are coming up — Far too many to name right now due to time, but I will give you a teaser of a couple: Mohammed Bamyer will be here Tuesday the 15th in conversation with Eleanor Goldfield. The discussion will be the no-state solution, looking at, instead of two-state or one-state solutions in Palestine, what would a more anarchist approach be in terms of a no-state solution? That is this coming Tuesday.

And then the following day, Wednesday the 16th, Andrew Zonneveld and Modibo Kadalie present “All Will Be Equalized!: Georgia’s Freedom Seekers of the Swamps, Backwoods, and Sea Islands 1526-1890”. Andrew and Modi are always bringing rad information whenever they visit Red Emma’s, we hope that you can join us for that evening too.

Information is what this evening is all about. The Great Depression is a time period that lives iconically in American culture. I almost was going to say shared memory, but it is not shared memory for a variety of reasons. That generation, of course, is fast passing on.

But what our guest tonight is going to talk about is that even our understanding of the Great Depression needs to be reexamined from some of the stereotypes and some of the mythology that’s surrounded. And so I’m very much looking forward to getting some more accurate information, especially in terms of what kind of organizing and what kind of agency persons during that period were taking for themselves.

Dr. Dana Frank is professor emerita of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz — Go Banana Slugs. My father did his undergrad at Santa Cruz as well. A well-regarded senior historian, she’s the author of many books on labor, women, and social justice in the US and Honduras. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, many other things. She’s testified before US Congress and Canadian Parliament. The sister knows what she’s talking about.

We are joined by Red Emma’s fam Max Alverez, who is the editor-in-chief of The Real News Network, the host of the podcast Working People, dealing with the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of today’s working class, has done so much, an alumnus of the University of Michigan. And his book, which was published by OR and which we had a wonderful event on recently here at Red Emma’s, is called The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke.

We are going to get some real information about a misunderstood period in US history. What can we learn from the Great Depression? We are small in number, we are mighty in spirit. Let us give up some real radical roof raising Red Emma’s applause for a conversation with Max Alvarez, Dana Frank.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, thank you so much, Analysis. Thank you to Red Emma’s cooperative cafe and bookstore. Such an incredible institution, a vital institution here in Baltimore. It’s an honor to be back here, and it is a true honor to be in conversation with the great Dana Frank.

As Analysis mentioned, Dana’s CV runs a mile long, but I just wanted to emphasize at the top that if you are just being introduced to her work now, you have a feast ahead of you. She’s the author of incredible books, including The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup; Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America; Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism; and Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929.

Dana, thank you so much for being here tonight. It’s a real honor and pleasure to be in conversation with you.

Dana Frank:  Well, what a thrill and what an honor. And boy, it’s really amazing to be here at Red Emma’s and seeing Baltimore for the first time, and to be with all the folks here, it’s really a thrill. Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Man. Well, we could not be more excited that you are here, and could not be more excited for this book, frankly. As Analysis mentioned at the top, your new book is called What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times.

Now, I could try to summarize this book over the next 10 minutes, but I will spare our listeners that. And I want to ask if just by way of introducing this incredible, rich text, if you could read a little from the introduction and give us the bird’s eye view of this book. Where did it come from? Why was it so compelling for you to write this book at this moment? And yeah, read a little from the intro and give us a sense of what it’s about.

Dana Frank:  I’ll read the introduction and then I’ll tell you a little something about how I came to write the book. This is the very beginning.

“In a crisis, people lie awake at night trying to imagine a way forward for themselves and their families. They talk to their neighbors, they talk to their loved ones, they listen to the news, to the gossip, to the streets. They read notices pasted to telephone polls or, in more recent times, posted online. And sometimes, sometimes, they hear about a path forward with other people and choose to join them.

“During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the US economy almost completely collapsed. By 1933, a third of all those who had jobs were unemployed. Another third were scraping by with lesser work. Racism, far from collapsing, festered and metastasized as insecurity rippled through the country, pushing people of color even further downward.

“I offer here four little-known stories of how ordinary working people, facing the enormous crisis of the Great Depression, responded by taking up creative, powerful, and often visionary collective action. I follow their paths from panicked impoverishment to shining hopes for a better future, through the joys and achievements of their collective projects, to the barriers and challenges they faced along the way, including the often unromantic world of actually organizing with other people.

“As we face our own crises today, a precarious economy, outrageous inequality and poverty, glowing racism, climate change, and ourselves lie awake at night facing our own fears, these stories from the Great Depression offer new and often surprising insights into our own time, our own choices.

“Two chapters focus on inspiring, often audacious militants, especially by women. One of them tells the story of seven African American women who worked as wet nurses, selling their breast milk to the city of Chicago Board of Health, who daringly staged a sitdown strike at City Hall to demand better pay and an end to racial discrimination. It follows their path from hyperexploitation to empowerment.

“The other looks at the ways people sought to meet their basic needs nationwide through mutual aid cooperatives, eviction protests, and demands for government relief. Some by building institutions of horizontal reciprocity among themselves independent of state control, others by making immediate demands on the state. In the process, often imagining alternative societies that over and over again look like socialism, even if they didn’t always call it that.

In these movements, as in the wet nurses’ strike, women militants lay at the center of working-class activism, yet both the labor and unemployed movements marginalized women, including their work in the home.

“In another chapter I look at the forcible expulsion, known as repatriation, of millions of Mexicans and Mexican Americans During the Great Depression, I explore its roots, in part, in farm workers, successful multiracial union activism, and follow the ways in which Mexican repatriados and their allies organized collectively and proudly to survive racist hostility and removal.

“I contrast their story, which has received extensive scholarly attention but remains largely ignored in mainstream histories of the 1930s, with the exalted, in many ways, fictional narrative of white so-called Dust Bowl migrants who stepped into the jobs vacated by Mexicans.

“In the final chapter, I look closely at the Black Legion, a white supremacist fascist group in the upper Midwest organized by white working-class men and a few women, whose hundreds of thousands of members believed that racism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, and a fascist seizure of the state were the answer to the Great Depression.

“I zero on the city of Lima, Ohio, and its Lima — ” They say Lima [pronounced LIE-mah], not Lima [pronounced LEE-mah] — “Where the Legion was founded, and trace its appeal, its activities, and the forces that brought it down, and its chilling legacy.

“Today, I’m looking squarely at the hard parts here, as well as the beautiful stories. Collective action during the Great Depression at times meant process against inequality and racism, or it meant new strategies to simply survive such hostilities, or it meant finding new ways to blame and oppress others.

“At its best, it meant powerful new forms of horizontal reciprocity and solidarity through which ordinary men and women, by working together, sought to provide the bread, beans, and comradeship of daily life, drawing on long traditions and new ideas alike. In acting collectively, they built carefully from below, interlocking their lives and visions, planting seeds for the next generation, and laying roots for struggle in our own times.

“Together, these stories point a moving portrait of the Great Depression at the grassroots, deep in the hearts and dreams of working people and their abilities over and over to organize themselves and try to improve their lives in the community. At its core, this book is about point of view, both our own viewpoint and understanding US history and the viewpoints of working people during the ’30s. What did the world look like to them? Where did they think the answer to their problems lay?”

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. There’s so many juicy turns of phrase in there that I keep getting hung up on, and I just can’t emphasize enough how beautifully written and tenderly written the book is, along with being incredibly gripping and informative, which is not an easy feat for digging up dusty —

Dana Frank:  Thank you so much.

Maximillian Alvarez:  — 1930s history.

Dana Frank:  That means so much to me because I worked so hard on the writing. I mean my whole life, and I poured a lot of thinking about writing and the poetic nature of writing and storytelling.

I want to say that the book is stories, as you can tell, four stories, but there are stories within stories, and it was possible because of oral histories that were conducted by all different kinds of people all over the country, mostly in the late ’70s and early ’80s. And those oral histories of all different kinds of people, from fascists in Ohio to repatriados that are coming back after being sent to Mexico, to so-called Dust Girl Migrants in the San Joaquin Valley in California, to have their stories and their worldviews and have them talking in their own voices, it was a real honor to be able to put their stories forward.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I want to come back to that in a second, but to reemphasize the need to retell the history of the 1930s in a way that grips people. Because I know from personal experience in my past academic life when I was doing my history PhD at the University of Michigan, I had to read a bunch of history about this period, and all of it was dry as an overcooked Turkey. So I’m very grateful to have this book now.

But that also got me thinking. I identify so much with your academic, intellectual career arc as someone who has accomplished so much in the history of Latin American studies, but who has also done incredible deep work on labor, economics, politics here in the United States. I was wondering if you could say a little more about that trajectory, where this book fits into it, and your work in Latin America, particularly Honduras, and your work here in the United States, are they informing each other in your mind?

Dana Frank:  Well, that’s really a wonderful question, because, of course, I think about this all the time. Most of my wage life and what I came to call my day job was studying and teaching, writing about US labor and working class history in transnational perspective. And that’s what I taught all my whole life. And I taught classes on the Great Depression in the last years before I retired, and that was who I was. And I wrote a lot of books about that from different angles.

And then 25 years ago, I was pulled into supporting the banana unions of Honduras and Central America, and I started having another life on the side. And then in 2009, there was a military coup in Honduras, and that changed my whole life. I put on trim little suits and started going to Congress, and I wrote 35 op-eds, and anything I could do to keep people alive and to be part of the Honduran resistance was this huge honor, which I would still, it changed my whole life.

And this book was about coming back. And I was exhausted with fighting the State Department and US imperialism in my lifetime for 15 years. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. So I return — And also with the rise of Trump and Trumpism and racism in the United States, not that it was ever abated, but with more ferocious racism, I made a political decision, as well, to return to using my skills as a historian to fight racism in the United States. And hence this book. And also, frankly, I needed a lockdown project, something I could do sitting there alone in my study every day and try to feel useful in the world.

And so it was very much a coming home. But it’s interesting. What were the connections there? When I first started writing about Honduras and Central America, I was definitely terrified — What do I know about Honduras? I was very humbled by that. Still am. But I wrote a book about women’s projects in the banana unions, and I was working with these women and I felt like I was just channeling them, but I could understand the analytical categories of what they would understand as women’s projects, we might say feminist labor activism.

And so I had some analytical categories that I could understand to talk about that work, but my voice is not in that book. I’m just trying to channel as much as possible.

And then once the coup came and I was involved in the resistance, it was a very different thing because a lot of the book about Honduras and us and the resistance came from articles I’d written for The Nation or op-eds, and some first person stories that where I was using to show that you too can get involved here, to show how people, government officials lie, to show the arc of the narrative of the building, and also to make it not so boring. So that was developing different literary skills there, because also I just couldn’t stand to write op-eds anymore, frankly.

So this book is really coming home. It was much more difficult than anything I ever wrote. The research was really hard. The literary side of it was really hard. The footnotes, the proofreading, the copy editing, the index. The index alone took three and a half weeks of 11 hour days. It looks like nothing, but actually, there’s a lot of analytical categories involved in doing an index.

So I really underestimated how hard it was going to be, and also emotionally hard. I wrote the chapter, we can talk about the chapter of the net Nurses. I wrote that one first, I always, and we can come back to that, and it was like I wrote it the year of the insurrection, and I spent a year, how do I get this right as a white person writing about African American women’s history? And I’m still not sure. I mean, I’ve had a lot of support, but that was a big challenge when I got to the fascism chapter. That was a really big thing, difficult.

And the book is structured as four very long chapters. They’re 50 pages type set, and that’s much longer than a normal chapter of a book. And it makes a certain kind of storytelling possible. You can go in and out of the story, you can do context, you can have stories within stories, you can have characters in a way you can’t in a 25-page chapter.

But that means as a writer, you have to carry your conversation with the audience and with the imaginary reader for about three months of daily life. And that was especially hard when I got to the fascism chapter, because living up to what I needed to say about that story, the one about the caravans and the repatriados, and about the Dust Bowl migrants, I knew what I wanted to say. And by the time I wrote the first one, last one, I was so tired. And I’ll say a little bit more later about the epilogue, but it was a very exhausting book to write —

Maximillian Alvarez:  I can imagine.

Dana Frank:  — Emotionally, and in terms of the labors involved.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I was thinking that as I was reading it. As someone who had academic training as a historian and being able to see a little more of what I knew was a whole lot of labor going into a seemingly simple sentence [laughs].

Dana Frank:  Thank you so much.

Maximillian Alvarez:  But also as someone who now, postacademia, is doing oral history journalism. I’m interviewing working people for a living these days, and that work has taught me just how hard it is to recreate a sense of place and time without those stories and those voices.

And of course we have oral histories of the 1930s. There are famous examples like Studs Terkel’s Hard Times in there, of course. And yeah, you cite ’em here, but that’s very different from trying to narrate and recreate the daily life of working people at one of the most horrific economic moments in our country’s history.

I wanted to ask if you could talk a bit about how you did that, and also why it’s so important to do that. Because within a generation, these stories can get lost. My generation, let alone our daughters’ generation, these are not stories that are readily remembered, or even remembered at all. And the farther away we get from that, the easier it is to forget the destitution, the hard scrabble realities that people were contending with, as well as the forms of organization, solidarity, and struggle that you write about.

So I wanted to ask if you could, for folks out there listening who don’t have that memory through family connections or research or anything, take us back to the 1930s, and let’s really remind people what it was like to live at that time as a working person. What were folks actually going through on a day-to-day basis?

Dana Frank:  Well, the statistic that I read a minute ago, it’s at the beginning of the thirties, and this is before Roosevelt was elected, before the New Deal comes in in 1933, is that it’s about one third of the country is unemployed and one third is what’s called underemployed, which means people have dropped down or they’re getting lesser hours.

But also, it really depends on your sector, because some things like steel factories, a lot of factories were just everybody was laid off. Or cotton picking like the cotton economy [loud vehicle] — The motorcycles did well. Cotton prices, agricultural prices just completely plummeted, so cotton workers in Texas were just starving. And so there’s a lot of agricultural crisis as well as urban employment crisis, but it’s important to understand that it didn’t hit everybody the same.

I mean, African American people were so poor to begin with. And there’s some great quotes that I have in the book, and from three completely different sources, where they say, oh, the Great Depression, that was a white people thing because we are always in the Great Depression [Alvarez laughs]. There’s three different, I think it’s Maya Angelou says it, somebody else does it, [inaudible]. So who has this collapse?

And of course, Black people are even poorer than ever because there was what’s called racial bumping, which is people among the jobs available to women, white women, middle-class women bump down the working-class women, who bump down the African American women, even from cleaning houses, who then ended up with no work. So it’s very racial and gender specific.

And one of the things I’d say about what made the book so hard is that I’m keeping all these variables of race, class, and gender going the whole time. And not just race on a single axis because I’m talking about Mexicans and Filipinos and African American people and white people and European immigrants that are being racialized. All of that is going on in the ’30s in really complicated ways.

And in the story, and I’m trying to keep a gender analysis going, which I was actually shocked by some of the… I’ve been studying women’s history my whole life, and the raw patriarchy in these mutual benefits societies and the co-op movement. And my editors said the same thing. I’m like, why am I surprised by this? But they didn’t even want women to belong. They didn’t want to give healthcare to the women. And I’m like, whoa. They didn’t want women at the meetings. And that was kind of shocking to me, which is a different question.

Where were we about? Well, I think the main thing is that the 1930s was a huge crisis of capitalism. And the capitalist system collapsed, but also that gave prestige to the left because the people on the left, particularly the Communist Party, had been saying, hello, the sky’s going to fall, capitalism is an unstable system.

And elites were very concerned about a revolution because it was only like 10, 15 years since the Russian Revolution, depending on which year. It was not a revolutionary moment, but the elites were very worried. And, as I say in the book, there were demonstrations of up to 100,000 people in cities all over the United States demanding unemployed relief in March of 1930, which is like six months after the stock market crash.

So that specter of potential chaos and revolution is looming over the elites. And that’s part of why we get the New Deal farther into the… But mostly people are scared and they don’t know what’s going to happen next. They don’t know that the state is going to step in, particularly in these early years.

But I just want to say something else about what you learned about the Depression. Of course, my father was the generation that lived through it, and his father died in 1932, and they lost the life insurance money in the stock market crash. And my grandmother, who was Italian with four kids, eventually got a WPA job teaching sewing classes and then was working as a home healthcare worker by the end of the ’30s.

But both my parents’ families were middle-class people that were very, very poor. And there were certain personality traits. My dad, that you could never leave a light on in a room that you were not in, for example. And a certain kind of frugality that was that Depression mentality. And these were people that survived OK, eventually.

But I also, from my generation, and I was born in 1956 and I’m 68 now. I went to graduate school in 1980, and there was a whole left generation of new generation scholars that turned to the ’30s — And I’m surprised you read boring books because there are all these wonderful books that were written in the late ’70s and early ’80s about all kinds of organizing. Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe, for example, is a really shining example, but all kinds of wonderful work. And then, of course, Studs Terkel’s Hard Times came out, amazing oral histories.

People looked at the ’30s with this optimism of the new left generation, the boom of the economy from the ’60s and ’70s, and before deindustrialization kicks in.

So it was like, gee, how do we make a revolution? Look at the explosions of tens of millions of people in the CIO into the labor movement, look at all these amazing cool things that we can write about to make a revolution.

And that’s really different now. And when I took up this book, I chose topics that instinctively I felt like writing about. Frankly, I didn’t have an overarching scheme. But when I was done, I realized this is a really different point of view.

For one thing I’m taking seriously fascism in the ’30s, which that generation, except for Alan Brinkley, did not want to talk about it, particularly. It was not a burning question. And also the sobering reality about immigration politics, which some people did look at, usually more in the ’80s, turned to pioneering Chicano historians and others. And I realized when I was done, I wanted those inspiring stories. And there it is, half of the book.

The other half is like, whoa, we do not take things for granted that we’re going to have a booming economy. We don’t take it for granted we’re not going to have fascism, and that we have a lot more sobering questions to pay attention to. It’s really different than that moment of 1980 with that other scholarship that I read in graduate school and was inspired by,

Maximillian Alvarez:  This is a message to my advisors, the great Howie Brick and the great Geoff Eley. They let me read the exciting books eventually, but they made me read a lot of dusty labor history first [laughs].

I want to talk about some of these specific stories and they upend a lot of our really stubborn cultural misconceptions about this period. But by way of getting there, I wanted to again ask the bird’s eye view question first, which is what are some of the most persistent, even pernicious ways of understanding the Depression era that we still have today? And what is this book doing to turn those on its head and provide a new perspective?

Dana Frank:  Well, I think the best place to start is the visual imagery. Now imagine what you picture when you picture the visual imagery of the ’30s, and you get a white man and a breadline, passively, alone. You might get an African American man and a white man depressed on a stoop in New York. You get Grapes of Wrath, white people suffering in the fields in California. And you get Dorothea Lange and the “Migrant Mother”, the poor woman with the babies, looking exhausted.

And all of these images are individualized, suffering, passive people, usually almost always white. And that’s the image we have.

There is one other counter image, which is massive numbers of white men, factory workers rising up in the CIO building, the auto workers in the sitdown strikes. And so that’s a more heroic image.

But the people in my book are, and I deliberately picked photographs that are disrupting that image. And certainly I have a long section, the chapter called “The Tale of Two Caravans” is half about the repatriados and these Mexicans and their communities and how they banded together to support themselves while they were being forced out of the country.

And really beautiful stories I found in the papers in Texas of people supporting these caravans of thousands of people moving off Texas because they were being forced out by employers and social workers and the police and forced into Mexico, a million people.

And I bet how many people listening to this or that are here even knew this ever happened. People know it in the Mexican American Chicano history world. But it is really one of the things I want to say is let’s get that out there that this thing happened. And I just had an op-ed about this in the LA Times a couple of days ago if you want to see the quick summary.

But the other image we have comes from Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” and the Grapes of Wrath. And the migrant mother herself in real life was a Cherokee woman. She found out many years later the photograph had been used without her permission, denounced it. Her daughter has said it wasn’t anything like that.

And so we have this iconic image which rises up, you just blink and there’s a migrant mother, and it gets used — We can talk about later — It gets used to talk about migrant women crossing from Central America into the US and Mexico border. They became migrant mothers, and it’s like this thing.

And then the John Steinbeck, you mean can read it in the book, John Steinbeck was, in his nonfiction writing, wrote stuff that was very white supremacist, it was very explicit. And he wrote Mexican and Filipino farm workers out of the story of farm labor organizing in the ’30s very consciously.

And actually we think of the Dust Bowl migrants, but actually only 6% of the migrants from the Southwest experienced the Dust Bowl — This is Jim Gregory’s research — Half of them were urban to urban. 

So there were farm workers that were white that experienced [that], the people in Grapes of Wrath. But there are a number of interviews with people from that world that were done in the late ’70s at Cal State, Bakersfield of African-American and white, mostly white, but some African-American people, and they all hate the Grapes of Wrath. They say it was completely inaccurate. And I found this in this archive.

And actually if you read the stories about the white workers, and also what the African-American workers say about the white workers, it’s clear that the white migrants had subtle white privileges. They had an uncle with a store, they had a cousin that was the foreman that got ’em a job as a foreman. They had some money from a piece of land that they’d sold. So they get footholds when they come into California in ways that African American workers did not, and the Mexican and Filipino workers who had been militantly organizing had been deported.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s talk about how — I have so many thoughts on that, but I want to zero this in on some of your chapters here and show how the stories that you write about give us a very different understanding of how this decade unfolded and how history was shaped and who was doing that shaping.

We have a couple of big competing dominant narratives here in the ’30s. You could have the great men of history narrative where, out of the morass, Roosevelt rose and benevolently bequeathed the New Deal to all of us and gave us the National Labor Relations Act, and then workers started organizing.

Or you have more of a flip side narrative, that it was the predominantly white industrial workers leading the charge, radicalizing, through the CIO, the labor movement.

But your picture’s more complicated. So let’s talk about the wet nurses chapter and what that adds to our understanding of history and how it upends a little bit of those dominant narratives we have of the 1930s specifically as the genesis of the modern labor movement.

Dana Frank:  Yeah, I’ll just read this introduction to the chapter, and I say this chapter is called “Whose Labor Movement?”. And this question that you’re raising about, I want to say something a little bit first about the New Deal, which is one of the things I’m trying to do in this book is that a lot of young people are interested in the Green Deal, Green New Deal, they hear a AOC talk about it, but don’t know what the New Deal was. And so I’m trying to weave through things about the New Deal, both the amazing power of it in terms of transforming class politics and the limits to it.

And in each chapter I talk about what each of these groups did and didn’t get from the New Deal depending on where they are in the economy, what their gender is, and their racial ethnic background. Also that the New Deal is not just this gift that comes from above, it comes from struggle, it comes from defensive maneuvers by elites, but it is still an amazing achievement.

So let me just read. I’ll say something about this chapter. People have said to me like, oh, I didn’t know about the strike. Well, it has never been written about by historians. I think the people in their families, the women told the stories. But I saw it in Life magazine from 1937, 25 years ago, when I was researching the strike of Woolworths workers, white women that worked at Woolworths in Detroit. And I saw this photograph and two sentences about it, and I’m like, whoa. And I told a friend of mine who researched this African American history and said, find someone to write about it. She forgot about it, and I sort of always remembered it.

So when I went to write this book, this is where I started. And the photograph is amazing. And if you don’t want to buy the book, if you look at Hammer and Hope magazine, the new Black left online magazine, it’s free, absolutely amazing. You can see a beautiful reproduction in it. They excerpted this chapter

Maximillian Alvarez:  And we’ll link to that in the notes for this episode.

Dana Frank:  OK, great.

“On a usual day, seven young Black women would show up first thing in the morning at a ‘milk station’ on the South Side to work as wet nurses selling their breast milk to the city of Chicago. They’d change out of their street clothes into uniforms, seat themselves around a table, and silently express their milk for an hour.

“But on Monday morning, March 15, 1937, they instead walked into the City Hall office of Dr. Herman Bundesen, president of the Chicago Board of Health, sat down on two rows of straight-back white chairs along the sides of his ante room, and announced they were on strike.

“They kept on their coats and their dark round hats with small feathers tucked into the brims. They kept on their long scarves with bright stripes or flowers that wound around and down their necks, their knees almost touching in the tiny space. They took off their gloves and held them tightly on their laps under their hands, folded atop their purses.

“In the photo captured by Life magazine, the women’s faces are turned to each other, laughing, smiling, full of joyous friendship and audacity. One of them, in the rear of the tiny room, leans forward and the side a bit to better catch her fellow striker’s words.

“When a reporter asks the women how long they plan to stay, Mary Hart, age 20, declared, ‘We can strike as long as we have to and we certainly will. We’ll be here every day, 8:30 to 4:30.’

“This extraordinary strike by Chicago wet nurses was just one of thousands of sitdown strikes that erupted throughout the United States in 1936 and ’37, especially in the upper Midwest. Most famously, workers newly organized in the United Auto Workers staged a sitdown strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, outside Detroit. On Feb. 11, 1937, the biggest corporation in the world agreed to recognize the union and soon negotiated higher wages and improved working conditions.

“Over the next few weeks, sitdown strikes, or even the threat of one, produced immense union victories for workers in steel and auto plants nationwide, and for many other workers as well, especially factory workers. All told, in March, 1937, a total of 167,210 workers sat down in 170 different strikes.

“But those seven women in Chicago weren’t factory workers. Their job was selling part of their bodies. Their work represented one of the most highly exploited forms of women’s labor imaginable.

“What does a heroic labor movement of the 1930s look like if we center our story on Black women’s reproductive labor, moving the frame far away from white men working in factories? What can the striking wet nurses tell us about imagining and building a labor movement today that includes all forms of labor and the labors of all working people?

“During the 1930s, the New Deal instituted a system of labor rights that is celebrated rightly for its gains for working people. But using the wet nurses as our compass, we can ask whether the New Deal’s labor system’s key elements delivered for all workers.

“To appreciate the wet nurses and their militant determination, we have to go deep into their world and try to understand the labor they perform, then gradually pull back to understand their daily lives, their city, its culture and political offerings, and what the broader labor movement and the federal government did and didn’t offer them.

“We don’t have a great deal of evidence about the strike itself, but newspaper reports at the time give us the gift of photographs of the strikers, their names, and, miraculously, their voices. As we trace the women’s path from oppression to empowerment, we can trace the resources and examples of protests available to them in the Black community of South Side Chicago at that exact moment in time, especially among African American women that made it possible for them to sit down on those white chairs, their hands tightly folded in their laps, with smiles on their faces, gloves off.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. This is such an incredible chapter to read, and we’re not going to be able to summarize it. For everyone out there listening, the whole point of this conversation is to get you interested and go read the book, and then write to us and tell us what you thought about it. Write to Dana and ask follow-up questions, get involved in this history.

And this reminds me of a book talk that I did with the great Kim Kelly with her new book on the untold stories of American Labor. It reminds me of a part where she talks about Black washerwomen in the South who went on strike and had a significant amount of leverage, and they exercised it at a critical moment. But that story, just like this story, is just never really talked about as part of the narrative of labor, particularly in the ’30s.

So what does that narrative look like if we do include this and if we center it, like you said?

Dana Frank:  Well, the story that Kim Kelly [inaudible] is actually taken completely from the work of Tara Hunter and her book To ‘Joy My Freedom, and —

Maximillian Alvarez:  It’s not taken, it’s cited.

Dana Frank:  OK, I’m sorry. The story and the research is from Tara Hunter. And Tara Hunter first talked about that strike at a paper I heard in the 1980s at the Berkshire Conference on women’s history. And for me, that was this defining moment where you could take the most oppressed workers and show how they shut down the city of Chicago.

And it had a huge impact on me. This is the kind of history that I want to write, and I want to honor Tara’s work in this foundational moment of reframing what we understand to be labor and working class history.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Each chapter, I meant to mention this at the beginning, but I think one of the most critical and engaging parts about this book is you end each chapter with taking an elevator back to the present from the past, and it really does communicate to you the central question: what can we learn from the Great Depression, and what can these struggles of the past teach us about our struggles today?

And I wanted to ask if you could talk about that for a second. And then I want to talk about the fascists and the deportations in the same vein. But we’ve been living in a moment of labor resurgence, especially in the COVID era, a lot of new unionization efforts that we’ve covered at The Real News, but also a lot of folks in sectors that have been traditionally ununionizable.

You’ve got the Union of Southern Service workers in the South, you’ve got this new effort in California to organize fast food workers. So what can folks, working people living through the kind of crap that we’re all living through today, what can they learn from this period in history?

Dana Frank:  Well, thanks for liking the part. It was a risky thing for me to bring each chapter up to the present because it’s a big, no-no it’s called being presentist. And I’m like, I’m all, I don’t care [Alvarez laughs], this is what I’m doing. And I do it in different ways in each chapter, playing off the themes and carrying it up to the present. And that was important to me. So thank you for that.

In terms of now, in fact, a friend of mine I’m here with was asking me, like, well, it’s not like that now. All these amazing things they did in the ’30s. I’m like, oh, no, no, no. It’s totally amazing now. And look, as you say, all this, the whole Starbucks campaign, some of the stuff that hotels and restaurants are doing, jobs of justice all over this place. We have to want to honor these really creative rank and file, bottom up explosions and creative moments that are happening all over, particularly among young people.

And the institutionalized labor movement is an extremely important power that a lot of people underestimate, but it’s wooden and it’s bureaucratized, and it has a stake in containing rank and file energies.

And that’s why you want to have a sense of, we really need to recreate and rethink what a labor movement is and what happens to housework in this, what happens to the unemployed? And that’s part of what I’m playing with in the book, and I owe to lots. Again, I’m drawing on so many other people’s work here in thinking about all this. And we want to say, yeah, the whole point is to be creative.

The first chapter, which we haven’t talked about, is I’m really speaking to young people that are committed to mutual aid and the notion that we can organize things ourselves, and that there’s often this phrase that people use called “a new social order”.

And I’m also talking about mutual benefit societies, which every single ethnic group, you name it, has mutual benefits societies, and they’re also often overlapping with anarchists and socialists and the African freedom movement, you name it. And what do we do with that whole history and those meeting halls? In my town, the Portuguese meeting hall or the Lithuanian meeting hall.

And also looking at the cooperative movement. But also I’m contrasting that with the demands that we’re like, no, we’re not going to pretend that we can fix this ourselves. We’re going to make demands on landlords. A tremendously successful eviction protest movement, and the unemployed people’s movement, which really made huge demands on the state and brought us unemployment insurance.

I used to have a bumper sticker: the labor movement, the folks who brought you the weekend, and Priscilla Murolo and Ben Chitty took that and put it into a book title.

But wait a minute, the unemployed movement, the people who brought you federal unemployment insurance, but not everybody gets it. That movement was full of African American, white women doing all kinds of militant things, including beating up on cops, being beaten up by cops. And unless you were in a dependent relationship, in a marriage with a man who had been in the labor force, you didn’t get federal unemployment benefits.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Of course, we got to shout out again our amazing hosts here at Red Emma’s, they are a worker-owned cooperative. And just thinking about that through the lens of your book, you start to really notice the absences in our current society.

In your chapters, you read, especially in that first one, you read about these Hoovervilles and other areas of life where people were providing for one another at a moment when so much scarcity was all around.

And then you start thinking, well, why don’t we do that now? There are many answers to that question, but it’s like we’ve usurped communal interdependence with credit and forms of allowing people to access those things without relying on each other for it. But then those systems are very fragile.

I was just interviewing folks in Asheville, North Carolina, who are still organizing and mobilizing in a disaster zone. And they’re talking about this. They’re saying the anarchists are helping us distribute food, and they know how to organize, but a lot of people don’t. And that stuff is deeply relevant for the moment that we’re in now, especially with these cascading catastrophes that we’re dealing with.

Dana Frank:  Well, I think this history of horizontal mutual aid, particularly in disasters that people have written about, including Mexico City, in Nicaragua, one of the catalysts for the trying for the revolution in 1979 in Nicaragua.

But part of what I’m exploring is what is enough? We have ways people naturally want to do things, I think, horizontally and among ourselves, over and over again. And we have this stuff that you get here about, it’s one of these myths about American individualism and the guy with the bootstraps. I never quite got it about the bootstraps. But lifting ourselves up individually, getting ahead, which is actually not how people get ahead — They get ahead through families and neighborhoods and associational life and faith-based communities.

But it’s also, there is this thing humming along out there called capitalism, now, corporate capitalism, transnational capitalism, and a very powerful armed police state, and what is the relationship between dealing with that and taking care of ourselves among ourselves?

And we have to confront that. It’s like we can’t escape that. And also, when you start having functional ways of taking care of yourself, capitalism has all these tentacles that moves in on it, never gets threatened, and will undermine you.

So there’s a long history. You have to think about how do we get there from here, of course, which is always the $64,000 question.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to talk about the Black Legion for a second, and I was just so impressed that you included this chapter in this book because I think it’s something so many of us would’ve been afraid to, but it works so well.

And in terms of communicating why this history is relevant today, in that way, it almost felt like the most important chapter because you also write about these cohorts based on bonds of racist white supremacist solidarity as forms of survival for people who were wrong. But I mean, that’s why they were doing it.

And we are seeing that now as working people are facing exacerbating, drastically exacerbating inequality. People are still struggling to get by. They’re being beaten down, not just by pandemics, but by inflation, yada, yada, yada. Again, these are the folks that we talk to, listen to, and read about every single day.

And I see how easy it is for people to, especially white workers, but not exclusively, Latinos can do this too. But there’s an allure to giving in to the fascistic offerings to destitute working people that this chapter really highlights what that looks like, why people are doing it, and also why it’s so dangerous and ultimately not what the working class needs to achieve the world that we want.

But tell our listeners and the folks here a little more about the Black Legion and about this chapter, and what it tells us about our situation today.

Dana Frank:  You’re so articulate, moving. I wish you had written the book [Alvarez laughs]. Could you just write all that down and I’ll shove it in there at the beginning?

Well, this chapter was the other seed of the book because I originally was interested in the question of whether the New Deal stopped fascism in the ’30s by offering things to white working class men. And I think it actually did in part because that didn’t mean they stopped being racist and antisemitic and anti-Catholic, it meant they stopped organizing in certain ways.

And then the rise of the CIO and the World War II economy and then the World War II boom, which is based on US imperialism, offers certain things to white working class men. And when it doesn’t offer that to them anymore, they turn back to this bedrock.

And when the Great Depression hit, I don’t think people necessarily know that the Ku Klux Klan, how big it was in the 1920s, in the decade before. I think people know about the Reconstruction era Ku Klux Klan, which is in the South, which was opposed to African American people, but it died out and then rose again in the 1920s and was known as the second klan.

And that second clan was anti-Black, but also anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant, and very powerful. It had 500,000 members in Ohio alone. It had millions and millions of members all over the country, especially in the South, it was actually much more, if not more, in the North. And it fell apart for a number of reasons by the end of the ’20s. But when the Depression hit, that legacy is still there.

And I talk about this organization called the Black Legion, which is sort of the missing link in the history of US fascism. And it was based, it was founded at the time of the town of Lima, Ohio, and spread throughout the upper Midwest, especially in Detroit. It was secret. They had black robes and pirate hats — I’m not making this up — With skulls and crossbones, that killed at least 50 in Detroit, including probably, the family thinks, Malcolm X’s father.

We don’t know how many people they killed in Lima, but they clearly beat up a lot of people, burned some things down. One in five white men in the city of Lima were members of this, including the chief of police, the mayor, the chief of detectives, the county prosecutor, who then became elected to Congress and then refused to prosecute the members of the Black Legion for their crimes.

So very much embedded. And also took over the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which is the predecessor to the WPA Federal Relief Agency. So they actually not only controlled almost all the 48 people that worked for the agency, but the thousands of jobs, they sent the jobs out to members of the Black Legion. So this is active white supremacy within a New Deal agency. And so very chilling.

And so what I traced in this, I had really amazing records from FBI investigations, the FBI never acted on it, but there were a lot of different government agencies that investigated them, and the records are available. And also had oral histories, and I had a lot of sources. The Black Legion became very famous in 1936 when a prosecutor in Detroit, himself a former Black Legion member, prosecuted 12 men in a very famous national trial. And the Black Legion pretty much fell apart, but it was big national news about fascism in the United States.

There’s a really great film starring Humphrey Bogart that’s pretty historically accurate, except it doesn’t talk about the antisemitism, the anti-immigrant, and the anti-Black parts. It’s just anti-democratic. But it backs off. It takes a step back from who the Black Legion really was.

So I was trying to understand exactly what you’re talking about. Its appeal to white working class men. Who were these members? What did they do, and how did they take over this town? And it’s the legitimation of it. There’s a lot of middle class-ministers and other folks who keep being referred to as harmless.

And then I was also interested in who stopped it and who didn’t. A lot of people whose job it was to stop it, including J. Edgar Hoover, looked the other way. They didn’t want to touch it. And a lot of very brave people, from rank and file people, to prosecutors in Detroit and Toledo, and just rank and file people who talked to the FBI very bravely.

And also I looked at the African American and Italian Catholic communities in Lima. There’s no direct evidence of resistance, but I talk about their amazing community survival in the ’30s and the ways in which survival was very much clearly resistance.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And again, the elephant in the room that we are watching this play out right now. We see it most prominently in Donald Trump’s campaign and all the spillovers of the MAGA movement. There is such a deep attachment to this reclamation of lost national pride, lost manhood.

So many of those same dynamics at play in this chapter are at play now, and are traditionally across the world at play when political systems collapse, economic systems collapse, and people are destitute. They’re much easier to turn against one another in those moments.

And it breaks my fucking heart — Pardon my French – To see it happening to people that I know and have spoken to, and I’ve interviewed in places near Lima, Ohio, like East Palestine where the train derailed almost two years ago. This is a white working-class town. I’ve been there.

I’ve interviewed people, working people whose lives have been upended by this train derailment. They’ve been abandoned by their government, turned into a political football for a time, and then forgotten by the national media.

And they’re still going to vote for Trump. Overwhelmingly. I’ve been seeing on my Facebook feed people that I know buying into Donald Trump’s latest lies about how the disaster relief that should be going to communities in North Carolina devastated by the hurricanes, all that money is going to “illegals”. It’s seizing upon people’s destitution, preying upon it and turning it against their fellow worker in ways that you can see how that plays out in your book. And it’s playing out in front of us right now.

And that also leads me to the chapter about the mass deportations. Because one of Donald Trump’s biggest slogans right now, people at the RNC were holding signs saying “mass deportation now”.

You actually write about a period in history where that happened. And as you said, a lot of people don’t know it happened. So tell us a little bit about that chapter and what it can tell us about what people in the half country are calling for right now.

Dana Frank:  [Good] question. We’re all trying to figure out how is it that Trump’s appeal is so mind boggling and strong, including in communities of color? This has been shocking to so many of us. And you’re the media expert. So much of it is like Fox News and narratives that are being fed to people that don’t have access to other critical thinking about the news. And it’s unbelievably chilling, as we all know.

And I would just say that Lima, Ohio, is in Jim Jordan’s district, and although Lima itself did not vote for Trump, there’s also a Black Lives chapter. Lima is now 25% African American. There’s still truly terrifying police control there of the African American community, but there’s also pushback now. And I want to underscore it’s not just a victim story of the African American community in Lima, not that it ever was.

The second chapter is called “A Tale of Two Caravans”, and half of it is the part I was talking about, about the Dust Bowl migrants and that myth, but the main thrust is about the people who were called repatriados, or the repatriated ones. And these were people who were not technically deported. There were 82,000 Mexicans who were legally deported by the federal government in the ’30s. And a lot of those were union activists in California and other parts in the Southwest.

But most of these, it was somewhere between 300,000 and 1 million people. There’s different estimates because the records were not kept at the border properly. And they were people who’d been living in the US for a decade or two, they had US-born citizen children, and they’re being laid off by jobs, by employers that lined up all the workers and say all the Brown people are on one side and all the white people on the other — This is in Los Angeles — And telling them that only the white people, American jobs for American workers. We’ve heard that slogan that has risen up again since the ’30s.

Or they would go to the welfare office, the relief office, the way white workers did, and be told, no, we have nothing for you. Here’s a train ticket to Mexico. You don’t belong here. Or they were put on boats, sometimes, from San Diego. Or a lot of people in Texas were just starving by the tens of thousands. And so they formed caravans.

And of course, having somebody who had been working on Central America for a long time, I was conscious of a reference to caravans. And there were these very beautiful caravans of up to 2,000 people. And I open the chapter with one from a place called Karnes City, which is near Laredo. And they traveled in vehicles that were donated by Mexican middle-class people, and trucks. And they traveled to San Antonio and then to Laredo and over the border.

And the middle-class community greeted them by the streets by the tens of thousands, donated whole steers to cook food. And there’s some beautiful lists that I found in La Prensa from San Antonio, a Spanish language newspaper, of things that were donated by regular people to give to the people that were going south over the border.

And it’s very complicated because the Mexican government actually supported repatriation because it was threatened by the Mexican revolution and its own social movements and wanted to demonstrate that it was the father taking care of the children. If they would just come back to Mexico, they would be taken care of, which did not happen. There were some big schemes that completely fell apart.

Most of the people who left that went back to Mexico went to their original villages and were absorbed in the villages. But many of them then come back after or even during World War II. Because what happens is in World War II, the economy booms, so white men in particular get good factory jobs. And who’s going to pick the crops? So then the US creates a Bracero program, which brings hyper exploited Mexican men into the United States to terrible conditions, and some of those were actually the ones that had left under repatriation.

Now here’s the story of this, unbelievable, as many as 1 million people, and a third of them were US-born children. And there was terrible family separation because the younger kids went with their parents, but a lot of the older kids did not want to go and stayed, and there were terrible separations of families. It was really hard for those older kids because they didn’t necessarily speak Spanish, they were acculturated to US culture in very different ways. So it was a lot of very traumatic family separation.

And this has been written about, memory was kept alive in the Mexican American community. But as Francisco Balderrama, and I forget his first name, excuse me, [Raymond] Rodriguez, a really great book called Decade of Betrayal. They did a lot of interviews in the ’70s and ’80s, I [don’t] know the exact dates. And that there were people that they interviewed that had never talked to their children about it because of the trauma of it.

And they did really beautiful work. That book, Decade Betrayal, I would encourage people to read. It includes a lot of these voices. And they actually got an apology from the state of California, if not reparations. It’s taught in Chicano and Mexican American Latino history classes, but it has not crossed over into the mainstream of US history. And how does this happen, that something like this could just be forgotten?

And then you have the enshrinement of the white Dust Bowl migrants as the central narrative [Alvarez laughs] of farm workers in California when it’s largely a fiction, or those people were in that situation for three or four or five years.

And there are also some African American farm workers in California, but the Mexicans and the Filipinos in the early ’30s were super militant. And there was a strike of tens of thousands of cotton workers in 1933 that raised wages in the middle of the Great Depression, and all kinds of amazing organizing, and that was shut down.

Deborah Weber has shown that the white workers didn’t have a tradition of union organizing because they had been farmers, or not even farmers, and the Mexicans and the Filipinos, they had been farmers too, but a decade before, and they lost their land in Mexico or in the Philippines. And so they were accustomed to wage labor and having to make demands, and the white workers were not militant and did not want to unionize for the most part. And so it also had this tremendous effect on farm labor organizing for those that were still there.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I could genuinely talk to you for hours about this, but I know that we probably only have time for maybe two more questions that I want to squeeze in. And I just want to emphasize one more time for everyone listening to this, everyone out here right now, go read this book. It is full chock-full of rich stories, important insights inside of US history that many of us have never actually heard about before.

And I want to end on a bigger picture question about, again, what can we learn from the Great Depression. But by way of getting there, you mentioned how there is one key echo in contemporary times to the period of the 1930s that does resonate with younger folks these days, and that is the Green New Deal.

This is a demand that grew out of the last 10 years in a lot of young progressive left-leaning folks who were all, understandably, terrified and freaked out about the climate crisis looking to the New Deal as a model for how to address a global crisis of this magnitude.

Now there’s a whole lot there that we can get into that we don’t have time for, but I think one thing that really struck me reading your book, you mentioned the WPA, which stands for Working Progress Association?

Dana Frank:  Works Progress Administration.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Works Progress Administration, sorry. But the WPA, the New Deal, one of the things that most stick out to people about that is the notion of the government putting people to work and public works being a thing. And this is very key for whatever a sustainable economy and society needs to be in the era of the climate crisis. There’s a lot of work to be had in reclamation. There are a lot of union jobs to be had in green sectors. But we’re not there.

So I wanted to ask what from the period of the New Deal can we actually learn to apply to the climate crisis today? And how can we learn to better articulate our demands and shape our vision for the future by looking back at that time?

Dana Frank:  Well, that was nice what you said. I’ll take what you just said.

I think it’s about being able to imagine an activist state and demanding an activist state. The New Deal didn’t just come out of the sky because elites were worried, which it did partly, but that people demanded it.

One of the things I talk about, which other people have documented, this is not original to me, is that the ways in which people at the beginning of the Depression internalize their failure, particularly white men, not so much African-American men, but white men, and that they had failed their families, and it was their fault, even though a third of the country was unemployed. It was very obviously an external crisis causing their supposed individual failure.

And one of the things the unemployed movement of the early 30’s did to organize by the left and the anti-racist left was it took that stigma off of the individual person and said, not only is it not your fault, but you have a right to demand of the state, and the state has to give you a job or give you relief or give you housing or whatever. This sense of entitlement to the redress by the government. And that happens over the course of the first three years.

So by the time you get the New Deal, it’s like the government is supposed to be doing this. This is not about my individual failure. And that demand and that entitlement is this important transformation that the social movements bring about.

And that I think we don’t even know how to imagine that the state does good things, especially on this enormous scale that the New Deal did on so many different fronts.

But not only did it give people relief jobs to tens of millions of people, but the jewels in the crown are actually the structures that open Social Security and the social security system, and federal unemployment insurance, and the National Labor Relations Act, which, what’s his name, Trump wants to get rid of in the National Labor Relations Board, this system that protects the right to organize and demand of your employer.

And although it didn’t say give more money to the workers, it said give the workers a legal framework to be protected while they demand it. But it was designed to tip the balance of power between labor and capital very consciously.

And the notion that the state would do these things, I’m like, hello, let’s think big. And so the New Deal is this amazing and, in many tremendous ways a successful thing, but you also have to have your eyes open about the limits to it because there are race and gender politics to it. And these sectors that were excluded from all of those things I just mentioned, as well as the Fair Labor Standards Act, which creates the federal minimum wage and agricultural labor in the fields, government workers and domestic workers in the home, and women working not for pay, or anybody, but in a home, but they were all excluded from the benefits of those systems.

Now, eventually, most of those groups are going to be included in complicated or limited ways. So the space is open there to expand them. But it’s really important to see who did and didn’t benefit from the New Deal because it’s those white male industrial workers in the upper Midwest who are most likely to benefit from it, and it’s the wet nurses who are least likely to benefit from it.

So you also have to have your eyes open about the race and gender structural… It wasn’t like they got up in the morning and said, let’s be racist. All the [inaudible] Democrats that pushed a lot of this through [Alvarez laughs], they did, how are we going to keep the Black people down? But it’s also true that it was also compromises that were made by Roosevelt and others to get these programs through, and then people have fought since to get them expanded to apply to other people.

So there are a lot of debates about the race and gender politics in the New Deal, but there’s no question that it was this huge activist intervention by the state. That is a really different thing than saying, let’s take care of ourselves and model what we want down here. Let’s think big about what the state should be. And then you’re getting these questions about big bureaucratized state enterprises and how are you going to manage them. So it’s not a simple thing.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to come back to the central question in the title of your book, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? Because as this conversation has shown, and as this book shows time and again, this is a period that we can learn a lot from. Not just in the optimistic, what are the hopeful signs of how to make a better world that we can find in the ’30s — And there are many, and you write about them beautifully, and we should learn from them.

But you also give us examples of how things can go bad and how they can get worse, and how people can be duped or dupe themselves into taking easier routes to salvation that sacrifice the well-being of their neighbors or other people.

I guess there’s no easy answer here, but I wanted to end this incredible conversation first by thanking you for writing this incredible book. Thank you for this incredible conversation. And yeah, I want to give you the final word here, both in the bad and the good. What can we learn from the Great Depression today?

Dana Frank:  Do we have time for me to read the epilogue?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Absolutely.

Dana Frank:  Well, I am very conscious that I don’t have any simple lessons. I ended up feeling like when I tell these stories, there’s some failed things about listening to working people, working people can run things themselves, working, people are creative. You have to understand the roots of people’s anxieties and address them. You have to take immigration politics seriously. And all of those things are the bedrock of this book.

And when you think about work and working people, you have to imagine all working people and all work. And there’s some bedrock principles in the book. And after that, I got kind of sobered by thinking about them like I wrote the book in a way that’s open ended. I got a lot of opinions in here, as I always do, but I also try to just say, OK, we’re in this together. Let me do the best I can to tell you this story and let’s think about it.

So let me just read the epilogue, OK, if there’s time. And the people at the beginning are all characters in the book.

“William Smith, the Lima Farmer in his overalls who talked back to Virgil Effer, the fascist leader, even though he was surrounded by hundreds of armed men with flashlights.

“Ruby Lucas, who sat on the stoop in her squirrel coat with a cup of coffee and announced, ‘I’m warring on the millionaire bankers whose greed has turned widows and orphans and destitute into slaves.’

“Mary Hart, camped out in a white chair at City Hall, who told reporters what they’d been paying ain’t enough for car fare.

“The unnamed elderly man on horseback who, as he crossed the border, threw his hat up in the air and shouted ‘Viva Mexico!’

“All of them, along with the inspiring collective actions of which they were part, have seemingly disappeared from history. So too the more chilling figures here, the men who held the flashlights, the policemen who threw down their badges and guns when told they could only use sticks, not bullets, against African American relief protestors.

“Indeed, a common theme emerges in these chapters: Invisibility. Women’s domestic labor was invisible to both the menfolk and to the state. The expulsion of a million Mexicans and Mexican Americans was invisible to most non-Mexicans and remains so. And then there was the Black Legion trying to hide its clandestine work of hate. The Ku Klux Klan, after all, was known as the Invisible Empire.

“Today in most mainstream renditions of the Great Depression in the United States, these stories from the grassroots remain largely invisible, largely forgotten. We need their stories, though, for our own time, full of its own terrors, resurgent fascism, steel borders, climate change. Neither capitalism nor racism has collapsed. Patriarchy hums along. Today, we need our own New Deal too, an activist state that curbs the rich, defends labor rights, redistributes wealth, and provides a safety net and free health care to everyone. We can join those who advocate for a Green New Deal to help stave off climate disaster.

“Trying to use the state to contain capitalism won’t ever be enough, though, because, in its very nature, the system dedicates itself to slipping out of and tearing apart any fetters. We need, like those seeking social justice in the 1930s, to dream up our own new social order, to build social movements that demand it and to model it in our own collective lives.

“During the time I wrote this book, three scary plagues visited my community. The first, of course, was the COVID pandemic. The second was a set of fires in August [2020] that destroyed over 700 homes in the Santa Cruz area, including those with people I knew, burned down acres and acres of beloved forests, and crept close enough to my house that the evacuation line was eight blocks away. For another year, we prayed for rain, but instead got more drought.

“In the last months before I finished this book, drenching rain was finally predicted for the day after Christmas, so I hurriedly planted grass where gophers had torn up the more or less lawn covering my backyard and had left bare dirt that turned into gunk that I tracked constantly into the house. I raked the soil, sowed grass seeds, covered them with mulch. Then over it all spread burlap coffee sacks to protect the seeds from the birds, anchoring down the corners with bricks.

“Then it rained in biblical proportions for days and days. Plague number three: sinkholes four blocks from my house appeared on the national news, as did a levee breach in a nearby town that destroyed the homes and livelihoods of hundreds of already impoverished people.

“Less disastrously, my own backyard turned into a lake, which inched into my study and garage. It was only one inch deep. No historical research was hurt, but the seeds were underwater. For three weeks, I watched the lake drown them. When the lake finally receded, I lifted off the burlaps sadly. The seeds were still there but no grass.

“One morning, though, I detected individual thin, dark blades miraculously scattered across the ex-lake. Then it flooded again for another entire week. Now I mourned my drowned grasslings, which I imagined waving for help underwater, kelp-like in the murky swamp.

“Finally, the water sank for good. With a bit of sun, the grass babies flourished, their roots happy in the rich muck, locking with each other and spreading horizontal networks that joined other thicker patches on nearby higher ground. I looked out the window and saw a beautiful sea of green fur.

“We are not grass, but we know how to survive fire and flood and beasts that tear up our landscapes. We know how to lay low, then rise up. We know how to survive when we are underwater. We know how to link our roots with others. We know our roots can flourish in deep muck. We know how to thrive. And we know how to learn from history.

“William Smith, Ruby Lucas, Mary Hart, and the man on horseback didn’t, in fact, disappear. They all appeared in newspapers at the time, which is where I found them, and they are now in this book almost 100 years later, speaking to us. They aren’t invisible.

“In taking on the terrors of our own time, we can learn from the grassroots activists of the 1930s who sought justice and equality, and carrying them in our hearts as we step off our stoops, step over borders, and march into the streets, sinking our toes deep into the rich, messy muck of history.”

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s give it up for Dana Frank, everybody [applause].

Longtime Working People listeners will be familiar with Max and Mel’s extended work discussing the supply chain, the workers who keep that system running day in and day out, and the dangerous and exploitative working conditions that many workers labor under. Our global economy relies on these workers to stay running–and bosses around the world use this pressure as a cudgel against the workers.

For today’s episode of Working People, we’re zooming out and taking a look at the global supply chain with Judy Gearhart, research professor with the Accountability Research Center at American University and host of the Labor Link Podcast, a podcast about “the brave individuals organizing the workers who make our stuff.” With decades of experience collaborating with organizers and rights advocates supporting worker struggles in the Global South, Judy is uniquely positioned to bring the stories of these workers forth to her listeners.

Additional links/info:

• Check out the Labor Link podcast here.
• Labor Link Podcast, “S2E4 – Hariyanto Suwarno (Indonesian Migrant Workers’ Union) and Charli Fritzner (Greenpeace USA)”
• Mel Buer, “Corporate billionaires are wrecking the supply chain. Just look at the railroads.”
• Teddy Ostrow and Ruby Walsh, “UPS and the Logistics Revolution”

Permanent links:

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube hannel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music:
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Speaker 1 (00:17):

Hi, I’m Judy Gerhardt. I’m a research professor with the Accountability Research Center at American University at the School for International Service, and I host a podcast called the Labor Link Podcast, which is about workers organizing and global supply chains.

Speaker 2 (00:33):

Hello everyone. It’s your host, Mel er, and welcome back to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. If you love what we do and are looking for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks that you’d like us to talk to.

(01:18)
And please support the work we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. Long time TRNN supporters will be familiar with my previous work on the US supply chain and the integral role that railroad workers played in maintaining the network of goods and services that keep our country running as we learned in 2022. Without the workers, these networks don’t run. Bottlenecks happen and the national and global economy can grind to a stuttering halt. If you haven’t read my previous coverage on it, then please check it out at the link in our show notes on today’s episode of Working People, we’re going beyond the borders of the US and trending our focus on the international workers who keep the world’s global economy running.

(02:04)
This is likely going to become a series of interviews with workers from all over the world, but I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself. So to start this conversation, I thought it would be important to bring on someone who’s been doing the important work of giving a platform to the workers who make these global industries run. I want to talk to her about her life and research and dig into the important work that she’s doing now. As always, it’s my goal to give you our listeners the context you need as we pull back the curtain on contemporary labor organizing both in this country and worldwide. So with us today to help us get that conversation rolling is Judy Gerhart, research professor with the Accountability Research Center at American University and host of the Labor Link Podcast, a podcast about the brave individuals organizing the workers who make our stuff with decades of experience collaborating with organizers and rights advocates, supporting worker struggles in the global south, Judy is uniquely positioned to bring the stories of these workers forth, her listeners from their website.

(03:01)
The Labor Link Podcast touches on many aspects of the global economy, trade policy, international development programs, corporate accountability, and the international human rights norms meant to protect workers from abuse. The first Labor Link podcast series featured organizers leveraging transnational campaigns to build power. And this second series is on Fisher driven solutions to the seafood industry, featuring interviews with Fisher organizers from around the world who are overcoming challenges and using creative strategies to advance fisher’s rights in the global fishing industry. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Judy. I’m really excited to have this conversation.

Speaker 1 (03:37):

Thank you so much, Mel. I really appreciate you and Max having me on.

Speaker 2 (03:41):

So to start off our conversation, I first wanted to give our listeners a chance to get to know a little bit more about you and your work, your career. How did the last couple decades of organizing nonprofit work bring you to this current research?

Speaker 1 (03:55):

Wow. So I have been working, I think I started about 30 years ago actually doing organizing work in Mexico and I got to know a lot of amazing people who were organizing women in the export processing factories, the macula ladora in northern Mexico. And really that was the beginning. I mean, I went to Mexico knowing that I wanted to work on economic rights. I had done that college study abroad in France when Miran, the socialists were in power, and I had been going to college in Philadelphia where it had the highest per capita homelessness rate. So that had gotten me all thinking, okay, I need to understand economic rights. And when I went to Mexico and met people who were organizing workers and the workers themselves, I fell in love with the movement. I fell in love with these people who are, they’re trying to do good in the world, but they’re also trying to build power for the people who don’t have it. And I really found their campaigns and their struggle compelling.

Speaker 2 (05:09):

So what did you end up doing after you finished that work in Mexico? Where did you go next?

Speaker 1 (05:17):

So it’s a little bit of a meandering story. So I went to grad school and I went and worked for the United Nations. I went to back to Honduras and worked for the International Labor Organization and for unicef, and I realized that international instruments are blunt end instruments. There was a lot of campaigning at the time about child labor in the Honduran export factories. You’ll remember maybe some people will remember the Kathy Lee Gifford scandal. That happened because there were 14 year olds making clothing for her. And being in Honduras at the time, I was really aware of the complexities of what was happening because you had 50% of kids in school got through elementary school, and by the time they were 13 or 14, if they hadn’t finished elementary school, they couldn’t go on to middle school. So they had to work. And our international campaigns ended up pushing a lot of 15 to eight to 17, 15 to 16, 17 year olds out of the workforce because all the global brands said no more child labor.

(06:25)
And then you had this sort of moment of struggle. And for me it meant I could see the power of the international mechanisms, but I also knew that we needed to figure out a way to connect with workers on the ground and what kind of remedy they needed. I then landed back in New York and I got a job with Social Accountability International, working on workplace standard, voluntary workplace standard, the basis for social audits. And in the beginning I thought, this is great because at the time you had a lot of companies putting out codes of conduct that didn’t include freedom of association and collective bargaining didn’t include a living wage. So I was part of a group of people trying to convert international human rights norms into language that was atory for companies basically saying, you should do this, you should do that. This is what it means for what you need to do in your supply chain.

(07:25)
And because it included those core rights, I found it compelling and I thought we could use it as an education instrument, which we did. We did a lot of worker training, we had a lot of trade unions. We partnered with the apparel unions globally, and we used that tool to help them in their negotiations and collective bargaining. But I ran into a bit of a wall at some point because the social auditing was, it was a voluntary mechanism. They reported the results of the audit, but not enough of the details. So it was confidential like so many of these initiatives. And at the time I started realizing I was not going to be able to change those core flaws in the social auditing and the voluntary compliance mechanisms. I was lucky enough to become the executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum, and then I spent 10 years working with amazing organizers and campaigners around the world and doing worker tours supporting, I was part of the team of people who helped negotiate the Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, which is a binding first of its kind transparent agreement. It’s basically a collective bargaining agreement between transnational apparel brands and the Bangladeshi unions and global unions. And that brought me to today where I’m really trying to figure out how do we take those amazing organizers and share their stories with other people so that they themselves can influence policy and also academic thinking to the extent I’m not a real academic, but to the extent that I’m part of the academy at this point.

Speaker 2 (09:13):

So the work that you do with the research center then is really kind of doing these interviews, talking to these workers, gathering this information and trying to present it to not just academic audiences, but translate this into potential policy objectives for the various organizations that you work with. Is that kind of a good understanding of the kind of work that you’re doing now?

Speaker 1 (09:36):

Yeah. Everything we do is trying to bridge between the global policy trade or corporate policies and what the workers on the ground are actually doing. I work with some great colleagues at the accountability research center who they work with health rights advocates in Guatemala or on education reform in the Philippines. Their work is a lot about community driven government accountability, and it was a perfect place for me to land with worker driven corporate accountability, this idea that we need to enable the workers and the organizers on the ground to influence the policies that are affecting them.

Speaker 2 (10:21):

I think this is kind of a good segue to really get into what your current focus is with the Labor Network or Labor Link podcast rather. Your first, or your series, I should say that you worked on was about these transnational campaigns to build power. Before we get into your current work with the Fishers in the fishing industry, was there anything that surprised you as you were interviewing these workers about the campaigns they were engaged in or about the workers themselves?

Speaker 1 (10:53):

So I think the thing that first surprised me is when I started working more heavily on research for arc, I was doing a lot of long form interviews, and when I first sat down to write the report that I had gotten a grant to write, I pulled the transcripts, which I guess many academics do all over the world, but I read the transcripts. I’m like, there’s so much smarter than me. What they have to say is so much more powerful. And that’s where I started saying, wait a minute, how do I figure out a way to put this out? So through the Labor Radio podcast cust Network, I met Evan Matthew Pap, who helped me with the first series through Evan. I met Jules who’s helping me with, who’s producing the second series, and it made it somewhat possible. I really hats off to what you do at working people.

(11:50)
It’s a lot of work. The thing I guess that surprised me, if anything, other than just this realization that I need to find a way to get their voices heard was the things I discovered about people I’d been working with for years. So the first four people I interviewed, I had known for anywhere from six to 12 years at the time, and I had helped them with worker tours. And when I was the director of the International Labor Rights Forum, we had given awards to their organizations for the organizing work they were doing. So that’s why I had wanted to start with them. But it was really taking that time to do the long form interview that I learned things like the organizer from Myanmar from the Migrant Worker Rights Network in Myanmar. He was an activist from Myanmar, and I compare him and I think the show notes, he’s basically like this Mother Jones character in my head because he comes from Myanmar shows up in Thailand, and he’s just trying to make a living. He’s escaping because he was at risk of losing his life or getting jailed in Myanmar. And so then he goes to Thailand and pretty much immediately starts organizing. And one of the big issues in Thailand is migrant workers can’t form a union. They can join a union, but they can’t form a union. But that didn’t deter haw.

(13:20)
And he and another expat who also had escaped cente, they started seeking out the trade unions and SA Karn, who’s another one of the first interviewees, so Sait Karn from the state Employee Relations Committee is a visionary. I mean, he basically said, okay, I may be maybe representing primarily Thai workers from public sector jobs, but we’ve got to help migrants. And he did, and he supported the Migrant Worker Rights Network and he did a lot of other things to try and bridge that gap, which is something I think the US at the time I met SA was really still beginning and improving upon, but it certainly took us a moment to try and bridge between traditional organized labor and migrant workers, and I think the movement’s better for it.

Speaker 2 (14:17):

Right. There are a couple things I wanted to just kind of touch on before we move forward. Really first, to share solidarity with you as a podcast host and a researcher and the realization that you come to that, the people that you interview really are the experts in the industries that they work in. And the job is kind of interviewees to really kind of set and open up a space where these folks, these workers can talk about the experiences that they live every day, whether it be the working conditions, the organizing that they do. And that’s sometimes a tough job. A lot of folks really get uncomfortable when the mic turns on. It’s oftentimes pretty difficult to get folks to feel like they can really talk authoritatively on the experiences that they have because they ask. The same question that we ask often is, how am I a representative for this?

(15:17)
Am I supposed to be here talking about this? And the reality is, yes, working people, a lot of the work that Real News does, what we do is we try to create this space where we recognize that the workers that we talk to are the experts and that they are the ones who are bringing this experience forward for our audience to understand. And that’s a tough job. And so I don’t want you to feel like you’re not doing a good job. I think it’s a really unique position to be in, and it’s a very privileged position to be able to bring these folks forward and provide this platform. And so I just wanted to acknowledge that work that you do and that it’s really important.

Speaker 1 (16:00):

Matt, Mel, back at you. I mean, I really appreciate what you all do, and I would be thrilled if you ever want to interview, I’d be happy to facilitate the conversations in the context. It’s really true what you’re saying. I mean, so Tola Moon from Cambodia, who’s one of the first people I interviewed, I mean, there are many of us in the international community who see Tola as this really incredibly brilliant strategist, and he’s very low key. And his organization, the Center for the Alliance of Human Rights and Labor is currently under threat that the Cambodian government might shut them down for an analytic report that they put out about a program being run called Better Factories Cambodia by the International Labor Organization and by the International Finance Corporation. And it’s an analytic report. They’re not trash talking. They did their research and anyway, so much respect. And whenever I interview him, he ends it by saying, thank you so much. It’s always so inspiring to talk to you. I’m thinking, you’ve got to be kidding me. You’re so much more inspiring than anything I’ve ever done. I’m just some small town kid who’s fascinated by

(17:24)
What other people do,

Speaker 2 (17:25):

Right? I mean, that’s the same thing here. Folks are like, oh, you’re so cool. You do all this great work. And it’s like, oh man, if you could listen to yourself, I hope you listen back to this episode and understand how intelligent and charismatic and hopeful these workers are. And the thing about work, about wage work in any context at any place in the world in this system is that it is designed to make you feel inferior, to make you feel like you don’t belong or that your contribution doesn’t matter and that you’re just another nut and bolt in this giant machine. And that’s it. The reality is that workers in every context are whole people who care a lot about what they do, who care a lot about the contributions that they have, particularly in the global supply chain. I had this experience when I was talking to railroad workers is that from an outside perspective, you wouldn’t think that folks would be able to feel like they can rise above the drudgery, I suppose.

(18:33)
But the reality is, whether it’s railroad workers, whether it’s farm workers in Southern California, in central California, there is this pride in the work that you do and the contribution that you have to keeping the world running. And that’s something that bosses really don’t believe is a reality, which I feel like is kind of like an ace in the hole for us when we’re organizing, is to say, when you assign and really believe in the dignity of your work and you assert your dignity as a worker, you kind of throw ’em back on their heels a little bit. As the organizing continues, there’s such a rich tapestry of how we interact with the jobs that we do, and it’s really beautiful to kind of be in a space and begin to sort of peel back those layers in conversation as we do as podcast hosts and researchers, and to see the moments click where I guests really start to believe what they’re saying, not that they didn’t believe it before, but that they’re coming to this better realization as they’re trying to tell strangers in our audience about the work that they do. That yeah, it is important. There’s no piece of it that is not, and that is a really gratifying piece of what I do and what you do, I’m sure as a host, facilitating these conversations. So

Speaker 1 (19:59):

Yeah, I will say the last one I should shout out from the first series who I didn’t mention yet, is my dear friend Ana actor from the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. And she is, I mean, she definitely is an amazing speaker. She’s actually quite well known now, amazing organizer. In fifth grade, her dad got sick and she went to work in the apparel factories. And what that woman has done with the fifth grade education, she is just continued to self-educate herself. She just is brilliant. I mean, her capacities on so many levels, and then her ability to inspire is just, it’s pretty incredible. And I have to think about more women leaders to include, although in the phishing sector, I have to get to the processing sector. That’s my next hope, because right now we don’t have a lot of women in live capture phishing.

Speaker 2 (21:03):

Yeah. Well, that’s a good segue actually. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about this second series. You have four episodes out, I believe, right?

(21:13)
Yeah. Hey, that’s amazing given the breadth of work that you’re doing. So this is focusing on Fisher organizers and the advancement of workers’ rights in both large and small scale fishing industries from around the world. I believe your last episode, you were talking to fishers in Indonesia, if I’m not mistaken, maybe a good way to kind of orient our listeners in this research and with these workers. Can you share a little bit about the conditions that they’re currently laboring under? I know that’s a broad loaded question, but can we kind of give them a little bit of context into what the sort of both large and small scale global fishing industry looks like? I imagine a lot of our American listeners may think of global fisheries and may immediately go to, I don’t know, deadliest catch or something, a very unique American sort of fishery that maybe doesn’t look the same elsewhere. So let’s start there.

Speaker 1 (22:21):

Okay. So global fisheries, the majority of them are at capacitor overfished, and they are environmentally, there’s a struggle to make them sustainable. And the environmental, so environmental advocates around the world have been working on this for a long time. However, in 2014, actually even before that, there were some small exposes, but in 2014, major media outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian and the AP came out with a series of stories about forced labor on the Thai fleet. And then there were also stories appearing about forced labor on the Chinese fleet, the Taiwanese fleet vessels showing up in South Africa in Australia, Indonesian migrant fishers just walking off the vessel saying, we’ve been slaves on that vessel help us, or other vessels that were pulled aside for illegal unreported and unregulated fishing, IUU fishing, which to the environmentalists, to their credit, have been working for a long time on illegal unreported, unregulated fishing.

(23:38)
And that has brought some cases in where fishing vessels were detained for fishing illegally, and then the forced labor was discovered. So the story that I have from Hatto from SBMI in Indonesia, the largest migrant worker union in Indonesia, they were asked to go and help the fishers who were stranded in South Africa. And then what they discovered is the Indonesian government, the way the laws were set up, they couldn’t get these fishers, the support they needed. And so then that begat a whole body of work for them. But globally, starting around 2014 with all of these exposes, the one in South Africa, the ones on the Thai fleet, there were other cases all around Southeast Asia, the global community started to mobilize, and they really started reacting to forced labor on these vessels. It is horrific. I mean, there are stories of fishers stranded at sea for 15 years.

(24:52)
That’s probably one of the outside timeframes, but there are others who are out there for more. And then of course there are others who don’t come back who are killed at sea or they die from an illness at sea, and then their body is buried at sea, which is something that’s very traumatic for a lot of these people. For the Indonesians, it’s very traumatic, particularly I talked about that with Hato. And the campaigns that have surged from there have focused a lot on forced labor and illegal fishing, and it really brought a lot more work to support fishers and migrant fishers. I want to stop there. So in case you want to ask another question, but there’s so much work to be done just to address that forced labor. However, the thing I got from talking with people like or SA Karn, is we can rescue forced labor victims for decades to come, but it’ll never stop happening until we organize the fishers, until we enable them to stand up to the captain, we enable them to get remedy when they’re not paid, and we enable them to build the social movement that challenges these laws.

Speaker 2 (26:17):

That’s kind of where I was headed in my own thinking. You talk about these exposes in 2014 on that are trying to tackle one issue and pulling back and peeling away layers of what seems to me to be a wholly systemic industry-wide practice of forced labor, the industry in this region and elsewhere. And that in itself feels like an overwhelming sort of experience in its breadth, in its scope in how many fishermen past, present, future may be affected by this. And so I think a good question to ask then is as this organizing has been happening, more concerted organizing has been happening over the last 10 years or so, have there been some campaigns that you’ve spoken with fishers about that they consider to be successes or effective or moving the needle and in a good direction in terms of these organizing objectives?

Speaker 1 (27:28):

Yeah, so I think the first couple interviews I did are with the International Transport Workers Federation and the Fisher Rights Network in Thailand. So the ITF has been helping to set up at port and at multiple ports in Thailand fisher organizations. And so the Fisher Rights Network is growing. Again, as I said, they’re not able to form a union technically, but that doesn’t keep them from forming basically a worker center and from pursuing negotiations with the employers. What’s happening a lot in this space is you have a lot of funding and a lot of people with goodwill who are focused on the forced labor. And it’s important work. If you have been forced to be at sea for two years and you haven’t been paid, or if you have a family member stranded at sea and you just want to get them back, it’s crucial work, right? It’s absolutely crucial,

Speaker 2 (28:37):

But it doesn’t stop there. We need

Speaker 1 (28:38):

To talk about the also the and the also and right, so I’m not saying yeah, but I’m saying also and right, we need that work, but that work needs to connect in. And you have a lot of NGOs that do that work that don’t necessarily connect in. So there are some efforts now to connect these pieces together. And I think with migrant fishers, it’s a challenge to learn how to organize. They don’t come from organizing backgrounds for the most part except for the exceptions of the people who are leading some of these efforts. And so how do you bring this consciousness of what it means to organize what it means to work with your fellow fishers? I hope that you’ll get to talk directly with John Harto from the ITF who’s been organizing now going on a decade in Thailand, not quite a decade, but to hear it through his perspective as a former teamster, as an American, it’s quite moving.

(29:42)
But the bravery of these fishers who continue to organize, and I don’t want to tell the story that he tells, but to hear him tell the story of the fisher that inspires him every day is just, it’s pretty jaw dropping because the guy should have died at sea and he didn’t, and he continues to organize, but that one fisher is standing up to his boss and continuing to organize. That’s what the movement’s built on. And I think, Mel, I’m not a trade unionist from history. I’ve always been on the NGO side, although I’ve always been in solidarity with and supporting worker organizing, and I’ve definitely been very deeply involved in worker centers and Latin America, but I think a lot of people beyond the labor movement don’t fully appreciate what it takes to organize the day in the day out and what it means to have your momentum crushed by a fake solution. And that’s what’s happening a lot in global supply chain solutions. So yes, absolutely, we want to get remedy for fishers who have been victims of forced labor. Yes, we want to rescue victims of forced labor, but we need to build from there to the next step of enabling fishers to defend each other.

Speaker 2 (31:16):

Right? Well, the industry moves on because the workers are going to be participating in the industry as folks begin to really truly put up that fence that says that forced labor is not the way forward. So then what are the rights of the workers now that they are getting paid now that they have some movement now that they can get off these boats? It moves beyond that and creates a new culture of worker dignity in these industries. And I agree. My experience in union organizing prior to this current job where I actually am a card carrying member of CWA News Guild now was organizing in the IWW as a freelance journalist. And for folks who aren’t union organizers or maybe have never worked in any sort of quote organizing group, whether that’s political organizing, whether that’s union organizing, whether that’s, oh, I don’t know, community meetings, quite a bit of it is, what’s a good way to put it, bureaucratic drudgery sometimes.

(32:27)
It’s a lot of really hopeful, really optimistic, really intelligent, really passionate people butting heads often, at least in the West. And there’s a lot of people on the outside of these organizing groups who really don’t want to see you succeed and will do really horrible things to make your job 10 times harder because what’s that really? Well-known Stokely Carmichael quote in, for example, in order for non-violence to happen, your opponent must have a heart. Essentially. We’re coming up against corporations, we’re coming up against nonprofits even I’m lucky to be at one where folks walk the walk and talk the talk, but that’s not always the case where individuals in positions of power really don’t want to share that power with a workforce. And so organizing is really difficult to try and get the folks who sign your paychecks, who create these conditions in your workplace to see you as a human being is extraordinarily difficult, which is always surprising.

(33:36)
And to also bring people in who have never experienced collective organization before and empower them to make decisions and to participate and to activate them and to keep them activated and to keep their spirits up and to do all of this in order to continue to push forward in what is a marathon, a long game is very difficult. And I cannot imagine what it’s like to be in an industry that I has its baseline as the complete and utter dehumanization of its workers, forcing them into situations for 15 years, forced slave labor, and then to pull these individuals out of this enforced culture of oppression, empower them, and then continue to empower them to assert themselves and the dignity of their work collectively. It’s got to be unreal, both in just the scope and difficulty of it, but also in the sort of payoff. And I can imagine that there’s some serious euphoria of the winds that happen that keep individuals moving forward, right? It’s got to be life affirming, truly, to see that needle move a little bit year after year,

Speaker 1 (35:03):

Even just to build community in migrant communities that are moving a lot. I mean, these are not stable work teams,

(35:15)
So how do you build community? So you talked about layers earlier, Mel, and I think we could talk about the layers of fear factor that happen whenever you’re organizing and you know that your boss doesn’t want you to organize, you feel threatened, but add to that the layer that your identity papers being held by the captain of your vessel. And so you’ve come into port and you’re allowed to leave the vessel, but if you leave the vessel, they don’t give you your papers and then they might report you if you don’t come back. So you have to get back on that vessel, add to that, that you’re indebted to the captain because you didn’t pay the recruiter that brought you over, but instead there’s money coming out of your paycheck that’s reimbursing the vessel owner for you getting over to get that job. I mean, the payment for a job is just another whole crazy level of abuse that happens in this industry.

(36:18)
And then add to that, your language inability in the country you’re in as a migrant, it just keeps adding on. And I’ll say, you said earlier that it’s become systemic. I mean, that’s absolutely true. So Indonesian migrants and they migrant fishers are disproportionately made up of Indonesian migrant fishers, at least all the cases that come in of forced labor and abuse. And the Indonesians that I have spoken with and the organizers I’ve spoken with, it’s standard procedure for them to go abroad, sign a two year contract. So they sign a two year contract on a Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese fleet generally, and then they’re supposed to get paid electronically, and that money’s supposed to go to their family or to them, however they set it up, but then they’re at sea and they don’t have access to wifi, and they have no way to see if they got paid. They have no way to communicate with their families. So our friends at Global Labor Justice, they’re supporting a campaign with Taiwan. The Indonesian fishers in Taiwan got together and started a campaign called Wifi for Fishers now, and they have slogans like No wifi, no wife, because imagine you’re gone for two years. Your wife didn’t get any money, didn’t hear from you,

(37:43)
You

Speaker 2 (37:44):

Don’t know. Might assume you’re dead. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (37:46):

Yeah. And so they really, they’re trying to figure out a lot of these vessels. They have digital tracking, they have satellite, they have the capacity to provide the wifi. In fact, there are even places where they get into range of wifi access and the captain will take their phones away. They don’t want them to communicate. So the fact that they’re on a two year contract, the fact that there’s transshipment at sea so that the fish get off, but the fishers don’t, and then often they will pull into a port and they can’t use port services because they’re not legal, they’re not allowed to go, their documents are held back. So it’s not like they can get off at port and go run to the embassy and say, I need help. I’m being trapped. I mean, that just, it’s not that easy.

Speaker 2 (38:40):

One comparison that I keep coming up in as we’re talking about this, particularly about migrant status, about language barriers, about the barriers to really free movement on these boats, you hear a lot of the same concerns from organizers who are working with United Farm workers and the migrant farm workers who are working in farms in Southern and central California in Arizona along the border, a lot of them will cross the border without the appropriate visa paperwork. They’re taken advantage of by the farms that hire them. They’re housed in these often cramped, scary conditions in the middle of the desert or wherever they’re being housed. They’re subjected to extreme heat. And the farms themselves, if they’re unorganized, because some of the farms are organized and do have a relationship with UFW as a union will really kind of give and take however much they want because there’s no consequences.

(39:57)
Oftentimes the government’s not going to step in a way that’s useful a lot of times because the individuals who could investigate these claims, the agencies are underfunded deliberately or otherwise. There’s just not enough people to go around to show up at these places to investigate these issues. I imagine that a lot of this is the same because you’re in the middle of the ocean and even if you get claims about workplace conditions and being abysmal or abuses happening on these boats, it’s likely pretty freaking difficult for these governments to step in international waters. So you have all of these complications. So the point I’m trying to make is what it comes down to is the workers themselves that they are the ones who are collectively able to address, call out these issues, address these issues, force consequences for these issues. And that is no small feat when you’re talking about fleets of boats in the middle of the ocean

Speaker 1 (41:00):

And the distant water fleet is so hard to police and regulate, and increasingly countries don’t allow foreign vessels in their waters, but that doesn’t mean they’re not overfishing. So the Indonesian fishers, I have an interview coming up with aren’t on from salute in North s Lui, and he talks about organizing at port, both for fishers on the Indonesian domestic fleet and the Indonesians going abroad on the distant water fleet. And Indonesia, a number of years ago, said, no more foreign vessels in our waters. But now you have a domestic fleet that pays even worse, but the conditions are terrible. They’re not well financed. They’re overfishing still the same waters that were, they booted out the Korean fishers to try and let their fish recuperate, but they didn’t. They basically continue to overfish. So it’s really a struggle. And then you have the fishers who would, because you can make so little money on the domestic fleet, they’re willing to take that risk of going abroad for two years and not being in contact with anyone. But listening to you now, Mel, I’m thinking we need to find a way to, first, with all the organizing that’s happening now, enable the fishers to sit down and reimagine how this could be. If we could imagine a world where migrant fishers, whenever the vessel comes into port and the ITF is saying it should be every three months, you should be coming into port at minimum.

(42:37)
And if those fissures in whatever port they’re at are able to access communications and support, it could be a completely different world. It is doable, but it takes an amount of coordination because you’ve got whatever country is flying the flag of the vessel, and there’s abuse of the flag registrations, which the ITF has a great campaign on flags of convenience, it’s worth looking at. But then you also have the port that the vessel comes into, and then you have the market state. That’s generally the US and Japan and Europe where we have some

Speaker 2 (43:14):

Influence,

Speaker 1 (43:15):

But we haven’t really been exerting it yet. There was a big campaign of global buyers and retailers saying, supporting the employer pays principle. And we looked into that. I worked with some students last year and did some research on the employer pays principle and companies support it. They support the principle, but they have no way to implement it, and they’re not financing it. So basically the buyer or the retailer, it’s just like in the global apparel supply chains, they’re saying to the vessels they buy from, go do this, but they’re not helping finance it. They’re not going to be steady buyers from those vessels that change their policies. They’re not really taking responsibility for bega the change in the sector.

Speaker 2 (44:07):

Well, there’s no incentive for that. There’s no incentive for it. There’s no consequences for not doing it, right.

Speaker 1 (44:14):

There’s only organizing pressure really. I mean, we can talk consumers, but it’s not penetrating in the way that we need it to.

Speaker 2 (44:21):

Right? Well, this is the sort of idealist, internationalist, anarchist in me, God forbid, hopefully some of my listeners don’t get mad at me for this, but it’s like, what would be great if we could just get rid of all of these borders that make this shit impossible? Pardon my language. Maybe a truly international community would benefit greatly from not having extra border barriers that make this impossible for individuals to stop off somewhere, contact family, I don’t know, get justice for the abuses they suffer in the middle of the ocean. That’s an extremely reductive idealist position for me to take. But when you hear these kinds of problems, you’re like, why? A lot of these could be solved with the air quotes, relatively simple solutions, right?

Speaker 1 (45:15):

I don’t know, Mel, I’m with you. I mean, capital’s treat across borders. They’re very unfettered. I mean, there are some regulations and some things they need to go through. We could do something if you were to treat migration equally to the people migration to capital, if you created regulations that were as facilitative, things would shift and change. Yes, it’s idealist, but 30 years ago I was working on Latin America and the impact of the US drug trade in Latin American and on human rights, and I never could have imagined we’d see the day that we’re in now with marijuana being legal, if somebody doesn’t rethink migration in a more radical way, I don’t know that we’re going to get there. So keep rethinking it. I’m way out of my depth and all the different repercussions. I mean, not so out of

Speaker 3 (46:20):

My depth,

Speaker 1 (46:21):

But I mean we would need another five hours to even start to hash out all the different repercussions because there’s a big cultural element to how do you mix different peoples and cultures and over time, and that is a segue to something I do want to mention is I’ve been doing this work starting on the egregious abuses of forced labor, but always with this eye too. We can’t just stay there. That’s like just looking at the tip of the iceberg, because the causal factors are really the inability of the fishers to have a voice, to organize, to bargain collectively. The phenomenal amount of discrimination they suffer day in and day out because as migrants, and at the same time, we can’t look at the seafood industry only through the lens of the distant water fleet. What I would hate to see is buyers and retailers finally addressing this piece, the tip of the iceberg, and not addressing the causal factors or the rest of the seafood industry.

Speaker 2 (47:30):

They would treat it as like a checked box. We’ve done our due diligence. Look at this

Speaker 1 (47:35):

Amazing work we did in this one piece, because I will tell you the future episodes I’m hoping to do with Fisher organizers. I’m looking at organizing in coastal fishing in Africa and Latin America, and there you’ve got a lot of tensions coming up between the industrial fleet and the coastal fishers who are really largely fishing for food security. So much of the global movement, the mechanisms we have as a global movement are trade related. And if you only look at what can I change using trade policy or global corporate policy, you’re going to miss this other layer. And with the seafood industry, these two butt up against each other, so you have the industrial fleet that’s further off the coast, that’s mostly is more likely to be doing export. And so we have mechanisms and policies that we can bring to bear on countries to change how that industrial fleet’s governed,

Speaker 3 (48:38):

But

Speaker 1 (48:39):

We need to also be looking at that coastal fleet because those coastal fishers, they’re managing the waters, the fisheries, they’re really providing it’s food security. What they’re doing, and this is where I really get to the cultural rights. Sorry, it was a long segue. It was long. It’s okay. But when you talk to coastal fishers, this is not just about livelihood and food security. This is a way of life for centuries for a lot of these people. And I think a lot of people think, oh, we just have to fish last along the coast. It’s like, well, maybe there’s got to be a different path because this is their way of life and we’re really threatening something much more profound than what we would be threatening if we’re curbing the industrial vision.

Speaker 2 (49:31):

Right? Important conversations and important nuance to this entire topic. I’m actually really looking forward to future episodes that you do, and I think this is kind of a great place where we can kind of close out our conversation. Can you share with our listeners where they can find your work? We’re going to be putting links to the Labor Link podcast in our show notes. Are there maybe one or two representative episodes of the last two seasons that you think our audience would be interested in or an episode that’s a good maybe primer for the second series that any of our interested audience members can kind of start with?

Speaker 1 (50:14):

Yeah. I think for the Fisher Driven solutions this current season, start with the first one with John Harto. As much as I’m really working to enable people to listen to the Fisher organizers, I think John will really get everybody thinking about what these fishers brave they are. This is really choosing among my children here now that’s D, listen to it all. Yeah,

(50:48)
They’re all fun stories. I mean, because then it segues to the Fisher Rights Network where they’re really, I mean, these guys are really, they have to be so crafty because like we talked about the fear factors, these trying to organize when and build trust with people who are so fearful. It’s phenomenal work that they’re doing. And then of course, Hoya, who’s also from Central and Cambodia organizing migrant fishers in Thailand from the Cambodians, and he’s got a fascinating story to tell. He was originally there as a Buddhist monk, and then he left and started organizing migrants. It’s just another amazing story. And then the one that is really fun and most recent is, and people should check this out, so it’s with Harto from SBMI in Indonesia, and there’s a little piece in there with Charlie Fritz from Greenpeace, and they’re talking about a film called Before You Eat that they produce with Greenpeace that really, if you want visuals on this stuff, check out before you eat or check out Outlaw Ocean. But okay, here I am promoting everybody else but my own show, and given that we share a producer, I better get on with it.

(52:09)
So the way to find the Labor Link podcast, we are on Spotify and we also set up a website, so maybe it’s easier for some people. Labor Link podcast.org. You can find us through the Labor Radio Podcast network and on Spotify, and also go to labor link podcast.org.

Speaker 2 (52:31):

Cool. Cool, cool. Yeah, we’ll put all of those links in the show notes so that folks can check out Judy’s work and stay up to date on what’s happening. The process of putting together a podcast is extremely difficult. We make it seem easy, but it’s definitely not. There’s a lot of work that goes into it, and one of those things is really promoting episodes that folks see them. So we’ll be adding a bunch of links to those episodes because they are incredible conversations, and you absolutely will find something interesting and impactful in what you’re listening to. And this will be my final note before we get to the closing paragraph here, but one thing that I learned in the research that I did for the National Supply Chain Network as it relates to railroaders, is that things that seem boring on their face really are pretty intricate, interesting and precarious when it comes to the supply chains, both nationally and internationally. You might go a little crazy going down that rabbit hole to realize just how precarious global supply chain networks actually are. I’m sure folks can remember the ever given Suez Canal disaster and how that completely choked up the global supply chain almost immediately, right

Speaker 1 (53:53):

In the middle of the pandemic.

Speaker 2 (53:54):

Yes. And how long it took to recover from that. Just one small piece can kind of knock the card pyramid down. So if you find that your knee-jerk reactions to say, oh, that boring stuff, then peel back a little bit of the onion there and take some time to look into it because it becomes endlessly fascinating, infuriating, enraging, and ultimately, you begin to see these sort of moments and spaces for productive and transformative organizing when you start to understand these systems. So that’ll be my final little note here. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Judy, please come back anytime. Let’s link up and continue talking and talking with folks and send me all the interviews that you can. I can’t wait to speak to the folks that you speak to. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on.

Speaker 1 (54:53):

Yeah, thank you so much, Mel, and thank you for the show that you all produce. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (54:57):

Yeah, yeah. I appreciate the work that you do as well. And as always, I want to thank you all our listeners for listening, and thank you so much for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons. And please go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so that you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. Once again, I’m Mel er and with much love and solidarity, I’ll see you next time.

On Nov. 12, unionized nurses at Ascension St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore held a rally in front of the Marriott Hotel downtown, where the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) was holding a meeting. St. Agnes nurses rallied with supporters from around the city, and they were even joined by fellow Ascension nurses who traveled from Wichita, Kansas, and Austin, Texas.

According to a press release from National Nurses Organizing Committee / National Nurses United (NNOC-NNU), the purpose of the rally was to “highlight how Ascension has failed to follow USCCB directives to Catholic health care organizations to both serve and advocate for patients ‘at the margins of society’ and ‘treat its employees respectfully and justly.’… Baltimore nurses have been in negotiations since Feb. 2024, following a successful union election in November 2023. Ascension has failed to bargain in good faith with Saint Agnes nurses on language that would improve safe staffing and protect patients from cuts to services, lawsuits for billing disputes, and surprise billing or excess charges.” In this on-the-ground episode, you’ll hear speeches and chants from the Nov. 12 rally, and we speak with Gideon Eziama, a registered nurse with over 20 years of experience who has worked at Ascension St. Agnes for the last six years, and Lisa Watson, a registered nurse at Ascension Via Christi St. Francis Hospital in Wichita, who traveled to Baltimore to stand in solidarity with her coworkers at Ascension St. Agnes.

Additional links/info below…

• National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United website, Facebook page, Twitter/X page, and Instagram
• NNOC/NNU Press Release: “Ascension nurses call on US bishops to hold Catholic hospital chain accountable to church directives”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Baltimore nurses at largest Catholic health network in US fight on for first contract”
• Aleja Hertzler-McCain, Religion News Service, “Ascension nurses receive tepid response from Catholic bishops after rally”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Crowd Chants:

What do we want? Safe staffing! When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Safe staffing! When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Safe staffing! When do we want it? Now!

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, which helps people find the show and reach out to us if you have recommendations for folks you’d like us to talk to or stories you’d like us to investigate and please support the work we do at The Real News Network by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got another important on the ground episode for y’all today. As you guys know, back in July, we published an episode in which I reported on the ground from a rally that was held by unionized nurses at Ascension St. Agnes Hospital here in Baltimore. The rally was held outside the hospital in an effort to raise awareness of the union’s fight, to secure a first contract, and to show management that they’re not backing down from their core demands for safe staffing levels and an operational model that puts patients and patient care first. Now, in that episode, you heard Chance and sounds from the picket line, and you heard me interviewing Nikki Horvat, a registered nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at Ascension St. Agnes, and a member of the bargaining team. Today’s episode is an important follow-up report on that struggle, and it’s a struggle that doesn’t just concern nurses at Ascension St.

Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, but healthcare workers across the Ascension network as the National Nurses Organizing Committee slash National Nurses United has stated the Catholic Hospital system is one of the largest in the country with 140 hospitals in 19 states, and also one of the wealthiest with cash reserves, an investment company and a private equity operation worth billions of dollars. And because of its nonprofit status is exempt from paying federal taxes. So last week on November 12th, Baltimore nurses and their supporters, which included fellow Ascension nurses who had traveled from Wichita, Kansas, and even as far as Austin, Texas, held a rally near the inner harbor downtown in front of the Marriott Hotel where the US Conference of Catholic Bishops or the U-S-C-C-B was holding a meeting according to a press release from the union. The purpose of the rally was to quote, highlight how Ascension has failed to follow us CCB directives to Catholic healthcare organizations, to both serve and advocate for patients at the margins of society and treat its employees respectfully and justly.

As a proud Catholic, I’m deeply saddened to see Ascension’s mission disintegrate. In the years I’ve worked at St. Agnes Hospital, said Melissa Rou, a registered nurse in the intensive care unit and member of the bargaining team. The church teaches that all human beings should be treated with dignity, but at our hospital we see indignity on a daily, even hourly basis with rampant unsafe staffing and workplace violence due to ascension’s relentless pursuit of profits. And as the press release continues, Baltimore nurses have been in negotiations since February of 2024. Following a successful union election in November of 2023, Ascension has failed to bargain in good faith with St. Agnes nurses on language that would improve safe staffing and protect patients from cuts to services, lawsuits for billing disputes and surprise billing or excess charges. So on the morning of November 12th, I went down to the rally and I spoke to some of the workers there about what they’re fighting, how that fight is going, and how things have developed since the last action that we reported on back in the summer. I got to speak with Gideon Isama, a registered nurse with over 20 years of experience and who has worked at Ascension St. Agnes in Baltimore for the last six years. I also spoke with Lisa Watson, a registered nurse at Ascension via Christie St. Francis Hospital in Wichita who traveled all the way to Baltimore to stand in solidarity with her coworkers at Ascension St. Agnes. Take a listen.

Bradley Van Waus:

What do we want? What we want it. Thank you, Gideon. Thank you to all of our community allies here today for the Catholic Labor Network. Thank you to the city council President elect. It’s a great day here in Baltimore. Good morning, Ascension Nurses. So my name is Bradley Vanis and I’m the Ascension director and it’s so great here to have nurses from Wichita, Austin and Vol are from our four Ascension hospitals and Washington Hospital Center altogether today. So today we’re calling on the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, the highest authority of the Catholic church in the United States to hold ascension accountable for their state and mission. They are an arm of the Catholic church and the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops needs to exercise their authority over them. Today the bishops are discussing a text called Dignity Us in Pita, highlighting the indispensable nature of the dignity of the human person. How do we feel as such a health has done in this department?

Does Ascension Health treat patients with dignity when they short staff their hospitals? No. No. Do they treat human life with dignity when Asension closes labor and delivery unit than inner cities at rate higher than any other hospital corporation? No. Does Ascension help treat its workers? Its nurses with any shred of dignity? No. Do they treat you with dignity when you miss your meal breaks? No. Do they treat you with dignity when their electronic medical record goes down and they still expect you to work? No. And did they treat nurses in Austin or Wichita with any dignity or they force you to swipe twice to get what you deserve? No.

Say Agnes nurses. Is there a lack of movement at the bargaining table making you feel dignified? Yes. No, no, no, no. They’re not making the field. So Ascension likes to hide behind the veil of Catholicism. They like to throw around the word ministry even though they run a venture capital operation worth billions. That would make some folks in Silicon Valley quite jealous. But nurses of patients alike within Ascension hospitals know the truth. Catholic social teaching is very clear about the dignity of the rights of workers, including the right to organize even within Catholic health there. Ascension should be setting the standard for how hospitals should treat workers and patients, but they see that 10 are lowering that standard. Nurses, you are the moral compass of this hospital corporation. Are we going to let them abandon their mission for profit? No. Are we going to make sure that nurses and patients are treated fairly? Yes, absolutely. We know one thing here. When we fight, we win. And our fight is one of moral imperative. We’re pulling the veil out over a CI’s greeds. We can’t stop until we win what we deserve. When we fight, we win. We fight, we win, we fight, we win.

Fr. Sinclair Oubre:

Now the leadership has to listen and act and give you a fair contract. It is by far, far too long. Now you deserve this contract. You deserve to walk back into that hospital with the security, the staffing, the pay, and the care and concern you deserve as sisters and brothers, as siblings united in the workforce as human beings. So we’ll be with you every step of the way. We’ll continue to call on bishops to come down and listen to your workers and listen to the voice of justice. They know that you’re a new and unsettling force. That unsettling will lead to something. I like to think it’ll lead to victory. It may not look like it now, but trust one another and trust in the movement you are building. And Baltimore deserves to give you all not just a huge amount of thanks, but also deserves.

We need to also take our obligation to walk with you and ensure that if retaliation takes place, we will be there. We will be there to call it out and to call this hospital administration to change their ways. They are not acting in a holy way. They’re not acting in a just way we’ll be. And we’ll be with you every the way. Who’s got this power? Jesus power. What kind of power? Union power. Word and power. Moses Power. Jesus Power. Catholic power. Church. Power. Justice, power. Keep it on. Keep fighting. You are going to win. And we will love to celebrate that when that happens on a day very soon. God bless you all and make peace. Speak on you, your families, your workplace, and especially the people you bring. Healthcare, your arts, your skills as healthcare providers. God bless

Crowd Chants:

Who got the power? We got the power! What kind of power? Union power!

Gideon Eziama:

My name is Gideon Eziama. I work at Ascension S in Baltimore. I’ve been announced there for almost six years now. I started working in 2019, June past June again to six years, but I’ve been in nurse for 24 years now and I worked almost different hospitals, butch union and non hospitals.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Gideon, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I really appreciate it, man. We are standing here in the inner harbor in downtown Baltimore, out in front of the Marriott Hotel. Y’all just held a rally here and we were actually there with y’all at St. Agnes Ascension Hospital here in Baltimore when you and your fellow coworkers were demonstrating in the summer, and that was about six months into the bargaining campaign after you guys successfully unionized. So I was wondering if we could just catch listeners up on what’s been happening since that action that took place in the summer and now

Gideon Eziama:

Actually during that summertime, we have already given them by then among the beginning team. By then we have given them everything they needed from our own union side. Since then, the management side have been stolen. Whatever we have given them. That’s why we came here because the bishops of USA are having conference. So we can energize them to give them a call to facilitate and move fast so that whatever we’re looking for, so they could fasten up the contract and we can get a fair contract for the union.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And can you remind listeners a bit about what you guys are fighting for in that contract? I know that we heard chance about safe staffing levels, right? The union has strongly pushed for patient first like policies. So can you just tell listeners a bit about the key areas that you’re fighting for in this contract?

Gideon Eziama:

The key area actually the first one is the first self staffing. Self staffing is the key. When you have a safe staffing, have less what I call the outcome of that hospital will be great. When you have a safe staffing, the input, the safety of the patient and the safety of the employees, both nurses, everything but the doctors and everything is less. But when you have no safe staffing, everything becomes risk. When the patient is not well treated, the family becomes an issue. So that’s what we’re looking for. The first thing we’re looking, and that’s what we’re looking for is self staffing. Any other thing follows. But the first thing is just self staffing. Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And you’ve been, you said working in healthcare for over 20 years, 24 years. 24 years. I’m wondering if you can put this struggle into perspective as someone who has worked in healthcare while healthcare in this country has changed since the time I was born. So can you tell listeners a bit about what you have seen change in the healthcare industry from a worker’s perspective in your 24 years working here?

Gideon Eziama:

As I said, I’ve been working in the healthcare department for 24 years. More than that. When we were working there, it used to be patient care. Now, Ascension as an example. Patient is normal patient. Patient becomes a commodity. It’s replaced. It’s like when you go to a shopping center, you go to inside the, let’s say you go to Walmart. When a commodity is taken out of shed, something else is place. That’s what it’s always productivity. That’s what they’re looking for. They’re always talking about less product, less productivity, more productivity. So it’s not more about how many patients, what is the outcome of the patient we are taking care of. It’s always patient is treated as being a commodity. So when we say safe staffing, that’s what we’re looking for so that the patient will not be treated as commodity. So we’ll be treated as a patient and being taken care of.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And given this sort of larger change in the industry that has been happening at private healthcare companies, but also not profit healthcare, this sort of industry wide shift towards understaffing, piling more work onto fewer workers, treating patients like commodities and getting them in and out as quickly as you can, what does that translate to for you on a day-to-day level? How does that change your working conditions?

Gideon Eziama:

I’m giving you as example of ascension. It becomes a profitable, they call it profitable environment. They always talk about the profits. He can’t believe how much the ascension is sipping in up, how much they’re making millions, billions. If you read articles, if you can go to articles, check Wall Street, you check ascension, see how much they’re making. And it’s not something I can start to explain here. It’s more in detail on this. So when they treat patient as a commodity, so what they’re looking is for what is the profit we’re making? It’s no more about how many patients are taking care of the outcome of the patient. What is, it’s always like the productivity. What is the profit, what is this, what is, it becomes a profit making ventures as of now. That’s what it is.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And can you tell folks out here listening in and around the city of Baltimore, I guess where things stand now in your contract fight and what folks listening to this can do to stand in solidarity with y’all?

Gideon Eziama:

When we study Union Ascension hire is a law firm. The law firm, they specialize in Boston, the union, and they kept this firm in our contract negotiation. And this law firm doesn’t care about negotiation. All they care is to store everything. So they will keep making their money and they’re making millions. So essentially Steve giving them millions because they know they have access. Instead of spending that million to the nurses and to the patient they’re taking care of. No, they’re just giving it to the lawyers and spending their money wrongly. That’s what it is.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And for folks listening to this, is there something they can do to support the union to make their voices heard to the hospital?

Gideon Eziama:

Yes. All we’re asking for is a fair contract. When we have a fair contract, we have a safe staffing. So anybody that can come over, what are we doing? We’re not getting, I worked last night and I’m working this night again, I haven’t got my sleep. I’m doing this. I’m not getting paid for it. Yes, we are all here, cold chilling. We did this, we’ve been doing it for almost a year now, getting to make sure that we have what we call self staffing and our patient is taken care of. That’s what we’re looking for. We’re not looking for something else. That’s what it is. So people that will see when they see us, they think that’s what it is. When I became a nurse, I became a nurse to take care of the patient. And when my patient is not taken care of, when the management ascension is staffing to make sure the gain is coming into them, not the welfare or the wellbeing of the patient we are taking care of, it gets meall. It looks like he cry by the bedside. So that’s what we’re crying for. Give us self stopping so we can take care of our patients. That’s what we’re looking for.

Lisa Watson:

My name is Lisa Watson and I’m a nurse at Ascension St. Francis in Wichita, Kansas for 19 years.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well Lisa, thank you so much for talking to me today. We are standing here on the inner harbor of downtown Baltimore, and you’re a long way from home, but you came out here to stand in solidarity with your fellow healthcare workers. I was wondering if we could first just start by having you tell us a little bit about why we’re here and what brought you out here to Baltimore today.

Lisa Watson:

So I am here to stand shoulder to shoulder with my union brothers and sisters. These nurses have been met with terrible acts from ascension of union busting and instead of taking this money that they have for their union busting and pouring it into their patients, that’s why we’re here. It’s very unfortunate that patients are not put over profits in a Catholic institution. They have all of these values and this mission that they boast on TV and what is happening inside these walls is the exact opposite of that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Can you tell us a little bit about what this looks like over there in Wichita? Are y’all dealing with the same issues that workers here in Baltimore are raising?

Lisa Watson:

So Ascension nationwide has been cutting staff to maximize their profits. Actually, there was a New York Times report a few years ago about how they do this all over the country. So what they’re doing here has definitely been happening everywhere. The nurses in Wichita and Austin have contracts. So we are able to push back and exercise our federal given rights not only to unionize, but to make things better for our patients. This has never been about money. This has been about being advocates for our patients. And so we could do that a lot better with a union contract. Baltimore nurses have put their contract on the table, they have given all their proposals, but Ascension refuses to bargain with them and are dragging their feet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m wondering if you could help our listeners put this into historical perspective as someone who’s been working in the industry for years. I think for a second the country’s attention was focused on the crisis in healthcare. During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, folks realized that how understaffed, overworked, overburdened our healthcare workers are, how burnt out they are. But I don’t think folks understand how that has been building over time. How have you seen that change take hold over the course of your time working as a healthcare worker?

Lisa Watson:

So my unit was covid for a couple of years and it was the hardest years of my life. But when Covid was over, the hospitals staffed us like it was still Covid, like it was still a pandemic. We are not in a pandemic. There are more nurses now with licenses in the United States than there ever have been. There is not a nursing shortage. There’s a shortage of nurses who want to work under these conditions. It is unfortunate that Ascension continues to put us in these situations. These are our licenses, these are patients’ lives and we have got to put them first. So I work in an intensive care unit and we are supposed to have two patients. We have three patients a lot of the time, and that’s what’s happening in Baltimore too. We cannot be in there to notice those subtle changes in our patients. We have got to be at bedside to take good care of our patients and we cannot be when Ascension staffs us the way that they have been staffing us there. Staffing grids are all about maximizing profits and keeping less people at the bedside, which does not align with their values of the dignity of life.

Maximillian Alvarez:

How does it change struggle when you’re going up against a explicitly Catholic kind of institution? I guess because one of the things we’ve been hearing from events like these is workers challenging ascension to live up to its own stated principles. So what does the struggle look like within the largest Catholic healthcare network in the country? How is that a positive and a negative for this struggle here?

Lisa Watson:

The struggle with Ascension is really disheartening. As a Catholic, I believe that every life is important and I want to take care of my patients. I want to go home. At the end of the day, I want to lay my head on my pillow and I want to know that I did right by them. And I can’t do that every day at Ascension. These nurses in Baltimore can’t do that every day. So it is very sad that the largest Catholic, not-for-profit organization hides behind their Catholicism and does the exact opposite. That’s why I’m wearing a shirt that says Act Catholic. I have worn this to numerous events because Ascension is not acting Catholic. It is degrading the faith. It is absolutely against every moral teaching of the church. Even the Pope has said that he believes in unionization and the right for workers to stand up for themselves and to have a livable wage. And ascension is doing the exact opposite. So they’re hiding behind their Catholicism. And that should make every Catholic mad. It should make every Catholic question what Ascension is doing and stand behind these nurses and especially these bishops. I mean, they’re here having a convention and they should be looking at the big picture. This is a national convention, this is a national corporation. This is a national problem. And they should see problems with what’s going on at Ascension.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just one more question. I know I got to let you go. You’ve had a long week, you’ve traveled far and wide. I want to let you get some rest, but I want to just kind of pick up on that last point. Like you said, this is a national issue and it’s going to take national and international worker solidarity to confront, and you physically standing here are living proof of that. Could you just talk a little bit about the importance of showing up for each other? I mean, maybe not everyone has the ability to travel across states for something like this, but what can folks out there do to stand in stronger solidarity with their fellow workers? And why is it important at this moment right now?

Lisa Watson:

So we are taught to stand up for our friends and to be there when people are sick and to do the right thing. So we need to do it here too. We have got to stand up for other unions and for people who are trying to unionize. We have federal rights and we will exercise our federal rights. I will be here every day exercising my federal rights. My husband is union. I understand the importance of unions. I understand how things are supposed to work and if we have federal protections, we should not let a hospital stand against us. We should definitely be standing up every day. So we have to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters. We’ve got to show up. We’ve got to do the right thing every day. We got to do the right thing even when nobody’s watching. And so I am very proud to be here standing up for my coworkers, for my brothers and sisters.

And if we don’t do this, everybody loses. All of these patients lose across the United States. We have got to stand up every single day everywhere because we will all need healthcare at one point in time and people should not be dying in the hospital because things are missed. It’s very unfortunate. We are here to show solidarity with St. Agnes and let the bishops know that the Ascension Hospital change is making a mockery of the church doctrine in Baltimore, I have witnessed firsthand how Ascension focuses on profits over patient care. I have experienced their disrespect for nurses. When we advocate for our patients and ourselves, we have to stand together to make a difference. We want a strong contract in Kansas and we use this as a tool to improve our conditions at the hospital. And that is what we want for the St. Agnes nurses

Crowd Chants:

Who got the power? We got the power! What kind of power? Union power! Who got the power? We got the power! What kind of power? Union power!

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us this week. As always, I want thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network Daily. We’re doing grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you’d never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

Sacrifice zones are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself, from toxic industrial pollution to the deadly, intensifying effects of man-made climate change. In a more just and less cruel society, the very concept of a “sacrifice zone” wouldn’t exist. And yet, in America, after decades of deregulation and public disinvestment, more working-class communities are becoming sacrifice zones, and more of us are being set up for sacrifice at the altars of corporate greed and government abandonment.

America’s sacrifice zones are no longer extreme outliers; they are, in fact, a harrowing model of the future that lies in store for most of us if the corporate monsters, corporate politicians, and Wall Street vampires destroying our communities aren’t stopped. And residents of different sacrifice zones across the country, fellow workers on the frontlines of all this reckless and preventable destruction, are connecting with each other, learning from one another, and working together to fight back. In this Working People liveshow, recorded on Oct. 19 at Red Emma’s worker cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore, we speak with a special panel of residents from four different sacrifice zones in the US about how the situations they’re facing in their own communities and their struggles for justice and accountability are connected.

Panelists include: Hilary Flint, communications director of Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community and a former resident of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, a few miles from the site of the Feb 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio; Melanie Meade, a community organizer, educator, and life-long resident of Clairton, Pennsylvania, the site of US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, which was named the most toxic air polluter in Allegheny County in a 2021 report by PennEnvironment; Elise Keaton Wade, a real estate attorney by trade, longtime environmental justice activist, and a native of Southern West Virginia; Angela “Angie” Shaneyfelt, a resident of Curtis Bay in South Baltimore, who lives just blocks away from an open air coal terminal owned and operated by rail giant CSX Transportation, which has been polluting her community for generations.

Special thanks to Dr. Nicole Fabricant and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust for organizing this live show.

Additional links/info below…

• Coal-Free Curtis Bay Facebook page and Instagram
• South Baltimore Community Land Trust website, Twitter/X page, Facebook page, and Instagram
• Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community website, Facebook page, Instagram, and Twitter/X page
• Hilary’s Instagram
• Nicole Fabricant’s Instagram
• Melanie’s Facebook page
• Angela’s Facebook page
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “South Baltimore residents on the toxic reality of living in a ‘sacrifice zone’“
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “East Palestine residents demand fully-funded healthcare“
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “One year later, East Palestine residents want Norfolk-Southern held accountable”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘Towns are gone’: In Helene-devastated Asheville, NC, volunteers battle misinformation and ‘apocalyptic’ wreckage”
• Maximillian Alvarez, In These Times / The Real News Network, “Scenes from a sacrifice zone: South Baltimore residents fight back against industrial pollution“
• Maximillian Alvarez & Molly Crabapple, In These Times, “Wasteland warriors”
• Laura Gottesdiener, The Nation, “You can wipe out coal, but you can’t bring the mountains back”
• Nicole Fabricant, University of California Press, Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore
• Nicole Fabricant, The Real News Network, “Opinion | CSX explosion in Curtis Bay should alarm Baltimore City and accelerate real change”
• Adam Willis, The Baltimore Banner, “A state-backed report found coal dust across Curtis Bay. CSX isn’t convinced“
• Melanie Meade, PublicSource, “Family history, loss and hopes for a bright future fuel my fight for clean air in Clairton”
• Daniel Shailer, PublicSource, “The Mon Valley holds its breath as the latest U.S. Steel settlement promises a fresh approach”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Hilary Flint:

Hi everyone. My name is Hilary Flint. My pronouns are she her. I am from Enon Valley, Pennsylvania that is a town of less than 300 people that borders East Palestinian, Ohio. I have a background of chronic health issues and I’m a young adult cancer survivor, and I’d always been very conscious of the environment and very conscious of health issues, but it wasn’t until the East Palestine trained derailment and chemical disaster did I start organizing full-time in this work. So I’m director of Communications and community Engagement at Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community. And we really work around fracking and the Shell Plastics plant in Beaver County and also around the East Palestine trained real as well. And then I also work with Clean Air Action Fund. It’s a C four. And the reason I do that is so I can put on a different hat and do things like lobby and help write bills that would prevent these types of things from happening.

And then I also just started working for Center for Oil and Gas organizing around the issue of LNG, which is kind of the next big thing that we need to be working on. But a lot of the work I do is through a lens of disability justice, solidarity building and trying to change the way nonprofits work. So getting more mutual aid, getting money directly to grassroots instead of big green except food and water watch, they can have all the money. So yeah, just figuring out a different way to do the work because I’ve seen that the system currently just does not work.

Melanie Meade:

Hi everyone. My name is Melanie Meade. I’m from Clairton, PA, and I came into this work in 2013 when I was burying my father, when six months later I buried my mother. And from the span of 2011 to 2020, I buried all of my immediate family. I live next to one of the largest plants, USX coing plants in Clairton pa, and I’m so thankful to have sisters like Hilary and everyone on the panel to stand in solidarity with.

Elise Keaton Wade:

Hello, my name is Elise Keaton Wade. I am from Southern West Virginia. I am a real estate attorney by trade, but I got started in my activism 25 years ago on Payford Mountain with Larry Gibson, looking at mountains being blown up for tiny seams of coal through the process of mountaintop removal, strip mining. And that is how I came to my environmentalism. It’s how I became a lawyer trying to find out why it was legal to blow the tops off mountains to get coal. Turns out it’s legal because we made a law allowing it. So it’s a policy issue, right? So I lived in Colorado for a little while. I was licensed to practice out there, and I came back to West Virginia in 2011, reconnected with Larry Gibson in 2012. He passed away shortly thereafter, but I was involved with the organization where I met Dr. Fabricant. And so she and I, 13 years ago sat on Payford Mountain and dreamed of a regional coordination of efforts. And here we are today with multiple states in this room, and we’ve spent two days together talking about how we’re all interconnected. So I’m honored and pleased, and I’m so grateful for each of you being here.

Angela Shaneyfelt:

And I’m Angela Shaneyfelt and I am a community member of Curtis Bay here in Baltimore. And I got started in this in December 30th, 2021 when the CSX Coal terminal had their explosion. And the reason why I am here is just when you look into your child’s eyes and they’re mentally checked out and you don’t know why. So that’s why I am here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, welcome everyone to this special live show of working people, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership within in these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and I cannot overstate how much of an honor it is to be sitting here with all of you here in this room here at this table. As those of you listening just heard, we have a really special installment of our ongoing series sacrificed where we have been talking with working class folks, living, working and fighting for justice in different, so-called Sacrifice Zones around the US and even beyond. And we are sitting here in the great red Emma’s cooperative bookstore and cafe and organizing space here in Baltimore. Shout out to Red Emmas, thank you for hosting us.

And I also wanted to shout out and thank the great Dr. Nicole Fabrican for bringing us altogether, everyone at the South Baltimore Community Land Trust for bringing us together. And thank you for all the incredible work that y’all do, and thank you all for being here. And yeah, as listeners of this show, no, I didn’t expect to be doing this kind of work. I’ve been doing this show for years, mainly talking to working people about their lives, jobs, dreams and struggles, but within the context of their workaday lives and labor shop floor struggles. And that’s why I was interviewing railroad workers a few years ago, nonstop, all of whom were telling me that there was a crisis on the freight rail system. I talked to engineers, I talked to dispatchers, I talked to the folks who maintain the track, right? And all of them were saying some version of the same thing, which is that corporate greed has destroyed this vital element of our supply chain, and it is putting all of us workers, residents, and our planet at Hazard, and they were screaming for someone to listen to them, and they were demanding of those companies and of their government and of the public that we support them.

And instead, as we all know, a little over two years ago, Joe Biden and both parties in Congress worked together to block railroad workers from going on strike, forced a contract down their throats and basically told them to shut up and go away. Two months later, east Palestine happened, a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed in Hilary’s backyard, and then three days later, the Norfolk Southern pressured local authorities to make the disastrous and unnecessary decision to vent and burn five cars worth of toxic vinyl chloride, spewing a massive black death plume into the air that we all remember seeing Hilary and her neighbors lived it, and they are still living in it. I mean, I think one thing that we want to emphasize here and that’s going to come out in the stories of our incredible panelists is that maybe you heard about the issues that they’re dealing with in the past, and then it faded from the headlines.

That does not mean the issue has gone away. In fact, quite the opposite is true in most cases. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been wins and struggle, and we want to make space to talk about that as well. But I really want to emphasize first and foremost that when communities are sacrificed for the sake of corporate profits or government negligence or what have you, I mean, these are people’s lives. These are communities that are destroyed and then forgotten. And as a journalist investigating and talking to folks living in these areas, what I’m realizing is we’re going to run out of places to forget. And so it breaks my heart going from East Palestine to South Baltimore to communities around the country talking to folks who feel so forgotten yet who are dealing so many of the same problems caused by the same villains. And so really, we’re here to talk about what we as fellow workers, as neighbors can do to band together to put a stop to this, to get justice and to build a world in which this kind of thing is not only unthinkable, but it sure as hell isn’t as normalized as it is today.

And so with all that upfront, I want to shut up and really just have you all listen more to the incredible women I’m sitting next to. I want us in the first half of this to just sort of talk a bit more for listeners and folks here about your story, about where you come from, about the kind of issues that you all are dealing with in your own respective communities. Because each has its own specificities. Every community is different. And then in the second half, I want us to talk about the significance of all of us being here together, of what y’all have seen in Baltimore, what discussions you’re getting into and what we can do to fight these corporate villains, wall Street monsters and corporate politicians who are destroying the planet upon which we all depend. So with all that upfront, Angie, I wanted to turn it back over to you since you are home based here in Baltimore. Tell us a bit more about yourself and about the struggle going on in Curtis Bay for folks who maybe haven’t heard about it yet.

Angela Shaneyfelt:

I grew up not in Curtis Bay or Brooklyn, I grew up just a little bit south of there in Anne Arundel County in Pasadena, a suburb of Baltimore City. And honestly, when I was younger, I said I would never live in the city, ever. And here I am 16 years later in the city that I said I would never live in. When I first moved to Curtis Bay, I never even thought about the coal other than it’s getting in my house. And I opened my windows the first year I lived there. And then after that first year, I was like, what is this black dust in my house and where is it coming from? And so we figured out that it was from the coal pile that’s two blocks, three blocks, city blocks down from where I live, just wafting into my house any way it could get in.

And so that’s when I just didn’t for 15 now years that I’ve not opened my windows at all. And then never, still didn’t pay attention to it honestly. And then December 30th happened, 2021, and literally I felt the sonic didn’t know what it was, did the mental checks looking around, and my kids were in the living room with me. My husband was on his way to Dunking Donuts. I had Covid, my daughter had covid, so we couldn’t go outside. He was going for coffee and we felt the pressure from the boom, didn’t hear anything yet. And I’m just looking around, what is it? My kids are looking at me for direction they didn’t know. And then we heard it and it shook our house. There’s neighbors that had windows blown out from this explosion. And then I looked at my daughter and she, one doesn’t, even before this, never really dealt well with loud noises or balloons.

And I’m looking at her and she literally wasn’t there. And my kids were around seven or eight at the time, so I had to tap on her chin three times to get her to come back to normal. And in that couple minutes time, I had to do the checks. The electricity’s still on. My windows are intact, and I live in Baltimore, so there’s nobody shooting outside my house. So we’re okay, but I don’t know what happened. And so then after the explosion, initial explosion happened, I go outside what we do here in Baltimore, go outside and talk to neighbors.

We didn’t get any alerts at all from any government agency, but word on the street what we go by a lot of times in South Baltimore because kind of the forgotten part of Baltimore City word on the street was there’s no threat to the community. But if you go outside and we found this out hours later from news and whatever, if you go outside, wear a mask, now it’s 2021 and we’re in the middle of a pandemic, of course we’re going to wear a mask, but why are you telling me to wear a mask if I go outside if there’s no threat to the community, like one plus one equals two in my world and that doesn’t add up. So with C, I lost my sense of smell and taste, and I had a mask on anyway, I was coming back inside because it was don’t go outside.

I had the worst suer and rotten egg smell that I’ve ever smelled in my life without a sense of smell and a mask on. So I don’t know, I can only imagine what a normal person at that point would’ve been smelling in our neighborhood. And so then my husband comes back and I literally was shuffling him inside because go inside, don’t be outside. And he had no clue. He was driving up the hill when the initial blast happened to the point where he felt like the car tires were lifting up off the ground and he stopped when he made the turn off of the street right next to ours and to check the tires to make sure there was still air in the tires. And that’s just one explosion. There’s been a history of explosions from CSX and they initially didn’t know it wasn’t us.

We’ve heard different things like it’s not our coal that is in our neighborhood, that is in your neighborhood. It comes from across the water in Ock, but your coal doesn’t leave the terminal. We’re breathing in somebody else’s coal. They tried to say it wasn’t coal. Well, what is it? Black dust. And now the community with the help of some scientists from John Hopkins have done the research, which we shouldn’t have to do. Honestly, we shouldn’t have to do that. The MDE and EPA should be doing their job. That’s their job, not our job to protect us as a community and as a city.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just to clarify for folks listening, y’all heard the episodes that we’ve done in the past with Angie and her neighbors in South Baltimore, and what we’re talking about here is the massive open air like coal terminal that is owned and operated by CSX rail, multi-billion dollar rail company that these uncovered coal cars have been coming in and out of that terminal for decades over a century. So we’re talking about the explosion that happened at the cult pier that Angie was referring to, but as you’ll hear later on in the conversation, and as y’all remember from our past episodes based on South Baltimore, this is sadly only one of many polluters poisoning Angie and her community.

Elise Keaton Wade:

So my name is Elise Keaton again, Elise Keaton Wade. It’s tough when you get married later in life, confuses things and complicates things. I said in my introduction that I got started with my environmental activism in college because I had to go away to college to learn about the environmental degradation happening in my backyard. And imagine my surprise at 19 years old when I’m sitting in an Appalachian studies course in Virginia Tech and I hear the words mountaintop removal for the very first time in my life, and I’m like, what are we talking about? And that visceral reaction to something so wrong, and that journey over the last 25 years has landed me in places where really tragic things are happening. For example, I graduated law school the year that Katrina happened. I was in the evacuation from Houston, from Rita where more people died in the evacuation from Rita than died in Katrina.

And that’s a little known fact, right? The entire city of Houston tried to leave within 36 hours and we sat for 28 hours going nowhere. But my policy mind was always at work in those instances, what is the policy that got us here? What is happening? Why am I staring at a bridge? And I was naive. I don’t know who said it earlier about being a naive high school student, but I thought it was a great statement that I’m a student. Of course I’m naive. I don’t know what’s going on right in my naivete, I thought this hurricane was going to be something that’s shone the light on all of these policy issues. This hurricane was going to show that we weren’t able to evacuate in a big way very quickly from some mass event. What if it wasn’t a hurricane? What if it wasn’t explosion or a chemical plant or some trained derailment with deadly chemicals going into the air?

We are ill-equipped across the board to deal with those types of things. That was in 2005, right? What the hell have we been doing? What have we been doing? Where is our plan? Right? So now, okay, it’s 2014. No, it’s not today. You’re glad I drank the espresso, I’m telling you. So it’s 2024 and in West Virginia right now what we’re dealing with is poisoned water in Indian Creek in Wyoming County because the coal companies are going back into the coal mines for the methane, the coal bed methane that’s down there. And one way they’re trying to figure out how to get it out of there is to flush it out with water.

Well, they’ve found out pretty quickly, that’s a terrible idea, but they continued to do it and continued to pollute. It’s been about a year and a half, maybe close to two years that this community has been aware of this, and they’re just now acknowledging that they have an issue. And yesterday they withdrew their permits to continue this practice. It was because hashtag Appalachian living on TikTok, my girlfriend Lindsay Riser who’s out there beating the drum every day, calling out the hypocrisy, telling people, why are you not talking about the industry that’s poisoning us? At the same time, we have a solid candidate coming out of that district. This is my Senate district, my state Senate District nine. She is a 35 year member of Teachers union. She started teaching right out of high school. She is from our community. She’s been a teacher for decades. She is pro West Virginia. She got involved in politics because one of her children is transgender, and she had to sit in our legislature and listen to them abuse transgender individuals with their legislation. It triggered her into action. The UMWA United Mine Workers Association, the union that we wear our bandanas to remember and to support supported her candidacy in the primary. They’re supporting her Republican opponent in the general.

Now out of respect for her, I’m going to wait until after the election to address this issue, but this issue will be addressed because of East Palestine. East Palestine is the reason that I am involved again in these issues. When Nikki brought me to East Palestine and I heard what really happened and the fact that very few news outlets were actually telling us the real news about what was happening up there, I realize it’s never going to stop. They are never going to stop doing this to us. The only people who have ever shown up for our communities are the people within our communities. And unless we’re there making other people show up, they don’t come. They’re not trying to help us and find out what’s going on. It is up to us every single time I’ve been around long enough to know Katrina, Rita, name your disaster, right?

It’s not changing and it’s unacceptable. It is disastrous and unnecessary to quote our host. And so when you find yourself in these systems and these situations where you are somewhat powerless as an individual, right? I can stand up and scream all night long and it’s not going to get anything done, but I can work in regional coordination and support the people who are in these different areas because those trains roll through my community. The coal in your bay came from my mountains in West Virginia that we have stood on as activists. They’re blowing mountains apart. Those mountains filter clean water. That’s a very shortsighted plan, don’t you think? So everything that happens in Appalachia, in West Virginia, in East Palestine, in Baltimore, this is all coordinated together and us talking to each other and having in these gatherings and committing to supporting each other regionally is their biggest fear because we’re recognizing our power and we’re using it. So I don’t know, that’s exactly the question you asked, but it felt good while I was saying it, so I’m going to stick with it. All right. Alright, with

Maximillian Alvarez:

Nah, sister, preach. Everything you guys say is incredible and important. I only picked the mic back up just to note and make a very grim footnote for listeners, because we just published another installment of this series where I spoke to two folks on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina providing mutual aid and trying to repair their destroyed community, their destroyed region, and something that Byron Ballard, who’s there working at a church and doing great work, said that really stuck with me. If you’re trying to see the connections here, not only through manmade climate change and all the ways that that is making these massive hurricanes bigger, more destructive and going and destroying parts of Western North Carolina for Pete’s sake, but what she said, because we’ve seen those pictures of towns that have been wiped off the map, mudslides that have taken towns off the map that have killed families. She said mountaintop removal made those mudslides a lot worse. So just really wanted to drive that home. If you think that these are distinct issues that aren’t going to come back and combine in monstrous ways they already are. Melanie, please hop in.

Melanie Meade:

Thank you Max. In Clariton. In 2005, I was successfully working at American University in Bowie State. I was part-time adjunct professor in Spanish. I was so proud to have my job. I went home to a Clairton reunion we have during Labor Day and I woke up the next morning in the hospital being diagnosed with what is called nocturnal epilepsy. That emergency doctor did not tell me what it came from and no other doctor could find it whenever they did scans of my brain. But then in 2013, when I came home to bury my father, I met a gentleman named Dave Smith and he was working for Clean Air Council and he had taught me about the campaign leaders of 10 and he said, Melanie, get 10 friends and tell them to each get one friend and let’s start talking about our shared issues. In 2018, fires burned the size of three football fields for 17 days before the mayor and Health Department informed us little black boys because they’re typically outside and want to be outside and play outside. We’re five times more affected according to a doctor’s report. Then we came to find out months later that everyone’s health was harmed who live within 10 miles of the USX Claritin K works.

And we didn’t get the right help, nor did we know what kind of help we needed. So there were people who came in to say they were helping, but we never really found out the truth. And it disturbed me to find out that those fires burned again in 2019 total of over 100 days, and it wasn’t on the news anymore. Hilary and I are very close, so we’re not in competition, but I felt like USX was in control of the media. There was a stop and desist with USXK works to talk about the trains, and those trains come through clariton as well. I can hear them all through the night and day.

That’s where I realized we have to remain connected. We have to tell our stories, we have to have real news. We have to have real journalists that report the truth according to what we have experienced because it can’t be done any other way. And I’m just really encouraged to have you all to look, to call on and come together like this because this is helpful and it’s healing to know that our work is meaningful and it will result in something. So I just continue to thank you for real news. I continue to thank Curtis Bay for sharing your stories. I continue to thank Hilary. I continue to thank Elise, Dr. Fabricant, all of you who are here because you are the wind beneath my wings, not having my parents or siblings. It can be a lonely place, but you fill those voids for me and I’m so very grateful for you all and I’m so very grateful that we can say let’s blow stuff up.

Hilary Flint:

I just want to start off by something I feel like is not spoken about enough is that East Palestine did get a lot of media coverage, especially in the beginning, right? We were on all the news stations and it was this big plume, but I genuinely think it’s not because USX is not allowing media to do things. I think it’s because we’re a predominantly white community, and I’m going to be super frank about that. Myself and two other community members were able to meet President Biden within a year of the trained derailment. And I have to see black leaders in Louisiana and in Texas who have been doing this fight for 40 plus years, 50 years, and they do not get proximity to the White House. They get nowhere near it. So I just want to start with that because I think we talk about East Palestine a lot and it’s like, yeah, we got the media coverage because it was a white community and it was not only that, it’s a very conservative area.

So it was a flashier news story than, oh, we’ve been poisoning people for 40 years. It was different. And that’s what was different about it is that we were a white, small rural community. And I try to do the work that now we can bring people with us because one thing about your whiteness is I can’t get rid of it, but what I can do is utilize it to then make sure that now the White House is contacting other communities because it’s disgusting to me that you feel this guilt that day that myself and other community members met with President Biden, I had the most extreme guilt because it was like we did this in a year and through that year I was connecting with communities all over the United States that went through environmental disasters. And I had to think like, oh, you expect, oh wow, that’s so cool.

You did that in one year. And so part of it, you do have that little bit of pride and you’re like, yeah, that’s awesome. And then you’re like, but why could I do that? Watching these other women, and by the way, it’s usually women, it’s usually female activists. I’m watching them and I heard Melanie speak one day and I was like, that is a fierce woman. And if Melanie Mead isn’t getting the help that she needs, then there is something wrong with the system. And that’s what this solidarity building is. It’s so important. But I did want to talk about the day of the derailment and how people think it is the derailment. That’s the problem. I refer to this as the East Palestinian trained derailment and chemical disaster because the derailment is just a piece of the puzzle. And yes, there was all these chemicals and there was fires, but it really wasn’t until a couple of days later when they burned the vinyl chloride that my community was affected.

So we know this as the East Palestine trained around it, but it’s directly on the border where this happened. Pennsylvania is right there, and other communities outside of East Palestine were affected and will be affected down the line, but it would not be as bad as it will be that vinyl chloride changed the game. So that’s the mushroom cloud that everyone saw. And I remember that day very distinctly because I was convinced I was glued to the news thinking they’re going to evacuate us. Of course they are. East Palestine at that point had been under evacuation. It was a one by two mile radius, but where I lived, you could see the smoke. So I’m thinking they’re going to have to evacuate us. And so then I’m watching the TV and I see, oh, my little brother’s school, they’re sending the kids home and our school is way further away from East Palestine than our physical home.

So I’m thinking, oh, okay, they’re sending the kids home so then we can evacuate as families. He gets home and we’re waiting and we’re waiting and we’re seeing, I’m watching the press conference on the news. They’re saying, alright, at three 30 we’re going to blow this up. And the call that we were looking for never came. We were never going to be evacuated. It was just a one by two mile radius. Now we’re over a year out and there is proof that this plume traveled to 16 different states. So imagine a one by two mile radius. Us, my family chose to self evacuate. We did it very last minute. I had my go-bag prepped. My Italian grandma was like, I’m not leaving my house. So last minute we got Mimi. We got Mimi in the car. She was the last one. But as we were driving away and we had no idea where we were going by the way, it was just like, you just have to get away.

And I look in the rear view mirror and that’s when they blew it up. So it felt like I was a storm chaser running away from a tornado or something. That’s what it felt like. And you see it. And at that moment, my dog just started barking like crazy, just barking like crazy. And I think they have a more sensitive smell and things like that. And we just kept driving and I’m like, where are we going by the way? So I don’t know. I had family in another town. So we went and I was sat in my cousin’s driveway for hours. She wasn’t home. And then I was like, well, I guess we’re going to have to get a hotel. Because once we saw what it looked like, some of my neighbors that had stayed behind at the farm next door to me and took pictures, I was shocked.

People were alive. It was black. The whole area was just black smoke. I couldn’t imagine that was safe to go home to. So we did end up getting a hotel. It was the last hotel book. We are small communities. Guess what? We don’t have a lot of hotel rooms available and the National Guard there. And we were checking in kind of at the same time. And so I had asked this man in full uniform, I said, we weren’t supposed to be evacuated, but we did anyway. What would you have done in that situation? And he said, ma’am, if it was up to me, I wouldn’t even be here right now. So this is someone in full uniform who came to respond to the crisis, who understood how dangerous it was. And at that point we were like 15 miles away and he didn’t even want to be there.

And the next day they say everything’s fine, everyone can go home. And I remember I had a business trip that I had to go back, pack my bag, and then go to the airport. The minute we opened the door of our home, I knew everything had changed. It was a smell that I had never sm smelled before. I couldn’t even find the correct words to describe it except sweet bleach. It was a chemical smell, but it also smelled sugary. And within a few minutes we had health symptoms. I mean, it did not take long. So I have some preexisting health conditions. I have chronic illness, and one of the diseases that I have is called rainy odds. And in rayons it causes blood vessel constriction. So you turn purple. Now, I’ve always had rayons since I was little. My hands would turn purple, but I’d never had it go beyond that.

And all of a sudden I look down, my feet are purple, everything is turning purple. And it wasn’t until later I find out that their vinyl chloride is one of the known triggers of that particular disease. And when we’re told it’s safe to go home, my question is, who is it safe for? It’s not safe for everyone. It’s not safe for people with asthma. It’s not safe with for people with preexisting conditions, but that is what we operate off of. It’s a blanket statement of, oh, it’s safe. That’s not true. It wasn’t safe for me. And then I had to get on a plane and leave my family and say, oh, I had to go to work. And so I was on this work trip and just, I smelled, there was a smell that lingered. So I get off the plane, I was flying to California and my boss and I are meeting at the airport and I go to hug him and he goes, Ooh, why do you smell like that?

It came with me to California. And that smell traveled with me for a full year. I had to leave all my clothes behind. I had to leave mattresses. You couldn’t take anything that was a soft surface because this chemical smell lived in it. And no matter how many times you washed it, it didn’t matter. And it got to the point where it became embarrassing because you had a smell. My partner also has chronic illness, and the smell would make him sick just from me being in his home. And it got to the point where when I would go over, I would have to get completely naked at the door, get in a shower, shut my clothes in a basement. I would have to shower, I would’ve to put on different clothes that I had to buy to keep there. And it was so I didn’t feel like a human.

And I remember at one point I was crying. I was so upset, I was so tired. And I was like, I can’t believe I have to go through this whole ritual, this decontamination ritual. And I just remember him saying, it’s not you, honey, it’s the chemicals. I’m like, I don’t know that. That makes me feel that much better, right? Yeah. He would get nosebleeds just from being around my suitcase. And so about six months in, I ended up, I worked two jobs until I could afford to move. Because when they tell you to just move, it actually doesn’t work like that, especially if you were exposed to a chemical. So now all of your belongings, you can’t take them with you. And so when I did move, I finally got a place, I was on an air mattress. Me and my grandma were sharing an air mattress on the ground.

There was no furniture. I just got a couch. And I’ve been there for over a year at this point, because you are rebuilding, you were starting over again. And so I’ve had to work from the crack of dawn until it’s dark out. And that’s what I had to do to move. And that’s a privilege, right? Not everyone even has that privilege. That’s pretty shocking. I can do that as a disabled person. But I look at people with families. My family is a small, well, small business owner, but we own a lot of acreage. And my parents want to move. But when you have 10,000 acres and you have a business based on tourism, and guess what? You can’t sell it. So where are you going to go? And you can’t pull equity out of your house. So they’re stuck. I could just up and move.

I didn’t have the business. I didn’t have this and that. So now my grandma and I, we lived in the home. My great-grandmother built on the land that my family originally lived on. My parents built a house in the backyard. I had moved back home because I had cancer. And I was a young adult and I couldn’t financially recover unless I did that. My plan was I live back with my grandma and then I build a house in the backyard. Cause we have 40 acres, we have our own little commune. That can’t happen now. There’s no way we used to lease farm land. And how can we ethically do that? How can we ethically, if you have farmers who want to farm that land, is that ethical? Is it ethical to sell your home? So right now, we just have our home sitting there because we don’t feel comfortable selling it.

And I had someone who was a lawyer be like, oh, actually you can, it’s okay. And I said, I’m not actually asking about the law here. I’m talking about ethics. Can I sell this home so that some little kid someday gets angiosarcoma, which is the cancer that vinyl chloride is tied to? So in the beginning, I was kind of the person behind the scenes organizing, I don’t really like to do stuff like this. I’m the person who likes to prep people for these things. And about six months in, I realized I was going to have to do this and step up. And so we had a grassroots group that we started just like a volunteer. We weren’t a nonprofit, we weren’t anything. And people always said like, oh, why didn’t you become a nonprofit right away? And I said, oh, because we didn’t want the rules.

So we did have some civil disobedience in the beginning. That’s how I met Robin and David. They went to the Ohio State Capitol with us. And we didn’t storm the capitol, but we had people go sit in a session and stand up and say, remember he is Palestine. My kid’s nose is bleeding. And let me tell you, once you go back to your community after you do something like that, things don’t go well. Small, rural conservative communities aren’t really into that kind of thing. But it was effective. And the reason we went when we did was one thing we thought that could help us was a major disaster declaration because we didn’t even get a state of emergency. It opened up this problem that because there was a company who was the reason this happened, the liability was with that company and it wasn’t a natural disaster.

So there was just so many things behind the scenes that they couldn’t figure out how to classify the disaster essentially to give us the government services we needed. But we thought a major disaster declaration would help. In the beginning had started a petition. We had over 20,000 signatures. And then it was the next day it was, if the governor didn’t ask President Biden for that, then you could never get it. And so we went because we knew we had to put pressure on Ohio’s governor to win Pennsylvania’s governor. I found out couldn’t even call that disaster declaration because it physically didn’t happen. So where an accident happens is really important apparently. So we went and we put the pressure on, and guess what? The next day DeWine did ask for the disaster declaration. So it worked to the whole community hated us after that. And I mean, still to this day, Facebook groups terrify me like what they’re saying about us, but it’s what we had to do.

And that’s what I’ve realized. Some of these decisions I have to make in this work is like, I have to do this and I’m not going to be liked after, and I have to do this in a way that I can stay in the work too. So maybe sometimes that means not organizing as close to home. I learned that federal policy actually can help us a lot more than talking to my representatives when they tell you, oh, talk to your representatives, talk to your counsel. That is true in some cases, but in this case, that wasn’t true. So a lot of my work has been about going to the very top and figuring out what we can get from the government. And unfortunately, it doesn’t happen quick. It does not happen quick. And so by the time we are going to get the things we’re fighting for, people are going to be sick.

There’s already people sick. There’s people with rare forms of breast cancer. There’s young girls getting their period super early. There’s respiratory issues. I was hospitalized multiple times. My sibling was life-flighted multiple times. My three-year-old sister has obstructive sleep apnea, which only happened after the derailment. So the system was horrible. And that’s kind of what I’m trying to change. And we found out when we did get to meet at the White House, something I had asked later, I said to them, what got us here? What was the difference maker? And they actually said, we noticed you were working with other communities and other industries. And they talked about the fact that we were working with labor, we were working with unions, and then they found out that we’ve been working with the Gulf South and we were working in West Virginia. And that scared them. It should.

And that got us in the door. And that’s why I think what we’re doing here is more important than anything we could do because this is what scares them. People coming together and realizing it’s not left versus right. It’s not Republican versus liberal. It is us versus them. And we are the people. We’re the everyday people. It’s us versus the billionaires in the systems and that’s scaring them. So we have to keep doing this in other communities because this is what gets the attention. Sometimes it’s not the rallies or the op-eds, sometimes it’s them simply understanding your network. So anytime I go to another community, I was in Louisiana at a public meeting and someone from industry said, oh, who are you and why are you here? And I said, oh, we all work together. And they were like, oh no. So letting industry know like, oh yeah, I know Elise in West Virginia. I know Nikki in Baltimore, and that’s really scary to them.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about that. Let’s go back around the table before we open it up to q and a. And I want to acknowledge that as y’all had laid out, and as Hilary, you were talking through some of the gains that you made by not going away. And I know that that has happened in your respective communities. Y’all are true heroes, love warriors for justice because you refuse to go away. And in that way, you were also an inspiration to all of us. So I want to acknowledge the fact that here in South Baltimore, y’all got together high school students, folks from Johns Hopkins doing community science to provide the proof that CSX without which CSX could keep on saying, no, that black shit in your home is not us, must be something else. So that’s a victory. But yet they’re still denying culpability. Their operational permits still up for renewal in coal country, right?

It’s like, oh, well, we stopped mining coal, now we’re fracking the shit out of everything and still poisoning the water that way. So I say this by way of asking if in our final turnaround the table, if y’all could say a little bit about what the communities have been doing and achieving through struggle, but also what this week has shown us in regards to as valiant and essential as those local efforts are to take on these international corporations. We need solidarity that’s operating at the level that they are and what we can do working together, building on what Hilary kind of got us started on. So yeah, could you say a little bit about what y’all and your communities have achieved and have been working towards, but also where you’re seeing that that’s not enough and that we need to band together to take this fight to the higher level higher.

Elise Keaton Wade:

So I want to start this. Can you hear me okay? I want to start this because their fights are more current in time than mine, and I want to kind of build on what Hilary said and then hand it to them to talk about their current struggles. But now you understand why Palestine at Palestine set me back on fire right now. You understand that I got there and realized that everything I’d seen wasn’t true. They were misleading the rest of the world about what happened there. And it wasn’t until I sat in the room and heard these people talk about why the people with no marks on their skin or their hair falling out were the ones who got to go into the White House, how they divided the community. And I stood next to my friend Dustin White who is here tonight with me.

He was at that meeting and the entire time they were talking about how that community and how the officials responded in that disaster. We were looking at each other across the room. That’s exactly what they did in 2014 at the Elk River Chemical disaster in West Virginia. The leak spill, whatever, nearly verbatim responses. And then the split, you have a coalition of people and we cobbled ourselves together. And now they’re going to pick and choose who they bring into the room so that when you leave that room, there’s division within your community. They did exactly the same thing to us. And I sat there with my jaw on the floor and they’re going to keep doing it to every community. There’s their standard playbook. So yes, what scares them is that we talk to each other now that we stand in solidarity with each other, that I go and raise hell with the union in West Virginia for our railroad brothers and sisters in East Palestine who stood for two months and screamed about the safety issues on this railroad, screamed to the people in this country about what was happening and what was going to happen if they didn’t shut it down and address it.

And we told ’em to sit down and shut up because our economy needed those trains to roll. Now, if you’ve been with me for the past couple of days, I’ve been on a bit of a diatribe about the failed economic theory of capitalism. Happy to go into that more on another podcast Max. But this is a great example.

This is a great example of why it doesn’t work, because if it worked in theory, they would’ve taken as long as they needed to clean up that mess because it would’ve been what was safe and best for the community and for making sure that the altruistic idea of what happened happened. That’s not what happened in West Virginia. If they cared about the community and the long-term effects, they would’ve addressed the issues that caused that chemical spill, which are mountaintop removal and contamination of local water sources from coal mining and chemical production. If they care, they don’t care. The only people who have ever shown up for us are us. The only people who have ever shown up for us are us. And then we have to support each other. Don’t let them divide us. Don’t let them go back and forth. So I want to step back and just say that the fact that it has become more egregious, they are pushing that boundary, right?

They are pushing it constantly and they will continue. Every community in this country has a train rail through it. This could be Hinton, this could be any town that has a railway through it. And what are they going to do? They’re going to destroy your lives with their contamination and they’re going to point fingers at each other and they’re going to point fingers at you and tell you it’s really not as bad as you say it is, because how do you know it wasn’t the nail polish you were wearing that caused the toxicity in your body?

Yeah, that’s what they told me. Do you wear nail polish? Do you color your hair? Well, how do you know you didn’t poison yourself? Do you smoke cigarettes? Do you drink soda West Virginia? Maybe you’re the problem. I want to say one thing about the myth of the inbred hillbilly, because this is one of my favorite things to talk about in broad groups, and I think it goes back a long time in our history, and I know everybody’s heard about the inbred hillbilly. If you haven’t heard about the inbred hillbilly, raise your hand. This is so diffused throughout our culture, right? Well, I went into the world carrying the identity of the hillbilly that had to do better. I had to prove that we’re not all inbred, that some of us aren’t. So I let them tell me who I was. I accepted their identity of who they told me I, I carried it with me into the world espousing it.

I came back to West Virginia because I love my state. I wanted to come back and do the good things that I’d learned out there that nobody taught me here, come back here and do those good works. And when I got back here with a little bit of perspective and context and some world experience, I realize that may be the biggest hoax of the 20th century. Because what happens when you live next to unregulated pollutants? You have high instances of birth defects, cancers deadly diseases. You die young, you die sick. You have offspring that are compromised and sick and young. And 150 years ago, all of these toxins were going unchecked into the community. And what better way to marginalize that community than they say, well, don’t look at that ugliness. They inbred and they changed the narrative and they framed a region for decades. The myth of the inbred hillbilly is still carried forward.

So it is on purpose. It is deliberate. If they can tell you who you are and what you’ve done to f your life up, then they’re not responsible. So don’t let them gaslight you. Stand firm and speak your truth to power because you’re right at the end of the day. You’re right. And what did Larry Gibson teach us? Teach us while we stood on Payford Mountain? If you’re telling the truth, what are you afraid of? Speak your truth to power and stand firm. And you’ve got brothers and sisters in West Virginia standing with you and you’ve got brothers and sisters in Pennsylvania standing with you. You’ve got brothers and sisters in Curtis Bay standing with you. So thank you for standing up East Palestine, we are with you in this. Thank you.

Angela Shaneyfelt:

Thank all of you. And I’m so, so glad that we’re sitting all here in this room together tonight because Curtis Bay, we’re at a point right now. We’re pushing. We’re getting the attention that East Palestine got. And I mean, I said it two years ago at a rally. Let’s take this to Annapolis and to dc. We’re so close to DC that we can’t stop fighting the fight. And it’s not for us. It’s for my kids who are in middle school right now. And my daughter joined us today for as long as she could hang, and she got up on the steps and she said her, she was awesome. And we have the higher cancer rates in Curtis Bay, like asthma rates. I never had asthma growing up. And I found out I had asthma in 2020 in the hospital for surgery. And they’re like, this is your breathing treatment. And I’m like, breathing treatment for what? Nobody ever told me I had asthma.

And we have been fighting. We’ve been going to city council. And at one point they didn’t listen, but then we kept fighting and we kept calling the news. And Max, thank you for starting the whole podcast thing and just getting the word out. I’ve gone through times. I mean, the fight is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. And I’ve had my own thoughts. What am I doing this for? I doing it. And I just, I’m so grateful right now that I’m sitting in this room with you guys because we’ve gotten to a point where what is our next step? And I’ve even said it along the way. There’s this lull of large numbers, and I see it happening right now. I didn’t know any of you guys before today. So I knew Nikki for a few years and I never would’ve ever imagined before 2021 that I would ever be sitting in circles that I’m sitting in now. And now I’m 16 years ago, I wanted to be out of Curtis Bay as fast as possible no matter what. And then kids happen. And Curtis Bay is where I can afford to live in all honesty. And in two years, I’m like ready to, the plan is to buy a house. Is it going to be in Curtis Bay? A hundred percent, no. But I’m invested now. So even if I move out, I’m still coming back to keep the fight going and keep the story going, to make the change because that’s what I need to do.

Melanie Meade:

My father taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Thomas Vme. He passed in 2013. And the reason he stayed in Clariton is because the family land that we had called Randolph Hollow was taken over for mill housing and he felt like it was worth it to sacrifice his life and his health so that our history could not be forgotten. And so when I hear Hilary stand in solidarity, and the new friend I have in Curtis Bay stand in solidarity, Elise and Dr. Nikki standing in solidarity with me, I know that I’m on the right path. I know that I have not forgotten my history, who I am and what I’m capable of. And I think each and every one of you are fierce in your own way. And it is so wonderful that we have this opportunity because we need it. We need to check in with ourselves, check in with others, because we are the ones showing up for ourselves, as Elisa said. And I need each and every one of you for the long haul. So thank you again, and let’s keep doing the work.

Hilary Flint:

To go off of what Melanie said, it’s stuff like this that keeps me in the work. So that’s a question I ask myself a lot, and I see other activists and I think, what do they need to stay in the work? What do I need to stay in the work? And every once in a while it’s going to a community and getting inspired by their wins. I noticed how closely the communities here, the EJ conversation is happening with housing injustice and you’re talking about racial justice, and we don’t see a lot of that in our corner of Appalachia. That type of solidarity building doesn’t happen. And so I get to leave and be really inspired by that. I have been working with a group of folks from the Gulf South, and we’re talking about creating an area where climate refugees can live. So I’m looking at the passive housing and I’m thinking, oh, interesting. And I bet a funder would fund something like that. So I get to think about those different ways of doing the work. And we just don’t celebrate joy very much in Appalachia, unfortunately.

And to see the positivity and the solutions, I got to see solutions to problems instead of just problems where we are just stuck in the doom and gloom. So for me, coming to this, this is what keeps me in the work. It keeps me going, but then as most people know, I’m a homebody. So I’ll go home and you won’t see me for three weeks now because this social battery, but we all have, that’s such an important lesson. As an activist, what are your boundaries? What keeps you in the work? What are you comfortable in and what are not? What type of hate are you willing to put up with? What’s going to cross the line for you? It can get really bad. I always say being an activist is choosing to be a target, and not only to industry, but sometimes community, sometimes politicians.

So again, it’s like what’s going to keep me in the work creating solutions to some of those problems? So something we’ve been trying to do is, again, bring mutual aid into the work. Because what we found out is in East Palestine and Beaver County, they go, oh, well there’s not property damage and there’s not this and there’s not that. So no one’s coming to help you because you don’t fit in a box. And mutual aid is the answer to that, right? It’s community care. It’s, we’re not looking for a box to check off on a grant. You tell me you need a mattress, we get you a mattress. And so how do we make sure that that’s present in the nonprofit industry? So we are fighting really hard to get mutual aid funds set up at small grassroots nonprofits that are just meant for answering community need, peer support.

So something that we’re working on is building up mental health resources within the movement. And what does it look to make sure other nonprofits are trauma informed, because what I saw was a lot of groups coming in and taking advantage of people, and I was expected to tell my story of my battle with cancer, and then I turned purple and I wasn’t getting paid for any of that. So something that I’ve been doing is I call people out and I say, you can build paying community members into a grant. And so we do it with everything. We build that money into a grant. And I did a video project where I made sure we paid everyone and paid them well. And this one funder said, that’s revolutionary. We don’t do that. And I said, paying people for their work is revolutionary. I said, and we are the progressive industry.

No, we’re not. So thinking about what does care look like in every aspect, because we are not going to stay in this fight. And as we’ve seen it as a long fight, if we don’t think about those things and we’re just, I’m an action oriented person, I’m like, I got to keep going. I got to keep going. And so that gets tiring. And it’s like sometimes I need Melanie to be like, Hilary, have you checked in with yourself today? Are you doing your self care? And we don’t always get that in our own community because when you’re fighting so closely together, people want to do the work differently. And there’s just so much division going on. The minute I decided that I was going to meet the president and then continue a relationship with politicians, it was, she’s been bought off.

We can’t trust her anymore. And I had to be okay with that and say, that’s fine. I’m going to work silently. I’m going to get done what I know is going to work because I have been with all of these people now for a year. I know what the needs are and I don’t need to be liked anymore, but I do need to be liked by someone. So that’s where activists come in. They remind me, okay, Hilary, you’re loved and respected in some just not your own home right now. So, okay. So it builds that friendship. And when I get to come and be with Melanie, or even I work very closely with Robin at home, and just to have people that keep filling you up, even if it’s just a couple people in the community, a couple people in different neighborhoods, or when you go through a really heavy situation and no one in your community can relate to it, I can say, Hey Melanie, have you ever experienced this?

What does it mean? Can you just be my friend right now and talk me through it? No one else gets it in the community. So again, there’s nothing more important than the solidarity building that we’re doing right now. It’s what scares them. I heard it from the highest up mouth that I could find in the United States. This is what scares them. So the more we do it, the more we win. Especially when it comes to public hearings, public comment periods, vinyl chloride, the chemical that ruined my home on October 23rd, you have until October 23rd to submit a public comment about what you think about that chemical, should it be banned. They’ve known since the 1970s that it was a carcinogen. It was the reason the EPA started something called tosca. Yet it has yet to be banned by tosca. This is the first year it’s up to be banned.

Just letting each other know, Hey, I have a public comment period. I would really appreciate it. Because then guess what? They look and they go, oh crap. They got all these public comments from Pennsylvania. They’ve hit every state. Now we’re going to have to do something no longer. Oh no, we poisoned this one community. We poisoned this one community. And they talk to this other poison community, and they talk to this house that has these people that have been dealing with racism. And then they talk to these people that are dealing with transgender rights and they go, oh, so reminding each other, we have some group chats that’ll be like, Hey guys, public comment period here. Submit. And just finding ways to engage with each other outside of this stuff is really important. Mutual aid fundraisers, some people I meet will have a chat where we’re just like, oh, here’s a GoFundMe.

Everyone send $5. And it doesn’t ruin my day to send someone $5 at this point. So it’s like, it’s so simple. But if you keep building out these networks and someone has a crisis, and I know people all over the United States, we can get a lot of money. I think we got $3,000 and not even 24 hours. And that’s just like us being random people. It wasn’t a part of our work. It’s just like you can get it because your network is big and your relationships are the work. And if people trust you, they’re going to donate to that. They trust you. So this is how we win

Melanie Meade:

In all aspects. Relationships are the work is powerful. And hills is,

Hilary Flint:

It wasn’t me, my colleague Andrew Wooer said it the first time, and I’ll never forget it because I don’t like emotional labor. I am someone who I don’t feel often. I just want to do. I want to solve problems. I want to keep going. And so I was getting so upset that people would be crying and I didn’t know what to do. I’m like, I don’t know what this means. I’m like Googling. I’m like, why would someone cry about this? So I was getting so frustrated and it was going to take me out of the work. It was because I was so bogged down and people would want to have two hour long conversations to tell me about their feelings. And I’m like, I am not the one I truly wish I was, but I’m not. So then you have to find your person who’s the one who does

Melanie Meade:

The feeling.

And I think what I learned here in Curtis Bay is education is important and valuable, especially for our youth in Clariton right now in 2024, we do not have climate change or environmental justice spoken of, nor will they allow me to go in and volunteer to talk to the youth. Our newest superintendent, who is an African-American woman, would not allow us to prepare a lawyer clinic because there are three remaining class action lawsuits for the 2018 and 2019 Christmas fires. So our youth are disengaged. Our little league football team practices directly across the street from the industry. And the coaches say to me, who are sickly, this is not harming us. It hasn’t harmed us. We did it when we were little. And that is what must stop aligning with Hilary, aligning with Elise, Dr. Nikki and Curtis Bay gives me voices to now take back to those coaches to say, look, here it is a problem and let’s stop it.

Let’s unite. Let’s stop allowing them to divide. Because our youth in Clariton are winning football games for 40 years and dying at the age of 20, overdosing on Fentanyl or other drugs less than 30 years. And we don’t have the time. We’re 50 years behind in the conversation. So we need to pick it up. And I’m able to pick it up because I have Hills, tiktoks and Curtis Bay and you Max real-time news. So that if you don’t understand, take a moment to listen here, check in and let’s continue this work. We are not defeated because we are together. Give it up for our incredible panel.

Two years ago, the US was on the cusp of seeing its first national rail strike in decades. Then, President Joe Biden, at the urging of the rail companies and with the help of both parties in Congress, preemptively blocked railroad workers from striking in December of 2022. Workers were forced to accept a contract that did not address the vast majority of issues that have been putting them, our communities, and our supply chain at hazard. How has this all shaped railroad workers’ attitudes and approaches to the upcoming elections? In this urgent panel discussion, we pose this question directly to three veteran railroaders, and we have an honest discussion about how working people should act strategically within and outside the electoral system to advance their interests. 

Panelists include: Hugh Sawyer, a veteran locomotive engineer with 36 years of experience, a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Division 316, and a founding member and acting treasurer of Railroad Workers United; Mark Burrows, a retired locomotive engineer with 37 of experience, who has served as co-chair and organizer for Railroad Workers United, where he still edits RWU’s quarterly newsletter “The Highball”; Ron Kaminkow, a recently retired former brakeman, conductor, and engineer who worked for many years in freight rail before working 20 years as a passenger engineer at Amtrak, a founding member of RWU and delegate in the Northern Nevada Central Labor Council. 

Additional links/info below…

• Railroad Workers United website, Facebook page, and Twitter/X page
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Railroad workers speak out after Congress and Biden block rail strike”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Why do railroad workers keep dying on the job?”
• Maximillian Alvarez & Mel Buer, The Real News Network, “Labor militancy can’t be stopped: Palestine and Labor Notes 2024”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “US freight workers say it’s time to nationalize the railroads”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, ““This was preventable”: Railroad workers explain how Wall St caused the East Palestine derailment“
• Mel Buer, The Real News Network, “Corporate billionaires are wrecking the supply chain. Just look at the railroads”
• Adam Johnson, Nima Shirazi, Maximillian Alvarez, & Mel Buer, Citations Needed / The Real News Network, “Biden and Congressional Dems partner with GOP and corporate media to discipline railroad workers”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Railroad workers are being ground to dust. Who will help them?” 

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

TRANSCRIPT

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A corrected version will be made available as soon as possible.

Hugh Sawyer: 

My name is Hugh Sawyer. I’m a working locomotive engineer in Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m completing my 36th year. I’ve been a locomotive engineer practically my whole career and I’m a proud member of the Teamsters as I belong to Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineer and Trainman Division three 16 in Atlanta, and I’m also a founding member of Railroad Workers United and the current treasurer of that organization, which we’re organization of rank and file rail members from all the crafts that are just working together to make a better, hopefully better work environment and better contracts in the future for the rail members that are left in the industry.

Mark Burrows: 

My name is Mark Burrows. I’m a retired locomotive engineer. I started railroading in 1974 at the Chicago Northwestern, 12 years there and then 25 years at the Canadian Pacific from 91 to the end of 2015. In my latter years I was a delegate for the UTU now, the Smart Transportation Division for our 2011 and 2014 conventions. I’ve been a long time member of Railroad Workers United since 2011 and am currently the editor of our quarterly newsletter, the Highball.

Ron Kaminkow:

My name is Ron Kaminkow, recently retired from the railroad as of last year. I hired out with Conrail in Chicago in 96, taken over by Norfolk Southern in 99, worked for the NS in 2004. I left the Norfolk Southern, came to Amtrak, which is the railroad I just retired from. I’ve worked on the railroad in nine different states, run trains over basically every rail carrier major class one carrier, having been an Amtrak engineer out of Chicago in particular, and Milwaukee, we run on all these different railroads. Founding member of Railroad workers, United served as the General secretary for many years also as the organizer and now serving in the capacity of a trustee for that organization. Still a member of Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen honorary member Division 51, and I am still the delegate to our local Northern Nevada Central Labor Council.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends, and your family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you got recommendations for working folks that you’d like us to talk to or stories you’d like us to investigate and please support the work that we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximilian Alvarez and we’ve got a critical episode for y’all today. We are just days away from the US elections and America stands on the precipice of a dark and uncertain future. Polls are showing that the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is incredibly close and we may not know which candidate legitimately won for days, if not weeks after November 5th, but what we do know because it’s already happening is that there will be a tug of war over the legitimacy of the results. And I want to just give a note on that really quick because as researchers at Trusting News, a research and training project that helps journalists demonstrate credibility and earn trust, writes, 

“The United States doesn’t have a nationwide body that collects and releases election results. Instead, journalists gather data from local and state agencies that report election results publicly.

The Associated Press gathers this data and makes it available to the public and to other newsrooms to count the votes and then declare winners. They’ve been doing this in presidential elections since 1848. Elections in the US are highly decentralized and complex. While uncontested or landslide races may be called right after polls close, competitive races may take days or even weeks to call, and while some states like Florida count most of the ballots on election day, other states like California can take weeks.”

So just take note of that and make sure that your family and your friends know how to interpret what is going to play out in front of us next week. Be critical, be watchful, be patient, and don’t let yourself become a tool of cynical actors who are trying to manipulate you and above all else, just go vote. Listen, we’ve talked for years on this show about how and why our political system sucks.

I mean, we know that you’re not going to find any naive defenses of that system here, but every conversation that we’ve had with workers has also shown in one way or another that the results of national, state and local elections still shape the ground upon which we all live, work, and organize. History has shown us, for instance, that if you’ve got a hostile underfunded national Labor relations board run by bosses and corporate hacks, that’s going to drastically change the entire landscape of rank and file organizing around the country facing an even more daunting path to victory and are getting a first contract. Many new union drives would be stifled and many existing unions may find themselves not going on strike, not expanding to organize new members, but instead defensively fighting for their right to exist. Ballot measures like the infamous Prop 22 in California, which passed in 2020 and which we covered here on this show.

These things can legally cement a permanent underclass of workers who make less than minimum wage and have virtually no rights as employees. So take elections seriously, even if politicians and their elite donor class don’t take you seriously. And that’s really what we’re here to talk about today. As you guys know, two years ago when the potential for a national rail strike was building, we conducted many, many interviews on this podcast and over at the Rail News Network with railroad workers from across the industry. We talked to engineers, conductors, dispatchers, track workers and more. And through those interviews, we help educate the public on the long brewing crisis in the country’s supply chain, a crisis driven by the insatiable greed of massively profitable rail companies and their Wall Street shareholders, a crisis that is affecting all of us as consumers who depend on the rails way more than we realize, and a crisis that has been most acutely felt by workers who have been run into the ground and trackside communities like East Palestine, Ohio.

As you guys also know at the request of President Joe Biden, with the urging of the rail companies themselves and with the help of both parties in Congress, the government preemptively blocked railroad workers from striking in December of 2022 and forced workers to accept a contract that did not address the vast majority of issues that have been putting them our communities and our supply chain at Hazard. Then two months later in February of 2023, the Norfolk Southern train derailment and toxic chemical disaster happened in East Palestine. Now, a lot of folks have been asking us how this has all shaped railroad workers’ attitudes and approaches to the elections, and plenty of folks have even cited the blocking of the rail strike as a key factor in their decision regarding who to vote for or whether to even vote at all. So as we always do here, rather than try to hypothesize or ventriloquize what we think workers might say, we’re going to go straight to the source and talk to workers themselves.

As you guys heard at the top of this episode, we’ve got an incredible panel of veteran railroaders here to help us navigate this. So let’s dive in…

Brothers Hugh, Mark, and Ron, it is so great to see you all and so great to be chatting with you all today. Thank you so, so much for making time for this. I really appreciate it and I’m really excited to talk to you guys about this today because as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of folks really want to know and really need to know what you think and what is being talked about on the rails, right? And we came together ourselves two, three years ago out of our reporting on the struggle of workers on the railroads that led us to connect with Railroad Workers United and so many great folks from across the different crafts, the different unions.

We’ve had Ron and Mark on different recordings on the Real News and working people. Brother Hugh, it’s so great to have you on the show and to introduce you to our listeners. And I want to kind of just quickly start there because since our listeners became over time, so familiar with Railroad Workers United and some of you guys, I mean, I think it’s at least worth starting on a positive note that since our intense recording interviews panels live streams during the last contract fight and potential railroad strike, brother Ron Kako has finally retired since then. And so, Brother Ron, folks just want to know, are you enjoying your well-deserved retirement?

Ron Kaminkow:

Yeah, very much. I’m catching up on many, many years of deferred personal life, all sorts of hobbies and interests, but also remain active in the labor movement. Definitely hope to remain active in Railroad Workers United for many years to come. So yeah, it’s a good thing. I highly recommend it.

Maximillian Alvarez :

Well congratulations from all of us here at Working People to you, brother Ron. Congratulations on making it to retirement, man. You deserve it. I hope that you’re enjoying every single second of it, and I know our listeners are sending nothing but love and solidarity to you and to Mark and brother Hugh. You’re going to be there soon, baby. Don’t worry. We we’re pulling for you too sooner or later, sooner or later, man. And let’s kind of go back to that moment right when we all started connecting back in 2022. I mean, because as I mentioned in the introduction for this brief moment, during that contract fight as we were moving stage by stage through the Railway Labor Act provisions that were getting us closer to a potential national rail striker rail lockout, we were learning through interviews with rank and file railroad workers, just how big of a catastrophe has been brewing on the rails for many years and how damaging this has been to railroad workers themselves, to communities that have railroads running through them or terminals stationed near them, not just places like East Palestinian, Ohio, but places like South Baltimore here that lived next to the CSX terminal that we’ve also reported on.

So it was in the process of those conversations that we learned so much of what you and your fellow railroaders had to teach us about the kinds of conditions you’ve been working under for many, many years. And it felt like for a brief moment in 2022 and into 2023, a lot of folks around the country finally woke up to a lot of the realities that workers like yourselves were describing to us on this podcast. And then as we know, which we’ll get to in a minute, the potential rail strike was blocked by the Biden administration and both parties in Congress, the East Palestine derailment and poisoning of an entire region happened in just a couple months later, people were paying more attention to the number of derailments happening around the country. And then as is the case with anything, whether it’s a war in Ukraine or East Palestine itself, like the news fades from the headlines, people move on, the attention wanes. And so I wanted us to start back at that moment and we’re heading into a new contract bargaining period in 2025. So I want to give our listeners an update before we dig into the upcoming election. Just give us an update on how things have changed or not changed for railroad workers and for the rail industry since the potential strike was blocked two years ago.

Hugh Sawyer:

Well, I’ll jump in on that and just say that I worked for Norfolk Southern. So we had, as you’ve already mentioned, the East Palestine disaster. And there’s been a hedge fund group and COR that’s come in and tried to take over the board of directors, and I think they’ve been successful by the way, and creating a situation in which they were able to oust the CEO Alan Shaw. And so we have a new CEO and I’m sure that we’re going to see further action to get their people onto the board of directors. And the goal, of course is to strip the railroad of its assets. I noticed in the third quarter results, they mentioned our 3.1 billion gross profit and what have they try to make the numbers look good, but if you read the fine print down there, there was close to half in land sales and what have you.

So we’re selling off our assets and what have you, and this is not bode well for the long-term health of the railroad. And we also, in my opinion, I got to stress that this is my opinion, it’s not the opinion of Norfolk Southern. Of course, we defer maintenance on locomotives, we defer maintenance on rail. Maintenance is still going on out there, but not at the level that it used to. And I think we’re just kind of trying to strip out the good of the railroad and leave the husk there for the taxpayers ultimately to pick up, which I should point out, the railroad Workers United is involved in trying to push to the public public rail ownership, that concept that we own the highways, we own the waterways, federal government regulates those things and runs them and maybe they should run the railroad, the infrastructure of it and just let anybody lease space it, so to speak, and that way they can maintain the safe level of maintenance and what have you that I feel like we’re kind of stripping away over time.

So with regards to the contract, when the Biden administration stepped in, they went through the steps and they had a public presidential emergency board. Keep in mind those are recommendations. President Biden could have sat there and thrown all those recommendations out or adjusted them to the degree that he wanted to present to Congress and he didn’t. And his attitude, oh, we’re going to put a bunch of other union people out of work. And I mean, he said that and he just felt like he had to shove this down our throat. Now we got a fairly good pay raise, but that really just got us from years where we had been going backwards. That got us up to some point that we needed to work from, but we got none of the working condition issues that we wanted. Now ultimately, we got some sick days, but I got to tell you, for your rank and file workers, yeah, we would like to have sick days like the rest of the country, but that was hardly the top priority for us and getting some kind of a lifestyle a reasonable, we’re on call 24 7 and for me, I’ve sat here for the last two years.

I used to be on a car job that at least had a specific time that I went to work. I was on a schedule, I had scheduled off days, all that’s gone now I’m back on a pool job where I was 20 years ago. And we just keep going backwards. We keep cutting off and they’ve cut a lot of yard jobs and what have you. Their goal is to have a great big happy extra board where you’re on call 24 7, 365 days a year. And despite any propaganda coming from Norfolk Southern, I just don’t think they really care about our lifestyle. They care about theirs, but they don’t want to give us a reasonable off time. I would like to, I would think with 36 years of seniority, I’d be on a high paying pool job with a good schedule and what have you. That’s where I would’ve been if this was 20 years ago,

Mark Burrows :

I’ll just jump in and add on to Hugh’s point about the whole railway labor process when the government decided to directly intervene, and not only could Biden have made a proposal, but Congress itself could have crafted and if there was one shred of sympathy for the just demands of rail workers, which contractually was mainly about the quality of life issues, everybody spinning on extra boards and working on their rest and fatigued and no life and potentially getting fired to take off for your daughter’s wedding or your kid’s T-ball game or whatever. And draconian attendance policies.

A, it’s worth noting that the main, while fatigue is certainly in and of itself a safety issue, a major safety issue, but all the other safety issues which we regularly, the long and heavy trains, the deferred maintenance, many of the factors that contributed to the East Palestine disaster, those were not even on the table and being discussed and they’re not now in the current round, but it was mainly about the quality of life issues. And so if there had been a shred of sympathy, Congress had the latitude, like Hugh said, the Presidential Emergency Board, they put out recommendations and that’s it. They could have crafted an agreement that could have been addressed the most egregious working conditions, some of the basic just demands of the workers as it is, the tentative agreement at the time was based upon the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations and they hid behind the time factor to just say, oh, we don’t have time to discuss any details. We’re just going to go with this. So it didn’t have to turn out that way. Now there have been, and a lot of the scheduling issues were left in a TBD category to be determined and negotiated later, and that’s common. And then that seldom works out in workers’ favor. On some railroads, on some properties, there have been some minor like smoothing the roughest edges, whereas many workers didn’t have any days off just spinning on the 24 hour call extra board going to work on two hours notice there are some property agreements.

It seems like the average seems to be like an 11 and four, so you work 11 straight, you’re on call, 11 straight days, then maybe you get four days off, but those are not even four real days off. That’s at Canadian Pacific. When they sold an agreement to get two days off, it wasn’t two days off, it was 48 hours. The average person who works a 40 hour week their weekend when they get off from Friday afternoon at four o’clock in the afternoon and go back to work at Monday morning, that’s like 64 hours if my math is correct. So a real conventional weekend is like 64 hours. So selling this 48 hours as a weekend is bullshit. And so any of these 11 and four, it’s the same thing’s, not really four days off, it’s four times 24 at best, and the first day is spent recovering from working like a dog and then you got less than three days to salvage what’s left. So smoothing off some of the roughest edges, but for the most part it’s still extremely rough and intolerable. I would say.

Ron Kaminkow:

I would just jump in and agree, I’m out of the industry now, but I keep my ear to the rail. For example, Norfolk Southern, the new quote leadership just came out with a report and nothing has changed. And the idea that things were going to change when the railroad was under the microscope due to the contract fight due to East Palestine, due to all the hard work of RW and our media committee just beating the bushes and promoting all that’s wrong with the rail industry, rail industry kind of got a black eye and they started to make nice. And so just an example, rail industry said, oh yeah, I guess the close call reporting thing that they have in the airlines we’re under the microscope, so we’ll agree to do it. And then as soon as they’re out of the spotlight, they all just rele on that and go, no, no, no, this close call reporting thing got problems.

It’s not going to work with the way we run the railroad and we find it unsafe and all this kind of thing. And so it’s just one example. Same thing, Norfolk Southern after East Palestine, we’re going to make nice with the shippers, we’re going to make nice with our workers and the report, if you all want to read it, it’s quite lengthy, but what Norfolk Southern is now saying is, yeah, we’re going to strip the company down. We’re going to save a lot of money by cutting out the fat, which means doubling up, pushing on the workforce, requiring more work, less employees and the usual PSR stuff. And so for a while there, precision scheduled railroading was getting a black eye, but time goes by and they sort of concede a little here and there, but the new leadership at Norfolk Southern is simply reasserting.

Yeah, we’re going to have real PSR like Ancora was demanding and go for the jugular. We’re going for a below a 0.6 operating ratio now. And all of us on the railroad knows what that means. That means job cuts, that means shop consolidations, that means job eliminations, more pressure on workers to get the job done, do more with less, this kind of thing. That’s what the code word is. And so to take up where Hughes Sawyer mentioned Railroad Workers United is in favor of public ownership of the railroad because we just don’t see anything really changing. There’s a few tweaks here and a few tweaks there. Amtrak is suing Norfolk Southern and I believe Union Pacific for failure to run the trains on time. So there’s a little bit of fluff, there’ll be a few concessions made, maybe a few court cases won a few sick days granted here and there, but at its essence, nothing has really changed Max, I think. And if you asked any railroader today, are you happier today than you were back two years ago when that contract fight was on? I would hazard a guess that most are about the same level if not less happy than they were two years ago.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, that’s really sad and sobering to hear, but I think really important for people out there to hear, especially if they’re thinking that we won something and that things have changed. Maybe they’ve bought the sort of PR machine trying to spin that contract as a huge gain. And don’t get me wrong, our listeners were rooting for railroad workers to get that pay bump all the way. But through our interviews with y’all, they understood as you guys helped us understand that the problem is so, so much bigger than a pay raise or a couple sick days. The sickness runs very, very deep. And for anyone continuing to follow it, I would highly recommend that folks follow journalists like Josh Funk who in March was already giving an update for AP. That, to make Ron’s point, is more of the same. I’m just going to read one sentence here.

This is from March, 2024, quote, “BNSF laid off more than 360 mechanical employees this week, just days after Warren Buffet told shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate that owns the railroad, that he was disappointed in BNFs profits.” So again, more of the same, more cuts deeper to the bone, piling more work onto fewer workers, automating what they want to automate, making the trains longer and heavier to the hazard of workers themselves and the communities whose backyards these trains are bombing through. I definitely want us to do a deeper follow up on this after the election because as we said, regardless of the outcome of this election, right, I mean the new contract bargaining period is coming in 2025. And so I want our listeners and viewers to be fully up to speed on that and to know what they should be looking for and how they can show support.

But I want to kind of build on this discussion and take us into the heart of darkness as it were. Like we all know that, that we are days away from what may very well end up being the most consequential election in our lifetimes. We hear that every year feels like it may be true this time. And as always, I want to be clear that as a 5 0 1 C3, the real news is not in the business of telling anybody how to vote. We are here to give y’all the information and perspective that you need to act and to make an informed decision for yourself. But as we discussed earlier today, like the railroad workers, as y’all were saying, infamously had your potential strike blocked under the Biden Harris administration in 2022. But I would remind listeners that that was also with full bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats in Congress, some dissented symbolically, but importantly, but by and large, this was a bipartisan effort, but it happened under the Biden Harris administration.

And as we discussed in our reporting from that period, the industry, the rail industry itself was further deregulated under the Trump administration. And so we know that railroad workers specifically and union workers in general are not a monolith. And I do not want to ask any of you guys to try to speak for the whole of rail labor or your union or even the company you work for, right? Again, just help us put our ears to the rail here, and what insight can you give us right now into how all of this is shaping your and your fellow railroaders attitudes and approach to the current election. A lot of people on the left, and even people within the world of labor have cited specifically the crushing of the rail strike as a reason not to vote for Harris. But we want to know what do railroaders themselves have to say? How are you guys navigating this moment and what are you hearing your fellow workers talking through as they are navigating this moment as we head into November 5th?

Ron Kaminkow:

Well, max, I’d say obviously it’s a mixed bag. It’s not a monolith, whether you’re on the railroad or at UPS or whether you’re a teacher or what have you, a myriad of different political opinions. But first of all, I think it’s important that railroad workers and all us citizens understand that in Biden breaking that strike, he didn’t do it alone. He asked Congress and Congress willingly, both Democrats and Republicans provided the legislation to break the strike. So that’s the first thing. Secondly, we haven’t had a national rail strike in 30 years. The vote in 1992 to break the strike, I believe was 400 to five. And so right off the bat, you know that it was complete bipartisanship, both Democrats and Republicans. So I have a little list here that I think it’s worth everybody, whether you’re a Democrat, republican or what your political persuasion is.

The great railroad strike of 1877, which was the first general strike in this country, one of the greatest labor uprisings to that point, that strike was largely broken by a Republican Rutherford b Hayes, but it didn’t take long. In 1894, just 17 years later, the great Pullman strike where Eugene Debbs was sent to jail and so forth, and the American Railway Union was destroyed. That was the great Democrat friend of labor, Grover Cleveland, who was president for that one. And then the shaman strike in 1922 that lasted for months. That involved a half a million shaman who maintained diesel or steam locomotives and so forth. Warren Harding Republican businessman intervened in that strike. And then back to 1946, the miners, steelworkers and railroaders all went on strike. The great friend of labor, Harry Truman, Democrat, threatened to draft every railroad worker into the military as a way of breaking that strike.

Pretty creative, innovative way to break a strike. And then we had 1985 National Strike Reagan, and then 1991, the CSX that developed into a national railroad strike Bush the first. And so now here we are 30 years later or with Biden in effect, breaking that strike. And it’s important for people to understand this just because this bipartisanship of Democrats and Republicans over the course of 150 years, they are doing their job, they’re doing their bidding, whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat, their job is to protect the interests of capital. And railroads have historically been some of the most powerful capitalists in our country. And when they say dance, the government does so and so I think what I’m trying to point out here is I’m not excusing the Biden administration at all for its actions. In fact, he shot himself in the foot. He had the opportunity to very easily state that if there’s a national rail strike, the fault lays squarely at the doorstep of the Class one carriers who won’t even provide a single day of sick time for these hardworking railroaders, 85% who at that time did not have sick time.

And he could have emerged as a hero. And I think that the National Carriers Conference Committee would’ve simply collapsed and agreed, but no Biden, not only was it offensive, it was just downright stupid politics basically. But hey, he owns it and he has to live with it. But I think it’s important that railroad workers understand. And like I say, everybody understands this has been a bipartisan effort of 150 years of breaking our strikes. And so railroad workers are not happy as a general role with Republicans or Democrats. I was at the founding of US Labor Party back in Cleveland. I think it was 1995 or six. One of the rail unions actually said, enough is enough. We’re tired of seeing our strikes broken. And so the brotherhood and maintenance away employees was present at the founding conventional Labor Party. And it’s just an example of railroad worker frustration that we do not have a party that represents our interests. And I’ll just leave it at that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Can I follow up on just one quick point there? And I think so appreciative, Ron, that you gave us that deeper historical perspective because Lord knows we need it right now when we’re in this sort of hyper digitalized, fast-paced news cycle where we all have the long-term memories of goldfish, that’s a dangerous place to be. We need to remember history to know how to forge our way ahead into the future. But you said something that I know will really perk our listeners’ ears up, right about the political stupidity of Biden, like asking Congress to break the strike in 22 and how he could have played it differently, which he did when the International Longshoremen Association went on strike just a couple of weeks ago. And so I have to ask the question that’s on my mind I know is on listeners’ minds, and I am not pitting unions against each other. I’m just saying explicitly in a case where Biden handled two consequential strikes very differently, were you guys watching that and thinking, how would your contract potentially have ended up differently if he had approached the rail, strike that way, the way that he vocalized support for the ILA?

Ron Kaminkow:

Yeah, I don’t want to hog the show, but I got to answer this. It’s fascinating. And I think a couple things. Biden I think learned a lesson, especially when Sean Fein told him directly, publicly, stay the hell out of our bargaining. Do not mess with us. Unfortunately, in the rail industry, we did not have a union leadership. First of all, we didn’t have a railroad workers union. We had 13 divided largely impotent little sections, but craft by craft that couldn’t speak collectively. That all took separate votes on separate contracts. And so there was no voice of unity to tell Biden to bug out. And hey, between us, I’m convinced that since the rail union leadership did not speak out publicly, not a single one of ’em made a statement that Biden and Congress should stay the hell out of this strike. We did hear that from Sean Fe in the auto workers.

We did hear this from ILA, had we actually had some real leadership that could have spoke with a unified voice, that could have been militant and told the US government, stay the hell out of our strike. We got this. Let us settle this. They may not have been so quick to intervene and order us back to work. So one could easily postulate that Biden was taking his cues from the rail union leadership. I mean, I hate to say it, but we did not hear a squeak from not a single rail union leader asking the government to stay out. So anyway,

Mark Burrows:

I’d like to chime in and then definitely want to hear what Hugh has to say, but while we’re on the subject, I want to back up. First of all, as far as railroad workers’ reaction to Biden saying, oh, I respect the collective bargaining process and I’m not going to invoke Taft Tarley, or whatever the vibe I’ve gotten from talking to workers as well as just online posts. Obviously there’s a lot of cynicism. Many rail workers see right through that. That’s kind of like those who are paying attention. That’s an obvious no brainer. Ron mentioned this, I believe it was 83, there was a BLE strike in 83 that lasted actually three days. We actually had that feeling of being out there and they weren’t trying to run without us. They were taking their beating like men, if I can say that without being out sounding sexist.

And then Reagan intervened after three days and imposed the presidential Emergency Board recommendations. And I don’t have the exact totals, but I remember distinctly that it was basically like a nine to one ratio. I think the Senate vote was more than 90 to 10, and the house vote was something like 4 55 to 30 or something like that, but I mean easily a nine to one ratio. And so then the next year, the 84 elections, so now the UTU news comes out with its recommendations for their preferred candidates, and most of them are Democrats, some of them are Republicans, but they have the check mark incumbent. And the vast majority of their recommendations were for incumbent senators and representatives who had voted to break this strike back in 83 in the same way they did in so no repercussions. Like Ron was saying, no repercussions, no calling out. This is just like smart TD President Ferguson right before Biden when he was employing his membership to ratify the contract or Biden or the government will. He just said, well, we’ve reached the end of the process, so this is it. We’ve done all we could. And I would argue, no, you haven’t done all you could without challenging, challenging their right, challenging the moral and ethical legitimacy to do this. There’s a whole history of how the Railway Labor Act came into being in the first place was for this very reason to curb railroad militancy.

And then also, I think it was 2011, the BLE was about to go on strike. I was working the afternoon shift and we were ready to get off our engines at the stroke of midnight. And then Obama, great friend of labor, he issued a presidential back to work order. Now, the only reason that didn’t turn into a big government intervention was because then the BLE just kind of implored its membership to here. You might as well ratify this or they’ll ram it down your throat. And they always hold this threat, ratify this. It’s not the best contract, whether it’s a tentative agreement or ratify before government intervention, I suggest you ratify it because it could always be worse, which is true, just as the government could make a more favorable contract to the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations, the government can always make it worse. So that threat has merit to it.

And then of course they wield it like a 20 pound sledgehammer. And so after Obama did the last minute, I think he invoked a cooling off period. It had gotten to the point where the last cooling off period was over. And so he invoked one more and then the membership ratified it. But so that was another example of if not direct government intervention, what I always call the gun to the head threat of government intervention. And now both the operating craft unions are just shamelessly encouraging their membership to support Harris thousand as if 2022 didn’t even happen in the same way that the union leadership did back in 84 as if busting the strike back then. So yeah, the history, I think Einstein said continuing to do the same thing while hoping expecting different results is the definition of insanity. So there you have it. Take it away.

Hugh Sawyer:

Okay, and let’s see. I don’t know where to start, but right now we’re in an election that I don’t even think what Biden did to us in 2022 is even a thought hardly at this stage of the game because the threat from is my opinion, Donald Trump and the 2025 project and what have you, forget about our pathetic problems in the rail industry. I mean, we’re talking about theoretical dismantling of this country if Donald Trump gets elected. So I think we’re beyond that. Having said that, I feel like a lot of my fellow workers down here in the south rail workers think this is the WWF or something. It’s some kind of entertainment industry. And so a lot of them and down here we’re like sheep. We run around in herds and what have you, and depending on where you live, I now live way out in the country where I grew up in the city.

They all convinced each other that they’re going to vote for Donald Trump and they’re voting against their own interests, but they’ve convinced themselves that he’s the man and they don’t want that horrible person Kamala Harris up there who’s black and female, let’s be honest. And I’m living in the south. So I want to go back and say something about the rail industry. Ron went through the history of strikes and how they’re broken. What everybody needs to understand is how important we are to the economy when we go on strike, the economy comes to a halt. I mean, stock market is affected on day one. I don’t know if this is still true, but they used to tell us in New York City, 24 hours after the rail industry shuts down, that you’ve got food shortages and what have you. So this is why I think Democrat or Republicans are so anxious to prevent a strike and prevent that economic blow. My thing about Joe Biden and breaking our strike, you could have imposed a lot of what we asked for and the way of work related rules and so on and off time and that sort of thing. He could have imposed a good agreement for the workers and chose not to.

But in fairness, he’s surrounded by people around him. I just think he was told, Hey, we give him a 25% pay increase that solves all the problems. And he went with it, but he was desperate not to have an economic slowdown. By the way, I’m going to go back to public rail ownership. The amount of freight that we’re moving in this country has been going down for years as a percentage of the freight. That’s ridiculous. These railroads are not operating in a patriotic mode in a, Hey, we’re the basic part of the economy that we keep the whole capitalistic system going. And without that thought process in there, this country, and by the way, a lot of the inflation I think is brought on by the cost of the logistics network. A lot of which those costs increases are due to the railroad just jacking up their prices and performing less for that money.

And so people need to look at things from a bigger scale than just the rail workers. And really, you could pay all of us a million dollars a year. What few railroad workers are left? And it would still be a pimple on the amount of profits railroads are making. But the greed is, I mean really you’re talking about you want to go to a 50% operating ratio, would you give me a break? And we were making money hands over fist, and it was at 80% what have you. So at some point, that’s why the American public needs to take back the ownership. We gave the railroads, the rails, the land, everything. And in exchange for a common carry, they would carry the goods for everybody. Rural America, the cities, everybody. They have violated their part of that agreement since almost day one, and it’s time to hold them responsible and we need to go in a different direction for the health of the American economy.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, man. And I want us to sort of end this conversation, right, with a kind of, let’s get real, let’s talk strategy here. Let’s talk about how working people of conscience who are trying to do the right thing for themselves, their families, their communities, their country, people who are trying to navigate this, what words can we have to offer them about how to navigate this election and whatever’s coming after it. But I want to just by way of getting there, just ask two clarifying questions here because again, these are questions that I’m seeing come up a lot online in the news. People ask me directly, and it feels like based on what you guys were saying, there are two key points here that I just wanted to ask for a little clarity on. So in one sense, would you say it’s fair that, by and large, the majority of railroad workers are not the majority of railroad who are thinking of voting for Trump or planning to vote for Trump, that they’re not primarily motivated by a feeling of betrayal from the Biden-Harris administration that’s driving them to Trump?

So that’s kind of just one clarifying question I wanted to pose to you guys. And then the other which, Hugh, it was kind of coming out in what you’re saying, is do you think a lot of folks on the rails are thinking of their votes as a rail worker? What is going to be good for me and my union and the industry? It sounds like what you guys are saying is that in terms of the folks who are planning to vote for Trump, they’re not thinking with that side of their brain. They’re thinking more in this WWE kind of terms that you were saying Hughes. So I wanted to ask if you guys could just comment on both of those before we kind of make the final turn here.

Hugh Sawyer:

Well, I’ll jump in and just say, I don’t think the screwing that we got in 2022, and that’s what it was, has any factor today. Everybody’s caught up in the news cycle that everybody’s caught up in on what’s going on today. And they definitely are not looking at it from a union, does this really benefit me as a rail worker and what have you, this may down in the south? I don’t think they’re thinking that at all. And we’re right back to the demoralized place we were two years ago before people got excited and said, wow, we’re going to go on strike and we’re going to really achieve something, and now they’re just back to their hang dog, make another day, and that sort of thing. So that’s my feeling that what happened back two years ago is not a factor today in how people are voting. And I don’t think they’re voting in their own interest. I can’t imagine any worker voting for Donald Trump in that bunch. I mean, really, we’re going to add another 8.2 trillion in debt, which was added under our glorious leader Donald Trump, when he gave that big tax cut to the rich. I mean, when will let anybody get it and somebody’s got to pay taxes in this country, it’d be amusing to me if everybody paid taxes, including the rich. So I don’t know.

A lot of union people are going to vote against their best interests, but I am hopeful that we’re going to eke it out as we did four years ago. It’s a lesser of two evils, and we can do more to change the Democrat party, I think than we’ll ever be able to with the Republicans who are led by people who are out to great Nazi Germany. In my opinion,

Mark Burrows:

My observations are,

Ron Kaminkow

Yeah, I’ll second that emotion.

Mark Burrows:

Go ahead. Go ahead.

Ron Kaminkow:

Well, I was going to say it is the lesser of two evils. This is the game that I personally feel that we’ve been playing my whole adult life when it comes to election time. I rarely have a candidate on the ballot that I’m excited about because I don’t see them as really representing the interest of working people. They’re always beating around the bush, even when they sound pro-union like Biden. Then he does something like goes along with the corporations and breaks a strike. It’s the same old, it’s been happening ever since Jimmy Carter first election that I was party to 44 years ago or what have you. So we got our back against the wall, and we’re looking at a regime potentially that could assume power in January that has shown itself to be somewhat fascist in nature. The Hugh alluded to that 2025 project of the Heritage Foundation that Trump has now said he doesn’t know anything about, but of course he does.

And all of his big time supporters are very excited about implementing such a thing. But railroad workers, like many workers aren’t necessarily in tune with what their interests are. And politics is complicated. And so yeah, we had this horrible guy, Ron Bori, who was head of the FRA, and he was all for single person crews, and he was all for granting waivers to the industry and getting rid of long-term safety regulations during covid on trumped up reasons. Grant given by the carriers, RO Batory lifelong, CEO of rail corporations was ready to give the industry everything it wanted. He was a Trump appointee. He could come back and if not him, someone just as bad if not worse. But people don’t necessarily connect these kind of dots, max, it’s really a shame. Elaine Chow, head of the Department of Transportation comes out of a big billionaire shipping magnet family.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of Pete Buttigieg, but God damnit. I mean, at least the guy isn’t from some billionaire shipping company who’s obviously going to side with the interest of big shippers. And so same with Pori, CEO, Amit Bose, he is what he is at the FRA, but he’s a hell of a lot better than having a CEO. These are the people we bargain with. These are the people who have implemented precision scheduled railroading. These are the people who want to eliminate crews, eliminate jobs, combine shop facilities, get rid of all of us if they had their way and gave us precision scheduled railroading. We don’t want those people heading up these agencies. And of course, when you have a billionaire president who’s very favorably disposed to all of his wealthy friends, this is exactly what we’re going to get. I don’t think Emett Bowes is great. I don’t think Pete Buttigieg is great at head of the DOT, and I could go on and on. But at times we have to look at the situation and just go, if you’re going to play the game, choose the one that’s going to hurt you the least. And right now that happens to be the Harris ticket.

Mark Burrows:

I just want to chime in, in my observations and discussions and posts, there is an element, some rails do have an andi-Biden hatred, and I saw one discussion Trump’s talking to Trump. Trump and Musk want to fire all workers who strike, and then, oh, well, at least he wouldn’t do what Biden did or whatever. So what’s going on there is what’s going on all over the country where workers are forced to make this choice. I mean, I go back to the first election I really paid attention to, like Ron was talking about 44 years ago with Reagan against Carter. And that’s when I came of age politically, and that’s when I became convinced of the need for an independent political party based on it. I organized militant trade union movement. And so I’ve been advocating for that for 44 years. But these last three election cycles has been Trump versus a lame Democrat Clinton, who in my opinion, if they had not stolen the nomination from Sanders, there’s a very good chance that Sanders could have beat Trump because so many of these workers who had voted for Obama and then got disillusioned about that, they voted for Trump.

Sanders, I believe, could have won some of those voters. So then four years later, Trump and Biden, now Trump and Harris, just a female version of Biden. And so people held their nose to vote for Clinton, and people held their nose to vote for Biden. And now people, some are going to hold their nose to vote for Harris, and some are so repulsed by them that they don’t even care about Trump. And then some will sit it out and who knows where we land. But we cannot allow ourselves to continue this cycle of, I mean, this is lesser equalism on steroids, maxed out circuits, overblowing. I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that the more of us that are convinced of the need for an independent political party, how we get there, what form it takes, we have to figure it out.

But the more of us that are convinced of that, we can start collectively having that discussion. And then if our union leaders don’t support that and help push it along, then we have to find, develop leaders from our own ranks to help make that happen. But this, I’m not an expert on the history of Nazi Germany and fascism, but the basic common thread is Hitler wasn’t taken seriously until, and the social Democrats were too impotent to mount any challenge. And I don’t want to be, fascism is around the corner, but there’s a common thread, okay, that’s the direction they want to go. And the Democrats have proven themselves incapable of mounting any resistance, and we could end up with Trump, and who knows where that will take us. But whoever ends up, we need to organize and resist, organize, resist, and ultimately come together and form an independent political party, use our numerical majority and our economic power and figure it out. Because we can run this show a whole lot. I’ll leave it there

Maximillian Alvarez:

Workers can run this shit way better than the billionaire class. Of that I am certain. And I appreciate as always your guys’ incredible insight and passion, and I just really hope that folks out there are taking everything that you say to heart. And I just, yeah, on a personal level, just really appreciate the kind of sober but principled kind of analysis that I always get from you guys because folks need that regardless of what sort of political tradition you’ve come out of where in the country you are right now, right? We’ve got to look at this situation soberly and not as Hugh was saying, sort of get caught up in that kind of herd mentality or the kind of online rage fueled sort of manufactured consent. I mean, if you feel yourself getting unmoored from that and you feel yourself being led where the media wants you to follow and where these politicians want you to go, take a step back, center yourself, listen to your fellow workers, talk to the people around you, have these kinds of conversations now before it’s too late.

And in that vein, guys, I want to just sort of build on the great points that y’all were making and sort of look forward here. As we said, we’re going to have y’all back on, have more brothers and sisters from the rails on to talk about the contract fight coming up and where we can as a working class, kind of learn from our past mistakes, learn from 2022, so that we’re forging ahead into the future, having learned those lessons and being better prepared for what’s coming. I know our listeners feel that. I know you guys at RWU are always planning, organizing, mobilizing in that direction, and we’re going to talk about that in a future episode. But we’re recording this on October 30th, and this is going to come out just days ahead of the election itself, which is taking place less than a week from now.

And as you guys have laid out in brutal detail, our political system sucks. And the system wide change that we need as working people is not going to come from elections alone. We know that we need to understand that, but the results of elections still shape the ground upon which we live and work and organize. And so when it comes to addressing the ongoing crisis on the railroads, the crisis of democracy that we’re in, the corporate destruction of the supply chain, and all the threats that poses to workers and to our communities, like what role do electoral politics have to play in that struggle? And what would you guys say to your fellow workers out there listening to this about how working class folks need to proceed strategically within and outside of the electoral system to advance our interests?

Ron Kaminkow:

Max, I think there’s a lot of examples from history, not just in this country, but in countries around the world where without a social movement to propel the political, the electoral struggle forward, you’re kind of pissing up a rope. I mean, everyone says FDR changed the country and this and that, or Lyndon Johnson facilitated the Civil rights movement. But had there not been a movement on the ground in both instances in the thirties and in the fifties and sixties, nothing would’ve changed. And so if you put all your eggs, the basket of electoral change, I think you’re doomed to failure. By the same token within the unions, if you elect reformers in my union, the brotherhood of locomotive engineers and trainmen, we actually do have one member, one vote. Very few unions in this country have that, and we deposed a long-term President Dennis Pierce, and replaced him with somebody else. It looks good on paper, but without a movement in our union that a caucus that’s organized to pressure the new president and to make sure that he moves in a direction that’s more accountable to the members and starts to take creative action and break from this bureaucratic srait jacket that we’re in.

You are just tweedle dee and tweedle dumb. And I think the same thing holds. One of the most unfortunate things that I’ve experienced in my life is that most people, unfortunately, are looking for a savior. And whether that savior is Jesus Christ or Muhammad, or whether that savior is a partner or that savior is a politician or a union leader, or a rich, wealthy person like Elon Musk or Donald Trump, unfortunately people don’t understand that the only way change is really going to come is, and when I say we, I mean tens of millions of regular working class people take matters into our own hands. We’re not just going to go vote next week and everything’s going to be okay no matter what we believe and who we vote for. Everybody has to sort of grow up and take responsibility and understand that politics isn’t something you do every four years in a voting booth.

Politics is something you do every day. You wake up and you say, what do I do today to further the cause of my class, of my neighborhood, of the people that I’m in this world with, that I identify with? And so you go to your union meeting and you go to the picket, you go to the rally, you raise hell. And I don’t think we’re ever going to get out of the quagmire that we’re in and less and until a critical mass of tens of millions of common regular, everyday working people inside and outside of unions start to basically say, we are going to take action. This is what happened in the 1930s. Workers spontaneously started taking over factories and this is how the modern labor movement was born. Modern labor movement didn’t come about by a bunch of bureaucrats spending a bunch of money and calling elections. Literally millions of workers occupied factories went on general strikes built a solidarity and a momentum that literally changed the body politic of this country. And that’s what we need to do I think going forward, no matter who wins this election that is on our agenda as working class people.

Mark Burrows:

I just want to add on my personal hero, and I know I’m not alone. Eugene Debs not only for his rail labor organizing, but his relentless fight to his dying day for social justice and for a better world of peace, justice inequality. And he fought and advocated tirelessly to build this kind of movement that Ron is talking about. And one of the things when he was trying to inspire people to build this kind of movement, he would say, don’t take my word for it. Go research it yourself. Go learn and study the facts yourself about how this system works, about how this all works and what’s really at play here. What’s really going on. And if you do that, then I’m confident that you’ll arrive at the same conclusions that I have. And so I mean 44 years ago I was just a hotheaded rebel without a clue. But I had mentors to start opening my eyes about what was possible.

I had a lifetime of ideological brainwashing that I had to unlearn just like, well what about this? What about that? And back then I needed mentors and then books to learn and study to undo and unlearn what all the propaganda that, because these corporations that we talk about, they also control the mainstream mean media. They control the flow of information. Today we’re blessed with outlets like with yourself, the Real News Network and others, democracy Now and others, where people who are beginning to question can go and learn the truth. Your series on the Middle East under the Shadow, so much important information and education. And so Ron was talking about the responsibility. We have a responsibility educate ourselves because only then can we make informed decisions. If we’re just buying the boss’s propaganda, then this is what we’re left with Trump against Harris. So there is a responsibility to think for ourselves and then we can act in an informed manner in our best interest. I’ll just leave it there.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Sorry, Hugh, I muted you one more time. I apologize.

Hugh Sawyer:

I don’t blame you for muting me, but well, let’s just say at least something positive. We’re stuck with this two party system and we can talk all we want about a third party and what have you. And I certainly advocate that. But right now there’s no reason why we can’t take, I believe, a portion of the Democrat Party and move it over to our way of thinking. And we have to exist in the political system as it exists and we need to, instead of just talking about it, we need to start putting forth candidates in the system that exists.

And I mean, you have some people like AOC and what have you. I mean there are people out there and I don’t necessarily agree with every, there’s nobody I agree with a hundred percent, but I appreciate people that are trying to lead us in a different direction and I have no problem throwing my support behind ’em. And the issue for me is finding more candidates that support our positions who are workers or have been workers themselves and let’s start putting them in the office. I fully admire the Republican party in that they have gone out for years now on a grassroots campaign to take over school boards and on up. And now they’re able to impose the Supreme Court justices on the whole country and what have you because they put their mind to it. So we’ve got the example in front of us that a group of people can make a change. I don’t think theirs was a change we wanted to make, but for the interest of people. But we can respond to that. And the Democrat party has not been doing a good job in responding to it. But I think we can force ’em to.

So I just want to say that it’s not hopeless. We can affect change in this country.

On Monday, Oct. 21, 2,400 behavior health workers at Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California locations walked off the job in their ongoing struggle for a fair contract. Over the summer, negotiations between the health system and the bargaining committee, represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers, failed to close the gap between their proposals, opening the door for a strike. The workers are now well into their second week on strike.

The healthcare giant refuses to bargain seriously with the workers, offering paltry raises instead of agreeing to the workers’ demands for better pay, pensions, and safer staffing levels at the Kaiser mental health clinics in and around Southern California. These gains, the union believes, would allow Kaiser to compete with other health systems, drastically improve patient care quality, and solve many of the scheduling issues that have plagued the health system since before the start of the pandemic.

The union hopes that by striking, they can show management that they are serious about securing a fair contract for their members. Last week, on the first day of the strike, Mel sat down with Chris Reeves and Lisa Caroll, two behavioral health workers who work in Los Angeles and San Diego, respectively, to talk about the state of negotiations, what workers are demanding, and how it feels to be out on the picket line in the struggle for a fair contract.

Additional links/info below:

• NUHW’s Strike Announcement Release
• Donate to the NUHW Mental Health Workers’ Strike Fund
• Stay up-to-date on the strike here
• Check out TRNN’s previous coverage of Kaiser workers striking in the east coast

Permanent links below:

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music:
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song
Studio Production: Max Alvarez

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Lisa Carroll:

I am Lisa Carroll. I’m a licensed clinical social worker. I work at San Diego Medical Center in the ICU. I also am on the executive board for NUHW, the Southern California division, and I also am the medical steward for all the medical social workers that are in the San Diego area, both inpatient and outpatient. I also have a wonderful partner over in Care at home. She’s a new steward and I’ve been mentoring her this past year just because the work is so important, ensuring people up is so important. I’ve been with Kaiser 17 years and I’ve been a steward for 15 of those years.

Chris Reeves:

My name is Christian. I am a registered nurse at Kaiser. I’ve worked there for about six years. I’m a union steward and I’m also a member of the bargaining committee.

Mel Buer:

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Working People. I’m your host, Mel Buer. Working People is a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you love what we do and are looking for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to.

And please support the work we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. On October 21st, after contract talks broke down, 2,400 behavioral health workers with Kaiser Health System in Southern California walked off the job on strike in a bid to bring their employers back to the table and negotiate a decent contract. In the first week of the strike, the union joined two bargaining sessions with the healthcare provider in an attempt to close the gap between proposals while workers continue to walk the picket lines at multiple locations in Los Angeles and San Diego. Chief among their demands is for Kaiser to secure safe staffing levels and reduce appointment wait times for their patients, as well as bring parity between the Southern California workers and their Northern California counterparts in pay retirement benefits and scheduling.

As it stands, SoCal workers are suffering under worse working conditions than their counterparts in the north. Bargaining for these gains however, has been difficult with the employer consistently bringing unsatisfactory proposals to the table. In a recent press release sent to the media on Monday October 28th, the union provided an update after bargaining once again broke down with Kaiser on the 25th contract. Bargaining has broken off after Kaiser Permanente negotiators on Friday. Once again invited workers to the table only to offer practically nothing new. While Kaiser’s nearly 2,400 mental health professionals are seeking the same amount of time as their counterparts in Northern California for critical patient care responsibilities that can’t be done during appointments, as well as the same pension benefits that Kaiser provides nearly all of its other California employees. Kaiser’s primary new proposal in bargaining on Friday was an additional 25 cents per hour for bilingual workers With me today to discuss the contract negotiations and the strike are Chris Reeves, a psychiatric RN with Kaiser and Lisa Carroll, a licensed clinical social worker and medical social worker with Kaiser. Thanks for coming on the show.

Chris Reeves:

Thank you for having us. Yes, thank you for having us.

Mel Buer:

You guys have been on the picket line all day. How are you feeling after the first day on strike?

Lisa Carroll:

Think physically a little challenged, but I think mentally and emotionally. It was for in San Diego, it was really good turnout, really good energy, really good media coverage, really good political support. So I would say it was a great first day and we even had nurses come out from Unac and a couple clerks come out from Local 30 to walk with us, picket with us during their clocked out time. So it was a really positive first day.

Mel Buer:

Great. How about you, Chris? How was your first day?

Chris Reeves:

I completely agree. It was actually very invigorating. Even though I’m extremely tired, I feel fired up. I think a lot of us really just kind of fed off of each other and really just felt the energy. There was a lot of energy, a lot of passion out there, a lot of frustration that we were able to get out, but it was very inspiring to see everyone come together. We had a really awesome turnout at LAMC today, and a lot of support from the public as well, so that was really nice to see and experience.

Mel Buer:

That’s really great. I think before we get too far into the weeds of the strike itself, I think it would be a really good place to start perhaps maybe to kind of discuss the makeup of the unit. So there are 2,400 behavioral health professionals in this Southern California unit. Can you kind of speak to the types of job titles, professions, what kind of your day-to-Day work looks like within the unit?

Lisa Carroll:

In medical social work, you’ll have people that are social workers in a hospital, you’ll have social workers that are in an outpatient clinic. You’ll have social workers that are working with hospice, home health, palliative care. So one of the reporters today said to me, because I work in the ICU, well what does an ICU social worker do? And I said, all the things that the doctors and nurses don’t do and shouldn’t be doing. I mean, they have medical things that they need to do, but if somebody’s ended up in an ICU, needless to say, either they’ve had an acute event or they have a chronic condition that has brought them there. And so they need social, emotional, financial, legal, psychiatric, behavioral health support as does their family because while the medical folks are putting the person back together again with a plan for stability, I have to do that for their life. So that coincides so that when they leave the hospital, they’re able to see a pathway to supporting themselves, their families, things like that.

Chris Reeves:

Yeah, so I work in the Pan City area. It’s a pretty large service area and it’s made up of two clinics. And among inside those two clinics, it’s an outpatient behavioral health centers and addiction medicine as well, which is made up of licensed clinical social workers, marriage, family therapists, psychiatric nurses, psychologists who are used in a very specific and specialized capacity as well as I think I mentioned psychiatrists, the physicians. So it’s a huge team. It’s everything under the sun. We also have medical social workers as well. And so we’re divided in teams. We have a team of what we call return therapists who are seeing patients. Usually it should be weekly or biweekly, but because of the poor access that our clinic has chronically suffered for many, many years, most patients are only able to be seen once every four to six weeks, sometimes eight weeks, sometimes longer by those return therapists.

We also have a BIOS group who really sees the patients who are more acute. We’ve seen some changes to that too because all those programs are very impacted. And so those are the providers, the social workers, therapists who are providing group services, case management for ongoing and more frequent follow up care for addiction medicine. There are addiction medicine counselors also. We do have physicians that work in that department managing the gamut of substance abuse and obviously psychiatric and substance abuse. A lot of times they go hand in hand. Those are very complex patients. I personally work more so directly with the psychiatrist and supporting them. They have extremely large caseloads. They actually have no caps on their caseloads. And so we have pediatric and adult psychiatrists, some who also have more specialized care such as eating disorder. And so the psychiatric nurses there really support patient messaging specifically all of the messages that are coming in via telephone or call centers as well as the physician emails.

And so our primary role is to complete assessments to provide education, to also do follow-up medication, follow-up, answer questions and address issues. Patients who are experiencing acute episodes, especially if they’re having exacerbations of their symptoms, patients whose symptoms are not well managed on their medications and really in the last several years doing a lot of care management through the phone and through messaging because a lot of our patients are on wait lists and are not able to see their providers. And so that is the bulk of our job. We do work with the interdisciplinary team and we get messages from our therapists and social workers, and we do provide follow-up for patients who have seen their therapists who are having untreated symptoms as related to medication or side effects, things of that nature. So we also have to follow up on those things. And last, I don’t think I mentioned, we do have a team of crisis therapists as well who work in the department, so we also work closely with that group as well.

So just from hearing both of you describe your respective spaces in behavioral health within the Kaiser system, that’s a lot of work to have to pay attention to. That’s a lot of focus on patient care as it should be. Right. I think this is a good place to sort of hone in on what’s been going on in your negotiation since July. So you’ve been negotiating a contract since the end of July, and what you’re asking for in regards to some of your proposals, especially as it relates to caseloads, as it relates to better quality of patient care without, I dunno, burnout ruining the caregiver’s life in terms of just time spent and pay for that kind of work. Lisa, can you kind of speak to some of those proposals and what the union is asking for?

Lisa Carroll:

I think one of the things that I wanted to start with is even before bargaining, the union leadership met with Kaiser leadership and Kaiser initiated that meeting and they asked us, what will it take to restore the partnership with your union? And we were very clear with the same three asks that were consistently repeating, which is in 2015, they unilaterally took away all of our new hires pensions as a punitive action because we had raised the mental health access and denial and lack of care and all the suicides and everything to Sacramento. And so we had to be, I guess, taught a lesson. They refer to it as bad behavior. They think we’re behaving badly again right now. The second part of that is that we are not asking for anything that any of the other labor unions don’t already have. So whether it’s the service and tech units or the nurses units, we’re asking for the same type of wage increases that they’ve received.

And there have been multiple periods of time where we’ve been given nothing five years here a year here. So over time, our wage scale has really eroded. So I know one of the things Kaiser has said in the news is that they’re paying us, I think 18% over market rate. I have no idea what numbers they’re talking about because we have to compete for the same group of people to come work for Kaiser, as does Sharp Scripps and UCSD in San Diego, and they have all equal or exceeded Kaiser’s wage scale. So either somebody’s not doing their job or I don’t know how to explain that, but that’s a real problem. UCSD still offers a pension, so we’re not able to attract, recruit, retain people. One of the things we did in a past contract, which Chris would remember, is we set these pathways so that you could bring in people who weren’t licensed, who could work on their license and earn their hours, and then hopefully that would be a way of attracting and recruiting and retaining employees.

But the workload is so horrific, and the competition is so good that they get their licenses and they leave and they feel really badly about it because they’ve been a part of a team. I think the only thing that we really have going for us is sort of lifeboat mentality. We all have been in this lifeboat together. We have all fought together. We all want to stay together and we want to navigate this lifeboat into better waters, but I can’t stand in the way of somebody choosing to leave where they’re going to get better compensation and a better work life. So for myself as an example, I cover an ICU and a step down unit that’s roughly 40 beds when the pediatric social worker who also covers a telemetry unit is off, I also cover her beds. So I’m expected to cover anywhere from 40 to 80 beds on any given day. And so that’s child abuse reporting. That’s a PS reporting, that’s finding a representative for somebody who no longer can cognitively designated representative and getting access to their funds to pay for long-term care. That’s getting people connected to dialysis centers. That’s getting people connected to transplant coordinators.

We also do a lot of goals of care conversations in my particular area as well as pediatrics, depending on how ill they are. And we have to be able to refer to our home care partners in home health, our palliative care or hospice, their staff has been cut in half as a savings effort for that department, which just means profit. There’s no savings. Kaiser members pay for these benefits and then they’re denied care. And they wanted, Christopher will remember this from the bargaining table, they wanted the hospice people to see five patients a day. Well, I don’t know if you’re aware of how big San Diego County is, but unless they live in the same cul-de-sac, that would actually be physically impossible. And the way the regulations read is that they must be seen by a licensed clinical social worker that there is an assessment that’s required within 30 days, actually really within the first week to 10 days of service.

And so those things are not happening. So that’s actually Medicare fraud, and I don’t know what part of being investigated, they don’t understand, but they’re making this whole thing so very public that we will make things very public too. And it all could have been avoided. We were happy to have this conversation at the bargaining table, but the proposals, well, I wouldn’t even say Kaiser has come back. They’ve maybe proposed two or three things that they’ve spent time on that are fit onto a half of a page. Not a lot of thought went into that. And those offerings are very, wouldn’t you say, Chris? Very 2020 2021. I mean, they don’t reflect the economy that we have in Southern California or the wages necessary to maintain housing and live in Southern California. So that’s what’s been going on at the bargaining table. Our group, NUHW, has just done such a fantastic job working on proposals, trying to come back with counter proposals, trying to achieve agreement.

And pretty much what we get from Kaiser is deny, deny, deny. This is something they keep repeating. We’re happy with the way things are. So they’re happy with three month waits for medical appointments, three week waits, six week waits, three month waits in psychiatry for appointments. This is viewed, our professional group is viewed as a non-money maker. So it’s okay that it’s a factory that churns out and spits out labor people because they don’t want to spend the money. And that sends a very distorted and hurtful message to Kaiser’s members because their purchasing a benefit that they’re not going to receive its deception.

Chris, do you want to speak more about the conditions that you’re seeing in Los Angeles and really about this? Let’s hone in on this conversation about Kaiser’s members are paying for this benefit, and Kaiser itself is making access to this benefit for its membership nearly impossible, while also making the ability for the providers themselves to be able to do their jobs just as impossible. So you would think going to the bargaining table that they would be willing to listen to what I’m sure is quite a bit of negative feedback from their own members as well as these proposals to try and solve these issues from its union membership in order to create a better space of care, right?

Chris Reeves:

Yes. Yeah. So as Lisa mentioned, we prepared vigorously months before we actually were able to get bargaining dates from Kaiser. We actually tried to engage with Kaiser in bargaining in early spring because the conditions for our workers were so bad and for our employees were so egregious, and they did not give us any bargaining dates until basically the start of fall, so July 31st. And so since meeting with them, we’ve brought forward many proposals. And like Lisa said, it’s usually met with either complete silence, rejection, not interested, or we like things the way we are. We’d like to keep the current contract language, but the thing that Kaiser is failing to recognize is the things that they’re doing, it’s not working. Them being fined that record 50 million fine. And I believe it was $50 million, right, Lisa from DMHC, that hasn’t changed much in the last year.

And so to be honest, things have gotten worse. I really truly feel like that has just, it started started things getting worse. It was already bad, but things went from bad to worse because then Kaiser was under the microscope and they started implementing all these different tools to kind of get by and manipulate the system. And so that actually put a lot of hardship on our providers because they had to start doing a lot more documentation and doing all of these tools basically to provide protection to Kaiser, but not necessarily to improve patient’s care, their access to care or the quality of care that they’re receiving. And so you’re right, access is impossible. They are paying for, our patients are paying for memberships, and they’re not able to see providers when they want to as often as they need to. Even they’re not able to see the providers according to the standards their own providers have set.

So the provider might say, please come back to me in two months or three months or six months. And you’re seeing patients who are going well beyond that because there’s no appointments right now, the clinic books appointments about three months out and every Monday a new schedule opens up for the providers on a week by week basis. And by Monday morning we’re completely out of appointments because the patients learn that that’s the day you need to call. And they’re basically fighting in line trying to get that appointment. So by Monday afternoon, they’re all gone, which that shouldn’t be the case. I mean, we’re talking about all the appointments are gone for the next three months. And so that’s when we get messages because those clerks are, they don’t know what to do. They don’t want to tell the patient, we can’t do anything for you.

And so they say, oh, talk to the nurse. Maybe they can get you a sooner appointment, but we don’t have any magic keys or access to appointments that just don’t. So what happens is we end up having to assess them and really say, how sick are you and what can we do right now to put a bandaid on it? I often say that, which has truly been the most difficult thing for me and my job, is putting a bandaid over a bullet wound because I realized as important as the work that we do, it’s just a very small piece. And there are just critical things within the foundation of Kaiser mental health system that is just broken and it’s not working. And so as a result of that, we’ve seen a mass exodus between all medical professionals. We’re talking a lot of therapists, there have been doctors, there have been nurses, people who have come on, they’re like, forget this.

Especially the ones who haven’t been invested and trying to see things get better or who have been here long enough to say, you know what? Things just haven’t gotten better. I’ve been here for a long time. It’s not changing. I’m out. But we’ve had a huge high turnover rate, including providers who have left Southern California to go to Northern California because there are a little bit better staffing and retention tools there, including the pension that was maintained. So it’s very interesting, the ability to do our jobs have gotten significantly more difficult. One of the things that Kaiser has done to address their access is to try and take away patient management time. And they want to tell people, the public, that the clinicians are saying, oh, we want to see our patients less. But the truth is, is that they need that time to do their job.

And we’re not asking for anything different than what Kaiser gives to our colleagues, our counterparts, because that time is important to be able to call patients back and answer their messages to address case management things, whether that’s following up with family or facilities coordinating care, filing the necessary and mandated reports such as filing a child protective service report or an adult protective service report. There’s a lot of things that go that are, it’s a part from the things that we do with the patient. And so our clinicians are really having to choose, am I going to sit there and look at my patient and make eye contact and engage, or am I going to try to do both and try to get this note done because I know I don’t have enough time and we’re basically being treated like an assembly line. We’re really working in these factory-like conditions where they don’t have enough time to do their work.

And so with the time that they’re given and they have to make those decisions, but yeah, it’s pretty terrible. Our patients are waiting months to see their doctors sometimes after they’ve gotten their medication adjustment over the phone, that still doesn’t get them an appointment. It gets what they need address maybe in the moment, but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to get them a face-to-face with their provider. And so we’re seeing burnout everywhere, and that’s the reason why we asked Kaiser to come to the bargaining table early on, why we did a lot of preparation on proposals to help address the staffing issues, the workload issues. And then lastly, we are trying to take care of ourselves and our families. We’ve had five years basically of wage increases. We are behind everyone else, and I completely agree with Lisa. I don’t know who is doing the math at Kaiser, but they need to hire someone else.

Mel Buer:

Well, someone who just moved from Los Angeles and who I have a decent job and it’s difficult to plan for a future when you don’t know if you’re going to be able to have a salary that is comparable to the rising cost of living every year over year. I don’t know, man, as kind of a lay person. My mom is in healthcare. And so all throughout my life there have been these sort of at-home conversations about you take care of the workers and the patient care gets better all the time. Right? And it just seems to me as a sort of lay person that this is a logical solution to a serious problem. We’ve seen this problem explode in the age of Covid and what the pandemic did to an already stressed out healthcare system, and especially to the sort of explosion in mental health crises that was accompanied by extreme isolation and these crises both within the workforce at these hospitals and outside of it.

It just seems logical to me that if you want to solve this problem, you would do whatever you could to retain good staff to solve this problem. It just doesn’t. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think I’m sure, and let’s talk about this a little bit, but I’m sure that you’ve had these conversations with folks who are interested in coming to talk to you at the picket line and perhaps before, and any sort of the sort of messaging campaigns that you’ve done about these negotiations. Are you getting that same sense that you’re coming from a rational position from these folks who are outside of the union who are supporting you on the picket line?

Lisa Carroll:

Absolutely. I mean, every single media person that I’ve talked to, every single political party, union party, every single person is like, yeah, we don’t believe Kaiser. We know that they have abundant resources, that they’ve made significant profits and that they’re making a choice not to support their workers. What we did the math today when we were on the line that what they’re paying a scab to come in, one person to come in and do one of our jobs would pay for six people to have the pension. That’s a clear choice.

Mel Buer:

It’s a hard choice. And it’s always a power move, isn’t it? Right. Because when it comes down to it, they can plead poverty all the time. And I hear this on picket lines all over the place that these giant corporations from Kellogg’s to John Deere, from the studios who were throwing rider under the bus last summer and the summer before,

All of them are pocketing obscene profits, like more money than I could ever possibly imagine to have in my life ever. Right? Yeah. In order to do what? So that they can continue to be the bosses really and not seed any power in the workplace, even though consistently across the board, Chris, as I’m sure the workers are the ones who understand the job most intimately and also understand how to fix the problems at the job, not someone sitting in an administrative boardroom at the top of the hospital choosing who to fire. You know what I mean?

Lisa Carroll:

So at the bargaining table, we gave them a calculation on how to plan for how much time a person needs to do these other activities that aren’t the immediate face-to-face therapy session. It was a simple math formula. I mean, I’m not a mathematician. I could understand it. And here you have a table full of people going, I don’t understand. And we’re looking at them going, how do you have your jobs and not understand this? So you’re either lying or you really shouldn’t have the job

Chris Reeves:

That you have. Right, Chris? Totally. And honestly, I really have taken it as I think they’re feigning ignorance. I honestly think that they’re playing games because it absolutely makes no sense whatsoever. And I think that it’s really important for people to realize really what the numbers are, because in math ain’t math, and it really isn’t. Kaiser is the Goliath of healthcare organizations. They have abundant resources and they to fix the issues, and we have given them so many proposals and really have painted a very clear picture of what’s happening within their mental healthcare system. And it really begs the question of, do you really, and to me it’s very clear that they don’t. It’s very clear that they prioritize everything else over mental healthcare for their patients and their members, but they’re not lacking in resources. We did the math for them that it would literally cost them about $2,000 to restore the pension for about 1700 members who don’t have it so that we can be like the 96% of Kaiser members who do have it.

But I think at this point, really it is really begging the question, do you actually care about your employees? And I think that Mel, you made a good, great point because we did really see a significant demand in mental health care and addiction medicine services with the pandemic. It was very interesting because of course there was a critical short staffing in the hospitals, so we did need providers to take care of those patients who were coming in medically ill. And so at one point they were trying to pull the few of us that were working in psychiatry, the nurses to put us in the hospital, which was fine. A lot of us were willing to go if they did the training, but it was like, who’s going to take care of our patients? Because at the end of the day, we saw our first patient before any of these hospitals saw their first patient because people were getting anxious and they were fearful.

And so our demand and our volume had already started increasing before that virus had really reached even our shores, if you will. And so since then, it’s just kind of skyrocketed. People have not only because of the isolation and the different things that happen socially, but they had time on their hands. And social media I think also has been a big influence. And so the things that we were hearing people calling in and saying, I want to get evaluated for anxiety and depression and all these disorders. They heard it on social media. We knew something was happening, we felt the shift. I always go to management and say, Hey, something’s happening here. We’re getting a lot of calls. We let them know our patients are much sicker. We’re having a lot of patients who are struggling with addiction. A lot of people started drinking and using substances during the pandemic to cope, and they just didn’t listen.

We warned them because a lot of times we’re getting those calls first. We’re already seeing it. We have a lot of patients who are learning about A DHD, autism, things like that from social media. We started seeing an uptick, A DHD evaluation started a huge portion of our access. So we absolutely do tell Kaiser about these things very early on. Do they listen? No. Do they prepare for it? No. Do they plan properly or have any insight? No. Things are always rolled out in our department without proper planning. Things that just make absolutely no sense for the workers or for the patients. It’s egregious. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how such a huge organization has such major problems and how things move very slowly. It’s very interesting.

Mel Buer:

Well, everyone’s a number instead of a person instead of a human being, right? From the patients to the workers who are taking care of the patients, everyone is a number and that number brings in a certain amount of profit. And if you can’t bring in that profit, then your number that gets shoved off the end of the Excel spreadsheet, which is just a horrendous way to look at healthcare in this country. And we could have a long, maybe we’ll have you back on with the other healthcare providers that I talked to and just have a long conversation about broadly what this type of system has done to reducing humanity in this country and into these sort of unique, not unique little boxes, check boxes for how much money they can get out of us on an individual basis without actually providing anything in return. Absolutely.

And I don’t mean to be so cynical about it, but it is something where I benefit greatly from mental health services myself and I did during the pandemic and will continue to do, and I did before the pandemic. And I understand how important and crucial this work is. If I didn’t have it then I wouldn’t feel like I could land on my feet after 2021. And I know many, many people in my life just from individuals that I talked to all over the country on picket lines or elsewhere, that also benefit from these services. It’s a no fucking brainer to fund them. And what that means is if you, the workload, frankly, pay the employees a competitive wage, increase the staffing levels, allowing for individuals to feel comfortable in a career where they don’t need to give in to these high turnover rates, then you’re going to see more patients offer more services, make more money.

If that is what you’re concerned about as an administrator is getting butts in seats and people coming through the doors and all of that nonsense to everyone but them, it makes perfect sense to listen to you at the bargaining table and find a way to solve these problems. But as we know, and again, I don’t mean to sound so cynical, but as we know about Kaiser, they don’t listen to their workers and they always end up pushing their workers out on strike to the detriment of everyone involved, which sucks. So I think maybe a good way to sort of end this conversation before we get to the what can my audience do to support you is what is Kaiser’s kind of response to the strike? Are they beyond just the full blown PR machine that always comes out of the corporation when you walk out, have you received any sort of indication in bargaining or otherwise that they’re hearing you and that they want to solve this sooner? Or is it just they shut the doors and you got

Lisa Carroll:

To, we’ll find out on Wednesday when we go back over the weekend, because I’m on the executive board, there is some internal medical advocacy in Southern California and it sounds like they’re willing to make some movement on the wages and also patient management time. But I will believe it when I see it because I feel like this is Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football, but they’re still taking a hard line with the pension because of our bad behavior. That’s literally what they say. And we’re not asking for anything that their unions don’t have. We’re just asking for equity.

Mel Buer:

Yeah. How does that not just immediately tip off some lawyers to honest to God retaliation?

Lisa Carroll:

Honestly unfair labor practice?

Mel Buer:

Yeah. I dunno. Maybe they’ll shoot themselves in the foot and give you guys an upper hand with that because that’s obscene. That’s outrageous. Outrageous.

Lisa Carroll:

And I think they like that tear in the fabric. If you can kind of think about that as a piece of clothing, because as long as they maintain that tear, then they can do the same thing to the other unions. They haven’t, but they want to.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, they can threaten that, look what we did to these professionals that we can do to you tell the line kind of thing.

Chris Reeves:

Yeah, I still think, I just feel like their response, to be honest, I’ve been hopeful throughout this whole thing, even in their first talks that they wanted to work with us, but I’ve seen the complete opposite. And so like Lisa said, I’ll believe it when I see it because right now all we’ve seen is them just to try to cover up what’s going on. Them being very deceitful them trying to be very confident saying, oh, we got this patients, don’t worry if your provider’s out on strike, we’re going to have other places where you can go for your care. In our vast external provider network, they’re calling patients and they’re saying, oh, well, do you want to just wait for your provider to come back? They’re doing the documentation that they think is going to protect them, but I feel like they’re doing all the things except for actually doing what.

They’re exactly everything except for the right thing. I think that’s well said because they can end this very quickly, but it doesn’t seem like they want to. They’re closing schedules for weeks out. They’re telling patients about their comprehensive plan. They’re buckling down telling people that they’ve actually, they haven’t taken any things away and they’ve offered all of these things, but they haven’t addressed the issues. They haven’t brought anything meaningful to the table at all whatsoever. Many days they come to bargaining without absolutely nothing. We ask them, do you have anything for us? No, it’s very curt and it’s very obvious that they’re not taking it seriously. But I think today, I think that we show them that we’re forced to be reckoned with. I don’t think that they anticipated the number of workers that said enough is enough. I did want to mention too, one thing that everyone can do, because this is a huge sacrifice for everyone.

And so if they want to help and support our cause, they can go to home.nw.org. That’s the main page for our campaign website. And there is a way to donate to hardship funds for Kaiser patients. There is a way for them to share their stories and a link to Kaiser Deny website so they can really actually tell the public exactly what’s been going on, how hard it’s been, how hard it has been to get appointments or services that they’ve requested or that they need. So that’s a huge way for people to support and bring awareness to what’s really truly going on at Kaiser.

Mel Buer:

Lisa, is there anything else you wanted to add? Is there a strike fund for striking workers or do you not have

Lisa Carroll:

Something? It’s all through the exact same resources that Chris just reviewed.

Mel Buer:

Okay.

Lisa Carroll:

Great. And I always say just call Greg Adams and tell him what you think. The more people that blow up his phone, the better.

Mel Buer:

That’s great. That’s great. Honestly, that would be great. Final thing, picket locations for anyone who wants to come join you on the picket line, there’s one in la, at least one in LA and one in San Diego.

Lisa Carroll:

Aren’t those also on the website?

Chris Reeves:

Yes, those will be on the website tomorrow. We are going to be in Woodland Hills, and so we’re expecting a large turnout in Woodland Hills, but that will also be every location. That’s going to be a day of action. It’ll be listed on our website tomorrow, will Beland Hills.

Mel Buer:

Okay. Is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience before we break for the night?

Lisa Carroll:

Oh, thank you. It was a nice conversation. I really appreciate your awareness.

Mel Buer:

Thanks.

Chris Reeves:

That’s my dog giving the last two raw. Yeah.

Mel Buer (44:31):

And as always, I want to thank you all for listening and thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons and go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real newsletter so that you can never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. Once again, I’m Mel Buer and with much love and solidarity, I’ll see you next time.

Two years ago, workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, represented by five different unions, walked off the job on strike. The Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh has been in negotiations for a contract with Post Gazette management for SEVEN years—since 2017—and have battled bad-faith bargaining, illegal and unilaterally imposed changes to working conditions, and loss of vacation time and insurance benefits. As of Oct. 18, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike has officially entered its third year, despite the National Labor Relations Board ruling that management has flagrantly broken federal labor law and committed multiple Unfair Labor Practice charges. We speak with a panel of striking workers about how they are faring after two long years on strike and what it will take to secure a victory and return to work.

Panelists include:

• Rick Nowlin, news assistant, editorial writer, and PG archivist
• Bob Batz Jr., veteran editor, writer, photographer, and Interim Editor of the Pittsburgh Union Progress (PUP)
• Steve Mellon, veteran photographer and writer, and regular PUP contributor
• John Santa, copy editor, page designer, and sports writer for the PUP
• Natalie Duleba, page designer, copy editor, web editor, and award-winning PUP contributor

Permanent links below:

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTubechannel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music:
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Rick Nowlin:

My name is Rick Nowlin, my title with the Post News Assistant. I work in new archives. I’ve been an editorial writer and I was also the jazz writer for 20 years.

Steve Mellon:

I’m Steve Mellon. I’m a photographer and writer at the Post Gazette. I’ve been at the newspaper since 1997. I write for the Pup pretty extensively. As a matter of fact, I’m often torturing Bob. He’s the editor of The Pup and Karen Carlin. I’m often torturing them with stories at 11 o’clock and I take every opportunity, actually, I’ve sent Bob’s stories to two o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the morning, and I always take every opportunity to profusely apologize for being a night owl.

Natalie Duleba:

I’m Natalie Duleba. I started working at the Post Gazette early 2020. I’m a page designer and copy editor and a web editor there. My participation at the Union progress has been sporadic, but one of my articles did win a Golden Quill Award, so not a lot, but when I do, it’s a good one.

Bob Batz Jr.:

Hi, Mel. I’m Bob Batz Jr. I’m a 30 year editor and writer and photographer at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and I got tapped to be the interim editor of the Pittsburgh Union Progress, which is our electronic strike paper.

John Santa:

My name’s John Santa. I’m a copy editor and page designer at the Post Gazette. I’ve only been there about a year, but I’ve been at various publications for about 20 years in the business now, so yeah. Oh, at Pop, most importantly, which I tell people that’s probably going to end up being the thing I’m most proud of in my entire career. But at Pop, I’m a sports writer and like Steve, I am very prone to sending in sports stories from late games at two, three in the morning and probably frustrating Rick Davis, our sports editor to No End. So thank you, Mel. Happy to be here.

Mel Buer:

I’m so glad everyone’s here. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Working People. I’m your host Mel Buer. Working People is a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you love what we do and are looking for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to, and please support the work we do with The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

So we’re coming up on a pretty mind-blowing anniversary in the news labor world. Two years ago in October, 2022, after the newspaper unilaterally cut off insurance benefits to production workers and newsroom workers filed ULPs for bad faith bargaining. The workers of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette walked off the job on strike. The newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh has been in negotiations for a contract with the Post Gazette management for seven years since 2017, and have battled bad faith, bargaining, illegal and unilaterally imposed changes to working conditions and loss of vacation time and insurance benefits. In October, 2022, newsroom workers voted to go on strike and strike. They did. Now, two years later, the workers of the Post Gazette are still on strike, and despite the NLRB upholding their unfair labor practice charges against the company, they still have a long way to go to total victory. Today we’ve brought some of the striking workers onto the show to talk about the last two years of the strike, the welcome updates from the NLRB and what’s next for the workers as their battle continues. Before we begin, a small editorial note for me, just as a disclaimer, I am also a dues paying member of the News Guild, CWA local 3 2 0 3 5, and the folks we have on today are my union siblings from the Pittsburgh Local. Now that that’s out of the way, welcome to the show friends. Thank you for

Natalie Duleba:

Having us. Hi, thanks for having us. Thanks

John Santa:

Now. Thank you. Happy to be here.

Mel Buer:

All right, so to start off our conversation, I think it might be prudent to give our listeners an update about the current state of things at this point in the strike. Bob, can you explain the recent NLRB decision from August and what that has meant for the strike and for negotiations?

Bob Batz Jr.:

Well, we won our case, Mel, you wouldn’t know it to look at us or talk to us, but we won our case. The NLRB board upheld the its administrative law judge decision from January, 2023. These dates are mind blowing to say them even though we’ve led them. So the board said, yeah, our judge was right. The company’s been breaking federal law in lots of different ways, and we want to expand the remedy. We want them to pay more for breaking the law. The problem is, and this is the crux of the problem with our strike, a crux of our strike, the NLRB has no enforcement power, and so the board said we won, and then we were all sitting there like I wanted to break out pots and pans and whiskey shots, and we couldn’t do that because we were still on strike and we were still on strike a month later, more or less. So what we’re waiting for and our siblings in the other CWA unions and in the Pressman’s Union, we are counting on relief from the federal courts through injunctive processes that we don’t fully see what’s going on because it’s this federal agency doing stuff on our behalf. And as we sit here coming up on our actual two year anniversary of US walking, we’re waiting for that relief to come from the courts.

Mel Buer:

John, if you want to just give me a little, what’s your impression here? This is a common sort of complaint that a lot of folks have about the NLRB is an agency really is that a lot of folks will see these sort of victories with their ULPs being upheld with various sort of small sea consequences being meted out to these corporations and these management teams that are breaking labor law and creating untenable working conditions for their workers. But oftentimes it really does amount to a slap on the wrist, or if the corporation is big enough, the fines don’t do anything. It’s a drop in the bucket for their daily profit, not to say they’re even the millions of dollars that they make year over year. So you have this NLRB victory and you’re still waiting for these sort of consequences to push the management back to the bargaining table to get them to, I don’t know, show shred of humanity for their working employees. How does that make you feel?

John Santa:

Yeah, it’s obviously incredibly frustrating. I mean, we face ownership or my bosses if you want to call them that publishers in the case of our paper that are unreasonable and even aside from being unreasonable, they’re oftentimes just completely unattached to reality of the situation that they’re dealing with here. And it’s obviously frustrating. You then think about how underfunded the NLRB is, and you see how difficult it is for these decisions to have any real teeth. I mean, I think the number, something like 30%, 27% of union election petitions are up there have been 27% more union election petitions over the past year. That’s just way too much for the NLRB to have to deal with in its current state. I mean, I would have to look at the numbers exactly, but I think it’s like $20 million that the NLRB is underfunded by. I mean, until there’s real change in that regard, it’s hard to believe that there’s ever going to be any meaningful kind of fix for us. So we’re hoping that we can get more support in every way, and especially from politicians and local leaders locally and nationally that could really affect change with the NLRB.

Steve Mellon:

Mel, if I can cut in here real quick.

Mel Buer:

Absolutely.

Steve Mellon:

Our case is a perfect example. We have ruling after ruling that states unequivocally that the Post Gazette has violated federal labor law. There’s no question about the rulings in this and about what the facts of the case are, and yet here we are two years out still on strike. This is the state of labor law in the United States right now. They have money, we don’t, and they have the power of appeals. They have these high price law firms, union busting law firms that can come in and just try to grind us down. I’m amazed that I sit in these morning meetings that we have, and I look around at the number of people like John and Natalie and Bob and Rick who are still with us, who are still fighting these fights. And that’s the one thing that gives me hope is that despite the odds that are against us here, the processes, the underfunding of the NLRB, despite those processes that we are still standing, we’re still here talking to you, we’re still a unified group, we’re still on strike.

It’s not easy after two years, we have to check in on each other on a regular basis. We have these discussions about how you’re doing not just financially, but two years without work, without that work identity, without those morning check-ins that you do around the coffee machine. These are, it’s tough. I never thought 40 plus years in this business that I would be on strike in the two minute warning of my career. I’m 65 years old that I would be doing this, but I can tell you that despite all that, I’m so proud to be look and see Natalie and John and Bob and Rick and all those other faces in the morning meetings and know that we’re still in this fight.

Mel Buer:

I think that’s a good sort of segue into my next question. Rick, you’ve been on strike for the last two years, and I really want to just ask how have folks fared in the last two years? How are you feeling now that you’re coming up on this official anniversary, two year anniversary of walking off the job? What’s the state of the strike fund? How are folks staying positive on the picket line? What’s your sense of that?

Rick Nowlin:

Well, I think with my situation, it is a little bit hairy because I got married about four years ago and my wife and I bought a house three years ago, and then the strike came even though I thought it was the right thing to do to take a stand, she was obviously quite concerned to say the least. So how are we going to make it, as I said, the process shake out and a big part of the issue that we’re working on is healthcare because I said healthcare being our healthcare being effectively canceled and replaced with another plan, which was way more expensive. One thing that has definitely been the case, in my case with the union picking up healthcare costs because a year and a half ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and you can imagine how expensive that might be it one going to not just hospitals, but also specialists, but because of that, if there’s a time to be on strike is your time to get prostate cancer, this will be the time to do it. And my wife, we’re very thankful for, if anything, that’s the time it happened. As far as that’s concerned, our income has been cut, but also because unions have been picking up many of our expenses, our expensive has also been cut out. So we’re thankful for that. And on a side note, to keep me from going stir crazy, many of these people know that I’m also a musician and my number of gigs that I’ve had have gone up prescriptions over the last year and a half as well. So in one sense it’s been for me personally, dialysis get to spend a lot of time with my wife that we wouldn’t have otherwise. But we’ve been able to weather the storm quite well because she has some investments that she’s made over the years. And as I said from the beginning, my being on Striker, I’m almost as old as Steve. I’m 63 and my being on strike is being a sympathy with my colleagues here because I’ve always felt that given the situation, as he’s mentioned in labor law that was being violated, that it does affect me in one sense, but I’m here for them. I just suppose it’s the right thing to do for me to go out with them because if they’re being screwed eventually it means that all my gut screwed as well. So it’s one of the things that we’re all in this together. That’s how I look at it.

Mel Buer:

That’s a very good point to make. And I really hope that your cancer fight is successful and that you do get the rest that you need to be able to heal from that.

Rick Nowlin:

And I want to say it was caught early enough, so we haven’t had any, I really haven’t had any treatments. I do know I have another biopsy in December, but the thing about it’s, we caught it early enough so that I really haven’t needed anything. The only thing we’ve been doing is just monitoring it. But once again, if I was still active, who knows how much we would’ve paid all these specialists there. And that’s part of the reason why, as I said, being on strike is, at least for me at this point, turned out to be a blessing.

Mel Buer:

Funny how that works. Right. Natalie, I did want to ask you a question.

Natalie Duleba:

Sure.

Mel Buer:

I know, and this is one of the, I think this is the hard question, I suppose. I know that some workers have crossed the picket line and gone back to work. I had a memorable and frankly heated exchange on Twitter with one of those scab workers back in 2023, and still others have been hired on in scab positions in the intervening two years. How have you as a group, as a union handled these strike breakers? Has it hardened resolve among the strikers, people pissed off, I imagine So unfortunately in this US labor movement management will do this every time there is a strike and it is a reality of it, of walking off the job. So how have folks at the Guild taken that in and yeah, what’s your thoughts about that?

Natalie Duleba:

So I remember that Twitter exchange quite a lot because that was a former striker who had gone back to work across the picket line was, I dunno, for lack of a better word, trying to get clout for supporting the SAG and WGA strikers and talking about, oh, well I’ll look at all this stuff that they had learned and it was just so hypocritical, but that’s not an attitude that is outside of the norm, that kind of hypocrisy that you see from scabs. And I actually lived with a striker, they lived in my house and they took a job at the Post Gazette outside of the bargaining unit, which just in the general of taking a position at the Post Gazette out of literally everything that they could have taken a job for. They’re a very talented writer, young and willing to work hard, and they decided to take an editorial position at the paper during the strike.

And it was a super personal betrayal. And that’s what I really think about a lot of people who have continued to work or who went back to work or even took the job. And it’s like, obviously I’m familiar with the kind of tough job market it is out there for journalists. I’ve moved across the country, this is my third cross country move to Pittsburgh chasing a job, better pay, et cetera. But especially people who live here and have an established reputation in Pittsburgh, they can get jobs probably almost anywhere else that needs a person who can put together a fun couple of sentences and knows how to talk to people.

And it’s just kind of mind boggling. I’m lucky that I really haven’t had any out in the wild encounters with scabs besides my former roommate. That was really tough. They did move out. They told me they took a job with post the day that they moved out. So it was definitely a shock, but I didn’t have to live with them after that. And the times that I have has just been in professional settings and we’re professional, so if we’re working, we’re going to be polite. And I know that sometimes if we have the mental capacity for it, we have the emotional bandwidth for it. We do try to say like, Hey, why did you take this job? Because a lot of people who have taken, well, a good portion of the people have taken jobs we’re freelancers already for the Post Gazette are known within the writing and photography communities here.

And it really felt, it feels like they saw an opportunity to, it was very self-interested to just slide in when the strike is on. When up until that point, they hadn’t been able to be hired during a non-strike situation where great photojournalist like Steve Mellon or Pan Pancheck are on strike and it feels very just self-centered, which is really the core of it. And I know that there’s a lot of, this is hard to say fortunate, but I started working right before the pandemic started, so I only had a couple weeks in the office and I was the nighttime worker, so I didn’t actually know a lot of people. I don’t think I had met Steve Mellon in person until that first day on the picket line. He had just been a name on a screen for me for two years. But we have strikers whose working relationships, friendships of decades are now broken and that’s not something that can be forgotten.

And it’s also something that if it’s ever to be, I don’t even know if forgiveness is like an option for folks. I’m not going to talk for anyone else, but that’s forgiveness, that has to be earned by the people who’ve continued to work and it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of indication that they want to do that because of the way that they don’t engage with us in good faith. At the beginning of the strike, we made a lot of bids. We called people regularly to hear their stances and I think we all remember just how emotionally draining that was. And some of this is just protecting our own mental health and our own emotional wellbeing to not engage with Strike Bakers or people who scabs who never came out. And I think that’s fine. I agree with that because it is so hard to parse those really intense interpersonal issues and it is going to be a huge uphill battle uphill negotiation when we’re back in the newsroom because I think that unfortunately it’s going to be us who has to be the bigger person when we’re 100% like the wrong party. Here we’re the people who some of us begged scabs to come out, begged them to not go back in and especially who came back in knowing the resources that we had already offered them that they just kind of spat on. And that’s going to be a really hard thing to work alongside knowing that they’re literally that they put their paychecks over supporting us and supporting themselves.

Steve Mellon:

That’s very well put, Natalie, and I appreciate hearing that. I’ve been around for a minute and some of these relationships that I have with some of the scab workers, I mean those go back decades. I’ve watched some of these people’s kids grow up and so it’s like a deeply personal betrayal in some sense. And I don’t know what those relationships are going to look like going forward once the strike is over. I don’t know. That’s just territory that we will have to navigate. I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about that right now. It’s pretty easy for me. I bumped into one of the new scab hires a couple of weeks ago at an assignment and for somebody like that, I didn’t know who he was. He came up and introduced me and I just told him, look, dude, I’m not having a conversation with you right now.

That’s pretty easy for me to do. I don’t know this person and I, he’s a human being, so I care about him on that level, but I’m not going to waste any brain cells on it. But some of these other relationships striking, you have a binary choice. You can either stand with your workers or you can stand with your employer. In our case, an employer that has been violating labor law. So if I break the law, if I go down and steal a toothbrush from the target store, my ass is going to end up in the back of a cop car and I’m going to go to jail. But if you’ve got money and you own a company, you can violate labor law. Go live at your main mansion, fly your airplane around, flash your fancy watch to your good buddies in New York City and live your happy life. So this whole thing with scabs, I used to, when we first started, I was calling some people who had crossed the picket line just to keep the lines of communication. I thought this would last three or four weeks. I didn’t know it was going to last for two years.

One of the issues I had is that I would call and just say, Hey, how are you doing? I’m just checking in and seeing how you’re doing. We can really use you out here on the line. And those weren’t successful conversations. Quite often it would be a litany of complaints about the union and about how I was hurting them, how I was making their job so much harder. And to your point, Natalie, I couldn’t have those conversations anymore because I was talking to strikers who were really struggling. That initial shock of going out on strike, I mean it’s hard to describe, to put into words what kind of a jolt that is to your life. It affects not only your paycheck but your sense of identity. There’s so many unknowns, like Rick said, so many unknowns, things you have to work through. And we were dealing with all that and then I would call people who were very comfortable in there getting a paycheck, very little in their lives had changed. The only thing that really had changed is that they might have somebody saying, Hey, isn’t there a strike going on there? Did you cross the picket line? Maybe somebody would call them a scab and they would become deeply offended. I just quite honestly didn’t have patience for that, so I stopped making those phone calls.

Mel Buer:

I think that’s a good point there Steve and John, I’d love to get your thoughts on this as well. I going out on strike, I think a lot of folks, particularly younger folks ostensibly on the left, these activists and organizers who maybe don’t have the benefit of union experience will get very excited when strikes happen understandably, because this is a monumental collective sort of action that happens where workers come together and say, we’re doing the thing that is going to have the most impact and that’s withholding our labor in service of better working conditions in our workplace. It’s a very uniquely empowering experience, but it is also a very difficult decision to make and I think it’s important to draw attention to that. And I wonder what your thoughts are, John, about what it means to go out on strike and also to maintain withholding your labor for two years. Incredible.

John Santa:

Yeah. Sincerely, there is not an aspect of my life that hasn’t been affected by this strike. I’ve friendships, family, money, struggles. I think it was Steve said, you lose your identity from a career that you’re very passionate about. I mean, let’s face it, no one gets into journalism to get rich. You do it because you believe in it. You believe in making an impact on your community. It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it that it’s hard. In terms of my personal story with going out on strike, I come from the very stereotypical Pittsburgh background. Like my dad lost his job at the mill in at the Westinghouse mill in the eighties when it closed. I come from grandfathers on both sides that were union workers. I have a grandfather that was a laborer. I have a grandfather that worked in a union rail yard. He did maintenance on the locomotives for years. So it was never a question I was coming out. And then you look at people like Bob Bats and Steve and Rick and Nolan and Natalie and Ed Bz mean I could name everyone that we’re on strike with and you know that these people are all on the right side of history and you want to be with them. I want to forever have my name mentioned with I stood shoulder to shoulder with Steve Mellon. I mean, I can’t imagine it being any other way. So there’s that, and you look at the people that are scabs and I think a lot of the scabs that are most responsible for keeping this going, I mean obviously the reason that the strike is still ongoing is because the Bloc family is unwilling to end this strike. They can do this, they could have done this at any point. They won’t do it. They want to make a point here and we’re not going to let that happen. If you look at some of our scabs, our worst scab offenders if you will, it’s the sports department. It’s guys like Jerry Lac who are cornerstone parts of this newspaper. They walk into that Steeler locker room, which Jerry walks in there to a Steeler locker room that is unionized by the way, and talks to these guys and makes it seem to the public, as I’m wearing my Steeler hat, makes it seem to the public that it’s business as usual.

It’s not, and it’s just whenever at the end of the day you get down to it, whose side do you want to be on? Want to be on the side of the owners of this newspaper who have time and time again for seven years, as you referenced at the top of the podcast, broken federal labor law. That’s not the type of person I want to be with. I want to be with Bob Batz, the interim editor of the Pittsburgh Union Progress. It’s an honor to stand with Bob Batz, an honor to stand with Natalie. And that’s what keeps me going because like I said, there’s no part of this that’s been easy. It’s been hard every day, every minute, every hour that we’ve been out on strike. And it’s that going back and forth between being, man, I’m fucking struggling and man, this is a fucking honor. I’m sorry for cursing. I don’t know if that’s allowed, but

Mel Buer:

Totally fine.

John Santa:

That’s just, that’s the truth of the matter, and that’s the way I feel.

Mel Buer:

That’s the power of solidarity. There’s nothing quite like it, frankly.

Rick Nowlin:

Yeah, and I want to take off on that too because as I’ve met, this is not my first strike. I was with Giant Eagle, which is the region’s largest grocery chain in 1991. As we went out for contract reasons, and I also do have some of the labor background, my mother was a teacher mostly in Wilkinsburg schools. That’s where she spent her career. And when we went out, we contemplated going out. I asked her for her advice, she gave me one piece. She said, don’t cross picket line, and that’s all I need to hear because frankly, I saw the proposals that the company was offering us back then, and my first reaction is they’re not going to accept this and they didn’t. So we went on for six weeks. One thing that helped us, I will say is that the customer’s boycotting. So yeah, this is not my first go around with stripes, but I do believe, and John mentioned to you is that we’re doing the right thing. Standing up for what I believe is justice. We’ve been doing it for two years is hard, but if when we go back to the newsroom, and I’ve said this in our Zoom meetings a number of times, we’re going to own it because we’ll be going to be tough. We’re going to be tried and tested once we go back in the newsroom. I can’t say how, of course, when is it going to happen, but we’re going to be the leaders in the newsroom when we go back because we’ve been through the ringer, we’ve been through the fire, we know what it’s like. We’ve been through the struggle. And the struggle is what makes us who we are.

Mel Buer:

Well said, well said. I think a lot about despite maybe because of these betrayals by these strike breakers, when you get back into the newsroom after victory, I think it’ll be maybe gratifying to know that this victory was one for them as well, despite their, I dunno how to put this nicely, inability to maintain their own piece of the picket line. They will still benefit, right? And I think that in itself is also a really good piece to kind of keep in the back of your mind as you’re out there on the picket line. It sucks that they’re not there, but you’re still fighting for them too and hopefully they appreciate that when they see the benefits that end up in their contract when you are finished negotiating this round,

Rick Nowlin:

And that’s the attack that many of us who have actually spoken with the strike breakers to Theca have gone back in, have been trying to come across. We’re not doing this simply for us. You’re going to benefit from us too.

Mel Buer:

Right? A hundred percent. Bob, I’d like to take a little bit of a sideways jump here. We’ve talked a little bit about the Pittsburgh Union progress, the strike paper that you’ve put together collectively since you’ve walked out in the last two years. I really personally would like to say that I think it’s one of the best strike papers in labor’s recent history. There is a long and storied history of American strike papers and what those do, it’s not just strike papers written by Newspapermen who’ve gone out. These are ways to communicate among striking workers, particularly for long haul strikes. And at some point, hopefully I’ll be able to do a couple part episode with working people about the history of strike papers because it is so cool and it’s like it hits the right nerd space in my brain about it. But I really want to, I’m going to start with you Bob, but I would also like to open this up to anyone else who has thoughts. What has it been like contributing to this paper the last two years? What are some of the things that you’ve learned in the course of publishing it? Has it changed the way you think about journalism? And I know that in terms of solidarity, there have been individuals in the community both in positions of power and just community members who have chosen to speak only to PUP and not speak to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. And so I want to get your thoughts about that. A lot of questions there, but pick and choose what you’d like.

Bob Batz Jr.:

All right, and I’ll be quick and I can turn it over to these guys. They’re all part of this too. I mean, we went on strike on October 18th and we had our first edition of Pup published on October 20th. We were the first strike paper of the digital age, whatever the hell that means. But we didn’t have to worry about printing it and sending it out, and we knew we were going to withhold our labor, but we didn’t want to withhold what we do because we still wanted to do what we do. It mattered to us. We wanted to write about things that mattered to us. We wanted to write about things that our community cared about, so that’s separate from the labor issue with our bad bosses. And so that’s what we did. And we never tried to be a replacement for the Post Gazette, the big daily metro.

We didn’t have the bodies for that even at the start. As Steve said, there’s a lot to unpack the first weeks and months of being on strike where you don’t know where your healthcare is going to come from and you don’t know there’s a lot of other work to be done, but we got off to a good strong start and we’ve never looked back. And I think I would say, and this Steve and I have deep talks about this all the time. We have from the beginning set out to do just journalism. That’s what we did when we got paid for it, and that’s what we do for free and it’s straight up the kind of stuff we do could run in any good journalistic publication, but we have found our sweet spot reaching out to communities that are overlooked or other people that are struggling.

We sort of have a new empathy certainly for labor issues, and our strike has coincided with a lot of other people going through these struggles as well. So we found sort of a new mission in reaching out to some of these other communities and individuals and neighborhoods and movements. And one of Steve’s stories is one of the things that I think we’re all proudest of is his ongoing coverage of East Palestinian, Ohio and after the trendy realm there. And that’s something that’s what we want to do. That’s the pure stuff that we do. We do all kinds of other stuff. Natalie had a great story about L-G-B-T-Q bar in a neighborhood that doesn’t get a lot of coverage. Sometime Johnny Santa goes out on Friday night to football games with other grandkids and great grandkids with mill workers. That’s what we do and those are things that are all important to us.

So I don’t know what to say. I’m happy for it to go out of business in a lot of ways because these people, Johnny San is going to work all Friday night and he’s going to work all day Saturday on college football and he doesn’t get paid. The Honor is mine to a work with him and with Steve and to do this work because that’s always mattered to me, but we want to get paid for doing this, so that’s the part that we have to finish up and get back to getting a paycheck is nice. A last word on being an unpaid journalist, though I keep saying this, it’s like journalism drugs. You’re not beholden to a boss, you’re not beholden to a company, you’re not beholden to a founder or a foundation. It’s just not something that you can do for two years when you’re not getting paid. So I hope we can keep doing what we do maybe with a little bit of strike flavor on it, but I would like to get paid for it as well and get benefits.

Mel Buer:

I will say before I pass it along, I worked as sort of part-time independent. I say I was in grad school at the time, but I was also working as an independent journalist and not getting paid for it because working as a freelancer is a godawful profession and I never want to do it again. And I commend to the people who sell their stories and their photos piecemeal and try to strong arm these publications into paying them a decent rate. I was not very good at it, but I will say that didn’t stop me from doing the work. There’s something unique about having some skills that maybe other folks in the community don’t have access to, and being able to tell a cogent story about a beautiful thing that’s happening to the humans around you and to have them trust you with that is extremely, it’s a privilege and I think about it a lot in the context of the strike paper and of strike papers in general.

It is a labor of love. No one’s getting paid for it, especially not in the digital era where you can pay five bucks to host a website for three months or what have you. And I think it’s an important thing to kind of point out is that you’re doing this voluntarily because you have the skills and you care about the community that you’re covering, and that translates as well to the work that you do at the Post Gazette when you’re getting paid for it. It’s the same thoughts, it’s just nice to have a paycheck and I will be the first to tell you that I really do appreciate being a union journalist and having a contract that guarantees a living wage. It’s very, very nice and I hope that you can get back to that soon. I will pass it along. I just wanted to offer my thoughts about it. Natalie, you were about to speak.

Natalie Duleba:

Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to toot my small little popcorn horn here because Steve and John and Bob have contributed infinitely more than I have, but Bob saying that it’s kind of like we get to decide what we cover and the stuff that I have done has been just things that I thought were cool. I did the Polar plunge into one of our rivers here on New Year’s Day, two years in a row. I’m hoping it’s not going to be three for the Pup, but that was something that I saw and I wanted to do, and I was like, Hey, is it okay? I’m not even sure if I told Bob beforehand that I was going to write about it. I was just like, Hey, I did this thing. Here’s photos and a story. And I talk to people and I’m sure that we all know that New Year’s Day is sometimes a slower Newsday.

Maybe there was some gratitude there to have something to run, or the story that I wrote about, it’s a they bar instead of a gay or a lesbian bar. I just thought it was a cool place and I told Bob I was working on a secret story, I would get it to him and he was like, cool, just turn it in. And knowing that we’re shaping it ourselves, I know that it’ll be an adjustment to have to listen to these managers and editors that haven’t advocated for us at all or in any meaningful way. I think that one of our strikers was in contact with a quote manager who doesn’t manage anybody, and that will have to go back to working with them and listening to their directives and that’ll be an adjustment, but we all know now what it can really feel like when it’s a truly collaborative, supportive environment that is journalists driven and story driven, not just, oh, we have to hit these bases. We have to talk about this because it’s important to Pittsburgh, which is, I guess it’s kind of that weird determination of the paper determining what’s important to Pittsburgh instead of Pittsburgh community determining what’s important to itself. And I think that we’ve done a really amazing job with that, with having it be community led and story led and journalist passion led instead of, I don’t know, being the record of paper. I mean the paper of record.

Steve Mellon:

That’s a good point, Natalie, and one of the things that’s been interesting to me to write for the strike paper is that it’s not only unburdening ourselves from the institution of the Post Gazette and all the being supported by a big newspaper has the advantages of you have resources and you have a built-in readership. It also comes with some weight, and that’s not always beneficial to your work as a journalist. I remember in 2020 during the George Floyd protest, the publishers, the editors of the paper made some really stupid decisions and you can Google that and figure that for yourself, but what that did is that it signaled to the community where the newspaper stood on these issues, and I was going out to cover some of these protests a number of times and people, I’ve covered these communities for years and people that I know were coming up to me and saying, Steve, we don’t want you here.

And I’d say, look where I’m coming from. You know how I write and how I cover these things. And I was told, it doesn’t matter. You’re working for the man. And those same people, those same people now are calling me. I think they recognize and appreciate that we have taken that have made a sacrifice to help not just ourselves, but for our colleagues and for the community that Pittsburgh will not benefit from a newspaper that treats its workers like shit and becomes a piece of garbage that’s not a benefit to the community and people, we tell people that they understand that and I think they appreciate that. The conversations I have with people are different now because I think they’re more trusting from the communities that I’m interested in covering. I like Bob says, I spent a lot of time in East Palestine and I was treated there the first several weeks I was up there to write to cover things.

I was treated as every other journalist. There were a certain number of journalists up there. I think once people, I didn’t talk about who I was or why I was up there. I was just Steve Mellon from the Pittsburgh Union Progress, and once people figure out that this was part of a strike effort, that we weren’t getting paid for it, that we were publishing the strike paper because we realized that there were stories that needed to be told that weren’t being told or that were being told from a corporate standpoint, they were being shaped by editors who sent maybe naive reporters who hadn’t spent enough time in the community to kind of figure out what was what, and that there was a realization that we were in this for the right purpose. I don’t want to sound self-righteous here, but I’m going to claim that mantle because you go on strike and you don’t like the paycheck and you do these stories, you work your ass off to cover these things, you put up a bunch of shit.

It’s because we believe in this and we have a lot of people who have taken the strike pledge. One thing I want to mention is that we’ve all stuck together and there’s a lot of solidarity in our group and people have spoke very ELO about that today, but we’ve also had a lot of support out in the community, and it’s the people that we’ve talked to that supported us that have come to us with stories. I never come up with a story idea anymore. We have so many story ideas coming into us that we don’t have time to fit around and think about what’s a good story. But we’ve had support too from, and everybody here, but maybe you, Mel, will recognize the name of Ali Batt and she is a member. She works for the United Steelworkers, but she has helped us raise money. They’re always out helping message us. This is a labor town, and we’ve been able to do this for two years because we’ve had each other to lean on, but we’ve also had members of this community that have stepped up to us when we’ve really needed it and backed us both financially and with just providing good vibes to us.

John Santa:

Yeah, I should say with the pop specifically, it’s sort of like a buzzword these days, but local journalism really gets thrown around a lot. Pop is living proof that local journalism really matters and how important it is not just tooting Steve Mellon’s horn because I’m in awe of him and he’s sitting in front of me. There’s no better coverage of East Palestine, not the New York Times, not the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. It’s the best there is. I mean, Google it and look, it’s astounding. I mean, Natalie was being gracious, but her story about Harold’s Haunt, I mean, that’s vital to our community. That’s a safe space. That’s a fun place for people. These are important stories that we’re not going to get to read otherwise wise.

Being a member of the sports team at the put, we are very intentional every day about telling local stories. It’s not about what the Steelers are doing. The scab column this at the Post Gazette, Jason Mackey can go off and have fun covering the pirates and sealers, and we really know that that’s what he’s about. It’s about the experience for him, not about the experience for the readers. Bob Bats instills that in us every day, how critical that is. We follow that example. That’s really the feedback I hear most about the Pup is this is truly, you truly are focused on what’s happening locally, and I think that’s the greatest Laura we can get from this. I mean, we care about this community. We love this community. We are this community. We’re not taking advantage of it, and that’s what makes me really proud. Seriously, go look at Steve’s Z policy and coverage. It is astounding.

Mel Buer:

Rick, did you have any thoughts about the union progress and about being a part of this incredible strike paper?

Rick Nowlin:

Well, I have not written for at all. So because

Bob Batz Jr.:

Yeah, Rick, I wanted to talk to you about that. I’ll catch you after this podcast.

Mel Buer:

There you go. Get a chance to kind of join in and enjoy the progress. As a sort of final thought before we head into this last question about what our audience, my audience can do to help support the strike is I’m in awe of the work that you do every day, and I feel very proud to be a member of the same union that is keeping the strike going. And I just want to say that in terms of the strike paper, it really is an example of what happens when community members come together to collectively create something important and impactful for the community that you live in. And it says a lot about the future of journalism that this is the kind of space where folks can really feel like they’re actually connecting to the community. And hopefully you can bring that collaborative spirit back into the newsroom when you’re done with the strike and maybe cajole a couple more editors into taking stories that actually people actually give a shit about. And hopefully that will also mean that these community members who maybe have a soured relationship with the post cassette can maybe rebuild some trust with these individuals who did such a good job with Union Progress with Pup, when this is all said and done and over, that would be the hope, right? That’s the optimistic sort of space. Okay, so this is an open question, anyone who would like to talk about this, but what can my listeners do to help you as you head into the, oh my God, third year of your strike?

It could be financially, it could be locals or folks who live within driving distance of Pittsburgh. What are some things that folks can do to kind of keep you in mind and keep you going?

Natalie Duleba:

Well, I mean this is going to be, we do still have a Stryker fund. You can donate that if as a one-time donor or as recurring donor, that money in terms of giving money that will go one-to-one to support people. That fund helps people pay their bills. It’s not just it’s going to disappear into a PR machine or anything like that. That is money that goes into our pockets when we need it. And you can get all this at union progress.com/donate. You can also subscribe to the union progress. That’s always really great to have a lot of eyes and supporters for our work. It shows the Post Gazette that these are stories that the community wants and that people wanted to read and that they should want us back in the newsroom writing their stories. And also, if you sign the Strike Solidarity Pledge, you’ll get on the email list that anytime you have an action, you’ll get an email. All of this is kind of all going to be clustered into on the union progress.com website. There’s a whole section to donate, subscribe, sign the Strike Solidarity Pledge, which is putting your name committing to support us and not to talk to the Post Gazette. And that way you can get on our mailing list when we have rallies, if you are within driving distance or local or feel like flying into Pittsburgh. And it’s a cool town, and we’ll show you a good time if you come.

And when we have actions, we always are pretty active on our social medias, so engagement with that retweets, posting to your stories, things like that are helpful and can be done just from your phone. All of this I just said, you can all do just from your phone and just continue to support union labor in general. We’re not the only strike that is there’s probably another strike happening right now. We saw the power of the Shoreman Strike strike recently that if we could put the fear of God into the Post Gazette the way that they did to the nation, that’d be great. And even though we’ve been in for this long, we’re still so proud and in awe of every other newspaper newsroom who go out on strike. We’re happy that their strikes are so much shorter than ours, but it still takes, we know the bravery in the sacrifice it takes to walk out even for a single day. So yeah, that’s my little spiel here. Anybody else have anything?

Bob Batz Jr.:

Mel? One thing I’ll say is, and we appreciate labor journalism and more than we ever would’ve before, so we appreciate you. We are glad that you and Max and other people don’t just forget about us because there’s just something about that if you’re doing it and people don’t even know you’re on strike. But one of the things I see going forward is we need more journalism about what it means to go on strike, why you don’t cross a picket line. What is the NLRB and how does it work? How should it work? A lot of the problems that we’re dealing with are just, we know that the Post Gazette is hiring people while we’re out that don’t even know what that means. Or maybe they’re not even being told there’s a strike, but there’s a lot of just education that has to happen. And I think people like you and Max, we’re doing our part now, but we need to just continue to keep that word out there about how this stuff works and doesn’t work and how it should work.

And that might help people down the road. I don’t wish any of the scabs, well that I feel like I’m fighting right now, but it’s easier for me to look ahead to some of the young college kids that we’re working with, had interns and we have writers, and I want to have a post Gazette that works for all my colleagues and for myself working there. But what I really want is for it to be a place that a real journalist of the future could work and have, do really good work and work that really matters, and also not have to work three jobs and not have any healthcare. But I think that the kind of work that you do can help make strikes shorter and maybe not happening as often in the future. That would be my hope.

Mel Buer:

Well, that’s kind of part of the mission that I have here as a co-host working people, is to really kind of draw back the curtain on union organizing and the contemporary sort of US labor movement and what that means to be a part of a union and what that looks like from election to bargaining, to contract to strike to. So hopefully in the future there is more of that chance for us to have these conversations. And I leave the door open for you, the experts on a long haul strike to come back and talk about what it means to be on strike for as long as you have, and especially after victory. You’re going to come back on and we’re going to celebrate. It’s going to happen. And yeah. Any final thoughts before I close it out, or is this a great way to end it?

Thank you so much, all Thank you so much. So much. Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you for sharing your experience and for talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly of what it means to be on strike. And as always, I want to thank you, my listeners for listening, and thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons. And please go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so that you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. Once again, I’m Mel Buer and with much love and solidarity, I’ll see you next time.

Over the past two weeks, people around the country have watched in horror as our neighbors and fellow workers have been battered by the successive disasters of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. “After making landfall as a Category 4 hurricane on Sept. 26 and tearing through the Gulf Coast of Florida,” Adeel Hassan and Isabelle Taft write in The New York Times, “Helene plowed north through Georgia and walloped the Blue Ridge Mountains, washing out roads, causing landslides and knocking out power and cell service for millions of people. Across western North Carolina, towns were destroyed, water and fuel supplies were disrupted, and residents were in a communications black hole, scrambling for Wi-Fi to try to reach friends and family… As of Oct. 6, there were more than 230 confirmed deaths from the storm.” The hurricanes have passed, but the devastation and dire need they left in their wake remain. In this urgent mini-cast, we speak with two guests who are on the ground in Asheville, NC, providing relief and mutual aid to their community: Byon Ballard, a cofounder of the Mother Grove Goddess Temple in Asheville, where she serves as Senior Priestess, and Lori Freshwater, a journalist and relief aid volunteer who is originally from North Carolina.

Additional links/info below:

• Mother Grove Goddess Temple website, Facebook page, and Instagram
• Mother Grove Goddess Temple volunteer and donation information page
• Beloved Asheville website, Facebook page, and Instagram
• Adeel Hassan & Isabelle Taft, The New York Times, “What we know about Hurricane Helene’s destruction so far”
• Dharna Noor, The Guardian, “Double punch of hurricanes could become common due to climate crisis”
• Oliver Milman, The Guardian, “‘It’s mindblowing’: US meteorologists face death threats as hurricane conspiracies surge”
• Oliver Milman & Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, “Global heating makes hurricanes like Helene twice as likely, data shows”
• Lauren Aratani, The Guardian, “Insurance is failing hurricane survivors: ‘People thought they were covered’”

Permanent links below:

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music:
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Lori Freshwater:

Hey Max, I am Lori Freshwater and I am originally from North Carolina, although I’m on the coast, but when I heard that my beloved mountains were in trouble, I had to come here and see if there was anything I could do to help and I found the Mother Grove goddess where I am today. I’m a journalist, kind of a nomadic journalist, and so I’m going to be here for the foreseeable future trying to get the news out about what the needs are here in Western North Carolina.

Byron Ballard:

I’m Byron Ballard. I am one of the founders, one of the co-founders, and I serve as senior priestess for the Mother Grove Goddess Temple here in Asheville. We are a church that honors and celebrates the divine feminine in whatever spiritual tradition you’re in, and we’ve been around for about 18 years doing public rituals, teaching classes, and this is our first and we are hoping, hoping it is going to be our last major push on relief efforts. Please. Oh, please.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. And please support the work that we do at The Real News Network by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all today. If you have been watching the news or just going outside in the record breaking October heat, then you like me, have surely been feeling ever more anxious and uneasy about the intensifying effects of climate change. If you live in the American Southeast, however, chances are you are feeling the disastrous effects of what must be understood as a full-blown climate emergency. Over the past two weeks, those of us around the country have watched in horror as our neighbors and fellow workers have been battered by the successive terrors of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. As a deal, Hassan and Isabelle Taft write in the New York Times after making landfall as a category for hurricane on September 26th and through the Gulf coast of Florida, Helene plowed north through Georgia and walloped the Blue Ridge Mountains washing out roads causing landslides and knocking out power and cell service for millions of people.

Across Western North Carolina. Towns were destroyed. Water and fuel supplies were disrupted and residents were in a communications black hole scrambling for wifi to try to reach friends and family officials raced to rescue survivors, locate victims, and restore flood damaged water systems. The chaos in the state was part of a path of destruction that Helene carved through the region, including portions of Tennessee, South Carolina and Virginia. As of October 6th, there were more than 230 confirmed deaths from the storm. Helene is the deadliest tropical cyclone to strike the mainland United States since 2005 when Hurricane Katrina caused nearly 1400 deaths on the Gulf Coast. According to statistics from the National Hurricane Center, pounding rain flash, floods and dangerous landslides savage, the area around Asheville and Western North Carolina putting the region in crisis. It’s like a mini apocalypse said Gretchen Hogan, a resident of Brevard, North Carolina. Now the hurricanes may have passed, but the devastation and dire need they left in their wake remain.

The stories coming out of communities ravaged by Helene and Milton are ghastly, devastating and heartbreaking. And the reality that humanity has been barreling down a decades long path to the extremely predictable climate emergency we’re now in is in infuriating, terrifying and overwhelming, but out of darkness. There has been light out of crisis, an outpouring of love, solidarity, and sacrifice, and today we are talking with two incredible human beings on the ground around Asheville, where communities have been directly impacted and where folks have been working overtime to provide relief and mutual aid to their community. Lori Byron, thank you so much for joining us today amidst all this chaos. We really, really appreciate it and I promise I won’t keep you too long. I was wondering if we could just start by turning things over to you and asking if you could talk us through what you have been seeing, feeling, experiencing, hearing from your community there in Asheville since Hurricane Helene hit and especially in the weeks since.

Byron Ballard:

I’ve got to be honest with you, many of the people that I talk to and deal with every day aren’t feeling anything. We can’t. We can’t because there’s too much work to do to stop and process. So we’ll do that later. I’m dreaming of a trip to the beach in the winter where nobody’s there and I don’t have to answer anybody else’s questions. We are in a place that we’re in the middle of a natural disaster. We’re at the beginning of a natural disaster. There are places that look perfect and untouched only to discover that there’s four feet of toxic mud inside them. My family has lived on the French Broad River since they came from an adjoining county at the end of the 19th century, and I lived there still, but high up so that I could watch the river rise in 1916. This river rose to 22.4, I think feet above its banks and it was over 27 feet for this flood.

So it is the worst flood that anyone here has ever historically experienced. What we are looking at is need on every possible level. So people need water because the water system is destroyed. There are towns that are gone. There’s a little sweet little touristy town called chimney rock, and it is much of it is simply gone. It’s not that the trees are down and there’s some mud, it’s that the buildings are gone. There is a beautiful valley called Swano, which we understand is a native ward and I don’t know if it’s creek or Cherokee, but that means beautiful valley and it is a long valley between heading east out of Asheville, heading towards downstate and the Swanno River, which is a tiny little drought, water river most of the time floods a lot and it flood flooded. It flooded in a horrific and substantial way so that the Swanno Valley is now the Swanno Valley of the shadow of death.

And for over a week it was almost impossible to get in and people would get in with a four wheel drive or an A TV or however they could do it and do the basics, pull people off the roofs of their houses, get the people into shelter and safety. It was extreme wartime triage, and I’ve heard that again and again from people who say, I was in Korea, I was in Iraq, and this is wartime damage. We are fortunate in that no one is bombing us actively. But yeah, that’s what we’re looking at. And at this point, two weeks in much of the triage is accomplished. People have water people, the hierarchy of needs are met with exception of shelter. And that’s what everyone is working on now, cleaning up, rebuilding, building where they can, but the infrastructure is gone.

The water system can’t be rebuilt in places because there are no roads left in those places. So first a road has to be built and then the water system can be addressed. And I want to address one thing right now, right up front there’s a lot, lot of misinformation. And here in the mountains we would just call it damn lion about what is and is not here. FEMA is here, the Army Corps of Engineers is here. We have had utility workers from as far away as Canada to reestablish power here. The government that everybody hates is here and they are functioning, but the terrain is impossibly difficult. So there are still without any doubt, families and individuals in the far western part of this state and in the higher elevations in these counties around here and in Buncombe County that have not been reached yet because it’s the terrain.

These are among the oldest mountains in the world and people look at ’em and go, well, they’re not the Rockies. They shouldn’t be too bad. Well, they’re bad, they’re bad. And because decisions were made on a higher level than any of us, we’ve had ridge top development and steep slope development that never should have happened because in addition to the flooding, we have landslides, we have rock falls. They tell us in order to drive the federal highway I 40 west to get from North Carolina to Tennessee, we will not be able to do that until November of 2025. So that’s the level of destruction. I’m going to say one more thing and I’m going to turn it over. Last night we had been expecting a load of supplies from the Charlotte area and the fellow got here and with his father-in-law, and we started unpacking all that we needed unpack.

And he turned me and just grabbed me in a big bear hug and looked in my face and he said, I don’t know if I should say this to you, but I was in Katrina and this is worse than Katrina. And he had tears in his eyes. So we know. But to get back to your first question, what are we feeling? We can’t feel that yet. Not yet, because we’re still delivering water, we’re still collecting diapers and bleach wipes and every afternoon we drink elderberry, tincture and hope we’re not going to get sick. Yeah, I mean that’s our reality right here on the ground.

Lori Freshwater:

Thank you, Byron. I would really also like to kind of clear up from people on the ground some of these absolutely insane conspiracies. I complained about FEMA being slow, getting in here with water openly. So I’m not someone who is afraid to criticize the government, but they are here and you see them with vest everywhere and they’re going around to people that are in the parks and that just clearly don’t have any place to go. The Army Corps of Engineers is here. I was listening to the Buncombe County press conference this morning and just heard this statistic that was just mind blowing from the Army Corps of Engineer Engineers. He said that there are an estimated, there’s an estimated 10 million tons of debris out here, 10 million tons of debris that has to be taken care of. So that alone is enough to just cripple the entire area if we aren’t really all working together. And that’s what people have been doing. They’ve been working together in a way that I’ve never seen through any other community. People have been communicating with people in far areas. They’ve been looking online in different Facebook groups to see, oh, there’s somebody that needs a meal for their autistic child. We can bring it up.

People are rising above what I would have ever even expected or dreamed. And I would just ask the rest of America to kind of the best thing you could do for the people of Western North Carolina is to follow their example. Stop looking at hate and conspiracies and things that push people down and look at what is going on here now and get your As to work. Sorry, that was a little interruption from Byron. They’re welcome to come here and work as well. We have plenty of work to do. But would just say what I’ve seen here has been really, really special and incredible. And I think that what I want to do going forward is to tell other communities whether you are a coastal community or wildfire or just a community that hasn’t been touched yet, start working together now with your community because that’s what’s going to save you.

Luckily the people here, were able to get things together quickly and are still trying to do so, but when you have to go to a cashless society overnight, it’s like no technology. So there’s no way to buy gas. There’s no way to buy food. You run out of cash pretty quickly. You want to be prepared. And so that’s a big lesson that I would say Max, that people really need to take from this is get going now. Get to know your neighbors, get out there and talk to people in your community and say, who’s got these skills? Who has a chainsaw? Who’s a good organizer on doing meal drops? That kind of thing. And that’s what people should be doing instead of talking about conspiracy theories, how you get through disasters, that’s how we become better Americans and that’s how we become better humans. So that’s my little preach for the day Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, I can’t thank you both enough for laying that out and preaching the good word that needs to be heard right now. I want us to end here in a second by talking about those relief and mutual aid efforts and the light that has come out of this darkness. The great Mr. Rogers famously said, in a moment of disaster or crisis like this, we always need to look for the helpers. We need to know that there are people there helping and you all are out there helping. And I want folks listening to this to look for the helpers and to be the helpers. And I want to emphasize that the people out there spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories and all that crap are not helping shit. So I want us to end on that in a second. And pardon my French, it’s heartbreaking hearing what you guys are laying out for us.

And I just wanted to, by way of getting us to the final question here, I want hover on something that you guys said about how other communities need to be preparing themselves for eventualities like this. Because when the catastrophe comes, you’re going to need your neighbors more than you ever thought you would. But this really speaks to the heart of an investigation that we’ve been doing on this podcast for years now. We’ve been interviewing working class people, living, working and fighting in different, so-called sacrifice zones around the country, places like East Palestinian, Ohio where working class residents have had their lives upended by the derailment unavoidable derailment of a Norfolk southern bomb train two years ago almost, right? And to communities here in South Baltimore who are being poisoned by another railroad, a medical trash incinerator, all that kind of work that we’ve done to talk to folks, living in areas like that has taught us something that I’ve said on this show many times is that we are all more or less being set up for sacrifice.

And in these communities you can see the future that’s in store for most of us. And if you don’t believe that, just look at the last two weeks. Listen to what Byron said about the toxic sort of sludge that you can’t control where that stuff goes when a hurricane hits your area. What about the mountaintop removal that’s increasing the likelihood for deadly landslides? I mean, what about the insurance companies that are telling people after a natural disaster that they are shit out of luck? I mean, this is what we mean when we say we all need to care about this and we all need to be fighting together against this because we’re all being set up for sacrifice. And that is unacceptable on every single level. And so I can’t stress that enough for people out there listening, please don’t comfort yourself with the notion that you’re going to be fine even if others aren’t.

And just hoping and praying that you live in a safe zone. We need to be proactive about this. And I just can’t emphasize that enough. And I know I can’t keep you both for much longer because you have the vital work to do of repairing your community and meeting your community members’ needs. And once again, we can’t thank you enough for doing that work. I want to just ask if you could tell our listeners a bit more about the kind of relief work that you’ve been doing, the kind of needs in the community that you referenced earlier that are ongoing, the different orgs, volunteer groups that are doing the work of helping and what folks out there listening right now can do to support those efforts and support our fellow workers in these regions battered by the hurricanes.

Lori Freshwater:

Right. Thank you for all that and thank you for just, it’s so nice to talk to someone so informed from a distance about what’s going on, not just here, but like you said, so many places. I was at a place called Beloved Asheville yesterday, which is they’ve kind of risen to the top of the organization chart. It’s amazing to watch. I was there a couple of days after the storm and I watched them ramp up and now I think it’s acres out there and they’re on social media, so please go find them on social media. They’re posting a lot of videos and reels and that kind of thing, and it really does show you how massive their relief efforts have become. And they have everything from gas cans, camping supplies, things we still need. By the way, it’s getting cold here. So we need blankets, we need clothes for people, gloves, those kinds of things.

We need medical first aid supplies. Like Byron said, I think we’re okay on water. We need to keep distributing what’s here and make sure that people aren’t getting left out, but we are pivoting now to a different kind of needs. When I was at Beloved Asheville, I spoke to the co co person facilitator, I’m not sure if his title, I apologize. And he was saying that what we need is land and we need housing, and that’s what we need to start thinking of now. Instead of saying, well, this isn’t the time to think of that, it is the time to think of that. There was a homeless population here before and now that population, we don’t know. We have no idea how many people are homeless in Western North Carolina right now. So his point is so valid. We need to be thinking about getting land and building housing for people and people who are owning investment homes here.

They need to do the moral thing since our laws won’t force them to do it, and they need to stop sitting on empty houses in these places where people are homeless. So that’s the focus going forward. How can we not just get to where we were, but how can we come out better? So that’s what I would say. And I think I would just ask Byron if she has a couple of things to say that people are sending here that we might have enough of or things that we need. Let me see what she has to say because kind of really got her eye on everything coming and going. Right now,

Byron Ballard:

I course want to talk about Barnardsville. So we heard early on that Barnardsville was a disaster, and it is the big Ivy River, which is kind of a misnomer. It’s never been a real big river, but the devastating flood on that river in this little valley, again, in this beautiful little valley, we just heard how terrible it was. So we loaded it up, a four wheel drive with water, food, diapers, all of that. We headed out there and the road was good, and that is a huge blessing. The road was good, but on a quarter mile, either side of the road, it looked apocalyptic.

Lori Freshwater:

It really max. It does. I have to just say it really does look like what people think of as the zombie apocalypse.

Byron Ballard:

It looks like the suburbs of Beirut, just fewer buildings. But then we got to the place we were headed and they said it’s right across from the post office. We got there, and it’s an old firehouse and the group of people who have organized that, a group of, I’m going to call them anarchists, that is a word close and dear to my heart, but they’re primitive skills experts and they do workshops in the area all the time. They had that thing set up so elegantly. So the first bay was missing persons. Second bay was first aid. After that, there was a section of clothing and a section of food and outside under 10 by 10 popups or thousands of cases of bottled water. And you pulled in differently if you were delivering versus picking up. The point is they had within hours of the disaster, they had organized that because they knew how to organize. So we at Mother Grove, goddess Temple are doing nothing, anybody. We’re not doing anything special. Everybody can do this, but you need to think about it now when you’re not in the grips of a crisis, it is possible to organize so that you get people what they need. But you need to think about it now because it is absolutely true that the first responders of any disaster are the people who are also the most effective victims, the disaster.

And we need to be ready for that because this is a warning shot the same way that Katrina was a warning shot, and we’re not going to get many more warning shots before the big huge cataclysm happens. We just simply aren’t. So I would say, and I’ve said this again and again, do the work. Do the damn work. Look at what your community needs and do it and do it and do it. And yes, it is exhausting. I mean, I look at your face and I know you look at my face, look at us, look at hanging out over your phone and we look tired because we aren’t tired, but we’re doing good work. So if people want to come to Mother Grave, goddess Temple, we are here. We will give you a cup of tea or a cup of coffee and a cookie and maybe some food, and then we may say, how much gas you got in your car? Can I give you money for gas? This stuff needs to go and I want to emphasize this. We are not special. Anybody can do this, but you just have to have the guts to do it, and you’ve got to get off your lazy ass and do something. Okay, I guess I’ll finish with that.

The student encampment movement last school year turned institutions of higher education into flashpoints of struggle over Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, US support for it, and the right to speak out against it. This year, college and university campuses have become laboratories of repression where different administrative efforts to silence Palestine solidarity and antiwar demonstrators are being deployed. And that is playing out right now at Cornell University.

As Aaron Fernando writes at The Nation, “Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, has taken disciplinary action against an international student that will likely force him to leave the country, and could have a chilling effect on other international students participating in political protests.

Momodou Taal is a PhD candidate in Africana studies and a graduate student worker, attending Cornell under the F-1 visa program. In the last academic year, Taal joined student-led actions demanding that Cornell divest from industries complicit in Israel’s attacks on civilians in Gaza.”

The Cornell grad worker union, Cornell Graduate Students United-UE, released a statement condemning the university’s disciplinary actions against Taal, and is demanding the administration bargain with the union “over the effects of the discipline administered to Taal.” “CGSU-UE condemns Taal’s suspension, which represents a disturbing pattern of discriminatory discipline against marginalized graduate workers. The union is still fighting for just cause protections in discipline and discharge, due process for academic evaluations, strong academic freedom, and nondiscrimination protections inclusive of political affiliation and action, religious practice, and caste.” In this urgent episode, Max speaks about Cornell’s actions against Taal with two members of the CGSU-UE bargaining committee: Jenna Marvin, a third-year PhD student in the History of Art & Visual Studies at Cornell; and Jawuanna McAllister, a sixth-year PhD candidate in Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell.

Additional links/info below:

• Cornell Graduate Students United-UE website and Instagram
• Petition: “UE Local 300 Member Facing Firing and Deportation for Exercising Free Speech”
• Call for other grad unions to sign “Solidarity Statement of Support for Momodou Taal”
• Aaron Fernando, The Nation, “A Cornell graduate student faces deportation after a pro-Palestine action”
• Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, “Cornell grad student who attended pro-Palestine protest could be forced to leave U.S.”

Permanent links below:

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music:
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Jawuanna McAllister:

Hi, my name’s Jawuanna. I’m a sixth year PhD candidate in molecular biology and genetics at Cornell. So I do a lot of stuff with cancer cells and I’m also a member of the C-G-S-U-U-E bargaining committee.

Jenna Marvin:

Hi, my name is Jenna Marvin. I am a third year PhD student in the department of the History of Art at Cornell University. I actually work on the history of American photography and like Joanna, I’m also a member of CGS U E’s bargaining committee.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within in these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for folks you’d like us to talk to or subjects you’d like us to investigate and please support the work that we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all today. We are recording this on Tuesday, October 1st, and so I just want to say up top that circumstances may change by the time you hear this, but we are going to do our best to turn this episode around and get it published as soon as we can after we finish this recording. But today on Tuesday, October 1st, as we prepare to commemorate a year of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in the West Bank as Israel with the United States is full backing, drags the Middle East into an all-out war. The war here at home is ramping up on working people and people of conscience everywhere who are speaking out and taking action to try to stop the slaughter, or at least to pressure those in power to do so. Just as the student encampment movement last school year turned institutions of higher education into a flashpoint of struggle over Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, US support for it and the right to speak out against it, college and university campuses this year are at the bleeding edge of institutional efforts to silence and repress Gaza solidarity and anti-war demonstrators.

And that is playing out right now as we speak at Cornell University. As Aaron Fernando writes at the nation, and I’m going to quote this piece at length, quote, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York has taken disciplinary action against an international student that will likely force him to leave the country and could have a chilling effect on other international students participating in political protests. Mama Dal is a PhD candidate in Africana studies and a graduate student worker attending Cornell under the F1 Visa program. In the last academic year, Taal joins student-led actions demanding that Cornell divest from industries complicit in Israel’s attacks on civilians in Gaza. Cornell student activists were not alone in launching public demonstrations across their college encampments took hold across the country. In response, some universities called in police to clear, often forcefully pro-Palestinian student protestors. But Cornell took a different approach during a year when it ostensibly prioritized free expression.

The university created a new policy to crack down on these types of protest first issued on January 24th, 2024. The interim expressive activities, policy limits when amplified sound can be used, delineates which objects are prohibited at collective campus actions like candles and sticks and subjects, some protestors to increased disciplinary action. By the end of the spring semester, six Cornell students including TAL face suspension for their pro-Palestinian activities. I’m trying to fight this to at least have an investigation and due process said tal, I’m not asking for anything special. I’m asking for Cornell to follow their own procedure. The Cornell Graduate Student Union, which is attempting to help Tall said no investigation was conducted before the discipline of temporary suspension was issued to Mama de. The Union issued a press release on Tuesday explaining that it is demanding to bargain with Cornell over the effects of the suspension.

The union said last spring. Cornell University signed a memorandum of agreement or MOA with C-G-S-U-E or Cornell graduate students United ue that gives the union the right to bargain over the effects of discipline of graduate workers on their working conditions effective immediately pursuant to the M-O-A-C-G-U-E issued a demand to bargain with Cornell administration over the effects of the discipline administered to tall C-G-S-U-U-E condemns tall suspension, which represents a disturbing pattern of discriminatory discipline against marginalized graduate workers. The union is still fighting for just cause protections and discipline and discharge due process for academic evaluations, strong academic freedom and non-discrimination protections, inclusive of political affiliation and action, religious practice and caste. So that is a lot of the context that we wanted to sort of provide for you guys up top. And we will of course link to Aaron Fernando’s piece in the nation so you could read more about it.

And I wouldn’t have to burden our guests today with explaining the whole context here because as I said at the top time is of the essence. And we do want to focus the second half of this conversation on where things stand right now as we record at Cornell and what folks can do right now to help and get involved. And so Joanna and Jenna from the Cornell Graduate Students Union are here to join us and help us unpack this important story. And thank you both so much for taking time to do this. I really appreciate it and I promise that that’s the most that folks are going to hear me talk at the top of the episode up here. I really wanted to turn things over to both of y’all and ask if, yeah, first if you could sort of take us back to last year, right when the student Antifa movement was really spreading to campuses, not just across the US but around the world, it felt like this was a really big step in the protest movement, and now we are facing a lot of the more sinister institutional backlash beyond just the immediate police led backlash that we saw on campuses like Columbia and more.

So can you both talk to us a little bit about how we got from there to here, and then we’ll talk about where things currently stand with Talls case and what the union is doing to fight it?

Jawuanna McAllister:

Yeah. Well first thank you again for having us. We’re really happy to be able to have a platform to share some of what’s going on at Cornell. Wish it was under different circumstances, but I think I speak for myself and Jenna when I say we’re both grateful that you made time for us, especially with the situation is evolving as quickly as it has been. So what I can say about last year is it’s actually interesting that you bring up some of the more overt forms of discipline and policing that were taking place across campuses. It’s actually one way that I think Cornell was different. So we are at Cornell’s main campus, which is in central New York in Ithaca, it’s college town. It’s pretty small, it’s rural for the most part. So a lot of what was taking place across the country we didn’t really have here in terms of overpolicing, especially with the student encampment in the spring. There were some flareups, but it never really got to the point where it was violent. Everything was entirely peaceful, at least from the side of the prop protestors.

But what was always present and I think now is sort of bubbling over and coming to the surface is some of these more insidious forms of repression and discipline and targeting of specific individuals who are perceived as leaders in this type of movement. And the censorship that we’re really seeing. It was taking place last semester, but now we’re just, it’s a continuation of what we had last semester. And I think one of the other shifts with Cornell is that we had a change in leadership. So our former provost is now the president of the university, our former president retired, take from that what you will. But so yeah, now we have a new president, Koff who has taken the helm and is really spearheading a lot of these more repressive tactics that he was able to get away with without as much attention I think in the past.

Jenna Marvin:

Yeah, I’ll jump in. And second Joanna, and of course, thank you for having us. We’re delighted to be here even under the difficult circumstances, but I really do want to highlight that change in leadership at Cornell. There was, I think a sense from all of us, either union members or activists that caught lakoff’s change of role from the provost to the president was going to lead to a real change intact or maybe even an intensification of what had been happening in the spring. And I think that our fears are being validated right now given what’s happening on campus. So that change of leadership I think is really key. You have a new president who will be an interim president, but is new nonetheless, who is trying to prove himself to higher up board of trustees, et cetera.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So let’s talk about, I guess how things have been moving in the new school year because it feels like I, and this is something that we’ve talked to students, graduate students and faculty who were involved with the different encampments last year with the coverage that we were doing here at the Real News. We spoke with folks at UCLA, university of Michigan, Columbia, Indiana, so on and so forth. And we were seeing that there were different kind of approaches that different administrations were taking. One university had snipers on the roof, the other university trying to make itself seem a little more like open students at Stanford won critical gains and concessions from the university. So this is definitely an intense and protracted struggle that has not had one single outcome. But what we have seen, especially heading into the new year, is that university administrations and the powers to which they answer be they on the donor side or the political side, have taken that time over the summer to really revamp their strategies for how to deal with, and when I say deal with that term’s carrying a lot of weight here, deal with these protests.

Some universities we’ve already seen are taking action, even disciplining or firing faculty. And now we have the case here at Cornell. So I wanted to ask if you could just sort of please tell us how things have gone this year. Did it feel markedly different walking onto campus at the beginning of this school year? And what has been the course of events that have led us to where we are right now and where do things currently stand right now?

Jawuanna McAllister:

Yeah, I think there was a sense from everyone on campus who’s been paying attention to events on campus that this year was going to be a little bit different and a little bit more intense. I believe it was the very first day of classes, I think it was on August 26th, the provost and new interim provost and new interim President Koff sent out an email to the entire student body and I believe the entire Cornell community outlining new guidelines for how discipline would be handled this semester for student activists. And it’s essentially this three tier system that’s more or less, as we’ve seen over the past week, just completely gone out the window where it is kind of like a three strike thing out. So first offense is, I guess I probably need to pull up the email, but the first offense is like a warning.

You get called into a conduct meeting with the student code of conduct office, and it’s a warning, the second offense, and it could just be an offense, could be, I don’t know, attending a protest, right? Attending a rally that’s going on a little too long per CUPD, Cornell University police’s discretion. Second defense is a non-academic suspension, which essentially bars people from participating in clubs and extracurriculars. And then the third would be more permanent or interim temporary suspension and academic suspension. So what’s happening to MOMU right now? The other change is that in response to some of the discipline that graduate workers in particular face in the spring where we had a number of international and just grads of various marginalized identities targeted for their participation in our encampment at Cornell were issued, they were suspended in response to that, graduate workers here organized a picket outside of a bargaining session, and that resulted in really demanding that the university bargain with us over that discipline.

And as a result of that, we got this memorandum of agreement, which we signed with the university in July. And this agreement essentially states that the university is obligated to bargain with us, bargain with our union over the effects of grad work or discipline. So you have this three tier system that the university is saying they’re going to abide by because there’s been a lot of questions about how disciplines made it out up until now because it’s been completely arbitrary. And our union has this MOA that we’ve signed with the university saying, you have to bargain with us. And as I think general can tell you more about things are not playing out how they should.

Jenna Marvin:

Yeah, I can talk a little bit more about the enforcement of the memorandum of agreement. It does feel like Cornell administration, like the head and the hand, are not talking on purpose. More than likely Cornell’s bargaining committee is composed of general counsel, faculty, and of course an outside negotiator as well. And so they are bargaining this memorandum of agreement with us beginning in May, which was a huge industry setting victory to win something that actually says your employer has to come to the bargaining table around really any kind of discipline that affects working conditions. So from the time we started bargaining that until July when we actually signed it, Cornell’s bargaining committee was working with C-G-S-U-U-E to hammer this out and it’s become final. And it’s a document that we are really proud of, not only for a victory for us, but for other graduate shops around the country.

So to see, I think we were all sort of waiting on bated breath to see how the university would handle the enforcement of the memorandum. And of course, the answer that we received is they are blatantly disregarding it. They have an obligation to bargain with us over any sort of discipline needed out that affects the terms and conditions of employment. And of course, in MoMA AL’S case, that is absolutely happening. Deen enrollment and the revoking of his visa alone constitutes a huge disruption to his terms and conditions of his work. So to have your bargaining committee actually bargain with the union to create this really, really clear, really, really, really clear guidelines for how discipline is to be handed down and how the union is to be involved in that process and then to completely disregard it, especially after sending out this three strikes email where due process is supposed to be a guarantee. It does feel like the president’s office is not communicating properly with the offices that actually are in charge of meeting out discipline. And it’s been very disappointing, to say the least from the union’s perspective.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Can I just ask a little more on that? I mean, I can’t imagine how they’re feeling right now, but what can you tell us about how Mama DE’s doing and how this is affecting them? For anyone out there listening who maybe is still asking those questions of like, well, why is this a labor issue? What are unions and grad workers have to do with Palestine? I guess what would you say to folks out there about why this is a labor issue and how this is affecting one of your members right now and their livelihood?

Jawuanna McAllister:

It’s very much a labor issue with the type of work that graduate workers do. We teach, we research, OU is a student in Africana studies, a grad worker in Africana studies. He can’t teach his classes right now because he’s been suspended. His students are missing out on all that he has to offer as an instructor because he can’t set foot on campus, he can’t do his job. So it’s very much a labor issue from a service level. And then you think about the types of things that graduate workers are being disciplined for, not only by participating in protest activity, but also just by teaching their subject matter in the classroom. I think Momu and a number of other graduate workers, just who I personally am aware of and have close friendships with, have reported some really troubling things about the response of the administration to the subject matter in their courses.

So this is really an issue of academic freedom as well, where you have people not only not having the freedom to express themselves really just on campus in general and oppose what’s happening in Palestine and the atrocities that they’re seeing, they can’t even teach about it as it relates to their courses, as it relates to their subject matter. That’s really scary at an institution that prides itself on Cornell. Being in an Ivy League institution, people pay a lot of money to come here, are really proud when they get in with an institution like Cornell with this type of reputation and really any institution, any, it just runs completely contrary to any institution of higher educations like educational and academic mission to be doing this. So it’s an issue of academic freedom, it’s an issue of worker autonomy and workers’ rights. And because we are workers, it’s very much a labor issue. Yeah,

Jenna Marvin:

Yeah. I’ve thought about this a lot in the last couple of days, and I don’t think there are many union members across industries in this country who would ever stand for the level of unilateral discipline from their employer that Cornell is meeting out to al right now. It is a fundamental union issue that your boss cannot exercise unilateral power over you. You get a say in your working conditions being hired and fired as part of your working condition. So this is an absolutely fundamental fight that unions, labor unions have been fighting for over 150 years in the United States. It’s absolutely crucial to our fight. And a union needs to be able to protect its workers from that complete unilateral bring down of power. And absolutely it is an academic freedom issue as well. To echo Joanna there, I work in the humanities. This is speaking of fundamental, it’s fundamental to what we do in the humanities is to teach about the horrors of history, to be frank, and to talk about what happens in the world today.

And that includes politics in all of its forms and it includes genocide. And to have students in the humanities anywhere across the university, but particularly right now in the humanities, I thinking maybe I shouldn’t teach this. I’m not really sure how that will be received by my students or I’m not sure who will find out about this. I hear that from my coworkers and that’s very scary. So what is happening to mom Al is absolutely a disgrace, but there are also many effects that trickle down from this. It’s about creating a culture of fear and when you workers are fearful, that is a union issue always.

Jawuanna McAllister:

There’s maybe one other thing that I just wanted to add to this that we haven’t, we’ve sort of talked around but haven’t actually spoken to directly, is a lot of people don’t understand what a grad worker union is because we are grad students and we also do work that makes the university run. So as Jenna has already highlighted, I think really eloquently, we teach, we do research on behalf of the university, but we’re also here taking classes. So we have these dual roles, and when the university disciplines workers under a as quote students or under the guise of academics, that is inextricable from our employment and our role as workers. So in mom’s case for example, when you are suspended as a student, you were also suspended and effectively fired from your employment. When you’re de enrolled as a student, you’re terminated. And to Jenna’s point earlier, there’s no other industry where that would be acceptable, where lack of due process or lack of just cause for termination because of something that is independent in the university’s eyes at least of your employment, is acceptable. And that’s also not a distinction that we really exist in practice. We’re one and the same. So I think that’s just maybe an important point to clarify for students. And we’re also workers and those things are inextricably linked.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. I mean, speaking as a former grad worker and member of University of Michigan, GEO, shout out to GEO. Yeah, we’re getting a lot of the education and practice in our coursework that we are then able to apply in our teaching work and be better educators. And lo and behold, we’re one and the same person learning and teaching at the same time. Holy shit. People can do more than one thing at once. And that I wanted to just kind of ask a quick question there because on the question of grad unions and grad labor struggles, I mean there is something sinister and kind of harrowingly that echoes one of the weapons of first resort that we tend to see during grad unionization efforts or grad strikes at universities is something that I’ve seen reporting on grad strikes and union efforts like across the country.

And I remember seeing myself as a tactic that the University of Michigan employed when I was a member of our graduate union there, international students have a sort of special place in the university’s calculus for how to instill fear and impose discipline and impose division within a bargaining unit. And I just wanted to ask if y’all could speak as union members about the fact that Amadou being an international student here is also a really important detail of the story, both in terms of what this discipline is going to mean for him personally, but also what him being an international student is allowing the university to do in perpetuating the chilling effect that y’all were talking about here. This is something that comes up all the time when grad students go on strike because universities will almost always like clockwork when a strike happens, they will send out an email notifying international students that if they’re not working, they could lose their visas and thus their immigration status. So could you please just speak to that for a second and then we’ll wrap up by asking what folks can do now to help?

Jawuanna McAllister:

Yeah, it’s not a surprise to anyone that when the boss wants to intimidate and instill fear, they go after the most vulnerable workers first. And that is our international students who make up approximately 50% of our membership, 50% of our bargaining unit. It’s an intimidation tactic through and through. It is, yeah, I don’t really have much more to add to that other than we see it for exactly what it is. And I think what’s been really heartening is to see the outrage from our international workers as well as the broader Cornell community. I think the response from the community is really demonstrating, and by community I mean on campus and then also more broadly nationwide, demonstrating to our workers here that people are not just going to sit by and accept this. Our union will not just sit by and let one of our own be disciplined and effectively have this visa status revoked and then effectively be deported. We’re not just going to sit by and allow that to happen. And I think that’s an important thing for that 50% of our unit to really see that we stand behind them 100%.

Jenna Marvin:

Yeah. I will add that one of the things that makes this situation around intimidation of international students at Cornell International workers incredibly divisive is that one of Cornell’s founding principles is any person, any study all over this campus. I see posters of it when I walked on the hall on my workspace. And so to sort of rest on the prestige of having 50% of our bargaining unit members be international workers who are some of the best, the brightest and the most generous colleagues ever, but then turn that right around and make people feel scared and to make people more vulnerable and for Cornell’s administration to feel like they have leverage or kind of control over international workers is really, really disappointing, particularly given its sort of founding ethos.

And just to echo, Joanna, if we have 50% of our bargaining unit members here on Visas, you better be sure that we we’re going to fight for one of our members being disciplined and possibly fired and losing his visa. If we don’t fight for that, what are we for? Right? This has always been integral to our organizing. It has always been integral to the contract that we are currently negotiating with Cornell. So it’s perhaps even as far as the numbers, even more of an issue here at Cornell than it’s if maybe comparable institutions in the United States.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Joanna, Jenna, I want to thank you both again so much for taking time to chat with me. I really appreciate it and I just wanted to give y all the final word here and ask if you could let our listeners know what happens now and what the union is trying to do, what the campus community is doing to stand against this, and what folks out there who are listening to this, what they can do to stay up to date on this and what they can do to get involved themselves.

Jawuanna McAllister:

Yeah, I can go ahead and plug a few things. So as you mentioned before we started recording, we have a rally for workplace justice tomorrow Wednesday, what is tomorrow, October 2nd at noon, we will be marching from one of the buildings near central campus down to the administrative building, demanding that the university bargain with us over the effects of Madu tile suspension, and also demanding that the university give us just cause and due process when it comes to these various forms of discipline, along with protections for academic freedom and non-discrimination when it comes to political speech and activity, caste, international workers rights. These are all things that are really, really integral to our union. So that’s tomorrow, and we’ll have members of the community there, faculty, some folks from our A UP chapter will be joining us, which is exciting. So it’s really, it’s going to be a great event if anyone is in the, well, I don’t think you’ll have this released by the time this goes out, so you can cut that part. I’m just going to say if anyone’s here, they can feel free to come up to campus, but I doubt anyone will be here. And then Jenna, do you want to take some of the other things that we have going on right now?

Jenna Marvin:

Sure. I mean, for those people who are not in Ithaca and want to stay up to date, we are keeping people up to date with our Instagram. That’s at Cornell gsu. We’re trying to be as on top of the developing situation as we can. So that’s one avenue to stay informed. We have a bargaining session. CGSU will sit across the table from Cornell’s bargaining committee on Wednesday, October the ninth. And so look out for news around that there may be some coordinated action as the situation develops. We’re still thinking about that, but more news to come as the bargaining committee that Joanna and I are part of, sort of goes to sit at the table again with Cornell’s representatives given what has unfolded since our last session about two weeks ago. So more news to come stay informed. Instagram’s a great way to do it. And if you happen to be around for a rally tomorrow, come on out, have a chant, it’ll be cathartic.

Jawuanna McAllister:

I have two more things to plug. We should have made a list ahead of this. So we have an action network petition that UE National has just helped us launch earlier today. So if you are a member of a local, any local doesn’t have to be ue, please, please, please check out our social media and the UE national socials and you should be able to find that petition. We can also send you the link max and you can share that. And then we also have different petitions for different groups depending on what your affiliation is. So we have one that’s specific to grad locals. So please reach out to us. You can either DM us on Instagram or Twitter, or you can follow up with us at bc@cornellgradunion.org with any questions. Or we should just have questions about how to support or want to get access to any of those resources. We can send them to you directly through that email as well. Cornell GSU on socials?

Jenna Marvin:

I think so. That’s the Instagram.

Jawuanna McAllister:

We need Cornell to bargain with us. We have this MOA, it’s time for Cornell to hold up their end of that signed agreement and bargain with us over, not just mom do suspension, but any grad worker discipline under these policies. Me to set the table.