Notice: Trying to get property 'ID' of non-object in /code/wp-content/themes/thenation-2023/functions.php on line 3332 John Fetterman, American Jagoffhttps://www.thenation.com/article/politics/john-fetterman-american-jagoff/Kim KellyMar 15, 2024

The former progressive darling has decided to become the world’s most antagonistic Israel stan. It’s a very bad look.

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Politics / March 15, 2024

John Fetterman, American Jagoff

The former progressive darling has decided to become the world’s most antagonistic Israel stan. It’s a very bad look.

Kim Kelly
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., speaks to reporters in the Senate subway after a vote in the Capitol on Tuesday, January 9, 2024.

Senator John Fetterman (D-Pa.) speaks to reporters in the Senate subway after a vote in the Capitol on Tuesday, January 9, 2024.

(Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

“Not this jagoff again,” I muttered quietly to myself. It was another day that ended in Y, so of course Senator John Fetterman had posted yet another tweet reaffirming his support for the Israeli government’s ongoing bombing campaign in battered, bloody Gaza.

Over the past several months, Fetterman, who represents me and 13 million other residents of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, has unexpectedly emerged as one of Congress’s most rabidly pro-Israel voices. He’s not alone in his support of Israel—it’s the default political position for every mainstream Democrat or Republican politician—but the 6′ 8″ junior senator has adopted the mantle of Israel’s biggest, and most combative, cheerleader. It was a surprising heel turn from a man whom many considered a progressive voice in Congress—at least, before he explicitly said, “I’m not a progressive.”

It’s not that all of Fetterman’s positions are wrong. There’s no problem with his repeatedly calling for Hamas to release the Israeli hostages in Gaza—that’s fine. Everyone wants all the hostages to come home. It’s the way he’s gone about expressing his stance beyond that reasonable demand. Quite simply, he has decided to be a real dick about it.

Fetterman, you see, is not only pro-Israel. He’s anti-cease-fire, anti-protest, and anti–any scrap of dissent from US taxpayers unhappy about funding the murders of Palestinian children. His standard line, which he used on a pro-Palestinian veteran who approached him in D.C., is that people should “be protesting Hamas.” Well, we’re not sending Hamas billions of dollars in military aid, are we, bud?

Fetterman is also apparently a massive Biden stan, and has thus adopted a hyper-aggressive contempt for the president’s critics, lashing out at the “uncommitted” movement and any hint that folks might not be super excited about the idea of voting for an elderly warmonger. “You might as well just get your MAGA hat, because you now are helping Trump with this,” he sneered recently.

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He went even further in a February interview with Politico: “I said the same thing in 2016 to voters, I said: ‘Hey, you know what, you don’t like Clinton, you know what, fuck around and find out what Trump is going to be about and, hey guess what, how’d you like it?’”

Right, because it’s definitely not the job of a career politician to convince people to vote for him—we owe him the power to rule over us and do things that the majority of Americans disagree with (like, for example, refusing to call for a permanent cease-fire). People love threats!

Fetterman appears to relish every opportunity he’s gotten to denigrate the millions of US residents—including thousands of Pennsylvanians—who have called for an end to the state-sponsored brutality in Gaza, for Palestinians’ right to self-determination, and for a permanent cease-fire. Whether he’s sending ugly, increasingly low-quality tweets (not coincidentally, he’s currently looking for a new communications director), giving bloodthirsty quotes to the media about Israel’s “supreme right to defend itself,” or literally waving the Israeli flag to mock anti-war protesters, Fetterman has made his stance on the conflict clear over… and over… and over. He’s ignored Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish voices whenever he’s not actively shouting over them. He’s gleefully alienated many of the progressive groups whose support helped him clinch his Senate win, while delighting the MAGA-verse. We get it. You’re this guy now.

If only he weren’t, though. One of the most frustrating things about Fetterman is the way his constant bad-faith antics distract and detract from the actual work he’s been doing in service to the Commonwealth.

If it is even possible to forget his genocidal boosterism for one moment (and I’m not sure that it is), Fetterman’s Senate record is pretty solid. Since he took office last year, he’s sponsored or cosponsored 380 pieces of legislation, and the vast majority of them have been to benefit the communities he continually lifted up as his priority during his campaign: workers, farmers, rural residents, LGBTQ+ folks, and children. He sponsored bills to help mushroom growers and poultry farmers, and to fund research into organic agriculture; to ensure that peoples’ chosen names are used on credit reports (which would make it easier for trans and nonbinary people to avoid using their dead names or being forced to out themselves); to cancel school lunch debt, eliminate predatory lending, tax billionaires, provide hunting safety classes, and ensure that striking workers are not denied benefits under the SNAP program.

These may look like a grab bag of random issues, but taken together, they paint an empathetic and accurate portrait of the Commonwealth, its people, and our needs (with the very, very significant exception of Palestinian Pennsylvanians, and all the rest of us who care about Palestinian lives). There is a reason people voted for Fetterman, and it wasn’t just his Twitter antics or baggy black hoodies.

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At the beginning, at least, he seemed like he actually understood what working-class Pennsylvanians are up against, even if his own cushy background made it difficult for him to truly relate. We knew he was probably a typical Democrat in progressive clothing, but he didn’t seem like one of the creepy nerds that D.C. usually tosses out to the electorate whenever they want our grubby little votes. We knew he was still the lesser of two evils, even if he was fun on Twitter. If he’d been up against anyone besides an actual television clown like Dr. Oz, who’s to say how the race would have ended—and as it stood, Fetterman still only scraped by with 51 percent of the vote.

There were signs. The Pittsburgh DSA refused to endorse his 2018 run. He championed fracking; few could forget the jogger incident, when he chased down a Black man and held him at gunpoint (oddly, his victim later endorsed his run for the Senate). Most pertinently, he was very open about his support of Israel, telling a Jewish publication during his campaign that he was “not really a progressive” on the issue and that he was “passionate” in his opposition to the BDS movement. (Pre-Gaza, this didn’t make much of an impact.)

Despite Fetterman’s obvious faults, people were drawn to him and his glamorous, wonderfully radical spouse, Giselle, whose own story as a Dreamer and many mutual aid projects lent authenticity to his campaign. The press fawned over them ( I’ll never stop regretting my own decision to accept an assignment to profile him after he won the lieutenant governor race). His advocacy for disabled people and mental illness was refreshing in a world where losing one’s abled status can mean losing shelter, autonomy, or human rights. To many people who were tired of being presented with the same old carbon copy corporate clones, Fetterman seemed like a good time, and like he cared about regular Pennsylvanians.

Maybe part of him still does, though whatever good remains inside of that supersized heart of his dwindles each time he uses his considerable power to push for mass death and destruction in Gaza. It really is a shame to see someone who clearly has the potential to become a genuinely effective public servant give in to his basest instincts to needle, antagonize, grandstand, and bully those who refuse to join him on his chosen hill.

On March 5, Fetterman introduced a bill to create a national version of Pennsylvania’s extremely popular Whole Home Repairs program, which provides resources to help elders and disabled residents with cost-prohibitive home repairs. The original statewide program was spearheaded in 2022 by the proudly progressive state Senator Nikil Saval, a former labor organizer who has had no problem publicly calling for a cease-fire and urging Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation—which includes Fetterman—to sign on to the call. Despite their political differences, Fetterman endorsed Savil’s reelection campaign for the state Senate, praising him as someone “who not only has his priorities straight, but knows how to make things happen.” If only the same could be said of Fetterman himself.

It’s become apparent that Fetterman is angling to become the Democrats’ new Reasonable Centrist, who’s not afraid to pal around with Republicans or play footsie with their rancid policies when it benefits him and snags him another round of headlines for his scrapbook. With Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema fast becoming old news, there’s an open seat for the Democrat’s next self-styled maverick—and Fetterman seems to be hauling ass toward it, his grody basketball shorts fluttering in the wind as he goes. Meanwhile, the people of Pennsylvania—particularly those of us who refuse to endorse his red-mouthed war lust—are being left in the dust.

Fetterman’s total disregard for the Palestinian people and slavish devotion to the Israeli government’s US-funded efforts to exterminate them have left a rotten, stinking mark on his record. So has his recent eagerness to align himself with far-right anti-immigration policies via his “concerns” about the number of people trying to cross an imaginary line in the sand. Why is he all over cable news spouting off his half-baked opinions on what constitutes a “reasonable” border? Who asked him, anyway—and why has he volunteered to be their mouthpiece? We’re not paying him to give interviews; we’re paying him to represent our interests—and we’re rapidly losing patience with his shenanigans.

There’s no time now for Fetterman to redd up his act or refill the well of political goodwill he’s built up over the past few years. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, yet has no empathy for the starving children of Gaza. He received a fine education, but said nothing when Israel bombed the last university in Gaza. His parents financially supported him for years while he was the mayor of Braddock, but he has no thought to spare for the Palestinian orphans or the parents who have seen their babies die under US-made rocket fire. He tweets about “the hostages,” but ignores freed Israeli hostages’ own calls for Netanyahu to “stop the war.

He’s just this guy now: “Genocide John,” a true American jagoff.



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Moms for Liberty Came to Philly. Philly Came for Them.https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/moms-for-liberty-philadelphia-protests/Kim Kelly,Kim KellyJul 5, 2023

None of this should have come as a surprise to anyone. The barricades, the protests, the arrests, the drab counterterrorism units bobbing in and out of the powder-blue sea of police—it was all to be expected, and could have easily been prevented weeks ago. A couple of canceled reservations, maybe some refunds, a cautiously worded public statement or two, and boom! Everyone in Philadelphia could’ve gone about their weekends in peace.

But Moms for Liberty, the far-right hate group that has pushed both book bans and their own anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric across the country while masquerading as a defender of “parental rights,” chose Philadelphia as the site of their annual “Joyful Warriors” summit this past week. And, with typical subtlety, they decided to hold their opening reception at the Museum of the American Revolution, in the heart of Old City, and booked the conference itself at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, just steps away from City Hall.

There was a certain logic behind choosing this particular city ahead of the Fourth of July holiday—we’re the birthplace of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, and all that jazz—but it was also a taunt, a challenge: This city, this country, belongs to us, not to you. So what are you going to do about it?

The museum and the hotel could have canceled the events. Both had been asked to do so, multiple times, by many voices (in the museum’s case, including their own workers and collaborators). They would have had the support of the majority of the city. Instead, the people of Philadelphia have had to show up in force to reject a flood of hate oozing its way into our city, to defend ourselves and our community from the violence being preached from chintzy pulpits, and to voice our displeasure with the hundreds of unwanted guests that we did not invite and refused to tolerate. (Oh, and we also had to foot the bill for whatever it costs to both pay cops even more money than they already get and fortify an overpriced chain hotel against the city it occupies.)

Moms for Liberty had invited Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and other assorted far-right hate-mongers to speak, ushering them into a majority-Black, heavily Democratic city that has repeatedly rejected their toxic rhetoric at the ballot box and in the streets. For some reason, though, the conference organizers appeared to assume that they would be able to live it up in Philly unchallenged, protected by police escorts and their own privilege. Maybe some of the moms had planned to do a little shopping at the Fashion District, or trundled down to gawp at the Liberty Bell from behind a barricade of its own. They thought they’d be welcomed into the City of Brotherly Love.

They were wrong.

s soon as the news of the oncoming summit became public, ACT UP Philadelphia, the local chapter of the iconic direct action group formed in 1987 to end the AIDS crisis, mobilized. Beginning on May 12, they rallied in front of the Marriott multiple times, each time calling on the hotel to cancel the event and deny hate a platform. Week after week, ACT UP members gave speeches, waved trans pride flags, and explained why it was so important to deny Moms for Liberty a space to tout their dangerously homophobic, transphobic rhetoric. The hotel seemingly ignored them, and in doing so, silently made clear where it stood on the issue.

ACT UP wasn’t alone in calling on the hotel to do the right thing. Philly’s Young Communist League played an instrumental role in organizing the weekend protests against Moms for Liberty, and other local groups spoke out and got involved in organizing against the event. Elected officials also voiced their opposition to Moms for Liberty’s incursion. In May, state Senator Nikil Saval and Representatives Mary Louise Isaacson and Ben Waxman sent the Marriott a letter saying, “Hosting an organization with a track record of promoting discriminatory practices and divisive policies goes against the principles of inclusivity and respect that should be upheld by a reputable establishment like yours.” Even Mayor Jim Kenney released a statement, writing, “We oppose this group’s policy goals, which include attempts to disregard history, ban books, and silence conversations about race, gender, and sexuality.” Celena Morrison, executive director of the City of Philadelphia’s Office of LGBT Affairs, went a step further and acknowledged the direct threat that Moms for Liberty’s convergence posed to the community itself. “We know that the presence of Moms for Liberty may stir up fear or distress for our BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities,” she said. “We urge all those affected to take the appropriate measures to ensure their well-being while Moms for Liberty is visiting our city.”

Those appropriate measures started off on the morning of June 29 with a banner drop over I-95. Early birds were greeted with warnings that “Philly Protects Trans Kids” and “Bad Things Happen to Fascists in Philadelphia,” and that was only the beginning of a four-day-long protest that would bring hundreds, if not thousands, of people out into the streets. That evening, I watched as protesters encircled the Museum of the American Revolution. Armed with passionate speakers like ACT UP’s Jazmyn Henderson, a heavy-duty sound system, a fierce playlist, and hundreds of supporters, ACT UP and YCL members led the crowd in an hours-long queer dance party that doubled as an open roast of the Moms for Liberty attendees slinking in and out of the museum. “We lit out here. We not boring like these fucking people!” one speaker hollered as the sound system blared hip-hop. Another protester held up a sign reading, “Hey Moms for Liberty: if you’re scared of violent pornographic content near your kids, just wait until you read your Bible!”

The cops set up a maze of barricades to ensure that none of the protesters were able to get within a few dozen feet of the entrance, and the conference provided a fleet of charter buses to shuttle its people between the museum and the hotel. But sound carries, and they were able to hear exactly what Philly thought of them, their poisonous ideology, their hateful actions, and their terrible haircuts.

The dance party continued throughout the weekend. Protesters decamped to the Marriott for the next three days of the conference, where more barriers and an endless stream of bored-looking cops tried to insulate the attendees from the actual city. That didn’t always work, either. A delightful video began circulating on social media on Friday after a local encountered a few errant moms in Reading Terminal Market, and helpfully ushered them out with a few choice exhortations—“Racists have never been welcome here, ever! And you’re still not welcome here!” The moms in question seemed shocked that anyone would dare oppose them. That indignant air accompanied them whenever they were forced to actually interact with a Philadelphian that weekend. Perhaps simply not enough people have been telling them to their face that their hateful agenda was not welcome, so Philly was happy to oblige. While I was there on Friday afternoon, the cops forgot to barricade off an exit path between the Marriott and the parking garage across the street, forcing conference attendees to come face-to-face with the protesters. All of a sudden, panicked fascists were getting chased down the street and up into the parking garage, heckled and jeered at, and told in no uncertain terms how the city felt about them. The cops scrambled to regain control, and the dance party continued. Making fascists feel unsafe is as much a Philly specialty as a cheesesteak from John’s Roast Pork or Irish potatoes, and it felt awfully nice to indulge.

Though there were arrests on Sunday after five brave activists blocked an intersection and refused to move and another waved a trans pride flag over the Marriott barricade, there was very little police violence that weekend (besides the usual implicit violence of their presence). ACT UP Philadelphia was adamant that the dance party and associated events remain peaceful, and they did; whenever things began to heat up, organizers would grab the mic and calm everyone down. The tagline, “They can’t stop trans and queer joy!” underpinned the dance party protest, and that joyful resistance was in full bloom. The kid-centered events were especially sweet, and the protests maintained a family-friendly vibe throughout, as long as your kid could handle a few (thousand) swear words.

It was very much a big-tent effort, with the Young Communist League and a guy holding a star-spangled donkey figurine peacefully occupying the same space outside the Marriott on Friday. Rainbow dresses, assless chaps, black balaclavas, and red-white-and-blue T-shirts were all there coexisting for a common cause. Local DJs filled the air with energy. Philly Elmo and Spider-Punk showed up. There was even a gospel drag choir! It was beautiful, and it was very Philly. Elsewhere in the city, people showed up to support the Free Library of Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Gay News had previously reported that the library’s Pride Month events had received threats from Moms for Liberty ahead of the convention, and that staff had been cautioned to keep an eye out for disruptors. The National Parents Union held a Rally Against Moms for Liberty in Love Park; the next day, so did Grandparents for Truth and Defense of Democracy. Campaign for Our Shared Future did a banned-book giveaway next to the Marriott. An autonomous group of local activists held an “art march” that took the streets and adorned the surrounding area with pro-trans, anti-fascist stickers and graffiti. There really was something for everybody, provided you weren’t a hateful fascist bigot.

That’s generally Philly’s vibe anyway. The city’s two cardinal rules—don’t be a dick, and mind your business—are very easy to follow. We’re a fun city, a welcoming city, and definitely a weird city. It’s part of our rough-edged charm, and why so many people love to visit us. But the thing that those visitors need to keep in mind is that we are also a very queer, a very trans, a very Black, and a very anti-fascist city, and if you can’t handle that, you’re no longer welcome. We won’t be shy about letting you know that, and we definitely won’t make your time here pleasant. Moms for Liberty fucked around, and they found out what it looks like when you cross us and threaten our neighbors. That’s when the City of Brotherly Love turns into Hostile City—and you’re on your own there, bud.



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Joy, Revolution, and Tear Gas: My May Day In Parishttps://www.thenation.com/article/world/may-day-paris-dispatch/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyMay 11, 2023

It was a beautiful May Day in Paris, and the air was filled with poison.

The Place de la Nation, a large, verdant square that was once home to one of the French Revolution’s most active guillotines, was filled with protesters calling for the head of a man they see as a modern-day tyrant. Madame Guillotine has been long absent from the premises, but the descendants of the men who sharpened her blades still have a bone to pick with the ruling class.

By the time I arrived, grim-faced police in riot gear were already moving to block off the exits, and the sickly sweet aroma of tear gas was blooming all around us, overwhelming the scent of lilies in my hair. It’s a French tradition to carry sprigs of lily of the valley on the first of May, but their delicate perfume was no match for the chemical weapons being volleyed into the crowd. At one point, a canister nearly landed on my foot and a young man in the black bloc darted up to douse it with water, shooting me a wink over his shoulder as he ran back into the chaos. (How’s that for romance?)

This was not how I’d expected the day to go. As a devout union member, I had been thrilled to spend May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, in a city renowned for its militant appetite for strikes and worker action. And as an anarchist and anti-fascist, I was curious to see how my Continental counterparts were planning to celebrate the biggest radical holiday of the year.

I lucked into having the best possible guide to the festivities, too; a dear friend moved to Paris for grad school a few years ago and has since become fluent in French and gained a foothold in the local anarchist scene. He was excited to show me the sights and take me to his neighborhood’s famed “antifa bar,” but first we had to make it through May Day.

We agreed to take it easy—he has a visa to think about, and I had no interest in seeing the inside of a French jail cell—but to keep an eye out for anything spicy. Given Parisians’ reputation for mayhem, I expected some fireworks but wasn’t overly concerned. Anarchist and anti-fascist stickers, graffiti, and street art seemed to be everywhere, so I knew I’d find some fellow travelers.

arisians usually spend May Day awash in celebration, not tear gas. And there was certainly plenty of fun throughout the day, as we marched up Boulevard Voltaire with 112,000 other people singing, chanting, and waving signs representing their unions and their politics. Everyone had showed up: trade unionists in technicolor vests, street artists bearing puppets, rowdy anti-fascists, and revelers of every description, including elders, children, and babes in arms. Politics can be fun if you know how to have a good time, and these people did, from the wildly energetic agricultural union member dancing to disco atop a float with a huge white cow statue to the militant grandmas gleefully chanting along to the bloodthirsty slogans and the queer Marxist bloc with their hot pink flares. Even a burst of rain couldn’t dampen their spirits (though the resultant mud did smudge more than a few hemlines).

But this May Day had come just after President Emmanuel Macron forced through his extraordinarily unpopular changes to the French pension system, which raised the retirement age from 62 to 64. The joy was thus accompanied by fury. People’s anger was palpable, and they pulled from their own history of rebellion to make their feelings plain. Decapitation was a popular theme for signs and slogans; I heard more than one chant of “Louis XVI, we beheaded him—Macron, we can do it again!” break out along the parade route (trust me, it sounds even better in French). The marchers did their best to ignore the 5,000 cops stationed along the route.

As we neared the Place de la Nation, signs of disorder began to appear, like small piles of trash burning in the street, a few broken shop windows, swaths of graffiti, and smashed-up bus stops. I was honestly surprised that more banks and multinational chains hadn’t been targeted, though, in fairness, many had boarded up their windows in advance. When we arrived in the square, it became apparent that the more rambunctious among us had merely chosen to conserve their energy instead of going too smash-happy—because here, there were cops to fight.

There have been multiple viral photos of French people being blasé in the face of police violence or general chaos—smoking a cigarette, sitting at a bistro, throwing unimpressed side-eye at a cop—and I am pleased to report that this national tendency was on display during even the most intense moments I witnessed on May Day. The police, with their plastic shields and ugly batons, were greeted with disdain or outright hostility, even after they began to discharge their chemical weapons and charge the crowd. When they trained a high-powered water cannon on us and began mowing down protesters with its streams, people scampered out of the way, then walked right back up to the police line to sneer. It would have been funny if I could breathe.

As the cops’ frustration intensified, so did the amount of tear gas they blasted us with. It got pretty bad. Neither I nor my friend were strangers to this type of situation, but being surrounded by hostile, militarized police never really gets less stressful. I eventually had to beat a hasty retreat when my eyes began to burn terribly, but my friend ran back to see what we were missing—and captured video of a gaggle of police accidentally tear-gassing themselves. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

he back-and-forth went on for hours, but we weren’t there to witness all of it; I’d gotten the gist and was happy to leave the locals to their revelry (which I saw later had included setting at least one cop on fire). While the main march had been animated by traditional labor-centric May Day sentiments and hatred of Macron’s pension reforms, the standoff between the cops and the black-clad protesters in the square seemed to have less of a specific purpose outside of pure mutual animosity. The chants of “Aca-beuh!” (ACAB, “all cops are bastards”) provided a clue, but I asked my friend anyway about why the French protesters we’d spent the afternoon alongside had seemed so enthusiastic about the conflict. He thought about it for a minute, then said with a shrug, “They just really hate cops.”

Later that evening, we headed to Le Saint Sauveur, a legendary lefty hangout in Ménilmontant. Its owner, Julien Terzics, is a former Red Warrior—one of Paris’s famed anti-fascist “skinhead hunters” who terrorized the city’s Nazi boneheads in the 1980s. Stocky, scarred, and clean-shaven, Terzics remains physically intimidating, but on the night we showed up, he was more focused on the bar’s clogged toilet than on reliving past glories. His presence and the overall political bent of the bar saturated the establishment, though, from the colorful antifa stickers covering the walls to the political literature laid out by the door to the anti-fascist football ultra scarves and punk posters tacked up everywhere. The bar provides an important social gathering place for the city’s anti-fascist community, but also hosts punk shows and visiting authors; just like in the May Day march, they find time to dance.

The clientele was a motley crew of dissidents, anarchists, SHARPs, intellectuals, and others drawn there by the low prices and convivial atmosphere. A group of youngsters on the concrete outside clutched plastic cups of beer, while a genial skinhead chatted my friend’s ear off about what we should do to the bosses, and a gently swaying older woman talked to me about Sea World. Coming from the US, where anti-fascism is still regarded by the mainstream with clumsy consternation at best and full-blown bad-faith terror at worst, Le Saint Sauveur felt like a magical refuge. It was a place where no one knew my name, but we all definitely felt the same way about punching Nazis.

We spoke different languages and lived different lives, but that night, we were all there for the same reason: to celebrate the workers’ holiday—our holiday—and raise a glass (or two, or three) to our shared vision of a better world. Every May Day brings us a new chance to get a little bit closer, whether we’re celebrating in Paris or Peoria, and it was heartening to find that some things truly are universal (even if one of those things is hating your boss). Later, I went to sleep with the scent of apple blossoms and cigarettes in my hair and cheap wine on my lips and dreamed of anarchy. For a moment at least, everything was beautiful, and anything was possible.



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Why the Warrior Met Strike Is Endinghttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/warrior-met-strike-union/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyFeb 20, 2023

On February 15, 23 months after more than 1,000 coal miners in Brookwood, Ala., walked out on their employers at Warrior Met Coal, representatives from the United Mine Workers of America gathered them in a union hall to share some bad news. The company had reported its results for the fourth-quarter and full-year earnings, and thanks to the skyrocketing price of coal, Warrior Met raked in huge profits. The strike, believed to be the longest in Alabama history, had not had the desired economic impact. It may have cost the company over $1 billion in potential profits, but the high coal prices and the replacement workers that the company brought in meant that the strike hadn’t made a sufficient dent in the company’s bottom line. In 2022, Warrior Met Coal pulled in more than $640 million in net income.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2019, the company did not shut down. Instead, while demand was low, it kept its miners working and stockpiled more than 2.8 million tons of coal. Thanks to that surplus, which Warrior Met sold off early in the strike, and the scabs—who are paid supersized wages and monthly bonuses, and have worked nonstop to keep the mines running—the company hit its production quotas and fulfilled its orders. The miners found themselves in a difficult position: They and their families were suffering, while company bosses were not.

UMWA International President Cecil Roberts informed the members of the union’s plan, and asked them not to post on social media about it until the news went public. Emotions ran high during the meeting, but they did as he requested. The following day, Roberts sent a letter to Warrior Met Coal CEO Walt Scheller to let him know that the striking miners were willing to return to work on March 2. That “unconditional offer to return to work,” to use the legal term, would “implement the return to work of hundreds of UMWA members while giving the union and the company time to work out a new agreement.” According to AL.com, the company confirmed that it received the letter, but had no additional comment. After the news broke, the union emphasized that the strike had not ended and would not end until they walked back into the mine, and that the fight had instead moved into “a new phase.”

The roots of this strike go back to 2015, when the mines’ previous owner, Walter Energy, went bankrupt and laid off most of its workforce. Warrior Met Coal stepped in and hired them back with a caveat: In exchange for their jobs, the workers would accept a union contract that cut their pay, benefits, and vacation time. The company implied that when the contract ran out, five years later, the company would be in a position to make them a better offer. As the years went by, Warrior Met profited handsomely off the miners’ labor, and when it came time to negotiate a new contract, the miners expected an upgrade. Instead, in 2021, the tentative agreement reached between the company and the UMWA offered few improvements. The workers walked out on April 1, and a few days later voted down the contract 1,006 to 45.

The UMWA leadership says it hit upon this return-to-work maneuver as the best possible option to create some movement. “We have been locked into this struggle for 23 months now, and nothing has materially changed,” Roberts explained in a statement. “The two sides have essentially fought each other to a draw thus far, despite the company’s unlawful bargaining posture the entire time.”

After all, Warrior Met’s refusal to bargain in good faith is what started this whole thing in the first place, and the ensuing strike over unfair labor practices was a direct response to the company’s stonewalling at the bargaining table. According to the union’s April 2022 post-hearing brief to the administrative law judge, Warrior Met failed to bargain in good faith by refusing to provide financial records and other information that the union deemed “relevant and necessary to the Union’s ability to represent the bargaining unit during the parties’ ongoing negotiations” in a timely fashion. By withholding relevant financial information, UMWA said, Warrior Met had the ability to plead poverty during negotiations over proposed changes to wages and benefits, and the union had no way to determine the accuracy of the statements being made at the bargaining table. All the while, the company was paying out hefty bonuses and salaries to its executives, offering replacement workers inflated wages, and paying a high-priced Los Angeles–based public relations firm to smear the striking workers in the press.

On February 17, the Warrior Met CEO responded to Roberts’s letter, and accepted the union’s offer. The company is asking that the UMWA provide a list of miners who will be returning, as well as those who will not, and will require those who are coming back to complete a mine safety refresher course and undergo a physical examination and drug testing. However, there are 41 miners whom they will not be allowing to return, a decision that the union has already been fighting them on for months. The company is insisting that these workers engaged in misconduct related to the strike; the unions says the workers did everything from defending themselves from a vehicular attack to accidentally stepping onto company property. It’s likely that the UMWA will push back against this, but as of this writing, the union has not yet made a public statement in response to Warrior Met’s letter.

The workers who do choose to return to Warrior Met on March 2 will be doing so under their previous contract, with its attendant benefits and protections. It’s not the contract the workers want, but it will provide a baseline level of stability as the union continues to negotiate with Warrior Met. After spending 23 months (and over $35 million), the union said, it was time to try a new tactic. “For several months, we have been stuck in a status quo that is not favorable to the workers,” explained Phil Smith, executive assistant to the UMWA president and the chief of staff. “With the price of coal continuing to stay at record highs, the company is making more revenue than it ever has, even with lower production. The company executives are doing well, and they are paying astronomical bonuses to the out-of-state temporary replacement workers and others who have crossed the picket lines. If they are going to pay that kind of money, we want Alabama miners to get it and not scabs from Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia.”

This strategy will also depend on the number of workers who heed the UMWA’s call to return to the mines. Braxton Wright is one miner who’s unsure. He’s been active in the strike since the beginning (and so has his wife, Haeden, a teacher and local Democratic official who serves as auxiliary president and helps run the strike pantry), but recently got a job at a factory making iron pipes. The pay and the work environment are both better than what he’d be returning to at Warrior Met, and Wright is wary of giving that up without a solid guarantee of an improved situation. “Everybody’s kind of disappointed and confused about what is going to happen,” he told me.

So what went wrong? As the strike dragged on and coal prices remained high, the union struggled to keep morale high and the membership active. A core group of dedicated strikers and supporters did their best to build momentum, but attendance at rallies, events, and even on the picket line dwindled as many miners lapsed into apathy or found other work. The seemingly never-ending series of injunctions and restraining orders that Warrior Met convinced the local judiciary to issue didn’t help matters, especially after workers lost the right to picket. With law enforcement watching carefully, the union did its best to avoid taking risks that could land its members in jail. This cautious posture frustrated some miners who wanted to take more militant action, while others believe it helped embolden the company. “It felt like we were blamed for the strike lasting this long, because we didn’t do enough to keep the scabs out of the mines,” Wright said. “It was hard to hear that it was kind of our fault that we let the scabs cross the picket line, and didn’t shut down production like we should have. But every time we did try to plan something, every time we had the numbers, nothing happened.”

Wright also said that he and the miners felt that they and their union had been abandoned—left to fend for themselves against a hostile company in a right-to-work state run by anti-labor government officials and business-friendly local media. “Alabama’s a hard state to organize,” he said. “So many people, from our local government, to the local news, to the National Labor Relations Board, to the supposedly most pro-union president and labor secretary that we’ve ever had, did not even mention us, you know? We were just abandoned by everybody, except a few different groups that supported us and maybe a few politicians. Bernie Sanders from Vermont can support us, but the people that live here, they can’t even be bothered to speak on it or to mention it.”

For now, the miners are in a holding pattern. The return-to-work date is set for less than two weeks away, and the miners are worried about how it’s going to go. Twenty-three months is already a long time to be away from your workplace, and when your office is 2,000 feet underground in a methane-filled cavern full of rats, coal dust, and knee-deep standing water, going back on such short notice will be an adjustment. Now, factor in the animus born of a contentious strike, the uncomfortable fact that the miners could be working alongside managers who sided with the company, the reality that some of the miners have found other jobs that pay better than Warrior Met does under the old contract, and the unknown safety conditions within the mine, which may have deteriorated due to the use of poorly trained replacement workers. It’s a recipe for potential disaster.

There are also currently hundreds of scab workers who have been brought in from as far away as West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee operating the Warrior Met mines, many of whom proudly drive through the miners’ picket lines and boast about their lucrative non-union gigs on Facebook. During the strike, there have been few altercations between union and replacement workers. But if those scabs stick around and are given permanent positions that union workers believe should rightfully belong to them, tempers may flare. What happens underground, stays underground—and there are a lot of very, very angry men heading back into those mines. If I were in the company’s position, I’d want to resolve this conflict as quickly as possible for everyone’s sake.

The Brookwood miners may not have caused quite as much of a ruckus as their predecessors at Pittston or Blair Mountain, but after 23 months, the tone of the Facebook posts that surfaced after the social media blackout lifted suggest they are in no mood to tolerate further disrespect. The union’s tactics have changed, but the miners are still hoping for a win. “If you pray, please pray,” Cheri Goodwin, an auxiliary member whose husband, Chad, has been involved in the strike since it began, asked of the strike’s supporters on Twitter. “We’re hoping this new phase brings action, actual negotiating in good faith by the company, & a good contract for all the men, women, and families on strike.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/warrior-met-strike-union/
Black Lung Is Still Killing America’s Coal Minershttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/coal-black-lung-safety-health/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyJul 7, 2022

American coal miners are used to getting bad news, whether it’s of a buddy’s injury, an accident at their mine, a dip in coal prices, or word of yet another politician ignoring their needs. The profession—which still plays a complicated role in the nation’s economy, history, politics, and cultural imagination—remains incredibly dangerous, even as safety technologies have advanced and the number of jobs in the industry dwindles. The coal miners I’ve met through my coverage of the ongoing Warrior Met strike in Brookwood, Ala., and at labor events around the country are accustomed to disappointment, so when they do get a win, it’s a cause for celebration.

The 1,000 Warrior Met miners in Tuscaloosa County 15 months into their strike are still waiting for their victory party, but in Las Vegas in June, they and their coworkers around the country received an encouraging update on plans to address a much longer-running issue. On June 8, during the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) 56th Constitutional Convention, a government official climbed onto a stage that had previously been filled by a parade of speechifying union officials and moving tributes to lost siblings, and shared some good news.

Chris Williamson, the assistant secretary of labor for Mine Safety and Health (MSHA), unveiled an ambitious silica enforcement initiative aimed at curbing miners’ exposure to respirable crystalline silica and its attendant health hazards. As the Department of Labor noted in a press release, when a worker cuts, saws, grinds, drills, or crushes rock and coal, silica fills the air, and the more a miner breathes in, the greater their risk of contracting a serious respiratory disease like silicosis, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or the dreaded coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, known as black lung.

A major plank of the new silica enforcement initiative will focus on repeat offenders, and operators who fail or refuse to improve face steep consequences. MSHA says it will conduct more spot inspections at coal and other mines with a history of citations or repeated silica overexposure to evaluate their health and safety conditions, and will expand its silica sampling program to gain more accurate assessments of the current risks. “Our first step is to work with them,” Williamson told me. “We will help you revise your ventilation plans or dust control plans to better protect miners, because we all benefit. That should be what we all want, right? Mine operators do better when they have healthy workers. … But at the end of the day, if they’re unwilling or that doesn’t happen, we have authority under existing law to require modifications to those plans, or if things get to a certain point, revoke them altogether.”

lack lung is a death sentence, and an ugly one. “I’ve watched people die of black lung, and I’ll just tell you, it’s the most awful sight you’ll ever see in your life,” Danny Whitt, a retired West Virginia coal miner and recording secretary of the UMWA Local 1440 in Matewan, W.Va., told me. “It’s like taking a fish out of water, and just laying them on a table, and watching them gasping for breath and dying. For a coal miner, if he dies with black lung complications, it’s a horrible death. They just smother.”

Whitt knows the subject well. The first time I met him was during last year’s Blair Mountain Centennial celebration; as we out-of-towners gathered in Local 1440’s cheerful, yellow-painted union hall, he sat on a dais and talked about the disease that’s been killing off his union brothers for decades. The bulk of the local’s membership is made up of retirees, many suffering from black lung, and each month, there are three or four more empty chairs. Whitt himself was diagnosed with the disease in 1988. The tall, genial Appalachian started working in the Mingo County coal mines in 1977, drawn in by good pay and the pull of tradition. He passed the required physical examination, which he described as rigorous—”They would go from head to toe”—but his clean bill of health wouldn’t last. “When I started, I didn’t have black lung, didn’t have any lung issues,” he told me. “But now I have all kinds of lung issues.”

In 1988, Whitt underwent a routine screening for silicosis, a type of pulmonary fibrosis caused by inhaling crystalline silica dust, and the doctors diagnosed him with black lung. The state of West Virginia deemed him 5 percent disabled by the disease—too low to qualify for any kind of benefits, but high enough for it to be a problem for Danny. Now, 34 years later, Whitt struggles to walk long distances, his energy levels have plummeted, and heat makes his symptoms more difficult to manage. Last year, when he took a blood gas test (which measures the oxygen levels in a patient’s blood, and is used to gauge lung and kidney function) his results came back at 81. “When Donald Trump contracted Covid, they said his blood oxygen got down to 96, and they were really worried about him,” Whitt told me. “What about a poor old coal miner who’s down in the 80s?”

There is a perception that black lung is a thing of the past thanks to technological innovations and increased oversight. Some miners themselves think it’s something that only affects old-timers and retirees, and assume that they’re in the clear. The unfortunate truth, according to the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, is that black lung is at a 25-year high. Even worse, current conditions mean that those younger workers are at risk of getting sicker faster, and of contracting progressive massive fibrosis, the most severe form of black lung.

“If you go back to my mine today, and look for a couple young guys and tell them that black lung is on the rise right now, they’d probably look at me like, ‘What do you mean? That’s an old man’s disease,’” UMWA International District 2 Vice President Chuck Knissel told me. “But I know guys that are in the mines right now that are 25, 26 years old. They go take off for a walk, and say, ‘Man, I can’t breathe. It’s hard for me to catch my breath. I don’t even smoke cigarettes, what’s going on?’ Yep, you’ve got coal dust in your lungs.”

Knissel, a gravel-voiced third-generation miner, spent 17 years working in Pennsylvania’s Cumberland coal mine before following his late father, Larry, into the union. At a convention dominated by white-haired elders, even with his salt-and-pepper beard, the 41-year-old Knissel is practically fresh-faced. Though he has not yet received an official diagnosis, he told me he’s sure he has black lung: “I have issues with breathing. A lot of my friends I’m with every day, I know they’ve got it too.”

pidemiologists from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) began seeing an increase in black lung cases among younger miners back in 1995. In 2017, the American Journal of Public Health published a NIOSH report documenting an uptick in black lung cases in central Appalachia since 2000, and found that 20.6 percent of long-tenured miners have the disease. A year prior, another study had found a similar situation affecting workers in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. In 2018, NPR ran a series investigating the rise in black lung cases in younger workers, raising alarm bells that were largely unheard outside of the mining community. Almost five years later, cases are still rising.

According to Secretary Williamson and the veteran coal miners and union officials I spoke to for this story, there are several reasons for the continuing spike. Appalachia’s coal seams have thinned out after centuries of extraction, and so miners have to dig deeper to reach the desired material. The machinery they use to do it, though, has improved since their fathers’ and grandfathers’ day, allowing them to massively increase the volume of rock they cut through. But this kicks up even more silica in the air. As Knissel explained, “You’re mining 30,000 tons in a 24-hour period. In the 1960s, it might’ve taken you two weeks to mine that much.”

There are existing regulations, engineering controls, and safety standards in place that mine operators are expected to follow to keep silica exposure down. Miners are also provided with safety gear to lessen their personal exposure, but, to Knissel’s frustration, not everyone uses it as often as they should, especially the younger, “tough guy” types. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” he told me. “It’s just a matter of making it a part of the job every day, and not an ego thing, or thinking you’re a dork because you wear your safety glasses and respirator every day. Everybody should be the dork for not wearing them!”

Still, the onus should not be on individual workers to create a safe working environment, and while Knissel said that some mine bosses do try their best to protect their workers and keep dust to a minimum, others—as Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hamby detailed in his 2020 book Soul Full of Coal Dust A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia—are far less fastidious about following rules or adhering to safety regulations. In Knissel’s estimation, enforcement is the key to cleaning up the coal dust problem on the bosses’ end: “The only way that you’re going to get these coal companies to listen is hit them in the pocketbook.”

After the announcement, I spotted Williamson inspecting a hulking, robin’s-egg-blue MSHA Emergency Command Vehicle parked in the middle of the exhibit hall, and climbed in for a chat. As we settled into its spacious innards, he explained how his experience as both a labor lawyer and a coal miner’s grandson has always landed him on the side of the workers and how important this initiative is to him personally. “The thought, and especially from my perspective, is, what can we do now to protect miners, even though we’re going through this rule-making process that will ultimately promulgate a health standard that will be much more protective?” he explained. “That’s where this enforcement initiative comes in; that’s why it’s important. It’s what we can do now to take some proactive measures to protect minors against exposure to high levels of silica.”

The West Virginia native has been on the job for less than two months, but he’s already named silica as his top priority. As he mentioned, MSHA is also working on a new silica federal regulation, but the rule-making process is slow, and workers need help now. “We have to be strategic with it. It’s going to be another resource thing at an agency that’s already spread pretty thin on resources, but it’s worth it, because miners are getting sick,” he said. “I’ve seen so many people develop these lung diseases from working in mining environments. You can’t play with your grandchildren. You can barely walk. Eventually, you have to pack around an oxygen tank with you. That’s no way to live.”

After hearing Williamson’s initiative, Whitt was impressed by its scope, telling me that someone should’ve done it “years and years and years ago,” and was pleased to see a fellow West Virginian standing up for him and his people. “He is from where I’m from, he only lives about maybe 15 miles from where I’m from in Mingo County,” Whitt told me proudly. “I think Chris is going to do an excellent job, and he’s going to bring about some great laws.

When I caught up with Knissel at the pool, he echoed Whitt’s optimism, and said he hoped the agency will help spread the word about the black lung crisis. Knissel’s own message to young miners is an entreaty as much as it is a warning.

“We need to be a little bit smarter as coal miners and as young men, and protect yourselves,” he said. “You want to be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor. We got enough shit to worry about: We got the roof that can collapse in on us, we got motors that can smash into us. The easy stuff is wearing the things that are provided by engineers that have figured out that, hey, if you wear this, it’s going to protect you, and you’re not going to have to wear that oxygen mask when you’re 50 years old.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/coal-black-lung-safety-health/
Starbucks Baristas in Philly Are Brewing Up a Unionhttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/starbucks-union-philadelphia/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyFeb 16, 2022

When Alexandra Rosa graduated from Indiana University with a gender studies degree in the summer of 2021, she moved to Philadelphia and quickly found a job she loved. “I don’t care what anyone says or how ‘professional’ it is, a barista coffee shop job is so much fun,” she told me over the phone last week.

In July 2021, Rosa was hired as a shift supervisor at the Starbucks location on 20th and Market Street, which occupies a glass-and-chrome corner spot in the city’s busy downtown business district. When she started working behind the counter, she brought her own class consciousness and experience of studying working-class history; it would come in handy six months later, when news broke about the Starbucks workers in Buffalo who had organized—and, in two of the three cases, won—a union. When her coworker Amalia Inkeles caught up with her after work one day in late December and casually tried to gauge her interest in organizing a union at their own store, Rosa answered with an immediate, “Oh, heck yeah!”

“It’s so important that our workers get organized and actually push back against these megacorporations and their blatant price gouging and labor exploitation,” Rosa told me. “We’ve come to a point where workers are kind of realizing, ‘Wait, we’re short-staffed, and there’s no one to replace us.’ And now is such a unique time in history for workers to have that realization, and push forward for workers rights in the future, because I think our country’s far off when it comes to our workers rights as they are right now.”

Earlier this month, their store as well as three others—3401 Walnut Street, 1945 Callowhill Street, and 600 S. 9th Street—went public with their intention to join Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) that has been leading a barnstorming campaign to unionize Starbucks’s thousands of US locations. As of this writing, more than 80 locations (and two of the company’s flagship roasters in Seattle and New York City) have joined the movement, with new stores popping up seemingly every few days.

In Philadelphia, that organizing has taken place in a number of ways: in group chats, Signal threads, Discord servers, and in-person one-on-one conversations like the one Inkeles had with Rosa. The four public stores are well-connected (when I spoke to Rosa, she already knew I’d been to visit the store with City Councilor Helen Gym earlier that day and met Inkeles) and are united in their goal of keeping the momentum going.

“What you are seeing on the ground now here in Philadelphia, and all over the country, is a renewed effort to really talk about how what’s good for workers is good for businesses and is good for a city,” Gym, a fierce champion for labor, told me as we sipped our iced tea out front. “We’re certainly going to do our best to show folks here at this location and all across the city that they’ll have a lot of love if they embark on these efforts, because we think it’s good for Philadelphia, and we think it’s good for the nation.”

You didn’t hear it from me, but I sincerely doubt that these four stores will remain a quartet for long, especially in a city with over 40 Starbucks locations.“We’re really trying to make this as apolitical as possible, and that’s very difficult when we’re talking about labor, and the distribution of money, but I cannot overemphasize just how much we want this to genuinely represent the people in our store,” Rosa explained. “This is a citywide movement, and we really want everyone to understand the working-class struggle that this is.”

Inkeles told me that she had initially expected the process to take much longer, but within a couple of weeks, she and Rosa had already assembled a five-person organizing committee (and “the only reason we didn’t mobilize sooner is because Omicron knocked a couple of us out”). The speed with which she and Inkeles were able to form a bargaining committee speaks to the urgency they all felt to make a change.

As much as Rosa enjoyed the work, it became immediately apparent that the conditions under which she and her fellow workers—“partners,” in Starbucks parlance—labored were unsustainable at best and, at worst, actively dangerous. Some of the baristas at her store have been forced to deal with nonstop sexual harassment or threats of violence from certain customers, whom she said management allows to keep coming in. Rosa told me about how one of her coworkers had sustained second-degree burns after using faulty equipment, which is still in use: “We’ve put in multiple work orders for it, we’ve tried to get new pieces for it, and it’s just something that never got fixed or repaired. We’re still working on even getting her paid for those shifts that she missed those two days.”

A lack of training contributes to the workers’ frustration and confusion, piling further stress onto busy workdays. “I told a manager of mine that I was improperly trained. I want to be able to do more. I’d like my training to continue,” Inkeles told me. “And his response was, ‘I have to think what’s best for the company.’ Well, if the well-being of your partners is not for the best of your company, and for them to be competent in their job is not for the best of the company, then what is for the best of the company?”

Workers also expressed concern over safety issues getting to and from work, especially those who have long commutes into Center City. Rosa, who had moved to Philly sight unseen and has a limited budget thanks to her Starbucks paycheck, ended up living in a neighborhood just below Strawberry Mansion, an area plagued by gun violence. She says the company does provide workers with some free Lyft vouchers, but only within a specific budget and set hours that often leave partners out in the cold, particularly those who live more than a $20 ride from Center City. “Right before you called me, there were gunshots that I could hear out my window,” she said. “Higher wages means I can live somewhere I can afford in a safer neighborhood. Especially when I have to be at work at 5 am—walking from my building into a Lyft is scary enough when it’s that dark, you know?”

Some of the concerns she raised will be familiar to workers in retail or food service—low wages that max out at $23 per hour regardless of seniority, long hours, shifting schedules, issues with vacation days and health care, high turnover, cantankerous customers—but some of their workplace problems come with a uniquely Philly flavor. A big part of a Starbucks barista’s job is connecting with the locals. In that part of town, that means interacting with a daily mix of starched businesspeople and houseless community members, two populations that can present challenges for the baristas on staff—but only one of which faces regular discrimination.

Philly’s population of houseless people is relatively small compared to other big cities’, but the majority of those folks tend to situate themselves in Center City, where subway and bus stops are plentiful, tourists provide opportunities for panhandling, and the streets are brighter and generally safer than further north in Kensington, the other major nexus for people living on the streets. Rosa said that she and her coworkers are happy to welcome houseless folks into their store, but fret over their inability to provide meaningful resources to these vulnerable neighbors. “I hate that when we bring these issues up to our managers, their solutions are very broad, as in, ‘Let’s take the tables away, so they can’t sit in here,’” she explained. “And that’s not what I meant at all! I don’t mind that they’re in the store. There’s just a few people that are a safety concern for us. That doesn’t mean we need to harm other people. [The response] is just very generalized, and the nuance of that situation, I feel like never gets recognized.”

They also worry about what can happen when a visitor does become agitated or aggressive. “Starbucks baristas are expected to have better de-escalation skills than the police,” Inkeles, a shift supervisor who works alongside Rosa, told me earlier that day. “Being a social worker is not part of our job description. But we have to, because at the end of the day, we’re the only ones there.”

One especially strong sticking point for both of the Starbucks workers I chatted with for this piece is the company’s reliance on calling the police, a policy that made headlines in 2018 when two Black men were arrested while sitting inside waiting for a friend. Rosa’s reluctance to bring the police into potentially volatile situations is well-founded: Philadelphia’s population is 44 percent Black, and the city’s police force has a long tradition of terrorizing and brutalizing its Black residents. (Meanwhile, Starbucks has its own well-documented pattern of racial discrimination.) “Those interactions are exactly why Starbucks often gets the reputation that it has,” she said, emphasizing her discomfort at being encouraged to call the cops as a first and last resort when she’s often supervising a shift of predominantly Black workers.

These are the kinds of issues that Rosa and her fellow workers on the organizing committee are hoping to tackle in an eventual contract, but they still need to clear some hurdles before they get to the bargaining table. Starbucks has taken aggressive anti-union measures at other shops, from flying in high-level executives to meet with workers to—in the case of the Memphis, Tenn., location—taking the extreme and likely illegal measure of firing the entire seven-person organizing committee. (Workers United has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB, arguing that the firings constituted illegal retaliation, and a GoFundMe campaign to support the fired workers has already raised nearly $55,000.) The workers at 1900 Market Street have heard rumors of anti-union pressure and executives lurking in the other three stores, but so far they haven’t experienced much interference. “It almost feels like the eye of the hurricane,” Rosa said.

Their organizing committee is taking advantage of the lull to inoculate their coworkers against Starbucks’s union-busting playbook and to prepare to go on the offense if any captive audience meetings do pop up on their schedule. “The more exposure you have to that, the more you realize the truth of the matter, and you realize, hold on, wait, let’s flip this on its head,” Rosa explained. “Let’s reframe this and ask them questions back—call it out as a bluff.”

The battle lines have been drawn, and if there’s one message that Starbucks executives should take away from the ongoing barista rebellion in the City of Brotherly Love, it’s a simple one: Don’t mess with Philly. We’re perennial underdogs, we love to fight, and we never back down, especially when we’re right. “We are not at all oblivious to the billions of dollars of profit that this company makes,” Rosa said. “They send us announcements each quarter—like, this is what we did, blah, blah, blah. How do you not think that that feels like a slap in the face? We are genuinely just asking for a reinvestment in your workforce. And what do companies always say: ‘reinvest, reinvest, reinvest.’ Baby, I want that reinvestment!”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/starbucks-union-philadelphia/
Journalist Mary Heaton Vorse Spent Decades on the Front Lines of Laborhttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/mary-heaton-vorse-labor-journalism/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyFeb 8, 2022

Coverage of labor, unions, and workers’ rights issues has exploded across a variety of media, particularly as the Covid-19 pandemic exposes the plight of vulnerable workers and changes the nature of work itself. Mainstream publishing behemoths are now trying to catch up to the left-leaning publications that have always cared about such stories. The organizing streaks of media unions like the Writers Guild of America, East (for which I’m a council member), and the NewsGuild have resulted in a generation of labor-savvy media workers with a fierce commitment to improving their workplaces. (This is how I unexpectedly morphed from a heavy metal journalist into a labor reporter!)

There are now more labor reporters (and labor-curious reporters on other beats) diving into strikes, union drives, corporate malpractice, internecine power struggles, workplace safety, and all the other fascinating components of workplace power. We’re wrestling with updated versions of the same injustices that so captivated our 19th- and 20th-century counterparts like Ida B. Wells, Ida Tarbell, Dorothy Day, and Mary Heaton Vorse—all heroes of mine, and one of whom you’ll be hearing much more about shortly. “With the flood of workplace stories in this unprecedented moment, it seems likely that labor coverage will remain strong and perhaps even grow,” veteran journalist and author Steven Greenhouse, who for years was one of the country’s few full-time labor reporters, wrote in a recent piece on the phenomenon. “The beat has expanded to include everything from how Uber treats its drivers to some Amazon workers not having enough time to go to the bathroom to issues like the #MeToo movement, work-family balance, and the lack of childcare.”

We’re still a far cry from the labor beat’s 19th- and early-20th-century heyday, though, when hundreds of labor reporters, magazines, radio broadcasts, and pamphlets—plus an entire cottage industry of union-printed newsletters and educational resources—brought workers’ struggles to the forefront of everyday life. As every good labor reporter knows (and as the pandemic has taught many others), every story is a labor story, and workers’ voices are always the most important part of any report or narrative.

Journalists like Mary Heaton Vorse devoted their lives to this truth as they chased down news in the streets and on the picket lines. Vorse, who was born into a wealthy New England family in 1874, shunned her gilded upbringing and reported on downtrodden, exploited, and abused workers. As a white woman born into privilege, she was expected to stay home, marry well, and have lots of well-behaved children. Instead, she forged her own path, one that was often sorrowful but that came with its own rewards. Her name is no longer as well-known as it once was, but at the height of her career, Vorse was one of the most popular women writers in America, and one of the country’s most brilliant and respected labor journalists.

History’s victors may have been uninterested in keeping her memory alive, but biographer Dee Garrison, professor emerita of history and women’s studies at Rutgers University, has ensured that Vorse and her work would not be lost. In 1985, she released a collection of Vorse’s writings titled Rebel Pen, which collects some of her most stirring reporting, and in her 1989 book, Mary Heaton Vorse: The Life of an American Insurgent, Garrison traces Vorse’s life from its suffocating beginnings through decades of heartbreak, hard work, and adventure to its quiet end in 1966. “There is at least one reliable measure of Mary Heaton Vorse,” Garrison wrote. “Across the space of half a century, wherever men and women battled for a wider justice, she was apt to have been there.”

Garrison was not exaggerating. Vorse was a late bloomer, and did not enter the world of labor journalism until she was a widowed 38-year-old mother of two splitting her time between New York City’s bohemian Greenwich Village and her idyllic summer home in Provincetown, MA. After an unhappy first marriage and a tragic second, Vorse became accustomed to supporting herself and her children on her own. She had already built a financially stable if unfulfilling career as a writer of popular short stories for women’s and general interest magazines (she was a regular contributor to The New Yorker) and light romantic fiction novels that she dismissed as “lollypops” when she decided to pitch to Harpers’ Magazine a very different kind of story.

The 1912 textile workers strike in Lawrence, Mass., of “Bread and Roses” fame was roiling New England, and strikers had begun sending their children out of town on trains to keep them safe. She had read about the exodus, and wanted to learn more. When she arrived, she was stunned to see armed soldiers lining the mill town’s streets, and when she visited workers in their rickety homes, she was devastated by the poverty, sickness, and squalor that mill families endured. “I wanted to see the wages go up, and the babies’ death rate go down,” Vorse wrote, having been shaken out of her middle-class bubble. “There must be thousands like myself who were not indifferent, but only ignorant. I went away from Lawrence with a resolve that I would write about those things always.”

The time she spent in Lawrence coincided with a new era in American labor journalism. Union leaders had seen the positive effect that publicity and good reporting had on the strike and workers’ morale, and the public had been given a bracing look into the bloody conflicts between labor and capital. It was the perfect time for a scrappy, principled writer to become a labor reporter, and she later wrote of the experience, “Before Lawrence, I had known a good deal about labor, but I had not felt about it. I had not got angry. In Lawrence, I got angry.” She stayed angry as she followed the workers’ struggle to Michigan, where she reported on the Mesabi Iron Range Strike; to New Jersey, where IWW organizer and friend Elizabeth Gurley Flynn recruited her to act as publicity director for the Passaic textile strike; to Gastonia, N.C., where she covered the bitter fight to organize the Southern textile mills; to Alabama to cover the Scottsboro Boys’ trial; to Harlan County, Ky., where the war between coal bosses and union coal miners raged and Vorse was run out of town by thugs; to Flint, Mich., to cover the United Auto Workers’ 1937 sit-down strikes, and to Youngstown, Ohio, to bear witness to the brutal Little Steel Strike, an experience she wrote about in her 1938 book, Labor’s New Millions. There, company guards nearly shot her in the head, and a photo of her pale face, bloodied by a ricocheting bullet, graced the front page of the nation’s Sunday newspapers. At the time, she was 63—a few years older than her friend the Irish immigrant and militant labor organizer Mary Harris was when she donned her trademark widow’s weeds and took the nickname Mother Jones.

Vorse made up for the time she’d lost to feckless husbands and what she felt were the stifling demands of motherhood by throwing herself into every bout of worker unrest or labor conflict she could find. Her personal life was always a source of stress and emotional turmoil, and she agonized over her relationship with her children, whom she often left with friends or relatives during her reporting trips and sometimes went for years without seeing. Vorse felt the pressure to have it all—a career, a partner, children—but was too often thwarted by a combination of circumstance, self-sabotage, and bad luck. She began using morphine after an injury, and spent several years battling substance abuse disorder. For a woman with so many comrades and admirers, Vorse spent much of her life feeling lonely and unloved. Her Victorian upbringing clashed with her radical politics and feminist worldview, and she felt compelled to escape her unhappy home life and concentrate instead on her work, which gave her a sense of purpose and accomplishment. “Like a warrior scenting battles, she dashes off for the fray,” her friend Dorothy Day once wrote. “But her movements are never dashing. Rather she quietly appears where labor trouble is, and gets to work.”

Her work was distinguished by her clear, evocative prose, and an emphasis on women and children—a novel approach throughout every decade of her career, in which social expectations for women slowly evolved but society at large continued to center men’s perspectives. During the UAW fracas, Vorse was the only reporter who gravitated toward the Women’s Emergency Brigade, a coalition of striking women workers and strikers’ wives who raised hell on the picket lines, and wrote about them for The New Republic. (In 1979, ​​the women were further immortalized in the film With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women’s Emergency Brigade.) Vorse often blurred the line between journalism and activism, and could often be found working closely with strike leaders and unions and using her skills as a writer and communicator to coordinate publicity, propaganda, and public opinion. Vorse made her sympathies plain, and the workers she covered respected her for it.

When she began traveling overseas to attend feminist conferences and then to cover international conflicts, she was often the only woman among the gaggle of male correspondents. The horrors she witnessed reporting in Europe during World War I had a marked effect on her; when she came home to Greenwich Village, she found herself unable to relate to her sheltered literati friends. Her experiences in Stalin’s Russia and in Hungary covering Béla Kun’s aborted Communist government had also permanently altered her political outlook. “I am a communist because I don’t see anything else to be, but I am a communist who hates Communists and Communism,” she wrote in her diary in 1931. Garrison locates Vorse’s true political identity in libertarian socialism. This stance complicated her love life. She had a doomed love affair with Robert Minor, an anarchist turned Communist Party mouthpiece who left her for a younger, more ideologically malleable woman. Her social circle ran the gamut from labor leftists to literary types to artsy bright young things, many of whom were caught up in the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare. Vorse herself was kept under FBI surveillance for nearly 40 years, though the bureau was comically bad at keeping tabs on the globe-trotting journalist.

It’s not as though she were flying under the radar like some of her old comrades. Vorse remained prolific, writing for major magazines and newspapers (including The Nation!) and traveling to strikes and campaigns around the country. She even briefly held a government position at the Office of Indian Affairs, acting as publicity director and editing the journal Indians at Work, and worked for the United Nations Refugee and Resettlement Agency during World War II as the nation’s oldest war correspondent (she was 71 when she sailed for Europe in 1945). In 1952, she penned a blockbuster investigation into dirty politicians, organized crime, and union corruption on the New York/New Jersey waterfront, charming her way into interviews with the likes of Tony “Bang Bang” Anastasia, a Brooklyn hiring boss who had family ties to the Mafia cartel known as Murder Inc. “It’s OK, she’s harmless,” he’d told his associates when the kindly looking elderly woman came knocking. He’d had no idea whom he was dealing with—but got to read all about it in Harper’s.

Vorse undertook her last reporting trip in 1959, when she traveled to Henderson, N.C., to cover a textile workers’ strike; she was then 85. She slowed down as a reporter only after suffering a stroke on her way home. Unable to support herself with writing, Vorse took on the role of doting grandmother. She survived financially on donations from friends and allies in the labor movement like the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and United Autoworkers, who disguised their charity by inventing a social justice award to present to her at their 1962 convention. She spent their money the same way she’d spent her life—in service to others. In 1965, the year before she died, she sent a check to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, who were then in the middle of the Delano Grape Strike. She died from a heart attack at 92, and was buried in the hills above her seaside home.

“When people are gathered together, when the individual is forgotten for the collective good, there is this quickening; suddenly, the aspirations of some anonymous, lonely people have come together and formed the flame,” Vorse had written in her final dispatch from Henderson, which could just as well double as an epitaph for her own remarkable life in labor. “There is the flame of the labor movement. The flame ebbs, it fluctuates, it never goes out.”



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Maida Springer Kemp Championed Workers’ Rights on a Global Scalehttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/maida-springer-kemp-labor/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyFeb 4, 2022

The American labor movement was built by Black workers, organizers, and activists, from the Rev. Addie L. Wyatt to Lucy Parsons to the washerwomen of Jackson, Miss., who formed the state’s first labor union in 1866 to the warehouse workers in Bessemer, Ala., fighting to unionize Amazon. Maida Springer Kemp, a union organizer who worked to connect the US and African trade movements, is just one of the incredible Black women whose determination and vision has shaped the history of labor in this country. During the height of Jim Crow, this daughter of Caribbean immigrants and former garment worker strode onto the world stage and took the struggle global.

Kemp was born Maida Stewart in 1910 in Panama, emigrated at 7, and was raised in Harlem by a single mother who embraced Black nationalist Marcus Garvey and was a member in his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). She held political gatherings in their home, took little Maida along to UNIA meetings, and sent her next door to help fold leaflets for a friend’s father, who was in the all-Black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union. A. Philip Randolph, the union’s charismatic leader, later became a close friend, and Kemp remained fiercely loyal to him even when their interests clashed. At 22, she went to see him speak when she was still distrustful of organized labor, which had earned its reputation for anti-Blackness and racial discrimination. Randolph’s speech connected the dots between how racist employers tried to divide workers and depress Black economic advancement, and she came away dazzled by the potential of union power. “He excited my interest and challenged my mind to think about something besides the prejudice against the Black community,” she later recalled. “I got a PhD education in survival from Randolph and an awareness of a struggle and of Black and white relationships.”

Kemp’s life, work, and politics were shaped by her experiences at the intersection of labor, race, gender, class, and colonialism. Her early years in Panama, her childhood in Harlem, her school days at a vocational boarding school in Bordentown, N.J., sometimes called “The Tuskegee of the North,” and her later international travels all informed her perspective on the world, her place within it, and what kinds of changes were needed. Kemp’s determination to confront those inseparable systems of oppression set her apart from many of her peers in labor, and made her a target for those who would rather ignore the ugly truths she lived through as a working-class Black woman in the United States, Europe, and Africa. Her career should be an example to the current and next generation of labor activists, and remind those of us in the West—and particularly in the US—that the cause of labor is a global struggle.

For example, as Luis Feliz Leon and Dan DiMaggio recently reported for Labor Notes, there is an extremely important union election underway in Mexico right now, where workers at a General Motors plant in Silao are trying to break free of their corrupt local of the Confederation of Mexican Labor (CMT). After voting to invalidate their last CMT contract, the workers are choosing between four options—two CMT-connected unions, a “ghost” union about which suspiciously little is known, and the independent National Auto Workers Union (SINTTIA). On February 3, the results came in, and the workers voted overwhelmingly for SINTTIA. “We can have better salary conditions, and more importantly, labor conditions, and good union representation,” SINTTIA leader Morales told Labor Notes. “That’s the starting point for other workers to be encouraged to raise their voices and not be subjected to the company.”

Kemp would have approved. She married Owen Springer, a Barbadian like her father, when she was 17, and initially stayed home to tend their children. When the Great Depression hit, he lost his job as a repairman, and she went out to work in the garment industry in 1932. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) had, as she told it, fallen “flat on its face” at the time, but she joined its Local 22 anyway—just in time for a 60,000-strong dressmakers’ strike to roil the city and recharge the union. “It was an electrifying occasion,” she told biographer Yevette Richards Jordan, an associate professor of history at George Mason University who published her wonderfully thorough book Maida Springer: Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader in 2000. “As a result of this exhilarating experience, I proudly accepted more assignments and enrolled in more classes than was reasonable. My youth, enthusiasm, and the daily evidence of changes that the Union had wrought in our lives lessened the normal tedium of tasks.”

Kemp rose quickly through the union ranks. She joined numerous committees and immersed herself in the union’s robust educational offerings, joining its executive board in 1938 and signing on as Local 22’s educational director in 1943. Her husband did not trust unions and was less than enthused about her career path, but she held firm, and continued to climb. Kemp held various staff positions at the ILGWU, including a 13-year stint as the union’s first Black business agent to lead an entire district, until 1959. Jordan’s book lays out an exhaustive list of her travels, appointments, honors, and committees throughout that period; suffice it to say, Kemp stayed busy, even when political turmoil threatened to slow her down or halt her progress altogether.

Unlike most of the other labor leaders I’ve profiled in this column, Kemp wasn’t a political radical. She never joined any leftist groups, and could generally have been described as a social democrat. But her actions as an organizer were radical for the Jim Crow era; so was her refusal to be bullied into changing her mind or altering her behavior to comfort racists, sexists, or colonizers. Her interests lay firmly in achieving racial and economic justice for Black workers, and she wasn’t interested in arguing. While she appreciated the US Communist Party’s anti-racist stance, she didn’t trust its motives. Throughout her early career with the ILGWU, the union was riven by internecine squabbles between Communists and anti-communists in the ranks and leadership. Kemp resisted repeated overtures from Communist organizers. As a political pragmatist with little interest in sectarian dogfights, she preferred to avoid alienating any potential allies, even as she held onto her own suspicions about the authenticity of the solidarity on offer. “The thing that offended me was that I always felt that I was being patronized,” she told Richards. “I think they loved me too much.”

That wasn’t the last time that anti-communist sentiment would complicate her work, and it would become an especially troublesome burden during one of the most important chapters of her life as an organizer and labor advocate. After spending 10 years rising through the ILWU’s ranks, in 1945 Kemp was tapped to join a CIO- and AFL-sponsored delegation to England to meet with British and European labor leaders, visit factories, and observe wartime conditions. That trip marked the beginning of her international career as the first Black woman to represent US labor overseas. She may have left Jim Crow back in the States, but she was still expected to sleep in a separate room from her white fellow delegates, and got a firsthand view of British racism. Kemp also met with African and Caribbean soldiers, who told her stories from the front lines of the fight for colonial independence, and connected with Trinidadian pan-Africanist socialist George Padmore, who would become her lifelong friend and mentor. Her path also crossed with Jomo Kenyatta, an anti-colonial activist who would become the first president of an independent Kenya. When they met, he asked Kemp, “Young girl, what does the working class in America know of the struggle for liberation from colonialism?” That question changed the course of her life. From that moment on, she became determined to convince US labor leaders to support the African struggle for independence and a strong democratic labor movement.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Kemp formed deep and extensive connections with labor leaders and anti-colonial activists in multiple African countries while navigating complicated and often frustrating Cold War dynamics exacerbated by US interventionism. Her first trip to Africa in 1955 took her to Accra, Ghana, where she served as an AFL observer and delegate to an International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) conference. The ICFTU had been established in 1949 after US and non-communist European unions left the World Federation of Trade Unions to form their own explicitly anti-communist federation, and both groups were vying for a stake in the African labor movement. Anti-colonial African labor leaders had looked to their US counterparts for support, and were instead greeted with racism, paternalism, and knee-jerk anti-communism. The tension made Kemp feel as though she was “dancing on the end of a needle” as she tried to focus on organizing work in newly independent African nations like Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika), Uganda, and Ghana.

Her experiences in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she was treated with racist hostility by the white minority elite, contrasted sharply with the respect she received in other African nations, where she was known warmly as “Mama Maida.” While she had no problem connecting with workers, Kemp’s relationships with colonial government officials and her European colleagues tended to be strained. She was often searched at the border of colonial states, and noticed how those in power would parry any criticism of their own actions by bringing up the US’s own dreadful track record with race relations, which they seemed to view as an absolving “gotcha.” “Our allies in democracy, to ease the burden of criticism of their colonial policies, never let us lose sight of our own color dilemma,” she noted in a 1959 speech. “Under such circumstances it comes with poor grace to tell Africans communism is worse.”

Though she was sidelined by health problems during much of that year, she made up for it during the next, when she joined the AFL-CIO’s International Affairs Department as its representative to Africa. Though the work never got easier, over the next five years, she witnessed independence celebrations in Nigeria, Tanzania, Gambia, and Kenya, and even found time to marry her second husband, James Horace Kemp, a well-respected Chicago labor organizer and activist who would later be elected president of the NAACP. (She had divorced Owen, who had never supported her labor work, in 1955).

During Kemp’s tenure at the AFL-CIO, she devoted herself to organizing and funding educational opportunities for members of the African poor and working class in Tanzania, where she established a scholarship for girls’ continuing education; in Kenya, where she worked with the Kenya Tailors and Textile Workers Union to found a trade school for women; and in Nigeria, where she partnered with the Nigerian Motor Drivers’ Union and secured AFL-CIO funding to establish a Motor Drivers’ Driving School. At the urging of her friends in African labor, she and A. Philip Randolph founded an exchange program that enabled African centers to send their members to the Harvard Labor-Management Industrial Relations Center (after which the AFL-CIO would pay them a stipend to organize workers back home). The Cold War and the AFL-CIO’s own anti-communist conservatism kept getting in her way, but Kemp refused to be deterred in her vision of international labor solidarity.

She would continue to work, organize, advise, and advocate for African workers and her allies in the African labor movement for the rest of her life, but Kemp was also kept busy on the home front. In 1966, she returned to the ILGWU and began working as a general organizer for the union in the South, and in 1970, was asked to serve as the Midwest director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an organization dedicated to strengthening ties between the labor and civil rights movements. During that same period, she began working with the African American Labor Center to organize relief programs for drought-stricken Western and Central Africa nations, and in 1973, joined its staff full-time. She also became a consultant for the Asian-American Free Labor Institute, and helped organize women workers in Turkey and Indonesia. Throughout this time, she was traveling to Africa and Europe for seminars and conferences, working on events with the NAACP’s Task Force in Africa, and was active in numerous women’s and civil rights organizations like the National Organization of Women, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the National Council of Negro Women, and the Urban League.

By the time she retired in 1981, Kemp had received countless awards and recognitions, including an honorary doctorate from Brooklyn College, and, most fittingly of all, she lived to see the establishment of the Maida Springer Kemp Fund, which combats child labor in East Africa by creating economic and educational opportunity. Maida died in 2005 at the age of 84, and will forever be known for her dedication to a better future for those who had been denied justice for centuries. “I have an unending love affair with the American labor movement,” she once said. “To the degree that a government can be challenged and workers can have the right to help to determine their hours of work, conditions of employment, redress of their grievances, it’s the labor movement that made this contribution on behalf of the working class. I remain a member of that class without apology.”



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The Militant Passion of Emma Tenayucahttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/emma-tenayuca-labor/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyFeb 1, 2022

Some knew her as la Pasionaria de Texas—the Texas Passionflower. Others called her Red Emma. But most of the people she fought alongside just called her “comrade.” Emma Tenayuca was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1916 to parents of Spanish and Comanche descent, and spent her childhood learning about Mexican identity, the evils of Jim Crow, and revolution from her grandfather. Emma was also constantly running off to Plaza del Zacate in San Antonio’s Milam Park to listen to anarchists and activists speak about politics and workers’ rights from their soapboxes. Her first experience on the picket line came when she was only 16. In 1933, she joined a group of Mexican women workers from the H.W. Finck Cigar Company, who were out on a wildcat strike over low wages and unsanitary working conditions. The teenager was horrified to witness the violent police response to the strike, and was arrested herself. That early baptism into the labor struggle convinced the young Tejana that she’d found her place—and her purpose.

“She was really kind of written out of history,” her niece, San Antonio attorney Sharyll Teneyuca, said during a gathering commemorating the strike’s 84th anniversary. Texas Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla also spoke, and the two women are currently working on a biography documenting Tenayuca’s life. She has suffered the same fate that has befallen so many other communist, anarchist, or otherwise “red” labor organizers like Ah Quon McElrath, Silme Domingo, Glen Viernes, and Marie Equi: consigned to obscurity for being “too radical,” too red, too Asian or Latina or queer or female or some combination thereof. During her lifetime, Tenayuca was smeared, threatened, and blacklisted, forced to leave her own hometown for decades after anti-communist threats made it impossible for her to find work or safety. Those who opposed her views on working-class liberation hated and feared her. Of course, they tried to silence her. Unfortunately for them, there are people who remember Emma Tenayuca’s life of militancy, mutual aid, and multiracial, multi-gender solidarity, and many more who are waiting to discover someone just like her.

As a bright, curious student who had become fluent in the language of racial and economic justice at an early age, Tenayuca gravitated toward other young radicals, and devoured every book she could on anarchism, Marxism, feminism, and the Industrial Workers of the World. Between 1934 and 1935, she helped organize two locals of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, but butted heads with union leadership, who she felt didn’t understand the unique needs and culture of the Mexican American community. In 1935, she joined the Young Communist League, and started organizing Mexican workers into Unemployed Councils, which were part of a broader Depression-era Communist Party program to radicalize and mobilize the unemployed. She was involved in community organizing, as well, and helped build ties between unions and Spanish-speaking workers. Though Tenayuca initially found herself drawn to anarchism, she turned to the Communist Party for its professed anti-racist, anti-sexist principles, an appreciation for the successes of the Mexican Community Party, and the potential she saw within it as a means to organize the working class on a mass scale. “Communists were at the forefront of the struggle,” she later wrote, and that’s exactly where Tenayuca wanted to be.

By the end of 1937, nearly everyone had heard of her in San Antonio. An executive committee member of the Workers Alliance of America, a coalition of socialist and Communists groups that had grown out of the Unemployed Councils and focused on serving the needs of unemployed people and exploited workers, Tenayuca became known for her organizing abilities as well as her passionate speeches. “The time is now for the workers to organize!” she thundered to one crowd. “We can no longer wait for better days without fighting for those better days!” Tenayuca was also the general secretary for San Antonio’s chapters, and represented 10,000 Workers Alliance members there–about 3,000 of which worked in the city’s pecan industry.

At that time, half of the country’s entire pecan market was controlled by one San Antonio–based nut behemoth, the Southern Pecan Shelling Company. Its owners, Julius Seligmann and Joe Freeman, had concocted a system to deindustrialize the labor-intensive process of shelling nuts; they sold their raw product to over 100 different contractors, who then farmed out the labor to predominantly Mexican and Mexican American workers, dodging labor regulations and paying them piece rates. Prior to 1926, pecan companies had used machines to handle most of the process, but Southern Pecan discovered it was cheaper to go the old-fashioned route. “They did not go for machines, because they had such a large group of people here to exploit,” Tenayuca explained to journalist Luis R. Torres in a 1987 interview.

The contractors paid men more than women, but all were paid very, very poorly. The average wage for a pecan worker was $2 to $3 per week, and thanks to unsanitary working conditions and a lack of ventilation, came with the added risks of disease. The rate of tuberculosis among San Antonio’s pecan shellers was almost three times the national average. A contemporary study cited in Justin Akers Chacón’s terrific Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class described how “thousands of human beings living in decrepit wooden shacks or in crowded corrals, breathlessly shelled pecans in a race with starvation.” Many of the workers also took piles of pecans home, and families would spend their nights cracking open as many nuts as possible.

The pecan shellers did not suffer this exploitation or the Jim Crow–approved segregation at work quietly. They struck in 1934 and again in 1935; these wildcats were successful only marginally because of a lack of resources and support, but prompted the workers there to take further action among themselves with the help of Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organizers Minnie Rendón, Leandro Ávila, and Willie Garcia. These efforts resulted in the Texas Pecan Workers Union’s being chartered by the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America in 1937, as Pecan Workers Local 172, and not a moment too soon, because a revolt was brewing amid the brown dust and cracked shells. On January 31, 1938, after Southern Pecan had slashed their pay without warning and left workers without the barest hope of making ends meet, nearly 12,000 pecan shellers—the vast majority of them Mexican and Mexican American women—walked off the job.

The workers elected Tenayuca to lead the strike committee, and the charismatic 21-year-old was thrust to the forefront of the largest strike the city had ever seen. Twenty-four hours later, she was in jail alongside several other organizers, and was freed only when a crowd of 300 supporters descended upon the jail. This rude welcome from the city’s power brokers was only the beginning of what would become a protracted battle between the striking workers, the pecan kings, the mayor, the cops, the city’s conservative Mexican middle class, and even the church. At the center of it all stood Tenayuca, who seemed to be everywhere at once. “I was arrested a number of times, [but] I don’t think that I was exactly fearful,” she once said. “I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice.”

Faced with a growing mass movement of disenfranchised, increasingly militant workers of color, San Antonio’s mayor, Charles K. Quin, took the novel approach of claiming the strike did not exist. Instead, it was an attempted “revolution” led by “red” outsiders, and thus did not fall under the protections of the still-new 1935 Wagner Act, which protects workers’ right to collectively bargain. Police Chief Owen Kilday followed suit, ordering his officers to protect strikebreakers while harassing, assaulting, and arresting strikers; disrupting community attempts to deliver supplies to the picket lines; shutting down strike kitchens; and raiding suspected strike leaders’ homes. Armed with tear gas, riot gear, and lethal weapons, the San Antonio police terrorized the striking workers, arresting over 1,000 men, women, and children during the three-month conflict. When the arrestees sang songs of solidarity in their overcrowded cells, their jailers turned fire hoses on them.

During the strike, Tenayuca and her fellow organizers endured months of Red-baiting from the pecan bosses as well as from local San Antonio business and religious leaders. Kilday, cited Tenayuca’s presence (as well as that of Manuela Solis Sager) to justify using force against the strikers. Under oath, he referred to the strike as a “Red plot” and told the papers, “It is my duty to interfere with revolution, and communism is revolution.” An investigation by the Texas Industrial Commission later found that the San Antonio police’s interference with the strikers’ right to peaceful assembly was unjustified, but the police faced no consequences for their assault on striking workers (and Kilday’s brother, Paul, was later elected to the US House of Representatives).

Uneasy with Tenayuca’s outspoken commitment to communism, the CIO buckled under the public and internal pressure, and removed her from her position as strike leader. They replaced her with CIO organizer and Democrat J. Austin Beasley, who immediately removed women from the strike’s leadership roles even as he leaned on the experience of United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America founder Luisa Moreno (a brilliant Guatemalan labor leader who deserves her own column entry here) for guidance. However, Tenayuca remained involved in the strike, and played a critical role behind the scenes. In ​​Zaragosa Vargas’s Major Problems in Mexican American History: Documents and Essays, Tenayuca wrote, “I continued to write all the circulars, [and] met with all the picket captains.”

The mass arrests and police violence against the strikers began to attract national attention. “These little brown women were being beaten by the police,” Sarah Gould, lead curatorial researcher at the Institute of Texan Cultures, told The Ranger in 2017. “It got a lot of media coverage, and it brought a lot of attention to this kind of injustice.” Governor James Allred informed the mayor that he supported the workers’ right to peacefully picket, and the Mexican Consul protested the arrests and jailing of dozens of Mexican citizens. After 37 days, the two parties agreed to participate in arbitration, which resulted in a favorable decision for the strikers. They won a small wage hike and union recognition.

Though the strikers won their battle against Big Pecan, their victory was short-lived. When Congress passed the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act later that year, it established a minimum hourly wage of 25 cents. That pay hike would have been an improvement for workers like San Antonio’s pecan shellers. The pecan bosses, however, were horrified, and immediately shut down the factories and petitioned for an exemption to avoid paying up. When the government declined to grant them an exception, the company embraced mechanization—and permanently laid off 10,000 workers. By 1948, Pecan Shelling Workers Union No. 172 had fully dissolved.

Tenayuca herself wasn’t there to see any of it. By then, exhausted by her inability to find a decent job and disillusioned with the political landscape, she had left both San Antonio and the Communist Party. “I was beginning to miss more and more meals,” she told interviewer Jerry Poyo. “I’ve come from a family of 11; I was one of the oldest. I couldn’t get a job, I couldn’t help, so I left San Antonio. I went to San Francisco and stayed there for 20 years.”

After studying in San Francisco to become a teacher and spending two decades away from home, she finally came back to Texas to help educate the next generation of rabble-rousers. Tenayuca, a veteran activist used to being taunted and harassed, wasn’t prepared for the welcome she received. “To my surprise,” she said, “I return and I find myself some sort of a heroine.”

Tenayuca was inducted into the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame in 1991, nine years before her death in 1999, and a new generation of labor, Chicano, and women’s liberation activists began to rediscover her work and impact. There are songs and murals dedicated to her memory, and she and the pecan strikers are featured in the 2018 documentary A Strike and an Uprising in Texas. In 2021, Virginia Hartung, a public history graduate student at St. Mary’s University, began circulating a petition to rename San Antonio’s Beauregard Street—which currently honors a Confederate general—to Tenayuca Street, and has so far collected over 1,000 signatures.

Tenayuca is an inspirational labor leader, an important part of Texas history, and, yes, a heroine, but before she was any of that, she was a working-class Mexican kid who took a look around and decided that things needed to change—and that she was going to be the one to change them. The next Emma Tenayuca is already out there, hard at work, reading or dreaming or causing trouble. Here’s hoping history is kinder to her.



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Ah Quon McElrath and the Power of Multiracial Working-Class Solidarityhttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/ah-quon-mcelrath-labor/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyJan 28, 2022

The history of labor in this country is chockablock with forgotten heroes, suppressed memories, and unknown soldiers in the class war.  Take Ah Quon McElrath. She is now remembered as one of Hawai’i’s most influential labor leaders, but beyond the islands’ borders, she and her work are all too often relegated to a footnote. As an unapologetically militant Chinese Hawai’ian organizer committed to the intersectional race, class, and gender struggles of the working class, she has suffered the same fate that’s befallen many now barely known lions of labor. As a communist, her politics were too red for the history books, and as a woman of color operating within a white male-dominated power structure, the same social and political barriers she faced in life have followed her to the grave.

When she graduated from the University of Hawai’i in 1938 with a degree in sociology, a bigoted professor convinced her to drop her dream of pursuing an advanced economics degree because: “One, you’re a woman. Two, you’re Oriental.” That fateful incident caused McElrath to lend her prodigious talents to the field of social work and the cause of labor, which proved to be a boon to Hawai’i’s workers and showed how deeply she held her commitment to liberation. The greatest lesson McElrath can teach us now is the importance of organizing across race, class, and gendered lines; embracing diversity as a strength instead of an impediment; and not being afraid to show our true political colors—no matter how much it makes the bosses or the media squirm.

A child of immigrants who settled on “the other side of the tracks” in O’ahu and spent her childhood working in a pineapple cannery to support her family, McElrath was born into hardship, but found power and purpose through the work she did in the interest of others. She approached her long career in labor with a social worker’s eye toward fostering community bonds, building up networks of mutual aid, and caring for peoples’ bodies as well as their minds. Her parents, Leong Chew and Leong Wong See, both came from Zhongshan, China, but arrived in Hawai’i separately; her father was a contract laborer who came over to work, and her mother was a “picture bride” who ditched her intended husband to marry Chew and raise their large family in Iwilei, a former red-light district in Honolulu. Born Leong Yuk Quon in 1915, Ah Quon (a diminutive of her birth name) was a studious child who excelled at English and spent her summers working in the canneries even after she entered high school. Her father died from a ruptured appendix when she was 4 years old, leaving her mother with seven children to support. 

In 1939, McElrath secured a job with Hawai’i’s Department of Public Welfare and continued the labor organizing efforts she’d begun as a college student. During her time at the university, she’d joined the Communist Party as well as an activist group called the Inter-Professional Association, and aligned herself with the antifascist cause as the Spanish Civil War raged overseas. It was a tumultuous time in Hawai’i. The year she finished university, local police faced off against a 200-strong crowd of Inland Boatmen’s Union members and supporters protesting for higher wages and union rights. In what’s now known as the Hilo Massacre, the cops threw grenades into the crowd and fired their riot guns, injuring 50 people, including two children; one man, Kai Uratani, was bayoneted by Lt. Charles Warren. “I remember when somebody came to our Inter-Professional Association meeting and announced, “Jack Hall has been beaten!’” McElrath later recalled. She and Hall, a leader in the Communist Party and head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 142, became friends while she was in university, and the former school newspaper wonk helped him run the organizing newsletter Voice of Labor.

He also introduced her to a man named Bob McElrath, who would become her husband in 1941 and remained her partner in life and organizing until his death in 1995. Together, they organized tuna packers, steamship workers, and pineapple canners, and became involved in the ILWU after World War II when the lifting of wartime economic measures resuscitated the islands’ labor movement. Led by Hall and operating on the multiracial, multiethnic principles that McElrath and friends had formulated around their kitchen tables, the union ramped up its efforts to take on the sugar barons who controlled Hawai’i’s agricultural economy and wrung enormous profits from its exploited immigrant workforce. Beginning in 1835, a procession of European and then white American colonizers had begun descending upon the islands to buy up land and run enormous sugarcane plantations staffed by contract laborers, who were bound to the land and indebted to the plantation store. (A situation that would’ve been all too familiar to the Appalachian coal miners populating company towns a world away.) The plantation bosses initially hired Native Hawai’ians to work their fields, but quickly decided it was easier to exploit immigrant workers instead, and began importing their labor—first from China, then expanding to Japan, Korea, Portugal, the Philippines, and even as far as Norway and Russia; in 1901, 200 Black workers were shipped in from Tennessee. 

The bosses assumed that ethnic and racial differences would keep the workers separated and prevent them from organizing, but did not factor in organizers like McElrath, who had grown up within multiracial communities. The ILWU identified community leaders within each ethnic or racial group, emphasized interracial and multiethnic solidarity in their organizing conversations, and held meetings in a variety of languages, including multiple Filipino dialects, to build trust. “At the time that our longshoremen and sugar workers began to organize, almost all sugar workers were in what is called segregated camps,” McElrath recalled in an interview with Robynn Takayama. “It was very simple. You are all economically exploited, whether you are Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, or whatever it is…. All of the information that was given to them was, ‘Look, you are exploited. What are you going to do about it?’”

The year 1946 proved pivotal for both McElrath and the Hawai’ian labor movement. In April, a tsunami devastated Hilo and other towns on the Big Island, and she sprang into action. “I’d had experience as a social worker with the Department of Social Security even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, but during Hawaii’s April 1946 tidal wave crisis I was not employed,” she explained in a 2004 interview. “I volunteered my services to the union to do the investigations of need, because the entire union was collecting money to give to families that suffered a death or the loss of a home or personal belongings. I also worked with families to get them to understand what it meant to help each other in times of disaster.”

When 26,000 sugar plantation workers and their families–79,000 people in all—went out on strike that September after the sugar companies refused to negotiate a fair contract with the ILWU, she was there, too, setting up soup kitchens and helping families navigate creditors and the parochial school system. The strike lasted for three months, and shut down 33 of the 34 sugar plantations in the islands for 79 days. It cost the Big Five sugar companies more than $15 million (about $212 million in 2021 dollars) and resulted in huge wins for the workers. “It didn’t make a difference whether you were Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, or whatever it is, they felt that the strike had to be won, and they gave their all in order to win the strike,” McElrath said looking back on the victory. “And for me, this was a magnificent illustration of how people of different colors got together and worked to win the strike.”

McElrath wasn’t wrong when she was quoted in 1977 saying, “Nobody gives the members of the Communist Party any real credit for the magnificent job of organizing they did.” Her experiences of growing up in a poor immigrant family in a multiracial working-class community shaped her politics. Following World War II, she was in good company in the Communist Party, especially in labor circles, though anti-communist sentiment was already widespread on the islands and on the mainland by the time she began working with the ILWU in the 1940s. 

During a grueling 1949 longshore strike over pay disparities between the Hawai’ian and immigrant Asian members of color and white workers on the mainland, she again organized soup kitchens and helped workers with paperwork. She also witnessed the ugly sight of middle-class women crossing the picket lines while screaming anti-union, anti-communist slogans. We, the Women was a group founded by Republican Ruth Black in response to the 1946 strike; its goal was to recruit predominantly white housewives and professional women from elite families to loudly protest outside the ILWW offices, disrupt picket lines, and Red-bait the union in order to chip away at community support for the striking workers and force out its radical leaders. This set them in direct opposition to the ILWU’s highly diverse, working-class Women’s Division Committee and Women’s Auxiliaries, who went toe-to-toe with them during an ill-fated 1947 pineapple workers’ strike and again in 1949. 

For all her efforts, McElrath was blacklisted from the Department of Social Security in 1948, and during the 1950s she was surveilled by the FBI and subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), twice. She refused to apologize for her politics or to back down when pressured. When seven of her ILWU comrades in Honolulu (including her old friend Jack Hall) were arrested in 1951 for allegedly violating the anti-communist Smith Act of 1940, McElrath served as the office manager for the union’s defense committee. “I remember when a lot of my friends would cross to the other side of the street to avoid me,” she told one interviewer. “If you were called a Red at that time, your means of livelihood was taken away from you.” Luckily for her, though, the ILWU was a left-led union that refused to be cowed by Red-baiting. She was hired on as the union’s full-time social worker in 1954, a position she held until her retirement in 1981. 

During her tenure there, McElrath focused on community organizing and advocating for labor, women’s, and immigrants’ rights locally and on a state level; she led educational programs; pushed for social welfare legislation, local infrastructure projects, and universal healthcare programs; and lobbied for—and won—lower housing costs for workers in Waipahu. For 25 years, she led education and social welfare programs for the union’s thousands of members and their families, assisting them in accessing government benefits and advising union leadership on myriad issues. In 1965, McElrath took a short leave of absence to study at the Michigan School of Social Work, and was sent to an Office of Economic Opportunity program at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where she spent three months working on a federally funded health care project in Lowndes County. 

McElrath’s experience in the South inspired her to work more closely with the ILWU’s education director to improve its own programming, and to become even more involved in local political action with the Democratic Party. The union’s efforts on the social, political, and economic front eventually helped to turn Hawai’i blue (which is a little ironic, given how much of her life McElrath spent being called a Red). Even in her retirement, McElrath refused to stop fighting, and spent the rest of her life advocating for and organizing on behalf of the poor, the elderly, and the vulnerable. Later on, she served on the University of Hawaiʻi’s Board of Regents, and was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1988. Ah Quon McElrath died in 2008 at the age of 92, and a team of Hawai’ian filmmakers are currently working on a documentary about her life. 

McElrath was a ILWU diehard, but I bet she’d be impressed by the newest report from UNITE HERE, another ambitious union whose membership is predominantly made up of immigrant workers of color and has a strong presence in Hawai’ian tourism industry. Titled “Come Back Stronger,” it details how the union has managed to bounce back after 98 percent of its membership lost their jobs during the peak of the Covid-19 shutdowns. Knowingly or not, UNITE HERE took a page from McElrath’s book when it mobilized during a disaster and committed time and resources to helping its members navigate unemployment insurance and other government resources, secured health insurance coverage, ran a huge political canvassing operation to elect more worker-friendly politicians, and provided cash and food aid to its members. 

It also managed to organize 15,238 new workers into the union in 77 workplaces, which is a major success story given the heavy toll the pandemic has taken on the hospitality industry. 

With all of the gloomy news coming out about organized labor’s decline, this kind of forward motion is a sign of hope. After all, as McElrath herself once warned us, “The minute the trade union movement leaves out the word ‘movement,’ and thinks only of where it is going for itself, forget it, it ain’t going anywhere.”



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A Bold Flavor of Tennessee Whiskey: Union-Madehttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/whiskey-tennessee-union/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyJan 25, 2022

For those of us who appreciate the warm, smoky sting of a nice glass of the good stuff, Tennessee whiskey enjoys the same outsize reputation as Kentucky bourbon; there’s history in every sip, and even the not-so-good stuff ain’t that bad. The two tipples are closely related, historically, geographically, and chemically; a liquor connoisseur will tell you the main difference comes down to an extra step (the Tennessee version is filtered through sugar maple charcoal after it’s distilled, which imparts its characteristic smoothness). But there’s another key factor that differentiates the two iconically American spirits that—hopefully—will soon evaporate like an angel’s share.

In Kentucky, workers at many of the bourbon distilleries that manufacture popular brands like Jim Beam, Buffalo Trace, Heaven Hill, and Wild Turkey are union members, and are represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)’s Distillery and Winery division. Until now, none of their Tennessee counterparts could say the same. But in December, workers at Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery in Nashville went public with their desire to organize a union, taking the name United Distillery Workers of Tennessee. They face an uphill battle by trying to unionize in a “right to work” state like Tennessee, whose Republican governor, Bill Lee, is so virulently anti-union that he’s personally led captive audience meetings, but they’re standing firm. The United Distillery Workers of Tennessee’s distillery union drive is among the first for their state, and, as one of the worker-organizers told me last week, is an essential move to protect themselves and their livelihoods.

It started with a strike. On September 11, 2021, following months of stalled negotiations over their next five-year contract, the arrival of a federal mediator, and a September 9 meeting that saw UFCW Local 23D members vote 96 percent against the company’s latest proposal, more than 400 unionized workers at the Heaven Hill distillery in Bardstown, Ky., walked out. Heaven Hill is known for manufacturing some of the biggest names in bourbon, including Evan Williams, Elijah Craig, and Larceny (a personal favorite). Workers pointed out that the bourbon industry had been enjoying record profits. In 2020, Heaven Hill made over $500 million in profits, but during negotiations, the company hardly budged on issues like overtime, wages, and health care premiums. Both labor and the local bar and restaurant community rallied behind the strike, urging consumers to boycott Heaven Hill products or refusing to stock them outright until an agreement was reached. Six weeks later, on October 21, the strike came to an end after workers ratified a new contract. UFCW Local 23D President Matt Aubrey celebrated their contract gains in a press release, saying, “Together, these hardworking Kentuckians preserved the affordable healthcare, overtime pay, and fair scheduling that enables them to balance work with supporting their families.”

Earlier that summer, Heaven Hill had cut the ribbon on the $19 million renovation of its visitors’ center, a project that took two years to complete and was part of a larger $125 million expansion plan. Other distilleries took notice, and even sent their own employees up there to scope it out. Workers from Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery, a historic craft operation in the heart of Nashville that was snapped up by beverage giants Constellation Brands in 2019 and is known for making Belle Meade bourbon as well as its own signature whiskey, took a field trip to Bardstown shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and found out that their own bosses were planning a big, costly expansion of their own. “Our distillery announced that they were doing a $10 to $15 million build out of our current facility,” Dylan Lancaster, a front-of-house worker at Green Brier and organizer for the United Distillery Workers of Tennessee, told me. “That got us thinking like, well, that’s interesting. We are all getting paid well, well below the industry standard, based on what we know about the distilleries in Kentucky, which are represented almost exclusively by UFCW. And that doesn’t seem right.”

Many of his coworkers agreed, and they decided that unionizing was the answer. On December 10, 2021, the United Distillery Workers of Tennessee went public, initially hoping that the company would recognize the union voluntarily. They had reason to believe that it might work out that way; Constellation Brands already has several UFCW-represented shops within its portfolio, and the Green Brier workers had an overwhelming majority, with 80 percent of the workplace signing union cards. Instead, the company refused to recognize the union and insisted on filing for an NLRB election. Their new corporate owner, Constellation Brands, has ignored them; Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery founders Andy and Charlie Nelson, who are now minority stakeholders in the company, have been compelled to act as go-betweens—and they have not responded favorably to the union drive. “We’ve expressed to them that it is not personal,” Lancaster explained. “This is a struggle between the workers and Constellation Brands, which is a multibillion-dollar corporation. If it was a bad job that people didn’t like, they would just quit and move on, but we want to improve on what they built here to make it better.”

The major issues Lancaster related to me are mostly of the bread-and-butter variety, with wages topping the list. As he notes, many of the major distilleries in Kentucky are located in more rural areas or rooted in small towns; but Green Brier is based in Nashville, where the costs of living are climbing and come with the added risks that attend its reputation as a boozy, late-night party town, rowdy “bachelorette barges” and all. “Bottlers start at $15 an hour, and I think the distillers start a little bit higher than that,” Lancaster estimated. But in terms of front of house associates, tour guides, and hospitality people and the bottling line, nobody makes more than $20 an hour.” That’ll get you about half a bottle of Belle Meade, one of the distillery’s flagship brands (and, it must be said, a damn fine bourbon). Discounts on liquor and other Constellation products are one of the perks of working at the source, but Lancaster told me, “It just seems like those are ways to obscure that we’re getting paid less than almost everyone else in the industry.”

When the pandemic first came to Tennessee, the company sent its front-of-house workers home, while insisting those in the bottling and distilling department remain at their posts; after a few months, everyone was ordered back to work. Lancaster explained how Constellation gave the front-of-house workers a small pay bump to offset the loss of the tips that usually make up part of their wages, but stopped as soon as they went back in. His position as a tour guide means he spends all day interacting with the public in an alcohol-fueled setting, and he sounds more than a little weary when he looks back at what he and his coworkers dealt with last year. “As you can imagine, most people who were traveling to places like Nashville during a global pandemic before vaccines are not the most considerate folks in the world, meaning that they’re not great tippers,” he said. “They were not very willing to adhere to Covid protocols, masks, social distancing, any of that stuff. So we were having to deal with a rather unruly public, and also getting paid less to do it than to stay home and stay safe.”

Workers are also hoping to gain a clearer grievance procedure to address workplace issues, particularly those that have continued to arise as a result of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, as well as stricter public health protocols and plans to address what Lancaster characterizes as a lack of diversity and gendered wage disparities. (“It’s definitely more fellas than women at the distillery, at least in the hospitality side, and that has been an issue in terms of the pay gap.”) With the planned distillery expansion looming, the United Distillery Workers of Tennessee are also determined to ensure that whatever comes next will be stronger, safer, and more equitable for them and their next round of new coworkers. “We’ve got this big buildup coming. We’re going to double or triple our numbers of workers, and we want these people coming into this new expanded facility to have all the protections that they deserve,” Lancaster explained. “And we want them to feel welcomed into this new endeavor, and we want to create that and blaze that trail for folks, and just make sure that people are able to pay their rent and have health care and be able to live with dignity.”

Ballots for their union election went out on January 18, 2022, and they have until February 8 to return them. Lancaster is confident that the union will prevail at the February 9 vote count, but he told me a few days ago that he’s been disappointed to see continued resistance from the company. “Since we talked, Charlie Nelson held a captive audience meeting with all the staff onsite at the time where he read off a script and peddled the age-old union-busting hits, ‘The union will take away your benefits and potentially lower your wages,’ and my personal favorite, ‘I’m not anti-union, but a union here is inappropriate,’” he said. Lancaster also told me that the union organizers had asked their Twitter followers to send flowers to the office to mark the first day of voting, and five bouquets soon showed up with notes of support and solidarity attached. Later that week, the flowers disappeared, and they later discovered that Nelson had donated the blooms to a local hospital—without saying a word to the workers about it. (“Charlie’s assistant responded to one of our tweets admitting that she personally drove them to the hospital, which is incredibly sad and petty,” Lancaster told me). But the anti-labor vibes coming from the corner office have not dampened the workers’ enthusiasm to win their union, or to make state—and spirit—history.

“It’s very exciting to be on the forefront of something that is much bigger than us,” Lancaster said. “We decided to refer to our union as the United Distillery Workers of Tennessee, because once we do it, we’re hoping that others will do it.”



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Concrete Actions Toward Worker Powerhttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/seattle-general-strike-teamsters/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyJan 21, 2022

Six weeks ago, several hundred union workers in Seattle called for an industry-wide work stoppage that has since expanded its picket line into nearby communities, disrupted a variety of businesses, and left building sites across the city vacant. The Teamsters have labeled it a general strike, which is typically defined as a work stoppage in which a substantial proportion of the labor force in a specific location participates to achieve an economic or political objective. As labor’s “nuclear option,” such actions are vanishingly rare, and technically illegal; those who wish to replicate the massive general strikes of old are now stymied by the federal ban on sympathy strikes, which prohibits workers from joining other strikes in solidarity. This strike began with 34 drivers at Gary Merlino Construction, but now includes over 300 members of Teamsters Local 174 at six different companies in the Seattle area, and is made up of cement mixer drivers, concrete plant workers, mechanics, lab workers, terminal attendants, quality control workers, and yard workers in the concrete and sand industries. “We are calling this a general strike, because it is not limited to one sector of workers, but many—from concrete pourers, drivers, mixers, safety and quality control, and more—covering the entire concrete industry,” explained Jamie Fleming, director of communications and research at Teamsters Local 174 in an e-mail. “The workers on strike are from multiple different companies, and covered under different contracts, but they are all fighting together toward the same goal of being treated and compensated fairly.”

The Seattle strike may not have captured as much attention as the perennial calls on social media for a #GeneralStrike, but it’s an example of how workers across industries in multiple locations can come together and force capital to bend to their demands. A general strike in which workers across the country hit the streets in a militant pursuit of justice (or at least, a few well-defined and agreed-upon goals) may one day be possible. But, for now, those who yearn for change should be taking notes from these Teamsters, and thinking about how to replicate these kinds of actions on a local level. We might not get to a nationwide general strike anytime soon, but there are a lot of industries, companies, towns, cities, and most importantly, groups of discontented workers in this country. Any one of them could be next, provided they have the right tools.

Lest we forget, this isn’t the first time Seattle has broken out this particular blueprint. On February 6, 1919, the city of Seattle went on strike. Beginning on the docks, a 35,000-strong shipyard workers’ strike spread as 25,000 other union members throughout the city joined them on a “sympathy strike” endorsed by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the American Federation of Labor, and everyone else stayed home. For five days, commerce virtually stopped, and a General Strike Committee organized culinary workers to set up strike kitchens and distribute food to city residents. Firefighters remained on call, sanitation workers picked up hazardous garbage, and Teamsters delivered supplies to hospitals. The strike began to waver after the third day when the mayor increased the police presence and called in two battalions of US Army troops to menace the quieted streets. High-level union leaders, fearful of losing face and nervous about the militancy of the strike, began pressuring the Strike Committee to end the work stoppage. As the days went on and the difficulty of living in a striking city began to weigh heavily on the people, more and more workers trickled back to their jobs. By February 11, the committee had officially ended the Seattle General Strike. The revolutionary project started strong but ended with a begrudging consensus vote. Still, for all of its failures, the Seattle General Strike was an important moment in labor history. It was one of the earliest 20th-century solidarity strikes in the United States to be proclaimed a “general strike,” and its lessons about mutual aid, power building, and solidarity remain useful to today’s aspiring general strikers (as well as those already on the picket lines).

More than a century later, another Seattle strike began on December 3, 2021, after contract negotiations broke down between the Teamsters bargaining committee and a representative of the five companies—Cadman Materials, Inc., CalPortland, Lehigh Cement, Salmon Bay Sand and Gravel Company, and Stoneway Concrete—that control the sand and gravel industry. Cadman and Lehigh are both owned by German construction giants Heidelberg Cement Group, while CalPortland is owned by the Japanese Taiheiyo Cement Corporation. Local 174’s members work under seven contracts that are simultaneously bargained with all five companies (not including a separate contract with drivers at Gary Merlino Construction, who first struck in November) and their most recent contract expired back in July. The bargaining committee didn’t expect much of a fight going into negotiations, but hopes for a smooth process quickly broke down when it became apparent that the companies’ bargaining representative didn’t actually seem interested in bargaining. After six months of stalled negotiations, the Teamsters were ready to walk. “They weren’t continuing to bargain in good faith,” Brett Gallagher, a longtime cement mixer driver and member of the bargaining committee, told me over the phone earlier this week. “They weren’t moving forward. There’s no way we could meet anywhere close to the middle if they just stop talking to us and stop listening. That’s not fair to us. And finally, we couldn’t wait anymore.”

Gallagher, who turns 47 next week, works for CalPortland, and has been a Teamster since 2005. He is proud to have a good union job, and enjoys his gig driving a massive mixer truck around metropolitan Seattle, sometimes logging up to 300 miles a day on the road. The work schedule is unpredictable, but, as Gallagher sees it, that’s just part of the deal. My dad is an operating engineer with a similarly touch-and-go schedule, and in the building trades that “we’ll call you when we need you” mentality is the norm. For Gallagher, the good outweighs the bad, especially when he gets to make a more personal connection with his customers. He told me a cute story about the time he showed up to a well-meaning but clueless young father’s house and ended up coaching the family on how to get their patio poured, including teaching their young daughter how to operate a crucial lever on the back of the truck. “I empowered that little kid so much,” he said. “And I keep thinking she’s gonna pop into a mixer one day, and I’m gonna run into her and hear her say, ‘That’s the reason I got into this!’ That’s a pipe dream, I know, but I just love stuff like that.”

That union difference—in pay, working conditions, and pride—spurred Gallagher to become more involved in his local. “I felt the need to do more for what I get for the dues I pay every month,” he explained. “I want to show how grateful I am for what they’re doing for me.” As a first-time member of the bargaining committee, he is seeing how unwilling the bosses are to budge on the issues. In this round of negotiations, the main point of contention besides wages is health care, specifically the medical costs that currently fall on the union’s retirees. A career in concrete is hard on a worker’s body, and health care costs add up the longer you’re on the job. Wear-and-tear injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome, torn rotator cuffs, and shoulder problems are common. The risk of silicosis, a brutal lung disease caused by breathing in silica fragments of rock and soil, is ever present, and, as Gallagher said, “there’s really nothing to do [for that] other than wear full hazmat gear all day every day.”

The union’s proposal would save retired members nearly $6,000 per year in premiums, and wouldn’t cost the companies a thing, since Local 174’s membership has pledged to cover any cost increases the company may incur. “All the companies have to do is agree to allow the language; there is a little additional cost involved, which every active member is more than happy to cover out of the wages we currently make,” Gallagher explained. “Those guys worked so hard for so long. Let them go. Let them enjoy their lives. We got it—we’ll cover it. Take it out of our check.” Management wouldn’t budge, and the impasse remained as relations between the two parties continued to deteriorate. “A spokesman for the company stepped up and he said, ‘It’s not that we can’t afford it. We’re just not gonna pay it,’” Gallagher fumed. “What message are you sending everybody with that? That was really insulting.”

As the unfair labor practices strike stretches into its second month, it has also expanded its borders. As of last week, the picket line has been extended to the Port of Everett, a West Coast customs hub that typically distributes half a million tons of concrete each year, and to Cadman-owned plants in Woodinville and Smith Island. Pacific Northwest labor buffs will feel a twinge at the mention of Everett, which in 1916 became the site of a bloody battle between IWW union members and local law enforcement. The Wobblies had planned a public demonstration that day, but were instead met by 200 armed deputies, who fired wildly into their vessel and killed at least five—and potentially as many as 12—labor activists. The Wobblies fired back, killing two deputies and wounding 20 more. The Teamsters, with their own storied and complicated past, even have a direct connection. In the aftermath of the massacre, a Teamster named Thomas Tracy was pulled up on murder charges, though he was eventually acquitted. The ugly confrontation was indicative of the violence, suspicion, and repression that followed the IWW and other leftist labor activists during and after World War I. Seeing striking laborers return to the area is a poignant reminder of that history and of the sacrifices that were made by those who struggled before.

Meanwhile, the entire $23 billion Seattle-area construction industry is feeling the strain as Local 174 continues to hold the line, because, as Gallagher told me, nothing gets done without him and his coworkers. “This industry is literally the foundation that every other building trade builds upon,” he explained. Without concrete, none of the construction projects dotting Seattle can get off the ground, and as a result, building project after project has been delayed while the strike continues. “No matter how long this strike takes, the work will keep piling up. None of that work goes away, and we’re gonna have to dig so hard to get out from under this mountain. It was not a decision the local took lightly, to go out on strike.”

Gallagher is eager to win a good contract and get back to work, but knows that the deeper issues afflicting his hometown and his livelihood won’t disappear after the ink dries. Everything, from real estate to the ground beef at his local Safeway—”7.99 a pound!”—is getting more expensive, and he’s not surprised that workers in other industries have been taking to the streets and walking picket lines too. “We’re building a city we literally can’t afford to live in,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing here in King County. It’s nuts, and people are getting sick of it. We can only take so much.”

Throughout our conversation, the good-natured Teamster connected Local 174’s struggle with other developments within labor, from the recent Teamsters United win to the propulsive campaign to unionize Seattle’s caffeinated hometown heroes, Starbucks baristas. He and his union siblings are appreciative of the support they’ve gotten during the strike, and he sounded especially chuffed about one unexpected supporter: Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, who auctioned off a guitar for their strike fund and is an old friend of the Teamsters (he even played at their annual convention in 2016). His own sentiments about fighting for retirees also echo striking workers from GM to John Deere to Kellogg’s to Columbia to Warrior Met Coal.

“We’re not fighting for just our benefit,” Gallagher told me. “We’re fighting for everybody that comes behind us. We’re fighting for the next generation. We’re fighting for people down the street. It’s a lot bigger than just us.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/seattle-general-strike-teamsters/
The Radical Vision of Silme Domingo and Gene Vierneshttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/domingo-viernes-union-reform/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyJan 18, 2022

The cost of labor rights in the United States has always been paid in workers’ blood. Many of the labor movement’s most critical moments are scented with gunpowder and dynamite and punctuated by funerals. Many of the movement’s greatest heroes have been beaten or imprisoned, and cops and assassins have murdered rank-and-file leaders like IWW organizer Frank Little, strike balladeer Ella May Wiggins, Laborers head Joseph Caleb, United Farmworkers strike leader Nagi Daifullah, and United Mineworkers reformer Jock Yablonski. But even against that backdrop, the story of Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes sounds more like a 1980s action movie than the real, horrific tragedy that it was. In 1981, a foreign despot organized the gangland execution of two young Filipino union organizers, with guns furnished by their own union president.

Domingo and Viernes are especially relevant now, as thousands of rank-and-file union members across the country are challenging the entrenched power structures and sclerotic union leadership whose actions—or lack thereof—have been disempowering members and weakening the broader labor movement for decades. In December 2021, over 60 percent of the membership of the United Auto Workers (UAW), one of the nation’s most storied unions, voted to implement a system of direct elections, thus upending the decades-long top-down rule of the UAW’s Administration Caucus. The referendum was the result of a consent decree between the union and the US Department of Justice, and followed a federal corruption probe and years of corruption charges against various high-ranking UAW officials, including former UAW presidents Gary Jones and Dennis Williams. Led by the Unite All Workers for Democracy reform committee, the “one member, one vote” campaign captured the attention of both the members (143,000 of whom voted) and the labor movement as a whole.

These are all fights over union democracy—a condition in which members have a direct say in their representation and the running of their union. Last year, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union notched a major victory when members voted overwhelmingly for a progressive, militant Teamsters United slate, toppling the Hoffa dynasty. The TDU was founded in the 1970s (initially as Teamsters for a Decent Contract) to push for free and fair elections. After a sprawling federal racketeering case against the union led to a 1989 consent decree forcing the union to implement “direct rank-and-file voting by secret ballot in union-wide, one-member, one-vote elections,” TDU was able to start cleaning up the union, and even briefly seized power before Jimmy Hoffa’s old guard came crashing back in in 1998. Now, the reformers have another chance to restore the union to its fighting form, and trade concessions and sweetheart contracts for beefed-up representation. TDU promises to modernize operations, bring Amazon to heel, and build enough power to face down UPS at the bargaining table in 2023.

Domingo and Viernes would surely have been thrilled to hear about these developments. They too were elected to leadership on a reform platform, and were determined to root out the corruption within their union, Local 37 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which until 1950 had been ​​a local of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packinghouse, and Allied Workers of America, and before that, the ​​Cannery and Farm Labor Union (CFLU) Local 18257. (In a stroke of foreshadowing, two Filipino CFLU leaders, Aurelio Simon and Virgil Duyungan—himself accused of corruption—were murdered in 1936 after fighting to abolish the exploitative contract labor system that kept Asian immigrant cannery workers in a cycle of debt and poverty. However controversial they may have been in life, their deaths galvanized the Filipino cannery worker community and strengthened the union.)

When Domingo and Viernes ventured into the Alaskan canneries in the 1970s, they were building upon decades of organizing, educating, and agitating by Filipino and Native Alaskan labor organizers and rank-and-file workers. The two friends—one an unassuming Texan, the other fond of driving a flashy Monte Carlo, both dedicated revolutionaries—spearheaded efforts to improve working conditions in the cold, wet factories full of sharp knives and fish guts where thousands of seasonal Filipino migrant workers (“Alaskeros”) and Native Alaskans labored. They were no strangers to the slime line; Viernes grew up spending his summers working in the Alaskan canneries, and Domingo had Alaskero experience as well; his father, Nemesio, a former migrant worker, was also the vice president of Local 37. As Viernes wrote in his unfinished history of the Alaskeros, “When the spring field work comes to a grinding halt, many Filipino workers migrate north to find the one job available to them: sliming fish in the chilly fish houses of Alaska.… they have tried but cannot find work elsewhere, lack necessary skills, schooling, or resources, and are prevented from gaining jobs.”

White employers treated Filipino workers and Native Alaskans abominably. The Filipino workers were kept in segregated, dank bunkhouses and served fish-head soup to power their 12-hour shifts. These migrant workers were part of a seasonal loop that took them from California’s fields to Washington’s fruit orchards to Alaskan canneries, and back again. One of the few upsides of this arrangement was that these workers also carried their shared grievances and union sympathies with them. When union organizers showed up, they were often welcomed with open arms by workers fed up with the racism, discrimination, and brutal working conditions. In 1971, Domingo and Viernes both found themselves blacklisted from their cannery jobs for speaking up about racism and soon became involved in the Alaskan Cannery Workers Association, which brought three class-action lawsuits against the cannery companies for racial discrimination. That would mark the beginning of their brief but historic partnership, and showed how their experience as rank-and-file workers drove them to try to fix the union they still believed in.

Inspired by Local 37’s militancy in the 1930s and ’40s (when the contract labor system was finally thrown off for good) and dispirited by its post–Red Scare conservatism, the two young men resolved to reform the organization from the inside. They founded a rank-and-file committee in 1977 devoted to fighting for union democracy and against corruption, which was already widespread. The union’s dispatch system, which determined which workers would be sent out to work assignments and was supposed to operate around seniority, was instead controlled by dispatchers and foremen who gave the best gigs to their gambling buddies and those who could afford a bribe. The union’s cozy relationship with organized crime further complicated matters; often those jumping the line were Tulisan gang members, who paid their way into the canneries where they oversaw gambling operations. Trying to clean up the union was dangerous, but the Rank-and-File Caucus persevered, quietly organizing across racial lines, training shop stewards, and building power for several years until they swept the 1980 elections and installed Domingo as secretary-treasurer and Viernes as a dispatcher.

The pair were also deeply involved in the Filipino community in their adopted hometown of Seattle, and were local leaders in the anti-imperialist struggle against the US colonial control of the Philippines and the country’s kleptocratic dictator, Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda. Domingo and Viernes cofounded in the Seattle chapter of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino, or KDP), a revolutionary anti-imperialist socialist organization devoted to combating Marco’s antidemocratic repression. They worked to foster solidarity across the Filipino diaspora and to inspire their local community to speak out against the atrocities happening back in the Philippines. In 1981, Viernes took a trip to the Philippines to visit family, meet with anti-Marcos union leaders (and present them with a $290,000 donation), and learn about the struggles workers faced under the Marcos regime. His findings were far from positive, and several months later, at an ILWU convention in Honolulu, he and Domingo introduced a resolution to investigate the conditions of workers in the Philippines (to the dismay of the Marcos supporters within their ranks, which included Local 37 president Tony Baruso).

Their resolution passed, but those close to them say that the convention was the moment when Domingo and Viernes knew that their futures were in jeopardy. Terri Mast, a Rank-and-File Caucus member, KDP comrade, and Domingo’s partner, with whom he was raising two young daughters, characterized their resolution as “a direct threat” to the Marcos regime, which had little support from labor due to its inhumane treatment of workers. “The support for the KMU, the largest trade union federation in the Philippines, had just been sealed,” she told Ron Chew in his essential oral history, Remembering Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes The Legacy of Filipino American Labor Activism. “Any disruptions of cargo in or out of the Philippines would have a major economic impact on the country.” Between the resolution, and Viernes’s overseas trip and material support for the anti-Marcos labor movement, the men were not surprised when they began seeing unfamiliar cars tailing them and their family members. After the convention, Domingo came to the Local 37 board with a macabre request: He wanted to buy life insurance.

His instincts were correct. On June 1, 1981, two Tulisan members murdered Domingo and Viernes, who were both only 29 years old. Viernes died immediately, but Domingo, shot four times in the stomach, dragged himself outside and gasped out the names of the men who’d shot them. He died the next day, and the men he’d named—“Guloy and Ramil,” or Pompeyo Benito Guloy and Jimmy Bulosan Ramil, Local 37 members and Tulisan enforcers—were arrested for murder and sentenced to life in prison, as was gang leader Tony Dictado, who’d put out the hit and driven the getaway car. The police questioned Baruso, but he would not face charges until a decade later. According to Seattle attorney Michael Withey, a close friend of Domingo and Viernes who had been the lawyer for ILWU Local 37 in 1981 and wrote a book about the murders, “The FBI was instrumental in the cover-up and didn’t want Baruso charged by the prosecuting attorney.” In 1991, Baruso—whom Withey contends the Marcos regime paid $15,000 to orchestrate the murders—was finally found guilty of first-degree murder and ordered to pay millions to the victims’ families. He died in prison in 2008.

As the Domingo and Viernes’s families and community mourned, it soon became clear that the shooters had been bit players in a larger conspiracy. “I would say it took us less than 48 hours to really map out who benefitted from the murders, and it was always the Marcos dictatorship who benefitted from Silme and Gene’s murders,” Cindy Domingo, Silme’s younger sister, told Seattle’s KNKX in 2020. The loss of Domingo and Viernes was devastating, but their surviving family members and labor comrades continued the work they’d begun together. Mast and Cindy Domingo worked alongside dozens of activists to create the Committee for Justice for Domingo and Viernes, whose legal work would connect the murders directly to Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. The Marcos were found guilty by a federal jury in 1989. It was the first and only time a foreign head of state has been held responsible for the deaths of Americans on US soil.

It’s hard to believe that a story this full of drama, violence, justice, and heartbreak isn’t common knowledge (or an HBO series), but Domingo and Viernes, like so many other pivotal labor leaders, have never gotten as much recognition as they deserve. Their memories loom large within several spheres, though—in Seattle’s Filipino and labor communities, in the ILWU’s storied history, and in the history of trailblazing rank-and-file Asian immigrant worker leaders in the US labor movement. Using court-ordered funds awarded from both the Marcos family and the four convicted murderers, Seattle’s Northwest Labor and Employment Law Office created the Domingo/Viernes Justice Fund in their memory. The Harry Bridges Labor Center at the University of Washington offers an annual Silme Domingo & Gene Viernes Scholarship in Labor Studies to students “who are committed to the principles of justice and equality and have demonstrated financial need.” Though devastated by the loss, Rank-and-File Caucus continued its reform mission, entering a troubled period before finding new footing in a merger with the Inlandboatmans Union. Mast, the lifelong labor activist and Domingo’s common-law widow, stepped in to fill his position in Local 37 after his death, and has served as the IBU’s secretary-treasurer since 1993.

Silme’s daughter, Ligaya Domingo, was only 3 years old when her father was murdered, but has kept his memory alive in her own way. She began her career in labor as a union organizer, and she now works as the racial justice and education director at SEIU Healthcare 1199NW. “I was just really instilled with the idea of needing to do work that changed the world,” she told Ron Chew in his oral history. “Working in the labor movement in a lot of ways is like home to me, because I’m with people who understand me on this whole new level because they know my history.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/domingo-viernes-union-reform/
Workers Are Paying the Price for Kroger’s Profitshttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/kroger-fred-meyer-labor/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyJan 14, 2022

Cindy Wilbur has spent over 20 years working for Fred Meyer, a big-box supermarket that is part of the Kroger family of grocery chains, and for the first 18 of them, she was happy. Back then, she was employed as a food price changer and making decent money working 48 hours a week. After itchy feet led her to try a string of sales jobs for other grocery chains, like Kraft and Advantage, Wilbur realized something wasn’t clicking. “Although I was good at sales, I didn’t really enjoy it,” the soft-spoken 51-year-old told me in a phone call earlier this week. “I really stopped and thought about what was the last time I was really happy in my job, and that was when I was at Fred Meyers.” She returned to the chain in 2020, and began working at the Federal Way location near her home just outside Seattle, Wash. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and everything changed. Now, she said, “I would swear that I was in a completely different company.”

With interjections from her beloved imperial Shih Tzu, Charlie, in the background, Wilbur told me how hard it was pay her bills in her new job in the online orders department, now that her hours have been slashed to 20 per week. She said she sees new workers being hired all the time and frets about losing her health care coverage, which is only available to employees who work 80 hours a month. If she loses so much as an hour to traffic or a miscommunication, the consequences are brutal. “I remember a few times now I received letters in the mail saying in two months, you won’t have medical coverage,” she said. Wilbur, who makes $18.10 an hour, has medical issues that require regular doctor visits, and she tries to help as much as she can a disabled sister and a 97-year-old grandmother. Charlie is sick, too, and his vet bills aren’t cheap either.

Wilbur is two months behind on rent, and several months behind on her power bill. The Fred Meyer job was supposed to augment her savings, which she’d built up into “a nice little nest egg” over the years, but instead she has depleted those savings just trying to get by. She told me she’s now planning on picking up a second job, which will have her working seven days a week, because the $362 per week (before taxes) she earns at Fred Meyer is not enough to survive. “Each time I go to look at my weekly pay, I feel a little sick to my stomach,” she said. “I have quite literally faced the choice of, do I eat or do I put gas in my car? Do I pay some on my power bill? Do I put this in my savings for rent, to catch up on the rent that I’m behind on? We have a mandate in Washington state right now to protect people from evictions and from having their power shut off. And if it wasn’t for that mandate, right now, I would be homeless.”

Wilbur is one of the nearly half a million people who currently work full- or part-time for Kroger or one of its subsidiaries, and the strenuous, uncertain conditions she deals with on the job are far from unique. A new white paper from nonprofit researchers at the Economic Roundtable called “Hungry at the Table” found her story reflected in thousands of other workers. Two-thirds of the 10,000 Kroger workers they surveyed said that they do not earn enough money to cover their basic expenses every month, with 44 percent of them reporting that they cannot pay rent and 39 percent saying they can’t afford groceries. Fourteen percent reported that they are currently experiencing homelessness or have been homeless within the past year. Eighty-five percent of the single parents surveyed are experiencing food insecurity. The 10 percent discount Kroger offers its employees must feel like an insult when they’re spending their days surrounded by food they cannot afford—and when the company’s CEO, Rodney McMullin, has seen his pay increase by 296 percent over the past decade, taking home over $22 million in 2020. Fueled by the very pandemic its workers were battling, Kroger’s profits spiked to $132.5 billion in sales during 2020, and netted $2.8 billion in profit during 2020.

Scheduling is a concern, too, both in terms of hours being cut and in the scheduling process itself. Over half of workers surveyed have work schedules that change at least every week, with 13 percent dealing with schedules that change every single day. “My work is never the same each week,” Wilbur said. “Each day it changes; sometimes I’ll work at 7 am, sometimes at nine, sometimes 11 am or 12 to 4 o’clock.” For workers who have had to take on second jobs or have family commitments, the system is untenable. Wilbur told me about a coworker who has young children and is desperate to keep those medical benefits for their sake, even if the schedule kills her. “She has been working herself to the bone to try to take care of her and her children,” Wilbur said. “She has picked up a second job, and I’ve seen a change in her. She’s so tired. And I don’t know how much longer she can keep up with it.”

These workers do have one advantage that many other grocery workers don’t—a union. Kroger employees are represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), who funded this new study and have pushed employers to take Covid precautions seriously as the pandemic has raged on. Earlier, the union won hazard pay for its members, and when that temporary bump evaporated two months later, Wilbur and her coworkers fought back. She became involved in a public pressure campaign to shame Kroger into doing the right thing, and was one of several union workers who spoke in front of the Seattle City Council last December urging it to reinstate hazard pay.

Their efforts paid off; they won a three-month extension and $4 per hour pay bump. Unfortunately, as she told me, once that period was over, “without a word, it was gone.” Her store’s Covid rules soon fell by the wayside too. Now, two years into the pandemic, between the customers who refuse to wear masks and a lack of safety protocols in place, it’s hard not to feel hopeless. “There’s just no protection, none,” she sighed. “In our store’s deli department, we have so many Covid-positive employees, that if there is one more, they have to shut down the department.”

When I asked her about how the pandemic has affected the way she interacts with customers, Wilbur emphasized how much she does appreciate it when people thank her for what she’s doing, or are even just polite. There are “rude, nasty” ones, but she tries not to focus on them. Right now, she works in the pickup department preparing online orders and taking them out to customers’ cars, a service that she says she’s seen a lot of elderly or otherwise medically vulnerable people use and that she’s proud to provide. “Just a little bit of patience is all I ask for,” she said.

But ultimately the customers aren’t the biggest problem facing Wilbur and her coworkers at Kroger stores across the country; it’s the employers who have failed to protect them while expecting peak performance from their overworked, underpaid, and, as it turns out, hungry and stressed-out employees. It isn’t just Seattle, either; workers at two other Kroger subsidiaries, King Soopers and City Market in Colorado went on strike early Wednesday morning. The strike—officially over the company’s failure to negotiate in good faith—involves 8,000 workers at 78 stores. The company has already advertised for scab workers at $18 per hour—two dollars more than the union workers are paid. The striking workers have asked customers to avoid shopping at King Soopers throughout the duration of the three-week strike, and members of Denver’s BCTGM Local 26—who have pledged to honor the UFCW picket line—have also voted to strike. They’ll meet with the company on January 19 to determine whether or not the union will walk. 

Just like Wilbur, the Colorado workers received hazard pay during the very beginning of the pandemic, only for it to disappear six weeks later; workers also report being harassed and even assaulted by customers, and crushed by heavy workloads caused by chronic understaffing. “The companies were thriving, but our workers didn’t thrive,” UFCW Local 7 president Kim Covoda said during a Monday press conference. “Know what our workers got? Covid. Attacked. Beat up. Spit on. Slapped. Overworked. And the company? They did great. They did absolutely great, sitting behind their desk doing their job by Zoom.”

Meanwhile, the Economic Roundtable paper provided a number of recommendations to alleviate the harm being caused to the Kroger workforce, from raising the hourly wage to a more livable $22 per hour to hiring more workers on full-time and offering housing assistance, child care assistance, and a 50 percent employee discount. All or any of these steps would be an improvement, and a relatively light lift for a company that continues to rake in billions of dollars. As it stands now, workers like Wilbur have borne the cost of those profits for far too long—and it’s about goddamn time they got a break.

“We are working really, really hard, and we’re working to help the customers,” she told me. “We’re being pushed to our limits, but it just seems as though my employers are never happy with anything. They always want more, more and more and more and more…”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/kroger-fred-meyer-labor/
The Indomitable Rev. Addie L. Wyatthttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/addie-wyatt-labor/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyJan 11, 2022

When she reported to work for her first day at Armour and Company’s meatpacking plant in 1941, Addie L. Wyatt was not planning on becoming a labor activist. She didn’t even really want to be a butcher, but after spending weeks applying for work as a typist and being rejected each time, the young Southern transplant was growing desperate. The meatpacking workers at Armour’s sprawling Chicago facility had a union, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), and drew a good wage; Wyatt had a family to support, so despite her lack of butchering experience, the five-foot tall, 100-pound 17-year-old decided to give it a shot. An exasperated foreman tossed her off the line, but as she was leaving, Wyatt noticed a group of white women waiting to apply for clerical positions. She slipped in and took the typing test with them, passing easily thanks to skills she’d acquired in a high school typing course. Those who had passed were told to report to work on Monday, but when Wyatt showed up, she was instead directed to the factory floor, and told to join the other Black women canning stew. At Armour—and in so many other places then—Black women were not welcome in the front office.

What happened to Wyatt that day was not unique, or even unexpected. During the 1940s, Black women across the country were forced to endure these kinds of humiliations just to earn a living. This phenomenon was not new then, and it is not new now, when Black women still make on average 63 cents to the white man’s dollar and continue to face racism, discrimination, and misogynoir (as well as classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and various other forms of oppression) on the job, in the courts, and throughout society. Wyatt’s politics and identity as a Black Christian feminist trade unionist drove her to push back against an unfair system, and she fought even harder because she had come up against it herself. If today’s union leaders can be criticized as too meek, too comfortable, too conservative, and too quiet on pressing social and racial justice issues, they need only to look back at trailblazers like Addie L. Wyatt. She was a poor Black woman born into the Jim Crow South who harnessed the power of solidarity, collective action, faith, and sheer grit to change the course of history. Every union should know her name, and every union leader should aspire to the example she set.

That incident at Armour had set off a series of events that saw a furious and determined young Wyatt channel her indignation and hurt into action. After she’d been shunted off to the canning department, she stayed at Armour because she needed the money; the pay for canning stew was 62 cents an hour. As she later told interviewer Joan McGann Morris, “If you were black like me and got hired at all, you might have earned something like $8 a week. Of course, $24 a week was more money than I had ever seen in my life.” Wyatt discovered that the UPWA not only did not discriminate against women or Black workers but had in fact put significant effort into becoming a model of militant, multiracial solidarity. (The UPWA required each of its union locals to have an antidiscrimination department, which must have been a relief for Wyatt to see after the rude welcome she’d been given by her racist employers.) She joined the union in 1941, and almost immediately began seeing the benefits of her decision. When Armour tried to fire her and hire a white woman in her place, the UPWA used its seniority clause to protect her job. When she became pregnant with her second child, Wyatt again feared she would be fired, but thanks to concessions bargained in the UPWA contract by union women before her, Wyatt found she was actually eligible for up to one year of parental leave.

Through her involvement with the union, Wyatt saw how rank-and-file unionized workers could improve their material conditions and build power in the workplace by coming together. By 1953, she had risen through the ranks to become the first Black woman to hold the office of vice president for Chicago’s UPWA Local 56. She was elected president soon afterward, representing workers across a five-state region. “Racism and sexism is an economic issue,” she later reflected. “It was very profitable to discriminate against women and against people of color. I began to understand that change could come but you could not do it alone. You had to unite with others. That was one of the reasons I became a part of the union. It was a sort of family that would help in the struggle.”

Wyatt was a child of the Great Migration. She was born Addie Cameron in Brookhaven, Miss., in 1924, and moved to Chicago with her large family when she was 6 years old. When Addie was 4, a mob lynched two Black men a short distance from her family home; two years later, when her father, Ambrose, got into a physical fight with his white boss, he took no chances and immediately left town, sending for the family a few months later. Like many other Southern Black families who’d left home to escape Jim Crow and landed in cramped, unfamiliar, chillier climes, the Camerons struggled to adjust. Though both of her parents were skilled tradespeople—her mother a seamstress, her father a tailor—the Great Depression made it difficult for them to find steady work, and they had to rely on relatives and supplemental assistance to get by. When her mother died in 1944, Addie took in her five younger siblings as well as caring for her own children with husband Claude, the high school sweetheart she had married at age 16.

Family and economic concerns were always on her mind, but even as she became more deeply involved in labor, she found herself consumed by the fight for civil rights and racial justice as well as the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. To Wyatt, all three struggles were intertwined; as she once said, “I was fighting on behalf of workers, fighting as a black, and fighting as a female.” By then, she had been called to serve as an international representative for her union, a post she would hold until 1974. Her experience as a Black feminist union leader inspired her to push for unions to take a more consciously intersectional approach when handling workplace issues and organizing an increasingly diverse workforce. In 1956, when she was working as a program coordinator for District One of the UPWA, hers was the first union to invite Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to visit Chicago—to be presented with funds for the Montgomery Improvement Association, which had recently been formed to direct the boycott of segregated public buses in Alabama. “I had to cover five states to raise funds so that we would have our quota,” Wyatt remembered. “Thank God, we did very well because, number one, I had faith in God, faith in the movement, and faith in the people, white and black, that we were serving. We raised the largest amount of any district in our union.”

After that, she and Claude developed a close friendship and working relationship with King. They were arrested with him in Selma, and took part in the March on Washington; she was part of the initial cohort of MIA members who brought powerhouse queer Black labor organizer Bayard Rustin down to Montgomery. Thanks to her leadership and that of other Black union leaders like UPWA Vice President Russell R. Lasley, the UPWA also played a key role in the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, donating 80 percent of the organization’s first-year operating costs. The union also held fundraising drives to raise money for sit-ins and freedom rides, as well as furnishing legal support. Wyatt was later invited to serve as a labor adviser to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and she and Claude were founding members of the SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket in 1962, working alongside the Rev. Jesse Jackson to distribute food relief to 12 American cities. “The United Packinghouse Workers of America has set an example for every democratic organization in the nation,” Dr. King said in a 1962 address to the union. “Indeed, if labor as a whole, if the administration in Washington, matched your concern and your deeds, the civil rights problem would not be a burning national shame, but a problem long solved and in its solution a luminous accomplishment in the best tradition of American principles.”

While she was consumed by her civil rights work, Wyatt was also balancing her commitments in labor and the feminist movement, as well as her faith. She had become an ordained minister in 1955, and she and her husband founded the Vernon Park Church of God, where they acted as copastors, organized grassroots protests, and fundraised for civil rights causes. The Reverend Wyatt was determined to lift up all of her people as she continued to climb. In 1962, she was appointed to President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, and served on its Labor Legislation Committee on Eleanor Roosevelt’s recommendation. In 1966, following several years of talks inspired by those findings, she became one of the cofounders of the National Organization for Women and an outspoken advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment—a goal that, sadly, is yet to be realized.

Wyatt cofounded the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists in 1972 and chaired its National Women’s Committee, working to open up more paths to union leadership for Black women. The UPWA merged with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America in 1968, but Wyatt kept her position as international representative until 1974. That was a busy year for Addie; not only was she tapped to lead the union’s first Women’s Affairs Department, she and Willa Mae Sudduth cofounded the Coalition of Labor Union Women, a nonprofit group that sought to forge strong connections between the labor and the feminist movements. In 1975, she was named one of Time magazine’s Women of the Year for “speaking out effectively against sexual and racial discrimination in hiring, promotion and pay” and in 1977 was similarly honored by Ladies’ Home Journal. When the Amalgamated and the Retail Clerks International Union merged into the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union in 1979, Wyatt became the ​​first Black woman to be elected international vice president of a major American labor union. She held that post until 1984, when she retired from her union duties and returned to the Vernon Park Church of God to serve as its full-time pastor.

Wyatt’s life as a leader and activist can be broken down into a seemingly endless list of accolades and accomplishments, but those only give us so much insight into the real woman behind all of those incredible achievements (though I would recommend reading Marcia Walker-McWilliams’s excellent Reverend Addie Wyatt: Faith and the Fight for Labor, Gender, and Racial Equality for deeper insights into Wyatt’s faith and personal life). Her truest legacy may be in the work she did on the factory floor, on the picket lines, and at the pulpit. She spent years listening, organizing, and advocating with and for her fellow workers; allying herself with the poor, ignored, and oppressed; uplifting her fellow Black women; and forcing an industry, a movement, and, later, a world that seldom gave them a second thought to make space for them. She occupies an outsize place in American labor history, whether or not the history books care to show it.

“Our women’s movement started in the organized labor movement, because one of our greatest themes was to make life better for women,” Wyatt once said. “We had to stir them up and we had to talk to our women about why we were really discriminated against. It has nothing to do with who has to do the more difficult jobs. It was because we were female and it was profitable to discriminate against somebody, and the somebodies that were discriminated against were those who were of color and those who were female; also, those who lived in geographical locations that were in the South. We had to make a change.”



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Why Alabama Coal Miners Are Still on Strikehttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/alabama-miners-strike-warrior-met/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyJan 7, 2022

appy miners run more coal.”

When coal miner Greg Pilkerton spoke those words to me in his gruff Alabama drawl, it sounded like the most natural statement in the world. Of course workers are more productive when they’re respected, well-compensated, and safe. Any argument against the notion would betray a profound lack of understanding of both the labor market and human nature writ large. Only a fool would say otherwise. Unfortunately, there are quite a lot of fools who sign our paychecks. Take the owners of Warrior Met Coal in Brookwood, Ala.; instead of sitting down at the bargaining table and hammering out a mutually satisfactory contract with the union negotiators who represent the will of their workforce, they have chosen to stall and, as an unfair labor practices charge filed by the the United Mine Workers of America alleges, to operate in bad faith. This kind of stubborn cruelty is bad for workers, but it’s also bad for business. The strike has cost Warrior Met nearly $7 million and counting.

The strike’s circumstances have shifted over the past 10 months, but the root of the conflict remains the same: The coal miners want a better union contract, and the company does not want to give it to them. The workers have held fast to the same demands they laid out back on April 1, when they first voted to strike, and again on April 9, after the membership resoundingly rejected a tentative agreement that had been negotiated between Warrior Met and the UMWA. As the miners saw it, that April 6 offer was just a linguistic reshuffling of the 2016 contract under which they already labored and which had caused them so much pain. When Jim Walter Resources, the former owner of the mine, went bankrupt in 2015, Warrior Met brought in and rehired the laid-off workforce with the caveat that they’d have to accept a stripped-down contract and deep pay cuts.

After five long years of sacrifice, low pay, and grueling working conditions, the workers expected something that was at least as good as what they had before Warrior Met swooped in. Improvements would be nice, too, but now they also need to ensure that the company doesn’t follow through on its threat to give their jobs away. The workers want higher wages, more time off to spend with their families, lower health care costs, and, most importantly, respect on the job. Since this is an unfair labor practices strike (rather than an economic one), the company is prohibited from permanently replacing the union workers, but Warrior Met—who has kept the mines running with scab labor from Kentucky, West Virginia, and elsewhere—isn’t budging. Out on the picket lines, miners set copies of that hated old contract on fire, consigning that physical representation of the company’s avarice into a rusty burn barrel.

For Pilkerton, the union—and coal mining—has always been about family. When I met up with him during a recent reporting trip for More Perfect Union, I visited his wife’s parents’ house, a spacious haven decorated with family photos. A frothy white Christmas tree winked out from a corner, and the requisite college football game was unfolding on the flatscreen TV hung behind him. A burly white man with a bushy beard and kind eyes, Pilkerton was dressed in green and gold UMWA camo; his cheerful blonde wife, Amy, looked on as her mother knit beside her. He settled into the sofa, and told me about how he got here.

His father was a coal miner who spent 47 years underground and served as a UMWA district representative, and for as long as he could, he did his best to instill union pride in the next generation. Greg said he remembers growing up going to meetings with his parents and playing with other coal miners’ children at union-sponsored picnics; their union hall had playground equipment outside, and they’d square off against kids from other local mines in games of tug-of-war. When a deadly explosion rocked the Jim Walter Resources No. 5 coal mine in 2001, killing 13, Greg’s father was supposed to have been down there with them. Miraculously, Greg had cajoled his father into missing work to attend his grandson’s birthday party that afternoon instead, because he’d never made it to one before. Coal miners are used to missing out on family gatherings and milestones because of their punishing 12-hour work schedules, and this lack of family time has remained a major point of contention throughout the Warrior Met strike. Back then, though, the rules were looser, and that “guilt trip” may have saved Greg’s father’s life.

Later, “like so many other coal miners, he retired, and died shortly after,” the younger Pilkerton told me. Greg followed in his footsteps, and worked in various local mines for years before he landed at Warrior Met in 2016. There, the mood was hopeful, with workers expecting that their efforts would be rewarded once the company was back on its feet. That honeymoon period didn’t last, though. “We were miserable the last two years, absolutely miserable,” he said. “But we knew if we did a good job, the company was going to do what they said they was going to do and take care of us. We put the right faith in the wrong people.”

Pilkerton got an up-close look at just how much Warrior Met values its employees when he was injured on the job several years ago. One night, he came out of the mines bleeding, his left hand crushed and mangled by machinery underground. Instead of calling for an ambulance, his boss asked a security guard to drive him to the nearest hospital, and to take the bumpy back roads instead of the highway. Then, after forcing Pilkerton to interrupt treatment and shunt between different medical providers, Warrior Met fired him. “It is sad that money becomes more important than the people,” he said. “But to hear that we’re not worth what we’re making? That’s what gets me, because that hurts my feelings.”

The company eventually hired him back, but Pilkerton had to fight it every step of the way toward his reinstatement. He also sustained permanent damage to his hand. When I showed him my own missing fingers (an accident of birth rather than industry), he gave me a wry grin, and told me, “We’re family.”

With that experience fresh in his mind, Pilkerton was still a little shocked when contract negotiations came around in early 2020, and the company essentially flipped them the bird. He and his coworkers hadn’t expected things to escalate into a strike so quickly. Neither had the company—but then the miners, all 1,100 of them, walked. “The first couple of weeks were pretty dadgum intense,” Pilkerton told me. “You had so many people out there at one time, and the intensity that was going on then, we actually had them stopped—the company wasn’t getting in and getting out. It was a situation where we had a little bit of bargaining room, too. It shouldn’t be one-sided all the time.”

Warrior Met disagreed. Beginning in July, the company filed a series of court-ordered injunctions against the union, whittling away bit by bit the number of picketers allowed on the line. By mid-December, a temporary restraining order had knocked it down to zero, and the strikers were left without a picket line at all. The company justified this measure by alleging that the picketers were “violent,” and even hired a high-powered publicity firm, LA-based Sitrick and Company, to feed stories to the local press that painted the UMWA members as lawless thugs. All the while, Warrior Met and local police were twiddling their thumbs as vehicular attacks on the picket lines landed multiple workers in the hospital. Greg hasn’t forgotten, though, and neither has Amy; as I reported for this publication back in June, both of them were victims of these attacks, and had witnessed others.

One hot summer morning, around 6:30 am, Greg was on the line as usual when, following a heated exchange of words between the strikers and the driver of a white Dodge truck, who’d been antagonizing them, the truck turned around and plowed into the picket line, flinging a heavy burn barrel directly into him. “I had to dive into the road to keep from getting hit any worse, and there was all kinds of cars behind it,” he remembered. The impact tore his meniscus, and he’s since had to receive expensive gel injections in his knee to help alleviate the pain. “I’m trying to keep from having a knee replaced so maybe that’ll last,” he said ruefully. The driver, a contractor from West Virginia who was employed by Warrior Met, was eventually arrested. “They found him guilty,” said Greg, “but I still haven’t got any medical bills paid.”

When Amy was struck, Greg was wrapping up his picket-line duty for the day. He got a phone call, and rushed over in a panic to where she’d been picketing with other strikers. Cell phone service is spotty at best out on the more isolated roads around the mine, and all he had heard was, “Amy got hit by a car.”

She was struck on the right side of her body, and was sore for weeks after; at the hospital, she was found to have deep tissue bruises. “I didn’t even see the car coming,” Amy told me. “He didn’t even attempt to stop. He just barreled through the picket line, and luckily he hit me just on the right side. Had he hit me head-on, who knows whether I’d be sitting here talking to you right now.” To literally add insult to injury, Amy is among the multiple UMWA members and auxiliary members who have been slapped with additional legal charges in relation to the ongoing restraining order. “I’ve done been subpoenaed to court for criminal trespass, and the only thing I can figure is they’re trying to say that I was criminally trespassing on the day that I got hit. If I did step over onto their property, it is because one of their employees hit me with a car!”

Greg’s eyes glistened as he spoke about that day, still shaken at the memory. “​​That’s my wife,” he said. “You can hit me with a car, you can curse me, you can throw a bottle at me, I don’t care. But you’re not gonna mess with her or my kids.”

Beyond family ties, both Greg and Amy (and many other miners and auxiliary members I’ve spoken with) say that Warrior Met’s attempts to break the strike has only made the union stronger, and strengthened the community bonds between them. “They think that if they threaten us enough that the union will just give up, or some will decide to cross the picket line,” Amy told me. “But ​​my message is, we’re not going anywhere. They supposedly are telling their new hires that the union is gone, but the UMWA is probably stronger now than it was on March the 31st of 2021.”

Ten months in, the strike has become a long-haul struggle, and even with all of the mutual aid projects, donations from unions and labor groups across the country, and local support networks that the miners and auxiliary have built up, it has still been a very hard year for Brookwood, and for the Pilkertons. Though the Warrior Met strike has yet to surpass the UMWA’s historic battles against Massey Coal strike’s 15 months or Pittston’s April 1989 to February 1990 stretch, it’s getting damn near close—and is now the longest strike in Alabama history. Despite the company’s best efforts to smear them as marauding brutes, the union’s motto that its members will stick it out “one day longer, one day stronger” is not a threat. As far as Greg and his union siblings down in Brookwood are concerned, it’s a promise.

“Keep your head up and keep pushing forward because we will get through this,” Greg said. “I’d rather stand out here without and say, ‘You know what, I’m union, and I’m proud, and I’m not going to stand to be mistreated any longer,’ than to go back and have to face my kids and say, ‘Look, I’m a coward.’ I’m not. I can’t do it any other way.”



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What We Can Learn From Portland’s “Queen of the Bolsheviks”https://www.thenation.com/article/society/marie-equi-iww/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyJan 4, 2022

In the first week of January 1920, power brokers in the United States were gripped by fear. The Red Scare was burning bright, and Russia’s October Revolution of 1917 was still fresh in capitalists’ minds. The nation had seen a post–World War I upswing in labor activity and strikes. Even worse, the radical Industrial Workers of the World were agitating from coast to coast, and the union’s anti-capitalist message was finding purchase among disaffected, exploited workers, who would form crowds in front of IWW speakers on soapboxes. Anarchists, communists, socialists, and trade unionists—many of whom were immigrants, women, and people of color—were publicly and loudly pointing out the inequities and indignities of capitalist exploitation.

When the United States entered World War I, the government was furious that workers and radicals dared to criticize its actions. The 1917 Espionage Act had essentially criminalized opposition to the war, and President Woodrow Wilson soon signed more legislation aimed at curtailing dissent. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it illegal to publicly criticize the government, the military, the draft, or the flag itself, and the US Justice Department saw it as an opportunity to ramp up its long-running war on the left—and to declare open season on the IWW. In November 1919 through early January 1920, the department launched a series of crackdowns known as the Palmer Raids. Under the auspices of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, more than 500 people were deported, including anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and over 3,000 people were arrested. Among the latter was a woman named Marie Equi.

She was already well-known throughout Oregon by the time she was arrested. She was a highly respected doctor known for ministering to poor families and unemployed laborers. She provided abortions to those who needed them, and threw herself into the struggle for women’s suffrage. She was also one of the Pacific Northwest’s most prominent lesbians. From the moment she ran away with a high school girlfriend to try their hands at homesteading in rural Oregon to when she legally adopted a baby with her longtime partner Harriet Speckart, Equi stayed true to her principles and to herself even when it seemed like the entire world—or at least, the entirety of the US government—was against her. One of her first newspaper appearances came in 1893, when The Dalles Times-Mountaineer reported that she’d publicly horsewhipped a boss who’d withheld wages from one of her romantic partners. That was only the beginning of Equi’s public fight against the cheats, capitalists, and warmongers who constituted her enemies in the class war, a stance that would eventually earn her the nickname of Portland’s “Queen of the Bolsheviks.”

Her association with the IWW feels especially timely now, when the union’s Northwestern outposts have been making broad strides in their efforts at organizing fast-food workers. After spending years locked in bitter contract negotiations, employees of Burgerville, an Oregon-based chain, finally reached a tentative agreement with the company in November 2021, later ratifying the contract. In December 2021, the National Labor Relations Board found that Voodoo Doughnut, a local chain, had illegally surveilled, retaliated against, and fired workers during the course of a union certification election. The company reached a settlement with its workers’ IWW-affiliated union, Doughnut Workers United. While the IWW tends to get short shrift—or sometimes even outright hostility—from the traditional labor movement, its anti-capitalist, industrial focus clearly still resonates with workers a century after Equi threw in her lot with the Wobblies.

orn into a large Catholic Italian Irish immigrant family in New Bedford, Mass., Equi was a bright and devoted student who nonetheless was compelled to drop out of school as a young teen to work in the city’s textile mills. A well-off high school friend, Betsy Bell Holcomb, stepped in and helped fund Equi’s education for as long as she could—and when she couldn’t afford to help her any longer, the pair headed West to Oregon, where Equi would find her calling. The next decade would see Equi attend medical school in San Francisco and then set up her private practice in Portland, where she specialized in women’s health and became involved with the women’s suffrage movement. When the Great San Francisco Fire of 1906 leveled her former home, Equi was the only woman to join a delegation of doctors who collected 20 tons of medical supplies and traveled down from Oregon to offer aid to the victims. The local press lavished her with praise. She had no way of knowing that her relationship with the nation’s media would never be quite so rosy again.

Upon her return from San Francisco, Equi became one of the most trusted abortionists in Portland, treating people from every social class—and deftly avoiding the attention of law enforcement. She pioneered a sliding-scale model by which rich patients were charged more to subsidize the cost of treating poorer ones. As a lifelong outsider, she was unbothered by the social stigma and potential legal implications surrounding her work. Her friend Lew Levy once explained, “She did most of it for nothing, because working-class women needed it. If they could, they paid, if not, not.”

Her abortion work placed Equi at odds with many of her cohort in the Progressive movement, and she gradually found herself drifting into more radical waters. When women workers at a fruit cannery on Portland’s east side walked out in June 1913, she was called to one of the workers’ homes to render medical attention. It was the height of cherry season, in which women were expected to work for five to eight cents an hour in filthy conditions; when 200 of them walked out in protest, the ensuing battle became one of the Pacific Northwest’s first strikes led by women workers. As Equi passed the picket line en route to her house call, she recognized several of her former patients among the strikers, and when they invited her over, she hopped up on a barrel and began exhorting the workers still inside the plant to come out and join the strike. That initial protest blossomed into a full-fledged labor battle, and Equi’s commanding presence became a fixture on the increasingly volatile picket lines, where local police charged the strikers on horseback and striking women faced off against cops in the streets. Equi was nabbed for stabbing a policeman with a steel hatpin, and as she was taken to the police station during her first arrest of many, the final vestiges of her liberal faith in government reform fell away, and she was reborn a revolutionary. “I started in this fight a socialist, but I am now an anarchist,” she proclaimed. “I’m going to speak where and when I wish. No man will stop me.”

That commitment to free speech was a defining aspect of the IWW’s activism in the 20th century. Unlike the distorted interpretation offered by subsequent generations of bad-faith reactionaries, the Wobblies’ definition of free speech was simple: They fought for the right to speak in public, to stand on their soapboxes and spread their message of industrial unionism, anti-capitalism, and the One Big Union to whoever wished to listen. This should be protected by the First Amendment, but there was—and still is—a yawning gap between theory and practice when it comes down to who is actually allowed to exercise that right. Before the advent of television and radio, public performance was the main source of entertainment, and soapboxing was a popular means of mass communication used by politicians, actors, preachers, and political activists alike. Despite a widespread street-speaking tradition, Wobblies were routinely beaten, arrested, and imprisoned for attempting to speak publicly, hauled away in front of crowds of onlookers by police as local and federal politicians fretted and fumed about their “anti-American” messaging.

Cities passed reams of local ordinances and vagrancy laws to prevent the Wobblies from speaking, but every effort to quash their resolve was met by fervent resistance. The union developed a wickedly effective formula to combat these efforts at repression: When the first Wobbly to attempt to speak in a new location was pulled down off their soapbox, another would hop up and take their place, and so on and so forth until the jails were full. If the city stuck to its guns, a call would be sent out and Wobblies from across the country would pour into the offending locale, pack its jails, siphon off city resources, and generally refuse to give in until they either won the fight, a deal was struck, or a bout of state violence got the best of them. Free speech fights broke out in Spokane, Wash.; Missoula, Mont.; Kansas City, Mo.; Sioux City, Idaho; and San Diego, Calif. as well as in Portland, Ore., when the IWW caught wind of the fruit cannery strike and showed up with soapboxes at the ready. It was here that the memory of her working-class childhood, her leftist political awakening, and the marks of an unequal system that she saw etched into her patients’ bodies each day led her to throw her lot in with the Wobblies. The cannery strike failed, but the movement gained a giant.

Equi’s involvement with the IWW was only one aspect of her quest to realize her political goals. Because of her status as a professional, she never became a full IWW member, but she was one of the IWW’s fiercest advocates, speakers, and representatives. Her fiery temper was legendary, as was her militant commitment to free speech and her unshakable resolve when it came to her anti-capitalist, pro-worker politics. She also became close to the IWW’s famed “rebel girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who cofounded the ACLU and served as chairwoman of the Communist Party USA, and whose zeal for soapboxing and unflappable commitment to the cause drew Equi’s respect. Later in life, the two lived together for nearly a decade, caring for each other during recurring bouts of ill health and exhaustion; the exact nature of their relationship remains unknown, but there was undoubtedly a deep emotional connection that kept the two women bound together.

When the United States entered World War I, Equi’s anti-war stance set her apart from her family and her peers in the Portland medical community, but she refused to be cowed by public disapproval. During a patriotic parade in 1917, she unfurled a banner reading, “Prepare to die, workingmen, JP Morgan & Co. want preparedness for profit.” Those bold actions underlined her commitment to her political stance, but put a target on her back.

Police arrested Equi as she was giving a speech decrying US involvement in the war on June 30, 1918, the same day that law enforcement snatched up fellow Wobbly and socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs. Equi’s trial was rife with homophobia, and the state devoted considerable resources to securing her conviction. Equi launched a lengthy appeal process that delayed her imprisonment. In early 1919, a shingle workers’ strike in Everett, Wash., boiled over into an armed confrontation between a group of 250 Seattle-based Wobblies who’d boarded a steamer to support the workers and several hundred local vigilantes who’d been recruited by the local sheriff to repel the IWW’s attempt to disembark. Despite her own legal woes, Equi rushed to the scene to care for the Wobbly wounded and dying. It proved to be a last hurrah of sorts; less than a year later, with her appeal dead in the water, Equi was locked up in San Quentin.

Though she told her supporters, “I’m going to prison smiling,” in truth Equi’s time in San Quentin left her profoundly shaken. As her comrades and friends on the outside fought to secure her release, she busied herself writing letters to friends in the movement, sending notes to her daughter, and trying to forget that the FBI was still surveilling her every move. President Wilson commuted her original three-year sentence to 12 months and a day, but her months at San Quentin still felt to Equi like a lifetime. The aggressive patriotism that had bolstered US participation in World War I began to fade, and the political tides began turning in favor of granting amnesty to those who had been imprisoned for wartime dissent.

Equi spent the rest of her life continuing to advocate for free speech and workers’ issues, even as her health declined. She received a full pardon from President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933; while she was pleased to have had her right to vote restored, she still regarded Roosevelt with suspicion, deeming him to be as “slippery as an eel.” Her last recorded appearance as a labor agitator came in 1934, when she ventured out to the Portland docks to support a massive maritime strike involving members of 75 different unions. At 62, Equi walked the picket line, where she was again recognized by many former patients, and made her way down to the union hall to donate $250 (over $5,000 in 2021 currency) to the cause.

The workers won the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike, and remembered her dedication years later. In 1952, after they heard the news of then-80-year-old Equi’s death from renal disease, the dockworkers union passed a resolution in honor of their old friend. They declared Equi to have been a powerful fighter for the working class, who had “braved personal danger and hardships to preserve peace, freedom of speech, and the right of labor to organize.” It’s hard to imagine a more fitting epitaph for this remarkable woman, who spent her life in service to the working class and, when faced with the full force of the US government, refused to bite her tongue.

It’s important to remember Equi now for a multitude of reasons. First, because so few do, and her story deserves to be told. One of the most compelling aspects of that story is how she used her status as a well-paid middle-class professional to materially aid the working class and poor without subscribing to or pushing the reformism or paternalistic liberalism of her white social and economic peers. Her work as a physician of conscience, providing care to anyone who needed it and respecting her patients’ wishes above other laws or social conventions, draws a direct line to today’s tireless reproductive health workers and abortion rights activists. Decades before the widespread queer liberation movement began, she refused to hide or apologize for her queer identity, or to accept second-class status because of whom she loved or how she chose to become a parent. Her allegiance to the IWW and her anarchist political identity showed that she’d found a more egalitarian way to weaponize her privilege, and believed that the consequences of defying an unjust system were worth bearing.

Equi set an example for today’s well-heeled radicals and wavering progressives to follow when using what they have to help those who have less. As Michael Helquist uncovers in his biography of Equi, she said in a 1914 interview with the New Bedford Standard that she saw only two ways to go about aiding the poor, unemployed, and forgotten. “You must either have no money at all, so that nothing matters, or you must have enough to get you out of trouble when you are in it,” she explained. “And you are continually [in trouble] if you fight for the underdog.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/marie-equi-iww/
Alabama’s Coal Miners Are Striking for Their Liveshttps://www.thenation.com/article/economy/alabama-warrior-met-coal/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyJun 11, 2021

Alabama is a beautiful place filled with contradictions and complexities, but there are a few things that my time there has taught me that this state holds sacred. God, football, and barbecue top the list, of course (Roll Tide!), but for a group of coal miners in Tuscaloosa County, there’s another hallowed institution perched up on that pedestal: the union.

While Alabama itself may be a “right to work” state with a blood-red Republican legislature, its labor bona fides run just as deep, and its people are no strangers to organizing for the common good. The labor movement in Alabama is tough, determined and nimble; it has to be, given what it’s so frequently come up against from anti-worker politicians and powerful corporations. This past year, a high-profile union drive at an Amazon warehouse in nearby Bessemer, Ala., captivated the nation—but really, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given the area’s grounding in the civil rights movement and its unionized industrial past. A few days after the sad results of the Amazon election were announced (and national attention turned back away from the Deep South), a small coal-mining community in the rural region between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa came together to launch one of the largest strike actions in Alabama’s recent history.

On April 1, 2021, 1,100 miners at Warrior Met Coal in Brookwood pulled off their hard hats, hung up their reflective gear, and walked off the job. Their union, the United Mine Workers of America, had called a strike—the first one to hit the state’s coal mining industry in four decades—and the workers knew what was coming. There’s a deep generational memory in these mines. While many of this latest crop of workers hadn’t been around (or even alive) the last time coal miners in the area went on strike, their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers surely were, and passed down that knowledge to their kin. The union has been a part of life in those mines since 1890, when John L. Conley founded the UMWA’s District 20 in Alabama, which remains one of the most racially integrated UMWA chapters in the country, where about 20 percent of workers are Black. Crossing a picket line is a mortal sin here, an unthinkable betrayal that is enough to earn a permanent black mark on one’s reputation and standing in the community.

A hundred and thirty-one years later, the current members of District 20 are out on an unfair labor practices strike against Warrior Met, citing the company’s conduct during negotiations, and have been for over two months. It wasn’t initially expected to last this long. About a week into the strike, the company and UMWA leadership came to a tentative agreement, but after it was presented to the membership, they voted overwhelmingly to reject the offer and stay out on the picket line.

As multiple striking miners told me, the company’s offer didn’t improve enough on the current contract, which was implemented five years ago when Warrior Met bought the mines. The previous owners, Jim Walter Resources, had gone bankrupt, which resulted in mass layoffs; when Warrior Met bought the company, executives promised to rehire the bulk of the workforce on the condition that they accept a subpar contract—and calling it merely subpar is generous. Pay was slashed by $6 per hour to an average of $22; workers lost many of their paid holidays, some of their time off, and their ability to earn overtime pay; and their health insurance costs went way up while safety standards and working conditions went way down. A severe policy for absences from work that eliminated any flexibility whatsoever in case of unexpected sickness or emergencies was also enacted; as one miner’s wife described it to me, it’s a “four strikes and you’re out” system, which felt especially onerous considering the heavy toll that the work takes on the workers’ bodies, and the fact that the majority of them are parents.

Nonetheless, the miners signed on the dotted line back in 2016 with the understanding that, five years later, when the company was on its feet, they’d be rewarded with a better deal. While Warrior Met’s finances improved considerably during that span and remain robust even in spite of the pandemic’s impact, that time is up—and the company has shown zero interest in holding up its end of the bargain or in transferring any of that wealth to the workers who created it. On top of that, with a spate of recent attacks being attributed to company employees, Warrior Met has also shown that it has no qualms about playing dirty—even when that places its own workers’ lives at risk.

The Warrior Met picket line is really a grouping of 12 small outposts, stationed in front of each entrance to the sprawling mines. Many of the mine entrances are isolated, set down wooded country roads with no cell-phone service; there are never more than a few people out there, because the company finagled a court injunction limiting the number of people allowed on the line at a time. It also called in both state and local police as well as its own private, armed security to surveil the pickets and enforce the cap, which began as a paltry six but was bumped up to 10 following an appeal. Both the company and the union fly drones overhead to keep an eye on the lines, and police are a constant presence at the larger entrances.

It’s a recipe for tension, especially when the scabs and supervisors pass in and out and the community is small enough for folks to know exactly who has sold them out by crossing that line. At the end of May, after leading 300 miners on a march, 11 UMWA leaders were arrested for blocking the entrance to Mine #7 and refusing to leave; they were taken to the Tuscaloosa County Jail and kept overnight. The company’s silence at the bargaining table has grown deafening, and those escalating tensions have recently reached a fever pitch, as the UMWA alleges that company employees have begun waging blatant acts of violence against the striking miners.

Thanks to the watchful eye of the UMWA’s drone, footage of a brazen vehicular attack surfaced earlier this week. It was the third such attack on the strikers in as many days, and in each instance, UMWA leaders allege that a truck was driven directly into the picket line. I was able to review footage of the incidents, which shows exactly that—a black pickup truck turning off the highway and driving straight for a group of striking workers; a man is seen connecting with the hood of the truck, and stumbling backward from the impact. Multiple police reports have been filed and at least one arrest has been made, but strikers say that local police have shown little interest in pursuing the perpetrators. In one case, police are actually looking to arrest one of the victims, on the allegation that they used pepper spray on the driver in self-defense. Meanwhile, several strikers have been sent to the hospital with injuries. As UMWA International President Cecil Roberts commented, “Warrior Met seems to believe that it is all right to strike people with cars as they engage in legal, protected activity. This is a dangerous course of action that can swiftly lead to events spiraling out of control.”

Amy Pilkington’s husband, Greg, a six-year veteran of the mines and a coal miner’s son, is one of the miners who was injured in the attacks. She says that as a truck barreled through a picket line earlier this week, the truck hit a heavy burn barrel, throwing it against Greg’s leg. Doctors say that the impact left him with a torn meniscus. Back in 2016, he was badly injured in an accident underground, and sued Warrior Met; his wife was unsure if he had been specifically targeted as a result, but all the same saw it as part of a dangerous pattern. “They’re all right now really being targeted,” she explained.

“But I’m not going to give up, because that’s what they want,” Pilkington relayed from Greg, who was sitting next to her as we spoke on the phone. “That’s part of their agenda, to scare us off or physically and mentally make us to where we don’t want to fight anymore. [And] I grew up in the union. I know my dad and them picketed back in the ’80s, and it was a whole lot worse than what is going on now. I’m not going to, but if I was to give up this spot, my dad would probably come back to haunt me.”

The strike continues, even as the miners are now faced with the additional worry of company violence on top of the day-to-day struggle of keeping their kids fed and a roof over their heads. Unlike many unions, the UMWA does have an active strike fund, so members are able to draw biweekly $650 strike checks as long as they spend 16 hours on the picket line per week. But those checks only go so far, so the UMWA Auxiliary, which is run by miners’ spouses, family members, and retirees, has also organized a formidable strike pantry operation that takes in donations to provide groceries for over 200 families per week. It’s truly a community effort, in an area where entire generations of families are tied to the mines by blood and coal dust.

While the metallurgical coal produced at Warrior Met will continue to be in high demand in rapidly industrializing nations in Europe and Asia, the US coal industry as a whole is already in the midst of a sharp decline. Securing a strong union contract is one way that these workers can protect their livelihoods, and ensure that they’re not left behind as the country fitfully transitions to a post-coal future. Coal mining is inarguably a dirty, deeply environmentally unfriendly job, but for now, someone’s got to do it, and they deserve to be compensated fairly for their labors.

It has been a hard slog, and will undoubtedly get even harder, but the miners are determined to win. The Pilingtons and their brothers and sisters in UMWA District 20 aren’t backing down, come hell, high water, or (God forbid) another boss’s F-150. As they’ve made clear, Warrior Met can’t scare them; they’re stickin’ to the union.

“In this day and time you have to have a union to support you,” Pilkington, who is herself a member of the Alabama Education Association, explained. “Companies are so greedy that they’re going to take care of their selves and they don’t give a flying fart about their employees, as long as they’re getting their money. That’s all they care about. And it’s not right to the worker. We deserve just as much as these people that are sitting in offices.”



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From Philadelphia With Love and Ragehttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/philadelphia-trump-celebration/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyNov 9, 2020

It all came down to Philadelphia. It was only fitting that the most acrimonious presidential race in recent history would meet its end in a city that takes pride in its underdog status and refusal to back down from a fight. Electorally speaking, Pennsylvania is always a big deal, and when the prolonged nightmare that was the 2020 presidential election finally heaved itself across the finish line and the race was called for Joe Biden, it was clear that the Keystone State’s coveted electoral votes had been the tipping point. Its biggest city, heavily Democratic Philadelphia, had long suffered the indignities and insults of Donald Trump and his cronies. As the rest of the nation anxiously waited, by Saturday morning, at least one of Trump’s many campaign smears had proven true. Turns out bad things do happen in Philly… if you’re a racist, fascist jagoff like him.

And as anyone who lives here can attest, the mantra “No one comes for Philly” is less a slogan than a battle cry. The city’s tough, acerbic reputation is well-earned. It has turned the truism “Nobody likes us, we don’t care” into a point of pride, and has happily adopted a gleefully violent, goggle-eyed antifa chaos beast named Gritty for its unofficial mascot. It’s the city whose sports fans are feared and reviled from coast to coast, whose gastronomic delicacies revel in fatty excess, and whose denizens are famous for throwing batteries at Santa Claus and flipping cop cars for fun.

I grew up across the river in rural South Jersey, but spent most of my formative years either visiting or living here, and finally made my way back after a decade in (sorry) New York City. That time away didn’t rob my vocabulary of its love for Wawa or water ice or jawns various and sundry, or my pride in this city’s radical history or its “Fuck me? Nah bud, fuck you!” attitude. Of course Philadelphia and its people are so much more than those colorful stereotypes, but as the election drew to a close, a kernel of truth was made apparent. Trump tried to come for Philly—and, true to form, Philly beat his ass.

That victory wasn’t immediate, though. On Thursday, as vote tallies stalled and voters’ anxiety spiked, a “Count Every Vote” rally convened outside the Convention Center and morphed into a cathartic block party, complete with conga lines and a DJ. Inside, poll workers continued counting the thousands of votes that the sitting president was already swearing were somehow “illegitimate.” When I stopped by on Friday afternoon, Trump’s lead had narrowed, and the party was still going strong. As a small crowd of bedraggled Trump supporters gathered inside a penned-in, police-protected space to protest the fact that the election wasn’t going their way, hundreds of Philadelphians danced, sang, chanted, and generally had a grand old time around them, pausing occasionally to heckle the shrinking “Stop the Vote” contingent. Signs implored the poll workers to “Count Every Jawn” and invited the Trumpers to “Kiss Philly’s Queer Ass!” In an elegant bit of foreshadowing, one sign warned Trump himself, “This Is Philly, We Will Fuck You Up!”

The Trump fans’ indignant murmurs were no match for DJ Neeek Nyce’s soundsystem (let alone Philly Elmo and the Positive Movement drum line). There was no stopping the dance party or quashing the convivial mood. In the background, a huge banner proclaimed, “The people have spoken!” The air felt electric, and the party went on long after the Trumpers gave up and slunk home. Even in a time of great uncertainty and unrest, there remains at least one inalienable truth: Philly goes hard, especially when we win.

The rally was scheduled to pick back up where it had started the next morning, but plans soon changed. Moments after I read that CNN had called the state for Biden, a cry went up around the city—starting with my neighbors, who ran down our South Philly block screaming, “Fuck Donald Trump!” It was a phrase that would be echoed around the city all day, as groups of Philadelphians gathered at Independence Hall, at the Convention Center, and at City Hall to celebrate Trump’s defeat, strolling freely between the three landmarks as the National Guard looked on. YG and Nipsey Hustle’s anthemic 2016 single “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump)” wafted through the air (and climbed the Billboard charts) as a crowd surrounded an inflatable dummy with Trump’s face to indulge in some collective venting. It showed up on T-shirts, on signs, and on the lips of Philly residents who hollered at their friends down Broad Street and out car windows on Market. As the sound of steel drums filled the air, the prevailing sentiment was that his loss was our gain, and with that came an overwhelming sense of raucous joy—and relief.

Despite the widespread celebrations, Philly remains a city built on contradictions, some of which were thrown into sharp relief as the electoral drama dragged on. It is hailed as the birthplace of American democracy and takes pride in symbols like the Liberty Bell and the Declaration of Independence, yet remains the country’s poorest major city and has continually failed its houseless residents and those who are struggling with opioid addiction. A proud abolitionist tradition contrasts with a modern legacy of segregation, disenfranchisement, and violence against the Black community. And what was a moment of revelry and rebellion for some was one of deep sorrow for others. On the same day that Center City’s streets overflowed with happy crowds, at the National Baptist Temple Church in North Philadelphia, the family of Walter Wallace Jr. said goodbye to their son, brother, friend, and father.

Two police had shot and killed the disabled 27-year-old in front of his weeping mother a week prior, mere blocks away from where the city’s 1985 MOVE bombing killed 11 people and leveled an entire Black neighborhood. The murder spurred protests and renewed calls for police reform and abolition, and on Friday evening, a march calling for justice for Wallace merged with a “Count Every Vote” demonstration. It was a reminder that there are multiple Philadelphias, and that disposing of Trump is far from a cure-all for the myriad ills that afflict the city and its residents.

On Saturday, steps away from hundreds of jubilant Biden supporters (and even more Trump haters), the Philly United Front held an assembly in front of City Hall. The group called for an end to the war on Black and brown communities; decried racist, ableist police brutality and white supremacy; and demanded the immediate release of West Philly activist and teacher Ant Smith, who has been detained on federal charges since October. As a massive papier-mâché eagle puppet “flew” down Broad Street and an antifa clown juggled bowling pins nearby, this coalition of Philly voices left the assembled crowd with an important reminder before leaving them to their merrymaking: that “whoever’s elected, the struggle continues.”



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We Must Sever Law Enforcement From the Labor Movementhttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/labor-unions-police/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyOct 26, 2020

The police were never supposed to have a union. In 1897 the American Federation of Labor, which would merge with the Congress of Industrial Organizations to form the AFL-CIO, rejected a petition from a group of Cleveland officers on the grounds that “It is not within the province of the trade union movement to especially organize policemen, no more than to organize militiamen, as both policemen and militiamen are often controlled by forces inimical to the labor movement.”

In the ensuing 123 years, the attitude of police toward the working class has not changed. You’ll never see cops join a picket line; instead, they’re the force that the bosses call to break the strike. Over the years, police have killed countless laborers, from coal miners at Blair Mountain, where police shot dozens of striking West Virginia workers dead in 1921, to Breonna Taylor, an emergency room technician in Louisville, Ky. Report after report reveals the proliferation of white supremacists and far-right rhetoric within the ranks of law enforcement.

On June 8, 2020, the Writers Guild of America, East, passed a resolution calling on the AFL-CIO to disaffiliate with the International Union of Police Associations, citing IUPA’s failure to uphold “the basic principles of free and democratic trade unionism.” WGA East was soon joined by the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union and the Washington-Baltimore News Guild. At its 2020 conference, the California Labor Federation resolved to disassociate from police unions and the National Border Patrol Council. In June the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA called for law enforcement unions that fail to address racism and hold officers accountable to be removed from the labor movement, and MLK Labor in Washington’s King County voted to expel the Seattle Police Officers Guild because of its failure to do just that.

These calls to chuck out the police are not new, but they have grown louder and more insistent. A number of rank-and-file groups have started organizing around the issue, from No Cop Unions, which includes labor activists and members from over a dozen unions, to union-specific groups like Cop-Free AFSCME, SEIU Drop the Cops, and IATSE Members for Racial Justice. But so far, the appeals to drop the cops have been brushed aside by labor leaders, who are reluctant to take political chances in an election year and fear alienating members who disagree.

But there can be no justice without sacrifice, and by taking the overdue step of pushing out law enforcement unions, labor will clear a path to the more fundamental missions of confronting racism within its ranks and rectifying mistakes. It is a daunting task but one that is necessary for the movement to evolve and show that it genuinely believes that Black lives matter. We cannot stand by and watch as our so-called union brothers continue to brutalize and extinguish working-class lives with impunity.

Given the dire peculiarities of our current moment, let us consider the question in medical terms. An infection, left untreated, will soon spread throughout the body. It will rot away the flesh, poison the blood, and when wholly unimpeded, eat its victim alive. Those who are weak and vulnerable will suffer the most. Sepsis will set in, then gangrene. By then, only one option remains: amputation. Excising the limb can prevent the infection from spreading further and allow the body time to heal. In this case, white supremacy is the pathogen, and the police are the diseased limb. In order to prevent even more harm, we must sever law enforcement from the broader labor movement.

Expelling police from our unions is not an immediate cure for racism within the labor movement, but it is a drastic intervention that will set a course for further treatment. It is imperative that labor address and eradicate the poison, from rank-and-file members up to the highest levels of leadership. In 2016 nearly 40 percent of union members voted for Donald Trump, including over 50 percent of white male members, but this problem is not a new one. Organized labor in this country has a long history of exclusion and discrimination against workers on grounds of gender, race, religion, and national origin. But it has also made great strides toward equality and justice, saved millions of lives, and uplifted the working class.

There is power in a union, and that power must be wielded carefully and judiciously. As an AFL-CIO general board statement noted, it would be “quick and easy to cut ties with police unions,” yet the federation has refused to do so. The board’s vision of “building a better labor movement from within” leaves out the Black workers, Indigenous workers, and other workers of color, who are disproportionately targeted, harmed, and killed by police, who are shielded by their unions.

It can be hard to do the right thing, but that is no reason not to do it. Unless we operate now, this deadly infection will only spread further. There is no other option. Which side are you on?

To read the other side of The Debate, read Bill Fletcher Jr.’s “The Labor Movement Isn’t Ready to Expel Police Unions.”



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This Is a Horror Story: How Private Equity Vampires Are Killing Everythinghttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/private-equity-deadspin/Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim Kelly,Kim KellyNov 5, 2019Deadspin.]]>

There are many, many different versions of the vampire’s tale, but in its most timeworn Eurocentric telling, vampires are evil’s upper crust: beautiful, blue-blooded aristocrats draped in velvet, exuding idle menace. Dracula and his cursed kin are the undead 1 percent and act accordingly: terrorizing villages, murdering peasants, siphoning off others’ lifeblood, and turning up their aquiline noses at the slightest hint of dissent.

An entire cottage industry operates around their stories, and vampire lore does not always confine itself to the page. In the 17th century, the very real and very sadistic Countess Bathory—she of Hungarian legend and historical infamy—is said to have broken the bodies of more than 650 village girls and bathed in serf blood to retain her youth. For that, history remembers her with a strange sort of fondness: as an unfathomably wealthy, castle-dwelling noblewoman always depicted as lavishly dressed and dripping in jewels. She was monstrous in an elegant sort of way, the kind that inspires gothic novels and Swedish black metal records. Vituperative inhumanity, but made fashionable.

Vampires’ modern-day counterparts, on the other hand, leave much to be desired from an aesthetic standpoint. Unlike the ancient Romanian moroi, Irish dearg-due, or Ghanaian sasabonsam, today’s vampires are parasitic new money. Vulgar, ugly, and smug, their wrists are cluttered with hideous statement watches, their torsos clad in power suits or, worse, upmarket hipster threads. Some call them vulture capitalists, after the great birds who feast on carrion. While catchy, this term doesn’t quite fit; these monsters do not focus on the dead—they go after the living. They run hedge funds, trade stocks, and manage private equity firms, flush with generational wealth but always hungry for more. Instead of hot blood, these fancy fiends hunt for cold cash—and much like their spiritual predecessors, care little for how others must suffer in their pursuit thereof.

They’ve plundered every industry available, and, as of late, have trained their eyes on the crumbling edifice of digital media. Unlike the countess, who secreted away the evidence of her cruelty in a dungeon, this new generation commits their horrors in the open.

Their latest victim is Deadspin—which was ostensibly a sports website, but ultimately more of an offbeat culture publication with a penchant for football-themed mockery and commemorating various guys. Earlier in 2019, Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm, acquired a number of former Gawker Media properties, including Gizmodo, Deadspin, Splinter, Jezebel, Kotaku, The Root, and The Onion, from Univision, who’d originally purchased the portfolio following Gawker Media’s 2016 vivisection cum bankruptcy. Great Hill slapped together a new media company they called G/O Media, hired a bunch of aging Forbes bros to run the show, and set to work dismantling their new purchases. The first to fall was Splinter, a razor-sharp politics site that kept the rebellious spirit of Gawker alive; on October 10, a memo went out that the site was being shut down and seven of its staffers were being laid off. Two weeks later, another memo was sent, this time to Deadspin’s staff, ordering them to “stick to sports,” and a beloved longtime editor was fired for resisting the mandate; the writers and editors called G/O’s bluff and quit en masse.

The entire tragedy played out on social media, specifically on Twitter, and watching Deadspin collapse in real time was both awful and inspiring for those who have already been through the digital meat grinder. It felt different than the hemorrhages at Vice, Buzzfeed, and so many others; those happened suddenly, without much warning, and the workers were rendered powerless to stop the cull. The layoffs were handled in-house, with as much sterility as HR could muster. All that the public saw was a sudden influx of “I guess I’m freelance now” tweets. All the viscera were carefully packed away in Kafkaesque severance packages and non-disclosure agreements.

But with Deadspin, the axe didn’t fall swiftly. The staffers knew that the worst was yet to come but didn’t allow themselves to be led quietly to their doom. With their union’s backing, they resisted. They yanked their heads off the block, and walked away with middle fingers held aloft. In the spirit of Gawker’s very public 2015 unionization campaign, former reporter Laura Wagner’s investigation into their craven new CEO, and former Deadspin EIC Megan Greenwell’s magisterial explanation of what went wrong, they took on this challenge the way longtime readers have come to expect: bravely, irreverently, with the most beautiful “Fuck me? Hey, buddy, fuck YOU” energy imaginable. As site founder Will Leitch said on Twitter, “They refused to give in to the bad guys.”

For now, Deadspin is still technically alive, albeit in a somnambulant fugue state. It likely won’t last long: Vampires and zombies are seldom found in the same place, and one can only imagine how G/O management will react to the relentless and deserved storm of criticism that greets their every boneheaded move. Vampires prefer their victims to be left lifeless. If the usual pattern holds, G/O will suck out what it can, and move on. Your favorite website could be next, and one can only hope they’ll be able to take a stand the way the wonderful freaks at Deadspin did.

his wrongheaded corporate plundering did not start and will not stop with Deadspin; vampires are forever in need of new hosts. Private-equity firms have quietly taken over a large swath of the American economy: buying up companies, selling them off for parts, then stealing away unscathed. There’s a reason presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren has been so outspoken against them. Private equity is a danger to the free press, and a scourge upon the already weakened state of journalism. In just under two years, these firms have turned LA Weekly into a lifeless husk, ravaged The Denver Post, gutted Sports Illustrated, and silently strangled dozens of local newspapers across the country.

Media is far from their only target, though private equity does have a taste for the most vulnerable. Over the past decade, they have killed 1.3 million retail jobs, and the Los Angeles Times reports that 10 of the 14 largest retail chain bankruptcies since 2012 were at private equity-acquired chains. A famous example of their brutal negligence is Toys “R” Us, which was driven into bankruptcy after being acquired in 2014 by a pair of private equity firms, KKR and Bain Capital. Some 33,000 workers were laid off, and it took months—and a class-action lawsuit—before workers got the severance payouts they were owed. Today, Bain Capital holds over $100 billion in assets, and continues to seek new victims.

Not even the ill and injured are safe from this particular strain of supernatural avarice. The Carlyle Group, a massive private equity firm, came under fire in 2018 when conditions at ManorCare, a nursing home chain that it had purchased in 2007 and driven into bankruptcy, were revealed to have been so understaffed that residents were frequently left to wallow in their own filth. Some reported rooms overrun with roaches and ants, while others sustained grievous injuries due to neglect. In 2018, Hahnemann University Hospital, a 171-year-old facility in Center City Philadelphia, was purchased by Joel Freedman’s Paladin Healthcare via a loan from MidCap Financial, a subsidiary of the notorious private-equity firm Apollo Global Management, whose founder Leon Black was allegedly friend of billionaire sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein and who up until recently counted Blackwater USA—the architects of a horrific massacre of Iraqi civilians in 2007—among its many holdings.

Freedman ushered the hospital—which is Drexel University’s main teaching hospital, employs thousands of unionized staff, and provides care to low-income, underserved, predominantly black and Latinx communities—into bankruptcy, and announced plans to sell its real estate to the highest bidder, hastening gentrification in the area. Locals are devastated at the prospect and have staged several protests. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders held a rally at the hospital, calling it “crazy” that “a hospital is being converted into a real estate opportunity in order to make some wealthy guy even more money, ignoring the health-care needs of thousands of people.” The hospital stopped accepting patients in July.

Private equity has wiped out entire grocery chains. It controls the price of calling our loved ones in prison. It profits off the bail bonds and payday loans that extort poor communities of color. It bought the Playboy Mansion (for better or worse). It kneecapped millennial fashion staple Forever 21. It even killed Necco wafers—and left the crumbs for the rats. Private equity vampires are gruesome avatars for capitalism itself: They are rapacious, and roam the earth draining communities of their livelihoods. As anyone who’s ever seen a vampire movie or read an Anne Rice (or Twilight) novel knows, vampires stop at nothing until they are satisfied—and this 21st-century subspecies will never suck down enough capital to fill the gaping holes where their souls should be. There is no happy ending here, unless a ruthless new era of regulation swoops in to put a wooden stake through the heart of private equity.



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