© Court Mast/Associated Press
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 28, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Labor advocates and Democratic lawmakers called on Americans to honor the legacy of the legendary union organizer Dolores Huerta, who died Wednesday at age 96, by “continuing to fight for her dream” of justice for all.
A spokesperson for Huerta’s family said she died of cancer, and her family members said they would share plans “to recognize and celebrate her incredible life and legacy” at a later date.
“We know that many of you around the world share in our mourning,” said her family, including her 13 children who survive her.
Huerta became a hero to workers across the world in the 1960s when she joined Cesar Chavez to establish the National Farm Workers Association, which became known as the United Farm Workers in 1972.
She helped lead a strike by Filipino workers in the grape-growing industry in Southern California, as well as boycotts of companies that paid migrant workers low wages, while exposing them to toxic chemicals and providing no job security.
Huerta faced violence by strikebreakers and police, 22 arrests for her nonviolent protests, and surveillance by the FBI, which suspected her and Chavez of Communist ties—but nevertheless organized one of the most successful produce boycotts in US history in 1968, garnering support from 17 million households and thousands of grocery stores that pledged not to purchase California table grapes due to growers’ abuse of workers.
Dolores Huerta has passed away from cancer at 96. She was a founder of what became the United Farm Workers and an inspiration for generations of organizers.
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) October 28, 2026
Her courageous leadership in civil disobedience set an invaluable example in nonviolence. Dolores’s memory will live on. https://t.co/BMnLgbI2XK
The strike led by Huerta and Chavez also gained the backing of the United Auto Workers and Democratic Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and the grape growers were forced to provide benefits to the workers the industry depended on.
“Through courage and determination, she helped change what the world saw as possible, who the world saw as deserving of rights and dignity. Every worker owes her a debt of gratitude,” said Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants. “It’s a debt that we must pay forward by continuing to fight for her dream of a world where no human is exploited and no injustice is written off as someone else’s problem.”
Along with Huerta’s historic boots-on-the-ground victory for farmworkers, she pushed for the passage of one of the country’s first major farm-labor laws, the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in California, which was passed in 1975. The law gave the state’s farmworkers the right to organize unions and made them eligible for health insurance, pensions, and other benefits.
For those who pursue peace and justice around the world, we mourn the loss of Dolores Huerta. The strength of today’s labor movement would not be possible were it not for the decades-long work of Dolores. From the Delano Grape Strike of the 1960s until the very end of her life,… https://t.co/DsCq6CXLDe
— Chi Ossé (@OsseChi) October 28, 2026
She also pushed lawmakers to pass immigration reform in the 1980s and backed campaigns for voting rights, environmental justice, and LGBTQ+ rights. Her last arrest was in 2019, when she was rallying for fair pay for home health aides.
“Dolores Huerta gave us all of the empathy, care, and encouragement of a mother for workers everywhere, with a fierce love for people that fueled her principled, relentless, strategic action for results that lifted millions of workers and our families,” said Nelson. “She never gave up, she never gave in, and she fought for a better world to her last breath.”
Chavez was often viewed as the leader of the movement they led together, with Huerta serving as vice president of the United Farm Workers for nearly forty years.
But earlier this year, Huerta and other women in the movement revealed to The New York Times in a bombshell report that Chavez had sexually abused women and children as young as 12 for years.
Huerta accused Chavez of raping her at least twice in encounters that led to pregnancies. She said she did not report the assaults to police because they were hostile to their labor organizing, and said she had not been aware of his alleged abuse of minors.
“Unfortunately, he used some of his great leadership to abuse women and children,” Huerta told the Times. “I never talked about it to anybody, and the reason I didn’t is because I just didn’t want to hurt the movement.”
Huerta remained with the United Farm Workers until 1999. Three years later she established the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which leads grassroots organizing efforts to promote education equity, LGBTQ+ equality, and other causes.
She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 by President Barack Obama, who acknowledged at the ceremony that the rallying cry he adopted in 2008, “Sí se puede” (“Yes we can”), had originated with Huerta.
“¡Sí, se puede! is more than a chant,” said Melat Kiros, a progressive Democratic US House candidate in Colorado. “It’s a promise we must keep in her honor: that the people united can change the world.”
© George Ballis/Take Stock/The Image Works, via PBS Distribution
Far from all the political bluster about police being “defunded,” six years after the earth-shaking George Floyd protests swept the US and public approval for law enforcement plummeted, police have never been more politically and monetarily supported than they are now. But when veteran labor reporters and union activists Hamilton Nolan and Jacob Morrison attended the 23rd Quadrennial Convention of the International Union of Police Associations in Las Vegas, Nevada, they found a different kind of union, and a different kind of convention, than they were expecting…
In this special episode of Working People, we speak with Nolan and Morrison about their August reporting trip to the IUPA Convention in Las Vegas.
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The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Jacob Morrison:
All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is not Maximillian Alvarez. It is Jacob Morrison, host of the Valley Labor Report, the largest union talk radio program in the South.
Hamilton Nolan:
And I’m Hamilton Nolan, a labor journalist based in New York City.
Jacob Morrison:
Hamilton and I marched on the boss and took Max’s microphone so we could introduce the special episode about the recent reporting trip we both went on in Las Vegas and wrote about for The Real News Network and how things work.
Hamilton Nolan:
The conference that we went to took place in late hot August in the Las Vegas desert at the beautiful Paris Las Vegas casino underneath a fake Eiffel Tower.
Jacob Morrison:
Here’s the intro to the piece that we wrote together for The Real News.
Hamilton Nolan:
On a plain blue lit stage in a plain event space at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, a gruff man with white hair and a thin goatee is complaining about Las Vegas. How it is too hot, how it is too expensive, and how the hotel’s convention management bureaucracy is driving him nuts. You can’t even move a box from left to right without contacting someone to do that, he barks into the microphone.
Jacob Morrison:
This will become a communal ritual by the end of the week. Without fail, like some sort of morning prayer, the convention begins every day with opening grumblings about the convention itself.
Hamilton Nolan:
We can see why. After all, the organization convening here is supposed to be a strong union representing nearly 20,000 members around the country. Far from all the political bluster about the police being defunded. Six years after the earthshaking George Floyd protests sweat the US and public approval for law enforcement plunged to a generational low. These guys have never been more politically and monetarily supported than they are now.
Jacob Morrison:
But there are only about 50 people here in the room with us. Only 28 delegates, 10 alternates and some wives and family members mixed in. The proceedings are pretty boring and energiless. The attendees are grumpy and the air is thick with middle age resentment.
Hamilton Nolan:
Clearly, the convention organizers and speakers were expecting something much different than this. To be honest, so were we, because it’s 2026, Donald Trump is president again, and this is the 23rd quadrennial convention of the International Union of Police Associations, IUPA, which represents tens of thousands of cops and departments from coast to coast.
Jacob Morrison:
The convention was billed as the premier gathering for law enforcement leadership, an event that you don’t want to miss.
Hamilton Nolan:
But it’s absolutely dead here. Even the speakers and attendees don’t want to be here. In fact, they won’t shut up about it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man, that piece is so fire and anyone listening to this, you guys have to go read what Jacob and Hamilton wrote from Las Vegas and thinking about this police union convention that took place in Las Vegas. And I can’t recommend it highly enough. We’ve linked to it in the show notes for this episode. We’ve linked to the additional writing that Hamilton did on it for how things work. But I’ve been dying to actually get you guys on the podcast to talk about it. Now that the reporting trip is over, the pieces are out. There’s so much that I just want to ask you guys about what it was like to be there, what the vibe was, the conversations that you were having that didn’t make it into these pieces. So we got a lot to talk about here, but I guess by way of setting things up and really setting the stage for folks, how the hell did you guys end up at this convention?
Who the hell invited you two assholes to Ayupa’s quadrennial convention in Las Vegas?
Jacob Morrison:
I guess I’ll answer that since I’m the one who got the invitation and I’m not totally sure why, but my best guess is that I got an invitation because I’m the principal officer of an AFL – CIO Labor Council. I actually got multiple invitations in the mail to my house. So IUPA knows where I live, which potentially is a terrifying prospect, but maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe I made a couple of friends who will protect me in IUPA. So I got invitations in the mail to Las Vegas, to the IUPA convention. And I say I’m not totally sure because I did ask a couple of Labor Council presidents if they also got that invitation and they said no. But I think that’s probably
Maximillian Alvarez:
It. Maybe they looked you up and saw the mustache and were like, “Oh yeah, this guy’s with us.”
Jacob Morrison:
Yes, maybe that was it. So I got an invitation in the mail and I thought it would be really funny to go. And so I started asking around for somebody to give me the money to go and I found Max.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Enter Max, they left baby.
Jacob Morrison:
My sugar daddy, Maximilian Alvarez. So I was able to go to Vegas. I though it would be very funny. And so I though it would be funny to go, but I also wanted to turn it into sort of a real piece of reporting. And I’ve done some reporting and I’ve done some journalism, but I’m still not super comfortable with that as a label for myself. And Hamilton has been in the space for a lot longer than I have. He’s done a lot of really serious journalism and in this space specifically. And so I thought that it would be made a lot better by having somebody a little bit more experienced to be tag along with me. So I registered with Hamilton as my guest. Nobody asked any questions at the registration phase. And so that’s how we got the invitation. We can maybe talk about when we actually showed up a little bit later, but Hamilton, is there anything else that you would want to add to the how did we end up there?
Hamilton Nolan:
No. As you said, I was just along for the ride on this. Jacob got the invite for some reason still unknown. Max paid the bills and I just tagged along and I had done some reporting on Ayupa, particularly in 2020 when we were trying to get him kicked out of AFLCO and I’ve never in my life been able to get Ayupa to respond to any of my emails or phone calls. So the chance to attend the convention to me was very exciting and I was excited to tag along.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So at any point walking in there, I mean, I don’t know, you guys are two white guys walking in there who maybe probably feel differently than I would walking in there. But at any point did the sort of like high teenager in you kick in and be like, “Oh shit, these guys know who we are. They’re going to come for us” kind of thing?
Hamilton Nolan:
We both look a little bit like cops to be fair. So either one of us could be a cop. Yeah.
Jacob Morrison:
I’ve got the mustache. Hamilton has the build. So together we make a cop.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, one of the reasons that the pitch was so compelling to me, we all thought it was funny, weird, interesting. There was something fateful about that invitation ending up in Jacob’s mailbox, just like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts letter, finding him somehow. And I think we could all sense that, but we didn’t quite know what we were going to find there. But like you guys lay out in that intro, you had very different expectations for the convention than what you found. So talk about that. What were you expecting and why? And then when you got there, what were you seeing and how were you processing it?
Hamilton Nolan:
Well, I will point out, first of all, that Jacob was very concerned about kind of OPSEC while we were doing this, cloak and dagger, are they going to find us out? And when we arrived to register for the convention, we said, “Here we are.” We gave them our names and they were like, “We can’t find you.” So they just typed our name and printed it out and gave us a badge. So there was no security at all. And my initial impressions at least, and you can say yours too, Jacob, but I’ve been to a fair number of union conventions and this was probably the most low energy union convention that I’ve ever been to in my life, which was a surprise to me.
Jacob Morrison:
Yes. On the OPSEC thing, there was a continued sort of incuriousness about who we were at the time. I don’t think anybody ever asked you, Hamilton, what you do for a job, which is crazy.
Hamilton Nolan:
Jacob was trying to workshop his cover story and actually nobody gave a damn at all. Yeah.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah. I talked to this one guy for literally an hour after the convention proceedings were over for the day, and I just kept asking him questions about his job. It was the local president who said in the piece that they’re affiliated with their labor council, but they don’t really do anything over political differences. I spoke to this guy for an hour. He never was curious about me at all. Who is this guy who’s not in IUPA? I mentioned, I’m not in IUPA and no further questions at all.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I’m sure every woman listening to this is saying, “You mean a man didn’t give a shit about anything you had to say?” It’s like big story of the year there, but I guess that’s kind of what I was getting from the reportage that you guys did for this piece is because some of the big questions you and we and you guys as ambassadors for the labor movement were going in there to ask is like, “Why are these guys in the labor movement and do they feel like they’re part of it?” And then you add on all the other politics of the police state that has been ramping up, especially ever since the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. But before we dig into that, I wanted to just ask a little more about the setting here and the sort of Noir-ish kind of presence in this story.
A, because you guys have to humor me and I promise that I was like, “I won’t turn this piece too much into a fake Hunter S. Thompson piece, but I feel like there’s something genuinely kind of overlapping here with what Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was actually doing and observing at the time in the America that existed back then. And you guys are doing the same in a very different kind of America in a very different Las Vegas where most of that noir has been paved over, blown up and rebuilt and consolidated under a few kind of mega owners of the Strip. So talk a little more about the sort of setting and the proceedings of the convention itself before we dig into the kind of politics of it.
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah. I mean, Fear and Low in Las Vegas, for those of you who haven’t read it, a large scene in the book is them attending a cop convention while high on a lot of powerful drugs. And Jacob refused to take any mescaline despite my trying to peer pressure him. So we didn’t have the drug part, but Vegas is an extremely fucking weird setting as anybody knows who’s been to the Vegas Strip. Paris, Las Vegas has a huge fake hot air balloon out front and a huge fake Eiffel Tower inside. There’s chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. There’s huge oil paintings of Louis XIV on the outside of the ballroom where we were. And then five steps away is a sign leading to the strip club and the next hotel and a cigar bar where middle-aged guys are sexually harassing the waitresses. So that was kind of the setting that we were in.
And ironically, Vegas, of course, the entire Vegas strip is unionized and the Kulinary Union in Las Vegas, one of the most powerful local unions in America. So Vegas is in a very real sense a union town and we were here for union convention and then the guys proceeded to kind of bitch about the fact that the union imposed a bunch of rules in the hotel. So that sort of came full circle for me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And Jacob, let me ask, had you ever been to Las Vegas before?
Jacob Morrison:
No. No, I’d never been to Las Vegas.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, country boy. What was it like going into that for the first time?
Jacob Morrison:
It was definitely crazy. Not only grew up sort of out in the county, but also very religious. And so very different vibes. They call it Sin City for a reason, obviously. And there’s an energy in Las Vegas, obviously, all of the gambling, the drinking, the girls and everything like that was just so contrasted with the very sort of dull, except for Rizzo. And I hope that, Hamilton, you’ll be able to talk about Rizzo, but even that was kind of dull a little bit, people kind of got tired of it. But the convention was just like… There was one time when I got up because there was a part of the convention that was clearly not newsworthy. It was very internal stuff and just not very interesting. So I left to go get lunch, I think. And I happened to be in the elevator up to my room with another officer or with an officer, I’m not an officer, with an officer.
And I asked him where he was going. He was like, “I’m going to take a nap. This is terrible.” I was like, “Oh, is this your first convention?” He said, “Yeah, it’s awful. I hate it basically.” I very, very much underestimated, like you talked about the contrast of what we were expecting. I was expecting not a huge convention, 20,000 members is not a very large international union, but I expected at least a hundred delegates and then some alternates and some family. That’s sort of what I was expecting at the least. The sort of mean I was expecting was maybe 200, maybe 250. And so getting there, there’s only 28 people who can vote on… That was crazy to me. So I was way overestimating how many people would be there and I was way underestimating how big Las Vegas is because part of my plan was I’m going to go down after the convention proceedings to the hotel bar and find one of these guys after the proceedings and shoot the shit with them for a few hours and get super drunk.
I really wanted to do that. And as soon as the proceedings was over and people left, they blended into the thousands of people that were there and there was just no finding anybody or connecting after the convention if you do not get their phone number and talk to them and make plans. There were so few people there and it was kind of… I don’t know.
Hamilton Nolan:
Jacob was envisioning a Holiday Inn. And in fact, the Paris Las Vegas has 3,500 rooms.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Well, it’s so wild because I grew up with Las Vegas being a big part of our lives as it was for so many people in the Southwest, particularly Southern California. Because in those sort of post mob town days of Las Vegas in the ’80s and ’90s, they were really trying to and succeeded in rebranding Vegas as the family friendly haven of these massive hotels, these big ridiculously overdone shows and buffets and pools and arcades. It was awesome. I’ve honestly had more fun in Las Vegas with my siblings and cousins in the ’90s when I was a kid than I’ve ever had being there after I was 21 and could drink. I don’t know what that says, but it’s also like I’ve watched Vegas change a lot over the years. A lot, a lot. I’ve seen some of those old hotels get blown up or live television feeds of them getting blown up.
And then you go there after a few years of not going there and all the things you remember are gone or renamed or under a new theme and new ownership. There is something uniquely American that is very intensely expressed in Las Vegas. And again, I feel like that is still the case now in the settings that you guys were in, but I want to talk about the union and what state is IUPA in? What the hell do they do and what were they doing at this convention?
Jacob Morrison:
The state of IUPA, it’s funny, because the turnout was so low, the energy was so low, it felt very familiar to me as the member of a public sector union where we have little… There’s not a whole lot of activity among our members and we don’t have very much power, which was very surprising because of all the reasons that we say in the introduction to the peace, the power of police has basically never been better. The police unions are politically feated and they didn’t even have a congressperson at their convention. I was expecting at least one sort of right-wing congressperson to be there. And the highest ranking official that they got was some deputy assistant under secretary of Homeland Security who is the liaison to local governments. I mean, that was sort of surprising to me. I guess
Maximillian Alvarez:
The state doesn’t need the police when we have a police state.
Jacob Morrison:
That may be part of it or it may be that IUPA, I mentioned this in the piece as well, that because IUPA is such a small union and there are other big police unions like the FOP, the PBA, that maybe this union in particular, and potentially because of its affiliation with the AFL – CIO, I’m not really sure and I wasn’t able to get an interview with Sam Cabral, the international president. I tried multiple times while we were on the trip and wasn’t able to make that happen. He would’ve been the one to answer those questions about sort of national politics within the labor movement and with the administration and with other politicians. And I really hate that I wasn’t able to get that interview, but those are questions that still remain. Is it because the police state doesn’t need the police unions or is it primarily because of the way that IUPA itself as an entity is situated in the political environment and there’s not really much of a need for them when they have the PBA and the FOP to be a liaison to them for law enforcement?
I’m not sure.
Hamilton Nolan:
So yeah, IUPA is a relatively small police union. The Fraternal Order of Police and the Police Benevolent Association are bigger. What makes IUPA interesting is they’re the only police union in the AFL – CIO. So they’re the only pure police union that is formally aligned with what is effectively the labor movement, the AFL – CO, America’s biggest labor federation. So they’re in an interesting political place. I mean, the convention itself, if you say, was this a union convention or a cop convention? It was much more a cop convention. And part of a cop convention, I think this is sort of maybe the symbolic part of all this is like they want to go to Vegas and play golf, man. That’s why people would attend the IUPA convention in Vegas is to go play golf. And part of the reason why Sam Cabral, IUPA’s president, sounded so pissed off every day as he was conducting this convention is I think they had so much busy work to do that he wasn’t able to just let everybody go out and play golf.
But the vendors that showed up next to the convention were like cop stuff, body cams, several of which were stolen from the reception at the last night of the convention, which was funny.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah, there was a vendor for assault boats, right?
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah. Assault boats.
Jacob Morrison:
Which is correct. The union is not going to be the ones purchasing assault. And so that adds to
Hamilton Nolan:
The – Right. It wasn’t like DSA was there in the vendor section. I mean, it was stuff that cops would want, although they were not allowed to have actual firearms in the hotel. So when they auctioned off a rifle, they just had to have a picture of it and I think to deliver it later on. I
Jacob Morrison:
Tried to get the rifle myself because that would’ve been funny, but unfortunately, my raffle was not picked.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. I mean, you can only commit so far to the bit, I suppose. And insofar as this was still a labor conference and a union convention where stuff was getting done, I want to talk about that, right? I mean, because there’s so many big questions here that we… And by we, I mean people in the broader labor movement, people connected to it, who support it, who have family members in it, who believe in it, and just working people in general who believe that workers banding together and fighting for our needs together is the way forward. And people like us who have questions of what the hell kind of relationship are we supposed to have to the police? There’s so much kind of intensity in those debates online and in person that also seem to contrast so much with the setting you were in, the discussions that were being had, and the mentalities of the people attending this conference.
So talk more about that. Do they see themselves as part of the labor movement? Do they still operate like a union?
Hamilton Nolan:
Well, the most fascinating part of this conference to me was getting to be in the room when a police union is talking to itself, presumably with nobody else in the room, right? There was no obvious press here or anything. So that was actually a very interesting kind of look behind the curtain because of the tone that a lot of the speakers had at the convention. And you saw really the qualities, I guess, that people think about police, but maybe don’t get to see so directly. The defensiveness, the kind of military mindedness, the us against the world thing, the we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys thing. All of that was very much manifested in the speakers that we had, including some of the speakers were so wacky and sort of bizarre and crazy that you start to worry, these are the guys who are talking to the guys with guns.
I mean, that doesn’t make me feel very good. One of the ones that stood out to me crossing over for the union part is there was a guy who spoke from a legal defense fund that serves police unions and all police unions can pay in to tap into the services of this legal defense fund and they will fund legal defense if you, as a police union member, do anything. And he was like, “It could be easy stuff like a dead body in the back of your car or basic stuff like you walk into the jail cell, the guy’s dead, and next thing you know –
Maximillian Alvarez:
Quick question, wasn’t Harvey Keitel from Pulp Fiction doing this?”
Hamilton Nolan:
I mean, to me it sounded awesome. I was like, “I would love to be in a legal defense.” He was like, “Even if you’re here in Las Vegas off duty, if something happens and something goes down and you got to shoot a guy, I mean, we will come to your defense if it was sort of a police action.” So that was pretty interesting to me.
Jacob Morrison:
And absolutely no sort of hemming and hawing about that either. That’s the thing that really kind of stuck out to me about that. And I guess it makes sense because they’re talking to themselves and they don’t feel like they have to justify it, but there really was no attempt to justify why should you as an off-duty cop from Florida be able to shoot and kill somebody in Las Vegas and have a Cadillac legal defense for it? I mean, why should you have that? No attempt to justify that at all and no attempt to reckon with the way that folks who are asking for more police accountability feel about the police and the reason that they would say they don’t have to, even beyond the fact that they felt like they were talking to themselves and so they don’t have to do that. But they cited approval polls from Gallup and stuff about how something like 74% of Americans have some or a great deal of confidence in their local police.
And so they feel like they have sort of won the propaganda war and it’s us actually who are wrong.
Hamilton Nolan:
I was just going to add, if you’ve been to a lot of union conventions or you spent time in union world period, at any union events, there’s usually a lot of talk about solidarity, the basic union buzzwords, and there was almost none of that at this convention. And that really leapt out to me too. I mean, I’ve never been to a union convention or event of any type where almost nobody said solidarity, union, we’re all together, very little of that at all.
Jacob Morrison:
Certainly no attempts to make alliances or highlight alliances that they have with other unions, which do exist, and you can read the piece for more of that locally, but there were no other unions that were speakers there. I mean, at most union conventions, you’ll have other unions speaking. I mean, I think that at the Letter Carriers Convention, Sean O’Brien spoke, at the UAW convention, Sarah Nelson has spoke.That’s a pretty common thing. At the AFL – CIO conventions in Alabama, we have bunch of union speakers. We’ve had people from the UMWA, we’ve had Sarah Nelson, and no other unions at all, not even other cop unions.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and for that reason, there was so much in the figure of Sam Cabral, IUPA president, and the sort of vibe and mentality that he embodied that echoes the steward of Gondor, just really having this sense of we have no friends, we are the thin blue line defending everyone from the darkness that is always ever creeping, but now the darkness is creeping from within our own ranks and we’re the ones holding society together, yada, yada, yada. It feels like so much of that was dripping from the details that you guys gave in this incredible piece, but –
Jacob Morrison:
Can I say something really quick about Cabral? He gave his speech, I think it was either right before or right after he was reelected president of the International, and not a good speaker, which is fine. Lots of people aren’t good speakers, but he was not a good speaker. I don’t think he would say he was a good speaker, but he had some interesting stuff in his backstory that I really would’ve loved to have asked him about. He said that a big reason that he decided to join the union was because of his dad who was in the Meat Cutters Union, which was a union that ultimately became a part of the UFCW, and about how inspired he was by his dad fighting for people that were being bullied, and how he doesn’t like bullies, and how that was such an inspiration to him. And so when he got on with the police force, he wanted to do that for rank and file officers who were being bullied by management.
And I thought that to me was basically the only time that I heard anything from Cabral that sounded like it tracked with my theory or the way that I think of unions. It seemed like there was a real sort of grain of unionism there in Cabral that I found interesting and I would’ve really liked to have talked to him about, because it seems like that sort… Of solidarity with the common every man, like the every man outside of law enforcement has really been buried. And it made me think of Bill Fletcher. I spoke to him for this piece and he talked about how in AFGE, among some of the law enforcement sections, particularly the federal prison guards, he told me, and this wasn’t in the piece, he told me that these guards, literally every single day, they are surrounded by people who would kill them.
They would, a lot of them would kill these guards at the drop of a hat. And doing that and not having a community outside of this law enforcement community to keep you grounded and to make you realize that that is not the rest of the world, the real world does not operate like everybody is out to kill you. If you don’t have a community that can ground you in a reality that’s outside of that, it sort of breaks your brain and it gets kind of boiled alive. And I wonder if something like that sort of happened to Cabral. It was something that I would’ve loved to have asked him about.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and in terms of what you guys were able to ask other attendees and speakers about, like we said, there’s so much here that you guys got the chance to kind of pose to these union members who are part of the only cop union affiliated with the AFL – CIO. And you write beautifully in this piece, and I’m just going to read it, where you guys say, “It is by no means the largest police union in America, but AIUPA has the distinction of being the only police union that is a member of the AFL – CIO. It joined the Labor Federation in 1979, making it a formal but uncomfortable partner to every progressive labor union and every rank and file union member in the AFL – CIO who has ever had to question why they should be affiliated with a union representing the same kind of cops who beat and arrest them, their union siblings, and their neighbors at protests and on picket lines.” So when you guys talked to them about that, what did they have to say?
Hamilton Nolan:
Well, first of all, I’ll say Sam Cabral, all three of us would love to interview you, Sam Cabral, so please reach out to us anytime, open invitation. I, as I mentioned, have covered IUPA a bit, particularly in 2020. Their media relations are kind of interesting to me. They’re very quiet. Absolutely, not only do they not do outreach very much, but they rarely respond to not just me from the left wing magazine, but to almost anybody. If you look them up in Google News, very little news about them apart from the fact that they had to go bankrupt because one of their people got sued for sexual harassment, but that’s a different story. But when you look at what Sam Cabral is on the record having done in the past decade or so, when Ferguson was going on and Michael Brown was killed and Richard Trumpka, who was the head of the AFL – CIO tried to make some positive statements about police reform, Sam Cabral sent a very angry, scathing letter to the AFL – COO, rejecting the idea that there was any racism in policing.
Then fast forward to 2020, George Floyd, once again, the AFL – CO, Richard Trumpka, tries to make some supportive gestures towards Black Lives Matter. And again, Sam Cabral sends an angry, scathing letter saying that the AFL – CO is demonizing police and how dare you do this and how dare you suggest police are racist. And then at this convention, a huge theme of the convention was like the crazies are trying to defund police and putting us all in danger and we’re fighting back and there’s this horrible danger on the horizon in the form of the democratic socialists who are going to defund police once again. And it’s fictional in a sense, but it’s also an interesting kind of look into the mind state. And when you talk about their PR strategy, one thing I learned at this convention, which I did not know before was that IUPA gives an award to journalists almost every year at their conventions.
And they’ve been doing so for decades now. And a lot of them are, it’s sort of like you’re the journalist who wrote great stuff about the cops, an actual award with a plaque and everything. And a lot of them were to, because they had a list of all of them in the brochure. And a lot of them were to sites like lawenforcementnews.com or some of them were to Fox News figures, Greta Van Sustran and stuff like that, who you wouldn’t really be surprised by. But some of them were also to Bob Schaefer from CBS News and people like that who had apparently accepted this award from IUPA. And again, it’s like that bunker mentality of talking to the world that Jacob touched on. It’s like it’s us and our friends and then it’s our enemies. And I think that came through a lot at this convention for me.
Jacob Morrison:
It was funny that this year’s recipient did not come to pick up her prize.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, again, it sounds like hardly anyone came, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised there, but I wanted to save this for the last 10 minutes after all the heavy lifting you guys have done to go there to Vegas, to be there for this convention, to write about it, to go through all the editing, co-publishing, all that. But we got 10 minutes here to sort of address the big question that the feature piece leads with is are cops part of the labor movement or are they an existential threat to it? I mean, I wanted to sort of ask for your guys’ thoughts on that, understanding that there are plenty of people, including people who listen to the show, people that we have interviewed and worked with who are not your typical sort of DSA defund, all cops are bastards kind of people. But as listeners can hear, you guys have been invested in this question, Hamilton, for longer than any of us, but it’s been something that you’ve looked at, seen, talked about, analyzed for many years.
So I wanted to ask where you stood on that question before the convention, if anything from the convention has changed your mind. And I guess having somehow gotten into this sad, decrepit, soulless convention and seeing a bit how the sausage is made, what do you think the rest of us on the outside who never get to see that need to understand about these kinds of cops and this kind of union?
Hamilton Nolan:
Well, I’ll put my cards on the table because I really do have an opinion on this that’s maybe stronger than a typical journalist you might think of. But in 2020 when the George Floyd protests were happening and Black Lives Matter was happening, there was a national movement within the labor movement to kick IUPA out of the AFL – CO. I was active in that. My union, the Writers Guild of America East, which is an AFL – CO member, passed a resolution. So that came from our entire union urging the AFL – CO to kick out IUPA, which the AFL – CO did not. And I also reported on the AFL – CO and IUPA. And what I saw really was the AFL crazily trying to sweep it under the rug, really, really trying to minimize it. Eventually they sort of formed a commission that came out with the report a year later that they totally buried and didn’t publicize.
And that report, in fact, rejected calls to defund police and rejected calls to kick out IUPA. And the same people that put out that report are still running the AFL – CO. So my belief, and it’s a belief that a lot of other people share and have written eloquently about, is that the goals of police unions are fundamentally incompatible with the solidarity that defines the labor movement. My personal belief is police can have unions. They are workers. They work, they have a job. They can, as far as I’m concerned, have collective bargaining and bargain over their wages and working conditions. But that is a different proposition from them being in our labor federation and being a formal part of the labor movement, because being a part of labor movement demands solidarity. Solidarity is a give and take. You give solidarity and you get the benefit of solidarity.
And that is not something that I think police are existentially capable of doing or that we’ve ever seen police do in the history of America. And everybody who says that, “Oh no, no, we need to keep them close and this is going to make them better,” it’s never come true. And I think at some point we have to recognize that. So I would love to see this issue, and thanks for bringing it up, Max, but I’d love to see the issue once again get elevated because the only way the labor movement’s going to make progress on this is for a lot of people to agitate around it and organize around it within your local unions and elevate that up the chain.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah. When I talked to Bill Fletcher about this, he has basically the same position as Nolan. And I asked him if that position was, does that sort of run counter to what you told me you’ll recall about the federal prison guards, how if these guards, they don’t have a community outside of law enforcement that sort of grounds them in the real world, then they sort of fly off the handle and become crazy. Is that not an argument for maintaining them as part of our labor movement and engaging with them? And he said that the problem with that is that within the Labor Federation, within the AFL – CIO and within unions that have sections of law enforcement, that never actually happens. Potentially he said that maybe that’s an argument to do it actually, but in the real world that hasn’t happened. I mean, like Hamilton talked about, there was this report and they said, “We believe that there would be more good from engaging our police affiliates than isolating them.” And maybe that’s true.
And I think potentially my interviews with leaders of the Memphis Police Association, maybe they speak to the value of that. I have a full hour up on the Valley Labor Report with the vice president of the Memphis Police Association. And long story short, I was able to write some in The Real News and talked about some in my interview about the ways that the Memphis Police Association very much unlike other police associations has stood in solidarity with unions in Memphis, has supported collective bargaining rights, not just for themselves, but for the other city unions, has supported striking workers and not arrested striking workers when they were called on to harass them by the boss and anti-union forces. And so maybe the unique history of Memphis, maybe there’s a path forward there, but you can’t talk about that as a path forward without recognizing that even though that has been talked about in other places within AFGE, within the AFL – CIO, the leaders of these federations show no appetite to actually make that happen.
And the leaders of the police associations by and large show no appetite to allow that to happen to them. I mean, there’s just no appetite at the international level from IUPA and certainly not from the FOP or the PBA for any sort of reform. And I talked to Covington about this, the vice president of the Memphis Police Association, John Covington, about why would you want to be sort of burdened with the responsibility of responding to the homelessness crisis in this country, the mental health crisis in this country, and every societal ill should not be handled by an armed agent of the state is sort of how I feel about it. And he had his response and it was basically like that these things can get dangerous and so basically we need somebody with a gun who can kill somebody if it gets out of hand.
And he actually even pushed back against having social workers in addition to cop teams because he was like, “If we have a social worker there, then that’s another person that I have to protect as the one with the gun.” And I think that is sort of part of his brain being broken and being always in the world of it’s us against them and everybody is out to kill me. And I don’t think that that is actually the world that we live in. Even when we’re talking about the mental health crisis and the homelessness crisis, I think that by and large, most of those people are not going to be violent unless violence is threatened against or put against them. And that’s just not really something that cops seem willing to tolerate.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and at a certain point, you really got to be able to see past the goodness real are perceived of the individual people wearing badges and think about, to borrow Hamilton’s term, the sort of existential basis of this job and the sort of powers of that badge. There are certain built-in structural foundational incentives that are literally pushing those people, good or not, to do the opposite of what everyone else would have to do in that situation. It’s like arguing why business owners all turn into Jeff Bezos want to be power hungry monsters because they’re literally incentivized to. They’re rewarded for being that. And the state apparatus is constantly giving them benefits for doing that. And the same sort of thing applies to cop unions, right? Why would they have solidarity when they are constantly being kind of enabled by the state to get by without it?
My mind always goes to what union workers and retirees in Wisconsin told me about Act 10 in 2011. When Governor Scott Walker and the Republicans during the Great Recession were capitalizing on people’s pain to just go all out against public sector workers and unions, go after their collective bargaining rights, their wages, their ability to even maintain their unions. But of course, there were carve outs for cop unions, firefighters, and deputy sheriffs. And that kind of pattern has been repeated in so many ways around the country. So it does sort of beg the question of why would they show solidarity with us if they are always sort of incentivized not to and rewarded for it?
Hamilton Nolan:
Something that is so relevant to this discussion I think is that this summer, 2026, the AFL – CO’s convention was held in Minneapolis. They purposely held it in Minneapolis in order to celebrate the Minnesota labor movement’s actions in opposition to ICE. So the whole kind of underlying theme of the AFL – CO convention this year was we are celebrating the Minnesota Labor Movement and what they did to resist ICE, particularly in Minneapolis. And at IUPA’s convention, they have speakers up there celebrating the agreements that local unions strike to help out ICE and help them in their deportation campaign. And it comes down to which side are you on? Everybody in the labor movement knows the song, which side are you on? And I would challenge the AFL – CIO to tell me how you reconcile these two points, how you believe you can have a union in your federation that is celebrating and assisting ICE’s deportation campaign at the same time you as a federation are purportedly celebrating our resistance to that thing.
It doesn’t work.
Jacob Morrison:
The International Union of Police Associations was the only affiliate of the AFL – CIO to not attend the quadrennial convention in June in Minneapolis.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our special guests, the incredible labor journalists and real news contributors, Hamilton Nolan and Jacob Morrison. Go follow and support Hamilton Substack, how things work and read his book, The Hammer. Go follow and support Jacob and the Valley Labor Report. My God, we need their work now more than ever. And I cannot stress this enough. Go read their amazing pieces about the IUPA Convention in Las Vegas that we published on the Real News website and that Hamilton published at How Things Work. We’ve linked to both of those in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you guys for caring about this. We do all of this work for you, but we cannot do it without you.
And that goes for us here at Working People in the Real News and also for Hamilton, Jacob, and every other labor journalist that you support. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Battle for Free Speech, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.
I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez.
Hamilton Nolan:
I’m Hamilton Nolan.
Jacob Morrison:
I’m Jacob Morrison.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Take care of yourselves.
Jacob Morrison:
Take care of each other.
Hamilton Nolan:
Solidarity forever.
© Abdul Saboor/Reuters
© Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
Gus Garcia-Roberts follows Belfi Rivera, a Major League Baseball prospect from the Dominican Republic, through an unregulated recruitment system that exposes young athletes to a network of predatory figures (and at least one former World Series MVP and prominent Fox Sports analyst). It’s a system that operates in plain sight and has for years, but Garcia-Roberts’s superbly reported narrative, which centers on Rivera and his vulnerable family, make those operations positively harrowing.
As a child, Belfi never cared for baseball. He started playing at 7, he told me, because a local coach would drag him from his house and cuff him on the head if he tried to escape to a nearby river to be with his friends. But even as a young boy, he understood the sport likely represented his family’s one shot out of grinding poverty. During that video call in 2021, it seemed that he had clinched it.
But in two and a half years, the $1.8 million Belfi was promised would be almost all gone. Carmona received $630,000, which represented his 35% commission. But more than $950,000 went to someone who had no hand in teaching Belfi how to play baseball. His name is Santo Caraballo, one of the most notorious moneylenders profiting from Dominican baseball. His business partner is a national hero and, 10 years after his retirement, still a commanding figure within Major League Baseball: David Ortiz, known universally as “Big Papi.”
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on Oct. 12, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
Speaking with members of the newly formed AutoZone Workers Union, you would never guess that one of them had just been fired — and that another would be the next morning. That’s what happened to Nathan DuCongé and then David Valencia after they won their union election. On a Zoom call with Jacobin, though, their joy was contagious. DuCongé and his coworkers were all smiles and banter as they talked about their union campaign, how it feels to win, and the unexpected boost they received from filmmaker Boots Riley.
On Friday, September 25, an AutoZone store in White Plains, New York, became the first of the company’s nearly seven thousand American retail locations to unionize. DuCongé and his coworkers, now members of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 259, said they hadn’t been sure which way the vote would go.
“The deck was really stacked against these workers trying to organize here,” said Brian Murray, an experienced organizer brought on in August by UAW Local 259 Vice President Mike DiGuiseppe. “It was because of their sticking together, the amount of fun they have, and their camaraderie, their solidarity for each other, [that] they were able to overcome a lot of union busting.” He added, “I would have expected [them] to not have succeeded in winning that vote, but they did.”
DuCongé moved to New York City two years ago and soon started working for AutoZone as a part-time employee. A year later, he became a parts sales manager. He said he decided to start organizing his store after he was removed from the schedule one Saturday in April, and instead went to a joint meeting of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA). There he was connected with UAW members who encouraged him to unionize.
By then, DuCongé and Valencia, who was hired several months after him, had already discussed the possibility of a union. Valencia’s turning point came in 2025, when he worked a Fourth of July shift and found out from his paycheck that he wasn’t getting holiday pay. “I went in and I told my manager that day . . . I’m going to make a union.”
“I know this isn’t always the case, but for us, it was already there,’ said Valencia. ‘We were already a union.“
Valencia said he already knew DuCongé’s political orientation when he approached him about unionizing. “We got to talking about it, and it took a long time because we didn’t have the institutional knowledge on where to even begin, until by chance Nate met someone at a DSA meeting. They hooked us up with the UAW, and the rest is history.”
Given the store’s small size, the workers’ specific grievances, and the tight-knit relationships among several key employees, DuCongé and Valencia felt it would be a good place to test whether AutoZone could be organized.
“I know this isn’t always the case, but for us, it was already there,” said Valencia. “We were already a union.”
Juan Accostupa, a full-time sales associate who has worked at AutoZone for ten years and trained many of the organizers, described the extra responsibilities workers take on. “We’re not just a retail place. We do a lot of work,” he said. “We unload the trucks, we do installations — batteries, headlights, brake lights, wiper blades, whatever the case might be — and we’re just not getting paid properly.”
“You’re expected to do a lot for so little,” said DuCongé. “These are the kind of things that mechanics are paid to do, right?”
Accostupa said he has made minimum wage throughout his tenure at the store. “Some people think this is, like, a revolution thing. It’s not. We’re just asking for what should be done: better pay and better benefits. That’s it.”
Jess Omelia, a part-time commercial driver who previously worked for a Pepperidge Farm warehouse in Florida with “really great benefits,” said working for minimum wage with little to no benefits was a huge adjustment. “It was a job that I needed at the time, so I took it.”
“Some people think this is, like, a revolution thing. It’s not. We’re just asking for what should be done: better pay and better benefits.“
Omelia said the lack of holiday pay for part-time employees came as a shock. She recalled being put on the schedule for Mother’s Day even though she was the only one among her coworkers with a toddler. “I was the only one there working on Mother’s Day,” she said. “It was only my store manager there. He had given everyone the day off or people had called out to be with their families.”
Workers also cited other reasons for unionizing: inconsistent and last-minute scheduling, inadequate equipment, no say in how they handle their routine responsibilities or in disciplinary procedures, and a push to upsell customers known as “WITTDTJR” — short for the AutoZone slogan “What It Takes To Do the Job Right.”
“We would literally come in and underneath the [sales] numbers every day, there would be a threatening note underneath that you need to get these numbers up,” said Omelia. “You would be punished and your hours would be taken away if you weren’t upselling.”
Workers said their card drive proceeded with little incident until July, when corporate got wind of it. After the workers sent their demand letter and submitted their cards in late July, AutoZone promptly rejected them, saying DuCongé’s involvement as a parts sales manager — a position the company says is supervisory — nullified them.
DuCongé disputes that categorization. Under the National Labor Relations Act, a supervisor must have the authority, using independent judgment, to make or effectively recommend decisions like hiring, firing, disciplining, or promoting other workers — authority DuCongé said he did not have. Rather than fight the issue, which could have delayed an election, the workers resubmitted the cards without him.
“I just felt like it would be selfish if I tried to fight for my eligibility,” said DuCongé. “I never wanted to stand in the way of these people. They’re my friends, my coworkers. It was a good feeling to be able to just help.” He added, “As a member of DSA as well, I felt that as a responsibility. It was kind of like, hey, look, I’m in this organization, I might as well do something that lives up to the organization and the reason why I’m in it.”
Workers said that at a prehearing meeting in late August, AutoZone made clear that it intended to challenge the election not before the National Labor Relations Board but in federal court in Tennessee, where the company is based. At the same meeting, the workers and AutoZone signed an agreement that locked in the list of eligible voters to prevent challenges to votes on election day.
Yet other employees who hold the same position as DuCongé were allowed to vote. Two workers who were transferred to the store in mid-August were also deemed eligible.
In the lead-up to the vote, workers reported being subjected to heavy surveillance, multiple antiunion meetings per week, and threats of disciplinary action against the organizers.
“We were having three meetings a week. It was constant . . . and they were really just reading off of a script every time,” said Omelia. “It was just all anti-union. They were extremely against it, said that they would do everything in their power to fight it. If we didn’t like the conditions, [they said] that we could quit and go to another store.”
Valencia said the anti-union messaging relied on half-truths and accusations, including misleading claims about union dues and employees’ ability to communicate with their manager. Organizers, he said, were accused of misleading or threatening workers into voting yes, and were portrayed as using the campaign to land union jobs paid for by workers’ dues.
Workers said AutoZone brought in managers from locations around the country to surveil the store. “There were up to eight, nine people in the store a day, and even the customers were like, ‘What’s going on?’” said Omelia. “There would be times where they’re literally just standing at the back of the store with their arms crossed, just watching us.”
DuCongé said that after the workers submitted their demand letter on July 24, an account under the name of AutoZone CEO Philip Daniele showed up among the viewers of one of his Instagram stories.
In a September 4 recording shared with Jacobin, management threatened to fire DuCongé for union activity on the grounds that he was a supervisor: “If you continue to involve [yourself] in unionization activity, we will accept your invitation to fire you.”
LaborLab, a workers’ rights watchdog group, estimates that AutoZone spent around $200,000 trying to defeat the union. “They do everything except pay you more,” said Murray.
Despite the onslaught of anti-union activity, the workers said the solidarity they felt with one another kept them moving forward. When Omelia’s mother died, her coworkers took up a collection. “I came into work, and they had a little envelope, and they all pitched in to help with my mom’s funeral costs. That’s how close we are.” Accostupa was quick to point out that every manager declined to contribute.
Support also came from outside the store. DuCongé, a filmmaker himself, had posted on social media about how inspiring he found Boots Riley’s new film, I Love Boosters. To his surprise, Riley started reposting updates on their organizing efforts. His first feature, Sorry to Bother You, follows a group of telemarketers who organize and go on strike.
“Boots has been massively influential on my personal life, my filmmaking efforts, but also really, really influential for this campaign,” he told Jacobin. “The solidarity is going beyond the movies and TV shows that he makes.” He added, “I just can’t thank him enough, truly, for helping us out.”
Workers said management kept talking to employees about the election in the twenty-four hours before the vote — and even during it. “On the day of voting, during voting happening, managers were pulling some of those people out of the store, and trying to sway those votes,” said Omelia.
Barred from voting and, he said, from entering the store, DuCongé stayed nearby. He recounted the moment:
I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I just stand on this hill that’s looking down at the store . . . I felt locked onto the ground, and there’s this groundhog sitting right next to me, just also looking out there too. I’m looking at the groundhog, and then eventually it just looks at me, like, “What are you looking at?” It turns out we’re both just looking down at the store. There’s this beautiful sunset and all these crows and everything, and that’s when Mike [DiGuiseppe] texted us the news, and said, “You won.” I just collapsed.
The final tally was 6–4 in favor of the union. Despite the prehearing agreement, and despite his serving as the union’s election observer, Valencia’s vote was challenged during voting, but, in the end, every eligible vote was counted.
The day after the vote, AutoZone fired DuCongé. In a recording provided to Jacobin, management tells him: “Effective immediately, AutoZone is terminating your employment as a result of the failure to act appropriately as a manager by engaging in and/or facilitating union activity.”
The following day, another worker was fired for, in DuCongé and Valencia’s words, “not stopping the union.”
Valencia says he was fired too, on October 3, the morning after the Zoom call. Asked on the call whether he was worried about his job, he had said, “If I get fired, I get fired. They’re going to have to come up with a good reason, because I’m in the bargaining unit. It won’t be so easy.”
“If I get fired, I get fired. They’re going to have to come up with a good reason, because I’m in the bargaining unit.“
That same day, AutoZone filed three objections to the election with the National Labor Relations Board, a move the union sees as a delay tactic. The workers seem undeterred.
“We fought for this and we did it. It’s funny, I was telling the staff and everybody else, we were like the Knicks. Knicks in six,” said Accostupa. “The thing about it was we won six and four, 6–4. That was the key.”
Next they intend to help workers at other AutoZone stores organize. “I deliver to other stores, so I see the things that they go through,” said Omelia. “They were watching this election and waiting to see what happened with us to see if they could move forward.”
Valencia says AutoZone runs on the work of people like him and his coworkers. “People come into AutoZone frantic,” he says. “You help them out, you send them on their way with a smile on their face. It’s a good thing. We’re not saving the world, but one person at a time, we’re making their day better.”
“The workers on the ground are really providing all the value to the companies that eat up all the value,” Valencia says, “and all the people at the top that take all the profits that we create. And we just want some kind of compensation that looks closer to the value that we provide.”
This feature report was co-produced and is being co-published in partnership with How Things Work by Hamilton Nolan and The Valley Labor Report.
On a plain, blue-lit stage in a plain event space at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, a gruff man with white hair and a thin goatee is complaining about Las Vegas. How it is too hot. How it is too expensive. And how the hotel’s convention-management bureaucracy is driving him nuts.
“You can’t even move a box from left to right without contacting someone to do that!” he barks into the microphone.
Far from all the political bluster about the police being defunded, six years after the earth-shaking George Floyd protests swept the US and public approval for law enforcement plunged to a generational low, these guys have never been more politically and monetarily supported than they are now.
This will become a communal ritual by the end of the week. Without fail, like some sort of morning prayer, the convention begins every day with opening grumblings about the convention itself.
We can see why. After all, the organization convening here is supposed to be a strong union representing nearly 20,000 members around the country. Far from all the political bluster about the police being defunded, six years after the earth-shaking George Floyd protests swept the US and public approval for law enforcement plunged to a generational low, these guys have never been more politically and monetarily supported than they are now.
But there are only about 50 people in the room here with us (28 delegates, 10 alternates, and some wives and family members mixed in). The proceedings are pretty boring and energyless, the attendees are grumpy, and the air is thick with middle-age resentment.
Clearly, the convention organizers and speakers were expecting something much different than this. To be honest, so were we. Because it’s 2026, Donald Trump is president again, and this is the 23rd Quadrennial Convention of the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA), which represents tens of thousands of cops in departments from coast to coast.
The convention was billed as “The premier gathering for law enforcement leadership… An event you don’t want to miss!”
But it’s absolutely dead here. Even the speakers and attendees don’t want to be here. In fact, they won’t shut up about it.
It is by no means the largest police union in America, but IUPA has the distinction of being the only police union that is a member of the AFL-CIO. It joined the labor federation in 1979, making it a formal but uncomfortable partner to every progressive labor union and every rank-and-file union member in the AFL-CIO who has ever had to question why they should be affiliated with a union representing the same kind of cops who beat and arrest them, their union siblings, and their neighbors at protests and on picket lines.
The plainspoken man on stage right now grumbling about the convention, the one with white hair and the thin goatee—that’s Sam Cabral. He’s been IUPA’s president for more than 30 years.
Cabral certainly sets the right wing edge of the AFL-CIO’s unions and union leaders. In 2014, when grassroots racial justice protests rocked Ferguson, Missouri following the killing of Michael Brown by police, the AFL-CIO’s then-President Richard Trumka, who was by no means a hard-left figure, joined calls for police reform and an end to police militarization.
That really pissed off Cabral. In a Strongly Worded Letter to Trumka, he proved what citizens have long known about how law enforcement “workers” wielding the might and prejudice of state violence see the rest of us: “[Police] are not the cause of the problems facing the black communities in America. They are not responsible for the single parent families, the unemployment, the school dropout rate or its attendant unacceptable literacy rate among black youth. They are not responsible for the gangs, black on black crime or the infant mortality rate.”
It is by no means the largest police union in America, but IUPA has the distinction of being the only police union that is a member of the AFL-CIO.
In true “nothing-to-see-here” fashion, Cabral also noted that, when it comes to police department staffing, “we have not ever seen racism or systematic exclusion of minorities.”
In 2020, as populist fury and protests swept the nation (and beyond) following the filmed police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, parts of the labor movement (including Hamilton’s own union, the Writers Guild—East) renewed their push for the AFL-CIO to disaffiliate from IUPA, on the grounds that police unions have clear, unique, existential interests that are irreconcilable with the shared interests of the rest of their alleged union siblings. AFL-CIO leadership disagreed, and they decided instead to speak out in defense of IUPA and its membership: “We believe the best way to use our influence on the issue of police brutality is to engage our police affiliates rather than isolate them.”
Yet the federation’s nominal support for some general accountability and police reform was still too much for Cabral. Stepping back into the political fray to hold the Thin Blue Line, he fired off another furious letter to Trumka, saying that the AFL-CIO President criticizing police over what happened to Floyd was “reprehensible” and an act of “profiling.”
“[Police] are not the cause of the problems facing the black communities in America. They are not responsible for the single parent families, the unemployment, the school dropout rate or its attendant unacceptable literacy rate among black youth. They are not responsible for the gangs, black on black crime or the infant mortality rate.”
Sam Cabral, President of the International Union of Police Associations
“Your recent statement where you speak of ‘America’s long history of racism and violence against black people’ is inflammatory and patently false,” Cabral wrote. “Further, your call to end racial profiling and ‘demilitarize’ police forces makes assumptions that are, again, ridiculous.”
Shocking no one, IUPA endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential reelection bid in 2020, and Cabral full-throatedly joined the MAGA chorus. “Every top Democrat currently running for this office has vilified the police and made criminals out to be victims. They seem to take any union’s support for granted,” he wrote in an official statement in September of 2019. “Many of them still refer to the tragedy in Ferguson as a murder, despite the conclusions of every investigative inquiry to the contrary.”
The mood-deadness and industrially chilled air here in the half-empty Concord Ballroom at the Paris Hotel contrasts so starkly with the grassroots intensity fueling the 2020 George Floyd protests—and with the heat and fury of the longstanding, ongoing debates about what the proper relationship between the labor movement and the police should be.
“Police unions are a conservative force in every institution they find themselves in,” Bill Fletcher Jr.—a lifelong unionist and racial justice activist—tells us over the phone. Fletcher recounts dealing with the police sections of his union during his time as Director of Field Services for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal employees union (and Jacob’s own union), which represents many members who are employed as law enforcement.
“It was like having a ship trying to leave the harbor with an anchor still out,” Fletcher says. “They obstructed everything.”
They could even openly flout the rules of their own union and face no consequences, Fletcher tells us. AFGE’s ICE Council did exactly that when they de-facto endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, against AFGE’s endorsement of Clinton. Guess we shouldn’t be surprised.
In order to secure member support for an agenda that is more challenging to the police state—an issue that is becoming more urgent by the day in Trump’s America—the labor movement needs “serious education” and an “open discussion that begins with the fact that the politics of the IUPA” and other cop unions “run counter to the rest of the labor movement.”
At one point during his time as an AFL-CIO staffer, Fletcher remembers trying to get the labor federation to encourage then-President Bill Clinton to issue a pardon or clemency for political prisoner Leonard Peltier. His proposal was not enthusiastically received. No one asked if taking such a step was worthwhile. No one debated whether it was the right thing to do. Instead, they just asked, “What does IUPA think?”
“They blasted the idea,” Fletcher says, “and that settled it.”
Therein lies the problem, and it’s not a new problem. As Fletcher puts it over the phone, in order to secure member support for an agenda that is more challenging to the police state—an issue that is becoming more urgent by the day in Trump’s America—the labor movement needs “serious education” and an “open discussion that begins with the fact that the politics of the IUPA” and other cop unions “run counter to the rest of the labor movement.”
But Fletcher has his issues with the “Defund the Police” camp, too, and he’s certainly not the only one. While agreeing with many of the goals of police accountability activists—in particular, the need to demilitarize the police and to delink police unions from the rest of the labor movement—Fletcher argues that many in the movement for police accountability have marginalized themselves.
“People have a right to safety,” Fletcher tells us, recalling a terrifying incident when his daughter was held up at gunpoint. “If a cop had killed the guy who did that, I wouldn’t have cared. The way I see it, when you point a gun at someone, those are the chances you’re taking. And I’m a Marxist.”
Fletcher makes the point stick by telling us about a 2020 forum he attended organized by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA). The union had also put out a statement in response to the police murder of George Floyd, which Fletcher commended as “a good statement.” That pissed off a lot of NYSNA members at the forum. Many of those members were married to cops, he says, and they felt like the statement attacked their partners.
Fletcher wonders aloud if certain segments of the left today—those who say they support unions but have no patience or tolerance for law enforcement of any kind—have any patience or tolerance for working people like those NYSNA members and their families. They should, he says.
Over the course of the convention, IUPA’s relationship with the AFL-CIO is the target of more than one sarcastic barb. Cabral refers to IUPA’s “friends” in the House of Labor with all the contempt of Denethor II in his voice.
Far from eschewing the negative popular stereotypes about cops in America—and far from heeding or caring about assertions from organized labor that the interests of police unions run directly counter to the shared goals of the rest of the labor movement—most of the cops here seem to revel in not caring at all (and not having to care) about those things.
Many at this convention make it clear to us that police unions and their members feel no need or duty to consider, accept, or align themselves with the goals of the broader labor movement. According to them, it is the rest of the labor movement whose politics and priorities are out of whack.
Presenters frequently point to a Gallup poll from last year that shows 74% of Americans having confidence in their local police, and 76% being satisfied with the relationship between the police and the public. Gallup’s long-running “Confidence in Institutions” poll also shows that 45% of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in police. Another 32% have at least “some” confidence.
In the six years since Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis—and the furious eruption of demands for racial justice and police accountability that followed—law enforcement unions (at least at the national level) have done absolutely nothing to try to meet the rest of the labor movement—or the rest of the country—on this issue. It’s also true and fair to say that neither unions in general nor the AFL-CIO specifically have made any attempt to seriously “engage” police unions on this issue.
In the six years since Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis… law enforcement unions (at least at the national level) have done absolutely nothing to try to meet the rest of the labor movement—or the rest of the country—on this issue
During the convention, when we speak to delegates about their relationships with other unions back home, they don’t have much to say.
One IUPA local president tells us his union is affiliated with the local labor council, but they don’t participate in council activities anymore, due in large part to rifts caused by political differences.
In Florida—the state where the IUPA international headquarters resides and where some of its largest locals are—labor reporter McKenna Schueler says the union is more or less a nonentity. IUPA members and leaders don’t really work with other labor leaders and unions down there. And the other police unions, which are much bigger in size and have much more political influence, don’t really need IUPA to see their priorities supported in Ron Desantis’s Florida.
“Police get what they want here in the state of Florida,” Joey Davis, a Florida firefighter and member of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), sums it up to us. As a member of the IAFF, Davis says he’s worked with the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) and the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) on shared policy priorities. But, echoing Schueler’s assessment, he says that IUPA has never been all that relevant.
Police unions and their members feel no need or duty to consider, accept, or align themselves with the goals of the broader labor movement. According to them, it is the rest of the labor movement whose politics and priorities are out of whack
Here at the convention, there’s certainly no love lost for the Fraternal Order of Police. To Cabral, FOP is less of a union and more of an advocacy organization with a bad insurance plan, which he contrasts with his own union, boasting about IUPA’s huge resources for members’ legal defense costs.
To put it bluntly, Cabral pretty much looks and talks exactly like you’d expect a cop union leader in America to look and talk like. But it would be dishonest not to mention that there are other attendees and speakers here who either buck the stereotype or at least complicate it. John Covington, Vice President of the Memphis Police Association (MPA)—an IUPA affiliate—is one of those people.
We speak with Covington on a Zoom call after the convention is over. He freely admits that he is “very active” in Republican politics in the state of Tennessee, but says he doesn’t see a contradiction between that and his commitment to labor.
“Supporting workers—advocating for the backbone of the city, the working class—doesn’t have to fall on any political spectrum ” he tells us.
There’s a disconnect sometimes between national politics and locally what’s most effective. When it comes to police unions, what we run across is the left is very suspicious of us because we’re police, and the right is suspicious of us because we’re in unions. We get it from both sides. [But] we use whatever influence we have to let it be known that we don’t stand alone and if you’re gonna support us… you have to support these others.
My advice for a lot of local [unions] in cities, especially Republican cities that naturally the right is going to gravitate to: be supportive of first responders. Those other unions may want to find ways to find that common ground and work together and… look out for each other, and get that mentality of “Look, we may not agree on every single thing, but when it comes down to the voice of the workers, of making conditions better, we’re all on the same page—and if one of us falls under attack, we all fall under attack.”
And then, for police that have more Republican support [my advice would be] to garner more Democratic support, to create coalitions together, because the biggest thing you could ever lose is that voice and right to collectively bargain… We understand the responsibility we have being one of the bigger [unions]; we’re not going to let any of our brothers and sisters fall by the wayside.
Of course, we bring up the fact that many police unions don’t see things the way Covington does. Hamilton recounts how collective bargaining rights for public sector workers are frequently attacked by austerity-horny politicians while police and fire departments get special carveouts. Covington doesn’t dispute the point, but tells us, “We’ve recognized that if you let one fall, you’ve started the domino effect to let all fall, and we take that very seriously. We’ve been under attack for 30 years—all of us. Sometimes the powers-that-be come after us, and the other unions stand with us. Other times it’s them that are the focus, and we stand with them. The bottom line is: advocating and giving a voice to all these folks that make the city run—that’s really unifying. We’re stronger together. ”
To put it bluntly, Cabral pretty much looks and talks exactly like you’d expect a cop union leader in America to look and talk like. But it would be dishonest not to mention that there are other attendees and speakers here who either buck the stereotype or at least complicate it.
Covington isn’t just a one-off figure. According to Memphis Labor Council President Kevin Bradshaw, Covington’s whole MPA local—one of IUPA’s largest—bucks the long-established trend of how cop unions operate.
Bradshaw is a leader in the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers (BCTGM) union representing Kellogg’s factory workers in Memphis, and he has led the labor council since 2022. He says the Memphis Police Association has been active in his labor council since Bradshaw started coming around well over a decade ago—and they continue to be a valued partner.
With 2,000 members, the MPA attends Labor Day parades, supports candidates endorsed by the labor council, and walks picket lines with other union members. Bradshaw also recalls multiple instances of the MPA helping to connect members of other unions to needed resources; particularly, women fleeing domestic abuse. Then he shares an important memory with us.
During the 2021 Kellogg’s strike—a strike that lasted 77 days and involved workers at Kellogg’s plants in Battle Creek Michigan; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Omaha, Nebraska; and Memphis—Bradshaw recalls the company trying to weaponize the cops and the courts against BCTGM strikers by claiming they were breaking the law, trespassing, and blocking the entrances. But Memphis police officers stood up for the BCTGM members and set the record straight. No one was arrested.
“We got calls from anti-union folks and from the company about the picket line,” Matthew Cunningham, MPA President and IUPA Region 15 Vice President, tells us after the convention. “We have to go when there is a call. But the BCTGM members were always following the law, so when we got there and investigated, we just told them they were doing a great job and went back to the station.”
When it comes to police unions, what we run across is the left is very suspicious of us because we’re police, and the right is suspicious of us because we’re in unions. We get it from both sides.
John Covington, Vice President of the Memphis Police Association
Cunningham also recounts an incident last year with Memphis Mayor Paul Young—a “Democrat in name only” who, according to him, is backed by “business owners and old money.” Mayor Young and the Memphis City Council sparked a furious uproar when they tried to revoke collective bargaining rights for city employees last October. What we hear from Cunningham—and what other labor leaders in Memphis have corroborated—is that MPA worked with the other municipal unions to fight back and save union rights, not just for cops and MPA members, but for all city unions. Rather than carve out a side deal for his members—as many police union leaders have repeatedly done in cities and states across the country—Cunningham led that fight to protect bargaining rights for all.
To be honest, Cunningham seems like a genuinely solid guy who is trying to do the most good he can. And of course there always are, always have been, and always will be genuinely good-hearted people who choose to make a living wearing a badge on their chest.
But the reality that there are decent people who work as law enforcers doesn’t negate the reality of what law enforcers do to poor and working people across the country (and what the police exist to do in our society). Two things can be true at the same time. Many things are true at the same time, in fact.
The reality that there are decent people who work as law enforcers doesn’t negate the reality of what law enforcers do to poor and working people across the country (and what the police exist to do in our society). Two things can be true at the same time.
Everything Memphis Labor Council President Kevin Bradshaw recounted about what happened (and, more importantly, what didn’t happen) between the Kellogg’s strikers and the MPA cops is true. So are all the documented and completely unwarranted murders of people by police. So are all the verified, horrifying images of police brutalizing and crushing student demonstrations, strikes, and countless forms of protest or righteous civil disobedience. So are all the other abuses of power people have experienced firsthand, witnessed with their own eyes, and recorded with their phones. So are all the things that the Fraternal Order of Police and its president Patrick Yoes have said in public and written down. So are all the things IUPA president Sam Cabral has said in public and written down.
When we’re talking to Bradshaw, we show him IUPA’s 2020 statements about George Floyd, racism in policing, etc. He is shocked.
As a contrast, he points to the way the MPA reacted to the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed black man who was beaten to death. While the association didn’t explicitly condemn the officers in press statements, they also offered no public defense of them. They did, however, provide a legal defense to the tune of $4.2M and counting.
Regarding the Nichols case, Covington stresses that the legal defense fund is a distinct entity that they pay into, and that it is ultimately that entity that makes decisions about which cases to take. (Here at the convention, funding the Tyre Nichols defense is something that the administrator of the fund openly brags about.) The Memphis Police Association never took a vote on whether or not to expend funds defending Nichols’ killers. But Covington reiterates what the union said at that time: that everyone deserves due process.
Defending “bad workers” is something that all unions have to deal with. When required to defend workers who actually have sub-par performance records or who have committed some other form of misconduct, most unions will generally defend this practice by arguing that protecting the contract is their paramount duty, that everyone deserves due process and a good defense, and that it is management’s job, not the union’s, to discipline.
But does that entitle the officers who killed Tyre Nichols to a $4.2 million Cadillac legal defense when they are so clearly in the wrong, should clearly never be entrusted with law enforcement duties ever again, and should (under the logic of our carceral system) be serving serious time for their crimes? Doesn’t it stand to reason that such defenses just embolden cops to use more force than they otherwise might? Is it the responsibility of the union to consider social ramifications like that, even if discipline and performance are supposedly the sole responsibility of management?
These questions are neither brought up nor wrestled with at the IUPA convention. Instead, a resolution is passed supporting qualified immunity for cops—unanimously, as far as we can tell.
In hindsight, the cops won the fight over police reform.
Police departments were not defunded; their budgets are bigger than ever. As IUPA members are quick to point out, confidence in police is still quite high—significantly higher than in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Even Zohran Mamdani, New York’s socialist mayor and erstwhile supporter of defunding the police, went on an apology tour to placate the police.
The AFL-CIO’s momentary enthusiasm for police reform collapsed into a symbolic committee that released a report rejecting calls to “Defund the Police.” Richard Trumka died suddenly in 2021. Now Donald Trump is in charge again. IUPA is still an AFL-CIO affiliate. And under the gaudy, chandeliered ceiling of the Paris casino, Sam Cabral has just been reelected as IUPA’s International President.
No doubt the record drops in crime the US is experiencing have something to do with the decrease in grassroots movements that are more antagonistic towards police. Ironically, current drops in crime can be attributed, at least in part, to policies advocated for by these very movements, from investing in non-carceral solutions to societal ills like poverty, homelessness, and drug abuse, to pushing local governments to hire and employ more people as social workers, teachers, counselors, clinicians, etc.
Eric Blanc, a prominent socialist writer and member of NYC-DSA, argues that an approach of emphasizing the addition of social services rather than subtraction of policing is a better agenda to pursue anyways. “Fight for a massive redistribution of wealth,” which could be used to fund programs like these, ultimately “taking jobs away from cops,” he says, instead of fighting them head on. With respect to the demand to kick police unions out of the AFL-CIO, Blanc cautions that, to many working people, it is “not so obvious how kicking out cops makes the world better.”
The slogan itself definitely needed some work, but it’s important to remember that “Defund” was as much about diverting public money away from police as it was about putting more money into social services. It was about questioning whether armed police officers should be asked to be the primary first responders when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis. Cops are being asked to do too much, with deadly consequences, and the Defund movement sought to take some of those responsibilities off their plate.
When we ask Covington about this, he enthusiastically endorses the call for increased spending on social services, acknowledging that they help a lot. “[The system] we have now is you take them in and in two days they’re back on the street, and we have no control over that. We want to see more support, more programs for people… We don’t like having to do all these roles that fall on us.” However, when it comes to “defunding” or replacing police with social workers on distress calls, or even adding them to a team of police, Covington is still very wary. “Situations can get out of hand quickly, violence can happen very quickly… For us, to bring a social worker on a scene—that’s one more person you have to protect. It’s that much more dangerous.”
Earlier this summer, the AFL-CIO’s quadrennial convention was held in Minneapolis. The federation made it a point to uplift and honor the role that Minnesota’s unions had played in the hard and grinding grassroots opposition to ICE that traumatized the city this year. A few months later, one of the AFL-CIO’s member unions has its own convention and goes out of its way to feature speakers who talk approvingly about union members working hand in hand with ICE to sweep up their immigrant neighbors.
A union like IUPA, and a convention like this, helps to illuminate the boundaries of solidarity. You see here how that admirable quality can be turned backward on itself and become meaningless, nonsensical, even harmful. How much solidarity are we expected to have—how much solidarity is it possible to have—with the people who arresting, deporting, and killing us? Will that solidarity be recognized and reciprocated by law enforcers when it counts? If the past is any precedent, and if this convention is any indication, our advice is: Don’t hold your breath.
For Oakland Review of Books, Stephanie Uchino-Beach writes about getting laid off at an education tech company that transformed into an “AI-first outfit.” As as customer success manager, she acted as a liaison to district administrators, school principals, and teachers. While AI could automate some of her tasks, what about the core responsibilities of her CSM role: building real relationships and understanding an educator’s needs? An AI sees data points, not people. This is a sobering read from a former tech worker living in the Bay Area, and an edtech company that has gone all in on AI and forgotten about its mission.
Before I went to work for Silicon Valley, I was a lot of things. A few jobs before this last one, I was an elementary school teacher in Chicago, helping kids learn to read, creating units, planning lessons, and buying supplies with my own money on the weekends, like countless other teachers around the country. I grew up on the Peninsula, and I made the move into Customer Success to get a job that would let me move home. Tech was never my dream; it was a means to an end. My dad studied computer science and still works in tech to this day and enjoys it, so it seemed like a satisfying and fruitful career was plausible. I figured that once I broke in, all my problems would be solved: I could get a house, have a kid, and fulfill every middle-class dream that had always felt slightly out of reach for a millennial like myself.
And yet, job after job, I consistently left feeling unsatisfied. Unsatisfied by how I wasn’t growing and wasn’t developing my skills. Unsatisfied with poor managers who were just in the right place at the right time to be promoted but so often lacked the skills to provide the same success for their employees. Unsatisfied with how the products I worked on could do wrong by the communities we sold them to, even though every company said they were “mission-driven” and “put our customers first.”
Because he was bullied in elementary school for being Native American, James Gardner’s friends lovingly call him “NDN.” His friends and family know NDN to be a fiercely loyal, loving person, and a fiercely hard worker. But as a third-generation concrete specialist, NDN was exposed to chemicals that have left him disabled, terminal, and facing foreclosure on his home. In this episode of Working People, we speak with James “NDN” Gardner and his best friend James Quigg.
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The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are in Fort Worth, Texas, and we’re talking about a fellow worker named James. As Maven Navarro recently reported in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, “After leaving Oklahoma, James Gardner built a life for himself in Fort Worth. Now he could lose it all. When Gardner walks into doctor’s offices to receive treatment for his terminal liver failure, he has to ask staff to remove all the air fresheners for his skin condition. Gardner has multiple chemical sensitivity, which he says was caused by his time as a concrete specialist working with two-part epoxy resin. The illness causes him to break out anytime he gets around chemicals, air fresheners, perfumes, cleaning supplies, and paint spark allergy flare-ups that can last for 10 days.
Concrete work is known to cause health problems. Cement plants can also cause respiratory or cardiovascular issues according to the Environmental Protection Agency. James Quigg first met Gardner in high school in Oklahoma where he was given the nickname NDN after enduring bullying for being Native American and kids calling him Indian. A few of Gardner’s friends started calling him NDN or Indian, and it stuck. Now, Quig started a GoFundMe to help prevent Gardner from losing his house. As he is unable to work and has faced challenges receiving disability, Gardner was denied disability the first two times he applied for it. It wasn’t until his third application that he was approved because of his internal organs shutting down.” So to talk about all of this, I am truly grateful to have James Indian Gardner himself and James Quigg, who they have given me permission to call them “NDN” and “Quigg,” friends since high school, both here on the show with us today.
Thank you guys so much for being here. It is really, really great to be connecting with y’all. And my God, I wish we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances and I’m so sorry that you’re going through all of this. And NDN, as much as you’re comfortable, I want us to make sure that we focus a good chunk of time today talking about what you’re going through now, where things stand now and what people listening can do to help. But we’ve got 50 minutes here and I really want listeners to get to know you and your lives more, your friendship and all the things that make you, you, not just these horrible people and jobs and systems that have done all this unforgivable damage to you. So NDN, start us off. Tell us the story of you and what brought you to Fort Worth. And then Quigq, hop in and tell us your story and how it intertwines with Indians.
James “NDN” Gardner:
I’ll start with a nickname “NDN” and then I’ll go from there. So as you were saying, back in school, kids were making fun of me and bullying me, and my principal called us into the office in my freshman year, said, “You guys can’t call him an Indian anymore. You’re being racist.” And one of my friends stood and said, “We’re not calling him Indian. We’re calling him letter N, letter D, letter N.” And he says, “Well, I can’t do anything about that.” And it just stuck and I’ve always enjoyed it. A lot of people are like, “He’s not just a Indian, he’s the Indian. There’s only one of them running around.” As far as career goes, I am third generation doing precast concrete with the passion. I’ve always enjoyed doing concrete. I’ve loved it. Being able to take the raw elements of earth and forging it into something that’s going to last and help the world is phenomenal to me.
I relocated down here to Fort Worth to actually do the McKinley Stadium, which is my third stadium to be a part of. Years ago, I was working for a company that dealt with a very strong epoxy resin and only 4% of the people that are exposed directly to it will develop an allergy to it. And with the company, it’s easier for them just to pay you off than it is to change their safety protocols, which shouldn’t be the way, but it’s cheaper for them that way. And over time, my symptoms and my condition got worse and worse and worse because it just doesn’t stop once you’re out of the environment of that specific thing. I remember one time they laid a new asphalt in front of my house here on the road and I broke out for a week because of the adhesive and the tar and the asphalt and I couldn’t avoid it because I was in my own home.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So I have so many questions about that specifically because I don’t know if you guys know about it, but on this show specifically, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews with working people who have been exposed to toxic chemicals from work, from industrial disasters near their homes, all this kind of stuff that poor and working people are being exposed to daily. I mean, I was just filming in South Baltimore last night where residents just like you guys, but here in Baltimore are fighting trash incinerators that are blasting toxic chemicals into the lungs of their children. So this is definitely something that we’ve talked a lot about on the show, but I do want to talk about what that looked like for you, Indian, on a day-to-day working level. But before we get there, I want to go deeper into some of the lore here. Take me back to where you guys were in high school where you first met.
Quigg, who was this guy in high school when you met? And NDN, same question about Quigg.
James Quigg:
So Indian is a grade above me. So I came in as a freshman. He was already an established sophomore. He had a cool car. It was painted. He had some lady. Did it have a female on the hood and it had the universe? I mean, you couldn’t miss this car.
Maximillian Alvarez:
You had a low rider?
James “NDN” Gardner:
No, actually, it was a 91 Chevy Cavalier and anytime I’d get bored, we would just re-spray paint it. It was all animal print once. Once it was all hippied out, make love, not war. Even at one point I gave all the kids an art paint pens and we just wrote quotes over the entire car. People would stand there and read it for hours. It was just something to do. So
James Quigg:
You’d see this car. I’d see the car around before I was even in high school. So then you see, oh, this is the cool guy with the cool car. And then he’s always hanging out in the courtyard and he’s always got this group of girls because he’s just very didn’t try very hard, I guess. And honestly, I don’t think we liked each other necessarily in the beginning. It was just he had this girls that I was trying to hang out with, talk to, and he just didn’t really like the new guy, the new skinny white dude that was hanging around.
Maximillian Alvarez:
You got to earn your keep, baby.
James Quigg:
It took a couple years.
James “NDN” Gardner:
He really had to. And most of these girls I’ve been friends with for years, so I was very protective of them because they were my friends. And here’s this scrawny kid coming in trying to ask them all different kinds of things and get involved. I’m like, “Hey, hey, you don’t need to be around here right now.” But eventually he warmed over to me and I warmed over to him.
James Quigg:
Yeah, I was saying hope I was best friends with his cousin for a couple years. Then probably what, sophomore, not sophomore, junior, senior year, we started maybe hanging out a little bit more. You invited me to your house.
James “NDN” Gardner:
I had a house that most people weren’t allowed to. I was very young and I lived on my own, so it was just me and this trailer house at 16 years old. So a lot of parents didn’t even allow their kids over to my place. And they spray painted up too in the walls.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. I mean, to be honest, I don’t think my parents wouldn’t allow that either, but that would be exactly the house we’d all want to go to. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, can I ask how you ended up having your own kind of place when you were 16?
James “NDN” Gardner:
My parents separated and it was a choice of either do I go live with my dad or do I go live with my mom? And I was already working full-time at the time, and I bought a trailer house on state auction and moved into it. And it was just simpler that way. My mother ended up moving back in with me a few years later, but it was just more convenient. So like I said, I already had the income coming in.
Maximillian Alvarez:
What were you doing back then for work?
James “NDN” Gardner:
Back then? Well, my first job was working for the Department of Wildlife through a program called ATEC, which was American Indian Education Training Association. They took Native Americans and put them at federal buildings and gave them summer jobs. So that got me experience. Pretty much I was doing property management, mowing the yard, stuff like that, but I got to do a lot of really cool stuff with them because I was, “Hey, let’s grab him and take him with us to go do this fish survey or let’s go explore the bat caves and do a survey out there.” And so it was very fun as a youth to have that. And then I went straight from that to Home Depot, working at Home Depot as a pro associate.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So paint a picture for me. When you guys were back there in Oklahoma, are we talking kind of small town Oklahoma, medium town, city? Yeah, paint a picture for me.
James “NDN” Gardner:
So Bethany, Oklahoma at that point was the very edge of Oklahoma City. So it’s pretty much small town. I knew all the police officers, they all knew me, not because I was in trouble, just because there wasn’t a lot of us running around. And of course it was the late ’90s, early 2000s, so we were always getting into some sort of trouble as we all did back in that time.
James Quigg:
Oklahoma is a pretty small, big town. I think less than a million people in the whole city, probably less than that now, but I mean it takes what, 10 minutes or less to get down into the heart of Bricktown, downtown Oklahoma City. I mean, it still is small town, but it’s trying to be bigger than it really is.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I mean, I come from Southern California, the land of endless lights and sprawl from the beach to the mountains. So everything feels small town to me to some extent. But to be honest, I kind of got a lot of love for the small and medium-sized towns in the country. I don’t think I gave them enough credit when I was younger, but the older I get and go visit more, the more fascinating they are. But I wanted to ask in that vein, we’re talking about Oklahoma. I guess we’re talking in the colonial project of the United States of America, so everything is ironic, but living in a state named Oklahoma and going to a school where you make fun of Native American kids feels so ironic and ridiculous that I don’t even know what to do with myself. But was that normal Indian? I mean, what was the kind of ratio?
Were there a lot of indigenous kids going to school there?
James “NDN” Gardner:
No. No, there wasn’t. In high school, there was maybe five of us altogether. I mean, there’s not a lot of us left. It’s sad to say. I was fortunate enough to run into… I mean, we just kind of all clicked together because, oh yeah, you’re native too. Cool. What tribe? What’s your family line? But the whole reason why we were in Oklahoma City is that my father was one of the Native Americans you hear about in the past being adopted off the res for a very low amount of money. And then he was adopted with four other siblings, all native from different tribes raised by a white man in the city. So yeah, there just wasn’t a lot that made it to the inner city area at that time. They all stayed out near the reservations, near the small towns like Carnegie and Adarko. So being inside the city, yeah, there wasn’t a lot of us.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I take it from the origin story of your nickname that it wasn’t a very kind place to Native kids like you?
James “NDN” Gardner:
Oh, no, no, no. I remember once I was 14 walking down the street and the cops pulled me over because they had an APP put out on a Native American with long hair. I just happened to be a Native American with long hair. And they picked me up and took me down to the police station, which was just three blocks from my house. I wasn’t the person they were looking for. The person they were looking for had robbed a gas station and he was in his late 20s and I was 14. We stood out, so you either knew who we were or it’s just the way it was.
James Quigg:
It’s true. And what they only taught us in school about Native American culture is just an annual field trip we take to the Cowboy Hall of Fame and they’d show us the statues and talk about the Trail of Tears.
Speaker 4:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
But there’s a lot to this story that I identify with in certain ways. I don’t know what that’s like Indian, but I know what it’s like to be a bald, scary looking Mexican dude in America. I’ll take looking like Quigg over looking like us on a normal day if I don’t want to get stopped by the cops. But that’s all the more reason why it just fills my heart when I hear stories of comradery and lifesaving solidarity, even among kids who are standing up for a friend. Tell me more about that, both of you, the stepping in to sort of reclaim the name and to say this is not how we’re going to do things. This guy’s our friend, not our enemy.
James “NDN” Gardner:
Oh yeah. I mean, Quig is my white guy. I always joke with people like, “I got my white guy. He’s right here. I’m safe. I don’t need a card. I got a whole person.” And I mean, he’s always had my back. Once we really connected and I realized that this is somebody that I needed to be part of my life and everything he’s done for me over the years, I can’t live up to. I try.
James Quigg:
I seriously doubt that, brother. I have computer smarts and I can do techie stuff, but this guy is the dude if you need any help. I mean, I’ll go back to last year, we had a leak in my daughter’s bathroom and it was coming down in the guest bathroom and I was like, “I don’t know what the hell to do, man. It’s just coming down.” And he just hopped in his car and he brought all his tools because he’s just that guy. And so he came and he helped me change the drywall. And as he’s doing this and helping me with all the stepping outside because I got to spray some kills on the wood, I mean, he’s getting hives, he’s getting blisters. I’m feeling incredibly guilty and he’s like, “Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get it done.” But he’s just that kind of guy and it’s been like that anytime I’ve needed him.
He’s just always there. And it’s not just me, it’s everybody. He’s helped damn near everybody that we know, either with a place to stay, help fixing their car, mowing a yard. It doesn’t matter. He’s a helper, he’s a doer, and that’s just something I’ve always admired from him.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and it’s genuinely beautiful to hear you guys say that, right? Because first and foremost, I’m thinking just as three men in the country today, we don’t say this enough to each other and we don’t allow ourselves to be that for each other. And so I just wanted to kind of honor the beautiful friendship that you guys have, having each other’s backs for this long is a marvelous thing. And I’ll be honest with all of you listening, Quig reached out to me about Indian’s story and told me about it, and that’s how it got on my radar. So these guys have been together for years and they’re still looking out for each other, and I think the world will be a better place if we all do a little more of that for each other. And Quig, even you telling that story reminds me that we’ve still got so much to talk about here, Indian, about your working life and the conditions and chemicals that you were exposed to that are now collapsing your health and your quality of life.
So that’s normally what we talk about on this show is I talk to workers and I say, “Tell me about your working life.What does it look like on the job?
For people who’ve never worked in this line of work, what does it entail?” Can you kind of take us a little bit on that journey and then tell us about the kind of work hazards that you were exposed to?
James “NDN” Gardner:
Yeah. The company where I was working for made burial vaults and the poncho that they used went on the liners of the burial vaults to seal it to the concrete so it maintain a watertight sealness for 50 to 100 years. That’s what they were concerned about. The people working in there that were alive being exposed to a hazardous chemical to keep somebody that’s going to go in the ground from being exposed to the elements of the ground was more important to them than the people actually doing the job because there was other things that could have been used that was more efficient but cost more money.
And after my initial exposure with this company, I was still passionate about concrete. I still wanted to do concrete, but I had to relearn what companies I could work for, where I could work at, and how I could do it because now I got to change everything. I can’t be around anything that has sold chemicals. I’ve got to be in open environments. And one of the things, I was also a journeyman iron worker because every now and then you get tired of staring at gray when you do concrete long enough. And back to the whole having lung and breathing respiratory issues, as a journeyman iron worker, I was working on the Devon Tower, which is the tallest building in Oklahoma City, and I was going from the ground up a thousand feet every day, and I had developed acute altitude sickness from just working on the outside of the building every day.
But a lot of that was contributed because they did a long biopsy on me to test me for silicosis, which is from concrete dust. And I did have some concrete dust built up in my lungs at the time. And that’s just because not wearing enough protection when you should wear protection because old school concrete guys just get the job done, which I got no problem getting a job done, but it should be done safely, effectively, and efficiently, not the other direction around, efficiently and safety being one of the last concerns. So after no longer working for the company that caused my initial, and I didn’t realize how bad I was going to get over the years, because initially it was just adhesives in general. Then it got where I couldn’t even put a bandaid on without breaking out from the adhesives as I am now.
I actually have to order special medical stuff when I do get a cut so I can seal myself and not have a reaction to it for a long period of time.
James Quigg:
He has to take his own adhesives to the ER when he’s got to go to the ER because of his terminal liver failure, otherwise he’ll break out from that.
James “NDN” Gardner:
Yeah. Even going in for a procedure, they put an EKG machine on me. I’m going to break out from every point where the EKG machine is.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus, man.
James “NDN” Gardner:
Even the tape on my fingers or to monitor my heart rate and my breathing will make me break out. So I travel with my own medical stuff now. It
Maximillian Alvarez:
Sounds like hell.
James “NDN” Gardner:
It is. It made me a shut in for quite a while because going to Walmart, going to the grocery store, luckily there’s DoorDash and things like that now where I don’t have to get out and get exposed. But again, like I said, it made me change how I worked in concrete. I went to places that had super structures that worked outside, still making beautiful things with concrete, but eventually the skin allergy, the multiple chemical sensitivity just overtook everything. I did work for a trailer company for a little while working three days a week because they knew my skin issue, they knew my thing. So I would go there whenever they needed something welded or something wired that they couldn’t figure out. But again, now I’m going to this place to work on a trailer and that trailer might’ve had paint in it. It might’ve had construction debris.
I can’t even walk into a Home Depot or a Walmart or Lowe’s. Fast food restaurants get me pretty good too. And as much as I love old people, they’re a little heavy with that perfume.That’s
Maximillian Alvarez:
Putting it mildly, man. And yeah, I’m sure so many of us don’t even realize all the spaces that we walk into where those irritants are, but if you start breaking out in hives the second that you’re exposed to it, you start realizing that actually there are a lot of places you can’t go. And that is just something that I think so many of us don’t have to think about. But when you’re in your position and you have to think about it, it must be just genuinely overwhelming at times.
James “NDN” Gardner:
T-Mobile has their own scent of air freshener. So when you open a T-Mobile store door, it puts a little spray into the air for a sensory thing. I understand how that can be with marketing. Oh, this is what T-Mobile smells like. I’m getting a new phone. And I didn’t know that till they rolled out with that and I went into a T-Mobile and next thing I know I’m being sprayed and now I’m breaking out in hives and I’ve got a leak.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus, man. So as we sort of get to the situation that you’re dealing with now, I’ve heard from you a number of things already. We’re talking silicosis, we’re talking exposure to epoxy resin generating a chronic skin sensitivity, right? I mean the altitude sickness that you developed on the job. I guess if you had to sort of sum it up, if you could, what conditions do you have now that came from working in this country, from being exposed to things or repetitive actions to things? I guess I wanted to try to collect all that for listeners and ask what is the kind of sum total of all the crap that you’re dealing with from all the jobs that you’ve worked?
James “NDN” Gardner:
If the MSDS is laid out and has its certain rules and regulations, if the company will abide by the MSDS correctly, I would’ve never been overexposed.
James Quigg:
What’s the MSDS?
James “NDN” Gardner:
Material safety data sheets. It tells you about the hazardous of the chemicals, what you’re supposed to be wearing and be doing to you’re not hurt by it and it doesn’t affect you. And most companies, yeah, we’ve got an MSDS. It’s in a book on the wall over there. You can go look at it if you want to. And then they tell you to go to work. And I was guilty of doing that to people too. I’m like, “Well, yeah, the MSDS is over there, but just put this little mask on.” In reality, they needed a respirator instead of just a dust mask and went on with the day to get the day done. Things have changed a lot now than how bad it used to be when me starting off in the industry of concrete and everything else, because again, it was you’d stand in a cloud of dust grinding and just put on some safety glasses and hold your breath.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and let’s talk about when these health conditions started piling up and to the point that you needed disability checks and then had to navigate this Kafka-esque system that doesn’t work to try to get the aid that you need to live. Tell us more about the kind of crisis that you’re in now and all the people who are supposed to be helping you right now but aren’t.
James “NDN” Gardner:
Yeah. I mean, even going to the social security office to file for disability, I would sit there breaking out because I’m waiting for long periods of time in the line in a room full of people with chemicals on. So it became I have no choice. I have to go do this. I’ve got to go file this paperwork and I filed the paperwork and I wait and I wait and I wait. And then, “Well, we want to send you to this doctor.” Well, I call the doctor’s office. I’m like, “Listen, I can’t just go in there and they don’t abide by those rules.” They’re like, “No, you’ve got to come in, you’ve got to wait, you’ve got to go through this.” Even now, I’ve got some doctors that really help me with my situation and make sure the days that I’m scheduled, that nobody’s wearing perfume and that it’s going to be a nice, clean environment for me.
And then I have other doctors that could care less, but I’ve got to go through them because the social security’s telling me, “Well, you need to go to this guy and get tested for this.” I mean, they just did an allergy test on me, and part of the allergy test, the bonding agent in the allergy test is an adhesive. So I tested positive for everything, even though I told them I’m an adhesive and yeah, it just has to be on my skin for a few minutes to test me for allergies. Well, that’s still an adhesive on my skin for a few minutes. And I ended up having to get an epishot in the middle of the test, which now became an inclisive test.
James Quigg:
And I do want to clarify that Fort Worth Star Telegram’s article, I don’t believe he’s been approved for disability yet.
James “NDN” Gardner:
No. No, I haven’t been approved yet, but since we’ve gotten the articles, they’ve started reaching out to me more instead of me having to wait and call them. So now we’re actually communicating back and forth for the first time, but I’ve been denied twice.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So the situation, as I understand it, please correct me if I’m wrong, is that you now, because of what you’ve been exposed to over the course of your working life, are no longer able to work and you are disabled by those things you were exposed to, but you have received no money from the disability office. Your life is in limbo right now.
James “NDN” Gardner:
Yes, I am in limbo. And the first two times I was denied because they did not recognize multiple chemical sensitivity as a disability until the past five years. And I’ve been dealing with it for 10 years now. So it wasn’t recognized as a disability. Now they’re starting to, “Well, what do we have to do to prove that this is a disability?” And because of my skin always having to fight these battles and me being on experimental drugs, trying to overcome with it, and part of being native is that most drugs aren’t made for a 40-year-old Native American guy. They’re made for a 40-year-old white man who has years and years of antibodies built up in the systems where if I get a flu shot, I’m ending up with walking pneumonia, where if Quigley got a flu shot, he’s just fine the next day because it’s more developed.
So my body started shutting down because of it’s trying to fight all the time, always battling, always battling my skin, always fighting, led to me having internal organ failure. I go in for another surgery on Monday, which will be my 10th surgery this year alone because my body’s just shutting down.
But yeah, I’m just in limbo. But now, so I was able to refile for social security with the internal organ failure and the liver failure and the terminal diagnostics now. So it’s not even really taking the multiple chemical sensitivity into effect with my disability. That’s just added to it now.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I guarantee that there are going to be folks that I know who are going to listen to this and they’re going to reach out and they’re going to say, “You’re damn right it’s a disability. They have it. A lot of the residents I was talking about who have been exposed to these chemicals, now they are so hypersensitive to these chemicals and they bioaccumulate and they make them feel worse and their kids are getting sick or staying sick or they haven’t been not sick for years at this point. And it’s just this kind of hell that they’re living through. And I can’t help but think of all the other workers like you who are exposed to this stuff. I mean, in the year 2026, black lung is on the rise in this country. There are men our age dying from coal mining or other forms of silicosis because of the stuff they’re inhaling, the lack of PPE they’re getting, just this whole system of grinding people down to dust and subjecting our bodies to the most toxic conditions just to make a buck.
And it’s so systemic, but it impacts us in so many different ways. And I kind of wanted to just ask you guys about that.What does this all say about the daily realities that working people are going through in this country? And especially if you’re disabled or indigenous or both?
James Quigg:
Well, I’ll say that invisible disabilities are easily ignored. That is one thing that Andy and I both have in common. You look at both of us on a normal day, you don’t see a disability. You don’t see a multiple chemical sensitivity in him. You don’t see type one diabetes in me. So it’s easy, kind of out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people, except for the people that have to deal with it day in, day out when they wake up to when they go to bed.
James “NDN” Gardner:
I feel like in a way I was robbed because I always wanted to provide for my family. I always wanted to work hard and make a living. And because I was working hard and making a living and the companies that I worked for ignored safety protocols, I can no longer do what I want to do for my family and be there for my family the way I should have been allowed to. And a lot of working people, that’s all we want to do is make ends meet, survive and enjoy life and enjoy the little things. And to not be able to do that now because a company wanted to make more money isn’t justified.
James Quigg:
I mean, it’s true. America is built on the backs of people like Indian and a lot of people just use them as stepping stones to get to the future.
Speaker 4:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think that was beautifully and powerfully and put and it’s so depressingly true. I mean, Jesus, we just passed the 25th anniversary of nine eleven and we’re learning about all the things that not just first responders, but people all over New York were exposed to and lied to about for years later. This is unacceptable at every single level and we can’t keep accepting it. We’ve got to do something about it and we got to start by taking care of each other. And I wanted to bring us there for the final turn here because I know I can’t keep you guys for much longer, but I wanted to ask where things currently stand. I mean, you guys already gave us an important update from the Fort Worth Star Telegram that apparently Indian still hasn’t received anything from the disability office and he was denied two times before that anyway until his organs started shutting down.
Then he got some movement, but where does that leave Indian now? Where does that leave your family now? And what are folks doing in response? What can folks listening do to help?
James “NDN” Gardner:
Right. I mean, to back it down, sage up, pray to whoever will listen.
James Quigg:
Yeah. We’re kind of waiting to see what disability says. Hopefully he gets an approval and he’ll get some sort of back money so that he can get caught up with his bills because the bills haven’t stopped. The mortgage hasn’t stopped. They’re still trying to foreclose as far as I know because he’s terminal. They’re trying to get at least the ability for him to stay in his home and not be evicted. But that doesn’t solve a problem. That just pushes it down the road and it leaves it for his kids when Indian’s no longer here to help. But as far as what’s keeping him afloat has been this GoFundMe the last month or so, just from the kindness of strangers. Indian spent his life helping anybody and everybody. That doesn’t mean that those people are in positions to be able to help financially or monetarily in any way.
Indian’s always been that person to support others.
It’s just there’s nobody there maybe outside of myself that’s able to help him in that sense. And so we were sitting around his cousin, my other best friend and his mother on his birthday, what, six weeks ago, something like that, sitting around the kitchen table trying to figure out how do we stop this foreclosure? What can we do? Can we get a loan? Can we try to refinance? Can we refinance his mom’s house? Can I afford to purchase the home on my own? And realistically, none of us, we couldn’t do any of that. So I went home frustrated that we had to do this on his birthday, kind of cried about it a little bit and said, “Fuck it, I’m going to do this. I’m going to make a GoFundMe. I’m going to tell my friend’s story the best that I can and see if people are willing to respond.” Just try to show the world the kind person and generous person he’s always been and hopefully karma will come back tenfold on him.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Indian, I want to give you the last word here and it can really be anything that you want, but I guess if you could know that you’re speaking to fellow workers around the country who listen to this show, who work in industries like this and industries that unlike this, if you could talk to those folks who are working jobs like this now or folks out there who could help, what would you just want to leave them with?
James “NDN” Gardner:
My family’s got a motto. If someone needs help, you help. You don’t ever respect anything in return. Whether it’s an old lady crossing the street, somebody on the side of the road with a flat tire, any situation. Somebody needs you to help them push a car or you notice your neighbor’s grass is too tall and you know he hasn’t been feeling well the last few weeks. Nothing’s going to cost you but time. Time is all we have for each other and let’s enjoy it and spend it and help everybody together. We’re all in this together. This is one world, one life. We’re all part of this. We’re all part of this.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, James Indian Gardner and James Quigg. You can get in touch with them and keep up to date with Indian story by using the links that we’ve included in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we can’t do it without you. So thank you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle across the US and around the world.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out our other great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Battle for Free Speech and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
This article was originally published by Truthout on Sept. 30, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
The 18th-century notion of the panopticon — a circular prison design with a guard station in the middle, allowing a single officer to enforce discipline by keeping watch over all the prisoners — has become real in the 21st century through AI-driven surveillance against workers: It’s the Amazon warehouse.
It should be no surprise that the company that harnessed technology to create a vast, $2.7 trillion empire would employ the same sophistication to enforce workplace discipline and tamp down insurgent unionization efforts. A recent disclosure of Amazon’s internal “employee relations” documents reveals just how extreme Amazon’s methods of warehouse surveillance and control have become.
Amazon employs what it calls the “Atlas” model, inputting into a computerized model a staggering amount of information on workers, their thoughts and behaviors, the workplace environment, and myriad other factors — “hundreds of data points,” according to the company. Atlas produces not just a granular measurement of ongoing worker unrest, worksite by worksite around the world, but also a prediction model for future organizing. It’s like the “precrime” police in the film Minority Report who use psychic powers to identify and apprehend would-be criminals before they act — except in this case, it’s an AI-driven tool used by the billionaire owners of one of the richest companies in history to head off rebellion among its low-wage workforce. And this is not Tom Cruise play-acting; it’s very real.
Workers anywhere who have endured anti-union campaigns can relate to stories of overbearing surveillance by management; the Atlas model, however, takes the spying to an entirely new level.
Details of the Atlas model came to light recently as a result of a legal dispute between Amazon and Unifor, the Canadian private sector union. Last year, British Columbia’s Labour Relations Board awarded union certification to Unifor at Amazon’s YVR2 warehouse outside Vancouver, finding that the company had broadly interfered in the union drive. It was the second union certification at Amazon in North America — the other being the 2022 union win at JFK8 in Staten Island, New York. But in contrast to the U.S., where Amazon has managed to stall bargaining for four and a half years because of weak labor laws, the B.C. Labour Relations Board ordered Amazon to recognize the union and negotiate. Contract bargaining commenced last December.
Not surprisingly, Amazon has dragged its feet in negotiations, prompting the union to file unfair labor practice charges with the Labour Board. Following a series of hearings earlier this year, the Labour Board found that Amazon violated provincial law. In August it ordered a remarkable step — first-contract arbitration at YVR2. That fight remains in play, but as a result of the legal proceedings, Amazon was required to turn over documents to the Labour Board and Unifor. Unifor has shared them with Truthout, and they can be viewed here.
Atlas produces not just a granular measurement of ongoing worker unrest, worksite by worksite around the world, but also a prediction model for future organizing.
In addition to the Atlas model revelation (beginning on Page 19 of the document), the material includes more than 100 pages that reveal in great detail how Amazon trains its frontline managers in union-busting. My colleague at the Center for Work and Democracy, Ben Fong, has written about this other portion of the disclosed material.
“Amazon’s own documents pull back the curtain on what workers have been telling us for years,” said Justin Gniposky, Unifor’s organizing director. “Behind the friendly PR, Amazon sees workers as property and treats their fundamental right to unionize as a threat to be managed and then eliminated.”
Amazon did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment on the Atlas model.
The documents describe the Atlas model as “a labor risk framework to clarify how Amazon evaluates emerging workforce issues, labor union targets, and internal or external labor threats.” The Atlas model ingests hundreds of data points: employee trainings completed; health and safety incidents, from simple first-aid cases to serious injuries; feedback from workers on management; worker tenure and turnover; the proximity of a warehouse to another workplace experiencing union activity; local minimum wage rates and other area economic conditions; and even the temperatures inside and outside of the warehouse.
Amazon seems especially thorough about scraping data from worker communications channels to plug into the Atlas model — the company’s internal “Voice of the Associate” (VOA) electronic bulletin board, the answers to digital questions posed daily to workers, and externally, forums including Reddit — “to understand the tenor of the discussion at the site level,” according to the documents.
“Behind the friendly PR, Amazon sees workers as property and treats their fundamental right to unionize as a threat to be managed and then eliminated.”
Atlas uses AI to identify phrases and “common keywords” to allow managers to do a “deep dive into the worker population driving the discussion.” Atlas also looks at the upvotes or other responses — positive, negative, or neutral — that the comments elicit, and the volume of those worker reactions. All of these data points go into Atlas and let managers “look around corners to identify developing themes” so they can “tailor strategic responses for addressing emerging risk.”
Amazon also tracks and documents all organizing activities that managers detect, and records them under the category of “employee relations events.” Each activity is assigned a severity score. “High severity” events include employees signing union cards, delegations of workers approaching management with demands, protests, sickouts, and work stoppages.
Atlas uses mathematical modeling to create a point system for all these data points, assigning a “labor score” to each workplace. The scale is further broken down into tiers, with the Tier 5 designation applied to facilities with high scores, where there is “no immediate perceived risk,” and Tier 1 applied to facilities where “future activity is imminent.” Amazon’s union busters focus largely on Tier 1 and 2 facilities.
Atlas produces extensive spreadsheets ranking different facilities and looking not just at raw “labor scores” but also at monthly trends. In 2024, the year the documents date from, Amazon was most concerned about union activity at 16 warehouses it had ranked as Tier 1. For instance, at LDJ5, a Staten Island sortation center across the street from JFK8, Atlas noted that leading issues of worker concern were “bathroom breaks, equipment, rest breaks, leadership/management, temperature.” The spreadsheet noted that “internal activists” — workers — were organizing, and that by looking at month-over-month trends, LDJ5 was experiencing “Risk Increase,” with the phrase placed inside a bright red box. At four of these Tier 1 facilities, the spreadsheet noted, the threat of union activity was sufficiently high to justify deploying Amazon’s “rapid response” team: union busters who travel to hotspots of organizing throughout Amazon’s global network.
Union organizing at Amazon is not just a battle over economics; it’s also a fight for basic freedom and democracy.
But the main value of Atlas seems to be predictive. For the Tier 2 worksites (“future activity is highly probable”), the spreadsheet poses these questions: “Which sites are showing the most future risk that are not Tier 1 sites yet?” and “What is the risk in each business line and which has the most risk, is it increasing or decreasing? What is driving the risk?” Tier 2 spreadsheets in the document look at the number of investigations of workers that management has handled in the last month, whether that number is trending up or down, the number of worker appeals of those investigations, and — notably — the percentage of negative worker comments on internal bulletin boards.
Voice of the Associate and other internal bulletin boards are key focal points. Charts in the document track how often workers raise particular topics, like weather, time off, breakroom amenities, management treatment, and restroom cleanliness. They also analyze the “vector” of each issue: “What are the top drivers of negative Sentiment and change MoM [month over month]?” is one question posed in the document. “What Sites are spiking MoM in negative sentiment? What themes are driving the sentiment? What anecdotes can we pull?”
Atlas is not strictly a North American tool. One chart analyzes trends for warehouses globally, documenting “employee relations events” — worker organizing — and cataloguing the number of worker comments on Voice of the Associate and the percentage of those comments that were negative. Two warehouses in the English Midlands where workers have been organizing with the GMB union — both Tier 1 sites in Atlas’ taxonomy — showed high volumes of negative VOA posts. A warehouse in Melbourne, Australia, also showed mostly negative Voice of the Associate posts, while posts were mostly not negative in some of the warehouses in Poland, Germany, and Italy.
All this is surely a tiny sliver of Atlas’s output. The former head of Amazon’s HR platforms, Bud Cashatt, boasted on LinkedIn recently about how his department created “predictive site-risk ML touching every building in Amazon’s global network.” (“ML” stands for machine learning, where programmers train AI to learn patterns and build predictions based on analyzing vast quantities of data.)
Did Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century British philosopher who dreamed up the panopticon, anticipate Atlas? Nearly 250 years ago, he imagined his panopticon as a useful tool for prisons, “madhouses,” and also “to the business of manufactories,” the industrialized manufacturing plants then just emerging in England. Speaking of his watchman in the center of the operation — the human Atlas of his time — Bentham wrote, “The concealment of his person will be of use.”
The documents uncovered at the B.C. Labour Board shine a light on Amazon’s concealed watchman. Atlas illustrates just how far Amazon will go to try to rule the warehouse floor. And its scope also underscores just how terrified Amazon’s masters are of their own workforce rising up and claiming their due.
Bentham theorized that the panopticon would facilitate social control: He imagined that incarcerated people would behave, not knowing at any moment whether they were being watched by the guard. It was, he wrote, “A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”
But what happens when prisoners — or workers — resist such attempts at social control? There’s no level of AI sophistication that can erase the reality that Amazon’s workers move millions of packages every day, and without their labor, the Amazon supply chain collapses.
Peter B. Olney, the retired organizing director of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, calls Atlas “a promethean tool for union busting and the thwarting of any employee organizing.”
To fight back against this “existential threat” to basic worker rights and unions, Olney says, “we have to get real about deploying massive resources towards organizing the workforce and finding their serious vulnerabilities and choke points.”
Today we see emerging fights everywhere against a billionaire class intent on harnessing AI and technology to undermine basic democracy and impose authoritarianism, both in the workplace and throughout society: in revolts against the algorithmically driven content we are force-fed on the internet; protests against and sabotage of the Flock cameras on neighborhood lampposts; and resistance against the replacement of workers with bots and computers. The Atlas model places Amazon workers at the center of this global fight against the AI billionaires. And it highlights that union organizing at Amazon is not just a battle over economics; it’s also a fight for basic freedom and democracy.
“We are living in a pivotal moment in labor history,” Cole Rockarts writes in their new book Fired Up About Unions. “At a time when corporations have more power, profit, and political influence than ever before, workers are leading inspiring union organizing campaigns and taking on bosses to win big… Their struggles reveal that everyday people can unite, change their conditions, and build better workplaces and a better world.” In this episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of labor organizers across the USA and Canada about why labor unions are more important now than ever, and how workers organizing collectively can change their workplaces, their lives, and the world.
Panelists include: Hassan Husseini of the Public Service Alliance of Canada and Labor for Palestine – Canada; Tina Oh of SEIU Local 2 in Hallifax, Canada; Alex Raymond of Teamsters 322 in Virginia, USA, and Cole Rockarts, veteran labor educator and organizer and author of the new book Fired Up About Unions.
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The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are talking about labor unions, why they are important, why they have always been important for working people, and why they are more important now than ever, and why you should be part of one. In their new book, Fired Up About Unions, veteran labor educator, organizer, and writer Cole Rockharts writes, “We are living in a pivotal moment in labor history. At a time when corporations have more power, profit, and political influence than ever before, workers are leading inspiring union organizing campaigns and taking on bosses to win big. These workers are fighting not just for themselves, but for their communities too. Their struggles reveal that everyday people can unite, change their conditions, and build better workplaces and a better world.” So this is what we’re going to be talking about today, and we’re really basing this conversation on Cole Rockhart’s great new book, which everyone should go read.
You can find it using the links in the show notes for this episode. And I’m really grateful to have Cole Rockarts themselves joining us on the show today. So Cole, welcome. Congratulations on this important book. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about the book and where it came from?
Cole Rockarts:
Absolutely. Thanks, Maximillian. It’s really exciting also to hear someone else read it because it’s just been in the ether for such a long time, so thanks for that. It’s very cool. So Fired Up About Unions, which again, you can get at BTL between the lines in Canada or AK Press in the US or your local library, give it an order there, really examines what unions are, demystifies the myths around unions, that we don’t need them, that they’re outdated, that young workers can’t be organized or different types of workers can’t be organized, and really lays the groundwork of why unions have become so weak in our respective countries in Canada and the US, and talks about why young people can be the antidote to all of the problems facing work and really unions themselves. Unions aren’t perfect, but if we take the view that unions are made up of people and we recognize that our coworkers are just regular people and we all ultimately want the same things, and that’s higher wages, protections at work, health and safety on the job, and better, that’s the great place where we can start to come together and change not only our individual situations, but as I say in the book, our communities and even beyond.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And we’re going to be talking about how to do that, how to do better, get better, and fight better from the shop floor and beyond. And I’m so grateful with Cole’s help that we’ve pulled together an incredible panel of folks here, union organizers and members from across Canada and the US. And we’re going to dig into all this now, but first I wanted to ask if y’all could introduce yourselves to our listeners.
Hassan Husseini:
My name is Hassan Husseini. My day job is a national negotiator with the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which is the largest federal public sector union in Canada. As such, I’m also unionized member of Unifor Local 2025. Unifor is a merger of a couple of private sector unions in Canada, one of them being the Canadian Auto Workers that split from the American Auto Workers Union back in the 80s. And I am also a member of the National Steering Committee of Labor for Palestine Canada. I’ve been active in social justice and labor movement for 30 plus, maybe more years. Happy to be here. Thank you.
Tina Oh:
Hi folks. My name is Tina Oh. My pronouns are she/her. I’m joining in from Halifax, Nova Scotia here in Eastern Canada. My role is organizing coordinator with Service Employees International Union Local two. We’re the only national SEIU division in Canada, but I also have a role as vice president for Eastern Canada. So the region is all of Atlanta, Canada, Newfoundland, PI, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Really happy to be here.
Alex Raymond:
Hey y’all, I’m Alex Raymond. I am a mental health worker out of Richmond, Virginia, United States, and I am just a regular worker organizer, very new to the labor space, but very fired up to be here.
Cole Rockarts:
My name is Cole Rocker. My pronouns are they/them, and I am a longtime union staffer, although the veteran brand doesn’t sit well when Hassan’s in the room. I’ve been working for labor unions for the past 10 years, and that’s been in Canada and the US. And I’m now a labor educator at a healthcare union in Los Angeles. And I am the author of the forthcoming book, Fired Up About Unions, which is about why young people can change the working world and the labor movement.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah. So maybe we need an updated taxonomy. We got veterans here and then we got legends with Hassan. So we got the full spectrum here, baby. And I’m so grateful to have all of you on and to hear all of your perspectives on this important subject. So I want to dive right in and ask y’all, what have unions meant to you over your lifetime? What did you know or not know about unions before being part of one? And I’m asking that as someone who does a labor show now, but knew jack shit about unions for most of my life.
Alex Raymond:
I kind of want to just directly responding to that, that was sort of my experience, that labor organizing in mental health, that’s really not a thing. But over the years that I’ve been in this industry, almost 15 years coming up this November, we just see wages decrease the amount of patients or clients that we are responsible for increase expectations going up while benefits go down. And a lot of us just silently accept that. We get into this line of work because we care and it almost feels like a betrayal to the work that we’re so committed to, to even think that better is possible. But it had always been a discussion. And growing up, my dad, he was an organizer with SEIU in Boston during his residency, and he would always tell me this story when he was laid off for labor organizing, that it was just the proudest moment of his professional life when all of his coworkers came to his shitty Boston apartment and they essentially shut the hospital down.
There was a lot of anxiety about what that would do to patients, but there was a lot of camaraderie and that’s something that’s missing nowadays. We’re struggling to get by and we deserve better. And I think that sort of bubbled up over the last couple of years. And a group of us got together a couple years back and we started organizing from the ground up, literally Googling how to make union. And we came into contact with a lot of people that have a lot of expertise and thank God because we needed all the help we can get. And we went from zero union density to more than zero and growing each and every month. And we formed a union here in Richmond, Virginia with Teamsters Local 322. And now there are unions with United Automotive Workers within our industry as well as National Union of Healthcare Workers and United Food and Commercial Workers.
And we’ve had to learn what all those acronyms mean and what they can mean for people in our field. And it’s been a huge thing. But from my perspective growing up, I’d always thought that was such an important thing to do, but just never really knew how to go about doing it.
Hassan Husseini:
From my experience way back when I first became unionized, and I think it’s still with us today, the thinking about unions is that it’s only about money. It’s only going to put more money in your pocket by increasing your wages from what you had before you were unionized. And to me, the thing that struck me, and I think it’s still with me today and in the organizing campaigns that I was involved in, it is really important for us to recognize and talk to workers about the fact that it’s about increasing your power in the workplace. It is about working class empowerment, and it is about some of the things that Cole just rhymed off with respect to health and safety, with respect to being valued in the workplace, giving your voice on so many different committees, and taking away the power, the exclusive power that bosses have without a union.
So I didn’t know that at the beginning. I came in, I though, okay, my wage will go up a little bit, not knowing that it’s going to give me so much more empowerment both individually and as a collective within the workplace. And that is something that opened my eyes to huge possibilities for that particular workplace I was in, but for the working class generally. And that lesson is still with me up to this point. I think things are getting even worse in terms of capitalist bosses propaganda that we can give you a little bit of a bump in your wages. You don’t have to go to unions because they know that when you unionize, you have more power in the workplace and that’s what scares the shit out of them.
Tina Oh:
Hasan, I’m just going to piggyback off that because I think that last point you just mentioned about how non-union workers are still gaining and benefiting off the winds of union workers is so relevant and I think that’s how I want to answer this question. It’s going to take me a second to get there, but I’ll get there. So my family moved to Edmonton, Alberta when I was two years old. My sister was five and it was just my mom and my dad. There was no other kind of family support systems that my parents had in Canada nor in Edmonton. So that like many non-economic migrants, that meant working traditionally low wage service jobs.
My parents have never worked a union job in their working careers in this country. And one of my dad’s longest held jobs was as a housekeeper and a janitor at the Western Hotel, and that was a non-union job. But the reason why that’s relevant is that that job, even though it was non-union, it was the first job that my dad had that gave us health benefits. It was the job that ended up getting us permanent residency so that we could stay in the country. And the reason why, of course, that connects to unions is because the work of the private sector hotel unions that have raised the industry standards to the point that these non-union hotels cannot recruit workers without offering health benefits, without offering them a pathway to permanent residency. And so I think about that job, especially now that I work for a janitor’s union, SEIU Local two, half of our membership is janitors, private sector contracted out janitors.
And now that I’m in this role and I think back to my childhood and the horrors really that my parents had to face in their working careers, I know absolutely without a doubt in my mind that our lives would’ve been better had my dad had a union at that hotel or any union really. And at the same time, I also can see how our lives still greatly benefited from the wins of the working class that have progressed the labor movement to the point where non-union jobs are still offering health benefits and whatnot. So I just wanted to leave that there.
Cole Rockarts:
I think for me, it’s a bit of a combination of all these things. As my co-podcasters have just said, a union can be the difference between having healthcare or not, having benefits or not. When I was younger, I didn’t realize that my mom was unionized. She was a teacher for many years before she retired, and it wasn’t until I started getting involved in my student movement. And in Canada, the student union system is quite different than in the US, and I think the US should absolutely steal this idea from Canada. But many of our student organizations that fight for lower tuition fees or free tuition or more rights for international students or different campaigns of equity on campuses are unionized. So my first foray into having a union was starting to work at the student union and run all these campaigns as a student organizer.
And so it wasn’t until I started getting involved that I had this conversation with my mom about, “Oh, there’s this union.” And I was told to go to a meeting because there’s free pizza and I wanted free pizza. And she said, “Oh yeah, I’ve been involved in my union. I was a shop steward.” I was like, “What the hell is a shop steward? What does that even mean? And it’s essentially the person that represents the workplace while they’re actually working in there, and you can go to them with questions about your contract or different issues you’re having.” And I said, “What? You were a shop steward?” She was like, “Yeah, I used to carry the book and the book is the contract.” And I said, “I didn’t know that.” She said, “Yeah, I’ve been out on strike. I’ve been on the picket line.” And so it was years later that I realized like, “Oh my God, my parent has been a union member, has fought for these things, and it’s because of her that I have the life that I have.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
It’s always so fascinating to me to hear stories like yours and the stories that folks have shared with me on this show for the past nine seasons. I always tell folks that I am endlessly fascinated in the stories of our fellow workers who take that step to do something, to change their conditions, because I lived most of my life not knowing that that was an option. Like most people in this country, I’m talking about the US here, when I had crappy jobs, whether they were in service or factories, warehouses, retail, I thought I only had two options. If the job sucked, I could either just stay, grin and bear it, or leave and try to find something better. I didn’t know there was a secret third thing you could do and band together with your coworkers and fight back and stay and fight to improve things.
And so to me, anyone who takes that step, especially in a country where working people are so routinely reminded and conditioned to believe that we are powerless, anyone who says otherwise and does otherwise to me is a hero. And not just that, but the way it changes your perspective on things to take that step, to organize, to bring your boss to the bargaining table, that really changes a lot of the ways that you look at the world and yourself and the work that you do. And I wanted to turn that into a question for y’all. You talked about this a bit in the first round, but I wanted to ask if you could go a little deeper and say how it changes your life at work and beyond when you become part of a union or join a union drive. Did it change the way that you guys all look at your own work in life when you did that?
Tina Oh:
For me as a young person that started labor work, I think I was 21 at the time when I first got my union job. And of course, previous to that, I was part of the student union like Cole was. And we’re living in a time where obviously we can talk about all these crises that are happening, global crises to mention that, and union work really helped make the world make more sense, if that makes sense. And I think a lot of young people, and when I reflect back to what I was thinking through when I was 21, and I’m not saying obviously I’ve got it all figured out now, certainly don’t, but I think a lot of young people are probably really confused and puzzled by all these kind of disparate crises when obviously they’re all interconnected. And maybe we could even say that they are interconnected, but it wasn’t really until I really immersed myself and understood how power works and the history of the gains that workers have made to really push the needle to where we are today.
Things really just started to click. And now when a new crisis happens in the world, it’s just less confusing for me. And I think that’s relevant because that feeling of hopelessness I think really gets reined in when you are in a fighting union because that fighting union is then about solutions and it’s about optimism and it’s about hope. And it’s also about, yeah, we might lose, but we’re just going to get back up the next day and fight again. And so that clarity really became clear when I was part of a union drive and helping workers form unions at their workplace. And seeing the transformation happen to them was so transformative for me because I’m seeing it in real time, ordinary people coming together to do extraordinary things.
Alex Raymond:
Yeah. Tina, hearing you say that, especially that piece about hopelessness was something that was deeply more so than I think I’ve even been aware of in my personal experience of work and working up until the idea that there could be something better came up in my working with this organizing that we’ve done recently. Meeting people across the country that are fighting for change and are in the exact same position. We are inexperienced, we are outnumbered, we are dealing with a very effectively organized managerial group that wants nothing more than to see us lose. And then seeing people like Sean and Noah out in Massachusetts, workers out in California coming together, Jane and Colin out in Marilyn, all these different people that I would not have met had not been for this organizing work changed a lot of that hopelessness into a deep sense of optimism that’s going to be really, really hard to lose.
And that I think is the most important way my life has changed since participating in organizing. And I see it at home, at work. We have this current style of people coming in and out of care work and healthcare, and it’s hard on us. We’re job hopping a lot, but it’s really, really hard on the clients that we serve. We work predominantly for little kids and somebody comes in, they build a relationship with you, and then you can’t afford to work the job anymore, you get burned out. And that’s devastating for those young people, and we want to change that. And since we’ve started organizing, we’re seeing turnover rates decrease. These people believe that better is possible and that possibility is brought into existence through our collective action. We alone can’t formulate what a solution might look like, but collectively we’ve found answers and we’ve put them into practice, not just in one location, but in lots of other locations.
And we’re seeing people pick up the banner with us, and it’s just been one of the most inspiring, if not the most profound experiences of my life. And hearing you speak on that just reminds me why I’m part of this fight.
Hassan Husseini:
This is a really good segue because most of you have done the organizing part, which is the hard part to organize workers into unions. My role as a national negotiator is that I come in to work with these newly organized group of workers to get in place a first collective agreement, which is challenging in and of its own, but it’s during the negotiations for a collective agreement. Well, actually it is during the organizing drive that you see their power and a recognition of the power that they have really come into fruition. But it is also a different kind of a very, very rewarding process when you’re working collectively with workers, trying to get a new collective agreement and seeing the bosses push back to put language in collective agreements that gives them more rights, more powers, more protections, more provisions. This is where you see that they are solidifying their power in the workplace and there’s nothing like it because at times when we’re negotiating new terms, and I’ve negotiated terms in the new collective agreement in the university sector, in the gaming industry, right now I have a group of firefighters in an indigenous community in Southwestern Ontario that I just came back from starting negotiations with them.
And you’ll see that their questions is that, “What do you mean we can put language in the collective agreement that is better than the minimum standards?” It’s like, yes, you are organized in order to do that. Minimum standards, you’re protected by it anyway, but your collective agreement, it relies on your power in the workplace, your power in the community, and you’ll see the relationship with their coworkers, their relationship with the boss, their relationship within the community completely changes. It gives them the confidence, it gives them the power, it gives them the power that comes with the fact that when they’re sitting at the bargaining table, no matter what, they’re equals to that boss. And of course, when the boss goes back to the workplace, they try to play games, but you cannot put back, what is that expression, the genie in a bottle or something?
They’ve recognized their power and they’re willing to take that extra steps in order to keep building on it and to demonstrate it in the workplace and outside the workplace. And there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing like it when work is recognized, I want to go Tina’s original point, recognize the power that they have in the workplace and in the community. And I’m privileged, I feel, that I get to work with workers to try to put together collective agreements that give them that extra power.
Cole Rockarts:
Yeah, I’ll just pick up on something Hassan said in his current negotiations about raising the minimum standards. And as organizers and workers, we talk about expectations a lot and great folks have written about raising expectations, so I won’t go into too much of that. But when people realize that not only can they raise the floor at their job, like Alex said, that he could change the mental healthcare industry and the ability for him to have consistency with his clients, with the kids that he’s trying to serve, that’s very mission-driven work. And we see all the time workers in organizing drives, particularly in healthcare, but lots of places, education where they say, “Well, I don’t know if I could do this because I would put the kids or the patients or whoever it is at risk.” But a lot of these campaigns are about connecting, “Well, this would actually make things way more sustainable for the work that I’m trying to do.
This would make me stay. This would help raise my wage so I can provide for my family.” All of these things go back to that question of power. And so when I think about how it changed the way I look at work and life, particularly now coming from Canada and the US, there is an entire industry that is dedicated to crushing workers’ ability to do this. And it has a lot of money behind it. It has a lot of politicians behind it. I mean, the US, we look at right to work states. We look at what is going on in Alberta, Canada right now and the attacks on trying to privatize our healthcare, which is a big no-no in Canada.
We workers, workers historically fought for all these things to get a public healthcare system to get funding. And so I think this’ll go to a little bit about the power that we’re up against, but we also talk about how we don’t have, and it’s because of people crushing unions, we don’t have a lot of money. We don’t have the ability to match dollar for dollar what our bosses are doing, but what we do have is people power. And so I think I was lucky enough to get into it at 20, but since moving here, even in the past few years, I’ve completely changed the way that I see power and what workers are up against as well.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, man. I mean, in the good old US of A, I mean, we have many rights on paper, but not in reality. And I’m constantly telling folks that you have a right to be a part of and form a union and collectively bargain in your workplace in this country. But in this country, that’s basically saying that Frodo Baggins has a right to go into Mordor, right? I mean, the opposition that you’re going to face, the pain that you’re going to be put through, the system that’s going to chew you up and spit you out just for exercising that right is going to take a lot from you and your coworkers, and you need to be prepared for that. And that’s what I wanted to talk about here in this round. Let’s talk about the hard stuff because we’ve seen over the past few years, over the course of me doing this show, I’ve heard it in the stories we’ve reported, this boom in energy around new labor organizing from the Starbucks workers to the Amazon workers, to the independent union movements, to the revivals within the established unions like the UAW, the Teamsters, some of the historic strikes that have happened in Canada in the past five years.
A lot is clearly happening, but at the same time, I think a lot of folks who got swept up in that energy over the past five years have also come to the hard kind of realities of unions aren’t perfect. Labor law is stacked against you. There’s going to be a whole lot of crap that you’re going to have to go through, but it is worth it. And so I want to talk about that with you guys and sort of address head on these real issues that folks have had or will face when trying to organize. So let’s talk about what people are really going to be up against when they try to unionize today in the US or Canada. And if someone’s listening to this, what do they do when their union sucks or union officials break their heart and screw them over?
Hassan Husseini:
You’re right. There are a lot of unions that, to put it in your words, can break your heart. But I always say having a union, even a shitty union is better than not having a union at all. Because even with a shitty union, there are mechanisms that you can do internally within your union in order to challenge those leaderships that are not willing to fight a good fight on your behalf, but collectively on behalf of all the workers and the community. So definitely I think we’re all on the same page or should be on the same page that unions are better than no unions whatsoever. But we also need to recognize that there are a lot of sellout unions or leaderships within unions that are no longer willing to fight a good fight. They’ve become part of the institutionalized capitalist system. They’ve lost the vision and they don’t advance anything more than protecting their careers.
And they have forgotten that unions are, after all, also political organizations of the working class. And they’ve lost that. And that’s where you see some unions or some leadership within unions making decisions that end up harming workers that they’re supposed to represent. But it’s not the end of the world because I always say that what you need to do as workers, the union is yourself. So you organize internally, you organize in order to bring democracy back into your union and your workplace. And you organize to take over, to take back those unions from those careerist elements within the union movement. Those who are willing to and understand and have class consciousness and they are fighting a class war to go back to the classics. This is the reality of it. And they’re not going to advance a lot of workers if they compromise with the employer on some fundamental issues.
And so our work is premised on the fact that we believe in the power of workers, but we also need to be very realistic about what kind of unions we’re dealing with. And also in my work in organizing in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle and Palestinian workers, I’ve realized that the connection between those unions who are taking better positions in solidarity with international workers around the world is very much connected to how much they’re willing to fight for their own members and for the working class in Canada or the US. And those who have sold out when it comes to the class struggle in their own workplaces and communities and in Canada and the US, you find them that they’re not willing to actually be in solidarity internationally. They may pay lip service, but they don’t do anything concretely to honor that global picket line of the Palestinian people.
And as it was before, the people of South Africa that fought against apartheid. So they’re connected. Good fighting working class unions that have clarity of purpose are also clear on the local, on the national and on the international issues. And we have no choice but to continue to fight a good fight internally to make sure that they stay on the straight path or the left path rather.
Tina Oh:
I want to hear from you, Alex.
Alex Raymond:
Yeah, I’m itching to jump in on this one. So what you’re up against, you hear, especially when you’re new to this, “Hey, there’s the NLRB, you have these rights and the NLRB will adjudicate if there’s any unfair action taken against you by your employer.” But my boss, Lindsay Thompson straight up fired me in writing for labor organizing and that’s still in NLRB hell. And we’re expecting a ruling any decade now, probably 2035, 2045, my grandkids will get a decision passed down. So I mean that’s the reality of it. And I’ve got some comrades that have similarly experienced pretty nefarious dealings from their employer because who’s going to stop them? They fire you, you’re kind of done for. And then on the heels of that, my union internally was going through a little bit of drama precisely when I got fired. And that happened to create a really perfect storm that weakened our bargaining unit and set us up for a lot of trouble going into 2026.
But what is the solution? To quote the adage, don’t mourn, organize. And I remind myself that these things, these institutions that exist today were built by the literal blood of people that were massacred and organizing in significantly more difficult conditions today. I lost a job, I got a new job. I wasn’t brutalized in the ways that you encounter in the history book. So not discounting the struggles that people are facing today, it’s just that the solution remains the same, which is you organize. And my union, we organize internally, brought it up to the local president. They got it fixed. He’s out there on the line with us, every opportunity he’s got. And they’ve done an incredible amount to organize with us. And not just Brian Payton with Teamsters Local 322 and a huge chunk of amazing UPS workers, Jennifer Hancock, those folks coming out, making sure that we’re all right and that this group of workers gets represented fairly.
But the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, especially their caucus of rank and file electrical workers, it’s an internal caucus that has come together and shown up for workers in Richmond and across the country in really profound ways. If there’s a worker struggle in town, there’s going to be hard hats there. And I think it’s that kind of ethos that we need to really embrace. One worker’s struggle is my struggle and it’s been really hard. There was an understandable amount of almost desperation when we did everything right and the employer is just able to break every rule and get away with it. But I think it taught us a very valuable lesson, which is that you don’t just win a vote and then you’re all done. You organize not just to win a contract, but then to enforce it and then to be able to have the capacity to show up for other workers because there’s not just one fight and then you’re done.
This is a global fight. The cause of every member of the working class is our cause. So this is the fight of a lifetime, not just for a contract or a vote or some particular grievance. So I think it’s been hard, but we’ve learned a lot of lessons and we’re continuing to learn. And a lot of that is because of the very cool people that are on this panel today. So shout out to y’all.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and obviously the fact that we have such an incredible panel of folks from Canada and the US, and Cole, you came from Canada to the US. I was wondering if you could also wrap into this question the differences of the situations and the things that folks are going to face in the US versus Canada while we’re answering this question.
Cole Rockarts:
Absolutely. I think I have two different parts to this answer. The first is that I think in Canada we have a different history when it comes to not only our labor movement, but our political parties. I think in the US, you folks are locked into the two party hell, that is the Democrats and the Republicans. Our system in Canada is multi-party and we had a labor movement that formed a political party that became the new Democratic Party, the NDP. And those were the folks I mentioned earlier that led to Medicare, healthcare being public in this country. And I say that not to give a knighthood to politicians because we know that everything that we’ve won in any country has come from workers pushing for that and pressuring that and always will be, always has been. And so I think that’s one of the big differences.
And obviously in the negotiation realm, when you don’t have to think about Medicare or healthcare being part of the contract and you can instead think about the things in Canada that haven’t gotten into that system like drug care, prescriptions, it changes the negotiation landscape for sure. I think the other big difference is the matter of density. And I mentioned the word density earlier, but that is how many workers percentage-wise are unionized within a given population. So in Canada, that is much, much higher. In the US, it’s brutal and it shows all of the things that have –
Maximillian Alvarez:
We’re below 10% now, I believe. That’s
Cole Rockarts:
Correct. And I’ll just say to your listeners, the Economic Policy Institute put out this amazing report about what would change if union density in the US was higher. And the reality is we would have healthcare. We would have about, give or take, 7,000 extra dollars a year in your pocket. And I don’t know about anyone else on this call, but I think people could use 7,000 plus dollars a year.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And that’s $7,000 a year that you would get in your contract versus the kind of fantastical fake $5,000 that President Trump is promising you if you just believe him and vote the way he wants in the midterms.
Cole Rockarts:
Exactly. And I’ll just say quickly on that, studies have shown that in countries where there are strong labor movements, there are more democracies. Even if we look at the US, we see that in right-to-work states, there are more attacks right now on the voting system than there are in states with higher union density. And so that’s kind of the first part of the answer to my question. But the second part is how is Canada and the US different? They’re not. Workers in Canada and workers in the US coming from both places, they’re not that different. They want the same things. They want higher wages, they want benefits, they want good jobs, and they want clean air and for the AI overlords to not ruin the planet and put a data center in their backyard. And so same as it ever was, workers, no matter the country, if they can get enough power, they can change things and make things better.
Tina Oh:
Everything yes, that Cole just said, a thousand percent. I just want to say genuinely, SEIU, it’s a giant of a union, one of the biggest in the US. And so when I look at my comrades in the US, not just in SEIU, but US unions in general, I really don’t have a problem in saying, I genuinely think it is harder to organize in the US than it is in Canada. And I don’t mean to say that as good or bad, as simple as that. But I think where in Canada workers have made gains like card check, which is a one-step unionization system. All you have to do is sign a union card. There’s no vote. Where there’s successor rights in the three biggest provinces of our country. So Quebec, Ontario, BC, the most populated provinces have successor rates. That means contracted workers when there’s contract flip that the new employer has to hire them on and keep their contract.
Those are two really sizable, genuinely… Those are huge wins, legislative wins that workers have made in this country. And it has, for maybe a less sophisticated word, I think it does actually produce some lazy organizing when I compare it to my comrades in the US who have to strike for recognition or right to work states where the dues aren’t guaranteed. And part of that lazy organizing is it can get dangerous, of course, because we know, just as Cole said, the bosses are the same. The power that they have will absolutely crush us. Our dollars can’t compete. Our legal can’t compete. And so when organizers on the ground, whether it’s a member organizer, worker organizer, staff organizer, is taking these shortcuts, we know we’re going to get hit by those shortcuts down the road because a fight is coming guys. A fight is always coming. And so I think it’s a really important, I think, moment for Canada-based organizers where even though we’ve made those gains like card check-in successor, that we do the right thing, which is to develop and recruit the best leaders we can in our organizations and keep it a fighting organization.
And that means yes, there might be shortcuts, but we’re actually going to do the really rigorous spade work that is required to build a fighting union.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. I thought that was all beautifully and powerfully put, y’all. And it bears mentioning that you could say the same thing about unions here just a little farther back in our history. I mean, the union density in this country at its height was around 30% or a little over. I mean, unions built the middle class, they gave us the weekends. We know all the talking points, but then that middle class gave up on the struggle. They cared more about their middle class existence, their specific contracts. They lost that sense of working class solidarity. And here we are 40, 30 years later with the results. Union density below 10%, wages have been stagnant or declining, cost of living has been going up, power has been shifting to the top away from the bottom. So I think the real takeaway message from Canada to the US to everywhere is don’t get complacent.
The struggle has to continue, and I could genuinely talk to you guys for hours about how to continue that struggle. And I’m so grateful for the conversation that we’ve had, but I know we have to wrap up here. And so I wanted to finish with a big picture question that y’all have touched on in this conversation, but for folks who are listening to this right now and saying, “Yeah, that all sounds great, but why should I care about unions now in the year of our Lord 2026 when the world is on fire and everything sucks and these oligarch nut jobs are taking over everything and destroying the planet?” So what would you say to folks in closing who are still in that head space?
Alex Raymond:
Yeah, what I would say is why you should care about a union now is because things have already gotten to a point where we’re feeling the everyday economic ramifications of those decisions. And whatever inertia is kind of keeping us moving in this direction, if we can overcome that, if we can come together, we can identify any solutions that need to be found and start putting them into practice so that we can build a future that we want to be part of. And I know that sounds like fanciful language, but every small step in the right direction is also a step we’re not taking in the wrong direction. And it feels difficult. It feels impossible. It feels exhausting when you think about it individual terms, but you’re not alone. People like me don’t know a ton. I’m sitting on a panel today with Hassan, Cole, Tina, and you, Max, and there’s a lot of expertise out there and you’re not alone.
So nothing weaker than the feeble strength of one. We got this together.
Hassan Husseini:
Very briefly, I think that for all the reasons that you spoke about Maximilian, it’s for all these reasons, because the world is run by not oligarchs, it’s for the reason that they’re destroying the planet, the reason that we have Trump in the White House and Mark Carney in Ottawa that are governing on behalf of banks and corporations and the super rich. It’s for all these reasons that we need unions if for nothing else to equalize things, to make sure that they fight for working people on the shop floor, but also they continue to fight for better society, for all the working class. And also they continue to make sure that international solidarity is not just a performative thing, but a real element of the work of unions. And without unions and without organizing and without that kind of mass democratic organizations that we value so much, that we will fall back even more.
And so from that perspective and because of that, unions are a lot more critical today than in my opinion, they were 50 years ago or 60 or 70 years ago. And we finish on the adage again that an injury to one is an injury to all. So this is not about individual protection, it’s about a collective work, a collective organizing and collective protection and collective empowerment.
Tina Oh:
I think a good union organizer knows how to answer any question with the answer being union. And so to me, it’s why should people care about unions? Well, it’s less about why people should care about unions, more about do you want a better life for you and your family and your loved ones? If so, the only answer is union. And I believe that. We just talked about the trickle down effects of increasing union density is that we live in a better society. There’s healthcare improvements, education improvements, life expectancy, I’m sure. And so I think that question that Cole talked about, workers in US, Canada, across any border, they want a better life for themselves and their families. I don’t know a single ordinary working person that doesn’t. And the answer to that question is going to be union.
Cole Rockarts:
Couldn’t agree more. I think the answer is unions. If we look at the world being on fire, what’s going to protect workers that are going out in increasingly record-breaking heat working outside if they’re postal worker, construction laborer, what is going to do that? Is the boss going to say, “Oh, I’m recognizing it’s a bit hot and unsafe out there. This doesn’t need to get built today. This work doesn’t need to get done.” No, bosses are going to continue to try and extract as much as they can. So that’s one example. If we look at this mass global movement in many countries, unionized dock workers have stopped the ports and refused to unload Israeli cargo.
The struggle of the anti-war movement, the struggle for basic protections of not dying on the job, and yes, the individual and materialistic thing of wanting more money in your bank account so you can pay your rent, so you can buy food, so you can get the basic necessities, all comes from having a strong resourced infrastructure. And the only thing that working people have in this country right now is a union. And so that would be my answer. Why should you care about unions now? It is literally the only thing that working people have on our side. And that’s not big you union, that’s you and your coworkers coming together to push for more and to fight the boss and to hopefully win.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Hassan Husseini of the Public Service Alliance of Canada and Labor for Palestine Canada, Tina Oh of SEIU Local two in Halifax, Canada, Alex Raymond of Teamsters Local 322 in Virginia, and Cole Rockhart’s veteran labor educator and organizer and author of the excellent new book, Fired Up About Unions, which everyone should go read. And you can learn more about the book using the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network.
We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing weekly at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories of people on the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and The Marc Steiner Show, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really, really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
A group of 50 family members and descendants of wartime forced laborers in China filed a lawsuit against six companies on Wednesday, September 16, demanding compensation for their suffering during the Japanese occupation.
In their lawsuit at a local court in Hebei, southwest of the capital, Beijing, the group is seeking around $55,000 in compensation for each member, along with an apology published in at least 10 Japanese and Chinese media outlets.
The plaintiffs accuse six Japanese firms of being beneficiaries of the forced labor, causing long-term pain, suffering, and the deaths of their family members, Kyodo News reported.
According to Kyodo News, the six Japanese firms named in the lawsuit include construction firm Taisi Corp, mining firm Nittetsu Corp, and heavy industry manufacturer IHI Corp.
Japan occupied large parts of China, the Korean Peninsula, and other parts of Southeast Asia at various times between the last decade of the 19th century to the end of the Second World War.
The Japanese military committed systemic torture, sexual exploitation, forced labor, and other cruelties against Chinese and other Asian peoples during the occupation, all which have been well documented.
Millions had to do forced labor in the territories occupied by Japan, including hundreds of thousands of Chinese people. Some Chinese forced laborers were also sent to Japan to work in mining and other industries. Thousands of these forced laborers were killed due to harsh working conditions and torture inflicted by their employers.
The survivors of Japanese atrocities and their descendants have in different moments raised demands for compensation and apologies.
In 2014, a similar lawsuit was filed by hundreds of people in a Chinese court against Mitsubishi Materials Corp and others. The case ended in an out-of-court settlement, with Mitsubishi offering an apology and compensation to the plaintiffs.
In China, survivors cite their lack of faith in the Japanese system as the reason for filing the suit in a domestic court.
Japanese courts have dismissed all such lawsuits. A 2007 Japanese Supreme Court’s judgment stated that all such claims were settled when Japan and China established their diplomatic relations in 1972.
However, China has maintained that the 1972 documents did not denounce an individual’s right to seek legal action. China has also often invoked Japan’s failure to acknowledge its repressive and atrocious colonial period and apologize to its victims in the region.
Reacting to the news on Wednesday, the official spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Guo Jiakun underlined that “forced recruitment and enslavement of laborers is one of the serious crimes committed by Japanese militarists during their foreign aggression and colonial rule.”
He urged “Japan to look history in the eye, reflect on past crimes, earnestly heed and respond to the just calls and legitimate claims of the people of victims countries in Asia, and properly resolve relevant issues left over from history with a responsible attitude.”
On August 27, registered nurses, patients, and community allies rallied and stopped traffic in cities around the US to demand that hospitals and elected officials cut all ties with artificial intelligence giant Palantir. In this episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of registered nurses—Kelli Brennan (Portland, Maine), Lee Barker (Kansas City, Missouri), and Kiera Arbour (Chicago, Illinois)—about National Nurses United’s “Purge Palantir!” campaign, and about the disturbing creep of Big Tech and Big Brother into a US healthcare system that is already in crisis.
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The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are speaking with union nurses who are speaking out against big tech and big brother, sneaking more of their tentacles into our healthcare system and into our lives. They and their union, National Nurses United, participated in a National Day of Action on August 27th, which brought together hundreds of registered nurses, patients, and community allies in cities around the country to demand that hospitals and elected officials cut all ties with artificial intelligence giant Palantir. As a press release from NNU lays out, “The nurses who are members of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union of registered nurses, stop traffic in an act of civil disobedience in eight cities, Palo Alto, California, Los Angeles, California, Chicago, Illinois, Washington DC, Portland, Maine, Asheville, North Carolina, Austin, Texas, and New Orleans, Louisiana.
Union nurses cannot be silent when our most vulnerable people, babies and children are being detained by federal immigration agents,” said NNU President Jamie Brown. “While our patients and neighbors are living in fear of immigration raids enabled by Palantir, our hospitals are facing huge cuts and our patients are facing mounting healthcare costs because of H.R.1. Nurses aren’t just saying no to Palantir, but we’re calling for our public resources to go toward the benefit of working people, not billionaires and their corporations. “The press release continues. From 2009 to 2025, Palantir received $2.5 billion in federal government funding, but this number has grown tremendously in just the past year. Last July, the Department of Defense announced a $10 billion agreement with Palantir to use its technology to share data across federal agencies, enabling unprecedented surveillance power. This followed a $30 million contract awarded to Palantir by the Department of Homeland Security to build an AI-powered system that would identify immigrants for deportation.
In February of 2026, the Department of Homeland Security and Palantir signed a $1 billion contract. In the hospital industry already, Palantir manages more than one fifth of US hospital beds. For nurses, this marks a dangerous threat to their nursing profession, which is seeing a glut of untested and unregulated technology introduced into patient care settings.” All right, so we got a lot to talk about here, and to talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by three guests who are all registered nurses, all members of National Nurses United. Thank you all so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.
Kiera Arbour, RN:
My name’s Kiera Arbour. I’m a registered nurse from Chicago, Illinois.
Kelli Brennan, RN:
My name’s Kelli Brennan . I’m a registered nurse from Portland, Maine.
Lee Barker, RN:
I’m Lee Barker. I’m a registered nurse in Kansas City, Missouri.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, again, thank you all so much for joining me today. I really, really appreciate having you all three here to talk about this because there’s so much here that I didn’t even know before I saw the day of action and started digging into this. So before we really get into Palantir and all this AI stuff, I want to start at the shop floor worker’s eye level, and I want listeners to get to know more about you all and to have y’all give us more of a lay of the land here. So could you start by telling us more about the jobs that you do, the hospitals that you work at, the kind of patients that you care for? And I guess could we talk a bit about all the non-AI workplace issues that you and your coworkers are already dealing with on a daily basis?
Kiera Arbour, RN:
This is Kira. I am a nurse in the neurosurgical ICU at Stroger Hospital of Cook County. We are one of the largest safety net hospitals in the United States. So I am just finishing up my first year as a nurse. Just graduated from my nurse residency program last week, came to nursing late in life. I took my licensing exam the day after I turned 50. For me, I think the thing that has really been the most challenging part of my first year of practice as a nurse is the patient population that we serve at Stroger Hospital as a safety net hospital in the third largest city in the country is just all of the poverty related, social determinants of health related illnesses. So in the neurosurg ICU, anybody who’s a gunshot wound to the head comes to us, blunt force trauma to the head, two gunshots to the head on the unit last night, one blunt force trauma, and then a whole bunch of people who have had strokes because they live in food deserts, they don’t have access to healthy things to eat or they don’t know how to manage chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure.
And as somebody who grew up pretty privileged and whose parents are heading into their 80s over the next year and a half or so, I see my amount of death play golf every day. They go swimming with their grandkids every day because they grew up middle class, they grew up with money. And then I see people 20 years younger than them who are looking at end of life type of illnesses in our hospital. And it has really kind of overwhelmed me emotionally just because we live in a system that doesn’t do a very good job of allocating resources to folks. And so I’m watching people be very sick and eventually die from very preventable diseases and things that are associated with poverty. Violence is associated with poverty.
Kelli Brennan, RN:
I’m Kelly. I’m at Portland, Maine. Similar to Kara, I also work in neurosurgery, neurotrauma. My background is in stroke. I’ve been a nurse for a little over 17 years from Boston and then I moved to Georgia. I was a director of neurosciences in Georgia, so I was in management, left management to come back to the bedside and be a union nurse and use everything I learned as a manager now for the good of the union. So happy to be here. I’ve been at MaineMed for about five years. I was a member of the original facility bargaining committee when we were organizing for our union. And when I got here, I was coming from Georgia right after COVID and COVID in Georgia was awful, made me realize I needed to go back to New England. So I left the South, came back to New England, wanted to be near family.
So I came to Maine and just wanted to work at the bedside, work my three 12s, get my shifts done and go home and not have twenty four seven responsibility. Now I’m in the union and I have a different kind of twenty four seven responsibility, but I love it. So I started and when I got to the hospital in Maine, I was almost like, well, this is compared to where I came from in Georgia, I was like, “Well, this is pretty nice.What are you guys all upset about?” And started talking to the staff and learning things. And then I shifted my thinking and I was like, “I just came from a really bad situation. Things aren’t that bad up here in Maine, but I know that the way healthcare works, because what I saw in Georgia was consolidation of healthcare systems, lots of financial issues, lots of layoffs and closures and all that kind of stuff.
I didn’t want any of that bad healthcare to come up to this hospital.” So I was like, “You know what? The best thing is to start a union and to lock it in what we have now so that it can’t get taken away because we know the turnover in the C-suite is every five years. These people are not dedicated to the communities. They’re not dedicated to the hospital. They are there for five years just to make a resume, just to go on to the next place.” So I got all in with the union. I’m a charge nurse, I’m a steward, I’m chair of our professional practice committee, and I’m co-president of the Maine State Nurses Association. Yeah, I’m all in. And the things that we’re working on now outside of AI is staffing. There’s this huge misconception or this though process that there’s a nursing shortage.
And we’ve been saying for years there’s not a nursing shortage. There’s a shortage of nurses willing to work in unsafe conditions at the bedside. And that’s why I went into management when I did because the working conditions at the bedside suck and nobody wants to work every weekend. Nobody wants to work every holidays. You can go to management and have your weekends off, have your holidays off, get paid more. So you see the shift of people leaving the bedside because the work is just unmanageable. The working conditions aren’t safe. The patients are sicker, more complex. Our nursing turnover is super high. The years of experience on the floor are low. When I work, there’s a lot of times I’m the most experienced nurse on my unit by 15 years. So it’s a lot of challenges in that, and there’s no focus on nurse retention. They just let one go and then just hire a traveler or temporary staff and we try to make the best of it.
I was at my professional practice committee meeting this morning and it was all about staffing. The hospital has budgets and staffing grids and plans, but they fall through. They don’t hold themselves accountable.
Lee Barker, RN:
Just wanting to build off of what Kelly said, staffing is also an issue at the hospital that I work at research in Kansas City, Missouri. I work specifically in our inpatient psychiatric population. Our staffing grids call for one nurse to every eight patients. That’s already an unsafe ratio and our management likes to push us to one to nine, one to 10. I’ve seen 11 and 12 as well. And like Kelly said, it’s not that there’s a nursing shortage in this country. There’s a shortage of nurses that are willing to work in the unsafe conditions that the hospitals push on us. At research, I mean, we used to have, I think, 800 nurses when we were fully staffed up. Currently we have like 550 and we just can’t. The hospital doesn’t care to retain nurses. Somebody leaves and, oh, we can hire in a new grad and they’ll stay for their two years, get their experience and leave and well, we’ll just hire another new grad.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and it’s like, I hate to make light of all the incredibly serious and important stuff that y’all just laid out, but in 2026, hearing all this, my mind is imagining the Pawn Stars meme of like, “Hey, hospitals, can you fix any of these problems?” And the response is, “No, the best I can do is nothing, and I’m going to add Palantir to your list of things to be worried about now.” So that’s the kind of upside down, topsy-turvy nightmare reality that we’re living in right now, but it is what it is and we got to deal with it.
I’m so grateful to all of you for laying that out for folks because it’s such important context for everyone to understand even though we’re all focused on AI and Palantir right now, let’s not lose sight of the forest from the trees here. There’s so many other systemic issues that are running workers into the ground and screwing over patients and all of us for the benefit of a few. Those sorts of dynamics are already at work in the stories you’ve been hearing on this show about the working conditions for healthcare workers around the country. We’ve been covering it for years, but now we got to worry about ICE coming into hospitals. We got to worry about these truly super villain-esque big tech oligarchs putting their AI into our most sensitive and private systems and information. So let’s talk about this gang, because I need your help unpacking this for myself and for our listeners.
So I want to stay in the world of healthcare right now, and I want to ask if you could sort of lay out for us how is AI in general and Palantir specifically seeping into your workplaces and your work lives?What are nurses seeing here that perhaps the average patient is not?
Lee Barker, RN:
So the hospital that I work at is owned by HCA or the Healthcare Corporation of America, and what HCA has done in their partnering with Palantir is to build an AI scheduler called Timpani. We don’t really know how it works. It’s like a black box. We put our preferred days of working in. Timpani spits out a schedule that’s allegedly balanced, so we have enough nurses working throughout the week. They’re supposed to also balance our level of experience so we don’t have a unit full of new grads and then all of the experienced nurses are working different shifts. These were the promises that we were made. And unfortunately, at the end of the day, Palantir is giving us a shitty product. Aside from all of the moral reasons that Palantir sucks, they can’t even provide us again with the product that meets the promises that they told us, which is that it would take the burden of scheduling off of our managers.
And now our managers in the building don’t have any way to adjust our schedules. So when the AI inevitably screws up, puts out a bad schedule, nobody in the building has any way to fix the schedule unless it’s, I think, within 24 or 48 hours of the shift beginning, which is ridiculous. Part of what Timpani does as well is HCA is using it to push short staffing. Allegedly, our understanding of how Timpani works is that it somehow looks at the average daily census on the unit and decides, “Oh, for 16 patients on this psych unit, we need two nurses every shift.” What Timpani doesn’t see is that that unit can hold up to 24 patients, and frequently we are trying to fill it up to 24. Timpani will schedule only two nurses and management will say, “Well, really, we could admit a couple more patients.
We’ll push you guys up to one nurse can take 10 patients instead of one to eight.” And so they’ll sneak in and just ask us to do more and more with less and less.
Kelli Brennan, RN:
So at MainMed or Maine Health, we have Palantir in our hospitals through their application called Foundry. When we first heard about the potential, we asked the hospital or MaineHealth to let us know what they were using it for. And at first they told us it wasn’t really any of our business. We further pushed, sent letters to the board asking what’s going on, what’s it for? And their response was that they’re using it for insurance denials. So they’re using it. So say a patient comes in and they have pneumonia and the doctor doesn’t write the details of the pneumonia clearly. The insurance company will deny the claim and say that there’s lacking documentation for payments or whatever. So the hospital or MaineHealth’s idea is that Palantir’s AI software will look at these denials and claims and figure out what the letter or what the documentation needs to be in order for the claim to get approved.
So this requires us, Maine Health, sharing information with Palantir of our patient’s information.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I’m sorry. So was our whole system of already not approving so many prescriptions and surgeries in our American healthcare system, was that all not bad enough that now we need a fucking AI bot denying us as well? I can’t believe that that is actually happening.
Kelli Brennan, RN:
It’s very much crazy. The argument is that the return on investment is already better than projected, so the hospital will be gaining so much money, but they’re claiming that they’re losing money because the insurance company is denying it because the insurance company changes the rules 15,000 times a year. It has no obligation to tell the hospitals, so that’s why they’re getting denied. So instead of holding the insurance companies accountable, now we’re introducing Palantir to help solve it. That’s the solution. It doesn’t make any sense, and it just makes us complicit in this whole thing.
Kiera Arbour, RN:
Thankfully, in Chicago, we don’t have Palantir software anywhere near our patient’s information. Our action was based on the fact that our pension fund has $28 million invested in Palantir. That includes all county employees, not just nurses. So everybody who works for Cook County, which is where Chicago is, including all the people who work at the hospital, the doctors, the administrators, the nurses, the PCTs, the environmental service people, the folks who work in the cafeteria, the people who work in the forest preserves of Cook County, where I like to ride my mountain bike. All these people unknowingly have their pension funds, A, invested in a company that’s heavily aligned with the current administration and could potentially go, if Democrats screw his spine, could go belly up in a couple years. And then B, is doing some pretty nefarious stuff, is collaborating with ICE and making it so.
Kellyann mentioned that the patients are getting sicker and sicker. One of the reasons the patients are getting sicker and sicker is because they know that they have the potential to get arrested if they come seek healthcare. So they delay and defer care and then they come to us and they’re a lot of times near death. I took care of somebody last night who intubated completely unconscious body full of ammonia because their liver had failed and they had deferred care. And I couldn’t get this person’s story because obviously they were intubated and in a coma, but judging from this person’s last name, they very easily could have been somebody who was undocumented. But for us, for me, for the nurses at Cook County, we became nurses because it sounds cheesy, but it is a calling. I walked away from a six-figure career in supply chain and logistics management to come do this with the rest of my life because I felt a calling to do so because in 2020, I was at the George Floyd protest.
I said, “Wow, I’m actually the baddie and I need to get my life right.” And so I was feeling really good about what I was doing every day, taking care of some of the sickest people, the poorest people, the least fortunate people in my community and serving my community. And then I find out the thing that I’m relying on for my retirement is heavily invested in a company that’s collaborating with ICE, that is writing software for the IDF, that is tracking kids home from school in Gaza so that the Israeli Defense Force can send a bomb to this person’s house because there’s a one in two million chance that this kid’s dad is part of Hamas. And so that doesn’t align in any way with my values. And so we felt the need to step up and demand that our pension board divest itself from Palantir, and we were kind of blown off.
So I am looking to put together a run to be part of the pension board in the next few months. So that’s where our involvement with Palantir is.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, I want to keep going in the direction that y’all are leading us to. I want to keep zooming out here and take this discussion beyond the world of healthcare, but I think it bears repeating or reminding all of us who and what we’re talking about here. I mean, if you’re still asking yourself or you listen to this and you’re saying, “Well, why is Palantir so bad? Who are they?” They’re telling us who they are. They published a whole batshit manifesto about their evil vision of and for the world. Their CEO, Alex Karp is constantly saying super villain type stuff about the kind of future he imagines with AI. And there’s a piece that we’ll link to in the show notes from The Guardian that is literally titled Palantir Manifesto described as Ramblings of a Super Villain Amid UK Contract Fears. And in that article, here’s a quote that says, “Palantir’s manifesto, which embraces AI state surveillance of citizens along with national service in the USA is either a parody of a Robocop film or a disturbing narcissistic rant from an arrogant organization.” And that was actually from a liberal Democrat MP in the UK.
But read that, read the manifesto. They are telling us who they are and we should believe them. I don’t want this creep carp near my healthcare or my information or any of my government data. I don’t want them near anything having to do with the administration of our society or what remains of it these days. And yet they are getting in there in our government. The data centers that are popping up everywhere. They’re tied up in all of that too. So I wanted to ask y’all to sort of zoom out and keep talking about that bigger picture. And I wanted to ask why you and your union are demanding that not only hospitals, but elected officials cut ties with Palantir. Why is it important for you to speak out against this kind of larger onslaught of big tech and to speak out as union nurses to stop it?
Kiera Arbour, RN:
I would say first of all, we have our own manifesto. It’s called Vision for a Healthy Society, and it’s not super villainy. We want people to live happy, healthy, self-fulfilled, self-actualized lives where they have the resources they need to not just survive day-to-day, but to thrive as human beings in the way that human beings were meant to exist and to flourish, not to be beholden to these giant unelected powers, whether it’s Palantir, whether it’s Anthropic, who was just in the news yesterday because they have their own AI building dossiers on folks like us who are opposed to what they do, and nobody elected these people. They became billionaires because venture capitalists invested money in them, and now they call the shots. They own pretty much both parties. Shout out to Rokana for giving that money back from Palantir, but for the most part, they’re heavily invested in both Democrats and Republicans.
As far as union nurses, because we can’t, because our union has our backs, because they’re going to protect our free speech rights, they’re going to protect our right to go out there and say, “This is wrong. We don’t agree with it.” And they allow me, because they are themselves, my union is itself anti-colonial, anti-imperial. They stand up for these values that I try to model myself, and so I need to stand in solidarity with my working class siblings, and I need to work for the society that I think is going to allow human beings the best chance to live the lives they deserve.
Kelli Brennan, RN:
In Maine, in January, we had operation Catch of the Day, which Maine is one of the whitest states in the country. We have a Somali population. So for us to be targeted with this operation, it was devastating. It affected our community, it affected the hospital, our housekeeping workers, our transporters, our ancillary services, and all staff felt this. You could feel the emotions throughout the hospital as this was going on. About 30% of our housekeeping were calling out because they were afraid. We were picking up food because we had a food bank, but people were afraid to go to the food bank. So our C-suite was storing groceries, so we were bringing our immigrant vulnerable community members to get food. And then one of my coworkers, who’s of the vulnerable community, I offered to give her a ride into work because everything was so escalating. So I picked her up one morning and we were driving to the hospital to go to work, and it was about six o’clock in the morning.
It was dark out. We were driving down the street, and as we were driving, pulled up to what seemed to be ice activity. There was a bunch of unmarked cars, out-of-state license plates, just seemed suspicious. So I couldn’t just drive by. So I pulled into a parking lot across the street and started filming on my phone what these officers were doing, just trying to see if they had anybody, if anybody was in trouble. But I also had my friend in the car, so I didn’t want to draw too much attention, so I didn’t honk my horn. I didn’t get out. I didn’t yell. I just sat there with my phone on recording, and the officers saw me. They flashed their flashlight at me as to say, “Hey, we see you.” And then I saw them heading to their car. So at that point, I decided that this was not a safe situation and we should leave.
So we pulled out of the parking lot, carried on down the street, and realized that they were following us. So got to a red light, and they pulled up in the lane next to me, and I could feel them staring at me through the window. So I rolled my window down because I could see that they were wanting that, and they rolled down their window and they looked at me. It was a male and a female officer, and they said, “Can we help you?” I said, “Yeah.” I said, “You can get the fuck out of Maine.” To which they replied, “Oh, looks like we have another Karen here.” At this point, the light is still red, and I’m like, “Okay, this is going to escalate.” I was worried My friend. And so when the light turned green, they looked at me and they said, “I’m going to arrest three more people today just for you.
Ha ha ha ha ha.” And pulled out in front of me, did a U-turn and carried on down back to where they came from. I don’t think anybody was abducted that morning, but my friend and I continued to drive to work and it was just like I felt so awful. It was traumatizing. And so that right there for me was like, this isn’t okay. And so we went to work and then this was happening across our town and the hospital went through so much to help and support people. They changed where they were picking up employees so that the parking lot was gated so that there couldn’t be agents in there. And they did all these things. And then we find out that they have a contract with Palantir and it’s like, wait a minute, we just went through this in January. We felt the effects of this in the hospital.
So that’s where we all kind of started to get involved. And then fast forward through the summer, we get to July and we have the murder of Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, which is three miles down the street from a Maine health facility. And at this point we are aware about the app called Elite that Palantir is using to target immigrants in our communities. So at this point, we’re concerned that this is really ramping up in our community. And then fast forward to August when our own nurse was abducted by ICE at an airport in Portland. And then to still find out that MaineHealth is still doubling down on their contract and Susan Collins is still holding onto her money, it’s just infuriating. And I think for us up here in Maine, you’re going to see us out and doing everything we can to try to tell the community that Palantir has no place in our hospitals, no place in our community.
And that if patients can’t trust the hospital, if they can’t trust where they’re going is safe, they’re not going to come and get care. And that’s not what we’re here for. Nurses are advocates first. We’re trained to advocate and to speak up when something is wrong and that’s what we’re doing.
Lee Barker, RN:
I mean, exactly. I think the biggest reason that union nurses are speaking out against Palantir is simply because we can. It’s the right thing to do. And like Kelly said, we’re advocates for our patients, we’re advocates for our communities.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, my God, thank you all so much for that. That was really, I think, important, really powerful. And I’m really grateful to y’all again for speaking out the way that you are and letting our listeners know why this is important. And I want to end on that and bring us back to where we started in the beginning where I learned about this Purge Palantir campaign from NNU because of the day of action in August. So I wanted to ask if you could tell folks more about now that we’ve thoroughly covered why we should all be invested in this and horrified that these tyrants and oligarchs and freaks and villains who want to control everything and everyone, why we should not just go quietly into that dark night and why people should stand up and fight back and that we can choose a different path. We don’t have to go down this path.
And that’s what I see all around me and in every kind of story we cover at The Real News. People around the country are pissed, they are fighting back, they are doing so wherever they can, however they can, whether it’s speaking out as union workers in mobilizations or it’s people in deep red, rural areas where there are data centers popping up or people here in quote unquote deep blue cities like Baltimore where data centers are also threatening to pop up. This is kind of forcing us all together and we’re going to need to work together to figure this out. And so in that spirit, I wanted to end by asking y’all if you could tell folks more about what NNU is doing to fight back and what people listening, what your message is to them about why they should get involved and what they could do to get involved.
And if you have any final words about what will happen to all of us if people don’t fight back against this now.
Kiera Arbour, RN:
So I would say that, and probably understanding that the demographic of your podcast are what we like to call fellow travelers. They’re socialist, anarchists, anti-capitalists, what have you. We need to get people off the sidelines. We’ll take care of our own business here in Chicago with this pension fund. What I would suggest that your listeners do is reach out to somebody who they would probably consider a liberal or a conservative and do something simple like, I don’t know, go take them to see the movie American Doctor. I don’t know if you’ve heard about that. It’s the story, it’s a documentary of people trying to go provide aid in Gaza in the midst of a genocide because I really feel like there is a large percentage of the population out there who just doesn’t really understand. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s just that A, they don’t understand what’s happening and B, they don’t know or don’t feel like they have any sort of political agency to change it.
And there are a lot of people who probably identify as neither any sort of political affiliation, and those are the people that we need to reach out to to let them know what’s happening around us. So go see something like American Doctor, which is really going to get you right here. Understand that Palantir and all these big tech companies played a very large part in all the horrible things that you’re going to see in that movie. And then wherever you live, I guarantee you there are people that there’s an anti-war committee. There are mutual aid groups who are going out every day and collecting donations and trying to feed the less fortunate in our community, the people who are undocumented, who are afraid to go to work. There’s so many opportunities to go out there and connect with the people in your community and that’s what’s going to make you feel safe and that’s what’s going to make you feel like you have power over this and that’s what’s going to make you feel like you have agency over this.
And that’s how we defeat this in solidarity together as working class human beings.
Kelli Brennan, RN:
I think it’s going to be really important that people get out and vote in November. I think it’s really going to be, we don’t know what the outcomes of the elections will be, but if they go the way we want them to go, there’s a chance that those results aren’t going to be accepted. So I think we have to prepare and organize and make sure that we’re getting everyone out to vote, making sure people are registered. I think there’s no hesitation on my mind about that we need a huge voter turnout this midterm. And I think if people aren’t involved, be a poll watcher, drive people to the polls, make sure your community members know if they’re registered, how to register, where the voting locations are, and notify your elected officials that you don’t approve of Palantir. Whenever I do stuff lobbying, one things that representatives in Congress or locally or wherever, they say that I don’t hear from my constituents.
No one’s called me to tell me about this. And that really matters. So I think it’s important for people to get out and vote. I think it’s important for people to join an organization, unionize. If you’re not in a union, join one, make one, connect with one because there’s so many resources. And if we’re all doing different things, we need to all do the same thing together at the same time. And we need to sustain organizing, sustain networking, talk to people that you don’t normally talk to. What I love is our candidate for Senate, Troy Jackson, one of his sayings I love is we’re not from the left, we’re not from the right, we’re from the bottom and we’re rising. This is a working class issue. They’re sayings that unions save the middle class, unions built the middle class. We’re going to have to do that again.
And even if you’re not in a union, you’ve got to link up with somebody because it’s going to take all of us to get through this. And nurses are first and foremost humanitarians, right? We’re the trusted profession over and over again. So we know what’s needed in healthcare. And as a nurse for 17 years, I’m so sick and tired of apologizing to my patients and their families on behalf of health insurance executives and hospital CEOs. So everyone get out and do something.
Lee Barker, RN:
Absolutely. Just to echo that, getting out to vote, reaching out to your elected representatives, telling them to purge Palantir. I’m going to put a couple links in the chat also. There’s a purgepalantir.com. You can get on there and find out what’s going on with the Purge Palantir campaign, Actions Near You. The other link I put in there is there’s a letter that people can fill out that will go to HCA specifically telling them to cut ties with Palantir. Anyone can sign that. Anyone can sign that. Anyone can find that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Kelly Brennan, Lee Barker and Kira Arbour, all three registered nurses, all three members of National Nurses United, all participating in NNU’s Purge Palantir campaign. And you can learn more about that campaign in the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Mark Steiner Show and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
Over the 2026 Labor Day weekend, I had the honor of speaking at the Reuther-Pollack Labor History Symposium in Wheeling, West Virginia, organized by the Wheeling Academy of Law & Science (WALS) Foundation. The symposium takes place in Wheeling every year and adopts a different theme each year; this year, the theme was “The Art of Labor.” I got to represent TRNN and speak alongside a truly incredible lineup of artists and working-class warriors, including: Tabitha Arnold, the great textile artist and tapestry maker; Erik Ruin, printmaker and shadow puppeteer; and Shaun Slifer, a multidisciplinary artist and the Creative Director for the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum.
The text below is a transcript of the talk I gave at this year’s Symposium, which has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. You can also listen to the audio recording of my speech on The Real News Network podcast feed.
https://www.spreaker.com/show/2952221/episodes/feedThank you. It is genuinely an honor to be here on these hallowed grounds with all of you in Wheeling, West Virginia. It really, really means a lot to me to be here with all of you.
I also have to say: I really appreciate it when Vince or anyone else tells me that that first-ever Working People interview I recorded with my dad, Jesus Alvarez, meant something to them—because it meant everything to me. It started everything.
I didn’t start out to become a labor journalist or to do the kinds of interviews I do with working people. I didn’t set out to make a life reporting on working-class struggles from working-class areas around the country, on the front lines of a class war that is hitting all of us in similar and different ways. I didn’t start out to be or do any of that. I started because I didn’t want my dad, the greatest man I know, to go to his grave feeling like a failure after we had lost everything during the Recession, including the house I grew up in, just like millions of other families. And we have continued to struggle, just like millions and millions and billions of us around the world have continued to struggle. And so, to be here standing in front of all of you—having started the show back then as a ruse to get my dad to talk about something he was so deeply depressed about and wouldn’t talk about—it means a whole lot for me and my family.
I really do want to thank all of you for being here. And of course, I want to thank Seán P. Duffy, Vincent DeGeorge, and everyone at the WALS Foundation for bringing us all together here on this hallowed ground.
I came here today from Baltimore to talk with you all about why stories matter to me, and why I believe they matter to us, or should matter more.
I wouldn’t be here without the stories that made me. And the same is true for all of us and every one of us.
And when I say “I wouldn’t be here,” to start, I mean it literally. I quite literally and very quantifiably would not be standing here right now, speaking in this room with you all, alongside all these amazing people—none of you would have ever had to hear my name or see my ugly face, if I wasn’t such a hopeless, relentless, lifelong lover of stories.
(Also, I know y’all were hoping Kim Kelly would be here today. I apologize, I am no Kim Kelly. I am a fill-in for Kim Kelly, but I am one-third of the tattoos and one-third of the talent. So that’s what you’re getting today!)
I wouldn’t be doing the work that I do now as a journalist and Co-Executive Director of a news organization, I certainly wouldn’t be doing it the way I do it, I would not have pursued all those ill-advised degrees in literature before that, I would not have written or said or filmed all the things that I have and will, if I wasn’t an eternal believer in the awesome, human-making, history-making, and society-making power of stories.
Whether I’m reading them, writing them, watching them, listening to them, studying them, teaching them, recording them, filming them, remembering them, dreaming about them, thinking about them, or thinking through them, I love stories, and I need stories to live. Always have, ever since I can remember remembering anything.
Like any fool in love would do, I followed that need wherever it took me. I have madly chased it headfirst into the best and worst times of my life. It got me to the most beautiful, ivy covered college campuses I’ve ever seen, and it got me through the most body-crushing, mind-numbing, soul-rotting jobs I’ve ever had. It led me to my wife and fellow literature dweeb Meg, who’s sitting back there, and it opened up the path for me to make the purpose-filled life I have now, and to do the purpose-filled work I do now.
I have continued to chase that love and that need for stories headfirst into the best and worst places in the world, where the best and worst of humanity is on display. From picket lines to protest marches, from union halls to student encampments on college campuses, from the horror-filled halls of immigration courts where masked federal thugs are kidnapping and disappearing innocent people daily, to rural, urban, and suburban communities fighting data centers all over the country, from “deep red” Texas to “deep blue” Maryland, from Occupied Palestine to East Palestine, Ohio, from communities that have been devastated by poverty, industrial pollution, and organized abandonment and disinvestment to communities that have been devastated by plant closures and school shootings, from poisoned coal mining towns in West Virginia to poisoned neighborhoods in South Baltimore where that very same coal ends up, where that very same coal sits and moves through the giant coal terminal pier right next to people’s houses, and where that very same coal ends up in the poisoned lung tissue of the people who live there and have been inhaling that toxic coal dust for generations.
I have followed my need for stories and our people’s need to have our stories told and heard. I have followed that need to wherever I need to be, and I have followed it all the way here to Wheeling, West Virginia. (You wanna talk about stories? There are a few more storied places than this.)
And though it has caused me and my family more pain and grief and debt and disappointment along the way than I can ever possibly sum up to you, I have learned to check myself by asking myself: If the need that I have, if the love that I’ve followed, brought me to this beautiful place and gave me the chance to be here now with you beautiful people, then how can it be wrong?
If that need and that love has led me to my life’s continuing work of lifting up the stories of our fellow workers around the US and around the world, of using every medium and platform and every tool and skill I have to offer to help people find confidence in their own voice and share their story in their own words—if it has guided me to the frontlines of the class war to report the news through the stories and voices and faces and lives and bodies and souls and firsthand realities of the people at the center of “the story”—if that absurd, magical, lifelong pursuit of stories has in any way helped me help other working people like me and my family believe that their stories are actually worth telling and hearing and remembering, that their lives truly do matter more than this world has led us to believe and that we all truly do deserve better than what this world has forced us to accept—and if it has helped me help others see that we can get better and make a better world the better we are to each other and the more we share our stories and listen to each other’s stories—if my love and my need for stories and my belief in stories has contributed anything at all to that, then how can it not be worth it?
But when I say, “I wouldn’t be here without the stories that made me,” I also mean it in the sense that I wouldn’t be the “I” that I am. I am me because of the stories that made me, the stories that made me more me than who I was before I experienced them, the stories that continue to make me who I am now and who I will be in all those versions of me to come.
I come from a family of storytellers. Being here in West Virginia, I got a sense you guys will know what I’m talking about. One of many things Mexicans and West Virginians have in common. I am the me that I am because of the people who raised me, the people who are and continue to be my life, the people who taught me how to live and be a person and become a self through their presences, their absences, and their stories. The stories they told and the stories they showed me and my siblings. Stories that hit back to the deepest end of my childhood beginnings of consciousness, stories that built my consciousness, stories that brought me out of human mud and helped shape me into human being.
For the same reasons I can always remember it being such a natural feeling to look out car windows and be fascinated and dazzled by all the warm lights of being out there, all those other homes and other lives people-like-me-but-not-me are living—for the same reasons I’ve always wondered about those other homes and lives and people—for all the same reasons I have always projected myself outward onto them and thought about them out of genuine curiosity and interest and goodwill—and for all the same reasons I have grown as a person the more I consider selves and lives that are not mine, I have always been naturally drawn to stories as a lifesource. Stories my family told me, stories I heard on the radio or saw on the TV, stories I read, stories I created.
Stories about human-beings-like-me-but-not-me, living in selves-and-bodies-like-mine-but-not-mine, living in times, places, circumstances, and worlds that are not the ones I live in and experience everyday. Stories that take my lifeworld and my perspective and open them up, open me up, to lives-like-mine-but-not-mine, to human perspectives other than the only perspective I can ever have and have ever had ever since I was born, ever since I’ve been me, Maximillian Lee Alvarez. All those stories now live on in me, and will continue to live on in me, so long as I live on as me.
Those stories live on through me in the impressions they have left on me. And they will continue to live on in me as formative parts of the person I became once those stories and my experiences of them became part of me. And they will continue to be a part of me and every version of me—all those selves I’ll ever become—so long as I am gifted to live on this earth as me.
These stories live on in the words I say and in the stories I tell to others. Because they have shaped the “me” that I am and the ways I use language to communicate with others and with myself, and the ways I use language to communicate myself to others and to myself.
They live on in the ways I cope with pain and failure, and what I learn from them.
Those stories live on in my thoughts and in the way I think. Now and for the rest of my life, they have their place in the vast, dazzling multiverse of mindstuff that my mind has to draw upon and remember from and think and dream and imagine with.
Over my lifetime, the stories I’ve found, the stories I’ve made, and the stories I’ve been told have shaped, challenged, corrected, sharpened, and reinforced my internal sense of right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, and what it means to be good, do good, and live a good life.
And if you’re feeling lost about those things right now, I’m telling you: Go back to our stories! We are not the only ones to face hard times. Our ancestors who faced such times left us their stories so that we would know what to do now. Don’t let those stories go to waste! There is power in them. We have power in them. (More on that in a minute.)
All those stories live on in the ways I try and have tried and will try to live and act and see and be in the world, in the ways I try and have tried and will try to see and treat other people and other life. And again, what I’m saying is true for me is, I fully believe, true for each and every one of us. And that on its own—even if you just take the people here in this room—is a miracle of life and nature and god and a joyous wonder to behold, on par with gazing out at the stars in the sky!
And yet, we so disinterestedly take all this for granted every day. We don’t appreciate stories enough, including our own stories and the stories of others. And I don’t think we appreciate this enough about the stories that make us and the roles stories play in making us human (and the role storylessness plays in our loss of humanity).
Just like we have been trained and trained ourselves to accept an unacceptable culture of violence and mass death that takes and destroys life everywhere with the kind of scale and self-serving abandon that would make the ancient gods of old blush, we have been trained and trained ourselves to lose touch with the magical, life-giving force of stories. And our life-sustaining love for stories has been beaten out of us by AI slop, by a shitty, commercialized culture industry, by living under capitalism and end-times fascism, etc. I get why we feel that way, and I feel it, too. But there’s something really, really wrong there.
Like our air and water and soil and atmosphere, I think we have been trained and trained ourselves to let stories be poisoned and polluted for so long that we will at worst cheer on their destruction or at best live monotonously without any urgent sense of duty or need to stop the destruction. Both paths inevitably lead to the same place: our own peril as a people, a society, and a species.
That’s why I think we miss the magic of stories and the magic in stories that’s all around us, available to us in so many forms, living in our heads and shaping who we are every day.
That’s why I think we tend to look at stories and the stories of others so mistrustfully or disinterestedly or scornfully or selfishly. We tend these days to not look for stories at all, let alone stories that challenge us and grow us. We don’t give them our time, and so many that are shoved in our faces aren’t worth our ime. And when we do look for them, we often look for the stories that we already know or stories that ultimately serve to stop us from growing and knowing more, stories that serve to stunt our being and reinforce the selves and prejudices we already have. What a waste of good magic!
Of course, we all want stories like that to some extent, and we all need stories that function like that to some extent. We all watched The Office five times during Covid. That’s fine. But what I’m talking about goes much deeper.
I’ll use myself as an example to try to explain.
I grew up in Southern California, post-Cold War, in the ‘90s. We were a middle-class mixed-immigrant family. We were the American Dream. And that’s why my dad and my mom and my family were so depressed after the 2008 Crash and the Recession, because we had had and lost the American Dream, and that really does a number on you and your soul.
The era I grew up in before the Crash was an era of America in which a lot of the dreams that I was foolish enough to have for my life still felt possible. And over the last 25-30 years, I think a lot of us have come to the awakening that many of those dreams, our dreams, are not possible in America anymore. At least not for working people like us. And after doing this kind of work for nearly a decade now, I’ve gotten confirmation from working people all over this country that I’m not the only one who feels that way.
It’s a real gift to contain all those different selves that I’ve been over my life, including the deep-red-conservative, Orange County dumbass who didn’t know much about life. I don’t despise or regret that version of myself, I accept him for all his faults. And I know I had a lot of right reasons for believing the wrong things back then. And I know that I still have so many good parts of me that were there in me when I was a conservative and that are here in me now as the lefty nut job you see before you. Because they’re just good things about being a good person. I don’t care who taught them to me, I’m just grateful they did.
I don’t see people in rigid identity or ideology boxes, and I try not to see myself that way either. And I definitely don’t like to see stories that way. And it’s in part because of stories that I don’t see the world that way. And yet, in this country, that is the way that we have trained ourselves to see each other and ourselves and our stories.
I remember being that younger, more conservative-type person and going into a Barnes & Noble and saying, “I want to read good, classic literature.” And the employee I talked to was like, “Oh, do you want French literature? Spanish literature? Feminist literature? African-American literature?” And I remember saying, “No, no, no. I want literature. I don’t want any of those ‘special interests.’”
That was a very juvenile way for me to think and feel about literature, but I think a lot of us can still relate to that feeling. I’m so grateful to literature especially, and to all the storytellers in my life and all the storytellers I’ve come across in my life, for teaching me over time, and for constantly reminding me, that that’s not what stories are there for. I’m grateful to them for teaching me how much it cheapens our relationship to stories—and the potential and beauty and magic we can derive from them—when we look at them and treat them this way. And stories themselves are the cure for this sickness. The more I read literature of all kinds, the less I thought about stories this way. The more I loved and connected with literature of all kinds, the more I grew and felt and thought and developed as a person with different kinds of me inside.
And so, I learned a very valuable lesson early on in life: That literature about other people, and that stories about other people—from other people’s perspectives, about the ways that they are living as people in this world—are not a threat to who I am. They make me who I am. They grow who I am.
And it’s for those reasons that it seems so clear and obvious when I say, “I wouldn’t be here without the stories that made me, and you wouldn’t be here without the stories that made you.”
Think of all those stories that still live in your head today, that you still talk about with your friends and siblings, that you still have living somewhere in the recesses of your mind as warm memories of reading a good book, watching a good movie, or having a good conversation.
For me, I think about sitting in my living room with my whole family back home, watching the movie Glory, the epic historical drama about the 54th Massachusetts, the first Black regiment to fight in the Civil War. Why did our whole family of Alvarezes connect with that movie? I could go on a whole dissertation about why we connected with that movie (but I won’t do it here, don’t worry). We bawled our eyes out watching it then, and I still bawl my eyes out when I watch it now. We saw so much of ourselves—the Americans we believed we were, the America we believed we lived in and believed we were a part of—in that movie. And we clearly weren’t the only ones.
It doesn’t matter that I don’t know what it’s like to be a “freed” Black slave in the Antebellum South; and it doesn’t threaten my understanding or sense of being to watch a movie that storytellers, story-makers, and story-actors have produced to try to help me understand. It enhances my being. It gives me more access to beings- and selves- and lives-like-mine-but-not-mine, and they then become part of my experience and shape who I am and how I am in the world.
That’s part of the magic I’m talking about, the magic that makes us who we are, which we all just take for granted. It’s like we put on glasses that removed the power of stories from our vision, made it invisible to us. But it’s there. It’s all around us. It’s there in us.
It was there when I was listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” while driving here to Wheeling. Truly, one of the most beautiful stories about love and working-class life ever told in our language. And no matter what stage of my life I was in, it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t know what it was like to live as a Black, working-class lesbian in the industrial Midwest around the ‘80s and ‘90s. I still knew enough to know that to live was to love, to seek love, to be loved, and to pursue happiness, and I still knew enough to know why it is a heartbreaking tragedy for someone to have their love and their lives and their happiness denied or taken from them.
Who among us human beings hasn’t feared making the wrong choice immortalized in Chapman’s line, “We got to make a decision: leave tonight or live and die this way”? Who among us living people cannot relate to the pain and fear and drama and yearning in the stories of other people who spend their precious, short time on this earth living unfulfilled, unhappy lives full of unrequited love and unrealized dreams, even if they weren’t our dreams?
I could relate to that even as a kid. I relate to it so much more now as an adult, now that I am far more aware of the limited time we in general and I specifically have to live. And that gives me so much more capacity to feel empathy and solidarity with others whose lives and loves and happiness and flourishing are beaten, crushed, lost, or denied. How could I feel anything but the natural human solidarity my heart feels when listening to Chapman’s song? And how can I not remember that listening to the song as a kid helped me begin to imagine and explore the unknown emotional depths of my own human heart?
The specifics of the story and the selves involved do not describe the specific story and self I already know as my own, but they still embody dramatically heightened versions of what I have known and experienced in my own life, dramatically and beautifully heightened versions of our human experience of life and love and loss and yearning.
None of the details that differentiate the story in “Fast Car” and its lovelorn protagonist from my own life story are reasons for me to say, “That’s not my story.” Those are reasons for me to connect with another person’s story—to get closer to them, and to become more myself, the more they and their story become part of me and mine.
Here’s another story. My wife Megan Berkobien just co-translated this book I’m holding in my hand, Goodbye, Ramona by Montserrat Roig.
It’s a beautiful, incredible book. Everyone should go read it. It’s a Catalan novel about Spanish Civil War times. I don’t know what the hell that’s like, but for the same reasons that my Mexican ass got two useless degrees in Russian literature, I don’t care. I don’t need anyone’s cultural permission to connect with my fellow human beings. Reading the stories of other people has only ever given me light and goodness. It’s never taken anything away from me or made me a worse person.
Reading the first chapter of Goodbye, Ramona transports me to the mind of a trapped woman—a woman whose husband is a tyrant and makes her feel powerless—as she wanders like a ghost in the streets looking for him after he has suddenly gone missing in the wake of a bombing in Barcelona. In Roig’s beautiful, harrowing description—and in Meg and Cristina’s beautiful, harrowing translation—you see the damage of his tyranny on her psyche, and you feel the fear and anxiety in the way she describes what she’s doing and what she’s thinking.
That’s the raw, human stuff that makes me feel as close as I can get to living and seeing through the head of another person. What a gift that is! And how necessary it is, especially in times like these when we live and exist so far away from each other, when we are so alienated from each other and isolated from each other, when we can be standing next to other people in the grocery store line or sitting next to each other in traffic but the spaces between us and our minds and hearts feels as vast as the distance between us and the moon.
We have stories to bring us closer, and yet we continue to let capitalism, a broken society, and the wickedness of the powerful push us away from each other. But it doesn’t have to be this way. And I hope that the stories that I have helped to tell, all these stories I’ve recorded and published, will continue to remind people of that. I hope these stories remind people of who we really are and who our neighbors really are. I hope these stories by and for our fellow workers not only remind us that every life is precious, but that they remind us what life is all about. I hope that they remind us what a gift it is that we are all here, and what a cosmic tragedy it is that we allow life itself and our lives to be treated with such inhumane disregard.
That’s why I interviewed the family of a Kroger worker, Evan Seifried, who committed suicide just an hour north of here, in Milford, Ohio, in 2021. And that’s why Evan’s story has impacted me so much.
For 19 years, with a virtually spotless record, Evan worked at a local Kroger grocery store in Milford, where he eventually became the dairy department manager. But from October 2020 to March 2021, Evan suffered a torturous campaign of bullying, harassment, and sabotage from two store managers, and his union abandoned him when he needed help. Evan took his own life, and his family will never be the same, and the world will never be as bright as it was with Evan in it. I thank god that I don’t know firsthand what it’s like to go through such a horrific tragedy, but because I heard them tell it, every other thing about me and my human being feels the Seyfried’s story and their pain and their fight for justice as my own. After learning about Evan’s story and after speaking with his loved ones about his story many times, I am forever changed by him and by them.
So, of course, I thought of Evan and the Seyfrieds, and I thought of my own family, when I saw the soul-crushing news story this past week of Pierre Damas Bel, the poor 20-year old young man who committed suicide in Springfield and walked into traffic after our government slapped a criminal ankle bracelet on him and told him he was a worthless cockroach. I know what it feels like to have others in my own country, even my own government, see me this way. Everyone here has some way of trying to understand what that feels like, but we don’t try hard enough. Stories help us get better at trying. And we need to get better, we need to do better, we need to be better. For Evan, for Pierre, for all of us.
I’m not the same person I was when I walked into that Barnes & Noble way back when looking for “just good literature.” I don’t look to stories or look for stories in that same one-way, transactional mode anymore; I don’t look to stories or look for stories that are just going to reflect me back to me.
I don’t just gravitate to stories that I gravitate to because I see something of me reflected in them. I gravitate to stories because a light in them draws me in, and that light then reflects in me and stays with me after I connect with them.
Every great human-made creation, construction, and operation embodies a whole that would not exist but for the sum of every worker and every ounce of human work that contributed to its existence. All those workers with all their lives and all their labor contributed to bringing all these magnificent things into existence, and all of us workers with all our lives and all our labor contribute to them, improve upon them, and keep them running. So, too, have all these stories contributed to bringing the me that I am into existence. And these stories will continue their work of shaping how I live and act and see and feel and think.
Stories have been and continue to be the most ever-present, ever-abundant, ever-beautiful reminder that I need other people to live, to be, to be me.
And the ever-present, ever-abundant, ever-beautiful number and forms of human stories all around us—all the stories that have already been told, all the stories yet to be told, all the stories that live on in our books, our films, our songs, our campfire tales—each and every one of them is a reminder to us that we need each other, too.
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