Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Refinery Town
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WEBSITE: http://steveearly.org/
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http://steveearly.org/bio.html
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PERSONAL EDUCATION:
Graduated from Middlebury College; graduated from Catholic University Law School.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, lawyer, and union representative. Communications workers of America, Boston, MA, staff member, 1980-2007. Freelance journalist for Nation, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, Toronto Globe & Mail, Berkshire Eagle, Progressive, CounterPunch, Beyond Chron, Guardian, In These Times, Our Times, American Prospect, Mother Jones, Labor History, New Politics, New Labor Forum, Social Policy, Labor Notes, Labor Studies Journal, WorkingUSA, Labor Research Review, Monthly Review, Technology Review, Boston Review, Dollars and Sense, Socialism and Democracy, Democratic Left, The Guild Reporter, Jacobin, Tikkun, and Labor: Studies in Working Class History in The Americas.
MEMBER:Pacific Media Workers Guild, United for a Fair Economy (board member).
WRITINGS
Contributor of chapters to books, including “Membership Based Organizing,” in A New Labor Movement For The New Century, edited by Gregory Mantsios, Monthly Review Press, 1998; “The NYNEX Strike: A Case Study in Labor-Management Conflict Over Health Care Cost Shifting,” in Proceedings of NYU Annual National Conference on Labor, Little, Brown &Co., 1991; (With Larry Cohen) “Defending Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy: The CWA Experience” in Which Direction For Organized Labor?, edited by Bruce Nissen, Wayne State University Press, 1999, reprinted, edited by Annie Fouquet, Udo Rehfeldt, and Serge Le Roux, Les Editions de L’Atelier, Paris, 2000; (With Larry Cohen) “Globalization and De-Unionization in Telecommunications: Three Case Studies in Resistance” in Transnational Cooperation Among Labor Unions, edited by Michael Gordon and Lowell Turner, Cornell University Press, 2000; “Strike Lessons From The Last Twenty-Five Years” in The Encyclopedia of Strikes, edited by Ben Day, Manny Ness, and Aaron Brenner, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2009; “The Enduring Legacy & Contemporary Relevance of Labor Insurgency,” in Rebel Rank-and-File: Labor Militancy and Revolt From Below During the 1970s, edited by Cal Winslow, Aaron Brenner, and Bob Brenner, Verso, 2009; and (With Rand Wilson) “Back to the Future: Union Survival Strategies in Open Shop America,” Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back, edited by Michael D. Yates, Monthly Review Press, 2012. Also serves on editorial boards for Labor Notes, New Labor Forum, WorkingUSA and Social Policy.
SIDELIGHTS
Steve Early is a lawyer, journalist, author, and labor activist who served for twenty-seven years as a Boston-based staff member of the Communications Workers of America (CWA). In this role he participated in CWA organizing with, and sometimes strikes against, companies such as NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, AT&T, Verizon, Southern New England Tel, SBC, Cingular, and Verizon Wireless. As a freelance journalist, Early has written for major newspapers and magazines including the Boston Globe; Boston Herald; Nation, New York Times; Washington Post, Los Angeles Times; Newsday; Wall Street Journal; Christian Science Monitor; Philadelphia Inquirer; and USA Today. He has also contributed essays, singly or as coauthor, to several anthologies. Early is the author of four books on labor and labor relations in the United States.
Embedded with Organized Labor
Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home is a collection of essays in which Early examines the history of labor organizing and offers insights on contemporary efforts to organize workers despite opposition from employers. Drawing on his own background as a union member and activist, the author offers an insider’s perspective on issues such as radicalism within unions; union hierarchies and structural organization; and new attitudes toward and forms of worker organizations.
Writing in Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, Andrew Stevens noted that Early considers Embedded with Organized Labor an example of participatory journalism. The book “draws attention to the significance of writing about labour and unionism in an accessible, yet articulate, fashion,” said Stevens, and can be seen as a model of academic writing capable of reaching a popular audience. The reviewer admired the “rich engagement with history and social commentary” that Early brings to the book, and praised the author’s analysis of “the racial, class, and gendered dimensions of trade unionism’s history in the U.S., as well as the extent to which these social relations produced new forms of dissent and change within the labour movement.”
Civil Wars in U.S. Labor
In Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers; Movement or Death Throes of the Old? Early examines the response of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to dissent among its members. The SEIU represents approximately two million members including hospital, nursing home, and home care workers; local and state government employees; and janitors, security officers, and food service workers. In the author’s view, the SEIU has become increasingly authoritarian and has ignored or squelched internal dissent.
Reviewing Civil Wars in U.S. Labor jointly with Embedded with Organized Labor, Andrew Stevens observed in Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations that “Early’s chief criticism against SEIU tactics is that they mirror corporate practices, namely the fascination with the use of mergers and acquisitions as a way of making unionism more efficient.” Even so, the author acknowledges that the SEIU has historically worked for the rights of the working poor, citing its “Justice for Janitors” campaign, among others, as a model of success in organizing workers. But at the same time, the SEIU has suffered some of the works internal conflicts in recent union history, with independent local chapters battling central union officials. “Early is unequivocal,” Stevens concluded in his review of Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: “union revitalization is nothing without strong union democracy, and neither academics nor appointed activists can substitute for rank-and-file democratic decision making.”
Save Our Unions
Early examines the decline of traditional organized labor and several newer approaches to workers’ organizing in Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress. While confidence in traditional unions has faltered in the early twenty-first century, different kinds of movements have arisen to address workers’ demands. Early discusses the example of employees at McDonalds and other fast-food chain restaurants who went on strike in cities across the United States in 2012 and 2013 to demand a U.S$15 dollar minimum wage. These workers were supported by the SEIU, but were not union members and did not make union recognition part of their demand. Warehouse workers in major U.S. cities have launched similar campaigns, benefiting from union support but forming independent organizations rather than entering a traditional union. As the author shows, this approach has allowed these workers to focus successfully on immediate concerns.
Looking at labor history from the 1970s through the 2010s, Early argues that rank-and-file dissent has played a significant role in shaping union dynamics. In 1970, the Miners for Democracy forced out corrupt leaders of the United Mine Workers. In the 1990s, a revolt among members of the large and powerful Teamsters Union ousted its corrupt officials and brought reformer Ron Carey to power. And in 2010, rank-and-file dissent in the Chicago Teachers Union prompted an electoral upset; two years later, members organized a successful strike opposing several neoliberal reforms.
Refinery Town
In 2012, Early retired from his activist work in Boston and moved to Point Richmond, California. Situated in the eastern region of the San Francisco Bay Area, Richmond had long been a town dominated by Chevron, a major oil company that controlled city politics. Poverty rates and crime were high, and residents suffered the effects of air pollution emanating from Chevron’s refinery, which exploded three times within thirteen years. In Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City Early traces the history of his new home town, following its rise as a shipyard in World War II, its rapid postwar decline, and its early twenty-first century renascence as a site of working class activism.
Early writes that, by the beginning of the 2000s, Richmond’s demographics had changed. The city had attracted large numbers of African American workers to its shipyards in the 1940s, and its black population had reached about fifty percent. That number fell to about thirty percent in the early 2000s, with forty percent of Richmond residents identifying as Latino, twenty percent as Caucasian, and ten percent as Asian and other. This new generation of working people, according to Early, is sensitive to government and environmental abuses, and has launched several protests against corporate proposals that citizens opposed for economic and environmental reasons.
In 2004, Richmond activists organized to rid the city of Chevron’s political influence. The Richmond Progressive Alliance, which Early describes as “simultaneously an electoral formation, a membership organization, a coalition of community groups, and a key coordinator of grassroots education and citizen mobilization around multiple issues,” ran two candidates for city council and won one seat for retired postal worker and Green Party member Gayle McLaughlin. In 2006, McLaughlin was elected mayor, serving two terms during which she relentlessly battled Chevron and the industrial hazards associated with its oil refining and transportation operations. As a result, Richmond won stricter environmental monitoring of Chevron’s operations, as well as higher taxes on the company. The city also provided ID cards to undocumented workers; instituted reforms in the police department; expanded youth outreach programs; and created initiatives to attract green industries and to secure more affordable housing. The city also attempted to pass a soda tax to combat rising rates of obesity.
As Early explains, Richmond residents have enjoyed a much-improved quality of life as a result of these grassroots initiatives. And it is notable that these improvements have come about without any support from the Democratic Party in Richmond’s county. “What the Richmond experience demonstrates are the continuing advantages of making change locally as part of a longer-term and eventually more sweeping progressive strategy,” writes Early. “What activists have going for them at the city level–an advantage almost nonexistent in the big-money-dominated realms of state or national politics–is greater personal connections to voters.”
Refinery Town received several positive reviews. Raymond Pun, writing in Booklist, called the book “inspiring.” Dissent contributor Robert J.S. Ross deemed it a “meticulously detailed and insightful account.” Kate Galbraith, writing in SF Gate, found the book one-sided and sometimes excessively detailed, but nevertheless observed that it “will be read proudly by activists” and that progressives “will value the blueprint laid out by Early–one that details setbacks as well as triumphs.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist November 1, 2016, Raymond Pun, review of Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City, p. 13.
Capital & Class, 2015, Kim Moody, Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress, p. 174.
Kirkus Reviews October 15, 2016, review of Refinery Town.
Labour/Le Travail, 2011, Bates, Matthew C. Bates, “Steve Early, Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home,” p. 219; 2015, Herman Rosenfeld, “Steve Early, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress,” p. 308.
Progressive February 1, 2017, David Helvarg, “Richmond’s Example to the Nation,” p. 40.
Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, summer, 2012, Andrew Stevens, “Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home,” p. 543.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, January, 2017, Michael J. Carson, review of Refinery Town.
ONLINE
Christian Science Monitor, https://www.csmonitor.com (April 28, 2017), review of Refinery Town.
Counter Punch, https://www.counterpunch.org/ (December 30, 2016), review of Refinery Town.
Dissent, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/ (April 6, 2017), review of Refinery Town.
International Longshore and Warehouse Union, https://www.ilwu.org/ (May 20, 2014), review of Save Our Unions.
International Socialist Review, http://isreview.org/ (July, 2011), review of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor.
In These Times, http://inthesetimes.com (February 24, 2014), review of Save Our Unions.
London School of Economics Review of Books, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ (March 10, 2014), review of Save Our Unions.
SF Gate, http://www.sfgate.com/ (March 2, 2017), review of Refinery Town.
Talking Union, https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/ (March 10, 2011), review of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor; (January 2, 2017), review of Refinery Town.
Author Biography
Steve Early has been active as a labor journalist, lawyer, organizer, or union representative since 1972. For 27 years, Early was a Boston-based staff member of the Communications Workers of America. He finished his CWA career in 2007, after serving as administrative assistant to the vice-president of CWA District 1, which represents more than 160,000 workers in New York, New England, and New Jersey,
Early aided CWA organizing, bargaining, and/or major strikes involving NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, AT&T, Verizon, Southern New England Tel, SBC, Cingular, and Verizon Wireless. He also assisted CWA public sector organizing, plus mergers with other AFL-CIO affiliates and independent unions.
Early’s freelance journalism has appeared in The Nation, The Boston Globe, Boston Herald, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, Toronto Globe & Mail, The Berkshire Eagle, The Progressive, CounterPunch, Beyond Chron, The Guardian, In These Times, Our Times, American Prospect, Mother Jones, Labor History, New Politics, New Labor Forum, Social Policy, Labor Notes, Labor Studies Journal, WorkingUSA, Labor Research Review, Monthly Review, Technology Review, Boston Review, Dollars and Sense, Socialism and Democracy, Democratic Left, The Guild Reporter, Jacobin, Tikkun, and Labor: Studies in Working Class History in The Americas.
He is the author of Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home (Monthly Review Press, 2009) and The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old? (Haymarket Books, 2011). His book, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress, was published by MRP in early 2014.
Alone or with co-authors, Early has also contributed chapters to eight edited collections. Among these is an often-cited essay, "Membership Based Organizing," in A New Labor Movement For The New Century, edited by Gregory Mantsios (Monthly Review Press, 1998); "Globalization and De-Unionization in Telecommunications: Three Case Studies in Resistance" (co-authored with Larry Cohen) in Transnational Cooperation Among Labor Unions, edited by Michael Gordon and Lowell Turner (Cornell University Press, 2000); "The NYNEX Strike: A Case Study in Labor-Management Conflict Over Health Care Cost Shifting," in Proceedings of NYU Annual National Conference on Labor (Little, Brown &Co., 1991); "Defending Workers' Rights in the Global Economy: The CWA Experience" (co-authored with Larry Cohen) in Which Direction For Organized Labor? edited by Bruce Nissen (Wayne State University Press, 1999) and also reprinted in Le Syndicalisme Dans La Mondialisation, edited by Annie Fouquet, Udo Rehfeldt, and Serge Le Roux (Les Editions de L'Atelier, Paris, 2000); "Strike Lessons From The Last Twenty-Five Years" in The Encyclopedia of Strikes," edited by Ben Day, Manny Ness, and Aaron Brenner ( M.E. Sharpe, Inc., April, 2009); "The Enduring Legacy & Contemporary Relevance of Labor Insurgency," in Rebel Rank-and-File: Labor Militancy and Revolt From Below During the 1970s, edited by Cal Winslow, Aaron Brenner, and Bob Brenner (Verso, 2009), and “Back to the Future: Union Survival Strategies in Open Shop America,” (co-authored with Rand Wilson) in Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back, edited by Michael D. Yates, (Monthly Review Press, 2012).
Early serves on the editorial advisory committees for four labor-related publications--Labor Notes, New Labor Forum, WorkingUSA and Social Policy. He is also a board member of United For a Fair Economy. He is a member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild (Freelancers Unit), an affiliate of the TNG/CWA.
Early has been a longtime backer of Jobs with Justice, the Association for Union Democracy and Teamsters for a Democratic Union. In 1992, while on loan from CWA, he was part of the Teamster headquarters transition team for newly-elected IBT President Ron Carey and other union reformers who won office in the union’s first direct election of national leaders.
Early is a graduate of Middlebury College and Catholic University Law School. He was admitted to the Vermont bar and state and federal courts in Vermont in 1976. In the 1970s, Early worked for the United Mine Workers and wrote for The UMW Journal, when it received a National Magazine Award in 1975.
What A California Refinery Town Can Teach America
A soon-to-be-published book by a longtime labor organizer chronicles how a grass-roots democracy movement overcame corporate money.
BY KATHY KIELY | DECEMBER 13, 2016
What A California Refinery Town Can [...]
In Richmond, California, a refinery town near San Francisco, a vibrant community coalition is proving that democracy is powered by votes, not money. (Photo by Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
When longtime labor activist Steve Early moved to Richmond, California, he thought San Francisco’s gritty neighbor would be a good place to observe and participate in a vibrant local political community whose battles against corporate neighbor Chevron have been chronicled by Bill Moyers. What he didn’t know was that he’d find the topic for his latest book — one that is all the more timely following the results of last month’s elections. In his forward for Early’s Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money and the Making of An American City, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) writes: “Our country obviously need a a great deal of change at the state and federal levels. But laying a solid local foundation, like activists in Richmond have done, is an important first step.” Early’s book will be available next month; in an interview with Kathy Kiely of BillMoyers.com, he provides a sneak preview.
Kathy Kiely: So tell me why you decided to write this book.
early-refinerytown-sanders
Steve Early: Well, I moved to Richmond five years ago, after working as a labor organizer and a union representative in New England for about 30 years. I immediately got involved in the Richmond Progressive Alliance in 2012 and —
Kiely: So let me stop you there. What made you move to Richmond? Did you move because you knew what was going on there, or was it just happenstance?
Early: I knew, through the labor movement and a national network of labor activists called Labor Notes, some folks in Richmond who were very much involved in the Richmond Progressive Alliance and who had moved here earlier from Detroit. And I had stayed with them. I had seen some of the campaigning that had gone on in 2008 and 2010 before we moved out. And it just seemed to me to be a very exciting place where good things were happening politically, where there was a terrific sense of community, and where progressives were really succeeding in building a kind of multiracial working class-oriented progressive political organization at the local level.
As you know, I’m sure, much of our activity on the left is marginalized and involves symbolic protest activity and casting often third-party votes, which I’ve done many times myself [laughs] in the past. But here we had a group that was actually contesting in local elections and winning them, electing people to city council, electing a member of the Green Party mayor, and then using City Hall as kind of an organizing center to link up with local grass-roots movements and unions and community organizations to strengthen and support their activities and involve many of the leading activists in the function of city government.
Kiely: So that’s really interesting. It sounds like what you’re saying is that you and a number of other people in your network deliberately chose to move to Richmond because you saw something interesting happening there. Is that accurate?
Take A Look: Bill Moyers talks to a Richmond leader and student journalist
Early: Yeah, I would say most of the migration isn’t from as far away as Boston or Detroit. But because of its historic problems with crime and violence and industrial decline, you know, the city’s housing prices and rents until recently were more reasonable than in other parts of the East Bay and certainly a cheaper place to live than across the bay in San Francisco. So as gentrification has become a bigger Bay Area problem and people have been pushed out of San Francisco and forced to move to Oakland and then forced up the coast from Oakland, a number of them have landed here. And I think part of it is economic necessity, finding what may be the last refuge for people with moderate incomes in the East Bay. And also, because they’re attracted to the idea that political activism here was making a difference, making the community better, and the scale of the city 110,000, which is much smaller than both Oakland and San Francisco — would enable people to have perhaps a greater impact than they had in previous political community or even union activity they were involved in, in other parts of the Bay Area.
Kiely: So getting back to my original question, did you move out with the idea that you were going to make a book of this or did that come later?
Early: No, not at all. I redeployed, as I say — retired from my full-time job as a national union staff member in 2007, and my objective then was to write about labor, and I did produce over the last 10 years three labor-related books. But I did not have any immediate plan to kind of stray from the labor beat and start writing more about municipal politics, about community policing, about housing affordability, about environmental issues. But I was confronted with all of them here in Richmond and started to cover these things locally and turned that reporting over the last three years into the book that’s coming out next month.
Sanctuary city
Kiely: What do you think are the lessons that this book has for people who are dismayed by the 2016 election?
Early: Well, sadly, but it’s going to turn out to be good timing in terms of readership interested in the book, since Nov. 8 there’s been a big discussion about the need to go local. People are realizing that in the next four years at least, avenues, pathways to progress at the state level in many states and certainly the federal government are going to be blocked and so much of the focus of progressive political activity is going to have to be in various forms at the municipal level. And I don’t want to make too much of a virtue out of necessity, but the Richmond experience over the last decade and a half really shows that you can simultaneously block kind of a reactionary tide coming from inside the Beltway, whether it’s the Bush administration or the forthcoming Trump years, and you can also be a source of progressive policy innovation at the local level.
And we’re seeing right now that there’s emerging resistance to what people expect will be Trump policies on immigration, the whole sanctuary city movement has revived. Richmond actually was one of the pioneer sanctuary cities more than 20 years ago, declaring it would not cooperate with federal immigration officials rounding up undocumented immigrants in the city. And that position was reaffirmed 10 years ago when there were major problems created by ICE coming into the city, rousting people out, identifying themselves as the police and undermining work that was already underway to reestablish closer ties between the Richmond police department and foreign-born residents of the city. So our new mayor, Tom Butt, just issued a very strong statement stressing the fact that this city is not going to cooperate with the Trump administration on any crackdown on immigrants, is not going to be an agent of federal law enforcement, and that protecting the immigrant community here is a foundation of more than 10 years’ worth of community policing reform that makes the city safer for everybody.
The lesson of the Richmond progressive movement is that you have to dig in.
Kiely: Do you think people have the patience to reenact and replicate the Richmond experience? Talk a little bit about what it took to turn that city around.
Early: Well, I think you put your finger on a key element: patience and persistence. In many ways, engaging in politics at the local level is not as glamorous and exciting as being involved in larger national or international causes or campaigns. One of the challenges I think that Bernie Sanders faces in rallying his supporters now and trying to redirect them to electoral politics at the level of local school boards and city councils and mayoral races and county supervisory boards and state legislative campaigns is many people may find that there’s not the excitement and the big issues that led them to support him when he ran for president.
But the lesson of the Richmond progressive movement is that you do have to dig in, you do have to develop expertise about local problems, you do have to develop an agenda for reform that’s driven by the needs of local people and not necessarily your own political priorities, though they may largely overlap. And as I describe in the book, the Richmond Progressive Alliance started out not really with an electoral focus. Initially, the group conducted campaigns around single issues objecting to police brutality, to mistreatment of immigrants, to the longstanding problems of pollution coming from the Chevron refinery — a whole range of issues, and then people decided that if they were really going to have an impact on these local problems, they had to have some people on the inside. They had to have city council members and a mayor who would support demands for change and for reform of how the city operated and for a different approach to dealing with its largest employer, Chevron.
An ecumenical movement
Kiely: One of the things that struck me in reading your book is how often sort of ideological purity clashed with pragmatism, and sometimes you had the labor movement disagreeing with some things or there were different groups representing African American constituents who disagreed with certain things within the alliance. Can you talk a little bit about how that worked out and are there larger lessons for other communities and national politics out of that?
Early: Well, I think the success of the Richmond Progressive Alliance as an electoral force really is due to the fact that it has taken an exceptionally ecumenical approach. It has welcomed people who are left-leaning Democrats, who are independents, who are registered members of third party like the California Greens or the California Peace and Freedom Party. There are members of different socialist groups. But it’s a broad charge, and under the banner of a local progressive movement, people have agreed to set aside disagreements that they or the organizations they belong to nationally might have about some issues in the interest of getting things done in a kind of united front at the local level. And that’s, as I’m sure you know, not characteristic left behavior in this country. Too often, people can’t get beyond their petty factional squabbles and ideological differences and compete rather than cooperate. So creating that kind of united front and kind of rebranding as the Richmond Progressive Alliance and welcoming people with different views and organizational affiliations on a left-liberal spectrum was really important.
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A view of a Chevron refinery on March 3, 2015 in Richmond, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Richmond Revisited: What It Takes to Beat the Elite
BY KATHY KIELY | APRIL 14, 2016
The politics of the city, as you know from the book, are very complicated. The corporate influence, mainly from Chevron, has really shaped African-American politics in the city for decades. Chevron has been a major benefactor of conservative African-American Democrats on the city council for decades and the African-American political establishment in the city, connected to some of the leading churches, for a long time was very hostile to the emergence of a new political force that was multiracial, that tried to rally younger African-Americans and Latinos under the RPA banner.
I think our most recent election was a real turning point. The oldest member of the council, an 86-year-old conservative African-American Democrat by the name of Nat Bates, was defeated and the top —
Kiely: This is just this past November you’re talking about?
Early: Yeah, Nov. 8. He’s been on the council for four decades, the leading —
Kiely: Yes, and he figures largely in your book.
A new generation
Early: Yeah. Yeah, well, he ran for mayor two years ago and it was assumed that he was going to be a shoo-in for reelection. I think he’s been on the council for close to 40 years. And he lost. I mean, he was on the wrong side of rent control. And the top vote getter was Melvin Willis, who’s 26 years old, was inspired to run by Bernie Sanders, was endorsed by Bernie’s post-campaign organization, Our Revolution, was the leading campaigner in Richmond for rent control that was passed on Nov. 8 here by a 2-to-1 margin, and who’s been a community organizer for the last four years for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, the successor to ACORN. And so I think that’s really a generational shift in the city that’s tremendously significant. Because in the past, politicians like Bates were able to take corporate money. They were able basically to race bait their white leftist opponents. They were able to rally the black community with a kind of reverse dog-whistle politics. And that started to fail two years ago and it really flopped this year.
Kiely: You talk in the book, or some of the people you talk to in the book talk about ceding their leadership roles in the progressive alliance to younger people because they worried that they were perceived as kind of these white outsiders. What is happening there and does that tension still exist and do you think they’ve negotiated it successfully?
There’s been a wonderful and successful and really inspiring generational passing of the torch.
Early: No, I think there’s been a wonderful and successful and really inspiring generational passing of the torch within the organization as well. Our two successful city council candidates this fall, Melvin Willis, who I just mentioned, and Ben Choi, who’s a fellow planning commission member and environmentalist — they were both part of the new RPA steering committee elected about a year ago. It’s predominantly — that body is now predominantly people of color and women. And again, it’s very rare that in a political organization on the left, people in leadership who built an organization are willing to turn the reins over to a new generation. I mean, we see a lot of dysfunctional organizational behavior flowing from founder syndrome problems. We see certainly in the labor movement, unions I’ve worked with for years, too much leadership concentrated among people who are in their 50s, 60s, even 70s. And so this is a very important model for an organization to kind of reinvent itself, recruit new people, become more diverse. And I think that had positive electoral impact this fall as well. I mean, it’s a little hard to bait the Richmond Progressive Alliance as the Richmond Plantation Alliance when the candidate slate is people of color and, you know, in one case a Richmond native. So I think the outsider baiting has subsided as the composition of the leadership of the organization has changed.
Rent control
Kiely: And what do you see happening in the future? Is the Chevron influence tamed or is it a sleeping giant? What’s it doing in Richmond these days?
Early: Well, Chevron kind of stepped back this election cycle. There was, thanks to the reporting of Moyers and many others, tremendous public opinion backlash against its huge amount of independent spending on the council races and the mayor’s election two years ago. The company really did get a lot of bad press for that. It was criticized by some shareholders. This time around, they ceded the field to the landlord lobby. The big corporate spender this fall in Richmond was the California Apartment Association and related real-estate interests that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars unsuccessfully trying to defeat rent control. And by a 2-to-1 margin, voters made Richmond one of the first cities in 30 years to reintroduce, or to introduce rent regulation and a new form of legal protection against eviction of tenants without just cause.
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Mayor Gayle McLaughlin and community prior to big vote on eminent domain to save homes. (Credit: Office of Mayor Gayle McLaughlin)
Chevron’s “Company Town” Fights Back: An Interview with Gayle McLaughlin
BY MICHAEL WINSHIP | OCTOBER 30, 2014
Kiely: So that was a ballot measure in the City of Richmond?
Early: Yes. And it was a ballot measure that was necessary because after the city council democratically by a majority vote introduced rent control a year ago, the Apartment Association, as I describe in the book, went out and spent tens of thousands of dollars on paid canvassers and they got enough signatures to nullify the city council’s adoption of rent control, which forced us to put it on the ballot and run a referendum campaign. And it’s an 80 percent non-white city, predominantly poor and working class with rising rents, and so this was a very, very popular issue and the landlord lobby was defeated. So one of the challenges going forward is creating an effective rent control board and making this important stopgap measure a first step in the direction of greater housing affordability, which ultimately requires building more low-income housing, not just restraining rent hikes.
A vibrant local media
Kiely: You’ve mentioned the media coverage and I wanted to ask you a little bit about that. Reading your book, it sounded to me like Richmond just had a plethora of local news outlets, some of them funded by Chevron, but others, the Berkeley site of course, and then it sounded like there were some other local sites. Is it unusual in that respect, from your experience, and how important was that?
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Early: Yeah, well, we do benefit from our proximity to the University of California journalism school and they have a wonderful community journalism project called the Richmond Confidential, which is essentially an online community newspaper. And every semester, we get a new crop of enterprising young would-be student journalists who cover the city, and as was the case two years ago, they did some of the best investigative reporting on Chevron’s political spending and other election issues. This year they’ve covered the rent-control fight. And I think it’s a great experience both for the young journalists in training who get to write for the Richmond Confidential and the city benefits from coverage that you’re not going to get from the San Francisco Chronicle or the East Bay Times, which is a kind of a countywide daily newspaper and part of a corporate-owned chain.
We also have a monthly community newspaper hardcopy called the Richmond Pulse. That is a wonderful outlet for Richmond-based young people — black, Latino, Asian — who write about the city themselves. They’re not in journalism school. They’re in high school or going to Contra Costa Community College or they’re working, and under the leadership of a wonderful editor by the name of Malcolm Marshall, they put out a great and very lively community newspaper.
The Chevron news site that you mentioned, Richmond Standard, has been much criticized by media watchdogs because it does present itself somewhat deceptively as a source of news and commentary that’s nonpartisan, when in fact it is funded, as the site acknowledges, by Chevron and is a mouthpiece for its own views about local politics and policy questions.
Kiely: And it sounded like there were some local bloggers as well?
Early: We have a mayor, Tom Butt, who is a very prolific blogger and commentator on local politics. We have another site called Radio Free Richmond, again, more conservative, tends to side with Chevron more on environmental issues and is more critical of the progressive movement in the city. So yeah, I think Richmond benefits from a variety of political voices, and thanks to the internet, they’re able to get their message, for better or worse, out to many people and people can pick through the competing versions [laughs] of local reality and choose the one that fits their own experience best.
Public campaign financing
Kiely: Do you feel that this experience can be replicated, and if so, what would the handbook look like? What would you tell people who say, “I’d like to do something like that in my community?”
Given the contacts that we’ve had recently from people in other cities in California and out of state, there definitely is a lot of interest in the Richmond model.”
Early: Well, I think given the contacts that we’ve had recently from people in other cities in California and out of state, there definitely is a lot of interest in the Richmond model. And I think it can be replicated. One key thing that people need to do in other places, however, is do more than just get involved in elections every two years. What has made the Richmond Progressive Alliance effective is its year-round program of organizing on a multitude of issues. It functions as a membership organization. People pay dues, they elect a steering committee, they go to meetings, they participate in committees and they do this all the time. They don’t just come together as kind of a pickup team in election years and run candidates. They’re holding those candidates accountable and they’re starting much earlier than electoral political campaigners do in many other places when there is a vote coming up.
The other dividing line really between Richmond progressives and their opponents, both liberal, centrist and more conservative, is that the RPA candidates do not accept corporate contributions, no business donations. And that has really helped distinguish them from the rest of the pack, both in this most recent election and the 2014 election. People respect the fact that our candidates are corporate-free. They may disagree with them on particular issues but they know that their votes are not going to be influenced by the landlord lobby, by big oil, big soda, big banks — whoever is banging away on something in Richmond that they don’t like.
The other thing that makes it possible for people here to run and win, refusing the usual source of campaign funding, is a program of public financing, partial public financing, where if you raise $25,000 in private donations, you qualify as a city council or mayoral candidate for $30,000 in city funds. So it’s not the most generous match in the world, but having a program like that is a very, very important reform for people in other cities who want to try to replicate the electoral success of the RPA.
Kiely: And how long has that program been in place?
Early: That’s been in effect for about a decade now. And, you know, it was controversial initially. Those who have tried to shut it down argue that it’s a drain on the treasury. Actually, the expenditures are not that great because a number of candidates who run don’t have a significant enough grass-roots base of their own to be able to raise enough money to quality for the incremental matching grants.
Steve Early
Author and retired labor organizer Steve Early (Photo by Robert Gumpert)
Kiely: So it sounds like what you’re describing is a very active community in which the political results are kind of the side effect of a very active community rather than someone who went out and started to try to get a political result and developed community around it.
Early: Yeah. I think that the other interesting organizational feature of the RPA is it’s kind of a hybrid organization. There’s about 300-400 individual dues-paying members, but there’s also organizational affiliates, several local environmental organizations, Communities for a Better Environment, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. There’s also several unions that have a representative on the steering committee. So I think that there’s an attempt to be an umbrella organization, not to replicate the work of existing single-issue groups, but to keep them in a coalition structure that’s going to make everybody stronger.
Kiely: Okay. Any single moral of the story you’d like readers to take away?
Early: I think we have to do this kind of work in more places, as hard as it is, because if we don’t create a progressive populist alternative that’s multiracial and working class-oriented, we’ve just seen on Nov. 8 who fills that void and what fills that vacuum and it’s not pretty and we’re going to be suffering greatly from it for the next four years due to what’s coming out of Washington. So I think communities like Richmond are going to continue to be a beacon of light and hope and hopefully creating more models for the kinds of public policies that in more places over time will be adopted at the state and federal level.
Populist Coalition Beats Back Chevron in California Refinery Town
Sunday, February 12, 2017
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
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More than 150 people protested at Chevron's annual shareholder meeting on May 30, 2012. The protest included workers at Chevron's Richmond refinery and local advocates from Richmond.
More than 150 people protested at Chevron's annual shareholder meeting on May 30, 2012. The protest included workers at Chevron's Richmond refinery and local advocates from Richmond. (Photo: Caroline Bennett / Rainforest Action Network)
How did the working class "company town" of Richmond, California reclaim their community from the grip of Big Oil? Labor reporter Steve Early's new book tells the story of the residents who, through years of community organizing and local politics, drastically improved Richmond, from raising the minimum wage to challenging evictions and foreclosures. Click here to order your copy of Refinery Town from Truthout.
Can progressive coalitions unite around common interests to successfully battle powerful foes? Yes is the answer, as this interview with Steve Early about his book Refinery Town reveals.
Mark Karlin: What are the demographics of Richmond, California, and its contrast to its neighbors, such as Berkeley?
Steve Early: Richmond is a blue-collar city of 110,000, just a few miles from Berkeley. It is 80 percent non-white. About 40 percent of its population is Latino, 30 percent African American, and 10 percent Asian. Nearly one-fifth of its families live at or near the poverty line. It has the lowest median income of 101 cities in the nine-county Bay Area and Latino family income is about $5,000 a year less than that citywide figure.
It's definitely not a university town, like Berkeley. It's been a city of industry for more than a century, growing up around a railhead and ferry to San Francisco, a Standard Oil refinery and a port area that included, during World War II, a Kaiser shipyard employing 100,000 workers.
What is the role of Chevron and the Chevron refinery in Richmond politics?
Until the early 21st century, Richmond City Hall and municipal politics were dominated by Chevron (nee Standard Oil). Big Oil is Richmond's largest employer and a reliable patron of old-guard Democrats, Black or white, eager to do its bidding. Chevron's political partners have included the Richmond Chamber of Commerce and local manufacturers' association, various developers, the building trades, and often, equally conservative public safety unions.
Steve Early. (Photo: Robert Gumpert)
Steve Early. (Photo: Robert Gumpert)
In the last three election cycles alone, Chevron, its labor allies -- and other big special interests -- spent more than $7 million trying to elect business-friendly candidates and defeat activists who are trying to make their city safer, cleaner, greener and more equitable for all its residents. Chevron's tendency to put production and profit ahead of workplace safety, community health and the future of the planet provides no shortage of issues to organize around between elections. Thanks to their year-round, non-electoral work, candidates fielded by the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) have won 10 out of the 16 municipal races they have entered since 2004.
What is the Richmond Progressive Alliance, and why should it be a role model for progressives?
The RPA is a 12-year-old membership organization and community-labor coalition, which is multiracial and working-class oriented. It helped elect the city's current progressive "super-majority" of five out of seven members. The other two councilors have often been RPA allies on many issues, although current Mayor Tom Butt, a liberal Democrat and local environmentalist, did try to defeat rent control in Richmond (adopted by a 2-to-1 referendum margin last fall) and has disagreed with the RPA about development issues.
The RPA was formed by California Green Party members, dissident Democrats, political independents, socialists of varying stripes, trade unionists, environmental justice advocates, immigrant rights defenders, and other "single-issue" campaigners. They agreed to set aside differences on bigger picture issues and a sometimes overly competitive focus on their own narrower agendas in favor of creating a united front around achievable city-level goals. This ecumenical approach and a commitment to running viable, "corporate-free" candidates stands in sharp contrast to the self-defeating sectarian divisiveness and political marginalization of too much of the left.
What happened in 2014 and 2016 that was evidence progressive municipal party coalitions could be intersectional and succeed?
In Richmond's last two municipal races, the RPA has fielded candidate slates that better reflected the diversity of the community. RPA councilors now include a Mexican American, an African American, a Korean American, a self-identified Black Latina lesbian and Gayle McLaughlin, an Irish American from Chicago who termed out as mayor in 2014 after eight years in that office.
The RPA steering committee is now majority female, people of color and much younger than in the past. Two of its new members were the top vote getters on November 8 in a Richmond Council field of nine. Melvin Willis, a 26-year-old organizer for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment who finished first was inspired to run by Bernie Sanders, and backed by Bernie's post-campaign organization, Our Revolution.
Melvin grew up in Richmond. He has spent four years knocking on the doors of neighbors who have kids suffering from asthma because they live downwind from Chevron, who faced foreclosure by the big banks and loss of their home, or could not afford a sudden rent increase imposed by their out-of-town landlord. He's now the youngest city councilor in Richmond history and someone committed to using elected office in a way that strengthens and builds grassroots organization.
When did the Chevron oil refinery fire occur, how many people did it impact and how did it affect progressive coalition building in Richmond?
As the US Chemical Safety Board has confirmed, Chevron suffered a catastrophic pipe failure and fire in August 2012 because of its own lax maintenance practices. When a leaking pipe burst, after being prodded, the resulting vapor cloud reached an ignition source almost immediately, creating a huge fireball. Nineteen first responders, including members of United Steel Workers Local 5, narrowly escaped death. Due to the towering column of toxic smoke and gas that was created, 15,000 downwind neighbors sought medical attention.
California's Division of Occupational Health and Safety (Cal/OSHA) accused Chevron of 11 "willful" violations and assessed its largest fine ever -- nearly $1 million. (Those citations and penalties are still being contested, four and a half years later.) Chevron pleaded "no contest" to six criminal charges filed by state and local prosecutors and agreed to pay $2 million in fines and restitution. Chevron was also placed on probation for three and a half years.
The city of Richmond sued Chevron based on its "neglect, lax oversight, and corporate indifference to necessary safety inspection and repairs." Like the long-running environmental litigation involving Chevron and rain forest residents in Ecuador, this case has yet to be settled -- and is far from going to trial. On the first anniversary of the Richmond fire, a "blue-green alliance" staged the largest protest in the city's history, a march 2,500-strong led by our then-Green mayor, Gayle McLaughlin. USW members -- and Chevron neighbors -- are still waiting for Cal/OSHA to implement stronger refinery safety rules sometime this year, a fire-inspired effort nearly five years old.
Can you explain about the effort the Richmond City Council adopted to reduce home foreclosures by using eminent domain?
In 2012 Richmond had 900 foreclosures. By the end of 2013, 50 percent of Richmond homeowners were still saddled with underwater mortgages, and many owed an amount twice the current value of their property. Foreclosures were forcing poor and working-class families out of their homes, often leaving vacant dwellings behind, which led to neighborhood blight and further depression of local property values.
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Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City
How did the working class "company town" of Richmond, California reclaim their community from the grip of Big Oil?
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By a 4-to-3 vote, the city council majority voted to use the threat of eminent domain to force mortgage lenders to renegotiate the terms of their housing loans. (Actual use of Richmond's eminent domain powers required a council "super majority" of five, which its left-liberal members did not have at the time.)
Big mortgage holders, like Wells Fargo, Bank of New York Mellon and Deutsche Bank, mobilized quickly to prevent this dangerous idea from spreading. Their PR and legal counter-attack campaign scared away much-needed allies on the city councils of neighboring communities. In late 2014 President Obama further undermined this anti-foreclosure strategy by signing a bipartisan bill forbidding any federal role in mortgage financing of homes taken by eminent domain.
Door-to-door canvassing among Richmond's many financially distressed homeowners did lead to the recent successful defense of tenants in 10,000 rental units. Due to the pro rent-control vote on November 8, their rent payments were rolled back to the level of a year ago. Rent hikes will be regulated in the future, and landlords will not be able to evict tenants without just cause -- a firewall, for now, against displacement of poor and working class people in Richmond threatened by broader Bay Area gentrification trends.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
MARK KARLIN
Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout. He served as editor and publisher of BuzzFlash for 10 years before joining Truthout in 2010. BuzzFlash has won four Project Censored Awards. Karlin writes a commentary five days a week for BuzzFlash, as well as articles (ranging from the failed "war on drugs" to reviews relating to political art) for Truthout. He also interviews authors and filmmakers whose works are featured in Truthout's Progressive Picks of the Week. Before linking with Truthout, Karlin conducted interviews with cultural figures, political progressives and innovative advocates on a weekly basis for 10 years. He authored many columns about the lies propagated to launch the Iraq War.
Richmond's example to the nation
David Helvarg
The Progressive. 81.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Progressive, Inc.
http://www.progressive.org/
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Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City
by Steve Early
Beacon Press, 248 pages, $27.95
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
I first got to know Richmond, California, in the 1980s, when I was working as a private investigator. Richmond at the time was a corrupt, crime-ridden town dominated by Chevron and its handpicked politicians. The police force was mostly white and brutal, self-identified "cowboys." About half the population was African American, mostly poor and with little access to Reagan-era consumer goods other than guns and crack cocaine. My clients included a teenage shooter who killed someone over a five-dollar pool bet and an abused woman who shot her boyfriend while he sat on the toilet.
Even ten years ago, when I moved back to Richmond after living far away, its only national media recognition was the result of a church shooting and a gang rape at a local high school. Six months after I moved to the Richmond Marina, a Chinese-owned container ship spilled more than 50,000 gallons of bunker fuel into San Francisco Bay and I saw my neighborhood wetland and shorebirds covered in oil.
In 2012, retired union organizer, lawyer, and labor reporter Steve Early moved from Boston to Point Richmond only months before the century-old Chevron Refinery just over the hill blew up for the third time in thirteen years. Locals would have been ordered to "shelter in place"--had the emergency response network worked properly that day. Instead, many were exposed as a raging fire from one of the refinery's crude distillation units generated a thick column of oily black smoke that rose above the city of 110,000. Thousands of people flocked to area emergency rooms complaining of burning eyes, nausea, and difficulty breathing. (In the end, the company pled no contest to six criminal misdemeanor charges and paid a $2 million fine.)
This is where Early opens his new book, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. Surprisingly, it turns out to be a pretty hopeful narrative about how bottom-up citizen action can restore a city's pride and make a real difference in people's lives around such issues as affordable housing, community policing, sustainable job growth, open space, clean energy, and immigrant rights.
"If urban political insurgencies are going to succeed in more places," Early argues, "they will need models for civic engagement like Richmond provides." This advice may be even more urgent now, as people push back against the petro-oligarchy being imposed by Donald Trump.
Following a friendly but somewhat generic foreword by Senator Bernie Sanders, Early plunges the reader into the story of how Richmond--once one of Americas World War II arsenals of democracy with its Kaiser shipyards--saw a rapid postwar deindustrialization and exclusion of many of its African American workers from good union jobs and housing. Today that story is well told at Richmond's Rosie the Riveter Historical Park.
Among the national historical parks best raconteurs is Betty Reid Soskin, who at age ninety-five is the oldest ranger in the National Park Service and is still making connections between her experiences as a young black woman working in a segregated shipyard union hall and today's struggles. "We had serious social issues but still defeated global fascism," I heard her tell one group of high school students. "So even with all the political problems we have today, you can still stop climate change."
By the beginning of the new century, the demographics and attitudes of Richmond had changed. The city was 40 percent Latino, 30 percent African American, 20 percent Caucasian, and 10 percent Asian and other folks. It had a new generation of working class activists and residents--people who protested environmental and police abuses (including those of undocumented day laborers), a proposed new oil-fired power plant by the Chevron refinery, and a mega-casino to be built on the city-owned 413-acre Point Molate headlands, one of the last bay-facing undeveloped coastal watersheds and woodlands.
With Richmond facing an ongoing financial crisis and mired in scandal, the activists came together to challenge the corporate dominance of their town in the 2004 election.
Early describes what coalesced with the Richmond Progressive Alliance being "simultaneously an electoral formation, a membership organization, a coalition of community groups, and a key coordinator of grassroots education and citizen mobilization around multiple issues."
In 2004, the Alliance ran two city council candidates and won one seat for Gayle McLaughlin, a retired postal worker, caregiver, and member of the Green Party. Two years later, McLaughlin would be elected mayor and serve two terms. (In 2014, after being term-limited out of the mayor's office, she was re-elected as a council member.)
Under Richmond's city charter system, most of the power was with the city manager. However, in his book, Early reports that "McLaughlin turned what had been a part-time job with a $45,000 salary--less than a city janitor's pay--into a bully pulpit for reform causes. In a series of battles that pitted fossil fuel defenders against local critics, the new mayor confronted industrial hazards arising from both oil refining and local railroad operations."
In chapter 2, "The Greening of City Hall," he goes on to explain how by the end of McLaughlin's second term in 2014, Richmond had become nationally recognized for its progressive initiatives. Among them: raising taxes on and increasing environmental monitoring of Chevron; providing city IDs to undocumented workers; reforming the police force and expanding youth outreach; creating new greenways and attracting new green businesses in solar and other industries; trying to use eminent domain to keep mortgage holders in their homes; and trying to pass a soda tax to fight obesity and diabetes.
These initiatives led to major battles with Chevron, big banks, what became known as Big Soda, and realtors. And while Richmond didn't win every fight, the city got a reputation for not backing down. Pretty soon its larger neighbors, including Berkeley and Oakland, had developed a mild case of RES--Radical Envy Syndrome.
Early cites National Research Center Surveys conducted between 2007 and 2015 that explain why Richmond Progressive Alliance candidates were able to go on to win a super-majority of five out of the seven seats on the city council while also passing a rent-control initiative in 2016.
Richmond residents believe their city--under left leadership--has vastly improved its overall quality of life and its image, governance, and sense of community. This belief has taken root despite the best efforts of Chevron and other corporate opponents, the Democratic Party of surrounding Contra Costa County (which never supported the progressives), and Richmond's dyspeptic liberal mayor, Tom Butt, who ran with the progressives in 2014 but has since turned against what he calls the Alliance's "self-righteous hysteria."
Early's book provides a comprehensive profile of the fuller cast of characters who have come to define Richmond's last decade of municipal conflict. It also explores the "glocal" (global/local) links between Richmond and other locales in Canada, Cuba, and Ecuador, whose president in 2013 invited Mayor McLaughlin and a city delegation to visit his country's indigenous victims of rainforest oil pollution that resulted in a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Chevron. (An $8.6 billion judgment against the company was subsequently blocked by an appeals court.)
Among the more fortuitous stories told in Refinery Town is that of the 2006 hiring of Fargo, North Dakota's police chief Chris Magnus, whom Early calls Richmond's "community policeman." During his decade in the city before moving on to Tucson, Magnus overcame internal opposition by reconnecting officers to the community, reducing both officer-involved shootings and injury to officers, and dramatically lowering the crime rate by engaging citizens. Under his watch, the police department worked with Operation Ceasefire to reach out to young men before they got involved in gang violence.
One of the few openly gay police chiefs in America, Magnus may also be the only one photographed holding a sign that someone handed him reading "#BlackLivesMatter." When criticized for participating in a political demonstration in uniform, he responded, "When did it become a political act to acknowledge that 'black lives matter' and show respect for the very real concerns of our minority communities?"
Another key chapter in the book recounts the 2014 election (which I reported on for The Progressive), in which Chevron spent more than $3 million, or about $150 on me and every other voter in the city, to try and restore what had once been known as the "Chevron Five," a pro-refinery majority on the city council. In the end, all of their 2014 candidates lost and progressives gained new seats on the council.
After this loss, Chevron apologized and promised to stop polluting both Richmond's air and its politics. Only kidding. It just adopted a different, more aggressive approach at city council meetings: constant disruptions, including race-baiting and homophobia, carried out by the two council members, Nat Bates and Corky Booze, deepest in Chevron's pocket. Both African Americans, they called the multi-ethnic Richmond Progressive Alliance the "Richmond Plantation Society," and attacked councilwoman Jovanka Beckles for being a lesbian, also claiming she wasn't really "African American" because she was born in Panama. Since then, both Bates and Booze have been kicked off the council by Richmond voters.
"What the Richmond experience demonstrates are the continuing advantages of making change locally as part of a longer-term and eventually more sweeping progressive strategy," Early writes in the book's epilogue. "What activists have going for them at the city level--an advantage almost nonexistent in the big-money-dominated realms of state or national politics--is greater personal connections to voters. Forging what Gayle McLaughlin calls authentic relationships isn't a spontaneous process, however. It takes time, organization, and systematic outreach around issues that affect people's daily lives."
To recap a few high points from the book: Local activists helped elect a Green Party mayor in 2006, defeat a casino plan that threatened parkland in 2010, and beat back a city council slate massively funded by Chevron in 2014. Two candidates affiliated with the Richmond Progressive Alliance--both recent Bernie Sanders volunteers, Melvin Willis and Ben Choi--were the top vote getters in 2016, creating a supermajority of the left in the same election that saw Donald Trump win the electoral vote with support from Russia and the FBI.
It's like I told Ralph Nader, while bragging about my town: When it's Republicans versus jellyfish, you lose; when it's progressives versus corporations, you can win elections and make things better.
Refinery Town provides an inside look at how one American city has made radical and progressive change seem not only possible but sensible.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
By David Helvarg
David Helvarg is a Richmond resident, author, and executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean conservation group. His latest book, The Golden Shore: California's Love Affair with the Sea, is now out in paperback.
Helvarg, David
Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City
Raymond Pun
Booklist. 113.5 (Nov. 1, 2016): p13.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. By Steve Early. Jan. 2017.248p. Beacon, $27.95 (9780807094266). 979.4.
Early, a labor journalist and author most recently of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress (2013), covers 10 years of "glocal" politics, labor history, and municipal reforms in Richmond, CA, a city in the eastern region of the San Francisco Bay area. Early writes passionately about the citizens, politicians, and grassroots activists of Richmond who campaigned for social and economic justice and municipal reform to reduce crime, raise minimum wage, and challenge the Big Oil companies to keep them from establishing reserves in this city that is known to be an important oil refinery in the state. Early cites extensively from a variety of sources such as interviews, newspaper articles, and academic law journals to illustrate how Richmond transformed itself from a deteriorating city plagued with crime and poverty for decades into a renewal city that embraces community activism, reform, and equity. Readers interested in American politics, progressivism, community practice, and local, labor, and social history will find Earlys book to be informative, engaging, and inspiring.--Raymond Pun
Early, Steve: REFINERY TOWN
Kirkus Reviews. (Oct. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Early, Steve REFINERY TOWN Beacon (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 1, 17 ISBN: 978-0-8070-9426-6
In Richmond, California, overlooking scenic San Francisco Bay, is a company town bankrolled by Chevron. A resident reports, in some detail, on his town's fraught governance.Labor activist and journalist Early (Save Our Unions, 2013, etc.) moved to Richmond in 2012 and soon became intrigued with the largely nonwhite community's municipal life. Naturally, Chevron took a large part in the electoral process. Yet there was an active left-of-center cadre in opposition to the influence of the refinery and other powerful interests. For example, the Richmond Progressive Alliance, in a fight with big soda, endeavored to tax soft drinks to promote good health, and the creation of casinos in the town was halted. To prevent the foreclosure of homes financially underwater after the Great Recession, the Alliance proposed the use of governmental eminent domain. Fair housing was often the topic of town council battles. It seemed, according to Early's account, a Manichaean fight. The forces of good were led by an admirable mayor, the Green Party's Gayle McLaughlin. On behalf of her town, she engaged in foreign relations with Ecuador. (McLaughlin is writing a book of her own.) The author also admired the effective and efficient police chief, Chris Magnus. Early suspensefully chronicles the town's 2014 political campaign. Spoiler alert: the good guys won, but the Frank Capra-like script took a turn, and the new mayor proved disappointing to his former friends. Early's ongoing study of community action is, assuredly, not objective, and his earnest text is marred somewhat by an excess of acronyms--e.g., "but all of them--the CSB, DOT, EPA, Cal-OSHA and BAAQMD--proceed at a snail's pace." Otherwise quite accessible, the story remains focused on one municipality, as wide-ranging lessons are scanted while the text progresses. A specific tale of governance at the local level that should appeal to labor activists and scholars of urban studies.
Steve Early, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress
Herman Rosenfeld
Labour/Le Travail. .75 (Spring 2015): p308.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Canadian Committee on Labour History
http://www.mun.ca/cclh/
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Steve Early, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress (New York: Monthly Review Press 2013)
Save Our Unions is a series of 35 articles, essays, and book reviews from US labour movement activist, writer, lawyer, and former union staff person, Steve Early. Most appeared in progressive and mainstream US journals.
The essays cover a number of items, divided into larger topic areas: an assessment of reform campaigns in major unions; the state of the strike weapon in this era and the potential forms and uses of workers' right to strike; strategies to expand private sector unions; the challenges of job-based medical benefits, the "private welfare state," and the contradictory and often hypocritical role of many unions in giving only lip-service to "medicare for all"; recent struggles in the telecom sector, featuring a case study of Verizon; the challenge of new leadership development across the larger labour movement; the experience of progressives in Vermont, in particular their important and leading fight for a single-payer health care system in that state; and an epilogue essay that draws larger conclusions about the direction of the labour movement from the ongoing struggles between the National Union of Health Workers/California Nurses Association and the United Health Workers/Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
The entire book is tied together with common threads, reflecting Early's political and union orientation. Its characteristics include the need for greater rank and file power and participation; democracy; unions that are truly independent of employers, with an adversarial perspective that fights with and for members; new ways of organizing the unorganized (especially immigrant workers); more independence from the Democratic Party; developing alliances with community movements; and solidarity across borders. The pieces include sometimes poignant vignettes of courageous and not-so-courageous efforts to build movements which reflect the above themes, in contexts which are most often unfriendly. (Particularly thoughtful and memorable was an article that appeared in the Boston Globe on the 100th anniversary of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, "Lessons of Lawrence.")
The essays are incisive, written in a journalistic language that is clear and accessible to working-class readers, but thankfully devoid of the kind populist oversimplification that is all too prevalent in much of what passes as labour journalism today. They also contain "postscripts," which tell the reader what happened after the essays were first written.
Underlying all of this are two key themes: a belief that, whatever constraints and limitations the now severely wounded union movement faces, there are always experiences that provide openings, hope and potentials, that demonstrate that "another way is possible." And secondly, those possibilities will come out of the movements built and the lessons learned from the participants in these on-the-ground struggles, defeats, and experiences. Examples include Occupy, Wisconsin, the Chicago Teachers, the May Day immigrant, and retail and hospitality sector strikes and protests; ongoing rank and file challenges that succeed in creating and re-creating union potentials such as in the rebuilding of the former Teamster Local of Ron Carey and the New York City transit workers, the California Nurses' Association, and National Union of Health Workers; the battle to challenge the "partnership" top-down approach of SEIU; and the progressive political and union movements in Vermont; and many others cited in these many essays and stories.
But in the telling, Early isn't uncritical and doesn't skip over the weaknesses and shortcomings of the movements he supports, as in his description of the limits of the way international solidarity is practised at T-Mobile and elsewhere (where the weaknesses of the local union movement, coupled with the unwillingness of the stronger international partner to take radical actions that threaten their cultural and institutional ties to the employer, makes these strategies fail).
Early's take on the strengths and weaknesses of the labour movement also avoids two erroneous extremes that many left writers fall into when analyzing unions. He doesn't slip into the trap of writing uncritically about unions under attack by neoliberal capital, the state, and all of the weapons at the latter's disposal, and neither does he go to the other extreme of attacking the labour movement itself, without contextualizing its challenges, and looking at ways it can be transformed.
There are problems in some of these pieces. Like many otherwise excellent American left labour analysts, activists, and journalists, there isn't all that much about efforts at creating radical and socialist political alternatives and the importance of having (and the costs of not having) the kind of left that can both build working-class consciousness and the kind of democratic, adversarial, and class-struggle oriented union movement he argues for. The only references to left politics are in the social democratic movement in Vermont (positive and constructive, for sure) and in the context of the failed experiments of the 1970s, and the way that these failures orphaned a number of activists who went into workplaces to build class-oriented unions and left political workplace cells.
This shows in his review of Jefferson Cowie's book, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010). He challenges the author's contention that today's workers don't generally have a consciousness of themselves as a class by pointing to the countercurrent of worker resistance that continues well into the 2000s. But however significant these movements are, he misses the larger political implication that can be drawn from Cowie's claim: the lack of working-class consciousness (and class organization) is partially due to the smashing defeat of labour in the late 1970s and 1980s that brought neoliberalism, as well as the concurrent defeat of the left, and the virtual disappearance of socialist and anti-capitalist movements that might be capable of fostering a class identity and orientation. What remained was (and is) a weakened and discredited "liberalism" and social democracy, both of which work within the constraints of neoliberalism and the labour markets it created, albeit looking to moderate its effects on working people.
The movements that Early describes are certainly made up of working-class people and institutions, but they are not tied to a larger class project, and the participants identify with their particular struggles and demands rather than a larger working class. It is difficult to build across these often isolated and limited struggles and help transform them into movements that actually unite different segments of the working class, build more permanent and ongoing institutions that can engage politically in a class-based politics, without an organized network of socialists, working inside and alongside unions and social movements. It is as true today, as it was in the 1930s.
Another problem is the rather hostile attack on Jane McAlevey, which is quite uncharacteristic of the approach that Early generally takes to those with whom he is engaged in common struggle to strengthen and transform the union movement. Those activists who have learned from McAlevey, the former SEIU organizer, would hardly recognize the rather cynical and personal caricature that is presented here.
Overall, Save Our Unions is an excellent and informative volume that takes the reader across some of the American union movement's principal challenges, struggles and openings, from the perspective of one of the US's principal labour journalists, with a healthy dose of humour and historical perspective.
HERMAN ROSENFELD
Toronto, ON
Rosenfeld, Herman
Steve Early: Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress
Kim Moody
Capital & Class. 39.1 (Feb. 2015): p174.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309816814564973
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Conference of Socialist Economists
http://www.cseweb.org.uk
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Steve Early Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress, Monthly Review Press: New York, NY, 2013; 343 pp: 9781583674277, $79 (hbk)
Those looking for an analysis of recent trends and events in the USA's beleaguered trade-union movement will do no better than Save Our Unions, by the long-time union organiser, socialist, and labour journalist Steve Early. Save Our Unions is not another dreary look at declining union membership and concessionary agreements. Nor it is a rerun of the by now superannuated debate between the 'serving model' and the 'organising model' as the universal salvation of organised labour in neoliberal America. Rather, Early turns an experienced and critical eye on what is actually happening beneath the conventional industrial relations radar. In this highly readable volume, we find not only fading confidence in labour-management co-operation schemes, but the new forces implementing different approaches meant to fit situations that unions have not always found familiar. Early in the book, we meet the 'unorganised' fast food workers who struck at McDonalds and other major chains in cities across the USA in 2012 and 2013. Though supported by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), they were not union members, and nor were they seeking traditional union recognition or formal agreements from their employers. Rather, they have merged into a movement known as 'Fight for Fifteen', demanding a US$15 minimum wage. No doubt the long-range goal is union organisation, but the methods are more those of social movements than those of traditional trade unions. Similar tactics have been used by workers in the huge concentrations of warehouses at the centre of the USA's reshaped just-in-time logistics system, found near Chicago, Los Angeles, and in New Jersey. Again with some backing from unions, these workers have formed their own workplace organisations, and have taken various levels of action to win small gains and grow.
In seeking possible ways out of organised labour's decline, Early also looks inside the more conventional unions; offering a history of the rank-and-file rebellions that have often appeared in US labour history. Starting with the Miners For Democracy in the 1970s, which threw out the corrupt leaders of the United Mine Workers, the author takes us through the 1990s, when the Teamsters for a Democratic Union-backed reformer Ron Carey beat an equally corrupt clique in one of America's biggest unions. Both rebellions eventually saw grassroots mobilisations beat back attacks by powerful employers for a time. Early also looks at more recent rank-and-file upsurges in large local unions of the Teamsters, Communications Workers, and Machinists, among others. All these rebellions reveal a strong desire for change from below, and an ongoing, possibly accelerating trend. Most notable of these was the 2010 victory of the grassroots Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) in the Chicago Teachers Union, the second-largest local teachers union in the country. This electoral overthrow was followed by one of the best organised strikes in recent years, when in 2012, more than 27,000 teachers beat back most of the tidal wave of neoliberal 'reforms' proposed by the mayor and backed by the Obama administration.
What all of these rank-and-file movements have in common is a commitment to union democracy, a rejection of the labour-management co-operation ethos of the last three decades, a greater willingness to employ militant direct action tactics, and the construction of dense workplace organisation--in other words, a turning away from the norms of US 'business unionism'. The driving force behind these movements, and the authors leading candidate for trade union revival, are what Early calls 'the stewards army': 'the tens of thousands of shop stewards who still form the backbone of the labor movement [and who] remain key to its revitalization today'.
Save Our Unions also examines organising trends and occasional union competition in a number of key industries, notably healthcare, hotels, retail, warehousing/logisitcs, and wireless telecommunications. The stories sometimes get complex, as with the multiunion competition to represent healthcare workers; but once again, there is a thread of analysis here. These industries are among those that have grown and been transformed as the contours of the economy and workforce have changed in the last thirty years. The USA's 5,000 'community' hospitals, for example, have gone from being local charities to becoming part of corporate chains operating for profit. With this change has come 'lean' production methods and pressures on the workforce once associated with manufacturing. These, in turn, have increased the demand for union representation. All these industries represent what is new, growing, and changing in the US economy. They are for the most part 'landlocked' industries less susceptible to 'offshoring' and international competition. Early, however, is aware of the many obstacles to unionisation that are also growing there and elsewhere, from intransigent employers to 'Tea Party' zealots in high political offices. There are few optimistic predictions and no triumphalist proclamations in Save Our Unions. Instead, there is a great deal of useful critical analysis.
The politics of US labour are viewed mainly through a focus on the fight for healthcare reform, particularly by those unions willing to go beyond the limitations and problems presented by 'Obama Care'. Here, the lens of critical analysis is brought down on the fight for a Canadian-style 'single-payer health care system' in the small state of Vermont. This is a state in which independent left and labour politics have achieved a sort of 'balance-of-power' prominence. The Vermont Progressive Party, which has operated for some thirty years, holds seats in the state legislature as well as in some cities. Along with several unions, the Vermont Workers Centre, and the state's Democratic governor, the Progressives have fought for a single-payer plan called Green Mountain Care, after the state's nickname, in which the state would be the sole insurer and healthcare free on delivery. Again, the obstacles are great and the outcome uncertain. One final thing that makes Vermont's left and labour politics unique is that this state's electorate has sent independent socialist Bernie Sanders to the US Congress for thirty years, most recently as a US Senator. One can be sceptical of whether there can be, as Early puts it, 'Two, Three, Many Vermonts!' in the near future, but the examination of how these radical Vermonters organise is worth taking seriously.
Save Our Unions was published in 2013, but is far ahead of most attempts to look at the changes in the US trade-union movement. For those who wish to understand what is churning beneath the 'business union' surface of US labour, Save Our Unions offers a one-of-a-kind crash course.
DOI: 10.1177/0309816814564973
Reviewed by Andrew McCulloch, Social Science Centre, Lincoln
Author biography
Kim Moody is a Ph.D. student in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham.
Moody, Kim
Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home
Andrew Stevens
Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations. 67.3 (Summer 2012): p543.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations
http://www.riir.ulaval.ca/
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Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home By Steve Early, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009, 288 pp., ISBN: 978-1-58367-188-7.
and
The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers' Movement or Death Throes of the Old? By Steve Early, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011, 440 pp., ISBN: 978-1-60846-099-1.
Union activist and labour journalist, Steve Early, has written two provocative books on the labour movement in the United States. Both Civil Wars in Labor and Embedded with Organized Labor provide critical accounts of the challenges confronting trade unions and their members. What sets Early's work apart from much of the labour studies and industrial relations literature is his examination of the internal struggles that characterize debates and divisions within unions. Together, Civil Wars and Embedded provide the reader with Early's signature journalistic prose and unapologetic style of writing about working America.
It is important to emphasize the author's self-described genre of "literary" and "participatory" journalism. Embedded draws attention to the significance of writing about labour and unionism in an accessible, yet articulate, fashion. Indeed, the book can be read as a how-to guide for academics that are attempting to make their research known to a broader audience.
At the outset of Embedded, Early recognizes that much of his writing breaks what he calls the "two cardinal rules of business unionism" (p. 11). That is, not criticizing or meddling in the internal affairs of another union. Early admits to having violated both principles as a member of the miners' union reform movement in the United States, when UMW President, John L. Lewis, used local trusteeships to disempower the rankand-file. His reputation as a critic of the SEIU's leadership assured his ban from the union's convention in 2008, when security removed Early from the event. What Early reveals through his biographical insights is a commitment and belief in union democracy. A practice, he says, that is evident in his parent union, the Communication Workers of America.
Early draws from a range of historical accounts, like Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais' Labor's Untold Story and James Matles and James Higgins', Them and Us: Struggles of a Rank-and-File Union, among other sources. In fact, it's Early's rich engagement with history and social commentary that makes Embedded so relevant. Throughout the book, the author traces the racial, class, and gendered dimensions of trade unionism's history in the U.S., as well as the extent to which these social relations produced new forms of dissent and change within the labour movement.
The protagonists in Early's work are the working class intellectuals and rank-and-file activists who aim to transform their unions and participate in broader social change. Such heroic characters are contrasted with the conservative elements within trade unions. One example is the story of New York City construction workers who, in May of 1970, attacked a crowd of antiwar demonstrators on Wall Street. This became, Early argues, "an encounter emblematic of the Vietnam era", where a battle of political stereotypes unfolded in the public eye and was played up by the media (Embedded, p. 120). Three years earlier, delegates at the AFL-CIO convention overwhelmingly voted down an anti-war resolution, signifying a commitment to the political establishment. As the author suggests, this was a symptom of the broader disconnect between the trade union movement and the civil rights movement, and other struggles that were erupting in American society.
When John Sweeney was elected to the AFL-CIO presidency in 1995, an era of what Early describes as a glasnost emerged. Sweeney's ascendancy marked a period of open discussion and criticism of union problems, which had been forbidden under the regimes of George Meany and Lane Kirkland. Union activists and officials joined academics in beginning a dialogue about what was necessary for union renewal and growth. According to Early, critics who had routinely chided American unions for their lack of militancy and progressive politics, like sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, started to applaud Sweeney's "insurgent leadership" (Embedded, p. 104).
But Early provides a dim review of Sweeney's presidency. Labour's "old guard" might have been eased out, and the new faces of influence are more energetic and racially diverse, but the author proposes that the leadership remains an appointed officialdom. Rank-and-file activism and democracy are still elusive, even if they are the objectives of those in positions of power. And, as trade union density continues to decline in the U.S., it is fair to ask what came from this supposed revitalization.
A decade after Sweeney's reform movement swept into power, a coalition of American labour unions broke away from the AFL-CIO to form a new federation, Change to Win. Spearheaded by then SEIU President, Andy Stern, CTF evolved from the New Unity Partnership, an alliance of unions that focused on organizing new members through union consolidation and the development of a political strategy aimed at building "union market share". There was wide acclaim for this new federation, which initially held almost a third of the AFL-CIO's membership, and its potential for organizing hundreds of thousands of workers employed in the low-paying service sector.
According to Early, CTW offered promise to the most exploited American workers. The Teamsters, the SEIU, the United Farm Workers, and the UFCW--the remaining four members of the federation--all have a rich history of organizing immigrant, LatinAmerican, and African-American workers. What Early takes to task in Embedded is the intensively hierarchical and business union strategy ultimately adopted by the CTW's leading members, the SEIU and the Teamsters. These unions came to represent the worst features of the AFL-CIO under the leadership of Meany and Kirkland, namely the opposition to internal dissent and the authority of appointed decision makers over that of the rank-and-file membership.
Early concludes that the aim of enhancing "union market share" without a concern for democracy and membership control has its consequences. Over time, "density without democracy" can end with a lack of financial accountability and transparency, which is a symptom of undemocratic politics and a contributing factor leading to union scandals and corruption. This is the sort of business union model attacked throughout both books.
Early's chief criticism against SEIU tactics is that they mirror corporate practices, namely the fascination with the use of mergers and acquisitions as a way of making unionism more efficient. Both Embedded and Civil Wars evidence this through countless interviews, academic articles, and news reports. It is a quote by Stern himself that captures Early's argument most effectively, when the then-SEIU President stated in response to resistance over the convergence of SEIU locals, "Workers want their lives to be changed. They want strength and a voice, not some purist, intellectual, historical, mythical democracy" (Embedded, p. 221).
In Civil Wars, Early provides an in-depth review of the union's centralized and imperious response to rank-and-file dissent. However, the author concedes that there is truth in the SEIU providing a home for the country's working poor, and the union's early victories can be attributed to a social unionism that used activism to successfully organize workers. The SEIU's spearheading of Justice for Janitors is one such example. Even Stern is characterized as having successfully replaced the "crooks and grifters" that once ran some of the SEIU locals (Civil Wars, p. 20). By contrast, the SEIU has also been host to the most public and vicious internal union battles in the last decade. A battle, Early emphasizes, that has been waged between independent locals and their membership with the central union officers. As American unions struggle for relevance, Early argues that Andy Stern adopted a collaborationist strategy of working with major corporations to ensure certification victories. Even more telling of the directional shift is the SEIU's attempt to have a seat at the policy-making table within the Republican Party.
From Puerto Rico, where public school teachers were pressed into certifying with the SEIU-backed Union of Puerto Rican Teachers, to the parent union's takeover of United Healthcare Workers West in 2009, the SEIU's leadership has used trusteeships and appointments as principal strategies to maintaining influence over the union. In the Puerto Rican case, Early characterizes the action as a form of "labor colonialism," whereby the SEIU worked with a local politician to break up the existing teachers' union (Civil Wars, p. 7). Journalists and American labour scholars such as Amy Goodman and Nelson Lichtenstein, amongst others, have been vocal opponents to UHW trusteeship on the grounds that the move disenfranchises members. Within U.S. academic circles, Early claims that rifts have opened between researchers who stand with the SEIU and those who oppose its tactics. As the author recognizes in Civil Wars, if academics don't remain neutral they can find themselves without union support for their teaching, writing, and research.
It goes without saying that the millions of dollars spent by the SEIU to secure the takeover of union locals, as well as the resources mobilized by members determined to fight the trusteeships, are devoted to combating allies rather than organizing new workers. Such is the consequence of a labour organization that, in the words of an SEIU critic cited in Civil Wars, wants to be "the Wal-Mart of unions" (p. 221). Moving towards a corporate and efficiencybased union structure does not stop with trusteeships. Early provides an examination of the SEIU's deployment of call centres as a mechanism through which the union interfaces with members. The project was sold as a comeback strategy, but it is arguable that such a system is required to manage the SEIU's centralized administration of over two million members.
In both books Early asks what has come from Stern's non-adversarial approach with business and his mission to abandon the trade union movement's supposed "class struggle mentality" (Civil Wars, p. 61). Dissident SEIU members and critics referenced in Civil Wars claim that the union's leadership has cut deals with companies behind members' backs, to the detriment of their benefits and pay. That said, in 2005, the SEIU won a hard-fought victory for child care workers represented by Local 880 in Illinois, through a mix of direct action tactics and political lobbying.
Early remains skeptical that the SEIU has made real gains for some of the poorest workers, despite concessions and Stern's appeal to "responsible unions" (Civil Wars, p. 236). As Sal Rosselli, former president of the embattled UHW comments, "Stern's multimillion dollar fights have diverted resources away from healthcare reform and employee free choice, weakening the former and scuttling the latter" (Civil Wars, p. 284). Rosselli is speaking to organized labour's response to Obamacare and the virtual abandonment of the Employee Free Choice Act--one of President Obama's campaign commitments to the working class and American unions. Stern also left the SEIU unable to pay its bills, undemocratic, and unwilling to defend its members, according to Early.
There are several considerations that the reader is left to contend with. First, Early questions the contributions made by the "60's radicals", like Stern, who took charge of the country's most influential labour unions. It is not an accusation that their leadership has been ineffective, but that the entrenched bureaucratic power of a professional cadre of appointees has been reconstituted with new faces. Early concludes that since the 1990s, there "seemed to be a glib assumption that any solid sixties political resume guaranteed laudatory results in subsequent labor work" (Civil Wars, p. 17). Such assumptions were fanned by labour scholars of the same generation, who saw their peers taking over the offices once occupied by conservative labour leaders. To this point Early is unequivocal: union revitalization is nothing without strong union democracy, and neither academics nor appointed activists can substitute for rank-and-file democratic decision-making. Embedded and Civil Wars are informative, provocative, and important. Even though both speak to U.S. labour history, for Canadian readers there is inspiration in Early's embedded approach to researching and writing about trade unions and the labour movement.
Andrew Stevens
Queen's University
Stevens, Andrew
Steve Early, Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home
Matthew C. Bates
Labour/Le Travail. .68 (Fall 2011): p219.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Canadian Committee on Labour History
http://www.mun.ca/cclh/
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Steve Early, Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home (New York: Monthly Review Press 2009)
IF IT SEEMS ODD to read a review of book reviews, bear with me; or, more accurately, bear with author Steve Early, who has organized and written on behalf of the North American labour movement for the past 35 years.
Early is a participatory journalist of the first rank: an individual with deep first-hand knowledge of the workers' movement, and a thoughtful chronicler of people, ideas, and events. The 38 book review essays that comprise Embedded With Organized Labor represent Early's continuing search for ways to build a movement that is truly run by and for workers, but that also commands the resources and organizational heft required to credibly challenge capital. Reviewing books about the workers' movement allows Early to weigh in on vital debates and events, and to pose intriguing questions of his own.
Early is a graceful writer with a generous spirit. He is careful to acknowledge the strengths of people and positions he opposes and to confront in very frank terms the shortcomings of those he supports. He is able to argue passionately for principles (rank-and-file democracy, in particular) without letting readers forget that in messy real-world struggles, success frequently hinges on the support of powerful, well-resourced organizations. For example, when Early reviews an edited collection of tank-and-file activist Martin Glaberman's writings, Punching Out (2002), as well as an edited collection of activist Stan Weir's works, Single-jack Solidarity (2004), he halls the books as a "welcome antidote" to the technocratic, top-down style of union reform so in vogue today. Glaberman and Weir (both deceased) advocated anarcho-syndicalist-style workers' councils during the 1930s through the 1960s, and Early contends the two would have dismissed today's union reformers as "union centralizers trying to consolidate power in their own hands." But when Alice Lynd and her husband Staughton Lynd (editor of Punching Out) propose their own similar strategy of decentralized, bottom-up union reform in their The New Rank and File (2000), Early takes quite a different tack. It is one thing to admire historic efforts to combat business unionism. It is quite another thing to suggest practical strategies for today, and Early takes the Lynds to task. He praises their book for reminding readers that union officialdom did not wake up one day progressive and enlightened, and somehow chose John Sweeney to head the AFL-CIO. As the Lynds show, Sweeney's election and other promising changes in U.S. labour resulted from decades of difficult grassroots organizing by radicals and progressives in neighbourhoods and work sites, large and small. But Early argues that the Lynds err badly in proposing a strategy for union reform based almost entirely on building horizontal networks among the union rank and file. This strategy, he says, writes off "all bids for organizational power above the local union (or even steward) level." Had rank-and-file Teamsters adopted that strategy, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union would never have elected Ron Cary, who delivered the 1.4 million rotes that put Sweeney in office. "Where is the roadmap for large-scale movement building?" Early asks.
Early chides leftist critics who insist that union reform movements must "challenge the fundamentals of capitalism." Valuable political spaces have opened up for debate and rank-and-file activity because of Sweeney's election and related changes in the top ranks of labour--changes brought about through mass campaigns that did not articulate an anti-capitalist message. But Early also faults an official history of the U.E. for failing to acknowledge the role communists played (and continue to play) in that union and in the larger labour movement. Early recognizes that the root problems facing workers and unions flow from the "multiplying crises of capitalism," and he cites case after case of labour radicals who, fearing rejection and persecution, buried themselves and their quest for a just social order in the mundane chores of running a union. Reviewing a biography of Off Chemical and Auto Workers' Union leader Ton), Mazzocchi, Early poses a question that continues to haunt labour leftists: "How can a trade unionist with strong anti-capitalist views-usually not shared by the workers he or she represents--make his or her politics relevant to workplace struggles in the absence of a mass-based left-wing party?"
Early has little patience for pat answers and does not offer any, and he rarely takes cheap shots even at fat inviting targets. One unfortunate exception is his treatment of the New Communist Movement of early 1970s. Thousands of radicalized youth abandoned the college campuses to start new lives in the factories, mines, mills, and unions in hopes of building a mass-based revolutionary movement. In his review of Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air (2002), Early recounts the many blunders and misadventures of these young, idealistic leftists. But how could things have gone differently? Early knows his history, and understands how completely communist and socialist organizations were crushed during 1940s and 1950s. The left's organic connections to the working class, its institutional memory, and precious lessons learned all had to be rebuilt and relearned by a new generation of young, inexperienced radicals. It is inconceivable that such a process could unfold without people falling into dogmatism, sectarianism, adventurism and all the other blunders characteristic of a newborn radical movement. It is a simple matter to identify and deride those mistakes and here, at least, Early can not seem to resist.
My other major disappointment with Early's book was his failure to address labour movement media. Perhaps this omission jumped out at me because labour media is my life's work and passion. But Early is a labour writer, and his book is subtitled Journalistic Reflections on the Class War. So it seems odd for him to write so extensively about the importance of building rank-and-file organizations between and across unions and among the unorganized without discussing the central role of labour media in making those things happen. Early complains about the "pallid institutional propaganda" dished out by most unions today and he lauds Mary Heaton Vorse, the writers at Labor Notes, and other activists, past and present, for wielding "a rebel pen." He even closes his book with an essay about how to build a larger market among workers and other readers for books about labour. But he never explores how the workers themselves can develop and utilize media on their own behalf.
Even so, I was able to add hall a dozen books to my reading list on labour communications by reading Embedded With Organized Labor. The range of Early's interests and the sweep of ideas expressed in his book are that broad and deep. Whatever your specific interests in labour may be, Early provides a valuable communications lesson: he shows how to argue a case with intelligence, grace, good will, and gentle humour.
MATTHEW C. BATES
Trinity Washington University
Bates, Matthew C.
Refinery Town
Michael J. Carson
Reviewer's Bookwatch. (Jan. 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
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Refinery Town
Steve Early
Beacon Press
24 Farnsworth Street, Boston, MA 02210
www.beacon.org
9780807094266, $27.95, HC, 248 pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: Home to one of the largest oil refineries in the state, Richmond, California, was once a typical company town bankrolled by Chevron. This largely nonwhite, working-class city of a hundred thousand had experienced the by-products of decades' worth of poverty, substandard housing, and poorly funded public education. It had one of the highest homicide rates, per capita, in the country and a jobless rate often twice the national average.
But in 2012, when veteran labor reporter Steve Early moved from New England to Richmond, where he witnessed a surprising transformation which he presents in "Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City". Here Early chronicles the ten years of successful community organizing in Richmond that raised the minimum wage, defeated a casino development project, created a municipal ID to aid undocumented workers, challenged home foreclosures, and took on a big oil giant.
Here we meet a dynamic cast of characters ranging from 94-year-old Betty Reid Soskin, the country's oldest full-time National Park Ranger and witness to Richmond's complex history, to Gayle McLaughlin, the city's first Green Party mayor who led the movement to sue Chevron--and won, to former police chief Chris Magnus, who pioneered "community policing" in Richmond, and is now celebrated as one of the country's most effective police reformers.
Part regional history, part call to action, "Refinery Town" is far more than the story of how one community defeated one company and remade itself into a revolutionary city. Richmond is merely a single example of how members of local government and empowered citizens can drive the nation forward, one city at a time.
Critique: Exceptionally well written, impressively informed and informative, a compelling and thoughtful read from beginning to end, "Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City" is very strongly recommended for both community, college, and university library American History collections. It should be noted for academia and non-specialist general readers that "Refinery Town" is also available in a Kindle format ($16.99).
Michael J. Carson
Reviewer
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'Refinery Town' tells the story of a city fighting for its own soul
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A look at the impact of the petroleum industry on one American city yields a portrait of a community struggling to put its future in the hands of its residents.
By Peter Lewis, The Barnes & Noble Review APRIL 28, 2017
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Corporations are people. This we know; the US Constitution tells us so. And cities are alive. This we know, with or without the US Constitution’s oracularity, because we can witness the shape-shifting of neighborhoods – of whole metropolitan areas – from buzzworthy to vilified to back again to back again, sometimes gradually, sometimes mercurially, sometimes inscrutably. Labor activist Steve Early’s Refinery Town chronicles just such a morphing in the life of Richmond, California. Early calls the work narrative journalism, but for us it is simply a story, both well told and true.
Richmond is one of those industrial burghs suitably distanced from its mother city so as not to be aromatically offensive, like Chicago’s Gary or Venice’s Mestre. Richmond’s mother is San Francisco. In the pre-World War II era, Richmond was a prototypical company town; in this case, under the thumb of the energy giant Standard Oil of California, where it operated one of the largest refineries in California. Richmond was working class – in addition to oil, there were rail yards, wineries, Pullman car works, chemical and automotive plants – and white: African Americans numbered less than 300 when Richmond reached its prewar population peak of 24,000, living “a tenuous existence on the outer edges of the city’s industrial vision, trapped at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchy.” Among Richmond’s ailments was a strong streak of bigotry: “Klan parades and minstrel shows reinforced the racial status quo” in the city, as in many white working-class towns.
World War II changed that. Standard Oil held fast to its union-busting, racist, wayward paternalism, but there was a new face in town: Henry Kaiser, of metal-making and dam-building fame. Kaiser had at his disposal massive federal funding to build ships to replace all those sitting at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Kaiser was a one-man-making boomtown. With wartime labor shortages, he hired thousands of workers from all over the country to build cargo ships at four new shipyards, targeting “young African Americans eager to escape post-Depression hardship and Jim Crow constraints,” for jobs long restricted to white males. Suddenly, nearly 15 percent of Richmond’s population was African American, if segregated and consigned to temporary housing (plenty of which is still inhabited).
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Then peace came, and fresh problems. The jobs spawned by the war disappeared. Other industries slumped or moved to more profitable climes. Standard Oil, soon to become Chevron, remained, unfazed by the demographic tides. But who got the benefit? “The Richmond refinery’s wartime workforce of three thousand initially included just nine African Americans. By 1944, after federal government prodding, its nonwhite head count rose to ... 114.” (Quick math: that’s 0.038 percent – even though the city’s population was nearly 15 percent African American, a figure that kept climbing. Deindustrialization led to even further joblessness, poverty, and substandard schools and housing, while drug trafficking, street crime, and gang violence led to an unenviable per capita homicide rate.
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Shaped by the optimism of the civil rights movement and a surge in Democratic voter registration, Early relates, African Americans soon started making their presence felt. There was the Black Panther Party, of which Richmond was one of the first chapters, and there was a growing presence of African Americans in the political establishment. By 1980, African Americans were the majority of the population, and by century’s turn, Richmond had a black mayor and black city manager. Every department head was black, as was a majority of the City Council. The result, however, was not what a previous generation of activists had imagined. A little investigative journalism by Early found that the “corporate-backed African American political machine, aligned with conservative, self-serving, and predominantly white police and firefighters unions, dominated city government. Cronyism, corruption, and bureaucratic incompetence became deeply entrenched.” Where insurgent African-American politicians in other cities – such as Gary, Chicago, Cleveland – experimented with new forms of direct participation, public enterprise, property regulation, and service structure, Richmond took the low road.
Only for a short stint, however, which shows how three decades can disappear when you look back. The crux of Early’s tale, when his storytelling begins to glow with embers of promise, is with the creation of the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA). The RPA is one of those rare birds that, having found common footing in a fight against Chevron’s abysmal labor and environmental records, not only successfully grappled with Big Oil but stayed in alliance to take charge of the Richmond city government. They threatened to use eminent domain to thwart home foreclosures, regulated rents and evictions, raised the minimum wage, defeated a casino development scheme, created a municipal ID card, curbed discrimination against former prisoners in job applications, and hired a visionary gay police chief to institute community policing.
All of these issues were mooted at the RPA’s first People’s Convention. This raised RPA’s profile enough that one of their number, Gayle McLaughlin, won a seat on the City Council, despite Chevron’s lavish spending on her opposition. Early then carefully, neatly follows the gradual ascendancy of the RPA, including McLaughlin’s stunning mayoral victory in 2006. Although the mayor didn’t have the immediate clout of the city manager, the position did afford McLaughlin a bully pulpit to “develop and inform City residents of policies and programs which he or she believes are necessary for the welfare of the City.” McLaughlin played it to the hilt.
RPA and its kitchen cabinet of liberal Democrats, socialists, independents, California Greens, and Peace and Freedom Party members inherited a bankrupt city government, a citywide toxic hot spot (including a radioactive landfill), a laughable level of corruption in city agencies, a police force rampant with “cowboys.” On top of that were periodic raids by Immigration and Customs to detain and deport undocumented workers – terrifying the expanding Latino population, which was 40 percent of the Richmond citizenry according to the 2010 Census.
And yet, the alliance turned the city around – not into Oz but into one where “civil rights, the environment, education, open government and quality of life issues” were paramount and, crucially, at a time when the state and federal governments were gridlocked, showed that town and city governments could enact legislation at the grassroots level, that shoe leather could defeat all the propaganda that Big Oil spent millions on – $3.1 million, to be moderately exact – to manipulate a municipal election. Bernie Sanders came to Richmond during the 2014 elections. “Sanders proclaimed our city” – Early lives in Richmond, let that be noted; Early was there – “to be ground zero in the struggle against Citizens United.”
McLaughlin was legally barred from running for a third term in 2014, and fissures started to open, as they will in alliances. There were complaints of a first-among-equals steering committee; key RPA activists are mostly registered Greens, while “the membership is overwhelmingly registered Democrats”; and there are the vexing, sometimes sundering “gray areas. One person’s tactical issue is another person’s principle.” The united front lost its molecular bonds.
As the quality of life began to improve, came the signs of gentrification. The government held together to pursue affordable housing, then split over the construction of market rate buildings. The University of California Berkeley made great plans for a Berkeley Global Campus to transform all of Richmond before finding itself cash-strapped: the pipe dream was summarily canceled. Rent-control negotiations, which were passed by the city council, were stalled by a phony petition campaign. Chevron, too, had its lawyers appeal all the fines levied against the company for one egregious energy-related fiasco after another.
The beauty of the Richmond experiment, that warm glow emitted as Early feeds his campfire storytelling, is that it testifies to the “continuing advantages of making changes locally as part of a longer-term and eventually more sweeping progressive strategy. What activists have going for them ... nonexistent in the big-money-dominated realm of state and national politics – is greater personal connection to voters.” Personal engagement, in the best of worlds, creates solidarity, and political insurgencies require civic engagement. “When we shelter in place together,” Early writes, his tongue in cheek – “shelter in place” is Chevron’s catastrophe alert; doors must be closed and windows taped shut – “we can change our communities for the better.” The option is apathy, alienation, and powerlessness, “until there are too many fires to put out and not enough time left to reverse the damage they’ve done.”
‘Refinery Town,’ by Steve Early
By Kate Galbraith Updated 10:50 am, Thursday, March 2, 2017
"Refinery Town" Photo: Beacon
Photo: Beacon
IMAGE 1 OF 2 "Refinery Town"
For a place steeped in oil, Richmond has a remarkably progressivist bent. In 2006, it became the largest U.S. city to elect a mayor from the Green Party. In 2014, the city made nationwide headlines again when the uniformed police chief held a “Black Lives Matter” sign at a protest. Currently, Richmond is locked in a battle over a rent control measure, which voters approved in November but a landlords group is suing to block.
In “Refinery Town,” longtime labor activist and writer Steve Early explores this striking blend of oil and progressivism. To him, it is logical and laudable that Richmond politics have marched left. The refinery, opened in 1902 and owned for most of its life span by Standard Oil and one of its successor companies, Chevron, has in his telling been a polluting and objectionable neighbor — the worst recent offense being the 2012 fire at the refinery, which caused 15,000 people from the area to seek medical treatment for respiratory issues and nearly killed 19 workers. The refinery has fully earned, he argues, the backlash against “corporate power and its many toxic externalities” that has ensued.
Early had just moved to Richmond from New England when the 2012 disaster occurred. His wife was out gardening; a neighbor spotted her and told her to go indoors to shelter in place. “What’s that?” his wife, Suzanne, asked. Quickly comprehending the danger, the couple took refuge in Berkeley. The year after the fire, Chevron paid $2 million fines and restitution and pleaded no contest to six criminal charges.
The 2012 disaster seems to have piqued Early’s interest in his new hometown. “As a forty-year veteran of labor and political organizing, I should have expected that a company with robber baron roots might have tangled with its own workers or downwind neighbors a few times before,” he writes.
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Off he goes to dig, and he unearths a troubled history. The majority-minority, working-class city used to be run, he writes, “by public officials installed by ... Chevron, local developers or their building trades and public safety union allies.” Besides pollution from the refinery, municipal problems included drugs, poor schools, unemployment and gun violence. Around 2006, Richmond was deemed one of the most dangerous cities in California and the nation.
From these dismal circumstances the progressive movement took root. After the Green Party mayor came the new police chief. Improbably, he arrived from Fargo, N.D., a town very unlike Richmond. The homicide rate plunged on his watch: 11 people were killed in Richmond in 2014, compared with 47 homicides in 2007 and 2009. (The chief, Chris Magnus, has since departed; he joined the Tucson police department last year.)
The section on policing, and Magnus’ role, is the most compelling part of “Refinery Town,” which is otherwise rather tedious. Local politics simply is not well-suited to a blow-by-blow account. Is anyone truly interested in exactly how many door-knockers canvassers in a given election reach?
The tale is also one-sided. Chevron has much to answer for, not least its safety record and its efforts to influence politics through various means, including the press. But Early talks to few Chevron workers — an omission that’s all the more notable given that factory jobs were a defining topic in the last election. Nor does he spend much time on the need for oil (and hence a refinery), and the difficulty in weaning Californians — not to mention other states — off of it.
With a foreword by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, “Refinery Town” will be read proudly by activists. National progressives will value the blueprint laid out by Early — one that details setbacks as well as triumphs. But the book will struggle to get broader reach.
As for Chevron, one of the enduring mysteries — not answered by this book — is why it remains a California company. A refinery cannot move, but its headquarters, which are in San Ramon, have more flexibility. Chevron is scheduled to finish transferring hundreds of employees to Houston by 2018; why has it not consolidated front-office operations there, out of the way of some of California’s regulations?
Chevron has said it plans to stay put in San Ramon. In any case, we’ll always have Richmond.
Kate Galbraith is the assistant business editor of The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: kgalbraith@sfchronicle.com.
Refinery Town
Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City
By Steve Early
(Beacon Press; 222 pages; $27.95)
Book Review: Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress by Steve Early
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This book brings together recent essays and reporting by labour journalist Steve Early. The author aims to illuminate the challenges facing U.S. workers, whether they’re trying to democratise their union, win a strike, defend past contract gains, or bargain with management for the first time. Melanie Simms writes that the insider perspective offered in this book will add to our understanding of how and why unions have contributed to the creation of specific patterns of disadvantage and exclusion for workers and for citizens.
Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress. Steve Early. Monthly Review Press. February 2014.
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Steve Early is a well-known commentator on the complex world of US trade unionism. His analyses are often provocative and always well-informed as he has worked in and around the US labour movement for more than 40 years. This is his third book since he retired from the Communication Workers of America (CWA) union. Evidently he is a man who intends to use the freedom of retirement to stir up debate.
As the subtitle suggests, the book brings together a series of previous pieces he has written for a range of audiences. Typically, they are from the journals, newspapers and websites that cover US labour issues: Labor Notes, Huffington Post, Working In These Times etc. And the tone of the dispatches taken as a whole is distressing. The reader is undoubtedly left with a strong view that the US labour movement is in very deep trouble and that strategies to plot a future course have been ill-fated.
Early is passionate about working people having the opportunity not only to have a say in their working lives, but to act as a countervailing power to corporate America. Readers unfamiliar with how deeply entrenched the interests of corporate America are within political institutions only have to look at the recent intervention of the Republicans in the vote of workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There, mangers were keen to allow the United Auto Workers (UAW) representation rights. Senior Republican politicians and lawmakers made it very clear that, in their view, such a move would harm job creation and workers subsequently voted against the proposal on a narrow margin. The ballot is currently being appealed, but the point is clear: anti-union voices are deeply embedded in political institutions and they carry a lot of weight.
Early is also clear that unions are not blameless in creating their own troubles. Historic links with organised crime, continual (often failed) efforts to improve internal democracy, and a poor track record on recruiting and integrating marginalised workers have all harmed the movement. He explores in some detail examples where reform from the rank-and-file has been squashed by well-funded national leaders. He is also clear that national leaders can make decisions that weaken and undermine local campaigns in processes that are too often murky and poorly explained. This is a brave position for someone who was a long serving national representative within his own union.
For me, the most revealing section of the book is his discussion of healthcare. In a short but informative chapter, Early outlines the complex and intersecting ways in which healthcare is a union issue. In the USA health insurance is typically one of the first things negotiated when a union gains recognition, unionisation therefore brings very real and immediate costs to companies. In a context where even an unfortunately timed minor illness can plunge any worker into a spiral of debt, healthcare matters. When only around 35% of public sector workers and fewer than 7% of private sector workers are unionised, healthcare matters a lot.
AFGE We Are One Rally – April 4th, 2011. Credit AFGE CC BY 2.0
Obamacare (or, to give it its official title, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) extends affordable healthcare to many citizens, but Early raises some important weaknesses of the wider approach. One problem is that from 2018, more advantageous health plans such of the kind typically negotiated by trade unions, will be taxed. As a result, some large employers are attempting to negotiate protections downwards in advance of the 2018 date in order to avoid the tax. Unions are not keen to concede, but recognise that in some cases there may be trade-offs between so-called ‘Cadillac plans’ and jobs.
In another section of the same chapter, Early highlights the often poor labour conditions on which the highly profitable healthcare industry is based. Campaigns to unionise hospital workers, home care helpers and others have been long-running struggles to ensure that health workers have access to some of the protections they are employed to provide to others. Another serious concern is the growing interest of corporate America in the ‘well-being’ of their employees. Companies increasingly see it as their business to incentivise employees to stop smoking, lose weight and take exercise. Why? Because healthcare protection is expensive and these large companies are the ones that typically do provide health benefits. So ensuring employees reduce their health risk reduces those costs. Of course, this can also become punitive and can act as a tax on employees who are overweight, inactive and/or smokers. Unions that have agreed to well-being programmes can therefore find themselves colluding in some highly draconian measures to monitor employees’ behaviours inside and outside work.
This chapter very effectively highlights the complex interactions between different aspects of state intervention, labour markets, service markets and unions that create specific patterns of disadvantage and exclusion for workers and for citizens. Overall, the book adds to our understanding of how and why unions have contributed to some of those. In that regard, it gives us very clear insight into the dynamics and tensions within unions at both the macro and micro levels.
What the book lacked, however, was an over-arching narrative. It is, presumably, deliberate that the author has chosen not to give any comment on how and why he has selected particular pieces to appear in this book, nor is it clear beyond the chapter titles how he wants the reader to link them together. At its most problematic, therefore, the book can be read as a rather unfocused series of criticisms of the unions, and of the US political and corporate systems more widely. It is left to the reader to decide what the most pressing problems are and how they might be addressed. Non-US readers also need to be aware that the book assumes considerable knowledge about the US labour movement and politics, so parts may be difficult to follow without some previous understanding. Overall, though, I was grateful for the perspective of an insider who has such deep knowledge. What future US unions have is an entirely different question and one that remains to be answered.
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Melanie Simms is Professor of Work and Employment at the University of Leicester.
MONDAY, FEB 24, 2014, 5:56 PM
Does Steve Early’s ‘Save Our Unions’ Have a Message for Chattanooga?
BY BRUCE VAIL
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What does Steve Early’s 'Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress' teach us about UAW's recent defeat in Chattanooga? (Photo via Monthly Review Press / AK Press)
The defeat of a union organizing election at the Volkswagen auto plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. this month has stimulated intense national scrutiny of the United Auto Workers (UAW). As labor’s friends and enemies debate over the places UAW leadership fell short in the campaign, journalist Steve Early’s new book, Save Our Unions: Dispatches From a Movement in Distress (Monthly Review Press) seems especially relevant. Though Early’s work doesn’t analyze the Volkswagen campaign itself—and makes only passing references to the UAW—the declining power of the country’s leading labor organizations is a consistent theme in his reporting.
The book is first and foremost a journalistic enterprise, bringing together news articles and related material that Early produced for a long list of labor-friendly publications, including In These Times. Labor reporting is a second career for Early, who spent 27 years as a Boston-based staffer for the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and he brings to his work a real depth of understanding about how unions work in practice. This is his third book since retiring from CWA in 2007—Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home was published in 2009, followed by The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor in 2011—and the three volumes together present a well-researched and crisp account of Big Labor’s troubles in the modern era.
Early is especially well known for his reporting in recent years on the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), particularly the efforts by some of the union’s California branches to break away and establish the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). And Save Our Unions contains plenty of material on NUHW’s post-schism campaigns to recruit new members out of SEIU’s ranks, as well as the continuing SEIU-NUHW clashes that have ensued. Early’s sympathy with NUHW is plainly stated and supported by a stinging critique of SEIU’s leadership. He depicts senior SEIU officials as divorced from the workplace concerns of most members, overly accommodating to the financial goals of large employers, and ham-handed in their dealings with union rank and file. Ultimately, his narrative is that of the NUHW as a scrappy underdog struggling against an entrenched and largely unresponsive SEIU bureaucracy.
That antiestablishment theme is echoed in Early’s reporting on other labor organizations in Save Our Unions, including his coverage of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ 2011 presidential election. The race in question was a three-way contest between incumbent president James P. Hoffa and two other union officers—pension administrator Fred Gregare and New York City local leader Sandy Pope. As the candidate from the dissident group Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Pope campaigned for stronger union contracts and against the high salaries and generous perks granted to union leaders. But her on-the-ground activism didn’t resonate widely with union voters. When the ballots were counted, Hoffa had racked up an impressive victory, trouncing both Gregare and Pope. Early doesn’t dwell too long on the apparent contradiction between his faith in rank-and-file democracy and the plainly expressed preference of Teamster voters. Instead, he counts the election as another instance of union officers manipulating the system to cling to power at a time that demands fresh and inventive approaches.
In an interview with In These Times, Early insists that his journalism is not intended to hammer the existing power structure of Big Labor, but rather to celebrate innovations in union organizing, especially at the grassroots level. But the conflicts he portrays are almost always centered on union leaders stubbornly resisting any change that might chip away at their power and privilege.
He savages American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) leader Gerald McEntee, for example, for holding the union in an iron grip for 30 years before delivering the presidency to his hand-picked successor Lee Saunders in 2012. Early also implicitly blames McEntee and other high-ranking officials for the 2011 fiasco in Wisconsin, when anti-union legislation sponsored by Gov. Scott Walker proved especially destructive to AFSCME.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, now aged 64, is not spared either. Early wonders—rather wearily—if Trumka will follow the example of his federation predecessors and remain in office into his 80s; such scrutiny seems especially apt considering other critics’ observations of Trumka’s overall failure to stem labor’s decline during his presidency. An acceptance of term limits, or a mandatory retirement age, is long overdue at the highest levels of the Big Labor hierarchy, Early argues. Not only would that allow younger, fresher blood to rise, he writes, but many of labor’s senior leaders could serve workers’ interests far better in other fields, like academia or electoral politics.
Early is an avid consumer of other labor-related books and news articles; Save Our Unions finds him frequently engaging with these sources on an in-depth level. One highlight is his treatment of Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), a 2012 memoir by Jane McAlevey detailing her years as a mid-level SEIU officer. Early delights in skewering the SEIU, of course—especially retired leader Andy Stern—and he takes McAlevey to task, too, for being what he calls a “progressive prima donna” who benefited from the very structures she lambasts. On a more academic note, Early is meticulous when it comes to references: The book contains extensive endnotes for readers who want to seek out additional details of the multiple labor dramas presented.
By his own account, Early does not intend to offer any grand scheme for rescuing labor from its current troubles, so any student of last week’s defeat in Chattanooga will not find any direct answer to UAW’s problem in these pages. (He did, however, publish his own “postmortem” in CounterPunch on February 19; unsurprisingly, he found fault with the UAW leadership.) Early does seem to imply that his home union is a good example for others to follow—for the most part, his fascinating descriptions of CWA’s long-running organizing campaigns at T-Mobile and the 2011 Verizon strike remain free from critique, and the book is dedicated to CWA President Larry Cohen, described “as the best of his generation in labor.”
Overall, Early’s workmanlike journalism is at its best when he illuminates the day-to-day problems faced by labor, such as the apparently intractable problems unions encounter with Obamacare. By leaving the grander themes and prescriptions for salvation to others, he can focus on his clear passion: the struggles of the rank-and-file against the powerful force arrayed against it, including, too often, its own leaders.
Full disclosure: The UAW, CWA and AFSCME are website sponsors of In These Times. Sponsors have no role in editorial content.
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MAY 2014 DISPATCHER
Book Review: Save Our Unions
MAY 30, 2014 11:27 AM
Book Review
Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress
By Steve Early
Monthly Review Press, 2013)
Veteran labor journalist and rank-and-file union activist, Steve Early, brings over 40 years of experience and insights to his new collection of essays, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress. Early’s collection of short articles provides us with snapshots of the challenges that face workers in today’s era of growing employer hostility and governmental indifference.
He brings together the stories of past and present labor activists who have been helping workers organize new unions, fighting for more union democracy, fighting to retain union jobs in the face new technology, reaching across borders to build solidarity with workers around the world, and developing more effective strategies for political action.
Many of Early’s essays have previ- ously appeared in Labor Notes, In These Times, and other pro-union publications. All are based on his first-hand reporting which is combined with excellent reviews of important books on labor history and memoirs from labor activists. These stories are told through the voices of rank-and-file activists, union officials, academics, and labor journalists. He combines all these per- spectives into a book that highlights the biggest issues confronting Ameri- can workers during the last 40 years: declining union membership and power, decreased worker militancy, problematic ties to the Democratic Party, the lack of rank-and-file democracy within many unions, and a troubling shortage of solidarity between unions.
Early tells the heroic and some- times tragic stories of labor activists who must battle hostile employers along with conservative, complacent and sometimes corrupt forces within their own unions. He begins the book with a look at past reform efforts, pro- viding details and inside information about courageous reform movements that were waged within the United Mine Workers (UMW), Teamsters, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), United Autoworkers (UAW), and the International Asso- ciation of Machinists (IAM). While all these efforts have fallen short of their goals, they have also scored some important gains in the process.
Early’s sympathies for “bottom up” unionism are clear, and his accounts of reform struggles and the sacrifices made by reformers are both heroic and deflating. He shows that building and sustaining reform efforts over many years takes hard work. He describes reformers who sometimes put their jobs and safety on the line with no guarantee of success. Because Early does not avoid talking about failures, younger activists will have learned many valuable lessons after finishing this book.
Early also looks at strategies for increasing union membership in the private sector. He profiles several innovative organizing campaigns that used “salts,” including an ILWU campaign in the late 1990’s to organize San Francisco bike messengers. Early details the “salting” strategy by explaining how union activists take jobs in shops where they slowly help co-workers learn how to organize and build union power.
Early also looks at the importance of “cross border” organizing campaigns by describing an effort by the Communication Workers of America (CWA) to organize T-Mobile call cen- ter workers with help from a German labor union.
Another section of his book is devoted to what Early calls “labor’s health muddle.” He covers the fight for a single-payer health care sys- tem in Vermont – the type supported by the ILWU – that could serve as an alternative model to our current Obamacare system that was designed by and for health insurance compa- nies. He explains how the Affordable Care Act was designed to hurt many union health plans, including the ILWU Longshore plan. In 2018, all high-quality plans must begin paying a federal tax that will punish union members who struggled for many years to win good health benefits. By one estimate, the tax on the ILWU Longshore health plan could cost $150 million in 2018.
Besides hurting patients, Early explains how many health care workers face poor wages and miserable working conditions in our profit-oriented health care system. He reports on campaigns to organize hospital and home health care workers, and the “civil war” that erupted within the Service Employees Union (SEIU) over a dispute whether to organize from the top-down or bottom-up. Early ends his coverage of health care by examining employer-promoted “wellness programs” that sometimes punish workers for smoking or being overweight.
Early’s essays are not for the faint of heart and it’s hard to be hopeful about labor’s future after finishing his book. But he does suggest a way forward, without pretending to have all the answers. It begins with a clear under- standing of past errors, so the next generation doesn’t have to repeat our same mistakes. And Early is convinced that the best ideas will come from rank- and-file members and their elected leaders who belong to democratic unions. In this sense, his book affirms the ILWU’s “Ten Guiding Principles” – and encourages all union members to put them into practice.
The struggle inside the unions
Review by Jenna Woloshyn
Issue #78: Reviews
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The Civil Wars in US Labor:
Birth of a New Worker Movement or Death Throes of the Old?
By Steve Early
Haymarket Books, 2011 · 440 pages · $17.00
WHEN ANDY Stern led the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and six other major unions out of the AFL-CIO in 2005 to form a new labor coalition, Change to Win (CTW), there was active discussion about organizing the unorganized. SEIU was one of the few unions growing at the time, and after decades of union decline, the formation of CTW seemed to many to offer the renewal of hope. Some likened CTW’s creation to the CIO’s birth in the 1930s, which led to a boom of union organizing.
But the talk turned to more of an embarrassed whisper before too long. Turf wars, power grabs, political wrangling, emotional manipulation, unnecessary trusteeships, and a ridiculous experiment to replace stewards with call centers are all part of SEIU’s missteps since the formation of CTW. This causes labor activists to ponder, with union bureaucrats like these, who needs the bosses? Steve Early’s new book, The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor, helps to explain what went wrong.
To start with, the laws are not on the unions’ side. Early recounts an SEIU attempt to organize nurses at a hospital in Maine through a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) vote. He details the anti-union campaign of the hospital, and how an NLRB vote can be undermined every step of the way by management. SEIU lost this vote, but even when unions win, employers can delay a first contract, sometimes for years, through appeals and legal objections.
These difficulties have led SEIU and many other unions to look for ways to avoid NLRB elections when organizing. This means negotiating some kind of employer “neutrality” during organizing drives. But SEIU, under Stern, took the idea behind labor-management cooperation to whole new levels in its bid to show employers how unthreatening the union could be. For some employers, SEIU agreed to wage and benefit concessions—and not to strike for ten years—in order to have neutrality at the employer’s’ non-union sites. If the employer was not keen on a 100 percent unionized workforce, the union would allow the employer to choose which site to organize and which to remain untouched.
The union also promised political alliances for employer interests including “support for state laws limiting the right of nursing home patients to sue over mistreatment.” Some contracts even allowed subcontracting a percentage of the workforce and other provisions that undermined job security. The San Francisco Weekly reported that “model contracts in California prevented SEIU members from reporting ‘health care violations to state regulators, to other public officials, or to journalists except in cases where the employees are required by law to report egregious cases of neglect and abuse.’”
Such bargains caused many labor activists to attack SEIU for being a “company union.” This disagreement came to a head in 2008 when an Ohio hospital chain, Catholic Healthcare Partners (CHP), filed a petition for an NLRB election, an unprecedented move for an employer. The more progressive California Nurses Association (CNA), believing the SEIU-CHP partnership to be detrimental to the entire labor movement, sent its own organizers from the National Nurses Organizing Committee to stir things up. With another, non–employer approved union in the mix, the hospital chain pulled its petition with the NLRB, and the hospitals remained non-union. In retaliation, the SEIU launched an intimidation campaign against the CNA, including a busload of purple-clad members being led in a Teamster-style attack on a 2008 Labor Notes convention that CNA officials were participating in.
If your tactic for successful unions is labor-management cooperation, then you can’t have pesky rank-and-file agitation among your membership. In Stern’s own words to the Wall Street Journal, he wanted to develop “a new model [of unionism] less focused on individual grievances, more focused on industry needs.” This model included merging many locals together to create super locals, putting any local that resisted under trusteeship, and by replacing local stewards with call centers.
While Early always makes it clear that he stands on the side of union democracy against union bureaucracy, he includes quotes from both sides and creates a full picture of the situations that he reports on. According to a report titled Union of the Future, by then secretary-treasurer Anna Burger, they were on track to build a
rosy future in which members would be “so strongly supported” by call centers that stewards and field staff could then “focus on building the union: identifying and developing leaders; organizing around workplace issues; fighting for better contracts, uniting more workers, and winning politically and in the community.”
The reality however, turned out to be quite the opposite. Members reported calling in to centers hundreds of miles away from their shop floor and talking with people unfamiliar with their contracts. When I started my job as a driver for UPS, I quickly learned the importance of having trained stewards at the workplace who know the contract and can help protect workers on the job. In my first evaluation with a supervisor, I was asked to sign a paper that went over my “strengths and areas of improvement.” Before I could even move toward the pen, my steward said, “She refuses to sign.” These small and sometimes subtle protections from daily management harassment make a difference in the lives of union workers. Enforcing a contract can’t be done from call centers. It takes an understanding of the individual workplace and types of harassment that occur on a daily basis. That kind of protection can only come from the workers empowered to stand up for themselves with the backing of a union. It’s no wonder why so many SEIU members felt abandoned after the implementation of call centers.
The book chronicles not only the corruption and nefarious twists and turns of politically bankrupt union bureaucrats, but also the folks who fought back. Early’s close association with labor activists allows the reader a unique view into the tactics used at every level to oppose moves by the International that were not in tune with the membership. One of the most significant acts of resistance was led by Sal Rosselli, once head of the SEIU-affiliated United Healthcare Workers (UHW). When Rosselli started to speak out against Stern’s backroom dealing with then California Governor Schwarzenegger, and in favor of union democracy, the International moved in January 2009 to put the UHW under trusteeship, which would allow Stern to replace the elected leadership with appointees of his own. Despite a courageous battle that included mass rallies of the UHW rank and file against the trusteeship, Stern prevailed, causing Rosselli to create a new union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). The NUHW has since had both successes and failures in its struggles against SEIU.
The SEIU vs. NUHW conflict is about answering the question that Early asks at the heart of this book: “What type of union structure keeps leaders at every level more connected to members at the base?” What union provides a better way forward for labor? It’s a question that has implications far beyond Stern and SEIU. While Early focuses on SEIU’s last decade, he also draws on historical references to past union “civil war” battles to allow the reader to understand union bureaucracy in a historical context and conclude that the last thing union membership can do is become complacent and depend on the leadership to do what’s right. Even leaders with good intentions and progressive rhetoric may steer a union in the wrong direction if they’re isolated from the membership. Knowledge of the recent history highlighted inThe Civil War in U.S. Labor leads a rank-and-file activist to an understanding that union democracy is not limited to voting for officials, it’s about having an engaged membership. That’s the real hope for renewal of the labor movement.
Labor’s Tangled Web: A Review of Civil Wars in U.S. Labor by Steve Early
Posted on March 10, 2011 by dsalaborblogmoderator
by Carl Finamore
Steve Early, The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor
Steve Early, The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor
“There are no shortcuts in politics,” bellowed a respected, much-older labor veteran as we young militants sat around hoping to pick up a few things. “No gimmicks, no tricks, you only end up fooling yourself.”
In his book, only working class people themselves could solve the enormous social problems of war, poverty and discrimination. He emphasized that no matter how difficult it is to achieve, politics should be measured by how it helps or hinders the direct involvement and political empowerment of working people. There was no getting around it.
That was some 40 years ago but I never forgot it.
This conversation from so many years past still resonated with me after reading Steve Early’s new book, The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor. In fact, some pages seem taken straight from my mentor’s own voluminous book of experience, as when Early concludes that “instead of unions that are top down and top heavy, too employer friendly and detached from their base, we need more that are lean and mean at the top, plus strong, broad and deep at the base.”
But Civil Wars does not simply offer a radical critique of current union policies. It does much more. It vividly describes, analyzes and contrasts actual labor experiences of the difficult and tumultuous recent past.
All is presented through the practiced eyes of an experienced journalist who served as both a labor organizer and union staff person for over 30 years.
Readers can draw their own conclusions from the actual disputes between local and international unions, many of which had a major impact on literally hundreds of thousands of workers, because Civil Wars provides opposing examples of how these different approaches played out.
For example, Early describes episodes across the country over the last two decades explaining the damaging national controversies engulfing one of the most powerful and largest unions in North America, the 2.2 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
Much of this union’s growth, critics claim, has come as the result of an overly centralized bureaucratic machine that tramples on the rights of members.
The few bright spots in labor’s horizon today are precisely those examples Early cites where local unions or leaderships rejected undemocratic choices, at great personal cost as the author tells it.
Class Snuggle
Early quotes a prominent union critic who colorfully described SEIU’s evolution as “class struggle” becoming “class snuggle.” The most socially conscious union in the country has steadily devolved into a bureaucratic, bloated machine that cozied up with management while smothering membership democracy.
The more SEIU sought favorable organizing agreements from state governments and private companies, in home care and child care fields as well as with hospitals, the more it traded away wage and benefit increases, the ability to criticize management publically and the right of members to exercise legitimate grievance rights on the job.
Essentially, SEIU’s strategy was to recruit members through non-confrontational agreements with employers as the alternative to troublesome and time-consuming efforts involving members in traditional organizing campaigns led by work-site committees of rank and file members.
However, Early shows how these fragile arrangements with employers collapse when management or state governments change their minds, leaving SEIU without an active and informed membership base from which to appeal. As a result, several units organized under these circumstances have in fact been decertified or undergone dramatic decreases in wages and benefits without much resistance.
SEIU’s policies led to disputes not only with its own members but also with other unions as well.
As the largest hospital workers union, their partnership agreements with management led to a bitter quarrel with the California Nurses Association (CNA) who believed patient rights were being sacrificed.
And, again, with a seemingly endless and principle-less desire to grow at any cost, SEIU even began raiding members of UNITE-HERE, its Change to Win (CTW) national union federation founding partner.
Make Peace to Wage War
Both these costly and damaging disputes with CNA and UNITE-HERE were quickly resolved by the new SEIU leadership once Andy Stern abruptly resigned in 2010 as President. However, as an important chapter in Civil Wars describes, current SEIU leaders are more determined than ever to continue the war in California against its dissident, rebel offshoot, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW).
And, it is using all the same combative and disruptive tactics it so destructively employed against CNA and UNITE-HERE. Only now, it has even more resources to throw against healthcare workers favoring NUHW’s more militant bargaining style of involving and mobilizing members.
The Fall 2010 Kaiser election in California between SEIU and NUHW revealed how all these pieces came together building toward the perfect storm of SEIU collaboration with management and deception towards its membership.
It is also noteworthy to point out that SEIU locals themselves are not immune to heavy-handed bureaucratic measures from national headquarters. “During his presidency, Stern put nearly eighty local unions under headquarters trusteeships or reorganized them under new leaders named by him,” Early writes. There were an additional “136 local reconfigurations-involving either total mergers or the transfer of some bargaining units-between 1997 and 2007.”
As a result, the top 15 SEIU locals collect dues from 50,000 to 350,000 workers, representing a whopping 57% of the total national membership. Clearly, behemoth-size locals spread across several state lines present a real challenge maintaining democratic norms, encouraging participation and defining leadership roles for rank and filers.
Critics believe this is by design.
An interesting corollary to the internal union disputes Early recounts is his description of objections to SEIU disruptive relations with other unions raised by hundreds of pro-labor community, religious and academic leaders. These fraternal critics are all enthusiastic supporters of SEIU’s previous record of progressive social involvement and member-based organizing like the Justice for Janitors campaigns of the 1990s.
But again, as the author does throughout the book, opposing opinions are also provided of scholars, labor lawyers and media sources supporting SEIU’s current approach. But in this chapter, at the same time, Early convincingly discloses the extensive financial connections these pro-SEIU academics and writers have to the powerful union they so lavishly heap praise upon – something the seemingly objective sources, to their utter professional embarrassment, failed to disclose.
The Dilemma of our Time
Every labor supporter wants to see union membership grow and reverse the shocking membership decline that now lingers at a depression-era low of seven percent of the private workforce. Every labor supporter that wants to achieve these goals also faces the common problem of an emotionally frustrated and politically confused working class not yet ready to take center stage.
No doubt, the recent massive mobilizations of government employees in Madison, Wisconsin, which followed closely the deeper revolutionary worker mobilizations in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, gives some hope that forms of social, union and class consciousness may be on the rise both nationally and internationally.
Early provides much insight into how to promote this greater awareness by describing exactly the results, tragic in many ways, of SEIU’s staff-driven, top-down approach as contrasted to the more difficult but productive examples he describes of seeking to inform and involve working people at the base around the goals and objectives of the union.
Civil Wars leaves the reader with a very sober understanding of current problems which cannot and should not be discounted. These are difficult times indeed. But, surprisingly enough, it also leaves us with an optimistic message about the ample rewards that come from continuing to emphasize democratic control and active involvement of workers in their unions as the way forward to achieving expanded social, economic and political goals of a revitalized labor movement.
Carl Finamore is Machinist Local 1781 delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council, AFL-CIO. He can be reached at local1781@yahoo.com
Talking Union invites further discussion of Steve Early’s The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor and the issues it discusses.
From Refinery Town to Progressive City
Robert J. S. Ross ▪ April 6, 2017
The August 6, 2012 fire at Chevron's Richmond refinery, as seen here from Oakland, helped make the company's abuses a cause célèbre for the local progressives (Stephen Schiller / Flickr)
Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money and the Remaking of an American City
by Steve Early
Beacon Press, 2017, 248 pp.
On November 8, as Donald Trump won the presidency and the Republican Party held both House and Senate, something altogether different was unfolding in Richmond, California. In the gritty Bay Area town (population 108,000), young activists with the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) won two much-coveted seats to secure the group a majority on the city council and claimed victory in a hard-fought campaign for rent control. In his meticulously detailed and insightful account in Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money and the Remaking of an American City, Steve Early—himself an RPA member—tells the story of Richmond, its activists, and their long-running quest to beat the Chevron Corporation and other “big money” interests in their own backyard. With a preface by Senator Bernie Sanders, Refinery Town presents a story that the Sanderistas (now under the banner of Our Revolution) would like to replicate around the country. While the lessons of Richmond are apt to be broadly useful, there are also limits to their applicability in both policy and politics.
Two main features stamp public perception of Richmond and its reality as well. Chevron’s oil-refinery complex is the town’s largest employer and contributes about 10 percent of the company’s global sales. The refinery management has had a corresponding influence on Richmond politics, pouring millions into electoral campaigns to head off any regulations that might harm its bottom line. The results have been all too clear. A 2012 fire at the refinery, causing scores of hospital visits from toxic emissions, and earlier dangerous gas leaks have made Chevron a cause célèbre for the local progressives, from the Green Party activists who are clustered in the RPA to an alphabet soup of Bay Area environmental groups and agencies.
Richmond is also known as a majority-minority city, a West Coast rust-belt outpost facing high rates of poverty and crime. From a Northeast or Midwest perspective, Richmond is not so distinctive in these ways; where it stands out, according to Early’s account, is as a progressive city that has succeeded in lowering crime while advancing racial, economic, and environmental justice.
Richmond’s demographic history is familiar to the Rust Belt. The city’s famous Kaiser shipyards and other wartime facilities attracted thousands of black workers from the South in the 1940s. Confined to segregated public housing, African Americans hardly received a warm welcome, but they set down roots and stayed long after the war ended and the shipyards and the Ford Motor Company closed down or moved away. In recent decades, Richmond’s black residents have been joined by large numbers of Latinos, both documented and not. Today, about 23 percent of Richmond’s population is black and about 40 percent Latino. The poverty rate is a bit under 18 percent. In 2015, the violent crime rate stood at 894 per 100,000, down about a quarter from a decade earlier.
There are cities of comparable size and demographic makeup to Richmond dotted across the country, some of them a bit worse off economically—from Hartford, Connecticut and Providence, Rhode Island on the East Coast to Buffalo, New York and Allentown, Pennsylvania in the Rust Belt to Waco, Texas and many more cities further west. Richmond is neither as poor or violent as Bay Area legend has it nor so unique that activists elsewhere in the country can’t learn from its example.
The Richmond Progressive Association (RPA) was founded in 2003, a convergence of local activists who had worked on homelessness, environmental issues (especially toxic pollution from the Chevron refinery), antiwar mobilizations, and community planning. Frustrated by the early years of the Bush administration, they aimed at transforming their local politics—a machine long dominated by a combination of Chevron money and influence and conservative police and firefighters’ unions.
Among progressive or left-leaning local political participants, there is a clear difference between those who have worked mostly within established party structures and those who have worked largely outside of them. I experience this myself, as a member of a local Democratic Town Committee who fits into the latter category. My committee neighbors in the village of Southborough, Massachusetts, are largely on the more liberal side of the Democratic Party (and a rough impression is that more voted for Bernie than Hillary), but I never encounter them at a march or demonstration. Richmond stands out in that longtime movement activists now dominate local politics, while continuing to collaborate with city-hall insiders.
Facilitating the activists’ ability to cooperate with one another was and is Richmond’s nonpartisan municipal elections. This allowed the activist Greens and the progressive Democrats to work together. As one founder, a Latino Democrat, put it, there were no “structural impediments” to this coalition. Nonpartisan municipal elections are a heritage of early Progressive movement reforms, and are very common—although, political scientists note, they tend to produce more conservative (Republican) local governments than predicted. “Fusion” voting laws—also known as cross-endorsement, multi-party nomination, plural nomination, and ballot freedom—can also facilitate this kind of coalition. Fiorello LaGuardia, New York’s progressive mayoral hero, was a “Fusion” candidate*; the Working Families Party of New York uses its endorsement of left (and sometimes not-so-left) Democrats to allow progressives to vote for its candidates without being “spoilers” in close races.
In their first election campaign in 2004, two RPA candidates ran for city council and one, in a surprise, won. Gayle McLaughlin went on to become Richmond’s mayor from 2007 to 2014 and was then elected, again, to the city council in 2015. RPA candidates have won ten of sixteen races they have entered for city council and mayor. As of last November, they have a working majority on Richmond’s city council.
Apart from their admirably determined commitment to stay together, argue through differences, and pursue a long list of mutually negotiated issues—both “identity” and “class” based—there are two keys to the RPA’s electoral success. Early notes the RPA’s emphasis on ground-level, door-to-door, neighbor-to-neighbor canvassing, talking about issues, laying out the progressive position, holding public meetings, and standing up for transparency, even when inundated with big money: these allowed the RPA, through dogged persistence, to gain a major foothold in governing.
And that’s the second takeaway: governing ain’t easy, coalition-building is arduous and often acrimonious, and it is as painful in attainment as it is rewarding. Richmond voters know the RPA means what it says. Integrity is an asset, especially when defending controversial positions. One such decision was to fly the rainbow flag over city hall during the mayoralty of the energetic Gayle McLaughlin, a decision urged in part by Jovanka Beckles, an Afro-Latina immigrant and the city’s first openly lesbian councilwoman. For a time, city council meetings became what Early reports were “Tuesday night cage fights” of invective and personal attacks aimed at the flag. One would not have thought that this was ground on which the RPA wanted to fight a big battle—what with Chevron pressing to revamp the refinery to take in more polluting types of crude, foreclosures threatening large swaths of homeowners, and rents going sky high. But they had committed themselves to gay rights, and they stood firm on it all.
For a town whose population could just about sit together in Michigan Stadium (a.k.a. the Big House, capacity 107,601), the amount of activity Early documents, concentrated in one decade, is nothing short of amazing. Under McLaughlin’s mayoralty, the RPA was able to influence the selection of a progressive police chief—white, openly gay, and coming straight from Fargo, North Dakota, no less—who managed to take a nasty, abusive force and through creative programs reduce violent crime and transform the standing of the police force among communities of color; they were able to resist Chevron’s attempts to transform the refinery into a processor of dirtier oil; and since McLaughlin was succeeded by Tom Butt, a Democrat, in 2015, they have enacted rent control and a just-cause eviction restraint, while cementing a majority on city council. In 2013 they floated but could not enact a creative solution to the foreclosure crisis, which would have allowed the municipality to seize delinquent properties through eminent domain and help refinance the mortgages through an entrepreneurial broker—leaving families in their homes. Ultimately dashed for both political and technical reasons, the proposal nevertheless dazzled policy wonks (this writer included) about the possibilities of progressive action in a time of crisis.
Early’s last full chapter ends on the eve of the 2016 election. It looks forward to what actually happened: an electoral victory, in Richmond at least. But that story alone would be too neat. Early’s epilogue is a serious essay about limits.
City governments and their powers derive from state constitutions. Much of what they can do depends on state legislatures and governors. Early notes properly that Bill de Blasio’s plan for pre-kindergarten for New York city kids was in part configured as a redistributive scheme, to be funded by a new tax on the very wealthy. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo absorbed the issue but not the tax.
There are other aspects to the Richmond case that highlight challenges that center around its political demography. The RPA has at times struggled to present itself as a vehicle for racial justice. Over the course of its first ten years, it came under regular fire from members of the city’s established black leadership for what they charged was a condescending approach toward Richmond’s majority black and Latino population. With backing from Chevron and later real-estate and other corporate interests, longtime city councilmembers Nat Bates and Corky Boozé regularly sparred with the RPA, with Bates referring to the group as the “Richmond Plantation Alliance.” And these charges did not come out of nowhere: while the RPA’s original activist base was representative of all of Richmond’s communities, it was weighted heavily to older white activists. Early documents the RPA’s self-examination in this respect and their successful initiatives to diversify their leadership and candidates. Of the six now representing the RPA in city government, only one (McLaughlin) is white, and the leading vote-getter in the 2016 city council election was African-American first-time candidate Melvin Willis.
So what’s keeping this success from being replicated in other places? For one thing, majority-minority constituencies have many predilections to progressive politics that are harder to overcome among white constituencies. The RPA can serve as an exemplar for many cities, including larger ones, in both form and content. But local progressives will sooner or later have to turn to state legislatures to pass broader measures—or to defend themselves from crippling preemptions. At that point, they may find themselves up against the preferences of a white majority with very different priorities.
In the wake of November’s debacle, Democrats—and especially the left wing of the party—have acknowledged the need for a new “fifty-state strategy” and are at least gesturing toward taking back the statehouses. A central part of any such strategy, which one hopes the new Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez understands, is that state legislatures (and governors) will redraw the congressional map after the 2020 census. Letting a thousand Richmonds bloom is one piece of the big picture; another is writing the RPA story for state-wide, and yes, in many cases, whiter constituencies.
The problem for the chattering classes is that state legislatures lack the drama and big-picture sweep in which their journals of opinion and literary reviews specialize. Expats from the Beltway and the Empire State read the New York Times and the Washington Post, not the Detroit Free Press or the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. They are steeped in national issues, not to say global ones, rather than the minutiae of local politics.
Still, Refinery Town suggests that there is hope yet. No local story can stand for all of them; each place has gone from the past to the present along its own path; but there so many places with so many similarities to Richmond, California that students of and activists in local affairs will be well advised to pay heed. And many of the Richmond’s lessons apply broadly to state, and even national, politics as well: forging unity among liberal Democrats and further-left outsiders, for example. The future of Bernie Sanders’s post-primary outfit Our Revolution—which endorsed RPA city council candidates Melvin Willis and Ben Choi in November—will be one test of that. As for the big picture, folks: 2020 will be upon us in a flash; Richmond shows one way it can be a better time.
Robert J. S. Ross is a Research Professor of Sociology and the Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise at Clark University and the author of Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops.
DECEMBER 30, 2016
The Dilemmas of Progressive Electoral Politics
by MIKE MILLER
A review of Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City, by Steve Early, Forward by Senator Bernie Sanders, Beacon Press, 2016.
In the otherwise bleak landscape of American politics, a few oases exist. One of the most hopeful is the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), a now almost 15-year old electoral effort in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Richmond. In Refinery Town, activist-author and recently-arrived Richmond resident Steve Early tells its story. It is a tale well-told, and a good antidote for the despair that now runs rampant among many American progressives.
RPA was built by people on the left. In its politics, it departed from much of what has been the more mainstream progressivism:
+ It is multi-issue, not single issue.
+ It raises money from individuals and organizations like unions; it isn’t foundation dependent, and it accepts no funds from corporations.
+ It is multi-ethnic and racial; its members are young and old, and they come from a variety of backgrounds: environmental groups, unions, interest and “identity” organizations, senior clubs and more; it is thus forced to deal with ‘contradictions among the people’ in its internal deliberations, candidate selection and policy formulations.
+ Its focus is on economic justice and environment issues, not identify politics.
+ While its focus is electoral, it joins issue campaign coalitions with a variety of organizations, including the Saul Alinsky/Fred Ross-tradition Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) (heir to ACORN) and the Alinsky-tradition Contra Costa [county] Interfaith Supporting Community Organization (CCISCO), a local affiliate of the PICO National Network, unions (particularly the Steel Workers local at Chevron and public employee unions like AFSCME and SEIU, interest and constituency organizations (environment, human rights, GLBTQ), and others—thus giving it a more-than-election time relationship with organizations whose members include the voters it wants to reach.
As well, Early describes the transformation of what was a Chevron company town to one that now talks back to its patron, and forces it to become more accountable—particularly on local tax, pollution/health and safety issues that in past uncontested Chevron formulations denied resources to the city and threatened the well-being of both residents and workers.
Because he is a member of RPA, Early is also able to give an insider’s view of an important change in the composition of the organization’s leadership—from older to mixed young-and-old, from “Anglo” to multi-ethnic and racial, and from left politicos to a more eclectic body whose roots are in a variety of experiences and left-of-center points of view.
He further illuminates a major internal debate that took place over the character of refinerytownthe organization, and its successful transition to an age and racial/ethnic mix and a variety of progressive backgrounds. I will deal later with both.
These, and other strengths, are all present in Early’s book. He successfully combines lively anecdotes, easy to read narrative, skillful analysis of often-complex issues, portraits of local leaders including the engaging Green Party former Richmond mayor Gayle McLaughlin, and commentary that places RPA in the larger context of American society and politics. A lot is packed in these pages. The importance of the book for these times is attested to by a Bernie Sanders foreward, and “blurbs” from such progressive and left notables as Immanuel Ness, Larry Cohen, Robert Reich, Annie Leonard and Kshama Sawant.
The politics of RPA’s growing influence and displacement of the city’s old guard is another of Early’s themes. An older African-American community leadership made its accommodation with Chevron, and was the beneficiary of its plantation economy paternalism: money for community-based nonprofits, and for black politicians who had the view, epitomized by veteran council member Nat Bates, that Richmond should be thankful for Chevron’s presence and not challenge any of its prerogatives.
The ins-and-outs of electoral politics, and the bitterness of the conflict among politicians, are told in a lively and often entertaining manner. When Bates runs for mayor, and no likely centrist emerges to oppose him, RPA leader Mike Parker reluctantly decides to challenge him. At the last minute, veteran council member Tom Butt—who RPA had earlier urged to run—decides that Parker isn’t electable and enters the race. An agonizing internal discussion in RPA leads to the conclusion that Parker should withdraw. The story of the campaign is, itself, worth the price of the book.
Early deals with the broad range of issues that are part of RPA’s agenda, including environment, taxation and public services, immigration, public health (a defeated soda tax campaign), the loss of a nearby public hospital, poverty and more, and, of course, the arrogance and power of Chevron. In this review, I want to focus on affordable housing and police, and RPA’s internal governance discussion, and comment on some strategic questions that, from my perspective, are unfortunately not part of the book.
That Chevron arrogance and power, by the way, had an interesting positive to it: RPA could make the environment a mass-based issue because Chevron was shitting on everybody, without regard to race, ethnicity, class, age or gender.
Urban Policing
Fifteen years ago, Richmond had one of the highest rates of violence, including homicide, in the country. It was overwhelmingly in the city’s black community, and involved drugs and gangs. The police department that was supposed to deal with crime was, itself, corrupt. Even before RPA’s arrival on the scene, urban reformers in Richmond were trying to get a handle on the problem.
Enter America’s most unlikely urban police chief, Chris Magnus, “a fair-haired Midwesterner,” gay and openly married, son of a university professor father and piano teacher mother, and most recently chief in lily-white Fargo, North Dakota. Magnus turned the department around, demonstrating what administrative leadership in a public agency, backed by elected and appointed public officials and an engaged citizenry, can do. He weeded out the worst of the cops; put the entire force through intensive technical policing and cultural awareness training; moved his officers from their cars and headquarters onto the streets and bicycles, and more generally implemented a full program of “community policing” that went far beyond the slogan (as Magnus put it, “If you’re really committed to community policing, you have to make structural changes within your organization.”). He choose to live in a modest Richmond neighborhood, and made himself available to whomever it was in the community who wanted to talk with him.
Magnus bucked heads with the police union. Early presents the dilemma facing pro-labor liberals, progressives and leftists: police, firefighter, correctional officer, building trades and other unions have been bastions of resistance to reform and to hiring minorities and women. Too often, the good old boys like what they’ve got and want to keep it that way. RPA dealt with the problem too, taking a clear stand for reform. In so doing, they on occasion also had to oppose the city’s black political establishment, including its captive local branch of the NAACP. RPA was among those instrumental in providing a political vehicle for a new generation of minority activists, some of whom are now elected members of the city council, and others leaders of RPA itself.
Magnus choose Operation Ceasefire as his vehicle to de-militarize the gangs and refocus their energies on peaceful activities. Unfortunately, there are two ceasefire programs in the country, and Early doesn’t tell us which one Magnus used. No matter: urban police reformers need to read David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot: One man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in inner-city America. I think Magnus used this one. Thompson is worth quoting at some length because he is not “left” in any usual sense of the word:
[Ceasefire is] still not welcome in some quarters. It’s too soft for some, too hard for others. This is a variation on the theme of enforcement vs. social services, but with philosophical roots. There’s the camp that believes in individual accountability, thinks crime is about bad character and bad choices, society has to take a stand about right and wrong. There’s that in what we do—We’ll stop you if you make us—but it’s not just that. It means that it doesn’t work to say, any longer, Those are terrible people, hold them accountable, lock them up. There’s the camp that believes in social accountability, thinks crime is about history and neglect and oppression, society has to take a stand about what it has done to troubled communities. There’s that in what we do—We’ll help you if you let us—but it’s not just that. It means it doesn’t work to say, any longer, Those people are victims, they’re not responsible, they need programs, support.
The old duality is simple, and it may be comforting, but it’s wrong. We need to find a new, more complicated logic, and we have. It’s a logic that says no amount of law enforcement will ever work, that law enforcement as we’ve been practicing it is part of the problem. It’s a logic that says no amount of traditional social investment will ever work, that the programs don’t help very much, that treating people doing terrible things as “clients” is part of the problem. It’s a logic that says, someone can be doing terrible things and still be a victim; someone can have done wrong and still deserve help; someone can have been the victim of history and neglect and it’s still right to demand that they stop hurting people. Not even remotely radical ideas: a good parent says, all the time, You’ve broken the rules, and I’m going to do something about it, and I love you and of course I will continue to care for you and hold you close. But radical when it comes to talking about crime, where commitment to accountability seems to crowd out room for caring, and commitment to caring seems to crowd out room for accountability.
The long and short of it is that violence dramatically declined in Richmond, and even some of his bitterly critical initial opponents have come around to give credit to Magnus for his program. He has since moved on to the larger police department in Tucson, AZ. But before he left, the dramatic decline in violence suffered a reversal, a warning that reform at the local level takes place in a context beyond its control.
Gentrification and Affordable Housing
For a brief period, Richmond became a livable city that was below the region’s radar. Thus it was both affordable and a nice place to be. And there was the bonus of a 40-minute BART (rapid transit) commute to San Francisco’s Civic Center and downtown. Low-income service industry workers, artists, a shrinking but still substantial African-American community (devastated by the housing speculation crash of 2007-09), newcomer Latinos, a more substantial working class in good union jobs, and a professional middle class all lived there. It was too good to last.
Early takes us through the crisis in affordable housing that now plagues the greater San Francisco Bay Area. The dramatic growth of hi-tech, from Santa Clara County’s Silicon Valley (45 minutes south of San Francisco) to San Francisco itself, resulted in skyrocketing home purchase and rental costs. In San Francisco, a $600,000 single-family home that doesn’t require massive repair is considered a bargain, and a two-bedroom rental at $3,500 is a pretty good deal too. (Median one-bedroom units are now $3,590; two bedrooms, $4,870.) The resulting “market forces” make it necessary for low-to-middle income renters, unless they’re fortunate enough to qualify for and find subsidized housing, to look elsewhere.
What happened in San Francisco then spread across the bay to Oakland. No place is immune; I know people who leave their homes in Tracy at 4:00 a.m. to beat rush-hour traffic, drive an hour to their jobs, sleep in their cars until the beginning of their work day, and don’t get home until 7:00 p.m. or later.
Finally, it caught up with Richmond. Over the last five years, home purchase prices almost tripled. Affordable rental housing is a thing of the past. Tenants whose landlords were interested in short-term maximization of profit experienced $600 and up a month rent increases. (A two-bedroom unit that cost $1100 a month in 2012 now rents for $2000.)
Compounding the affordability problem is the shrinkage of federal funding to build affordable units or subsidize rentals in market housing. This is a national crisis, not simply a Bay Area one.
All this is noted by Early. The book provides a context for the Richmond housing fight, making it more understandable.
San Francisco has strong rent control, but it is limited in what it can do, and is sometimes unfair to small landlords in its implementation. State law preempts what local rent control law can do. When a unit is vacated, it can seek market rate, and only returns to control after a new tenant moves in at the current market price. New construction is exempt (a book typo incorrectly says the law only applies to newer housing—the reverse is true); owner “move-ins” are exempt as well. Smaller landlords decide to get out of the business, leading to greater concentration of rental housing ownership, and more power for corporate owners. Landlords interested in making a buck have strong incentives to push long-term tenants out of their units, and they are ingenious at doing so. Their tactics range from buying people out of their apartments to intimidation. Foreign investors living in politically volatile countries see the housing market as a safe haven for their dollars. High land costs make it impossible to build affordable housing without subsidies to do so, and few are available. Negotiated “offsets”—the builder sets aside some units for below-market rental or puts money into a city-administered fund for affordable housing construction—in exchange for building permits and planning commission approval are insufficient to balance the loss of affordable places to live. All these are likely to soon make their appearance in Richmond.
Absent in the Richmond discussion is a strategy of nonviolent direct action: rent strikes, public shaming of unscrupulous landlords, disruption of business as usual at owner’s places of work or business, places of worship, social gatherings and wherever else leverage might be found, and, perhaps most likely to provide relief, efforts to negotiate housing subsidy funding from the region’s major corporations with mass action against them in the absence of agreements.
The obvious source of the region’s housing problem is the booming hi-tech and genetic engineering industries. Shouldn’t Twitter, Salesforce, Apple, Google, Yelp, Genentech and others be making substantial contributions to a regional housing affordability fund? But successful nonviolent direct action against them should negotiations fail to be productive requires thousands, if not tens of thousands in the streets. No such movement now exists in the Bay Area or elsewhere. Can a campaign create it? Might RPA be the catalyst for it?
In the low-to-moderate income neighborhoods that are most heavily hit by rent increases, direct action might be especially effective. I know that from my experience as a community organizer in San Francisco’s Mission District in the mid-1960s to early-1970s. Mission Coalition Organization (MCO) created an atmosphere inhospitable to investment. It put some landlords out of business. It made others think twice, and decide against, jacking up their rents. (For details, see my A Community Organizer’s Tale: People and Power in San Francisco.)
Governance and Composition
RPA’s founders viewed it as a cadre organization: a disciplined body of organizer-leaders who mobilized the Richmond electorate in support of candidates they supported and from whom they demanded accountability, and in support of issue campaigns they endorsed or led. In this they were not unlike Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), whose minister-leaders were chosen by a self-perpetuating internal nominating process, and who mobilized through the mass-based black churches of the south. In one election, RPA’s steering committee simply announced an endorsement to a membership meeting. Rumblings from the membership broadened both how the organization’s leadership is selected, and the role of the membership selecting candidates for public office—members now must endorse leadership recommendations.
Early considers these “democratic” rumblings. Perhaps this characterization is unfair. Is it more “democratic” for an activist membership numbering at the maximum in the few hundreds to make decisions, or for a self-selected cadre that is regularly touching base with its constituency and the voluntary associations comprising it to make decisions and let the chips fall where they may when their nominees or issues face the acid test of wider public support at election time?
After serious internal discussions, the organization transformed itself from its cadre form and a body of older, left activists to an internally democratic membership organization that is increasingly representative of Richmond’s demography—no small feat. Its voter education and other accomplishments deserve notice as well. Early provides it.
At times, Early is guilty of overreach in his aspirations for RPA. The creation of community, for example, requires a vast shift of Americans from consumerism and its culture to participation in civic life and a very different culture. That, in turn, requires the renewal of civil society’s unions, congregations, interest groups and other voluntary associations. Neither participatory budgeting and other government reforms nor “greater personal connection to voters” are a substitute for a vital civil society, which I believe is the necessary underpinning of a democratic society. None of which is to underestimate RPA’s importance.
From my perspective, the missing piece of the RPA representativeness puzzle is an annual or bi-annual convention that might gather a couple of thousand representative delegates from newly-formed RPA house meetings to supportive congregations and unions (and with everything in between) to adopt a platform, endorse candidates and elect RPA’s leadership. Such a gathering would provide a base of support and legitimacy that would make RPA’s claim to be the voice of the people uncontestable.
When I was a boy growing up in San Francisco, come election time I knew how my parents would vote: according to the recommendations of the International Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) Political Action Committee “slate card”. No matter what the amount of money spent by the adversaries of those recommendations, or the editorial recommendations of the several daily newspapers, the word of this then-left union was enough. And my father wasn’t even a member!
RPA offers the possibility of that kind of alternative to big money. Its multi-issue character, growing record of public integrity, attention to diversifying its membership and leadership all bode well. The road ahead will have many pot-holes. We should wish RPA well in avoiding them.
Conclusion
Early takes us on an important digression—a look at the limits of urban reform in a hostile state government environment. Specially, he looks at the battles between New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, the former a progressive Democrat, the latter a corporate Democrat. He notes, “Amid continuing academic and journalistic celebration of municipal innovation and mayoral leadership, the Cuomo-de Blasio rift provides a good reality check on the constraints faced by elected leaders in cities large and small.” He’s right. For Richmond, the situation is even worse because it doesn’t even control its schools (they’re part of a larger school district) or its public health delivery system. And the problem in the Trump era will expand exponentially!
The book’s epilogue vividly portrays the financial squeeze Richmond faces, and the dilemmas faced by reformers who want to preserve and extend public services, pay adequate wages and benefits to their employees, and implement progressive taxes. Whether RPA can wend its way through these contradictions remains to be seen. In the meantime, Early properly warns, “[A]s RPA’s experience in Richmond demonstrates, even successful electoral work conducted at the local level over many years does not by itself build year-round, multi-issue political organization. That takes an unconventional approach to politics, before, during, and after any election.”
Indeed!
In the interest of transparency, I should note that both Steve Early and RPA leader Mike Parker are friends.
“Refinery Town”: A Model for Local Political Action
Posted on January 2, 2017 by paulgarver
by Ryan Haney
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Steve Early, Photo by Robert Gumbert
Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money and the Remaking of an American City will be available from Beacon Press on January 17th, 2017.
Steve Early’s Refinery Town is a compelling read on multiple levels. It paints an interesting portrait of Richmond, CA (pop. 110,000), a Bay Area city that is home to a massive Chevron refinery. It also works as a journalistic deep dive into contemporary municipal politics, with a cast of reformers and establishment actors clashing over approaches to problems in a city wracked by disinvestment, toxic waste, corruption, and crime.
In November 2016, the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) won a majority on the City Council, overcoming massive campaign funding for their opponents by Chevron.
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(Pictured, left to right: Gayle McLaughlin, Eduardo Martinez, and Jovanka Beckles, three members of the Richmond Progressive Alliance who now serve on City Council. Photo by Tom Goulding, Richmond Confidential.)
Written before this success, Refinery Town excels as a case study for activists looking to build power at the local level through grassroots organizing and independent electoral work. Early, a longtime labor activist and journalist who moved to Richmond five years ago, counts himself among the reformers. His book is an invaluable documentation of their journey and a testimony of what might be possible in other cities.
COMPANY TOWN
Early provides a useful background on the social and economic history of the city, from the construction of the Standard Oil (now Chevron) refinery, through the immense wartime shipbuilding operations that drew thousands of African American migrants from the South, to the eventual deindustrialization of the city beginning in the 1970s.
Central to Early’s historical background are the struggles of workers for union representation at the plant and the struggles of African Americans for equality in jobs and housing. Though great strides were made on both of these fronts, Early contends that Chevron was still able to fix the terms of the political game in Richmond—terms favorable to the maximization of their profits, and to a lesser extent the pockets of the political movers and shakers enabled by the support of Big Oil.
Unfortunately, the “company town” set-up accomplished little for regular people in Richmond, who suffered greatly as the rest of the industrial base disappeared, leaving superfund sites, poverty, and crime to take place. By 2003, the city had a miserable reputation and a $35 million budget deficit that had been carefully hidden by the outgoing City Manager.
RISE OF THE RICHMOND PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE
More positive developments were also emerging in the early 2000s, though. A new group calling itself the Richmond Alliance for Green Public Power managed to defeat a Chevron-proposed power plant on the grounds that it would increase pollution in the city. There were also stirrings in the rapidly growing Latino community of Richmond, with a day laborer association successfully pressuring the Richmond Police Department to cease harassment of its members at an area Home Depot.
Emboldened by these victories and eyeing a 2004 election where five City Council seats would be up for grabs, area activists formed the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA). The RPA held a “People’s Convention,” where 300 residents set policy goals on issues that had long been ignored by elected officials, and fielded two candidates, including future mayor Gayle McLaughlin. McLaughlin, a relative unknown who was a longtime activist and member of the California Green Party, landed in fifth place and won the first seat for the RPA.
The bulk of “Refinery Town” is devoted to the story of how the RPA built on this victory and subsequent elections, growing its representation in City Hall (now up to five of seven councilors are RPA members) and its organization at the grassroots. It’s a story that, until now, had been largely relegated to the local news and Early’s own reporting on the pages of Labor Notes, Beyond Chron, and other left-wing media.
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that the story hasn’t been told in the corporate media. After all, the RPA has been a fierce opponent of corporate power, especially Big Oil, from day one. Their candidates are required to refuse corporate donations and are held accountable to a platform drafted by Greens, socialists, and left-leaning Democrats who didn’t feel represented by state or county party structures.
Their accomplishments are certainly newsworthy by any measure:
RPA pressure on Chevron netted the city hundreds of millions in tax revenue that would have otherwise lined the pockets of millionaire executives;
Their work on refinery modernization gained more stringent worker and public safety than the company was initially willing to offer;
They passed a measure to “ban the box,” fighting employment discrimination against formerly incarcerated people;
As mayor, Gayle McLaughlin supported an overhaul of the once notoriously oppressive Richmond Police Department–today the department is a national model for “community policing”;
The RPA introduced a measure to raise the city’s minimum wage to $12.30, the highest minimum in the state when it passed.
More symbolic, but no less significant, is the solidarity the elected officials and members of the RPA have built for area labor unions, environmentalist organizations, anti-poverty groups, and even with the people of Ecuador, who have long fought the toxic presence of Chevron.
The RPA also managed to pass a powerful anti-foreclosure program, utilizing the power of eminent domain to keep residents in their homes—unfortunately, this program was effectively killed by legislation signed by President Obama in 2014 that prevented any federal role in financing mortgages of homes taken through eminent domain.
As we get into the most recent years of the RPA experience, Early offers us a very close look inside the strategic maneuverings of the RPA leadership as they respond to various challenges. For example, a controversial police shooting under the watch of a reformer police chief that the Alliance had supported created significant strain with allies in the Bay Area. Another controversy developed during the 2014 elections, when the group faced a decision on whether or not to keep an RPA candidate in a mayoral race where he might have split the anti-Chevron vote.
What’s important about these anecdotes, for those of us outside of Richmond, is to learn from the real world pressures that will inevitably challenge any experiment in independent politics. How much should one sacrifice principle in favor of preserving electoral gains? Which battles should be fought, at what time, and on whose terms? How does a scrappy, volunteer-run, left-wing coalition manage strategic relationships to its “right” within municipal institutions, while privileging its partnerships with grassroots organizations whose role it is to put constant pressure on those same institutions?
There are no easy answers, of course, but the experience is invaluable in itself. Because the RPA is not just an electoral coalition, but a grassroots membership organization, these issues are openly debated and resolved democratically. The lessons generated from that experience are generalized among the membership, rather than confined to party functionaries and professionals. Early’s transcription of these experiences onto the pages of his book greatly enriches the national discussion on independent politics.
LESSONS FOR INDEPENDENT POLITICS
With so many Sandernistas still hungry for a politics free of corporate influence that can expand the horizon of what’s possible, Refinery Town could not have come at a more opportune moment. Sanders proved how a social democratic platform, much like that of the RPA, resonates with working people and youth across the country.
The army of activists built through his campaign is still out there, armed with practical experience and rightfully wary of corporate influence within the Democratic Party. Furthermore, the failure of Clinton’s campaign to defeat Trump and an emboldened far right underscores the importance of articulating a working class politics, as Sanders did, that builds solidarity to defeat the one percent.
Senator Sanders himself wrote the forward to Refinery Town, claiming, “to change US politics, we need more cities like Richmond, California.” And it’s not at all hard to imagine how successful replications of the Richmond experience could one day “trickle up” into state and congressional politics, causing real trouble for the servants of capital in both parties.
But before that can happen, it will take people passionate about declaring their independence from corporate influence getting together and not just talking, but strategizing about building power that flows from the grassroots and is capable of expressing itself in government. The experience of those involved in both “realignment” strategies and third party approaches to independent politics will be essential to the conversation, as will new formations like LeftElect (in which Gayle McLaughlin and other RPA members have been involved).
It will also take getting Refinery Town into the hands of fellow activists and union members who may not yet be convinced that there’s a more promising path than continuing to support “lesser evils” or abstaining altogether from electoral politics. After the depressing victory of Trump, the story of the RPA may be exactly the inspiration they need to dream big again.
Ryan Haney is a labor activist and Teamster, based in Dallas, Texas. He spent some time in Richmond in 2014 assisting with the RPA campaigns that elected three of their members to the City Council.