On June 19, at a Juneteenth membership meeting, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area inducted Angela Davis as an honorary member.

Local 10 President Trent Willis opened the ceremony by calling on women members of the longshore workers’ union and women members of the community to testify on Angela Davis’ behalf.

They each said that Davis’ lifetime of fighting for social justice had opened doors for them. Much of what they spoke about was written on the plaque certifying her membership:

“Sister Angela Davis’ selection … is a testament to her life’s work that embodies what ILWU Local 10 stands for. She is a radical African American female activist-scholar ­writer and educator, who has been in the vanguard of the Black liberation movement and struggle for the emancipation of the working class at home and abroad.

“She is indeed an internationalist. Her politics and beliefs reflect those of the founders of the ILWU. As a result, Sister ­Angela has been the victim of targeting by the FBI, she has faced death threats, she has also been placed on the FBI 10 Most Wanted List, and held as a political prisoner. All of this is attributed to her uncompromising commitment to fighting systemic racism, capitalism, and imperialism.”

Call for justice in 1971

Davis has a long history with the ILWU.

In 1971, Cleophas Williams wrote the following resolution which called for justice for Angela Davis at the ILWU Convention:

“WHEREAS: We know from California history that anti-­radical hysteria and frameup are anti-labor weapons; and

“WHEREAS: We know that Tom Mooney, a labor organizer, was kept in prison for 32 years before it was officially acknowledged that he was framed. We know that Harry Bridges was ­per­se­cu­ted for 20 years because he was an effective and militant union leader; and

“WHEREAS: Now there is a relentless crusade to kill Angela Davis, prejudice and frameup is now employed to crush Black Militancy. The same device has ­always been used against labor when the powers of big business and government decide that organized workers are ‘getting out of line;’ and

“WHEREAS: When President Nixon, Governor Reagan and the big money press incite the legal lynching of Angela Davis, ­experience tells us to beware. Those are our enemies too. It could well be us ‘next time around,’ or it could be you; and

“WHEREAS: Angela is also charged with conspiracy. An old gimmick used to repress the labor movement in this country. We defend ourselves by ­defending Angela Davis;

“THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: The International Convention of the ILWU goes on record to support Angela Davis and to see that she receives a fair trial and is released on bail pending trial.”

Juneteenth speech becomes reality

This is only the third time an honorary ILWU membership has been bestowed, the first being to Paul Robeson in 1943, and the second to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had spoken before ILWU Local 10 only six months before he was assassinated.

When the union’s president, Trent Willis, spoke on Angela Davis’ membership, he talked about what it meant to be a member of ILWU Local 10 and it’s historic Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and white rank-and-file unity. He said, “Know who you are!”

Willis said he’d been reading Malcolm X on “The Ballot or the Bullet.”  He explained that the racist war is ongoing and that the union contract is a form of war meant to prevent real war. He said that if people were denied participation in the voting process, as is currently being enacted by some in the U.S. Congress and some states, that denial of rights is an open act of war.

In upholding the fighting legacy of ILWU Local 10, Willis pointed out that Davis had gone to prison to defend her people. The union hall erupted!

Angela Davis expressed her appreciation by reiterating the role of Local 10 in linking the fight for workers’ rights to combating racist capitalism. She talked about how Local 10 had refused to unload cargo from apartheid ships from South Africa as well as the recent apartheid ship from Israel; how they used their power at the point of production to support Mumia Abu-Jamal. The union hall erupted again!

One year ago, during the height of the pandemic, Angela Davis spoke to dockworkers and community protesters at the 2020 Juneteenth Commemoration at the Port of Oakland.

She said, “I was thinking the other day that if I did not become a university professor, my next choice probably would have been to become a dock worker or warehouse worker in order to be a member of the most radical union in the country, the ILWU.”

In her speech on Juneteenth 2021, Honorary ILWU Local 10 Member Angela Davis spoke about the official U.S. government recognition of the holiday occurring some 158 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and one year after the burst of outrage that gripped the country following the police murders of George Floyd, Breona Taylor and all the others.

The Unemployed Workers Union announced a lawsuit June 24 challenging Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s decision to end several pandemic unemployment programs early. The class-action lawsuit in Baltimore Circuit Court also seeks benefits for people whose cases have been pending in the state’s claims system.

Many claimants have been disqualified from benefits “without explanation or hearing” or “were placed in an ‘on-hold’ status for months at a time or indefinitely,” the lawsuit charges.

“The stories we have heard from people who have not received a dime — a dime — over the past year are beyond harrowing,” attorney Alec Summerfield said at a press conference in Baltimore before heading into the courthouse to file the lawsuit. “People who worked for decades now cannot afford to put food on the table. This is a disgrace.”

https://www.facebook.com/strugglelalucha/videos/601520320811342

SUNDAY, JUNE 20, AT 3 PM EDT

Book Launch of Mobilizing In Our Own Name: Million Worker March
on Sunday, June 20, 2021

June 2 — We condemn Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s abrupt decision to curtail federal pandemic unemployment benefits early, giving the unemployed just one month’s notice. Just weeks earlier, the State Labor Department said that Maryland would not be joining states that returned federal benefits.

Looking beyond the false rhetoric that “benefits are keeping people from taking jobs” are the facts. The April jobs figures were deeply disappointing. Dow Jones estimated one million new jobs; instead, new jobs totaled only 266,000.  

The national unemployment rate inched up to 6.1%; Maryland’s is slightly higher at 6.2%. Baltimore City is 7.6% and Prince George’s County is 8%.

We assert that the motive for removing the meager federal safety net (which costs the state nothing) is to create an ever-larger and desperate group of unemployed workers that will push wages and benefits down for all workers.

It is the responsibility of the government to protect and defend all of its people. It is reprehensible for the state government to leave workers at the mercy of the so-called “market” rather than planning for decent-paying jobs, dignity and economic stability for everyone. 

Where is the “Public Works Program”? Is the Labor Department opening up its doors and providing training and job placement?  

Insult to injury: People have not received benefits 

The Peoples Power Assembly has filed two separate “Freedom of Information Requests” with the state. The first is to provide our organization with the number of people who have yet to receive unemployment benefits through the Beacon system, whether state or federal, and the second is to give the number of people who received the one-time grant while their benefits were delayed. 

To date, we have heard from no one who has received the state benefit. Instead, we have heard horror stories from people who have not received a dime of their benefits, despite applying a year ago. 

The Peoples Power Assembly has launched the Maryland Unemployed Workers Union to help fight for our rights and obtain our state and CARES Act benefits. Together and united, we can win! We want jobs or income now! Halt evictions, foreclosures and repossessions for all unemployed workers.  

Every Thursday, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., we hold a clinic for unemployed workers to file formal grievances and appeals. A pro bono attorney and assistants are present to fill out grievances and execute letters to the labor secretary and governor.

Join us in front of our office at 2011 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. We assemble outdoors, in front of the office, and masked for everyone’s comfort and safety. The clinic takes place rain or shine. If our tents are not adequate, we will meet inside and maintain social distance.

We realize that people who live outside the Baltimore metropolitan area cannot make it in person. Please let us know, and we will arrange a zoom call. Text (410) 218-4835 with your email, telephone number and information. 

Mobilizing in Our Own Name: Million Worker March
An anthology by Clarence Thomas
DeClare Publishing
MillionWorkerMarch.com
Available at most booksellers

Although I began to write a review of this remarkable anthology as a literary and historical assessment, it is much more than that to me. It is personal. 

Clarence Thomas — the “real” Clarence Thomas, labor leader and author — tells an amusing story of his conflicted reaction when he heard some Detroiter appropriated the Million Worker March (MWM) T-shirt design and made T-shirts! 

That was me. Just weeks away from the Million Worker March on Oct. 17, 2004, the Detroit Labor Day Parade and Labor Fest gathered hundreds of workers — our audience — in one place. But the official T-shirts couldn’t get here in time to deck out the distribution team. In the spirit of MWM, we forged ahead. No T-shirts, no problem — we made a few to wear for the day.

What drew me so intensely to the MWM? Only when I was present at the Lincoln Memorial on that day did I understand. It was the only time since my first national march in Washington, D.C. — against the Vietnam War in 1967 — that the hardhat, overalls and work boots I wore meant something more than a way to earn a paycheck, to pay the bills so I could do political organizing. 

Being a worker counted; our independent voice, unfiltered through capitalist party politicians, counted in the Million Worker March Movement.

Looking back now, through these pages, pictures and documents, the MWM was our movement’s equivalent of a Midwestern spring crocus pushing through the snow of the remnants of the Cold War, McCarthy red-scare and post-9/11 Patriot Act.

A harbinger of upsurge

I think we can say MWM’s independent voice was a harbinger of the upsurge reflected in the electoral arena through the wide, unexpected enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders’ unapologetically socialist campaign in 2016. When the facade of U.S. democracy overrode the desire for progressive change, the imperialist business-as-usual Democratic Party pro-war corporate candidates were rejected, saddling the world with wannabe fascistic emperor Trump.

The striving for progressive change thwarted in 2016 was renewed in the unprecedented mass movement throughout pandemic summer 2020. Justice was demanded for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many more, but also deeper systemic justice. It burst through in over 2,000 cities and towns in all 50 states with as many as 26 million U.S. participants.

International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 and MWM organizing and leadership in action against police brutality and murders foreshadowed this development, too. 

In 2010, ILWU Local 10 shut down Bay Area ports for justice for Oscar Grant, and on May Day 2015 with the union action to stop police killings of Black and Brown people. 

For me, the example of ILWU founder and leader Harry Bridges uniting with the San Francisco Black community to take control of the waterfront jobs echoes October 10, 1868, in Cuba, when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed enslaved Black workers, asking them to join in the fight for Cuban independence. More than a winning strategy, it is fundamental. 

This was the key to winning the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, forging the ILWU with Black workers at its militant core, and Local 10 where the Million Worker March was born.

Centrality of Black workers

The settler-colonial crimes underpinning the United States of America can no longer be denied. The false concept of white supremacy is condemned publicly even from the presidential lectern. 

The centrality of Black workers is one of two historical components of the ILWU that made the MWM possible. The other is the rank-and-file character of the ILWU. The ILWU survived the McCarthy era, refused anti-communism and the Taft-Hartley “loyalty” oaths to capitalism.  

Today Black workers, Latinx and Indigenous peoples and women lead the pivotal working-class social justice movements of our time. The Bessemer, Ala., organizing drive at Amazon; fast food workers fighting for $15 and a union; nurses and health-care workers demanding COVID-19 personal protective equipment and safe staffing, challenging the corporate sickness-for-profit health industry. 

Workers and social movements are pressing against systemic boundaries as the MWM showed us in 2004.

Million Worker March’s influence 

Although this book is about one initiative, one time in history, it has influenced or been part of all the major struggles in the nearly 20 years since MWM organizing began: from advances in understanding gender, to migrant and immigrant struggles, to solidarity with Palestine, international solidarity against war from Venezuela to Iraq, to the pandemic. 

“Mobilizing in Our Own Name” is the story of the Million Worker March, but it is also very much the reflection of the life of a third-generation longshoreman and his family that is intertwined with the struggles, social fabric and political history of Oakland, Calif., and the Black freedom movement. 

We thank the REAL Clarence Thomas for sharing with new and old generations this remarkable history and labor of love. 

May 7 — Baltimore activists held a news conference to announce a campaign to win justice for unemployed workers who have not received their benefits.  

Several workers discussed their hardships and interactions with the Maryland Department of Labor’s Division of Unemployment Insurance. A union representative spoke for the workers inside the department.  

Thousands have yet to receive their benefits due under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and face evictions, foreclosures, car repossessions and more.

The group announced an unemployed workers’ speak-out and picket line. The event will be held on Saturday, May 22, 2 p.m. at 1100 N. Eutaw St., Baltimore.  Unemployed workers, friends, family and supporters are encouraged to come out and participate.

The state government is violating the CARES Act. Our benefits belong to us! Bills are due now — it’s life and death for us!  We say: Service now — no more games, pay up! Unemployment benefits are a right!

Presenters included:

Steven Ceci, unemployed hospitality worker

Rasika Ruwanpathirana, unemployed warehouse worker

Joyce Butler, community organizer, Peoples Power Assembly

A union representative spoke for workers inside the Maryland Department of Labor’s Division of Unemployment Insurance

Sharon Black of the PPA chaired the news conference

Starting in 1930, Union Carbide hired 5,000 people to build the Hawks Nest Tunnel In West Virginia. It became a deathtrap for the workers, most of whom were Black.

Cutting through three miles of sandstone, at least 764 workers died from the silica dust that tore through their lungs like pieces of glass. The death toll may have reached 2,000.

No safety measures were taken. Workers were covered with the deadly silica dust. Black employees who were ill were forced to go to work at gunpoint. 

After being promised high wages, employees worked between 10 and 15 hours a day for 25 cents an hour.  

Because of segregated cemeteries, many of the Black victims were buried on a farm. Others were buried in an old slave cemetery or alongside roads.

Fifty years later, 15,000 people were killed on Dec. 2, 1984, when a Union Carbide pesticide plant exploded in Bhopal, India. At least 30 tons of toxins were released that created an open-air gas chamber.

None of these crimes prevented Union Carbide, now owned by Dow Chemical, from raking in over $1 billion in profits in 2018. 

It’s only the class struggle of poor and working people that forced corporations to adopt any safety measures. Typical was an early rule book of the Pennsylvania Railroad, most of whose tracks are now owned by the Norfolk Southern.

It told employees that if they got injured or killed, it was their problem, not the company’s. In 1909, one out of every 210 railroad brakemen in the United States were killed on the job. (“The Economic History of the United States” by Ernest Bogart.)

The response of the Interstate Commerce Commission was to stop collecting such statistics. It wasn’t until 1911 that the first workers’ compensation law in the U.S. was passed in Wisconsin. 

Despite these laws, workers continue to be killed and maimed on the job. In U.S. coal mines alone, 100,000 miners were killed during the 20th century.  

The billion-dollar art collection of mine owner Henry Clay Frick — whose paintings are displayed in his former mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — is covered in blood. 

OSHA was won by struggle

The AFL-CIO commemorates Workers’ Memorial Day every year on April 28. This was the date the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was born in 1971.

The president who signed the OSHA bill — Richard “Watergate” Nixon — was no friend of working people anywhere. He and his fellow war criminal Henry Kissinger killed millions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Children were burned alive there by napalm, much of it made by Dow Chemical.

Nixon and then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan tried to break the grape boycott called by the United Farm Workers Union led by Cesar Chavez.

But the U.S. labor movement was much stronger then. Driving it forward were hundreds of thousands of Black workers concentrated in the big plants in Detroit and dozens of other cities.

Capitalists counterattacked. Malcolm Wallop’s successful 1976 U.S. Senate campaign in Wyoming featured a TV ad attacking OSHA for mandating bathroom facilities on farms and ranches. 

Wallop thought it was a joke that farm workers be provided with sanitary bathrooms and some dignity. Homeless people needing bathrooms aren’t given any dignity by capitalism.

New Jersey Senator Harrison Williams, who co-sponsored the OSHA act, was sent to prison. He was framed during the FBI’s ABSCAM investigation that was named after the racist term “Arab scam.” 

According to Tip O’Neill, who was then speaker of the House of Representatives, the FBI also tried to ensnare him and Senator Ted Kennedy. 

Deindustrialization — closing thousands of factories — weakened the working class. General Motors shut down nine of its 10 plants in Flint, Mich. That set the stage for the state government to poison the city’s children with lead in their drinking water.

Global capitalism kills more workers. One-hundred-forty-six workers were killed in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City.

Eight times as many people were killed in the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, housing five garment sweatshops in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At least 1,132 workers were killed there, with over 2,500 workers injured. 

Safety is a human right

In Britain, where the Industrial Revolution was born, the struggle for safety went hand-in-hand with reducing the work day of 12 hours or longer. 

Frederick Engels — Karl Marx’s co-worker in developing scientific socialism or communism — heard factory owners in Manchester “joke” about workers losing their fingers from accidents. 

Even some wealthy individuals were appalled by the number of workers killed on the job. Sir Humphry Davy helped invent a safety lamp for coal miners.  

Yet the new lamp actually led to more deaths. Mine owners used it to drive miners even deeper into the earth.

It was the decades-long struggle of workers that forced parliament to pass the “factory acts.” These laws reduced the working hours in cotton textile mills and other industries.

But there were no safety laws for the enslaved Africans who picked the cotton. They worked from “no see” in the morning to “no see” at night.

James Watt’s first steam engine was financed by slave owners, according to “Capitalism and Slavery” by Eric Williams. Justice demands reparations for these crimes.

A small number of safety inspectors, led by Leonard Horner, enforced the factory acts. Horner was described by Marx as having “rendered undying service to the English working class.”  

British bosses kept the number of inspectors to a minimum. That’s also how U.S. capitalists curbed OSHA.

According to Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA advisor who is now with the National Employment Law Project, it would take 160 years for OSHA to inspect every workplace. The same political windbags in Congress that attack defunding the police have defunded OSHA for 50 years.

Thousands of essential workers died from COVID-19 because of a lack of safety protection. Employees at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City were given Hefty bags as personal protective equipment. Meatpacking workers were placed two feet from each other.

The fight for safety at work is a struggle against the same capitalist class whose cops kill 1,100 people annually in the U.S. We have to organize to stop the murders on the job and by the police.

May 5 — Today community and social-justice organizations held a news conference announcing the filing of an injunction to stop the closing of Kroger-owned grocery stores in Los Angeles County. The coalition is first trying to stop the closure of the Ralphs in South Central on Crenshaw and Slauson. 

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Southern California is the plaintiff in the filed complaint. 

“Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the U.S., made $2.8 billion in profit during the pandemic off the labor of workers who risked exposure to COVID-19. Many got sick. But because they were forced to pay a temporary increase of $5 per hour to their essential workers, the corporate giant decided to abandon them and communities already suffering from a lack of quality grocery stores,” explained John Parker of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice.

“We are demanding that the courts and politicians finally take this assault on the workers and community by Kroger seriously,” Parker said. “Black and Brown communities already suffer from food deserts and these closings have a disproportionately negative effect on them. 

“We’re not having it,” said Parker. “The community will do whatever is necessary to fight the reckless and irresponsible acts of a giant whose profits and existence come from the workers’ labor and community’s support. That store has already been bought and paid for time and again by such support, and therefore rightfully belongs to the community and the workers. 

“Whose store? Our store!” he concluded.

On May Day, the Peoples Power Assembly held a two-mile march and car caravan that ended at Baltimore City Hall, where participants held a United Workers’ Assembly. Workers spoke on many of the major issues facing the working class and resolved to take action.

Joyce Butler of the PPA co-chaired the assembly with Sharon Black. Butler introduced Rev. Annie Chambers, who proclaimed the history of May Day as our history and called for a real minimum wage of $25. 

Steven Ceci spoke on behalf of unemployed workers, explaining that a huge number of workers are not receiving their benefits. Ceci is a former hospitality worker and Amazon warehouse worker. The assembly plans to hold a press conference on Friday, May 7, to demand that people receive their unemployment benefits and will be holding protests in the near future.

Lars Bertling, Game Workers Unite representative, declared the need to fight against capitalism and for socialism.  

Prisoners are workers too! Alec Summerfield and Marilyn Barnes, mother of Marlyn Barnes, who died under suspicious circumstances at Harford County Jail, gave powerful presentations. They represented the Prisoners Solidarity Committee and the Peoples Power Assembly.  

Following a presentation by American Federation of Government Employees representative Andrew Concon, the assembly voted to support the Protect the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), a bill in Congress to defend the rights of workers organizing for union representation. They also called for President Joe Biden to immediately issue an executive order protecting union rights in the wake of Amazon’s theft of the election in Bessemer, Ala.

Russ Mack highlighted the connection between racism, police terror and the workers’ struggle, calling on participants to “Say their names” to highlight the rash of police killings that took place during and after the trial of Derek Chauvin.  

Abby Sea from Bmore 4 Border Justice highlighted the importance of supporting im/migrant rights.

The Assembly heard a special message from a Baltimore Amazon worker and an exciting message from the Los Angeles struggle to defend “hero pay” for essential workers and stop Kroger’s store closings by John Parker of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice.  

The video clips included here were just a small part of the hour-long workers’ program.

SLL photos: Andre Powell

On May 1, Los Angeles community organizations, civil rights and church organizations, and unions mobilized for a third unified demonstration — this time a car caravan. The coalition demanded the end to Kroger’s planned grocery store closures.

The coalition was formed after Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the country, announced the closing of five stores in Los Angeles County. The stores — Ralphs and Food 4 Less — are owned by Kroger.

Kroger cried poverty in response to being forced to pay an extra $5 per hour in wages for just 120 days to compensate essential workers during the pandemic. Yet Kroger made $2.8 billion in profits during the pandemic alone, through the labor of workers risking their lives. 

Kroger’s plan is an assault on its workers and the communities that depend on them, especially Black and Brown communities that already suffer from a lack of affordable, healthy and quality food. It threatens to create more food deserts in underserved neighborhoods.

The caravan began at the Ralphs store in South Central Los Angeles with a large picket line made up of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770 workers, joined by other coalition members, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, Families of Park Mesa Heights, Service Employees Local 721, Unión del Barrio and United Workers Assembly. 

The participants then got in their cars to begin the caravan to Food 4 Less in East Hollywood. 

There the protesters held an ending rally that took up the entire parking lot and had management running out the door to see what was causing the commotion. Chants and speakers rang out in harmony with Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” playing in the background.

SEIU Local 721 provided the sound truck and sound system.