We interviewed Meaghan Diffenderfer, a member of UE Local 203 at City Market. We discussed the role the Union had to play in advocating for safety practices, hazard pay, and the shifting balance of power at work. The UE (United Electrical Workers) is a nationwide union that represents members in a number of workplaces both private and public, service industry and manufacturing alike. 

What are workers able to achieve through collective representation at City Market?

I think one of the most important aspects of being unionized is that, being in an industry where employees are often seen as expendable/ replaceable, there are a lot of protections to be sure employees are not terminated without cause… 

We also have the power to organize ourselves and community members when big issues arise without backlash that is often presented by other employers; we can speak up when there are unsafe conditions, or policies that are harmful to our employees, and often demand change and win, creating a safer workplace for ourselves and help set an industry standard.

Since the onset of the COVID crisis what have been the major concerns of the workers? 

The biggest concern has been for employee safety and protection from exposure. The union leadership has been instrumental in gathering concerns from employees (needing more appropriate PPE, less customers in the store, enforced distancing, more sanitizing) and demanding them from Management.

 What implementations has the union been able to win? 

We've gotten hazard pay, bandannas provided for PPE use, Plexiglas for the cashiers in the front end, increased security, and limited store capacity. At the beginning of the crisis, when demands were made for protocol changes, we were often told that Management was working on it and looking at different options. Now when we demanded change, it happened at a much faster rate. I acknowledge some delay was due to taking time to research what options might be available, but unfortunately the truth of this crisis is that there literally is not time, and a lot of these protections should have been implemented weeks before they were.

You won a $3/hour hazard pay increase. How did that happen? Can you talk about the social media campaign the union launched and what effect that had?

We did win hazard pay, or a “staff appreciation bonus”, which has been substantial in making employees feel better about continuing to put our lives on the line during these unprecedented times. Shortly after Governor Scott declared the state of emergency, and seeing that other grocery chains in the area were securing hazard pay, we requested to enter negotiations with management on this issue and other pressing employee safety measures. After the first meeting between management and the union, it was clear that additional compensation was not going to be an easy win. We took to social media to communicate with our union membership with updates about bargaining, but saw a lot of engagement from community members. When it was clear that hazard pay was something we were going to have to fight tooth and nail for, we began a fairly simple social media campaign. 

We had members fill out a sheet of paper with why they deserve hazard pay, and take a photo with it to post online. This was particularly effective for a few reasons: 1) We put faces to our struggle. It is one thing to read a story about a person's working conditions. It’s another thing entirely to see the face of that person and, especially for co-op members, recognize that community member and 2) as individuals shelter in place, there’s an increase in screen time! This resulted in hundreds of thousands of people seeing our posts, and they were shared literally coast to coast. 

We made sure to create a VERY clear ask in our posts, and made sure it was the same with each photo shared. We requested that people reach out to Co-op leadership and demand hazard pay, PPE, and other protections for employees. With a new abundance of time that could be used flexibly, there was an outpouring of calls and emails to our General Manager that most certainly had an impact at the next bargaining session. This barrage of  communication from community members near and far meant that Co-op management was faced with a real dilemma- give employees hazard pay and save the Co-op’s public image, or lose a significant amount of business and equity from disappointed Co-op members. We are delighted that management and the union were able to settle on a fair hazard pay, and that we get this moment in time to start to re-align the Co-op with it’s founding values.  

These are major victories yet there are you still issues the City Market workers face.

We're still seeing an influx of customers coming in to only buy a few items, which continues to put our employees at an increased risk of exposure. I think as we fully implement store capacity limits, individuals will be more conscious of what they are coming in for and shopping more efficiently.  We've also been working with Management to figure out how to best handle the influx of delivery and curbside pickup requests, which has been hard with the current staffing levels on our delivery team.

How can fellow workers show solidarity with the employees of City Market?

One of the greatest things that has happened from this crisis is the power shift from management believing they hold power to the union and co-op members realizing the power they hold. When our posts were being shared and questions were asked on the Co-op social media posts, as well as individuals calling and emailing in their concerns for employee safety, it was a clear message to Management that not only were the union's demands founded, they were backed by the co-op equity holders. 

So continue to share our posts, question decisions that are founded on public image and not employee safety, and please, please don't come to the store if you aren't feeling well! Shop quickly, with protection, and always practice social distancing- or at least the most you can in our small aisles.

The cooperation between community members and store employees is an inspiring example of workers’ ability to effectively wield collective power in order to create necessary change. 

Do you have anything else to add?

A huge thank you to all those who took the time to join our fight for hazard pay and safe working conditions- so many of us literally found the strength to keep going to work knowing that you all had our back and are fighting with us. Solidarity forever!

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM.

You don’t get exactly the same feeling of solidarity when you wave at each other from the driver’s seat, but the horn makes up a lot of the difference.

If it were not already clear, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a disgusting arm of the US government. They hound and harrass migrants, separate children from families, and do it all with a smirk on their face. The people they target have been scapegoated as ‘criminals,’ ‘aliens,’ and worse. Many come to the US fleeing violence linked to the US government itself. In many ways, ICE is the logical conclusion of the age old tradition of American Nativism -- brutalization. 

ICE operates a data center in Williston, Vermont, which coordinates these operations. So, we honked like hell to tell them off. On April 17th, Migrant Justice and Community Voices for Immigrant Rights organized Vermont’s first pandemic-era car protest with the help of the Vermont Peace and Justice Center. Members of CVDSA’s Covid-19 Response Working group lined up with the others in the Home Depot parking lot in Williston. Community Voices for Immigrant rights member Bria Yazic roused us with a speech that made the stakes clear. From the hood of the car, Bria made the following demands:

1. Release all detainees

2. Stop ICE arrests and deportations

3. Close the ICE data center in Williston, VT

4. Ensure that undocumented essential workers receive benefits and are included in COVID-19 response plans.

These demands are crucial at a bare minimum--the pandemic has only made the continuous human rights crisis worse. 

At the Mexican border, ICE detains people and throws them back into the desert without any medical examination. ICE holds many others in detention and the US government pushes Mexico to do the same thing. With overcrowded and unhygienic conditions, these detention centers (aka prisons) leave detainees at a huge risk and with few resources. Many detainees that ICE deported from detention centers have already tested positive for covid-19, exacerbating the spread of the virus. It’s not an exaggeration to say detention is a death sentence.

In an effort to keep safe, protestors took strict measures to stay socially distant. For 45 minutes, we laid on our horns while we drove Harvest Lane. And it was loud! 

This protest was a crucial effort to register discontent and make public our resistance to ICE, but I hope we can build further from here. As Thelma from Migrant Justice, speaking through an interpreter, laid out: 

“We have to free all of our people who are suffering…[especially] in a situation that puts their lives in danger from the virus.” 

For me, freeing all the people means fighting like hell against detention centers, and beyond that. We need farmworkers to be free from exploitative labor, cramped living conditions, and exposure to toxins at work. We need to fight for everyone suffering in Vermont, about 40,000 of whom filed unemployment claims in the wake of the crisis. We need to fight for an end to US hegemony abroad. Onward to May Day, when we’ll fight for just that.

With the Covid-19 crisis taking almost all the national and local attention, and rightfully so, it can be difficult to speak about struggles that began long before the crisis and that will likely continue after the crises abates. Within the Champlain Valley DSA, we are certainly strongly responding to Covid-19, with an adjunct working group created specifically for this crisis. However, we can't forget about the other struggles, and in this case, I want to talk specifically about the need for continued vigilance in the fight against creeping fascism.

The BTV Clean Up Crew began as an idea in August 2019, when I was looking for a clever way of removing fascist propaganda that had been cropping up in Burlington. At the time, I had just come across a large poster for the neo-Nazi group the Patriot Front, plastered on the window of Memorial Auditorium, urging Burlington residents to call ICE on their immigrant neighbors. I was disgusted, and I was worried that the poster had stayed up there longer than it had any right to. I immediately started thinking about a project that could focus on removing propaganda like this before anybody else can see it. That same weekend, I went on a short hike on the Riverside Trail, and I couldn't help but notice the build-up of roadside garbage. I decided that I would go out every weekend and pick-up roadside trash, and at the same time, ensure that any fascist propaganda is removed. When I announced the idea to some of my friends in the DSA, the response was very positive, and a small group of us began regularly going on "clean-up" sessions.

After about two of these sessions, a neo-Nazi rally happened in Portland, Oregon that I was following closely on social media. At that rally, the Portland group "Popular Mobilization" came up with a strategy to prevent future rallies from happening. They asked their supporters to pledge a donation to a local immigrant rights organization for every fascist that shows up to the rally. The group ended up raising $30,000 for Causa Oregon, and I was blown away by the success of the idea. I knew that we had to adapt the concept to the situation in Burlington. InBurlington, we were luckily not having any physical fascist rallies, but the sticker problem was growing more and more. I adapted the idea so that we would ask people to pledge a donation for every sticker or poster we remove, and at that point, the BTV Clean Up Crew in its current form was born.

Over the last eight months, I have been grateful and humbled by the response we have received. We got covered in Seven Days. We have raised nearly $2,000 for amazing local organizations like Migrant Justice, Outright Vermont, and Black Lives Matter of Greater Burlington. And we have ensured that fascist propaganda gets removed quickly, before any media can cover it or targeted groups have to see it. We've built community resiliency to racism and discrimination that was intended to terrify the most vulnerable members of our community, and we've effectively stood up for our neighbors.

With the Covid-19 crisis currently occupying nearly all of our time, the Clean Up Crew has had to adapt our tactics. We don't go out in groups anymore, and clean up sessions have become solitary events. However, I think it is important that we don't let our guard down, despite the need for social distancing. Fascists in other parts of the country have taken advantage of the empty streets to spread more propaganda, and we need to make sure that this doesn't happen here. Keep reporting any stickers you see, and keep following our page on Facebook and Twitter. Keep your eyes peeled when you are out, and keep the streets safe for everybody who lives here. There was a joke post on Tumblr that spread fairly quickly after the fascist attack in Charlottesville in August of 2017. It read, "Sometimes antisocial - always antifascist." In these times, this has become less of a joke and more of a call to action.

Let's keep the work going.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, the Burlington City Council passed a resolution calling for a halt to Vermont Air Guard F-35 bomber practice flights. Perri Freeman, Progressive Party City Councilor and Champlain Valley DSA member, introduced the resolution in response to ramped up flight training of the newly deployed F-35s from the city’s airport. The airport is in the densely populated area. The expanded flights are despite the statewide stay at home order and prohibition of all but essential services.  The resolution passed 11-1  (most Democrats were pressured into supporting it) and called on the Vermont Governor and Congressional delegation to do everything in their power to suspend the flights due to the intense, harmful noise.

The resolution developed out of a community petition calling on the Governor to halt F-35 flights and to redirect Air Guard’s resources to needed pandemic response.  Estimates put the annual operational cost of Vermont Air Guard practice flights at well over $100 million/year. At the time of this article, 1,600 people had signed the petition. 

Republican Governor Scott, along with the Democratic Party-aligned Congressional delegation of Senators Sanders and Leahy, and Representative Welch, have all unconditionally supported the F-35 bomber basing in Burlington.  This is despite majority opposition in several towns near the airport, including Burlington. According the Air Force’s Environmental Impact Statement, the extreme noise of the F-35 poses both immediate and long-term health hazards to nearly 10,000 people. This is in the communities designated “not suitable for residential use” because of the extreme F-35 noise. Many thousands more are impacted outside this super-intense zone.

The State and Congressional supporters of the F-35 cite the mission of the F-35 as reason to ignore the damage to public health and the waste of resources. But the only military use of the F-35 is high altitude bombing.  The Vermont Air Guard flew the predecessor to the F-35, the similar F-16 bomber, in missions to the Middle East and Iraq, participating in the massive killing, war crimes, and regional destabilization carried out by the U.S. invading forces. Fewer people would have a problem with the boondoggle F-35, the most expensive weapon in history, if it wasn’t a weapon of mass destruction in the service of U.S. empire.

In the State Legislature, Progressive Party Representatives and DSA members Colburn and Brian Cina from Burlington backed the resolution and wrote in a letter to the Governor:

“Our constituents are working hard to comply with the "Stay Safe, Stay Home" order by social distancing, sheltering in place, and working from home. We have heard many instances of F-35 planes disrupting sleep, causing ear aches and headaches, interrupting the ability to work at home, and reactivating past traumas and exacerbating mental health issues at a time when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others have recognized the significant mental health impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak. One constituent shared that she runs to the basement when the planes fly overhead, because of how painful the disruption is. She wrote of her home country, "When I was growing up, the basement was where we went for a potential bombing during a war."

While the resolution is likely to be ignored by the Governor and Congressional delegation, who are firm in their commitments to the regional military industrial complex, it is part of an on-gong fight. As one community F-35 opponent, Jennifer Decker, told reporters, “Justice must surely include cancellation of the F-35 basing. It is a reasonable request to ground the planes during a pandemic as a prerequisite to removing them from a municipal civilian airport in a densely populated area.” 

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM.

On April 1st tens of thousands of tenants, their incomes decimated by the pandemic, woke up without the means to pay their rent. Many more faced a choice between food, medical bills, utilities, or paying rent.  Anticipating this moment, nationwide petitions, Facebook pages, and other online groups have formed calling for rent strikes. A rent strike is when tenants decide to collectively withhold rent from their landlord.  It is typically the final maximum tactic in an escalating series of actions, each of which builds the level of trust and organization in a community until it is prepared to strike. Some common situations where rent strikes occur are: 1) When a landlord announces they will significantly raise rent without any additional benefits to the tenants; 2) When a landlord has announces they will be selling the building, threatening displacement for current tenants; and 3) When the building or apartments are in serious disrepair, and the landlord refuses to fix the conditions.

Rent strikes are a highly effective way of exerting tenant power.  They can force a landlord to respond to tenant demands when other efforts such as letter writing, media exposure, and rent escrow have failed to produce results. 

Rent strikes require planning.  Without planning, a lot can go wrong.  For one, if few tenants participate, the landlord will have no reason to concede to demands. Instead the strike will give the landlord an opportunity to evict the most engaged and organized tenants in their property, in one stroke setting back our long term organizing work irreparably. Organizers, adapting tactics from the labor movement, will instead aim to build a reliable, tested commitment from over 75% of their building before engaging in higher-risk tactics.  To get that majority, you will need to convince tenants that you have a plan to win. Second, there must be a demand. Without a demand, the landlord won’t know how to respond in order to satisfy the tenants. Third, there must be a plan to support tenants who are participating in the strike. It is unfair and irresponsible to ask tenants to put their shelter on the line without a plan for possible negative responses from the landlord.

A mass failure to pay rent is not a rent strike, it is simply the result of a massive economic downturn caused by unprecedented layoffs.  We understand why, faced with this desperation, organizers hope to escalate to a rent strike immediately, but as a movement we have learned the hard way: there are no shortcuts in our work.  Mass desperation is no substitute for mass power. Columbus DSA’s Housing Committee supports rent strikes; building the capacity to strike is at the heart of our work. We hope that this crisis has revealed the desperate need for long-term tenant organizing in this city, and we encourage new and veteran organizers to join in that work.  We can’t do it without your help. Thousands are on the verge of losing their homes, and only collective action can change that. We encourage tenants to reach out to the committee for assistance in organizing their buildings and communities and to join us in building tenant power now and beyond this crisis.  

Contact: Housing@Columbusdsa.org
Columbus Tenants Union Facebook Page, @UnionColumbus on Twitter
The Columbus Tenants Union will hold its first remote meeting on Saturday, April 11th at 2:00pm, where we will discuss building tenant power in the city.  Please RSVP here: Bit.ly/CTUMeeting
A Tenants Union Organizing Guide from the Philadelphia Tenants Union, including information on how to organize a rent strike during quarantine.

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM.

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM.

We are very thankful and impressed by this community’s response to the current pandemic we are facing. As closures and social distancing set in, we are seeing the most vulnerable in our community be deeply affected by the loss of income and access to resources.

For this reason, we request that not only the governor’s executive order N-28-20 be respected, but that there be an additional suspension of rent given how many renters in this city are hourly service workers who no longer have a safe source of income while performing social distancing. We request as well that empty hotel/motel rooms be immediately offered to houseless community members who cannot self-quarantine without a space to do it in. It is vital emergency shelters be provided immediately.

As per the latest executive orders, we further recommend the city guarantee continued publicly-provided water and trash service regardless of payment.

We request that you do not fail your earlier promise to provide free tests to all who qualify and furthermore that these tests are provided regardless of doctor’s note—putting such a roadblock on students and those without insurance or local doctors will keep us from having the knowledge we need to keep our county safe.

Lastly, we ask that as per executive order N-26-20, you ensure state funds are allocated and properly used within our school systems. Parents deserve daytime childcare and school lunches need to continue to be provided.

We also ask the state for paid sick leave for those workers who have no source of income while following health directives. Flattening the curve necessitates avoiding public interactions for longer than those 14 days; disability and unemployment are not an adequate response.

In solidarity,
The Steering Committee of DSA SLO