'Israel' killed 137 journalists in Gaza, largest on record in decades
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/-israel–killed-137-journalists-in-gaza–largest-on-record-i
By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
31 Mar 2024 21:25
The Committee to Protect …Journalists reports that the Israeli war on Gaza is the deadliest for journalists since the organization started collecting data in 1992.The Government Media Office in Gaza stated that the number of journalists killed since the beginning of the genocidal war on the Strip has risen to 137 after an Israeli strike targeted the home of journalist Abdul Wahab Aouni Abu Aoun in the al-Maghazi refugee camp on Sunday, leading to his martyrdom.
المكتب الإعلامي الحكومي:

– ارتفاع عدد الشهداء الصحفيين إلى (137 صحفياً) منذ بدء حرب الإبادة الجماعية على قطاع غزة، وذلك بعد ارتقاء الزميل الصحفي:

– الصحفي الشهيد/ عبد الوهاب عوني أبو عون المصور الصحفي والمونتير مع عدة وسائل إعلام استشهد بقصف الاحتلال لمنزلهم بمخيم المغازي وسط… pic.twitter.com/7IBWYRZM84— احمد فوزي – Ahmed Faozi (@AFYemeni) March 31, 2024

Journalists in Gaza are facing terrible dangers, brought forth by "Israel's" mass indiscriminate bombing of the Strip, communication and electricity outages, and supply shortages.
The Committee to Protect Journalists CPJ warned on Thursday that “journalists in Gaza face particularly high risks as they try to cover the conflict during the Israeli ground assault."
“CPJ is investigating all reports of journalists and media workers killed, injured, or missing in the war, which has led to the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992,” it added.
Read more: Day 177: 32,782 killed, 75,298 injured
An Israeli airstrike targeted earlier today tents housing journalists and forcibly displaced families within the premises of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. The aggression resulted in the martyrdom and wounding of over 20 people.
Earlier this week, the world's largest organization of journalists, the International Federation of Journalists, alongside 38 more media freedom organizations, including the CPJ, called on the Media Freedom Coalition (MFC) member countries to take “meaningful action” to protect journalists in Gaza.
Read more: WHO urges immediate evacuation of 9,000 Gaza patients for treatment
The situation in Gaza “requires action from your member states to consistently and publicly call for the treatment of Palestinian journalists, who continue to report from Gaza in spite of the risks," their statement read, also calling for “the immediate and unfettered access of international journalists to Gaza."
Related News

Israeli soldier killed, 3 wounded by Resistance in northern Gaza

Gaza death toll nears 51,400 as IOF attacks kill 50 people in 24 hours
The groups condemned "the collective official silence of the MFC member states as a group regarding these killings, with increasing evidence of journalists being specifically targeted (..) seriously diminishes our collective ability to credibly stand up for media freedom globally."
Calling the journalists “our eyes and ears” on the ground, the organizations also stated that journalists in Gaza face serious threats to their safety and urgently need support and solidarity.
“Finally, the growing evidence of targeted killings of journalists in this war requires a clear and joint call for prompt, independent, effective and thorough investigations into these killings."
Conceal the genocide in Gaza
In a separate statement on Monday, the CPJ urged the United Nations to initiate an investigation into the occupation entity's detainment of Palestinian journalists.
“Israel is utilizing administrative detention to detain a record number of Palestinian journalists without charge,” the organization wrote in an urgent appeal submitted to the UNRWA on Arbitrary Detention.
In a statement to the press, the Committee stated that the appeal calls on the Working Group to investigate the cases of journalists Moath Amarneh, Mohammad Badr, and Ameer Abu Iram, all of whom have been detained by "Israel" without formal charges since October 7.
“The alarming use of administrative detention by Israeli authorities amid the Israel-Gaza war represents the silencing of dissenting voices, most notably journalists,” said CPJ Director of Advocacy and Communications Gypsy Guillen Kaiser.
“The incidence of administrative detention is a concerning bellwether for Israel’s efforts to restrict the public’s right to know what is happening in Gaza,” he added.
In early February, UN human rights experts sounded the alarm over soaring numbers of journalists killed in the war on Gaza, denouncing the "deliberate" Israeli strategy of silencing critical reporting.
On Monday, the Government Media Office in Gaza held Israeli occupation forces fully responsible for the safety and lives of the journalists and members of the media, who were taken to an unknown location after being tortured and brutally beaten.
The Office revealed that the Israeli occupation arrested a group of journalists who were reporting on the unfolding events in the Gaza Strip, as they gave updates on the wounded and famished in Al-Shifa Medical Complex.
Despite constant warnings by Palestinian and international media against the Israeli targeting of journalists in the Gaza Strip and calls for their protection, the occupation continues to systemically and deliberately target and kill journalists and media personnel in an attempt to conceal its genocidal crimes against the people of Palestine.

‘Israel’ killed 137 journalists in Gaza, largest on record in decades

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that the Israeli war on Gaza is the deadliest for journalists since the organization started collecting…

english.almayadeen.net

LUIGI THE MUSICAL

LUIGI THE MUSICAL is a wildly irreverent, razor-sharp comedy that imagines the true story of Luigi Mangione, the alleged corporate assassin turned accidental folk hero. With real-life cellmates Sam Bankman-Fried and Diddy by his side, Luigi navigates friendship, justice, …and the absurdity of viral fame.

Bold, campy, and unafraid, Luigi: the Musical is both laugh-out-loud funny and surprisingly thoughtful. If you like your comedy smart and your show tunes with a criminal record, Luigi is your new favorite felony.

Directed by the visionary Nova Bradford, with original music and lyrics by Arielle Johnson, Luigi the Musical will leave you smiling…and wanting a hash brown.

Premiering Friday the 13th, June 2025. TICKETS at https://luigithemusical.info/
7PM June 13
7PM June 14
Taylor Street Theatre
277 Taylor Street
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Luigi: The Musical

Experience the dramatic and possibly true story of Luigi’s journey through his journey of despair and redemption with the most unlikely of cellmates.

luigithemusical.info

The Global Fascist Project: Crisis, Control, and the Struggle From Below
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-global-fascist-project-crisis-control-and-the-struggle-from-below/

By William I. RobinsonApril 23, 2025Z ArticleNo

The starting point for any analysis of the shocking …conjuncture of events now rocking the world – trade wars, genocide, fascism – is the unprecedented crisis of global capitalism. There are four interwoven dimensions: 1) economic involving overaccumulation and chronic stagnation; 2) social reproduction and widespread social disintegration; 3) a crisis of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony as the post-WWII international order cracks up; 4) an ecological crisis that threatens to exhaust the biosphere. What follows is an effort to paint in the broadest possible strokes – in 1000 words – the “big picture” of the historic conjuncture.
The system is experiencing a radical new round of restructuring and transformation based on the digital revolution, above all on artificial intelligence (AI), which revolutionizes the forces of production and also alters the relationship of transnational capital to labor and to the state. The emerging hegemonic bloc brings together tech with finance and the military-industrial-security complex. The entire global economy and society are becoming ever-more dependent on digital technologies. AI is now able to instantaneously process unquantifiable amounts of data and to generate its own algorithms. Corporations, states, political and military institutions, cannot function now without digital technologies, which makes global society extremely dependent on the giant tech corporations that manage and control these technologies and the knowledge to develop and apply them.
Global markets are saturated. There is massive industrial overcapacity. The rate of profit has been declining since the turn of century. The transnational capitalist class (TCC) is in a desperate search for where to unload surpluses and open up new spaces of accumulation. Predatory extractivist expansion involves waves of displacement. States are engaged in intense competition over markets and resources as each tries to attract TCC investment and assure the resources that accumulation requires inside the national territory. The drive to seize resources is central to events in Palestine, the Congo, the Sudan, Mexico, Colombia, and elsewhere, to Trump’s claim to Greenland, Canada, and Ukraine minerals. Relentless pressure for expansion increases instability and conflict. Splits among political and economic elites intensify as the global capitalist historic bloc that formed in the late twentieth century crumbles.
New Political Dispensations

The institutions of bourgeois democracy cannot manage the crisis and are obstacles to capitalist expansion. The new authoritarianism, twenty-first century fascism, and far-right populism involve novel modalities of control over civil society as new state forms emerge. U.S. President Donald Trump, Argentine President Javier Milei, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, Turkish President Recep Erdogan – these and other such figures represent new political dispensations that hasten the breakdown of the rule of law as it has been constituted. These dispensations correspond closely with the economic transformations that have taken place, especially the unprecedented concentration of power and wealth on a global scale in the billionaire cabal of the TCC.
There is a reconfiguration of the power bloc in the state. The old forms of legitimation do not work. Bourgeois democracy is an impediment to the reconstruction of the capitalist order under the direct control of the emerging hegemonic bloc that seeks alternative forms of legitimacy, rule by force and decree, and the normalization of mafioso dealings. Elements within the Trump regime, backed by powerful tech and financial capitalists and advised by a cabal of shadowy political and intellectual figures such as Curtis Yarvin, with his notion of the “dark enlightenment, want the constitutionally-established (“Administrative”) state to collapse and be plundered – hence Milei’s chainsaw metaphor.
The drive to massively compress the U.S. state is a frontal attack on the working class, including its most unionized sector (civil servants). It aims to smash what remains of the regulatory and social welfare state. Decades of neoliberalism have involved the ongoing privatization of the state, from war and intelligence gathering, to social services, prisons, and infrastructure. The goal now is not just to privatize the state but to create private mafia states. The first of these, Próspera in Honduras, serves as a model.
Surplus Humanity

The digital revolution is bringing about a rapid expansion of surplus populations – billions have been expelled and must be controlled and even exterminated. Nightmarish strategies of containment include the Gaza option of outright genocide, the Salvadoran option of mega-imprisonment, and a radical expansion of the global police state, applying the new technologies for mass surveillance, social control, and repression. Another form of dealing with surplus humanity is simple abandonment, as in the case of rural United States, where opioids conveniently wipe out whole communities. Trump has proposed a $1 trillion Pentagon budget as military spending around the world escalates. Militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression are pivotal to sustaining global accumulation and controlling rebellion from below.
There is a crucial symbolic dimension to this repression. Surplus humanity must be criminalized, dehumanized, and scapegoated in every possible way. This explains the unspeakable cruelty with which prisoners in El Salvador’s gulag are manhandled and humiliated before the cameras of the world. In the United States, the brutality of the war on immigrants, involving arbitrary, often violent arrests and public abductions, are intended as potent spectacles of the power of the emerging fascist state and a more general warning that political dissent and class struggle from below will not be tolerated.
Fascist class warfare from above seeks to shift the burden of the crisis onto the laboring masses: to divide and disorganize working classes, pulverize wages, attack unions, intensify the rate of exploitation, and impose states of exception. It is no surprise that the attacks on immigrants have specifically singled out for arrest and deportation union members and labor organizers. The fascist state strives to instill fear and impede the development of the subjective conditions necessary for mass resistance.
Everything laid out in this analysis requires an urgent caveat: there is a huge gap between intent and ability. The global fascist project is riddled with contradictions! Mass resistance from below must identify and exploit those contradictions. There is at this time a favorable correlation of forces for the fascist project. Our task is to reverse that correlation through mass struggle.

The Global Fascist Project: Crisis, Control, and the Struggle From Below

The starting point for any analysis of the shocking conjuncture of events now rocking the world – trade wars, genocide, fascism – is the…

znetwork.org

Taiwan’s social democrats and Stalinists counter Trump tariff hikes with calls for closer China-Taiwan trade relations

Shih-Yu Chou
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/24/qjwd-a24.html
In response to the Trump administration’s 32 percent “reciprocal tariffs” imposed on… Taiwan, the country declared a series of measures to balance the US trade deficit. This included expanding arms purchases and imports from the US, eliminating existing tariffs on imports from the US, removing non-tariff barriers to trade (e.g., health and sanitary regulations), and further increasing Taiwan’s direct investment in the US.

Prior to “Liberation Day” announced by US President Donald Trump, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited had already pledged to invest US$165 billion in the US, the largest foreign direct investment in US history.

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President Donald Trump speaks during an event to announce new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House, April 2, 2025. [AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein]
Taiwan’s economy is highly dependent on exports to the US. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s abject capitulation to Washington makes clear that working people will be made to bear the burden of escalating economic warfare.

On April 9, the DPP government further pitched its capitulation to Trump’s demands as “Leaving China, Entering the North” by proclaiming that Taiwan would “capitalize on every geopolitical and economic shift to advance its economic development”, with the goal of decoupling from China and integrating the island’s economy with Washington-led “democratic allies” of the Global North.

In his opinion piece titled “Taiwan Has a Roadmap for Deeper US Trade Ties” published in Bloomberg on April 10, Lai Ching-te, President of the Republic of China (ROC), elsewhere referred to as Taiwan, simply reiterated his previous stance on “reciprocal tariffs”.

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Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te delivers a speech during National Day celebrations in front of the Presidential Building in Taipei, October 10, 2024 [AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying]
Wu Yong-Yi, a seasoned trade unionist and Taiwanese scholar, responded to his Bloomberg piece on April 14. He criticised that not only had Lai made no request for tariff reductions from the White House, he was also prepared to go to any length to “win over” the Trump administration.

Wu has played an instrumental role in organizing a group of professors, social democrats and Stalinists, to oppose the DPP government’s anti-China stance and rhetoric. He is renowned as an anti-imperialist. It is worth examining the actual content of his group’s struggle against Trump’s “America First” policies.

Wu accused Lai of “betraying the national interests of the Republic of China” and turning over Taiwan to “deliver blood transfusions” to the US economy.

Wu insisted that an opinion piece outlining the “national interests of the ROC” by the president should have been “carefully worded” to recognize “the goodwill” displayed to Taiwan by previous US administrations. Lai, he complained, did nothing of the sort. Following the election debacle for the Democrats, he simply consigned into oblivion their contributions to Taiwan, including the visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the numerous arms sales to the island that were made possible by the Biden administration.

After aligning himself firmly with the Democrats, which he clearly views as pursuing a more carefully calculated anti-China policy that benefitted Taiwan, he characterized Lai’s groveling before Trump as “stupid, ignorant, rude, snobbish and ruthless.”

When one examines the response to Trump’s global economic warfare by Wu and the group he represents, it is clear that they differ tactically from the DPP government only in terms of Taiwanese national capitalism’s geostrategic orientation.

In a press conference held by Wu on April 9, social democrats and trade unionists laid out a blueprint for defending Taiwan’s access to markets and profits, namely South-South cooperation as an alternative to the policy of “Leaving China, Entering the North”.

Trump’s maneuvers to re-shore manufacturing jobs had drastically eroded Taiwan’s industrial base, they argued. The DPP should have acted as “a genuine ruling party” rather than as a subordinate of the US government, which aimed to hollow out Taiwan’s manufacturing capacity. The island must shore up its economy by integrating into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), establishing “a division of labor” between Taiwan and the mainland and “tapping into China’s market”.

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Social democrats and Stalinists painted a rosy picture of China’s export-oriented economy while turning the defense of countries oppressed by US imperialism into political support for their own bourgeois state’s “fair share” of capitalist exploitation.

There can be no reformist or national solution to a deepening breakdown of the global capitalist system, of which the US-China rivalry is a malignant expression.

Since Washington’s escalation of its trade war on a global scale, it has made enormous efforts to prevent BRI countries from tilting toward China. As the Wall Street Journal reported, the Trump administration is bent on “pressur[ing] US trading partners to limit their dealings with China” through respective tariff negotiations.

Furthermore, South-South trade proposed by Taiwan’s social democrats, Stalinists and trade unionists has never escaped capitalist production relations. According to David Goldman, economist and Deputy Editor of Asia Times, while China’s direct exports to the US had fallen from 8 percent of GDP in 2007 to 2.3 percent in 2024, China’s indirect reliance on the US market had remained quite substantial. Between 2020 and 2023, China’s exports to the Global South surged from approximately US$60 billion each month to US$120 billion each month. During this period, US imports from the Global South increased from over US$40 billion per month in 2020 to almost US$80 billion per month by 2023.

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The Port of Shanghai, May 2013, [Photo by Bruno Corpet / CC BY-SA 3.0]
As US imports from the Global South rose in proportion to China’s exports to the region, Goldman explained that China’s exports to the Global South were contingent on that region’s exports to the US.

Personal consumption expenditures accounted for 84 percent of US GDP growth over the last decade, he pointed out.

Phrased differently, the acceleration of South-South cooperation will not compensate for Trump’s global economic warfare that removes the US as China’s consumer of last resort.

Moreover, China’s economy has faced huge demographic challenges. According to the Brookings Institution, China’s “working-age population… peaked in 2011 at more than 900 million”. It would decline “by nearly a quarter, to some 700 million, by mid-century.”

This demographic trend coupled with China’s rapid technological breakthroughs contributes to the country’s increasing use of automation and robotics in production processes.

Dandan Zhang, Professor in Economics at Peking University, stated in February 2025, “the demand for labor in manufacturing industries”, particularly computers, communications, and consumer electronics, gave rise to “a production model with specific Chinese characteristics, combining high-tech and gig economy”. There were around “40 million just-in-time workers” in these industries, accounting for 31.12 percent of the total workforce in these sectors.

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Dr. Zhang Dandan [Photo: BHP: Climate Change Project]
Zhang’s research showed that smart manufacturing technologies like industrial robots, artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things not only increased productivity but also paved the way for the decimation of manufacturing jobs and the rise of gig employment in this sector. “Job vacancies in major manufacturing hubs like the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta required merely familiarity with 26 English letters.” No educational qualifications or prior work experience were needed.

To compound the problem, the ability of labor recruitment platforms to hire just-in-time gig workers made it possible for cyclical fluctuations in exports and changing demand for labor to “match seamlessly”. This enabled Chinese corporations to drive down labor costs by depriving gig workers of social security, medical insurance and pensions.

Zhang claimed these platforms have created job opportunities for workers by “giving them greater autonomy and flexibility.” “By 2021, China’s flexible workforce had grown to 200 million, accounting for 43 percent of urban employment” including non-manufacturing sectors.

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As Karl Marx powerfully explained in Capital, Volume 1, the use of machinery and technology is never intended to lighten workers’ toil under capitalism. Rather, it is a means for capital valorization.

Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing.

Marx further explains:

the advance in the productivity of social labour undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed thus: the higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labour-power for the increase of alien wealth, or in other words the self-valorization of capital.

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Karl Marx (1818-1883)
China’s large-scale automation in manufacturing exemplifies Marx’s insight. It should be underlined that Zhang is Deputy Dean at the National School of Development and Deputy Dean of the Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development, Peking University. Her study was intended to assess the true scale of gig workers in China’s key manufacturing sectors while simultaneously promoting “the sustainable growth of gig workers” and policies supposedly assisting them to achieve “common prosperity”.

It is another telling example of professors for “labor rights” rallying workers behind the ruling elite to defend the frontiers of the capitalist state. These academics have no qualms whatsoever about making the toiling masses pay for China’s spectacular economic rise.

In 1866, Marx explained to working people that as capital transcended national boundaries it would be impossible for trade unions to fight for workers’ jobs and rights on a national basis under capitalism. He indicated:

Apart from their original purposes, they must now learn to act deliberately as organising centres of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation. They must aid every social and political movement tending in that direction. […] They must look carefully after the interests of the worst paid trades…. They must convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions.

One must reasonably ask the following questions: Whether those who speak in the name of “national interests” are primarily concerned about the “interests” of the national bourgeoisies of Taiwan and China to accumulate profit under capitalism? Whose “national” interests and “division of labor” do those social democrats, Stalinists and trade unionists embody? Why, similar to the Chinese Stalinist regime, is this patriotic front of Taiwan so utterly oblivious to the plight of the Chinese downtrodden millions?

There is no doubt that the relentless economic warfare and onslaught on jobs and living conditions launched by the Trump regime pose a threat to the US working class and to workers internationally. The Taiwanese and Chinese toiling masses, if they remain isolated, can never defeat this onslaught on their own. The global trade war is a symptom of the breakdown of the world capitalist economy and a key component of the US war drive against China, Russia and Iran. The fight against “America First” policies hence must not be channelled back into the political dead end of bourgeois “democracy”.

As the ruling classes try to accelerate tensions between China and the rest of the world, working class opposition to this global social counter-revolution must be mobilized independently from and in opposition to both our “own” ruling establishment and all factions of the bourgeoisie.

To the capitalist division of the world into rival nations and blocs, we must counterpose the unity of the international working class in the fight for the socialist revolution and the overthrow of capitalism.

We urge workers, youth and principled scholars who aspire to real peace and equality among nations to contact the International Committee of the Fourth International and take up the fight to abolish capitalism, the root cause of class exploitation, national oppression, oligarchy, fascism and war.

Taiwan’s social democrats and Stalinists counter Trump tariff hikes with calls for closer China-Taiwan trade relations

Whose “national interests” and “division of labor” do Taiwan’s social democrats and Stalinists embody?

www.wsws.org

How Trump Deportations Fit Into War Against American Workers
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/04/trump-deportations-are-not-about-strengthening-american-labor-but-part-of-the-effort-to-decimate-it.html
Posted on April 21, 2025 by Conor Gallagher
The Trump administration is ending …work authorizations for two hundred union members who assemble dishwashers, refrigerators, washers, and dryers for GE Appliances-Haier at Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky. It also revoked the visas of several members of the Graduate Workers Coalition at the University of Indiana. The union frequently strikes and pickets for better wages for student teachers.

Mostly lost in the firestorm around Abrego Garcia, the man who was illegally deported to the notorious hellhole prison in El Salvador, is that for the past year he worked as an apprentice with the Sheet Metal Air Rail & Transportation Local 100 union. Perhaps that fact contributed to what the Trump gang calls the “administrative error” that led to his rendition. Judging from the larger pattern, it doesn’t appear to have been an error at all.

While the number of deportations under Trump lags behind the pace of the Obama and Biden administrations, Team Trump looks to have a goal in mind. Edgar Franks, the political director of Familias Unidas, had this to say to Truthoutabout the crackdown on farmworker organizers:

From the beginning, we thought Project 2025 and its plan for mass deportations was meant to send a chill among farmworker organizations that had been gaining momentum. It was meant to silence the organizing, deport as many people as possible, and to bring in a captive workforce through the H-2A program.

We think that might be the ultimate plan: to get rid of all the immigrant workers who are organizing and fighting back for better conditions, and to bring in a workforce that’s under the complete control of their employer with basically no rights. It’ll make it even harder to organize with farmworkers if more H-2A workers come. It wouldn’t be impossible, but it’ll be more difficult. All the gains that have been made in the last couple of years for farmworkers are at risk.

While Project 2025 wants to get rid of labor protections in almost every fashion, it actually calls for reducing H-2 visas, which allow employers to hire foreigners for temporary work. H2-A is used for agricultural workers and represents 70% of H-2 issuances, and the H-2B for non-agricultural workers represents the remaining 30%.

There is clearly friction between MAGA and big business as the H1-B visa showdown demonstrated, Trump usually sides with the money as he did in that case. The MAGA movement about ethnic belonging as some form of essential right as an American citizen and rebuilding the mostly white working class. Silicon Valley and other financial stakeholders are about destroying labor, which means engineering an easily exploited workforce.

If an individual anywhere in the world can contribute to the bottom line of American monopolies, then they are welcome in the US — as demonstrated by Trump’s “Gold Card” scheme, in which visas are up for sale. Here’s Trump:

“A person comes from India, China, Japan, lots of different places, and they go to Harvard, the Wharton School of Finance. They go to Yale. They go to all great schools. And they graduate number one in their class, and they are made job offers, but the offer is immediately rescinded because you have no idea whether or not that person can stay in the country. I want to be able to have that person stay in the country. These companies can go and buy a gold card, and they can use it as a matter of recruitment.”

Lowly farmworkers and hotel cooks and cleaners won’t be getting a gold card but they can contribute just the same.

At an April 10 cabinet meeting Trump said that undocumented people working on farms and in hotels would be allowed to leave the country and return as legal workers if their employers vouched for them. Here’s the quote:

“We have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to need people…So a farmer will come in with a letter concerning certain people, saying they’re great, they’re working hard. We’re going to slow it down a little bit for them, and then we’re going to ultimately bring them back. They’ll go out. They’re going to come back as legal workers.”

What —or who— does he mean? And why is the administration deporting people who were already here legally?

A White House official told NBC News that Trump wants to “improve” the H-2A and H-2B programs, which coincidentally his businesses increasingly rely on.

Let’s briefly look at some numbers. As of 2024 there were 384,900 H2-A and 215,217 H2-B workers in the US. About 40 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, and as of 2020 there were more than 406,000 individuals with Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to reside and work legally in the US due to unsafe conditions in their home country. The similar humanitarian parole covered another 530,000-plus like the 200 union members in Kentucky mentioned above.

Key about those latter two categories is the ability to stay in the US is not directly tied to work. Team Trump is working to end those programs but facing legal obstacles.

It’s not clear what exactly the improvements are that Trump plans to make to the H2 program. So far, it appears as though the goal is to simply replace current undocumented workers, asylum recipients and other protected immigrants with more of an H-2 workforce would be a boon for employers as H-2 employees would be more vulnerable to abuse than those they would be replacing. It’s also likely to hurt American workers. The Food & Environment Reporting Network on how:

…these visas are notoriously abusive to foreign workers. That’s because they effectively create a captive workforce: In contrast to other immigrant workers in the U.S. — including recipients of certain humanitarian programs, like TPS — H-2 workers’ presence in the country is tied to a particular job and employer. H-2 employees are eligible to work for whoever sponsors their visa, and it can be prohibitively difficult for them to switch jobs even if they’re mistreated. If they quit, they’re sent back to their home countries, which would ruin many H-2 workers and their families financially. (Over half of all H-2A farmworkers enter the country in debt to illegal recruiters, who charge fees for connecting workers with job contracts.)

…Predictably, some employers take advantage of the power the H-2 program gives them over their employees. The nonprofit Polaris, which runs a U.S. human trafficking hotline, has connected the H-2A visato rampant human trafficking, as have a number of criminal cases and media investigations. Wage theft is also a pervasive problem. In an interview with Prism media, Mike Rios, a DOL regional agricultural enforcement coordinator, said that wage theft is “baked into” the H-2A visa, and described the program as the “literal purchase of humans.”

H-2 workers have so little bargaining power that some employers prefer to hire them over U.S. citizens — which ends up disenfranchising the American-born workers Trump and Miller say their deportations will benefit. Under federal law, employers must show they were unable to hire American workers before they’re approved to hire H-2 workers, but some employers circumvent that rule and commit visa fraud to avoid hiring Americans at higher rates. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) has filed a string of complaints with the DOL, alleging that meatpacking companies have repeatedly requested increased allocations of H-2B workers as a way of undercutting wages.

How’s that for “America First”?

But it’s not just Trump. While he always acts as an accelerant, this is a process decades in the making ever since neoliberal ideology took over both American political parties nearly half a century ago. The role of immigration in the ongoing class war is succinctly described here by Michael Macher:

…the US immigration system runs not on the enforcement of immigration laws, but on their selective nonenforcement. Employers have relied on the state to ignore the exploitation of undocumented labor while holding the credible threat of deportation over workers. This has had the effect of strengthening employer bargaining power generally against all workers—lowering wages, weakening unions, and shifting the politics of work away from collective bargaining and wage-and-hour regulation. The interest in labor that is weak and disorganized has driven US politicians, consciously or not, to adopt the role of petty bosses, threatening the deportation of significant portions of the US workforce. But if Trump can afford to blow up this arrangement, it is because the precarity of the undocumented worker represents the future of labor relations in the US, not its past.

How so? In essence, the administration is engaged in a workforce engineering project reminiscent of university founder Leland Stanford’s brutal equine engineering in early Silicon Valley. Here’s Malcolm Harris’ description from his book ‘Palo Alto’:

It’s worth retracing our steps to the Palo Alto system, in which potential counts for everything –– but only a specific kind of potential. A colt that won’t pull a cart is no good to the system, no matter how fast. And a colt that organizes all the horses to strike? That’s no potential at all.

Organized laborers — and especially immigrant organizers — not only don’t have potential, but are part of what the administration and its Silicon Valley stakeholders consider “nihilistic violent extremists.”

With Trump and DOGE’s gutting of the National Labor Relations Board, attacks on federal workers unions, selective deportations, Gold Cards, and promotion of H-2 workers, this Palo Alto system vision is coming into view.

It heralds a day where all workers are as exploitable as the immigrant and accelerates a decades-long trend in that direction. Where is this leading? We can turn to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 for clues. Written by numerous now-Trump administration officials, it includes in its recommendations the steps Trump has already taken, as well as many more. Among them:

Make overtime pay available to fewer workers. Trump cut the pay of hundreds of thousands of federal workers by rescinding an order that their wages be indexed to inflation.
Abolishing all public sector unions. Trump is trying to get rid of collective bargaining labor protections for federal employees. In the name of national security, of course.
Ban the use of card check, one of labor’s most effective tools to organize workers.
Gut worker health and safety protections. As just one example, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is no longer enforcing its rule titled, ​“Lowering Miners’ Exposure to Respirable Crystalline Silica and Improving Respiratory Protection.” And DOGE is closing 33 MSHA field offices in 19 states, accelerating a trend of closures, which means fewer inspectors and mine inspections.
Maybe the most egregious example is the big comeback of child labor— again this predates Trump but he acts as an accelerant. In some cases the exploitable (immigrant adults) are now being exchanged for the more exploitable (immigrant children). This comes as the administration just canceled millions of dollars in international grants that a Department of Labor division administered to combat child labor and slave labor around the world.
The list goes on and on. The assault on worker protections has been relentless. Despite all these actions and the high-publicity “ICE Barbie” at the Department of Homeland Security, what the administration has yet to do is go after employers of illegals, which is the easiest and most effective way to stop the hiring of illegals.

For decades, every administration has promised to go after employers and failed to follow through. Instead, we have only gotten more power going to employers who leverage the threat of deportation with impunity and use immigration law as a shield against labor law.

Trump is looking to further these trends, as he did in his first term. During that time the temporary work visa programs steadily grew a total of 13 percent larger, and he used the Covid emergency to help make it happen:

During the pandemic, his administration issued a series of emergency measures that made H-2A and H-2B visas more flexible and employer-friendly. Workers were allowed to stay in the country for longer periods of time, in part because they had been deemed “essential workers,” and wages for H-2A workers were effectively frozen.

With trade war and worker shortage emergencies just around the corner, it won’t be surprising to see the administration try to make a similar move with regards to the H-2 programs.

In conclusion, the administration’s immigrant-labor overhaul is more about strengthening the oligarchic police state than gains for the MAGA workers.

Rather than manufacturing jobs, we’re getting a militarized border with big handouts to well-connected surveillance and population control tech companies, as well as the private prison industry to remove the “horses” no longer showing potential.

Rather than cracking down on employers exploiting foreign labor, we’re getting an assault on universities and rendition of immigrant activist students in order to cow elites, silent dissent, and please the Zionist crowd.

And rather than better pay and working conditions to entice American workers, we’re likely to get an increase in H1 and H2s to further drive down wages and worker protections. High-profile cases in the news day after day of ICE smashing car windows and dragging out brown people and students being snatched up from bougie universities with billion-dollar endowments, well, that might make it seem like Trump is really doing something.

When that high wears off, however, and the dust settles on the latest assault on worker rights, everyone might be feeling a little more vulnerable. Kind of like an immigrant.

How Trump Deportations Fit Into War Against American Workers | naked capitalism

Rather than cracking down on employers exploiting immigrant labor, we’re getting an assault on unions and rendition of immigrant activist students….

www.nakedcapitalism.com

How Trump Deportations Fit Into War Against American Workers
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/04/trump-deportations-are-not-about-strengthening-american-labor-but-part-of-the-effort-to-decimate-it.html
Posted on April 21, 2025 by Conor Gallagher
The Trump administration is ending …work authorizations for two hundred union members who assemble dishwashers, refrigerators, washers, and dryers for GE Appliances-Haier at Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky. It also revoked the visas of several members of the Graduate Workers Coalition at the University of Indiana. The union frequently strikes and pickets for better wages for student teachers.

Mostly lost in the firestorm around Abrego Garcia, the man who was illegally deported to the notorious hellhole prison in El Salvador, is that for the past year he worked as an apprentice with the Sheet Metal Air Rail & Transportation Local 100 union. Perhaps that fact contributed to what the Trump gang calls the “administrative error” that led to his rendition. Judging from the larger pattern, it doesn’t appear to have been an error at all.

While the number of deportations under Trump lags behind the pace of the Obama and Biden administrations, Team Trump looks to have a goal in mind. Edgar Franks, the political director of Familias Unidas, had this to say to Truthoutabout the crackdown on farmworker organizers:

From the beginning, we thought Project 2025 and its plan for mass deportations was meant to send a chill among farmworker organizations that had been gaining momentum. It was meant to silence the organizing, deport as many people as possible, and to bring in a captive workforce through the H-2A program.

We think that might be the ultimate plan: to get rid of all the immigrant workers who are organizing and fighting back for better conditions, and to bring in a workforce that’s under the complete control of their employer with basically no rights. It’ll make it even harder to organize with farmworkers if more H-2A workers come. It wouldn’t be impossible, but it’ll be more difficult. All the gains that have been made in the last couple of years for farmworkers are at risk.

While Project 2025 wants to get rid of labor protections in almost every fashion, it actually calls for reducing H-2 visas, which allow employers to hire foreigners for temporary work. H2-A is used for agricultural workers and represents 70% of H-2 issuances, and the H-2B for non-agricultural workers represents the remaining 30%.

There is clearly friction between MAGA and big business as the H1-B visa showdown demonstrated, Trump usually sides with the money as he did in that case. The MAGA movement about ethnic belonging as some form of essential right as an American citizen and rebuilding the mostly white working class. Silicon Valley and other financial stakeholders are about destroying labor, which means engineering an easily exploited workforce.

If an individual anywhere in the world can contribute to the bottom line of American monopolies, then they are welcome in the US — as demonstrated by Trump’s “Gold Card” scheme, in which visas are up for sale. Here’s Trump:

“A person comes from India, China, Japan, lots of different places, and they go to Harvard, the Wharton School of Finance. They go to Yale. They go to all great schools. And they graduate number one in their class, and they are made job offers, but the offer is immediately rescinded because you have no idea whether or not that person can stay in the country. I want to be able to have that person stay in the country. These companies can go and buy a gold card, and they can use it as a matter of recruitment.”

Lowly farmworkers and hotel cooks and cleaners won’t be getting a gold card but they can contribute just the same.

At an April 10 cabinet meeting Trump said that undocumented people working on farms and in hotels would be allowed to leave the country and return as legal workers if their employers vouched for them. Here’s the quote:

“We have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to need people…So a farmer will come in with a letter concerning certain people, saying they’re great, they’re working hard. We’re going to slow it down a little bit for them, and then we’re going to ultimately bring them back. They’ll go out. They’re going to come back as legal workers.”

What —or who— does he mean? And why is the administration deporting people who were already here legally?

A White House official told NBC News that Trump wants to “improve” the H-2A and H-2B programs, which coincidentally his businesses increasingly rely on.

Let’s briefly look at some numbers. As of 2024 there were 384,900 H2-A and 215,217 H2-B workers in the US. About 40 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, and as of 2020 there were more than 406,000 individuals with Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to reside and work legally in the US due to unsafe conditions in their home country. The similar humanitarian parole covered another 530,000-plus like the 200 union members in Kentucky mentioned above.

Key about those latter two categories is the ability to stay in the US is not directly tied to work. Team Trump is working to end those programs but facing legal obstacles.

It’s not clear what exactly the improvements are that Trump plans to make to the H2 program. So far, it appears as though the goal is to simply replace current undocumented workers, asylum recipients and other protected immigrants with more of an H-2 workforce would be a boon for employers as H-2 employees would be more vulnerable to abuse than those they would be replacing. It’s also likely to hurt American workers. The Food & Environment Reporting Network on how:

…these visas are notoriously abusive to foreign workers. That’s because they effectively create a captive workforce: In contrast to other immigrant workers in the U.S. — including recipients of certain humanitarian programs, like TPS — H-2 workers’ presence in the country is tied to a particular job and employer. H-2 employees are eligible to work for whoever sponsors their visa, and it can be prohibitively difficult for them to switch jobs even if they’re mistreated. If they quit, they’re sent back to their home countries, which would ruin many H-2 workers and their families financially. (Over half of all H-2A farmworkers enter the country in debt to illegal recruiters, who charge fees for connecting workers with job contracts.)

…Predictably, some employers take advantage of the power the H-2 program gives them over their employees. The nonprofit Polaris, which runs a U.S. human trafficking hotline, has connected the H-2A visato rampant human trafficking, as have a number of criminal cases and media investigations. Wage theft is also a pervasive problem. In an interview with Prism media, Mike Rios, a DOL regional agricultural enforcement coordinator, said that wage theft is “baked into” the H-2A visa, and described the program as the “literal purchase of humans.”

H-2 workers have so little bargaining power that some employers prefer to hire them over U.S. citizens — which ends up disenfranchising the American-born workers Trump and Miller say their deportations will benefit. Under federal law, employers must show they were unable to hire American workers before they’re approved to hire H-2 workers, but some employers circumvent that rule and commit visa fraud to avoid hiring Americans at higher rates. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) has filed a string of complaints with the DOL, alleging that meatpacking companies have repeatedly requested increased allocations of H-2B workers as a way of undercutting wages.

How’s that for “America First”?

But it’s not just Trump. While he always acts as an accelerant, this is a process decades in the making ever since neoliberal ideology took over both American political parties nearly half a century ago. The role of immigration in the ongoing class war is succinctly described here by Michael Macher:

…the US immigration system runs not on the enforcement of immigration laws, but on their selective nonenforcement. Employers have relied on the state to ignore the exploitation of undocumented labor while holding the credible threat of deportation over workers. This has had the effect of strengthening employer bargaining power generally against all workers—lowering wages, weakening unions, and shifting the politics of work away from collective bargaining and wage-and-hour regulation. The interest in labor that is weak and disorganized has driven US politicians, consciously or not, to adopt the role of petty bosses, threatening the deportation of significant portions of the US workforce. But if Trump can afford to blow up this arrangement, it is because the precarity of the undocumented worker represents the future of labor relations in the US, not its past.

How so? In essence, the administration is engaged in a workforce engineering project reminiscent of university founder Leland Stanford’s brutal equine engineering in early Silicon Valley. Here’s Malcolm Harris’ description from his book ‘Palo Alto’:

It’s worth retracing our steps to the Palo Alto system, in which potential counts for everything –– but only a specific kind of potential. A colt that won’t pull a cart is no good to the system, no matter how fast. And a colt that organizes all the horses to strike? That’s no potential at all.

Organized laborers — and especially immigrant organizers — not only don’t have potential, but are part of what the administration and its Silicon Valley stakeholders consider “nihilistic violent extremists.”

With Trump and DOGE’s gutting of the National Labor Relations Board, attacks on federal workers unions, selective deportations, Gold Cards, and promotion of H-2 workers, this Palo Alto system vision is coming into view.

It heralds a day where all workers are as exploitable as the immigrant and accelerates a decades-long trend in that direction. Where is this leading? We can turn to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 for clues. Written by numerous now-Trump administration officials, it includes in its recommendations the steps Trump has already taken, as well as many more. Among them:

Make overtime pay available to fewer workers. Trump cut the pay of hundreds of thousands of federal workers by rescinding an order that their wages be indexed to inflation.
Abolishing all public sector unions. Trump is trying to get rid of collective bargaining labor protections for federal employees. In the name of national security, of course.
Ban the use of card check, one of labor’s most effective tools to organize workers.
Gut worker health and safety protections. As just one example, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is no longer enforcing its rule titled, ​“Lowering Miners’ Exposure to Respirable Crystalline Silica and Improving Respiratory Protection.” And DOGE is closing 33 MSHA field offices in 19 states, accelerating a trend of closures, which means fewer inspectors and mine inspections.
Maybe the most egregious example is the big comeback of child labor— again this predates Trump but he acts as an accelerant. In some cases the exploitable (immigrant adults) are now being exchanged for the more exploitable (immigrant children). This comes as the administration just canceled millions of dollars in international grants that a Department of Labor division administered to combat child labor and slave labor around the world.
The list goes on and on. The assault on worker protections has been relentless. Despite all these actions and the high-publicity “ICE Barbie” at the Department of Homeland Security, what the administration has yet to do is go after employers of illegals, which is the easiest and most effective way to stop the hiring of illegals.

For decades, every administration has promised to go after employers and failed to follow through. Instead, we have only gotten more power going to employers who leverage the threat of deportation with impunity and use immigration law as a shield against labor law.

Trump is looking to further these trends, as he did in his first term. During that time the temporary work visa programs steadily grew a total of 13 percent larger, and he used the Covid emergency to help make it happen:

During the pandemic, his administration issued a series of emergency measures that made H-2A and H-2B visas more flexible and employer-friendly. Workers were allowed to stay in the country for longer periods of time, in part because they had been deemed “essential workers,” and wages for H-2A workers were effectively frozen.

With trade war and worker shortage emergencies just around the corner, it won’t be surprising to see the administration try to make a similar move with regards to the H-2 programs.

In conclusion, the administration’s immigrant-labor overhaul is more about strengthening the oligarchic police state than gains for the MAGA workers.

Rather than manufacturing jobs, we’re getting a militarized border with big handouts to well-connected surveillance and population control tech companies, as well as the private prison industry to remove the “horses” no longer showing potential.

Rather than cracking down on employers exploiting foreign labor, we’re getting an assault on universities and rendition of immigrant activist students in order to cow elites, silent dissent, and please the Zionist crowd.

And rather than better pay and working conditions to entice American workers, we’re likely to get an increase in H1 and H2s to further drive down wages and worker protections. High-profile cases in the news day after day of ICE smashing car windows and dragging out brown people and students being snatched up from bougie universities with billion-dollar endowments, well, that might make it seem like Trump is really doing something.

When that high wears off, however, and the dust settles on the latest assault on worker rights, everyone might be feeling a little more vulnerable. Kind of like an immigrant.

How Trump Deportations Fit Into War Against American Workers | naked capitalism

Rather than cracking down on employers exploiting immigrant labor, we’re getting an assault on unions and rendition of immigrant activist students….

www.nakedcapitalism.com

UAWD Steering Committee Moves To Dissolve Reform Caucus
https://working-mass.com/2025/04/10/uawd-steering-committee-moves-to-dissolve-reform-caucus/
Post published:April 10, 2025

An effort by the majority group to dissolve the reform caucus highlights on-going internal tensions …over the direction of the caucus

By Henry De Groot

Tensions within the Unite All Workers For Democracy (UAWD) reform caucus within the United Autoworkers Union have boiled over as the majority group on the caucus’s Steering Committee (henceforth, majority group) issued a statement calling for members to vote to dissolve the caucus.

The statement from the majority group asserts that internal divisions within the caucus have hardened, blocking productive work from continuing. The majority group statement also seemed to question the validity of a caucus which is largely composed of non-autoworkers within UAW Region 9A (covering the Northeast), in a union largely composed of midwestern blue-collar manufacturing workers.

We believe in the need for a reform caucus, but not in one that is constantly engaged in insular debate that distracts from the work of building the union.

The majority group statement concludes by announcing the launch of a new network within the UAW which is focused on “developing the future generation of shop-floor organizers and leaders in the UAW, helping members stand up to bosses and win strong contracts, and building stronger local unions, including by running for office.”

A counter-statement was released by the minority tendency on UAWD Steering Committee (minority group) criticizing the effort.

The minority group statement explores how, from their perspective, the effort to dissolve the caucus is the result of a slow drift away from the original principles of the caucus, and the alleged opportunism of certain UAWD leaders elected to the union’s International Executive Board (IEB). In contrast to this alleged opportunism, the minority group, instead, asserts a vision of what they call “class struggle.”

The statement from the minority group also asserts that the effort by the majority group to dissolve the caucus at the next meeting would violate the caucus’s by-laws and responds to the allegations of dysfunction that are raised in the majority group statement.

The minority group also punches back, questioning the relationship between the majority group and Teamsters For A Democratic Union and Labor Notes.

The UAWD caucus took power in the country’s sixth-largest union, covering almost one million auto-workers, higher education workers, and other manufacturing and white-collar workers, following the successful UAWD election effort which saw UAWD member Shawn Fain take the union’s top job.

Fain also faced criticism, especially from the Palestinian movement, for his endorsement of Kamala Harris, and more recently for his apparent approval of Trump’s tariffs.

The division also seems to have split members of the DSA active within the caucus, with members currently or previously active in the Boston DSA Labor Working Group (which founded Working Mass), Worcester DSA, and other DSA chapters represented on both documents.

Henry De Groot is the Managing Editor of Working Mass.

Note: An earlier version of this article described workers embedded in higher education as “graduate students.” This has been corrected for accuracy in light of other workers within the field.

UAWD Steering Committee Moves To Dissolve Reform Caucus – Working Mass

Working Mass is a project of DSA members in Massachusetts. We cover strikes, new organizing, and contract campaigns, as well as labor strategy, the…

working-mass.com

Union-backed Oakland school board majority ousts home-grown superintendent
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/union-backed-oakland-school-board-majority-ousts-20289400.php
By Jill Tucker,
Education Reporter
April 23, 2025

Oakland Unified School District …Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell is seen in this May 14, 2023 file photo. On Wednesday, the school board voted to oust the superintendent from her position.
Oakland Unified School District Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell is seen in this May 14, 2023 file photo. On Wednesday, the school board voted to oust the superintendent from her position.
Don Feria/Special to The Chronicle

The Oakland school board voted Wednesday to replace the district’s longtime superintendent, giving her a payout to step aside at the end of this school year, officials confirmed, rather than wait until the end of her contract in the summer of 2027.
The 4-3 decision to push out Kyla Johnson-Trammell was announced as a “voluntary separation agreement,” although the board did not immediately provide details of the deal.
Johnson-Trammell will remain with the district as “superintendent emeritus” from July 1 through Jan. 15, 2026, according to a joint statement released by her and board President Jennifer Brouhard. It is unclear what Johnson-Trammell’s role will be under the new title. An interim superintendent will be appointed by July 1, they said.

The new agreement nullifies the superintendent’s current contract, which was extended in August until the summer of 2027 by the previous school board to ensure a smooth transition of leadership.
Brouhard voted for Johnson-Trammell’s contract extension, but has recently led the effort to bring a new leader in as early as this summer.
“Superintendent Johnson-Trammell has done an extraordinary job over the past eight years, a historic tenure marked by stability, strong fiscal oversight, and improvements in student achievement,” Brouhard said in the statement, citing increased literacy, improved graduation rates and historic pay raises for educators, among other accomplishments.
Johnson-Trammell was not available for additional comment. Board members were not immediately available for comment given their ongoing presence at the public meeting.
The announcement regarding the superintendent at the beginning of the meeting, however, was met with loud boos in the La Escuelita auditorium where the school board meeting was held. Several parents and community members challenged board members to explain the decision, but were given no explanation.

Oakland parent Vivica Ycoy-Walton said the community was kept in the dark, without the opportunity for any input.
“I’m outraged because we were given no forward warning, no reasons, no anything,” she said, adding that Johnson-Trammell is a native Oaklander who has the trust of the community.
“We love her. She’s done a lot of great things. I trust her,” she said. “Somebody who was born, raised, went to school and went through every level of leadership to get to the position she is right now — that is somebody the city trusts. And she looks like us and she supports all of us.”
This was the third closed-door session over the last month about the fate of the superintendent, with the Oakland branch of the NAACP, district administrators and some board members speaking out in opposition to Johnson-Trammell’s possible ouster. Others criticized a process that appeared to be an effort to remove the superintendent in secret without any public input.
“While it is normal for new boards to provide new direction, I want to be very clear: what matters is how we pursue that vision,” said board member Patrice Berry in an April 13 letter to the community. “What matters is that we lead with a process that is structured, careful, and transparent. Unfortunately, that has not been our path in this process so far.”
The board’s vote, made behind closed doors, comes at a pivotal time for the district, which has faced significant declining enrollment and a persistent deficit, backfilled in recent years by pandemic recovery funds and other one-time funding sources. That money is nearly gone.
The district has about 40% fewer students than in the 1990s, but has not shrunk its footprint to address the decline, leaving many schools with fewer than 200 students.
Johnson-Trammell, the superintendent since 2017, has pushed the board to spend within its means and confront the thousands of empty seats spread across a large number of schools. She was expected to recommend a plan to reduce the number of schools in June, as mandated by the previous board.
It’s unclear if that will happen now. The board majority has the support of the teachers union, which has opposed school closures and budget cuts.
The union, the Oakland Education Association, has called for a strike authorization vote to protest what its leadership has said is a lack of transparency over district finances. If approved by voting members, the union has said it will be able to call a one-day strike on May 1.
When Johnson-Trammell took over, after working for 18 years as a teacher and administrator in the district, Oakland Unified was already facing a budget crisis, with mid-year cuts required. During her tenure, she has led through three teachers strikes, the COVID pandemic, divisive school closure battles and the ongoing fiscal oversight given the ongoing debt from a $100 million state loan required after the district ran out of money in 2003.
The district announced this week that it will make the final payments on the loan in June and it has a final audit report in hand, which is also required before the state returns all local control.
The audit found that the district is “in the best fiscal condition in 22 years,” officials said in a statement posted on the ousd.org website, citing stable leadership as a primary reason for that.
But at the same time, there are big challenges ahead, district officials said. That includes facing the fact that attendance is below 85% in some settings and the city’s schools lose 700 students every year during the elementary-to-middle school transition.
In addition, the public school system has 30 more schools than fiscally sustainable and only 6 of 77 schools are within sustainable size ranges, officials added.
“The report warns that without continued action to reduce costs and improve attendance, the District is at risk of needing another state bailout,” according to the statement posted on the Oakland Unified web site.

Union-backed Oakland school board majority ousts home-grown superintendent

In a 4-3 vote, the Oakland school board voted Wednesday to replace the long-time superintendent, paying her to leave before her contract expires.

www.sfchronicle.com

Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2025
https://aflcio.org/reports/dotj-2025

April 23, 2025

2512%20AFL-CIO%20DOTJ%202025%20N-BUG_FINAL.jpeg
CONTENTS

Executive Summary
The State of Workers’ Safety and Health 2025
Executive Summary
This 2025 …edition of “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect” marks the 34th year the AFL-CIO has produced the only comprehensive report on the state of safety and health protections for America’s workers. This report features national and state information on workplace fatalities, injuries and illnesses, as well as workplace safety inspections, penalties, funding, staffing and public employee coverage under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act). It also includes information on the state of mine safety and health, key topics such as workplace violence, musculoskeletal disorders and heat illness prevention, and transitions in policies on government occupational data reporting, transparency and equity.

This report focuses on the most recent data available from several different sources: job fatality, injury and illness data from 2023, and enforcement data from FY 2024.

Fifty-four years ago on April 28, the OSH Act went into effect, promising every worker the right to a safe job. More than 712,000 workers now can say their lives have been saved since the passage of the OSH Act. The federal Mine Safety and Health Act was enacted 48 years ago. Since that era, workplace safety and health conditions have improved. But too many workers remain at serious risk of injury, illness or death as chemical plant explosions, major fires, construction collapses, infectious disease outbreaks, workplace assaults, toxic chemical exposures and other preventable tragedies continue to permeate the workplace. Workplace hazards kill approximately 140,000 workers each year—including 5,283 from traumatic injuries and an estimated 135,000 from occupational diseases in 2023. That is 385 workers each day—and many worker protections are under threat. Job injury and illness numbers continue to be severe undercounts of the real problem.

Over the years, our progress has become more challenging, as employers’ opposition to workers’ rights and protections has grown, and attacks on unions have intensified. Big corporations, many conservatives and billionaires have launched an aggressive assault on workers’ lives and their livelihoods by repealing job safety and health regulations, promoting deregulatory initiatives, blocking funding and pulling back resources for job safety agencies, firing federal staff doing critical work to protect worker health and safety, and requiring additional burdens in order to issue protections at all. They aim to dissolve the protection structures and shift the responsibility for providing safe jobs from employers to individual workers, and to undermine the core duties and capacity of workplace safety agencies, and more recently disregard and discard the government’s responsibility to protect workers altogether.

President Trump’s first 100 days of his second administration have not only attacked Biden administration progress, but confirmed his anti-worker, pro-business philosophy. 1 Since taking office at the end of January 2025, he has issued dozens of executive orders to roll back or review existing regulations, including an order that requires that for any new regulatory protection issued, an agency must remove 10 safeguards from the books. He has empowered Elon Musk and his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) to launch a full-scale attack on workers by eliminating entire government agencies, removing the independence of other agencies, and firing tens of thousands of federal workers under the guise of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. Although no significant waste, fraud or abuse has been identified in federal agencies, Trump and Musk have used DOGE to launch attacks on workers’ rights, workers’ protections, federal agencies, and private and public sector unions.

The Trump administration and DOGE have focused on totally decimating the fabric of what makes government protections work for people through attacks on job safety, public health, union rights and the independence of federal agencies. Attacks on federal workers aim to decimate the fairest employer in the country; it is not a coincidence and it is not efficient. There is no misunderstanding among workers and unions that state and local governments and the private sector will be next on the chopping block. In the most poignant and direct attack on worker safety, DOGE functionally eliminated the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the only worker safety and health research agency. Worker safety is not a priority for this administration.

National progress over the decades has undoubtedly made workplaces safer and saved lives. But that progress is under attack, now more than ever. The nation’s workers now must fight fearlessly to hold onto worker protection and public health systems, as they did a century ago to create these agencies, laws and standards that keep us safe at work. We must prioritize protecting workers from job injury, disease and death, restore dignity and justice to working people, improve livelihoods, and reduce burdens on families and communities, over the whims and greed of billionaires. Employers must meet their responsibilities under the law to protect workers and be held accountable when they put workers in danger.

There is much more work to be done to ensure the fundamental right to a safe and healthy job is a reality for all of America’s workers.

The High Toll of Job Injuries, Illnesses and Deaths

In 2023:

385 workers died each day from hazardous working conditions.
5,283 workers were killed on the job in the United States.
An estimated 135,304 workers died from occupational diseases.
The overall job fatality rate decreased to 3.5 per 100,000 workers.
Workers of color die on the job at a higher rate: Black and Latino worker job fatality rates are disproportionate compared with all other workers and they continue to remain high.
Employers reported nearly 3.2 million work-related injuries and illnesses, a decrease from the previous year.
At least 55 workers died from heat on the job, a 28% increase from 2022; fatal and nonfatal data are an undercount of the real problem.
Workplace homicides continue to be a significant problem, even though they decreased 12.6% since 2022; workplace suicides increased 5.2% from 2022.
Separately, unintentional overdoses at work decreased nearly 5% from 2022 to 2023, due to increased attention paid to and efforts to combat the opioid crisis.
The rate of serious workplace violence injuries has increased to 4.3 per 10,000 workers.
Musculoskeletal disorders from repetitive motion injuries continue to be a major problem, accounting for approximately 28% of all serious work-related injuries and illnesses in private industry.
Underreporting of all workplace injuries and illnesses is widespread—the true toll of work-related injuries and illnesses is 5.2 million to 7.8 million each year in private industry.
Chemical exposures continue to plague working people, leading to debilitating, life-threatening diseases that are totally preventable.
The cost of job injuries and illnesses is enormous, estimated at $174 billion to $348 billion a year—an undercount of the real impact on society, families and communities.

Is Your Workplace Safe?.png
States with the highest fatality rates in 2023 were:

Wyoming (16.0 per 100,000 workers)
West Virginia (8.3 per 100,000 workers)
Arkansas (7.5 per 100,000 workers)
Alaska (7.4 per 100,000 workers)
Montana (7.1 per 100,000 workers)
North Dakota (6.9 per 100,000 workers)
Industries with the highest fatality rates in 2023 were:

Agriculture, forestry, and fishing and hunting (20.3 per 100,000 workers)
Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction (16.9 per 100,000 workers)
Transportation and warehousing (12.9 per 100,000 workers)
Construction (9.6 per 100,000 workers)
Wholesale trade (5.4 per 100,000 workers)
Black and Latino workers are more likely to die on the job. In 2023:

Black workers’ job fatality rate was 3.6 per 100,000 workers.
659 Black workers died on the job—the second-highest number in more than two decades.
Latino workers’ job fatality rate decreased to 4.4 per 100,000 workers—meaning they continued to face the greatest risk of dying on the job than all workers at 26% higher than the national average.
The number of Latino worker deaths increased again to 1,250. Of those killed on the job, 67% were immigrants, an increase from 60% in 2022.
Latino Workers Have the Highest Job Fatality Rate.png
Black Workers are Dying at Higher Rates than Other Workers.png
Older workers and minors are at serious risk. In 2023:

More than one-third of workplace fatalities occurred among workers ages 55 and older.
Workers 65 and older have 2.5 times the risk of dying on the job as other workers, with a job fatality rate of 8.7 per 100,000 workers.
Many older workers are injured from falls on the same level.
Many children, mostly migrants, have become the focus of stark exploitation, working in dangerous conditions.
23 workers younger than 18 years and 415 workers between 19 and 25 years old died on the job.
Job safety oversight and enforcement

Strong enforcement and worker protection efforts during the Biden administration occurred through several targeted enforcement initiatives:

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) clarified the importance of the participation of all workers to choose their representatives during OSHA inspections.
OSHA reinstated the collection of employer injury data for large employers to better inform inspection and prevention measures.
OSHA instituted instance-by-instance citations for high-gravity violations, maximizing the penalty for employers who violate the law.
OSHA signed a joint agreement with the National Labor Relations Board to strengthen information-sharing for whistleblower cases.
OSHA instituted targeted enforcement programs and awareness campaigns on heat, silica, COVID-19, falls in construction, combustible dust, injuries in the poultry industry and warehousing.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) reinstated impact inspections, focusing on mines with a poor history of compliance with MSHA standards, high numbers of injuries, illnesses or fatalities, or other indicators of unsafe mines.
OSHA resources in FY 2024 still are too few to be a deterrent:

There are 1,802 inspectors (768 federal and 1,034 state) to inspect the 11.8 million workplaces under the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s jurisdiction, covering 161 million workers—a workforce that keeps growing while OSHA staff numbers do not.
Federal OSHA has 85 fewer inspectors than in FY 2023— only enough to now inspect workplaces once every 185 years—and state OSHA plans have 12 additional inspectors compared with FY 2023.
There is one inspector for every 84,937 workers.
The current OSHA budget amounts to $3.92 available to protect each worker.
Penalties in FY 2024 still are too weak:

The average penalty for a serious violation was $4,083 for federal OSHA.
The average penalty for a serious violation was $2,580 for OSHA state plans.
The median penalty for killing a worker was $16,131 for federal OSHA.
The median penalty for killing a worker was $7,031 for state OSHA plans.
Only 137 worker death cases have been criminally prosecuted under the Occupational Safety and Health Act since 1970.
Much Work Remains to Be Done

Workers need more job safety and health protection, not less.

Action needed from Congress:

Immediately intervene to require DOGE and the Trump administration to reinstate all staff across all NIOSH divisions, the agency with a unique and imperative role mandated by Congress.
Reinstate appointees at independent labor agencies who were wrongfully fired as part of a broad attack on labor unions and worker rights.
Oppose efforts by DOGE to access sensitive worker data, manipulate government structures without any context and label unique roles as “redundant” and “inefficient.”
Oppose any attempts to destroy or decimate worker health and safety agencies, including NIOSH, OSHA and MSHA, and hold operators of these agencies accountable to the responsibility assigned to them by Congress.
Put the critical need to protect workers’ health and safety above billionaire and corporation motives.
Oppose attempts by corporations to weaken broad regulatory systems under the guise of “reform” that actually would make it more difficult—or impossible—for agencies to issue needed safeguards.
Defend a federal budget that maintains and increases funding and staffing for job safety agencies for both standard-setting and enforcement, modernizing the flat-funded budget that has prevented agencies from fulfilling their obligations.
Pass legislation on heat and workplace violence to ensure OSHA develops and issues strong standards on these major problems.
Pass the Protecting America’s Workers Act to extend the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s coverage to workers currently excluded, strengthen civil and criminal penalties for violations, enhance anti-discrimination protections, and strengthen the rights of workers, unions and those who have been injured or made ill because of their jobs.
Pass the Robert C. Byrd Mine Safety Protection Act to strengthen the federal Mine Safety and Health Act related to mine incident investigations, standards, miners' rights and protections, and training for miners.
Action needed from job safety agencies:

Stand up for employers’ responsibility to protect workers under U.S. law: Defend against staff reductions and funding and resource cuts—all of which are the lifelines for protecting workers.
Fully enforce OSHA, MSHA and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) job safety and health protections to hold employers accountable for not following workplace safety and health laws.
Strengthen federal OSHA oversight of state OSHA plans.
Strengthen protections for workers facing higher job fatality, injury and illness rates, rather than launching attacks on immigrant workers and workers of color that keep them living in fear of raising safety concerns that put all workers in danger.
Strengthen anti-retaliation protections and worker participation rights.
Issue an OSHA workplace violence standard for health care and social service workers.
Issue an OSHA heat illness and injury prevention standard to protect indoor and outdoor workers from dangerously hot working conditions.
Action needed to restore and improve injury and illness data:

Enhance access to timely injury and illness information by providing the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) with additional resources to publish annual detailed nonfatal injury and illnesses data.
Improve and restore the collection and reporting of demographic, cause, nature and other descriptive data for workers killed on the job through agreements and policies that allow BLS to publish more comprehensive and descriptive worker fatality data.
Refocus and align data collection and analysis efforts with emerging worker safety and health issues to support the tracking and understanding of these key areas.
Develop a national occupational disease surveillance system to determine and illuminate the true toll of occupational illnesses from workplace exposures, and inform prevention efforts to reduce chronic illnesses.
The State of Workers’ Safety and Health 2025

This 2025 edition of “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect” marks the 34th year the AFL-CIO has produced the only comprehensive report on the state of safety and health protections for America’s workers. This report features national and state information on workplace fatalities, injuries and illnesses, as well as workplace safety inspections, penalties, funding, staffing and public employee coverage under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act). It also includes information on the state of mine safety and health, key topics such as workplace violence, musculoskeletal disorders and heat illness prevention, and transitions in policies on government occupational data reporting, transparency and equity.

This report focuses on the most recent data available from several different sources: job fatality, injury and illness data from 2023, and enforcement data from FY 2024.

Fifty-four years ago on April 28, the OSH Act went into effect, promising every worker the right to a safe job. More than 712,000 workers now can say their lives have been saved since the passage of the OSH Act. The federal Mine Safety and Health Act was enacted 48 years ago. Since that era, workplace safety and health conditions have improved. But too many workers remain at serious risk of injury, illness or death as chemical plant explosions, major fires, construction collapses, infectious disease outbreaks, workplace assaults, toxic chemical exposures and other preventable tragedies continue to permeate the workplace. Workplace hazards kill approximately 140,000 workers each year—including 5,283 from traumatic injuries and an estimated 135,000 from occupational diseases in 2023. That is 385 workers each day—and many worker protections are under threat. Job injury and illness numbers continue to be severe undercounts of the real problem.

Over the years, our progress has become more challenging, as employers’ opposition to workers’ rights and protections has grown, and attacks on unions have intensified. Big corporations, many conservatives and billionaires have launched an aggressive assault on workers’ lives and their livelihoods by repealing job safety and health regulations, promoting deregulatory initiatives, blocking funding and pulling back resources for job safety agencies, firing federal staff doing critical work to protect worker health and safety, and requiring additional burdens in order to issue protections at all. They aim to dissolve the protection structures and shift the responsibility for providing safe jobs from employers to individual workers, and to undermine the core duties and capacity of workplace safety agencies, and more recently disregard and discard the government’s responsibility to protect workers altogether.

National progress over the decades has undoubtedly made workplaces safer and saved lives. But that progress is under attack, now more than ever. The nation’s workers now must fight fearlessly to hold onto worker protections and public health systems, as they did a century ago to create these agencies, laws and standards that keep us safe at work. We must prioritize protecting workers from job injury, disease and death, restoring dignity and justice to working people, improving livelihoods, and reducing burdens on families and communities over the whims and greed of billionaires. Employers must meet their responsibilities under the law to protect workers and be held accountable when they put workers in danger. There is much more work to be done to ensure the fundamental right to a safe and healthy job is a reality for all of America’s workers.

Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2025 | AFL-CIO

This 2025 edition of “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect” marks the 34th year the AFL-CIO has produced the only comprehensive report on the…

aflcio.org

Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2025
https://aflcio.org/reports/dotj-2025

April 23, 2025

2512%20AFL-CIO%20DOTJ%202025%20N-BUG_FINAL.jpeg
CONTENTS

Executive Summary
The State of Workers’ Safety and Health 2025
Executive Summary
This 2025 …edition of “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect” marks the 34th year the AFL-CIO has produced the only comprehensive report on the state of safety and health protections for America’s workers. This report features national and state information on workplace fatalities, injuries and illnesses, as well as workplace safety inspections, penalties, funding, staffing and public employee coverage under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act). It also includes information on the state of mine safety and health, key topics such as workplace violence, musculoskeletal disorders and heat illness prevention, and transitions in policies on government occupational data reporting, transparency and equity.

This report focuses on the most recent data available from several different sources: job fatality, injury and illness data from 2023, and enforcement data from FY 2024.

Fifty-four years ago on April 28, the OSH Act went into effect, promising every worker the right to a safe job. More than 712,000 workers now can say their lives have been saved since the passage of the OSH Act. The federal Mine Safety and Health Act was enacted 48 years ago. Since that era, workplace safety and health conditions have improved. But too many workers remain at serious risk of injury, illness or death as chemical plant explosions, major fires, construction collapses, infectious disease outbreaks, workplace assaults, toxic chemical exposures and other preventable tragedies continue to permeate the workplace. Workplace hazards kill approximately 140,000 workers each year—including 5,283 from traumatic injuries and an estimated 135,000 from occupational diseases in 2023. That is 385 workers each day—and many worker protections are under threat. Job injury and illness numbers continue to be severe undercounts of the real problem.

Over the years, our progress has become more challenging, as employers’ opposition to workers’ rights and protections has grown, and attacks on unions have intensified. Big corporations, many conservatives and billionaires have launched an aggressive assault on workers’ lives and their livelihoods by repealing job safety and health regulations, promoting deregulatory initiatives, blocking funding and pulling back resources for job safety agencies, firing federal staff doing critical work to protect worker health and safety, and requiring additional burdens in order to issue protections at all. They aim to dissolve the protection structures and shift the responsibility for providing safe jobs from employers to individual workers, and to undermine the core duties and capacity of workplace safety agencies, and more recently disregard and discard the government’s responsibility to protect workers altogether.

President Trump’s first 100 days of his second administration have not only attacked Biden administration progress, but confirmed his anti-worker, pro-business philosophy. 1 Since taking office at the end of January 2025, he has issued dozens of executive orders to roll back or review existing regulations, including an order that requires that for any new regulatory protection issued, an agency must remove 10 safeguards from the books. He has empowered Elon Musk and his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) to launch a full-scale attack on workers by eliminating entire government agencies, removing the independence of other agencies, and firing tens of thousands of federal workers under the guise of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. Although no significant waste, fraud or abuse has been identified in federal agencies, Trump and Musk have used DOGE to launch attacks on workers’ rights, workers’ protections, federal agencies, and private and public sector unions.

The Trump administration and DOGE have focused on totally decimating the fabric of what makes government protections work for people through attacks on job safety, public health, union rights and the independence of federal agencies. Attacks on federal workers aim to decimate the fairest employer in the country; it is not a coincidence and it is not efficient. There is no misunderstanding among workers and unions that state and local governments and the private sector will be next on the chopping block. In the most poignant and direct attack on worker safety, DOGE functionally eliminated the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the only worker safety and health research agency. Worker safety is not a priority for this administration.

National progress over the decades has undoubtedly made workplaces safer and saved lives. But that progress is under attack, now more than ever. The nation’s workers now must fight fearlessly to hold onto worker protection and public health systems, as they did a century ago to create these agencies, laws and standards that keep us safe at work. We must prioritize protecting workers from job injury, disease and death, restore dignity and justice to working people, improve livelihoods, and reduce burdens on families and communities, over the whims and greed of billionaires. Employers must meet their responsibilities under the law to protect workers and be held accountable when they put workers in danger.

There is much more work to be done to ensure the fundamental right to a safe and healthy job is a reality for all of America’s workers.

The High Toll of Job Injuries, Illnesses and Deaths

In 2023:

385 workers died each day from hazardous working conditions.
5,283 workers were killed on the job in the United States.
An estimated 135,304 workers died from occupational diseases.
The overall job fatality rate decreased to 3.5 per 100,000 workers.
Workers of color die on the job at a higher rate: Black and Latino worker job fatality rates are disproportionate compared with all other workers and they continue to remain high.
Employers reported nearly 3.2 million work-related injuries and illnesses, a decrease from the previous year.
At least 55 workers died from heat on the job, a 28% increase from 2022; fatal and nonfatal data are an undercount of the real problem.
Workplace homicides continue to be a significant problem, even though they decreased 12.6% since 2022; workplace suicides increased 5.2% from 2022.
Separately, unintentional overdoses at work decreased nearly 5% from 2022 to 2023, due to increased attention paid to and efforts to combat the opioid crisis.
The rate of serious workplace violence injuries has increased to 4.3 per 10,000 workers.
Musculoskeletal disorders from repetitive motion injuries continue to be a major problem, accounting for approximately 28% of all serious work-related injuries and illnesses in private industry.
Underreporting of all workplace injuries and illnesses is widespread—the true toll of work-related injuries and illnesses is 5.2 million to 7.8 million each year in private industry.
Chemical exposures continue to plague working people, leading to debilitating, life-threatening diseases that are totally preventable.
The cost of job injuries and illnesses is enormous, estimated at $174 billion to $348 billion a year—an undercount of the real impact on society, families and communities.

Is Your Workplace Safe?.png
States with the highest fatality rates in 2023 were:

Wyoming (16.0 per 100,000 workers)
West Virginia (8.3 per 100,000 workers)
Arkansas (7.5 per 100,000 workers)
Alaska (7.4 per 100,000 workers)
Montana (7.1 per 100,000 workers)
North Dakota (6.9 per 100,000 workers)
Industries with the highest fatality rates in 2023 were:

Agriculture, forestry, and fishing and hunting (20.3 per 100,000 workers)
Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction (16.9 per 100,000 workers)
Transportation and warehousing (12.9 per 100,000 workers)
Construction (9.6 per 100,000 workers)
Wholesale trade (5.4 per 100,000 workers)
Black and Latino workers are more likely to die on the job. In 2023:

Black workers’ job fatality rate was 3.6 per 100,000 workers.
659 Black workers died on the job—the second-highest number in more than two decades.
Latino workers’ job fatality rate decreased to 4.4 per 100,000 workers—meaning they continued to face the greatest risk of dying on the job than all workers at 26% higher than the national average.
The number of Latino worker deaths increased again to 1,250. Of those killed on the job, 67% were immigrants, an increase from 60% in 2022.
Latino Workers Have the Highest Job Fatality Rate.png
Black Workers are Dying at Higher Rates than Other Workers.png
Older workers and minors are at serious risk. In 2023:

More than one-third of workplace fatalities occurred among workers ages 55 and older.
Workers 65 and older have 2.5 times the risk of dying on the job as other workers, with a job fatality rate of 8.7 per 100,000 workers.
Many older workers are injured from falls on the same level.
Many children, mostly migrants, have become the focus of stark exploitation, working in dangerous conditions.
23 workers younger than 18 years and 415 workers between 19 and 25 years old died on the job.
Job safety oversight and enforcement

Strong enforcement and worker protection efforts during the Biden administration occurred through several targeted enforcement initiatives:

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) clarified the importance of the participation of all workers to choose their representatives during OSHA inspections.
OSHA reinstated the collection of employer injury data for large employers to better inform inspection and prevention measures.
OSHA instituted instance-by-instance citations for high-gravity violations, maximizing the penalty for employers who violate the law.
OSHA signed a joint agreement with the National Labor Relations Board to strengthen information-sharing for whistleblower cases.
OSHA instituted targeted enforcement programs and awareness campaigns on heat, silica, COVID-19, falls in construction, combustible dust, injuries in the poultry industry and warehousing.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) reinstated impact inspections, focusing on mines with a poor history of compliance with MSHA standards, high numbers of injuries, illnesses or fatalities, or other indicators of unsafe mines.
OSHA resources in FY 2024 still are too few to be a deterrent:

There are 1,802 inspectors (768 federal and 1,034 state) to inspect the 11.8 million workplaces under the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s jurisdiction, covering 161 million workers—a workforce that keeps growing while OSHA staff numbers do not.
Federal OSHA has 85 fewer inspectors than in FY 2023— only enough to now inspect workplaces once every 185 years—and state OSHA plans have 12 additional inspectors compared with FY 2023.
There is one inspector for every 84,937 workers.
The current OSHA budget amounts to $3.92 available to protect each worker.
Penalties in FY 2024 still are too weak:

The average penalty for a serious violation was $4,083 for federal OSHA.
The average penalty for a serious violation was $2,580 for OSHA state plans.
The median penalty for killing a worker was $16,131 for federal OSHA.
The median penalty for killing a worker was $7,031 for state OSHA plans.
Only 137 worker death cases have been criminally prosecuted under the Occupational Safety and Health Act since 1970.
Much Work Remains to Be Done

Workers need more job safety and health protection, not less.

Action needed from Congress:

Immediately intervene to require DOGE and the Trump administration to reinstate all staff across all NIOSH divisions, the agency with a unique and imperative role mandated by Congress.
Reinstate appointees at independent labor agencies who were wrongfully fired as part of a broad attack on labor unions and worker rights.
Oppose efforts by DOGE to access sensitive worker data, manipulate government structures without any context and label unique roles as “redundant” and “inefficient.”
Oppose any attempts to destroy or decimate worker health and safety agencies, including NIOSH, OSHA and MSHA, and hold operators of these agencies accountable to the responsibility assigned to them by Congress.
Put the critical need to protect workers’ health and safety above billionaire and corporation motives.
Oppose attempts by corporations to weaken broad regulatory systems under the guise of “reform” that actually would make it more difficult—or impossible—for agencies to issue needed safeguards.
Defend a federal budget that maintains and increases funding and staffing for job safety agencies for both standard-setting and enforcement, modernizing the flat-funded budget that has prevented agencies from fulfilling their obligations.
Pass legislation on heat and workplace violence to ensure OSHA develops and issues strong standards on these major problems.
Pass the Protecting America’s Workers Act to extend the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s coverage to workers currently excluded, strengthen civil and criminal penalties for violations, enhance anti-discrimination protections, and strengthen the rights of workers, unions and those who have been injured or made ill because of their jobs.
Pass the Robert C. Byrd Mine Safety Protection Act to strengthen the federal Mine Safety and Health Act related to mine incident investigations, standards, miners' rights and protections, and training for miners.
Action needed from job safety agencies:

Stand up for employers’ responsibility to protect workers under U.S. law: Defend against staff reductions and funding and resource cuts—all of which are the lifelines for protecting workers.
Fully enforce OSHA, MSHA and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) job safety and health protections to hold employers accountable for not following workplace safety and health laws.
Strengthen federal OSHA oversight of state OSHA plans.
Strengthen protections for workers facing higher job fatality, injury and illness rates, rather than launching attacks on immigrant workers and workers of color that keep them living in fear of raising safety concerns that put all workers in danger.
Strengthen anti-retaliation protections and worker participation rights.
Issue an OSHA workplace violence standard for health care and social service workers.
Issue an OSHA heat illness and injury prevention standard to protect indoor and outdoor workers from dangerously hot working conditions.
Action needed to restore and improve injury and illness data:

Enhance access to timely injury and illness information by providing the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) with additional resources to publish annual detailed nonfatal injury and illnesses data.
Improve and restore the collection and reporting of demographic, cause, nature and other descriptive data for workers killed on the job through agreements and policies that allow BLS to publish more comprehensive and descriptive worker fatality data.
Refocus and align data collection and analysis efforts with emerging worker safety and health issues to support the tracking and understanding of these key areas.
Develop a national occupational disease surveillance system to determine and illuminate the true toll of occupational illnesses from workplace exposures, and inform prevention efforts to reduce chronic illnesses.
The State of Workers’ Safety and Health 2025

This 2025 edition of “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect” marks the 34th year the AFL-CIO has produced the only comprehensive report on the state of safety and health protections for America’s workers. This report features national and state information on workplace fatalities, injuries and illnesses, as well as workplace safety inspections, penalties, funding, staffing and public employee coverage under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act). It also includes information on the state of mine safety and health, key topics such as workplace violence, musculoskeletal disorders and heat illness prevention, and transitions in policies on government occupational data reporting, transparency and equity.

This report focuses on the most recent data available from several different sources: job fatality, injury and illness data from 2023, and enforcement data from FY 2024.

Fifty-four years ago on April 28, the OSH Act went into effect, promising every worker the right to a safe job. More than 712,000 workers now can say their lives have been saved since the passage of the OSH Act. The federal Mine Safety and Health Act was enacted 48 years ago. Since that era, workplace safety and health conditions have improved. But too many workers remain at serious risk of injury, illness or death as chemical plant explosions, major fires, construction collapses, infectious disease outbreaks, workplace assaults, toxic chemical exposures and other preventable tragedies continue to permeate the workplace. Workplace hazards kill approximately 140,000 workers each year—including 5,283 from traumatic injuries and an estimated 135,000 from occupational diseases in 2023. That is 385 workers each day—and many worker protections are under threat. Job injury and illness numbers continue to be severe undercounts of the real problem.

Over the years, our progress has become more challenging, as employers’ opposition to workers’ rights and protections has grown, and attacks on unions have intensified. Big corporations, many conservatives and billionaires have launched an aggressive assault on workers’ lives and their livelihoods by repealing job safety and health regulations, promoting deregulatory initiatives, blocking funding and pulling back resources for job safety agencies, firing federal staff doing critical work to protect worker health and safety, and requiring additional burdens in order to issue protections at all. They aim to dissolve the protection structures and shift the responsibility for providing safe jobs from employers to individual workers, and to undermine the core duties and capacity of workplace safety agencies, and more recently disregard and discard the government’s responsibility to protect workers altogether.

National progress over the decades has undoubtedly made workplaces safer and saved lives. But that progress is under attack, now more than ever. The nation’s workers now must fight fearlessly to hold onto worker protections and public health systems, as they did a century ago to create these agencies, laws and standards that keep us safe at work. We must prioritize protecting workers from job injury, disease and death, restoring dignity and justice to working people, improving livelihoods, and reducing burdens on families and communities over the whims and greed of billionaires. Employers must meet their responsibilities under the law to protect workers and be held accountable when they put workers in danger. There is much more work to be done to ensure the fundamental right to a safe and healthy job is a reality for all of America’s workers.

Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2025 | AFL-CIO

This 2025 edition of “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect” marks the 34th year the AFL-CIO has produced the only comprehensive report on the…

aflcio.org

2 town hall meetings on the impact of the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine
https://www.wtae.com/article/norfolk-southern-train-derailment-east-palestine-town-halls/64555130
COLUMBIANA, Ohio —
Residents are expected to attend two town hall meetings Tuesday and …Wednesday evening, in Columbiana, Ohio, and Homestead Borough, respectively.

They will hear from a toxicologist who conducted an independent study on the impact of the Feb. 3, 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

He believes eight cancerous chemicals polluted the air during the derailment, which multiplied to 120 after the controlled burn, conducted by emergency personnel on the scene.

George Thompson says he has Ph.D.s in toxicology and psychopharmacology, and believes the air, polluted with chemicals, traveled across multiple states.

"I have done independent analysis that this could affect as far south as Washington, D.C., encompassing 16 different states, including southern Canada, due to wind shifts," Thompson said.

Health complications experienced by residents in East Palestine and in Darlington, Pennsylvania, should not be ignored in states in the path of the traveling plum of chemicals.

"So if you were to consume something that had those particles on it, they can accumulate in your body, and they can accumulate and stay in your body for seven to 11 years. They can accumulate in the soil and last 11 years," Thompson said.

Tuesday night's town hall meeting will be held at the Columbiana Theater at 7 p.m.

Wednesday night's meeting will be held at Homestead United Presbyterian Church at 7 p.m.

Town hall meetings on impact of Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine

Attendees will hear from a toxicologist who conducted an independent study on the impact of the Feb. 3, 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

www.wtae.com

Stop The Frigging Greed! SF City Workers Demand That AB&B Pay Their Taxes & Warn Mayor Lurie On Cuts
https://youtu.be/DBp_krD7w_w
Hundreds of San Francisco City workers rallied on April 22 at a San Francisco Court House next to City Hall to
protest the failure of AB&B and …other big companies to pay their taxes. They are suing to stop the City from
using their taxes to pay for city services and City worker unions are demanding that they pay their taxes. They
also warned San Francisco billionaire Mayor Daniel Lurie that he should not enact major cuts of workers and
public services.
Additional Media:
"He Locked The Doors" SF Mayor Lurie Locks The Doors On SF Black City Workers To Prevent Meeting
https://youtu.be/iW1AUFe2fl8
SF Black Trade Unionists & Unionists Speak Out Against Systemic Racism & Retaliation In CCSF
https://youtu.be/iW1AUFe2fl8
CCSF Black Workers & Supporters Speak Out At SF City Hall Against Systemic Racism And Corruption
https://youtu.be/rVZ7zyc4gjY
Union Busting, Union Rights, Racism, Covid/PPE & Healthcare Workers With SEIU 1021 SF Local Leaders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MxyTGFLtu0
Reign Of Terror Against SF SEIU 1021 DPH Members & Other City Workers: Speakout At SF Labor Council
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JN-f8HeN3w&t=7s
SEIU 1021 SFGH Workers Speakout! Stop Racism, Union Busting & Privatization Of SFGH Pharmacy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1XzRrzB9ZI
Racism, Outsourcing and Retaliation At SF Civil Service Commission With HR Director Micki Callahan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqNhPRQeHGk&t=34s
On Day Before Women’s Day, SF City Workers Rally & Speak Out Against Discrimination, Racism, Privatization & Outsourcing
https://youtu.be/GeBcv4rFZfM
SF General Hospital Workers Fed Up With Short Staffing Threatening Patient Safety While Millions Go For Outsourcing
https://youtu.be/2-mA-9oVb-M
Stop The Attacks! SEIU 1021 Members Speak Out At CCSF Civil Service Commission On Retaliation & Discrimination
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMZJlCt–t0&t=6s
Racism, Outsourcing, ​and Retaliation At SF Civil Service Commission With HR Director Micki Callahan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqNhPRQeHGk
At a hearing of the San Francisco Civil Service Commission on December 17, 2918, the issue of racism, outsourcing and retaliation came to the fore.
Stop The Racist Terror Against African American Workers-Speakout At SF BOS Special Meeting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkoYXzKO_so&t=537s
SF SEIU 1021 Rank & File Leaders/Members Speak Out Against Racism At BOS Meeting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XHt2wbvOD4&t=89s
Workers Speak Out At SF Supervisor’s Meeting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-kmrjrxvF4&t=275s
SFGH "Zuckerberg" SEIU 1021 Workers & Community Protest DPH Privatization, Racism & Union Busting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpxZcETKB6o
Stop Racist Discrimination And Workplace Bullying At SF DPH! SEIU 1021 Members & SF Residents Rally & Speakout
https://youtu.be/iNs4zHn96rI
EPIC, LEAN, SF General, Privatization & SEIU 1021 Contract Negotiations: Interview With John Wadsworth
https://youtu.be/eTRAzcbj-yo
Reign Of Terror Against SF SEIU 1021 DPH Members & Other City Workers: Speakout At SF Labor Council
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JN-f8HeN3w&t=7s
SEIU 1021 SFGH Workers Speakout! Stop Racism, Union Busting & Privatization Of SFGH Pharmacy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1XzRrzB9ZI
Racism, Outsourcing and Retaliation At SF Civil Service Commission With HR Director Micki Callahan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqNhPRQeHGk&t=34s
Production of Labor Video Project
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Stop The Frigging Greed! SF City Workers Demand That AB&B Pay Their Taxes & Warn Mayor Lurie On Cuts

Hundreds of San Francisco City workers rallied on April 22 at a San Francisco Court House next to City Hall to protest the failure of AB&B and other…

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S.F. Mayor Daniel Lurie might face his biggest test yet as unions issue budget warning
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/daniel-lurie-vs-unions-in-sf-budget-fight-20288775.php
By J.D. Morris,
City Hall Reporter
April 22, 2025

City workers hold signs during an Airbnb …court hearing against the city and county outside the San Francisco Superior Courthouse on Tuesday. Workers used their personal lunch breaks to protest.
City workers hold signs during an Airbnb court hearing against the city and county outside the San Francisco Superior Courthouse on Tuesday. Workers used their personal lunch breaks to protest.
A Tuesday rally that San Francisco union leaders held outside the local courthouse across from City Hall also doubled as a warning of sorts for Mayor Daniel Lurie as he approaches one of his biggest tests so far.
The focus of the demonstration by some of the city’s largest public-sector labor groups was litigation that Airbnb has filed seeking a refund on about $120 million in previously paid business taxes, claiming it was overcharged by the city. Unions say Airbnb and other companies that filed similar claims should “pay their fair share” and called on the short-term rental company to drop its lawsuit.
But much of their energy is actually directed at Lurie, who is preparing to submit his first budget proposal by June 1. Lurie has warned of major cuts as he prepares to close the city’s projected $818 million two-year shortfall. On Friday, his budget director told city departments they must dig deeper to help solve the deficit and signaled that layoffs among the city’s more than 30,000-person workforce remain possible.

The unions’ message to the mayor is clear: They want his administration to persuade Airbnb and other companies seeking business tax refunds to drop their claims so the city can use some of its $311 million set aside for business tax litigation to reduce the need for cuts to services and jobs.
ratio3x2_960.jpegratio3x2_960.jpegratio3x2_960.jpegCity workers hold up signs during an AirBnb court hearing against the city and county outside the San Francisco Superior Courthouse in San Francisco on Tuesday, April 22, 2025. Workers used their personal lunch breaks to protest.
City workers hold up signs during an AirBnb court hearing against the city and county outside the San Francisco Superior Courthouse in San Francisco on Tuesday, April 22, 2025. Workers used their personal lunch breaks to protest.
Minh Connors/For the S.F. Chronicle
But the labor groups seem unlikely to get what they want. Airbnb has given no indication that it will drop its suit, and Lurie has not publicly shown any desire to focus his budget planning on the business tax litigation. And even if the mayor could use all the money held in reserve for the lawsuits, that wouldn’t eliminate the entire deficit, nor would it address the ongoing mismatch between the city’s growing expenses and its tax revenue.
Still, union leaders have signaled that they will intensely resist any effort by Lurie to lay off workers or make huge reductions to public services without getting concessions from the companies that have sought business tax refunds. That’s setting the stage for what could become a fierce dispute between labor and the new mayor as the annual city budget process gets into full swing in June.
“Lurie is putting pressure on the city’s departments, threatening cuts, but he should be putting all the pressure on these big corporate companies like Airbnb to pay their fair share of taxes,” said Kristin Hardy, SEIU Local 1021’s San Francisco vice president, at the Tuesday rally. “The budget cannot be balanced with cuts to jobs, services and to crucial elements that keep the communities in this city running.”

Theresa Rutherford, the president of Local 1021, was similarly frank in an interview before the rally.
Connie Chan talks to protesters outside the San Francisco Superior Courthouse on Tuesday.
Supervisor Connie Chan talks to protesters outside the San Francisco Superior Courthouse on Tuesday.
Minh Connors/For the S.F. Chronicle
“We want to support his vision … to address homelessness, to address mental health issues, to make sure that our services are intact,” Rutherford told the Chronicle. “We can’t do that if some of the richest billionaires in our city are saying that they have a problem with paying their taxes.”
Rutherford said Lurie needs to communicate with the leaders of companies such as Airbnb and “insist that they pay their taxes” and “insist that they drop these ridiculous lawsuits.” If that doesn’t happen, and if the mayor ultimately proposes a budget that includes major cuts to services and layoffs, Rutherford said labor groups will be ready to take to the streets.
Lurie’s office declined to comment on the labor groups’ rally Tuesday. But in a previous statement about the budget in March, Lurie said his goal was “to protect our city’s core services — public safety, clean and safe streets, transit, and public health.”
“We cannot meet this moment with short-term thinking,” Lurie said at the time. “We must take responsible action to confront the long-term structural challenges that have led us here.”
Airbnb is seeking the $120 million tax refund because the company says the city miscalculated its tax obligation from 2019 to 2022 by improperly classifying its business activity in a way that produced a higher tax bill. The company has said it can’t comment on the active litigation directly but has emphasized that it “complies with its tax obligations” in general.
City workers hold up signs during an AirBnb court hearing against the city and county outside the San Francisco Superior Courthouse in San Francisco on Tuesday, April 22, 2025. Workers used their personal lunch breaks to protest.
City workers hold up signs during an AirBnb court hearing against the city and county outside the San Francisco Superior Courthouse in San Francisco on Tuesday, April 22, 2025. Workers used their personal lunch breaks to protest.
Minh Connors/For the S.F. Chronicle
Airbnb said in a previous statement to the Chronicle that it views itself as “a critical source of economic empowerment in communities across the country, including San Francisco.” The company recently entered into a decade-long extension on the lease of its San Francisco headquarters.
“We’re committed to ensuring San Francisco remains a great place to live and work, and we’re proud to have stood alongside other companies and organizations in supporting reforms to the City’s business tax structure that are critical to helping businesses of all sizes thrive in San Francisco and advancing the City’s post-pandemic recovery,” Airbnb said in its statement.

S.F. Mayor Daniel Lurie might face his biggest test yet as unions issue budget warning

S.F. Mayor Daniel Lurie might face his biggest test yet as unions issue budget warning

www.sfchronicle.com

On Earth Day 2025 SF Bay View Hunters Point Residents Want Justice, Healthcare & Human Rights
https://youtu.be/Npi7vJ0f84I
On Earth Day 2025, the resident of Bay View Hunters Point marched and rallied on April 22, 2025 to
demand healthcare, justice and a clean environment. They …talked about the corruption and billionaires who want to develop the area for more profits while the residents are getting cancers an further contamination.
They also talked about the role of the City and Navy in allowing the deadly toxins to continue to kill them.
Additional Media:
Stop Poisoning & Killing Us For Profits! SF Hunters Point Community Residents & Advocates Speak Out
https://youtu.be/zez66ZLmnFU
San Francisco Unprepared to Handle New Risks at the Hunters Point Superfund Site
https://civilgrandjury.sfgov.org/2021_2022/Hunters%20Point%20Press%20Release.pdf
SF Grand Jury 2010-2011 Report On Hunters Point
https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/player/clip/13405?view_id=11&redirect=true
SF Treasure Island Development, Corruption, Whistleblowers & Radioactive Dump Site Cover-up Links
https://youtu.be/zYfsS5_K3S8
SF Treasure Island Radioactive Dump Site Cover-up, Residents & Workers With Attorney Stanley Goff
https://youtu.be/icvlTjvh57Q
Treasure Island residents bring $2 billion class action lawsuit for radiation and toxin exposure
https://sfbayview.com/2020/01/treasure-island-residents-bring-2-billion-class-action-lawsuit-for-radiation-and-toxin-exposure/
San Francisico Treasure Island Criminal Cover-up With SF Bay Viiew Journalist Carol Harvey
https://youtu.be/4OmLqRRez6c
Corruption Galore! SF Hunters Point TI Radioactive Cover-up For Profits With Dr. Ahimsa Sumchai
https://youtu.be/TL0dv4Jhdl8
$1 Billion Eco-Fraud At SF Hunters Point/Treasure Island-Residents/Whistleblower Files Charges
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdO8QHT7ptY
Racialized evictions are part of Treasure Island redevelopment
https://sfbayview.com/2018/01/racialized-evictions-are-part-of-treasure-island-redevelopment/
SF Treasure Island Conservation Corps Nightmare, The Cover-up & Environmental Racism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb49dvh5hsU
"No Charter School On SF Treasure Island Superfund Site!" Environmentalists/Candidates Speakout
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCvWcgx7_qI
Treasure Island Nightmare: Whistleblowers & Former Residents Speak Out About Cancers & Cover-up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtuDlkvWJO8
SF Hunters Point/Treasure Island Radiation Whistleblower Speaks Out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htA8lqYc96Q
SF Treasure Island Radiation Whistleblowers Expose Deadly Cover-up By Tetra Tech & Government: A $1 Billion Dollar Eco-Fraud
https://youtu.be/lb6LxUOKWks
Former Treasure Island residents report radiation and chemical poisoning during Feb. 8 SF Supervisors’ hearing
https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/former-treasure-island-residents-report-radiation-and-chemical-poisoning-during-feb-8-sf-supervisors-hearing/
Treasure Island H&S Whistleblowers, Former TI Residents & Advocates Speak Out On Cover-up
https://youtu.be/rtuDlkvWJO8
SF Hunters Point/Treasure Island Radiation Whistleblower Speaks Out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htA8lqYc96Q
San Francisco irradiates the poor on Treasure Island
https://sfbayview.com/2019/01/san-francisco-irradiates-the-poor-on-treasure-island/
Production Of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net

On Earth Day SF Bay View Residents Want Justice, Healthcare & Human Rights

On Earth Day, the resident of Bay View Hunters Point marched and rallied on April 22, 2025 to demand healthcare, justice and a clean environment. …

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A Kaiser strike by NUHW mental health workers drags on — setting a US record — as talks resume NNU CNA-SEU UHW MIA
https://calmatters.org/health/2025/04/kaiser-strike-mental-health-workers/
BY JOE GARCIA
APRIL 15, 2025

Three women wearing matching red shirts sit on air …mattresses in a room as they participate in a hunger strike.
Aida Valdivia, a psychiatric social worker with Kaiser Permanente, sits on a blow-up air mattress that is set up in a room at West Hollywood United Church of Christ in West Hollywood on April 10, 2025. Kaiser's mental health workers have been on strike for six months, and the group in this room is on the fourth day of a five-day hunger strike. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters
IN SUMMARY

Almost half a year into the dispute, eight striking Kaiser mental health workers wrapped up a hunger strike as broken-off negotiations were set to resume.
Welcome to CalMatters, the only nonprofit newsroom devoted solely to covering issues that affect all Californians. Sign up for WhatMatters to receive the latest news and commentary on the most important issues in the Golden State.
Nearly six months into their labor union dispute against Southern California Kaiser Permanente, eight mental health care workers banded together last week in an organized five-day hunger strike to highlight their cause.

“Kaiser’s trying to starve us out, that’s clear — so, give them what they want,” said Adriana Webb, a member of the National Union of Healthcare Workers who chose to subsist solely on water and electrolytes from Monday morning through Friday evening. “I feel hungry for equity. I feel hungry for change. How is this any different?”

Now engaged in the longest mental health strike in U.S. history, the Southern California workers have been seeking a new union contract that would include:

more mandated time between therapy sessions for patient follow up
restoration of pension benefits that were removed from new employee contracts in 2015
cost-of-living wage adjustments
After a long list of Democratic members of the state Assembly and Senate wrote Kaiser in December urging it to accept the union’s “reasonable contract proposals” — and after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Feb. 6 written request for both sides “to prioritize the common good that have allowed Californians to rise above our difficulties and resolve our differences” — state Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly and former Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg have agreed to mediate.

Union negotiators voted unanimously on March 11 to suspend further mediation when they felt Kaiser refused to bend on any of the three major contract issues. Today bargaining talks are scheduled to resume.

Steinberg mediated a similar open-ended strike for Northern California Kaiser mental health care workers in 2022, which lasted 10 weeks and resulted in Kaiser meeting most of the union’s demands.

“We know Kaiser can provide all these things if they wanted to,” said Webb, a medical social worker in the infectious disease unit who stood on the picket line in front of Kaiser’s Los Angeles Medical Center on Sunset Boulevard. “They already provide it to our Northern California counterparts, and all we’re asking for is the same thing. Kaiser still can’t explain why we deserve less or our patients deserve less.”

In a written response to CalMatters questions, Kaiser Permanente spokesperson Terry Kanakri discussed Kaiser’s overall commitment to work with more than 40 unions that represent 80% of its employees.

“Every one of the 80 contracts is different, and each reflects the differences in operational needs, local market economics and wages, professional classifications of the employees in each local, and a host of other factors,” said Kanakri.

“Our goal is and has always been to reach an agreement that makes Kaiser Permanente the best place to give and receive care. We have made — and repeatedly improved — our proposals during bargaining in an effort to reach an agreement. However, in nearly nine months of bargaining, NUHW has made very little movement on the key bargaining issues.”

People walking one behind the other turn a corner while holding signs that read "NUHW On Strike" while protesting at a medical building.
Kaiser Permanente mental health care workers on a company-wide strike picket outside Kaiser Permanente Downey Medical Center on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters
Although not aware of any specific details of the 2022 NorCal strike or the current SoCal strikes, University of Southern California professor of healthcare finances and economics Glenn Melnick gave his overview on today’s health care labor climate.

“Northern California has the highest wage index in the country,” he said. “I think it’s 20 points higher than L.A. — maybe 25%. So there’s economic reasons why there’s differences. An economist would say, ‘Mental health care worker, you want these benefits? Move to San Francisco.’

“And many employers are cutting back pension benefits these days. Ten or 15 years ago, pension benefits were much more generous across the board. Kaiser could easily afford to give them these benefits and not think twice, but it’s bigger than just these workers. It’s the ripple effect, right?”

Melnick also speculated that health care workers’ negotiating power has waned as the COVID pandemic, which drove demand for their services, has somewhat subsided.

Kaiser could easily afford to give them these benefits and not think twice, but it’s bigger than just these workers. It’s the ripple effect, right?

From April 8 through 12, the hunger strikers spent eight-hour days alongside their picketing fellow union members and each night together fasting at a West Hollywood church. Sleeping in a community space barely big enough for eight air mattresses huddled beside the piano against a back wall, they shared a bathroom and took turns showering in a motel room next door.

Medically cleared beforehand, they received daily wellness checks from volunteer union nurses.

“Right now, I feel like I could go another month,” said Zhane Sandoval, propped up on an elbow from their mattress on the morning of April 11, day four of the hunger strike. “So test me, Kaiser!

“Kaiser says that it’s a union employer, but all we’re seeing is union busting. All we’re seeing is separation, trying to divide. But their efforts just lead us to unite.”

Union organizer Rachel Forgash, who stayed overnight with the hunger strikers at the church, expressed frustration over the protracted standoff.

“Kaiser has exceeded all of our expectations in their unwillingness to bargain in good faith and drag this out as long as possible,” she said. “In Southern California, they’re about to start bargaining with the Alliance, which is a huge group of unions at Kaiser, and I think they’re afraid that — when we win — it’s going to set a precedent for other unions to fight just as hard.”

People wearing red or black t-shirts gather in a room with air mattresses and other personal belongings while they participate in a hunger strike.
A group of Kaiser Permanente mental health care workers who are currently on a five-day hunger strike, at the West Hollywood United Church of Christ in West Hollywood on April 10, 2025. Kaiser’s mental health workers have been on strike for six months. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters
A person with short and curly black hair and wearing glasses with a black t-shirt sits at the edge of a mattress while looking into the camera.
A person wearing a black hat and a red t-shirt holds pink teddy bear on their lap as they look directly into the camera.
Zhane Sandoval, left, a psychiatric counselor with Kaiser Permanente, sits in a room at the West Hollywood United Church of Christ in West Hollywood on April 10, 2025. Melissa Chavez, right, a medical social worker with Kaiser, shows off her son’s stuffed animal. Both participated in a five-day hunger strike as part of an ongoing strike by mental health workers against Kaiser. Photos by Jules Hotz for CalMatters
Aida Valvidia, a psychiatric social worker at Kaiser’s Sylmar facility, and Melissa Chavez, a medical social worker at Riverside, both started working for Kaiser before the 2015 contract negotiations reached a settlement, so they each have pension benefits that 70% of their fellow mental health care union members do not. Yet both chose to participate in the hunger strike.

“For the people who don’t have pensions, I think it’s unfair,” said Valvidia. “Why do I have a pension and you don’t? Because you started later? That makes no sense to me. We’re equals.”

Chavez and her husband have been on strike together since Oct. 21. “Kaiser members deserve equity and access to timely quality care,” she said. “Workers are experiencing high caseloads, inadequate and unsafe staffing, lack of time, lack of tools.”

The hunger strike week started with iconic labor leader and activist Dolores Huerta visiting the picketers on April 8, two days before her 95th birthday. “I know that you’re not just doing this on your own behalf,” said Huerta, surrounded by cheering union members in their red union T-shirts. “You’re actually doing this on behalf of all the patients at Kaiser that are not getting the mental health services that they deserve.”

The union cites a recent 88-page report from the state Department of Managed Health Care, which notes that Kaiser’s failures to remedy 19 of the 20 violations in 2022 led to $200 million in state fines. The union has also filed its own complaints alleging Kaiser mismanages patient triage and appointment scheduling, by hiring unlicensed clerical staff and using algorithmic programming.

They take out ads in the paper saying everything’s fine — that they’re providing adequate care to their patients and everything is top-notch. It’s so bizarre and unbelievable.

“Despite the persistent efforts of NUHW to mislead the public, the Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) has not identified new deficiencies in our mental health care,” said Kanakri’s statement. It went on to say that Kaiser met with the state department “last week in our first quarterly review and demonstrated the extraordinary progress we have made on all the deficiencies outlined in the Corrective Action Work Plan.”

“We’re in disbelief,” said hunger striker Nick Nunez, a therapist in Kaiser’s Virtual Medical Center, which lends support to any patients in need across Southern California. “They take out ads in the paper saying everything’s fine — that they’re providing adequate care to their patients and everything is top-notch. It’s so bizarre and unbelievable.”

Andrew Kane worked as an associate clinical social worker at the Los Angeles Medical Center he now pickets and fasted at. “It’s a little odd, a little surreal,” he said, noting that he happened to see a patient in the world outside of Kaiser. “Fortunately — or unfortunately — he didn’t notice me, so we didn’t have to have that interaction.”

Kane started in June 2024, so he’s been on strike longer than he’s received a Kaiser salary.

As the strike persisted without end in sight since October, many workers have returned to Kaiser due to financial concerns. But some communicate the problems they see internally while back at work.

“They’re actually the ones documenting all the things going wrong,” said hunger striker Kassaundra Gutierrez-Thompson, a psychiatric social worker in Kaiser’s ADAPT virtual online treatment program. “We have DMHC investigators talking to a lot of our returned back staff. Unfortunately, a lot of our managers are combatting them.

“And so, a lot of our members are kind of scared, having to advocate for our patients.They’re fighting a different kind of battle inside.”

Rage Against the Machine guitarist and political labor activist Tom Morello joined the Kaiser picketers on April 9 to perform a short acoustic set, and U.S. Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove and state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo visited the strikers April 11.

Hours later, they broke their fast with religious leaders passing around a ceremonial bread loaf.
“We can’t just be treated like numbers,” said hunger striker Ana Vargas Garcia, who also saw members remotely through the ADAPT program. “Patients can’t be treated like numbers. There’s real lives behind everyone that we see, behind every worker at Kaiser. That’s a big part of why we’re doing this.”

A Kaiser strike by mental health workers drags on — setting a US record — as talks resume

Nearly half a year into the dispute, eight striking Kaiser mental health workers wrapped up a hunger strike as negotiations resume.

calmatters.org

One woman’s defiant remembering keeps the tragic story of Times Beach alive
https://www.unionprogress.com/2025/04/21/one-womans-defiant-remembering-keeps-the-tragic-story-of-times-beach-alive/

by Steve Mellon
April 21, 2025

Marilyn Leistner in her Eureka, Missouri, home …on Saturday, March 15, 2025. (Steve Mellon/Pittsburgh Union Progress)
EUREKA, Missouri — You can lose your town and home and pretty much everything you own and become part of a nightmare story so big it’s on all the TV networks, and then four decades later people won’t even remember your town’s name, much less the heartache and loss you endured.

Forgetting the bad stuff is our national pastime. In the case of Times Beach, Missouri, once considered one of America’s most toxic sites, the forgetting seems almost malicious. All of the homes and buildings and streets and people are gone. There’s no marker describing what happened there, no plaque with names and dates. It’s like an unmarked grave.

It would be an impressive act of erasure if not for Marilyn Leistner and her insistence on remembering. Marilyn lived in Times Beach and, perhaps more than anyone, shaped its trajectory in the final days. When she speaks about Times Beach, the town emerges as a vibrant yet tragic place, a vital part of the American story. She speaks as an act of defiance against those who’d rather we just move on and not worry about the lessons Times Beach may teach us.

Marilyn lives in Eureka, Missouri, a few miles from the footprint of her old town, so the presence of Times Beach is never far. One night in 2023 she received a late-night message from a stranger — Christa Graves, an Ohio resident concerned about the health of her community after the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Graves had learned about Leistner from a 1992 documentary she’d found online.

For hours the two shared stories and concerns and forged what’s become a growing connection between two contaminated towns separated by 600 miles and four decades. Marilyn deepens that bond this week by traveling to the Ohio/Pennsylvania border and telling her story to those wrestling with fears and frustrations she and her community wrestled with years ago. She’s scheduled to speak at two events: one in Ohio and another in Homestead.

Marilyn Leistner goes through pictures and other items from her time as mayor and then trustee of Times Beach, Missouri. (Steve Mellon/Pittsburgh Union Progress)
Marilyn was always a worker, and at age 87 remains so. In late March she spent a day setting up chairs and preparing for an upcoming memorial service at the Eureka funeral home that employs her. She worked more than 12 hours. The next day she awoke weary and occasionally coughing. Still, she took time to once again immerse herself in the past.

She walked slowly to a bedroom in her home and opened a cardboard box. Inside were documents and manuscripts and framed pictures and out-of-print books impossible to find these days. Marilyn pulled them out one by one and once again unspooled the often difficult moments that shaped her life and thus the arch of the Times Beach story.

* * *

Cancer took its sweet time killing Helen Stoff. For nearly 10 years the disease tortured her as it crept through her body. You can see her pain in a picture shot sometime in the late 1940s. Helen presses her hands against her lower abdomen, a pose that helped her deal with the agony. By 1952 she was confined to bed, where she lay flat on her back. Three times each week a visiting nurse arrived at the Stoff home in Valley Park, Missouri, and stuck a needle in Helen’s hip, a shot to help dull the pain. Helen was 49 years old and mother to 10 children. Her 14-year-old daughter, Marilyn, provided most of Helen’s care. Marilyn cooked potato soup, her mother’s favorite, and made sure Helen always had something to drink.

October approached; green leaves turned orange, red and yellow. Helen’s end grew near. Her husband, John Stoff, a barber and a good Catholic, offered a bargain God: spare Helen from suffering in her final days, and John would send a daughter off to a convent to begin a life of service as a nun.

Death arrived Oct. 24, 1952. The Stoffs had no family pictures, so the owner of the funeral home propped up Helen’s body in the open casket while the 10 children and John gathered around. A photographer captured a moment saturated with grief.

The Stoff family at Helen Stoff’s funeral in 1952. Marilyn is at lower right. (Courtesy Marilyn Leistner)
A few months later, Marilyn entered the motherhouse of School Sisters of Notre Dame in St. Louis. The massive convent cast a giant shadow over her life. She awoke every morning at 5, attended Mass and basic high school classes, she swept floors, cleaned laundry, learned to square dance. For more than two years she continued on a path to fulfill her father’s wishes. Then her older sister, Catherine, married, and it all came to an end. The marriage meant Catherine could no longer help John care for the three youngest Stoff boys. Marilyn returned to Valley Park to take her sister’s place. The move shattered John’s dream of seeing his daughter in a habit and thus fulfilling his promise to God.

Marilyn finished her education at a Catholic high school in nearby Glendale, Missouri, and after graduation went to work as a telephone operator, a job that earned her $45 each month. She made extra money as a part-time waitress at a restaurant called the Coffee Pot, where one day in 1956 she met a young man named Jerry Akers. Jerry was on a two-week leave from the U.S. Marine Corps. Marilyn thought he looked handsome in his uniform. Plus, he liked the chili Marilyn served him.

Jerry became Marilyn’s first boyfriend. The couple dated for two weeks. Before heading to Camp Pendleton in California, Jerry proposed, and Marilyn accepted. Jerry sent a ring in the mail. A few months later, Marilyn hopped on a California-bound bus with Jerry’s mother, Lena. It was time to tie the knot. Lena especially looked forward to the wedding.

Plans changed abruptly shortly after they arrived in the Golden State. Jerry told Marilyn they should elope with another couple he’d befriended. The four of them drove to Tijuana, Mexico, where each couple paid a man $50 to perform a wedding ceremony. Jerry’s mother learned of the quick marriage a few days later. The news broke her heart. She returned to Missouri alone and Marilyn stayed in California to live as Jerry’s wife.

The couple’s bliss proved short-lived. A Marine chaplain informed Jerry his Mexican wedding wasn’t legally binding; therefore, Jerry didn’t qualify for an increased housing allowance. He and Marilyn were now in a jam. They struggled to pay bills. Jerry and a few friends came up with an idea. They’d rob a sailor.

Marilyn knew nothing about it. One day she looked out a window of her apartment and saw police searching her trash can. They found the sailor’s wallet and ID. Jerry went to jail for 10 months, and Marilyn, four months pregnant, returned to Missouri and moved in with her in-laws, then living in a tiny home in Times Beach. She looked out the window of her bedroom, saw a bunch of ramshackle homes built in the 1920s and thought, “This is the most godforsaken place I’ve ever seen.”

* * *

No longer on the map: Times Beach, Missouri. (Jennifer Kundrach/Pittsburgh Union Progress)
It’s difficult, all these years later, to get a sense of Times Beach. Old maps show it as a fan-shaped town splayed out along a bend in the Meramec River, 30 miles southwest of St. Louis. The St. Louis Times newspaper founded the town in 1925 as an advertising stunt. A six-month subscription, plus $67.50, bought a plot of land in what was billed as a summer resort. The Great Depression ended the weekend parties. Times Beach evolved into a working-class community.

The Beach, as its approximately 2,000 residents called it, became a place of modest homes, mostly one-story structures clad in aluminum siding, and three trailer parks. The men worked in nearby auto factories or as mechanics or truck drivers or in construction. Some of the women were stay-at-home moms; others worked in office jobs or maybe as waitresses. Service industry gigs. Retirees loved the town. Life there had an easygoing pace. You could walk a few blocks to the Meramec River and fish or watch deer stepping from the woods for a drink. Eagles sometimes swooped down from a bluff across the river.

Even folks who lived there, however, admit Times Beach wasn’t much to look at. It had a reputation as a poor, run-down place famous for its junk cars. “A junked car was something that everyone seemed to love,” said one former alderman. People in wealthier communities such as Eureka tended to look down on Times Beach residents, whom they called “river rats.” Marilyn felt the weight of the town’s reputation. When people asked her where she lived, she’d reply, “right outside of Eureka.” She wouldn’t mention Times Beach.

* * *

In 1958, Marilyn gave birth to a son she named Scott. Jerry returned to Missouri a few months later, and he and Marilyn bought a small house on Blakey Street, on the southern edge of Times Beach. Marilyn’s father pitched in a few thousand dollars to help replace furnace, clad the home in aluminum siding and lay white ceramic tile on the kitchen floor. Marilyn painted the exterior green.

John Stoff wanted his grandson to be baptized in a Catholic church. Marilyn knew this wouldn’t go over well with Jerry. Like his parents, Jerry despised the Catholic church. Marilyn was in a jam. She wanted to please her father but not anger Jerry and his family. In the end, she decided a priest would baptize Scott, but her family would have to keep the news secret.

A few weeks later, Jerry arrived in a car to pick up Marilyn at work. She was then packing shoes at the Brown Shoe Co. in Pacific, Missouri. Jerry had brought baby Scott along for the ride. Marilyn could tell her husband was drunk. He also was furious.

With his family in the car, Jerry pressed his foot on the accelerator and the vehicle roared ahead. Jerry told Marilyn he knew Scott had received a Catholic baptism. As revenge, Jerry said, he was going to crash the car into a telephone pole and kill all three of them. Terrified, Marilyn pleaded with him. She lied and insisted Scott had not been baptized. Her words calmed Jerry. She and Scott survived the night.

Marilyn decided to join the Times Beach Bible Church. She wanted to please her husband and in-laws, who were members. Marilyn threw herself into church life. She taught Sunday school and worked as the church secretary. Jerry never attended but wanted his wife there.

All the while, Marilyn and Jerry kept their own secret. No one knew their marriage was bogus. Marilyn begged Jerry several times for a proper wedding. Jerry wouldn’t do it. He figured the news that he and Marilyn had lived together all this time without a marriage license would crush his parents.

Years passed. The couple’s family grew to include three daughters. LaDonna arrived in 1959, Tammy in 1961 and Jerilyn in 1963. Family life didn’t sit well with Jerry. He drank heavily and became abusive. Sometimes he’d disappear. In 1969 he was gone for three weeks. Marilyn and her father-in-law searched but couldn’t find him. Finally, on a Saturday morning, Jerry appeared at the front door on Blakey Street. The children were watching cartoons on TV.

“Well, you finally figured out where you lived,” Marilyn said.

Jerry lunged at her. LaDonna tried defending her mother, as did son Scott. Jerry backed off, threw his hands in the air and said, “I can see I’m not wanted here.” Then he stormed out of the house.

Still, the union endured another two years. A tipping point arrived in 1971. Marilyn returned home early from work one day to see a Lincoln parked in her front yard. That was odd, Marilyn thought. She reached to open the back door of her house, but the storm door was locked. Again, Marilyn was puzzled. The back door was never locked. She climbed into the living room through a window and heard muffled voices. Marilyn figured one of her children must have left a radio turned on. She walked to the back of the house and opened a bedroom door and saw Jerry in bed with another woman.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Jerry yelled at Marilyn. The woman on top of him looked at Marilyn and demanded, “Who are you?”

“I’m just his wife,” Marilyn replied.

Marilyn closed the door. She wanted to get out of the house. Jerry came running after her. He was now crying, pleading with her not to leave. Then the woman came roaring out of the room. She attacked Jerry. “Get out of here,” Jerry yelled at Marilyn. “I don’t want you mixed up in this.” Marilyn headed for the door, but before she could escape the woman pounced on her.

Bleeding from a bite wound on her thumb and with chunks of her hair yanked out, Marilyn fled the house and ran across the street, where a neighbor was working in his garden. Marilyn could hear Jerry screaming inside the house while the woman attacked him with a steak knife. “Can I use your phone?” Marilyn asked. “I need to call 911.”

County police showed up and took the raging woman into custody. She kicked the windshield out of a county police car, so officers placed her in the back seat of another vehicle. She broke out the side windows of that car.

When her children arrived home from school, Marilyn took them to her in-laws’ house. She didn’t want the kids to see their father’s blood splattered in the Blakey Street home. The woman’s Lincoln remained in Marilyn’s yard for a week. Son Scott smashed the headlights with a baseball bat.

Marilyn told Jerry to leave. Because they were never legally married, the couple didn’t need a divorce. Marilyn was on her own with her children.

* * *

Marilyn’s view of her town changed as the years passed. To her, Times Beach became more than a collection of ramshackle houses. She developed friendships and grew to love the people in the community. She saw residents sprucing up their properties and planting gardens. To her it was looking more like a middle-class town.

Still, life there came with challenges. In dry months, for example, dust rose from the town’s unpaved roads and dirt lots. Fine particles of airborne dirt covered cars and seeped into houses, settling on furniture and floors and clothes. In August 1971, while her relationship with Jerry lurched toward its end, Marilyn teamed up with her neighbors to do something about all of that dust.

They pooled their money and paid local oil hauler Russell Bliss $50 to spray a barrel of waste oil on dirt areas around their houses. This was a common practice in the region. Bliss sprayed oil to control dust at horse arenas, trailer parks and other private property.

Bliss’ business included picking up used crankcase oil from gas stations, garages, trucking companies, taxi firms and airports. He sold most of the oil to refineries for reprocessing, but some he stored in tanks on his property about 12 miles north of Times Beach. Sludge settled at the bottom of those tanks, the sludge he sold as a dust suppressant.

A few months before spraying Marilyn’s property in Times Beach, Bliss got a call from Judy Piatt, the owner of Shenandoah Stables, a horse arena in Moscow Mills, about 50 miles north of Times Beach. She and her partner had scheduled a horse show in late May, and they did not want dust to be an issue. Dust made breathing difficult for horses. Piatt hired Bliss to spray the arena in late May 1971.

Problems emerged within days. Bodies of dead birds littered the arena floor. Piatt’s family dog became sick and died. Then a dozen stable cats fell ill. Piatt watched as one staggered up the driveway, its head swollen to twice its normal size, its body oozing a yellow liquid. Howling, the cat staggered beneath a porch and gasped loudly until it died. Piatt wrote in her book “Killing Horses” that it was like watching a scene in a horror movie. Over the next two weeks, the wails of distressed cats grew so loud Piatt turned up a radio at night to drown out the noise. She didn’t want her young children to hear the animals suffering.

Horses in Piatt’s stables got sick, too. They refused to eat, lost their hair and struggled to maintain their balance. Some developed convulsions. They’d fall and struggle to get back up. Green foam drained from horses’ nostrils. Ulcers erupted in the animals’ mouths and tongues. The illnesses puzzled veterinarians.

A page from Judy Piatt’s book “Killing Horses,” which chronicles the contamination of Shenandoah Stables and Piatt’s investigation, which led to the discovery of dioxin contamination in Times Beach. (Steve Mellon/Pittsburgh Union Progress)
On Aug. 20, a favorite stallion named Louis collapsed. Louis had lost so much weight its bones showed through the skin, which had become covered in open and bleeding sores. The stallion convulsed and moaned in pain, then suddenly erupted in a burst of energy, throwing itself into the air and then crashing to the ground and breaking a leg. There Louis died.

Piatt and a friend loaded the horse’s body into a truck and drove it to a facility in Columbia, 90 miles west. Hours later, she returned home to find her sister standing at the front door with grim news. Piatt’s youngest daughter, Andrea, 6, seemed close to death. She’d been listless since June and suffered from flu-like symptoms and diarrhea. Urinating was extremely painful for her.

Andrea began hemorrhaging shortly before Piatt arrived home. The house was a bloody mess. Piatt drove Andrea to a St. Louis hospital, where doctors were able to control the bleeding. Piatt told physicians her daughter often played in the arena where so many animals had fallen ill and died. Whatever was killing those horses, physicians figured, now plagued Andrea.

Piatt suspected the oil. She confronted Bliss, but he denied his oil contained anything toxic. Piatt didn’t believe him. Determined to learn the truth, she began secretly following Bliss trucks as they made their rounds. To avoid detection, Piatt drove borrowed cars and wore disguises. She discovered that, in addition to oil, Bliss picked up waste from industrial facilities, including a chemical plant that once produced Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. That waste contained highly toxic dioxin.

Piatt’s detective work revealed that Bliss was mixing this toxic waste with oil and spraying the deadly mixture at several locations in the St. Louis area. This included Times Beach. Elected officials there in 1972 had paid Bliss $2,400 to spray streets throughout the town. Piatt put Times Beach on the list of places Bliss had contaminated and gave it to the EPA.

* * *

A few years after Marilyn’s split with Jerry, some friends stopped by her house for a visit. They brought along a friend, a truck driver named Bill Leistner. He and Marilyn got along well and began dating. In 1975, Bill and Marilyn married.

Marilyn and Bill lived in a manufactured home in a Times Beach trailer park called Easy Living. Bill seemed Jerry’s opposite. He had steady work and cared for her four children, as well as three of his children from a previous relationship. Marilyn liked to say that, while her relationship with Jerry was a disaster, her marriage to Bill was made in heaven.

Problems arose, however, with Marilyn’s children. Jerilyn began having seizures. Doctors speculated they were due to a psychosomatic reaction to a traumatic experience. LaDonna loved the outdoors, but when she’d go outside her lips and hands would swell and she’d develop hives on her body. She’d have trouble breathing, so Marilyn would put her in a car, roll down the windows and drive up and down a nearby highway until LaDonna could breathe more easily. She ended up in a St. Louis hospital for several weeks. Doctors suspected an allergy to dust found on bird feathers.

Tammy’s blood pressure shot up to dangerous levels and her pulse rate reached 122 beats per minute. Doctors diagnosed her with a thyroid condition. Tammy spent five weeks in a hospital while doctors tried to manage her health.

Marilyn had her own health problems. In 1980, she began experiencing excessive periods. They lasted for weeks and sometimes kept her home from work. She developed endometriosis. Doctors performed a hysterectomy and removed seven tumors from her body.

People throughout Times Beach were getting sick. Children who lived across the street from Marilyn developed bleeding and urinary tract problems. One developed leukemia. A 13-year-old girl was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Illness and tragedy haunted Linda and Lewis Biermann after the couple moved to Times Beach in 1975. Linda became pregnant a few years later but suffered a miscarriage. Another pregnancy followed in 1979. Linda gave birth to daughter Melissa, who died at 3 months of neuroblastoma, a rare cancer.

Doctors told her neuroblastoma was extremely rare — it strikes about 800 children in the U.S. each year. So the Biermanns tried again to have a family. In 1980 Linda gave birth to daughter Jessica. She, too, developed neuroblastoma. A physician told Biermann the chances of two children in the same family developing the cancer were astronomical.

* * *

For years, Times Beach residents remained ignorant of the possibility their town was poisoned. No government agency informed them. Then, in November 1982, reporter Ken Walk called Times Beach City hall. He told the city clerk the town was on a list of sites suspected of dioxin contamination. A whistleblower had leaked the list to the press. Walk, writing for a regional newspaper called the Tri-County Journal, wondered if city officials wanted to comment. Stunned, the city clerk asked, “What are you talking about?”

The Journal published its story Nov 10, 1982. In Times Beach, the news sparked memories of Bliss’ trucks and the spraying. Some residents recalled the streets turning purple and smelling like paint thinner.

One day Walk drove to Times Beach, parked at a four-way intersection in the center of town and began knocking on doors. He visited at least half a dozen homes on each street, asking residents if they’d experienced any major medical issues. Nearly every household answered yes. Residents reported liver damage, miscarriages, premature births, a skin disease called chloracne, nosebleeds. This can’t be coincidental, Walk thought.

Marilyn was then serving as an alderwoman — she’d won the seat in a 1981 election. News of a possible contamination caused her little concern. Few people had even heard of dioxin. Small towns such as Times Beach had enough problems to deal with — political infighting, arguments over flood insurance and an emergency warning system, to name a few. Plus, everyone was busy working and paying bills.

One day a furious young mother who happened to be a neighbor confronted Marilyn. The woman was furious. Her children were sick, and she knew other people in town were sick, too. She’d read the newspaper stories and suspected Bliss’ contaminated oil was the cause. She told Marilyn to wise up and do something about it.

By then the EPA was taking action. A team wearing protective gear that residents called “moon suits” arrived on Nov. 30. They’d spend the next several days collecting water and soil samples from drainage ditches, road sides, municipal wells and drainage sites. They sent those samples out for testing and told anxious residents it would take months to get results.

That wasn’t good enough for folks in Times Beach. Marilyn thought about Bliss’ trucks rolling through town and spraying all of that contaminated oil a decade earlier. Her children had playfully chased after those trucks. She remembered the mud her kids tracked onto the white tile of the Blakey Street home. She thought about the angry mother and her sick children. It was all coming together for her.

Marilyn collected $2,700 from residents and hired a private lab to test the soil and water. The results came back quickly. In early December, Marilyn received a phone call from the lab. There was a problem. Something was jamming the company’s testing device.

“Why is that happening?” Leistner asked.

“There’s only one thing that would do that,” she was told. “PCBs.”

Polychlorinated biphenyls possess toxic properties similar to dioxins and are included under the term “dioxin.” The lab determined dioxins were present, but they didn’t know at what levels, and residents couldn’t afford another test.

* * *

The Meramec River floods Times Beach, Missouri, in December 1982. (Route 66 State Park Museum)
Things were about to get much worse for residents of Times Beach. While the EPA team continued to collect samples, heavy rains began soaking southeastern Missouri. By Dec. 4, four days after the arrival of the EPA team, officials warned Times Beach residents the rising Meramec could inundate the town. Few heeded warnings to evacuate.

The flood arrived with shocking speed the next day. At times the water rose by as much as 4 feet an hour. Marilyn and Bill were among those who had remained in town. Now they were rushing to stash their most valued belongings as high as possible in their home while keeping a wary eye on the muddy water as it crept closer and closer.

When the water rose to the level of the house, Marilyn and Bill and daughter Jerilyn stepped in a small fishing boat Bill had tied to the front porch. The three began a perilous journey up flooded Maple Street. The swift current carried debris, some of it hidden below the surface, and at one point the propeller of Bill’s motor struck a wood pallet, damaging the engine’s gearing. Now the motor would function only in reverse. Marilyn, Bill and Jerilyn slowly made their way backward through town.

A woman standing on a porch called for help. Bill backed the boat into position for a rescue. Marilyn saw a propane tank bubbling nearby. She feared a spark would cause an explosion. The woman slipped while stepping into the boat and tumbled into the turbulent water. Bill and Marilyn hauled her in and motored to the highway, then tied the boat to a Times Beach sign. Marilyn looked out over the town and saw little but rooftops.

Water receded after a few days, revealing a town devastated. Residents returned to find clothing hanging from tree limbs and bodies of dead possums and raccoons tangled up in chain-link fences. People entering their homes stepped into inches of stinking mud that covered the flooring. Rooms were a riot of upended furniture. People began a grim cleanup.

Beleaguered residents got more bad news two days before Christmas when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that preliminary tests showed dangerous levels of dioxin in the samples taken before the flood. The agency recommended nonemergency cleanup cease. Any cleanup deemed necessary should be done only by people wearing full protective gear and who had notified authorities. In addition there was this: The CDC said residents should not move back into the area.

The news didn’t go over well with acting Mayor Sidney Hammer. “The only way my family and I are leaving is if they carry us out forcibly,” he said. He wasn’t alone. The town quickly split. Some residents, concerned about contamination, wanted out. Others were determined to stay.

Over the next few weeks, hundreds of people attended public meetings at a school in nearby Eureka. Residents had questions, and they didn’t like the tentative answers offered by government officials. Folks in town were traumatized. A historic flood had driven them from their homes, they were living in temporary housing, uncertain of their futures, trying to manage work and family obligations. And what about this thing called dioxin? Some news stories called it the world’s most toxic compound. Was it sickening the people of Times Beach?

During one tense exchange, a neighbor slapped Marilyn. An attorney urged Marilyn to sue the woman, but Marilyn said no. She understood residents’ concerns, yet she had no idea what to say to them. She couldn’t send them to doctors for answers. All the doctors seemed to say the same thing: They didn’t know what was causing the illnesses in Times Beach.

When the EPA announced yet more testing, residents lashed out. The agency functioned with a seeming indifference to the stresses crushing the people of Times Beach. Residents felt like pariahs. Dry cleaning operations refused to accept their business, and restaurants wouldn’t accept their checks. Some outsiders even refused to shake the outreached hands offered by folks from Times Beach. Everyone feared contamination. Teachers separated Times Beach children from others. Residents driving through nearby towns saw signs reading, “Times Beach people go back, we don’t want you.”

Under pressure to make a decision about the future of Times Beach, EPA administrator Anne Burford traveled to a Eureka Holiday Inn on a balmy Monday, Feb. 22, 1983, to make what she called an important announcement. News leaked that federal and state officials were going to buy out Times Beach homeowners and businesses. About 200 residents showed up but were locked out of the room where Burford held a news conference. They watched behind glass doors, listening closely to an audio system set up so they could hear Burford.

When she officially announced the buyout, cheers arose from the crowd. Even Hammer, the acting mayor who said he’d never leave, was on board. He’d had a change of heart. He’d move out “just as quick as possible,” he said. But he acknowledged the pain of many longtime residents who’d soon be watching the disappearance of a town they loved. That included his parents, who lived with him.

“I’m going to see them in just a few minutes,” he told reporter Ken Walk after the announcement. “And I’d imagine we’re all going to have a crying spree.”

* * *

Houses in Times Beach after the evacuation in 1983. (Courtesy of Marilyn Leistner)
Marilyn and Bill moved temporarily to a condominium in nearby Pacific, Missouri. By then a series of resignations, including that of Hammer, resulted in Marilyn serving as acting mayor. With an election coming up, people asked her to run for the office. Marilyn didn’t want the job. She and her family were safe. She didn’t need the stress. Residents called Bill and told him they needed his wife. Would he talk to her?

Marilyn continued to resist. She and Bill argued about the job for nearly three weeks. “We should just get on with our lives,” Marilyn pleaded. One night Marilyn went for a long drive to clear her head. Crying, she returned home and told Bill she wanted a divorce.

“That’s not what you want,” Bill replied. “Let’s do this: You run for mayor and I’ll run for marshal. We’ll do it together.”

The two won the election and worked as a team. Marilyn had to quit her job as a dental assistant. It was a financially painful move because the job paid well — $18 per hour.

Marilyn paid a price for her deep involvement in the town during its moment of crisis. A small group of residents remained opposed the buyout. Some threatened Marilyn. For a while a police officer accompanied her to town meetings.

“There are days when I wish, back then, I would have gotten out of it,” she told a reporter in 1983. “I guess somebody had to do it. I felt I had so many friends there I did owe it to them.”

Marilyn Leistner speaks at a news conference during the Times Beach dioxin event, with John Ashcroft, left, then Missouri’s attorney general, and Gov. Kit Bond, center, wearing a suit and closely watching Marilyn. (Courtesy of Marilyn Leistner)
The town disincorporated in 1985, and then-Missouri Gov. John Ashcroft appointed Marilyn trustee for the Times Beach properties. She was a logical choice because she’d been at the forefront of efforts to solve the town’s dioxin problem from the beginning.

Marilyn spent her days in an office across the river from Times Beach. She worked with Ashcroft and the state’s attorney general to wind down the city’s affairs, pay outstanding bills and expedite the buyout process. She also monitored access to the town, now a collection of abandoned homes on lots overgrown with weeds and brush.

When former residents arrived for brief visits to their old homes, Marilyn asked them about their health issues. She wrote the names, symptoms and illnesses on a legal pad. It contains more than 1,300 handwritten entries that include fatigue, vaginal bleeding, leukemia, seizures. Nosebleeds were common. Marilyn’s were so persistent they eventually required surgery.

In the mid-1990s, workers built a temporary incinerator in a field not far from the lot where Marilyn and Bill once lived. In 1996-97, more than 250,000 tons of soil and debris that included tree stumps, carpet, brush, rocks, sawdust and gravel arrived from throughout the town and 20 other contaminated sites in eastern Missouri and were reduced to ashes. Everything else from Times Beach — the broken remnants of homes, playground equipment, stereos, Christmas trees, toothbrushes, underwear, the pews of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church — was bulldozed, smashed and buried in a giant pit known as the “town mound.”

Once cleared, Times beach was redeveloped as Route 66 State Park. The EPA assessed the park in 2012 and concluded visitors faced no significant health risks.

* * *

A wooded section of Route 66 State Park, the former site of Times Beach, Missouri. (Steve Mellon/Pittsburgh Union Progress)
Arena owner Judy Piatt, who uncovered the contamination by following Russell Bliss’ trucks, sold Shenandoah Stables in 1973 and, under instructions from the CDC, burned all of her belongings except a television set. She and her daughters were diagnosed with “chronic systemic chemical poisoning from the inhalation, skin absorption and ingestion of dioxin” and suffered from a range of disorders. Piatt died after a lengthy illness in July 2013.

Throughout his life, Bliss continued to claim he thought the waste oil he sprayed at Times Beach and other locations was harmless. For this he was mocked — bumper stickers in the 1980s proclaimed “Ignorance is Bliss.” Not everyone blamed him for the town’s dioxin woes. Some residents felt he was taking the fall for corporations who knew the dangers of dioxin and were using him to solve a waste problem. He was never held criminally liable for the contamination, although he did serve a year in prison after a 1983 conviction of federal tax fraud for overstating his business expenses. In April 2024, Bliss died in his sleep. He was 90.

Marilyn and Bill moved to a house on a hill in Eureka, a short distance from the park that was once Times Beach. Some of their old neighbors lived nearby, including the woman who’d slapped her years earlier. The two became good friends.

Bill developed prostate cancer but soldiered on until Aug. 31, 2005, when he died of a heart attack.

Marilyn occasionally drives through the park that was once her town. She can point out the location of the town’s streets — some remain as narrow trails under a canopy of trees — and identify the mobile home lot where she, Bill and Jerilyn saved themselves by stepping off a porch and into a boat during the flood of ’83.

“The Chicken Coop restaurant was over there,” she said during one recent trip. She drove past the location of the Blakey Street house, which was demolished in the early 1990s. “See that tree?” Marilyn said. “My dad put a swing in that tree for the kids.” Names came to mind. “Lorraine was my best friend until the buyout happened. She was opposed to the buyout.” Marilyn recalled illnesses, arguments, good times, odd moments and laughter as she continued her act of defiance.

One woman’s defiant remembering keeps the tragic story of Times Beach alive – Pittsburgh Union Progress

EUREKA, Missouri — You can lose your town and home and pretty much everything you own and become part of a nightmare story so big it’s on all the…

www.unionprogress.com

As the U.S. threatens to privatize Amtrak, the UK begins to renationalize passenger rail after 30 years of a failed experiment with privatization
…https://ble-t.org/news/as-the-u-s-threatens-to-privatize-amtrak-the-uk-begins-to-renationalize-passenger-rail-after-30-years-of-a-failed-experiment-with-privatization/
APRIL 14, 2025 | Amtrak, News, Top News

While the Trump Administration and billionaire advisor Elon Musk are talking about privatizing passenger rail here in the USA, in the UK, they’re going in the opposite direction. Next month, on May 25, the British will begin nationalizing passenger rail after decades of failed privatization, which began in 1994 (see write-up from the British House of Commons). Amtrak referenced the UK’s experiment with privatization in a March 2025 analysis explaining why privatization is a bad idea (see Amtrak FAQ here).
On this side of the Atlantic, Amtrak had its best year ever for ridership and revenue. Some of its ridership growth is due to an increasing number of long-haul commuters, especially commuters from Philadelphia to New York City.
Despite Amtrak’s success, the Trump administration is talking about quickly privatizing the passenger service and along with it, the United States Postal Service and possibly mortgage lender Fannie Mae.
Jim Mathews, President & CEO of the Rail Passengers Association, outlined five reasons why privatizing Amtrak won’t work. Click here to watch the video. Another reason opponents of privatization oppose the model is corruption. For example, rapid privatization in Russia led to the rise of oligarchs and rampant corruption.
Rail unions in the UK have hailed the renationalization of that country’s passenger rail as a return to public service. Mick Whelan, the general secretary of UK’s locomotive engineers’ union, ASLEF, said railways would now be “run as a public service, not for private profit.”
The House of Commons reported that among other cost-saving measures, renationalization would save the public about £680 million ($868 million) per year by removing shareholder dividend payments.
Amtrak photo: Cory Rusch, BLET Division 659

As the U.S. threatens to privatize Amtrak, the UK begins to renationalize passenger rail after 30 years of a failed experiment with privatization – Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen

While the Trump Administration and billionaire advisor Elon Musk are talking about privatizing passenger rail here in the USA, in the UK, they’re…

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