United Public Workers for Action

1 day ago

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

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

www.sfchronicle.com

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

United Public Workers for Action

2 days ago

A Kaiser strike by NUHW mental health workers drags on — setting a US record — as talks resume NNU CNA-SEU UHW MIA
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.” … See MoreSee Less

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

calmatters.org

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

United Public Workers for Action

2 days ago

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

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. … See MoreSee Less

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

www.unionprogress.com

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 wo…

United Public Workers for Action

2 days ago

As the U.S. threatens to privatize Amtrak, the UK begins to renationalize passenger rail after 30 years of a failed experiment with privatization
ble-t.org/news/as-the-u-s-threatens-to-privatize-amtrak-the-uk-begins-to-renationalize-passenger-…
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 … See MoreSee Less

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

ble-t.org

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 t …

United Public Workers for Action

3 days ago

Tesla settles lawsuit by Black worker who alleged widespread racism at Fremont electric car factory
Automaker still fighting similar court battles
www.mercurynews.com/2025/04/21/tesla-settles-lawsuit-black-worker-widespread-racism-fremont-elect…
Production associates work on a Tesla Model 3 at the Tesla factory in Fremont Calif. on
Wednesday July 18 2018. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Production associates work on a Tesla Model 3 at the Tesla factory in Fremont Calif. on Wednesday July 18 2018. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)Ethan Baron business reporter San Jose Mercury News for his WordPress profile. (Michael Malone/Bay Area News Group)By ETHAN BARON | ebaron@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
April 21 2025 at 4:26 PM PDT
Tesla has settled a lawsuit by a worker in its Fremont electric car factory who claimed she was harassed and discriminated against because she is Black.Raina Pierce sued the automaker in 2022 alleging that her manager referred to the facility as “the plantation” and the “slave house” and that her supervisor called her a racial slur that was pervasive in the factory. Pierce still worked at Tesla when she filed her lawsuit but has since left the company her lawyer said Monday.Tesla led by CEO Elon Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Pierce’s case first filed in Alameda County Superior Court and moved the next month to San Francisco U.S. District Court is one of several claiming widespread anti-Black racism at the Fremont plant. Two are scheduled to go to trial in September.Terms of the settlement were not disclosed in the court filing Friday about the agreement. Pierce’s lawyer Hunter Pyle said the settlement was confidential. The deal followed court-ordered arbitration that started in March 2023 and mediation in October 2024 that concluded early this month in the agreement according to an earlier court filing.Pierce had claimed that when a manager noticed she had been assigned to push two carts that were too heavy for one person and notified her direct supervisors one of them angrily claimed she got him in trouble and later made a vulgar comment about not being able to tolerate Black people. Pierce’s supervisors let non-Black workers swap work stations regularly but denied her requests to switch stations and also disciplined her more frequently and severely than non-Black colleagues the lawsuit claimed.
Pierce had reported alleged harassment and discrimination to Tesla’s human resources department in May 2021 after she had begun a month before to feel a sharp pain in her left knee and lower leg that was made worse by standing for long periods walking long distances or carrying heavy items the lawsuit said. A few months later suffering from the leg pain and an infection she called out sick and was told she was being put on leave the lawsuit claimed.
Tesla in addition to discriminating against her on the basis of race and gender and failing to stop the alleged race-based harassment retaliated against her by making her stay on leave for more than three months the lawsuit alleged. She was seeking unspecified general punitive and compensatory damages.The car maker continues fighting a number of legal actions claiming it failed to properly address anti-Black racism in its facilities.California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing — the state’s civil rights regulator — filed suit against Tesla in 2022 alleging Black workers at the company’s Fremont facility were paid less than White workers denied advancements and faced daily racist abuse including a noose drawn in a bathroom next to a lynching reference and a racial slur. Tesla has called the lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court “misguided” and “unfair.” The case is set to go before a jury Sept. 15.In the widest-ranging ongoing racism case against the pioneering EV company hundreds of current and former Black workers for Tesla filed declarations supporting a 2017 class-action lawsuit by former Tesla contractor Marcus Vaughn alleging that despite complaint after complaint the company did not stop race-based abuse and discrimination with Black workers segregated into the hardest most dangerous lowest-paid jobs and subjected to a barrage of racist treatment language and images. Thousands of current and former Black workers at Tesla have signed on to the lawsuit.Tesla said in a 2022 blog post that it “strongly opposes all forms of discrimination and harassment” and claimed it “has always disciplined and terminated employees who engage in misconduct including those who use racial slurs or harass others in different ways.” The judge in the case Noël Wise said last year that the experiences of workers who submitted declarations “might reasonably be characterized as race harassment.” A jury trial in the Vaughn case is scheduled to start Sept. 8 in Alameda County Superior Court.In 2021 a San Francisco federal court jury awarded a Black former Tesla worker Owen Diaz almost $137 million after he sued the company over alleged “daily racist epithets” in a workplace where colleagues drew swastikas and left racist graffiti and drawings around the facility. San Francisco U.S. District Judge William Orrick later cut the award to $15 million saying “disturbing” evidence supported the verdict against Tesla but legal principles compelled him to slash the payment. Diaz rejected the award in favor of a new trial where a jury found that Tesla should pay $3.2 million. After Diaz filed a court notice that he would appeal he and Tesla reached a confidential final settlement in March 2024.In May an arbitrator ordered Tesla to pay $1 million to Melvin Berry a Black former Tesla factory worker called racial slurs by supervisors.The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Tesla in 2023 accusing the company of “tolerating widespread and ongoing racial harassment of its Black employees and … subjecting some of these workers to retaliation for opposing the harassment.” Tesla in a court filing claimed the lawsuit arose from “run-amok competition” between the commission and the California civil rights regulator and that it lacked “any sound factual basis.” The next hearing in the case is scheduled for June.
Published: April 21 2025 at 2:35 PM PD … See MoreSee Less

Tesla settles lawsuit by Black worker who alleged widespread racism at Fremont electric car factory

www.mercurynews.com

Two lawsuits claiming rampant anti-Black racism at Tesla’s electric car plant in Fremont are set for trial later this year.

United Public Workers for Action

3 days ago

How Trump Deportations Fit Into War Against American Workers
www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/04/trump-deportations-are-not-about-strengthening-american-labor-but…
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. … See MoreSee Less

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

www.nakedcapitalism.com

Rather than cracking down on employers exploiting immigrant labor, we’re getting an assault on unions and rendition of immigrant activist students. And an increase in H1 and H2s to further drive dow…

United Public Workers for Action

3 days ago

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

Avatar photo
BY JOE GARCIA
APRIL 15, 2025
calmatters.org/health/2025/04/kaiser-strike-mental-health-workers/
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

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?

USC PROFESSOR OF HEALTHCARE FINANCES AND ECONOMICS GLENN MELNICK
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.

HUNGER STRIKER NICK NUNEZ, A THERAPIST IN KAISER’S VIRTUAL MEDICAL CENTER
“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.” … See MoreSee Less

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

calmatters.org

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

United Public Workers for Action

3 days ago

Class Struggle To Heat Up
DOGE layoffs of federal mediators leave grocery chain talks and other labor disputes in limbo
www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-04-21/doge-layoffs-hit-southern-california-grocery-labor-medi…
Signs reading "Ralphs employees on unfair labor practice strike" are stacked on a table.
Organizers at UFCW Local 770 headquarters in Los Angeles prepared strike-ready signs as negotiations soured in 2022. A federal agency that aids unions and employers in resolving labor disputes has largely been dismantled by the Trump administration. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
By Suhauna Hussain
Staff Writer
April 21, 2025 1:02 PM PT

In late March, Isael Hermosillo received an ominous message from his supervisor around 7 a.m. ordering him to cancel all his meetings scheduled that day.

Hermosillo rushed to notify several locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers union as well as attorneys for Albertsons and Kroger that he would not be able to attend a session in Buena Park later that morning — the third consecutive meeting set to be held that week for labor talks between major Southern California grocery chains and unions representing their workers.

Two hours later, Hermosillo found himself on a video conference call where he was informed by his supervisor that he would be put on a monthlong paid administrative leave, and that his job would be terminated.

Hermosillo is among 130 federal mediators who were fired on March 26 after the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), effectively shuttered a 79-year-old federal agency that mediates labor disputes.

The terminations at the agency, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, have fueled concern among unions and employers alike about who will step in to help ease labor conflicts in Southern California and beyond.

Though relatively small and obscure, the agency plays a vital role in helping to settle disputes so as to avoid labor unrest that can disrupt the free flow of commerce, according to former federal mediators and experts.

Besides brokering negotiations for private employers, the mediators handle worker grievances; train joint labor-management committees; appoint arbitrators if a dispute cannot be resolved; and assist with negotiation impasses in the federal sector. These services are offered at little to no cost.

“We are the ones that come in quietly when people are having issues or contract negotiations aren’t working and are falling apart,” Hermosillo said. “We go in and assist, and then move on to the next group that may need our assistance. I think that’s a lot of why the American people don’t know who we are and what we do.”

Hermosillo works out of the agency’s Los Angeles office in Glendale, staffed by five mediators and a supervisor.

His termination caught employers and unions off guard — coming weeks after the labor contracts covering some 55,000 unionized grocery workers in California had expired — and threw a wrench in negotiations, said Kathy Finn, president of UFCW Local 770.

Finn said that because Hermosillo has worked on negotiations for many years, on multiple cycles since around 2017, both sides trust him and they engage him very early on in the process — which has helped to avert strikes.

“We always have difficult negotiations with these companies. … We’ve gotten very close to going on strike many times, ending or reaching a deal minutes or hours before a deadline — or after,” Finn said. “The help Isael has provided has been very valuable.”

UFCW Local 770 is among seven locals representing workers from San Diego to Santa Barbara in labor talks with Albertsons, parent owner of the Vons and Pavilions chains, and Kroger, which owns Ralphs.

LOS ANGELES-CA-MARCH 21, 2022: Tyson Kehm, left, and Andrea Garcia, right, help make strike-ready signs at UFCW Local 770 headquarters in Los Angeles on Monday, March 21, 2022. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
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Finn said mediators like Hermosillo are highly effective. Without them, negotiations can break down into finger-pointing rather than become productive sessions focused on the substance of a contract, Finn said.

Neither Kroger nor Albertsons returned requests for comment.

DOGE and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget also did not respond to requests for comment.

Last week, UFCW joined a dozen major unions in bringing a lawsuit against the Trump administration to reverse the closure of the federal agency. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, argues that the Trump administration’s dismantling of the mediation service is in “clear defiance” of Congress’ constitutional powers to create and dissolve such agencies.

In fiscal 2024, the agency, which has a budget of $54 million, employed about 143 full-time mediators who conducted more than 5,400 mediated negotiations and provided some 10,000 arbitration panels. And recent estimates show that the mediators’ services save the economy more than $500 million annually, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit cites data from the agency’s website that have been scrubbed in recent weeks.

Just five mediators and a few support staff workers remain at the agency after the cuts, according to the lawsuit.

Some major employers and trade associations have been petitioning the Trump administration to reverse the decision, said Martin H. Malin, a professor emeritus at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and a mediator who served on the Federal Service Impasses Panel during the Obama and Biden administrations.

“No one will talk about this publicly,” Malin said. “They can see this hair trigger mentality in the White House. Everybody is afraid.”

DOGE has said the agency will limit its services to labor disputes that involve more than 1,000 employees. But Malin said even with those restrictions, the workload will be too much for the remaining mediators.

“It’s impossible for four mediators to cover the entire country,” Malin said. “The situation, it’s pretty dire.”

Tina Littleton, another federal mediator in the Glendale office who had worked at the agency for 15 years, was stunned by the decision.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk standing aside each other
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These departments investigating Elon Musk have been cut by DOGE and the Trump administration

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“Do I feel this was done correctly or appropriately?” Littleton asked. “My answer is no.”

Littleton recently facilitated negotiations between some 200 workers and their employer, which manufactures plastic pouches used to dispense IV infusions in medical facilities.

“It doesn’t matter to us whether big or small, they still have some part that they play in making sure interstate commerce continues,” Littleton said.

Martha Figueroa, a field representative who helps the California Federation of Teachers negotiate contracts, said she has frequently relied on a federal mediator in discussions with Head Start, the child development nonprofit targeted by the Trump administration for funding cuts. She worries about potentially having to turn to private mediators, who are “really, really expensive.”

“When you have a private mediator, it’s very stressful to both parties,” Figueroa said. “The more you’re at the table, the more they get paid. And that’s not the case when you have a public mediator.”

Hollywood, CA – March 20: People blur by the Hollywood and Highland shopping complex along Hollywood Blvd, in the heart of Hollywood, CA, as COVID-19 restrictions are loosened and people filled the sidewalks Saturday, March 20, 2021. This is one year and one day, after California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a stay at home order, "to protect the health and well-being of all Californians and to establish consistency across the state in order to slow the spread of COVID-19." As of March 19, 2021, 57,510 people died from the coronavirus, with more than 3million positive cases. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
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Rather than saving money, dismantling the agency will create more inefficiencies, said William Resh, associate professor of public policy and management with USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.

“What you have without mediation are disputes that are going to be more prolonged, more contentious,” Resh said. “These are highly professionalized individuals with a lot of experience in bargaining and conflict negotiation.”

California and several other states are exploring how they might fill the gap.

California’s Public Employment Relations Board, which oversees disputes between state workers and their employers, also has the authority to offer mediation services to private employers, but it doesn’t have the budget to do so, said Lorena Gonzalez, head of the California Labor Federation. Labor groups have been pushing state lawmakers in budget talks to augment the board’s budget by several million dollars, she said.

“In the long run the state does benefit. We don’t want people to go on strike. Sometimes, it’s needed, but for the most part, if mediation is able to help get a good resolution, we prefer that,” Gonzalez said. … See MoreSee Less

DOGE layoffs of federal mediators leave grocery chain talks and other labor disputes in limbo

www.latimes.com

Isael Hermosillo, a mediator who was negotiating labor contracts for California grocers, was one of 130 terminated in March.

United Public Workers for Action

3 days ago

Another Blackout Forces the Question of Puerto Rico’s Political Future
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/opinion/puerto-rico-blackout.html
April 21, 2025
In darkness, two people take a selfie by the light of a mobile phone in front of a wall painted with Puerto Rico’s flag.
Credit…Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters

By Yarimar Bonilla
Dr. Bonilla is a contributing Opinion writer who covers race, history, pop culture and the American empire.
During last week’s Holy Week observations, Puerto Rico was plunged once more into darkness. One image quickly went viral: a woman at a supermarket, plugging her respiratory machine into an outlet. A private act turned into a public indictment of a broken system.

Like many in the Puerto Rican diaspora, I experienced the blackout from afar through dropped calls and frantic texts, part of an all-too-familiar loop of state failure. I stayed on the phone with my mom as night fell on Wednesday, hoping to ease her sense of abandonment.

Near tears, she recalled how she had spent her life working multiple jobs, saving carefully as a single mother for a modest but dignified retirement. Now she was heating a meal on a camping stove she could barely light with her arthritic hands.

“I don’t think I deserve this,” she said. She’s right. This isn’t the life Puerto Ricans were promised.

The latest islandwide blackout is not just a technical failure; it is the most recent sign that Puerto Rico’s colonial bargain has collapsed. For over half a century, its commonwealth status — under U.S. federal control but lacking full political rights — was justified by promises of security, stability and the material comforts of modern life.

But through storms and earthquakes, bankruptcy and blackouts, displacement and austerity, that promise has steadily unraveled. Each flicker of the failing power grid reveals a deeper truth: the waning promise of American empire, the hollow performance of local politicians and the growing conviction that Puerto Ricans must — and will — forge a different path.

At her first news conference after the blackout, Puerto Rico’s newly elected governor, Jenniffer González-Colón, declared, “Puerto Rico cannot be the island where the power is constantly going out,” and cast herself as a mere inheritor of the island’s longstanding energy crisis. Yet, as a career politician, staunch Republican and public supporter of President Trump, she spent the past eight years as Puerto Rico’s nonvoting member of the U.S. House — a period defined by congressionally mandated financial austerity in the wake of the island’s 2015 debt default, failed disaster relief and the controversial privatization of the power grid. During this time, Puerto Rico has become exactly what she now decries.

That was never supposed to be the deal. In 1952, as anticolonial movements arose worldwide, Puerto Rico was cast as a showcase of American-led progress through the creation of the commonwealth status. In exchange for limited self-rule, the island received paved roads, public schools, hospitals, industry and electricity reaching even the most remote mountain towns. Power lines and reinforced concrete came to symbolize a broader political promise: that under U.S. oversight, Puerto Rico would thrive.

That illusion suffered a deadly blow in August 2016, when the federal government appointed a fiscal board — the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico — in light of the island’s default. Just a month later, a fire at a power plant set off the first islandwide blackouts. At the time, it felt almost quaint. Neighbors gathered in the streets. Children played outside. Many people likened it to a short story by the celebrated Puerto Rican author José Luis González, “La Noche Que Volvimos a Ser Gente” (“The Night We Became People Again”).

At that time, I wondered if Puerto Rico was entering its own special period, like Cuba’s era of post-Soviet scarcity, marked by blackouts, food shortages and economic collapse. Now the comparison feels less speculative. The old warnings issued by those not in favor of independence — “You don’t want to end up like Cuba” or, more recently, Venezuela — no longer carry the same weight. We already live with constant blackouts, crumbling infrastructure, a housing crisis, political corruption and mass migration. What exactly are we being protected from?

Yet some Puerto Ricans still cling to the idea that deeper integration with the rest of the United States is the solution to our problems. After the latest blackout, calls to federalize the electricity grid resurfaced on social media. But what does that mean today in an era defined not by New Deal public investment but rather by dismantlement under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency? Not to mention that America’s own energy grid is under mounting pressure.

Since 2017, Puerto Rico has been governed by a succession of pro-statehood leaders, each echoing the promise of the 1950s: that U.S. citizenship — in a full, enfranchised form — would finally bring stability, prosperity and dignity. Though they often pose as adversaries, local politicians and members of the federally appointed fiscal oversight board have advanced the same agenda: austerity, privatization and disinvestment, all while enabling speculative investments through generous tax incentives. Just this month, Ms. González-Colón proposed extending Act 60, a law that offers tax exemptions to wealthy outsiders, from 2035 to 2055.

For decades, Puerto Ricans seeking independence from the United States were warned that without its protection, the island would descend into chaos or dictatorship. But as the nation flirts with authoritarianism — detaining international students for expressing dissent, imprisoning migrants abroad without due process and warning that homegrowns (citizens) could be next — U.S. citizenship begins to feel less like a shield. The fear of becoming like Cuba might just be canceled out by the fear of becoming like Florida.

So what comes next?

Puerto Rico’s future isn’t being shaped in Washington or the governor’s mansion. After last week’s blackout, Bad Bunny — Puerto Rico’s most recognizable voice — posted on X, “When are we going to do something?” The truth is, Puerto Ricans, including Bad Bunny, have already done plenty. They’ve occupied shuttered schools and turned them into community centers. They’ve battled developers to reclaim public beaches. They’ve built grass-roots solar networks and started community farms to fight food insecurity. They even toppled a governor. And in the last electioncampaign, they broke with tradition, forming new voting alliances and daring to imagine new forms of governance unconstrained by Cold War-era fears.

These aren’t isolated acts of resistance. They signal the slow build of a new political project — one rooted in mutual aid, solidarity, sustainability and self-determination rather than dependency or tutelage.

I have no romanticism about this. How could I, watching my own family pushed to the brink just to survive?

But I do have conviction. And I know I’m not alone. When Bad Bunny asks, “When are we going to do something?” he’s not posing a question. He’s voicing a certainty. The work has already begun. The only unknown is when we’ll reap the fruit of the seeds we’ve already sown. … See MoreSee Less

Opinion | Another Blackout Forces the Question of Puerto Rico’s Political Future

www.nytimes.com

For over half a century, the island’s commonwealth status was justified by promises of security, stability and the material comforts of modern life.