Rabbi James Rudin’s memoir recounts the interfaith movement’s hits and misses

In the book, 'The People in the Room: Rabbis, Nuns, Pastors, Popes, and Presidents,' Rudin writes about his favorite collaborators, the challenges of cultivating pluralism and the future of interfaith relations.

“The People in the Room: Rabbis, Nuns, Pastors, Popes, and Presidents" and author Rabbi James Rudin. Courtesy images

May 30, 2022

By 

Yonat Shimron

(RNS) — Rabbi James Rudin had a front-row seat to all the major developments in Jewish-Christian relations in the second half of the 20th century.

Probably no other rabbi has traveled as widely or met with as many global religious leaders as Rudin, who for 32 years worked at the American Jewish Committee, retiring as its national interreligious affairs director in 2000.

At 87, he’s now written a memoir chronicling his efforts to improve Jewish-Christian ties in the wake of the Holocaust and give Jews a measure of dignity and respect they were often denied.

Rudin’s book, “The People in the Room: Rabbis, Nuns, Pastors, Popes, and Presidents,” tells of his many travels — 42 times across the Atlantic — and his meetings with popes, presidents, Protestant denominational leaders and world-famous evangelists.

Rabbi James Rudin as a U.S. Air Force chaplain at the Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Facility in Japan in 1962. Photo courtesy James Rudin

Rudin’s personal biography before joining the AJC helped. As he writes in the first part of the book, he grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, among Southern Baptists. After finishing rabbinical school, he served for several years as an Air Force chaplain stationed in Japan and Korea. And then, while serving an Illinois congregation, he did graduate work in history at the University of Illinois.

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RELATED: Despite 2022’s cluster of religious holidays, multifaith understanding slow to evolve

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In addition to possessing a curious mind eager to learn about other religions and make friends across the faith divide, he is also a writer, contributing hundreds of columns over the years to Religion News Service, among other outlets.

RNS spoke to Rudin from his home in Florida about his favorite collaborators in his interfaith work, the challenges, even today, of cultivating pluralism and the future of interfaith relations. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You devote a full chapter to the late New York Cardinal John O’Connor and another to a Catholic Sister Ann Gillen. Are Catholics the group you had the most success with?

No. We just hit it off very well. I came on board the AJC in 1968. That was three years after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. Because of the excitement and the breakthrough of “Nostra Aetate” (the document that transformed the church’s approach to Judaism), there was a lot of energy around Catholic-Jewish relations. Also, Jews historically had more contact with Catholics than any other group. Cardinal O’Connor, of blessed memory, was a friend, a colleague. In private we called each other by our first names.

But growing up in Alexandria, Virginia, I also had an understanding of Southern Baptists. I knew these folks. I went to school with them. I went to their revivals. It helped me in relating to them.

Each December in the area I grew up there was a huge Christmas decoration contest. It was very important to these families who won the contest. They had a very divisive decision one December and it looked like it would be the end of the contest. They came to my father and asked him if he and my family could be the judges because we would be totally impartial, which we were. So for several years my late brother and father and I trudged round in the snow to judge which house had the best Christmas decorations. Our judgments were upheld because we were totally impartial. I don’t think too many rabbis had that experience.

One of the evangelicals you grew to respect is Billy Graham. How did your views of him change?

I met with him during his last crusade when he came to New York in 2005. In a private conversation he said that he would go on his hands and knees and beg forgiveness from the Jewish community for the things he said and agreed with in 1972 in his White House meetings with President Richard Nixon, which were full of antisemitism. He regretted it. He apologized.

A lot of the work you did abroad was trying to explain to Christians how their own Scriptures often cast Jews as Christ-killers. You devote a chapter to Oberammergau, a town in the Bavarian Alps famous for its Passion plays, which in years past were virulently anti-Jewish. How hard was it?

When I went there I was fully aware that we were trying to overcome antisemitism. Europe was a haunted continent because of what happened there. I went to Germany many times. I was one of the first interreligious American Jewish leaders to go to Poland in 1989 to build positive Christian-Jewish relations. But it was also very personal. My own family — my uncles, my cousins — were involved in battles with the Germans in World War II. I got a tour of Auschwitz by a wonderful Polish Catholic priest. It made the work sacred to me. But it was also very difficult.

The U.S. is having a hard time with pluralism these days. But you write about a battle back in the late 1980s over the design of a chapel at Camp David in which the committee you served on wanted stained glass windows with Christian symbols. How’d you get them to change their minds? 

The committee felt they were not creating an interreligious chapel for a presidential retreat but a Christian church. I was told again and again, America is a Christian country. But the Founding Fathers had every opportunity to put Jesus into the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. It’s not an accident that it isn’t there. Ironically, Camp David is a place 99% of Americans will never visit. It’s a secluded presidential retreat. But that’s where it played out at the highest level. I had to deal with it diplomatically. It was a time for me to not only quote Jefferson and Madison but to point out that we were doing this for history. Once you put this chapel there, international visitors would come there of all religions and no religion. It was a very important and symbolic moment for me. It was one of my proudest moments. I’m not sure I would be as successful today persuading people to understand American history.

What do you think of interreligious work today when the authority of religious leadership is being challenged everywhere?

In the sexual abuse scandal we have the perfect trifecta. We’ve had the Roman Catholic sexual abuse scandal. Earlier this year we had sexual abuse scandal in my movement, the Reform (Jewish) movement. Now we have it in the largest Protestant denomination. Is it any wonder respect and commitment to various religious leaders are under attack? Religion is radioactive. Sometimes it can be very helpful; sometimes highly destructive. You have to handle it with great care. We need fewer declarations, fewer statements, fewer proclamations. We need less wholesale religion and more retail. I’m advocating for lay-led, small groups that tackle problems in communities on an interreligious basis. That’s the future; small pockets of religious energy.

In the U.S., all religions are represented. Nobody’s getting out of the boat. It’s a necessity that we have interreligious cooperation and bridges of human solidarity.

Yes, Muslims are portrayed negatively in American media — 2 political scientists reviewed over 250,000 articles to find conclusive evidence

In examining media coverage of Muslims over a 21-year period, in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, scholars found that articles mentioning Muslims were far more negative than other faith groups.

Students with the Muslim Consultative Network's summer youth program gather on the steps of New York's City Hall on Aug. 14, 2013, to speak out against Islamophobia. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

May 29, 2022

By 

Erik Bleich, A. Maurits van der Veen

(The Conversation) — The warm welcome Americans and Europeans have given Ukrainians in 2022 contrasts sharply with the uneven – and frequently hostile – policies toward Syrian refugees in the mid-2010s.

Political scientist David Laitin has highlighted the role that religious identities play in this dynamic. As he pointed out in a recent interview, Syrian refugees were “mostly Muslim and faced higher degrees of discrimination than will the Ukrainians, who are largely of Christian heritage.”

The media provide information that shapes such attitudes toward Muslims. A 2007 Pew Research Center survey of Americans found that people’s negative opinions on Muslims were mostly influenced by what they heard and read in the media. Communications scholar Muniba Saleem and colleagues have demonstrated the link between media information and “stereotypic beliefs, negative emotions and support for harmful policies” toward Muslim Americans.

To better grasp the evolution of media portrayals of Muslims and Islam, our 2022 book, “Covering Muslims: American Newspapers in Comparative Perspective,” tracked the tone of hundreds of thousands of articles over decades.

We found overwhelmingly negative coverage, not only in the United States but also in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Negative coverage of Muslims

Previous research has identified widespread negative media representations of Muslims. An overview of studies undertaken from 2000 to 2015 by communications scholars Saifuddin Ahmed and Jörg Matthes concluded that Muslims were negatively framed in the media and that Islam was frequently cast as a violent religion.

But the studies they reviewed leave open two pressing questions that we address through our research.

First, do articles touching on Muslims and Islam include more negative representations than the average newspaper article? Second, are media portrayals of Muslims more negative than articles touching on other minority religions?

If stories about minority religious groups made it to the news only when they were involved in conflict in one way or another, then they may be negative for reasons that are not specific to Muslims.

What we found

To answer these questions, we used media databases such as LexisNexis, Nexis Uni, ProQuest and Factiva to download 256,963 articles mentioning Muslims or Islam – for which we use the shorthand “Muslim articles” – from 17 national, regional and tabloid newspapers in the United States over the 21-year period from Jan. 1, 1996, to Dec. 31, 2016.

We developed a reliable method for measuring the positivity or negativity of stories by comparing them to the tone of a random sample of 48,283 articles about topics drawn from a wide range of newspapers. A negative value on this scale means that a story is negative relative to the average newspaper article.

Crucially, this approach also provided a baseline for additional comparisons. We collected sets of articles from U.S. newspapers relating not only to Muslims, but also separately to Catholics, Jews and Hindus, three minority religious groups of varying size and status in the United States. We then assembled stories linked to Muslims from a broad array of newspapers in the U.K., Canada and Australia.

Our central finding is that the average article mentioning Muslims or Islam in the United States is more negative than 84% of articles in our random sample. This means that one would likely have to read six articles in U.S. newspapers to find even one that was as negative as the average article touching on Muslims.

To give a concrete sense of how negative typical Muslim articles are, consider the following sentence that has the tone of the average Muslim article: “The Russian was made to believe by undercover agents that the radioactive material was to be delivered to a Muslim organization.” This contains two highly negative words (“undercover” and “radioactive”) and implies that the “Muslim organization” has nefarious goals.

Articles that mentioned Muslims were also much more likely to be negative than stories touching on any other group we examined. For Catholics, Jews and Hindus, the proportion of positive and negative articles was close to 50-50. By contrast, 80% of all articles related to Muslims were negative.

The divergence is striking. Our work shows that the media are not prone to publishing negative stories when they write about other minority religions, but they are very likely to do so when they write about Muslims.

Beyond comparing coverage across groups, we were also interested in coverage across countries. Perhaps the United States is unique in its intensely negative coverage of Muslims. To find out, we collected 528,444 articles mentioning Muslims or Islam from the same time period from a range of newspapers in the U.K., Canada and Australia. We found that the proportion of negative to positive articles in these countries was almost exactly the same as that in the United States.

Implications of negative coverage

Multiple scholars have shown that negative stories generate less favorable attitudes toward Muslims. Other studies that looked at the impact of negative information about Muslims also found an increase in support for policies that harm Muslims, such as secret surveillance of Muslim Americans or the use of drone attacks in Muslim countries.

In addition, surveys of young American Muslims have found that negative media coverage resulted in weaker identification as American and in lower trust in the U.S. government.

We believe acknowledging and addressing the systemic negativity in media coverage of Muslims and Islam is vital for countering widespread stigmatization. This may, in turn, create opportunities for more humane policies that are fair to everyone regardless of their faith.

(Erik Bleich, Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science, Middlebury. A. Maurits van der Veen, Associate Professor of Government, William & Mary. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

 

Banker says he warned Vatican about London fund investor

Enrico Crasso cited a series of emails he sent to Vatican officials expressing concern and perplexity at some of Mincione's investment choices.

A rainbow shines over St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, on Jan. 31, 2021. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)

May 30, 2022

By 

Nicole Winfeld

re

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican’s longtime investment banker testified Monday that he repeatedly voiced concerns about a fund that was investing in a troubled London property, but said the Holy See’s secretariat of state insisted on pursuing the deal even as it lost money.

Enrico Crasso said he was very much on the sidelines of the London deal, which is at the center of the Vatican’s big fraud and embezzlement trial. Prosecutors have accused Crasso and nine other people of fleecing the Holy See of tens of millions of euros and of ultimately extorting the Vatican for 15 million euros to get control of the property.

Crasso, who handled the secretariat of state’s investments for 27 years at Credit Suisse and his own firms, is accused of several counts of embezzlement as well as corruption, fraud and extortion. Crasso denies wrongdoing and testified Monday that in his more than quarter-century of work for the Holy See, the investments he managed always turned a profit.

On his first day on the stand, Crasso stressed that he was only brought into the London deal by chance after he was called on by the secretariat of state to help it evaluate ways to diversify its asset portfolio in 2012, first into a potential petroleum development deal in Angola and then the London property.

Crasso said Credit Suisse recommended a commodities expert, Raffaele Mincione, to evaluate the Angola deal. After all sides agreed against it, Mincione stayed on as a new money manager for the Vatican via his Athena investment fund that was investing in the London property.

Crasso referred to a 2016 formal statement from the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, making clear that there were no limits on where the Vatican’s Credit Suisse assets could be invested. Crasso’s defense has cited the letter to rebut the embezzlement allegation that Crasso routed Vatican money destined for charity to highly speculative investments.

Crasso testified that he was essentially sidelined after the Vatican began working with Mincione and he cited a series of emails he sent to Vatican officials expressing concern and perplexity at some of Mincione’s investment choices.

By 2018, the Vatican decided to exit Mincione’s fund because it had lost some 18 million euros and was looking for a way to buy him out of the London property. Enter another defendant, Gianluigi Torzi, who was proposed by a friend of Pope Francis as a potential manager and developer for the property.

The deal involved paying off Mincione 40 million euros and then entering into an agreement with Torzi via a new holding company, Gutt, to manage and develop the property. The deal, in which the Vatican held 30,000 shares in Gutt and Torzi 1,000 shares, was hashed out over three days in Torzi’s London office in November 2018.

Crasso said he attended the meetings but had no real reason to be there since the negotiations were being handled by the two top in-house money managers of the Vatican.

Unbeknown to the Vatican at the time, Torzi structured the Gutt shares in such a way that his 1,000 shares were the only ones with the right to vote, meaning he controlled the building and the Vatican held virtually nothing.

According to previous testimony, Francis and the Vatican decided against suing Torzi for alleged fraud and agreed to pay him 15 million euros to finally get control of the property — a payout that Vatican prosecutors say amounted to extortion.
t
Crasso said there was no logic to prosecutors’ claim he was involved in the alleged extortion since he had only met Torzi for the first time a few days before the November 2018 meetings.

World Leaders Must Commit to End Covid-19 Patents: Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus

Decrying the "brutally unequal global rollout of Covid-19 vaccines," Yunus wrote that "there is still time for world leaders to say never again."


People carry mock coffins in front of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's office in London on October 12, 2021. (Photo: Hasan Esen/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)


ANDREA GERMANOS

May 28, 2022

Social entrepreneur and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus on Saturday called for a comprehensive waiver of intellectual property rules for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, declaring that "freeing" the technology "from profit and patent is the key" to a global health system that puts human lives above corporate profit.

In an op-ed published Saturday in Stat news, Yunus—who's previously joined with other Nobel laureates in pushing for an end to intellectual property barriers—pointed to the global inequality in access to vaccines.

"The brutally unequal global rollout of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments is a consequence of an ever-increasing concentration of wealth and focus on profit maximization."

He referenced Oxfam's estimate that it could take an additional two and a half years for the poorest countries to meet the World Health Organization's target of vaccinating 70% of the world's population.

"Denied vaccines for more than a year," lower-income countries are now seeing the arrival of doses, he wrote, yet those countries will not be the ones deciding on which company's products arrive nor on what timeline, thus complicating vaccination campaigns. A similar phenomenon, he added, is now happening with antiviral pills, which are being hoarded by wealthy nations.

"Wealth is power," wrote Yunus. "And the brutally unequal global rollout of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments is a consequence of an ever-increasing concentration of wealth and focus on profit maximization."

The pharmaceutical industry, he asserted, is on a quest for "ever-greater profits" and thus supplies vaccines to the highest bidder.

Yunus went on to accuse "the wealthy nations, the G10, the continuous beneficiaries of the wealth-concentrating economic machine" of gaining from the current framework at the expense of the rest of the world. But these same wealthy nations, he said, "have the resources to narrow the great vaccine gap, if they want to."

A key step in ensuring equitable access to vaccines, according to Yunus, is the establishment of pharmaceutical companies focused on solving social problems rather than making profits, ones that could distribute the doses at cost. And that means "removing barriers like intellectual property rules.

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That needs to happen this month, he said, with world leaders taking a step they've so far refused to do in the pandemic—backing a comprehensive waiver of parts of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. He pointed out that the E.U. and U.K. have thus far blocked such an effort. He also called out the U.S. for backing a waiver solely on vaccines.

"There is still time for world leaders to say never again," he wrote, "and to commit to a fairer system of global health that prioritizes human life over the profits of a handful of pharmaceutical companies."
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Organizers Herald 100th Win as Starbucks Unionization Wave Continues

"Howard Schultz and Starbucks are getting creamed in union vote after union vote."

The Starbucks Workers United hub in Buffalo, New York on November 16, 2021. 

(Photo: Libby March for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

ANDREA GERMANOS

May 29, 2022

The tally of unionized Starbucks locations is continuing to swell, with the latest additions coming after pro-unionization votes late last week in Seattle and Birmingham, Alabama.

The coffee giant's CEO "Howard Schultz and Starbucks are getting creamed in union vote after union vote," labor journalist Steven Greenhouse tweeted Saturday.

By the union's count, there are now 100 stores across the nation that have unionized.

The milestone was achieved after successful votes Friday at two stores in Seattle.

The Eastlake store employees won their effort to collectively bargain in a landslide 12-0 vote, while the Union Station store voted 6-3 in favor, local KOMO News reported.

A day earlier, the store on Birmingham's 20th Street South became Alabama's first Starbucks to back unionization after a 27-1 vote Thursday.

Kadarius Perkin, a shift supervisor at that store, declared after the vote, "Our voices will be heard," according to AL.com.

"Starbucks has until later this week to file any objections with the National Labor Relations Board," The Associated Press reported Sunday.

Workers at hundreds of Starbucks stores have filed to unionize since the first successful union drive in Buffalo, New York late last year.

According to Matt Bruenig, founder of People's Policy Project, "a trickle of election filings" that started last year "has built to a wave—and Starbucks workers are winning in location after location."

Bruenig analyzed data from the National Labor Relations Board, writing in an op-ed published last week at Jacobin that out of 89 union elections that had taken place at Starbucks, the union prevailed in 77 locations—87%—of them.

Those wins, he noted, came despite "a fierce campaign against the union, prompting a torrent of unfair labor practice (ULP) charges against the company."

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John Logan, a professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, also pointed to that campaign in a recent op-ed at Jacobin in which he described Starbucks as worthy of the title "worst worker rights violator."

Contributing to the "union-busting lawlessness," wrote Logan, is the company's firing of over 20 union activists and announcement of a benefit increase to stores that have not unionized.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has previously boosted Starbucks workers' unionization efforts and told Schultz as he resumed his position as CEO this year, "If Starbucks can afford to spend $20 billion on stock buybacks and dividends and provide a $20 million compensation package to its CEO, it can afford a unionized workforce that can collectively bargain for better wages, better benefits, safer working conditions and reliable schedule."

"Please respect the Constitution of the United States and do not illegally hamper the efforts of your employees to unionize," Sanders wrote in a March letter to the billionaire executive.

Sanders reiterated that message in a tweet on Friday.

"Congratulations to Starbucks Workers United for winning the 100th union election at Starbucks coffee shops all over America," he wrote.

"I say to Howard Schultz: Stop the union-busting," he continued. "Obey the law. Negotiate a fair contract with your workers now—no more delays. Enough is enough."

Starbucks Workers United Wins in US’s Most Anti-Union City

An outside view of a Starbucks in New York City on March 8, 2022.

KENA BETANCUR / VIEWPRESS

BY John Logan,

Truthout

PUBLISHED May 29, 2022

The Starbucks Workers United union campaign continues to produce astounding election wins week after week. As of this writing, more than 260 stores have petitioned for National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections: The union has won more than 70 NLRB elections, most by overwhelming margins, and has lost only nine elections. The union has won elections throughout the country, including in places where union victories are rare, including in Mesa, Arizona; Boone, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Knoxville, Tennessee; Augusta, Georgia; and Overland Park, Kansas.

Last Monday, workers in Greenville, South Carolina, voted eight to one to become the first unionized store in the state. Greenville has a deserved reputation as being “among the most relentlessly anti-union cities in the nation,” as The New York Times described it in 1977. Starbucks Workers United’s victory there is arguably one of the most remarkable union wins in recent years.

South Carolina Has Lowest Union Density in the Nation

For the past two years, South Carolina has been the least unionized state in the country, and is the only state with a union density under 2 percent: South Carolina’s union density in 2021 was just 1.7 percent. The next lowest state, North Carolina, was 2.6 percent.

Most recent union campaigns in the state have failed: In a campaign that lasted for several years before a defeat in 2017, the machinists union was met with a blistering anti-union campaign inside and outside of Boeing in North Charleston, South Carolina. Then-Republican Gov. Nikki Haley stated, “We discourage any companies that have unions from wanting to come to South Carolina because we don’t want to taint the water.”

Then-Governor Haley’s labor director, Catherine Templeton, said on her first day in office, “Let me be very clear … this is an anti-union administration.” The South Carolina Chamber of Commerce — which has had links to anti-union organizations like Union Free South Carolina and Palmetto Shield — also discourages unionized firms. When its CEO retired in 2020, he listed “Keeping Unions out of South Carolina” among his major accomplishments.

Greenville Is the Most Anti-Union City in the State

Greenville is even more anti-union than the rest of South Carolina. The metropolitan area has only seven employers with any union workers, three represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, two by the Teamsters, one by the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers, and one by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Moreover, over the past decade, the city’s unionized workers have not participated in a single strike, protest or walkout.

The Greenville area has had an extraordinarily lawless anti-union history. In one especially bloody incident at the Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina, just outside Greenville, seven union supporters were shot and killed during the 1934 national textile strike.

In the 1970s, the J.P. Stevens textile mill in Greenville, along with its other mills in the Carolinas, became the country’s worst labor law violator. When it finally recognized the union in 1980, The New York Times reported that the “truce” marked “the end of one of the ugliest episodes in recent labor history: a 17-year war during which Stevens repeatedly harassed or fired union activists.”

Marketing anti-unionism:

The Greenville Area Development Corporation has stressed that weak unions are a major reason firms locate there, boasting that, “In 2021, the private sector unionization rate for the Greenville area was only 0.3%. The Greenville Metropolitan Statistical Area is the least unionized Metropolitan Statistical Area in the United States…. There have been no reported work stoppages reported in the past ten years.” Even with a 0.3 percent private-sector unionization rate, the Greenville Chamber of Commerce lists “Promoting a Union Free Environment” prominently among its major policy and economic goals.

Greenville is also home to several leading law firms that specialize in fighting unions. The nation’s second-largest union avoidance law firm, Ogletree Deakins, was founded in Greenville in 1977 with 11 lawyers — along with five in Atlanta, Georgia. It now has more than 800.

Ogletree has played a key role in keeping Greenville and South Carolina union-less over the past several decades. It represented J.P. Stevens, and it helped several foreign auto transplants fight unionization, causing one recent profile to call it a “witness to history.” Attracted by the city’s anti-union reputation, Starbucks firm Littler Mendelson, alongside Jackson Lewis — the nation’s first- and third-largest union avoidance law firms — have long-established offices in Greenville.

Starbucks’s blistering and unlawful anti-union campaign:

For a corporation which consistently and prominently tries to associate itself with progressive values, Starbucks has engaged in one of the most brutal anti-union campaigns of recent decades. The union’s remarkable success has likely obscured some of the intensity and lawlessness of the anti-union campaign.

Starbucks’s anti-union campaign in Buffalo, New York, last fall was comparable in intensity and lawlessness to anything that Amazon or Walmart have ever done to crush unions. In May, the Buffalo regional NLRB office issued a complaint alleging that Starbucks committed more than 200 violations of federal law, an extraordinary number probably not seen since the United Auto Workers’s campaign at Caterpillar over several years in the 1990s.

Starbucks is alleged to have committed hundreds of other unfair labor practices across the United States. The NLRB currently has opened more than 100 allegations of unlawful anti-union behavior. On May 20, the NLRB imposed a bargaining order on Starbucks at the only Buffalo store at which the union had lost, a rare remedy only used when unlawful actions make a fair election impossible for the foreseeable future.

In addition to unlawful dismissals and other illegal actions in Buffalo, Starbucks management has fired workers in Phoenix, Arizona; Memphis, Tennessee; Kansas City, Missouri; Raleigh, North Carolina, and at multiple other locations.

How Did Starbucks Workers Pull Off Greenville Victory?

Given the city’s anti-union reputation, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Greenville victory is that pro-union workers won there pretty much the same way they’ve won at almost every other Starbucks store across the country.

Intrepid worker-organizers lead the Starbucks union campaign:

After resisting the company’s anti-union onslaught, Starbucks Workers United won two NLRB elections in Buffalo in December 2021. In the six months following those two historic wins in Buffalo, the union campaign has constructed a replicable model based around the dynamism of its intrepid, self-assured worker-organizers at stores all across the country.

New activists who reach out to the campaign by email, Twitter or through the Facebook page have been trained via Zoom meetings on how to organize their own stores. They then go on to play leading roles in organizing other stores in their own region. In regions such as the Boston, Massachusetts, area, worker-organizers have built up an incredible campaign infrastructure. The organization of the Greenville store — the first store in South Carolina to go union — followed a now-familiar pattern for the union campaign.

Shift supervisors as lead organizers:

The lead organizer at Greenville, Hayden Mullen, first reached out to the union campaign via email and was connected with one of the experienced Buffalo-based organizers. Mullen had no previous involvement with unions; he had worked as a barista at another Starbucks outside Spartanburg, South Carolina, before transferring to the Greenville store to become a shift supervisor.

Shift supervisors have no managerial authority and thus are eligible to vote in NLRB elections. Most baristas trust their shift supervisors — often long-serving employees — more than store or district managers. Shift supervisors have been organizers at several stores, which has assisted the organizing. Some stores have had vocal anti-union shift managers, which can undermine organizing. However, at the first store to unionize in the South — in Knoxville — all the shift managers opposed the union, but it still won because the store had an unusually determined and charismatic lead organizer.

Inspired by Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Mullen had worked at American Eagle, Dunkin’ Donuts, Krispy Kreme, and other low-wage service jobs. He was inspired and politicized by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns — as have other Starbucks activists — and strongly supported workplace organizing.

Before the Greenville union campaign became public last fall, Mullen informed his store manager at his former store in Spartanburg — who was sympathetic — that Starbucks would benefit from a union. Mullen’s Greenville store manager, in contrast, was curious about how unionization would change her job — which Mullen explained to her satisfaction. The Greenville store manager, however, later participated actively in the anti-union campaign, which Mullen attributes to pressure from Starbucks corporate representatives.

Starbucks has consistently worried that store managers are insufficiently dedicated to the anti-union campaign, and both CEO Howard Schultz and Executive Vice President Rossann Williams have implored them to get more involved. Some managers viewed as being too sympathetic to the union campaign have been reassigned or even fired from their stores.

From Zoom to petitioning for an election:

Mullen first had a Zoom meeting — followed by other contacts by Zoom, email and text — with a Buffalo-based Starbucks Workers United activist, and was given a step-by-step guide to the unionization process: how to print NLRB authorization cards; how to approach coworkers about signing cards; how to mail the cards and petition the NLRB for an election; and how to draft the “Dear Howard” letter requesting recognition.

The entire process from Mullen’s first Zoom meeting to mailing off the store’s authorization cards — signed by 75 percent of the store’s workers — took little more than one week at Greenville.

Anti-union reputation not an obstacle:

Mullen said that Greenville’s anti-union reputation did not impede organizing. Some workers had negative views on unions, primarily because they had worked at anti-union corporations such as Target where management had expressed anti-union views. Others wanted reassurance that it was legal to form unions in South Carolina.

However, when Mullen explained that this campaign was about getting respect and improving daily conditions, and that workers would negotiate their own collective agreement, most signed cards and subsequently voted for the union.

Throughout the campaign, Mullen kept secret the identities of union supporters so as not to expose them to management retaliation. Starbucks has allegedly fired more than 20 union activists, while others have allegedly been disciplined for minor infractions of rules — which would not have been enforced prior to the union campaign — or have had their hours reduced drastically.

Starbucks’s anti-union campaign:

The Greenville store got its vote scheduled within a month of having petitioned for an election. In most cases, Starbucks’s Littler Mendelson legal team has done everything possible to delay elections and vote counts.

When the store’s organizing committee is small — as measured by the number of signatures on the “Dear Howard” letter — Starbucks has generally facilitated faster elections, believing that it can win these ones. However, even in most of these cases, as in Greenville, management has significantly underestimated support for the union.

One-on-one anti-union meetings:

Prior to the election, Greenville management did not hold group captive-audience meetings — which, at other stores, have often proved ineffective or even counterproductive for management — and instead focused on one-on-one anti-union meetings with store “partners.”

These meetings were conducted by a combination of the store manager, district manager and a regional manager. In the meetings, the managers, asserted that the things workers most cared about, such as the ability to transfer from store to store, could be lost under a collective bargaining agreement.

Benefit threat:

Management also repeated the threat — first stated by CEO Schultz in early May, then repeated by Starbucks headquarters and subsequently amplified by district and store managers around the country — that Starbucks cannot extend upcoming benefit increases to stores already engaged in bargaining and those who have voted to unionize.

In reality, organizing and bargaining committees have already informed the company that they will not object and have called on it to extend any benefit increases to all partners; thus, the only reason that management has repeated this (almost certainly unlawful) threat is to disrupt the momentum of the campaign. The union has filed a complaint with the NLRB on this issue.

Starbucks’s scaremongering didn’t work:

After management’s one-on-one meetings, the lead union organizer talked with workers about Starbucks’s threat to eliminate benefits for unionized stores, including the ability to transfer stores, and other scare-mongering talking points. Most were satisfied with his reassurances, Mullen said.

Mullen believes the one-on-one meetings discouraged some of the store’s pro-union workers from voting. But only one worker voted “no,” and that worker told Mullen that he mailed his ballot early and that, if he had spoken to Mullen prior to sending it, he would likely have supported the union. Thus, despite the extraordinary result in Greenville — an eight-to-one win for Starbucks Workers United — Mullen was disappointed that the margin of victory wasn’t bigger because some pro-union workers decided not to vote.

Union campaign spreads beyond Greenville:

Three other Starbucks stores in South Carolina — in Columbia, Anderson and Sumter — have petitioned for NLRB elections. Last week, workers at the Columbia store participated in a three-day strike to protest Starbucks’s sacking of the store’s manager. Other than strikes by McDonald’s workers who were part of the Fight for $15, a three-day strike over unfair labor practices at a non-union employer is a rare event in South Carolina.

Other Starbucks stores will likely petition for NLRB elections soon. Mullen has already reached out to the other Greenville stores. If the campaign continues to spread and win, Starbucks Workers United might challenge Greenville’s reputation as the most anti-union city in the country.

Starbucks Union Is Reaching Areas Other Union Campaigns Couldn’t

Over the past several months, Starbucks Workers United has won victories — often by overwhelming margins — in several locations in which unions are unaccustomed to winning. By mid-May, stores in almost every state in the South had petitioned for NLRB elections, and activists believe the campaign would have spread even more widely if not for the terminations of the “Memphis Seven” early in the campaign. Now it is spreading in South Carolina.

In 2016, then-Governor Haley’s labor director Templeton — a former Ogletree Deakins lawyer who was “the only woman involved in three successful defeats of the historic United Auto Workers drive on Nissan in Smyrna, Tennessee in the late 1990s” — warned a Greenville business audience about a new poll showing growing support for unions among the state’s newer residents: “It’s a shocking result, especially for those of us who were pretty sure we were anti-union…. [South Carolina has a] new demographic that we need to be aware of. And it’s only going to continue to become more of a majority.”

Templeton was fretting over a poll, but Starbucks Workers United has won an election in the nation’s most anti-union city. The newly unionized Greenville workers are the demographic that terrifies anti-union ideologues like Templeton, and more workers will likely follow their courageous example.

The union campaign has developed a grassroots dynamism that appears replicable, thus enabling it to spread even to cities and regions with ferocious anti-union reputations. Union revitalization in the U.S. will almost certainly require many more such campaigns, which are based to a significant degree on worker self-organization.

The campaign’s remarkable victory in the U.S.’s most anti-union city might just be a harbinger of things to come. If Starbucks Workers United can win in Greenville, it just might be able to win anywhere.

John Logan is professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University. He has published widely on the topic of employer opposition to unionization.

Seattle considers measures to address gig worker pay, rights

yesterday

SEATTLE (AP) — The Seattle City Council will vote Tuesday on the first in a series of policies that would ask app-based companies like food delivery services to improve wages, transparency and other working conditions for gig workers.

The Seattle Times reports if the bills pass they would require companies to pay per-minute and per-mile rates to delivery drivers on apps like DoorDash, UberEats and Grubhub.

The rates would begin when drivers accept an order, in an effort to help the drivers — who are contract workers, not employees — earn the city’s $17.27 minimum wage and receive the standard mileage reimbursement set by the Internal Revenue Service.

In a statement, DoorDash criticized the council’s plans, calling for an impact study to be completed before a vote is taken. The company said the proposals would lead to higher costs for customers and reduced earnings for workers.

City Councilperson Lisa Herbold says the companies should find a sustainable business model that allows workers to make a fair wage.

“This is an expensive city to live and work in and if paying employee subminimum wage is the only way that businesses can sustain their model, then there should be some consideration about whether or not their business model really works,” Herbold said, adding DoorDash reported nearly $5 billion in revenue in 2021, up 69% over 2020.

“I don’t think that paying minimum compensation is a threat to their business model.”

Future legislation being considered by the City Council would aim to regulate a series of transparency and equity issues, including right to access restrooms, discrimination protections and protections from unfair deactivation from apps that can result in wage loss.

PROTECTING PETROLEUM

The 900 US Troops in Syria Should Not Be There

Let's get the 900 U.S. troops out of Syria and away from any war with Russia or Iran.

Soldiers stand guard next to a US Bradley Fighting Vehicle (BFV) during a patrol in the countryside of the Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli in Syria's northeastern Hasakeh province, on April 20, 2022. (Photo: Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images)

JUAN COLE

May 30, 2022

 by Informed Comment

Memorial Day or Decoration Day (referring to the decoration of the graves of soldiers killed in combat) began after the Civil War and has been commemorated since 1868. It is no wonder that the mourning began then. Historian J. David Hacker has estimated that 750,000 troops died in the war, the biggest total for any war in which the US was involved. Nearly 300,000 died in WWII.

Whatever the U.S. troops are accomplishing in eastern Syria is not worth it, especially since their mission seems poorly or illegally defined since the days of Trump.

Today instead of writing about the war dead, I’d like to consider the plight of the 900 U.S. troops in Syria. They should not be there, and their presence is a mixed bag when it comes to U.S. national security, especially in view of the new Cold War between Russia and the United States and their proxy war in Ukraine. As with eastern Ukraine, Syria is crawling with Russian troops and air force planes.

Whatever the US troops are accomplishing in eastern Syria is not worth it, especially since their mission seems poorly or illegally defined since the days of Trump. This is a powder keg, given the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. President Biden said that he did not want US troops in Ukraine because if they came into conflict with Russian troops, that would be WWIII. Well, the same consideration should lead him to get out of Syria, which is a Russian sphere of influence now.

After what happened in Afghanistan when the US left, Biden may be reluctant to pull US forces out of Syria. But the two situations are not similar. Russia and Iran have already shown that they will go to great lengths to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. There were no outside powers willing and able to prop up Ghani in Afghanistan. Besides, the real danger is in staying in Syria without a clear mission, cheek by jowl with Russia and Iran, not in leaving it.

The basis on which the Obama administration sent troops into eastern Syria was self-defense. The ISIL terrorist organization had formed a mini-state in eastern Syria and northern Iraq and had hit NATO allies like France as well as using the internet to encourage stochastic or random terrorism against the United States.

The Syrian Kurdish militia, the Peoples Protection Units or YPG, provided the infantry to defeat ISIL and take its capital, Raqqa. The YPG captured Raqqa on October 17, 2017, receiving US air support, and having some US troops embedded among them.

So there is no longer any self-defense justification for US troops to be in Syria. In the meantime, the government of Bashar al-Assad, backed by the Russian Aerospace Forces and Shiite militias from Lebanon and Iraq, along with a small contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, defeated most of the rebel forces that had challenged the regime, most of the Sunni Arabs of a fundamentalist bent. They are now holed up in the northern, rural Idlib Province, along with some 3 million residents and internally displaced persons.

The Syrian government, which is gradually regaining its sovereignty and recognition, has said that it wants the US troops out. Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal al-Miqdad says the US troop presence is “illegal,” and has called on the Syrian Kurds to stop cooperating with Washington, saying that the US will have to leave sooner or later.

In mid-October of 2019, Trump abruptly ordered US troops out of Syria and gave Turkey’s president Tayyip Erdogan a green light to invade the regions of the Syrian Kurds, who had been US allies against ISIL. Most US troops were pulled out, to the dismay and fury of their erstwhile Kurdish allies, who felt abandoned and betrayed. Their tanks headed for Iraqi, festooned with rotten eggplants and tomatoes cast at them by angry Kurdish villagers, who soon thereafter had to run away from Erdogan’s invading forces.

Someone in the White House, however, manipulated Trump into keeping a few hundred US troops in southeastern Syria at Deir al-Zor around some of Syria’s oil fields, the oil from which was then going to the Kurds and not to the Damascus government. The staffers told Trump, who always had a thing about stealing other people’s oil, that he should keep those US troops there to siphon off Syrian oil, and Trump was persuaded. In the end a scheme for an American company to exploit Syria’s oil fell through, which is just as well, since that would have been a war crime.

Whatever you think of the Obama administration’s self-defense argument, it at least had some merit and ISIL was a dangerous statelet that roiled the world for a few years.

The current charge of the 900 remaining US troops seems awfully vague, and one fears they might actually be there to make sure the petroleum in Deir al-Zor goes to the Kurds rather than to the Damascus government. This mission is problematic in international law and weird because the US has thrown the Syrian Kurds anyway to the Turkish wolves.

The US troops at the Green Village Base near the al-Omar oil field, one of Syria’s largest, have recently come under rocket fire from Shiite militias, as Jared Szuba explains at Al-Monitor. These ongoing attacks will not stop.

Erdogan is making noises about another invasion of Syria, to establish a 20-mile deep security zone between the YPG Kurds and Turkey’s border, inside northern Syria. The Biden administration has warned Erdogan not to do it, but it is hard to see how Washington could stop it. Since the US is facilitating the transfer to the Syrian Kurds of the oil of the al-Omar field, Ankara sees them as an enemy, even though the US and Turkey are supposedly NATO allies. Erdogan is using his position in NATO to block the accession of Sweden and Finland until they agree to declare the YPG a terrorist organization. The US, which has long been allied with the YPG, has declined to so designate them, of course. The US does view the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), based in southeastern Turkey and in Qandil in Iraq, as a terrorist organization, but sees the YPG as a separate group rather than as a branch of the PKK.

There is more bad news. Alarmed at Erdogan’s invasion plans, Russia, for which Syria is a major military theater of operations and client state, sent s surveillance helicopters and fighter jets to Qamishli airport in eastern Syria to observe the Turkish border. US troops are deployed near Qamishli, according to the pan-Arab daily al-Sharq al-Awsat (The Middle East).

It is nervous-making to have 900 US troops in the midst of the ongoing Syrian maelstrom, with continual possibilities for war to break out if they get caught in the crossfire in some dispute among the various players in Syria, with the behemoth being Vladimir Putin’s Russian army and air force.

© 2021 Juan Cole


JUAN COLE teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His newest book, "Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires" was published in 2020. He is also the author of "The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East" (2015) and "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East" (2008). He has appeared widely on television, radio, and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles.

BUFFALO SHOOTING UNDERSCORES THE HUMAN COST OF HATRED

BLACK ENTERPRISE

 Editors

May 30, 2022

(Image: Courtesy of Mike Groll/Office of Gov. Kathy Hochul)

The fatal mass shooting inside a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store on May 14 has shaken the faith of national political leaders by echoing a tragic and familiar refrain across the country—another mass shooting that appears motivated by race and hate.

Payton Gendron, 18, traveled 200 miles from his home in Conklin, N.Y., to Buffalo, where he strapped on body armor, walked into the Tops Friendly Market and shot 13 people in the store. He streamed the attack online before the police subdued him. Eleven people shot were Black, while two were white—10 of the victims died.

Federal authorities found a racist 180-page document written by Gendron, who said the assault was intended to terrorize all non-white, non-Christian people to persuade them to leave the United States.

A Washington Post analysis of more than 600 messages found that Gendron had planned to target the Tops grocery store since February, because its customer base is mainly Black.

“The American experiment in democracy is in danger like it hasn’t been in my lifetime,” said President Joe Biden in a Buffalo speech May 17.

“It’s in danger this hour. Hate and fear are being given too much oxygen by those who pretend to love America but who don’t understand America.”

Biden went on to say, “In America, evil will not win, I promise you. Hate will not prevail. White supremacy will not have the last word.”
Part of the crowd that gathered May 17 at the Delavan Grider Community Center in Buffalo to grieve with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and President Joe Biden over the grocery-store shooting in that city. (Mike Groll/Office of Gov. Kathy Hochul)

Law-enforcement officials said that New York State police troopers were called to Gendron’s high school last June for a report that the then 17-year-old had made threatening statements.

From President Biden to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, political officials have offered many words in the wake of a shooting that has stoked fear and worry across the country, while law enforcement searches for answers.

The Sunday morning after the incident, Hochul spoke at True Bethel Baptist Church in Buffalo, where she said: “Our hearts are broken, and I’m going to say one thing: Lord, forgive the anger in my heart right now.”

“Forgive me, Lord. I know it doesn’t belong there, Lord,” Hochul said.

“I was raised to love and respect and care. Well, to hear these stories and the pain that’s out there in a community that I love so well—I’m angry.”

The governor went on to quote Psalm 34: “The Lord is near the broken-hearted and saves the crushed of spirit. Well, Lord, I know you’re here because we are so broken-hearted, and we are crushed in spirit at this moment. But this is temporary because with your love, Lord, we will rise up, and our crushed spirits will rise again.”

Governor Hochul also took practical steps. On May 20, she issued two executive orders.

The first executive order is designed to fight the surge in domestic terrorism and violent extremism frequently inspired by social media platforms and internet forums. The executive order calls on the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services to establish a new unit, dedicated solely to the prevention of domestic terrorism, within the Division’s Office of Counterterrorism.

The second calls on New York State Police to establish a dedicated unit within the New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC) to track domestic violent extremism through social media. The second executive order will require state police to file for an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) under New York State’s Red Flag Law whenever they have probable cause to believe an individual is a threat to themselves or others.

In addition, Hochul is proposing legislation to close “other gun” loopholes by revising and widening the definition of a firearm to get dangerous guns off the street.

While she offered political remedies, spiritual leaders also made pleas to end violence.

Bishop Vashti McKenzie, the interim president and general secretary of the National Council of Churches, said in a statement: “Our communities have not healed from the onslaught of violence from past white supremacist attacks and now the scabs have been ripped off to bleed again.”

McKenzie stood with President Obama and other bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church after the young white supremacist Dylann Roof walked into Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 and opened fire, killing nine people during a midweek Bible study.

“This racial violence has to stop,” McKenzie said.

“We must all increase our efforts to bring racism to an end. That will not happen by only making ceremonial or performative gestures that don’t get to the root causes of the problems. We have to do the deeper work. This is especially true for Christians.”

The Revered Eric Manning, pastor of Mother Emanuel AME, said in a statement that he and members of his congregation could empathize with the suffering from the May 14 shooting in Buffalo.

“We can relate to your hurt, pain and anger,” Pastor Manning said.

“The congregation of Mother Emanuel was in the same place almost seven years ago.”

A memorial to the victims of another grocery store mass shooting, this one in Boulder, Colorado, in March 2021. (gotojbb/Flickr)

On May 17, New York City Mayor Eric Adams joined faith leaders who came to a Harlem vigil for the 10 victims of the racially fueled mass shooting.

During the vigil at Bethel Gospel Assembly Church, Adams placed one of the 10 pink roses on a table. But he also referred to a shooting closer to home—race and hate are not the only reasons why people of color are being killed.

“You are no less demonic,” said Adams to the drive-by shooter who killed an 11-year-old girl in the Bronx. Adams had just visited her parents, and he drew parallels between the Buffalo shooting and New York City gun violence.

Many communities around the country are hosting vigils for racial healing after the Buffalo shooting. In Rockville, Maryland, people from Jewish, Asian, Hispanic and other groups targeted by white supremacists were to gather for a vigil at the Rockville Seventh-day Adventist Church.

“As a family of faith, we pray for healing for all who have been affected,” the Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America said in a statement on May 19.

“But as much as our prayers go up and our hearts go out to those who have been devastated by this horrific event, we cannot stop there.”

“We denounce this mindless and premeditated act of hatred and violence. We call on all people of goodwill to use their voices and platforms to denounce hatred and racism in all of its forms. May we use this evil intention as a catalyst to propel us to action and demonstrate that love is stronger than hatred.”
About the author

Senior contributor Hamil Harris is an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and has been a lecturer at Morgan State University. Harris is minister at the Glenarden Church of Christ and a police chaplain. He was a longtime reporter for The Washington Post.