Africa's first post-pandemic Comic-Con festival draws thousands

LOOKS KINDA WHITE

Zama LUTHULI
Sat, 24 September 2022 


In a makeshift changing room swathed with black fabric, South African Luke Andalis transforms into the burly Aratak, preparing to perform at Comic-Con Africa, the continent's largest pop culture, fantasy and gaming festival.

"There's so much fur in my mouth," the 32-year-old cosplayer Andalis chuckles to friends as he dons a stiff green pleather parka over his head and shoulders.

This year he chose to cosplay Aratak, the middle-aged chieftain of the Banuk tribe in the popular video game Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wild.


After a two-year Covid hiatus, Comic-Con Africa's return has been widely anticipated by cosplayers and fans.

Clad in superhero capes, colourful masks, sci-fi costumes and eccentric wigs, thousands on Saturday flocked to a vast expo centre near the FNB Stadium, which hosted the FIFA 2010 World Cup final.


Loud music welcomed the festival-goers to Stranger Things escape rooms, pop-up tattoo parlours and comic haven.

This year's festivities are star-studded, hosting fan favourites including award-winning Stranger Things and Twilight actor, Jamie Campbell Bower among others.

Africa's third edition of the comic convention is being staged at the national recreation centre, south of the economic hub Johannesburg. The festival first hit African soil in 2018.
- 'Very proud moment' -

Andalis has been cosplaying for six years but says his 12 years as a film costume designer and maker made for a natural transition.

During the pandemic when performances slammed to a halt, the Cape Town-raised artist shared tips on costume play and showing off his "builds", a term used to describe a finished costume, racking up a large Instagram following.


Shortly before stepping on stage, Andalis's personality shifts slightly as he starts to get into character.

He complains about the stiffness of the costume, which perfectly imitates Aratak’s garb, a traditional attire used to protect the character from the frigid climate of his tribe's territory.

"It is a very proud moment. I've been working on this costume for eight months," he says.

Complete with stocky faux fur tussles that swing as he turns and a regal head garment atop a fake triangle shaped beard and thick sideburns, Andalis's friend helps him put on the last component of the ensemble -- armoured quill braces.

As he walks from the dimly-lit dresser, a crowd swarms around him marvelling at the final product.

The four-day pop culture festival has won praise for opening doors for cosplayers in a country where the industry is not yet as big as in more developed nations.

NO PICTURE A SHAME

It is the first time at Comic-Con for Johannesburg-based Thifhuriwi Nephawe.

She is dressed as princess Neytiri of the alien Na'vi race, in the American science fiction film series Avatar.

"The character Neytiri is for me an African woman who's very powerful and fighting for her village, for her tribe," she tells AFP.

"People from the outside are coming to try and take everything from them, so she's trying to fight against that, that's what I resonate with, just the power."

zam-sn/bp

Detained Russian protesters face conscription or jail

Vu(m) AFP|Update: 24.09.2022 00:05

Monitoring groups said Russians at 15 different police stations were handed military summons after joining anti-mobilisation protests / © AFP

Mikhail Suetin expected to be detained when he protested Russian mobilisation, but he never imagined he would be ordered to enlist in the very army he was denouncing.

After President Vladimir Putin appeared on state television on Wednesday to announce the country's first mobilisation since World War II, protests erupted in Russia.

"I was ready for the usual: to be arrested, taken to the police station, brought to court," 29-year-old Suetin, who regularly joins opposition protests in Moscow, told AFP.


"But to be told 'tomorrow you will go to war'... that was a surprise," he said in a telephone interview.

The Independent monitoring group, OVD-Info, reported that men detained in the protests were handed draft papers while in custody in at least 15 Moscow police departments.

Answering questions from reporters the following morning, Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, defended the procedure, saying "it isn't against the law".

One day before mobilisation was announced, the Russian parliament approved a bill to toughen punishment for those refusing military summons or who desert.

The bill, yet to be signed into law, will impose prison sentences of five to 15 years.

- 'Big trouble' -

At the police station, Suetin said he was taken to a room alone and pressured to sign papers summoning him to the military mobilisation office the following day.

"Either you sign this and go to war tomorrow, or you'll sit in prison for 10 years," he quotes police officers as threatening.

One day before mobilisation was announced, the Russian parliament toughened laws against refusing military summons or desertion / © AFP/File

Suetin refused, on the advice of his lawyer, and was released at around 5:00 am the following morning.

He was told Russia's investigative committee, which probes serious crimes, would be notified and that he was in "big trouble".

More than 1,300 people were arrested during protests on Wednesday, a monitoring group reported. For those who did answer the call-up, the future is no brighter.

Andrei, who turned 18 last week, was called up -- in papers seen by AFP -- after being detained during the anti-mobilisation protests in Moscow.

The student described feeling "numb" after sitting for hours in a police station where officers "threatened" people who wouldn't sign.

"It was clear I couldn't run away... I looked around and decided not to resist... Unfortunately, I signed the paper," Andrei told AFP by telephone, referring to documents that acknowledge he intends to turn up at his recruitment office.

- 'Worried' -

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu had promised on Wednesday that students would not be called up.

This means that Andrei, who recently began university, should not have been caught up in the recruitment drive.

"As we say, Russia is a country of endless possibilities," he joked bitterly.

Andrei decided not attend the appointment at the enlistment office on Thursday.

He says he is still looking for a lawyer and doesn't know what he'll do next.

"I haven't told my parents yet," Andrei told AFP.

They would "be worried," he added.

"I'll probably tell them when I have a better understanding of what's going to happen to me."

'The only good thing is that they won't grab me off the street' How Russia's mobilization affects women and transgender people

September 23, 2022
Source: Feminist Anti-War Resistance

MEDUZA

Buses wait for new conscripts outside of the Moscow Military Commissariat
Moskva News Agency

On September 21, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would officially begin conscripting people to fight in the country’s war against Ukraine. Contrary to what the bulk of media coverage has suggested, cisgender men aren’t the only people at risk of being sent to war. Some cisgender women and transgender people are at risk of being drafted, too — potentially a lot of them, given that the call-up could apply to as many as 1.2 million Russians. The Feminist Anti-War Resistance and the nonprofit Center-T recently spoke to legal experts about what cis women and trans people should know about the mobilization. Meduza summarizes their advice.

According to Tamilla Imanova, a lawyer from the Memorial Human Rights Center who recently spoke to the Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAS), the women most likely to be called up for Russia’s mobilization are those who have degrees in certain fields as determined by Russian law: medicine, communications, computer engineering, hydrology and meteorology, printing, and cartography.

“All women are assigned to the third category of Russia’s reserve forces,” said Imanova. “Women with the rank of officer remain in the reserve until 50 years old, while all others are taken off at 45 years old. Unfortunately, the fact that women are in the third [of three] categories doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily be the last to be drafted.”

Instead, she said, who gets drafted will depend on which skills are in demand at the front. And this has already begun to play out: in just the last three days, there have been numerous reports in the Russian media of people with medical degrees receiving draft orders “en masse,” Imanova said.

EVADING THE DRAFT

‘Everyone knew it was coming’ A dispath from Russia's Republic of Buryatia, where mobilization is already underway

2 days ago

Certain women in these categories, however, will be spared from mobilization — at least temporarily. According to Imanova, women in the following categories are eligible for deferment:Women who have at least one child younger than 16 years old, as well as women who are at least 22 weeks pregnant;

Women in reserved occupations as spelled out by the Russian Government (though the only way to find out whether you’re in this category is to asked your employer; the official documents outlining which occupations are reserved are classified)
Women declared temporarily unfit for service due to health issues (for up to six months)
Women responsible for providing constant care to family members or to people with certain disabilities

Women whose mothers have four or more children under the age of 8 and who care for the children in place of their father
Women who work in the defense sector (only for the duration of their employment)

‘Some want to flee, but others can’t — because of their husbands and children’

One woman who works as a doctor spoke to the FAS about how her work has changed since mobilization was announced — and about her fear that she’ll be drafted. As a medical professional, she said, she’s required to report to her local military commissariat if summoned. She’s also not allowed to change her place of residence during mobilization without the military commissariat’s permission.

But because the Russian authorities are trying to have it both ways, maintaining that this mobilization is only “partial,” the doctor has had difficulty keeping up with the specifics, she told the FAS.

“I get my information about the ‘partial mobilization’ and its various odd rules from Telegram channels,” she said. “Every day, it's something new. We don’t get any clear information.”


The woman said a number of employees at her workplace were granted exemptions from the draft, but she wasn’t one of them — and it appears to be too late to get one.

“On the day the 'partial' mobilization was announced, 2–3 hours after the announcement, they received forms granting them exemptions for one year [...] and the forms were stamped by the military commissar,” she said. “In other words, their exemptions had been granted in advance; evidently, the list of people to be made exempt from the draft had been submitted long before the announcement.”

MOBILIZATION

‘A guarantee of the country’s destruction’ Russian political scientists on Putin’s mobilization announcement

3 days ago

In addition, she told the FAS, the higher-ups at her workplace don’t seem to be concerned about the mobilization at all. “It wasn’t until [September 23] that the head of my department learned that some people hadn’t been granted exemptions,” she wrote, “so 🤡.”

So far, said the woman, nobody at her hospital has received a summons — though it’s only been three days. “There’s one guy who [previously] served in the army,” she said, “and he’s been pale as a ghost.”

She told the FAS that she felt “anxious and panicky,” and that every time she’s found herself idle since mobilization was announced, she’s started shaking. “The other women are in shock, too; some of them are thinking about fleeing the country, while others can’t, because of their husbands and children. [...] The only good thing is that because I’m a woman, I don’t have ‘medic’ written on my forehead, so at least they won’t grab me off of the street.”

A lawyer’s advice for trans people

Despite the fact that Vladimir Putin’s mobilization order doesn’t mention trans people directly, many of them could still be subject to conscription. Center-T, an advocacy group for trans people in Russia, asked Alexander, a lawyer, what trans people seeking not to be drafted need to know.

According to Alexander, if a transfeminine person has a female gender marker in her passport and doesn’t have a degree in a "military occupational" field but was once included in the draft registry, she’s legally supposed to have notified her local military commissariat of her passport change when it was completed. Failing to inform the commissariate is punishable by a fine. Nonetheless, Alexander recommends that anybody in that situation keep quiet for now — unless they receive a summons, in which case he offered a template for requesting to be removed from the draft registry.

Transmasculine people who have male gender markers in their passports are probably not on the military authorities’ radar unless they’ve gone to their local commissariat and requested to be added to the draft registry, Alexander said. There is a chance, however, that somebody could be spotted by a law enforcement official and reported to his local military commissariat, which might require him to register for the draft. In that case, he should insist that he’s unfit for military service when he appears before the medical evaluation board, which every conscripted soldier is required to do before being sent to a combat zone.

In the past, however, the Russian Defense Ministry has done everything in its power to “disown” trans people, including by categorizing them as “unfit for military service” when there’s no legitimate reason to, according to Alexander. Even if a transmasculine person is deemed to be fit for military service after an initial medical evaluation, the lawyer said, he’s legally allowed to submit a written statement demanding an additional one — and that's likely his best option.

REST IN POWER 

Pharoah Sanders, Saxophonist Who Pushed Jazz Toward the Spiritual, Dead at 81

Daniel Kreps

Sat, September 24, 2022 

Pharaoh Sanders In Holland - Credit: Redferns

Pharoah Sanders, the saxophonist who helped John Coltrane explore the avant-garde and pushed jazz itself toward the spiritual, has died at the age of 81.

Record label Luaka Bop, which released Sanders and Floating Points’ acclaimed collaboration Promises in 2021, announced the jazz legend’s death Saturday; no cause of death was provided.

“We are devastated to share that Pharoah Sanders has passed away,” the label wrote on Instagram. “He died peacefully surrounded by loving family and friends in Los Angeles earlier this morning. Always and forever the most beautiful human being, may he rest in peace.”

The Little Rock, Arkansas-born Farrell Sanders first came up in the Bay Area jazz scene before moving to New York City, where he initially struggled.

“Unable to make a living with his music, Sanders took to pawning his horn, working non-musical jobs, and sometimes sleeping on the subway,” the saxophonist’s website said. However, Sanders soon found work alongside fellow innovators like Sun Ra (who told him to adopt the name “Pharoah” instead of Farrell), Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, who after his landmark A Love Supreme was beginning to experiment with free jazz.

Sanders’ joined Coltrane’s group on tenor saxophone in 1965, a year that saw Coltrane record three of his avant-garde masterworks: Ascension, Meditations and Om. Following Coltrane’s death in 1967, Sanders briefly performed alongside his widow Alice Coltrane (including her classic Journey in Satchidananda) before embarking on his own path as leader.

In 1969, Sanders released what is considered his most revered work, Karma, which features his side-and-a-half-long opus “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” a recording that pushed spiritual jazz further skyward and one of the most influential tracks of its era.

The saxophonist continued his steady output over the Seventies and Eighties, both as leader and sideman for fellow jazz greats like McCoy Tyner, Sonny Sharrock, Idris Muhammad, Leon Thomas and many more.

While the saxophonist remained a fixture on the live jazz circuit, in 2021 Sanders returned from a nearly two-decade studio hiatus to record alongside electronic music producer Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra. The resulting work, Promises, has been hailed as one of the best jazz albums of the past decade.

“Consisting of a single, 46-minute work, the album is both startlingly minimal and arrestingly gorgeous,” Rolling Stone wrote of the LP.

“Only sparingly, such as one during brief, stunning episode about 35 minutes in, does Sanders break into the harsh sax ululation that he’s famous for, but overall, the piece feels like a loving sonic gift to a master from a disciple, and a worthy successor to Sanders’ foundational Sixties and Seventies epics.”

Floating Points paid tribute to Sanders Saturday following news of his death, “My beautiful friend passed away this morning. I am so lucky to have known this man, and we are all blessed to have his art stay with us forever. Thank you Pharoah.”

 

 “An anarchist is someone who doesn't need a cop to make him behave.”

― Ammon Hennacy

 

 

 

Wildland Firefighters Struggle To Keep Up With Raging Wildfires

JUST THIS YEAR BIDEN INCREASED THEIR WAGES TO $15HR. THEY GET NO OT PAY

Sep 23, 2022
NBC News
Progress is being made on California’s largest wildfire of the year as crews battle the flames on the frontlines, leaving some to deal with a different kind of burnout. NBC News’ Julie Tsirkin has the story of one 15-year wildland smokejumper veteran who explains why many in the profession are facing labor strains as catastrophic fires become more prevalent.

 

AND $15HR IS TOO MUCH FOR SOME FOLKS 

California Is Dependent on Prison Labor for Fighting Fires. This Must End.

A prison firefighter from Oak Glen Conservation Camp looks out of a gated window as he is transported to a work assignment under the authority of CAL FIRE on September 28, 2017, near Yucaipa, California.

DAVID MCNEW / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Abby Cunniff,

Truthout

September 23, 2022

PART OF THE SERIES
The Road to Abolition

On September 7, 2022, after many attempted delays from the City of Susanville, California, a Lassen County judge ruled in favor of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to close one of Susanville’s two prisons. The court case and public debate over the prison closure has been almost entirely based on the anticipated loss of 1,000 jobs in the prison, but the closure of this facility marks an enormous shift in the use of prison labor for public work. The California Correctional Center in Susanville is set to be closed by June 2023. It is one of two remaining training hubs for the California Conservation Camp Program, which, before 2019, made up 192 of 208 hand crews working for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (also known as CAL FIRE).

Although popular references to prison labor today often focus on the production of manufactured goods for private companies, public work programs make up significantly more of the total work assignments in prison. In fact, public work assignments are a larger percentage of prison jobs than government and private manufacturing combined.

Public work is a catchall category that refers to many types of manual labor for state governments including doing road work, cleaning up landfills and hazardous spills, moving debris and clearing roads after a hurricane, filling sandbags to mitigate flooding, carrying out forestry work in state-owned forests and firefighting.

Many Western states — like Nevada, Washington, Arizona and Oregon — have “conservation camp” programs where a few hundred incarcerated people are put to work on behalf of natural resource departments on vegetation management, hazardous fuel reduction projects and wildland fire suppression. California’s conservation camp program is the largest of these by far, employing somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 incarcerated people across the state in an average year to carry out millions of hours of work for CAL FIRE.

A groundbreaking new report on incarcerated workers by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law Center aggregated all types of prison jobs in state and federal facilities. They broke down the types of prison jobs into four main sectors: maintenance of prison facilities (80 percent), production of goods and services for government agencies (6.5 percent), public work (8 percent) and work for private industries (>1 percent). The report estimates that 63,000 of all incarcerated workers are doing public work (8 percent of prison jobs).

Incarcerated firefighters face much higher rates of injury than professional firefighters, and are largely unable to negotiate the conditions of their work. A TIME investigative report found that incarcerated firefighters were four times more likely to be injured from “object-induced injuries, such as cuts, bruises, dislocations and fractures” than professional firefighters working on the same fire.

These types of programs use incarcerated workers to carry out year-round wildfire management labor, largely because they comprise an incredibly cheap labor pool for the state governments dealing with increasingly devastating fire seasons. However, California’s Conservation Camp Program, also known as “fire camp,” has been using this labor force for close to a century, and Susanville’s embattled prison has been at the heart of this program.If the labor of prisoners was pulled out of the town, not only would Susanville have less revenue from the employment the prison offered, but would also have to pay workers to do what incarcerated hand crews had been carrying out for free.

Susanville’s California Correctional Center is closing for two reasons. Firstly, the prison would require half a billion dollars in repairs to be up to code, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, making it a prime target for closure. Secondly, there are fewer “low-level offenders” eligible for fire camp, so the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has reduced the size of the conservation camp program and is routing all remaining training for the program through the Jamestown Sierra Conservation Center.

The smaller number of Level 1 (or “low level”) incarcerated people is a direct result of the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling that California must release people from state prisons in order to reduce overcrowding. In tandem with other sentencing reforms and California’s Public Safety Realignment Initiative, federal enforcement of the 2011 ruling has reduced the number of people convicted of so-called nonviolent, nonsexual, nonserious crimes, and these are the people who have historically made up 92 percent of California’s state hand crews.

This year, CAL FIRE reported that there are only 37 hand crews made up of incarcerated people, and only about 75 total hand crews, which is less than 25 percent of the standard 208 hand crews that CAL FIRE had relied upon. To restore the forestry and firefighting capacity of CAL FIRE, it must train and recruit people with livable wages and workplace protections.

California’s Incarcerated Public Workers

The low or unpaid workforce needed for wildfire management in California has long been disciplined by the police and prisons. “Paddywagon raids” carried out by fire wardens and sheriffs targeted “vagrants” who couldn’t prove their employment and thus would be either available to work in the forests or sent to jail if they didn’t. These took place in the early 20th century, as large groups of laborers were necessary for state-mandated projects in wildfire management and timber. The California prisons had auxiliary “road camps” starting in 1913, where incarcerated people built roads and highways throughout the state. The first iteration of “fire camp” was a stop-gap program started by a Los Angeles probation officer during the Great Depression to reduce the costs of incarceration in a crowded city jail.

The Los Angeles model caught on and during World War II, sentenced prisoners were given vacant positions in both manufacturing and forestry. Prison forest camps were established during the war, due to the Board of Forestry’s concerns that the state lacked sufficient labor power to counteract wartime arson attempts from Axis forces, which had occurred on occasion in Oregon. In the same period, the California Department of Corrections was formed as a separate entity from the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1944 and these prison fire camps became a centerpiece of this new department. “Forest labor camps were the flagship of the department’s new approach,” wrote historian Volker Janssen.

When Gov. Pat Brown took office in 1959, he sought to expand the number of prisoners in camp and the rehabilitation programming in the Conservation Camp System. The focus on creating good workers and well-adjusted citizens out of the prisoners was particularly apparent in the Conservation Camp Program, which took its name after FDR’s insistence on conserving the resources and men of the nation. Brown’s unique contribution to the conservation program was construction of the Conservation Centers, first in Susanville, then in Jamestown and Chino, in order to recruit and train more individuals to join hand crews for forestry, trail maintenance and wildfire management. Brown championed these centers with the combined support of a state senator from Susanville, as well as the director of corrections and director of natural resources.

The Susanville prison, originally named the California Conservation Center, was built on 1,100 acres with open dormitories with 16 people in each, which was meant to replicate the number of people assigned to each hand crew. Programming at the center was meant to replicate military training for physical aptitude, with additional classroom training on firefighting in order to prepare incarcerated people before they were stationed at one of the Northern California fire camps. However, the number of people who were eligible and interested in working in conservation camps began to wane as drug convictions increased in the late 1960s and more placements were demanded in remote Northern areas of the state. Most prisoners had preferred to participate in the program because of the freedom it afforded them to meet with their family, but camp placements were more than 6 to 8 hours north of Los Angeles urban centers at this point.

The California prison system began to balloon in the 1970s, as it transformed into the “golden gulag,” and the Conservation Center held less and less relevance to the mission of the Department of Corrections. However, when the Susanville Center was slated to be closed in April 1973, the town pulled together a “Save Our Center Committee” which argued that the closure of the Susanville prison would spell economic ruination for the town, which had come to depend on the tax revenue of guards to support local education and government programs.

Even more damning, however, was the argument that the town would not be able to make do without the labor of incarcerated people used for wildfire management, fuel reductions and natural hazards mitigation. They reasoned that if the labor of these prisoners was pulled out of the town, not only would Susanville have less revenue from the employment the prison offered, but their town would also have to pay workers to do what incarcerated hand crews had been carrying out for free as a part of the Conservation Center programming.

After a year of rallies and town hall meetings, the “Save Our Center Committee” successfully lobbied the Department of Corrections to convert the Conservation Center into a medium-security facility. It was renamed the California Correctional Center, and was used as a reception center for other prisons instead of primarily as a training ground for the fire camp program. In the following decades, the prison became overcrowded and held 4,400 people, which was nearly four times the original capacity of 1,200. As the number of guards increased to keep up with the incarcerated population, the prison’s payroll skyrocketed from $1.6 million in 1963 to $34 million in 1995.

The Susanville residents lobbying for the protection of their prison won their demand to safeguard prison jobs — for both free and incarcerated people working in them. They recruited the construction of another facility in their town, High Desert State Prison, and they have kept open the Antelope Conservation Camp in their town as well. However, the pressure to reduce the overcrowded state prison system and sentencing reforms have forced the state to reduce the number of Level 1 prisoners, which has limited recruitment of incarcerated people for wildfire management labor.

Replacing Prisoner Labor?

The budgets from 2020-2022 have successively implemented Newsom’s “right-sizing” and closure of camps and prisons throughout the state, and a mandate to limit public spending on prisons. Newsom successfully closed one prison in Tracy, and has plans to close three more in the next three years. After writing it into the 2020-21 budget, CAL FIRE and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation released a joint statement announcing the closure of eight fire camp locations, bringing the total in operation to 35 throughout the state. Throughout these projected closures, tenuous agreements have been drawn up between the California prison guards’ union (CCPOA) and Newsom about staffing cuts, salary increases and campaign support in the wake of the decreasing total population of California prisons. Only after Newsom promised a bonus and yearly raise to all prison guards did their union write out a check of $1.75 million for Newsom’s recall defense campaign, which was the single largest contribution from a state employee union.Environmental justice issues and an inordinate exposure to health hazards are a huge issue for incarcerated people at the Susanville prison.

Throughout the 1970s, lawsuits from prisoners alleged that their living conditions were grotesque. Their discontent culminated in a protest against the guards in 1977. Today, incarcerated people say the facility is worse than ever. More than 100 incarcerated people at the California Correctional Center in Susanville filed an amicus brief in May 2022 testifying about the poor conditions of the facility in order to underscore the urgency of the state’s plan to permanently close the facility. They explained that the roofs of the building often leak and leave their cells flooded for days, which contributes to the growth of algae and black mold throughout the facility. As Truthout has previously covered in the case of other California prisons, environmental justice issues and an inordinate exposure to health hazards are a huge issue for incarcerated people at the Susanville prison.

Reducing prison population and program sizes will reduce state expenditures in one way but will require more spending to replace the millions of work hours that Conservation Camp Program hand crews have carried out on controlled fires, trail maintenance, fuel reduction and firefighting.

The decrease in incarcerated people has meant that there are 100 fewer hand crews available to CAL FIRE. The 2021 and 2022 budgets have replaced the Conservation Camp Program hand crews with people from the California Conservation Corps and California Military Department, but so far, they have only been able to scrape together funding for 24 additional crews, meaning that CAL FIRE is still short about 1,000 frontline wildfire and forestry workers.

Brian Kaneda, deputy director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, one of the state’s largest prison abolitionist organizations, argues that this is exactly the opportunity for a just transition away from carceral facilities supporting town economies, and a need for state investment in careers in wildfire management and conservation to replace prisons. Experts in forestry policy agree with Kaneda, and argue that California’s forest restoration requires coordination with Tribal governments, recruitment of formerly incarcerated firefighters, and improvements in wages and conditions for all forestry and hand crew workers.

The Fire and Forestry Recruitment Program takes this proposal a step further; it trains formerly incarcerated people to become professional firefighters. Many of their program participants were in fire camp themselves and want to join the ranks of CAL FIRE and county fire departments but encounter many difficulties doing so. However, as journalist Adam Mahoney reported in the news site Capital B, Royal Ramey, co-founder of the organization and a former incarcerated firefighter, speaks enthusiastically about the possibilities for careers in firefighting. “We need firefighters, and to be doing a job that is needed by the world makes it more fulfilling,” Ramey told Capital B. “Purpose is something they take from you in prison; this gives it back.”

Abby Cunniff is a Ph.D. student in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

U$A

Two Powerful Unions Have Come Together to Fight the Right’s Attack on Higher Ed

Izabel Depina, student organizer and vice president of Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts, chants during a rally held by the American Federation of Teachers outside the statehouse in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 19, 2020.

JESSICA RINALDI / THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Eleanor J. Bader, 

Truthout

September 23, 2022

According to “America’s Censored Classrooms,” a report released in August by the nonprofit human rights group PEN America, 39 percent of the 137 educational gag orders introduced in state legislatures so far this year have targeted colleges and universities. Most of them focus on race and LGBTQIA+ issues and seek to suppress discussion of topics the right wing deems “divisive.”

This, PEN concludes, is an about-face for the right: “Just four or five years ago, Republican lawmakers were touting so-called Campus Free Speech Acts purportedly designed to protect intellectual diversity and free expression. Now many are targeting higher education with some of the most censorious language to date.”

Indeed, bills to restrict the freedom to teach and learn have sparked outrage — and organizing — on campuses throughout the country. In addition to increased COVID-inspired health and safety concerns and an ever-increasing spike in the number of low-paid contingent laborers, it is not surprising that campus workers are mobilizing in every region of the U.S. and pushing for a New Deal for Higher Education. The effort is being led by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), two groups that entered into a permanent affiliation agreement that took effect on August 1.

The agreement builds on more than a decade of joint work in support of intellectual freedom but allows the 50,000-member AAUP to retain its independence and autonomy.

In promoting the New Deal for Higher Education campaign, both the 1.7 million-member AFT and the AAUP say they are elevating the “common good,” advancing a platform that defends academic freedom, and promoting shared governance between administrators and faculty. In addition, they are mobilizing members to push Congress and the states to reinvest in higher education, oppose censorship, cancel all student debt and protect part-time employees from arbitrary firings.

The stakes have rarely been higher.

“People see that democracy is under assault,” AFT President Randi Weingarten told Truthout. “We now need to protect knowledge and critical thinking and go beyond bread-and-butter issues to redefine union activity. We have to fight authoritarianism as we work to make a difference in people’s lives and communities.”

Paul Davis, national vice president of the AAUP and an emeritus professor at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, agrees and sees the affiliation as providing enhanced organizing opportunities. “This country and its people are changing,” Davis says. “OK, so let’s adjust and not throw our hands up in the air in despair. When the economy changes, we have to be able to react; we have to change, too.”“People see that democracy is under assault. We now need to protect knowledge and critical thinking and go beyond bread-and-butter issues to redefine union activity.”

The pace of change, he adds, has escalated. In fact, he reports that shortly after campuses shut down because of COVID-19, both the AAUP and the AFT began receiving requests for help in forming bargaining units. “We began to hear primarily from adjuncts, in every part of the country, who were being treated horribly. They were mobilizing for respect, job security and better pay,” he says.

But it was not just adjuncts who were fed up — and riled up. Cathy Wagner, a professor of creative writing at Miami University of Ohio, began working with the Faculty Alliance of Miami in the spring of 2020, following the announced layoff, in March 2020, of 150 full-and-part-time faculty for the Fall 2020 semester.

“The cuts meant that everyone’s workload was going to go up,” Wagner explains. “Worse, it meant that we would not be able to work with students in the way that we wanted to. It was a scary time, but we talked to a lot of people who’d formed academic unions at their schools. In some of these places, faculty and administrators had come together to discuss budget projections. This did not happen at Miami University. Our administrators refused to come to the table and discuss anything with us.”

During the subsequent 18 months, Wagner says Miami’s full-time faculty and librarians worked to organize the campus and got enough union cards signed to demand an election. Adjuncts, Wagner explains, were excluded because Ohio law bars part-time public employees from collective bargaining. Still, the full-timers prevailed.

But, Wagner says, the union still has not been recognized by Miami University’s administration.

“They are dragging their feet to slow down the process, quibbling over the composition of the bargaining unit,” she explains. “They want to keep librarians, visiting professors and non-tenure-track faculty out. We say ‘no,’ and are hoping the State Employee Relations Board will force them to stop stonewalling.” Wagner says the Faculty Alliance of Miami, in tandem with the AAUP and the AFT, is pushing the State Employee Relations Board to issue a decision on the make-up of the bargaining unit; since 9 of 10 public university faculty unions in Ohio include non-tenured faculty, “we believe that precedent is on our side,” she says.

Another issue has also promoted increased activism — and made the Faculty Alliance increasingly visible on campus. “Turns out, Miami had higher enrollment numbers for the 2021-2022 academic year than the administration expected,” Wagner says. “The college also got CARES Act money so we ended up with a $262 million surplus. It makes my stomach hurt to even think about this.”

Financial boondoggles notwithstanding, AFT/AAUP organizers say faculty throughout the country are united in demanding administrative transparency, faculty and staff input in decision-making, better pay and the academic freedom to determine what course materials to use and what content to include in the courses they teach.

Ernesto Longa, president of United Academics at the University of New Mexico (UNM), says those concerns motivated faculty to begin organizing there in 2014. He credits both the AFT and the AAUP with helping them win union recognition in 2019. “We began negotiating our first contract at the beginning of 2020,” Longa told Truthout. “Then the pandemic hit and since we were dealing with a very anti-union administration it took us 18 months to hammer out the first three-year contract. Thankfully, the AFT provided some of the heavy lifters who helped us with table negotiations and research.” The successful result included a 7.12 percent raise in year one, with annual wage reopeners during each of the following two years covered by the contract.“Every AAUP member is now an AFT member. Together, we’re fighting for democracy and for academic freedom.”

Longa says that while he and the negotiating team were pleased with the initial contract, everyone understands that more needs to be done to ensure that adjuncts and others are paid decently and have job security. “There are still adjuncts who make $2,500 for teaching a three-credit class,” he says. He also notes that United Academics still has a lot to learn about organizing and negotiating. “We’re slowly finding out just how pro-employer the law is when it comes to contract interpretation,” he says. “We now know that our language has to be precise. A clause that says UNM may do something, rather than shall do something, allows UNM to sidestep the protections we thought we’d won.”

Another challenge, Longa continues, involves outreach to form a coalition between United Academics and members of unions that represent other staff at UNM — the college’s hospital employees, food service workers, graduate students, security staff and medical interns and residents belong to what he calls a “smorgasbord of unions” — to build solidarity.

“We want to do wall-to-wall organizing and coordinate our bargaining efforts,” he says.

Unlike the faculty at UMN, faculty at New Jersey’s Rutgers University have been organized for decades. Nonetheless, they have been working without a contract for more than three months. Rebecca Kolins Givan, an associate professor in the School of Management and Labor Relations, says that although students and faculty recently returned to campus, staff are already planning a series of escalating actions to ensure that they get an equitable contract.

“We’ve been in an ongoing and beneficial affiliation with the AFT and the AAUP since the early 2000s,” Givan told Truthout. “Right now, we’re seeing heightened awareness of the need for greater investment in public higher ed due to the outsourcing of staff roles and increased dependence on adjunct labor.” Additionally, she sees the need to defend academic freedom as a priority since 12 members of the Rutgers faculty are on the Professor Watchlist compiled by the right-wing Turning Point USA. All 12 have been targets of hate mail, doxing and smear campaigns because of their anti-racist and pro-LGBTQIA+ work.

While the University Faculty Senate has denounced the list, Givan nonetheless worries that some faculty may self-censor in an effort to avoid negative publicity.

That said, Givan says she is proud that Rutgers’s bargaining unit continues to be a leader in academic unionism, promoting equal pay for equal work for adjuncts, supporting environmental justice initiatives on- and off-campus, and opposing overspending on athletics. A recent scandal in which the 50-plus member football team racked up $450,000 in DoorDash bills — 19,745 orders between May 2021 and June 2022 — is a case in point.

Challenging this, and fighting attacks on higher education more broadly will, of course, be an uphill slog. At the same time, several recent campus labor victories bear mention. A five-day strike, led by AFT/AAUP members at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, ended in mid-September after 500 faculty walked off the job. Similarly, AFT/AAUP-organized faculty at Rider College in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, reached a tentative agreement on a five-year contract, averting a strike earlier this month.

The AFT’s Randi Weingarten sees these victories as harbingers of future successes. “Every AAUP member is now an AFT member,” she says. “Together, we’re fighting for democracy and for academic freedom. Both are under assault. Precarity has become a through line on campuses throughout the country, but people understand the importance of organizing. They know that we’re working to make our communities better and make a positive difference in people’s lives.”

Eleanor J. Bader is an award-winning journalist who writes about domestic social issues, movements for social change, books and art. In addition to Truthout, she writes for The Progressive, Lilith Magazine and blog, the LA Review of Books, Fiction Writers Review and other online and print publications.