Kentucky Battery Plant Workers Launch Union Drive with UAW

By Luis Feliz León

November 22, 2024

Source: Labor Notes

Blue Oval battery workers attend a campaign kick off meeting. Photo: UAW.

A majority of the 1,000 auto workers at the car battery park Blue Oval in Glendale, Kentucky, have signed union cards to join the United Auto Workers.

The battery park, a joint venture between Ford and South Korea’s SK On, is expected to ramp up hiring to 5,000 hourly workers by 2030. It has twin battery plants. But the second one is on hold due low demand for electric vehicles. At the first plant, workers are testing battery module packs from facilities in Georgia, as the plant prepares to become fully operational next year.

Since he started last year, Chad Johnson has seen co-workers suffer mild heart attacks and respiratory problems, apparently from exposure to chemicals. He has seen workers carried out on stretchers with broken pelvises from tripping on exposed wiring, because they are working in what is still an active construction site.

The organizing “has moved more quickly than expected,” said Johnson, a quality control technician and a former UAW Local 3047 member at a nearby Ford supplier. “There were originally six of us. That grew to about 15. Now there’s an organizing committee of about 70.”

Workers announced their public campaign on November 20 with a video that compared their organizing to the 2023 Stand-Up Strike, when Ford UAW Local 862 members in nearby Louisville walked off the job at the Kentucky Truck Plant.

Next, the company can choose to voluntarily recognize the union. But this appears less likely than requesting a union election with the National Labor Relations Board.

“I am a pro-union governor and always will be,” said Governor Andy Beshear. “My hope is the companies that are involved will stay neutral and let this be a true decision of the employees.”

INFESTED WITH BATS

Halee Hadfield was one of the original six workers who spoke with a UAW regional director. Then she began holding meetings in her living room.

Hadfield had been a member of the Communications Workers’ industrial division, IUE-CWA, for four years at General Electric, where she built appliances. She applied at Blue Oval because the company was promoting that it offered free health insurance and other perks, including cell phones and computers, plus a starting rate of $21 an hour.

The company later withdrew the offer of free health care, a sore point for workers who were drawn to the job for that reason.

A month in, Hadfield became concerned when the company sent new hires to train in a school infested with bats. “The bat colony had roosted in the elevator shaft of this decommissioned middle school,” she said, “and we didn’t really have much choice but to be exposed to their guano and their droppings, and it started to make a lot of people physically ill.”

Once they started training onsite, while the plant was still under construction, Hadfield and her co-workers really started getting to know each other and talking about their shared issues at work.

Meanwhile, the safety problems at the Blue Oval site had begun before factory workers even got here. Since construction started in 2022, the workers building the complex have been raising safety concerns, including mold and respiratory illnesses among electrical workers. The company recently quarantined a whole building and workers say it is finally tearing out the whole HVAC for mold.

SAFETY THE TOP CONCERN

But Blue Oval workers cite safety concerns, especially about handling dangerous chemicals, as a main motive to organize.

Many members of the organizing committee are contrasting the conditions at Blue Oval with their own past union experiences, including at Ford suppliers. Johnson, for instance, was a shop steward at Metalsa Structural Products.

“Roughly three weeks in, I just mentioned to a co-worker one day, ‘Golly, if we don’t get the UAW in here, I don’t know if I can stay,’” said battery worker Bill Wilmoth.

“We started running into a myriad of safety issues. We are taken into a plant that is in construction, and we’re being asked to navigate that and never really given clear instructions on things like what happens if there’s an emergency? How do we evacuate? How do we deal with the raw material chemicals?”

One of the fears is exposure to cathode and anode powder. The hazards can include chemical leaks, electric shocks, explosions, and fires.

“Cathode and anode powder are used to make paste that is applied to different foils that we use to pull together and create our battery pouches,” Hadfield explained. “If you look at an Energizer battery, you’ll see a plus and a minus sign on opposite sides of that battery. Within that battery itself would also be tiny little bits of cathode and anode powder.”

The batteries that auto workers manufacture are made of lithium-ion electrochemical cells. Each cell has two electrodes—a positively charged cathode, containing lithium, and a negatively charged anode, typically made of graphite. The cathode usually contains nickel, manganese, and cobalt oxides.

BATTERY PRODUCTION PROCESS

Workers are required to sign non-disclosure agreements about the production process. But from various interviews across multiple battery plants and talking with experts in the field, I’ve outlined what the typical process involves.

At fully operational battery plants like Ultium Cells, the production process unfolds through machines the size of casino slot machines. They are made of metal and glass, so workers can stand sentry, watching the batteries run through a series of lifts carrying miniature trays and conveyor belts that run over the machines and feed them materials from above.

When the machines run into any issues, that’s when workers step in, ready to troubleshoot errors, fix jams, and perform steps that need the dexterity of human hands, such as adding copper tips. They wear clean-room suits, hairnets, ear plugs, and goggles, which make them look like astronauts.

The process begins in the electrode department, where machines mix a slurry of powder made of minerals like cobalt mined by children in Democratic Republic of the Congo. Then a machine coats this slurry tube of gel in aluminum foil. These coated rolls are then pressed to specific specifications in another machine. They move along to “notch and dry,” where machines cut out tabs on the end of the rolls, separating the cathode and the anode to prevent them from sticking together and causing a fire.

The process then continues to lamination and stacking, where the battery gets put through a heater, cut again, and shaped like cylinders or pouches. The laminated cells wend their way through another machine to be gassed and de-gassed, charged and discharged to the end of the line where they get taped, packaged into a rectangular pouch, and sent off for final inspections and boxing.

‘A NASTY CHEMICAL’

By handling the slurry contained in pouches, workers can come into contact with a hazardous solvent known as n-Methylpyrrolidone (NMP) used in the production of battery cells. ​“The NMP is the worst part of the slurry. It’s a nasty chemical that is definitely not good to breathe or get on your skin,” Greg Less, technical director at the University of Michigan Battery Lab, told me last year.

“Acute exposure [to NMP] may damage unborn children, cause respiratory tract irritation, skin irritation, nausea, headache, dizziness, and diarrhea,” a UAW white paper notes about the Ultium Cells plant.

“In manufacturing the anode, the company uses a product called Lucan BT1003M,” the white paper continues. “More than 95 percent of it consists of carbon nanotubes, which can cause germ-cell mutations and cancer.”

“These products all come with pictograms on them that indicate that they are not just flammable if around open flames or excessive heat, but they’re also carcinogenic,” Hadfield said. “For people who don’t know what that means, that essentially means that ingesting these raw materials long-term will give you cancer and could kill you.”

Workers said that the company promised it would put people on rotation schedules, so no one worked for longer than three years in sites with exposure to these carcinogenic chemicals. But so far the company has not made that schedule public.

“There’s a lot of different acids that we work with—basically the exact same thing a regular chemist would work with on a daily basis in full hazmat suit,” said Johnson. “A lot of these folks are not even being given proper PPE [Personal Protective Equipment]. “There’s no respirators being fitted. Nobody feels safe whatsoever over here.”

And despite all the hazards, workers say they’re being told to hurry up, as heavy machinery whirs around them and construction workers are building above their heads.

As Blue Oval onboards new hires, Hadfield says organizers are doing community outreach, so people in new-hire classes find out there’s a union campaign brewing to address the safety issues they’ll soon face onsite.

ORGANIZING BATTERY PLANTS

The electric vehicle sector is growing fast, and auto companies have been using the transition as an excuse to open non-union plants. Organizing them is do-or-die for the UAW.

During the Stand-up Strike, Ford CEO Jim Farley accused UAW President Shawn Fain of “holding the deal hostage over the battery plants.” Shortly after the Big 3 contracts were settled, the UAW announced its intention to organize the whole auto sector, especially the plants making batteries and electric-vehicle plants.

The union notched a lucrative first contract in June at Ultium Cells, a joint venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solutions at a plant in Ohio. By the end of the agreement, wages will have more than doubled since the workers there joined the union in 2022. The union also won four full-time union health-and-safety reps and time-and-a-half pay after 10 hours (regular shifts at Ultium are 12 hours).

The 1,600 workers at that plant were brought under the GM national agreement as a result of the Stand-Up Strike; GM agreed to pay Ultium workers at least 75 percent of the top wages of other GM workers.

“This is the kind of agreement that makes thousands of electric vehicle battery workers want to join the UAW and fight for a better future,” Fain said. In September, GM voluntarily recognized another 1,000 auto workers, also part of the national agreement, at an Ultium plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

ELECTRIC VEHICLE CAPITAL

Governor Beshear christened Kentucky “the EV capital of the United States,” after it received more than $11.5 billion in electric vehicle-related investments. These investments are part of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a program of public subsidies and financing for companies that are moving away from fossil fuels.

The incoming Donald Trump administration has opposed the electric vehicle transition, saying it would spell “complete obliteration” for the U.S. auto sector. But according to the Financial Times, it would only obliterate Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s competition: “While Tesla is making money from its EVs, rivals’ losses on them have been narrowed by consumer tax credits worth up to $7,500 under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.”

Tesla makes profits from its battery-run cars and trucks. But so far, the legacy U.S. carmakers are still generating losses. That’s why consumer tax credits are a boon, reducing these losses, especially for leased EVs.

“Take away the subsidies,” Musk posted in July on X. “It will only help Tesla.” The company’s market capitalization has surged to $300 billion since the election, outpacing the combined market value of Ford, GM, and Stellantis, according to a Deutsche Bank analysis.

At Blue Oval, Johnson said, there was a moment when the organizing committee worried the change in administration might doom the union drive. But the dour attitude faded quickly: “I don’t think there’s anything that could damp our resolve.”

 

Giving robots superhuman vision using radio signals

University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science

 

image: 

Freddy Liu, Haowen Lai and Mingmin Zhao, from left, setting up a robot equipped with PanoRadar for a test run.

view more 

Credit: Sylvia Zhang

In the race to develop robust perception systems for robots, one persistent challenge has been operating in bad weather and harsh conditions. For example, traditional, light-based vision sensors such as cameras or LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) fail in heavy smoke and fog. 

However, nature has shown that vision doesn't have to be constrained by light’s limitations — many organisms have evolved ways to perceive their environment without relying on light. Bats navigate using the echoes of sound waves, while sharks hunt by sensing electrical fields from their prey's movements.

Radio waves, whose wavelengths are orders of magnitude longer than light waves, can better penetrate smoke and fog, and can even see through certain materials — all capabilities beyond human vision. Yet robots have traditionally relied on a limited toolbox: they either use cameras and LiDAR, which provide detailed images but fail in challenging conditions, or traditional radar, which can see through walls and other occlusions but produces crude, low-resolution images.

Now, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science (Penn Engineering) have developed PanoRadar, a new tool to give robots superhuman vision by transforming simple radio waves into detailed, 3D views of the environment. 

"Our initial question was whether we could combine the best of both sensing modalities," says Mingmin Zhao, Assistant Professor in Computer and Information Science. "The robustness of radio signals, which is resilient to fog and other challenging conditions, and the high resolution of visual sensors."

In a paper to be presented at the 2024 International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), Zhao and his team from the Wireless, Audio, Vision, and Electronics for Sensing (WAVES) Lab and the Penn Research In Embedded Computing and Integrated Systems Engineering (PRECISE) Center, including doctoral student Haowen Lai, recent master’s graduate Gaoxiang Luo and undergraduate research assistant Yifei (Freddy) Liu, describe how PanoRadar leverages radio waves and artificial intelligence (AI) to let robots navigate even the most challenging environments, like smoke-filled buildings or foggy roads.

PanoRadar is a sensor that operates like a lighthouse that sweeps its beam in a circle to scan the entire horizon. The system consists of a rotating vertical array of antennas that scans its surroundings. As they rotate, these antennas send out radio waves and listen for their reflections from the environment, much like how a lighthouse's beam reveals the presence of ships and coastal features. 

Thanks to the power of AI, PanoRadar goes beyond this simple scanning strategy. Unlike a lighthouse that simply illuminates different areas as it rotates, PanoRadar cleverly combines measurements from all rotation angles to enhance its imaging resolution. While the sensor itself is only a fraction of the cost of typically expensive LiDAR systems, this rotation strategy creates a dense array of virtual measurement points, which allows PanoRadar to achieve imaging resolution comparable to LiDAR. "The key innovation is in how we process these radio wave measurements," explains Zhao. "Our signal processing and machine learning algorithms are able to extract rich 3D information from the environment."

One of the biggest challenges Zhao's team faced was developing algorithms to maintain high-resolution imaging while the robot moves. "To achieve LiDAR-comparable resolution with radio signals, we needed to combine measurements from many different positions with sub-millimeter accuracy," explains Lai, the lead author of the paper. "This becomes particularly challenging when the robot is moving, as even small motion errors can significantly impact the imaging quality."

Another challenge the team tackled was teaching their system to understand what it sees. "Indoor environments have consistent patterns and geometries," says Luo. "We leveraged these patterns to help our AI system interpret the radar signals, similar to how humans learn to make sense of what they see." During the training process, the machine learning model relied on LiDAR data to check its understanding against reality and was able to continue to improve itself.

"Our field tests across different buildings showed how radio sensing can excel where traditional sensors struggle," says Liu. "The system maintains precise tracking through smoke and can even map spaces with glass walls." This is because radio waves aren't easily blocked by airborne particles, and the system can even "capture" things that LiDAR can't, like glass surfaces. PanoRadar's high resolution also means it can accurately detect people, a critical feature for applications like autonomous vehicles and rescue missions in hazardous environments.

Looking ahead, the team plans to explore how PanoRadar could work alongside other sensing technologies like cameras and LiDAR, creating more robust, multi-modal perception systems for robots. The team is also expanding their tests to include various robotic platforms and autonomous vehicles. "For high-stakes tasks, having multiple ways of sensing the environment is crucial," says Zhao. "Each sensor has its strengths and weaknesses, and by combining them intelligently, we can create robots that are better equipped to handle real-world challenges."

This study was conducted at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science and supported by a faculty startup fund.

PanoRadar uses radio waves and AI to achieve superhuman vision. 

Credit

Sylvia Zhang

 

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DOI

10.1145/3636534.364936 

Method of Research

Experimental study

 

Eyes wide shut: Bats can navigate long distances using sound alone

Tel-Aviv University

 

image: 

Fruit bat

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Credit: Yuval Barkai.

The researchers: “For the first time, we have shown that bats are able to navigate great distances in open areas with their eyes closed, using only echolocation; they even create a mental acoustic map of their surroundings.”

 

A new study by Tel Aviv University and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History has proven, for the first time, that bats can navigate in nature over many kilometers using only echolocation, without relying on other senses. The researchers explain: “It’s well-known that bats are equipped with a natural sonar, allowing them to emit sound waves that bounce back from nearby objects, helping them navigate. However, it’s also known that bats use their sense of sight during flight. Laboratory studies have shown that bats are able to navigate within enclosed spaces using only echolocation — but sonar ‘sees’ only about 10 meters ahead, so what happens under natural conditions, in open areas stretching over many kilometers? Can bats rely solely on echolocation for long-distance navigation?” In this study, that question was explored in depth for the first time.

 

The research was led by Prof. Yossi Yovel of Tel Aviv University’s School of Zoology, Sagol School of Neuroscience, and Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, along with Dr. Aya Goldshtein, formerly a doctoral student of Prof. Yovel and currently a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Additional partners from Tel Aviv University included Prof. Sivan Toledo of the Blavatnik School of Computer Science; Xing Chen, Dr. Eran Amichai, and Dr. Arjan Boonman of the School of Zoology; and Lee Harten of the Sagol School of Neuroscience. Prof. Ran Nathan and Dr. Yotam Orchan of the Hebrew University and Prof. Iain Couzin of the Max Planck Institute in Germany also participated in the study, which was published in the journal Science.

 

The innovative research, carried out over a six-year period, utilized a unique tracking system installed in Israel’s Hula Valley. Using this GPS-like technology, the researchers were able to track the flight of tiny bats from the species known as Kuhl’s pipistrelle, each weighing only six grams —— the smallest mammal ever to be monitored in this way.

 

For the study, the researchers collected around 60 bats from their roost in the Hula Valley area and moved them about three kilometers away from the roost — still within their familiar habitat. A tag was attached to each bat, and the eyes of some were covered with a cloth strip, temporarily preventing them from seeing during flight, though they could remove the covering with their feet upon landing. In addition, the researchers employed techniques to temporarily disrupt the bats’ sense of smell and magnetic sense, thereby creating conditions in which they would be able to find their way home using only echolocation. Remarkably, the bats managed to return to their roost without difficulty.

 

In the second phase, the researchers built a computerized acoustic model of the bats’ natural environment in the Hula Valley. Prof. Yovel explains: “This model is based on a 3D map of the area where the bats navigate, reflecting the echoes that the bat hears as it uses echolocation to journey through its surroundings. In examining the bats’ flight paths, we discovered that they choose routes where the echoes contain a lot of information, which helps them navigate. For example, an area rich in ​​vegetation, such as bushes and trees, returns echoes with more information than an open field, making bats less likely to fly over open terrain. We also found that some areas are characterized by distinct echoes, which are picked up by the bats. These findings strengthened our hypothesis that in any given area, bats know where they are based on the echoes. The bats effectively create an acoustic map in their head of their familiar environment, which includes a variety of active ‘sound landmarks’ (echoes) — just as every sighted person has a visual map of their everyday surroundings.”

  

Fruit Bat

Credit

Yuval Barkai

Link to the article:

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adn6269

 

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DOI

10.1126/science.adn6269 

Sea angels and devils: could plankton unlock the secrets of human biology?

Brianna Randall
Tue 5 November 2024 
THE GUARDIAN

Different plankton found off Greenland and California, including Sapphirina and an unidentified siphonophore species related to hydrozoan jellies.Photograph: Leonid Moroz/University of Florida

Off the west coast of Greenland, a 17-metre (56ft) aluminium sailing boat creeps through a narrow, rocky fjord in the Arctic twilight. The research team onboard, still bleary-eyed from the rough nine-day passage across the Labrador Sea, lower nets to collect plankton. This is the first time anyone has sequenced the DNA of the tiny marine creatures that live here.

Watching the nets with palpable excitement is Prof Leonid Moroz, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida’s Whitney marine lab. “This is what the world looked like when life began,” he tells his friend, Peter Molnar, the expedition leader with whom he co-founded the Ocean Genome Atlas Project (Ogap).

Moroz gestures toward Greenland’s glaciated valleys. The rapid warming here is replicating conditions from 600m years ago, when complex life forms began appearing. “We’re sailing through deep biological time right now,” he says.

Moroz and Molnar’s mission is to classify, observe, sequence and map 80% of the sea’s smallest creatures to learn more about ourselves, and the health of the planet.

Plankton and humans do not have much in common at first glance. But studying marine organisms has led to breakthrough understandings about our own brains and bodies. Observing the electrical discharges of jellyfish taught us how to restart the heart. Sea slugs showed us how memories form. Squid taught us how signals spread between different parts of the brain. Horseshoe crabs demonstrated how visual receptors work.

An unusual aspect of Moroz and Molnar’s research trips is that they are unlocking plankton’s secrets onboard sailing boats rather than engine-powered vessels – and they are not alone in this endeavour.

“Large oceanographic vessels can cost $100,000 [£77,000] a day, which can quickly bankrupt your research organisation,” says Chris Bowler, an oceanographer with France’s National Centre for Scientific Research and a scientific adviser to the Tara Ocean Foundation.

For the past two years he has collected plankton samples for the Microbiomes Mission, a research initiative to study micro-organisms in the ocean, onboard a 33-metre schooner. “Working from a sailboat is 50 times cheaper,” Bowler says.

That cost saving also allows researchers the luxury of time, which is imperative for finding the genetic commonalities and patterns that will reveal answers about human health. Bowler says it is important to analyse and observe these microscopic organisms interacting with each other and the world around them. That cannot happen in a lab back on land because the organisms are too fragile.

Low-carbon, readily available and easier to manoeuvre near to shore, sailing boats also “don’t vibrate, so you can do really precise work aboard”, says Molnar, who has captained Ogap voyages over more than 9,000 nautical miles.

The reason that microscopic marine life can teach us about our own development is convergent evolution. This is when unrelated organisms arrive at the same solution to a problem, such as how birds, beetles, butterflies and bats all adapted to fly, but did so at different times and in slightly different ways. Overlapping solutions provide common building blocks for everything from how to fold a protein to how to form a brain.

“Every organism that lives here today is a logbook of every single adaptation that made it successful,” Moroz says. “The brain is one of the most complicated structures in the universe. Yet 70% of our knowledge about how the brain works is thanks to marine creatures. Without them, many of today’s medicines would simply not exist.”



The brain is one of the universe’s most complicated structures. Yet 70% of our knowledge about how it works is thanks to marine creatures

Leonid Moroz

The reason he studies plankton is because their “logbook” is the longest – some single-celled marine organisms have been around for more than 3bn years. That means they have more tricks up their metaphorical sleeves than we do.

“Some groups of these marine species do not age, never develop cancers and they can fully regenerate when damaged. They are able to perform many tasks better than us,” Moroz says.

One way to take human medicine to the next level is to take our cues from these organisms. But first, we have to identify them. Ogap’s lofty mission would not have been possible 10 years ago; rapid technological advances have reduced the size of equipment, while satellite communications and AI have shrunk the timeframe for analysing results from months to minutes.

In Greenland, for example, Ogap kept marine organisms alive for several days on their sailing boat while sequencing their DNA during different stages of life. “We were able to watch them reproduce, decay, then repair themselves, even die, all while taking high-resolution video,” Molnar says.

The team then uploaded the data via Starlink to universities where scientists used AI to look for pattern recognition in the organisms’ DNA. “Literally within an hour, we would have results back on the sailboat,” Molnar says. “This type of work was simply science fiction 10 years ago.”

While the technology is new, using sailing boats to explore is a millennia-old human endeavour.

“There’s a long history of sailing to answer scientific questions,” says David Conover, the owner of ArcticEarth, the sailing boat Ogap used for its Greenland expedition. From Captain Cook’s anthropological discoveries in the Pacific to Darwin’s groundbreaking observations on natural selection onboard the Beagle, sailing boats have afforded many types of researchers the luxury of getting to far-flung parts of the world to deeply engage with their surroundings.

“The more time you can afford to be at sea, the more open you are to discovery,” Conover says.

Related: ‘A huge loss’: is it the end for the ship that helped us understand life on Earth?

The key now is to observe the cornucopia of unknown marine organisms before they disappear for ever. “By the time you finish your coffee tomorrow morning, between 20 and 100 species will have vanished for ever, including the wonderful solutions they were offered by nature, which is a huge loss for biomedical science,” Moroz says.

To continue documenting the wonders of tiny single-celled sea creatures, Ogap will head next to Patagonia, at the tip of South America. Eventually, Ogap’s genomic atlas will be digitised and made freely available, providing a baseline of marine biodiversity as well as valuable insights for the development of new medicines.

“Every day is a surprise,” Moroz says. “That is the finest part of all of these voyages – the level of excitement, of discovery. It’s so rich. It’s nonstop.”

Los Angeles Teachers Union Votes to Support Effort to Block U.S. Military Aid


The Los Angeles teachers union voted to support a congressional effort to block $20 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel, providing an important example for the labor movement.


Emma Lee 

November 4, 2024

LEFT VOICE USA

United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and Service Workers International Union (SEIU) Local 99 held a joint rally outside Los Angeles City Hall, Los Angeles, Calif., on Wednesday, March 15, 2023. Photo by Caylo Seals, The Corsair.

In late October, the LA teachers union voted to support a congressional effort to block $20 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel. The genocide in Gaza, carried out by Israel and bankrolled by the United States and other imperialist powers, has lasted over a year and has expanded into Lebanon last month. The United States has provided more than 70 percent of the funding for Israel’s military operations since last October. Meanwhile, according to multiple polls, a majority in the U.S. believe that the U.S. should stop sending weapons to Israel.

“The arms named have been used in violations of U.S. and international law, indiscriminately killing large numbers of civilians, many of them children,” stated union materials prepared for a board of directors meeting, according to The LA Times. The motion for the resolution states: “It is our duty as educators to speak up for the protection of education and all young people and their families, especially when it is our tax dollars fueling this destruction and our government providing the arms. Furthermore, this directly affects our members; many UTLA rank and file have loved ones who have lost their lives or livelihoods due to this conflict.”

The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) called for California Senators Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler to pledge their support for a joint resolution which would stop specific arms sales to Israel. The “Joint Resolutions of Disapproval” is expected to be taken up when the Senate reconvenes in November. The joint resolution is sponsored by Senators Bernie Sanders, Peter Welch, Jeff Merkley, and Brian Schatz. The UTLA did not release the vote tally, but it passed easily among those members of the union’s House of Representatives who attended the virtual meeting, according to sources of the LA Times.

A sector of LA teachers have been organizing for Palestine for years. In 2021, during the Israeli onslaught of Sheikh Jarrah, the UTLA chapter chairs passed a resolution calling for an end of U.S. aid to Israel, though the resolution was not passed along to the UTLA leadership or voted on by the rest of the membership. In March of this year, the UTLA joined the hundreds of unions in the U.S., including seven major unions such as the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Auto Workers (UAW) and United Electrical Workers (UE), in calling for a ceasefire.
Zionist Opposition

Unsurprisingly, the resolution was immediately met with Zionist opposition. The Los Angeles Jewish Antisemitism Roundtable, which is a coalition of a number of Zionist groups, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), issued a public letter in opposition to the teachers union. In the letter, the group expressed their “profound concern regarding ULTA’s recent decision to adopt a resolution taking a one-sided position on the Israel-Hamas conflict.” The letter went on to claim that blocking military aid, “dismisses the complexity of this geopolitical crisis, ignoring Hamas’s well-documented and globally condemned attacks on innocent civilians.”

The group went on to not only dismiss the role of labor in taking a stand against the genocide, but also continue the tired tactic of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism: “Passing this resolution has no impact on the situation in the Middle East but serves to foster an environment of exclusion within LAUSD, further alienating Jewish students, teachers, and allies who feel increasingly unsafe.”

This conflation is taken straight from the playbook of the McCarthyist congressional hearings of higher education officials, and continues the pattern of heightened repression against the pro-Palestine movement by the state since the genocide began last October.

Zionist groups have organized petitions against the teachers union, saying that “UTLA needs to focus on local issues that directly impact our educational system.” The implication here is that the genocide does not directly impact education in the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As rank-and-file UTLA members wrote in their letter in response to the Antisemitism Roundtable, “As educators in a nation where the military funding is ten times that of federal education spending, we are directly impacted by the scarcity resulting from American involvement in foreign wars.” Rather than funding crucial public services like education and healthcare for children in the U.S., enormous sums of money directed toward slaughtering Palestinian civilians, including tens of thousands of children. Those who remain have lost one or both parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, teachers, and friends, and bear indescribable psychological trauma. Educators are not only nearsightedly concerned with the physically and mental wellbeing of the specific students sitting in our classrooms; we are deeply aware that the wellbeing of all children of the world is intertwined.

Moreover, by conflating justified outrage over a genocide with discrimination against Jewish community members, the Antisemitism Roundtable is not only suppressing freedom of speech, it is also casting the Jewish community as a monolith and ignoring the diversity of opinion that exists among Jewish people. As the rank-and-file response states, “The resolution in question was authored by a coalition of UTLA members, including Jewish and Middle Eastern educators.” Though the state of Israel uses Jewish identity as a cover for its genocidal, settler-colonial project, Zionism, based on displacement, apartheid, and occupation, does not represent the Jewish people, neither in the U.S. nor the world at large.
The Labor Movement Needs to Go Further

The pro-Palestine movement has energized rank-and-file workers to challenge the Zionist common sense of our union leaderships and demand an end to our unions’ complicity in the genocide. Yet the brutal events of the past year have proved to us that ceasefire resolutions are far from sufficient — and that rank-and-file workers are willing to fight for more.

The action by LA teachers is significant in that it not only calls for a ceasefire, a demand which has met its limits, but goes further by challenging U.S. military funding, reflecting the movement’s extended demands beyond a ceasefire and towards an arms embargo. But why should we limit ourselves to essential but limited measures like this Sanders-sponsored effort that blocks only “certain defense articles and services,” as the resolution states?

Members of UTLA should organize resolutions that go even further — to demand that their unions divest from Israeli companies and to end all U.S. aid to Israel. The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), for example, recently passed a resolution in support of a ceasefire and arms embargo, divestment of pensions from Israel, protection of workers engaging in political speech, and endorsement of only candidates who adhere to their principles. Organizing local chapters can serve to deepen the conversation about how to organize against U.S. imperialism within our unions and the wider labor movement.

There is nothing more urgent as workers in the United States than the task of organizing ourselves independently from the capitalist parties that support this genocide. Our union leaderships spend enormous resources organizing to campaign for Democrats — who continue to fund Israel’s military, as well as the police that crush our protests. The UTLA, for example, endorsed the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ticket for president, along with other Democrats at all levels. The Chicago Teachers Union, which called for a ceasefire in January, uncritically supports Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who comes from their own ranks but now serves as Chicago’s top cop. Ahead of the DNC, Johnson organized a “labor truce,” in which union leaderships agreed to not strike during the DNC, crushing in advance the potential of what could have been a powerful show of solidarity among the working class for Palestine, and against the Democratic Party’s support for genocide.

When union bureaucracies undemocratically endorse capitalist politicians and organize dues-funded top-down election campaigns, they actively ignore the massive potential in their memberships for campaigns that resist the anti-worker, anti-immigrant, imperialist policies of both capitalist parties. Moreover, they undermine workers’ rights to democratically discuss and decide our unions’ priorities, orientations, and actions. With the upcoming presidential election results, we have to organize now to resist the continued U.S.-backed genocide of Palestinians, which will be supported by whichever capitalist presidential nominee who enters the White House in January.

Our Democrat-allied union and social movement bureaucracies go to great lengths to defend “lesser-evil” politics by decrying the impending “fascism” that will sweep the U.S. if Trump takes office. Of course, workers and oppressed groups every have right to despise the repulsive agendas of the Right. Yet these selective campaigns serve to distract workers from the attacks of the Democratic Party, which have occurred during the length of the Biden term, and will surely continue if not deepen under an apparently even more right-wing Harris presidency.

As rank-and-file workers, organizing independently means we have to fight for greater democracy within our unions. Fighting against capitalist exploitation — whether for bread-and-butter issues or against oppression — is inherently political, and therefore our unions are and should be political spaces. But our union leaderships are linked to both parties of capitalism — historically concentrated among the Democrats, but in the case of the Teamsters and other unions, have been turning toward the Republicans in a wave of “dealignment”.

Los Angeles, among other California cities, have provided a powerful example of labor action from just this year. Back in April during the wave of Gaza solidarity student encampments that swept the country, a Zionist mob physically attacked the UCLA encampment with fireworks, pepper spray, bats, and knives while the police stood by. In response, over 1,000 people mobilized at UCLA to defend the encampment and defend students against the Zionist attacks. Members of the labor movement in particular showed up and called for solidarity. How did workers respond? UAW 4811 — representing the UCLA graduate workers — released a statement calling for a strike authorization vote of the local to defend the encampment. Hundreds stayed and forced both the Zionists and the LAPD to retreat from the encampment, and the University of California workers eventually went on strike to defend their students. University of California workers have demonstrated how the labor movement can respond to attacks upon our democratic rights to speech and protest. We should take inspiration from this example in the struggles to come.

Why is the working class so strategically important in this question? Educators in the United States, you might say, have little direct impact on arms sales to Israel. Of course, not every worker is as directly tied to the production and distribution of arms as dockworkers, for example. But we know that our labor — as teachers, healthcare workers, logistics workers, and beyond — makes the world go around. We have the power to demand an end to military support for Israel, withholding our labor until our demands are met. That is why it is so crucial to strive for greater union democracy and fight back against every anti-worker law that tries to defang the labor movement, such as the Taylor Law here in NeYork that makes public sector strikes illegal. The example of the dockworkers in Greece who blocked ammunition to Israel, teachers in Los Angeles, NYSNA healthcare workers, and all those who are fighting in their unions and universities to oppose the U.S.-backed genocide, should serve as an inspiration. Alone, they may appear small, but together provide invaluable examples to workers around the world. Our class has the power to stop the genocide — and we need to do everything in our power to use it.




Emma Lee
Emma is a special education teacher in New York City.

 

Sweden Cites “Defense Concerns” Blocking Plans for 13 Baltic Wind Farms

Sweden approved its first floating wind farm proposal while rejecting farms proposed for the Baltic (file photo)

Published Nov 4, 2024 2:36 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

The Swedish government announced that after reviewing all considerations including defense issues it would not proceed with permits for 13 proposed wind farms planned for the Baltic outside of Sweden’s territorial waters. The government said defense considerations had won out in the review while it also approved one offshore wind farm plan and emphasized that it still wants to develop wind and solar energy.

The government said during a press event on Monday in Stockholm that it had determined the projects could not be permitted because of the impact that they would have on defense. Pal Jonson, Defense Minister, said the Armed Forces had provided documentation that showed the wind farm would delay the country’s ability to react to incoming missiles and the activity of submarines.

Sweden increased its defense considerations after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the general heightened security anxieties in the Baltic region. It was highlighted that both Sweden and Finland joined NATO in response to safety concerns and increased tensions with Russia.

 

Map shows the locations in the Baltic rejected due to security concerns (Swedish government)

 

“In these current cases, however, the defense interest has weighted the most,” said Romina Pourmokhtari, Climate and Environment Minister.

Among the companies proposing the offshore projects were Sweden’s OX2, Germany’s RWE, and Norway’s Statkraft. The decision is also seen as a setback to Sweden’s midterm plans for electrification and sustainability. The country has called for doubling its electric power supply which could have largely been achieved with the 13 projects which would have had a combined capacity of 140 terawatt-hours. Experts also highlight that the Baltic is a primate location for wind farms due to its relatively shallow seabed and consistent wind speeds.

The Swedish government emphasized that the projects needed to be considered in the broader scope but that it remains committed to wind and solar energy. While rejecting the 13 projects based on location, they granted permission for the Poseidon project which would be on the western coast in the southern Skagerrak. It became the first floating wind project to gain approval with government officials saying it would put Sweden at the forefront of floating wind. Vattenfall has invested in developing the project.

“It opens the door to developing additional offshore wind farms at greater ocean depth than has been previously possible,” they said announcing the approval.

Poseidon would consist of up to 81 floating turbines standing at up to 340 meters (over 1,100 feet) and have a potential for 5.5 TWh per year. The permission calls for the wind farm to be completed within 10 years and to have a total 40-year lifespan. The minister said it could tentatively start construction by 2029 and possibly be completed by around 2031.

It requires further review and permissions including for underwater cabling and the interconnect to the main power grid. The developer will also have to incorporate considerations for commercial fishing as well as marine mammals, bats, and birds.

Poseidon is the third offshore wind project to gain approval from the current government. They noted that 10 additional proposals are currently being reviewed. In addition, they are directing the state authorities to update the rules and technical specifications for intermittent power generation, including wind and solar. They are calling for additional consideration on how these forms of power generation can be supplemented or designed to contribute to power needs. The report is due at the end of 2025.