AFTER HELENE CAME TRUMP

A Trump Win Would Threaten Historic Climate Progress in North Carolina

Antonia Juhasz
Wed 23 October 2024


In 1999, Hurricane Floyd roared through North Carolina as one of the state’s deadliest and most harmful hurricanes. It was the second major storm that month and the third in as many years to ravage the state. Chandra Taylor-Sawyer, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, was raised in the small Black community of Kinston, but “the neighborhood I grew up in no longer exists,” she tells me. It was rendered uninhabitable by the storm.

Twenty-five years later, on September 26, Hurricane Helene struck North Carolina, breaking all of the state’s past records for death and destruction, as it carved a path of ruin across Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia. Patrick Hunter, a managing attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, lives in Asheville, whole sections of which were wiped away along with entire towns across western North Carolina.

“It’s really hard to put into words what the devastation looks like,” he tells me of his beloved mountain community, the sound of shock thick in his voice. “It’s hard to describe the sense of loss.”


Hurricane Helene is one of the worst storms in U.S. history, causing over $250 billion in economic damage. At least 224 people have died, almost half in North Carolina, where another 26 people are still missing, likely drowned in torrential waters or buried by mud. The death toll will rise in the years to come. The average hurricane in the U.S. ultimately causes the deaths of as many 11,000 people, with the most disadvantaged prior to the storm suffering the worst consequences in its wake.

An increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is the hallmark and long-predicted outcome of the burning of fossil fuels causing a worsening climate crisis.

“Climate change is here and we’re going to experience more of these types of events if we can’t address it,” Hunter says, exasperation finally entering his voice. “When we’re not taking the steps we need to take to reduce the effects of climate change… there are very real consequences.”

For Taylor-Sawyer and Hunter, that means righting environmental injustice, protecting public health and the environment, and transforming the region away from fossil fuel — the primary cause of the climate crisis — to renewable energy. They’re working with allies across the state to significantly deepen these efforts by tapping into billions of dollars in funding from the Biden-Harris administration.

Less than two weeks before Hurricane Helene struck, I’d been visiting communities across North Carolina to see how the Biden-Harris money is contributing to their organizing, what the investments look like on the ground, and the threats and opportunities presented by the looming November election.

As a key swing state, North Carolina could single-handedly determine the outcome of the Presidential election (some polls give Trump the lead). There’s also an extremely consequential gubernatorial race pitting Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson against Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein.

While Donald Trump has used Hurricane Helene as an opportunity to deny the reality of climate change and spread lies and conspiracy theories, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris “are harnessing every agency and every authority to respond to Helene’s destruction and devastation,” White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi says in a statement to Rolling Stone. “At the same time, we keep accelerating our efforts to build long-term resilience to extreme-climate disasters and attack the root cause of climate change itself.”

Historic levels of federal funding for climate action, the energy transition, and environmental justice are included throughout the over $2 trillion in the administration’s “Investing in America Agenda,” which includes the Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, American Rescue Plan, and CHIPS and Science Act.

With its Justice40 Initiative, the Biden-Harris administration stipulated within days of taking office that at least 40 percent of federal climate and environmental funds, across 19 federal agencies and totaling some $613 billion, must target disadvantaged environmental justice communities. These are Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other people of color and low-income communities who have been overburdened by pollution and the climate crisis, and underserved by government. An official with the Environmental Protection Agency tells me the agency has exceeded that bar, with over 60 percent of the funds serving those most in need.

It amounts to the nation’s largest-ever financial commitment to environmental and climate justice. “It’s unprecedented. I don’t think there’s any other time in history that there has been such a targeted plan to invest in disinvested communities,” Taylor-Sawyer says. “Just the EPA’s $3 billion Environmental and Climate Justice program is 80 times more than any federal investment in environmental justice in history.”


Chandra Taylor-Sawyer.

Since 2022, the EPA alone has awarded North Carolina over $1.3 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, according to new figures provided by the agency to Rolling Stone. These and other “Investing in America” funds are credited with directing over $19 billion in federal and private clean energy investments to North Carolina, resulting in the third-highest overall net growth in clean energy jobs in the nation.

I met dozens of people across North Carolina who have received or are applying for Justice40 and related federal funds, including the heads of environmental justice networks, small rural Black community groups tackling coal companies and hog farms, the mayor of Durham, Native American activists taking on oil pipelines and methane gas plants, and Southern Environmental Law Center lawyers battling just about everyone.

The funding is supporting air and water quality monitoring, zero-emission buses, protection of tree canopies and tree planting, flood mitigation, rooftop and community solar — including local “resilience hubs,” renewable energy and energy efficiency tax credits, and community education and organizing, among other efforts. The administration is also trying to do something that the federal government has rarely achieved before: directly engaging and funding frontline communities.

But they’re in a race against time. Harris plans to continue and expand upon these policies. But the funding and the climate and equity agenda it supports are under direct assault from Donald Trump, who calls the money Washington’s “green new scam.” Project 2025, the 900-page playbook for a second Trump term published by the Heritage Foundation and authored by at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration, would eliminate all of the funding and the legislation that backs it. Congressional Republicans have also attacked the programs, accusing the administration of “funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to radical, far-left organizations whose mission is to protest, disrupt, and undercut United States energy production and leadership, while also freeing up funds to support their extreme activist agendas.”

“There’s a huge urgency,” explains Sherri White-Williamson, director of North Carolina’s Environmental Justice Community Action Network. “If things change on November 4, we know that money is not going to be there.” And critical work that’s just getting started, “just wouldn’t get done,” she says.
Spidey Sense-r

It was raining and early in the morning when I met Chris Hawn, a co-director at the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, in downtown Durham’s Central Park. But Hawn looked fantastic, dressed in stylish brown leather loafers, burgundy slacks, and a ‘50’s-inspired colorful geometric sweater. They directed me to a gnarly spider web, home to a funnel weaver spider (not to be confused with the more popular but far less useful, orb-weaver spider). While the latter spin Halloween style webs, the funnel weaver is all-functionality. This web had probably been there for about a year, and it was filthy. But that’s exactly why Hawn, a Ph.D. in zoology, liked it. Piled in amidst the soot, leaves, and trash, the web was also collecting polluting metals like arsenic, aluminum, and cadmium that can destroy human health.

In less than 15 minutes, and with little more than a straw, a stick, purple tape, and a phone app, Hawn taught me how to measure the pollution in the air in downtown Durham using the spider’s web. Hawn calls it “Spidey Sense-r.”

Measuring the pollution where we live is the first and most basic step to protect public health. But getting expensive air monitors into communities is stymied by the polluters who hate them, governments that don’t want to pay for them, racism, classism, and communities that can’t afford them. Spidey Sense-r, by comparison, can be made available to anyone with the skills to spot a spider’s web.


Chris Hawn collects a web.

Hawn specializes in community centered participatory research, with those most impacted by harm in the lead. The North Carolina Environmental Justice Network is a grassroots, people of color-led coalition of community organizations and their supporters who work with low-income communities and people of color on issues of climate, environmental, racial, and social injustice. It has already received federal funding to participate in a larger hub of organizations working to aid local and smaller frontline groups apply for and win Justice40 money. The network has also applied for funds to support their broader educational work, including to develop a curriculum and pay for the testing of web samples to bring Spidey Sense-r to K-12 schools, community colleges, seniors, and local organizations across the state.

“It’s a once in a generation opportunity,” Hawn says of Justice40. “I see a massive potential to increase environmental justice competency and conversations, and also support the movement.”
Airkeepers

While Spidey Sense-r awaits its support, the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act are funding a first-of-its kind community air quality monitoring network in locations across the country based on the same principles of local empowerment and advocacy.

Christian Felipe is the newly hired project coordinator at the Environmental Justice Community Action Network (EJCAN) in Clinton, a small rural city in Sampson County in Eastern North Carolina where hogs outnumber people 35 to 1. Sampson is one of the most economically distressed counties in the state. It is home to the state’s largest landfill and a multitude of industrial hog farms primarily located in low-income Black and Latinx communities. Felipe is 30-years-old and a sincere, unassuming minister in his mother’s nearby church. He was hired as part of a $500,000 grant from the EPA to oversee the area’s first community air quality monitoring project.

“We call them ‘airkeepers,’” Felipe tells me, describing the thirty or so local residents who have volunteered to place the free small air monitors outside of their homes.

“Sampson County has never had any kind of federal attention around air quality,” he adds. “We’ve had a lot of issues for many, many years, but our closest federally regulated air monitor is about an hour away.”

With Felipe’s hire, EJCAN’s staff now totals five (including two others recently hired with federal funds). The office is located just down the street and at times downwind from the Smithfield Packing Company where up to 11,000 hogs a day are slaughtered, cut, and packaged into pork products. The smell is a pungent and sickening cocktail of hog feces, urine, and flesh that regularly wafts over Clinton. But it’s more than just a bad aroma. The cumulative impact of the different polluters here releases a myriad of dangerous and toxic pollutants into the air harming public health. Until now, the only information about which, how much, where, and when pollutants are being released was provided by the companies themselves.

“Like so many other environmental justice communities, there’s very little data that’s available, and especially true for rural areas,” EJCAN’s founder and director, Sherri White-Williamson explains. Collecting that data is how “we can tell the story of what’s happening in places like this.”

Alice Brunson.

Around the corner from Smithfield’s and down the street from the Southern Style Barbecue and Fried Chicken restaurant, airkeeper Alice Brunson welcomes me into her home. “I was probably one of the first ones that signed up,” Brunson tells me. “I think the air we breathe is really important… and it should be a right to have clean air so, I just jumped on the wagon and said, ‘Let’s go for it.’” She enthusiastically presents the air monitor perched on her front lawn.

Brunson and her fellow airkeepers attend regular meetings to discuss their goals for the work, learn how to use the monitors, about the pollutants they are measuring and the associated health harms, what the data means, and how it can be used.

Since 2021, the EPA increased clean air and pollution standards estimated to have saved more than 200,000 lives. The federal funding is enabling a ground-up model of self-regulation, allowing residents to directly police industry and determine how well they’re abiding by the law.

As I left EJCAN’s office, two young women who are lawyers with the Southern Environmental Law Center arrived to talk about legal proceedings against the landfill.

“It’s how we start to create action and bring about change,” White-Williamson says.
Durham’s Justice40 Benefits: Trees, Clean Buses, Flood Protection, Solar

Seated at his desk at city hall, Durham Mayor Leonardo Williams beams with excitement, ready to share his city’s success stories. He credits the Biden-Haris administration with a new approach to providing much-needed support. “For the first time, I felt like the federal government worked with us locally on the ground,” he tells me. “We [usually] have to jockey around with the state on determining what’s a priority,” with those communities most in need the last to be served, he says. “But the federal government, this administration, stepped up and said, ‘We see you. We’re going to help you.’”

In other words, the Biden-Harris administration leap-frogged the ultra-conservative North Carolina Republican General Assembly and went straight to the municipalities, allowing spending that would otherwise never have taken place here.

A zero-emissions bus in downtown Durham.

Durham has been awarded nearly $60 million in federal Justice40 grants. The evidence of this money is apparent walking around the city. I see trees planted to reduce heat stress in the historic Black communities of Braggtown and Merrick-Moore, among thousands of trees planted and existing canopy maintained with funds for urban and community forestry.

In downtown, the new fleet of zero-emissions buses pass by without the familiar choking cloud of black polluting smoke from fossil fueled buses, part of the Infrastructure Law’s $5 billion Clean Bus Program. Researchers at Harvard have estimated that roughly 17,000 to 20,000 people die each year in the U.S. from fossil fuel transportation air pollution, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.

A day earlier, I sat in on a meeting at the Durham Armory organized by the Southern Environmental Law Center where about 100 local elected officials, non-governmental organizations, and community organizers gathered to discuss strategies, including tapping into federal funding, to make Durham and the state less focused and reliant on automobiles, ensuring accessible and equitable provision of public transit, housing, zero-emissions vehicles, and more walkable and bikeable cities, with the goal of reducing driving miles overall.

Durham also received funds to restore watersheds, part of some $472 million in EPA funding across the state to upgrade water systems, improve water quality, and reduce flooding.

“Getting the Solar in and the Fossil Fuels Out”

After meeting Mayor Williams, I am greeted by an eager group of local city officials from the Parks & Rec and related departments on Fayetteville Street at the W.D. Hill Recreation Center. W.D. Hill is on the other side of the train tracks and the freeway from downtown Durham. That’s by design, explains Summer Alston, special projects manager for the City of Durham.

Alston grew up in a small rural community about an hour outside of Durham in Warren County, the birthplace of the U.S. environmental justice movement. In 1982, residents blocked roads to halt the dumping of toxic waste just down the road from the Coley Springs Missionary Baptist Church, where much of their organizing took place.

Seated on the historic church’s pews, associate minister, Reverend Bill Kearney, tells me how the EPA had okayed the dumping based on the assumption that the Black community was “poor, politically impotent, and this was an easy thing to do.” But then, Kearney says, Black and white residents joined together, and “everyday people, many of them who were descendants of enslaved people who had been fighting and wishing for social justice, found themselves having to fight and resist because of environmental injustice. So, the two merged here” and the term “environmental justice” was born.

This legacy influences and permeates the work of those who have followed in their footsteps, Alston explains. She is not alone in expressing a healthy dose of skepticism about relying on the federal government or its money. Trained as an urban planner, Alston is now working full-time to ensure that the new federal funds service the needs of North Carolina’s most hard-hit communities.

W.D. Hill sits in the heart of the historic Black community of Hayti where residents face a host of challenges that are exacerbated by the worsening climate crisis. “There is a historic trend here of poor and Black folks getting less quality land and being in those areas that are more prone to flooding historically having infrastructure that is not up to standard,” Alston says. “Now with climate change, historical wrongs are just being amplified, generation after generation after generation.”

To address some of these risks, W.D. Hill is about to become Durham’s first “resilience hub.” The city received a $297,000 grant from the $550 million Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grant designed to assist states, local governments, and Tribes to reduce energy use, fossil fuel emissions, and improve energy efficiency. W.D. Hill will be installing solar panels and backup battery storage which will allow it to retain power even when the centralized fossil fuel system fails.

Summer Alston, André White, and Neisha Reynolds at W.D. Hill Recreation Center in Hayti.

The community already relies on the facility not only for recreation, but also as a cooling center and place of refuge during frequent bouts of extreme heat and storms. Now W.D. Hill will be energy-self-reliant. The federal funding also inspired a community-led months-long discussion about what “resilience” means for the whole district. The city applied for a $12 million Justice40 grant to support the resulting, “Hayti Reborn” initiative.

In a Hart Research poll for the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters Foundation, registered voters of all affiliations in North Carolina overwhelmingly support solar and wind over fossil fuels and want to rapidly transition off fossil fuels. They identify the urgency of the climate crisis, with Black voters expressing the greatest concern. In a Quinnipiac University poll, North Carolina Democrats place the climate crisis above abortion, health care, and crime, and rank addressing racial inequality second (after preserving democracy) on their most pressing issues facing the nation.

Central Park and Fayetteville Street flooded as a result of Hurricane Helene. To the west, Asheville was without power for weeks, and many areas are still waiting for electricity. Without electricity, water and sewage cannot flow. Across the state, over one million households went without power, including parts of Durham.

Durham, like the rest of the state, primarily depends on electricity powered by highly centralized fossil fuel energy plants that rely on coal and methane gas, followed by nuclear power. A leading cause of electricity outages in extreme weather events is downed or damaged lines and towers carrying power from centralized plants to faraway users. The shorter the distance energy travels the more resilient the system, and the less energy is used. This is why localized distributed renewable energy systems — such as solar panels on the roof — are a solution to a host of fossil-fueled problems.

City officials share a vision of bringing solar panels and community-level microgrids across Durham, building off of a grant from the American Rescue Plan. The state government has received $156 million from the Infrastructure Law’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund for a Solar For All program to fund rooftop and community solar projects in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Across the state, some 90,000 North Carolina households claimed more than $100 million in residential renewable energy credits and $60 million in energy efficiency credits under the IRA in just one year, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

Bobby Jones outside a Duke Energy facility in Goldsboro, North Carolina.

Federal subsidies will help overcome obstacles imposed by Duke Energy, the state’s monopoly power-provider. In what advocates describe as its decade-long battle against solar, among other policies, Duke has made solar more expensive to use by rejecting net-metering.

Bobby Jones, founder and President of Down East Coal Ash Environmental and Social Justice Coalition, wants a 100 percent renewable energy transition in his small city of Goldsboro. Duke’s Goldsboro power plant burned coal from 1951 to 2012, and has continued to store and utilize coal ash waste after it switched to methane gas. Jones has watched loved-ones die from cancers and other illnesses that he attributes to pollution from the plant. He’s working to not only hold Duke accountable, but also halt Duke’s plans to further expand methane gas operations.

“Solar could be such a blessing to my community in a whole lot of ways,” Jones says. “Not only would it put clean energy in our community, [but also] get them fossil fuels out.”

“It’s an all-boats-float situation,” Alston says of the Biden-Harris funding. “Making scarcity less of a thing means” there’s more money to go around to service the entire state.

“When we can deliver on funding, this once in a lifetime funding, we’re able to execute on promises that we’ve made, not promises we’ve made today, promises we made for the past 20 years,” says Neisha Reynolds, Durham’s grant writer. “Then you know that we’ll re-instill people’s faith in the system that’s supposed to be designed to serve them.”

But if the money falls through and they’re unable to deliver, people will disengage even further. “I don’t know how many more hits they will take,” Alston confides.
“We’ve Never Been Asked Before. We’ve Always Been Told.”

Crystal Cavalier-Keck is a member of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. Her family and her Tribe have resided in North Carolina for generations. She lives in the home built by her grandfather in Mebane just North of Durham and surrounded by relatives.

She has repeatedly put her body on the line in protest to protect her land and her people, including showing up outside of the White House in 2022 to shut down roads and block traffic in opposition to the Inflation Reduction Act. Passage of the law required a side deal with Senator Joe Manchin that greenlit the Mountain Valley Pipeline project, which would pass within miles of her home and which she has led opposition to for years. “It was a deal with the devil,” she says.

Crystal Cavalier-Keck and husband Jason Crazy Bear Keck.

Cavalier-Keck founded 7 Directions of Service to “mobilize impacted communities and our allies to protect sacred places and phase out fossil fuels.” She has continued to fight not only against the pipeline, but also the many other faults in the law which include tax breaks for the largest fossil fuel companies to conduct carbon capture and storage, support for destructive extractive projects, and other federal policies that are expanding fossil fuel production. But this has not stopped her from also working to ensure that tribal communities secure benefits.

As a part of a Justice40 hub which includes North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and Southern Environmental Law Center, 7 Directions has already helped seven tribal communities submit their own proposals for support.

Cavalier-Keck describes an entirely unique and empowering process. “Whenever somebody used to come into our community, they would say, ‘This is what’s good for you, this is what will be done.’ We’ve never been asked before. We’ve always been told.”

If Trump takes back the White House, not only will these benefits likely stop flowing, she explains, but she and her allies will instead be forced to confront a rollback of hard-fought victories. She expressed similar fears for the outcome of the state’s gubernatorial race if Mark Robinson were to win.

“Our community would really be at a loss,” Cavalier-Keck says. “Even low-income white communities too. I don’t think these Trump administration people understand what they are proposing, or they do understand, and they just don’t care that it would affect those people too.”

A Trump Win Would Threaten Historic Climate Progress in North Carolina
The Attack

Donald Trump plans to renew his “American Energy Dominance” agenda via a fossil fuel free-for-all on behalf of Big Oil. He will gut solar, wind, and federal regulations that protect our air, water, and climate. He tried to kill the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law while it was being negotiated, and said that he will repeal the Inflation Reduction Act and rescind any “unspent” funds, having asserted that he should have the power to refuse to spend any federal money he considers wasteful. He has threatened to deploy the U.S. military against the “radical left;”congressional Republicans have described many Justice40 recipient organizations, including the Southern Environmental Law Center, in remarkably similar terms.

Project 2025, the conservative policy handbook for a second Trump term, would undo what it calls the “woke” and “racist ‘equity’ agenda of the Biden administration.” Stephen Moore, co-author of those words, also co-wrote Fueling Freedom, which calls fossil fuels the “Master Resource” and details how white men and the federal government can fully unleash them.

Project 2025 would eliminate the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and rescind all funds not already spent by these programs. If the IRA withstands the assault, Project 2025 would end direct funding for nonprofits or community organizations under the law. It would eliminate Justice40, the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, gut the EPA, end climate action, and halt “extreme ‘green’ policies,” including subsidies for renewable energy and green energy jobs.

An analysis by Energy Innovation found that, in contrast to current policies, Project 2025 would increase annual energy costs by nearly $200 per household for North Carolinians in 2030 and more than $360 in 2035. It would also emit an excess of over 21 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in the state in 2035 — equivalent to the emissions from five coal-fired power plants.

“There’s so much on the line” with this election, says Williams, the Durham mayor. Vice President Kamala Harris’ policies are “the solutions that we’re looking for on the ground.”

The alternative, he adds, is just “impossible to imagine.”

Rolling Stone

 

Australia’s forgotten global anarchist

Features, Sep 27th

Jack Andrews was Australia’s leading proponent of communist-anarchism and a key figure in the international anarchist movement

~ Tom Goyens ~

Born in Bendigo in 1865 to London-born parents, John Arthur Andrews grew up in Melbourne, where his father worked as chief clerk for the Victoria Mines and Water Supply Department. As a child, Andrews was frequently bullied at school. In 1879, he enrolled at Scotch College, graduating two years later. After his father died in 1882, Andrews took a job in the same department, earning a good salary. However, he quickly became disillusioned with the work. A budding writer, he once won a prize for a poem celebrating the eight-hour workday.

Andrews’ growing interest in freethought and socialism further distanced him from his bureaucratic life. His dissatisfaction peaked in 1886 when he was fired shortly before Christmas. His physical and mental health deteriorated, and he may have even considered suicide. In early 1887, he joined the Melbourne Anarchist Club, though he was initially sceptical of anarchism. After a period of rest in Dunolly, Andrews returned to the Club as a committed anarchist and soon became a journalist advocating communist-anarchism.

J.A. Andrews | takver.com

By 1889, Andrews was corresponding with several international anarchist publications. A polyglot fluent in languages including Latin and Chinese, he immersed himself in the ideas of Russian revolutionary Peter Kropotkin, whose works appeared in La Révolte. That same year, Andrews published “Communism and Communist-Anarchism” in Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty. He argued that revolution was simply about casting off oppression, not waiting for it to fade away.1 According to historian Bob James, Andrews also contributed to two Portuguese anarchist publications.In 1890, a severe economic downturn plunged Australia into depression, leaving thousands unemployed. Jack Andrews made his way to Sydney, where he joined German-born anarchist and florist Joseph Schellenberg at his farm in Smithfield, on the outskirts of the city. Together, they formed a “Communist Anarchist Group” affiliated with the Australian Socialist League, issuing a manifesto to promote their ideals.2

That August, Andrews sent a report on the maritime strike to Johann Most, editor of Freiheit in New York, which was published in October 1890. Andrews believed Melbourne was on the brink of a general strike and possible revolution, with anarchists playing a key role in educating workers and running soup kitchens for the unemployed. Later, Freiheit published Andrews’ essay, “Anarchismus in Australien,” which he may have translated himself.3 It seemed that the German-Australian anarchists were the only organised game in town. “There is no consolidated party whatever to back us up,” he reported, “except in Adelaide where there is a small group of German Anarchists who contributed £4 [to Andrews’s periodical Reason] and do their best to push on the circulation in that city.”4

By early 1892, Jack Andrews faced severe financial hardship and tramped for months in search of work. Despite his struggles, he remained committed to writing and anarchist agitation. He established a correspondence with historian Max Nettlau, a key figure in documenting global anarchism. Andrews’ letters, written in a candid and personal tone, conveyed the isolation and difficulty of being an anarchist in Australia. “The movement in Australia,” he wrote, “appears more disintegrated than it has ever been.”

For Andrews, staying in touch with comrades, both locally and abroad, was not just a tactical necessity but also a source of psychological support: “if I can keep in active communication with others interested in the movement it will keep me going.”

Through these connections, Andrews had access to a range of foreign anarchist publications, such as El Combate, La Révolte, and Les Temps Nouveaux. In return, he shared Australian papers and pamphlets with Nettlau and other international anarchists, contributing to the broader exchange of ideas. His own writings would soon appear in anarchist publications across Europe and the United States, keeping his ideas in circulation despite the challenges he faced at home.5

The Labor Call (Melbourne), July 9, 1908

In the early 1890s, Jack Andrews, without steady work, continued his anarchist agitation by publishing several short-lived papers such as Reason and Revolt, often produced with minimal resources. He joined the Active Service Brigade in 1893, a radical direct action group for the unemployed, which became a constant thorn in the side of Australian conservatives. Through both mainstream and labour presses, Andrews defended anarchism, contributing polemical articles that challenged the status quo.

In December 1894, Andrews was arrested and charged with seditious libel for his outspoken writings. Convicted the following year, he served five months in jail, during which the authorities confiscated all his papers, pamphlets, and drafts, a significant blow to his efforts.

After his release, Andrews returned to Melbourne and resumed his anarchist work. In the fall of 1895, he began contributing regularly to Les Temps Nouveaux, the newly launched anarchist journal edited by Jean Grave, which succeeded La Révolte. He also became a correspondent for The Firebrand, a prominent communist-anarchist paper published in Portland, Oregon. For two years, Andrews provided detailed and lucid articles on anarchist organization, revolution, property, and communism, as well as reports on the anarchist movement in Australia. In 1897, The Firebrand even offered Andrews a position on its staff, but due to financial constraints, he was unable to afford the voyage to the United States.

Jack Andrews’ correspondence with anarchists across the United States and Europe revealed the existence of a deeply integrated global anarchist network. His involvement in this network was vital in linking Australia’s isolated anarchist movement to the larger global currents of anarchism, despite the practical challenges he faced. These connections facilitated the constant exchange of news, ideas, and materials. Editorial offices of anarchist papers functioned not just as places to produce content but as international clearinghouses, where printed materials from around the world were reviewed, serialized, translated, advertised, or forwarded to other periodicals.

A glimpse into the letter-box section of any anarchist paper showcases the polyglot nature and transnational logistics involved in producing each issue. Language served as a practical tool for gauging the movement’s reach. International anarchist news was often categorized by country, but anarchist publications were typically grouped by language. For instance, the Italian-language section of anarchist media might include papers from the United States, Argentina, Tunisia, and Italy.

Translators were essential in this polyglot network, constantly in demand to bridge linguistic divides. The idea of a centralised translation bureau gained traction among anarchists and was revived in the mid-1890s by Alfred Sanftleben, a German anarchist who operated under the name “Slovak.” From his home in Zürich, Sanftleben established a translation service, placing ads in major anarchist newspapers like Freiheit, The Firebrand, and Les Temps Nouveaux. His “office” became a hub for translating and distributing anarchist books and pamphlets across borders. Andrews made use of this service. In 1896, Sanftleben wrote to him requesting information on the anarchist movement in Australia, along with radical papers. Andrews, fluent in French, sent a report in English to be translated for Les Temps Nouveaux. This report, “Our Movement in Australia,” was first published in May by The Firebrand in English, and a condensed French version appeared in Les Temps Nouveaux that July.

Alfred Sanftleben (1871-1952). Kate Sharpley Library

Despite his undeniable talent as a writer and translator, Andrews struggled financially and never achieved the international prominence of anarchists like Pietro Gori or Peter Kropotkin. He died of tuberculosis on July 26, 1903, in Melbourne. His untimely death — he was thirty-eight — cut short a life dedicated to anarchist ideals, limiting his potential as a global figure within the movement.

The Museum of London chooses a pooping pigeon for its logo – a symbol of duality, defiance and immigration

Philip Howell, Professor of Geography, University of Cambridge
Fri, 23 August 2024 


As the Museum of London relocates from London Wall to the old Smithfield Market site, it has reverted to its old name, the London Museum, and chosen a brand new logo – a pooping pigeon.

The new design features a white porcelain pigeon trailed by a golden “splat”. It’s a choice that the museum’s director Sharon Ament interprets as a metaphor for London: “The pigeon and splat speak to a historic place full of dualities, a place where the grit and the glitter have existed side by side for millennia.”

In a blog post, the museum explains that the pigeon was chosen because it has remained for a thousand years “an impartial and humble observer of London life”, watching over the changing city and ultimately becoming a London icon itself.

Brand identity wise, this is a bold choice. It’s fair to say that it has generated some bafflement: a few have called the choice crude, embarrassing and a waste of money. Some of these reactions clearly consider the pigeon not just irrelevant and insignificant, but also repellent.

This is all very understandable. Arguably our least favourite feathered friend (besides, perhaps, the antisocial seagull), the urban pigeon has long been established in the UK as a public nuisance.

Pigeon excrement is the obvious problem, given that a single pigeon drops around 11kg of excrement per year. A flock of 80 pigeons (and pigeons do like to congregate) will create nearly a tonne of droppings in the same period. Buildings and public sculptures suffer a loss of dignity when caked with pigeon poo. But more importantly, diseases associated with pigeon droppings include the fungal lung infections cryptococcosis and histoplasmosis, and the infectious disease psittacosis, tellingly known as ornithosis.

So it is no surprise that pigeons have come to be regarded worldwide as thoroughly unwelcome pests – “rats with wings” as coined by New York City Parks commissioner, Thomas Hoving in the 1960s.

In cities all over the world, pigeons have been actively discouraged by spikes, netting and other low-cost deterrents that act as “defensive” or (perhaps more honestly) “hostile” architecture. The message is clear: pigeons aren’t welcome here.

Read more: Why you should have more sympathy for seagulls – and how to stop them stealing your chips

PR for pigeons

The war on pigeons feels like hubris, however. Pigeons continue to find places to roost, even on gleaming new developments. Their seagull rivals come to snack on the corpses of pigeons trapped in anti-bird netting. Crows and magpies have learnt to make nests from anti-bird spikes. Nature finds a way, even in cities designed to deter it.

There is a case to be made for appreciating the ingenuity not just of clever corvids and crafty gulls, but the resilience and opportunism of the urban pigeon too. As the Museum of London points out, the pigeon has been around for a long time, the descendant of domesticated doves imported after the Norman Conquest. Escaping from dovecotes, these birds followed their rock dove instincts, but swapped sea cliffs for the city’s eaves, lintels and architraves.

They are indeed an admirable example of the urban wildlife that nature enthusiasts and urban ecologists have begun to celebrate. As Ament rightly points out: “We share our city with others, including millions of animals. Pigeons are all over London and so are we.”

Implicit in the anti-pigeon line is the fact that the pigeon is, like many people, too easily portrayed as out of place. Urban pigeons are, for the sociologist Colin Jerolmack: “explicit trespassers on spaces that we’ve decided are supposed to be for humans only”. That makes them vulnerable, but in the same ways that some kinds of people become vulnerable.

It has been recognised that antipathy towards urban animals turns alarmingly quickly into mistreatment of human beings, such as rough sleepers who suffer from the use of “defensive architecture” to police them out of city centres: a decent society wouldn’t treat people as pests.

More troubling still is the crackdown on unwanted migrants. I have written elsewhere that the histories of pigeons have become strangely entangled with the histories of Caribbean migration to London and the UK. There is an uncomfortable parallel between the fortunes of pigeons and people, both once welcomed and even celebrated, but increasingly vilified, all the way up to the creation of “hostile environments”. In the words of blogger Tim Hamlett, pigeons are “another group of immigrants we don’t like”.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Colombian artist Iván Argote has been commissioned to install a 16ft tall hyperrealistic sculpture of a pigeon on New York’s High Line public park. The point of this gigantic pigeon perched unnervingly above Manhattan’s west side? Argote is keen to remind us that we are all in some sense immigrants, and we shouldn’t be too quick to say who gets to stay, and who gets to be deported (or worse).

As High Line art director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani puts it: “It’s a sculpture that talks about many other quite profound issues such as the relationship between the human world and the animal world, and ideas of immigration and who has the right to be the guest in New York city.”

I am all in favour of the London Museum and its pooping pigeon, then. The controversial rebrand directs our attention to the long history of London, the stories of its many different communities and their routes to the capital, but also to the contribution of its less loved residents, even the ones with wings. These humble birds could do with a PR boost. In the appealing words of a friend to pigeons in my hometown of Nottingham: “Every dove deserves love.”


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Philip Howell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

How Donald Trump Undermined the Health and Safety of American Workers

by Lawrence Wittner / August 15th, 2024

During his four years as President of the United States, Donald Trump was remarkably active and often successful in sabotaging the health and safety of the nation’s workers.

Trump, as the AFL-CIO noted, targeted Medicare and Medicaid for $1 trillion in funding cuts, eroded the Affordable Care Act (thereby increasing the number of Americans lacking health insurance coverage by 7 million), and “made workplaces more dangerous by rolling back critical federal safety regulations.”  Trump’s administration not only refused to publicly disclose fatality and injury data reported to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but slashed the number of federal workplace safety inspectors and inspections to the lowest level in that agency’s 48-year history.  According to one estimate, with these depleted numbers, it would take 165 years to inspect every worksite in the United States.

Furthermore, the administration repealed rules requiring employers to keep and report accurate injury records, proposed eliminating the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, and cut workplace safety research and training programs.  The Trump administration also proposed revoking child labor protections, weakened the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s enforcement of mine safety, and reversed a ban on chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide that causes acute reactions among farmworkers and neurological damage to children.

In April 2019, the Trump Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service put into place a rule to allow an unlimited increase in the line speeds for hog slaughter.  In an industry already notorious for endangering workers―with more than 4,700 occupational injuries and more than 2,700 occupational illnesses per year―this was a sure-fire recipe for undercutting worker safety.  Even so, the Trump administration completely ignored the impact on workers’ safety and health before issuing the rule.

Downplaying workplace hazards, the administration scrapped new rules on styrene, combustible dust, infectious diseases, and silica dust―a mineral that can cause silicosis, an incurable and often fatal lung disease carrying an increased risk of lung cancer.  Eager to reduce business expenditures, it also canceled a requirement for training shipyard and construction workers to avoid exposure to beryllium, a known carcinogen.  In addition, the administration delayed and proposed a rollback of the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical risk management rule, thus increasing health dangers for workers, the public, and first responders.

The Trump administration’s callous disregard for the health and safety of workers became particularly apparent during 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic swept through American workplaces.  Trump refused to issue binding rules requiring businesses to institute safety measures to protect nurses, bus drivers, meatpacking and poultry workers, and other particularly vulnerable workers.  Quite the contrary, in April 2020 Trump issued an executive order to require the nation’s meat production plants to stay open.  This fact, plus an April 2020 authorization by Trump’s Department of Agriculture for 15 large poultry plants to increase their line speed, led by September to the sickness of more than 40,000 meat and poultry workers and to the deaths of hundreds.

Other groups of workers were also hard-hit by the absence of key Trump administration health and safety measures during the pandemic, including its failure to use the Defense Production Act to expand production of personal protective equipment for endangered workers. According to National Nurses United, by September 2020 more than 250,000 health care workers had come down with the Covid-19 virus and at least 1,700 of them had died from it.  In addition, according to Purdue University’s Food and Agriculture Vulnerability Index, 147,000 agricultural workers had contracted Covid.

By that fall, although more than a thousand meatpacking, food-processing, and farming facilities had reported cases of Covid-19, Trump’s OSHA had managed to cite only two of them for violations of health and safety regulations.  JBS (the biggest meat-processing company in the world, with annual revenues of over $51 billion) was ordered to pay a fine of just $15,615, while Smithfield (owned by the WH Group, the largest pork company in the world, with more than $25 billion in annual revenue) was ordered to pay only $13,494 (about $10 per worker sick with Covid).  Both companies refused to pay the fines.  Meanwhile, Trump’s OSHA remained ineffective and rudderless, with an acting director yet to be named.

Even in the ostensibly “good” years before the onset of the pandemic, the absence of adequate health and safety measures contributed to an appalling number of work-related deaths in the United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the annual number of worker deaths on the job rose between 2016 (the last year of the Obama administration) and 2019 (the last pre-Covid year of the Trump administration) to 5,333.  In addition, an estimated 95,000 American workers died in 2019 from occupational diseases.

Moreover, occupational deaths during the Trump era were dwarfed by occupational injuries and illnesses.  As the AFL-CIO reported:  “In 2019, nearly 3.5 million workers across all industries, including state and local government, had work-related injuries and illnesses that were reported by employers.”  Furthermore, added the union federation, “due to limitations in the current injury reporting system and widespread underreporting of workplace injuries, this number understates the problem.  The true toll is estimated to be two to three times greater—or 7.0 million to 10.5 million injuries and illnesses a year.”

The grim fate of millions of American workers―crushed by dangerous machinery, riddled with carcinogenic chemicals, or gasping their last breaths with Covid-19―apparently did not matter enough to Donald Trump, as President, to safeguard their health and safety.  But it might be of greater concern to Americans when they go to the polls this November.Facebook

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Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press). Read other articles by Lawrence, or visit Lawrence's website.

Anti-China Missouri candidate campaigning on bus owned by lobbyist of Chinese pork producer

Rudi Keller, Missouri Independent
July 21, 2024 

Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe exits his campaign bus in Cuba, Missouri, on July 11 (Jason Hancock/Missouri Independent).

In his campaign for governor, Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe has promised Republican voters he will stop China “from buying up our farmland.”

He’s doing so while traveling the state in a bus owned by Jewell Patek, a former legislator who is the only lobbyist employed by the only Chinese business that owns a significant chunk of agricultural land in the state.

The Republican primary for governor has nine candidates listed on the ballot, with three – Kehoe, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and state Sen. Bill Eigel – running full-scale campaigns. The issue of foreign land ownership, especially by China, has been one of the major issues.

State senator throws first punches of 2024 Missouri governor’s campaign

Eigel made it the subject of his first advertisement of the campaign, and Ashcroft has backed legislation to bar China and other hostile nations from owning farmland and enlisted his father, former Gov. John Ashcroft, to deliver the message.

The cost of using Patek’s bus isn’t listed among the expenses reported in Kehoe’s latest campaign finance report. Instead, his campaign spokeswoman Gabriella Picard said the bus cost is covered by a June 4 entry showing Kehoe himself made a $25,000 “in-kind” donation.

The bus, she wrote in an email to The Independent, was “personally leased” by Kehoe.

The exterior wrap on the bus, with campaign messages and a larger-than-life photo of the candidate and his wife Claudia, is reported among the campaign’s expenses. It cost $15,591 at Impact Signs Awnings Wraps Inc. in Sedalia.

“The Kehoes personally didn’t want to use the campaign funds for a bus,” Picard said in an interview. “The reason that it was reported as an in-kind donation by Mike Kehoe is for that reason, because we just didn’t want to use money that people have donated for a bus. And he wanted to personally make that contribution himself.”

Charter bus rental can cost $1,200 to $1,700 a day plus mileage, depending on the size and interior amenities. The bus owned by Patek is a 2000 model, according to records in the Moniteau County Collector’s office, and is assessed at the nominal value of $100.

Picard would not say whether the reported amount is how much Kehoe is paying Patek for use of the bus.

“All fuel and associated costs with the bus tour are being covered by the campaign,” she said in a message Saturday. “The lease for the bus was negotiated between Mike Kehoe and the owner. Everything has been reported to the MEC as required.”

Since 2007, Patek has lobbied for Smithfield Foods, which in 2013 was acquired by Shuanghui International, now known as WH Group, China’s largest pork producer. Smithfield operates a facility once known as Premium Standard Farms on more than 40,000 acres near Princeton in northern Missouri.

Patek is Smithfield’s only lobbyist but not Patek’s only client. Patek became a lobbyist in 2003 and his Missouri Ethics Commission filings list 44 other clients, including utility providers Evergy and Spire, the Heavy Constructors Association of Kansas City and Cheyenne International, a discount cigarette manufacturer.

Patek did not return a call seeking comment.

Prior to 2013, Missouri law banned foreign ownership of agricultural land. To accommodate the sale of Smithfield, lawmakers that year made it legal for up to 1% of the state’s farmland to be foreign owned.

Kehoe, a member of the Senate at the time, voted for the bill and to override a veto by then-Gov. Jay Nixon.

In his veto message, Nixon wrote that the allowance for 1% foreign ownership was never debated until it was inserted into the legislation at the last minute “without the benefit of a hearing that would have allowed for public testimony” and over the objections of agricultural groups.

Criticism of the legislation didn’t take long to develop – backers of Josh Hawley’s campaign for attorney general broadcast an ad in 2016 with actors speaking Chinese attacking his Republican primary opponent, then-state Sen. Kurt Schaefer, for backing the legislation.

Schaefer, of Columbia, this year is seeking the Republican nomination for Congress in the 3rd District.

Despite growing bipartisan support for repeal or revisions to the 2013 legislation – 13 bills altering the 1% allowance were introduced by Republicans and Democrats this year alone – nothing has passed to the governor’s desk.

Eigel won Senate approval this year of an amendment barring foreign ownership of Missouri farmland within 500 miles of a military base, but it was stripped out before the bill was sent to Gov. Mike Parson.

In January, Parson issued an executive order banning land purchases by “foreign adversaries” within 10 miles of “critical military facilities.”

In an interview earlier this month with The Independent, Kehoe said he doesn’t believe “an enemy of our country should own anything here.”

He defended his 2013 vote, saying “you’re talking about very different circumstances in the relationship the U.S. had with other countries than today.”

“That happened 11 years ago,” he said. “Times have changed, and so we would move forward with the position that I have very clearly stated that I do not want any enemy of this country owning anything.”

Using a bus owned by Smithfield’s lobbyist – and obscuring that fact by calling it a donation from Kehoe – drew fire from Eigel and Ashcroft’s campaigns, who have both worked to portray him as too close to interest groups.


“China has owned Kehoe for a long time, and of course they’ll own him as governor, too,” said Sophia Shore, campaign manager for Eigel. “He voted four times to sell Missouri to the Chinese; everything that has followed is completely unsurprising.”

The bus is symbolic of Kehoe’s whole campaign, said Jason Roe, an adviser to Ashcroft.

“Kehoe has hundreds of lobbyists supporting his campaign,” Roe said. “Any lobbyist could subsidize the bus for him, but this one is pretty interesting.”

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on Facebook and X.

We’re in a Class War. Jane McAlevey Actually Acted Like It.

By Alex N. Press

July 9, 2024

Source: Jacobin


Image by Alice Attie, Creative Commons 4.0

Before I ever met Jane McAlevey, I received a package from her in the mail. In addition to a copy of Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, her first book (written with Bob Ostertag), it contained instant coffee and a few other items that one could imagine packing into a rucksack while on the move.

I’d just reviewed A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, the Fight for Democracy, her then latest book. My piece opened with an anecdote about Hosea Hudson, a legendary labor organizer and black Alabama communist in the 1930s, a time when being either of those things put one’s life at risk. Of his rap to new recruits, Hudson said, “We had [to] tell people — when you join, it’s just like the army, but it’s not the army of the bosses, it’s the army of the working class.” I likened Jane to a drill instructor, the book an army manual. If there were any doubt as to whether the comparison was apt, Jane’s care package confirmed it.

We are always in a class war, but sometimes it felt like Jane was one of the few people who acted like it. Urgent, direct, no bullshit: that was Jane, the master organizer and negotiator and communicator and strategist. And she was like this with everyone in her orbit: once you were in, you were to be cared for, looked after, and, fundamentally, organized by her — toward the end of keeping up your strength to not only wage class struggles, but to win (one of her favorite words). Her father was a World War II fighter pilot and progressive politician; the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

Jane devoted her life to union organizing, and then to writing about it. But the writing was organizing too, a means of multiplying herself, allowing the lessons to reach into countless nooks and crannies across the economy and globe. Bay Area factory workers, striking teachers from West Virginia to Los Angeles, Starbucks baristas, and Amazon warehouse workers have all mentioned her work to me as an inspiration. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that many workers treat Jane’s writing like a kind of Bible, but that would imply a reverence that the substance itself refutes. As Jane argued again and again, workers already have the power to change the world, and the organizer’s role is to show them that: to listen, to identify what they cannot stand, and to teach them the skills to channel their power effectively in order to wrest control from the bosses — to fight and win.
Win, Win, Win, Win, Win

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the Gilded Age, her 2016 book, has played a role in a dizzying number of organizing drives and strikes across the country. It began as her late-in-life sociology PhD dissertation at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center (advised by social movements scholar Frances Fox Piven, whose own career-long emphasis on the importance of “ordinary people” plays a major role in McAlevey’s book). Each chapter is a case study: “The Power to Win Is in the Community, Not the Boardroom,” “Nursing Home Unions: Class Snuggle vs. Class Struggle,” “Chicago Teachers: Building a Resilient Union,” “Smithfield Foods: A Huge Success You’ve Hardly Heard About,” and “Make the Road New York.” The conclusion’s title is classic Jane: “Pretend Power vs. Actual Power.“

Assessing the reasons for the wins and losses in each case, Jane hammers on the distinction between mobilizing (getting people out for a one-off rally or action) and advocacy (which dispenses with ordinary people entirely) versus the deep organizing that was her everything, the process by which power is transferred “from the elite to the majority.”

In her view, the Left and progressives’ decades-long decline is partially explained by a shift away from deep organizing in favor of shallow mobilizing and advocacy. The book also takes the reader through power-structure analysis, a tool Jane used time and again in building campaigns that homed in on the enemy’s weak points in order to win.

No Shortcuts also lays out a clear emphasis on organic leaders rather than activists — a distinction of critical importance for budding organizers, many of whom fall into the latter category. In a workplace, you shouldn’t focus on the people who already agree with you, but rather those who are trusted and respected by their coworkers. It’s the organizer’s job to bring them (and their networks) into a campaign, to teach them the skills they need to win, then to test the strength of the majority being assembled again and again (what Jane termed “structure tests”). This is how one builds a supermajority at an employer, a battle-ready army that can withstand the boss’s inevitable attacks.

As she writes,


Which key individual worker can sway exactly whom else — by name — and why? How strong is the support he or she has among exactly how many coworkers, and how do the organizers know this to be true? The ability to correctly answer these and many other related questions — Who does each worker know outside work? Why? How? How well? How can the worker reach and influence them? — will be the lifeblood of successful strikes in the new millennium.

The same criterion applies beyond the workplace. It’s the leaders in your community, your neighborhood, your religious or social organization, the ones who have earned the respect of those around them, who are your target if you hope to build a mass base for your cause that has staying power.

McAlevey didn’t invent these principles, but she popularized them among broad swathes of the labor movement and the Left, in large part through No Shortcuts. Ever since its publication, characterizing a strategy as a “shortcut” is about as damning a condemnation within the labor movement as you can make.

Raising Expectations, Jane’s first book, is a memoir, but no less instructive for it. The title is Jane’s phrase for what she believed organizing is about at its core. To organize is to make a worker demand more


about what people should expect from their jobs; the quality of life they should aspire to; how they ought to be treated when they are old; and what they should be able to offer their children. About what they have a right to expect from their employer, their government, their community, and their unions. Expectations about what they themselves are capable of, about the power they could exercise if they worked together, and what they might use that collective power to accomplish. Ultimately, expectations about where they will find meaning in their lives, and the kinds of relationships they can build with those around them.

Jane called this expansive vision “whole-worker organizing,” an approach that draws on a worker’s entire self, rather than bracketing their lives outside and beyond the workplace. A worker’s relationships inside the workplace are the foundation for organizing: the means by which they can move others to action, the trust needed for workers to take on the risks that come with acting collectively, the faith and confidence such action requires.

But Jane saw their ties off the job as both another resource and a place they could organize in turn upon gaining workplace-organizing skills. Not only could a worker enlist their religious institution, their community organization, or their social clubs to strengthen a campaign, but a good organizer could expand the expectations a worker brings to the other areas of their lives. When unions failed to engage workers in their entirety, she was unrelenting in her criticism.

She rejected the dichotomy of workplace and union versus community and community organization, arguing instead for “bringing community organizing techniques right into the shop floor while moving labor organizing out into the community.” Everything was a feedback loop with Jane: power begets power, wins beget wins, community begets community; multiplication not division, a sense of self-interest that continually broadens. You start with your on-the-job interest and, if the organizer does her job right, you end with the entire community.
Always War Footing

Raising Expectations is about how workers can organize and win, but it’s also a record of the sexism that pervades the labor movement. (Jane: “If I discussed every instance when [sexism] had a negative impact on the work I was trying to do, there would be no room to talk about anything else.”) In this respect, too, Jane was a pioneer: there are lots of female union leaders today, but the culture remains hostile to women, and especially ones like Jane who don’t put up with such disrespect. As she told me when we first met, gin and tonic in hand: “Don’t worry about all the bullshit you’ll get from men in the movement. Fuck ’em.” It felt like I was being inducted into a secret sisterhood.

Indeed, the labor movement’s shortcomings almost led Jane to give up on it. A lifelong environmentalist (her later decades were split between a rent-controlled apartment in New York and a leafy, spartan outpost in the Bay Area, and she was prone to going off the grid to ride horses), college-aged Jane saw the labor movement opposing “every environmental principle I believed in.”

At SUNY-Buffalo, she joined the student association, becoming its president. It was there that she first gained organizing skills. After a foray around Central America, including work on a construction brigade in Nicaragua at the height of the Contra War, she devoted herself to environmental work — though her time in Central America added further marks against unions. It was the 1980s, and the AFL-CIO was implicated in backing death squads in Latin America via the American Institute for Free Labor Development, its international arm.

As she wrote of that period, “The unionists I was working with, who were already deeply engaged in a battle with a capitalist class of the most brutal and violent nature, now also had to deal with killer thugs funded by the unions of my country.” It made an impression on Jane, planting the seeds of a lifelong devotion to making the labor movement, that pain in the ass that is our only hope, better.

Jane’s time in the environmental justice movement connected her with the storied Highlander Research and Education Center, which played a central role in the civil rights movement, hosting and training everyone from Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King Jr to John Lewis and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) throughout the 1950s. By the time Jane was in her twenties, she was working at the center to develop its globalization program, traveling the globe to fight toxins that don’t respect borders. She referred to Highlander as a “creative hothouse,” with her subsequent work in unions traceable to the hours she spent browsing the center’s archives of educational materials from its era as the training and education arm of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

As she told my colleague Micah Uetricht in a long interview last year,


I was set up in the library [of Highlander], because there was no office space for me. I was in my mid-twenties. I started to go into the archives, and that was the first time I saw organizing manuals from the CIO and realized, “Oh my God, it’s always been the labor movement in the civil rights movement. These have always been inseparable movements.

She was recruited into the AFL-CIO in the late ’90s, heading up the experimental Stamford Organizing Project, which focused on cab drivers, city clerks, janitors, and nursing home aides, exerting influence through Stamford’s churches — “Note to labor: workers relate more to their faith than to their job, and fear God more than they fear the boss,” Jane wrote of the campaign — and organizing workers around a range of issues beyond the workplace, including affordable housing.

After Stamford, Jane became the national deputy director for strategic campaigns in the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) health care division. In 2004, she was appointed SEIU Nevada’s executive director and chief negotiator, where she began leading open-bargaining sessions in which hundreds of workers would attend negotiations, seeing the boss’s tactics for themselves and getting a hands-on training in negotiations in the process. Her unwillingness to abide by what she characterized as undemocratic orders from higher up in the union hierarchy put her at odds with SEIU leadership, but it took a 2008 ovarian cancer diagnosis to put a pause on her organizing activities. She used the time off to write Raising Expectations.

As the pandemic created one crisis after another for the working class, Jane designed an international organizing training program in conjunction with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, an almost industrial-scale workshop to train groups of workers around the globe. At the time of her death, she had trained some twenty-five thousand people through the program, a remarkable legacy.

No matter what her schedule, Jane somehow always found time for workers. When the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) sought help following their unlikely victory at JFK8 in Staten Island, Jane squeezed in intensive trainings with founding members. When the New Yorker, a shop in my union local, was organizing toward a strike, I received an email informing me that Jane McAlevey would be leading a training.

Her PhD from CUNY led to a postdoc from Harvard Law School, then a position as a senior policy fellow in her beloved Bay Area, at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. There she continued to teach unions and community organizations the fundamentals of organizing and winning (and seemed to never miss a Golden State Warriors game; if Jane had ever held a time-management training, I’d have been the first to register).

She kept writing through all of it, offering a real-time first draft of the history of working-class struggle in the United States. She had a column with Jacobin and was the Nation’s “strikes correspondent” (an enviable title). Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations, a book on democratizing union negotiations, written with Abby Lawlor, was published last year.

Her final piece before announcing that she would be pausing her work as she entered hospice care is titled “Enjoy Labor’s Tailwinds — but Don’t Forget to Keep Rowing!” It concludes: “Given the odds against workers, all victories are worth celebrating, but we can’t afford to rest until we’ve seen those wins codified in a union contract — enforced by an organization that keeps going toe-to-toe with the bosses, the union busters, and the political elites. Nothing else will do it.” War footing, always.
“They Thought I Would Be Dead a Few Weeks Ago”

I loved this about Jane, as did countless other people, as evidenced by the flood of testimonies on social media from workers around the world as to how her work changed their lives. To be committed, a soldier in struggle, is worth honoring, yet it was her singular personality — a loud, polarizing, unmistakable individuality and pride — that really set her apart. Jane devoted her life to collective action, but she never forgot that collectives are composed of people, and every person is a world unto themselves. She modeled that: living off the grid in the Bay Area, disappearing to ride horses in Mexico, taking pride in her accomplishments, extending herself beyond all conceivable measures to mentor so many of us. Leave the world better than it was when you arrived and leave many more organizers in your place when you go.

“They thought I would be dead a few weeks ago,” Jane said on Democracy Now! in late April, shortly after announcing that she had entered home hospice care, having exhausted treatment and clinical trial drugs for the multiple myeloma cancer she had been battling since 2021. Ever with her eye on the prize, she was on the show to talk about the United Auto Workers’ earth-shattering win at Volkswagen’s auto plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “I’m out again. I’m riding my bike. I’m on your show. And I’m going to fight until the last dying minute, because that’s what American workers deserve.”

It’s an ethos in the labor movement to never say “thank you,” as it implies one did something for you, rather than the truth, that we speak up and take risks and act for ourselves. So I won’t say that. Instead, I’ll leave it with what Jane herself wrote in finally, reluctantly, announcing that she had found one fight that she could not win: “I have loved being in this world with you.” We loved it, too, Jane, and we’ll fight like hell to make it every bit as good as you knew it could be.