Volcanic tremor and deformation at Kīlauea

by Kate Wheeling , American Geophysical Union

A view of Kīlauea’s summit lava lake. The lava lake is contained within a crater, which is set within the larger Halema‘uma‘u Crater. New research aims to understand the activity that led to the eruption in 2018 in Kīlauea’s lower East Rift Zone. Credit: USGS

Kīlauea in Hawaii is the best-monitored volcano in the world. The 2018 eruption was the largest in some 200 years, providing researchers with a plethora of new data to understand the volcano's plumbing and behavior. Two new studies dig into data on volcanic tremor and deformation to better characterize the events leading up to and following the 2018 eruption.

In one study, Soubestre et al. used data from a permanent seismic network and tiltmeter located at Kīlauea's summit and derived models of tremor source processes to examine how volcanic tremors related to the disappearance of a lava lake and subsidence in Halema'uma'u Crater at the beginning and throughout the 2018 eruption. Here the authors used a seismic network covariance matrix approach to enhance coherent signals and cut out noise to detect and locate the volcanic tremor sources.

The team identified three previously unidentified tremor sources, including long-period tremor during the period preceding the eruption associated with radiation from a shallow hydrothermal system on the southwest flank of Halema'uma'u Crater. The team picked up on two sets of gliding tremor in early and late May. Models show that the first set was linked to the intrusion of a rock piston into the hydrothermal system and the second was linked to changes in the gas content of magma within a dike below the crater affected by a dozen collapse events.

The second study focused on the period following the 2018 eruption. Here Wang et al. used GPS and interferometric synthetic aperture radar data to examine deformation around the caldera associated with the volcano's known reservoirs—the shallow Halema'uma'u reservoir (HMM) and the deeper South Caldera reservoir (SC)—after the eruption ended in August of 2018. They documented inflation on the northwestern side of the caldera and deflation on the southeastern side of the caldera, indicating that the summit magma chambers are hydraulically distinct. The concurrent East Rift Zone (ERZ) inflation indicated dynamic magma transfer between the summit and the ERZ.

The authors presented a new physics-based model that uses differential equations to describe reservoir pressure and magma flux between the volcano's reservoirs to simulate potential magmatic pathways of connectivity between the reservoirs and the ERZ. They used a dynamic inversion of the postcollapse GPS time series of surface displacement to estimate the conductivity of potential magmatic pathways.

The team found that the primary connective pathway in the postcollapse period that best fits the GPS data is a shallow connection between the HMM and the ERZ. The study doesn't rule out a direct pathway between the SC and ERZ reservoirs but suggests that if it exists, it was significantly less active over the study period.

More information: Jean Soubestre et al, Sources of Volcanic Tremor Associated With the Summit Caldera Collapse During the 2018 East Rift Eruption of Kīlauea Volcano, Hawai'i, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth (2021). DOI: 10.1029/2020JB021572

Taiyi Wang et al, Post‐2018 Caldera Collapse Re‐Inflation Uniquely Constrains Kīlauea's Magmatic System, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth (2021). DOI: 10.1029/2021JB021803

Journal information: Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 

Provided by American Geophysical Union 

This story is republished courtesy of Eos, hosted by the American Geophysical Union. Read the original story here.

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Anatomy of an Anti-Union Meeting


How No Evil Foods, a plant-based meat company, squashed a union drive

BY DAVID DAYEN

AUGUST 2, 2021

This article appears in the July/August 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. 

Mike Woliansky began to speak, in a practiced, rehearsed fashion that most resembled the closing argument from a prosecutor. Woliansky is the CEO of No Evil Foods, a plant-based meat company that brands itself as strongly left-wing. Its product names include the vegan chicken “Comrade Cluck” and vegan chorizo “El Zapatista,” though when advocates of the Free and Sovereign State of Chiapas got wind of that name, they were furious, and the company changed it to “El Capitan.”

But on this day, February 11, 2020, at the company’s production plant in Weaverville, North Carolina, Woliansky wasn’t talking about the importance of veganism for climate protection, or the need to seize the means of production.

He was talking about quarterly earnings.

“We are nowhere near close to being profitable yet,” Woliansky said, pointing to a chart. He explained that while demand for plant-based foods had soared, and while No Evil products had jumped from 1,400 to 5,500 stores in a little over a year, “it takes a lot of money to launch and grow a business … and at this point that money doesn’t come from sales, it comes from investors who believe in our product.” The balance sheet showed consistent projected losses at about $200,000 a month. That was the plan, to spend what was necessary to build scale. The only thing that could get in the way, he explained to the workforce at the mandatory meeting, was if they voted to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).

“It’s a very real risk that having a union at No Evil Foods will greatly impact our ability to continue raising capital,” Woliansky intoned, the self-described leftist singing off the song sheet of cold-eyed capitalism. “I had one of our current investors say this week, ‘I’ve seen hundreds of companies come across my desk, and I have never seen an investment in a unionized startup … if I was looking at this business for the first time, I would run the other way.’”

It was a devilishly clever closing argument for what was a brutal, coordinated campaign against the union drive. Woliansky’s hands were clean; the threat didn’t come from management, but from the investors. They would bring down the company if workers tried to assert their collective rights. “Please understand that I have no control over what investors will do,” Woliansky stressed. He said that unionization would be seen by investors as a “vote of no confidence” in leadership. He could be deposed, with a new CEO brought in “to run this business in a very different way.” Investors might simply pull their money, or they would demand that management re-evaluate pay, benefits, health coverage, everything. Workers could lose what little they had.

“If you’re still thinking about voting to bring the UFCW to No Evil Foods, I’m asking you to step back, give us a chance to be successful by voting no,” Woliansky concluded. “You can always bring the union back in a year for another vote. But you’ll never know what we could have done and achieved together if you do it now.”

The room erupted in applause.

Former workers at No Evil Foods have described this as the “scorched earth speech.” Given two days before the election, they said it altered the dynamic from one where pro-union leaders thought they had a good shot to win, to one where it became pretty clear they would lose. “That was the biggest turning point of the whole thing,” said Jon Reynolds, a production worker and one of the key organizers. “Any people on the fence were hopping off. It was like a slow-motion car crash.”

Two days later, workers would vote 43-15 against going union.

THE SPEECH WAS THE LAST and perhaps the most nakedly direct of a series of captive-audience meetings held for No Evil Foods employees in the run-up to the union vote. Across America, meetings like this have been routine for decades; union organizers are excluded, of course, but employees are required to attend. They’re part of the playbook that union-busting consultants hand to companies looking to fight collective-bargaining efforts. No Evil Foods had the assistance of Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, a management-side labor law firm that runs union avoidance campaigns. (The day of the election, one of Constangy’s lawyers, Leigh Tyson, was walking around the vegan meat facility with a leather handbag, two workers told me.)

They may be routine, but it’s hard to truly gauge just what goes on inside these private meetings. We can imagine the arguments made about union corruption, threats to businesses, and the uncertain relationship between workers and management. But it’s quite different to actually hear bosses go on for hours, day after day, about the scourge of unions. The cumulative nature of the messaging can only be weighed if you hear it.

And thanks to workers at No Evil Foods, we can.

Snippets of audio of the anti-union meetings have floated around in left media circles since the demise of the union drive. Vice, Jacobin, The Appeal, and the Dixieland of the Proletariat podcast have reported on them. Video of one entire meeting was put on the internet. No Evil Foods waged an aggressive campaign to get any recordings scrubbed, including filing takedown requests claiming that the company held a copyright on the speeches made, and even impersonating a former employee at the plant in making some of those requests. They failed, because North Carolina is a one-party consent state, making the recordings legal, and making reporting on them fair use.

The Prospect has exclusively obtained over five hours of recordings of nearly all the meetings held for workers at the plant in January and February 2020. In total, they paint an important picture of how companies, armed with that union-busting playbook, commit psychological warfare on their employees to turn them against collective bargaining.

Under the guise of voter education, unions were depicted as corrupt, money-grubbing businesses that would neglect workers and tear companies apart. Workers were told that their bid for collective bargaining could lead to cuts to pay and benefits; that they could be dragged before kangaroo courts and fined heavily for breaking union rules; that at a company like No Evil Foods, they would usher in a culture starkly at odds with progressive values and social justice. Most of all, employees were told that the union would upend a successful startup business, and get in the way of the team spirit and mutual trust that made No Evil Foods great.


No Evil Foods CEO Mike Woliansky addresses workers at the company’s first anti-union meeting.

That last argument is what all the other arguments funnel into, a narrative honed over decades. “The actual message is that there are not two parties to labor relations, bosses and workers,” said Bob Muehlenkamp, a former organizing director for SEIU 1199 and the Teamsters, and author of the introduction to a forthcoming new edition of Confessions of a Union Buster, the 1993 Martin Jay Levitt autobiography. “There’s the employer and the employees and they’re the happy family. And something called the union, which is the outside, carnivorous, voracious, communist, violent third party … We’re here together and there’s this thing coming from the outside to divide us.”

There’s a reason these meetings aren’t broadcast, and a reason why No Evil Foods wanted them suppressed. At a time when workers attempting to unionize are under constant pressure—see the tactics used in the campaign to organize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama—union adversaries would rather keep their secrets under wraps. But it’s worth demystifying their methods, in the interest of, as any manager speaking at an anti-union meeting would tell you, keeping workers fully informed.

“Unions Are Big Business”

“We’re investing in your education about unions because we believe that it’s important to your future,” said Sadrah Schadel, one of No Evil Foods’ two co-founders, in her speech (she was one of four management-level speakers in the recordings; the others were co-founder and CEO Mike Woliansky, plant manager Becky Heinen, and vice president of engineering Mark McPeak). The meetings were pitched as information sessions, and speakers stressed repeatedly that, because unionization is such a big financial decision for workers and their families, the company was taking the time to make them knowledgeable voters. And workers did need more knowledge; there was little understanding of what unions were all about among the staff, according to workers I talked to.

Critical to management’s strategy was preempting any thoughts that No Evil Foods was peddling anti-union propaganda. McPeak repeatedly interrupted himself to say that everything being presented came from public sources, like the National Labor Relations Board website, the UFCW constitution, and the North Carolina Local 1208 bylaws, handbooks, tax filings, and news reports. “If you don’t believe me that’s fine,” McPeak says at one point. “I’ve got kids, they don’t believe anything I say … [but] it’s in here, it’s all in here.”

Furthering the pose of objectivity, management would occasionally point out the good in unions. McPeak noted several times that he was previously in the Teamsters, and that unions “make sense” for some companies. Schadel said unions “helped workers whose voices have been ignored by corporate giants.” But those moments were rare. The predominant assessment about unions was unequivocal. “Just like No Evil, it’s a business,” McPeak said. “Call it this, call it that, it’s a business, period … They’re in the business of negotiating labor contracts.”

Becky Heinen spent much of her speech running through the UFCW’s 2019 tax statement. She highlighted the $222 million brought in from dues paid by its 1.2 million members. That’s the union’s main revenue source, and to No Evil Foods managers, all that the union cares about. A lot of stress was placed on how hard it is to get out of paying dues. At one point, McPeak rattled off a series of unfair labor practices filed against the union over a number of years, repeating several times that “they won’t let them resign or stop paying dues.” Heinen compared dues to “a shitty gym membership you want to get out of; the stipulations on it are insane.” (When called on this by Meagan Sullivan, a pro-union employee who often spoke up to rebut management statements, Heinen said the comparison was merely to a passive deducted payment like a subscription.)

Heinen then ticked off where the UFCW’s money went. She described high salaries (the president of the international makes $341,000 a year, not even on the charts compared to a corporate CEO), generous benefits, and perks. She mentioned a $1 million “party” at the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas, and $220,000 to hire travel agents. (These combined are less than one-half of 1 percent of dues revenue.) She claimed that $120 million directed to officer salaries, buildings, overhead, political advertising, and lobbying was “not spent on the members or getting the things that they need.” And litigation was highlighted: “They did illegal things on labor laws, and union dues are their source of money, so y’all going to be the ones paying for things on their lawsuits,” Heinen said.

With all this talk of dues, only rarely did a couple of salient facts slip out. First of all, in the right-to-work state of North Carolina, workers can opt out of dues-paying. (Management even painted this as a bad thing, because those workers would have no say in the election of a union representative or a final contract.) Plus, it’s rarely mentioned how much No Evil Foods employees would actually pay in dues, which considering how much emphasis is put on dues, you’d think would be a primary preoccupation.

In his “scorched earth” speech, Woliansky briefly talked about the union leaders “collecting $500 a year in dues,” which is the approximate average for Local 1208, the North Carolina UFCW affiliate. Once, Schadel made the mistake of breaking that down in terms of the weekly paycheck: ten dollars. And dues across all UFCW locals are less than half that, which is the weekly equivalent of the discounted cost of one package of No Evil Foods’ “The Stallion” plant-based Italian sausage. But because the low level of dues was inadvertently mentioned just once, and the concept of siphoning dues from workers was foregrounded, an impression was made.

“You Give Up Your Voice”

Management emphasized over and over that if employees chose the union, it would become their “exclusive bargaining agent” for all terms and conditions of employment. They framed this as workers giving up their individual rights to speak with managers. Even the union steward, who would be a fellow worker elected by the employees, wasn’t talked about as if they were a fellow employee. “Whoever you select … is the only person in the unit that can negotiate on your behalf,” McPeak said. “Somebody says, ‘Oh, I want to talk to you.’ Nope, can’t do it, gotta go through this person.”

This is part and parcel of the idea that the union is a scary interloper that would break up the glorious worker/management relationship. “I don’t want to sit across a table from you. I want you all next to me,” said Schadel during her speech. “I don’t want your individual voices to be silenced.” Asserting collective-bargaining rights, in management’s description, would constitute a reduction of overall rights at work.

This narrative continued in management’s discussion of the grievance process, a masterstroke of anti-union doublespeak. Heinen pointed out that stewards have “total discretion” to decide what grievances to pursue on behalf of workers, whether for wrongful termination or unfair disciplinary action or other slights. The labor contract would likely have a formal grievance and arbitration process, but “no real legal obligation to help you if you have a problem,” Schadel said.

Schadel and McPeak both read off a litany of what they presented as 6,500 unfair labor practice cases against the UFCW, where workers claimed violations of the union’s duty of fair representation. Notably, managers gave no insight into the nature of the cases or how they turned out at the NLRB. “You can go look it up and find out what happened to this, if you have interest in it,” McPeak said about one charge. “I’m not sure how these cases turned out,” Schadel said about two others. But if you are to believe the narrative, the mere existence of complaints against the UFCW demonstrates its overriding failure to represent its membership.

But in select moments, management gave the exact opposite impression: that the union would zealously protect and defend the worst possible members. They relayed lurid, mostly hypothetical tales of unions fighting to keep sexual harassers and stalkers on the job, even forcing them to work side by side with their victims. Heinen said this happened to a friend of hers at a unionized workplace, although the union in question wasn’t identified as part of UFCW. This was expressed as just part of the directive of the union, to advocate on behalf of their members. But most of the time, management was stressing that the union would not advocate on behalf of their members.

Schadel tried to pull off the feat of expressing both ideas at the same time. “I’m horrified at the thought that a union that’s supposed to represent all of you including anyone who is subject to harassment might fight to put that person back to work,” she stated. Then pivoted. “And maybe they wouldn’t. I mean they do have the right not to process a grievance. And they definitely have a history of abandoning cases against their members’ wishes.” She took a stab at squaring the circle by suggesting that the harasser may be the union steward, or the victim a vocal opponent of the union. But she wouldn’t be pinned down on one side or the other; the union either is negligent in protecting wronged workers, or passionate in defending sleazebags, or both, or neither.
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Despite the logical faults, you could see how it worked. If you view yourself as an upstanding employee, the picture of the union given is that either you won’t get the help you need, or someone who doesn’t deserve the help will. Which just raises doubts about the advantages of unionization.

“Everything Starts at Zero”

It is entirely true that nothing is guaranteed in collective bargaining; the union only wins the right to ask for certain terms. But the way No Evil Foods managers presented that fact was clearly designed to play on worker fears.

The only rules governing a contract bargaining session, as management reminded workers several times, are that the parties operate in good faith and in a reasonable time frame. All of the details regarding employment—pay, benefits, vacation, worker conditions and complaints, and so on—would be “unknown and uncertain,” as Woliansky put it. McPeak was even more stark: “The fact that you have a union agreement doesn’t mean there’s more money” at the company for wages.

Key to this discussion was the fact that No Evil Foods paid $13.65 an hour on average at the time of the union vote, more than a living wage for the region, which includes the college town of Asheville. The company had even recently offered health benefits. Several employees, even pro-union ones, remarked at the meetings that they were making more than they ever had before. The company also added a “shift differential,” increasing pay for those on the night shift working irregular hours.

The contention from pro-union forces was that they just wanted to lock good pay and benefits into a contract, giving them the security that it cannot be taken away. That drew the counterattack from management. “It starts at zero,” McPeak said of the bargaining process. Everything would be renegotiated. If there was an impasse, Schadel explained, management could implement their last, best, and final offer, and institute pay or benefit cuts unilaterally. When asked whether it was mandatory to negotiate all employment terms from scratch, McPeak answered wryly, “No, but it’s smart business.”

No Evil Foods couldn’t even confirm who would be sitting at the bargaining table. It could be the CEO or it could be the investors, as Woliansky pointed out in his “scorched earth” speech, who’d be re-evaluating everything. Examples of pay cuts and concessions that unions had made—most of them from the period of the Great Recession when businesses were desperate to avoid closing—were peppered into the speeches, as well as cases of unionized businesses failing and shutting down. Woliansky described the potential outcomes of bargaining: “Could be less, could be more, could be the same.”

By law, management is not allowed to say that workers will lose pay or benefits if they vote to join a union. But they can say that the outcome is unknown. And any worker with some memory of precarity in their heads will immediately make the connection: They could lose what they have. And if they didn’t like it, No Evil Foods would find workers who’d accept those terms. “Do you think people in Asheville would be willing to work for less than what we pay?” Woliansky asked at one point.

Bargaining units were not even guaranteed to win a first contract, Schadel declared, using 2009 data from the Economic Policy Institute. Even more than three years after winning a union election, 25 percent of bargaining units fail to win a first contract, EPI reported. Then again, non-union workplaces get contracts governing their employment zero percent of the time.

Of course, unions do have tools that may get what they want, most prominently the strike. No Evil managers didn’t shy away from arguing that strikes are effective at crippling businesses and forcing changes, but they naturally focused on the economic costs to the workers. It is certainly true that UFCW offers a meager strike fund of $100 a week for full-time employees, and only then after 14 days on the picket lines. (In a recent labor action at Stop & Shop grocery stores in New England, Schadel said, UFCW paid nothing because the action lasted only 11 days.) Schadel layered on top of that the fact that workers would not get health insurance premiums paid, would not be eligible for unemployment insurance in North Carolina, and could even be permanently replaced if they walk out.

In fact, fewer than 1 percent of UFCW bargaining efforts evolve into strikes, because both businesses and workers have large incentives to avoid them. But the worst-case scenarios are the main ones presented at anti-union meetings.

“They’re Going to Come After You”

Mark McPeak devoted an entire session to a small subsection of the UFCW constitution. Perhaps deliberately, he chose the most confusing legalese in the document to illustrate his point, with a smattering of lawyer jokes along the way. (“It was written by a bunch of lawyers, so it’s got to be really easy to understand.”)

The rule in question was about how the union can discipline members for “violating duties and obligations,” and the vagueness of the duties and obligations that could draw such an action. McPeak homed in on the proviso that former members who were previously part of a union local could be brought up on charges. “These charges can be brought by peers,” McPeak said, his voice rising. “So if somebody didn’t like you … you can still be charged, and they can go after you financially, after you leave.”

McPeak explained that those charged would be “put on trial” before the local executive board, with the ability to gain assistance only from another member of the union (“You can’t even do what the American justice system allows you to do, which is have a lawyer”), and if found guilty by two-thirds of the board, be assessed fines. “So you’re going on trial,” McPeak concluded. “They can get you up with a financial penalty through this trial. It’s a lot like a real trial, except you don’t get a lawyer … you’re going to be charged for something.” He kept emphasizing the word “shall” in the legal document, as evidence that you, the person in that room, will definitively be brought up on charges at some point. (“Shall” refers, of course, to what must happen during the hypothetical process.)

Coming out of McPeak’s mouth, the process sounded like something out of Kafka. But missing from the hysteria is any indication of whether members or ex-members are routinely brought up on charges for violating the constitution or its bylaws. The only real example that McPeak managed to find were cases involving “scabs,” workers who cross picket lines. “If you’re providing for your family,” McPeak said, “they’ll come after you because you’re in violation of the bylaws. If you stay out, your family doesn’t eat.”

McPeak supplied one letter from a union local warning members that they would be retaliated and discriminated against if they crossed a picket line (the letter was a response to the employer’s claim that changing their union status would allow them to do so), and one case of a worker in western Massachusetts who had crossed a picket line in the Stop & Shop strike, was subjected to harassment (including unacceptable homophobic slurs), and eventually brought up on charges by the union.

This led to a remarkable exchange. Meagan Sullivan asked McPeak, “What was the result of that with the guy?”

“I have no idea,” McPeak replied, alluding to the fact that the scab filed an NLRB claim against the union. “You can go on the NLRB website and go make yourself happy and look these things up.”

“I did actually,” Sullivan said. “The guy received a settlement, and got all his dues paid back, and now they have posters all around their workplaces at Stop & Shop saying that you don’t have to continue, that you are able to cross picket lines, that you won’t lose your job as a result.”

McPeak: “Well if you knew the ruling, why’d you ask me the question?”

Sullivan: “Because you’re not telling us.”

McPeak, now wounded: “Why are you being hostile?”

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“Information From Both Sides”

McPeak’s one-sided retelling of this event typified the stories management told in the meetings. Despite claiming to put out information “from both sides,” routinely managers would relay the most damning tales about union malfeasance, without discussing the outcome. “Every single case that you guys have cited has been resolved,” Sullivan said at one point in a meeting.

That included not just the case at Stop & Shop. Management brought up a situation involving sexual misconduct claims against Mickey Kasparian, president of a UFCW local in San Diego; Kasparian was voted out by the local membership in 2018. There was talk of the embezzlement of nearly $300,000 by a former union president and secretary-treasurer at the local that No Evil Foods workers would be signing up for, Local 1208. The local’s members complained about it in 2014, the international union investigated and uncovered the thievery, and both parties pleaded guilty and were sentenced in federal court. Schadel even brought up cases of sexual harassment at the New York City Ballet and a Ford plant in Chicago, which had nothing to do with the UFCW.




A back-and-forth argument would ensue habitually about these cases. Sullivan would point out the resolutions, which managers chose not to describe, and would then call them “stories of accountability,” where the system worked to root out misconduct. Woliansky would then interject, whether he was leading the meeting or not, and say that actually, they were stories of corruption, and should give workers pause about entering an organization where this kind of conduct goes on. “If it were me and I heard that story about a company I was about to go work for, whether or not they held themselves internally accountable … I would still decide I don’t want to be a part of that organization,” he said once. Woliansky later reiterated the story, initially saying the Local 1208 leaders had been embezzling for 40 years, then four years, then “several.” (It was three years.)

Union members have certainly made mistakes, engaged in despicable acts, and even committed crimes. In an organization as large as the UFCW, you are bound to find stories of impropriety if you go back far enough. Even in a small company like No Evil Foods, managers said there had been episodes of harassment and discrimination, and asserted that they had swiftly terminated anyone confirmed to have been involved in such conduct. The company wanted credit for holding bad actors accountable, while neglecting to mention when unions had done the same.
“These Are Not Our Values”

No Evil Foods prides itself on its woke progressivism—the managers were types who would wear baseball caps and black hoodies to work, and throw out the words “fuck” and “shit” a lot. Whenever they could, managers tried to use that pose to demean the UFCW as out of step with their culture, claiming that the union “co-opted the language of worker’s rights and socialism” for their own purposes.

Schadel referred to the “old white guys” at the top of the union, and how much money they made. Heinen compared union dues paying for “junkets” to Vegas to how “it bothers me that tax money is going for our president to play golf.” (At the time, the president was Donald Trump.) Schadel, who was adept at wielding this identity politics, responded to the argument about the union holding people internally accountable to how Harvey Weinstein was brought to justice, but “does that make him absolved from the fact that he did those things?”




The often-repeated incidents of sexual harassment and anti-LGBT comments were singled out for umbrage-taking. “This is the exact opposite of what we stand for and who we are,” Schadel said.

A popular argument involved referring to Local 1208 as those people from Tar Heel, home to the Smithfield Foods plant, the largest pig processing plant in the world, which is unionized with UFCW. No Evil Foods is a vegan food company, and managers tried to play up the rivalry. “I am an unapologetic vegan, I don’t trust a union that represents meat,” Heinen said at one meeting. Woliansky took it a step further, outlining a conspiracy theory that the union local would want to sabotage No Evil Foods. “If they keep us from being successful, all they do is create new opportunities for Smithfield and the 3,400 meatcutters in Tar Heel that they represent to put animal meat products into stores instead of our plant meat products,” he said. “I mean come on, these guys are our competitors.”

There was such a deliberate effort to build a dichotomy between No Evil Foods culture and union culture that Woliansky just blurted it out: “I think a lot of these points are being made to draw a contrast between the culture we are trying to build at No Evil Foods and the culture and atmosphere that sometimes is built around unions.”
“Just Trust Us”

The closing argument throughout the meetings was that No Evil Foods was a great place to work, and that bringing in the union would create an irreparable breach in the relationship between workers and bosses. The union was just not a “good fit” for a young company looking to grow; it would prohibit flexibility and add bureaucracy. It would throw a company of equals into an “us versus them” posture. It would “force us to apply a one-size-fits-all approach to people we see as unique individuals,” as Schadel put it. It would leash a high-flying company in an emerging field to a dying union model; several managers noted how union membership was declining, as if that was a consequence of the unions themselves and not decades of employers using the deficiencies of labor law to make organizing nearly impossible.




The message was clear: No Evil Foods cared about its workers. It provided health benefits and extra pay for the night shift. It fixed the concerns that initially animated the union drive. It made sacrifices that other startup companies wouldn’t to give back to the workforce. It hired people who’d been incarcerated and attempted to rehabilitate them. (Several workers told me managers seeded a rumor with these people that the union would drug-test employees, raising their anxiety.) And what the company was doing was working, with rising sales and excitement about the future. “I think the best thing I can say is it comes down to trust,” Woliansky said. “Sadrah and I really do have a vision for what we want to do here.” That vision could only be derailed by the union vote.

“They did a good job cultivating this team language that’s difficult to get over the hump,” says Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes, who reviewed transcripts of the meetings. “And reading transcripts with swearing as part of the general conversation, like we’re hanging out and having a good time. That’s going to be effective in creating a situation that’s cynically very paternalist … it’s very insidious and tremendously effective.”

Prior to the union drive, workers told me that they were friends with their colleagues, able to sit down and talk in a civil manner about just about anything. But the effectiveness of management’s campaign could be seen in the question-and-answer sessions held at the end of the meetings, which often devolved into shouting matches among the workers. By the end, pro-union voices were being told by their fellow employees to “go find another job,” and that “this is [Woliansky and Schadel’s] company … don’t try to be here and fuck up what they got.” This was more than just people expressing their opinions about their job and the company and the union; it got personal.

The infighting grew into a manifestation of how the union itself would toxify the pleasant workplace. The worker discussions served to prove the point management was making. “I swear these people got off on making those of us especially vocal about it,” said Meagan Sullivan. “They’d just push us and push us until we hit a breaking point, where we’re visibly upset. They painted us like we’re these emotionally unstable bullies. That was the goal, to cause tension between all of us.”

It’s part of management’s playbook, according to Muehlenkamp, the former Teamsters organizer. “You have to create this miserable workplace, and then you provide the relief at the end,” he said. “This is the psychological, physical, economic, manipulative system, and all the parts work together.”

The divide-and-conquer approach began right at the outset of the union effort the previous summer. Soon after it started, No Evil Foods shifted from a four-day, ten-hour schedule to five days a week. This led to about half the staff leaving, according to workers, including many who had signed union cards. “It leads me to believe that maybe they had caught wind of the organizing push,” says Josh Coit, a former production assistant at the plant.

To fill that gap, the company hired a lot of new workers, who largely felt that things were going well and didn’t want to risk a union blowing that up. “I spent seven months trying to find a job,” said one worker. “Now I’ve got a job … a better-paying job than I ever thought I’d have … No Evil Foods has helped me change my life tremendously. And I think I trust the people who helped me get that far.”

ON FEBRUARY 13 OF LAST YEAR, when the NLRB tallied the votes, the union effort fizzled.

A month later, the COVID pandemic led to lockdowns across the country. It was a disaster for restaurants and hotels and the hospitality industry, but a huge boost for food companies, as grocery stores were flooded with customers and Instacart shoppers.

The No Evil Foods facility was small; workers toiled in four smallish rooms, working in close proximity. Several were either immunocompromised or had family in that condition. Without a union contract, it was up to management to decide how to handle the pandemic and keep workers safe.

They offered workers three choices, which had to be made within 24 hours. Option one, they could quit, with three weeks’ severance, and sign a nondisclosure agreement agreeing to not work in the food industry for a year, refrain from talking to the press, and absolve the company of any violation of the National Labor Relations Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the Family and Medical Leave Act. There would be no option for filing for unemployment insurance in the event of a resignation. Option two, they could quit, not sign the NDA, get no severance, and maybe come back later. Option three, they could stay, with a $1.50-an-hour pay increase in the fall, but only if workers had perfect attendance for the next 90 days.

About 13 percent of the workforce took the buyout. Jon Reynolds and Meagan Sullivan circulated a petition, which a majority of the workers remaining signed, asking for “reconsideration regarding the ‘90 days of perfect attendance’ policy before we are able to receive hazard pay.” Reynolds started to get that old feeling back. “It was like there was solidarity in the workplace again,” he told me. “We were going to take the petition and march to the boss with the petition in hand.”

But the day before that was to happen, he was pulled off his shift and asked about the petition. Shortly thereafter, the company announced an immediate raise for production employees of $2.25 an hour, with no conditions. Reynolds wouldn’t be getting it. He was fired a few weeks later for “social distancing violations.” Another union organizer, Cortne Roche, was fired for violating the company’s dress code; she was told her pants were too short. Sullivan would voluntarily leave shortly thereafter, also feeling pressure that edged up to retaliation.

Reynolds and Roche took their case to the NLRB, and No Evil Foods agreed to a $40,000 settlement in October 2020. The company didn’t have to admit fault—although during the anti-union meetings, just the existence of a complaint was enough for them to smear the UFCW—but it did have to post a flyer in the facility stating that workers had the legal right to organize without fear of retaliation.


Rarely do you get an opportunity to see exactly how important a union job would have been to a group of workers.

That flyer didn’t stay up for long. On June 11, every remaining worker at the North Carolina facility lost their job. No Evil Foods announced it would outsource production of its foods to a separate manufacturer in Danville, Illinois, eliminating the need for the workforce. “In-house manufacturing with our own team was something we built, loved, and fought for very hard,” Woliansky said in a statement. “Ultimately, however, for a company of our size to survive in the hyper-competitive marketplace, the co-manufacturing model will be required going forward.” Discourse Blog reported that the co-manufacturer also makes meat products.

Workers were given no notice; the day they found out, at a staff meeting with a tearful Woliansky, was their last day on the job. Nobody got a day of severance. Health benefits were immediately canceled. Woliansky claimed in the meeting that the company had run out of money and had to make this tough decision. But No Evil Foods wasn’t shutting down; it was just outsourcing its labor. Schadel, in her statement, made it sound like this was simply the evolution of the company: “With this next phase of No Evil Foods, we look forward to continuing to deliver delicious, sustainable foods to our customers that they can feel great about eating.”

The company did give workers an envelope on the way out; it included a form letter of recommendation and a flyer for a job fair in Asheville.

“Screw all of y’all,” said one worker before leaving.

Rarely do you get an opportunity to see exactly how important a union job would have been to a group of workers. With a contract, they would have been able to negotiate over hazard pay and workplace conditions during the pandemic. They would have been warned 60 days in advance of any shuttering of the facility (small workplaces with under 100 employees, like No Evil Foods, are exempt from this legal requirement). They would have been able to work with the company to try to save their jobs. Instead, taking on faith that the bosses would look out for them and take care of them, the workers ended up with nothing.

The theme of the anti-union meetings was that unionization was a risk, a roll of the dice, a threat to the status quo. But businesses are inherently fraught with danger. The risk is always present, as workers at No Evil Foods found out one year later. But people are naturally protective of what they already have, and suspicious of the unknown. With unions so decimated as a percentage of the U.S. workforce (they represent just 6.3 percent of private-sector employees), it’s easy to paint a nefarious picture of them to the uninitiated, and then let human nature do the rest. “It’s really underrated how scary it is to vote yes,” Loomis said. “In the modern workplace it’s a brave act to vote for a union.”

The only way to reverse this is with strong labor laws that prevent the most egregious anti-union tactics, including captive-audience meetings of the kind we’ve quoted from in this article. Absent such laws, it will be very difficult to prevent the mass psychological experiment that management has enacted, with sophisticated precision, over the past 40 years. Whether at a meeting or on the shop floor, those tactics will continue. Workers looking to organize must be prepared for them.

LABOR UNIONS NORTH CAROLINA JUL/AUG 2021 ISSUE

DAVID DAYEN is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is ‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’

 

A little inflation is sign of success, not failure, for Bank of Canada's Tiff Macklem

Fearmongering over runaway inflation only complicates governor's next challenge

Author of the article:

Kevin Carmichael

Publishing date:

Aug 02, 2021  •  

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Some former central bankers make a point of staying out of the way of their successors. Not David Dodge, the Bank of Canada’s leader from 2001 to 2008.

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Dodge, who is now an adviser at law firm Bennett Jones LLP, told a reporter from Bloomberg News early last week that his former colleagues should “temper their enthusiasm” over the likelihood that the current burst of inflation will be short-lived.

“By insisting it’s all temporary they tend to undermine their own credibility, which is unfortunate,” Dodge said. “It’s better to be humble and say that what we think, but of course there is a chance things could be different.”

Tiff Macklem was probably surprised to read that his former boss thought that the Bank of Canada was taking a cocksure approach to inflation. Macklem and his deputies have hedged their assessment of pandemic price dynamics every step of the way. Dodge was voicing an impression, not a fact.

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The latest interest-rate statement on July 14 included an unusually long description of what policy-makers thought was happening with prices, suggesting the governor was sensitive to the possibility that a population used to inflation around two per cent might panic at the prospect of an extended period of prices increases in excess of three per cent. “The factors pushing up inflation are transitory, but their persistence and magnitude are uncertain and will be monitored closely,” the statement said.

The Bank of Canada’s most recent economic report acknowledged that supply bottlenecks and other factors putting upward pressure on prices could be “stronger or more persistent than estimated.”

In his prepared remarks for reporters after the report’s release, Macklem said there is “continued need for careful attention to the dynamics of the recovery and inflation.” He later shot down a question about whether he was getting distracted by other indicators such as joblessness and inequality, declaring that “we have one target and that’s inflation.” Macklem reiterated that point in an interview with The Canadian Press, saying it was his best guess that the factors influencing inflation “will work their way out … but if they don’t, and we start to think that inflation will remain above our target range, we have the mandate, we have the tools and we will control inflation. We will get it back to target,” which is two per cent, the midpoint of a comfort zone of one per cent to three per cent.

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There is definitely a lack of humility in those comments, but it doesn’t stem from a cavalier attitude about what’s going on with prices. Macklem sounds like every other leader of an inflation-focused central bank since Paul Volcker, the former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, crushed double-digit inflation with double-digit interest rates in the 1980s. They routinely seek to reinforce their credibility by reminding audiences that they long ago discovered the cure for runaway inflation, and they aren’t afraid to administer it.

You can question whether Macklem has what Volcker had, but you’d be doing so based on nothing but cynical opinion. The evidence suggests that Macklem is as credible an inflation soldier as Dodge or any of his predecessors. The current governor, who has been on the job for 13 months, already passed an early trial by fighting off the deflationary forces that threatened to deepen the recession a year ago.

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The astonishing cost of acquiring the lumber to build an outdoor deck was a talking point this spring, but such chatter forgets that a year earlier, annual increases in the Consumer Price Index had plunged below zero. Those numbers represented a bigger threat to price stability than the CPI’s current jump above three per cent. Inflation today is evidence of success, not failure.

Winning his match with deflation was only the first challenge, of course. Macklem must now keep price increases from getting out of hand, a task that could prove difficult if the post-pandemic recovery keeps throwing up surprises. No one predicted an epic recession would include a historic surge in housing prices, but that’s what happened, and shelter costs are now the biggest drivers of upward pressure on the CPI.

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Former Bank of Canada Governor David Dodge. PHOTO BY POSTMEDIA/FILE

Lockdowns caused demand for video-game consoles to skyrocket, diverting supplies of computer chips that would normally have been used to build cars. The result: a shortage of automobiles at a time when tens of thousands of previously locked up North Americans want to hit the road in new wheels. Claire Fan, an economist at Royal Bank of Canada, calculated last week that vehicles are now the second biggest driver of inflation after shelter.

But unless the global economy was totally broken by the pandemic, it is reasonable to assume that supply will eventually catch up with demand. Lumber prices, the unexpected talking point of the pandemic, are now in retreat, in part because 2×4 boards became too expensive for DIY contractors, and in part because sawmills started cutting up more logs. Statistics Canada reported on July 30 that softwood lumber prices plunged 12.5 per cent in June.

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“A lot of sectors stopped work, let inventories run down during the pandemic and now we’re getting excess demand,” Stephen Poloz, the previous Bank of Canada governor, told the Financial Post’s Larysa Harapyn in May. “But on the other side of every expansion of demand in the commodity sector, what you get is an expansion of supply. So, I suspect that is a very temporary phenomenon.”

It’s possible that Macklem, Poloz and the bond traders whose behaviour so far indicates little fear of runaway inflation are wrong. There is a lot of stimulus in the system and that money could end up stoking more demand than forecasters currently predict. It’s also possible that the psychology of households and businesses changes in a way the pushes expectations of future prices higher.

The latter represents one of Macklem’s biggest challenges. That task will be harder of people with the stature of David Dodge continue to sow doubt about whether the Bank of Canada is up to the job.

• Email: kcarmichael@postmedia.com | Twitter: carmichaelkevin

'Rights aren't a competition': Anti-trans hate is on the rise in Canada, activists and advocates say

Brooke Taylor

CTVNews.ca Writer

Published  Saturday, July 31, 2021

In this file photo, a person walks on a trans Pride flag crosswalk in Calgary on Sunday, Aug. 18, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Dave Chidley


TORONTO -- As LGBTQ2S+ people and allies await the return of Parliament to see if Bill C-6, a bill banning conversion therapy, will be passed into law, trans Canadians and activists worry that the delay could be fueling rhetoric that trans folks are a threat to women’s rights.

“Rights aren't a competition. No trans folks are going out saying women shouldn't have rights. Trans folks, fairly unanimously, are in favour of women's rights, trans rights,” Fae Johnstone, trans educator, organizer and writer, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on July 21.

In fact, this notion that by granting trans people equal rights and opportunities will somehow infringe on women’s rights has been debunked by several legal experts and the Canadian Bar Association.

Related Links
Bill C-6
TransPULSE Canada Reports

“Legal experts have continuously debunked that notion,” she said. “The Canadian Bar Association, in 2016, quite clearly articulated that there is no reasonable argument that trans rights infringed on women's rights, that’s not how our legal rights structure works.”

Adrienne Smith, a trans non-binary social justice lawyer in Vancouver, said there is no threat to women's groups by including trans, two-spirit, non-binary and gender non-conforming people.

“But if all you have known is privilege then equity and inclusion can feel like oppression, but they're not the same thing, being prevented from discriminating against someone isn't a loss of power for anyone who's behaving properly,” Smith said.

Florence Ashley, a jurist and bioethicist, told CTVNews.ca in an interview on Friday that anti-trans hate is on the rise not only in Canada, but elsewhere too.

“It's coming at the same time as a rise of anti-democratic populism, which is where they want the majority to define what is the good life for everybody,” Ashley said.

And while all trans people are vulnerable to anti-trans groups, trans women of colour face the brunt of hatred, particularly as more come out publicly, advocates say.

“A lot of trans women of colour have always been experiencing a lot of hate and it's probably heightened a bit now, but because a lot of trans women of colour have been coming out and being more visible and exposed they’re having to deal with that hate,” Yasmeen Persad, trans program coordinator at The 519, an advocacy group for LGBTQ2S+ communities in Toronto, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on Tuesday.

TRACKING ANTI-TRANS HATE

Anti-trans ideology isn’t new in Canada, but those who take this stance are getting louder and more bold.

“The ideas aren't necessarily new, but the difference is, I think a lot of TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminist) are becoming much more explicit about their beliefs and how vocal they are about it,” Sebastien Roback, a researcher with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on July 16.

Through his work with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, Roback has found that in Canada, Vancouver seems to be home to a lot of anti-trans people and organizations.

One Canadian group claims that accepting trans people in “sex-segregated” spaces would be dangerous. For TERFs, this means not allowing trans people to use bathrooms and change rooms that align with their gender, not allowing them to access shelters based on their gender for unfounded fear that they will prey on women and girls using these spaces.

However, it is well documented in Canada that men who are cisgender, a person whose identity and gender align with that which they were assigned at birth, most often perpetrate violence against women. In 2020, of 160 Canadian women and girls killed, 128 had a male accused as the killer. In 17 of the cases, the killer remained unknown.

In fact, surveys conducted by TRANSPulse Canada suggest that many trans people in Canada actively avoid some public spaces for fear of harassment or being outed. More than two-thirds of trans Canadians avoid three or more public spaces because of this, and only 16 per cent don’t avoid any spaces. The avoidance was worse among Indigenous trans, two-spirit and non-binary people, with 76 per cent of respondents avoiding three or more spaces, and only 12 per cent not avoiding any spaces.

Tracking hate crime statistics against trans people in Canada is made more difficult by the fact that there is no dedicated organization tracking these details. The 2021 census was the first census in Canada to count transgender people living in the country.

“In 2018, about 0.2 per cent of Canadians aged 15 and older indicated that they were transgender, including those who are non-binary,” Statistics Canada said in a statement.

The statement continued that the 2021 census included a new gender question and the data collected will be available next spring.

For hate crimes committed in Canada and reported to police, those with a sex-based motive have nearly tripled since 2015 from 12 to 53. There has also been a rise in total hate crimes reported to police in Canada since 2015 from 1,362 to 1,946 in 2019, peaking at more than 2,000 in 2017.

“Hate crime collection was added to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Survey in 2005, giving police services the ability to track all reported hate-motivated criminal incidents. Since that time, anti-transgender hate crimes have been collected under the category of ‘Sex’ and the sub-category of ‘Other,’” Statistics Canada said in a statement.

This survey will be amended this summer, replacing the category "sex" with "gender," the statement said.

What makes tracking hate crimes against trans people more difficult is that police stations aren’t safe spaces for trans people, activists said. Often trans folks are misgendered, called by the wrong name and mistreated by police, Persad said.

“Trans people experience different forms of hate, violence, all these different things, and not many of them reported for the same reasons of not being believed or just having to go through a system that's transphobic,” said Persad.

Further complicating the tracking of hate crimes committed against trans people in Canada is that anybody can create a website and social media accounts under any name they want, said Johnstone, which makes it difficult to track exactly how many anti-trans hate groups are organizing.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network is tracking anti-trans hate and TERF groups in the country, and one thing that’s come out of their work, is that despite labelling themselves as feminists, these groups often collaborate with conservative and far-right groups, and many of these groups are out of Vancouver.

“They're really looking to capitalize on any signs of allyship they can get,” said Roback. “If you look at where the ideas originate from, a lot of it comes from a very reactionary application of second wave feminism theory,” said Roback.

The 1960s second wave feminist movement fell by the wayside as a more gender inclusive and global third wave feminist movement began in the 1990s.

Some anti-trans rhetoric focuses on being “pro-science,” but Roback said that it’s a very outdated science that they’re relying on.

“The version of science that they're advocating for is dating back in the 1970s,” he said. “That biology class in their first year of high school we were taught that you have X chromosomes and Y chromosomes. They're stuck on that very sex essential perspective, and to them anything that's new information has been tainted by what they call ‘gender ideology.’”

BILL C-6

Conversion therapy is the debunked practice of trying to change someone’s sexual identity, gender identity or gender expression. The “therapy” can be provided by nearly anyone from licensed psychologists, to ministers, to life coaches. It can also fall under different names such as gender critical therapy, reparative therapy and sexuality counselling.

Smith, who was a witness for the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, said that the testimony from survivors of this practice should speak for itself.

“They say that this is incredibly damaging, that it's ruined their lives and hurt them very much, and the scientific community is unanimous that you can't bully someone into not being queer or trans,” they said. “But that's exactly what these processes seek to do.”


People and groups were able to submit their support or opposition of Bill C-6, and Johnstone said that what she read in the opposing submissions was troubling.

“I spent a lot of time looking through all of the submissions that were being sent to the Senate Committee on Justice that was reviewing the bill and there was a horrifying volume of both social conservative anti trans, freedom of speech, freedom of religion type language coming into submission,” she said.

And those submissions weren’t just from Jane Doe Canadian citizens.

“There was a staggering amount that were specifically from anti-trans, TERF organizations referring to things like ‘sex-based rights,’ leading to this idea that we're forcing people on a path towards medical transition without any choice, and this idea that trans people are corrupting children,” Johnstone adds.

One such submission, reads: “Bill C-6 will allow healthy bodies to be irrevocably damaged under false claims of a gender identity that has no basis in science.” At no point in the submission do they offer any evidence to their claims.

While Bill C-6 plans to ban forced conversion therapy, it does not give the government, or anyone, the power to forcibly make anyone undergo medical transition.

Johnstone added that these organizations often emphasize children’s safety as a cover for their hatred and to draw in parents and skeptics.

“Despite the fact that credible children's rights organizations, none of them will endorse or condone any of that,” she said. “They are quite firm: protecting children's rights has to include banning conversion therapy.”

Many of the anti-trans groups, including those who oppose Bill C-6, brand themselves as women’s groups, which could be dangerous but Ashley said this isn’t a new tactic.

“I believe it was 1917, Vladimir Lenin wrote in the first chapter of State and Revolution that one of the most successful things the bourgeois had done with Marx's legacy was to co-opt it, so now all the bourgeois liberals are Marxists,” they said.

We can see this trend when we look at how Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are portrayed, they added.

“It's a very common political strategy, especially among more regressive groups, especially white ones, and by regressive I am including both liberals and conservatives here, who are trying to defend some sort of status quo, and fight against change, and this is what is happening here, the same thing, same playbook,” they said.

This strategy is also used among anti-abortion groups masquerading as feminist groups, they said.

“It's all the same strategies of adopting the language of progressivism to push for regressive policies, and that's harmful because it misleads people,” Ashley said

Roback believes that these groups are becoming more desperate, a sign that they are losing the fight.

“The more aggressive they get, it’s also a sign that they’re losing,” he said.

Johnstone, Smith and Ashley agree that the government fumbled this bill. What should have been easy to pass got muddled and lost along the way, they said, and now with Parliament on summer break, Smith wonders if it will pass in the fall.

“The government could have fixed this a long time ago,” Smith said. “We know they've got the votes. There's no reason that we have waited this long. And now with the impending federal election, which could happen in the fall, the passage of this bill is uncertain because it still needs to get through the Senate, and we're not sure if they're going to sit in the fall.”

Queer and trans communities' push and advocacy to get Bill C-6 passed may become political ammunition in the event of a federal election.

“They waited until the last day to push it through the House of Commons because they know they can politicize it during the election,” Ashley said. “It doesn't feel great making queer and trans people, and especially trans people given what the objections to the bill are, playing hacky sack with us.”

ORGANIZED MOVEMENTS MOVE FROM ONLINE TO OUTSIDE

It’s important to remember that these organizations are not just targeting trans people online, they also have boots on the ground with increasing frequency, said Johnstone.

“We're definitely seeing more like IRL (in real life), on the ground organizing for TERFs. That connection between local TERF groups, national and international groups, a lot of this is coming out of what's called the Women's Human Rights Campaign which is an international anti-trans organization,” she said.

But it’s also important to remember that we live in an online world, said Ashley. Our online identities are just a piece of who we are.

“For all these people who are being hateful online they have friends they go hang out with, they talk about their hateful views, they spread them to their other friends, and you kind of get this entire web,” they said. “Some are more extreme in how they speak on the internet, but that's only like part of the iceberg.”

And while the internet is a place where people can be anonymous, Ashley said that a lot of the hate mail they get is from people who use their real name, real email and even their real photos.

Local chapters of anti-trans organizations are papering cities and towns with anti-trans posters and stickers, and getting them up just as quickly as trans activists and allies can take them down.

“There are folks in different communities, including in Ottawa, Vancouver and other cities, who are putting posters up every chance they get,” Johnstone said.

There’s an idea that because more trans Canadians are living openly, that things are improving, it’s becoming safer, but Ashley said this isn’t the case.

“There is a myth that things are getting better, that I see a lot, and we just need to wait it out. The reality is that's not true, things are not getting better,” said Ashley.

Johnstone said, in Ottawa, for the last eight months anti-trans posters and stickers have been put up around the city regularly. While she said that not all violence against trans people is as a result of TERFs and their messaging, it does add to it.

“TERF rhetoric legitimizes this idea that trans people are invading women's spaces, and that cis women should be fearful of this figure or phantom men in dresses,” she said. “That ideology, that rhetoric does result in cis people in public looking at trans people strangely and harassing trans women.”

“That legitimizes the acts of violence and harassment and TERFs are contributing to that baseline of homophobia and transphobia and creating an environment where folks are more likely and empowered to target trans people in public.”

And the COVID-19 pandemic may also play a role in the increase of anti-trans hate in Canada.

“There's been a lot of talk around how COVID has enabled and fueled the hate movements across the board with the connection between movements and racist white supremacist groups,” said Johnstone.

And some groups have used this to their advantage, recruiting new members and organizing with their time in isolation.

“There are opportunities that have arisen through COVID that TERFs and other hate groups have leveraged to recruit to bring more folks on board and continue that narrative of: trans people are attacking everybody,” she said.

Despite being on the receiving end of hatred, Johnstone still holds out hope that anti-trans groups will turn a new leaf and realize their mistakes and she’s ready to welcome them to the team once they are.

“This is a fight we shouldn't be fighting, we should be fighting the patriarchy,” she said. “We shouldn't have TERFs attacking trans people when our liberation, our hopes and dreams for the future are bound together.”

Allies need to step up and make their presence known, said Ashley.

“You need to support trans people, just as loudly and if not even louder than others hate us because just being there not discriminating, that's unfortunately not enough to undo and outweigh the harm that's being done by those who hate us.”

-----

Edited by CTVNews.ca producer Adam Ward

Hard enough lifting a barbell:' Laurel Hubbard would rather not carry the weight of transgender history

Rachel Axon
USA TODAY

TOKYO – Laurel Hubbard had not sought to be a trailblazing figure, and she doesn’t want to be.

A day after she became the first openly transgender woman to compete in the Olympics, the New Zealand weightlifter reckoned with what her participation in these Games meant – both for sport and for her. Competing here had not been about breaking some barrier, and that brought Hubbard a kind of attention uncomfortable to the soft-spoken athlete.

From a hotel room overlooking Tokyo Bay, hours after her competition ended, Hubbard shied away from the significance of it.

“I am reluctant to take it because I don't think it should be historical,” Hubbard said. “I think that as we move into sort of a new and more understanding world, people are starting to realize that people like me are just people. We are human, and as such I hope that just by being here that's enough.”

Though she hadn’t intended it to be, Hubbard’s participation became a referendum on transgender athletes and their place in sports. In the United Kingdom, vocal groups pushed to exclude transgender women from rugby and called them a threat to safety.

In the United States, Republican lawmakers have used spotty anecdotal evidence in an effort to bar transgender students as young as kindergarten from participating in sports. In several states, those laws have passed.

And here, at these Olympics, Hubbard’s competition in the +87 kg weightlifting has drawn online harassment, media focus and attention to the International Olympic Committee’s evolving stance on transgender athlete participation.

All of that has come at a cost to Hubbard, who has kept an otherwise private life. The New Zealand Olympic Committee and IOC have sought to shield her from the negative attention here, limiting her media access.

“I tried not to dwell on, I suppose, negative coverage or negative perception because it makes a hard job even harder,” she said. “It's hard enough lifting a barbell but if you're putting more weight on it, it just makes it an impossible task really.”

Hubbard had wanted to compete in these Games, despite the attention and blowback, because of what they represent. For weightlifting, they are the pinnacle event. It is the furthest she could go in her sport.

There is value in proving herself on this stage, even if the competition was far from what she had hoped.

Hubbard did not finish after failing to register a snatch. She came closest on her second attempt, seemingly getting credit for the 125 kg snatch before it was ruled a no lift.

On her last attempt, she struggled to stand and dropped the bar behind her. As she walked off the platform, she smiled at the crowd of athletes, officials and media, and made the shape of a heart with her hands.

“Anyone I think can train on their own time, but to actually be called to account on platform, we've got one minute to make it all happen, that's the real test,” she said. “That's what's really brought me here is to answer those questions and I may not have got the answers that I would hope for, but I’m just glad that I had that chance.”

That opportunity, and the IOC’s recognition of sport being open to all people, was heartening to Hubbard.

The IOC is set to announce a new framework in the coming months to guide sport federations on how to include transgender athletes while preserving fairness, particularly in the women’s category. Hubbard expects those policies to evolve and change over time as sport comes to understand more about and includes transgender athletes.

For Hubbard, any new policy seems unlikely to affect her competitive future. At 43, Hubbard said years of training and competing, of thrusting hundreds of pounds above her head over and over, has taken its toll on her body. She’s ready to focus on other parts of her life.

“While I recognize that my involvement in sport is a topic of considerable interest to some, in some ways, I'm looking forward to this being the end of my journey as an athlete and the attention that comes from it,” she said.

It’s attention she has shied from, even physically. As she spoke to a small group of reporters, Hubbard fidgeted with her hands and sat on them when the unease seemed to be too much.

She hadn’t set out to make history but doing so was part of the bargain she made to pursue her athletic goals. Reluctantly, she accepted she had broken that barrier.

“What I hope is if I am in a position to look back, that this will just be a small part of history, just a small step,” she said. “I know that we often look at history in terms of singular events, but really, I think it's a continuum. It is a product of so many uncountable lives and experiences and I really hope that with time any significance to this occasion is diminished by events to come.”

Tennessee sued over 'bathroom bill' for public schools

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee was hit Tuesday with a second legal challenge aimed at overturning a slate of bills targeting transgender people that Gov. Bill Lee signed into law earlier this year

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The federal lawsuit filed by the Human Rights Campaign challenges the state's “bathroom bill,” a measure that restricts school bathroom use by transgender people.


“Courts have time-and-again ruled against these dangerous and discriminatory laws and we are going to fight in court to strike down this one and protect the civil rights of transgender and non-binary young people,” Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David said in a statement.

“With our representation of two transgender kids today, we are sending a strong message of support for all transgender and non-binary children across the country — you matter, and your legal rights should be respected,” David added.

Tennessee Attorney General spokesperson Samantha Fisher said in an email the office was reviewing the lawsuit.

While numerous anti-LGBTQ measures advanced in GOP-led statehouses across the country, no state’s political leaders went further than Tennessee in enacting new laws targeting transgender people.

Under Tennessee's bathroom measure, a student, parent or employee can sue in an effort to claim monetary damages “for all psychological, emotional, and physical harm suffered” if school officials allow a transgender person into the bathroom or locker room when others are in there. They also can take legal action if required to stay in the same sleeping quarters as a person who was a member of the opposite sex at birth, unless that person is a family member.

For those transgender students or employees who want more privacy than that afforded by a bathroom designated for their sex at birth, the law says schools must try to offer a bathroom or changing facility that is single-occupancy. Critics of that provision say it could further stigmatize an already marginalized group.

The Human Rights Campaign filed the lawsuit on behalf of two transgender students currently enrolled in Tennessee schools. Specifically, the plaintiffs allege that the law violates Title IX, the 1972 federal law that protects against sex discrimination in education.

The group says one student, identified as Alex, 14, had already been forced to use the school nurse's private bathroom or the bathroom that corresponded to his gender assigned at birth during seventh grade because of the school's current policy.

“Both options were alienating and isolating for Alex who instead stopped drinking liquids at school to avoid having to use the facilities,” the Human Rights Campaign said in a statement.

After attending a private school where he was allowed access to the boys restroom when he was in eighth grade, Alex is now preparing to start public high school, where he will once again be forced to choose forgoing the use of the bathroom in order to avoid stigmatization, the lawsuit says.

Meanwhile, the family of 4-year-old Ariel says school officials were understanding of her gender identity in kindergarten and protected her from “stigmatizing experiences,” including by allowing her to use the girls restroom. However, the family says that when she enters the first grade, Ariel will either have to use the boys restroom or the private nurse's bathroom.

The Human Rights Campaign says both families are considering moving out of state.

So far nationally, there has been no big, tangible repercussion where bills have passed targeting transgender people, unlike the swift backlash from the business community to North Carolina’s 2016 “bathroom bill.”

In June, however, the U.S. Education Department announced it would expand its interpretation of federal sex protections to include transgender and gay students. The new policy directive means that discrimination based on a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity will be treated as a violation of Title IX.

Just weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Virginia school board’s appeal to reinstate its transgender bathroom ban. While LGBTQ advocates declared the ruling a key victory for transgender rights, the court's decision did not set a national precedent, which means the Tennessee case must still move through the court system.

Earlier this year, the American Civil Liberties Union challenged Tennessee’s first-of-its-kind law that requires businesses and government facilities to post signs if they let transgender people use multi-person public bathrooms of their choice. A judge has since blocked it from being implemented as the lawsuit makes it way through court.

Kimberlee Kruesi, The Associated Press