Tag Archives: History

Essential Workers and the American Labor Movement: Harvey Schwartz on Labor Under Siege

“I can’t stay home. I move the world’s cargo,” declared Rudy Moreno of Los Angeles/Long Beach ILWU longshore Local 13. His words were later memorialized in The Dispatcher, the union’s newspaper, in the January 2021 issue dedicated to Moreno and other members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union who had already lost their lives to Covid-19 because they risked staying on the job. In the first year of the pandemic, as many as 40 ILWU longshore and several warehouse workers braving the risk of disease fell to Covid; as of today, some 50 ILWU members have died.

Early in the Covid pandemic, ILWU waterfront workers greeted and docked the 1,000-bed United States Naval Ship Mercy when it came to Los Angeles to help relieve the burden of the disease on local hospitals and medical facilities. And like many other workers in “front-line” industries whose ranks have been diminished by Covid’s ravages, ILWU longshore and warehouse members have continued to show up, to persevere through grueling round-the-clock shifts, and to risk their lives and health while moving and storing critical cargo—food, medicines, cars—that America depends on. In October 2021, current ILWU President Willie Adams met with President Joe Biden to address ongoing supply chain issues brought on by the disease. Since then, ILWU leaders have met repeatedly with public officials and shipping executives to help unjam pandemic-caused backups in West Coast ports.

Over the past two-and-a-half years, many “essential” workers have been publicly celebrated for their courageous efforts to keep hospitals and basic businesses functioning and the supply chain moving despite the perils of the Covid-19 pandemic. But celebrated or not, when workers have tried to unionize, their efforts have often been fiercely opposed. Despite some surprising successes in the 2022 organizing drives by employees at Amazon, Starbucks, and Apple, workers’ gains in these industries have involved ferocious battles against entrenched company resistance.

Under its long-serving president, Robert McEllrath, the ILWU’s struggles over the past two decades, described in Labor under Siege: Big Bob McEllrath and the ILWU’s Fight for Organized Labor in an Anti-Union Era, reflect the difficulties faced by all unions in a challenging era for organized labor. Narrated in participants’ own words, this oral history will inspire workers in other industries now organizing and rejuvenating the American labor movement. With the ILWU’s long tradition of championing civil rights, social justice, equal opportunity, respect for diversity, and domestic and international labor solidarity, the union has endured numerous attacks going back to its founding in the 1930s. During the twenty-first century, the storied West Coast union has persevered despite serious threats from hostile corporations, government officials, and law enforcement agents. “As labor reasserts itself,” Laurie Mercier, professor of American history at Washington State University, recently wrote of Labor under Siege, “it can learn from those who recall the importance of effective leadership, maintaining solidarity locally and internationally, supporting social justice causes, and upholding the ILWU motto, ‘an injury to one is an injury to all.'”

Harvey Schwartz is curator of the Oral History Collection for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union library in San Francisco. He is the author of The March Inland: Origins of the ILWU Warehouse Division, 1934-1938 and, with the University of Washington Press, Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU; Building the Golden Gate Bridge: A Workers’ Oral History; and, with Ronald E. Magden, Labor under Siege: Big Bob McEllrath and the ILWU’s Fight for Organized Labor in an Anti-Union Era.

While Making Other Plans: Ellen Waterston on “Walking the High Desert”

 

In 2012 the Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA) pieced together a 750-mile trail that starts at the Oregon Badlands Wilderness outside of Bend and continues to the southeastern Oregon canyonlands that flank the Owyhee River. I moved from New England to the high desert of central Oregon four decades ago. Though I now live in Bend, my love of this hardscrabble outback still informs me every day. So it’s no surprise that this new trail spoke to me, lured me back into the desert. No longer actively ranching, I decided I’d walk sections of the trail to bring attention to the ONDA’s Oregon Desert Trail especially as it underscored public and private land use issues. I would make a point of evenly and fairly presenting the conflicting points of view about repurposing open areas of public land. I prided myself that in so many ways I already knew the players: ranchers; Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, and Fish and Wildlife employees; schoolteachers in rural schoolhouses; merchants in remote outposts; American Indians on reservations in the high desert; law enforcement officials who, some years back, were kind enough to wave me on, despite my excessive speed, as I made my way along desolate Highway 20 back to the ranch with a station wagon full of fussy infants and sacks of groceries.

In 2015, I began researching and writing this A to Z examination of land use issues in the high desert. But the January 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters by an armed group of far-right extremists changed all that. Life and writing projects are what happen while you are busy making other plans. The occupation was an invitation I couldn’t refuse to broaden the scope of the book, to examine how each section of the trail, in its own unique way, underscored issues that weren’t only regional but also national, if not international, seen through the optic of the high desert—issues such as water resources, climate change, protection of environmental habitat, recreational demands on open spaces, the rural-urban divide, economic inequities, and racism in the rural West.

Writing this book has led me to love the desert even more and to deeply apprehend how fragile it is socially and environmentally. With so many new people moving into this high and dry region, just as I did before them—there needs to be a commensurate commitment to care for it. I hope this book inspires people to engage in important conversations not only about the high desert but also about how these broader and seemingly unresolvable issues manifest where each of us live. As I encountered those issues, I confess I didn’t see any chance for resolution, but by the end of the book… well, I won’t be a spoiler.

 

Ellen Waterston is author of Where the Crooked Desert Rises: A High Desert Home, a memoir, four poetry collections, and four poetry collections including a verse novel. She is the founder and president of the Waterston Desert Writing Prize and the founder of the Writing Ranch in Bend, Oregon.

#TinyDeskContest Staff Pick: No-No Boy’s “Two Candles In The Dark”

I am a huge National Public Radio nerd (I know), and from late February through the end of April you’ll often find me watching and listening to the wonderful submissions from unsigned talent to the annual Tiny Desk Contest.

I was especially thrilled to see the 2018 submission from No-No Boy, the amazing multimedia project of Brown University doctoral students Julian Saporiti and Erin Aoyama that takes inspiration from the oral histories of World War II incarceration camp survivors and aims to shine a light on the Asian American experience, including Saporiti’s family’s history living through the Vietnam War and Aoyama’s grandmother’s incarceration in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. (Their submission, “Two Candles In the Dark,” is a featured staff pick this week on the All Songs Considered blog.)

I’ve been a fan of their music and other work for a while now, and my little publicist heart is especially excited that their contest submission video features not only No-No Boy by John Okada, but also Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone, Desert Exile by Yoshiko Uchida, Years of Infamy by Michi Nishiura Weglyn, and A Tragedy of Democracy (Columbia UP) by John Okada coeditor Greg Robinson, among many other scholarly books on the Asian American experience. Can you spot any other university press titles?

I hope you’ll join me in rooting for No-No Boy for Tiny Desk Contest (the winner will be announced in late April). In the meantime, check out the project on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Soundcloud. You can (and should) also listen to interviews with and songs by No-No Boy on Order 9066, an eight-part series podcast from APM Reports and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and anywhere else you are able.

—Casey LaVela, Publicity Director