From Company Town to Rebel City: Richmond, California Shows How Progressives Can Win

Rebel cities have long been laboratories for progressive policy experimentation. Specifically, the small Bay Area city of Richmond, California has stood out for its boldness. It’s now the subject of a new book by Steve Early, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City, set to be released next Tuesday by Beacon Press.

A long-time labor activist and frequent writer for In These Times, Early moved to Richmond five years ago. After “thirty-two Boston-area winters,” the placid weather was more of a draw than the city’s vibrant urban reform movement, Early writes. But, naturally, he soon got involved and began taking notes, eventually producing a lively read—an intimate, warts-and-all look at how a small band of activists fought for and won a slightly better world at home. His book is a ray of hope for anyone wondering how to survive, and possibly even thrive, under Donald Trump and a hostile, Republican Congress.

Taking on Chevron
Richmond was once home to factories that built warships and automobiles. Today, what’s left of local industry is a giant oil refinery owned by the global superpower, Chevron. The deindustrialization of Richmond produced the usual urban problems: white flight, declining tax revenue, a corrupt government and a police force that behaved like an occupying army.

In 2004, an “unlikely group of Greens, Latinos, progressive Democrats, African Americans, and free spirits” formed the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), and began to organize around environmental and good government causes. It grew into a political machine.

Party labels don’t appear on Richmond city ballots and all city council seats are elected on a citywide basis—a structure that’s advantageous for insurgent minority efforts to gain representation and build a reputation in government.

In its first election, the RPA managed to win a city council seat for Gayle McLaughlin, a Green. As councilwoman, McLaughlin championed city parks and pushed for more environmental regulation of the refinery. Two years later, she was elected mayor.

McLaughlin hired a good government city manager, who straightened out the city’s books, as well as a new police chief who retrained the city’s force to emphasize community relations and de-escalation.

The alliance also fought to make Chevron pay its fair share in taxes, eventually extracting an additional $114 million from the company. It helped negotiate a separate $90 million payout, along with new safety regulations and investments for the plant. In turn, that money was invested in parks, in youth jobs programs and in expanding the city’s workforce and services.

In spite of such successes, the RPA found itself under regular attack. Its members skewed older and whiter than Richmond’s diverse population. Machine Democrats exploited this fact by running African-American opponents against RPA-supported candidates. These hacks were routinely endorsed by state Democratic leaders like Dianne Feinstein, out of party loyalty. In a dynamic familiar to anyone who labors in urban union politics, the building trades and police and fire unions also opposed the progressive alliance.

Finally, and least surprisingly, Chevron spent $3.1 million in an unsuccessful effort to defeat the RPA slate in 2014. To put that in perspective, that’s more money than the company spent on every congressional race in the country for two cycles—combined!

From protest to policy-making
Richmond progressives also faced intense opposition from powerful real estate interests. The city made national headlines with its “Richmond Cares” plan to use its powers of eminent domain to help homeowners whose loans exceeded the values of their homes in the wake of the mortgage crisis and Great Recession that followed. “The banking and real estate industries,” writes Early, “wanted to strangle Richmond Cares in the cradle before it could become a model and precedent for other cities.”

Corporate interests sued to block implementation, and inundated the local airwaves with broadsides against the mayor and progressive councilmembers. In essence, the banks threatened a capital strike, warning that “lending for new home buyers will dry up, home values will decline, and neighborhoods will be hurt,” Early writes. Ultimately, the mortgage industry successfully lobbied Congress to prevent the use of eminent domain to renegotiate private mortgages. Such a bill was signed into law by President Barack Obama in late 2014.

Efforts to provide relief for Richmond renters were more successful, although no less contested. Located just 17 miles from San Francisco and connected by a train line, Richmond has seen an influx of new residents priced out of more expensive cities to its south. Newcomers were soon pricing out longtime Richmond residents, as rents were raised by hundreds of dollars a month, with no warning. Evictions spiked.

In July 2015, the city passed a package of rent control measures. They established a rent control board, capped annual rent increases to the federal inflation rate and established a just cause standard for evictions. The California landlord lobby responded by paying canvassers to mislead several thousand Richmond voters into forcing a referendum on the law. Although Early’s book went to press before the November election, the happy postscript is that Richmond’s rent control law was one of the many progressive ballot questions that won.

The rent control battle exposed a deepening rift between the RPA and the new mayor, Tom Butt. Butt, who the alliance backed at the end of McLaughlin’s two terms, favored a “supply side” solution to the city’s housing crunch and bitterly walked out on the council’s rent vote.

This kind of political growing pains is being experienced in almost every city where progressive coalitions have won more power in city hall. In the transition from protest to policy-making, alliances contend with the rising expectations of Left voters, on the one hand, and the dawning reality, on the other hand, that liberal allies may only be along for part of the ride.

“Showed what a little group of people could accomplish”
Appropriately, Refinery Town includes a foreword by Bernie Sanders. Before he became the de facto opposition leader against Trump, Sanders gave hope to a beleaguered and much tinier Left during the Ronald Reagan years, as mayor of the small Vermont city of Burlington. He’s now working with Our Revolution, the new national organization that spun off from Sanders’ recent run for the presidency, and is focused on the recruitment and training of local activists for down-ballot races.

Community activists who are just starting out could find examples like Richmond a bit daunting, which makes intimate, contemporary histories like Refinery Town so valuable. The first step, of course, is to find each other. The activists who would go on to form the Richmond Progressive Alliance first coalesced around a successful effort to block construction of an oil-fueled municipal power plant next to the Chevron refinery.

The next project they worked on was a year-long campaign to stop the police from harassing Latino day laborers at their morning meetup spot outside a local Home Depot. This campaign was also a success, and led to the creation of a day laborer association to improve safety and workers’ wages.

Organizing around these discrete winnable issues “showed what a little group of people could accomplish,” Early writes one founder recalled, and inspired the shift into electoral work.

[Originally appeared at In These Times.]

Fighting Trump Isn’t Enough—We Must Also Wage War Within the Democratic Party

What reasonable American does not feel some amount of bitterness about the stunning election win of the short-fingered vulgarian scion of an outer borough slumlord, who squandered a billion-dollar casino fortune, and reinvented himself as a reality TV star and racist demagogue?

There’s plenty of acrimony to go around. The cadre of technocratic campaigners, pollsters and pundits trained to campaign on promises of “we’re not as awful as the other guys” is already pointing fingers at millennials, working-class whites, old people and Jill Stein voters.

Then there are those of us who understand that we have a world to win and that we need to actually energize and motivate people to vote for something. We’re pissed that the Democratic establishment—including union leadership—manipulated the primary process to guarantee the human embodiment of “The Establishment” would win the nomination because it was her “turn.” And we’re pissed that she didn’t turn her campaign into a full-throated denunciation of the last half-century of Republican demagoguery against minorities, immigrants, women and the working class because her “get things done” fantasy involved doing shots with John McCain to craft bi-partisan solutions to intractably partisan controversies.

We need to fight Trump’s agenda, but we arguably have a more urgent need to fight a civil war within the Democratic Party. This party needs to campaign on paycheck and civil rights issues, and needs to deliver real wins that put more money in people’s pockets and win them more dignity at work and in their communities.

Left, center or a third way?
I wrote in March about the ongoing realignment of our two major parties. As the Republican Party circles the drain of a toilet bowl of ethno-nationalism and borderline fascism, it becomes a marginal extremist party that can obviously do real damage when it wins. Fortunately, their voters are rapidly dying of old age. And let’s remember, too: The majority of voters have rejected them in six out of the last seven presidential elections.

But—absent our activism—the changing face of the GOP will continue to drag the Democrats further to the right. There are simply too many stockbrokers and single-digit millionaires who enjoy rigging the capitalist system to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us, but also support immigration, gay marriage and gun control. The GOP is no longer a comfortable home for them.

Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party welcomed these exiles with open arms. Her “Republicans for Hillary” efforts resulted in a flag-waving, military-saluting George W. Bush-style convention, complete with a prominent role for billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Clinton brought (more of) the moneyed elite into the party. The left has to organize to kick them out.

Anybody whose 2016 campaign strategy involved lowering voters’ expectations must be tossed onto history’s compost pile like the moldy vegetables they are.

Look, I’m not above casting a protest vote, or organizing in earnest for a durable third party alternative. In fact, I managed the Socialist Party’s 2000 presidential campaign. I recruited the candidate, David McReynolds, and I got him on the ballot in—among other places—Florida, where his more than 600 votes eclipsed the official margin between Bush and Al Gore. A framed Palm Beach County sample ballot still holds a place of pride on the wall of my home office.

But our job now is to organize the greatest possible progressive coalition, and third party efforts tend to attract the least serious and least skilled campaigners, resulting in a muddle like the Stein campaign. I did not cast a vote for the Greens last Tuesday. Between dopey statements about vaccinations and Clinton’s e-mails, and the party’s perennial lack of a clear anti-capitalist message, it just wasn’t a coherent protest statement. So, after 16 years of resistance, I finally voted for Hillary Clinton … on the Working Families ballot line.

The Working Families Party is currently the best-organized left opposition caucus within the Democratic Party. Happily, it is also structured to take advantage of opportunities to break with corporate Democrats and run serious third party campaigns down-ballot now, and to build towards becoming a real third party threat after the GOP has been vanquished. It is well worth paying ten bucks a month to join, take a serious role and push the party to raise its ambitions.

Yes, comrades, it is our burden to “fix” the Democratic Party. Like it or lump it, the project of capturing the Democratic Party to organize the largest possible progressive coalition to beat the fascists falls to us.

Tell-tale signs
While we’re sifting through this mound of horseshit, frantically searching for a pony, I offer this: We were likely to face a recession—possibly a global one—in the first two years of whomever’s administration. If that recession happened on Clinton’s watch, the 2018 midterms would have been a bloodbath for the Democrats, and her 2020 re-election campaign would have faced an uphill battle of historical proportions.

Now Trump gets to own the recession (which might be more severe, thanks to his bigly business savvy), and lose the House on his path to one-term ignominy. That’s as long as Democrats reject neoliberalism and run full-throated Robin Hood-style campaigns to take from the 1% and give the rest of us universal health care, free public college, affordable housing and wages we can live on.

Let’s be clear: The majority of voters rejected Trump. Like Bush 16 years ago, he lost the popular vote. Unlike then, we should insist that Democrats reject the legitimacy of his LOSER administration and agenda and punish those corporate Democrats who don’t. Democrats should filibuster Trump’s judicial picks and appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. Any rollback of rights must be vigorously challenged.

Let’s also take heart from the fact that where progressive issues were on the ballot, voters supported them. The minimum wage was raised through ballot initiatives in Washington, Arizona, Colorado and Maine. Voters in Massachusetts rejected a billionaire-backed effort to raise the cap on charter schools. San Jose, California, voted for a fair scheduling law for retail workers. Wake County, North Carolina voted to increase funding for public transportation.

The lesson here is that we on the left should remain on the offensive and press to put progressive issues—not debatably “liberal” personalities—on the ballot. Here in New York, I’m in favor of the CUNY Rising Alliance campaign to make the City University of New York tuition-free and of voting next November to authorize a statewide constitutional convention. Minimum wage hikes, fair scheduling laws, rent control and free public college all seem like winnable issues in our biggest, most progressive cities.

Sadly, union leaders are not likely to lead on this agenda, as Micah Uetrecht has bitterly noted. Most of the big NYC unions are lining up against a constitutional convention out of fear, just as they lined up against the most pro-worker Democratic presidential candidate in decades: Bernie Sanders.

As we prepare to challenge the next president of the United States, we must gird ourselves for those moments when we might have to act in contradiction to official union leadership, and ask ourselves how we rebuild a movement that cannot be so easily derailed by the personal ambitions—or fears—of union leaders, but instead encourage grassroots protests that expand on the wants, needs and frustrations of the coalition that Barack Obama built.

[This article first appeared at In These Times.]

When the Hell Did the NLRB Become More Activist Than Labor?

When the hell did the federal government get bolder than most labor unions about asserting the legal rights of workers?

On Monday, in a 3-1 ruling, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) reversed a Bush the Younger-era precedent that gave employers a say over whether temporary and subcontracted workers can be included in the same bargaining unit as the regular, full-time employees with whom they work beside. Go figure, most employers said “no” to the proposition that people who work shoulder to shoulder, but are paid from separate checkbooks, could bargain together in the same union. But the new Miller & Anderson, Inc. decision could force subcontractors to bargain with a certified union over the wages and working conditions determined by the controlling employer.

The ruling comes hot on the heels of the Board’s American Baptist Homes decision. That case re-established a balancing test for whether a boss’ employment of permanent replacement strikers is actually motivated by a desire to bust a union —which goes a long way towards restoring a legal right to strike.

And, of course, the Board’s attempt to expedite representation elections by holding frivolous management objections in abeyance until after the workers vote nearly broke the Congress. (Seriously, if you want to drink some delicious boss’ tears Google “quickie NLRB election.”)

As veteran union organizer Stephen Lerner succinctly puts it, “Unions have been significantly hobbled by the legal regime, and a lack of imagination to challenge it.” I have advocated that unions should pursue an agenda of judicial activism. These recent NLRB actions prove that the time is ripe to challenge the rules of the system that keep unions shackled. I’ve spent most of my career complaining about how slow and ineffective the NLRB is, as have most union organizers. That bias should not blind us to the opportunity of the moment.

Grandma’s pot roast
After eight years of a Democratic administration, and—with the implosion of Trump’s GOP—the reasonable expectation of at least another eight years, we finally have a labor board that will no longer shrug and sigh that it “is what it is” when it comes to the unfair rules of the system.

But are union leaders and staff bold enough to reject the “is what it is” mentality? There’s an analogy that makes the rounds in Cornell University’s labor extension programs. It involves a man sharing his grandma’s pot roast recipe with a friend. The first step of the recipe calls for cutting the ends off the raw rump, which prompts the friend to ask, “Really? Does that, like, make the roast more tender … or what?”

The man sharing the recipe, who had never questioned why it called for the ends to be cut off, calls around to his parents, siblings and aunts and uncles to find out why grandma’s recipe does so. Finally, he gets his grandma on the phone and she says, “Oh, that’s because the grocer only sold rump roasts that were too big for our roast pan.”

This is the most devastatingly on-the-nose analogy for how unions engage in long-term strategy. We hope and assume that sometime in the past, someone smarter than us considered all the possible options and settled on what we are currently doing as the best possible choice.

What if I told you … that isn’t what it is?
A good case in point is employers’ “right” to force employees to attend mandatory anti-union “captive audience” meetings during a union organizing drive. Most organizers accept that it “is what it is”—another fucked up way that NLRB election rules are rigged so that unions lose a ton of representation elections. (Although, it should be noted that unions used to lose half of all representation elections during the Clinton I-era and now tend to win about two-thirds of elections, thanks partly to more strategic organizing choices and partly to the NLRB’s recent return to its historic mission of encouraging unions and collective bargaining.)

Meanwhile, apparently, the NLRB has been on the record for half a century as inviting unions to make a case that there should be some kind of equal access standard for unions if an employer forces workers to attend mandatory meetings on the subject of union representation. A group of 106 leading labor scholars, led by Charles Morris and Paul Secunda, have filed a petition at the NLRB to re-establish just such a rule.

The speculation is that the NLRB is unlikely to act on Morris’ and Secunda’s petition, as it prefers to act on union (or employer) initiated procedural cases. The Miller & Anderson decision came in response to a union representation petition; the American Baptist Homes decision in response to an unfair labor practice charge. To win equal time, a union will have to file exceptions to a losing representation election in which the employer made use of mandatory captive audience meetings. Surely, and sadly, someone reading this article has recently lost an election under such circumstances, and can take the initiative.

Similarly, most unionists just accept that an employer has a “right” to permanently replace striking workers. For example, Jane McAlevey, in her organizing memoir Raising Hell (and Raising Expectations), incorrectly chalks it up to a law signed by Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t. It was a poorly decided 1938 Supreme Court case that was dusted off in the 1980s. Like referees in a schlocky Hulk Hogan wrestling match, Reagan’s NLRB appointees looked the other way as employers engaged in a coordinated union-busting drive that weaponized the unfrozen caveman Supreme Court precedent.

After an unsuccessful attempt to legislatively ban permanent replacements during the first Clinton era, most unions seem to have shrugged and accepted that workers can legally lose their jobs for striking—that is until the NLRB reverted to the pre-Reagan rules. But the Board can go further. The crucial phrase in that 1938 Court decision, NLRB vs. Mackay Radio, is that an employer can hire permanent replacements if it is necessary “to protect and continue his business.”

In other words, to meet the Supreme Court standard, the NLRB could force Verizon or any other Fortune 500 company to prove that they would otherwise go out of business unless they can hire scabs to steal the jobs of their striking workers. Good luck with that. Unions should get in the habit of filing unfair labor practice charges any time a boss advertises for scabs.

The NLRB even potentially has the power to reverse “Right to Work.” The statutes, passed on a state-by-state basis, aim to prevent unions from collecting fees from all of the workers they are legally obligated to represent. But the federal law that allows “Right to Work” statutes has, until recently, faced very few judicial challenges. One open question is whether the legislative intent of the Taft-Hartley act was merely to ban union membership as a condition of employment—not whether unions could negotiate mandatory fees for grievance representation services. Seattle University Associate Professor of Law Charlotte Garden notes that the NLRB could approve such a formula, and has indicated openness to cases arguing for it.

Only 3,114 days to go
Tom Perez, the current Secretary of Labor, is apparently a bit notorious for noting exactly how many days the Obama administration has left (190, as of today) to make any gains for working Americans. Perez, who has milked every ounce of executive authority that his department has in the pursuit of that goal, is most well known (on Wall Street, at least) for getting Obama to sign an executive order that extended overtime protections to salaried workers earning less than $47,476 per year (up from the mid-1970’s standard of $23,660). In so doing, he won a pay raise, or reduction in hours, for millions of working Americans. And for that mitzvah he is reportedly on the shortlist for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vice-presidential pick. And, honestly, choosing Perez is Clinton’s last chance to disprove Erik Loomis’ contention that she’s “a Martha Coakley-level campaigner with a once-brilliant campaigner for a husband.”

If labor leaders allowed themselves enough optimism to last not just until the end of Obama’s term but to anticipate at least another eight years of a Democrat in the White House, while maintaining the urgency with which Secretary Perez conducts himself, imagine what we could win for working families. If I didn’t mess up my math, that means we have at least 3,114 days left of an activist, majority-Democratic NLRB with which to press our case for a restoration of workers rights.

Because here’s the thing: challenging bad labor law involves breaking the law. When unions violate the law in pursuit of a voice at work for unorganized workers (by, say, engaging in solidarity boycotts, waging partial strikes or making “permissive” community goals their essential bargaining demands), the NLRB is the sheriff that is tasked with taking them to court. Is it crazy to think that this NLRB might treat bad labor law the way that Obama’s Justice Department treated the Defense of Marriage Act? In the court because they have to be, but conceding that the law is unjust?

Grandma’s pot roast recipe should be revised for our newly remodeled kitchen.

[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]

Making Abortion Rights Real

The week began on a surprisingly strong note for reproductive justice advocates, as the US Supreme Court, by a 5–3 margin, overturned Texas’s draconian House Bill 2.

The law, which Wendy Davis famously filibustered in her pink tennis shoes, purported to protect women’s health by requiring that health clinics providing abortion services “meet the standards for ambulatory surgical centers, including regulations concerning buildings, equipment and staffing” and that “doctors performing abortions . . . have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.” These regulations, which the Supreme Court found on Monday to be an “undue burden” for those seeking an abortion, would have shuttered half of the Texas facilities that perform abortions.

Activists are rightly celebrating the ruling as a win for abortion rights. In Texas and elsewhere, women seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies likely won’t have to contend with the anti-abortion statutes passed since the 2010 Tea Party wave.

But the decision in Whole Women’s Health v. Texas, much like the 4–4 tie in the recent anti-labor Friedrichs v. CTA case, is more a reprieve than an absolute victory. Rather than overturn an earlier, poorly decided decision, the Court potentially locked in the justification for restricting the unalloyed right to an abortion by ruling that the Texas law was simply an overreach.

That earlier, poorly decided case, 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, represented the culmination of the Reagan-Bush-era legal drive to overturn Roe v. Wade. In a 5–4 decision, in which Anthony Kennedy cast the decisive vote, the Court upheld a Pennsylvania law that mandated a twenty-four-hour waiting period, parental consent for minors, and spousal notification before a woman could obtain an abortion.

While the ruling nominally rendered Roe v. Wade a settled precedent (Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas voted against it for that reason), it opened the door for state law restrictions, as long as they didn’t present a “substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.” In other words, Casey simultaneously protected the right to an abortion and gutted it.

This is strikingly similar to how the Supreme Court has handled labor rights. In 1937, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which enshrined workers’ right to form unions and go on strikes, and gave the federal government the power to go after bosses who interfered with those rights.

But one year later, a key Supreme Court decision, which was similarly celebrated at the time, protected the right to strike while utterly gutting it. In Mackay Radio v. NLRB, the Court upheld the law and ordered the employer to reinstate four striking workers who had been fired.

Yet despite the statute’s guarantee that “Nothing in the Act should be interpreted to interfere with or impede or diminish in any way the right to strike,” as well as its explicit protection of striking workers against “discrimination,” the Court held that in order to “protect and continue his business,” the boss could permanently replace workers in the order of reserve seniority. Employers, in other words, could get rid of striking workers as long as it didn’t present a substantial obstacle to exercising their union rights.

Obsessive union-busters seized on the new precedent. In one important case, an employer tried to give its scabs “super-seniority” — workers who had gone on strike would get laid off first, even years after the job action. The Court struck down that action in 1963, ruling that it was too discriminatory and “not proper under Mackay.” But like Whole Women’s Health, the Court’s Erie Resistor decision further legitimized restrictions on a fundamental right by declaring that a certain set of actions simply went too far — not that the right was improperly restricted in the first place.

A ticking time bomb for decades, the so-called Mackay Doctrine was deployed by employers in the 1980s and 1990s as part of a broader union-busting campaign. Beginning with a strike at the Phelps-Dodge mining corporation in 1983, employers bargained hard for drastic concessions in pay, benefits, and working conditions; dared their unions to strike; hired scabs to take their jobs; and after twelve months encouraged the replacement workers to vote to decertify the union. This is the union-busting playbook that has decimated labor’s ranks and paved the way for massive income and wealth inequality.

Casey has worked out about as poorly for reproductive rights advocates.

The past quarter century has seen a sustained drive to place all kinds of limits on reproductive rights: waiting periods, forced “counseling,” trans-vaginal ultrasounds, burdensome zoning regulations. Already more than a third of women seeking an abortion have to travel at least twenty-five miles to find a facility. Add in mandatory waiting periods (still constitutional, alas), and you’re talking about entire days off from work, travel and motel expenses as well as the cost of the procedure itself, which is often not covered by insurance. (Now, as ever, is an excellent time to donate to your local abortion access fund.)

For far too many working-class women, the right to an abortion exists on paper, rather than as a genuine right — just as for many workers, the right to strike remains purely formal.

So by all means, let’s breathe a sigh of relief. Let’s take some time to celebrate. This was supposed to be a much worse Supreme Court term, and maybe, just maybe, we’re seeing the beginning of the end for constitutionally accepted restrictions on abortion rights.

But the labor movement’s experience with Mackay should give us pause. Even if the heat dies down on new anti-choice efforts, if the now-legitimized Casey precedent is not overturned, and soon, it could be used as legal ammunition in the next massive assault on reproductive rights.

The next president could appoint as many as three Supreme Court justices — totally changing the high court’s makeup and voting dynamics. We need to begin thinking beyond the defensive strategies of Friedrichs and Whole Women’s Health and start planning campaigns of judicial activism to overturn rotten Court precedents and put women’s fundamental rights on firmer legal footing.

[This article originally appeared at Jacobin.]