April 9, 2025 • 40 mins
Mia talks with Coalition of Independent Unions organizer Mark Medina about ICE's kidnapping of Familias Unidas por la Justicia organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, Lelo's work, and the April 12th rally at Portland City Hall to free him.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to ikidapp Here Podcasts, where here is the rapidly
encroaching rise of fascism. My name is Mia Wong, and
one of the major vectors of fascism that we have
been covering on this show has been the increase in
just effectively straight up black baggings by ICE and Immigration's
enforcement in general. We have spent a good amount of
(00:29):
time covering a bunch of different angles of this, but
there is another incredibly distressing angle that we have not
covered as much yet, which is their targeting of labor organizers.
And with me to talk about that is Mark Medina
from Portland Jobs with Justice and the Coalition of Independent Unions.
And yeah, Mark, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, I'm glad to have you on. So one of
the most pressing sort of black baggings that's happened fairly
recently is ICE's kidnapping of a freight Wharezy for Reno
otherwise known as Lailo. Can you tell us about sort
of his work and the projects that he's been doing
and Famulus you need us Justicia.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
Yeah, So it's been a very disheartening and scary couple
of weeks since it's happened, because this opens up a
new path for the state to go after organizers, to
go after workers and the most underprivileged in our society
in a way that I suppose we all expected. But
(01:30):
now that we see it, now that we see it happening,
now that we see it happening to people that we
know in our community, it's becoming a parent. There is
no turning back from the idea that we have to
be able to take this on head first. We as activists,
as organizers, have to look at this and then see
it as an actual thing in our day to day
that we have to combat and incorporate into our organizing.
(01:53):
So maybe it might be a little helpful to start
off with a little bit of a backstory on So
I mean I need us by Lassa. Yeah, So the
Union has its origins going back to twenty thirteen. The
area in which they organize, the Bellingham or the Washington
Walkins scadged areas, has the very particular type of immigrant
community there. Lelo himself is of Meteco background. There's a
(02:16):
lot of indigenous Mexican populations in the region. It's also
one that has long routes a lot of these people
go back generations, have been here for quite some time.
This area also happens to be a very particularly with
the non Hispanic population, particularly the white population, a very conservative,
particularly conservative for the area. It's one of the very
(02:38):
few areas of Northwest that Donald Trump came to visit.
It's an area that has had repeated attacks on then
imbric community. And so it's in this context that workers
are organizing in twenty thirteen for this first independent union.
And two it's important to mention the independent part of it.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
A lot of the.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
Organizers from the start of this of the union came
from a tradition of the United farm Workers in California.
They some of them worked with Seef Javis in the
heyday of the United farm Workers. And in the years
and decades since then, since the Delana voidcotts and other things,
there's been a growing rift of what the next steps
(03:20):
should be. And I think that for a lot of
farm workers, because they don't organize under the general labor
law that we have for most workers, there is a
sort of patchwork system for how farm working organizing happens
in the United States that's dependent upon different states and legislatures,
and for the most part, with the exception of only
two states, farm workers don't have the same kind of
(03:42):
protections that regular workers generally in the society have for
union recognition, for collective bargaining. Only Washington and New York
at the moment, I believe have the laws that allow
for elections for farm worker unions, and there is a
very particular reasons for that being the case. Farm workers
were excluded from the Wagner Act for having general labor
(04:05):
rights in the nineteen thirty because precisely it was seen.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
As immigrant labor.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Yeah, and immigrants were not seen as meriting the same
rights as white Americans in the same way the domestic
workers were removed because I was seen at the time
as black labor.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
So it has its roots and racism.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
And yeah, and that's something that you know, like you
can tie that exclusion, like there's a straight line between
that and Japanese and tournaments, which also to a large extent,
is about land seizure and this sort of like fusion
of racism, specifically racism in the farming sector with the
tax and labor rights and with this desire to just
sort of seize literally the lands and labor from non
(04:43):
white people.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Yeah, so it's a long and bleak history.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
No, absolutely, and I'm sure your audience is well aware
of a lot of these subject matter. It is a
bleak history, and it wasn't until groups like the United
farm Workers in the sixties and the seventies, I think,
began to create the possibility for something new for the
Hispanic community. It was United farm Workers that built not
(05:08):
just a lot of solidarity with other immigrant groups in
the California area, but they also built a sense of
pride and identity and belonging for a lot of communities.
I grew up in Boro Heights, East Los Angeles, says
such Travis and the Knight farm worker murals are everywhere.
You know. Me and my friends would often joke as
seb Jravis is like the Patron Saints. It's Los Angeles,
(05:28):
even though it's nowhere near Delano.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
And there's a reason for that.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
I think that a lot of us looked up to
the United farm Workers, We looked up to the farm
worker Union movement, and we saw in them our heroes,
our modern day heroes.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
We saw them.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
We saw people who said be proud to be brown.
You know, there's a courage that comes from that history.
The union movement that then sprung up in twenty thirteen
in the Bellingham, Northern Washington area was coming out of
that milieu. They understood that background, they understood that history,
but they also understood that there was very little organizing
in the region. There was a lot of fear in
(06:03):
the region. It's very difficult to organize farm workers to
have access to a lot of these areas. You have
to cross just private property for quite some time before
you reach the first farm workers, and it becomes very,
very difficult to have organizing happen.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
And it's intentional that way.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
The rise in farm worker unions that happened in the
sixties and seventies had a massive plummet by the time
the beginning in the nineteen two thousands, and so these
workers had heard these stories, had heard by this legacy,
but had been essentially delivered with increasing frustration, racist behavior
by bosses, lower and lower pay, and the use of
(06:43):
certain types of immigrants to try to scab their jobs.
It be the capitalist class using one type of worker
against another type of worker, picking them against each other.
It's in this context in twenty thirteen that this union
starts to form, they go public at that time period,
they call for recognition and they started taking action directly,
(07:03):
and they organized this years and years long boycott campaign
to gain recognition, to get the employer to start bargaining.
And after years and years of this, I court battles
and the employer trying to lay everyone off and hire
certain types of newer immigrants coming in to replace all
of them, putting one worker against another, all these types
(07:24):
of maneuvers. By twenty seventeen, these workers win a contract,
and the philosophy of the union since then has been
not just to grow this union, but also for them
to be able to stand on their own two feet.
Their idea is that they are very proud of their
independent nature of that union. They're not part of, you know,
the AFL CIO, they're not part of the UNICE farm workers,
(07:45):
They're not part of any other organization.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
You know.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
When I spoke to some of their leaders last year,
one of the things that came to mind was they
brought up a quote from Eugene Debts, the notion of
like if we were to lead you into the promised land,
someone else would just lead out. And the notion of
their union is we have to be able to stand
on our two feet. We can't rely on anyone else
because if we, if they promises things today tomorrow, they'll
hold something over us. And so the notion that farm
(08:08):
workers lead this movement and leave this union is an
incredibly powerful statement of what working class people can do.
The kinds of workers that everyone else kind of looks at.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
They could never do it.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
These you know, these workers could never handle this kind
of level of struggle and couldn't do this kind of
organization have built one of the most powerful inde kind
of farm worker unions in the West Coast. Lelo Alfredo Lelo,
was a founding member of this union. He was a
farm worker studying at the age of twelve, and since
then devote his entire life organizing to helping workers, to
(08:44):
being the kind of person who commits himself to the
work of making the world a better place than you
found it. You know, at twenty five, he is significantly
younger than me. And when I think of people who
I look up to, who I think of, Wow, when
I grew up, I want to be stione like that,
I think.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Of Leloe little many of times over the years.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
He's a very soft spoken, very thoughtful type of person.
And yeah, I think that the labor movement owes him
a bit of a debt. Now it is time that
we as a whole stand up for him.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, we are going to go to ads regrettably, and
then when we come back, we are going to start
talking I think a bit more about the repression we
are back. So obviously, then this is this is a
(09:35):
part of the story that you've been telling, the sort
the sort of capitalist class out in Bellingham, and you know,
the sort of I mean, this has been true of
the broader capitalist class since it's kind of organizing starting
like has been trying to break these unions this entire time.
You know, that has been a major focus of everything
that they've been doing. And you know, what we're seeing
right now seems like a massive sort of escalation in
(09:59):
the degree of for So, yeah, can we talk about
the recent black bagging Alilo and yeah, and sort of
what happens and where we go from there.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Yeah, the weaponization of the state to go after immigrants
and go after activists is I'm sure your audience is
well known, is nothing new, and it knows party affiliation,
the Democratic administrations have been doing this to immigrant communities,
and I've been using it to silence political activists. The
Chump administration, however, is now doing this on a level
(10:31):
that is at least to a lot of us unheard
of in the modern day, which is to go after
specific union leaders in the labor movement, to go after
civil rights leaders. You've seen this happen also when it
comes to Palasini rights activists around the country. The idea
is pretty simple, to silence the loudest voices, to cut
(10:53):
to leadership from the movement.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
On March twenty fifth, Alfredo Lelo Barres.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Waspping off his girlfriend at a nearby farm for work
and was accosted by ICE agents as he was exercising
his rights or what he thought his rights were at
the time because of the regime. Who knows what your
rights are. They broke his window, they dragged him out.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Of his car.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
You know, this was obviously a very traumatic incident, but
also it was a real shock to the union to
see to see the community group that works with the
union and to the local Hispanic community in the area.
Within hours of that, workers organizers community went to move
to try to carry a response. Knowing that time was
(11:40):
of the essence. He was then taken to a local
Heights facility. He's now since been moved to a detention
center in Tacoma, Washington. A large rally of hundreds took
place calling for his immediate release. What we know now
seemingly is that at the very last minute apologies, I
(12:01):
forget the exact day, but it was within a couple
of days of the kidnapping, Lelo was pulled off. He
has an automatic stay of deportation in place at this point,
no longer has any legal authority to remove Lelo. If
this came at the last minute, he was in line
for deportation and was removed at the.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Very last minute.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
However, while this is good news, this is not good
for someone's personal health and well being. These are massively
cramped facilities, underfunded facilities. You know, there's horror stories around
the country of the conditions in some of these places.
Every day that Lelo is stuck behind these prison walls
(12:44):
is an injustice to our movement.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Yeah, yeah, I think. The thing it immediately reminds me
of is the story of Thomas Paine, who was like
slated to be executed in the French Revolution and they didn't.
They didn't execute him because his door was opened, so
they didn't see the slash line on the cell that
I was supposed to execute him. And then like the
next day, the rate of terror ended with the coup
against the Jacobins. There rids me a lot of that,
(13:08):
but you know, but on the other hand, here's the thing.
We have gotten the stay of the deportation, but we
have not we have not brought down the rate of
terror yet.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
So yeah, and I would hope it has the way
four more years for that one.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Yeah, good lord, good lord, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So
let's let's talk a bit about So. I mean, obviously,
you know what we're seeing here and this this is
you know, the connection that you made is we're seeing
just on a sort of broad scale, the use of
the state and of the sort of black bagging and
of these deportations as a way to target organizers from
Palestine to label organizers. That's only going to expand as
(13:46):
this goes on. And I think something critical about you know,
one of the first things you were saying here about
the fact that they're targeting sort of the loudest voices
in the community. And I think a big part of
this is that they know that their position isn't as
strong as they're making it out to be. Right, Like
they have just detonated a nuke across the entire economy.
(14:06):
They are systemically going through and individually fucking over every
single group of people who are supposed to be their base.
And I think part of what they're doing is they're
trying to spread sort of raw terror and spread fear
and you know, and and attack the critical infrastructure of
organizing because they want to make it look like resisting
(14:26):
them as impossible, and that's just not true. They can be.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
I think that oftentimes, particularly fascistic power wants and needs
to present itself as inevitable, as overwhelming, and impossible to defeat,
in part because it's meant to hide the ultimate weakness
of some of these powers.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
The actual power that these farm workers showed against the
Sukuma farms when they went on strike and boycotted for
years and years and years out in the fields, talking
to workers for years and years and years, it showed.
But no matter how powerful some of these companies are,
some of the CEOs are that the power of workers
overwhelms and the power solidarity overwhelms and they know that
(15:09):
going after leadership, going after some of the most some
of the bravest people in our movement is a way
of trying to hit the movement at the knees and trying.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
To convince folks that struggle list is impossible.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
But I think it is important to remember that what
we're doing, the struggle now, the response. This is how
we show the population the world, you know, our communities,
that they are not inevitable, it is not insurmountable and
so and by taking action responding to the kinds of
specistic behaviors of the state, we show how feeble the
(15:43):
state can be at times, even when it seems it's
most treacherous and awful.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Yeah, And I think a lot of times when we
win fights, it can be very very hard to actually
see our victory because we don't see the world that
could have been if we didn't fight. And that's the
thing I think about what the administration we're in, the
first Shomp administration, they absolutely wanted to be doing this
kind of shit, and they were able to do a
lot of terrible stuff, but they weren't able to sort
(16:09):
of go this far because of the kind of mass
mobilizations that shut down a lot of the kinds of
things that they wanted to do. And I think that's
a kind of victory that is hard to kind of
like process because all all we see is, you know,
the suffering that did happen, and we can never see
an image of like all of the people you know,
(16:32):
who got to continue living their lives because we stop them,
And that I think is another sort of powerful tool here.
But also we do have an opportunity to make sure
that we can beat them right here and right now
in a way that's very, very public and visible.
Speaker 4 (16:48):
And that's a question mark about that in my mind,
because you know, my entire adult life, I've heard stories
of the state repression against union organizers in the twenties
and the thirties and the forties. You hear the stories,
if you're in argier about all the violederas and how
hard it was in the past, and we forget that
a lot of that does continue on is just not
(17:09):
where you would imagine it where a lot of American
workers imagine it, and so they don't see it in
their shops and their factors, in their unions.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
But this right here is an attack on the labor movement.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Had this been the head of you know, the Electricians Union,
the head of the SCIU. Had this been an attack
on what a lot of Americas wol view as the
mainstream labor movement, this would be headlines.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
The fact that it isn't shows and that it has been.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
So much work to try to get attention to a
union leader being picked up and kidnapped by the state
should be you know, a blaring red light on the
labor movement to take action immediately. I hope that what
we're doing is the first steps to that, because you know,
this is one of those moments if you know, they
went after the trade unions unionists and I was not
a trade unionist.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Well, going after the farm work. I am not a
farm worker.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
It isn't common upon us morally to stand up one
another at this point in time.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yeah, And I think there's been a real kind of
real cowardice and a real sort of appeasement of power,
and a real sort of demonstration of where a lot
of these union's politics are. I mean, we saw the
way that the Teamsters like leadership just I mean just
you know, openly went to speak at the R and
C right. We've been seeing the UAW, which traditionally has
(18:28):
had better like immigration politics in the last few years
than a lot of these other sort of mainstream unions,
but it's also been sort of going to bat for
Trump's tariff, Like I've been calling you the turf tariffs
tariffs because of their wages of transphobia. But you know,
they've been going to bat for like the turf tariffs, right,
And that I think is like part of why they've
been sort of unable to like respond to this moment
(18:50):
and why they've been unable to respond to the past
fucking fifty years of moments, which is that like, if
you're sort of like labor politics is rooted in this
sort of like American now nationalist like American jobs for
American workers stuff, right, and it's not actually based in
the power of workers and the power of workers everywhere,
then you're going to lose. It's not just sort of
(19:11):
reactionary politics, so so it is it's also bad politics,
and we're seeing it right now.
Speaker 4 (19:16):
Yeah, And I think that the history of the labor
movement has been an interesting one in my adult life
because you know, I'm.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
As pro liber as they come.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
However, the history of the labor movement in the modern
day has been a fascinating one. It is one that
when it came to large strikes, with that it's nadier
At the mid and late two thousands, I think at
one point it was just over a dozen strikes over
two thousand workers. And you compare that to the high
of the labor movement in the forties and the fifties
when it was in the hundreds, and you've had strike
(19:44):
actions all the time, and that is what built so
much of what we call middle class for some and
it was this really historic moment at the time, and
we're in a historic moment now where I think the
labor movement for so long from that point has been trying.
Workers in the rank and file have been trying to
kind of reshape the labor movement in the thoughts and
the ideas of the new but it comes with its
(20:06):
own regressive setbacks, and it comes with its own shortcomings
of leadership. You know, the teams to is making statements
around immigration rights was a very unfortunate thing to be
said in the modern day. In the modern context, I
think that you know, other unions seemingly looking to you know,
(20:26):
circle the wagons rather than take the risks that need
to happen in this current time. Has really shown a
lack of imagination from some of the mainstream unions. And
the thing is, I hope for the best for them.
I want them to succeed and I want them to
get better because the world is a better place for
having these larger unions. However, if the independent movements, the
(20:48):
independent unions like Familias who need this po Thesia, like
these other unions in the region, that can be the
kind of canary in the coal mine, the kind of
labs of experimentation that can be the first people out
to do some of the most radical and interesting and
worker centric type of movement building and messaging.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Like I think there is the reason why.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
It was the coalition of independent unions here in the
Pacific Northwest that came up with the notion of having
transity of solidarity, this idea of patterning contracts together to
have inclusive and protections for trans workers and having that
be a thing that unions take up together. I think
that it's incredibly notable that it's group's life for means
(21:31):
we need this that carry out this long years long
boycott and created a model by which other workers in
the region can not just organize themselves, but organize themselves
on a low cost, member led democratic model. I think
it's important to see that sometimes the large unions have
to start looking at some of the radical pragmatism that
(21:52):
comes from the necessities of these smaller independent campaigns.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Yeah, and I mean before we go to ads, I
think the last thing I want to say there is, like,
you know, the the other option they have is to
do the option of what the unions didn't during the
rise of the Nazis, which is like dreaming the rise
of the Nazis. The unions fell online, right, they fell
in line because they were scared and they thought that
they could fucking win benefits from it. And you know,
it saved some of them, like they were a few
of those people like just became Nazis, but the rest
(22:18):
of them got fucking liquidated. Anyways, So those are your options, right,
You either stand and fight now with the independent unions,
or you become part of the regime and eventually get liquidated.
When you know, Trump in like fucking two and a
half years science executive order that says unions are illegal
or whatever.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Yeah, and what does that do at the end of
the day, even if it stays, even if you're the
head of some of these larger unions. And by working
with the administrative, the administration today, by selling your soul,
by selling the movement out, you give up the moral
high ground of our movement, of our working class democratic movement.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Yeah, you give it up for another generation. Then when workers,
when people like myself growing up looking at images of
the United farm Workers, there are similar I presume there
are similar people in the United States growing up who
look that way up to the United Lado Workers, look
that way up to the Teachers Union. What happens to
those children, to those kids, those young people who want
to be the next the next leadership, the next era
(23:17):
of the labor movement, they will not look at us as.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Having the moral high ground. We give that up. We
give our role in history, our moral role in history
to fight for the working class when we do things
like this.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, and what you become and set is just another
extension of the state. You become like one of like
the national syndicates and like Franco of Spain. And what
and what that does to you is people people don't
look at you in a generation as a labor movement,
they look at you as just another arm of a
fascist regime. And it doesn't have to be like that.
It really doesn't.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
But yeah, no, it does not.
Speaker 4 (23:49):
I took no pleasure in saying this, you know, I
take no pleasure in saying this. But it's an unfortunate reality.
And hopefully the turnaround can come from anywhere. It can
come from from unexpected places, and I hope there is one,
and things like.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Solidarity for Lelo. I hope it'd be a small link in.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
The chain that moves the pensulum right back into the
direction of an ethical and moral superiority that comes with
fighting for working class folks.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, we're going to take an ad break, and when
we come back, we're going to talk about what we
can do for Lilo. Right now, as as you are
listening to this, we are back. So let's talk about
(24:35):
both the operation I mean, just immediately, the plans to
sort of put pressure to free Lilo, and also what
then I guess we'll get into, sort of more broadly,
the kinds of fighting that we need to be doing
in order to resist this.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
Sounds good, So, like I mentioned earlier, and you need.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
An aftermath of lelo is kidnapping by ice, workers in
the region began organizing and unions came together and support
a Lelo and help a rally in front of the
tention center in Tacoma. Now, what we're trying to do
is trying to spread the word further. There are other communities,
particularly here on the West coast, that can't stand solidarity,
(25:13):
that should stand in solidarity. And when we heard this
needs to go down, activists within the CiU ask themselves
we can't stand idly by while a leader in our
movement is kidnapped by the state. We need to take action,
and so we did. And the point was to move
as quickly as possible to try to build a larger
voice for Lelo while he is in detention. So there
(25:36):
is a good number of activists here in the Portland area.
We can be of service to the farm Workers Union.
You know, we have a strong core of independent unions
here in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in the Portland area.
We can do what other unions are hesitant to do,
which is take action immediately. It stands firmly with our
brothers and sisters. Are monos up in northern Washington. So
(25:58):
what's happening is the call from the union is workers individually,
for people individually to call into the Attorney General in
Washington State and call to the release of Lelo, also
calling the new governor up in Washington State to call
for the release, bring a wider attention, making me known
that this person is someone who is important to the community,
(26:18):
cannot be expirited away to another country where they are
not from, where.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
That is not their home, and taken away from their family,
the community and from the good work that they do.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
And the other thing that we're trying to do is
we're trying to get local officials to also use their
voice to maximize the pressure to give more attention to
this issue.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
So that's the call so far.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
This rally that we're having in front of city Hall
on Saturday, April twelfth at two pm is the beginning
of what we hope is a larger campaign that will
not end until Lelo is free and until these raids
stop attacking the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest. You know,
just because we in Portland, you know, are not farm workers,
(27:05):
because we don't work with farm workers.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Because a lot of the workers who who work here
had maybe never met a farm worker.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
It does not mean that we should not stand shoulder
and shoulder and arm and arm and support the farm
workers Union up in northern Washington to the hilt. And
this begins this fight of building that kind of level
of solidarity. It begins by showing up for them doing
what they can do right now. They don't have the
resources to go stay by stay in city by city
to bring its tension and awareness to one of their
leaders being attacked. But we can do it, and if
(27:34):
we can do it, we should do it. It's a
moral imperative that little be free.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, And so I mean statistically there are a lot
of you in Portland listening to the show, but statistically
most of you are not in Portland. Are there are
there things that people in the rest of the country,
and I guess the rest of the world. I know,
I know there's so Sally statistically don't live in the US. Yeah.
Are are there things that people in other places can
do to put pressure specifically for Alala, but also just
can do in their own communities to you know, I
(28:00):
mean put pressure to stop these raids?
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (28:02):
Absolutely, So this is very similar I think to the CiU,
the Coalition of Independent Unions is Coalition of Independent Unions
here in the Pacific Northwest. It was trying to do
and it's trying to do with TRANSI of solidarity. The
idea is, we are trying to make this work here
in the Pacific Northwest, and if it's useful, if it's good,
if people are paying attention to it, then we can
export this to other cities in other areas to bring
(28:25):
more attention to these causes. And so with that one
pavan earning contracts together, particularly on this one issue of
transgender healthcare and trans influencive language and contracts, and codifying
that between unions and having that a demand of labor
movement that they not walk away from this. We want
to also do the same thing with this fight for
freedom for the farm workers union and their leaders and
(28:47):
workers everywhere. And the tax will comes soon soon enough,
I suppose, I would imagine from this regime in Washington.
If this works, we want workers in other cities to
start assisting the farm worker and take them up the
call of action and fighting for not just let up
whoever comes afterwards, because there will be levels in the
future unfortunate as they may be. So if this works here,
(29:10):
workers here as they hear more updates, we would hope
and we would love if workers elsewhere, if organizing groups
elsewhere would want to take up this fight and bring
attention to the cause.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Hell yeah, yeah, And I think there is a lot
of you know, potential and sort of mobilizations. There's a
lot of potential in getting people to understand that this
stuff's happening, and there's a lot of potential in cross
uniting organizing. And also, and I will say this too
because like you know, obviously statistically like there are a
large number of people listening to this who are like
union staffers, but also like most of you are not.
(29:46):
That also doesn't mean that whatever kind of organizing that
you're doing doesn't overlap with this and doesn't have capacity
that they can bring to bear to stop the entire
deportation regime that we're facing right now. And that's something
that you have to do both on the level of
solid on a moral level, and also on a strategic level,
because again, he is going to come for you two.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
So yeah, yeah, you know, without making it too personal,
like I know level personally, I have met a little
many times over the years, He's a fantastic person.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
The reason why a lot of us as organizers.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Why we do this kind of work to begin with,
is because we believe, as as bizarrely as it may be,
that we could be a link in the chain that
makes the world a better place, that we can leave
the world better off.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
Than we found it.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
And we also believe in what we're doing because when
we look at people who have been attacked by corporations
and attacked by the state, we feel a moral compulsion
to help. And what I would say to folks who
are outside of Portland who are hearing this story, who
hear the calls to call the Attorney General in Washington
State and demand that they'll be released, to follow up
(30:56):
with the union, but media further direction on how they
can and potentially holding their own rallies and support and
solidarity and bring attention to the issue.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
I would hope that they do this.
Speaker 4 (31:07):
Imagine if Letlo were your brother, Imagine if Letlo were
your cousin, your father, your friend, Act as if they
were them, because it requires that level of empathy to
have the kind of solidarity that we need in order
to fight this fastiest regime and everything that it does.
It is easy to say I will wait for someone
(31:30):
else to do the work. I will, someone else will
come along and it'll get resolved that way. No, if
you don't do the work, it just will not get done.
And so we have to go in every day as
part of civic engagement and assisting the working class, as
part of our daily routines, and using the kind of
the kind of sense of moral necessity and of immediate action.
(31:53):
It requires that you would do for someone that was
close to you, because this person is you just by
another name. This person is your fan, even if you've
never met them. We were all in this together as
working class people. And if we start coming up with
boundaries and reasons for a while we shouldn't stand up
for one another, those reasons then become excuses for everyone else.
So I would hope that when people hear this, they
(32:15):
look and see the struggle of this person, and they
can imagine what would happen to them in the future,
and they say, I would want someone there for me
in my corner, in my time of me, So I
will be there for them and theirs.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, it reminds me a lot of this line from
Peggy Seeger, who wrote wrote an anti fascist song called
Song of Choice, and one of the verses that's always
stuck with me is today the soldiers took away one.
Tomorrow they may take away two. In April, they took
away Greece, but surely they will never take you. And
(32:47):
you know, I mean, that's the thing that people in
the thirties woke up to, right is you know, if
you're in this country and this is the thing that
you're waking up to now, is that, yeah, the soldiers
are taking people away, and every day they're taking away
more and more people. And day you wake up and
they've taken entire countries. And the only way that you
can stop this is by making sure that the action
that you're taking is not just waking up and going
(33:08):
back to sleep. Right, Yep, you have to take a stand.
You have to fight because no one is coming. The
only person who was coming for these people, the only
person who is coming for the people coming next to them,
and inevitably the only people who is coming to save
you when they come for you is going to be you.
And you know there are enough of us to stop them,
(33:29):
right There always have been, That's always been a thing
about fascism is that it relies on us not fighting them.
It relies on us on our passivity, It relies on
us not caring enough about the people that they take first,
you know, to sit back and do nothing and think
that we can wait, and you can't have You have
to start right now, and you have to stop them
(33:49):
before they advance any further, and you have to roll
back what they've already done. And this is our opportunity
to do that.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, I think that says that encapsulates the
sentiment perfectly.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Well, yeah, do you have anything else that you want
to add before we head out? And we will put
links to a whole bunch of things in the description
to this. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
I suppose to those that would want to know more
about not just the struggle of the farm workers Union,
but also the general experiments in independent unionism here in
the Pacific Northwest, I'd highly encourage that folks take a
deep dive and see that to organize your workplace to
have the kind of solidarity with your coworkers, you need
(34:35):
not be dependent upon someone else and other organizations that
come in and sort of.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
Rescue you from the mystery and drudgery. Of non union workplaces.
You can do it too. You can create.
Speaker 4 (34:48):
You have it in your head, in your own mind
and your own ends, the ability to organize, the ability
to fight with your coworkers. You have the kind of
clever problem solving skills that every work or has in
order to come back the boss and create a better
world than the one that currently exists. And also that
when it comes to issues like standing up for this
(35:10):
struggle now and struggles in the future, I would say
you have it now, the creative capacity to in whatever
city you're in, to make connections, to build inroads with
the labor movement, to build inroads with working class people,
and to try to create those bonds that happen. We
here are trying to build closer bonds with city workers
(35:33):
and farm workers out in the country. It's an important
struggle because one it's going to be more and more
important in the future. You don't have to wait for
anyone else to tell you how to do that. You
yourselves can show solidarity and work together to build those
kinds of bonds now so that in the future you
can create working class movements, whether that takes the form
of collective bargaining or something else, organizing for the common
(35:56):
good is useful no matter in what legal capacity it happens.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, and I mean, you know, last one I want
to add about that in terms of looking at like
you not needing help to do things, like you know,
I know a lot of the people who you know,
like are the organizers who are hired by places like
the UAW like AFLCIO unions. Right, they're good people, like,
they are good people. They're good organizers. They don't know
anything that you can't learn, Like, a lot of these
(36:22):
people are just literally college students, right, who are recruited
like from college campuses and are thrown with no training
into organizing these things, right, and you know, and again
these are people who are just like stepping out of
classrooms into like into these organizing scenarios with very minimal training,
and they've been able to do it. And if those
(36:42):
people can do it, so can you, Like, I know you,
I know, I know these organizers And the only difference
between them and you is that they spent some time
learning some things and then they apply the same tools
like they apply in some ways worst versions of the
same tools the independent union organizers use, and they're all
tools that you can learn.
Speaker 4 (37:03):
Yeah, And if any of the people listening want to
learn sim of these tools, yeah, or you help with
education and training, or just want to make connections in
interroads with workers elsewhere, contact the coalition independent.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Units and seeing how we can build these bonds together.
Speaker 4 (37:17):
Because I think that we will problem solve how to
defeat this regime one way or another. But I think
that we, particularly in the independent union space, provide a
unique possibility for how this can happen. Because since we
are not tied to larger established contracts, we're not tied
to you know, jurisdictional disputes, we're not tied to a
(37:38):
lot of the legacies of some of the larger unions,
God bless them. We can create and fashion a labor
movement that doesn't have to live by those rules.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
You know, if you imagine the idea of what it.
Speaker 4 (37:48):
Would look like to refound the CIO in the nineteen thirties,
if you could imagine the worst aspects of labor movement
and excising them, and what is the best aspect of
labor move that you would want to see, we can
create that together today.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
And today it takes the form of standing up in
solidarity with LELO and farm Workers Union up to northern Washington.
Speaker 4 (38:07):
Not because we get anything from it, not because it's easy,
but precisely because it is difficult, and precisely because it
is a moral compulsion on us to take action today
for it.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
We don't have to wait for anyone to tell us
what to do.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
As part of an independent labor movement, we get to
decide our future and our faith, and we get to
decide our struggles.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Yeah, and if and when we beat them here, we
can beat them today, we can beat them tomorrow, we
can beat the next day, and one day you know
we will. We will have one one victory too many
for them to hold on to power. And that's the
only way forward.
Speaker 4 (38:36):
Absolutely, fascism wants you to believe in a nihilistic perspective
of the world. They want you to believe in which
it is hopeless to fight back. They want you to
believe just doom scroll forever and don't take any action
and focus on yourselves and naval gaze indefinitely.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
No.
Speaker 4 (38:51):
No. The way that you find out the kind of
person that you are and the way that you build
the kind of future that you want for yourselves, your families,
for your communities, for the people that you don't even know,
Oh I never will meet. What you want a good
life for them. The way that you do that is
you take action. Now, you start organizing, You do what
you can, you build what you can.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
That's how we do this.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
Like we said earlier, they want you to believe that
the fighter is already over, the history has already been written.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
They only say that because they know it's not true.
Speaker 4 (39:17):
Yep, and me and other people who talk like this,
who are as optimistic and as hopeful and is fight ready,
we don't believe this out of nowhere.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
We believe this because we truly do see that the
better world is possible if we fight.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Yeah, and I think I think that's a spectacular place
to end. Mark, thank you so much for coming on
the show. Yeah, thank you, and everyone else who's listening
to this, go out and fight.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
It could happen. Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
You can now find sources for It could happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening,
Call Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to ikidapp Here Podcasts, where here is the rapidly
encroaching rise of fascism. My name is Mia Wong, and
one of the major vectors of fascism that we have
been covering on this show has been the increase in
just effectively straight up black baggings by ICE and Immigration's
enforcement in general. We have spent a good amount of
(00:29):
time covering a bunch of different angles of this, but
there is another incredibly distressing angle that we have not
covered as much yet, which is their targeting of labor organizers.
And with me to talk about that is Mark Medina
from Portland Jobs with Justice and the Coalition of Independent Unions.
And yeah, Mark, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, I'm glad to have you on. So one of
the most pressing sort of black baggings that's happened fairly
recently is ICE's kidnapping of a freight Wharezy for Reno
otherwise known as Lailo. Can you tell us about sort
of his work and the projects that he's been doing
and Famulus you need us Justicia.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
Yeah, So it's been a very disheartening and scary couple
of weeks since it's happened, because this opens up a
new path for the state to go after organizers, to
go after workers and the most underprivileged in our society
in a way that I suppose we all expected. But
(01:30):
now that we see it, now that we see it happening,
now that we see it happening to people that we
know in our community, it's becoming a parent. There is
no turning back from the idea that we have to
be able to take this on head first. We as activists,
as organizers, have to look at this and then see
it as an actual thing in our day to day
that we have to combat and incorporate into our organizing.
(01:53):
So maybe it might be a little helpful to start
off with a little bit of a backstory on So
I mean I need us by Lassa. Yeah, So the
Union has its origins going back to twenty thirteen. The
area in which they organize, the Bellingham or the Washington
Walkins scadged areas, has the very particular type of immigrant
community there. Lelo himself is of Meteco background. There's a
(02:16):
lot of indigenous Mexican populations in the region. It's also
one that has long routes a lot of these people
go back generations, have been here for quite some time.
This area also happens to be a very particularly with
the non Hispanic population, particularly the white population, a very conservative,
particularly conservative for the area. It's one of the very
(02:38):
few areas of Northwest that Donald Trump came to visit.
It's an area that has had repeated attacks on then
imbric community. And so it's in this context that workers
are organizing in twenty thirteen for this first independent union.
And two it's important to mention the independent part of it.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
A lot of the.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
Organizers from the start of this of the union came
from a tradition of the United farm Workers in California.
They some of them worked with Seef Javis in the
heyday of the United farm Workers. And in the years
and decades since then, since the Delana voidcotts and other things,
there's been a growing rift of what the next steps
(03:20):
should be. And I think that for a lot of
farm workers, because they don't organize under the general labor
law that we have for most workers, there is a
sort of patchwork system for how farm working organizing happens
in the United States that's dependent upon different states and legislatures,
and for the most part, with the exception of only
two states, farm workers don't have the same kind of
(03:42):
protections that regular workers generally in the society have for
union recognition, for collective bargaining. Only Washington and New York
at the moment, I believe have the laws that allow
for elections for farm worker unions, and there is a
very particular reasons for that being the case. Farm workers
were excluded from the Wagner Act for having general labor
(04:05):
rights in the nineteen thirty because precisely it was seen.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
As immigrant labor.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Yeah, and immigrants were not seen as meriting the same
rights as white Americans in the same way the domestic
workers were removed because I was seen at the time
as black labor.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
So it has its roots and racism.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
And yeah, and that's something that you know, like you
can tie that exclusion, like there's a straight line between
that and Japanese and tournaments, which also to a large extent,
is about land seizure and this sort of like fusion
of racism, specifically racism in the farming sector with the
tax and labor rights and with this desire to just
sort of seize literally the lands and labor from non
(04:43):
white people.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Yeah, so it's a long and bleak history.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
No, absolutely, and I'm sure your audience is well aware
of a lot of these subject matter. It is a
bleak history, and it wasn't until groups like the United
farm Workers in the sixties and the seventies, I think,
began to create the possibility for something new for the
Hispanic community. It was United farm Workers that built not
(05:08):
just a lot of solidarity with other immigrant groups in
the California area, but they also built a sense of
pride and identity and belonging for a lot of communities.
I grew up in Boro Heights, East Los Angeles, says
such Travis and the Knight farm worker murals are everywhere.
You know. Me and my friends would often joke as
seb Jravis is like the Patron Saints. It's Los Angeles,
(05:28):
even though it's nowhere near Delano.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
And there's a reason for that.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
I think that a lot of us looked up to
the United farm Workers, We looked up to the farm
worker Union movement, and we saw in them our heroes,
our modern day heroes.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
We saw them.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
We saw people who said be proud to be brown.
You know, there's a courage that comes from that history.
The union movement that then sprung up in twenty thirteen
in the Bellingham, Northern Washington area was coming out of
that milieu. They understood that background, they understood that history,
but they also understood that there was very little organizing
in the region. There was a lot of fear in
(06:03):
the region. It's very difficult to organize farm workers to
have access to a lot of these areas. You have
to cross just private property for quite some time before
you reach the first farm workers, and it becomes very,
very difficult to have organizing happen.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
And it's intentional that way.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
The rise in farm worker unions that happened in the
sixties and seventies had a massive plummet by the time
the beginning in the nineteen two thousands, and so these
workers had heard these stories, had heard by this legacy,
but had been essentially delivered with increasing frustration, racist behavior
by bosses, lower and lower pay, and the use of
(06:43):
certain types of immigrants to try to scab their jobs.
It be the capitalist class using one type of worker
against another type of worker, picking them against each other.
It's in this context in twenty thirteen that this union
starts to form, they go public at that time period,
they call for recognition and they started taking action directly,
(07:03):
and they organized this years and years long boycott campaign
to gain recognition, to get the employer to start bargaining.
And after years and years of this, I court battles
and the employer trying to lay everyone off and hire
certain types of newer immigrants coming in to replace all
of them, putting one worker against another, all these types
(07:24):
of maneuvers. By twenty seventeen, these workers win a contract,
and the philosophy of the union since then has been
not just to grow this union, but also for them
to be able to stand on their own two feet.
Their idea is that they are very proud of their
independent nature of that union. They're not part of, you know,
the AFL CIO, they're not part of the UNICE farm workers,
(07:45):
They're not part of any other organization.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
You know.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
When I spoke to some of their leaders last year,
one of the things that came to mind was they
brought up a quote from Eugene Debts, the notion of
like if we were to lead you into the promised land,
someone else would just lead out. And the notion of
their union is we have to be able to stand
on our two feet. We can't rely on anyone else
because if we, if they promises things today tomorrow, they'll
hold something over us. And so the notion that farm
(08:08):
workers lead this movement and leave this union is an
incredibly powerful statement of what working class people can do.
The kinds of workers that everyone else kind of looks at.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
They could never do it.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
These you know, these workers could never handle this kind
of level of struggle and couldn't do this kind of
organization have built one of the most powerful inde kind
of farm worker unions in the West Coast. Lelo Alfredo Lelo,
was a founding member of this union. He was a
farm worker studying at the age of twelve, and since
then devote his entire life organizing to helping workers, to
(08:44):
being the kind of person who commits himself to the
work of making the world a better place than you
found it. You know, at twenty five, he is significantly
younger than me. And when I think of people who
I look up to, who I think of, Wow, when
I grew up, I want to be stione like that,
I think.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Of Leloe little many of times over the years.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
He's a very soft spoken, very thoughtful type of person.
And yeah, I think that the labor movement owes him
a bit of a debt. Now it is time that
we as a whole stand up for him.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, we are going to go to ads regrettably, and
then when we come back, we are going to start
talking I think a bit more about the repression we
are back. So obviously, then this is this is a
(09:35):
part of the story that you've been telling, the sort
the sort of capitalist class out in Bellingham, and you know,
the sort of I mean, this has been true of
the broader capitalist class since it's kind of organizing starting
like has been trying to break these unions this entire time.
You know, that has been a major focus of everything
that they've been doing. And you know, what we're seeing
right now seems like a massive sort of escalation in
(09:59):
the degree of for So, yeah, can we talk about
the recent black bagging Alilo and yeah, and sort of
what happens and where we go from there.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Yeah, the weaponization of the state to go after immigrants
and go after activists is I'm sure your audience is
well known, is nothing new, and it knows party affiliation,
the Democratic administrations have been doing this to immigrant communities,
and I've been using it to silence political activists. The
Chump administration, however, is now doing this on a level
(10:31):
that is at least to a lot of us unheard
of in the modern day, which is to go after
specific union leaders in the labor movement, to go after
civil rights leaders. You've seen this happen also when it
comes to Palasini rights activists around the country. The idea
is pretty simple, to silence the loudest voices, to cut
(10:53):
to leadership from the movement.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
On March twenty fifth, Alfredo Lelo Barres.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Waspping off his girlfriend at a nearby farm for work
and was accosted by ICE agents as he was exercising
his rights or what he thought his rights were at
the time because of the regime. Who knows what your
rights are. They broke his window, they dragged him out.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Of his car.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
You know, this was obviously a very traumatic incident, but
also it was a real shock to the union to
see to see the community group that works with the
union and to the local Hispanic community in the area.
Within hours of that, workers organizers community went to move
to try to carry a response. Knowing that time was
(11:40):
of the essence. He was then taken to a local
Heights facility. He's now since been moved to a detention
center in Tacoma, Washington. A large rally of hundreds took
place calling for his immediate release. What we know now
seemingly is that at the very last minute apologies, I
(12:01):
forget the exact day, but it was within a couple
of days of the kidnapping, Lelo was pulled off. He
has an automatic stay of deportation in place at this point,
no longer has any legal authority to remove Lelo. If
this came at the last minute, he was in line
for deportation and was removed at the.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Very last minute.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
However, while this is good news, this is not good
for someone's personal health and well being. These are massively
cramped facilities, underfunded facilities. You know, there's horror stories around
the country of the conditions in some of these places.
Every day that Lelo is stuck behind these prison walls
(12:44):
is an injustice to our movement.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Yeah, yeah, I think. The thing it immediately reminds me
of is the story of Thomas Paine, who was like
slated to be executed in the French Revolution and they didn't.
They didn't execute him because his door was opened, so
they didn't see the slash line on the cell that
I was supposed to execute him. And then like the
next day, the rate of terror ended with the coup
against the Jacobins. There rids me a lot of that,
(13:08):
but you know, but on the other hand, here's the thing.
We have gotten the stay of the deportation, but we
have not we have not brought down the rate of
terror yet.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
So yeah, and I would hope it has the way
four more years for that one.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Yeah, good lord, good lord, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So
let's let's talk a bit about So. I mean, obviously,
you know what we're seeing here and this this is
you know, the connection that you made is we're seeing
just on a sort of broad scale, the use of
the state and of the sort of black bagging and
of these deportations as a way to target organizers from
Palestine to label organizers. That's only going to expand as
(13:46):
this goes on. And I think something critical about you know,
one of the first things you were saying here about
the fact that they're targeting sort of the loudest voices
in the community. And I think a big part of
this is that they know that their position isn't as
strong as they're making it out to be. Right, Like
they have just detonated a nuke across the entire economy.
(14:06):
They are systemically going through and individually fucking over every
single group of people who are supposed to be their base.
And I think part of what they're doing is they're
trying to spread sort of raw terror and spread fear
and you know, and and attack the critical infrastructure of
organizing because they want to make it look like resisting
(14:26):
them as impossible, and that's just not true. They can be.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
I think that oftentimes, particularly fascistic power wants and needs
to present itself as inevitable, as overwhelming, and impossible to defeat,
in part because it's meant to hide the ultimate weakness
of some of these powers.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
The actual power that these farm workers showed against the
Sukuma farms when they went on strike and boycotted for
years and years and years out in the fields, talking
to workers for years and years and years, it showed.
But no matter how powerful some of these companies are,
some of the CEOs are that the power of workers
overwhelms and the power solidarity overwhelms and they know that
(15:09):
going after leadership, going after some of the most some
of the bravest people in our movement is a way
of trying to hit the movement at the knees and trying.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
To convince folks that struggle list is impossible.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
But I think it is important to remember that what
we're doing, the struggle now, the response. This is how
we show the population the world, you know, our communities,
that they are not inevitable, it is not insurmountable and
so and by taking action responding to the kinds of
specistic behaviors of the state, we show how feeble the
(15:43):
state can be at times, even when it seems it's
most treacherous and awful.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Yeah, And I think a lot of times when we
win fights, it can be very very hard to actually
see our victory because we don't see the world that
could have been if we didn't fight. And that's the
thing I think about what the administration we're in, the
first Shomp administration, they absolutely wanted to be doing this
kind of shit, and they were able to do a
lot of terrible stuff, but they weren't able to sort
(16:09):
of go this far because of the kind of mass
mobilizations that shut down a lot of the kinds of
things that they wanted to do. And I think that's
a kind of victory that is hard to kind of
like process because all all we see is, you know,
the suffering that did happen, and we can never see
an image of like all of the people you know,
(16:32):
who got to continue living their lives because we stop them,
And that I think is another sort of powerful tool here.
But also we do have an opportunity to make sure
that we can beat them right here and right now
in a way that's very, very public and visible.
Speaker 4 (16:48):
And that's a question mark about that in my mind,
because you know, my entire adult life, I've heard stories
of the state repression against union organizers in the twenties
and the thirties and the forties. You hear the stories,
if you're in argier about all the violederas and how
hard it was in the past, and we forget that
a lot of that does continue on is just not
(17:09):
where you would imagine it where a lot of American
workers imagine it, and so they don't see it in
their shops and their factors, in their unions.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
But this right here is an attack on the labor movement.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Had this been the head of you know, the Electricians Union,
the head of the SCIU. Had this been an attack
on what a lot of Americas wol view as the
mainstream labor movement, this would be headlines.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
The fact that it isn't shows and that it has been.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
So much work to try to get attention to a
union leader being picked up and kidnapped by the state
should be you know, a blaring red light on the
labor movement to take action immediately. I hope that what
we're doing is the first steps to that, because you know,
this is one of those moments if you know, they
went after the trade unions unionists and I was not
a trade unionist.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Well, going after the farm work. I am not a
farm worker.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
It isn't common upon us morally to stand up one
another at this point in time.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yeah, And I think there's been a real kind of
real cowardice and a real sort of appeasement of power,
and a real sort of demonstration of where a lot
of these union's politics are. I mean, we saw the
way that the Teamsters like leadership just I mean just
you know, openly went to speak at the R and
C right. We've been seeing the UAW, which traditionally has
(18:28):
had better like immigration politics in the last few years
than a lot of these other sort of mainstream unions,
but it's also been sort of going to bat for
Trump's tariff, Like I've been calling you the turf tariffs
tariffs because of their wages of transphobia. But you know,
they've been going to bat for like the turf tariffs, right,
And that I think is like part of why they've
been sort of unable to like respond to this moment
(18:50):
and why they've been unable to respond to the past
fucking fifty years of moments, which is that like, if
you're sort of like labor politics is rooted in this
sort of like American now nationalist like American jobs for
American workers stuff, right, and it's not actually based in
the power of workers and the power of workers everywhere,
then you're going to lose. It's not just sort of
(19:11):
reactionary politics, so so it is it's also bad politics,
and we're seeing it right now.
Speaker 4 (19:16):
Yeah, And I think that the history of the labor
movement has been an interesting one in my adult life
because you know, I'm.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
As pro liber as they come.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
However, the history of the labor movement in the modern
day has been a fascinating one. It is one that
when it came to large strikes, with that it's nadier
At the mid and late two thousands, I think at
one point it was just over a dozen strikes over
two thousand workers. And you compare that to the high
of the labor movement in the forties and the fifties
when it was in the hundreds, and you've had strike
(19:44):
actions all the time, and that is what built so
much of what we call middle class for some and
it was this really historic moment at the time, and
we're in a historic moment now where I think the
labor movement for so long from that point has been trying.
Workers in the rank and file have been trying to
kind of reshape the labor movement in the thoughts and
the ideas of the new but it comes with its
(20:06):
own regressive setbacks, and it comes with its own shortcomings
of leadership. You know, the teams to is making statements
around immigration rights was a very unfortunate thing to be
said in the modern day. In the modern context, I
think that you know, other unions seemingly looking to you know,
(20:26):
circle the wagons rather than take the risks that need
to happen in this current time. Has really shown a
lack of imagination from some of the mainstream unions. And
the thing is, I hope for the best for them.
I want them to succeed and I want them to
get better because the world is a better place for
having these larger unions. However, if the independent movements, the
(20:48):
independent unions like Familias who need this po Thesia, like
these other unions in the region, that can be the
kind of canary in the coal mine, the kind of
labs of experimentation that can be the first people out
to do some of the most radical and interesting and
worker centric type of movement building and messaging.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Like I think there is the reason why.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
It was the coalition of independent unions here in the
Pacific Northwest that came up with the notion of having
transity of solidarity, this idea of patterning contracts together to
have inclusive and protections for trans workers and having that
be a thing that unions take up together. I think
that it's incredibly notable that it's group's life for means
(21:31):
we need this that carry out this long years long
boycott and created a model by which other workers in
the region can not just organize themselves, but organize themselves
on a low cost, member led democratic model. I think
it's important to see that sometimes the large unions have
to start looking at some of the radical pragmatism that
(21:52):
comes from the necessities of these smaller independent campaigns.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Yeah, and I mean before we go to ads, I
think the last thing I want to say there is, like,
you know, the the other option they have is to
do the option of what the unions didn't during the
rise of the Nazis, which is like dreaming the rise
of the Nazis. The unions fell online, right, they fell
in line because they were scared and they thought that
they could fucking win benefits from it. And you know,
it saved some of them, like they were a few
of those people like just became Nazis, but the rest
(22:18):
of them got fucking liquidated. Anyways, So those are your options, right,
You either stand and fight now with the independent unions,
or you become part of the regime and eventually get liquidated.
When you know, Trump in like fucking two and a
half years science executive order that says unions are illegal
or whatever.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Yeah, and what does that do at the end of
the day, even if it stays, even if you're the
head of some of these larger unions. And by working
with the administrative, the administration today, by selling your soul,
by selling the movement out, you give up the moral
high ground of our movement, of our working class democratic movement.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Yeah, you give it up for another generation. Then when workers,
when people like myself growing up looking at images of
the United farm Workers, there are similar I presume there
are similar people in the United States growing up who
look that way up to the United Lado Workers, look
that way up to the Teachers Union. What happens to
those children, to those kids, those young people who want
to be the next the next leadership, the next era
(23:17):
of the labor movement, they will not look at us as.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Having the moral high ground. We give that up. We
give our role in history, our moral role in history
to fight for the working class when we do things
like this.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, and what you become and set is just another
extension of the state. You become like one of like
the national syndicates and like Franco of Spain. And what
and what that does to you is people people don't
look at you in a generation as a labor movement,
they look at you as just another arm of a
fascist regime. And it doesn't have to be like that.
It really doesn't.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
But yeah, no, it does not.
Speaker 4 (23:49):
I took no pleasure in saying this, you know, I
take no pleasure in saying this. But it's an unfortunate reality.
And hopefully the turnaround can come from anywhere. It can
come from from unexpected places, and I hope there is one,
and things like.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Solidarity for Lelo. I hope it'd be a small link in.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
The chain that moves the pensulum right back into the
direction of an ethical and moral superiority that comes with
fighting for working class folks.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, we're going to take an ad break, and when
we come back, we're going to talk about what we
can do for Lilo. Right now, as as you are
listening to this, we are back. So let's talk about
(24:35):
both the operation I mean, just immediately, the plans to
sort of put pressure to free Lilo, and also what
then I guess we'll get into, sort of more broadly,
the kinds of fighting that we need to be doing
in order to resist this.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
Sounds good, So, like I mentioned earlier, and you need.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
An aftermath of lelo is kidnapping by ice, workers in
the region began organizing and unions came together and support
a Lelo and help a rally in front of the
tention center in Tacoma. Now, what we're trying to do
is trying to spread the word further. There are other communities,
particularly here on the West coast, that can't stand solidarity,
(25:13):
that should stand in solidarity. And when we heard this
needs to go down, activists within the CiU ask themselves
we can't stand idly by while a leader in our
movement is kidnapped by the state. We need to take action,
and so we did. And the point was to move
as quickly as possible to try to build a larger
voice for Lelo while he is in detention. So there
(25:36):
is a good number of activists here in the Portland area.
We can be of service to the farm Workers Union.
You know, we have a strong core of independent unions
here in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in the Portland area.
We can do what other unions are hesitant to do,
which is take action immediately. It stands firmly with our
brothers and sisters. Are monos up in northern Washington. So
(25:58):
what's happening is the call from the union is workers individually,
for people individually to call into the Attorney General in
Washington State and call to the release of Lelo, also
calling the new governor up in Washington State to call
for the release, bring a wider attention, making me known
that this person is someone who is important to the community,
(26:18):
cannot be expirited away to another country where they are
not from, where.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
That is not their home, and taken away from their family,
the community and from the good work that they do.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
And the other thing that we're trying to do is
we're trying to get local officials to also use their
voice to maximize the pressure to give more attention to
this issue.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
So that's the call so far.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
This rally that we're having in front of city Hall
on Saturday, April twelfth at two pm is the beginning
of what we hope is a larger campaign that will
not end until Lelo is free and until these raids
stop attacking the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest. You know,
just because we in Portland, you know, are not farm workers,
(27:05):
because we don't work with farm workers.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Because a lot of the workers who who work here
had maybe never met a farm worker.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
It does not mean that we should not stand shoulder
and shoulder and arm and arm and support the farm
workers Union up in northern Washington to the hilt. And
this begins this fight of building that kind of level
of solidarity. It begins by showing up for them doing
what they can do right now. They don't have the
resources to go stay by stay in city by city
to bring its tension and awareness to one of their
leaders being attacked. But we can do it, and if
(27:34):
we can do it, we should do it. It's a
moral imperative that little be free.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, And so I mean statistically there are a lot
of you in Portland listening to the show, but statistically
most of you are not in Portland. Are there are
there things that people in the rest of the country,
and I guess the rest of the world. I know,
I know there's so Sally statistically don't live in the US. Yeah.
Are are there things that people in other places can
do to put pressure specifically for Alala, but also just
can do in their own communities to you know, I
(28:00):
mean put pressure to stop these raids?
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (28:02):
Absolutely, So this is very similar I think to the CiU,
the Coalition of Independent Unions is Coalition of Independent Unions
here in the Pacific Northwest. It was trying to do
and it's trying to do with TRANSI of solidarity. The
idea is, we are trying to make this work here
in the Pacific Northwest, and if it's useful, if it's good,
if people are paying attention to it, then we can
export this to other cities in other areas to bring
(28:25):
more attention to these causes. And so with that one
pavan earning contracts together, particularly on this one issue of
transgender healthcare and trans influencive language and contracts, and codifying
that between unions and having that a demand of labor
movement that they not walk away from this. We want
to also do the same thing with this fight for
freedom for the farm workers union and their leaders and
(28:47):
workers everywhere. And the tax will comes soon soon enough,
I suppose, I would imagine from this regime in Washington.
If this works, we want workers in other cities to
start assisting the farm worker and take them up the
call of action and fighting for not just let up
whoever comes afterwards, because there will be levels in the
future unfortunate as they may be. So if this works here,
(29:10):
workers here as they hear more updates, we would hope
and we would love if workers elsewhere, if organizing groups
elsewhere would want to take up this fight and bring
attention to the cause.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Hell yeah, yeah, And I think there is a lot
of you know, potential and sort of mobilizations. There's a
lot of potential in getting people to understand that this
stuff's happening, and there's a lot of potential in cross
uniting organizing. And also, and I will say this too
because like you know, obviously statistically like there are a
large number of people listening to this who are like
union staffers, but also like most of you are not.
(29:46):
That also doesn't mean that whatever kind of organizing that
you're doing doesn't overlap with this and doesn't have capacity
that they can bring to bear to stop the entire
deportation regime that we're facing right now. And that's something
that you have to do both on the level of
solid on a moral level, and also on a strategic level,
because again, he is going to come for you two.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
So yeah, yeah, you know, without making it too personal,
like I know level personally, I have met a little
many times over the years, He's a fantastic person.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
The reason why a lot of us as organizers.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Why we do this kind of work to begin with,
is because we believe, as as bizarrely as it may be,
that we could be a link in the chain that
makes the world a better place, that we can leave
the world better off.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
Than we found it.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
And we also believe in what we're doing because when
we look at people who have been attacked by corporations
and attacked by the state, we feel a moral compulsion
to help. And what I would say to folks who
are outside of Portland who are hearing this story, who
hear the calls to call the Attorney General in Washington
State and demand that they'll be released, to follow up
(30:56):
with the union, but media further direction on how they
can and potentially holding their own rallies and support and
solidarity and bring attention to the issue.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
I would hope that they do this.
Speaker 4 (31:07):
Imagine if Letlo were your brother, Imagine if Letlo were
your cousin, your father, your friend, Act as if they
were them, because it requires that level of empathy to
have the kind of solidarity that we need in order
to fight this fastiest regime and everything that it does.
It is easy to say I will wait for someone
(31:30):
else to do the work. I will, someone else will
come along and it'll get resolved that way. No, if
you don't do the work, it just will not get done.
And so we have to go in every day as
part of civic engagement and assisting the working class, as
part of our daily routines, and using the kind of
the kind of sense of moral necessity and of immediate action.
(31:53):
It requires that you would do for someone that was
close to you, because this person is you just by
another name. This person is your fan, even if you've
never met them. We were all in this together as
working class people. And if we start coming up with
boundaries and reasons for a while we shouldn't stand up
for one another, those reasons then become excuses for everyone else.
So I would hope that when people hear this, they
(32:15):
look and see the struggle of this person, and they
can imagine what would happen to them in the future,
and they say, I would want someone there for me
in my corner, in my time of me, So I
will be there for them and theirs.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, it reminds me a lot of this line from
Peggy Seeger, who wrote wrote an anti fascist song called
Song of Choice, and one of the verses that's always
stuck with me is today the soldiers took away one.
Tomorrow they may take away two. In April, they took
away Greece, but surely they will never take you. And
(32:47):
you know, I mean, that's the thing that people in
the thirties woke up to, right is you know, if
you're in this country and this is the thing that
you're waking up to now, is that, yeah, the soldiers
are taking people away, and every day they're taking away
more and more people. And day you wake up and
they've taken entire countries. And the only way that you
can stop this is by making sure that the action
that you're taking is not just waking up and going
(33:08):
back to sleep. Right, Yep, you have to take a stand.
You have to fight because no one is coming. The
only person who was coming for these people, the only
person who is coming for the people coming next to them,
and inevitably the only people who is coming to save
you when they come for you is going to be you.
And you know there are enough of us to stop them,
(33:29):
right There always have been, That's always been a thing
about fascism is that it relies on us not fighting them.
It relies on us on our passivity, It relies on
us not caring enough about the people that they take first,
you know, to sit back and do nothing and think
that we can wait, and you can't have You have
to start right now, and you have to stop them
(33:49):
before they advance any further, and you have to roll
back what they've already done. And this is our opportunity
to do that.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, I think that says that encapsulates the
sentiment perfectly.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Well, yeah, do you have anything else that you want
to add before we head out? And we will put
links to a whole bunch of things in the description
to this. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
I suppose to those that would want to know more
about not just the struggle of the farm workers Union,
but also the general experiments in independent unionism here in
the Pacific Northwest, I'd highly encourage that folks take a
deep dive and see that to organize your workplace to
have the kind of solidarity with your coworkers, you need
(34:35):
not be dependent upon someone else and other organizations that
come in and sort of.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
Rescue you from the mystery and drudgery. Of non union workplaces.
You can do it too. You can create.
Speaker 4 (34:48):
You have it in your head, in your own mind
and your own ends, the ability to organize, the ability
to fight with your coworkers. You have the kind of
clever problem solving skills that every work or has in
order to come back the boss and create a better
world than the one that currently exists. And also that
when it comes to issues like standing up for this
(35:10):
struggle now and struggles in the future, I would say
you have it now, the creative capacity to in whatever
city you're in, to make connections, to build inroads with
the labor movement, to build inroads with working class people,
and to try to create those bonds that happen. We
here are trying to build closer bonds with city workers
(35:33):
and farm workers out in the country. It's an important
struggle because one it's going to be more and more
important in the future. You don't have to wait for
anyone else to tell you how to do that. You
yourselves can show solidarity and work together to build those
kinds of bonds now so that in the future you
can create working class movements, whether that takes the form
of collective bargaining or something else, organizing for the common
(35:56):
good is useful no matter in what legal capacity it happens.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, and I mean, you know, last one I want
to add about that in terms of looking at like
you not needing help to do things, like you know,
I know a lot of the people who you know,
like are the organizers who are hired by places like
the UAW like AFLCIO unions. Right, they're good people, like,
they are good people. They're good organizers. They don't know
anything that you can't learn, Like, a lot of these
(36:22):
people are just literally college students, right, who are recruited
like from college campuses and are thrown with no training
into organizing these things, right, and you know, and again
these are people who are just like stepping out of
classrooms into like into these organizing scenarios with very minimal training,
and they've been able to do it. And if those
(36:42):
people can do it, so can you, Like, I know you,
I know, I know these organizers And the only difference
between them and you is that they spent some time
learning some things and then they apply the same tools
like they apply in some ways worst versions of the
same tools the independent union organizers use, and they're all
tools that you can learn.
Speaker 4 (37:03):
Yeah, And if any of the people listening want to
learn sim of these tools, yeah, or you help with
education and training, or just want to make connections in
interroads with workers elsewhere, contact the coalition independent.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Units and seeing how we can build these bonds together.
Speaker 4 (37:17):
Because I think that we will problem solve how to
defeat this regime one way or another. But I think
that we, particularly in the independent union space, provide a
unique possibility for how this can happen. Because since we
are not tied to larger established contracts, we're not tied
to you know, jurisdictional disputes, we're not tied to a
(37:38):
lot of the legacies of some of the larger unions,
God bless them. We can create and fashion a labor
movement that doesn't have to live by those rules.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
You know, if you imagine the idea of what it.
Speaker 4 (37:48):
Would look like to refound the CIO in the nineteen thirties,
if you could imagine the worst aspects of labor movement
and excising them, and what is the best aspect of
labor move that you would want to see, we can
create that together today.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
And today it takes the form of standing up in
solidarity with LELO and farm Workers Union up to northern Washington.
Speaker 4 (38:07):
Not because we get anything from it, not because it's easy,
but precisely because it is difficult, and precisely because it
is a moral compulsion on us to take action today
for it.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
We don't have to wait for anyone to tell us
what to do.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
As part of an independent labor movement, we get to
decide our future and our faith, and we get to
decide our struggles.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Yeah, and if and when we beat them here, we
can beat them today, we can beat them tomorrow, we
can beat the next day, and one day you know
we will. We will have one one victory too many
for them to hold on to power. And that's the
only way forward.
Speaker 4 (38:36):
Absolutely, fascism wants you to believe in a nihilistic perspective
of the world. They want you to believe in which
it is hopeless to fight back. They want you to
believe just doom scroll forever and don't take any action
and focus on yourselves and naval gaze indefinitely.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
No.
Speaker 4 (38:51):
No. The way that you find out the kind of
person that you are and the way that you build
the kind of future that you want for yourselves, your families,
for your communities, for the people that you don't even know,
Oh I never will meet. What you want a good
life for them. The way that you do that is
you take action. Now, you start organizing, You do what
you can, you build what you can.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
That's how we do this.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
Like we said earlier, they want you to believe that
the fighter is already over, the history has already been written.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
They only say that because they know it's not true.
Speaker 4 (39:17):
Yep, and me and other people who talk like this,
who are as optimistic and as hopeful and is fight ready,
we don't believe this out of nowhere.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
We believe this because we truly do see that the
better world is possible if we fight.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Yeah, and I think I think that's a spectacular place
to end. Mark, thank you so much for coming on
the show. Yeah, thank you, and everyone else who's listening
to this, go out and fight.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
It could happen. Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
You can now find sources for It could happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening,
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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