Support Ryan: Fired for Union Organizing at UFCW 2013
…https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-ryan-fired-for-union-organizing?attribution_id=sl:48d80d14-aba0-4b2c-b9b9-3b6cf7305aaa&lang=en_US&ts=1780882492&utm_campaign=fp_sharesheet&utm_content=amp17_tc-amp20_t1&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link
Phoebe Gilpin
Donation protected
Ryan, a dedicated union organizer and parent of two young children (8 and 4), was unjustly fired in February 2026 by UFCW 2013 management. This firing came less than a week after he and his UFCW Local 2013 coworkers publicly announced they had created a union of their own. As a key organizer, Ryan faced blatant retaliation when management tried to discourage others by terminating him. Management withheld his final paycheck, made up reasons for his dismissal, and even contested his unemployment claim.
For years staff at UFCW 2013 have attempted to unionize, which were repeatedly undermined and busted by management. When Ryan joined the Local in 2024, he brought new energy and leadership, successfully organizing a core group of supporters and leading the final card-check campaign with FAIR. Over this multi-year process, Ryan was continually patient, motivated, and courageous as the staff struggled with fears, doubts, and second-guesses.
In February 2026, the campaign was publicly announced, Ryan was immediately fired, and the staff received an agreement from Local 2013 to card check. Despite management’s attempt to flood the unit in the final days, the staff emerged victorious and certified their union in March 2026.
Co-Worker Solidarity
We, the united staff of Local 2013, recognize the incredible work Ryan has done not only in leading our internal organization, but also in his work as a Collective Bargaining Representative. He pushed contracts forward by organizing members and empowering them to take control of their own bargaining. While this was too threatening to leadership to be allowed to continue, it demonstrated to the rest of the staff that trusting members was the only way to move the union forward. As a consequence of that courage and success, Ryan was fired. Those who remain support him in his struggle for reinstatement and look forward to the day when he can once again serve the Local 2013 membership.
About Ryan
Ryan lives in Brooklyn, NY with his partner Phoebe, two kids, and cat Ezra. He has worked in unions for over a decade, including with NUHW, the Machinists, Unite HERE NEJB, and most recently UFCW 2013. Ryan helped organize Sesame Workers Union (Sesame Street), OnPoint United (harm reduction workers), and a staff union with his coworkers at UFCW 2013 through FAIR. Outside of work he’s a volunteer Lead Organizer for the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), coordinates a community garden, installs community-based wifi through NYC Mesh, and is a member of South Brooklyn DSA.
What You Can Do
Please stand with Ryan and help him through this difficult time. You can:
1. Donate. Funds raised will be used to pay for essentials—housing, food, transportation, and care for Ryan’s family.
2. Share. Send this fundraiser to your friends, community groups, co-workers, and fellow organizers.
3. Tell UFCW to reinstate Ryan Price. Complete the "Contact" form here and demand Ryan's reinstatement to UFCW 2013. https://www.ufcw.org/about/contact-us/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/05/professor-suspended-assignment-mentions-palestinians?fbclid=IwY2xjawSSvv5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEerkOCRQUnyqiJkaE-wEMafjXaq3G4NcvQvIKhEbAVxWcIMTb7yGBe1yBfnEU_aem_TSPpaRu9Bt7ePT0DGS7AYQ
School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor put under investigation after a student complained about a case study
www.theguardian.comLocal health leaders call for state support for public hospitals
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/public-health/health-leaders-call-for-state-support-for-public-hospitals/article_b5408aa1-f50d-4cad-9368-af4938b10156.html
By Natalia Gurevich | Examiner staff writer 5 hrs ago
Daniel …Tsai at Zuckerberg
Public-health officials — including San Francisco Department of Public Health Director Daniel Tsai — are calling for more state funding for public hospitals.
Natalia Gurevich/SF Examiner
Bay Area public-health officials gathered at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital on Thursday to plead for $500 million in state funding to offset federal funding cuts.
The state’s 17 public hospitals face about $3 billion in funding cuts as a result of the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and could suffer $800 million in cuts in the upcoming state budget.
San Francisco Department of Public Health Director Daniel Tsai and representatives from Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, as well as health-care workers from UCSF and Service Employees International Union 1021, spoke out at a press conference in support of a proposal from the California Association of Public Hospitals for a $500 million fund to be included in the state budget.
Beyond the individuals affected, public hospitals are expected to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, Tsai said, with San Francisco to suffer a loss of $300 million to $400 million annually with the reduction of federal support.
“There’s only so much all of us can do without support from Sacramento and the state to help offset these incredibly damaging cuts,” he said. “Make no mistake, there will be cuts: cuts to clinical services, cuts to trauma services, cuts to specialty and primary-care services — the very things that keep our communities, regardless of income, safe and healthy.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office did not respond to The Examiner’s request for comment as of press time.
“$500 million may sound like a lot,” Tsai said. “It’s a small percentage of the California budget, without which we will have massive cuts all across the state.”
The proposed state budget, which was unveiled last month, includes a $1.8 billion reduction from general-fund spending in an effort to close the state’s budget deficit. It includes some investments in health care, such as $300 million set aside for the loss of Affordable Care Act subsidies that expired at the end of last year.
But the funding would not be enough to maintain the services and staffing at public hospitals across the state, and officials are concerned that patients will no longer be able to access the care that they need.
“[Zuckerberg] is San Francisco’s safety net,” said Dr. Gabriel Ortiz, the chief medical officer at Zuckerberg. “We’re also the region’s only Level 1 trauma medical center. We care for over 100,000 people every year here at this hospital. That’s one in eight people in San Francisco who may need our help in the next year. That’s a tremendous responsibility.”
Ortiz said the effect of the federal cuts is already being felt at Zuckerberg, where positions have been cut and clinic hours reduced despite a steady rise in the demand for care.
Just as concerning is the number of patients who are delaying or avoiding care because they don’t have coverage, he said.
“I had a patient with liver disease who came in bleeding, who our team saved, and now is struggling to connect with primary care,” Ortiz said. “I’m afraid we will see many more people with preventable complications if we do not make changes and support our health care systems further.”
San Francisco is facing its own budget challenges. Mayor Daniel Lurie’s initial budget proposal, released this week, included significant cuts to public-health and social-service programs as The City struggles to winnow down a $600 million deficit and prevent San Franciscans from losing their insurance coverage.
“Half of the city’s budget deficit in this coming budget cycle is directly related to this,” Tsai said, referring to the broad cuts enacted by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The City’s Department of Public Health has proposed some $20 million in cuts in response.
“We have made a decision in the city budget to help fill some of the gap in this budget cycle, so we’re not having to gut San Francisco General Hospital primary care,” Tsai said. “But we have had to make other cuts at DPH that are directly related to this, and other city departments have had to make cuts.”
While the proposed city budget will help continue to support the hospital, it’s not enough.
“The bottom line is we need help from the state,” Tsai said.
Local health leaders are calling for the state to step in.
www.sfexaminer.comAmazon Is Using AI to Disempower Workers. The US Labor Movement Must Fight Back.
Amazon is using AI in terrifying ways to disempower workers. We must fight back
https://truthout.org/articles/amazon-is-using-ai-to-disempower-workers-the-us-labor-movement-must-fight-back/
.
By …Jonathan Rosenblum , TRUTHOUT
PublishedJune 6, 2026
Kentucky Amazon air cargo workers and community supporters protest for rights at work, 2023.
Kentucky Amazon air cargo workers and community supporters protest for rights at work, 2023.
CALVIN PRIEST
Honest, paywall-free news is rare. Please support our boldly independent journalism with a donation of any size.
Beginning June 7, the AFL-CIO quadrennial convention gathers in Minneapolis with the stated aim of organizing “in unity and clarity of purpose to empower working people.”
That clarity of purpose ought to include a real commitment to take on the biggest and most important organizing challenge that unions face in this era — Amazon.
Thus far, notwithstanding some inspiring individual sites of struggle, the U.S. labor movement has failed to get Amazon to the bargaining table.
Uncompromised, uncompromising news
Get reliable, independent news and commentary delivered to your inbox every day.
Email*
Nationally, union density last year was a measly 10 percent, continuing a historic decline, and that’s not even counting the members lost when Trump ripped up union contracts covering nearly a million federal workers.
That leaves tens of millions of workers to organize, but none are more crucial than the 1.5 million workers and contractors at Amazon.
RELATED STORY
Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT) members protest at the Amazon RMU1 warehouse entrance on the first day of the November strike.
Striking Spanish Workers Just Showed That Amazon Is Not Invincible
Ninety years ago, General Motors was capitalism’s trailblazer, emulated by other industrialists seeking to hone productive efficiency, worker exploitation, and profit extraction. GM workers organizing under the CIO banner and resourced by unions that stood to gain no new members themselves from the project — like the United Mine Workers — pushed back against that exploitation, struck, and won new standards. They heralded in a period of mass organizing, the modern heyday of labor’s power.
Amazon is today’s General Motors. What happens to Amazon workers — good or bad — will happen to workers everywhere.
Amazon is a test bed for the future of work for all of us. Employers everywhere are seeking to imitate the behemoth’s labor model of exploitation, job instability, and — terrifyingly — the deployment of AI technologies to discipline and disempower workers.
Amazon is perfecting contracting out, just-in-time labor, and speedups. Its 250,000-plus U.S. drivers are all contracted out, either to a host of small businesses called delivery service partners (DSPs), or hired as independent contractors. That way Amazon can deny responsibility when drivers get injured, ask for more money, or try to unionize. Warehouses operate on a lean-labor model. Normal full-time warehouse schedules are four consecutive 10-hour shifts, but Amazon often cuts workers’ hours any time production slows, even in the middle of a shift, wreaking havoc on already tight family budgets. Then, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Amazon imposes mandatory overtime — an extra hour a day, plus an additional required workday every week — bringing the workweek to a brutal 55 hours and disregarding the effects on workers’ personal and family lives.
Amazon is today’s General Motors. What happens to Amazon workers — good or bad — will happen to workers everywhere.
Through its aggressive introduction of robots — now over 1 million — Amazon is replacing workers and forcing those remaining to work faster. It’s no wonder that Amazon workers get hurt on the job so often, and that the company’s serious injury rate is nearly double the rate of its warehouse industry peers.
Then there is AI. I know a bit about this directly, as I’ve worked for the last year and a half as a part-time Amazon delivery driver. The delivery service partner I work for is a fair employer, but it is not the problem; Amazon is, because while drivers technically are not employed by the company, we all are subject to its tracking and oversight.
When I’m in the Amazon truck, every movement I make is tracked with technology and evaluated by AI programs — where I am, which packages I’ve delivered, and whether it’s keeping pace with the algorithm that Amazon has determined I must meet. Readouts at the end of every shift show how each of my deliveries compared to the timing prescribed by Amazon’s algorithmic standard. We are evaluated every week on whether we took accurate photos on delivery, delivered the packages exactly where the customer requested, and got good or bad customer feedback. Through the system, drivers who don’t “make rate” or who don’t meet Amazon’s prescribed standards don’t stay employed.
Netradyne’s AI-driven “Driver•I” camera mounted in an Amazon delivery vehicle.
Netradyne’s AI-driven “Driver•I” camera mounted in an Amazon delivery vehicle.
What’s enabling this level of oversight? Big Brother: the “NetradyneDriver•i,” your ride-along buddy in the van. Camera lenses point in all directions, continually measuring your speed and distance. Netradyne also tracks whether or not you are making a complete stop at every stop sign, using your turn signal, avoiding lane drift, braking, accelerating, or cornering too fast. It watches your eye orientation and movement. Whether you yawn. If you look away from the road for too long. All of these data points are ingested into an AI system where technology, not a person, is evaluating your behavior every second. Netradyne boasts about this as “physical AI deployed at scale.”
Employers everywhere are seeking to imitate the behemoth’s labor model of exploitation, job instability, and — terrifyingly — the deployment of AI technologies to discipline and disempower workers.
In Reddit chat groups, Amazon drivers around the country now report being fired not by a human, but by AI.
For warehouse workers, Amazon has harnessed the same surveillance technology to make sure that workers’ pick, pack, and sort rates meet its algorithmically determined standards, that their scans are perfect, and that they’re minimizing “time off task” — like going to the bathroom. Everything is measured and tracked. And if you don’t “make rate,” then first you get counseled, then disciplined, then fired.
In many warehouses, Amazon utilizes security officers and local police to enforce “an organizational culture of near-carceral obedience — what amounts to a ‘militarization’ of human resource functions,” a recent academic report found. “It feels like we’re coming into prison, and they’re trying to make sure we don’t escape,” the report quotes one worker as saying.
This workplace dystopia is being perfected at Amazon, then exported to other employers — in factories, grocery stores, hospitals, restaurants, hotels, construction sites, laboratories, and offices.
This is the bleak future we are handing to our children — unless we organize Amazon at scale and fight back.
Amazon is not just a problem for those of us in the logistics industry. From a humble online book seller, Amazon has transformed in a generation to disrupt other industries. Its avariciousness is only growing. Amazon today operates 532 Whole Foods grocery stores and is rapidly building out its grocery delivery network. This is the next major industry that the company intends to upend.
Through Amazon Web Services, the company is now a dominant global provider of computing power, storage, networking, analytics, and security. Amazon makes its own Trainium AI chips, directly competing with Nvidia. Amazon produces and distributes film and television shows through its Amazon MGM Studios. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Amazon One Medical is a primary care health service with online and clinic care, and it’s moving aggressively into the prescription drug market with Amazon Pharmacy. Through its Ring subsidiary, Amazon today dominates the home security market, and it provides other leading consumer electronics such as Alexa and Kindle.
Can a company that big and expansive, a behemoth with nearly $3 trillion in market valuation, be beaten?
Yes, it can. But as a report published on June 4 emphasizes, it will take a herculean, all-in effort by the entire U.S. labor movement to beat back Amazon — not just the valiant but fragmented efforts we have seen thus far.
In Reddit chat groups, Amazon drivers around the country now report being fired not by a human, but by AI.
The report, Renewing Labor and Winning at Amazon, which I coauthored along with Michael McQuarrie and Benjamin Y. Fong, and which was published by the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University, documents how in contrast to the 1930s, when CIO organizers were able to throttle production by striking at a few key production sites, the Amazon organizing project must aim wider. With a network of hundreds of warehouses, sort centers, and air cargo facilities, “the company has the agility to redirect package flow to other facilities, keeping the supply chain intact” and render single-site strikes largely irrelevant, the report notes, concluding that “today’s labor strategists need to recognize that in order to be successful, organizing must disrupt Amazon’s supply chain flow.”
That means organizing throughout entire regions or sections of the company’s supply chain. The report highlights two strategic regions in particular. The first is centered in the Los Angeles area and the Inland Empire just east of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where most of Amazon’s imported goods flow before being disbursed to warehouses nationally. The second comprises the Northeast region, which is home to a huge concentration of Amazon customers. The Teamsters union already is organizing in both of those regions, where workers doggedly have been taking on the company. But the scale of organizing to date is not equal to the challenge. In the company’s massive JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, the Amazon Labor Union, now part of the Teamsters, won a historic union representation vote in 2022. Four years on, notwithstanding persistent worker organizing, Amazon has yet to agree to recognize the union and bargain.
Hundreds of inside organizers — political activists who have taken jobs at Amazon to “salt,” or organize from within — have developed sophistication in organizing at Amazon in recent years, and must play an important role in any national campaign. The same is true for existing logistics, grocery, health care, and other union members. “UPS and DHL Teamster members have been especially effective organizers, sharing with Amazon workers a common language and common concerns about the supply chain work process, speedups, technology, and the problems posed by management,” the Renewing Labor and Winning at Amazon report notes. “They, along with union members in other sectors, can easily point to wins they have achieved through collective bargaining and striking that differentiate their working conditions dramatically from those of the Amazon workers.”
While organizing must be centered in the warehouses and geared toward building mass strike actions, the labor movement must envision — and fund — an all-encompassing campaign that draws in the public, other businesses, governments, and regulators. That’s because Amazon’s impact goes far beyond the workplace, and it will take pressure both inside Amazon’s supply chain and throughout society to force the company to deal with unions.
Tens of thousands of Amazon trucks pollute the air, harm public health, and degrade public roadways, and the tax breaks demanded routinely by Amazon starve local governments of the resources needed to provide public services.
“Communities in warehouse concentration areas, such as California’s Inland Empire, are ripe sites for uniting workers and community members in common campaigns against both exploitation in the warehouse and also against the externalized burdens that Amazon imposes on the community at large,” the report notes.
Amazon utilizes security officers and local police to enforce “an organizational culture of near-carceral obedience — what amounts to a ‘militarization’ of human resource functions.”
Because the National Labor Relations Board is not an effective pathway to force Amazon to bargain, unions must advance state and local ballot initiatives to advance key worker and community demands. This is not a novel concept. Fifteen years ago, the Fight for $15 drew on the power of ballot initiatives to win raises for millions of workers. Some went on to build unions in their workplaces. Today, the call could be “Fight for $30,” a number frequently cited by Amazon workers as the bare minimum they need to survive.
Initiatives also could set safety standards for workers, ban the contracting-out of Amazon delivery drivers, and restrict data center siting.
Another initiative idea involves taxing robots. This would replenish revenue that governments lose when Amazon swaps out humans — who pay payroll taxes and who also contribute to sales tax revenue when they spend money in the community — with robots, who do neither of those things. Initiatives could also require Amazon to pay into a publicly controlled affordable housing fund to offset the destruction of housing that warehouse expansion causes. Or they could require Amazon to pay for health clinics and air cleanup, to compensate for the pollution that is caused by the daily movement of Amazon trucks and train cars.
These and other initiative ideas disrupt Amazon’s business model of exploitation and can be powerful mechanisms for drawing workers and community members together in common cause and in the ultimate demand for union recognition and contracts.
In some cases, ventures that challenge Amazon’s business model can be run as legislative campaigns instead of initiatives. In New York City, a coalition of union members and community activists is pressing City Council to pass the Delivery Protection Act, which would require Amazon to hire drivers directly and improve safety standards. That’s a good start. Now imagine Delivery Protection Act campaigns being waged simultaneously in 20 cities.
Workers at Amazon’s air cargo hub in northern Kentucky strike in July 2024.
Workers at Amazon’s air cargo hub in northern Kentucky strike in July 2024.
JONATHAN ROSENBLUM
Unions also should exploit frustration that third-party vendors and sellers have with Amazon. Individuals and small businesses trying to sell their products on the Amazon platform find their margins squeezed by the behemoth. Some companies have accused Amazon of stealing their ideas and then launching competitor products. Vendors like the DSPs are continually on tenterhooks, their contracts with Amazon subject to cancellation with almost no notice. A creative Amazon campaign can find common cause with these unlikely forces by launching local and state fights to rein in the behemoth’s power against individual sellers and small businesses.
Amazon “has a corporate dynamism and infrastructural flexibility unmatched by any other contemporary company,” the report notes. “But sheer size and wealth does not make it invincible. Indeed, the speed and complexity of Amazon’s supply chain make it a vulnerable organizing target as well as a challenging one. A well-resourced and multi-dimensional campaign can secure union recognition and contracts at Amazon.”
What constitutes a “well-resourced” campaign? Unions currently spend in aggregate about $10 million a year on Amazon organizing, with the lion’s share of that coming from the Teamsters. That is simply not enough to beat a company with 1,500 U.S. worksites and more than $120 billion cash on hand. To organize 80,000 workers in LA, or 100,000 on the east coast, or 50,000 in Florida, or the tens of thousands in other regions, I think we will need at least $100 million annually for at least a decade to fund thousands of organizers, both inside and outside Amazon facilities, along with a robust campaign infrastructure to build a new CIO-style industrial organizing movement.
That may seem like a lot of money, but consider that the U.S. labor movement assets today are around $35 billion, a 225 percent increase in the last 15 years, and that U.S. labor leaders spent more than $400 million on the failed Biden-Harris candidacy.
Collectively within labor, the resources are there to mount a serious Amazon campaign. Whether or not to take on the fight is a political choice.
This can’t be a fight taken on by just a handful of unions. It must be an all-in effort. Some 90 years ago, leaders in the United Mine Workers and other unions made a pact to organize workers in the auto, steel, electrical, and rubber industries, because they knew that without mass organizing, the entire working class was in jeopardy. This weekend, as AFL-CIO leaders meet in Minneapolis, unions stand at the same parlous crossroads. Let’s hope they make the right choice that their predecessors did 90 years ago.
Amazon is using AI in terrifying ways to disempower workers. We must fight back.
truthout.orgAmazon Is Using AI to Disempower Workers. The US Labor Movement Must Fight Back.
Amazon is using AI in terrifying ways to disempower workers. We must fight back
https://truthout.org/articles/amazon-is-using-ai-to-disempower-workers-the-us-labor-movement-must-fight-back/
.
By …Jonathan Rosenblum , TRUTHOUT
PublishedJune 6, 2026
Kentucky Amazon air cargo workers and community supporters protest for rights at work, 2023.
Kentucky Amazon air cargo workers and community supporters protest for rights at work, 2023.
CALVIN PRIEST
Honest, paywall-free news is rare. Please support our boldly independent journalism with a donation of any size.
Beginning June 7, the AFL-CIO quadrennial convention gathers in Minneapolis with the stated aim of organizing “in unity and clarity of purpose to empower working people.”
That clarity of purpose ought to include a real commitment to take on the biggest and most important organizing challenge that unions face in this era — Amazon.
Thus far, notwithstanding some inspiring individual sites of struggle, the U.S. labor movement has failed to get Amazon to the bargaining table.
Uncompromised, uncompromising news
Get reliable, independent news and commentary delivered to your inbox every day.
Email*
Nationally, union density last year was a measly 10 percent, continuing a historic decline, and that’s not even counting the members lost when Trump ripped up union contracts covering nearly a million federal workers.
That leaves tens of millions of workers to organize, but none are more crucial than the 1.5 million workers and contractors at Amazon.
RELATED STORY
Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT) members protest at the Amazon RMU1 warehouse entrance on the first day of the November strike.
Striking Spanish Workers Just Showed That Amazon Is Not Invincible
Ninety years ago, General Motors was capitalism’s trailblazer, emulated by other industrialists seeking to hone productive efficiency, worker exploitation, and profit extraction. GM workers organizing under the CIO banner and resourced by unions that stood to gain no new members themselves from the project — like the United Mine Workers — pushed back against that exploitation, struck, and won new standards. They heralded in a period of mass organizing, the modern heyday of labor’s power.
Amazon is today’s General Motors. What happens to Amazon workers — good or bad — will happen to workers everywhere.
Amazon is a test bed for the future of work for all of us. Employers everywhere are seeking to imitate the behemoth’s labor model of exploitation, job instability, and — terrifyingly — the deployment of AI technologies to discipline and disempower workers.
Amazon is perfecting contracting out, just-in-time labor, and speedups. Its 250,000-plus U.S. drivers are all contracted out, either to a host of small businesses called delivery service partners (DSPs), or hired as independent contractors. That way Amazon can deny responsibility when drivers get injured, ask for more money, or try to unionize. Warehouses operate on a lean-labor model. Normal full-time warehouse schedules are four consecutive 10-hour shifts, but Amazon often cuts workers’ hours any time production slows, even in the middle of a shift, wreaking havoc on already tight family budgets. Then, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Amazon imposes mandatory overtime — an extra hour a day, plus an additional required workday every week — bringing the workweek to a brutal 55 hours and disregarding the effects on workers’ personal and family lives.
Amazon is today’s General Motors. What happens to Amazon workers — good or bad — will happen to workers everywhere.
Through its aggressive introduction of robots — now over 1 million — Amazon is replacing workers and forcing those remaining to work faster. It’s no wonder that Amazon workers get hurt on the job so often, and that the company’s serious injury rate is nearly double the rate of its warehouse industry peers.
Then there is AI. I know a bit about this directly, as I’ve worked for the last year and a half as a part-time Amazon delivery driver. The delivery service partner I work for is a fair employer, but it is not the problem; Amazon is, because while drivers technically are not employed by the company, we all are subject to its tracking and oversight.
When I’m in the Amazon truck, every movement I make is tracked with technology and evaluated by AI programs — where I am, which packages I’ve delivered, and whether it’s keeping pace with the algorithm that Amazon has determined I must meet. Readouts at the end of every shift show how each of my deliveries compared to the timing prescribed by Amazon’s algorithmic standard. We are evaluated every week on whether we took accurate photos on delivery, delivered the packages exactly where the customer requested, and got good or bad customer feedback. Through the system, drivers who don’t “make rate” or who don’t meet Amazon’s prescribed standards don’t stay employed.
Netradyne’s AI-driven “Driver•I” camera mounted in an Amazon delivery vehicle.
Netradyne’s AI-driven “Driver•I” camera mounted in an Amazon delivery vehicle.
What’s enabling this level of oversight? Big Brother: the “NetradyneDriver•i,” your ride-along buddy in the van. Camera lenses point in all directions, continually measuring your speed and distance. Netradyne also tracks whether or not you are making a complete stop at every stop sign, using your turn signal, avoiding lane drift, braking, accelerating, or cornering too fast. It watches your eye orientation and movement. Whether you yawn. If you look away from the road for too long. All of these data points are ingested into an AI system where technology, not a person, is evaluating your behavior every second. Netradyne boasts about this as “physical AI deployed at scale.”
Employers everywhere are seeking to imitate the behemoth’s labor model of exploitation, job instability, and — terrifyingly — the deployment of AI technologies to discipline and disempower workers.
In Reddit chat groups, Amazon drivers around the country now report being fired not by a human, but by AI.
For warehouse workers, Amazon has harnessed the same surveillance technology to make sure that workers’ pick, pack, and sort rates meet its algorithmically determined standards, that their scans are perfect, and that they’re minimizing “time off task” — like going to the bathroom. Everything is measured and tracked. And if you don’t “make rate,” then first you get counseled, then disciplined, then fired.
In many warehouses, Amazon utilizes security officers and local police to enforce “an organizational culture of near-carceral obedience — what amounts to a ‘militarization’ of human resource functions,” a recent academic report found. “It feels like we’re coming into prison, and they’re trying to make sure we don’t escape,” the report quotes one worker as saying.
This workplace dystopia is being perfected at Amazon, then exported to other employers — in factories, grocery stores, hospitals, restaurants, hotels, construction sites, laboratories, and offices.
This is the bleak future we are handing to our children — unless we organize Amazon at scale and fight back.
Amazon is not just a problem for those of us in the logistics industry. From a humble online book seller, Amazon has transformed in a generation to disrupt other industries. Its avariciousness is only growing. Amazon today operates 532 Whole Foods grocery stores and is rapidly building out its grocery delivery network. This is the next major industry that the company intends to upend.
Through Amazon Web Services, the company is now a dominant global provider of computing power, storage, networking, analytics, and security. Amazon makes its own Trainium AI chips, directly competing with Nvidia. Amazon produces and distributes film and television shows through its Amazon MGM Studios. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Amazon One Medical is a primary care health service with online and clinic care, and it’s moving aggressively into the prescription drug market with Amazon Pharmacy. Through its Ring subsidiary, Amazon today dominates the home security market, and it provides other leading consumer electronics such as Alexa and Kindle.
Can a company that big and expansive, a behemoth with nearly $3 trillion in market valuation, be beaten?
Yes, it can. But as a report published on June 4 emphasizes, it will take a herculean, all-in effort by the entire U.S. labor movement to beat back Amazon — not just the valiant but fragmented efforts we have seen thus far.
In Reddit chat groups, Amazon drivers around the country now report being fired not by a human, but by AI.
The report, Renewing Labor and Winning at Amazon, which I coauthored along with Michael McQuarrie and Benjamin Y. Fong, and which was published by the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University, documents how in contrast to the 1930s, when CIO organizers were able to throttle production by striking at a few key production sites, the Amazon organizing project must aim wider. With a network of hundreds of warehouses, sort centers, and air cargo facilities, “the company has the agility to redirect package flow to other facilities, keeping the supply chain intact” and render single-site strikes largely irrelevant, the report notes, concluding that “today’s labor strategists need to recognize that in order to be successful, organizing must disrupt Amazon’s supply chain flow.”
That means organizing throughout entire regions or sections of the company’s supply chain. The report highlights two strategic regions in particular. The first is centered in the Los Angeles area and the Inland Empire just east of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where most of Amazon’s imported goods flow before being disbursed to warehouses nationally. The second comprises the Northeast region, which is home to a huge concentration of Amazon customers. The Teamsters union already is organizing in both of those regions, where workers doggedly have been taking on the company. But the scale of organizing to date is not equal to the challenge. In the company’s massive JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, the Amazon Labor Union, now part of the Teamsters, won a historic union representation vote in 2022. Four years on, notwithstanding persistent worker organizing, Amazon has yet to agree to recognize the union and bargain.
Hundreds of inside organizers — political activists who have taken jobs at Amazon to “salt,” or organize from within — have developed sophistication in organizing at Amazon in recent years, and must play an important role in any national campaign. The same is true for existing logistics, grocery, health care, and other union members. “UPS and DHL Teamster members have been especially effective organizers, sharing with Amazon workers a common language and common concerns about the supply chain work process, speedups, technology, and the problems posed by management,” the Renewing Labor and Winning at Amazon report notes. “They, along with union members in other sectors, can easily point to wins they have achieved through collective bargaining and striking that differentiate their working conditions dramatically from those of the Amazon workers.”
While organizing must be centered in the warehouses and geared toward building mass strike actions, the labor movement must envision — and fund — an all-encompassing campaign that draws in the public, other businesses, governments, and regulators. That’s because Amazon’s impact goes far beyond the workplace, and it will take pressure both inside Amazon’s supply chain and throughout society to force the company to deal with unions.
Tens of thousands of Amazon trucks pollute the air, harm public health, and degrade public roadways, and the tax breaks demanded routinely by Amazon starve local governments of the resources needed to provide public services.
“Communities in warehouse concentration areas, such as California’s Inland Empire, are ripe sites for uniting workers and community members in common campaigns against both exploitation in the warehouse and also against the externalized burdens that Amazon imposes on the community at large,” the report notes.
Amazon utilizes security officers and local police to enforce “an organizational culture of near-carceral obedience — what amounts to a ‘militarization’ of human resource functions.”
Because the National Labor Relations Board is not an effective pathway to force Amazon to bargain, unions must advance state and local ballot initiatives to advance key worker and community demands. This is not a novel concept. Fifteen years ago, the Fight for $15 drew on the power of ballot initiatives to win raises for millions of workers. Some went on to build unions in their workplaces. Today, the call could be “Fight for $30,” a number frequently cited by Amazon workers as the bare minimum they need to survive.
Initiatives also could set safety standards for workers, ban the contracting-out of Amazon delivery drivers, and restrict data center siting.
Another initiative idea involves taxing robots. This would replenish revenue that governments lose when Amazon swaps out humans — who pay payroll taxes and who also contribute to sales tax revenue when they spend money in the community — with robots, who do neither of those things. Initiatives could also require Amazon to pay into a publicly controlled affordable housing fund to offset the destruction of housing that warehouse expansion causes. Or they could require Amazon to pay for health clinics and air cleanup, to compensate for the pollution that is caused by the daily movement of Amazon trucks and train cars.
These and other initiative ideas disrupt Amazon’s business model of exploitation and can be powerful mechanisms for drawing workers and community members together in common cause and in the ultimate demand for union recognition and contracts.
In some cases, ventures that challenge Amazon’s business model can be run as legislative campaigns instead of initiatives. In New York City, a coalition of union members and community activists is pressing City Council to pass the Delivery Protection Act, which would require Amazon to hire drivers directly and improve safety standards. That’s a good start. Now imagine Delivery Protection Act campaigns being waged simultaneously in 20 cities.
Workers at Amazon’s air cargo hub in northern Kentucky strike in July 2024.
Workers at Amazon’s air cargo hub in northern Kentucky strike in July 2024.
JONATHAN ROSENBLUM
Unions also should exploit frustration that third-party vendors and sellers have with Amazon. Individuals and small businesses trying to sell their products on the Amazon platform find their margins squeezed by the behemoth. Some companies have accused Amazon of stealing their ideas and then launching competitor products. Vendors like the DSPs are continually on tenterhooks, their contracts with Amazon subject to cancellation with almost no notice. A creative Amazon campaign can find common cause with these unlikely forces by launching local and state fights to rein in the behemoth’s power against individual sellers and small businesses.
Amazon “has a corporate dynamism and infrastructural flexibility unmatched by any other contemporary company,” the report notes. “But sheer size and wealth does not make it invincible. Indeed, the speed and complexity of Amazon’s supply chain make it a vulnerable organizing target as well as a challenging one. A well-resourced and multi-dimensional campaign can secure union recognition and contracts at Amazon.”
What constitutes a “well-resourced” campaign? Unions currently spend in aggregate about $10 million a year on Amazon organizing, with the lion’s share of that coming from the Teamsters. That is simply not enough to beat a company with 1,500 U.S. worksites and more than $120 billion cash on hand. To organize 80,000 workers in LA, or 100,000 on the east coast, or 50,000 in Florida, or the tens of thousands in other regions, I think we will need at least $100 million annually for at least a decade to fund thousands of organizers, both inside and outside Amazon facilities, along with a robust campaign infrastructure to build a new CIO-style industrial organizing movement.
That may seem like a lot of money, but consider that the U.S. labor movement assets today are around $35 billion, a 225 percent increase in the last 15 years, and that U.S. labor leaders spent more than $400 million on the failed Biden-Harris candidacy.
Collectively within labor, the resources are there to mount a serious Amazon campaign. Whether or not to take on the fight is a political choice.
This can’t be a fight taken on by just a handful of unions. It must be an all-in effort. Some 90 years ago, leaders in the United Mine Workers and other unions made a pact to organize workers in the auto, steel, electrical, and rubber industries, because they knew that without mass organizing, the entire working class was in jeopardy. This weekend, as AFL-CIO leaders meet in Minneapolis, unions stand at the same parlous crossroads. Let’s hope they make the right choice that their predecessors did 90 years ago.
Amazon is using AI in terrifying ways to disempower workers. We must fight back.
truthout.orgS.F. General Hospital hit with record fine after fatal stabbing exposed safety lapses
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-general-fatal-stabbing-fine-22294062.php
By St. John Barned-Smith,
Staff Writer
Updated June 6, 2026 3:19 p.m.
Cal/OSHA has fined San …Francisco General Hospital a record $130,500 after the fatal stabbing of a social worker in December exposed “serious” safety lapses.
Cal/OSHA has fined San Francisco General Hospital a record $130,500 after the fatal stabbing of a social worker in December exposed “serious” safety lapses.
Felix Uribe/For the S.F. Chronicle
San Francisco General Hospital was utterly unprepared to deal with workplace violence when a social worker was fatally stabbed there in December, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health said in issuing a record fine against the facility.
State safety inspectors fined S.F. General $130,500 for seven workplace-violence-prevention violations, six of which were labeled “serious.”
The agency’s investigation, released Wednesday, began less than a week after the Dec. 4 killing of Rangel, a 51-year-old social worker at the hospital’s sexual health clinic, allegedly by a mentally ill patient. Rangel, 51, died from his injuries days after the stabbing.
Wilfredo Jose Tortolero-Arriechi, now 35, is accused of stabbing Rangel after becoming obsessed with his doctor and showing up at Ward 86, the hospital’s HIV clinic, to confront him.
After learning that Tortolero-Arriechi was headed to the hospital, the city’s public health department asked the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office to dispatch a deputy to the clinic, records show. The deputy was guarding the doctor on the opposite side of the clinic when Tortolero-Arriechi entered and stabbed Rangel as the social worker tried to calm him down and escort him back to the elevator, records show.
The hospital failed to maintain proper security staffing, failed to identify hazards in the clinic where Rangel worked by allowing uncontrolled access to the clinic, and failed to create proper threat management plans, the report found. Inspectors accused the hospital’s leaders of numerous breakdowns in coordinating with UCSF (whose employees staff the hospital), the sheriff’s office and other agencies.
OSHA inspectors cited the failure to intercept Tortolero-Arriechi and accompany him through security, the failure to prevent him from bringing a weapon onto the hospital’s campus, and several other “serious accident-related” lapses.
One critical finding included the hospital’s failure “to develop a site specific plan” to make sure that employees, security and others “understood their respective roles in managing threats posed by high acuity patients with substance abuse, mental health, exhibiting behaviors of concern, and histories of violence.”
The report found that S.F. General failed to create a plan to identify threats, to effectively restrict building access and screen for weapons, and to communicate with staff about threats. The hospital also failed to deploy or coordinate security, train staff on emergency procedures, or intercept Tortolero-Arriechi, who had previously threatened and stalked his doctor, according to the report.
S.F. General failed to effectively restrict access to the building housing the HIV clinic during a fatal December stabbing, the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health concluded.
S.F. General failed to effectively restrict access to the building housing the HIV clinic during a fatal December stabbing, the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health concluded.
In an emailed statement, city health department spokesperson Christine Falvey said the agency learned of the fine and citations Friday and was “carefully reviewing” the safety watchdog’s findings.
Falvey said the health department took “immediate action” after the attack on Rangel and fully cooperated with Cal/OSHA’s review.
“Countless additional security measures have been initiated or expedited to strengthen workplace safety, including enhanced physical security measures, expanded security staffing, increased crisis prevention and response training, and a fundamental change in security structure governance to better connect leadership to frontline staff and their concerns,” she said.
“The safety for our staff, our patients, and our community is not negotiable,” Falvey said, noting that the department has already addressed “the vast majority” of the state’s findings and will continue to invest in safety changes at the hospital.
The Cal/OSHA report came a week after Rangel’s husband, Stuart Moulder, announced he was preparing a wrongful death lawsuit against the city.
A memorial honors slain social worker Alberto Rangel in his San Francisco home.
A memorial honors slain social worker Alberto Rangel in his San Francisco home.
The inspectors also faulted the hospital for not making sure its staff and security worked together to de-escalate Tortolero-Arriechi’s behavior or make sure that, after he showed up at Ward 86, a deputy accompanied and monitored him as he interacted with Rangel.
The report also accused the hospital of not having proper procedures to ensure employees knew how to report violent threats or other workplace violence concerns to their superiors or to the sheriff’s office as well as failing to provide a photo or physical description of Tortolero-Arriechi to clinical and administrative staff, security, and law enforcement assigned to identify and respond to potentially dangerous patients.
Inspectors accused the hospital of failing to identify recurring hazards in Building 80/90, which houses Ward 86, the clinic where Rangel worked, including not having procedures for securing weapons and not having a protective barrier at registration. Surveillance cameras on the floor where Rangel was stabbed didn’t work, and the health department failed to address inconsistent security guard staffing, the report said. Inspectors also cited the hospital for not having enough staff at the clinic to manage dangerous or erratic patients with histories of drug use, threats or violence.
Nick Casper, an attorney representing Rangel’s husband in a wrongful death claim against the hospital, called Cal/OSHA’s findings “encouraging.”
“The findings are significant because they contain many of same concerns healthcare workers, labor unions and frontline staff have been raising for years,” he said.
Casper said he was particularly troubled because state regulators had identified many of the same problems at the hospital years previously, after a nurse was attacked in 2019. After that incident, regulators had faulted the hospital for failing to coordinate with the facility’s staff, lack of weapons screening, and not having a single point of entry.
“The warning signs had been there for years, the risks were known, but meaningful action didn’t come until a frontline worker lost his life,” Casper said.
CAL/OSHA’s fine is the largest it has levied against the hospital and follows years of warnings by whistleblowers and previous sanctions by the state over patients’ assaults on workers, inadequate staffing and attendant employee burnout as well as fears about high-risk patients at the city’s “hospital of last resort.”
A photo of slain social worker Alberto Rangel is displayed during a memorial at S.F. General Hospital in December.
A photo of slain social worker Alberto Rangel is displayed during a memorial at S.F. General Hospital in December.
The state safety watchdog agency fined the hospital $26,660 in 2020 after a nurse was attacked for several workplace safety violations, including retaliating against employees who complained about dangerous conditions.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for University Professional and Technical Employees CWA Local 9119, the union that represents social workers at the hospital, said Cal/OSHA’s investigation “once again confirms the reports of UPTE frontline clinicians that chronic short staffing and high turnover endanger both workers and the public.”
“It’s long past time for UCSF to take responsibility and end this dangerous and inequitable system,” he said.
June 6, 2026|Updated June 6, 2026 3:19 p.m.
Photo of St. John Barned-Smith
St. John Barned-Smith
The state Division of Occupational Safety and Health fined S.F. General $130,500 over the fatal stabbing, the largest it has levied against the…
www.sfchronicle.comIF THE AFL-CIO HAD A CONVENTION, WOULD ANYONE NOTICE?
https://mltoday.com/if-the-afl-cio-had-a-convention-would-anyone-notice/
Posted by Chris Townsend | Apr 4, 2026 | Labor Movement | 2
If the AFL-CIO Had a Convention, Would Anyone Notice?
BY CHRIS TOWNSEND
April 3, 2026
…
I recently conducted a straw poll, over 10 days in March, 2026. I asked union members or union retirees only, not wanting to pack the results with people unfamiliar with the labor movement. Almost all were members today, the rest had been members in their work lives. A big majority are today, or were, stewards, elected leaders, staff members or activists. All from unions affiliated with the nation’s only labor federation, the AFL-CIO. My question was simple: “Do you know when the next AFL-CIO Convention will be held?” Of the 30 contestants, exactly 3 knew that there was a Convention sometime soon. None knew the exact date or the city where it is going to convene or had any idea of what debates or developments might be in the works.
Current AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, always eager to share the news that “public opinion polls show that big majorities of working people in the U.S. support unions…”, might do well to examine this reality. Try as today’s labor leadership might – to claim the support of their members and the gigantic numbers of unorganized – the real situation is alarming, although not a surprise in any way. Did you know about this coming Convention at this critical junction in our labor movement and our country? Offer a comment below, or send me an e-mail. My address is at the end.
The fact is, the 30th Convention of the American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), is set for June 7 to 10, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This once-every-three-years convening of the unions – that represent about two thirds of the U.S. organized workforce – is about to be held. For a sense of how these meetings work, see my article from the last AFL-CIO Convention in 2022: https://mltoday.com/sunset-of-the-afl-cio/
This invisible status raises an obvious question: if even the active layer of union members do not know that there is going to be an AFL-CIO Convention, then does it even matter? The labor federation comprising 61 different National and International unions, with more than 10 million working people paying dues to belong to it, has steadily slipped farther and farther into obscurity in recent decades. Today, many labor movement observers, even strong union supporters and leaders, might amend that description of “obscurity” to read “obscurity andirrelevance.”
THE COMING 2026 AFL-CIO CONVENTION
Many millions in union members’ dues money will be spent to hold this top level meeting in June. Around 2,000+ delegates, guests, and a small staff army will journey to Minneapolis for the highly scripted proceedings. The food, accommodations, and entertainment will be top-notch. The speakers will be carefully selected and scrubbed, always staying “on message”. Lots of union “gear” will be passed out, and some will even be sold. Every politically correct button in the universe to support Democrats will be worn and pushed a hundred times. It also might be time for Federation consultants to roll-out another expensive and tricky new slogan, since the carefully researched “It’s Better in a Union” jingle failed to electrify the masses last time.
Some Convention speakers will be driven to denounce Trump for his flagrant crimes, but they might stop short of invoking his name. There will be reluctance in some unions to blast Trump or Trumpism by name – since huge numbers of union members voted for Trump. Not once, but twice. A carefully selected number of high-profile Democrat politicians will be given the podium, and we can bet that they will all bend over backwards to try to prove to us that one of their parents, or a great aunt at least, once belonged to a union someplace. A Republican speaker may even be dredged up and offered as some “balance”, since the federation is sure to reassure everyone that the two-party system is just fine, even if the Republican Party has degenerated into a criminal cabal. Somewhere in the multi-day program a handful of union members will be showcased and choreographed to say the right things, claiming a victory here or there. Bravo for them as the only real workers who will be heard from. This also provides the appearance that the federation has real vitality, is growing, and is confidently confronting the Trump regime and its pathologically anti-worker agenda. Of course, none of that would be the case.
NONSTOP DECLINE, 1955 TO THE PRESENT
The obvious, glaring fact to any sober or concerned observer is that the AFL-CIO continues to recede in relevance and importance on all fronts. The highest leadership body of the federation – the coming Convention in Minneapolis – is virtually unknown to the vast masses of even active union members. This absurd situation poses the question of whether the AFL-CIO leadership would hold the coming Convention at all, were it not for the Constitutional requirement that they do so?
It is an historical fact that both the AFL and the CIO were already in decline prior to their ballyhooed 1955 founding Convention, where the reactionary AFL elements gladly took the surrender papers from the cleansed and tamed CIO remnants. This became known as a “merger”. The leading militant, left, and yes, communist forces within labor had been mostly destroyed after rounds of massive state and corporate repression. The AFL-CIO that was born banned the class struggle, elevated class collaboration to a permanent all-consuming policy, and made its truce with the two-party political trap. The stage was set for what has ensued – more than 70 years of drift, decline, membership loss, destruction of most accepted union standards in the industries, and loss of most loyalty from, or influence among, the broad masses of working people.
FRANK DONNER’S WARNING
Frank Donner, for several decades the general counsel of the independent and unaffiliated United Electrical Workers Union (UE), spoke to the 1962 UE Convention offering some of his thoughts on the state of the nascent AFL-CIO. At that point the federation was still in its infancy, being only 7 years old at the time. Donner pointed out that, “… the AFL-CIO is undergoing a process of transformation and decline… that the process is irreversible and continuing… The evidence shows that the collapse of the organized labor movement is not due to the existence of new problems which defy solution, such as hostile legislation or automation, but because of certain inherent policies and weaknesses of the movement itself. It has become clear that all of the separate and individual failures of the labor movement – in organizing, in collective bargaining, in the achievement of social and economic goals – are all explained by the decay, reaction, and corruption which are eating away at the heart of the movement.”
Donner’s landmark address, later reprinted as a UE pamphlet, concluded with a stark warning, just as relevant today as it was in 1962. “It seems clear to me that… the merged movement is dominated by the most virulent practitioners of business unionism. The remnants of the old CIO lack the strength and clarity of purpose to resist this dominant pressure… The old CIO leaderships have abandoned the trade union philosophy of militance and social reconstruction, the only approach which successfully organized industrial workers and brought labor to a position of leadership in the struggle for economic and political democracy.” He continued, “The historic evidence is too overwhelming to be ignored any longer. The labor establishment has betrayed the American worker. We must find a way to undo the mistakes of the past and rekindle the bright promise which trade unions once offered working people”.
Donner’s blunt warning and forecast has, for the most part, been borne out, tragically, but predictably so. More than 90% of the U.S. working class remains unorganized, helpless and increasingly super-exploited in the grip of the employers. Since 1955, the beginning of the AFL-CIO era, the size of the U.S. workforce has more than tripled in size while union membership has skidded to less than 10% – and been destroyed across many sectors. Large sections of the disaffected, impoverished, abandoned, and angry working class have demobilized completely, or have joined the reactionary and destructive Trump MAGA bandwagon. Today, a full 15 months into the Trump regime disaster, the Democratic Party – the alleged patron of working people – remains mired in political confusion, historically low public opinion ratings, organizational paralysis, and drift. The near-total subordination of the labor officialdom to this failed Democratic Party should be cause for concern – but at the coming AFL-CIO Convention there will be virtually no debate about this crisis. Likely none in fact.
TODAY’S BUSINESS UNION “HIDEOUT STRATEGY”
Such an appalling set of circumstances is sadly not new, and in the opinion of this author, it is now by design. Organized and unorganized working people face the growing many-headed threat of Trump and Trumpism. But what are the top AFL-CIO labor “leaders” doing? Beyond public pronouncements, assorted defensive lawsuits, and occasional social media offerings, very little, it appears. Some unions have made serious efforts to rally their membership to confront the dangers, the National Nurses United (NNU) health care union for one. https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/ The United Electrical Workers Union (UE) https://www.ueunion.org/ has also maintained a high degree of member education and activism in their pushback against Trumpism. There are also several other national and regional sections of unions who have also mobilized in the face of the dangers.
But this list is far too short. A visit to the web sites of the various unions is an instant indicator of whether that union sees its role as a mobilizer of its members – and the broad working class – or not. Dozens of unions are instead apparently taking cozy cover in the political tall weeds, waiting as the Trumpzilla beast stomps by, hoping to remain safely out of sight. This contemptible “hideout strategy” has been the predominant recent game plan, leaving labor stunned, bruised, and on the run across the board.
TWO UNIONS COMPARED: AFL-CIO AND INDEPENDENT
Over my long career I have belonged to four different unions, having completed entire careers in two – the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), and the United Electrical Workers Union (UE). The contrast at this critical junction could not be more stark. A comparison just of their print publications – sent by mail to the homes of their respective memberships to presumably inform and educate them – tells the story of our current dilemma. The UE News publication which recently arrived in my mailbox contains more than 13 articles over 16 pages in their newspaper, all explaining the links between Trumpism and the attacks on union members and working people. UE journalists commendably dig out the real story on the despotic Trump regime, its crimes, and expanded dangers. There is exactly one photo of the current UE General President, featured among photos of hundreds of members engaged in all manner of actions in opposition to Trump and employer assaults.
In contrast, the 32-page color ATU magazine which likewise arrived at my home recently, featured 13 photos of their President, including an odd religious-themed cover photo as if to present the leader presumably as some sort of deity. Having read the 32 page magazine word-for-word, I can also report that the name of Donald Trump, or any direct reference to him not by name, does not appear even one single time. Not one single time! No mention whatsoever of the criminal acts of the Trump regime, his further plans for war and domestic repression, no reports on his massive union-busting. And for the members of the largest transit union in the U.S. there is no mention of Trump’s intentions to further attack transit funding and worker protections. Silence. There are thankfully several articles showcasing struggles of ATU members against various employers and local regressive legislation, including in Canada, but any member reading the magazine would find themselves lost in a time warp, as if Trumpism did not exist or perhaps poses no danger and is unworthy of mention.
MORE CONTRASTS
As I have recently written about in these columns, the opinions of ATU’s Canadian members are of keen interest, since this “International Union” seems to have forgotten that Trump has declared an all-out political and trade war against Canada in hopes of fragmenting their nation and absorbing its pieces into our poverty-stricken and anti-union operation. See: https://mltoday.com/international-unions-and-trumps-aggression-against-canada/ What a contrast, one union working diligently to educate the rank-and-file to resist Trumpism in its many forms, and one doing…. very, very, little. While the now 90-year-old UE remains an independent union, never having been an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, the ATU has been an AFL or AFL-CIO affiliate for its entire 134 year history. The current President of the ATU also sits on the AFL-CIO Executive Council, and on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) too. While this is merely a comparison of the two unions where I spent the bulk of my working life, it does speak volumes about why the labor federation is mired in failure and retreat.
LABOR NOTES CONFERENCE FOLLOWS AFL-CIO
The large and very popular Labor Notes publication conference will follow the AFL-CIO by several days, convening in Chicago, Illinois, with more than twice the attendance. The AFL-CIO proceedings will bear no resemblance to the Labor Notes event, with nearly 5,000 mostly rank-and-file unionists traveling to the meeting to plot resistance and share experiences in trade union and political struggles. Trumpism and how to resist it will be a centerpiece of the Labor Notes event, while the well-paid and well-fed AFL-CIO Convention will reflect more the look of a high-budget business union staff meeting. One meeting will be stage managed down to the smallest detail, the other will be vital and overflowing with energy pushing towards a revitalized labor movement.
The Labor Notes publication and its attendant networks have also reached a clear new junction in their development. It is clear to all observers that Labor Notes has triumphed so far as the respect and loyalty of the activist union layers. This is certainly an accomplishment by itself, the result of decades of genuine trade union action and persistence. But the courageous union activist movements and fragments remain shut-out of most of the unions. Progressive and militant forces are still small, even microscopic, and find themselves sidelined and frequently isolated. Wealthy and powerful business union regimes still control the bulk of the unions and are largely unchallenged. Organized resistance to even the worst aspects of business union corruption, autocracy, and decay, is limited. Much remains to be done, with Labor Notes hopefully considering some new strategies as we approach the midpoint of Trump’s second term.
PART TWO
Defenders of the AFL-CIO often point out that critics are too hard on the Federation, or are somehow unfair. They sometimes apply their “logic”, which observes that the AFL-CIO is merely the sum of its parts. That it merely reflects the views of the bulk of the leadership of its affiliate unions. Is this then confirmation of a new low in trade union organization, thinking, and action by the federation? By this measure, has the AFL-CIO ceased to be a realistic force for the progress of the U.S. working class?
Part two of this article will examine additional aspects of the coming AFL-CIO Convention.
-Chris Townsend is a 47-year union member and leader. He is the retired Political Action Director for the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) and was the Organizing and Field Director for the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU). He may be reached at cwtownsend52@gmail.com
Secret AFL-CIO Convention In Minnepolis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLA86ztLX94
Ralph welcomes back union organizer, Chris Townsend, to discuss the…
www.youtube.comSecret AFL-CIO Convention In Minnepolis With Chris Townsend
Ralph welcomes back union organizer, Chris Townsend, to discuss the…
www.youtube.comSecret AFL-CIO Convention In Minnepolis With Chris Townsend
Ralph welcomes back union organizer, Chris Townsend, to discuss the…
www.youtube.comHarry Bridges Back to the Waterfront
https://milleravenuemusings.com/tag/harry-bridges/
Miller Avenue Musings
by John H Myers
Somewhere in the midst of my comedown and the start of my depression, my childhood friend Robbie Bridges, appeared and invited me to go on a road trip …to southern California. Robbie was the son of Harry Bridges and he and I used to play together when we were very young. After his parents’ divorce, he’d been living back east with his mother Nancy. He was now based in San Francisco and doing some kind of a white collar job which was nothing to do with Harry or the longshore union.
Robbie must have known what I’d been through the past few months but my memory of our drive down the coast was that we talked as if nothing had happened to me and I responded well to this. Everybody around me at this time was treating me with tremendous delicacy and somehow Robbie not thinking there was anything wrong with me was liberating. At one point he asked me to drive and I did. It was an exciting moment of self discovery to learn that I actually knew how to drive a car.
He told me all about the pop music he was keen on. He was particularly taken by The Who and told me about gigs he’d been to. I cannot remember where we stayed on this trip but I think we were away from San Francisco for a few days.
A little bit of logical thinking was seeping into my fevered brain. The idea of a trip to England, became something I felt I had to do. I knew that in order to get the money for such a journey, I would need to go back to work on the waterfront. But to do that I would have to pull myself together and make accommodations with the world around me. For someone who, a mere six weeks earlier, had been stomping around the psychiatric wards at Napa State Hospital insisting that John Lennon was in the next room, this was something of a tall order. But at every point on my journey of madness, I had responded to the signals around me and the fact I had two contacts in London: my sister Nell and my friend Jo Bergman, I took as just such a signal. It did, however, require some organisation on my part.
That I had the opportunity to work on the waterfront as a ship’s clerk was a privilege indeed. This privilege came to me as a result of being Blackie Myers’ son. I was aware just how sought after the clerking jobs on the front were. For starters they paid very well indeed and it could be more than a bit interesting, particularly when you worked down inside the hold of a cargo ship.
Had I never worked on the front before, the prospect of clerking would have terrified me, but the waterfront was a world I was familiar with having done it a fair bit. However this time was different. The recent experiences I’d been through had taken me into dimensions outside the social boundaries of normal society and I realised I’d have to conform to my father’s ways. The first thing would be to cut my hair and dress in a sober manner. There was a huge prejudice against long hairs on the front and, after several months of being a hippie mental patient, my hair was long indeed. My father was a very respected guy up and down the Embarcadero and I knew that it would be disrespectful of me to behave in any way which upset or embarrassed him.
blackie-montage-1.jpeg
Blackie with his brothers Billie and Harvey in Brooklyn(left), Blackie at his desk in the NMU, and Blackie on Market Street with a seafaring friend.
Also it was very important to be conscientious in the work, which wasn’t really that difficult but accuracy was essential. Blackie always stressed the importance of doing your job to the best of your ability. The reason he always gave for this was to protect the union. After all that was his history. He was a sailor by trade and had helped build the National Maritime Union which was no cake walk. Whenever they tied up a ship and went on strike they were up against all the forces that the ship owners had at their disposal: the police, the national guard, and gangs of strike breakers known as Goon Squads. The fight to build their union had been long and bloody. A few of Blackie’s comrades had been killed in the struggle and while he and his sailors were building the NMU on the east coast, Harry Bridges was leading the longshore union on the west coast.
From left: Blackie Myers, Harry Bridges, Vincent Hallinan.
The west coast longshore strike of 1934 was a crucial turning point for the American trade union movement. The police, firing live rounds at the striking stevedores, injured many and killed two. The union held a funeral march for the two dead men which processed up Market Street. Thousands of people lined the street to watch. This was a major factor which led to a general strike.
How the Hearst press Examiner reported the first days of the 1934 longshore strike.
The 1934 strike was the beginning and the original union, the ILA, became the ILWU (International Longshore & Warehouse Union). Their militancy improved working conditions and wages for ordinary labourers. But it also made Harry a target. Those that felt the working class should know their place conspired against him. He was, after all, an Australian by birth, and the federal government would do their damndest to deport him. But that was in the 1930s.
ilwu-montage.jpeg
From left: the 1934 longshore strike, the ILWU logo, the longshoremen march up Market Street in 1939.
From left: Harry getting good news, speaking at a conference, and speaking to a large crowd in San Francisco.
In 1952, the Myers family had travelled all the way from Connecticut to California because every job Blackie managed to get on the east coast would last only as long as it took the FBI to turn up and tell his employer what a dangerous radical he was.
The last leg of our journey west was from Taos, New Mexico to Mill Valley. All of us, Blackie, Beth, Nellie, Katie, Jimmy and I were bleary-eyed from the endless stretches of highway but when we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and climbed Waldo Grade, the end was in sight. Turning left off Miller Avenue at the 2am Club, we drove into Homestead Valley where a welcome party for us was in progress at Bob Robertson’s house. Bob was an executive of the longshore union, the ILWU. Every family friend we would know in the town we were destined to grow up in was there. The Dreyfus family, the Hallinan family and the Bridges family along with the Goldblatts and the Cox’s. It was such a friendly gathering of people and I instantly thought of all these folks as family.
The reason we had come west was the possibility of work for Blackie on the San Francisco waterfront. Harry Bridges and Blackie Myers were trade union comrades of old. However it took some time before Black was allowed to work on the front. With hindsight, I think the delay was possibly because Harry, with all the political persecution he was continuing to suffer, felt nervous about provoking the federal government. After all Blackie had been a prominent trade unionist in New York and was an early target of the witch hunters.
bb-montage.jpeg
Beth and Blackie pictured on the left in Connecticut in 1950 and on the right in San Francisco in the 1960s.
jim-montage.jpeg
From left: Johnny Myers with Blackie in Manhattan, centre: Jimmy. Blackie & John, on the right Johnny, Blackie, Jim and Totem our cat.
Harry was born in Melbourne, and had gone to sea at a young age, winding up working on the docks in San Francisco. The federal government had tried repeatedly to prosecute and deport Harry, claiming he’d lied about not being a member of the Communist Party.
The propaganda of the post war anti-Communist era was very powerful indeed. Hollywood fell in line with the government by creating a blacklist for writers, directors and actors who wouldn’t cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. The cooperation the committee required was to name names of those who either were Communists or fellow travellers. The Hollywood Ten all went to prison, Alger Hiss too went to jail and in 1953 the Rosenbergs were executed for treason so by that time the terror in the country was pretty substantial.
The House Un-American Activities Committee featuring a young Richard Nixon on the right and J. Parnell Thomas in the centre.
Pressbook advertising for the 1951 Warner Brothers film ‘I Was A Communist For The F.B.I’
For Americans who have grown up believing the propaganda of the McCarthy era, the image of a Communist was a ruthless person with shifty mannerisms and dishonest tendencies. Many of my parents’ friends were actually party members but none of them behaved remotely like that. Humour played a big role in most of those friendships.
Blackie had a mischievous sense of humour and was what he called a pork chop socialist. Whatever put food on the table was what motivated him and he was always fair with others. During the depression he found himself in a town where they had a fist fight contest with a prize of ten dollars for whoever won. Handy with his fists, Blackie fought the guy and beat him, but then split the money with his opponent. When I asked him if he was tougher than the other guy, his answer was: “No. I was hungrier.”
As kids, we always enjoyed Blackie’s performances. He was a very good mimic and did a pitch perfect impersonation of Harry, who he always called The Nose.
There were party members who did behave in a stereotypical secretive way but none of my parents’ friends were like that at all. One such person was our neighbour, Dennis Brogan’s grandmother Jean. She used to bring us her copies of The People’s World newspaper and my memory of her was that she was completely humourless.
The American Communist Party became a political force in the early days of the Great Depression. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had no qualms about dealing with Communists. His administration had many advisors from all avenues of left wing politics including the NMU, and Blackie was one of them. A family friend, Albert Kahn, wrote in his book, High Treason, quoting FDR just after his electoral victory in 1932: “Coming back from the west last week, I talked to an old friend who runs a great western railroad. ‘Fred,’ I asked him, ‘what are the people talking about out here?’ I can hear him answer even now. ‘Frank,’ he replied, ‘I’m sorry to say that men out here are talking revolution.’”
Blackie had gone to sea at age fourteen and became an able bodied seaman. Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the great depression it had caused, he was often out of work and would “grab a handful of boxcars” to get from one port to another in search of a ship to sign on. The hiring halls in every port were referred to as Fink Halls as sailors would have to bribe the man handing out the jobs. The pay was low and working conditions on the ships were often dangerous. Blackie was a tough guy who during those years was both hungry and angry. It wasn’t until he became involved with those working to organise as a union that he was able to channel his anger in a constructive way.
But the fights ahead were deadly dangerous as the shipowners perceived the formation of the union as a direct attack on their interests and deployed all their weapons. The NMU organised strikes on the east coast and ports in the Gulf of Mexico and not one of them was won easily. In addition to the brute force of the military, police and goon squads, the shipowners also had the help of press barons like William Randolph Hearst whose newspapers utilised highly effective anti-labour propaganda. One of Hearst’s papers was the San Francisco Examiner, whose readers were told on a regular basis of what an enemy of the state, Harry Bridges was. During the 1934 strike the Examiner described the strikers as rioters, and celebrated the National Guard and police as heroes defending decent citizens. The fact that they were firing live rounds at unarmed workers was celebrated as protecting the interests of decent society.
People who aren’t too clear on their history often mix up the House Un-American Activities Committee with the senate committee of Joe McCarthy but the two are separate. The House Committee began stirring things up in 1947 while Joe McCarthy didn’t discover Anti-Communism as a cause until 1950. Once he did, he went at it with a vengeance, grilling ordinary citizens on television about petitions they might have signed years before or meetings they may have attended.
Blackie and Beth had been popular folks about town before he was blacklisted but after that, people they’d known pretty well would pass them on the streets of Manhattan without a glimmer of recognition.
He told me later that he truly hadn’t seen the red scare coming. But the signs were there. As an advisor to the U.S. Government on labour relations during World War 2, he was sent into Germany with the occupying troops in 1945. He told me he’d had a meeting with General Patton not long before the accident which killed him. After they’d dealt with their business, Patton poured them each a snifter of the finest brandy and held his glass up in a toast, saying: “Now that this is over, we’re going to get you bastards.” Black told me that he just laughed. But soon after his return to the U.S. his passport was taken away from him. A sailor without a passport cannot work as a seaman.
The choreography of the cold war was designed with military precision and one of the most important weapons was propaganda. Convincing the American public to forget about the Germans, Italians and Japanese being their enemy and to concentrate their fear on the Russians, was essential to this endeavour.
They were helped in no small part by the hearings held by HUAC and Senator McCarthy but also by Hollywood and those who controlled the media. People with left wing or liberal tendencies during the 1930s and 40s suddenly found themselves perceived as highly suspicious individuals and began running for cover. Many of them became stool pigeons and turned on their friends. The fifth amendment, which protects citizens from incriminating themselves, was seen by the newspapers as an admission of guilt and people who took it often lost their jobs.
But the machinations of the federal government didn’t work on my parents and their close friends and I grew up hearing fantastic trade union tales from the 1930s and 40s.
So here I was, fresh out of Napa Hospital, preparing myself for going back to work on the waterfront and yet there were still a few hoops which I had to jump through. True, I wasn’t over my crazyiness but was capable of putting on a reasonable appearance of “not so crazy.” I continued taking Thorazine, but in smaller doses. I went to the barber shop and got my hair cut short. I started shaving regularly and dressing in a conservative way. When Black was convinced I was okay he told me he’d had a word with Johnny Aitken who was the dispatcher in the hiring hall and when I felt up to it I could turn up for work.
Posts about harry-bridges written by milleravenuemusings
milleravenuemusings.comive Discussion with Argentinian Workers Occupying their Shutdown Factory
Adobe Books ( 3130 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110)
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Date:
Sunday, June 07, 2026
Time:
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Event …Type:
Fundraiser
Organizer/Author:
Bay Area Coalition for FATE Argentina Workers
Location Details:
Adobe Books 3130 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110
Bay Area workers and organizers — stand in solidarity with the Argentine FATE factory workers!
After the company threatened to close the factory and retaliated against workers fighting back, the workers of the Argentinian, Fate factory and their union launched a strike and occupied the plant. Join us on June 7th at 2 PM at Adobe Books in SF to hear directly from representatives of the FATE struggle, learn about their fight, and help raise donations in support. But also, come together to build international worker solidarity and connect their struggle to our own here in the U.S. because…
From Argentina to the Bay — workers rise to seize the day!
Endorsements:
United Front Committee for a Labor Party
Adobe Books
Socialists Without Borders
WorkWeek
Peoples Revolutionary Party (Bay Area)
Anti-Imperialist Action Committee (San Francisco)
If you are not able to make the event in person, it will be live streamed on Zoom! The link to join is:
Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.
us04web.zoom.ushttps://www.wbaltv.com/article/ai-bots-fake-student-aid-fraud-bccc-baltimore/71498093
A new fraud case involving artificial intelligence stole thousands of dollars in financial aid from Baltimore City Community College.
www.wbaltv.comSF Mayor Lurie's Union Busting Privatization Drive On City Workers Threatens All Public Workers
https://youtu.be/W-IaIvm5TdQ
San Francisco billionaire may Daniel Lurie is engaging in an open attack on union contract rights and
civil service rules among public workers who are …members of SEIU 1021 and IFPTE 21.
Without following seniority he transferred Department of Public Health workers to other centers and is
closing community healthcare clines for youth and seniors. These cuts according to workers will lead to
the deaths of their clients. The City has been contracting out billions of dollars of public work to private
non-profits and other companies and this privatization was protested at the San Francisco Civil Service.
City public workers are now working side by side with workers doing the same work at 30% less pay and
benefits that public workers. While the City is closing public mental health and other clinics it is continuing
to spend millions for outside contracts. SEIU 1021 and IFPTE 21 both attended the hearings at the SF
Civil Service. The two of the three commissioners including Firefighter union and labor council member
Adam Woods voted to contract out social service workers who take care of children outside of San Francisco.
Also
the violation of San Francisco Civil Service rules was protested by San Francisco City workers an unions
on 5/18/26.
Additional Media:
SEIU1021 SF Workers & Clients Rally To Stop Killing Cuts By Mayor Lurie At Mission Geriatric Clinic
https://youtu.be/4SAhyrvGhYc
SF Mayor Lurie & DPH Threaten To Close 3 Healthcare Center Including For Seniors
https://youtu.be/BcNmJTAPeJ0
‘We can shut down the city’: SF Mayor Lurie’s budget cuts spark a showdown with labor
https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/12/can-shut-city-lurie-s-budget-cuts-spark-showdown-labor/
STOP SF Mayor Lurie's Union Busting & Contracting Out Jobs! SEIU1021 Unionists Speak Against Cuts
https://youtu.be/_qA_r_hPBl0
SEIU1021 SF Workers & Clients Rally To Stop Killing Cuts By Mayor Lurie At Mission Geriatric Clinic
https://youtu.be/4SAhyrvGhYc
STOP SF Mayor Lurie's Union Busting & Contracting Out Jobs! SEIU1021 Unionists Speak Against Cuts
https://youtu.be/_qA_r_hPBl0
SEIU 1021 & IFPTE 21 Officials Protest SF Mayor Lurie's Contracting Out & Layoffs Of City Workers
https://youtu.be/HVxNAHBEk94
SEIU1021 & IFPTE21 City Workers Rally At SF Gen Against Mayor Lurie's Union Busting Layoffs & Prop D
https://youtu.be/-8If3hYKhF8
SF Mayor Lurie & DPH Threaten To Close 3 Healthcare Center Including For Seniors
https://youtu.be/BcNmJTAPeJ0
SEIU1021 & IFPTE21 City Workers Rally At SF Gen Against Mayor Lurie's Union Busting Layoffs & Prop D
https://youtu.be/-8If3hYKhF8
Black Workers Bullying Privatization & SEIU 1021 With SF DPH Licensed Therapist Blue Williams
https://youtu.be/HyyfoWDhAH0
Terrorism Racism & Union Busting Against SEIU1021 SF General Hospital Workers By CCSF HR/DPH & Mayor
https://youtu.be/gUpZqFxFplI
STOP Discharges At Laguna Honda Hospital: Discharges = Deaths Say Labor, Community & Families
https://youtu.be/z1TL2yQv6IQ
WW 8-9-22 SF Laguna Honda Hospital Discharges & The Deaths With Pat McGinnis Of CANHR
https://soundcloud.com/workweek-radio/ww-8-9-22-sf-laguna-honda-hospital-discharges-the-deaths-with-pat-mcginnnis-canhr-8-9-22
WorkWeek 8-4-22 Fight To Save SF Laguna Honda & SEIU 1021 SF Tenderloin Housing Clinic Workers
https://soundcloud.com/workweek-radio/ww-8-4-22-fight-to-save-sf-laguna-honda-seiu-1021-sf-tenderloin-housing-clinic-workers
Patients' Families, Supporters Hold SF Rally to Keep Laguna Honda Hospital Open
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco-rally-laguna-honda-hospital/2976789/
SF Laguna Honda Doctors And Whistleblowers Speaks Out At SF Health Commission Hearing
https://youtu.be/OgQfINEQSwo
SEIU 1021 SFGH Workers Speakout! Stop Racism, Union Busting & Privatization Of SFGH Pharmacy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1XzRrzB9ZI
SF City Dr. Kerr From SF Laguna Honda Hospital Discusses Bullying In The Workplace
https://youtu.be/_shGLuXU9uk
California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform (CANHR)
http://www.canhr.org
Hundreds of SEIU 1021 SF Non-profit Tenderloin Housing Clinic Workers Strike For Living Wages
https://youtu.be/yCARCOMpFE0
EPIC, LEAN, SF General, Privatization & SEIU 1021 Contract Negotiations: Interview With John Wadsworth
https://youtu.be/eTRAzcbj-yo
Reign Of Terror Against SF SEIU 1021 DPH Members & Other City Workers: Speakout At SF Labor Council
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JN-f8HeN3w&t=7s
Racism, Outsourcing and Retaliation At SF Civil Service Commission With HR Director Micki Callahan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqNhPRQeHGk&t=34s
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
Published 23 July 2020Updated 23 July 2020Cite This PageShareDocument PreviewYour browser doesn’t support embedded PDFs. Click here to download…
www.labormedia.netRetired San Francisco firefighter Ken Jones dies from lung cancer being denied treatment by Blue Shield
https://abc7news.com/post/retired-san-francisco-firefighter-ken-jones-dies-lung-cancer-being-denied-treatment-blue-shield/19224406/
KGO logo
Thursday, June 4, 2026 …9:36AM
Retired SF firefighter dies from cancer after losing insurance battle
The retired San Francisco firefighter at the center of a bitter insurance fight with Blue Shield has lost his battle against cancer.
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — The retired San Francisco firefighter at the center of a bitter insurance fight has lost his battle against cancer.
Ken Jones passed away Saturday, 14 months after being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.
PREVIOUS REPORT: City asked to intervene after SF firefighter's stage 4 lung cancer treatment denied by Blue Shield
We first told you about Jones in January — when the 17-year veteran and supporters asked the City Commission for help.
The Fire Department's insurance carrier, Blue Shield, denied coverage for some of his recommended treatments.
Ken Jones was 70 years old.
RELATED: SF firefighters rally for retiree denied cancer treatment by Blue Shield as more come forward
"After we got some publicity, thank you, a Blue Shield physician reached out to Ken's physician, and they worked out a different plan that Blue Shield would cover. It's still an incomplete plan," said Helen Horvath, Jones' wife when ABC7 Eyewitness News spoke to her in January, 2026.
Since then, Jones' story has led to an investigation into other cases, with the city's mayor vowing to support firefighters.
According to San Francisco's Health Service Board, about 5,000 city employees and retirees are insured by Blue Shield. Now, city leaders are asking anyone who has been denied cancer treatment to speak up.
Tony Stefani with the Cancer Prevention Foundation said firefighters with a cancer diagnosis have a 14% higher chance of dying than other cancer patients in the general population.
"Current statistics tell us that 65% of the men and women in our profession are going to contract some form of cancer in their lifetime. Some of them will be fatal," Stefani said.
In a Statement Blue Shield said, in part: "For Medicare members, health plans must follow medical policy established by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)."
The retired San Francisco firefighter at the center of a bitter insurance fight has lost his battle against stage 4 lung cancer, after pleading with…
abc7news.comRetired San Francisco firefighter Ken Jones dies from lung cancer being denied treatment by Blue Shield
https://abc7news.com/post/retired-san-francisco-firefighter-ken-jones-dies-lung-cancer-being-denied-treatment-blue-shield/19224406/
KGO logo
Thursday, June 4, 2026 …9:36AM
Retired SF firefighter dies from cancer after losing insurance battle
The retired San Francisco firefighter at the center of a bitter insurance fight with Blue Shield has lost his battle against cancer.
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — The retired San Francisco firefighter at the center of a bitter insurance fight has lost his battle against cancer.
Ken Jones passed away Saturday, 14 months after being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.
PREVIOUS REPORT: City asked to intervene after SF firefighter's stage 4 lung cancer treatment denied by Blue Shield
We first told you about Jones in January — when the 17-year veteran and supporters asked the City Commission for help.
The Fire Department's insurance carrier, Blue Shield, denied coverage for some of his recommended treatments.
Ken Jones was 70 years old.
RELATED: SF firefighters rally for retiree denied cancer treatment by Blue Shield as more come forward
"After we got some publicity, thank you, a Blue Shield physician reached out to Ken's physician, and they worked out a different plan that Blue Shield would cover. It's still an incomplete plan," said Helen Horvath, Jones' wife when ABC7 Eyewitness News spoke to her in January, 2026.
Since then, Jones' story has led to an investigation into other cases, with the city's mayor vowing to support firefighters.
According to San Francisco's Health Service Board, about 5,000 city employees and retirees are insured by Blue Shield. Now, city leaders are asking anyone who has been denied cancer treatment to speak up.
Tony Stefani with the Cancer Prevention Foundation said firefighters with a cancer diagnosis have a 14% higher chance of dying than other cancer patients in the general population.
"Current statistics tell us that 65% of the men and women in our profession are going to contract some form of cancer in their lifetime. Some of them will be fatal," Stefani said.
In a Statement Blue Shield said, in part: "For Medicare members, health plans must follow medical policy established by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)."
The retired San Francisco firefighter at the center of a bitter insurance fight has lost his battle against stage 4 lung cancer, after pleading with…
abc7news.comTesla settles some Bay Area worker’s racism claims as bigger trial looms
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2026/06/04/tesla-settles-some-worker-racism-claims-as-bigger-trial-looms/
Tesla vehicles line a parking area at the company’s Fremont, Calif., factory on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025. (AP …Photo_Noah Berger)
.jpeg
Tesla vehicles line a parking area at the company’s Fremont, Calif., factory on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Author
By BLOOMBERG | wordpress@medianewsgroup.com | Bloomberg
PUBLISHED: June 4, 2026 at 8:15 AM PDT
By Robert Burnson and Dana Hull, Bloomberg
Tesla Inc. reached an agreement to settle several workers’ claims alleging pervasive anti-Black racism at one of its California plants, while the company still faces a jury trial in a broader case brought by the state’s civil rights enforcement agency.
The electric-vehicle maker’s accord with three workers was disclosed Wednesday in a court filing, averting a series of trials that were set to start earlier this week in state court in Oakland. Terms and conditions in the settlement remain confidential and the filing said claims by two other workers are still pending.
For almost a decade, the company headed by Elon Musk has been trying to fend off allegations that the assembly line in Tesla’s Fremont plant was a hostile work environment filled with racist slurs, graffiti and drawings of nooses and swastikas.
Tesla has lost arbitration proceedings in some cases and privately settled others while publicly denying wrongdoing. The company has previously said it does not tolerate harassment and has removed employees found responsible for misconduct.
Five years ago, a similar case generated one of the largest-ever verdicts in a discrimination case involving a single worker — $137 million — but Tesla got the award reduced 98% before reaching a confidential settlement.
Tesla reveals its Texas robotaxi fleet is dwarfed by Waymo’s
SpaceX IPO will add second Musk stock. It’s a problem for Tesla.
Musk, Cook set to join Trump for Xi Summit, White House says
Tesla made $573 million in sales from SpaceX and xAI last year
Elon Musk’s Tesla compensation totals $158 billion for 2025
The allegations grabbed a bigger spotlight when civil rights regulators at the state and federal level sued Tesla in separate cases in 2022 and 2023. California’s case, alleging systemic discrimination, pay inequities and a hostile work environment, is scheduled for a July 20 trial, also in Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accused the company of tolerating racial harassment and retaliating against workers who spoke out against the abuse. The Trump administration and Tesla entered into settlement negotiations earlier this year.
The case that was set for trial this week was filed in 2017 by Marcus Vaughn, who alleged that he had heard the “N-word” used at least 100 times by co-workers. He presented evidence that Black and White employees alike referred to the factory as “the plantation” or “slaveship.”
After he complained repeatedly to management, one of the offensive co-workers was fired, but the racist slurs continued, according to Vaughn’s complaint.
When Vaughn’s six-month contract was up for renewal, a supervisor recommended against it, saying Vaughn “does not have a positive attitude at work and for the company” and he was let go, according to the complaint.
Vaughn’s complaint was at one point certified as a class action on behalf of some 6,000 Black workers at the Fremont plant. But the judge overseeing the case later voided the class status because attorneys for the plaintiffs were unable to secure commitments that at least 200 former employees or contractors were willing to testify.
In its defense of Vaughn’s case, Tesla argued that with more than 10,000 workers at the factory, it wasn’t possible to stop all bad conduct. The company also denied that termination of Vaughn’s work as a contractor was retaliation for his complaints.
The electric-vehicle maker’s accord with three workers was disclosed Wednesday in a court filing, averting a series of trials that were set to …
www.eastbaytimes.comSF Mayor Lurie's Union Busting Privatization Drive On City Workers Threatens All Public Workers
Pittsburgh Post Gazette Strikers Plan for a New Paper; Teamsters Challenge Union Leadership; Canadian Labor Congress Breaks With Israeli Corporate Union Histadrut; Dr. McCullough Debunks Hantavirus Hysteria
…https://capitalismraceanddemocracy.org/2026/06/01/pittsburgh-post-gazette-strikers-plan-for-a-new-paper-teamsters-challenge-union-leadership-canadian-labor-congress-breaks-with-israeli-corporate-union-histadrut-dr-mccullough-debunks-hantavirus-hy/
By Capitalism, Race & Democracy – June 1, 202614
Members of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh just ended their strike over unfair labor practices at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette after 1132 days. They had won one court battle after another, until the Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The paper’s owners then announced that they would be shutting it down and turning it over to a non-profit, which promptly terminated most of the workers. Now the workers and the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh have decided to launch a new worker-community-owned newspaper. Pacifica’s Steve Zeltzer interviewed labor journalist Steve Mellon, one of the workers who had been on strike, about what’s to come.
Israel’s main labor federation, the Histadrut, has a long history of supporting the Israeli apartheid state. It has strong ties to the US’s AFL-CIO, which is also supporting the Gaza genocide.
In Canada last month the Canadian Labor Congress broke ties with the Histadrut after a long education campaign and struggle at their convention. Canadian trade unionist Hassan Husseini, who is with Canadian Labour For Palestine, gave this report to a group of US trade unionists who are working in the US to break ties with the Histadrut and the AFL-CIO.
Next, Marianne Pizzitola and Michelle Keller, hosts of Labor and Healthcare Confidential on Pacifica’s WBAI in New York, talk to two rank-and-file Teamsters about their fight for equal representation in the contract battle that put them at odds with union leadership. Colleen Donovan is with UPS Teamsters Local 804-New York and Jess Lister is with Teamsters UPS Union Local 728-New York.
***
Recent headlines scream about the next pandemic, but Dr. Peter McCullough says that there’s a lot of irrational fear involved. Next we share part of an interview Dr. McCullough gave to Kristie Leigh’s DC Dispatch on Lindell TV on May 23.
And that concludes today’s edition of Capitalism, Race & Democracy. We thank all of Pacifica’s sister stations and affiliates who contribute to the production of this show. Today’s program was produced by the Capitalism, Race & Democracy collective, with contributions from Steve Zeltzer, Ann Garrison, Polina Vasiliev, and Thomas O’Rourke.
You can find this and all previous episodes at our website “capitalism race and democracy dot ORG”. Make sure you click the subscribe button. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, @PacificaCRD.
Thanks for listening.
Music:
David Rovics, performed by AI Tsuno, “If We All Sing Together”
Explosive Media, “Little Orange Man”
It’s Coming Out! (Who’s Funding Who?) from the Fearless Teamsters
Members of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh just ended their strike over unfair labor practices at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette after 1132 days….
capitalismraceanddemocracy.orgPittsburgh Post Gazette Strikers Plan for a New Paper; Teamsters Challenge Union Leadership; Canadian Labor Congress Breaks With Israeli Corporate Union Histadrut; Dr. McCullough Debunks Hantavirus Hysteria
…https://capitalismraceanddemocracy.org/2026/06/01/pittsburgh-post-gazette-strikers-plan-for-a-new-paper-teamsters-challenge-union-leadership-canadian-labor-congress-breaks-with-israeli-corporate-union-histadrut-dr-mccullough-debunks-hantavirus-hy/
By Capitalism, Race & Democracy – June 1, 202614
Members of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh just ended their strike over unfair labor practices at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette after 1132 days. They had won one court battle after another, until the Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The paper’s owners then announced that they would be shutting it down and turning it over to a non-profit, which promptly terminated most of the workers. Now the workers and the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh have decided to launch a new worker-community-owned newspaper. Pacifica’s Steve Zeltzer interviewed labor journalist Steve Mellon, one of the workers who had been on strike, about what’s to come.
Israel’s main labor federation, the Histadrut, has a long history of supporting the Israeli apartheid state. It has strong ties to the US’s AFL-CIO, which is also supporting the Gaza genocide.
In Canada last month the Canadian Labor Congress broke ties with the Histadrut after a long education campaign and struggle at their convention. Canadian trade unionist Hassan Husseini, who is with Canadian Labour For Palestine, gave this report to a group of US trade unionists who are working in the US to break ties with the Histadrut and the AFL-CIO.
Next, Marianne Pizzitola and Michelle Keller, hosts of Labor and Healthcare Confidential on Pacifica’s WBAI in New York, talk to two rank-and-file Teamsters about their fight for equal representation in the contract battle that put them at odds with union leadership. Colleen Donovan is with UPS Teamsters Local 804-New York and Jess Lister is with Teamsters UPS Union Local 728-New York.
***
Recent headlines scream about the next pandemic, but Dr. Peter McCullough says that there’s a lot of irrational fear involved. Next we share part of an interview Dr. McCullough gave to Kristie Leigh’s DC Dispatch on Lindell TV on May 23.
And that concludes today’s edition of Capitalism, Race & Democracy. We thank all of Pacifica’s sister stations and affiliates who contribute to the production of this show. Today’s program was produced by the Capitalism, Race & Democracy collective, with contributions from Steve Zeltzer, Ann Garrison, Polina Vasiliev, and Thomas O’Rourke.
You can find this and all previous episodes at our website “capitalism race and democracy dot ORG”. Make sure you click the subscribe button. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, @PacificaCRD.
Thanks for listening.
Music:
David Rovics, performed by AI Tsuno, “If We All Sing Together”
Explosive Media, “Little Orange Man”
It’s Coming Out! (Who’s Funding Who?) from the Fearless Teamsters
Members of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh just ended their strike over unfair labor practices at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette after 1132 days….
capitalismraceanddemocracy.orgNYC’s Largest Public Sector Union AFSCME DC 37 Splits Over Leader’s Opposition to Bill Banning the 24-Hr. Workday
…https://www.work-bites.com/view-all/nxhl1zknlcc0gpq8wizfw4th3y4g0e?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=6a208a4f69c09b65e6c7fa29&ss_email_id=6a208de9dcb0633bbc7fe85f&ss_campaign_name=Members+Defy+Garrido+Over+‘No+More+24’+Opposition%2F’Maximum+Leverge’+is+Here&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-06-03T20%3A26%3A31Z
LATESTTRI-STATE NEWS
JUN 3
New York City home care workers and their advocates urging City Council Speaker Julie Menin to back the No More 24 bill clashed with members of District Council 37 at demonstrations held outside City Hall on May 20. Photos/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
A coalition of both active workers and retirees from New York City’s largest public sector union are defying union leadership and calling on City Council Speaker Julie Menin to back a bill banning round-the-clock shifts in the home care industry.
“We, the undersigned retired and active members of District Council 37, are deeply concerned that the City is failing to enact the ORIGINAL, UNAMENDED No More 24 bill to abolish the 24-hour workday system,” theopen letter to Speaker Menin states.
DC37 Local 3005, the union representing some 1,200 New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) and Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) employees, passed a motion at its May 28 general meeting announcing that it’s signing onto the open letter with retirees and members of more than 10 other DC37 locals as a “single entity.”
The action comes just a week after DC37 Executive Director Henry Garrido led an ugly demonstration outside City Hall on May 20 deriding No More 24 proponents for not having “skin on the line,” and warning that passage of Intro. 303 will deprive clients of the round-the-clock care that some require.
“Change is needed,” Brendan Griffith, president of the New York City Central Labor Council, told the DC37 rally. “But you can’t fix a flawed system by implementing new requirements without a sustained funding solution and hoping everything works itself out, and that is exactly what Intro 303 would do.”
Intro. 303 advocates led a counter protest during the same DC37 demonstration, however, in which they both dismissed those claims as fear-mongering and denounced Garrido’s historic failure to help advance efforts to ban the 24-hour workday during any point in the decade-old No More 24 campaign.
District Council 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido vowed to continue efforts to “amend” or “kill” Intro. 303 during a union demonstration held outside City Hall on May 20.
Local 3005 specifically called out the legalized system of wage theft in New York State that continues to allow home care employers to assign employees 24-hour shifts while only paying them for 13 hours.
“Home care employees realistically cannot take their legally allowed breaks while attending to their patients’ needs and due to the fact that their services were advertised as 24 hours of care, resulting in worker exploitation and worse care for patients,” Local 3005’s motion in support of Intro. 303 says in part.
Speaker Menin met with home care workers advocating for passage of the No More 24 bill during Day 2 of their previously-held City Hall sit-in on March 19, in which she promised to bring Intro. 303 to the floor for a vote the following month.
But April came and went without any action being taken other than attempts by Garrido and others to weaken or kill the bill.
“We saw you in the media promising the workers that you would submit Intro 303, unchanged, to be voted on,” the open letter to Speaker Menin goes on to state. “We know that you are under immense pressure from the insurance companies, home care agencies, and SEIU1199 & DC37. We also know that Governor Hochul and Mayor Mamdani are pressuring you. We are particularly stunned by Local 389 of DC 37 asking to be exempted from the bill, essentially sanctioning brutal 24-hour workdays for its own home attendant members.”
DC37 Local 389 represents about 5,000 New York City Home care workers.
“We should be getting paid more, but what can you do,” DC37 Local 389 President Margaret Glover told Work-Bites during the union’s May 20 demonstration outside City Hall. Asked whether aides get paid more when they don’t get uninterrupted sleep, she exclaimed, “No! We don’t get paid for it.”
Editor’s Note: This is a developing story and Work-Bites will have more as additional facts are obtained.
