Jose Martinez has lived and worked in the United States since he was 14 years old. Now 67, he drives around the Yakima Valley in Washington state checking on fellow workers.
“When it’s hot, do you have a place to protect yourself from the sun and heat?” he calls out to some workers on the side of an apple orchard on a sunny June morning.
Martinez worked in agriculture across the fields of California and, most recently, Washington state. Irrigation, grapes, apples, mushrooms, dairies and now cherries. He’s done a little bit of everything.
“I love the fields because you’re in the open air,” he told NPR in his native Spanish, sitting on the lawn outside his home in Sunnyside, Wash. “It’s beautiful. I am proud to do it, to be a farmworker. Why not?”
When people think of farmworkers, often they think of migrant workers and labor organizers like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Now, they may add another name to those creating major changes in the farming workplace: Jose Martinez.
Over the past decade, Martinez has been central to two flagship lawsuits creating policy changes in the state — making Washington one of the leaders in providing overtime to farmworkers and settling a civil rights case in favor of workers. And recently, he has taken his fight to Washington, D.C., where he has pushed for an expansion of legal status and protections for farmworkers.
Federally, farmworkers are largely excluded from many federal workplace safety regulations. They don’t have a right to overtime pay or to unionize, and children as young as 12 can legally work in the fields. As a result, some states, like Washington, have extended additional rights and regulations.
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The Nottingham Starbucks voted to join Starbucks Workers United in June 2022 — and Ms. Torregoza and her colleagues stepped into a world of trouble.
The corporate dirty war that ensued — in Nottingham and at newly unionized Starbucks cafes across the country — draws a sobering picture of employee rights casually crushed and labor laws too weak to help. Starbucks continues to fight and appeal the many labor complaints pending against it and maintains that the company has done nothing wrong.
But these professions of innocence are countered by piles of testimony from workers and National Labor Relations Board findings suggesting that Starbucks has indeed illegally repressed employees’ rights. The company has so far racked up a staggering number of complaints from the agency. In 100 cases, many of which consolidate a number of incidents, regional N.L.R.B. offices have decided there is sufficient evidence to pursue litigation against Starbucks. That includes a nationwide complaint, consolidating 32 charges across 28 states, alleging that Starbucks failed or refused to bargain with union representatives from 163 cafes.
Starbucks lacks the glamour of Hollywood and the indispensability of UPS, but as strikes and union drives erupt across the economy, the coffee workers’ struggle illuminates the stark and sometimes insurmountable challenges confronted by ordinary American workers who try to exercise their right to organize.
That Starbucks is carrying on this campaign in plain sight may be the most damning aspect: Union busting is illegal, but consequences are inconsequential. The Starbucks case demonstrates that a large corporation can effectively bust a union with time, by dithering over details and exhausting legal appeals. According to national labor laws, an employer “must bargain in good faith.” But that is a squishy and essentially unenforceable rule. Starbucks may yet succeed in smothering one of the most energized labor movements of our time.
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Source: Megan K. Stack, “Inside Starbucks’ Dirty War Against Organized Labor,” New York Times, 21 July 2023
The striking miners were 10,000 strong on the first day of September 1921 as they charged up the slope of Blair Mountain, propelled by a radical faith in the American dream. According to an Associated Press reporter who crouched behind a log and watched through field glasses, each time they pressed forward, a “veritable wall” of machine gun fire drove them back. As the barrage echoed through the hollows, reminding some of the action they had just seen in the forests of France, the advancing miners soon heard a different sound: deeper, earthshaking explosions. From biplanes above, tear gas, explosive powder and metal bolts rained down. “My God,” screamed one miner fighting his way up Crooked Creek Gap. “They’re bombing us!”
“They” were Sheriff Don Chafin and his deputies, who terrorized the citizens of Logan County, W.Va., by the authority of the coal companies. The miners vastly outnumbered their opponents, but Chafin had the superior position and weapons. “ACTUAL WAR IS RAGING IN LOGAN,” one local paper declared the day before.
The miners were fighting for the right to unionize, and to end the reviled “mine guard system,” a private force of armed guards who brutally enforced the company’s control in the coal fields. Unless the mine guard system was removed, John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America, had warned, “the dove of peace” would “never make permanent abode in this stricken territory.”
On Sept. 4, federal troops arrived at Blair Mountain. The miners cheered, thinking Uncle Sam had come to liberate them from King Coal. Uncle Sam had no such plans. In 1921, about three million Americans were unemployed, and Washington was concerned that the industrial war raging in southern West Virginia could spread to other states. The troops told miners to stand down, and they did. “We wouldn’t revolt against the national government,” one of them said.
The miners were roundly defeated, but their struggle was not in vain: Years later, as part of the New Deal, the rights they were fighting for — including the right to collectively bargain — were written into law. Black, white and immigrant, the “Red Neck Army” (so named for the red bandannas they wore) had mounted the largest working-class uprising in U.S. history and the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War.
Today, Blair Mountain is just that: a mountain. While many battlefields are the object of exhaustive study and veneration — places and times when power wobbled and blood was shed — Blair Mountain is still largely unexplored. No statue or roadside attraction commemorates it; no tour buses roll up and disgorge visitors. Despite a burst of recent interest, for most West Virginians, the story of Blair Mountain barely even exists.
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Source: Cassady Rosenblum, “The Redneck Army Refuses to Stay Buried,” New York Times, 21 July 2023
The global craze around “Barbie” has reached Russia — even though many Russians will be unable to see the movie about the iconic doll.
The movie will not be legally shown in Russian theaters due to Western studios leaving the country over the invasion of Ukraine.
But that hasn’t deterred Barbie fans from dressing up in pink, going to Barbie-themed parties and living out their Barbie dreams:
Tanya Tuzova, who was nicknamed the “Russian Barbie” after she changed her appearance to resemble the doll.
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Source: “In Photos: ‘Barbie’ Mania Sweeps Russia Despite Absence from Theaters,” Moscow Times, 26 July 2023. The Instagram post, above, was not used in the original article.
