Mark Medina
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
Yeah, so it's been a very disheartening and scary couple of weeks since this happened because this opens up a new path for the state to go after organizers, to go after workers, and the most underprivileged in our society in a way that I suppose we all expected. But now that we see it, now that we see it happening, now that we see it happening to people that we know in our community,
Behind the Bastards
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It's becoming apparent. There is no turning back from the idea that we have to be able to take this on headfirst. We as activists, as organizers, have to look at this and then see it as an actual thing in our day-to-day that we have to combat and incorporate into our organizing. So maybe it might be a little helpful to start off with a little bit of a backstory on Flaminas Unidas by La Sisa.
Behind the Bastards
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So the union has its origins going back to 2013. The area in which they organized the Bellingham or the Washington walk-in scheduled areas has a very particular type of immigrant community there. Lelo himself is of Mixteco background. There's a lot of indigenous Mexican populations in the region. It's also one that has long roots.
Behind the Bastards
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A lot of these people go back generations, have been here for quite some time. This area also happens to be a very particularly with the non-Hispanic population, particularly the white population, a very conservative, particularly conservative for the area. It's one of the very few areas in the Northwest that Donald Trump came to visit.
Behind the Bastards
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It's an area that has had repeated attacks on the immigrant community. And so it's in this context that workers are organizing in 2013 for this first independent union. And two, it's important to mention the independent part of it. A lot of the organizers from the start of this, of the union, came from a tradition of the United Farm Workers. in California.
Behind the Bastards
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Some of them worked with Cesar Chavez in the heyday of the United Farm Workers. And in the years and decades since then, since the Delano boycotts and other things, there's been a growing rift of what the next steps should be. And I think that for a lot of farm workers, because they don't organize under the general labor law that we have for most workers,
Behind the Bastards
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There is a sort of patchwork system for how farmworking organizing happens in the United States that's dependent upon different states and legislatures. And for the most part, with the exception of only two states, farmworkers don't have the same kind of protections that regular workers generally in the society have for union recognition, for collective bargaining.
Behind the Bastards
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Only Washington and New York at the moment, I believe, have laws that allow for elections for farmworker unions. And there's a very particular reason for that being the case. Farmworkers were excluded from the Wagner Act for having general labor rights. in the 1930s because precisely it was seen as immigrant labor.
Behind the Bastards
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And immigrants were not seen as meriting the same rights as white Americans in the same way that domestic workers were removed because that was seen at the time as black labor. So it has its roots in racism.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. No, absolutely. And I'm sure your audience is well aware of a lot of these subject matter. It is a bleak history. And it wasn't until groups like the United Farm Workers in the 60s and the 70s that they began to create the possibility for something new for the Hispanic community.
Behind the Bastards
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It was United Farm Workers that built not just a lot of solidarity with other immigrant groups in the California area, but they also built a sense of pride and identity and belonging for a lot of communities. I grew up in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles. Cesar Chavez and United Farm Workers murals are everywhere.
Behind the Bastards
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You know, me and my friends would often joke that Cesar Chavez is like the patron saint of East Los Angeles, even though it's nowhere near Delano. And there's a reason for that. I think that a lot of us looked up to the United Farm Workers. We looked up to the farm worker union movement and we saw in them our heroes, our modern day heroes. We saw them. We saw people who said, be proud to be brown.
Behind the Bastards
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You know, there's a courage that comes from that history. The union movement that then sprung up in 2013 in the Bellingham, northern Washington area was coming out of that milieu. They understood that background. They understood that history. But they also understood that there was very little organizing in the region. There was a lot of fear in the region.
Behind the Bastards
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To have access to a lot of these areas, you have to cross just private property for quite some time before you reach the first farm worker. And it becomes very, very difficult to have organizing happen. And it's intentional that way. The rise in farm worker unions that happened in the 60s and 70s had a massive plummet by the time that we get into the 90s and 2000s.
Behind the Bastards
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And so these workers had heard these stories, had heard about this legacy. but had been essentially dealing with increasing frustration, racist behavior by bosses, lower and lower pay, and the use of certain types of immigrants to try to scab their jobs. It'd be the capitalist class using one type of worker against another type of worker, pinging them against each other.
Behind the Bastards
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It's in this context in 2013 that this union starts to form. They go public at that time period. They call for recognition and they start taking action directly. And they organize this years and years long boycott campaign to gain recognition, to get the employer to start bargaining.
Behind the Bastards
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And after years and years of this and court battles and the employer trying to lay everyone off and hire certain types of newer immigrants coming in to replace all of them, pitting one worker against another, all these types of maneuvers. By 2017, these workers win a contract.
Behind the Bastards
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And the philosophy of the union since then has been not just to grow this union, but also for them to be able to stand on their own two feet. Their idea is that they are very proud of their independent nature of that union. They're not part of the AFL-CIO. They're not part of the United Farm Workers. They're not part of any other organization.
Behind the Bastards
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When I spoke to some of their leaders last year, one of the things that came to mind was, They brought up a quote from Eugene Debs, the notion of like, if we were to lead you into the promised land, someone else would just lead you out. And the notion of their union is we have to be able to stand on our two feet.
Behind the Bastards
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We can't rely on anyone else because if they promise us things today, tomorrow they'll hold something over us. That's the notion that farm workers lead this movement and lead this union. is an incredibly powerful statement of what working class people can do. The kinds of workers that everyone else kind of looks at, they could never do it.
Behind the Bastards
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These workers could never handle this kind of level of struggle and couldn't do this kind of organization, have built one of the most powerful independent farm worker unions in the West Coast. Lelo, Alfredo Lelo Juarez, was a founding member of this union. He was a farm worker starting at the age of 12.
Behind the Bastards
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And since then, devoted his entire life to organizing, to helping workers, to being the kind of person who commits himself to the work of making the world a better place than he found it. You know, at 25, he is significantly younger than me. And when I think of people who I look up to, who I think of, wow, when I grow up, I want to be someone like that. I think of Lalo.
Behind the Bastards
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I have met Lalo many times over the years. He's a very soft spoken, very thoughtful type of person. And yeah, I think that the labor movement owes him a bit of a debt now. It is time that we as a whole stand up for him.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. The weaponization of the state to go after immigrants and go after activists is, I'm sure to your audience as well-known, is nothing new. And it no-knows party affiliation. The Democratic administrations have been doing this to immigrant communities and have been using it to silence political activists. The Trump administration, however, is now doing this on a level that is...
Behind the Bastards
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at least to a lot of us, unheard of in the modern day, which is to go after specific union leaders in the labor movement, to go after civil rights leaders. You've seen this happen also when it comes to Palestinian rights activists around the country. The idea is pretty simple. It's to silence the loudest voices, to cut the leadership from the movement.
Behind the Bastards
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On March 25th, Alfredo Lelo Juarez was dropping off his girlfriend at a nearby farm for work and was accosted by ICE agents as he was exercising his rights or what he thought his rights were at the time because of the regime. Who knows what your rights are?
Behind the Bastards
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They broke his window. They dragged him out of his car. You know, this was obviously a very traumatic incident, but also it was a real shock to the union, to C2C, the community group that works with the union and to the local Hispanic community in the area within hours of that. workers, organizers, community, went to move to try to carry a response, knowing that time was of the essence.
Behind the Bastards
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He was then taken to a localized facility. He's now since been moved to a detention center in Tacoma, Washington. A large rally of hundreds took place calling for his immediate release. What we know now, seemingly, is that at the very last minute, Apologies, I forget the exact day, but it was within a couple of days of the kidnapping. Lello was pulled off.
Behind the Bastards
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He has an automatic stay of deportation in place. At this point, no longer has any legal authority to remove Lello. This came at the last minute. He was in line for deportation and was removed at the very last minute. However, while this is good news, This is not good for someone's personal health and well-being. These are massively cramped facilities, underfunded facilities.
Behind the Bastards
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You know, there are horror stories around the country of the conditions in some of these places. Every day that Lelo is stuck behind these prison walls is an injustice to our movement.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, and I would hope it doesn't have to wait four more years for that one.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, absolutely. I think that oftentimes, particularly fascistic power wants and needs to present itself as inevitable, as overwhelming and impossible to defeat. In part because it's meant to hide the ultimate weakness of some of these powers. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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The actual power that these farm workers showed against the Sukuma farms when they went on strike and boycotted for years and years and years out in the fields, talking to workers for years and years and years, it showed that no matter how powerful some of these companies are, some of these CEOs are, that the power of workers overwhelms and the power of solidarity overwhelms. And they know that.
Behind the Bastards
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Going after leadership, going after some of the bravest people in our movement, is a way of trying to hit the movement at the knees and trying to convince folks that struggle is impossible. But I think it is important to remember that what we're doing, the struggle now, the response, this is how we show the population, the world, you know, our communities, that they are not inevitable.
Behind the Bastards
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It is not... insurmountable. And so by taking action, responding to the kinds of fascistic behaviors of the state, we show how feeble the state can be at times, even when it seems its most treacherous and awful.
Behind the Bastards
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And there's a question mark about that in my mind. Because, you know, my entire adult life, I've heard stories of the state repression against union organizers in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s. You hear the stories, if you're an organizer, about all the violent eras and how hard it was in the past. And we forget that a lot of that does continue on.
Behind the Bastards
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It's just not where you would imagine it, where a lot of American workers imagine it. And so they don't see it in their shops and their factories and their unions. But this right here is an attack on the labor movement.
Behind the Bastards
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Had this been the head of the electricians union, the head of the SEIU, had this been an attack on what a lot of Americans would view as the mainstream labor movement, this would be headlines. The fact that it isn't shows and that it has been so much work to try to get attention to a union leader being picked up and kidnapped by the state.
Behind the Bastards
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should be a blaring red light on the labor movement to take action immediately. I hope that what we're doing is the first steps to that, because this is one of those moments. They went after the trade unionists, and I was not a trade unionist. Well, they're going after the farm workers. I am not a farm worker. It is incumbent upon us morally to stand up for one another at this point in time.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, and I think that the history of the labor movement has been an interesting one in my adult life because, you know, I'm as pro-labor as they come. However, the history of the labor movement in the modern day has been a fascinating one. It is one that, when it came to large strikes, was at its nadir at the mid and late 2000s. Mm-hmm.
Behind the Bastards
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I think at one point it was just over a dozen strikes, over 2,000 workers. And you compare that to the high labor movement in the 40s and the 50s when it was in the hundreds. And you had strike actions all the time. And that is what built so much of what we called middle class for some. And it was this really historic moment at the time.
Behind the Bastards
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And we're in a historic moment now where I think the labor movement for so long from that point has been trying, workers from the rank and file have been trying to kind of reshape the labor movement in the thoughts and the ideas of the new. But it comes with its own regressive setbacks and it comes with its own shortcomings of leadership. Right.
Behind the Bastards
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you know, the teensters making statements around immigration rights was a very unfortunate thing to be said in the modern day, in the modern context. I think that, you know, other unions seemingly looking to, you know, circle the wagons rather than take the risks that need to happen in this current time has really shown a lack of imagination from some of the mainstream unions.
Behind the Bastards
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And the thing is, I hope for the best for them. I want them to succeed and I want them to get better because the world is a better place for having these larger unions.
Behind the Bastards
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However, it's the independent movements, the independent unions, like Familias Unidas por la Justicia, like these other unions in the region, that can be the kind of canary in the coal mine, the kind of labs of experimentation that can be the first people out to do some of the most radical and interesting and worker-centric type of movement building and messaging.
Behind the Bastards
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Like, I think there is a reason why it was the Coalition of Independent Unions here in the Pacific Northwest that came up with the notion of having Trans Day of Solidarity, this idea of patterning contracts together to have inclusive and protections for trans workers and having that be a thing that unions take up together.
Behind the Bastards
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I think that it's incredibly notable that it's groups like Familias Unidas o La Justicia that carried out this long, years-long boycott and created a model by which other workers in the region could not just organize themselves, but organize themselves on a low-cost, member-led, democratic model.
Behind the Bastards
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I think it's important to see that sometimes the large unions have to start looking at some of the radical pragmatism that comes from the necessities of these smaller independent campaigns.
Behind the Bastards
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You give it up for another generation. Then when workers, when people like myself growing up and looking at images of the United Farm Workers, there are similar, I presume there are similar people in the United States growing up who look that way up to the United Auto Workers, who look that way up to the Teachers Union.
Behind the Bastards
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What happens to those children, to those kids, those young people who want to be the next leadership, the next era of the labor movement? They will not look at us as having the moral high ground. We give that up. We give our role in history, our moral role in history, to fight for the working class when we do things like this.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
No, it does not. I take no pleasure in saying this. You know, I take no pleasure in saying this, but it's an unfortunate reality. And hopefully the turnaround can come from anywhere. It can come from some unexpected places. And I hope that there is one.
Behind the Bastards
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And things like solidarity for Lelo, I hope it'd be a small link in the chain that moves the pendulum right back into the direction of an ethical and moral superiority that comes with fighting for working class folks.
Behind the Bastards
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Sure, sounds good. So, like I mentioned earlier, in the immediate aftermath of Lilo's kidnapping by ICE, workers in the region began organizing. And unions came together in support of LELO and helped rally in front of the detention center in Tacoma. Now, what we're trying to do is trying to spread the word further.
Behind the Bastards
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There are other communities, particularly here on the West Coast, that can stand in solidarity, that should stand in solidarity. And when we heard this go down, activists within the CIU asked themselves, we can't stand idly by while a leader in our movement is kidnapped by the state. We need to take action. And so we did.
Behind the Bastards
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And the point was to move as quickly as possible to try to build a larger voice for Lello while he is in detention. So there is a good number of activists here in the Portland area. We can be of service to the Farm Workers Union. You know, we have a strong core of independent unions here in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in the Portland area.
Behind the Bastards
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We can do what other unions are hesitant to do, which is take action immediately and stand firmly with our brothers and sisters, our hermanos y hermanas up in northern Washington. So what's happening is the call from the union is workers individually, for people individually to call into the attorney general in Washington state and call to the release of Lelo.
Behind the Bastards
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Also calling the new governor up in Washington state to call for the release. Bring a wider attention, making it known that this person is someone who is important to the community, cannot be spirited away to another country where they are not from, where that is not their home. and taking away from their family, the community, and from the good work that they do.
Behind the Bastards
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And the other thing that we're trying to do is we're trying to get local officials to also use their voice to maximize the pressure to give more attention to this issue. So that's the call so far. This rally that we're having in front of City Hall on Saturday, April 12th at 2 p.m.,
Behind the Bastards
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is the beginning of what we hope is a larger campaign that will not end until Lello is free and until these raids stop attacking the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest. Just because we in Portland are not farm workers, because we don't work with farm workers, because a lot of the workers who work here
Behind the Bastards
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and maybe never met a farm worker, it does not mean that we should not stand shoulder to shoulder and arm in arm and support the farm workers union up in Northern Washington to the hilt. And this begins this fight of building that kind of level of solidarity. It begins by showing up for them, doing what they can't do.
Behind the Bastards
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Right now, they don't have the resources to go state by state and city by city to bring attention and awareness to one of their leaders being attacked. But we can do it. And if we can do it, we should do it. It's an immoral imperative that little be free.
Behind the Bastards
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Yes, absolutely. So this is very similar, I think, to the CIU, the Coalition of Independent Unions, this Coalition of Independent Unions here in the Pacific Northwest. It was trying to do and is trying to do with Trans-EU solidarity. The idea is we are trying to make this work here in the Pacific Northwest.
Behind the Bastards
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And if it's useful, if it's good, if people are paying attention to it, then we can export this to other cities and other areas to bring more attention to these causes.
Behind the Bastards
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And so with that, when patterning contracts together, particularly on this one issue of transgender health care and trans-inclusive language in contracts and codifying that between unions and having that a demand of labor movement that they not walk away from this, we want to also do the same thing with this fight for freedom for the farm workers union and their leaders and workers everywhere.
Behind the Bastards
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And the attacks will come soon enough, I suppose, I would imagine, from this regime in Washington. If this works, We want workers in other cities to start assisting the farm worker union, taking up the call of action and fighting for not just LELO, for whoever comes afterwards, because there will be LELOs in the future, unfortunate as they may be.
Behind the Bastards
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So if this works here, if workers hear, as they hear more updates, we would hope and we would love if workers elsewhere, if organizing groups elsewhere would want to take up this fight and bring attention to the cause.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. You know, without making it too personal, like I know Level personally. I have met Level many times over the years. He's a fantastic person. The reason why a lot of us as organizers, why we do this kind of work to begin with, is because we believe, as bizarrely as it may be, that we could be a link in the chain that makes the world a better place.
Behind the Bastards
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That we can leave the world better off than we found it. And we also believe in what we're doing because when we look at people who have been attacked by corporations and attacked by the state, we feel a moral compulsion to help. And what I would say to folks who are outside of Portland, who are hearing this story,
Behind the Bastards
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who hear the calls to call the Attorney General in Washington State and demand that they will be released to follow up with the union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, further direction on how they can assist and potentially holding their own rallies in support and solidarity and bringing attention to the issue. I would hope that they do this. Imagine if Lelo were your brother.
Behind the Bastards
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Imagine if Lelo were your cousin, your father, your friend. Act as if they were them. Because it requires that level of empathy to have the kind of solidarity that we need in order to fight this fascist regime and everything that it does. It is easy to say, I will wait for someone else to do the work. Someone else will come along and it'll get resolved that way.
Behind the Bastards
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No, if you don't do the work, it just will not get done. And so we have to go in every day as part of civic engagement and assisting the working class as part of our daily routines and using the kind of The kind of sense of moral necessity and of immediate action it requires that you would do for someone that was close to you. Because this person is you just by another name.
Behind the Bastards
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This person is your family, even if you've never met them. We are all in this together as working class people. And if we start coming up with boundaries and reasons for why we shouldn't stand up for one another, those reasons then become excuses for everyone else.
Behind the Bastards
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So I would hope that when people hear this, they look and see the struggle of this person and they can imagine what would happen to them in the future. And they say, I would want someone there for me in my corner, in my time of need. So I will be there for them in theirs.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think this encapsulates the sentiment perfectly well.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I suppose to those that would want to know more about not just the struggle of the Farm Workers Union, but also the general experiments in independent unionism here in the Pacific Northwest, I'd highly encourage that folks take a deep dive and see that.
Behind the Bastards
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The ability to organize, the ability to fight with your coworkers. You have the kind of clever problem-solving skills that every worker has in order to combat the boss and create a better world than the one that currently exists. And also that when it comes to issues like standing up for this struggle now and struggles in the future.
Behind the Bastards
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I would say you have it now, the creative capacity to, in whatever city you're in, to make connections, to build inroads with the labor movement, to build inroads with working class people, and to try to create those bonds that happen. We here are trying to build closer bonds with city workers and farm workers out in the country.
Behind the Bastards
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It's an important struggle because it's one that's going to be more and more important in the future. You don't have to wait for anyone else to tell you how to do that. You yourselves can show solidarity and work together to build those kinds of bonds now so that in the future you can create working class movements, whether that takes the form of collective bargaining or something else.
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Organizing for the common good is useful no matter in what legal capacity it happens.
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Yeah, and if any of the people listening want to learn some of those tools...
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or need help with education and training, or just want to make connections and inroads with workers elsewhere, contact the Coalition of Independent Unions and see how we can build these bonds together, because I think that we will problem-solve how to defeat this regime one way or another, but I think that we, particularly in the independent union space, provide a unique possibility for how this can happen, because since we are not tied to larger established contracts, we're not tied to
Behind the Bastards
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You know, jurisdictional disputes were not tied to a lot of the legacies of some of the larger unions. God bless them. We can create and fashion a labor movement that doesn't have to live by those rules.
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You know, if you imagine the idea of what it would look like to refound the CIO in the 1930s, if you could imagine the worst aspects of the labor movement and excising them and what is the best aspect of the labor movement that you would want to see, we can create that together today.
Behind the Bastards
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And today, it takes the form of standing up in solidarity with LELO and Farm Workers Union of Northern Washington, not because we get anything from it, not because it's easy, but precisely because it is difficult and precisely because it is a moral compulsion on us to take action today for it. We don't have to wait for anyone to tell us what to do.
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As part of an independent labor movement, we get to decide our future and our fate, and we get to decide our struggles.
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Absolutely. Fascism wants you to believe in a nihilistic perspective of the world. They want you to believe in which it is hopeless to fight back. They want you to believe just doom scroll forever and don't take any action and focus on yourselves and navel gaze indefinitely. No, no, no.
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The way that you find out the kind of person that you are and the way that you build the kind of future that you want for yourselves, for your families, for your communities, for the people that you don't even know and never will meet, but you want a good life for them. The way that you do that is you take action. Now you start organizing, you do what you can, you build what you can.
Behind the Bastards
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And me and other people who talk like this, who are as optimistic and as hopeful and as fight-ready, we don't believe this out of nowhere. We believe this because we truly do see that the better world is possible if we fight.