if my Panda Express order gets messed up, I'll probably just eat it anyway. But if the plane I'm flying on falls out of the sky, there's no, like, way for me to just kind of be the bigger man and eat that The strike vote was amazing, like up in the nineties. That should tell you something right there. Yeah, that right there should speak for you. FedEx delivers them to the door, Amazon delivers them to the door, UPS delivers them to the door. Why the heck wouldn't we?
he's thinking, I wish I could buy a coffee to like, I'm a man, just like you're a man. I want to buy some coffee too. And the man told him, he said, You know, y'all need to join the union and that way when we get raises, y'all can get raises I can think of several instances where I would go to an airport and I would hop out of the plane and I'd have a student with me or a passenger and the people at the airport would go up to them because they were male and say like, how much fuel do you want?
How long are you going to be here? And I'm like, hello, it's my airplane. You're listening to the labor radio podcast weekly produced by the labor radio podcast network, labor radio network.org. I'm Chris Garlock. On today's show two reports on the ongoing strike by 32,000 workers at Boeing. One from the work stoppage podcasts, the other from labor radio on K B O O K BU FM, where Jamie Partridge. Interview strikers in Portland, Oregon.
Then Casey and Eric Robinson discussed thrift savings plan scams On the NILC branch 4 58 podcast. The resolved labor podcast. explores how Joseph Caleb discovered the value of being in a union. And in our final segment, we meet Emily Daniel, one of base, small, but growing number of female, agricultural pilots or crop dusters that's on the America works podcast. And that's all ahead on this week's edition of the labor radio podcast weekly. Here's the show.
First up shows, you should know a quick overview of some of the great shows this week that we couldn't get into the weekly. Here is Harold. Thanks, Chris. Hey folks, social media guy Harold Phillips again, and you know, there is a lot of labor activity happening right now, and you can bet that Labor Radio Podcast Network members are covering it. Here's just some of the shows you should know for the week of September 15th.
Mike released three Labor Force podcasts over the past week, including reports on strikes at AT& T and Boeing, and union organizing by Amazon drivers in New York. Jamie interviews six striking machinist union members at the Boeing manufacturing plant and paint shop in Portland, Oregon on Labor Radio on CABU. Bob gets a strike update from representatives of the Law 360 Union and Unite Here on What's Going On Labor Monday.
Madison Labor Radio shares a look at the presidential debate from the Labor Temple Bar, machinists striking at Boeing, United Flight Attendants strike authorization, and more. On the lighter side, on Art and Labor, O. K. and Nas discuss the recent debate, traditional values on DIY booking, and more. And Mark updates APWU members on the status of negotiations as Lockdown Week begins.
On the latest communicating with you, the member, want to find out the latest news about strikes, negotiations, and everything else that labor is up to? Follow us on Instagram. Twitter and Facebook at labor radio net or search for the hashtag labor radio pod back to you, Chris. Welcome to Work Stoppage, everybody. Your favorite labor podcast. Joke implosion to start the show. Didn't get out of the hangar. It's been a long couple of weeks for me. A lot of good stuff. A lot of annoying work shit.
But thank you so much for joining us on the program. My name is John. I'm Dan. And I'm Lina. And we are your number one labor podcast. So, we, it's time to talk about, perhaps, America's most nationalizable company, Boeing. Um, but yeah, so immediate, obviously immediately after the contract offer was presented to membership. The rank and file made it clear it wasn't anywhere near good enough.
As reported by the Seattle Times, on Monday after the announcement of the TA, hundreds of machinists held a protest march through the Everett manufacturing plant calling for a strike. The Times reports that Boeing had already sent a request to their engineers to see who would be willing to work as scabs for double pay during a strike.
The Engineers Union, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, or SPEEA, told the Seattle Times they will protest that it's this attempt to get their members to scab. Hell yeah. And so workers have cited really three main areas in the reporting that I've seen, uh, that the New Deal came nowhere close to addressing. Low wages, obviously. endless mandatory overtime, and that's obviously related to the low wages, and the loss of their pension.
Workers point out that while the contract claimed a 25 percent wage increase over four years, it also eliminated a current annual bonus, which usually amounts to 4 percent of workers wages, which means that the actual increase overall would be much lower than 25%. Which is why workers have been demanding a bit more robust 40 percent wage increase with the bonuses remaining.
And uh, Brandon Phelps, the team lead at the Renton 737 assembly plant told the Seattle Times his team can't live on current wages. Quote, at Panda Express, they're making as much as a grade three mechanic, end quote. And while the people working at Panda Express should be well paid. Uh, I feel like, perhaps, that, uh, we should be paying, uh, the airplane mechanic. Yeah, the people who make sure that the airplanes work.
Well, and somebody who's also, who's operating in a much more dangerous working environment. Yeah, well, and also if my Panda Express order gets messed up, I'll probably just eat it anyway. But if the plane I'm flying on falls out of the sky, there's no, like, way for me to just kind of be the bigger man and eat that loss. Yeah, and so, like, It's, it's ridiculous. And this has contributed to the problem of forced overtime because you have the wages that are so low.
A lot of the workers, in addition to being forced by the requirements of the bosses to do the OT need to do a lot of OT just to be able to pay their bills. Uh, and But the amount of overtime workers are demanded to take on is, uh, oppressive. Because currently, workers can hit 112 hours of overtime in a quarter, with the company being able to force workers to work 19 days in a row without a day off. That's 12 weeks.
So you're doing, you're doing almost 10 hours of overtime a week, pretty much as a standard practice. Yeah. That's disgusting. Uh, yeah, they're basically just like, oh yeah, you're working 50 hour weeks, just period. Yeah. But that's the baseline, and you have to do that. For 19 days in a row. Without a day off. Workers told Labor Notes that the endless overtime has pushed their fellow, uh, co workers to physical and mental collapse.
And the proposed contract that was offered by Boeing would keep the 112 hour limit as it is and only ban the company from forcing workers to work two weekends in a row, which would still allow you to work 12 days. consecutively. You would think, oh, the company must just be, it just, you know, falling apart. It can't, it must be completely bankrupt, except that the company has spent 68 billion on stock buybacks and dividends since 2010 per Michael Sonato at the Guardian.
Their last two CEOs have left the company with a combined compensation package of nearly 100 million, despite running Boeing into the ground. I was gonna say, is there a company that has more money and functions less in the entire fucking world than Boeing? And so, following that near unanimous vote to strike, picket lines went up at Boeing plants across the Pacific Northwest.
Union workers began assembling burn barrels to keep picketers warm on the picket lines at night, even before the results were announced. Those images are very cool. With the general mood making it clear how the vote would go. Links are at workstoppagepod. com. Listen to Beep Beep Lettuce, listen to Red Game Table, and as always, have Labor peace is not in our interest, and solidarity forever. Solidarity. Solidarity, everybody. To you, the nine to fiver, just making your way home.
To you, the all night driver, out in your cab alone. To you, waiting for lunch break, as the minutes drag so slow. Take courage, turn the volume up, it's Labor Radio. Good evening and welcome to Labor Radio of the Working Class, by the Working Class, for the Working Class. I'm your host this evening, Jamie Partridge, and we're interviewing folks on the picket line, workers at the Boeing manufacturing plant here in Portland, Oregon, on strike.
With the International Association of Machinists, Local 63. So we're out here on the picket line with the machinists at Boeing, and this is the main plant out here on Sandy Boulevard, and I'm talking with Katie. Halliday. Halliday. Why are you on strike today, Katie? We don't agree with the terms of the contract that was presented to us. We feel that we deserve a lot more. Not just wage wise, there's a lot of principles in there that need to be addressed. Like what?
Like underlying principles of new hires coming in and what they do deserve to get the qualified personnel that we need to build a quality product that we're expected to build. So people coming in that are untrained, is that what you're saying? Not necessarily untrained, but there are a lot of people that are very qualified, that could come in with higher skill sets, but they can't because they're starting at a very low wage. Oh, I get it.
And the turnaround point to get some people that are coming in, that have skill set, But we are helping them better their skill set. It's taking a lot of time. They're not allowing us that time to get those people that proper training. And so do you have a high turnover of new people that come in and then leave? We can, yeah, especially in the last few years. People don't have the desire to stay like they used to. There's nothing long term to offer them anything.
Well, there's been a lot of, there's a lot of, uh, you know, In the news about safety and quality work at Boeing and with like doors falling off of planes and things like that, well why do you think that's happening? Sounds like it's the same thing that you're talking about.
Well I think that also ramping up right now in the times that we are is very difficult and there is a lot of elements that come into play with that and that that is an unfortunate accident but there's also When you say ramping up you mean like speed up? And not having time for quality control. No, not necessarily. Because I think that that time is there.
I think that we do have that and we do have quality parts, but I do also feel that there has been processes that we do need to better on and we are making strides to do some because us on the front lines are stopping and saying, stop, slow down. It looks like you had to go on strike to get the message across to the company. Yeah. So what's the mood out here? How are people feeling? Feeling strong. We're strong. Yeah. The strike vote was amazing, like up in the nineties.
That should tell you something right there. Yeah, that right there should speak for you. Oh. How do you think, how long do you think, think people can hold out as long as they need to? Do you have anything that, uh, you would want to say to the, the, the public, the Portland people, Portland community, about how they can support you? I think that they can not just go off what the media is saying, I think they need to actually do some research.
Read the fine print and know what we're really fighting for instead of what everybody's trying to tell them we're fighting for. Thanks for your time, Katie. Katie Holiday out here on the picket line in front of the Boeing plant on Sandy Boulevard. Hey everybody. Welcome to the branch four or five, eight podcast. Uh, I'm Casey Ritchie. And today we have Eric Robinson with us. All right.
So, uh, let's jump into the main topic of this episode and that's, uh, delivering things to the door, uh, and providing that service. So. I'll let Eric speak about that for a little bit. All right. Um, recently the topic of delivering parcels and certified to the customer's door that lives in an apartment complex has been on my mind.
a couple of months ago at Stewards Training up here at the Union Hall, um, they handed out an article that was in the postal record, um, in March of 2012, the title of the article was, You Gotta Knock on the Door. what he goes into is, was that back in 2012, our parcel delivery business was expanding. Um, you know, more and more people were ordering products online and having them delivered to the door and the post office was gaining that business.
And what he talks about in here is that some carriers, uh, may feel pressured to save time on the route by leaving the Seattle right away. Yeah. I wonder who's pressuring them. It must be the union. Uh, some carriers may feel pressured, even from their own mind, or maybe even directly from a supervisor.
Sure. To save time by leaving parcels on the doorstep or simply leaving notices in mailboxes for customers to pick them up at the apartment manager's office without first delivering or attempting delivery at the customer's door. Um, and in some locations, you know, station management's encouraging this, or even in a minimum, they're turning a blind eye to it, uh, all in the, you know, idea of saving, you know, time making the numbers. And really this is a dereliction of duty.
And that's what he kind of refers to it as, you know, in the article. So if you're at an apartment complex and you have 500 people that live there, it may not be the best idea to leave a parcel just, you know, at their doorstep, especially if it's a location that may be prone to theft or has had problems in the past with people, uh, you know, stealing, uh, their parcels. But we have a responsibility. Uh, to go to the door and attempt this delivery and see if they're home.
And then if they're not home, uh, some apartment complexes allow you to leave the parcel at their office, where you can put a, a notice in the customer's mailbox. If that's not available and there's no parcel lockers and the customer's not home, you could fill out the 3849 so the customer can pick it up at the post office. Casey, do you know how much certifides nowadays cost if they got the return receipt, the green card on the back? I have no idea. The other day, I had one.
I believe it was either 9. 80 or like 9. 82. They went up in price. So, customer is paying almost 10 to have a certifide sent to a customer. And you're on a walking route, and you're going door to door, and you come across a certifide in your DPS. What do you do? Well, you got to attempt delivery right there. You're in front of their house. You walk up, hit the doorbell, knock on the door.
They either come to the door and sign for it, or you fill out the 3849, leave it in their mailbox, and they can pick it up at the post office the next day. Or they can fill out the back and have us bring it back to them at a, you know, date of their choosing. So those customers we're providing the service to.
You know, if a customer on a walk in split has a parcel, uh, you know, unless they're in a high crime neighborhood, we're leaving those at their door, typically behind a bush, behind a flower pot, or handing it to them when they come to the door. So why in the world, if another customer happens to live in an apartment complex, are we not providing them the same level of service when our handbooks and manuals tell us very clearly.
how to perform these duties of delivering the parcels and delivering the certifides. FedEx delivers them to the door, Amazon delivers them to the door, UPS delivers them to the door. Why the heck wouldn't we? All right. Well, uh, thanks guys for listening. we appreciate you have a safe, a safe one out there and listen. Next time. See you later. Hello, troublemakers. Welcome to this week's episode of Resolved Labor Podcast.
I am your host, Len Fields, and this week we will be highlighting Joseph Caleb. Joseph Caleb was born November 2nd, 1937. Shout out to the Scorpios. He was born in Florence Dale, Alabama. His parents were Israel and Rosalie Caleb. His dad owned a tailor shop, and his mom was a sharecropper. So, back then, troublemakers, like, if anybody in your family was a sharecropper, that means everybody was sharecropping. So, Joseph had two brothers, Willie and William.
Neal and Robert Lee, and he also had a sister and so he and his siblings, they were expected to help out when it was time to pick cotton and Joseph. It's said that he absolutely hated this chore. and he hated it so much that it said that his sister would actually like go behind him and like help him pick, help him pick more cotton so that he wouldn't get in trouble for slacking.
So Joe. Uh, graduated and he started working at this hotel and apparently he got, you know, a tip at this hotel that was a nickel and just like the sharecropping, he was like, Oh hell no, this, I'm not about this life. So then he got another job, um, I believe it was at a restaurant. And the family lore is that, you know, there was an incident with a white woman at this restaurant.
So I don't know exactly what the incident is troublemakers, but you know, when I spoke with Joseph Caleb's family, you know, the only thing that like, I kind of got out of them was that, whatever the incident was, I'll quote, I'll bet she won't pull another chair from out from behind somebody else when they're trying to sit down, end quote. I don't know if Joseph like jumped up and slapped a shot at the lady. I don't know if he just cussed her out, but either way back then.
You know, you can't just be scaring the white ladies. So Joseph ended up moving down to Miami, Florida with a cousin who was working as a longshoreman. So this cousin gets Joseph a job in Miami, Florida as a longshoreman. And just like cotton picking, just like, hotel work, and just like restaurant work, uh, Joseph absolutely hated being a longshoreman. So a neighbor hooked him up with a job on a construction site. So Joseph gets this job, uh, on the midnight shift pouring concrete.
He's making 1. 50 an hour. And it was a union job, but not everybody Had to be in the union and Joseph remembers that, you know, pouring this concrete, he's making this 1. 50 an hour and he's working next to these white men who are making more than him and they actually would ask him sometimes, Hey, can you go grab me a cup of coffee? And then he would go get it.
but he said that, you know, the wages that he was making, like he could just afford to, live his life, you know, and support he and his wife, but he's like, man, like, he's thinking, I wish I could buy a coffee to like, I'm a man, just like you're a man. I want to buy some coffee too. And the man told him, he said, You know, y'all need to join the union and that way when we get raises, y'all can get raises.
And Joseph said that, you know, basically an employee orientation, the contractor was like, you know, look, y'all can make this much, and keep all y'all money in your pocket or y'all can give some of this money to the union and, you know, they just going to be taking y'all money. So. He said the majority of the blacks on the job, they didn't see the value in a union because they needed all of their money.
And all they know is, is that there is something coming out of their check and they didn't understand it. So they didn't sign up. But he said that once he started talking to the white workers and they, You know, basically laid it all out for him and explained the game to him. He said he was on board and he was like, yeah, I am joining this union. Thanks for listening troublemakers. As always peace and solidarity.
Welcome to America Works, This is AFC staff folklorist Nancy Gross, and this America Works feature excerpts from a longer interview with Emily Daniels of AFC. Southampton, New Jersey, who is one of a small but growing number of female agricultural pilots, or as they are often referred to, crop dusters.
A third generation pilot, Daniels learned to fly as a teenager, and today, she and her husband, who is also a pilot, manages a small, family owned crop spraying business that services farms from New Jersey to Maryland and Texas to Kansas. She was interviewed by Missouri based documentarian Ellen Kendricks for the Agricultural Aviation Occupational Folklife Project. Our farm is on a cranberry farm. My husband and I farm 20 acres of fresh and frozen cranberries.
I hadn't really experienced any adverse, uh, Kind of like women, uh, in a male dominated field stigma until I actually moved away from home. Um, I grew up in New Jersey a little bit further South than I am now. And I'm a third generation pilot and I was the only girl in my family, besides my mom, who also flies. And so just growing up, it was, it was normal at the airport. Um, it was a family owned airport. And. Everyone knew me and it was just a community.
I didn't realize that women didn't usually do this. It really took me moving away. So my husband and I got married in 2015 and I went with him to Air Force pilot training in Texas. And that's when I really started to learn that, you know, women aren't always welcomed in some of these fields. And I, I remember calling my parents and saying like, this is mind blowing. I can't believe people, you know, are saying these things to me. Like, I just never experienced this.
Um, there was a local ag pilot out in Texas where we were, we were in Wichita Falls and he was retired. And I remember telling him like, oh yeah, that's so cool. Like I, I'm going to be an ag pilot one day. And he kind of looked at me and he's like, well, no, no, you're not. And I was like, well, excuse me. And he said, women can't be ag pilots. And I said, well, why not? And he said, well, who's going to raise the kids and who's going to make dinner?
Like someone has to have dinner on the table every night. And I'm like, okay, well I don't have to be the one that makes dinner or you can go buy some takeout somewhere. It's not really a big deal. And uh, that kind of put a little, a little damper on everything for a little while. And then I didn't, you know, I kind of used that as fuel and right then and there I decided I'm going to do it.
Um, I can think of several instances where I would go to an airport and I would hop out of the plane and I'd have a student with me or a passenger and the people at the airport would go up to them because they were male and say like, how much fuel do you want? How long are you going to be here? And I'm like, hello, it's my airplane. because we farm too, we understand that the farmers are paying us a lot of money. And they want the job done right. Everyone always asks me, is this a fun job?
And I said, the flying is fun, but it's, it's still work and it's still business and we're still out there just doing our best. You've been listening to agricultural pilot, Emily Daniel. To hear the complete interview with Ms. Daniels, as well as interviews with hundreds of other contemporary American workers, please visit the Occupational Folklife Project at www. loc. gov forward slash folklife, or just search online for the Occupational Folklife Project.
I'm Rick Smith, and this is Labor History in Two. On this day in labor history, the year was 1878. That was the day that socialist author Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland. A prolific writer, Sinclair wrote nearly 100 books and other publications. Upton Sinclair's father, and father's relatives had been wealthy Southerners. But thanks to the Civil War and its aftermath, the family was left in financial ruins. His mother was from a wealthy Episcopalian family and was very strict.
Sinclair often stayed with her wealthy parents. These family experiences growing up gave Sinclair an insight into how both the rich and poor lived. Sinclair studied at the City College of New York and for a time at Columbia University. He went on to write several popular novels that explored the experiences of working people in the rapidly industrializing United States. The Fliver King explored the impact of Henry Ford on auto production. Oil focused on the oil industry in Southern California.
But Sinclair is best remembered for his classic expose of the Chicago meatpacking industry, The Jungle. The book was fiction, but based in fact. In 1904, he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago's meatpacking plants to get material for the book. The Jungle was published in 1906 and was immediately a bestseller. It was originally published in serial form in a socialist newspaper.
Sinclair said that he wrote the novel intending to set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profit. The novel led to congressional legislation and federal regulation Of the meat packing industry. It helped lead to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act Labor History in Two, brought to you by the Illinois Labor History Society and the Rick Smith Show.
For more information, go to labor history in two.com like Cass on Facebook and follow us on the Twitters at Labor history in two. And that is going to do it for this week's edition of the labor radio podcast, weekly, just a small sample of the amazing programs aired over the last week. On more than 200 labor radio and podcast shows. They're all part of the labor radio podcast network shows that focus on working people's issues and concerns.
We've got links to all the network shows, labor radio network.org. You can also find them. I use the hashtag labor radio pod on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And remember you can be part of the network. You don't even need a microphone. Labor radio podcast network. T-shirts are now available. I'm wearing one right now. They are union made. You'll find them in all sizes. And two [email protected]. This podcast is recorded under a sag after collective bargaining agreement.
The labor radio podcast weekly was edited this week by Patrick Dickson. I produce a show and our social media guru. Always and forever. Is Mr. Harold Phillips. For the labor radio podcast weekly, this has been Chris Garlock stay active and stay tuned to your local labor radio podcast show. And we will see you next week.