The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein
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Frank Bardacke, the 2012 Hillman Book Prize-winner meets Tom Morello, winner of the 2012 Hillman Officer’s Award at the Hillman Prize ceremony at the TimesCenter. See Verso Books’ website for more details.
Spencer Soper won a Sidney Award for his expose of deplorable working conditions at an Amazon warehouse complex. This week, Soper published another memorable labor story. His latest dispatch is about truck drivers who say they were fired for talking about forming a union:
Five months after it opened a new $35 million cardboard plant in Lower Macungie, Pratt Corrugated Logistics laid off most of its 18 truck drivers, telling them the company decided to contract with outside haulers instead.
But 13 drivers who lost their jobs in April allege in legal documents that their terminations came after the company found out they were talking about forming a union.
The drivers complained to the National Labor Relations Board that they were terminated due to union activities, in violation of federal laws that protect workers’ rights to form collective bargaining units.
The Morning Call interviewed eight truck drivers who were terminated, and those interviewed maintain they have reason to be suspicious of the company’s motives. [Morning Call]
Read the whole thing.
[Photo credit: visagency, Creative Commons.]
Trymaine Lee of the Huffington Post accepts the April Sidney Award from Hillman executive director Alexandra Lescaze. Lee won the Sidney for his outstanding coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting, coverage that helped turn a local tragedy into a national scandal.
[Photo credit: Lindsay Beyerstein, all rights reserved.]
New York Times op/ed columnist Nick Kristof admires the Chicago Tribune’s investigative series on flame retardants as much as we do:
If you want a case study of everything that is wrong with money politics, this is it.
Chances are that if you’re sitting on a couch right now, it contains flame retardants. This will probably do no good if your house catches fire — although it may release toxic smoke. There is growing concern that the chemicals are hazardous, with evidence mounting of links to cancer, fetal impairment and reproductive problems.
For years, I’ve written about this type of chemical, endocrine disruptors, but The Chicago Tribune has just published a devastating investigative series called “Playing With Fire” that breaks vast new ground. It is superb journalism.
It turns out that our furniture first became full of flame retardants because of the tobacco industry, according to internal cigarette company documents examined by The Tribune. A generation ago, tobacco companies were facing growing pressure to produce fire-safe cigarettes, because so many house fires started with smoldering cigarettes. So tobacco companies mounted a surreptitious campaign for flame retardant furniture, rather than safe cigarettes, as the best way to reduce house fires. [NYT]
It’s great to see the Tribune’s work getting the high-profile recognition it deserves.
[Photo credit: abbyladybug, Creative Commons.]
This month, Graham Rayman of the Village Voice continued his hard-hitting investigation of unchecked violence at Rikers. Be advised, the photos of inmate injuries that he obtained are horrific. The Voice published these images in the hopes of shocking New Yorkers and their elected officials out of complacency regarding conditions at the prison.
In 2008, the Voice exposed a “fight club” for teen prisoners which operated with the support of guards, who used inmate-on-inmate violence to keep order. Two correctional officers went to prison for their role in the fights, know as The Program.
Rikers officials say that the Program is no more, but insiders tell Rayman a different story:
However, several sources, including current and retired investigators, say that the practice is very much still in place, which is backed up by hundreds of internal Correction Department documents obtained by the Voice.
The documents also lay bare the extreme influence that gangs, mostly Bloods, still exert on day-to-day life in the jails—particularly at the Robert N. Davoren Center, where teens are housed and where Robinson was murdered three years ago.
Documents show that inmate leaders known as “the team” control access to the phones; extort phone privileges, commissary allowances, and food from weaker inmates; and even enforce rules on where inmates can sit when watching television in the dayroom. The weakest inmates have to sit on the floor. All of this happens right under the noses of Correction officers.
Inmates at the juvenile detention center have sustained 10 broken jaws, 6 broken noses, and 3 shattered eye sockets in 2012, according to serious injury reports obtained by The Voice. The real numbers may be much higher, because not all injured inmates seek treatment in jail. Rayman estimates that over 4000 teens are injured every year at Rikers, and that the majority of those injuries are from violence.
05/14/2012
Nadia Sussman accepts the Sidney Hillman Prize for Social Justice Reporting at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s Awards for Excellence in Journalism banquet.
Sussman is a 2011 graduate of the CUNY J-School who was recognized as the student in her class with the highest commitment to excellence in social justice journalism. At CUNY she produced slideshows and web videos on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, day laborers in New York, and immigrant girls coping with the aftermath of female genital cutting. Sussman is currently a web video producer for the New York Times.
We at the Sidney Hillman Foundation congratulate Nadia on her achievements and wish her all the best in her future endeavors.
Hillman Prize blogger Philip Turner of the Great Gray Bridge on rewarding great advocacy journalism.
HASTINGS — LeRoy Smith thought he had hit rock bottom when he found himself trolling Atlanta’s gay district, looking to exchange sex acts for a hot hit off a crack pipe. Then he wound up on a Florida farm near the small town of Hastings, being bilked blind, he says, by a man with a fifth-grade education, sweating all day for a few dirty dollars, with no way to escape from the middle-of-nowhere camp.
He did not think slavery existed in modern America. He knows better now. [Tampa Bay Times]
So begins a harrowing story of drugs, debt, and modern-day slavery on a Flordia farm by Ben Montgomery of the Tampa Bay Times.
In his excellent book, Tomatoland, Barry Estabrook describes how Florida contractors enlsave undocumented migrants. Montgomery describes how similar tactics are used on Americans, often on homeless black men:
What Smith found when he got there: “Slavery. Abuse. Overwork. Deplorable, unsanitary conditions. Drugs,” he said. “The only reason there’s no shackles is because now they make the people submit to the cocaine. That’s what they use to basically control the people.”
Specifically, he found an overcrowded bunkhouse full of elderly, drug-addicted black men and one decrepit bathroom. Before he even arrived, the man in the driver’s seat had loaned each of the 15 recruits in the van $10 for a bite to eat, on the condition they pay him back with 100 percent interest.
At the bunkhouse, he said, the men formed three lines. One was for loans, also at 100 percent interest. One was to buy shots of Wild Irish Rose or grape “Mad Dog 20/20” out of an ice chest. And one was to buy crack. By the end of the first night, penniless Smith already owed $50.
Over the course of the two months Smith was at the camp, he never received a paycheck. Though he mowed and scrubbed toilets and cleaned shower stalls, he ran up $210 in debt. The thought that he was being bilked, that there was no way out until he paid his debt, angered him.
Smith is suing the contractor who allegedly placed him in bondage.
[Photo credit: Willy Volk, Creative Commons.]
Nelson Lichtenstein
Remarks
Sidney Hillman Foundation
Sol Stetin Award for Labor History
May 1, 2012
I am delighted to receive this award from the Hillman Foundation and quite humbled to stand at the same podium where that great generation of labor history pioneers and teachers – the late David Montgomery, David Brody, and Melvin Dubofsky – once stood.
They made labor history, which had once been the marginal stepchild of business administration and an unwelcome bother to most economists, a central component of what we study in the academy, not just in history, but in English, Sociology, Politics, Law, and Gender Studies. Indeed, it has been somewhat of an embarrassment in my own profession that so many of those who win prizes or get elected to top offices began their careers as students of labor history. And among the new generation of historians that it has been my privilege to mentor, few study the labor movement per se, but in their studies of business, politics, globalization, and capitalism, all are thoroughly grounded in labor history and its distinctive ideological and ethical imperatives. (Of that I make sure, in part through the activities of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.)
In truth, there is something different about labor history. Although they are entirely welcome, you don’t find many conservatives, and certainly very few opponents of the labor movement, identifying with the research agenda pursued by most labor historians. And that is because men and women like David Montgomery and James Green and Dorothy Sue Cobble, the latter two also previous Stetin Award winners, have been passionately committed to the labor movement in all its manifest forms. They have been “labor intellectuals” in the best and truest sense of the word.
Indeed, I accept this award in the spirit manifest by one of the great labor intellectuals of his day, a man who was for decades associated with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, the union founded and long led by Sidney Hillman himself. This was Jacob Benjamin Salutsky or J.B. S. Hardman, the editor of the Amalgamated’s newspaper, The Advance, for many years during the first half of the 20th century. Hardman was part of the great generation of exiles from Czarist Russia who helped found the garment trades unions and who never stopped pushing and prodding the entire labor movement to fulfill its humane and socialist destiny. He tutored America’s most influential and radical sociologist, C. Wright Mills, in labor politics, so that when in 1948 Mills published The New Men of Power, America’s Labor Leaders, he dedicated the book to “J.B.S. Hardman, labor intellectual.”
I wish that the leaders of the union movement today could once again be described as “the new men of power.” But regardless of the status of the unions, then or later, Mills knew that the insights, arguments, and empirical research of labor intellectuals like Hardman was essential if unionists were to understand the trajectory of capitalism and fulfill labor’s potential. As Mills then wrote “To have an American labor movement capable of carrying out the program of the left, making allies among the middle class, and moving upstream against the main drift, there must be a rank and file of vigorous workers, a brace of labor intellectuals, and a set of politically alert labor leaders. There must be the power and the intellect.” I accept the Sol Stetin Award in the interests of that alliance.
[Photo credit: Clark Jones.]
