 Madaloni. I use the pronoun she her. I'm with the labor notes staff and I just want to say what an amazing three days. I also want to say happy Juneteenth, break the freedom won by the people who are enslaved in this country and with that the ongoing struggle for black liberation. Yeah and happy Father's Day. Yeah here's to building a world where you have all the time you need to father your children. Yeah that's what they want is our time we're gonna take it back. So it's been amazing right? I mean Friday night in this room. Amazing right? Stacey Davis Gates, Michelle Eisen, Nolan Top, Sean O'Brien, Chris Smalls, and Bernie Sanders. And by the way the guy who held the mic. Is he in the room? That was great. Yeah it was an electrifying moment as we all felt the power and possibility and joy of our movement. Friday night was great but here's the thing so was Friday at 11 and Friday at 3 and Saturday 3 and 5 and 6 Sunday morning Sunday right now because Friday night wasn't Friday night without all the conversations that we've been having learning from each other about tactics and strategies about courage and power. All the ways we've been transforming our unions, our workplaces and our communities. The ways we are changing our understanding of what is possible. We've got one more awesome panel this afternoon before we head out. Let's think about how we're gonna take all of this with us. The courage and the hope and the organizing smarts. Who are you gonna talk to? Where are you gonna ask them? How are you gonna bring people together to have these kinds of conversations? Where are you gonna demand? What plans will you make? How are you gonna take collective action? What collective actions are you gonna take? Think about those questions. Answer those questions and keep connected to Labor Notes as you do so. Yeah. Subscribe to our magazine. Write up your stories of struggle for our magazine. Come to our workshops. They'll be live. They'll be online. When a troublemaker school comes to your city, come to it. Help build it when we're doing that. Labor Notes is all of us. Labor Notes is building, working power, all workers together to win a better world. And that's why there are so many people to thank. So many people that we couldn't thank each individually from the podium. But first, I really want to thank and I want to give you a selves a round of applause for showing up for standing up and for carrying this movement. Give it up for yourselves. I want to thank all the speakers here today and over the course of the conference, the facilitators and the panelists. It was an incredible pleasure for me to put panels and facilitators and conversation with each other and watch them through email, begin to generate ideas, share sort of the generosity that is our movement and the deep commitment and understanding that we carry the knowledge and we carry the power. So thank you all for pulling those together. Really, really important part of this. Thank you to the scores of people who recruited and fundraise in their cities and in their unions to get you here. And you better give a big shout out for this one. Thank you to the interpreters. All of the interpreters, they bring us together by allowing us to hear each other. It's really important part of what they do. And I have something to hold my mic. A little closer. Okay. Lean in. All of you know that. And I want to thank the Labor Heritage Foundation. How amazing and great was it to connect this conference and the great labor arts exchange and their work. I'm really grateful that we had so many international participants who came in the context of this pandemic from around the world to join us to share their knowledge and to learn with us. So thank you to all the international participants. And almost last, and this one is a bit awkward because I'm going to thank myself. But, you know, we have 10 labor note staff that have been working really hard for months and months and months to pull this together. I guess I'll first say personally, it is an incredible, I'm going to get teary eyed. It's an incredible honor to work with my comrades on labor notes. So proud of us, of who we are, of how we pulled this together. So please give it up for the labor note staff. Almost no thank yous. A really big thanks to all of you who gave at the fundraising dinner last night. Thank you. Yeah, I'm going to, well. So again, like we labor notes is us building this together. And in order to do that, this build this project, it, we need support, we need the resources to do it. So please make a donation when you can however much you can by going to labor notes.org slash donate. You can make a one time donation. You can make a monthly donation. It really means a lot. We've grown this conference so large, we're going to have to keep growing as a labor notes. And we need the resources to do that. So if you can, please do. Okay, just a few more details before we get to our speakers. If you found a vanilla cream colored wallet with a yellow camel on it, please bring it to the labor notes registration desk. Okay. And last, we've come together. We're going to have to depart and say our goodbyes. The airport shuttle is here to help you do that. It'll be leaving every 15 minutes. So just go stand online, let them know that you need to do that. And thank you all for staying safe this weekend. And highly recommend that when you get home, make sure you take some COVID tests and keep yourself safe. But I really I want to appreciate how much we have taken care of each other by wearing our masks by being safe. So thank you all for that. Okay, now for what we came for this afternoon. In 2019, 50,000 GM workers in the US were on strike. Probably many of you here did solidarity for that strike. So did Israel Sarantes, a worker in GM's plant in Salaho, Mexico, where workers build really lucrative pickups and get paid less than $25 for a 12 hour shift. Israel had been organizing in the plant against the company Union there. When he publicly expressed his support for the American strikers, GM fired him. And he's still fighting to get his job back. The firing though only strengthened his resolve to build a strong independent union for all workers in the Mexican auto industry. He's an organizer with the Casa Obrera del Bahio traveling through Mexico to help workers from form independent unions. And he laid the groundwork for stunning success in Salaho, Israel. Good afternoon, everyone. Organizadores, muchas gracias. Esperemos que no sea la primera vez que nos inviten. Good afternoon. My name is Israel Sarantes. And first of all, I would like to thank you for the invitation to participate in this incredibly important event for organizers. So thank you. And I hope it is not the last invitation that we get to be here. Durante abril del 2019, un grupo de trabajadores cansados de tantas violaciones a nuestros derechos laborales, nuestros derechos humanos, pues nos empezamos a organizar. During April of 2019, a group of workers who was tired of having our rights as workers violated, tired of having our human rights violated, we started organizing. Our first goal was to get rid of a union that had been imposed on us by the company General Motors. Este sindicato nunca fue votado, nunca fue elegido por los trabajadores. This union was never voted on, it was never selected by the workers. Ese era el motivo principal por lo que ellos defendían los derechos de la, defendían los a la empresa y desprotegían al trabajador. And the reason for that was because the union protected the company and not the workers. When our union siblings in the U.S. went out on strike, we showed our solidarity and joined their fight. We were fighting the same boss and for similar things, better wages and better working conditions. We were fighting the same boss and for similar things, better wages and better working conditions. Así fuimos creando y gracias también al señor Héctor del Grupo de Silas que nos ayudó en la organización. So we started building and thanks also to Héctor from Silas who helped us organize. So that's how we managed to vote the CTM, the Mexican Workers Federation, out of General Motors. En 2021, the Miguel Trujillo Lopez Union, which is local one of the CTM, convoca a votaciones para que los trabajadores acepten o no lo acepten dentro de la empresa. They called for a vote to see whether the workers would accept that union's representation within the company. Donde incluso compraron votos, rifaron carros, hicieron todo para intentar comprar la voluntad de los trabajadores. Esa votación se anula y gracias a la línea directa, la demanda que se hizo en la línea directa del TMEC. That vote was annulled thanks to a direct line related to the regulations of the USMCA. A suit was brought against the Mexican government to reinstate the vote. So en August 17th and 18th, the majority of workers at GM Silao voted to kick this corrupt union out of General Motors. At the same time, we were able to form an independent union 100% made up of active workers. El sindicato independiente nacional de trabajadores y trabajadoras de la industria automotriz Cintia, donde logra la historia de tener a la primera mujer como secretaria general de un sindicato de industria. And we made history by electing the first woman general secretary of an industrial union. Así es como el 1 y 2 de febrero del 2021 teniendo como visores a la OIT y al INE. On February 1st and 2nd of 2021, with observers from the WLO and the National Electoral Institute del 2022. Se logra que Cintia quede como representante de los trabajadores en General Motors. We achieved getting Cintia as the official union representative of workers in General Motors. A la vez, logramos fundar la Casa Obrera del Bajío. Un lugar para que más compañeros de diferentes empresas This is a place for more workers from other companies. Tengan un lugar para organizarse teniendo el apoyo y la solidaridad de todas las organizaciones que han apoyado a Cintia. It gives them a place to come and organize to be in solidarity and receive support from everyone who has supported Cintia. El mes pasado con ayuda nuevamente de organizaciones solidarias Last month, with the help of other organizations in solidarity with us, Cintia logra firmar el contrato colectivo con GM. Cintia signed a collective bargaining agreement with GM. Y eso se lo debemos en gran parte a toda la solidaridad que organizaciones nos han brindado. Muchas gracias. And we owe that in large part to the support and solidarity of other organizations. So thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yes, Leo. Jess Wunder Schubau was fortunate to start her stint as president of the Brookline Educators Union, which is a suburb just outside of Boston, at the same time that a reform caucus was forming within the Massachusetts Teachers Association. Educators for a Democratic Union. I know that caucus because I'm a member of it too. Jess was also fortunate to have a grandmother who told stories about fearlessly facing police at Mayday rallies during the 1910s. Jess became a high school social studies teacher because it's a union job. She is proud to be part of a social movement, labor movement that she had long dreamed of being around for. Jess, good afternoon. It's a total honor to be here, but if a scrappy local of troublemakers in a wealthy suburb surrounded by Boston can win an illegal open ended strike, so can you. So just last month in a town I like to call a virtual gated community where management has mastered conveying a message that talking about fighting for a union is unprofessional and paternalistically letting anyone know who steps out of line that they will be scolded. You can imagine why you would be surprised people would want to go on strike. And that 1919 law put in place to stop the Boston police strike has been in place ever since. And yet educators themselves face still another challenge. And that is sometimes our unions themselves sometimes overthink overthink striking. Too many unions have been preoccupied with having a lone seat at the table in policy making bodies that are overrepresented by experts with no teaching experience and an eye toward money making. Too often our union leadership and staff have acted like experts themselves. As a case in point, right after our strike and without a single conversation with a striking educator in Brookline, the president of the union and neighboring Cambridge sent out to every member of his local a detailed analysis of why Cambridge and our striking Brookline union have nothing in common. Nevertheless, our approach was quickly picked up in Belmont, Massachusetts nearby where we showed up with our banners. Some of the people who were there are here with us. We won by striking. They were able to win right after us just by becoming strike ready. Winning for us meant eliminating a threat to impose a workday longer with no extra pay to diminish grievance rights, to refuse to negotiate working conditions at all. We were able to win a guarantee of 40 minutes of duty free time every day. Racial justice language and over 15% more in compensation by August 2026. But I want to share with you at this organizing conference what our members taught us. Don't underestimate them and trust them. For months, many of our members, we thought simply didn't want to do the tedious work of setting up communication structures. As you've heard this weekend, I'm sure one to 10 networks of two-way communication to go out on the other kinds of actions. What they were really saying was don't waste my time. When the union is ready to do something bold, I will be there. And once we asked, would you strike if 90% of your colleagues in the union were ready to do it? The communication structures sprang up in response to the question. We learned to draw an extremely clear opposition between what you can get from the boss and what you can get from the union. We said, don't poll, agitate and persuade. Don't mistake Google surveys for union democracy. Now, I want to acknowledge that for some union sending out a survey is a real step forward because it's about communication. However, for us written surveys were isolating too much like the shutting down of the imagination and possibilities. Real conversations by contrast drew out the concerns, the fears, addressed them in a personal and respectful way. They helped the initiator of the conversation practice and get more confident about their own understanding of what solidarity entailed and what the possible outcomes of this process were. We asked our communicators to rate a person's readiness to strike on a scale of one to five themselves, not to ask people to reduce themselves to numbers. And after that conversation, they got that information back, knowing that they would need to pick up on that and return with more conversation. They provided the grounds to follow up and they broke the isolation of COVID that was so deadly. Our members taught us the strategy of do everything, to stand up to management works, meet members where they are and let them enter. You know, I've heard all of these things all weekend, so I'm just drawing it together, I think. We did everything on whatever scale we could. Informational pickets at the workplace, rallies, public comment at the school board meetings, work to rule. We talked about work to rule as a way of affirming our need to attend to our most needy students. Auto replies on emails, which they filed a charge against us for. That just really pissed people. Canvassing towns, people door to door. As important to gain confidence for our own members as to count data. But what we found was, and people have said this all weekend, Facebook is no measure of what a community really feels and thinks. Perhaps one of the most and maybe single most important things which our caucus EDU has been a part of democratizing bargaining, opening up bargaining. Is to do everything we could to fight to allow us to get more people into that room. So that they, the most skeptical, could go back to their buildings and say, oh my God, they're right, they really are SOBs. And to have your least militant members confirm that really there is very little in common between the boss and the worker. When they witnessed how disrespectful management was, other members heard about it. Our base was expanding very quickly. They told us to focus publicly on what is inspiring, not what is undermining and demoralizing. We learned to moderate questions in meetings so meetings weren't taken off track. We did have a meeting with 900 members. We increasingly focused on who wanted to act, not who wanted to give up. We remember saying to, I remember saying to a committee chair, unions don't give up, period. Here's a really important lesson. Don't assume you need a fully organized plan to commit to action. We revised the plans, the agendas, forms. We stole them from other places. We brought Connor Borgoyne to the meeting of our reps council. He said, don't worry about the parents. Frankly, the parents came out to support us when we showed ourselves and one another and them that we respect ourselves and one another. We echoed the vision being articulated by EDU. And I think it's really important that we knew because we have that influence inside Mass Teacher's Association, we were able to say, thanks to 10 years of good work there, MTA has our back. There's a strike fund, and that was actually put in place by the EDU caucus inside MTA. Don't underestimate the importance of clean, and Justin is here as our cat, co-chair and Maggie, clear and clean forms for tracking where your members are at. So when you need to talk to them again, you know where to find them and who talked to them. It's amazing how much it helped to have this kind of stuff put in place. We saw that our momentum was building and we could tell our members that that was true. We discovered that building that collective momentum is itself a motivator. Not to wait before you start to decide who's ready to do something, but let people get ready through the process. And they did. We did not use old bureaucratic forms. We called together anyone who wanted to do anything and we gave them a job. And before long, we had 200 plus people that had some assignment in this process. So I give you a sense of the nuts and bolts because that's where it really happens, but I want to close by asking why did this happen now? Not earlier, since we've been organizing and also trying to bargain for an excruciatingly long time. It shouldn't take six years to get a 40-minute prep period. I think the lesson is simple. We're part of something larger, you are part of something larger. We all here are clearly part of something larger that shouldn't shy away from naming the enemy. We feel the energy. We see the bold commitment to action and social justice by putting anti-racist planks into the contract proposals so that people have something to fight for. And our members stood up for that. We use the word exploitation. We talked about the super exploitation of our members of color, of our largely immigrant world language teachers. We actually laid it on the line in that language. And I found myself remembering Audrey Lorde's statement, when I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid. Don't wait till you're not afraid. Our members were afraid and they did it, and now they are super happy. So one of the final lessons that I'll share is that we learned to have an alternative vision of the world we want and the society and schools that we need. Not to react to the most, you know, seriously hostile forces in the town, and we have a few. At that point, I've heard a lot this weekend. Solidarity was a very healing antidote to the exploitation that everyone has felt through COVID. But seeing the inspiring leadership of the Amazon and Starbucks workers really did demonstrate to us there are through lines. They're getting, facing stalling, we're getting stalled. What does that tell us about where our friends are and where our allegiance should be? It exposed management's liberal pretenses to be very, very surface indeed. It's a strategy we hope we will continue to use to continue to translate into action at the school level and to bring to other locals like Belmont. And now we have a few more in mind, Maldon, Medford, and we're on our way to share our stories like I've had the pleasure of doing. Thank you for giving us the strength we needed to do what we did. Thank you, Jess. So one lesson we can take from the News Guild election of 2019 is that it matters when members have the right to vote, one member, one vote for their top officers. John Schles, a 32-year-old LA Times data and graphics reporter who'd never held Union office before, won the News Guild's presidency against a 12-year incumbent when members decided they wanted something done about the decimation of the news industry and of Union journalists. The Guild has organized 7,486 new members at 160 workplaces since 2018. John was part of the start of that organizing wave as a leader of the Guild's victory at the notoriously anti-union LA Times. I give you John. Happy Juneteenth and good afternoon. I grew up in a town called Harmony Grove, Arkansas. It's tiny. It's like a school and a few churches. It's barely even on a map and there's not even a single stoplight. It's one of those places. Stoplights are for fancy people towns, right? I was raised by strong women, a grandmother who was a letter carrier and a single mother. Our home wasn't a big union family, though obviously we benefited strongly from the union. As a kid, I didn't even know much about unions. I assumed it was for like these strong men who worked in mines and put cars together in Detroit, right? They do! But as a gay kid growing up in rural Arkansas, unions felt distant. They felt other. My grandmother was a big news consumer. She subscribed to two newspapers. And every evening, for most of her life, we watched the evening news. When I went to college, I found journalism through college radio. And I knew I wanted to become a journalist. I charted a path and became sort of a computer programming data journalist. And eventually I nabbed a job at the Los Angeles Times. Now, Los Angeles is a town with a lot of stoplights and fancy people. And the job was good, mostly. But things kept getting worse. Pay was stagnant. Women were paid less than men to do the same work. Journalists of color were paid less than white journalists. And the newsroom didn't look like the community we reported to. There was no job security and benefits got worse every single year. We had a rotating door of dudes at the top of the company who claimed to have the vision for what our newsroom could be. For our work. And I saw many, many publishers go in and out of those doors. We were tired. We were really angry. When the company came and took our paid time off, that was it. A colleague said, we should form a union. And I walked over to him and I said, yeah, how do we do that? The LA Times never had a union in 137 years. And it was the epicenter of anti-union propaganda 100 years ago and stood as a symbol of the boss fighting the workers. But in January of 2018, 400 workers at the LA Times created a union. We joined the News Guild. It's a sector of the communications workers of America. It's a great union that has been fighting for journalists, media workers and activists since 1933. And I committed to my colleagues to make our union strong. Obviously in the work site, but I also saw our union as being stronger internationally. So in 2019, I ran for union office at 32 years old. I ran for international president and won. I've been in the position for a little over two and a half years and I have the privilege of working alongside activists who have been in this fight and been in the struggle for decades. All of our exciting moments that we are experiencing right now in the labor movement right now are built on the backs of so many workers before us. As Barbara said, in our part of the movement, we have helped so many workers unionize. 7,500 just about in the last five years across 160 workplaces. It's been a little wild. That includes Politico and BuzzFeed News. It's in places like in Texas at the Austin American Statesmen, the Dallas Morning News, which actually coined the phrase, right to work. That's a union now. And it places like the Miami Herald in Florida, who are fighting for a first contract right now. It's in newsrooms all across the country in Canada, in Montana, in Idaho, in Kansas, in Wyoming, and even in South Carolina. And also recently, the Czech workers at the New York Times unionized with us, which means, y'all, wordle is union. And folks want to know, how do you do it? How do you take advantage of this moment? This moment didn't come out of thin air. It's a moment created by workers. They are taking risk. They are pushing through fear. And they are taking the time to do the organizing work. There is no shortcut in this work. When we say the workers are the union, we have to put that into action. We have to train workers to have one-on-one conversations. We have to identify leaders. We have to facilitate good meetings. We have to learn our rights and inspire them to dream big. Bigger than a million people. We do that by training, and the goal is to train every single worker to become an organizer, so that we have the capacity to win even more. We have to channel fear into action, into collective action, and then we have to take the temperature of those actions through structure tests. We have to escalate to strikes, and the organizing never stops. We have to take advantage of every crisis and turn it into an opportunity. When we organized at the LA Times, we had a lot of dark moments. At one point, we found out that we were losing our building, and we were being shoved into a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles that was more of a party pad for the CEO than a newsroom for the journalists. So we called out the boss, we organized, we came together, we ridiculed them. More of our colleagues joined our movement, and we owned the communication and sprung into action. Every crisis is a potential opportunity. A chance to organize around. A chance to win a strong contract. Or a chance to save our democracy. We create these moments. We, the workers of this world! If you're frustrated and you should be, take action. Grab a friend. Grab another friend. Get them to grab a friend. Grab another friend. Get another friend. And another friend. And another friend. We've got a whole world to organize, y'all. A Starbucks worker said it best here, we fight for what we love, and we love each other. If you think that your union could do better, run for office, work to tear down walls, support the workers, set them up for success, and get the hell out of their way. And get out of your own way. This work is hard. It takes time. There's a lot of bureaucracy, but you've got to take the time to build the structures, do the planning, make the strategies. You do that with the workers. It takes one-on-one conversations with everyone. But we have more power than we know. So use it. Solidarity forever! Thank you, John. A daughter of California's Borderlands, Chicana singer-songwriter Liliana Herrera is a cultural worker hailing from the Bay Area, housed in the house. With music at the center of her words, she bridges her passion for music and the arts to organizing as a language justice advocate and interpreter. To echo the words of Irish writer John Millington Sin, a translation is no translation, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it. Liliana. Se puede? Se puede? Thank you so much. I am so inspired by all of you. I am so honored, privileged, and happy to be here with you today. And these last few days, I don't even want to say anymore because I'm going to start crying. Have you all heard of La Llorona? I am La Chillonna. La Llorona's prima. Well, in the spirit of unity, I want to invite my friends, Joe Jenks and Lynn Marie to join me. After the Great Labor Arts Exchange concert last night, we were jamming out out there and I said, let's do this together. And we met like an hour ago in my hotel room and we made this little arrangement for you all. I want to say happy Juneteenth. I want to say happy Father's Day a todos los papitos to all the grandfathers, the grandmothers, los tíos, the uncles, the single mothers who have taken the role of mother and father. And I want to especially recognize my fellow interpreters who have been busting their butt here for all of us. Thank you. And I want to encourage every one of you to motivate in your own spaces in encouraging, creating multilingual spaces that includes the voices of all workers on or to this area that we're in this ancestral land of indigenous tribes of the Council of the Three Fires comprised of the, excuse me if my pronunciation is not correct, but I'm going to try. Si se puede. The Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi nations as well as the Miami Ho-Chunk, Menomini, Sac, Fox, Kikapu and Illinois nations. Thank you, Ancestors. Can you guys hear this, the uke? Sing, sing with the solidarity is where we'll stay. We can't let the bosses get in our way. We have the power collectively to make the change we want to see. So open up your hearts and just let it in. Let's stand united together, we will win. So join the mantra. Please sing along. I feel like Dorothy. Like home. Do. With an accent. Different colors make a rainbow. Together. Together. Muchas gracias. Music is the international language of love. And thank you for our labor notes. Thank you Albright Berry especially for the invitation. Thank you so much. In our hands is place to power greater than their hoarded gold greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold. We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of solidarity. One more time, solidarity forever. Gracias. Obrigada, merci. Thank you so much.