 Welcome. Can everyone hear me? Thank you all for attending this panel, Black Labor Struggles Over Time and Intergenerational Panel. You all have the distinction of being people who are not too hungover on the last day of labor notes to come to a morning workshop or you're hungover and have the force of will. So, welcome again. My name is Paul Prescott. I'm a staff organizer with TeamSys for a Democratic Union. I'm going to, you know, today in this panel, we're basically going to have like a free-wanging discussion with our panelists over some questions, and then we'll definitely have time at the end for question and answer. And I think, you know, I'll start, I mean, kind of framing this discussion. You know, we're almost four years on from the murder of George Floyd and the mass protests that broke out across the country. And this country has a tradition of every 10 years doing a quote-unquote conversation on race and never doing anything. And one thing that's always frustrated me about these conversations is around, you know, not really appreciating the history and the current struggles of labor and black workers in the labor movement and how critical that's been, again, historically and presently to the advancement of black people. So I think, I hope this conversation provides more to that. So I'll first just introduce our panelists individually, and then we'll start going with the questions. So directly to my left is Destiny Blackwell, who's with the Carolina Amazons United for Solidarity and Empowerment Organization. And to her left is Angela Bonilla with the Portland Association of Teachers. And then we have Margaret Cook from Communication Workers of America. Then we have Daryl Pace from Teamsters Local 413 in Ohio. UPS. We have Lynn Marie Smith from Musicians Local 1000. Raise your hand if you want Lynn to give a performance before the end. Sorry, Lynn. Sorry. Right. And last but not least, we have Katora Johnson from Association of Flight Attendance CWA. So we'll start out, you know, just a quick thing to get us warmed up. I mean, we could go around and just say quickly, how did you come to the labor movement? What got you involved, especially what got you involved to the point of coming to a labor notes conference, being an activist in a union? Okay. Good morning, everybody. Let me say it's actually very appropriate that you started talking about 2020 because how I came into the labor movement is that, honestly, I was doing community organizing, right? Around police brutality, the deaths of Edward McCrae, Marcus Dion Smith, John Neville. These are not nationally publicized names. These are just people who the police killed in North Carolina. And one of the leaders in organizing against police violence is Reverend Nelson Johnson. And there is an incident in North Carolina history that is an overlap between the labor movement and police violence. And it's the Greensboro massacre of 1979, which how many of y'all know about the Greensboro massacre? It's very encouraging to know that people are aware of it. You don't know what happened was that there was a rally led by labor leaders who were also community organizers that was shot up by the Klan, the American Nazi Party in the Greensboro police department and killed five people. At the 40th year anniversary of that where they were commemorating their deaths and celebrating the lives of the people who survived. And they were celebrating the legacy of the labor organizing there. And, you know, I had been in community organizing spaces and the whole time I was there, I'm like, it's hella white. Like where are all the regular working class black people? The black people there were academics. I know I'm light-skinned and bougie. I found the only black person there. Where's everybody else? Okay. But when I saw the labor leaders, when I saw USSW, the Union Southern Service Workers, when I saw UE 150 and I saw regular working class black people breaking down capitalist exploitation, I'm like, oh, the regular black people are at work. Duh. And that's where the organizing needs to be. And I had not considered labor organizing before, but the people who were killed in the Greensboro massacre were organizing in key, they were salting in key industries. And that's what brought me to the labor movement. So it is an intergenerational conversation from the beginning for me. Thank you. All right. So I'm originally from the Bronx, New York, and yeah. I'm gonna throw that eggs up. So my mom actually worked for the city of New York and human resources. So I grew up with my mom being a member of DC 37 and my dad being a taxi driver with no Union and being able to very clearly see that difference, right? Between having protections paid for the work that you actually do versus everything being on your body and not having any other kind of support or backup. And I used to go to her job after school all the time. I learned to use a copy machine before I was 10, you know, gotta help out. But I got involved in the labor movement in Portland when I moved out there and became an educator because I was frustrated at work. As a teacher, as a black teacher, usually the first black teacher my students had in Portland by the time they got to me in fourth grade. I realized that the things I needed for my students and the things I was constantly advocating for I kept meeting barriers. And so when what I always tell my members is when I feel powerless, that's when I have to lean into the Union because that's where the power is. And so I started getting more involved and because I was in that principal's office having arguments all the time about like, well, why won't you put all the black kids in my class? There's studies that say this is good for them. And also, you know, asking for the resources and supports my students needed. So I started going to Union meetings. I ran to be a building rep, a building steward. And as I started getting into more of those like bigger Union meetings, I saw a lot of black women in those spaces. And I was like, dope, I'm supposed to be here. And then the more meetings I went to the less of them I saw. And I was like, what's going on here? Where did they all go? What happened? Because I know they still work here. And there was a kind of very serious situation in our Union where we had a black member on release working on issues of racial equity and racial justice in our Union and in our district. And she was treated really poorly by our white leadership and wrote a full report about the work that she did with narratives. She had all these community sessions and they refused to release it. And so it was because it kind of made the Union look bad, which is an area of growth, you know? So lots of people of color just stopped going to the Union, stopped engaging, and I was kind of like in the periphery. And so I was like, well, why don't we just go and take it over then? And so that's kind of how I got involved in the movement. Well, I am a third generation Union member, right? My grandfather was a shop steward and a janitor for the New York Police Department. And my father was, he worked in some area of telecom, so he was a member of CWA 1101. And I was the youngest Union delegate in the Hotel Trades Council when I worked for Leona Helmsley. So I moved to the south. I moved from New York to Memphis and on my second day of work joined the United Campus Workers of Tennessee. And I was activated by the custodian on my floor. She was the vice president of the Memphis chapter. And she would come in and because she knew I was on the ropes, right? I was paying dues. And she said, hey Margaret, there's a Union meeting on Saturday, and I didn't go. On Monday her voice would change. There was a Union meeting and you didn't come. And I started thinking more and more about how much these custodians on the campus, you know, how much they believed in their local and how much they fought for their local and how much they volunteered their time. Well then they brought me to Labor Notes in 2018. We took a minivan from Memphis, drove up to Chicago. We slept two to a bed because I mean we were still a small local, right? And we didn't have much money, but we were all happy to be there. And I often say it's at that Labor Notes conference that I took the Union red pill. I didn't look back. Everything that my Union asked me to do, I said yes. Whether it may be scared, sad, angry, I said yes. And here we are. I am now the CWA national vice president of the public health care and education workers sector. I'll make sure I'll say again just in case anybody forgot. Daryl Pace, local 413 out of Columbus, Ohio teamster. What brought me to the labor movement was me learning my place in it and allow me to explain that. I have 15 years in corporate America being in sales and management and learning the process from the corporate America side of things. I realized that the greed in America. I just got to a point where it was completely out of control. I knew that my place was no longer there. So I wanted to come to a union that would offer me protection that would offer me rights to fight against the employer. To think about how I looked at it at that time is shameful for me. And I realize now after becoming a teamster and getting the UPS that my place is not to be protected by the union. It is to use the tools that the union has afforded me to fight for the rights of myself and fight for the rights of my brothers and sisters. So I sit here before you today as one of you to keep the fight going to light the fire that leads the way that gets us to victory. Thank you. I'm Lynn Marie Smith. I hail from the great state of Michigan, Detroit to be more specifically. I'm honored to be here. As a child, I was a justice fighter. I always stood up for what appeared to be the underdogs. My uncle preached union. So I fell in love with it earlier and before I even knew what it was. When I got my first organizing job with the HGRE, my first organizing job was against what seemed to be like Goliath. It was like David and Goliath. It was the big hotel casino owner of Greetown. We had an election. They cheated. We went to court. We almost won what's called a Gissel bargaining order. We got a second election and naturally we lost because they had the money to steal it from us. But right there, I fell in love with, we as a collective, if we were single-minded, we could bring down the giants. From there, I fell in love with making that my mission. As a musician, I found a tricky way to use that gift as an organizing tool to give labor's message for this hard assignment that was in front of us. It was kind of successful. For me, I don't believe that organizing is a job. It's a calling. If you're an organizer, you're a foot soldier for justice in the trenches. All we have to do is learn the process of the steps of organizing. That's all I have to say. So I'm Katora Johnson. I'm the International Vice President for the Association of Flight Attendants. We represent 19 airlines and 50,000 flight attendants. How's that? So I'm the International Vice President for the Association of Flight Attendants. I'll lead with that. I was the very first Queerman of Color and Combat Veteran ever to be elected. Thank you, but I say that because of the panel that we're on. A lot of people here have talked and the reason that we're here at Labor Notes has been labor within their families. My family was missionaries in Kenya. I grew up in Kenya for 17 years. So it wasn't labor that brought me in. It was service. And I think people forget. I don't want to say they forget, but maybe there's a separation. So like labor, it's fighting for rights, but there's also a service to the people that we're organizing and working for. And I always want to make sure that people are seeing where they're at and they're represented. And representation matters. Like all of us leaders sitting here, like the fact that you said the first black teacher that students saw until fourth grade. And you think about the members who are coming in right off the bat. Like we need to make sure that we're in spaces as soon as they come in to make sure that we're lifting up people that come in behind them. And so while I don't have a labor background, it's about service and making sure that we see people where they're at and make sure that we're protecting them because we all come from different ways of life and backgrounds, but in our unions and in our jobs as reps, as leaders, we need to make sure that we're representing everyone and making sure that we're just meeting people where they're at. So, you know, we obviously, we have people from, you know, come into the labor movement from different backgrounds, different generations. So my question, you know, next one for anyone who wants to answer, how have you seen the labor movement change over the time you've been in it? Both positive, negative, what it has to do with, you know, with racial demographics or not, what has changed since you've been in the labor movement? Real quick, what I think I've noticed, like I said, I'm the first of my type to come in. But just like here at Labor Notes, the diversity that I've seen just from two years ago is incredible and just like bringing people in. So I think one of the things that I've noticed is being a representative of people that look like me, who love like me, who think like me, and who want to change and see change like me is really, really important. And the fact that I have a lot of black leaders and queer leaders who have come to this Labor Notes as a representative of their union and from their airline I think is really big so that they can go back and take that. And that's how we need to build up multi-generational labor is to make sure that we're bringing someone every time that we come. A lot of black leaders will say, bring someone as they're talking to you by themselves. And I said, oh, okay. But you didn't even bring me, but you're telling me to bring someone else. So we need to start bringing people if we're going to start telling people to bring. So that's it. I actually think that's a really good question that you raise Paul. And it's interesting because we're now in uncharted waters, right? So we get to a point where the labor movement has been a voice that hasn't been heard and now that voice is being heard and we're starting to get results. So now we have to recognize how do we build on those results and then how do we keep people engaged. So as it pertains to our particular situation at UPS, you might win a contract and you might get a lot of the things you want, but there's things that you did not get. So we need to go back to the table. We still need to be engaged. We need to bring up issues now and keep the pressure on our leadership and on the company. So it's about bringing in more people, keeping people that are engaged, fully engaged and immersed into what we're doing here because it's only a movement if we keep moving. So it's not a movement because of what we've done. What I've noticed is, well, in 2018 when I did come to Labor Notes, I was on a panel about organizing the South. And one of the things I said on that panel was that leadership needed to reflect the membership, right? And so now that I'm in a position where I can start to influence that, I'm putting my money where my mouth is, I have to travel all over the country, including Puerto Rico. And whenever I go to a local, I am looking actively for women of color, people of color, right? Women in general, and encouraging them to take more leadership roles in their locals because it can be done, right? At some point, our local officers need to reflect what it looks like on CWA's executive board because I am so proud of the fact that out of the, I want to say 18 people on the CWA executive board, half are people of color and women. And we have come a long, long way. I'll just speak really quickly. I think what I've seen is that coming from Portland, we are one of the widest cities in the country and with 70% of our population identifying as white non-Hispanic. And so, you know, often we talk about like reflecting our population and what I found in my union is that we have, it has to move past that and we have to, because we saw democracy being used to silence folks like me. So, while we can't talk about all these issues, you all educators of color care about because the majority of our union wants this and we have to be democratic. And so one thing that I've seen a lot of educators of color and queer educators coming in and helping push forward is the idea of like, you know, race and gender matter and we're going to do surveys and we're going to disaggregate that data and we're going to say, well, only this percentage care about the affinity group leaders getting paid. Right. But it's 90% of the members of color. So this is an issue we have to work on because our members are saying it's important and really looking at those groups as having something to say. So I think with this labor movement, what I'm seeing is that the definition of worker or, you know, union sibling has expanded. Right. So it's never, I don't think it's the ideals that have been wrong or the values. It's just that it's the application. We're really changing and lifting folks up, bringing folks in and making sure that everyone sees that. No, when we say everybody, we mean everybody and we're going to be supporting everyone and thinking about all of the issues, not just the ones that are the easiest to win. When I first got in became an organizer, we were using the old Rolodex and the old cart system. That's when I started. For me, the union leadership, I couldn't add in, I couldn't separate them from management. They started to look more like management. And, you know, they would say, we need to organize, we need to organize and we as organizers would say yes, but we need resources to organize. You want us to organize, we have to have the money and resources to go do it. And then when we go and do it, you squash the drive as if you're afraid that the more educated they are, they're coming for your positions. Right. So, so the very people that asked us to build the union are the people that would squash it right behind the scenes. And so that was kind of disheartening. But what I like now is that the young folks that are organizing, they're not coming through the established way of organizing. They're doing it on their own and they're setting new sites and new ways of thinking about them. So I'm really excited to be a part of that movement. And as Daryl said, we have to move. The operative word and movement is move. And I'm really excited about what we can do and the diversity that we can do it in. And together, we can get our agenda addressed as well. One small point I just want to add. I mean, I think in the general population, there's a certain stereotype about what a union member is. I think most regular people think older white guy in a hard hat. And I actually tested this out. I Google image search union worker and it was an old white guy in a hard hat. And don't get me wrong, there are many of them who are union members. I want more old white guys to be union members. But the reality today is actually black workers have the highest union density of any racial demographic. And that's just a statistical fact. And a lot of people are surprised because I don't think that reality is caught up to the image of black workers. And the leadership hasn't caught up to that reality. The next question though is, have you noticed in your unions and your locals divisions among different generations of black workers? And if so, how do these play out and how can you overcome those kind of generational divisions? All right. So there's a couple ways that I see generational divides. Sometimes it's like things that would seem small to me like I notice older members care a lot more about. Okay, let me say for a second that we are a grassroots worker led independent union building from the floor of Amazon in Garner, North Carolina. And so like our union leadership is coming straight off the floor. Our members are coming straight off the floor. And so some of the issues like one thing that I noticed that only older people complain about is how the young people dress at work. Okay. And these booty shorts are not oppressing you. Like they're not causing the high turnover rates and the high injuries. They're not taking any money at your paycheck and trying to like, you know, redirect to the other what it would unifies us and not what divides us. And also just like there is some like changes that have happened in the past. I mean, my lifetime, but you know, the past like 20 years in like gender discourse. And, and sometimes we got to catch people up and it's just like, you know, I, you know, because I'm a part of the community that I'm organizing. I know y'all are just country and southern, and you don't think there's anything wrong with calling somebody sugar, honey, or honey or love. But we have to have this conversation now because people my age might be like, why are you calling like ancient, ancient sweet like who should. And when we have these getting to make sure that we see each other's point of view, it can be a struggle. Right. It can be a difficult conversation. It might be a conversation you have multiple times. But like as organizers, like we aren't just getting people to the right opinion. Right. We're, we're having conversations. We have to have conversations that move people. Like we have to have transformative conversations, not transactional. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. But yeah. So this conversation speaks to the heart of me because I'm 39 years old. So as a labor worker and being a delivery driver at UPS, you're going to have all age ranges represented. So maybe in 39 I could be in touch with drivers in her 20s and I can also find a middle ground with drivers that may be 50 plus. And I've noticed that as my sister said earlier, beside me that we are really getting the younger generation. They are very woke and aware of what's going on in the labor in the labor movement. They know what these companies are doing to us and they're ready to fight. So I'm happy to have that. Just now I have two young warriors out there, Damian and Jenny. I mean, they're in her 20s and they have more information at that age than I ever had. So the problem that I usually have is with older individuals because I came up and at that time of you just work, keep your head down, avoid trouble, get your paycheck. Go home and take care of your family. Well, we're no longer in those times anymore. You have to stand up for the person beside you and me being black. Any other black worker that I have that is around me, it is almost duty bound. Like you said, we have responsibilities. Just taking care of your family and going home is not good enough. When you have a union behind you that's going to fight for you and you have rights, we have to execute and use those rights. So having that conversation with someone older than me is just giving them the information we got to educate first. Let them know the ways in which this company is taking advantage of you. You may have a good job, but it should be a great job. We should be treated like great individuals. We should get recognized for showing up for work. We should be recognized for doing a great job. Our company should look to go above and beyond for us. I don't care if you care about me, but you will act like you care about me. One of the biggest divides that I see is that older black leaders, and I hope no one gets offended, but older black leaders tend to gatekeep, right? And it gets to a point where it's like, well, I had to go through all of this to get here. So now I'm going to put you through everything that I went through because if I don't then my struggle is not valid. I'm done with that, right? I do not gatekeep. As I said, I try to provide as many opportunities for people of color that I can within the union. And I don't take no for an answer. That just means we need to negotiate a little bit longer because I'm going to get to a yes. And I'm proud to say that I'm a Gen Xer 50 plus one. And I stand at the intersection between the older ones and the younger ones. And I have to navigate between both worlds and try to understand that Gen Z is not thinking like me, right? I'm scared to put TikTok on my phone. That's all they look at on their phone, right? But like she said, I also have to stand in and have the conversations with both generations to say, hey, it's not polite to say these kind of words. And I've always been saying it's no longer okay to call people that, right? And then you have to speak to the younger ones and say, hey, you do have to give them some modicum of respect. You do have to follow Robert's rules of order with your inner conference. Like pay attention not just to the exciting striking protesting thing, but to the inner workings. Have you read your union's constitution, right? And so I get into those deep conversations because that's the only way we can make change. Just to echo what Margaret said, it is about making space. And a lot like gatekeepers, fuck that shit, that shit's over, you know. But it is because a lot like, and that's crazy what Margaret said. It's like you want someone to feel all those struggles, but why are we doing that? It's going to take longer to get the work done. And there's a lot of work that we need to get done. But that's just like we say in the airline delay delay, it's not okay even when it, you know, is with us working. But gatekeeping and also education too, because there is a difference, there is a change. But we also have to recognize that people aren't going to change overnight and we need to have grace. And I, you know, we just need to make sure that we are educating and meeting people, but we also need to hold them accountable when they are learning. And when they do continue to misgender folks over and over, we need to hold them accountable as well. But we need to educate and have grace for them as well. Yeah, do we, do we, yes. You know, it comes down to do we want to be right or do we want to be heard? You know, and we have to realize that how we communicate with each other, there's a saying, there's an African proverb that says, as long as the tale of the hunt is written by the hunter, the lion will never get its do or its story told. We have to tell our story. We have to tell our own story. We have to find, we have to understand that the systems affect us all and we all play a part, whether we recognize that or not. And so the way that we talk to each other and educate each other about the importance, the difference from my generation, because I'm the oldest person on this panel, probably about at least 20 years, at least 20 years, I would gather that. You're 50, I'm 68. In numbers, I'm eternally youthful. This is, this is what you want to be. That's why I'm here. I need to let you know that I'm 20 in here. Those are just numbers. And so we've got a bridge that this ageism thing that because, you know, just, just I was watching the State of the Union address and you know how they keep saying that Biden is old, Biden is old. Okay. Face got a little tight. But when they pan the room, everybody in the room looked like the Crip Keepers. Everybody, but really everybody, but Kamala and Mike, they really did. I mean, I'm like, whatever they talking about old because we're aging. We're seasoned. We have the experience. And you're younger. You have the technology and the information of what's happening now. I don't understand why we can't bridge that and be open to grow and listen from each other. Because that's the only way we're going to get. That's the only way we're going to move forward. Yeah. So, you know, open up your hearts and your minds to it. And let's do something different. If you've always done what you've done, you're going to get what you've always gotten. That's kind of a perfect segue. Because my next question is why is it important that the labor movement be multi-generational? Why not just say, you know, kick the old people out. Let's just have the young people. Why is it actually important? Because sometimes I just turned 36 in February and sometimes us younger people be wild. And so that's like the first part. But I think genuinely, you know, we can continue to criticize. Just the idea of like, well, Joe Biden's old. It's like, there's plenty of other things we can criticize. Besides like just, yeah, Jim Crow, Joe genocide. I mean, we got a lot of things we can talk about besides trying to focus on the identity of people, right? Because, and I think that's kind of the evolution of the conversation that we're having with our members and talking about, you know, when we are in those meetings and as much as I don't know who Robert is and why we have to follow his rules. Until we collectively develop a different system, we're going to follow the expectations and the rules that are here. And I think as educators, you know, with education, we learn so much. There's so much new that comes up and we like live at this very specific nexus of expertise when it's like child development, the subjects that we do and conversations with families organizing. But things change and folks have to constantly be ready to reflect on what they know. And so it's important to have people who can give us context of what's happened in the past because we can't keep fighting and moving forward if we don't know what we're building upon. So I think it's important to have that intergenerational, multi-generational, you know, movement and not be excluding people because, oh, you're just young and rabble rousy or, oh, you're old and you don't know what you're talking about anymore. It's like, actually, you have the context we need and you have the vision, the future is yours because I'm not going to be here at that time, so I need to hear what you want to see. And we've also been bringing in students and having students getting involved and trying to figure out ways to get them excited about organizing and union work so that they eventually leave school and get a union job and do this work as well. So we have to just get into the habit of listening to each other with the respect that just being humans on this earth, we deserve, right? My answer to that is very short and concise. We get nowhere alone. We get everywhere together. I'm not going to exclude anybody because of race, because of age, or because of beliefs. We should all believe in getting fair treatment at our employer and being treated like human beings. That's all that matters. I want to try this mic. Maybe that'll work. So our organizing committee right now is between the ages of 19 and 69. We don't have a choice but to be multi-generational. But for the movement, local to us in North Carolina, there is a lineage of grassroots worker-led black predominant. Not just some representation, but overwhelmingly black unions. The UE150, which is the public service workers union in North Carolina, was started. It is grassroots. It is worker-led and it is black run. And the people who started UE150 also started the Southern Workers' Assembly. And they're kind of the incubator for how cause came to be. Because before, when our co-founders, Rev Ryan and Monmary, decided to start organizing at RDU-1, they were able to reach out to people who were tilling the soil, who were out there leafling, hoping that somebody would decide to organize. And the people who started that were black workers for justice. Our existence is intergenerational from multiple struggles. But we don't need to recreate the same mistakes. They figured out how to do a grassroots black-led union 40 years ago. We don't need to make the same mistakes over and over again. We can leapfrog their mistakes if we stay in contact. We're part of the black radical tradition. It's a living tradition. If we let it feed us as we continue its work, we can not repeat the mistakes while we're making history. So no one wants to kick the old people out. We've established that. None of that. And one theme that's been coming up is the lack of black union leaders. Leaders not reflecting membership. I mean, I think that's slowly changing, but this is still a big issue. So one question is how can black union leaders, whether they're leaders of their local, whether they're just rank and file leaders, whether they're national leaders, how can they be better supported by the labor movement? I'm going to keep it plain because I'm also a New Yorker from Harlem. Stop hating, right? If you see someone really taking ownership of leadership, right? That is not the time to say, oh, well, I remember they were doing that last week. They're not really a leader. Oh, look what she's wearing. Is she really a leader? Like there is this underlying piece of envy that I just really don't understand. Like everything about a black leader is critiqued, how they speak, who their team is. When I won my first election in 2019 in Vegas, my entire team were the members from my local and they happen to be white. So a lot of people talked about that, right? And they said, oh, she's just the white man's lackey. Let me tell you something. I've been divorced twice, so that should let you know I don't listen to any man much less. Support your leader. If they're inviting you to come to a meeting, pack the room, right? Because they're watching to see how many of us show up to meetings, how many of us show up to rallies. Now I understand sometimes these things are scheduled during work hours. That's when you push back and say, no, we have to wait until everyone gets off from work so that everyone can be present at whatever event it is we're trying to do. So in short, support your people, you know, because eventually you're going to need people to support you. So the reason I'm on this panel is because of Margaret. And the reason that I say that is we talk about supporting, but it's also like saying other people's names in other rooms where they're not there. It's about letting people know that there are other black queer union leaders, hey, PFA in the back, you know, but it's like letting people know what's going on and letting them shine in other other spaces. I don't want to be doing this for a very long time. I have other plans. This was a little detour, but it's also like setting everyone up. But just thank you, Margaret, for also always creating space. I know Claude Cummings is the president of CWA. We can give him a big round of applause for his first black president. Yeah, but like that leadership and Amina having that leadership and knowing that there's representation at the top. And I can say like as an international vice president as a leader, I'm going to ask my members what they need from me and how I can best support them. And we just need to listen and make a space that people can ask questions because if you don't create a safe place for people to ask questions, you're not going to be able to change and no one's going to be able to come up to you. So that's it. Language is very powerful. Words are living things. They either built or they destroy. There is no middle. Thinking when there was a time when black people were thought of, we couldn't be bus drivers because they didn't think we had the mental capacity to do it. We couldn't be quarterbacks because we didn't have the mind capacity to hold the place. When I first came in, nepotism was a really big thing. The dad was the president. He gave it to his son. If you were fortunate to be in that fold, you got selected, but not necessarily because you had, you were thought of as having the ability to do the job. You were the token. You're special. You're not like the others. You speak better. You're kind. We can work with you. Yeah, we can work with you. I mean, yeah, I mean that that's how it was. And so language, when you have language out there that black people are subhuman, we're only three-fifths that and one drop that. We have to change the way we're viewed, spoken about. And I think the language about how we're viewed would change the way we're respected and seen as full, contributing, thinking, feeling beings that happen to be human, you know? So let's think about each other higher. Let's just think higher, more love. That's Michael say, where's the love? So I was, I'm so happy, happy that Margaret mentioned hating because I would like to shout out the haters in this room and because, like, I would like to shout out all the big unions that, you know, ignored causes, formal letters asking for help to come to labor notes. I'd like to thank all the big unions that blocked their own members' resolutions, wouldn't even let the members vote to donate to cause so we could come to labor notes. I'd like to thank the people who offered join or die solidarity where they think that Amazon is the biggest fight and that, oh, we just, we just want you to win. We don't care if you're independent. We don't care who you organize with. But when, when it came to come to labor notes, it was like, well, if you join us, we'll give you a little scratch to come. Thank you all for showing us who you are because we believe you. And, and we're here anyway. And they pointed us to people who do support grassroots independent unions like coworker like Action Network. And, and there are many people in here who support it and that and, and not gatekeeping, like the difference, there was a line we asked for help, like, and our leadership is all black, because it's straight off the floor at Amazon. Amazon's, Amazon's, I guess I'll say that later, I'll talk about Amazon, Amazon demographics later. But it's like, like, when we ask for help, don't take that as an opportunity to gatekeep. Don't take that as an opportunity to, to, to colonize. Yes, that's the word I was going to say. Don't take this as an opportunity to impose control over the workers, over the movements, over the leadership. Stop hating. Okay. But we're here. If you're caught in this room, please make some noise. Yeah, if I can just speak to that because I am a black leader of a predominantly white union. And I was just having some moments, the triggers of like, wow, you're so articulate. Wow, you're just like so Wow. I mean, I had a former leader, I was trying to find my way onto the bargaining team and I kept asking people like, how do you get on the bargaining team? And they just wouldn't tell me. And eventually, the president at the time was like, let's have a drink, let's talk. And she's like, you know, the way you can be on every committee is if you run for president. And I was like, oh, wow, that's cool. And then we left. I was like, wait, she still didn't tell me how to get on the bargaining team. What the heck. And having, you know, I'm, I'm on the spectrum and I think of it as like a protective factor because I don't notice haters. I'm like, oh, they were mad at me about that. That's wild. So after that, I was like, okay, well, then I think I'm going to run for president only to later realize that what she meant was when I'm done. Because, because I would be running against her. And she chose not to run, which was totally fine. So I think, you know, I'm the reason I chose to become part of leadership was because I felt like I had skills I could contribute to my union. I saw district leadership becoming more like being filled with black and brown folks who were skin folk, but not Kim folk right saying and being able to use their faces to call our teachers racist and that's why we can't listen to the union. And I knew that a white face at the front of our union would not be able to combat that to advocate for our kids. And I was like, okay, so I think I can, I can speak to these things. I've lived this experience. I've actually been in the classroom in for the last six years. I can come and do this work. And I think part of that too is making sure that we're also speaking about our own humanity and being public about that. Like during our strike and strike buildup, I would tell people like, I'm a cry every day. I cry. It's just about when and about what, but I'm a cry. And I think it's just because I'm a freaking human being. I'm not this like, so strong and powerful black women like, oh my gosh, you're a superhero. No, I'm a human. I'm a human being who does very difficult work. And sometimes I cry and I'm going to cry and that's okay. And so, you know, I think the ways to support black leaders is to validate that human humanity. It's to have folks who just check in on me and like are like, hey, what do you need right now? How are you doing? And then us doing that for others. Like now Becky Pringle, who is the president of NEA, who is also a strong black woman, she came out for our strike. And I like now send her a message every so often like, I'm thinking about you. I hope you're doing okay. Because even if she's running the largest union in the country, she's still a black woman having to run the largest union in the country. So she needs that support. We should be seeing them. So I think a big part of it is like, don't forget that we're humans. Support us and love us and help us, you know, organizing is community building help us build the community that we all want to live in by treating us like community members to despite our titles. I'm going to start the next question off. I'm going to read a quote. This is a quote from WB Du Bois saying probably no movement in the last 30 years has been so successful in limiting racial prejudice as a labor movement. And he wrote that in 1944. And this is kind of the potential, the keyword being potential of the labor movement. It can be a vehicle for, you know, challenging racial discrimination on the job in society and powering black workers. We know, of course, this does not always happen, but does anyone on the panel maybe have an example or a story of in your union, whether it's your local or nationally, the union being a vehicle for challenging discrimination. Yes. So, in Portland. So, you know, with seniority rights, it's a fundamental part of union work, but we also know that educators of color have been kept out of schools and programs for so long that usually they'll be the first in first out. And so some of the work that we did in our union was to adapt our seniority language to allow for exceptions for race and gender and multilingual ability based on the population of your school. So, and of the like staff so if you are going to now have a faculty that's not going to represent your students, if you let this less senior person go, you can allow them to stay and have someone else be switched out. And I think that was like something to show our members like hey we value the lived experiences that you bring to this work and our kids need to see themselves in their educators. And this is the other piece that we found because the district always talks about you know the disproportionate discipline of our black and brown students. And we asked for a bunch of data and I was like hey guess what, you also disproportionately discipline educators of color. And so don't pretend that this is a racist teacher thing. This is an institutional racism thing, and y'all have a problem you need to fix. And so we, I, every school board meeting that I would speak at I would, I would repeat that data over and over and over again to make sure that they have a problem that they need to fix, not just continue to sweep under the rug while talking about student achievement, because how are kids going to achieve if they see that their teachers every year getting pushed out of their building, because they're getting disciplined they're getting reported to the licensing board, all these other things so what we did as a union was hat we had a mini bargain just on issues that supported educators of color. We won a ton of protections and the language was built with educators of color. So having them come in look at language we were working at working on tell us if it would actually meet the thing that address the concern they were worried about, and then fight for it. We got the district to agree to giving every educator, every educator training on anti racism implicit bias and culturally responsive practices. Just because we were like it's not just that we need to know it is that our co workers need to know it, because I'm tired of them calling me and saying hey, can you come talk to this mom she's really having a hard time and she seems kind of angry and then you show up oh it's a black mom okay I get it, like we want all of us to be moving forward together and it's the union that can ensure that those things happen, regardless of what the employer says they value, because if it's not on paper if it's not in the contract I can't trust that you're going to do it. Super happy that CWA has an anti bias training that all of the executive board and local staff and local leaders have taken right because this was born out of, like you mentioned in the beginning George Floyd. So at that time the executive board voted to create this presentation and to require everyone to take it, right because we noticed when we had an action, a day of action for George Floyd we all decided that we would do it for eight minutes and 40 some odd seconds and on various Facebook pages we saw comments from union members that said I'd rather be taking a shit and so at that point that's when everyone knew that this was a deeper problem and that we needed to run these anti bias trainings as much as possible. Are we past that and in a rainbow utopia of how everyone gets along no we're not singing kumbaya yet. However, this is a marathon and not a sprint and so we will continue to run the trainings and we will continue to let people know that CWA will not stand for racist and I'm so proud to be a part of this organization. You know I had a perfectly orchestrated story I was going to tell and then I look up and I see this room and we have an example here right in front of us as union workers coming together to fight. And the diversity in this room if you look around it shows the power that we harness and we are the leaders and we lead the way so you should give yourself a pause for the way that this room looks right now. So it's simply about us and everyone here coming together the way that we have taken an energy and go into our perspective residences and just spinning it all around us. Making sure that everybody fills it everybody joins on board and this is how we're going to win with a room like this and creating more rooms like this. This is the power that we have to make a change. Thank you. So this is where I'll talk about Amazon's demographic. So there are Amazons all over the country and I know that the demographics are different. I'll tell you what it's like in North Carolina. If you walk into an Amazon facility it's like walking into an HBCU. It is 60 percent black people. It's 20 percent Latinos. It's 10 percent African North African immigrants and then 10 percent white people. All right. Now in management it's 80 percent white people right and it's very obvious they don't promote from the floor. They act like they do right. But people like there is a position that should be an assistant manager. It's called a process assistant. None of the names make sense in Amazon. But like you might get a process assistant but for a process assistant that is black to get promoted to a manager. It's like oh maybe a one in a hundred chance. But for some reason 80 percent of the white people make it in there. But this is not just like at our location across Amazon the what they call like the they literally call us the field workers. Anyway our it's 50 percent black and Latino and in management it is 80 percent white and Asian. It is this company is structured this way in such a way that the people who are working until they faint are black and brown and the people who shoot themselves in the space are white. OK. And I'm happy you started with a W.E.B. Du Bois quote because the original labor movement is not a white man in a hard hat. It is the black people who are brought human trafficked here to be exploited for their labor. OK. And W.E.B. Du Bois talks about the general strike that now the general strike that ended slavery right is not often acknowledged. A lot of slave revolts were not acknowledged. They used to call them on the ships insurrection of cargo because they called us cargo during the Civil War. They called it contraband of war because they taught talked about us as though we were items. OK. But during that situation two hundred thousand black people left the plantations and fought the people who oppressed them. All right. This is another unnamed slave revolt. This one's called a Union Drive and we openly call I mean everyone calls Amazon the plantation. We call this a everyone calls this a everyone calls Amazon a plantation. This is a slave revolt and we're taking it to the top. So I think this will be the last question before throwing out to Q&A from the audience. But you know all of us we've had someone who's paved the way for us. You know my first labor conference was 2010. You know someone who mentored me paid for my flight to come introduced me to the labor movement. So the last question is you know who paved the way for you. And what do you hope to leave behind for the next generation. Have to say it's Mrs. Thelma Jean Rimmer. She was the custodian on my floor and she was ready to step down. And she said Margaret I want you to take the VP of Memphis and no one had ever asked me to be in a leadership position for anything. And I was shocked. You know. But what that also showed me was you know for years I had been stuck in the administrative assistant box for over 25 years. I could never be promoted to an advisor. Right. I couldn't be promoted to another part of the campus. I had to stay in that box. But it was through the union that I was able to come out and be a leader. And I will be always grateful to Mrs. Thelma Jean Rimmer for seeing the leader in me and making sure that I made that step. Paul I didn't know you was opening it up for shout outs. So there were two individuals that were truly instrumental in me getting involved and saw a man that had skills that were not being used. And I thought that all the skills that I had would have been for corporate America and turns out that they can be used to fuel a labor movement as well. But those two individuals are Isaac Gobble and Nick Perry. Thank you. I have to the only person I was honored to call my boss. Candy Landers who was the secretary treasure of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union saw my cultural gifts and sent me to my other mentor Elise Bryant. Told me I reminded her of Elise and sent me to my first summer school for women workers through the University of Michigan. And it was like I had met my twin. So I'd like to thank her for being a visionary. I would say my grandmother just because anyone know the poem Don't Quit. From a very small age she would always tell me that read that poem to me and not coming from a union household. But I think it'd be my grandma and leading the way like I'm the very first woman of color. But it's like now that I'm here I didn't have someone before me but I'm going to make sure that like I bring everyone along to make sure that there continues to be representation in our union and in the labor movement. Yeah I mean I think it's there's definitely strong black women in our union who paved the way and in Portland it has to be multi racial. So I think you know Nicole Watson Marguerite Peoples Paula oh just folks who really held that line that slowly disappeared as I showed up being like oh wait but you know we're human and sometimes we're done. So I think them and then also I want to give a shout out to some of the folks who are like our Latino folks who were also there Alicia Chavez downing who was our secretary for so many years and made sure to put in the minutes all the foul things people said and made sure that they were documented and like so that she could give us that history and keep us going and moving forward and Rachel Haynes who helped start with Alicia our Portland caucus of rank and file educators where a lot of our educators of color found a space to really start talking about union issues. I think those are really the folks who kind of made sure that we had a space and held the line so that when I came in like hey we're going to take over a union right. It wasn't just kind of flying in blind they knew where those pieces needed to be moved and how to move them. And I could just be there to support and use the skills that I had so shout out to them for paving paving the way for me there's only one answer. It is our co-founder of cause Miss Mary Hill Miss Mary Hill we stand up. So let me say say I'm not done. We actually got y'all beat on the most years young and union leadership. My Mary is 69 it will be 70 next week. And and in addition to leading the fight against Amazon while working full time at Amazon. My Mary is fighting cancer. And what we are trying to do before we leave here is to fundraise enough money for my Mary to go and flex so she doesn't have to recover from chemotherapy on Jeff Bezos dystopian plantation. So if you all will raise up my Mary with me I got a little song. Alright Mary Hill is a freedom fighter and she taught us how to fight. And we gonna fight all day and night until we get it right. Which side are you on my people which side are you on. Which side are you on my people which side are you on. You're supposed to say we're on the freedom side we'll try one more time. Which side are you on my people which side are you on. We're on the freedom side which side are you on my people which side are you on. Thank you. Lynn you got out of the performance you got out of it. You got out of it. Okay. Alright after Q&A stick around you're going to get a performance. Can we get another round to the panel before we go to Q&A. So we do have some time for questions. I'm thinking maybe the best way to do this is we can take maybe a handful all at once and then throw it to the panel and see we have some time for more. So if you want to raise your hand I'll try to call on people across the room. Okay. Do you think could you project without a mic? No. Okay. We can start there in the red. Hello everybody. Hi. I'm full with emotions. So I'm a very passionate person. So I'm going to do my best because I have so much to say. Thank you guys for this amazing panel. I am a nurse. I am here representing NNU, National Nurses United. I sit on the board of directors for the California Nurses Association. I, you guys did an amazing job. The only thing I would add is I really wish you had someone from healthcare sitting up there with you. Because there's so much that is going on in healthcare in our community that we need to talk about. Especially when we're talking about intergenerational changes, right? One amazing thing NNU does every year is they send us to Selma. I went there to the Legacy Museum. My name is Mawata Kama. My name is Mawata Kamara. I am African. My father is a Mendingoman. My mother is Cron. I came here because of a war in my country years ago. When I went to this museum, the way that I felt, the anger that I felt. I now realize when they say all the time the angry black woman I knew from walking to that museum that our anger was justified. And I was not ashamed to be that woman, right? So I took this back to where I work. I begin involving a union first of all because I'm a nurse from the East Coast. I decided to be a travel nurse. I traveled all over the place. My first job was at Johns Hopkins. I worked at Yale. I worked at every hospital throughout the country and ended up in California. So when I got to my little safety net hospital where black and brown people are the primary people who were being treated and the way we were doing things was not right. I was obligated to speak up. And when I spoke up, every time I spoke up, I knew I had a target on my back. And it was in a wine garden with a union rep who saw how I represented myself and said, you need to be a union rep. And that's just how I got here. People who didn't look like me saw my potential and they lifted me up. And I've been fighting this fight for a very long time. And I really need everyone in this room to really just that we were talking about my sister Mary here. We all need healthcare. We cannot escape it. We all need healthcare. And we saw what happened with COVID. Right. And for being in the union, that's not only fighting for language to prevent discrimination within our hospitals to encourage leaders like me to speak up. When management wants to fight back and retaliate, it's so very important. So when we're in the communities and we're pushing for things to fight for our community, we need the collective voices from all over the place. Because when I'm going to the board of supervisors and saying, this is what's happening in your hospital, I need a community to back me up. And that's just what it is. Our partnerships are so very important. I may not have so much to say. I'm just going to try to keep it short, but I just want to tell you guys all thank you for your leadership. Thank you for this amazing presentation. Literally every single one of you, as you were telling your stories, I saw me in some of your stories. I've been through the whole, oh, you hang out with too many other people too much. You talk a certain way while you really talk really nice for a black person, then they're done that. And all I have to say is like, I know my cause is deeply rooted in the community that I serve. So it's never touched me. Not one bit doesn't even matter. It's the person that was saying it looked just like me. I know why I'm there. So just thank you for this. It was amazing. I just wanted to address you really quickly. Maybe you came in after our introductions, but I represent 130,000 people across the country. Out of the public health care and education worker sector. We have nurses, right? And we do support our nurses in Buffalo and New Jersey and Denver and California. I can go on and on and on. So I understand your struggle. I actually made a friend. Her name is Sharifa. We met upstairs and we've been hanging together for about two days and she's been alone by herself. And I recognize that she probably didn't have anyone to sit and eat dinner with. And so I made sure that I was, you know, kind of a guide for her at her first labor notes. So you are not alone and you will never be alone. My sister. Any other questions? I want to try and get. And thank you so much for this presentation. I'm a nurse from Minnesota Nurses Association. And last year we did pass in the House of Delegates to require elected leaders from the union to take these anti-racial, anti-racism training. So I just wanted to ask Miss Angela and Miss Margaret, like how it's been working for you guys and like, how do you, what have you seen that your training had transformed your union? Maybe we'll take like two more questions and then panel can respond. You know, I came to this of the labor notes and I'm a PCA, a personal care attendant. And I didn't hear them say anything about personal care attendants because we're the first, we are the platform to keep people at home in their housing. Make sure they don't go to nursing homes. They don't go to nursing homes. I'm a living caregiver. My latest person was delivered to be 103. That was because of me. And I just want to say that, you know, they always say that we're never, we're not in order. We're not respectful. We don't know how to act, but I can say that we know how order is. We know what respect is. I see this all around in my sister's, my brother sitting here and we know how to act. So being, you know, to say that, to say this, we all got to come together. Red, black, brown, I don't care. We all got red blood. I wouldn't know you if you bled, if you didn't have no color. And so we're in this together and we got to stop acting like and turning our heads and stuff like that. When somebody's talking about somebody or doing something, call that person out. I mean, I'm tired of this. I'm in a place and I said, you know, I closed my eyes act like I'm tired and stuff. I hear everything that people is talking about. You know, every eye clothes ain't sleep. That's what my mama told me. That's how she caught me up with a lot of stuff because I thought she was asleep, but I just want to say that and call them out. And then you say, you, anybody got any, cause I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm 66 and I'm a retiree and I'm very busy and with everybody's lives and doing things. But we got to, we got to renew. We got to take care of our self care and ourselves, call that person out, say what's going on, talk about it. And what's the, and then you say anybody got anything to say about anybody? Ain't nobody got nothing to say, but they've been talking about everybody all day long in there and carrying on. It's crazy. And then you leave the bill, leave it out and they go, say, oh, I wanted to say, I said, girl, I don't want to hear nothing. You got to say, because when I called you out, y'all out, you out and you act like you didn't have nothing to say, but you was busy body with everybody in there. So you understand and you know who, what, what's going on. So just take care of yourselves, take care of other people and make sure that you know what's going on with the elderly. They're so low. They don't know what's going on. And you know who's so low. There was, during the pandemic, there were so many elderly people that died in their homes and nobody, they ain't talking about that. You know, so we take care of yourselves, take care of the elderly, take care of people you don't know are young, the mental issues that's going on. It's just crazy out here. That's because we all are into ourselves and we should be all into our communities. Thank you. My name is Gabrielle Prosser. I'm a member of the Bakers Union, the BCTGM. There's actually a strike that just wrapped up down in Memphis, Tennessee of the BCTGM local 390G. I'm in Minneapolis, but this was against IFF, International Flavors and Fragrances, which is owned by DuPont. They just went back to work, mostly, you know, black workers there. One of them there, I think it was his great uncle was in the sanitation strike, a historical strike where the I am a man sign came from. So that's, you know, the continuity of workers going back to the civil rights movement, you know, which was predominantly working class mass mobilization that overthrew Jim Crow segregation and brought down barriers for black workers including like affirmative action to go into industry and for black and white workers to be shoulder to shoulder to fight against them. So that's against the boss together. So my question is, you know, how does that history of the courageous and disciplined struggle of black workers in America lend itself to the workers' struggles of today? Do you want to do around maybe a panel responses? Okay, go ahead. My name is Laura, I'm in SMART, I'm a railroad conductor in Miami and I'm in the Socialist Workers Party. Okay, I wanted to say, I see wherever I've worked on the airlines or wherever I've worked different jobs, black, specifically African American mainly because of the forging of the black nationality and struggle from the Civil War, right, overturning slavery to today, the reconstruction period, civil rights, many things you can talk about. I pointed that one, that's the weighty role workers who are black play in the union leadership because of the history and forging a vanguard fighter for our class. That's how I see it. I see Malcolm X was a hero to me and brought me, that's what I said, who is this person? Why is he of such dignity? He's not afraid to die and he's telling the truth. And I think for many working people, specifically black, but for all shades, pigments, and he became an internationalist. He started talking about the exploited and exploiters and started seeing how to get rid of racism. It's not saying the white man's the double anymore. I thought he was a revolutionary then too, but he changed as he went through life, you know, and left the nation and became an internationalist and looked to more of a class perspective, which I just think is important if anybody wants to address it. One of the teams brother, he came from another class, sounds like, and he decided I want to go to the work back to the working class. Good choice. We can win some over, right? We're not going to start there. And that's how I just wanted to say that. Now, I think someone wanted you to address demands that can help us speed the day to get rid of capitalism, which nurtures the divisions. It doesn't come from when you're born. It comes from the boss class. So demand for, for example, the family unit center women, especially if you're black or press nationally, but the women, we face the crisis. The whole family faces the crisis. We need to fight for things that we want to have a family. Do we need daycare? What about parental leave? And if you want a legal safe abortion, but all of those things, which help you fight in the movement and speed the day because you need time to do that. Somebody raised this, I think it was a nurse on a panel. She goes, oh yeah, in Texas, she goes, we need daycare so I can be out there. But anyway, those, these are demands through unions or commute. We need to, you know, something to help us play a role and speed the day to unify our unions and fight. And it's, it's, it's on the road to getting rid of racism and sexism. That's, that's my thought. All right. We panelists want to find any comments and questions. I can address the lady that just spoke up. There is a, there is something to what you say. And coming up, you know, I was told I could be successful by riding through corporate America. And we get tied up in these position and titles that they hand us to believe us to think that we're someone important when we're doing this, all at the hand of someone else's bidding. And we're trapping other workers into a box that they can't get out of and take an advantage of that system that's still taking advantage of us, right? And at the end of the day, we're losing and we're causing others to lose behind that. So I have a lot to make up for and I know that and I am not happy about the things I did as being a management and being a leadership and doing it all for a pat on the head until being told I did a good job as I'm a pressing a worker. So I'm here to atone and I'm here to do the best that I can moving forward to strengthen this movement and make up for the things I've done in the past. So I do appreciate you speaking to that. And I hope myself accountable every day for what I do on the job. Moving forward. So I'm going to address your question. And like I said, it's a marathon and not a sprint. I just got a text message from someone out in the audience that let me know there is a region of our union where the staff has not gone through the anti bias training. So, you know, that's something that I will probably have to bring up on the executive board and see where we're at with that. But I can say because of the union and because of this position at a hold now, this is the first time in my life where I finally have pay equity with my white counterparts. That is a big deal. However, I am not treated the same. And so the fight still continues. You are not going to talk to me any kind of way you don't get to yell at me. I'm not frying fries and McDonald's. I'm sitting on the executive board with you. You will treat me with respect and you have to demand it. They're not going to just give it to you. Yeah. And I just wanted to speak to the two questions that I heard. So I think around the trainings and how it has informed and supported our union. So when we won that language back in 2020, we had leadership that was doing their best to advocate to make that happen, but it wasn't happening. Right. And so when I came in, I kind of made it a priority to make sure that we were pushing this forward from our district. But then we also created a training for ourselves as the union to give our own members because the idea was we can make through our bosses because they can make it mandatory. But we can't mandate that our members go to this training, but now I'm like, but I'm going to get those leaders in. But I think what we started doing was a training that was that I helped create with another educator of color. Another Afro Latina and then two white educators where the first two sessions are just giving the basics of the manifestations of racism and how race has impacted labor and labor history and our own timeline as a union and our state. And then the last three sessions are just scenarios coming from our own jobs of like, how do you address when racist shit comes up during your with your boss or your parents that you're supporting or your colleagues and your fellow members. Right. And what would you do while also looking through our contract and identifying places where racial justice and racial equity is embedded and having folks identify that because often they're like, well this person sucks at my job. And I don't know what to do about it. And I'm like, we have language for that. 23.16 is my favorite because it's about a respectful working environment and and like we can grieve you for being a racist boss for being a piece of shit and we have that ability. And so being able to train our members on that helps us also give remind them of the power they have to fight back. While we're pushing the employer to ensure that those who are not going to opt in have to learn, they got to learn because we don't have time for this. And I think to the question around like the history of the African American struggle as an Afro Latina my parents are immigrants of the Dominican Republic. Yeah, what's up. Yeah, what's up. And so I always want to make sure folks know that I am black, but I am not African American, because that is a struggle in a story that is very important but not mine to own because my family chose to come here. Right, which is not that same story but I benefit from those struggles and I want to continue to recognize and acknowledge those struggles and speak to them and educate as much as I can because that is, you know, we are. We're standing on the shoulders of giants and it's every single African American and black person who came before me who did this work, who had to deal with the indignities and continue to keep that dignity and continue to fight that we now can do this so that I just wanted to speak to those two questions. I wanted to speak to the question about the legacy of the civil rights movement. So there's so much of that for me I'm wearing right now I'm wearing a shirt that says learn from the past organized for the future. I got this from the SNCC digital gateway project when they were celebrating the sick. You all know what SNCC is. I'm just making sure man I got to make sure I talked to so many people who don't engage with the black radical tradition that don't know our freedom struggle that don't recognize it as a part of the labor struggle and so I got to make sure that's why I asked. But with the like SNCC is what convinced me to organize like my parents did not send me to college to be a community organizer. They sent me to college to become Kamala Harris and but what SNCC said was that everything that black people have is owed to the mass struggle of the black working class. And so we owe everything to the struggle of the mass working like to the to the struggle of black working class people and that we need to redefine success for ourselves. Success is not getting a job at IBM. It's not individual success. It is going back into your community to organize. And that that inspired me and they started a student organizers. They created integration with their bodies in the sit ins once again started in North Carolina. And it's Nick also started in North Carolina at Shaw University. It is a really deep like this this tradition is living and the the SNCC people are still alive and they and they get together. And when they had their reunion for the 60th anniversary of SNCC I was there and they invited all the active college students and that's I got to learn from my elders. And like that is what convinced me to invest my life in organizing as opposed to making change for working class people through direct action as opposed to trying to work within the system. Right. And I will say that in continuing this legacy because it's not just what brought me in but it is continued through my work. One of the projects that we are working on for assaults is to get students. I'm not sure if you'll notice but students are kind of popping over Palestine right now. But what happens to these student movements during election years every time what happened to the Black Lives Matter movement. What happened to Defund the Police. What happened to Occupy Wall Street. And so and I they're going to be doing voter registration for the Democratic Party in three months if they don't have a plan. And we're trying to give a plan for people to have a freedom summer and come assault at Amazon and help us win this campaign. And we have partnered with university professors to set up internships and fellowships so that they you know have something to tell their parents that they're doing. During the during the summer and also to like as an incentive so that we can redefine success as coming back to your community to organize. And I came straight out of SNCC. I come straight out of the civil rights movement and it's happening right now. I just have to say this response to Daryl it turns out you can make more driving a UPS truck than being a dam manager anyway. So there you go. So we've been we've been at it a while and I think a good place to end would be Lynn. Go ahead. The floor is yours. Thank you. Just briefly the I'm working on a piece called The Wizard of Nozama which is Amazon spelled backwards. So we go and let's organize Nozama. But the the Labor Heritage Foundation for those of you that don't know exists to highlight and hold space for the artists the creatives and cultural workers in our labor movement. We're a small nonprofit whose mission is to honor the arts the storytellers and the history holders. We've been holding space to share and exchange labor art of all forms now for 40 years. We hold the great labor arts exchange convening every single year and partner with labor notes every other year. We're honored to be here. And as a cultural artist and organizer though what I do is entertaining. This is not just entertainment. This is educational and it's transformational. So what I'd like you to do is help me clap like this. It's an economic trend. It's an economic trend. The boss cuts back on what he spends by hiring lots of part time workers. Here just last week in my workplace the boss walked right up to my face and said I'm replacing you with I just grab a cup of coffee on the run. To serve at night and to 40 hours a week would be full time. They've scheduled me for the stuff it's do I receive no overtime no basic leave because I am just he and she are watch out because they made me. Organize, organize, organize, organize. You too will be apart.