 Hello, I apologize for all our technical difficulties today. We're glad to have this conversation and we're very grateful for you all for joining us to listen today. My name is Kari Barclay. I'm the Community Engagement Coordinator for the San Francisco Mime Troop. I want to give a huge thank you to the San Francisco Public Library for hosting us today. And a thank you all to you all for listening. We are here today for a panel on dignity and labor, a chance to talk with an artist, a journalist, and have some conversations about what labor looks like in the era of 2020 and all the dynamics that are going on around us. I want to acknowledge that the San Francisco Public Library is on the land of the Olone people and that as somebody broadcasting from Berkeley, I'm also on Olone land. I welcome you to go ahead and think about sort of what land you are right now. And if you want to post in the YouTube chat, even after the fact, that's fine by us. I would love to introduce our two guests for today. We have Kiko Shimasato Carrero, who is a longtime Mime Trooper, is a costume designer, a performer award-winning who's worked around the Bay and has been a collective member for the Mime Trooper for many years. So thank you, thank you so much, Kiko for joining us. As well, we have Steve Zeltzer, who is a labor journalist who produces the weekly labor show on KPOO called Workweek. And he is a producer of labor video documentaries, including Halfway to Hell, the workers and unions that built the Golden Gate Bridge, narrated by Danny Glover and Hanning Iron after the Quake of 89. And he's co-founder of Laborfest.net, which commemorates the San Francisco 1934 general strike. He also works with the Pacifica Network as an executive producer of COVID, race, and democracy. And he has produced a multimedia production for Mayday 2020, that's at mayday.pacifica.org. So we're excited to hear from both of y'all. I'll give you a chance to introduce yourself. Specifically, you can go ahead and describe, Kiko, how you got involved with the Mind Troop and then Steve, how you got involved in doing labor journalism. And then a question that I'll have for both of you is a habit or hobby that you've picked up over COVID. It's completely a non-productive thing, just something that's just, you've picked up in your free time that, or if you have free time these days, that you enjoy these days. So cool. So let's go ahead, Kiko, and get us started. Okay. Hi, I'm Kiko Shimosa of Carrero, and I am a collective member with the San Francisco Mind Troop. I've been one for over 30 years now. I'm not sure how much over 30, it's something like 35. I don't know how that happened because I joined when I was 26 in like the late 80s. And my way of joining was by auditioning for a remount of the Dragon Ladies Revenge, which was remounted in 1987. And so I did a tour and then sort of got curious about what was happening around the building. Heard these really loud meetings around the round table in the kitchen where things were thrown across the room, more than just words sometimes. And so I was both intrigued and afraid, but at the end of that tour I was asked if I would be interested in joining the collective. And at that time, the first time I actually said no. I was like, I was a little too scared. I was like, yeah, maybe not yet. So I then stuck around and built props and did do another show. And the second time I said yes, and I've been there ever since. Habit or hobby that I've picked up, you know what's crazy? You'd think that during a shelter in place during a pandemic, I would have free time. And I am now looking back like very fondly at those early like March days, like March and April when I did have some free time. And I'm now looking at like 10 hour Zoom days, 11 hour Zoom days with different projects. And I'm very glad to say I'm directing a virtual play now. So I guess that's my new hobby. Hey, that is plenty to take on time these days. Well, that's one of the interesting things about Zoom workplaces these days and these digital workplaces is labor can expand. That might be its own topic for us to explore. Well, congrats on the show. What's the show that you're directing? Ah, well, I started a theater company just before the pandemic hit. So the company is Kunoichi Productions, which means female ninja productions. And the play is the true tale of Princess Kaguya, which is based on a traditional folk tale of a Japanese princess sent from the moon. However, our tale is not traditionally told. It's told from a feminist point of view and it's a kind of a gender queer positive retelling of the story. And it'll be up in November through Playgrounds. Oh, great, excellent. Yeah, that's great. Well, I'm excited, I'm excited to check it out. And for those who don't know, Kika was talking about all those conversations, the Mime Troop, the loud conversations, the Mime Troop is a collectively run, sort of worker run, yeah, theater company. And so from that perspective, we have to have all of our conversations about the management, about like how things work within the company. And so that's an exciting sort of just structure that speaks to our values. And I will say, since I couldn't say before, this summer we are doing a podcast series and that is the occasion for this discussion. So Tales of the Resistance, all nine of our episodes are happening throughout the summer and into the fall. So that is why we're here today. So Steve, I'd love to give you a chance to introduce yourself. Just tell us your name, how do you got involved in Labor Journalism? And yeah, again, another habit or hobby that you've picked up over the course of COVID. Okay, well, I was active in the 60s against the Vietnam War and organized protests. And I ended up at San Francisco States during the strike. I was active politically in the strike. And as a journalist there covering the strike before our newspaper was shut down by Hayakawa, the president. And I ended up working, since I was on strike, I was a library worker at San Francisco State, which had a union and the ILWU, the longshore union, offered all strikers the opportunity to work on the docks as longshore workers. So I started working as a longshore worker and I loved it. I loved the work on the docks. You could work when you wanted to and it's a camaraderie collective work group, actually. So they have a lot of power, the union and the members. So I was involved in the strike and I did, you know, covered it and then after I went to work, I became an engineer and I became active trying to get labor information on workers' information. So when I discovered community access, that was an opportunity to have uncensored labor programming. So we had one of the first labor shows on community access called Labor on the Job, which lasted about 10 years and of an hour-long weekly show on what's happening with edited pieces and interviews with trade unionists. And we formed a network, a national network, international network of labor producers who wanted to get workers' stories out and labor issues. So, and I also got involved in labor history, labor education and one of the things about San Francisco is there was a general strike here in 1934 that was launched as a result of the murder of two striking workers, two workers were killed and it led to a general strike in San Francisco and that general strike was successful. It shut down not just San Francisco but other parts of the Bay Area and as a result of that, hundreds of thousands of workers joined unions and that's why the Bay Area is more unionized than many other places in the United States because of general strikes and that's why the capitalists don't like general strikes because general strikes bring all the working class together and it becomes harder to fire people who wanna join unions. You might have 1,000, 2,000 people at your doorstep if you fire somebody who's trying to organize a union. So I had been working in developing documentaries when I was working and I produced video documentaries. It was on KQED with Danny Glover who I went to school with and then fighting for a national labor channel, international labor channel that will tell workers' stories and there's a political vacuum, there's a media vacuum as far as working class voices and issues and the development of the internet has provided a vehicle for having broadcasts and platforms where working people can tell their stories and most people use social media for their prior to Black Lives Matter, for their personalized but now social media is being really used by fighters against racism, it's being used by workers and Bella Russ for example, they're using Telegram to the unions to get stuff out live. So the potential is for an international labor channel that would broadcast issues of working people around the world and I think information is power, communication information is critical for working people and also dealing with how technology and communication technology is being used against working people by Facebook, by other companies because Google and these companies are tracking us and they're actually spying on workers who are trying to organize as a matter of fact. So it's a, but you have to understand it and then we've started a thing called labortech.nip in 1990, that was actually before the web to discuss how technology is affecting working people because technology is introduced in the workplace unlike Sweden for example, there's no examination of the effect of technology on workers before it's introduced in the workplace. And so we had conferences on education and technology and we've been focusing also on the gig economy and how these platforms have been used to, far from freeing workers, they've been further exploiting workers and I was at a conference in Seoul, labor com and spoke at National University, a labor media conference and at that time that was in 1999. There was a professor there who wrote an article called The Beeper Revolution and the Beeper Revolution was how the bosses were gonna get rid of all the workers, regular workers and then they only work when they're beeped. This was in 1999. Oh wow. That was like a prelude to what we have today where everybody's waiting for their application but basically technology should be used to free people instead under capitalism it's being used to further exploit people. You're tethered to the internet, you're running around and you're waiting on this and waiting on that and there's no free time. Even workers who work at home, they're being tracked. So all these issues, technology, communication, media are critical for working people to organize to understand what's going on, to educate ourselves and art and music is a way of, in a creative way, expressing what's happening and that's why I really am glad we're fortunate enough to have the Mind Troop here as a collective organizing, educating and using their art and their abilities to get the word out in a popular way, so. Yeah, it sounds like, thank you, thank you for that. And there's seemingly like so many connections between our work both in terms of, I just love how you're recognizing the Bay Area just has such a unique labor history that's so necessary to bring forward and all those questions about what technology means are for labor are very much what this episode of Tales of the Resistance is about it's set at this corporation jamazon.com that's sort of talking about the intersection of tech and labor. So I'm excited for us to crack into that to get us started with that conversation. I would love to share with us a little clip from episode five. This is the title of this episode is a Jade for hire, the keys of the wrinkled egg. And this is building on a previous episode where one of our characters, Jade, is trying to find the solve a mystery of a worker at jamazon.com who's been who's been fired for trying to organize and he cracks back into the gets back into the Amazon Amazon headquarters and he witnesses a scene before him. And this scene is what I'm about to play for you. Some workers are all gathered in a conference room. We have to band together. Yeah. To demand representation. Yeah. And to demand respect. Yeah. Right now your representative Enrique Flores is upstairs meeting with Chip Bonzo, the owner of Jamazon negotiating the best deal he can get. Yeah. Wait a minute, Enrique Flores, I know him. You do? Sure, he's a pal. We trained to be organizers together. Didn't know he ended up at Jamazon. Sounds like a right guy. He is. Flores is up there hammering out what's best for all of us, engineers and drivers. Yeah. He'll never knuckle under. Order pickers and packers. Yeah. And he will never let the workers down. Stewards, foremen, managers and owners. Yeah. Wait, what? Even the stockholders, all of us must unite. The owners? The stockholders? During these difficult times, everyone in the Jamazon family has to come together. But what about the union? What is a union, really? A bunch of people working together towards a common goal. And don't all of us at Jamazon, all of us from the top down, want the same thing? But the bosses don't. Do we really need some outside agitator coming in here, telling us how to run our shop? Yes, a union is a wonderful thing. But aren't we already united? We're a family. Would you want some outsider coming into your home, dividing your family, splitting the kids from their parents, taking them from the home they love, making them into orphans and aren't unemployed workers just like orphaned children? Wandering the streets, cold, alone, no one to look to for comfort. I don't want to be an orphan. What about us getting paid nothing while the boss makes all that money? Is that all family means to you? No, but money? I guess it's just like the bosses say. Some of the workers are just jealous of them. And jealousy, my friends, is a terrible thing. Wait a minute. What does Flores say about all this? Who are you? A friend. You don't work here? I used to, but now... So, you're an outsider. Well, we did come from outside. This is none of your business. I just can't believe that the pre-care would... Agitator of your shop! I'll stop us there. All right. So, as maybe you can tell, you heard Kaco's voice there in that little excerpt. And it's something it's presenting as kind of this rhetoric that's coming from above, from bosses, from managers, that like a whole workplace is a family, including as a corporation. I've definitely seen the COVID era, all sorts of advertisements of like, Walmart is thanking its essential workers and that aren't you proud to be working on Amazon and like keeping the infrastructure going. And this rhetoric that's trying to value workers, but it's within a framework that doesn't necessarily empower them. So I'd be eager to hear from each of you sort of what you think worker power means and what does genuine worker power look like, both within the context that you've worked in or just in general, what you think... Yeah, what you think worker power... What does that mean for you when you hear the phrase worker power? And let's start with Steve. Well, workers power means the right to free speech, the right to speak up and the right to organize around work side issues, the right to work, to organize over all issues. I consider labor issues, all issues. Working class issues are racism, it's the house society's organized sexism, war, these are all issues that working people face and the climate, I mean, every issue is an issue, is a worker issue from my point of view. And I think that the structure of American unions is the unions are for the most part, organized around the business, business unionism, which is that workers are mainly organizing, negotiating contracts with employers. And that's a very kind of confined thing because as we see now this pandemic, the issue of worker health and safety is not just a contractual issue with the employer. In California, for example, there are less than 200 inspectors at Kalosha for 18 million workers, which is inconceivable, inconceivable in this pandemic. And unfortunately, the unions have not demanded that there be a thousand, they're massive inspectors to make sure that the health and safety laws are enforced. Well, this part of the problem of the lack of workers power in this country are workers are not organized and they don't have power and they rely on structures which are corporate type structures. And that has to change if workers are gonna be able to defend themselves. So self-organization, free speech and an end to the fear that workers have, if they speak out, they'll be retaliated against. And millions of workers would like to join unions, but 12,000 are fired every year simply for saying they wanna join a union. They're coerced, Google workers are coerced, Google workers who speak out around issues are fired. And it's the same at many companies if you speak out, you're putting your job in jeopardy. So that has to change and workers power can change that. Yeah. I really appreciate what you said about how thinking about worker organizing is something that talks about political issues like across the spectrum. You had mentioned the IOWU earlier, the Longshoremen Union and something we'd been talking about before we went online was the strike on Juneteenth. The Oakland dock workers were essentially striking in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and how thinking about those general strikes that you mentioned and that you were doing the documentaries around, there's aren't always around an individual workplace, they're around politics more broadly and they're around just being able to exert political demands as a whole. And so I think that vision of worker power is political power and it goes into all sectors. I find that really inspiring. Kiko, tell us what does worker power mean to you or any other responses to that little clip from the episode? Oh, well, I have some responses to that clip. The first thing is that whenever I hear my own voice, I'm like, oh, that's how I sound. So, but I just want to say because it doesn't say in that clip but the character's name is McParlin and so kind of based on this Pinkerton labor spy, just a little inside thing. Worker owner power is, I mean, because at the Mime Troop we are a collective but I'm also a worker owner, we are all worker owners. So along with the feeling of empowerment, we also have a feeling of great responsibility because we collectively own the building or we're responsible for maintaining the building where we rehearse and build costumes and props and sets and all of that. And what the flip side, the benefit of that responsibility to me is that we as a collective organization make the choices and decisions as far as like, do we want healthcare? Well, we can't afford healthcare, but we need healthcare. Okay, well, that's the priority. We're gonna raise funds or look into, somebody needs to research that. So being able to bring up what it is that is most important in this moment. Like, I think I was the first one who had a baby within this last 20 years. And so when that happened, the issue of, well, childcare, that's the necessary thing. We need to like think about that. I feel empowered that I can bring that up in the Roundtable Collective Meeting discussion and say, well, first of all, we need to, we need to babyproof this building because my kid's gonna have to be here because I can't afford daycare. And then, you know, we also discuss, well, let's make it so that I can't afford daycare. I mean, it's great to be able to rehearse with a baby in a backpack, but at the same time, it's been great to, it really feels like a family or certainly a community, a real community where we can tell each other what we need. And then we, when we're being our best, we try to make it work for one another. And I feel like that also goes for our hiring practices, both, you know, from the top down, from our board, because we're a nonprofit and a 501C3, we need to have a board, but we want our board to represent us and our community. So we would like it to have women and men and people of all races, be multi-generational if possible. And that's the same with the Collective and our acting company as well. So that feels like a lot of power. I mean, I take it, maybe I take it for granted a little bit because most of my jobs, because when I got into theater as an actor of color, the options of going into a primarily white organization theater weren't really available to me. I tried, I really did, I would audition and get really close, but the plays that felt more interesting to me were the original plays that dealt with the issues of people of color and of, you know, the underrepresented and the oppressed. So that kind of put me into the alternative theater vein. And many of the organizations that I've worked with have been collaboratives or collectives or at least, you know, trying to work with an alternative governance. So I, having worked at other theaters where it's really a luxury, it really is a luxury to just come in for rehearsals, go away, have a dressing room, I am not knocking that. And yet at the same time, I don't get to say to the director or the general manager, you know, this isn't right. This isn't working for me. So, and yes, I'm an equity actor as well. So I am a union actor and I can complain through my union, but it's so much easier just to complain to my family and talk it out. So that's it in a little nutshell. Totally, and yeah, I think, so in my mind, so much of what building worker power is about is also building in that cognizance of identity because like the working class, we all have our own identities in different ways. And like, I've been trying to, I'm a graduate student down at Stanford and I've been trying to organize graduate students and workers down there around childcare. That same thing that you went to the collective with and it takes like, it took like four, five plus years of just talking to graduate students or the young kids in order to be able to actually get a campaign around this and ask the administration for it. And there are just so many different steps. And it might have been a challenge even within a collective context, but just in a non-collective hierarchical context, it's so much harder to fight for things like gender equity. And so I really appreciate what you're saying about recognizing that the structures that have worker power also tend to be the ones that tend to be employing anti-racist frameworks and thinking about social justice holistically. So I really appreciate that. Steve, I'd like to ask you in terms of your work on the show Workweek and through other bits of journalism, what function do you see journalism as having and contributing to worker power? And you talked about sort of amplifying working class voices, like how do you use journalism and what appeals to you about journalism as a medium? Well, I think journalists should have a responsibility to get the stories out and the real issues facing, from my point of view, the working class, the working people and all people, actually. But journalism is in a capitalist society is controlled by the capitalist for profit. And what is happening in capitalism now is that capitalists are destroying journalism. There are tens of thousands of journalists have been laid off mass unemployment among journalists. So the ability of people to cover stories have been limited. I mean, journalism requires time to do a story, to investigate and that kind of thing. So most journalists now, probably in the United States, are freelance. They're not working for regular newspapers. And I'm in the journalist union, the newspaper guild and Pacific Media Workers Guild. But a large number of our members are now freelance workers. And so this prevents people from doing their jobs and they're going from job to job. And there's no stability. And the health care issue, getting health care, pensions, I mean, all these issues for journalists and their conditions are very threatened. Survival. So it doesn't make a ability to focus on your job when you're working day to day to survive and can't take care of your needs. So the other thing is that the corporate media, the capitalist media, have a propaganda agenda. And they frame the issues. And they do not tell all the stories. For example, in San Francisco, the story of the Treasure Island, which was played done, about how in this city you could build a condos on a contaminated nuclear radioactive dump. Now, the Chronicle has been covering that. But if you look at these stories of the Chronicle and some of their journalists, Jason and Cynthia, are doing some good stories, however, they never go to Pelosi. And they never go to the capital's politicians and saying, well, you're involved in oversight. If there's a billion-dollar eco-fraud, which there was in fake testing by Tetra Tech in San Francisco, why isn't there a congressional investigation? Why aren't we finding out who's responsible politically, not just the company, but actually the government politicians or the agencies, CalOSHA, EPA, who are responsible? That hasn't seemed to come up in the story. And one of the interesting things, I covered the story of Darrell Whitman, who was a federal OSHA investigator and lawyer who was defending whistleblower at Test America, who was fired. And then he was also defending other whistleblowers at FedEx, Lockheed Martin, many, many companies. And he started to get bullied. And he and four other lawyers in the office in San Francisco were fired. And this was under Tom Perez, who was then Secretary of Labor and now head of the Democratic Party. Well, he and other whistleblowers, federal whistleblowers, along with private whistleblowers, abandoned together. Because to be a whistleblower, and that's an important story for journalists, you put your neck on the line. I mean, and that's why people are afraid to be whistleblowers because they're afraid of losing their jobs. And they do lose their jobs. And the story that I'm getting to about San Francisco, the corruption, the systemic corruption is that the mainstream media are not going to the people who are really responsible for oversight. Governor Newsom, who gave a $200 million contract to Tetra Tech after two Tetra Tech officials went to jail for falsifying the records in San Francisco and firing workers. So these are, I mean, the political connections and the really getting into the system, and that's what we're talking about, systemic problems are something that journalists should be covering, but they're not necessarily going to be covered because the companies that run these media operations are not interested in exposing this kind of corruption. Yeah, and there's so many similarities between what you're saying about workers in journalism and arts workers as well. And I think so much of the transference of that type of journalist labor into gig and freelance work and then seem in theater is that you lose the deep roots in a local place that you can get through kind of long-term and local media institutions, right? If the only institutions that are getting support are the New York Times and the LA Times, what happens to local journalism? And in the arts, we similarly have the problem where a lot of our artistic institutions, because they're moving to this gig model, all of the actors you get, all of the playwrights, are going to be from New York, are going to be coming from somewhere else and kind of coming to a theater on their show-to-show basis. And so you lose some of those grassroots and kind of the long-term sustained investigation into a place that allows for things like the Treasure Island show from the Mind Troop. That's really depends on being rooted in a place. So I'm with you that the gigification of journalism, yeah, there's something tremendous lost there. And then you can't take these deep local issues to the folks who are at the state level like Pelosi. The local is always, in my mind, the root to the national and the international. It's kind of you have to get that dialogue and the move between those two separate modes. And speaking in terms of the national and the international, right now, of course, we're in the midst of a global pandemic, which is, in many ways, I think, changing the way that people relate to labor in some ways. It's altering our perception of politics. And I'm curious if you think that the pandemic is changing labor in a way. Around there's the rhetoric of essential workers. There's the idea of remote work. Are things changing for the worse, for the better? Do you what do you see as kind of emerging in this moment right now? And I'll go ahead and start with Kiko, which is a big question, I'm sure, but any observations you have from your world around you? From my world around me? Well, OK, so my two veins of income, personal veins of income, my two places of work are both in theater as a theater worker. And then I also am a production manager for a catering company. So both of those things on March 17th, boom, gone. And neither one of them are going to come back soon. It's going to take a while. I mean, we're all still out there. And theater is trying to take a pivot into the virtual realm. But it was interesting to just feel the words coming at me that I am not an essential worker. We do not consider the arts to be essential. And there's really been no care or support for these gig workers who are catering workers. And that's a huge, huge group of people. I mean, this is not restaurant workers. Restaurants eventually got to open up. But so do I think that it will improve? Or do I think that things will improve? Because of this recognition of essential workers, I feel like it really depends on, in many ways, what happens on November 3rd. But because my sister teaches in Iowa, in Iowa City, where right now they have the highest per capita of COVID-19 cases after the universities were forced to open up in-person classes by their governor. However, they were going to start off in person in the elementary school classes. And she teaches third, fourth mix. I was really worried about her. But since the numbers have been going up, they've gone back to not being in-person classes and being online. But we call them essential workers, but they're being put into a dangerous situation for the, I mean, really, it's like for the sake of the national economy. It's like, parents can't go to work because their kids aren't staying at home. And it's not equal because some kids have good internet. Others don't. They don't have the right computers. Yeah, it's not equal. So I mean, it's making me look at the inequities that having to rely on tech in order to be able to work or putting my face. Yeah. I think what you're saying about the inadequacy of that label essential is, I think, really, that I think that's spot on. And there was a great op-ed in the New York Times speaking of national news sources that was from a New York subway worker in the early days of the pandemic who said, we're not essential, we're sacrificial. You're telling us to do this work to keep the economy going. That's really treating us as expendable. And also this label, what you were saying about, to be told as an art worker that you're not essential is kind of a division of the working class in a way of, OK, we have our immaterial laborers who are out staying at home, doing all their work on Zoom. And then we have our essential workers who are doing our material labor. And I think it's sending bad messages to both, that the people who are doing digital work and who are educators, for example, are kind of being told that their work is being undervalued. And then the essential workers themselves are not being given the protection. They need to be able to carry out the vital infrastructure of our economy these days. So I think in my mind there needs to be that connection across those categories. And sometimes that label might not be hopeful there. There is something that has given me hope, though. And that is how by being kind of the playing field is sort of leveled amongst performers across the board, like whether you work at Berkeley Rep or ACT, or whether I work at the Mime Troop or the Magic Theater or Crowded Fire, it's like, oh, none of us can do a show. None of us can produce the next season. And so I feel like the community of actors, directors, bearded workers, I have hope in a grassroots kind of support of one another, because that's been happening. And it's hard to see nationally. But I mean, we're watching each other across the coast, and it's all on this screen, unfortunately. But yes, at least maybe that will continue, that kind of caring for one another as fellow workers in the arts. So that's my hope. That's excellent. That's awesome. I think that's great. And I think, as well, our arts institution, so many of them are in flux right now. That some changes that years ago felt radical, we might actually be able to see. And it's amazing that the pandemic is aligning with these demands from, like, we see you at the White American Theater. And some of these folks are really trying to re-envision the arts. I think it's really exciting in this time. So thanks for that. Steve, I want to be able to bring you in on this on your perceptions of sort of based on the folks you've been interviewing these days. What have you perceived as the way that COVID is shifting how people do labor or talk about labor? Well, I think I want to respond to the art thing, because in the 30s, when there was general strikes and mass movements, it forced the government, Roosevelt, and the government to have an arts program. They actually hired artists, gave money to arts. And in San Francisco, we have the Coyle Tower. We have many beautiful murals, art projects, the WPA. And Victor Arnetoff, who was hounded because he was a communist, did work on art. We have Rink and Annex and those murals. And also the Zakon murals at UCSF, which now are threatened. They want to destroy them, actually. Imagine that. The University of California in San Francisco, this educational institution wanted to destroy the murals, these historic murals, including Biddy Mason, the first black woman medical worker who was delivering babies who was in one of the murals. That's in portrayed by Bernard Zakheim in his murals. And so the lack of support for artists and their work is exemplified today. And there's an effort to destroy, pay $800,000 to cover up or destroy the murals at George Washington High of Victor Arnetoff, which show the real history of Washington, who was a slave owner and also supported the imperialism and taking over the lands of the Native Americans. He was a surveyor. That's in the murals. But I would say that a lot of workers, for example, who work at Uber or Lyft, are doing it part time. The marginalized working class, workers cannot survive in one job. Workers have to drive hundreds of miles. So what this says, and regardless of their awareness, is that the system is not providing for people. People are being stretched. They can't take care of themselves. Their families are sleeping in cars. They're health and safety dangers. And the capitalists are saying, well, that's life. Accept it. Make the best of it. That's what we have. That's what you have to live with. And I think that's creating a rage. I mean, if you look in San Francisco now that just announced another $70 million to fight against AB5, which protects workers, Uber, Lyft workers, gig workers, so they get social security, disability, and workers comp. And these are basic things that people don't have. Many, many workers working all different kinds of jobs. They don't have those things. They can't retire. In fact, even though AB5 passed in January, for example, Uber and Lyft refused to pay workers' compensation to their employees under the law. And my view is that our Chess and Boudin, our district attorney, should be arresting the owners of Uber and Lyft for refusing to supply workers' comp. I mean, that's the law. They should be arrested. The billionaires should be arrested when they violate the law. But like what we saw with Elon Musk and, for example, Tesla, many workers went to work for Tesla because they believe in electric technology. They want to have electric cars. But it's like a plantation at that factory. The way the conditions, the work conditions, are terrible. And if you speak out, you're harassed, you're bullied. And many of these workers are Black, Latino, and immigrants. And they can't afford to live in the Bay Area. They have to go to the Central Valley. And they have buses bringing them back and forth to the Central Valley. So they're on the road. And they're forced to work 72-hour workweeks. They work six days a week. So you've actually got a plantation system where workers at the lower level are being further and further exploited. And the level of exploitation now going on in capitalism is massive, which is going to bring a big backlash. And then you have the political crisis, which a president who says to hell with the laws, to hell, I mean, you're telling people to vote twice. You know, basically, saying I'm not going to leave, basically. And that really raises a political issue, again, for the working class. Can we allow him to stay in power, in office? And how is he going to be removed? Because working people have the power to remove him. And there's some discussion in the labor movement about national action, national work action of the entire working class, shutting down everything and saying you have to go. Because as many people are concerned about, his view is he's not going to go on his own. He has to be pushed out. Well, that means we, the working people, have to become together politically and have to become aware of that and have to prepare ourselves for what's coming. And the danger of fascist movements, of terror tactics, I mean, you have peaceful demonstrators and then these right-wing terrorists with guns, ready to shoot them down. These are very horrendous conditions that are developing in this country. And unfortunately, the working class is not organized. I mean, when we had that rally in June 10th in Oakland, that should have been 100,000 workers. It should have been a hospital workers. It should have been art workers that all workers should join together. We have to create the conditions now, a mass movement of the working class, which we have not had in our lifetime, not my lifetime, not since the 30s and 40s. And the last general strike in the United States was in Oakland in 1946, where a transit worker shut down his transit car to support some women clerical workers who were fighting for a contract in downtown Oakland. So we need to build up a movement, a working class movement, where people can have collective power, people can discuss and debate. I mean, that was what was frightening to the capitals about Occupy. Occupy was a place where people could come together and talk and discuss issues. And that is one thing that actually the pandemic has done. It's forced people in a way that they're stuck at home, some that don't have to go out to work. They're stuck at home, they can debate, discuss, they can communicate here and internationally and have forums, have debates, of working people around the world who have the same issues. So this is dangerous times, but on the other hand, it's exciting possibilities for people to come together and for there to be a political development. One of the things in the past is you're so stressed out working, you don't even have time to stop and think. Right. I was thinking about it. And that's a danger for the capitalists when people have the time to stop and think. They start discussing and debating. That's, it'd be very problematic for people. We're nearing our time here, but before we close, the library likes me to do a shout out to a book since they're the library. And on that point that you were just saying, Steve, one of my old mentors, Jedediah Purdy, a fantastic political theorist, he has a fantastic book called Tolerable Anarchy, which is about sort of thinking through American political thought and relationship to the economy. And one of his quotes from there is that democracy is more than voting. So yes, we need people to vote a hundred percent. If they're evil, please do vote. But we also need to back that up so that the results of the election hopefully can get respected. And so that throughout the rest of the year, we're building working people's power to do those things like general strikes that's able to exert political demands and bring our politics into thinking about working people and to be in the hands of working people. So thank you, thank you for all those thoughts. I want to invite you all as viewers to check out Work Week on SoundCloud to be able to listen to all those different episodes. There's a fantastic episode I just heard about politics in Belarus, talking with labor organizers out there. And to keep in touch with the work of the Mime Troop, we'll be doing this series into the fall and to October. So every two weeks, you can tune in to this channel on San Francisco Public Library. Here are different panel discussion with us. We had panels earlier this summer with ride-share workers to sort of follow up on what we were just speaking about and two weeks ago talking about voter suppression. So very good stuff to check out. You can find all of that on YouTube. And to hear our radio shows themselves, go to sfmt.org and you can listen to all of our episodes so far. And they'll be going out throughout the fall, released every two weeks. Well, thank you so much for coming today and thank you so much, Steve. Thank you, Keiko. Really appreciate all your thoughts and I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you, Kari. Thank you to the Mime Troop. Further, more Mime Troop. Thank you, Steve. Thank you. Thank you. Further, yes. Onward. You've got a lot further to go, so keep going. Onward. All right.