JOE BIDEN’S GRASS

I grew up in the Redwoods in Humboldt, California. My parents met on a Jesus People commune there. The evangelicals had infiltrated the hippie movement – long-haired Christians growing organic vegetables. It was the worst of both worlds. My folks left when they started having kids. We grew up homeschooled up there before getting tied in with these conservative Mennonites through homeschooling textbooks. This stuff was largely my focal point, though it wasn’t something I knuckled under to. This conservative Mennonite culture was very patriarchal. Rich men ran it and shamed poor men for not being “smiled on by God.” The only avenue for poor men to redeem themselves in the eyes of the brethren was by ruling their women and children with an iron fist. When the bottom fell out of the economy in Humboldt, our family wound up moving to Delaware.

As a teenager in the early 2000s, I dropped out of school and got a landscaping job to support my family. I started working as a hod carrier, ferrying around bricks for masonry work. I was not developed politically at all other than having a very general awareness of Irish republicanism. My grandmother, my dad’s mom, this old Irish lady, had been in a union or two, and I remember learning things from her, including to never cross a picket line and that there was a sense of dignity among the poor. She raised six kids by herself. She’d recount stories of getting treated condescendingly by people for being on public assistance. After organizing a lot of folks who were in the same program as her, she started running pressure campaigns, including a small matter of threatening to blackmail the lieutenant governor of Iowa. She worked at the phone company back when there were switchboard operators. The girls in her unit weren’t organized but participated in a strike even though they didn’t stand to benefit from it. I was probably a teenager by the time I started to connect the dots with her stories.

I used to cut Joe Biden’s fucking grass. One of the contracts we got was for the Biden estate wherever it was up in northern Delaware. He wasn’t on the take, I thought, because the estate looked like shit. This was back when George W. was grubbing cedar and being a real man of the people. While working we’d stop for lunch and get a newspaper to try to be informed, and Biden would be out there shirtless with an axe, either grubbing out or digging up hedge stumps and things like that. It was a phony interaction, compounded by the fact he didn’t really ever pay his bill on time. The guys we worked for would have to keep calling his office down in Washington, DC.

At this time, my orientation was more visceral. But I think dropping out of school and selling my labor to make rich people’s homes look nicer definitely helped to hone something. You’re on the East Coast, it’s very humid, summertime, and you’re like pulling blades of grass from some motherfucker’s English Ivy.

ROAD DOGS

I left Delaware by the time I was 21 and headed to New Orleans. This was not long after Hurricane Katrina. I started working for some guys rewiring houses in Center City and in the Lower Ninth Ward. There was a lot of hustling. A lot of people got fucked over. Before I knew it, I did too. You learn quickly. That good judgment is a byproduct of bad judgment was something I quickly came to embrace.

I started working with some guys I didn’t really trust doing piece-rate work. I wound up in a situation where the guys, who were spread really thin, were behind on my money. So, I found them an incentive: I took a few spools of their wire and relocated it so that we could have a more fruitful negotiation. But I only took the approximate value of what I was owed. I didn’t know that when people know it’s not your fucking wire, they’re gonna pay you pennies on the dollar. So, I learned that I should have taken more wire.

People were starting to move back into the Lower Ninth Ward and things were getting worse. People weren’t really shooting the person they had a beef with; they were shooting up the block. I start thinking that if I’m just awkwardly not blending in here, I don’t really like my odds. I finally got paid by that guy, so I hit the road. I had a brother that worked down in the citrus groves, down by Sarasota and Fort Myers. I headed down there and started planting bare-root citrus for cash. It was brutal-ass manual labor. This turned into a bunch of traveling and working from Florida to Ontario and back, framing townhouses, doing cash deals, always in US dollars. I did alright.

One thing just led to another at this time. It was a whole lot of living in the moment, not thinking particularly far ahead, which is great as long as there are construction booms. A lot of it was just being sharp, being in shape, and having an ear for shit. By the time I had three or four thousand dollars in my pocket, I became super restless and could no longer see a point in staying where I was. News of work traveled by word of mouth.

After getting hustled, you begin to develop some basic rhythms. And I was like, okay, first thing you do is you go work and you figure out where you are, and then, you find a place you can get taken care of. Some place where you’re not gonna put down roots, but where you can fucking take a breath. Figure out where that is, figure out where you are, figure out what it costs to get there. And then you have $250 – okay, fucking hide that under the truck seat, and then, worst-case scenario, if everything goes to shit, you got enough money to relocate. Though, once I did piss away all of my gas money after trying and failing to self-diagnose a truck repair in Texas.

Without enough money to get to Reno, I wind up in Cheyenne, Wyoming in fucking January. I got a few dollars to my name, but I’ve fucked up the math. I knew these cowboys back in California who were out in Laramie, an hour away, and they were working on a ranch building corrals. It’s $10 an hour cash at 7,200 feet elevation in January. Spud bars, railroad ties, building solid, beautiful-looking corrals. I learned a lot, but I was not prepared for the weather at all. At the time, I had a Carhartt jacket, a couple pairs of jeans, and some wifebeaters. These cowboys took pity on me and loaned me some wool-lined boots and some long johns.

I went back out to California, but the recession was easing in, and it was getting harder and harder to get a job in construction. I saw the cowboys at a wedding, and they talked me into going back to Wyoming. They had a summer lease on a place in the mountains, but this time even higher up, eight or nine thousand feet. We were moving water from the forest. In Nevada, in California, and in Utah, moving water is pretty basic. It’s relatively flat, so it’s very measured, laser level type of shit. This was pastures and hay meadows at eight thousand feet, and you’re moving water down from ten thousand feet. There’s a lot more momentum. So you’re throwing rocks in a big snowmelt ditch and making an eddy, not just dropping an orange dam in and walking away. You gotta watch the terrain a lot more and watch how the water moves through and figure out where you’re backing it up, where you’re hitting it harder to charge up those hay meadows, and then move it around. I wound up getting really immersed working with those guys. I had gas money now, but I was rolling around with these fucking buckaroos: people with strong opinions about whether you tuck your pants in your boots or fucking pull them over the outside, and whether your hat’s got a curl or if it’s flat, or how you treat a horse, and whether your rope’s tied off or not, and what all this says about you as a man. I’m just rolling around with these guys, pondering shit. But this was the first place where I was ever really just accepted. We were in rough country, with rough weather, and it really drove home how you didn’t have to just be tough but look out for each other too.

HWY 24, between Oceti Sakowin Camp and Cannonball, North Dakota, December 2016.

WOBBLING JOBS

By this stage in LiUNA, I had really come to understand that the skilled trade unions will attempt to poach you if you are sharp enough. But I appreciated working with my hands, and I liked the simplicity. You’d see these skilled guys grovel. They’re like, “We got these skills, so you should pay us more.” I personally feel very strongly about the simplicity of our crew: taking out the trash, running picks, running fucking sledgehammers. Our attitude was, “You’re going to treat us with dignity and respect or we’re going to fuck up your job.” If more of these skilled guys had that attitude, we’d all be better off. I wasn’t about to go try and get some skills so I can ask some motherfucker to treat me better.

In 2010 or 2011, I was working a job at a natural gas compression station with two laborers and maybe six carpenters. There should have been a more equal number of laborers, but the construction company that hired us was hoping to get in the good graces of this gas company. The foreman was a carpenter, so he stacked up the carpenters and had them try to do our job while our own guys were on an out-of-work list. I remember one time when the foreman was being a complete dick. We were getting this base set for a concrete pour, and we had to get it within a quarter inch. We’re taking a laser level out there, and he calls out, “You guys gotta make sure you know how to use that thing!” At that time, I was still on the prod and fixing to run my mouth. My steward says, “Hey, shut the fuck up. Fuck this guy, but you don’t got to run your fucking mouth.”

This foreman thinks we’re fucking stupid. Far be it from us to prove the guy wrong. So, we go out there, and we’re out there raking gravel and checking our measurements. Oh, we’re a little too high, and we rake again and make a big fuss. Now we’re too fucking low, and we make a big fuss. Nobody’s looking, so we fuck the whole thing up again. We keep going like that all day. We’re supposed to pour concrete the next day, and at the end of the day the foreman asks how it’s going. “It’s fucked up,” we say. “We were just trying to do right by you, sir,” and, “We just don’t know how you guys do it, sir.” Now he looks fucking dumb because they’ve been trying to put their good foot forward with the gas company and we can’t even get the most basic shit handled. They had to reschedule the job.

The next day we come in, nobody apologizes or nothing, but now he’s okay. He doesn’t mention it, treats us respectfully, and gives us our instructions. We say that we’ll go take care of it and in an hour or two, it’s done, and we’re good to go. For me at least, that one was really eye-opening. You’re not just running your mouth, you’re not just being all macho. You’re also not asking someone to be nice to you, which I hated to do. It’s just very simple: if people don’t treat us with respect, then we’re going to make their lives fucking hell to the point where the easier decision is to treat us with respect.

At that point I realized that we could actually put this kind of thing into action more often. We’d run into all kinds of dumb situations, but I had begun to internalize the fact that we could do something about it. On one job our crew would take the trash out, so we got to understand the workflow and how to put the trash cans in the most intelligent and useful places so people aren’t traipsing several hundred feet. But these carpenters – we actually got along with them – were throwing a bunch of trash on the ground. We say, “Look, there’s a trash can over there,” but they tell us it’s our job to clean this shit up. I tell them, “Okay, look, so the way this works is either you put your trash in the trash can, or we’re gonna go to fucking war. We’re gonna pound your grade stakes into the ground, we’re gonna steal your fucking tools, and we’re gonna fuck up your whole job every time you’re not looking. We’re getting paid by the hour, bro. All you gotta do is put your trash in a fucking trash can.” They started using the trash cans.

What I learned from all this was, despite shitty contracts, it really comes down to how organized you are on the job. I didn’t even read a contract till 2022, honestly. You looked around, sized people up, and if those fools were down, and we were savvy about it, we could push things further. That is how you get conditions and maintain them. I first learned this principle on pipeline spreads. I didn’t like the United Association (UA) – still don’t. But one thing they were really solid on was respect. They would drop their tools and respect a righteous beef. When we had a problem, those guys would hear what it was and roll as a unit. Suddenly, you’re having a way bigger ripple effect and shutting down way more of the job. Now, it’s not only the laborers not doing shit, it’s the welders too – ain’t nothing happening. The willingness of those guys, even if they were pricks in a lot of personal ways, to back shit up if there was actual beef gave us way more strength on those jobs than what our contract said.

Around this time, I was dispatched out to the refineries. The culture there was very hard-drinking, a lot of bullying, and it felt like you either accepted lower conditions or went nose-to-nose with the fool trying to intimidate you. Breaks were a particularly significant fight. In Texas City, they’d had the break tent right next to the unit, and when that unit exploded, it killed the guys in the break tent too. Now the break tents are a quarter mile away, so that if you’re on break, you won’t die. But the pricks started trying to make the time you spent doffing/donning PPE and cleaning up and walking to and from that tent all a part of the break itself. We organized tightly against that, and I spent plenty of time fighting our fuckin’ bricklayer ramrod over that point. But the work was killing you anyway. You could see that you were trading your health for a fucking paycheck. One time the exhale flap on my gear failed even though the perimeter seal was good. I was mainlining silica for an hour. I tried to go back to work and one of the bricklayers told me, “You’re gonna fucking kill yourself in there, and there’s nothing worth killing yourself for out here.”

We came out of some really rough country and had a lot of pride. When you ran into a LiUNA Local 1271 guy on the road, the expectation was that we’d be a solid motherfucker: a competent and good union guy and a competent-ass fucking guy. But there’s only so much Jägermeister you can throw up in a boomtown. Things were percolating about “being a man” and fighting with people. I was like, this isn’t who I want to be, but here we are anyway – so what does it mean to actually try to back this stuff up?

THAT’S IT, YOU’RE ON THE LINE

I kept my union card and shifted into wildland firefighting in 2012. I was curious. I was trying to figure things out. I was angry. I always wanted to work with fire. In the fire service, all this union stuff started coming together that hadn’t really coalesced before. My chippyness coming out of the Laborers’ Union was helpful in showing a crew how to relate to the chains of command when they’re shitty.

I had a real mentor there, this gnarly old lesbian smokejumper. She observed me developing bad habits. Even though she wasn’t in my direct chain of command, we started drilling things. One time I was going to go fuck off and she was just like, “I need a hand over here, you want to come help me with this?” I’m like, okay, fine. She didn’t need shit, as it turned out. She taught me a lot about small-unit leadership, which gave me an opportunity to solidify my experience from the Laborers’ Union. She was super principled. She’d already made her money and was in a higher pay grade and all this shit. When we were out chasing fires and she couldn’t get relief right away for her vacation, she could have brought us back to the station so that she could take her time off. But then we’d all go to the bottom of the rotation and be stuck on the base for days with nothing to do. So she would scrimp and cut up her vacations to make sure that didn’t happen. She did a lot of shit like that for us.

Federal employment is very different as far as the union goes. The Bureau of Land Management doesn’t have a big union presence. Unions in the land management agencies are based on duty stations and static delineations. We were very fluid. We’d have an engine and a couple of firefighters, maybe five, and then some biologists. The union beefs were totally different. Our pay grades were totally different. Our exploitation had these different formats to it. It was very unclear whether the union was even available to temporary employees, 1039s – so-called because 1,040 base hours makes you a “real” employee in the eyes of the government. Being a 1039 keeps you just shy of the benefits that are awarded to real federal employees. We weren’t technically classified as firefighters. We were “forestry technicians” or “range technicians.” If you died in the line of duty, then you got called a firefighter at your funeral. The majority of us were 1039s and were laid off in the winters.

There’s a huge suicide problem among wildland firefighters. Some of the crews, like smokejumpers, are more real about confronting it. But officially it wasn’t considered a big deal, because if you were laid off and not in pay status, were you really a firefighter they had to quantify in the statistic when you committed suicide?

SOME KIND OF AN ACTIVIST NOW

I was not making my bread and butter as a union pipeliner when this shit went down with the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in 2016. I was on a helicopter at that point in Southern Oregon and was tight with this Blackfoot dude on the crew, and we were both following the skirmishes during the season. We were planning to go out there once we got laid off for the fire season. But then someone in his family got sick, and he had to go take care of folks out that way. So I just wound up out there in North Dakota. That’s where this whole Labor for Standing Rock deal started, run by a lawyer in New York. Another disappointing reality: lots of photo ops and social media postings for other people’s struggles, often putting me in the center of the photo as the old pipeliner, which lent credibility. In the end, the lawyer’s misogyny ran off the rep from the only LiUNA local to publicly oppose the pipeline (which was a pretty courageous thing to do in LiUNA). I learned about that too damn late. I didn’t really know what I expected, but I didn’t feel good about any of that. The Right of Way Camp had just been raided, with folks tossed in dog kennels in jails around the region. This killed the actual disruption at the point of construction while I was en route. The pigs pushed their lines closer to the camp, and the power vacuum gave room to more peace policing types to gain ground in the camps. Everything was in flux, and it seemed to me that the best course of action was to help winterize the camp to keep people from dying from exposure and to make space for the Native folks to work up a new strategy.

During that time, when I went to get my truck and tools and come back, one of the dudes started a GoFundMe, which got a couple grand that we decided to use on materials for the camp. The only objection to it was the lawyer wanting to use some of the money for t-shirts and banners for our group. In the process of transferring the couple grand, the guy hooks my bank account to the GoFundMe and all these random donations begin to trickle in. And it’s $16 here, $27 there, all these oddball fucking numbers. God forbid any of them are round. It became a problem. I didn’t even have phone service and all this shit’s happening. People are sending shit to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe because they don’t understand the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is not actually who’s opposing the goddamn thing. There were also scam fundraisers too. And a whole lot of money is not actually getting here, because all kinds of nice people around the country and the world are just throwing money into the wind.

My experience and perspective coming into all this is you never look to the top for solutions. You gotta look at least three layers down to find somebody that’s doing something real. I thought, “Let’s look at the building crew, look at the winterizing crews, let’s look at what’s going on, find the guys that are doing shit, and figure out what to do.” In truth, I wound up a fixer – asking people what was happening, what they needed, what was holding them up, and helping fix it. People were donating drills, but everybody’s got different battery systems, so I’d help them get the adapter so they could flip-flop. Little things. “Let’s also buy some more drill batteries and get you a box of screws and get you ten drill bits, because your hands are gonna be cold, and you’re gonna be dropping them in the snow.” That kind of shit.

The broader thing just got dumber and dumber. People are getting drawn into long debates and saying shit like, “The proper socialist response is blah blah blah,” or, “We need a door-knocking campaign in North Dakota.” Okay, who’s gonna do it? I’m not opposed to door-knocking campaigns, but you’re in New York City. Then there were these rich Burning Man-type Californians who said they’d help us fund a water purification setup so long as we didn’t put fluoride in it. All the while, I’m still getting random not-round number donations in my bank account.

Delegations of people from different unions started arriving, and I wound up in a role receiving them. The movement was pretty solid and started fundraising. Burgerville people, various Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers people, Canadian union people, and Workers United people all made the trip out. One of the guys managed to start a pissing match with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) delegation that had been enthusiastic about plugging in with us. The grad students in the United Auto Workers (UAW) showed up at a real lull and were absolutely clutch.

A solid Native homegirl had vouched for me with these younger Native cats who were very active in camp then, with a real “from each according to their means” bent to ’em. She got me a hearing with the suspicious youngsters who only talked to me out of respect for her. As we wrapped up, one said, “Hey, how are we gonna tell you from all the other white guys with beards?” I always rocked a bright blue silk wild rag, so he’s like, “Make sure you always wear that, so we can tell you apart from every other white dude with a beard.”

These cats were hella solid, and we worked well alongside each other. When they came asking for some volunteers that I could absolutely trust, the UAW gals came through, and deepened that whole relationship as a result. The only thing that kept me afloat with all of this was a handful of ladies in the group who busted their asses doing logistics with me and unfucking my bank account incessantly, saving my ass in so many ways. I was drinking from a fire hose, doing a horrible job of keeping notes. I’d find people’s contact info two years later that I’d dropped in a cushion.

Navigating the politics of the situation was complicated. When we first showed up, this old Native fool from Cannon Ball pulled us aside. He said that we had to understand something: the “official Native leaders” the Bureau of Indian Affairs liked to deal with never opposed the project. Neither did their traditional elders. Initially, it was these Native youth that came out here to fight it by themselves. He said that people living around Cannon Ball saw them doing that and felt ashamed they weren’t fighting alongside the youth. Unfortunately, after the Natives threw their weight behind it and it started to grow, the hippies started rolling in and eventually took over the original camp. Then a few other camps were built around it. By this point, the Native youth who started everything were out of the picture.¹ Everybody else out here was jockeying to be the big dick that’s running shit.

I still had my union card at my old pipeliner local and kept in touch while I was out fighting fires. I knew that plenty of those guys were steering clear, avoiding going up to work on a contested job, but without articulating a principled stance. (The only effective example I knew of the latter was a city workers’ local in Wisconsin.) Working the job is just like crossing a picket line because it’s hard to miss the Indians out here, and they’re getting a pipeline built down their throats.

My old steward hit me up. He had quit the Laborers’ Union because he got silicosis and decided that, since he already had it and was going to die of it anyway, he could make more money as a miner – not untrue. He called me from a casino travel center near the Wind River Reservation and told me there were just busloads of Natives coming through. He was just fucking stoked, geeked on it. Plenty of union dudes felt the way I did and had a great deal of quiet respect for the Natives fighting the pipeline, even if most didn’t run their mouths the way I did.

I’d come in and out of camp for a couple of weeks at a time. You had to pace yourself. I could roll in and go hard when I knew I was coming out sooner. Maybe the last time I came through, I stopped by the Union Hall in Cheyenne to ask what was up. I went in there, and there was the president of the local with the business agent who once threatened to blacklist me (though we had since made up). They’re like, “You’re some kind of an activist now? We got guys fucking blowing up our phone ’cause you’re out there talking to people.” And I was. I name-dropped my local anytime I talked to anybody, rep’d my local – I still rep 1271 even from the right side of the pig line, motherfucker, why not? They told me, “People have been calling the hall, telling us what a piece of shit you are, what a piece of shit we are, that you’re undercutting all the guys, and we should kick you out.” I told them, “Sorry you guys got to deal with all this bullshit on my behalf.” And they’re just quiet for a second. And then they’re like, “It’s fine. We told them to fuck off.”

GRINDING AWAY

These days I’m back in California in the ILWU, working on deck out of the Inlandboatmen’s hall. The Bay is so full of motherfuckers, whether they’re a leftist from an organization or a  leftist from another union who wants to go and party down at the port and call it people power. Sure, but the people working there ain’t eating, and they don’t see you putting your ass on the line at your own job. They only see you celebrating while it’s getting harder for them to eat. It’s deeply ironic. At the same time, there’s a lot of respect and love in the Local for the Palestinian fools shutting things down.

There’s also a long history of solidarity with the Palestinian people in these unions. Recently, we’ve been organizing around the call for solidarity from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions since 2023. The Inlandboatmen’s Union (IBU) national joined the Labor Network for Ceasefire last fall, with Local 5 and Local 10 not needing any prompting to line up beside us. The ILWU international followed suit in April. The number of Palestinians that live in the Bay certainly has a big impact here and in the ILWU more broadly, as well as within the local rank and file.

Ultimately, you just got to talk to people. You got to break shit down and figure out where people are at. I’m still beefing over a lot of the same issues: lunch breaks, misogyny, safety, and now Palestine. But you can tell when people aren’t used to thinking of their union as something that they’re an actual participant in, something that actually fights and even, God forbid, succeeds. This is not the reality for a lot of these guys on the ferry boats. Very rarely does the union appear to fight. And when it does, it’s choosy about who and what and when in such a way that’s not conducive to broader solidarity. That’s the perception of the union for a lot of the guys.

I think the biggest obstacle that I see with our guys in the IBU is that people don’t see the union as something that they can actually participate in, something that they can struggle within to improve their own conditions. This makes it easy for some guys to dismiss Palestinian solidarity as “out of touch officers making paper statements.” I take that one head-on and push back hard. The Palestine organizing is a rank-and-file push, led by folks like me who strive to be very fucking solid on day-to-day jobsite beefs and union principle. Guys see that, and it gets me a serious audience with some pretty skeptical fools.

In a lot of ways, longshore is at the tip of the spear in terms of the way that people conceptualize jobsite actions: it’s historically the place with the most militant international solidarity in our union. Your first point of contact is the tugs that take the ship to the dock, and that’s my division. I work with a mess of longshore casuals out of my hall as well, solid guys with a work background closer to the one I come from. It’s easier to get them up to speed on marine shit and get them holding a line amongst the crowd. I was just at a union training where the idea of our different divisions reinforcing each other’s flanks was highlighted. It was stellar to see the rank and file buy in across divisions, and I’m stoked to start looking at things with fresh eyes. I want to bring that home to my region and continue to push hard.

I’m still chewing on all this as we’re watching a livestreamed genocide and yapping about how “an injury to one is an injury to all” all the while. We are grinding away at bringing back some guts in the bottom-up flank of our labor movement.