LETTER FROM SUNSET PARK

It was my first week of working overnights in the warehouse when I attended the Long-Haul launch party in my city. My “day” started after an afternoon nap induced by eight hours of running around my facility pushing and pulling heavy boxes, bags, and carts. The work is barbarous, injury-inducing, and is meant to keep us isolated. But I read in the first issue of Long-Haul that injury-prone work is encountered by workers beyond my warehouse. I saw the images of stone carriers in Jordan engaged in their work and read how they suffer similar types of injuries that people in the warehouse suffer from our work. I saw that a sea of stones engulfed their worksites, like packages engulfed my work station, as more and more come down the belt with no end in sight.

My nap was followed with a swig of day-old instant coffee, and I headed over to the event hosted in a hole-in-the-wall in Queens. I reconnected with comrades as well as met new ones in a night that recognized both the achievements of the movement thus far and the long fight ahead for us all. The theme of the night addressed immigration, and the fact that our co-workers and community members are being detained by ICE. We heard how teachers, farmworker organizers, grad students, warehouse workers, and tech workers all faced real and threatened ICE raids and how they are responding to them. In that moment in that room, a class seemingly scattered and dispersed, across incomes, industries, and workplaces, could identify and act against threats to our immigrant neighbors and community members. 

It further made clear to me that solidarity across different sectors of workers for the immigrant members of our community is an instance of a practical internationalism that is forming the basis of the world we wish to see: one where we are all responsible for the safety and well-being of all those around us, in spite of the barriers that the DHS, ICE, the Trump administration, and hazardous work (in my warehouse and in Jordan) seeks to reinforce. For me Long-Haul has been a project that brings the inspiring stories of workers in struggle across the world into dialogue, in print and in person.

LETTER FROM ROCHESTER TO RIDGEWOOD COMMUTER

As I think readers can imagine, first-time-meeting-someone-at-a-party awkwardness was quickly overtaken by shop talk; angry teachers, amazon militants, unionists and communists of various stripes, rank and file activists, and student veterans of the Palestine solidarity movement could very quickly find something worthwhile to talk about over a drink.

The event was held in early June, as the fightback against Trump’s ICE Raids in Los Angeles was on everyone’s minds.

Brief speeches from magazine contributors and militants turned to ICE, who had come for friends, coworkers, students, union siblings, classmates, neighbors. New York teachers shared their response to raids targeting students in their schools. Formal and informal networks within the union led to the creation of ICE resistance committees at multiple schools, who disseminated know your rights information, agitated for protective practices from administration, and created various defensive protocols for their students and coworkers.

Federal workers sprung into action in NY’s federal building as immigration court proceedings became a common target for ICE actions. A huge mass meeting organized by rank and file workers led to a string of workplace actions to pressure management to limit ICE access to the building, beginning a campaign against ICE presence.

A graduate worker at Columbia shared the difficulties of responding to the moment, as ICE came after Mahmoud Khalil. Plans of antagonistic workplace action had to reckon with new forms of targeted repression along the lines of immigration, as well as the union’s place and potential within the movement for Palestine on campus.

Local Amazon workers reflected on their strike in December and the organizing that led to it, on how the company organized work groups along lines of ethnicity and various immigration classifications – reminding us that the border extends its reach on more than just those without status. Organizing required “burrowing” into these groups, and crossing ethnic and linguistic lines. I remember one Amazon worker’s reflection on how politicizing this experience was. His coworker joked to us about his past political centrism – which was reluctantly admitted with a laugh. How would having to cross lines of nationality, language, and immigration status in order to create a force strong enough to survive and fight back against the backbreaking pace and low wages imposed upon workers by a company owned by the wealthiest man on the planet not politicize someone?

I briefly shared some stories from my area, where I organize with farmworkers in vegetable and apple fields. A month or so before the event, almost an entire work crew was taken in an ICE raid while on the way to work – while in the midst of an organizing drive. Not much time had passed until ICE returned to the same company, once again stopping a company vehicle and detaining multiple other workers. Grief quickly turned into action, as workers scrambled to find their co-workers legal names (not an easy task in workplaces where workers typically use fake names or are intentionally only known by their work-given nickname) in order to locate them in detention facilities. Families and friends were checked on, and sombre arrangements made to collect possessions and still-owed checks. Those with most urgency to support were those workers who had lived through the first raid and were released on bond, who knew first-hand what their co-workers were going through. These workers exhibit an urgency that must find all of us.

Unions have not been able to present a serious bulwark against the ICE raids, remaining largely set within a legalistic framework and without any real palpable antagonistic initiative required to meet the moment. As ICE raids target workplaces more and more, it is clear to me that this moment can only be met at an immediate level through the types of initiatives demonstrated by those who spoke at the gathering. ICE has brought a fight into our workplaces, and we must respond with our own – with or without the high organs of the labor movement. 

Thank you to the workers who spoke that night. I very much appreciate these meetings of disparate militants who come together to share their experiences, tactics, and initiatives. Thank you to Long-Haul for bringing us together and for bringing light to these moments of organization, anger, struggle, and creativity that very often remain isolated and lost.

LETTER FROM OAKLAND

I was thrilled to learn that there would be a series of events in the Bay Area in July to welcome the second issue of Long-Haul. Over three days, I attended a film screening, a labor history walking tour of San Francisco, and, of course, a party.

A few months prior, I was laid off from my nonprofit job that myself and others were attempting to unionize. The week we were gathering “yes” confirmations before our vote we were blindsided by management. Feeling bummed and discouraged, the opportunity to engage with the long lineage of labor struggle felt timely to me. Plus, it was all free!

Thursday night, 50 of us watched Long Haulers, a film by Amy Reid, which profiled three women truck drivers. It centered around visualizing their day to day lives, their thoughts on the industry, and their experiences in a male-dominated field. The following day, Long-Haul editors hosted a party at one of East Bay’s mainstay leftist community spaces, Tamarack. Music played as comrades, friends, workers, and organizers filled the space.

Finally, on Saturday, 30 people gathered to stroll the streets of San Francisco for a labor history walking tour. We began at the old Rincon Annex Post Office near the Ferry Building, where murals cover the interior and detail critical episodes of labor struggles as well as cultural threads of Bay Area history. There was a lingering New Deal optimism in the paintings from the 1940s. We walked to the Mission, stopping for murals, strike scenes, and wayward stories. Our ending point was the former home of Emma Goldman, facing Dolores Park. We were in awe to see the name “Emma” inscribed in the cement, this lingering feeling of history’s presence laid literally onto the sidewalk.