Back in Brooklyn

Well, one of us is back in Brooklyn -- and that would be me, Becky.  Sarah is still in Williamstown with her mom and will be returning later this week.  After a concerned text from one of our friends, we realized that -- to our delight -- people had been following our blog and were wondering what had happened to us since our post last Sunday.  I figured it would be a good idea to offer some sort of update, despite the fact that it will be entirely one-sided.  (Sarah, you'll fill in the details, right?)

We completed our last interview on Tuesday evening with Sarah's good friend, Keith, a Math and Computer Science teacher at a Chicago public high school in McKinley Park.  Keith, his wife, Chris, and Sarah met many years ago on a volunteer project in El Salvador.  They became involved in the project through their activity with the oft-underreported progressive side of the Catholic church.  And all have been committed to social justice ever since, though they have chosen different paths.  Keith saw teaching as a legitimate option to becoming a priest, which he'd originally planned to do.  It was a way to help people who are often denied access to our nation's resources -- like education, good jobs, healthcare, and political representation.  Through becoming an educator, he hoped to give his students the tools to give themselves a better life.

He's been disappointed, though, by his experience.  He's positive about being a teacher and says he expects to stay in his job until he retires.  But the prospects of his students are not particularly encouraging.  Half of Chicago public school students don't make it to graduation.  Keith says students fail his courses often, but that they rarely feel the need to improve performance.  They wonder why a high school education is really necessary.  There are jobs in the neighborhood that don't require a diploma -- and parents are not involved enough in their childrens' schooling that students are taken to task for failing or not graduating.  The problem, though, is systemic, Keith says.  It's not the students, the teachers, or the parents.  And for his school, at least, it's not the money invested.  It's all of these factors and more.  What education reveals most, Keith implies, is how entrenched the power structure is and how invested the powerful are in maintaining their position,.

We learned similar things when we interviewed Bob Breving, who teaches at the Labor Center at DePaul University.  Bob is a friend of my parents.  They all met in Maywood, IL public schools in the late 1960s, where they taught middle school students.  Maywood was -- and still is, to some extent -- a disinvested school district.  Most of Bob's and my parents' students were African American and their educational prospects were as bleak as those of Keith's current students.  Bob and my parents became teachers for different reasons.  For Bob, he felt it was in line with social justice work he had already been doing with the VISTA program in New Mexico.  For my parents, teaching was a profession that they felt able to do, but they did not start off as exceptionally passionate about it.  All three became dedicated teachers though.  Not only that, but they gained even more insight into the injustices facing their students.  As Sarah and I interviewed Bob, my parents joined the conversation and revealed more about how the three of them worked together to form a teachers' union in Maywood.  My parents say that teaching made them "politicized."  All three had come from rather conservative, Republican households, but seeing how their own students struggled inside and outside the classroom and how teachers themselves were treated by school administrators as something akin to indentured servants pushed their politics to the left.  After years of teaching, Bob and my father began working directly for the American Federation of Teachers, while my mother focused her attentions on raising me and working in the community.

Sarah and I had the good fortune to interview other people as well, but these last few interviews really galvanized our interest in talking to people whose politics blended with their careers.  In fact, not to scoop Sarah, but it seems likely that we will be focusing our interviews exclusively on teachers now.  By the way, in case you find the summaries above rather broad, you will be pleased to know that we recorded them and that we may make them available for viewing in the near future.

There will be more to come!

Chicago, Back Aboard the Mothership

Sarah and I are pretty exhausted after two full days in Chicago.  We drove in on Friday, arriving quite late (though not too late to enjoy beefs from Johnnie's) and unsure of what we might accomplish over the weekend.  When we took the El into the city on Saturday afternoon, we decided to approach the day as tourists, wandering about the Loop in search of architectural wonders.  Adventures followed, of course, which included meeting a couple of fascinating chess players and being invited to attend services at a South side Baptist church, which we did today.  While we have not interviewed anyone in Chicago yet, we have at least two meetings lined up for tomorrow, so be prepared for reports. 

In the meantime, I must say that I have been humbled and delighted by this visit.  It seems Sarah agrees too.  Seeing parts of Chicago we've never seen before and being welcomed by strangers wherever we have gone -- even though this city is our home -- has been a great gift. 

Health & Safety with the United Steelworkers

Hello from Pittsburgh! Our first 24 hours here have been educational- Pittsburgh is a beautiful, interesting city. Old and young neighborhoods flow over the hills of the city and the rivers cradle the edges of Pittsburgh with bridges crossing in all directions. I don't want to speak for Miss Becky but I think she had the same reaction that I had when I first came here- it felt immediately comfortable. It's an industrial city with a serious history and waterfront- much like Chicago.

We wandered around the campus of Pitt in the morning as we waited for our camera to charge. We ended up at Pitt's Cathedral of Learning, a 1930's neo-gothic steel tower erected to a better life with amazing reading rooms. In the afternoon, we hopped the city bus downtown to go to a conference on Health, Safety and the Environment organized by and for the United Steelworkers of America (USWA.) We were lucky enough to secure an interview with Mike Wright, the union's director of Health and Safety and the chief organizer of the conference. The story of the union and Mike's story were both compelling. Mike explained that the USWA has about 850,000 members at present, both in the U.S. and Canada. The union no longer just represents steel workers. Massive changes in the steel industry and numerous union mergers have brought oil, chemical, paper, forestry, mining, and health care workers into the union. Almost all of the integrated steel mills left in the U.S. are still with the USWA, as are about half of the country's mini-mills, "boutique" mills that process steel for specialized uses.

Mike's stories about the USWA's experiences with the oil industry were especially interesting. Because his department is dedicated to health, safety and environmental issues, they have firsthand experience with some of the major spills and explosions that have taken place in the last several years. Mike explained that of any industry, the oil industry has the greatest gap between potential hazards and regulation of such dangers. Mike's 25 person department coordinates emergency response services for workers (union and non-union) who are injured or killed in oil industry accidents. Currently, there is one serious fire in the oil industry per week. Mike talked about the growing focus on "behavioral safety" in the workplace, which targets human error as the cause of any accident. The end result is that workers are often singled out as the culprits for industrial accidents, as opposed to systemic problems with management. As an example, he explained that when the surviving workers for the Deepwater Horizon were rescued from the Gulf earlier this year, those who did not have life-threatening injuries were first tested for drugs before they received medical treatment or were able to contact their families. For the last several years, Mike's department has handled the fallout from the Texas City explosion of a BP refinery that killed 15 workers.

The USWA's Health & Safety department coordinates education on worker and industrial safety, assists local unions with accident investigations, and develops legislation to push for better protections for workers and the environment. They are heavily involved in pushing for stronger OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health) regulations. One of the most interesting things that Mike said was that enforcement of worker protection standards has improved significantly under the Obama administration.

Mike came to this work as a veteran of the 1960's civil rights and anti-war movements. After studying engineering and public health, he joined the Steelworkers in 1977 and has been part of the movement to build global health and safety standards for industrial workers ever since. As steel production has globalized, the USWA has remained active in the fight for better conditions for steel workers, whether they are in Brazil or Nigeria. The USWA is part of two global steel worker federations. In Mike's opinion, perhaps the greatest contribution the American labor movement has made in the last 50 years has been the development of the "right to know" concept into a set of global standards. Becky should clarify this but the "right to know" concept asserts that workers are entitled to understand the materials they are handling and any risks involved. [Becky: Yes, this is correct.] This is particularly pressing for oil and chemical workers. Mike has been part of the effort to build a global "right to know" set of standards and has worked with unions from Poland to Zimbabwe.

Mike said he has never regretted his decision to join the Steelworkers. He was generous enough to be our first full-on interview. We learned a lot talking to him, and he was kind enough to invite us back after the conference to visit some of the plants represented by the USWA. More to come!

Day One: Pittsburgh, who knew?

It's the end of Day One and we are pooped, but pleased.  Getting out of New York was remarkably simple compared to the last time Sarah and I drove out of town together many years ago.  We thought the stars might be aligning for us.  Then came the merger to I-76 right after Harrisburg, where there appears to have been a huge pile-up that shut down the entire interstate for about fifty miles.  We detoured down I-81, switched to another road, then linked up with I-70, which took us to Pittsburgh after about eight hours on the road.  Of course, we were also met with mountains, thick fog, pounding rain, and big trucks.  That didn't stop us, though.  We are committed documentarians and that means we will continue to senselessly bulldoze toward our goal.

Case in point: after a second visit to Panera in a single day (is it the soup?) we forged into the night for beer and cigarettes at a local bar, Gene's Place.  We both ordered local brews, which were served in glasses the size of a Big Gulp and cost between $2.75 (mine) and $3.25 (fancy Sarah's.)  While watching the Twins-Yankees game and nursing our drinks, we struck up conversations with the bartender, Zach, and one of the other patrons, Christy.  They were kind of enough to direct us to where we might find some tasty delicacies tomorrow -- like sandwiches layered with capicola, cole slaw, and french fries -- and were game for talking to us about their work lives.  Christy told us about her dad, whose band produced a one-hit wonder in the 1960s and who has worked casually in various odd jobs over the course of his entire professional career.  He drives limousines now to begin to gain quarters for his social security.  He has health problems and Christy worries that he may not be able to drive for long.  In fact, she worries most that he'll actually die behind the wheel.  But without having contributed to social security in the past and without his own alternate retirement and health plan, this is the best he can do.  Christy, on the other hand, works for a company that does on-line marketing and she loves her job.  Her clients range from Chase Credit to Puma and she feels that her company treats her right because it's small and its leaders are invested in keeping a loyal staff.  Not only does she get to do the kind of work she likes, which includes computer programming and marketing, she also has her healthcare paid for completely by her company and her ideas are appreciated by her bosses.  One of her co-workers, who just started working at the company, has learned that he may need to take a leave of absence to care for an ill family member and Christy says he's been told to put his family first and that his job will be waiting for him.  Sounds like a dream!

Sarah and I hope to go back to Gene's Place again tomorrow, where both Christy and Zach say they would welcome our company, particularly because there's a big PA-based hockey game scheduled and there will be a rowdy crowd.  If possible, we may try to interview Christy on camera.

We're looking forward to tomorrow when we will, among other things, actually learn how to use the camera and track down this Steelworkers' Convention about which we've heard so much.  Could we really get a chance to attend part of the conference and interview people?  We hope so.  More updates on that to come tomorrow.  Sleep tight, friends.

We're about to take off!

It's take-off eve and, if Sarah is anything like me, she has only just packed (sort of) and is making a snack of toast before retiring into her make-shift bed for a good night's rest before the big day.  (Something tells me that, if these are the criteria, Sarah is, in fact, nothing like me.  Indeed, she is astonishingly organized!)  Wish us luck.  We are taking your music mixes and good wishes with us...