Warehouse Workers in the Green New Deal Fight: An Interview with Roberto Clack
A longtime labor organizer discusses the power that warehouse and transportation workers could have in disrupting corporate America’s status quo to win a Green New Deal.
Photo by Ruchindra Gunasekara
Roberto Clack is Associate Director of Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), a worker center organizing for stable, family-supporting jobs in Chicagoland’s warehouses. WWJ is also a member of Athena, a new coalition of over 40 organizations holding Amazon and other big corporations accountable, while pushing for a just energy transition.
We sat down with Roberto to discuss his experience organizing warehouse workers just outside of Chicago, the power that warehouse and transportation workers could have in disrupting corporate America’s status quo, and ways for the climate and labor movements to build collective strength.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Amelia Diehl (interviewer): How did Chicagoland become the nation’s largest inland port? And where does WWJ fit into that?
Roberto Clack: WWJ came out of the Republic Windows and Doors occupation and strike, organized by United Electric (UE) Workers, back in 2008. It was the last of a series of manufacturers that the UE had organized but had closed; they were especially hit hard during the Great Recession. WWJ founder Mark Meinster really wanted to figure out where we could rebuild the labor movement and get people organized where they can't just move.
Because there were two Class I railroads that went through [Joliet, IL, just southwest of Chicago]—plus the river and the access to the highways—it was really perfect for a transportation project, and there's this whole proliferation of all these different warehouses. Two Amazon facilities, an Ikea facility, Dollar Tree. Warehouses basically go up and down the road, with more being proposed. The Pulaski yard is still a very busy yard. They probably do 800,000 containers.This was created because it would take 36 to 48 hours to get from here to the California ports, but then it's so congested in Chicagoland that it would take another 36 hours just to get through the Chicago network, so this really alleviated a lot of the bottleneck there.
A lot of this is imports from Asia for retail stores, though it's actually everything. You see a real shift from manufacturing to warehousing because less and less has been made in the country now; more of it’s being made in Asia, especially China. Warehousing surpassed manufacturing in Will County [where Joliet is]; there are 24,000 warehousing jobs here and 69,000 in the city. This is a huge part of the state's economy.
AD: What are some of the underlying dynamics and challenges to organizing in the warehouses and in the communities near them?
RC: When we started Warehouse Workers for Justice in 2008-2009, no one really wanted to talk to us about the warehouses except for the workers, who were very aggrieved and upset about what was going on. A lot of them are Trump supporters and Republicans, but they really are upset and aggrieved by the warehouse industry and the developers who promote it. We have been able to find common ground and build a coalition with people who are conservative. This as an opportunity for those of us who are leftists and progressives to really challenge some of the conservatism.
If we actually focus on the bad actors who are really making society worse, then we can move people to a better place politically. The bad actors here are Warren Buffett, BNSF, Jeff Bezos, the Walton family.
A lot of the workers we deal with are already vulnerable. You had workers dealing with wage theft, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, discrimination against people with immigration status issues. A lot of warehouses do have direct employees, but if you don't have the right immigration status or you have something on your criminal background, they'll say, ‘well you can't work for our warehouse, but you can work for a temp agency that does the same thing as a directly hired employee.’
Misinformation and union-busting is ongoing and very thorough. It escalates if there's an actual drive. People are already vulnerable and oppressed, and it’s a very scary thing to stand up and say, ‘I am being oppressed. This is bad.’
I think people have kind of forgotten how to do workplace organizing. It used to be more common that people knew how to organize unions in their workplaces. It's going to take a lot of time and a lot of outreach and organizing. We’re talking about hours and hours of one-on-one conversations. At the end of the day, you know really being able to move people to take action, you know, despite the risk. It’s very risky to take on an organizing drive and take on the bosses. A lot of people have a lot of incentive or fear not to do that. They could lose everything.
Plus this whole temping industry that had really proliferated in the warehouses [makes it hard to unionize]. All those different entities [are considered] different employers, so you'd have to run nine different elections possibly at the same time, which is insane. That’s been created intentionally to drive labor conditions down, but it's also union avoidance.
It is very hard because of the contracting, but unionization is happening slowly. Two IKEA warehouses unionized earlier this year, and a warehouse in Centerpoint [Intermodal Center, the freight terminal] is trying to organize too.
AD: What are some ways that workers’ rights are inseparable from environmental justice?
RC: Transportation is the biggest contributor to climate change both in the state and the country. It’s overtaken the energy industry. This is a massive transportation node.
One of the better-paying jobs you can get in Will County is working at one of the oil refineries or the nuclear power plant. These are really good, middle-class, union jobs. In a place like Will County where people experienced the loss of major employers and manufacturers, the thought of transitioning away from good-paying jobs is a scary thought.
There are going to be contradictions there, but there really needs to be some intentional engagement around this issue of just [energy] transition. What do the new solar panel installer and the windmill jobs look like? We really need to articulate why a Green New Deal would be this massive boon for the labor movement.
The people gotta organize, and it's not just workers—communities live here. If they got organized, both in the workplace and within their communities, they would have a lot of say over some of the richest and most powerful corporations in the entire world.
When we think of what really contributes to climate change, overwhelmingly it's business, and if you see the scale, which we do in Will County, you realize where that business has to go. Workers and communities working together to address the problem could be very powerful—we could succeed in changing things for both. That's the vision.
AD: How can the Chicagoland warehouses be a key site to leverage change for Green New Deal? What’s at stake for warehouse workers in this?
RC: In the BNSF intermodal [a massive redistribution center near Joliet, IL, owned by Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the country’s largest freight operator], there’s Walmart's largest warehouse in the entire country. This is a very strategic location for our economy. This is a choke network. This is a very, very strategic area for a who's who of Fortune 500 companies. If workers got organized here, they would have a lot of say in the overall economy. If these workers right here decided they need to go on strike, or they're going to shut down operations, this would completely disrupt the economy—just those 400 or 500 workers. There's that much potential power here.
We know it's the energy companies holding up the Green New Deal, but it's the larger corporate America who doesn't want to see anything like this. There's a potential for a neoliberal Green New Deal where we give Tesla and Amazon all this money to convert [to electricity] but then they still have the same labor practices and does that benefit the labor movement? Absolutely not. People need to take seriously the idea of just transition.
We have to do something like the Walmart strikes again: we need to really focus on having an organized workforce that takes disruptive action. Fundamentally, that's what it's going to take to change things. When WWJ's at the point where we're able to do that again, hopefully we'll have a bigger party of supporters—the environmental justice movement, the local communities.
AD: Amazon has a huge sway over our economy. Do we need to be rethinking our consumer cultures?
RC: We are part of launching this national multi-issue Amazon coalition. [At the Black Friday action in Staten Island] Groups are demanding a community benefits agreement, and there [were] Amazon trucks backed up. We feel like we're really doing something, but in that context, Amazon had its most profitable day ever.
Some people love e-Commerce. They love Amazon. This is the reality. I occasionally use Amazon. There's an overemphasis on consumer culture, and that needs to change. But whether we like it or not, Amazon's here for the foreseeable future and is going to be a major force, and so our emphasis is, ‘what can we do to influence it to be better?’ That's why we are part of the climate strikes for a climate pledge, and that's why we support the $15 an hour wage.
We need to make sure that there's public support for it but also that these billionaires are paying for it too. We should tax them. We should make sure that this is done in a way that benefits working class people. There's this tremendous opportunity with the ascension of the climate [movement]. I feel like there's a there's a moral call to make to the rest of the labor movement and the Left in addressing the crisis.
AD: Tell me about the Athena coalition.
RC: Probably five years ago, our director Mark Meinster realized that Amazon was gonna be the predominant force in warehousing and retail. We’ve been working on this behind the scenes for about two years now. We've seen this emergence and exponential growth [of Amazon]. That comes with the realization that our organization is not big enough to meet this challenge—that it has to be a coalition effort of many groups. And it has to be broader than just workers’ rights. It has to incorporate these different issues.
We framed [Athena] as, imagine if the Left and labor had taken on Walmart before they became the predominant big box retailer in the early 90s. Would all these small businesses not have gone out of business? How different would local communities be? How much better off would the labor union workforce be?
The Athena coalition campaigns on different issue sets, like environmental justice, worker justice, community justice, digital surveillance.
AD: Why is it important for the youth climate strikers and labor movement to work together?
RC: It's really exciting to see the youth [climate] strikes happening, where even the language is invoking labor movement language. But can we deepen that relationship with collaboration? That's definitely something WWJ is advocating and pushing for.
The Earth Day strike is going to be probably the biggest strike in human history, but we really want to push for doing Earth Day all the way to May Day [May 1] and organize days of action every single day over nine days. Some of it will be decentralized and topical and really connect the youth environmental movement to the labor movement. I do see potential for the climate and youth movement to help labor kind of in the way that Occupy really changed things and created more possibilities.
There’s a chance for very interesting campaigns like that to arrive from this moment that's happening with the youth. We need to work to make those connections.
Amelia Diehl is a writer, organizer and musician based in Chicago. Her work gravitates towards place-based movements and the environmental humanities. Follow her tweets @amelia_diehl.
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