Audio Stories: Life and Work on the Backward River

Edith Tovar, Senior Justice Transition Organizer with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), speaking in spring 2022 about what it means to imagine a Just Transition for each community.

Transcript of Recording

So hi everyone. Edith Tovar, she/they. I am a lifelong resident of the Little Village community. I am a community organizer for the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, which has been around in the South Lawndale/ Little Village community for, I think we’re going on to our 28th year as an organization. And so we’re excited to continue to work and organize with our community, but at the same time upset that a lot of the environmental injustices and policies that continue to exist continue to harm us. And so that’s why we continue to organize in a community.

Edith Tovar, Senior Just Transition Organizer with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), speaking in spring 2022 about the intersection of environmental justice, labor and public health in Little Village and its industrial corridor.

Transcript of Recording

Within the industrial corridors, like we realized, because of how big they are, because of the importance that they have carried where we don’t minimize the importance of having local jobs, the importance of having a closed economy within our community. A lot of these jobs were beneficial to a lot of working class families in establishing roots and being able to purchase their homes, being able to raise their families, right? But within the passing decades, what do we know? We know that our community has one of the largest asthma rates. We know that when the Crawford coal plant was operating within the industrial corridor, we know that every year we lost about 50 residents to premature deaths. We know that cardiac disease is rampant in our communities. Why? Because close to 50% of our land use is dedicated to industry. So these are like the type of connections that LVEJO really tries to make- where industry and corporate polluters do such a great job at green washing and selling the idea of jobs and the creation of thousands of jobs in the industrial corridor. Again, we love jobs. We want our community to be able to have access to thriving, living wages, right? We don’t want extractive working conditions for a community that is already struggling with like all the other -isms, right? And so trying to make that connection within environmental justice and labor and public health is one of these three layers. I think now we’re working with it and our community is picking up on the language and saying - challenging a lot of these narratives that corporations are trying to sell to us, right? That because we’re going to install solar panels, like everything is going to be great. Don’t mind the 400 plus trucks that we’re going to be coming in and out of this warehouse, right, on a daily basis. At least now folks are questioning like, whoa, why are there so many trucks to begin with? And are these jobs, are these union jobs or what’s the starting minimum wage? Are these salary jobs? What kind of benefits are you going to include? Tuition waivers? And so these are the questions that we are supporting residents and asking and teaching them how to negotiate, or how not to negotiate, but teaching them about knowing their own work rights. And again, we want industry, we believe that industry can be great. But the type of industry that is not extractive. The type of industry that will not literally put our health at risk just so that we can have a decent job, we want to make sure that these jobs are like - benefiting our communities. We just don’t want a company that shows up and just ignores everything that’s happening outside of their industry walls, right? We want active participants of our community.

Edith Tovar, Senior Just Transition Organizer with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), speaking in spring 2022 about the Hilco warehouse development in Little Village neighborhood, including the environmental and public health disaster of the botched implosion of the former Crawford coal plant.

Transcript of Recording

Yeah. So one of the major corporate polluter green washing that we have had recently is Hilco. So again, Hilco built one of the largest warehouses in Little Village, a development that was not supported by the community. The community developed a plan that was led by the City of Chicago with former alderpeople. I don’t even want to mention them because I think they’re both now convicted alderpeople. But it’s Danny Soliz and Ricardo Munoz. That says a lot, too, that these are the folks that approved the selling of Crawford to Hilco. The false ideas that Hilco came in with was that this company was going to bring thousands of jobs, that they were going to install solar panels on their roof, that they were going to plant around 800 trees. They were going to support the City of Chicago’s bike infrastructure by developing a safer road down Pulaski, which - please try to make Pulaski safe because that’s a scary street. And to this day, Hilco not only caused one of the worst environmental disasters, like in the 2020s with the botched implosion. But they have a lot of money to really utilize their resources in continuing this fake idea that they are good neighbors. The fact that they went ahead and built this warehouse knowing that the community was not happy at all with this type of development; the botched implosion; the fact that there was a resident from Little Village who was part of the demolition team that unfortunately passed away on site; the fact that they say that solar panels and 800 trees and thousands and thousands of jobs. To this day Target has only hired 1600 people, to this day we really don’t know the actual amounts of how many trucks are going to be coming in and out, and to this day, there is no solar panels on top of that huge warehouse. And so in all counts, they’re definitely not good neighbors. The fact that they have a paid lobbyist that is very much involved in other initiatives - for example, the Department of Transportation is leading the Southwest Industrial Corridor, which they’re like combining five industrial corridors, so instead of the Little Village Industrial Corridor, like the modernization project, now they’re converting it to the southwest. And they’re trying to compact a lot of the information into one. But one of their community engagement organizations is Rodriguez Media Inc, which, again, the CEO is a Hillco paid lobbyist. So it’s like, weird how the community engagement process is. Right. These are just some red flags that we have seen, that I have been a part of in conversations with departments here in the City of Chicago. So yeah, there’s a lot to green washing, and there’s a lot to the fact that, unfortunately, some of these companies do have a lot of influence as far as having access to different opportunities on them pitching their sale. When in reality, knowing that Little Village has high rates of asthma cases, knowing that Little Village is already burdened with not the best air quality. An additional warehouse that will bring hundreds of diesel trucks on a daily basis is not, in my opinion, good development. It’s not good, it’s not good business.

Edith Tovar, Senior Just Transition Organizer with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), speaking in spring 2022 about what residents of Little Village dreamed and asked for during the city of Chicago’s industrial corridor planning process for the corridor in Little Village.

Transcript of Recording

One of the things that we have been looking for is for more access to public transportation, more connection from the West Side to connect more to the CTA, the train, the Pink Line. There isn’t that many main roads or main buses that folks can rely on. And so right now it’s just the number 60 and the Cermak bus heading east and west. Heading north and south those modes of transportation are a little bit more accessible. But also our neighborhood is not bike friendly either. And mostly because it’s- one because of the land use, there’s a lot of industry, there’s a lot of semi trucks. There’s just like lack of safety and folks not feeling safe riding their bikes on the street. That can also be like the lack of infrastructure. One of the things that we were requesting were- how are the roads or like the sidewalks going to be fixed? Are they going to be fixed? Was this part of the industrial corridor modernization process? Right? Probably not. So some of the most basic requests were not really something that were really taken seriously, but more like, what kind of industry do you want to be moved in? It’s like we don’t want any more. We already have enough industry, but rethinking of the type of industry. And g up a home in Joliet, but they wouldn’t be able to afford their lifestyle anymore if their water bill tripled. Right. And for a working class person, and especially if we go back to my stats about how much warehouse workers in particular are making, that triple increase is really dire.

And so the other interesting part of all this is that Amazon alone has gotten about 741 million dollars in tax breaks from Northeast Illinois alone. So just the Chicago land area that we’re in. And that’s almost enough to pay for the entire pipeline. And this is money that’s coming from taxpayer dollars that has been given to Amazon to set up shop, to provide unsafe and unstable jobs for people. And so to say all that, some of the work we’ve been doing is getting community members together, really getting input on what we think might be a fair solution for the community, and landing on asking some of these huge multi billion dollar corporations that are profiting excessively from this region in particular, to pay a little bit more so that everyone else can pay a little less. And out of our curiosity, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request, which was subsequently covered in a Grist article by a great reporter, Adam Mahoney. And we were curious to know how much Amazon is using and other warehouses are using. And we found that Amazon by itself, so just one of hundreds of warehouses in Will County, is using over 106 times the water as a regular household, and yet are paying pretty much the same rate. Right. And not to mention all the tax breaks they’re getting. So within those tax breaks or water bills, are more than covered, right?

Edith Tovar, Senior Just Transition Organizer with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), speaking in spring 2022 about what it means to imagine a Just Transition for each community.

Transcript of Recording

Just transition is not a cookie cutter solution and it’s not a cookie cutter template. And each community literally has to figure out, what is the type of job force that we want to see in our community? And we know from Little Village, like, it’s agriculture. Like, there’s so much agricultural knowledge that we should not be ashamed for it. I think that’s one of the things about being an immigrant community as well, is that sometimes we feel like working the land can be embarrassing, but sometimes it’s like such a gift, right, that we’re able to grow fruit from a seed and go through that whole process and thinking about how that can be a possibility, how we can lower our carbon emission, right? If we produce locally, we can deliver literally a few feet away. We don’t even need trucks. We’ll probably just take it in our bikes, right, and start thinking about, like, those. I know it sounds like a little bit silly and it’s a little bit utopian, but I think it could happen. We are just so close. it’s not simple. I know it’s not simple, but just like, the thought of being able to work with the land or being able to install solar farms in your community and working in your community and shopping in your community, that just, builds the wealth for folks to be able to thrive, right. And to look at their job is just like, not only a job, but something that they also enjoy doing. And I know it sounds weird.

Additional comments by Citlalli Trujillo of the Freshwater Lab:

All the jobs that are offered in those kinds of communities are like warehouse, factory jobs. What do you see us as? What do you see as, you know, only someone you’re making money off of us. And even then, those types of jobs, they’re harmful. The dangerous labor that goes into a warehouse job, factory job, all the bending and the repetitiveness, that kind of thing hurts your body. It wears your body down over time. And even then again, those kinds of jobs don’t care. They don’t want you to unionize. They don’t want you to bring up those kinds of concerns. They’ll fire you. And you can be easily replaced by the next person. Exactly.

Edith Tovar, Senior Just Transition Organizer with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), speaking in spring 2022 about two example projects implemented by LVEJO - La Villita Park and las semillas de justicia, seeds for justice garden - that serve as models for moving towards a Just Transition.

Transcript of Recording

And so some of the examples that we have of just transition and little village is the Celotex site, which was once upon a time a Superfund site that has been converted into the second largest park, green space in Little Village, which is La Villita Park, developed. The organizers back then, they had a lot of community meetings. They had a lot of input from residents. Through the data that they collected, they found out that there’s close to about 2,000 children within a 1 mile radius that live in close proximity to this park. So they built a beautiful children’s play area. There’s a skate park that was designed by youth in the area and there’s a few soccer fields and basketball courts and baseball fields. But yeah, those are examples of Just Transition, right, what was once something so toxic can be converted and can be utilized.

Again, another example is the Semillas de Justicia (seeds of justice) garden, which was another brownfield here. The problem was that there were dozens of old oil containers buried on the ground that started to seep. And with the seepage, a lot of toxic smells started to come up. And so the city was able to clean it and NeighborSpace was able to acquire that. And so we’ve been working with NeighborSpace to have a free community garden where we have about 45 families that have access to land, where they grow herbs, fruit, vegetables. And in these last two years that we have really opened up the garden, the first year in 2020, the gardeners produced about two tons of food. And that’s like chilies, tomatoes, onions, garlic, things that we can really weigh, not so much the herbs. And in 2021, we saw an increase to four tons of food. So the same amount of land, just a whole lot of folks more interested in getting access to land. And the head gardener also created a program. And again, this is another mode of just transition, mutual aid, where a lot of the family saw that they were going to have a lot of their veggies leftover -they started hanging grocery bags from the fans. And we made social media posts like, if folks want to pick up fresh organic veggies, come pick them up at the garden, in a way, also distributing food in that way. And so those are examples of just transition. And so those are the examples that we would love to see projects like this duplicated and so many different opportunities.

Yana Kalmyka, formerly with Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), speaking in spring 2022 introducing herself and WWJ.

Transcript of Recording

My name’s Yana Kalmyka. I use she and they pronouns. And I am the labor and environmental justice director at Warehouse Workers for justice. So I really lead our department work at the intersection of workers issues and environmental issues, which we’ll delve a lot into today, but there’s a lot of deep intersections. Absolutely. Warehouse Workers for justice is a worker center that’s been around since 2007 -2008 ish and our main mission is fighting for stable, safe, and family sustaining jobs in the warehouse and distribution industry across Illinois, and our environmental justice department is a newer piece of that work. But I think really deeply connected to this piece of safe work and family sustaining work is what happens to communities that warehouse workers are living in once they’re returning home from the job. And warehousing is a really huge polluter in the geographies that we work in so we have an office in Chicago and an office in Juliet, which is a working class south suburb of Chicago. But the environmental department really primarily has been based in the collar counties just because that’s where we feel like there’s the most need for the kind of work. There’s a lot of really awesome environmental justice groups in Chicago that already do this kind of work here that we love and work with closely and learn a lot from. And so we really took to the collard county is because it was a space where a lot of this work felt important but wasn’t necessarily happening in an organized way.

Yana Kalmyka, formerly with Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), speaking in spring 2022 about the history of warehousing and goods movement has a long history with the Chicago River and enables opportunities for leveraging power across the labor and environmental movements.

Transcript of Recording

I’m really excited to have this conversation about the river because actually, the history of warehousing and goods movement in general has such a long history with the Chicago River in particular. In the mid 1800s, when the Illinois and Michigan Canal were built, they used the Chicago River to connect the Mississippi River to the Great Lakes for the first time, which really changed the way that goods movement and development happens in the city and probably in the world. And we saw instead of three weeks to get from one end to the other, it started taking a day, and that really changed everything. The entire locus of goods movement in the United States moved from St. Louis to Chicago when that happened. So by 1870, Chicago was the busiest port in the United States. There are more ships at the City’s harbor than New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia combined. And in that process, the first modern distribution center, like a really big warehouse was created, which is pretty much exactly where the Freshwater Lab Festival took place, pretty much exactly where we were sitting at the Backward River Festival. And also in the 1850s, the US was in the middle of this really rapid railroad expansion. And as soon as the canal opened, construction started on Chicago’s first railway. And so today we see that there’s over 25 intermodal railyards throughout Chicago, all located on the south and west sides. And Chicago remains this really vital foothold in the warehouse industry.

And this is really where Warehouse Workers for Justice was born. So Will County, or the Chicago land area kind of broadly, is the only place for six major railroads meet out of seven in the United States. It’s also where a lot of major highways are intersecting. And the Chicago land area is a day’s trip from about 60% of the continent. And so that makes Will County home to the nation’s largest inland port, which is CenterPoint. And it’s between Joliet and Ellwood, where our offices and it’s just really interesting because the river is such a huge part of this expansion and of the existence of the concept of warehousing as a whole. But I also bring up the fact that the largest inland port in North America is in the Chicago land area to talk about the fact that we have a lot of power in this region uniquely. And so Warehouse Workers for Justice was founded in 2007 because folks at a union, the United Electrical Workers, were interested in finding ways to creatively organize workers who have trouble for one reason or another, organizing themselves. And in case of warehousing, the prolific presence of third party logistics companies, temp agencies, etc makes it really hard to organize. And so union folks really came together and said, well, what industry needs organizing and also how do we do it creatively and also where do we have power, right? And after doing a power analysis, they really found out that the warehousing industry has to be where we’re at right now and it can’t move. And so this figure about this place being a day’s trip from 60% of the continent becomes really important because you think about Amazon delivering next day, two-day, even same day I’ve been seeing that they deliver like the night of your order, which is absolutely nuts. But all that to say, we have such an incredible amount of power here because this is such a vital region to make that kind of quick delivery model possible. And so when we think about the potential of environmental organizing and labor organizing in this region, it seems like we can really have ripple effects throughout the country because if we can organize here, the companies can’t move, right? And that’s kind of the central concept of our organization.

Yana Kalmyka, formerly with Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), speaking in spring 2022 about how farmers, conservationists, and warehouse workers have aligned to fight against a major warehouse development in Joliet, breaking down the environment vs jobs dichotomy with which we are often presented.

Transcript of Recording

Will County, where I work mainly, is such a company town, essentially, of warehousing. And we see a lot of the local electeds taking warehouse money from these big companies. And then it becoming really hard to stand in the way of new warehouse developments. We really came to this work because there was a proposed development of warehousing that would expand, I believe to six times the size of Midway Airport. And that is on top of a place that’s already so inundated with warehousing, right? And a bunch of local farmers actually became really concerned about what this meant for farmland. And there is a prairie preserve in the area, too. So conservationists got concerned, were organizing against this new development and then kept running into this question of, well, how are you going to stand against this development if it’s bringing jobs to the community, if it’s bringing economic development, right? And eventually, after hearing that enough times, they found warehouse workers for justice and said, well, what about the jobs? Right? What are the warehouse workers think about all of this? And we went to the warehouse workers and the real answer was, these jobs are not worth it. If we’re talking about lifelong health and environmental degradation, it’s not necessarily worth it. And also, if we’re thinking about what kind of jobs they are, not that anything necessarily would be worth planetary destruction, but to say that pitching the jobs as benefits when folks are really risking their lives, losing their lives even before the pandemic, but especially exacerbated by the pandemic - it’s wrong. And so warehouse workers really started working together with farmers to organize against this big development called North Point. And that’s kind of how we came to the environmental work. And we really started interrogating what are the intersections of the labor and environmental issues.

Yana Kalmyka, formerly with Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), speaking in spring 2022 about the incredible cost of Joliet’s drinking water crisis while warehouses like Amazon have simultaneously received immense tax breaks and discounts on water to operate in the area.

Transcript of Recording

Talking to you all at the Freshwater Lab, I want to share that Joliet is in the middle of a water crisis, and a lot of the south suburbs are close to follow. Joliet is projected to be unable to meet their demand with their current water source by 2030, so that’s a timetable of less than ten years before people don’t have access to that water. Currently, the water source is an aquifer, so it’s more related to the lake than the river. But water systems are all deeply entwined. And it’s really fascinating because people need a new water source. They’re trying to build this billion dollar pipeline to Chicago to start getting water from Lake Michigan, which is great. And actually, a lot of our folks are excited to have potentially cleaner water than what they’ve had before. But the city is saying that to pay for this billion dollar pipeline, they are going to triple people’s water bills. And we do a lot of engagement on the doors around this. And folks have told me straight up many times that they would have to leave their home, potentially a home that they grew up in or move their family to, or whatever many reasons folks might have for setting up a home in Joliet, but they wouldn’t be able to afford their lifestyle anymore if their water bill tripled. Right. And for a working class person, and especially if we go back to my stats about how much warehouse workers in particular are making, that triple increase is really dire.

And so the other interesting part of all this is that Amazon alone has gotten about 741 million dollars in tax breaks from Northeast Illinois alone. So just the Chicago land area that we’re in. And that’s almost enough to pay for the entire pipeline. And this is money that’s coming from taxpayer dollars that has been given to Amazon to set up shop, to provide unsafe and unstable jobs for people. And so to say all that, some of the work we’ve been doing is getting community members together, really getting input on what we think might be a fair solution for the community, and landing on asking some of these huge multi billion dollar corporations that are profiting excessively from this region in particular, to pay a little bit more so that everyone else can pay a little less. And out of our curiosity, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request, which was subsequently covered in a Grist article by a great reporter, Adam Mahoney. And we were curious to know how much Amazon is using and other warehouses are using. And we found that Amazon by itself, so just one of hundreds of warehouses in Will County, is using over 106 times the water as a regular household, and yet are paying pretty much the same rate. Right. And not to mention all the tax breaks they’re getting. So within those tax breaks or water bills, are more than covered, right?

Yana Kalmyka, formerly with Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), speaking in spring 2022 about the ways in which labor union leadership often disregards the intersections with the environmental justice movement.

Transcript of Recording

For our warehouse workers, sometimes they load and unload Idling diesel trucks for like ten or 12 hours a day. They’re really up close and personal with those tailpipe emissions. And then they’ll go home to a community either in Joliet or elsewhere in Will County or a lot of folks live on the South Side of Chicago and commute down to the suburbs for work. And for those folks, it’s like a double exposure, right? It’s exposure on the job and then coming home and living in an environmental justice community. And I think that that connection of workers as whole people and workers as residents of EJ communities, et cetera, is something that’s really lost on labor movement folks, especially, like the leadership. It’s kind of interesting because I feel like with the rank and file, like the union members and other folks, there’s much more of that connection made because a lot of them are people of color, a lot of them are living in EJ communities, a lot of them are working class folks. And yeah, I just want to uplift too, that I think I did a little bit of this too, and it’s hard not to sometimes it’s like there’s labor and there’s EJ, but I think there’s a really deep intersection of those issues and especially for our most low wage exploited workers.

Yana Kalmyka, formerly with Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), speaking in spring 2022 about the sacrifices that warehouse workers made during the Covid-19 pandemic which enabled much of society to stay safely at home.

Transcript of Recording

A large percentage of warehouse workers are temporary workers. And so we know that across Illinois, 85% of temp workers are primarily Black and Latino. And we also did a survey in December of 2020 where we talked to our networks of workers to see who was represented and what their experiences were like in the workplace. And we found that of our folks, less than 10% of the workers in our network self-identified as white. And so it is a predominantly people of color and low wage industry, partially because of the temp component of all of this. But I also want to name, in terms of who are warehouse workers, just that warehouse workers are the reason that a lot of us were able to stay home and really be safe during the pandemic. The reason that we could get stuff delivered to the comfort of our homes, to our very front doors, was because warehouse workers never stopped going to work. And folks who had the luxury, like us right now, to sit on Zoom and have virtual meetings were able to then get stuff delivered to their homes that they needed and were allowed to stay safe because of the work of warehouse workers. And some other stats that I wanted to pull out from our report, which came out in January of 2021, it’s called The Covid Jungle, and it really focused on working conditions throughout the pandemic. But I wanted to pull out that almost all of our interviewed workers made less than $20 an hour, and 56% of them made less than $15 an hour. And at the same time, 83% of them had a caretaking responsibility. So either an elderly parent, a disabled family member, or a child. And 96% of them, at the time of interview, were not receiving any hazard pay, which is heightened pay for going to work in more dangerous working conditions. 83% of the workers that we talked to who got Covid during the pandemic did not receive any paid sick leave. And this is really important because folks, if they’re not receiving paid sick leave and if they are making low wages and can’t afford to skip a paycheck, right, a lot of the time folks might go to work because they feel like they have to, not report symptoms and not take care of their bodies, but then also get other coworkers sick as a result of that. And then 50% of the workers we talked to didn’t have any health insurance, and 20% qualified for Medicaid, so 70% of them were not getting health insurance through their job at all. And so I just share all that to say that acknowledging how essential warehouse workers were during the Pandemic, they were also some of the most oppressed folks in the workforce at that time and were not adequately repaid for the sacrifices that they made going to work.

Yana Kalmyka, formerly with Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), speaking in spring 2022 about the harmful effects of diesel and larger patterns of environmental racism.

Transcript of Recording

For us the environmental impact of the warehouse industry in Will County is really immense. There’s an air quality problem. The Clean Air Task Force came out with a study pretty recently about the negative health impacts of diesel. And actually, in that study, you can look up your own county or your own state, see where it’s at. I think Illinois is fifth or sixth in the country for negative health impacts with diesel. We actually requested the specific statewide data, which was really jarring because you can see the percentile of each county relative to the rest of the country in that. And there’s no county below 66 percentile in all of Illinois with negative health impacts related to diesel. And Will County, where we work, is in the 98th percentile. So there’s only 2% of counties in the entire country that have worse projections for negative health impacts related to diesel. And diesel can do a lot to your body. It’s a real public health crisis. It can impact your brain, your lungs, your heart, and it’s carcinogenic, too. And so a lot of folks in warehouse communities have actually suspected cancer clusters resulting from the rapid expansion of warehousing.

You know there was this recent Consumer Reports piece that came out about Amazon and essentially was pointing to really intentional patterns of environmental racism and where the warehouses are being set up. And I think when you look at other industries, other big polluters, there’s a lot of reasons, historic and current, for why environmental racism kind of operates in these patterns. And the legacy of redlining is a huge part of that. But I also think it’s almost easier for a working class community that feels like they do need those jobs, right? It’s a community that has been historically divested in. It’s easier to try to sell this talking point to folks of like, well, you need jobs, so we’re going to build here because this is a benefit to you. So I think that’s one piece with warehousing, and I think it’s maybe more apparent with warehousing because there’s a little bit of a disconnect sometimes in people’s minds between all of the trucks they see on the roads as an infrastructure problem and then how that impacts their air quality. And this is some of the narrative-building that we’ve been trying to do around what diesel actually does to your body and what a normal concentration of trucks is within a community because when you drive into Joliet, sometimes you feel like you’re the only car on the road and it’s just all truck all around you, right? And so really doing that education work with folks feels important. But I think for companies that are kind of known or expected to be polluters, a lot of the time, Black and brown communities aren’t asked, right? They just find out about the polluter when it opens. And the fact that communities are really not valued in the development process is a huge problem. And then I think to value a community’s input is to give them perfect information, right? And that’s something we saw in Joliet, is that when the warehouses started coming up, all that was talked about was the jobs. And when the Amazons got built, people were kind of excited because Amazon was on the up and up, it was expanding. And then I think there were all these promises made to people that have since been almost entirely broken. I think the one thing about Amazon is that they pay a little higher than the other warehouses, right? But it’s still a low bar, we’ll say.

But I think the real strength, for example, of the workers center model leading on some of these environmental questions is that the only thing that these companies really care about right, is their profit. And if warehouse workers can put a hold on some of the profit, and again, especially in this kind of vital region for warehousing, that if we could potentially halt something here, it would have ripple effects throughout the entire country. Right. I think this is a real strength of the labor movements model. And the real connection that I see between the power that we can build around labor and environmental justice is that folks can take it to the real decision maker. I mean, unfortunately, especially in a place like Joliet, when most of City Council is bought off by the warehouse companies, right. You’re not making requests of your city government, you’re actually making your requests of the businesses that are lining their pockets. And so for us, it’s like, how do we take that fight directly to the companies? And how do we demand some kind of development? Or in the case of the ones that are already there, right? How do we demand fair job standards? How do we have them invest in electric vehicles so that they’re not polluting the entire community as they drive through the neighborhoods?

Two Amazon workers speaking in spring 2022 about how workers at Amazon are set up for an impossible and incredibly strenuous job, and how little the corporation cares about its employees.

Transcript of Recording

They really ask like an impossible task of you, and they try to brainwash you to think it’s possible by having try-hard people promote all the items that they can stow in a day, which aren’t really real, but yeah, it’s just all around like a really stressful environment. And they don’t give you enough time to recover and recoup between three hour shifts, they give you 30 minutes. And as Darra mentioned, it takes ten minutes to walk anywhere in Amazon from anywhere you are at, no matter where you are, it takes ten minutes to walk to where you need to be. So it’s just hard to try and hustle when your legs are sore from standing for 6 hours straight. And then you’re also tired because your arms and shoulders hurt from stowing things that are way above your head.

I have family members who- I don’t know anybody that works at Amazon, honestly, beyond me and you, but I have family members who’ve made entire lives off working warehouses, warehouse, blue collar work, basically. Well, my one cousin was very vocal from the jump. She’s worked at Ford since 2012. And she was like, that job hurts. My fingers hurt. My body hurts. Like, the job is hard. And I was just like, I just feel like maybe you’re overdoing it. Literally. How old was I in 2012? My 14 year old brain, I was like, yeah, she doesn’t know what it’s like. So I haven’t thought again about warehouse jobs until I walked into Amazon for my first day. And I was like, oh, okay, this is awful. This is what everybody’s talking about. This is why people are so anti-Amazon. Because I didn’t understand why people were anti-Amazon exactly. I’m like, it’s a corporation, so there’s blood and there’s death all around it. So I’m like, I don’t know why this one is so specifically being attacked, but I think now it’s because of how, since the corporation is - the needs are so high for that specific corporation, like anyone, but specifically Amazon, they whip you more, so you get more lashings if, you know, so it’s more aggressive in that way, for sure. So I wasn’t expecting it to be an impossible job. I was expecting there to be a way for you to get through the day with all you could do, like preparing in the morning and stretching all this. That the work could be doable, and it’s not. Not in any reasonable sense of getting work done in a day’s span. No, you can’t do it, but you have to try. So you do.

Long story short, the question was, what do people not understand about working at Amazon? It’s just really like you don’t understand how little they care about their employees. I think you can talk about it all day long, but actually being an employee there and realizing they don’t care that I get the correct pay, they don’t care that I get all my time off, they don’t care about any of that. They care that I send out 1200 items in a day. That’s all they care about. It’s sad. It’s sad and it’s really frustrating at the same time. And those are like really bad emotions to have towards the job that you’re trying to do. And especially when you have all these requirements you want to meet, when you don’t want to meet them because you don’t like your employer. That’s what I think.

Two Amazon workers speaking in spring 2022 about why they work at Amazon despite how physically demanding and depressing it is.

Transcript of Recording

Okay, so basically it makes me feel like you never finish anything because once you finish all of your work, they just bring you new work. So it’s not like, oh, okay, so like, today, okay, once I finish this, then I’ll be done with work for the day, and then I can move on to something else, like a normal job. When you have different kinds of projects, it’s just like constant - they’re bringing in boxes, they’re bringing in boxes, they’re bringing in boxes. There’s never, like, a sense of accomplishment, I feel like. And that also makes it really hard to stay motivated because it’s like, oh, once I finish these 97 items, they’re in this big ass box. I’ll be cool. No, they’re going to bring you 97 more items each time. Like, there’s nothing you can do to finish your work until you leave and clock out. That’s fucking depressing.

Okay, so I make $20 an hour on Amazon. And that’s like well, it’s like about $4 more than I’d make as a gallery assistant, like, in the real world, which is like a job in the career path of what I actually studied to do with my life. So it’s like when you compare the monetary, literally just the monetary, because Amazon is Amazon, you get your check, you can apply for benefits and stuff, but you have to commit so much more of your soul to get those things. And I’m like, girl, please. But if I were to work at a gallery and they would give me benefits and time off, and then they’d be like, less physically demanding work, and more satisfying for my soul to be there. So, like, the $4 cut wouldn’t be that bad there bad or like, you think it would be that bad. It’s like they do it like that so that you are forced to really be like, damn, it’s still like $20. I’m still young, and $20 is a lot. Like, I’m not used. But it’s like when you get there, you stand there for an hour and you’re like, was that really worth $20? I immediately want to go home, and I don’t care about the money anymore. I’ll quit. When you got a car note and the rent and utilities to pay, it’s a good wage. You have to do it. Yes.

That’s kind of where I’m at right now. I am starting off. I’m fresh out of college, so I don’t have any, like, saved money or assets. I have to start everything from scratch. So as I’m trying to build and save with that, I have to work some weekends at Amazon in addition to my full time job. I wouldn’t work at Amazon if I didn’t have to. I don’t like working there, and I just want to stay and work a couple of days a month. It’s not like that. It’s literally I have to in order to live the lifestyle that I want to live. So it’s okay for that. But if I had to work at Amazon four days as my full time career or anything like that, I don’t think $16.50 would be sufficient.

Exactly. Yeah. And I feel like that’s really what this question is about. It’s not for people, like, you and me, we just work there because what else is there? We’re not trying to support kids and pay mortgages and shit. So it’s really great for us in that regard because having actually actualized Amazon as a career for myself, it would be really tough. It’s like, this is it for the next 30 years, is what I’m going to do. Like, watch my body fade away for fucking $20 an hour and nothing else. Like, as a full grown adult, all you have is, all you get is money. That’s not enough. There’s no satisfaction, like, psychologically, there’s no benefits, there’s no dental, there’s no, like, everything you want to come out, like, you got to pay for it all. There’s no seeing your work do anything in the end. Yeah. You don’t see somebody getting their package of socks and joy on their face when it happens or anything. There’s no fulfillment after you stow that item. There’s no fulfillment at the fulfillment center. Hashtag.