by Steve Early
Meanwhile, Jimenez’s success in rallying Richmond Latinos on her behalf raised her profile in case she sought public office in the future. She also played a valuable role, along with other younger activists, in a survey that queried Richmond community leaders about how the RPA might broaden its political base. Interviews conducted by Jimenez and others on the RPA’s restructuring committee confirmed the need for organizational changes. Part of the feedback they got was that “young people do not feel welcome in [RPA] meetings” because “the majority of the members are old folks” and the whole “culture of the organization is not welcoming.”
Despite the RPA’s successful deployment of several hundred canvassers during the 2014 election, one respondent chided the group for not “using volunteers effectively” or having a good understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. According to this survey participant, members should be able “to contribute in a specific way without having to be part of everything the RPA is doing.” According to another, the RPA’s “framing of issues doesn’t fit well with people of color.” As a result, some respondents indicated, Richmond Latinos had little feeling of connection to the group.9
A REFINERY LABOR UPRISING
Meanwhile, Chevron’s largest union in Richmond, United Steel Workers Local 5, was about to frame its own issues in a way that better resonated locally. Along with oil workers across the country, Local 5 members were preparing to strike, for the first time in three decades, over unsafe practices like the maintenance delays that led to our 2012 refinery fire.
The USW’s stalled contract talks coincided with the Chemical Safety Board’s return to Richmond for a public briefing on January 28, 2015. The board still lacked any statutory authority to compel safer operation by Chevron. But it did release timely recommendations based on its Richmond investigation. Once again, the CSB faulted lax maintenance practices for “the catastrophic pipe rupture,” hydrocarbon release, and resulting vapor cloud that engulfed nineteen Chevron employees and nearly killed them two and a half years earlier. The agency criticized a corporate “safety culture” that “encouraged continued operation of a unit despite hazardous leaks” and discouraged unionized refinery employees from asserting their contractual safety rights. Don Holmstrom, lead CSB investigator of the Richmond fire, cited evidence of “increased reluctance” among Chevron refinery operators “to use their ‘stop work’ authority despite being concerned about the results of maintenance deficiencies.”10
Members of Local 5 turned out in force for this city hall event. They wore union jackets and held signs publicizing their safety-related contract demands. Not surprisingly, the USW’s 2015 bargaining agenda tracked the CSB proposals. Local 5 Secretary-Treasurer Jim Payne welcomed government support for “stop work” protocols that would make workers feel more secure about bucking management in moments of imminent danger. Speaking as a newly reelected city councilor, Gayle McLaughlin endorsed the CSB/USW “call for workers’ right to shut down operations when they feel it’s unsafe.”
Looking around the CSB briefing room, I noticed that McLaughlin’s building trades opponents were not in attendance. As one USW leader explained: “They’re silent on issues related to safety and anything outside of jobs.” Labor adherence to the company line has its rewards, however. Greg Feere, who calls himself the “CEO” of the Contra Costa Construction Trades Council, is a welcome contributor to Richmond Today, the Chevron newsletter for Richmond residents. In this and other management-funded media outlets, Feere writes articles with titles like “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs,” while applauding Chevron’s use of outside contractors in its “safe and modern facility.”
The union views or activism of seven hundred workers represented by Local 5 never gets equivalent mention. In fact, it took the first big oil strike in thirty-five years to better inform Richmond refinery neighbors about USW safety concerns. Nationwide, about thirty thousand workers were seeking a new master contract with Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and other smaller firms Their complaints included “onerous overtime, unsafe staffing levels, the daily occurrences of fires, emissions, leaks and explosions that threaten local communities . . . and the flagrant contracting out that impacts health and safety on the job.”11
In February 2015, four thousand walked out in a “selective strike” aimed at nine refineries. Among the strikers were Local 5 members in the city of Martinez, who were protesting safety hazards at Tesoro, an oil refiner with a Chevron-like history of them. Other USW members, including those employed at Chevron in Richmond, remained on strike alert.
In anticipation of USW picket lines, Chevron covered its main gate signs so its corporate logo wouldn’t appear in any protest-related TV coverage. Inside the facility, Local 5 president B. K. White accused management of trying “to quell the voices of workers with the fear of the refinery’s closing, whether it is from regulatory agencies or community activists.”12 The resulting eight-week work stoppage at other refineries exposed historic rifts between USW leaders and their counterparts in the conservative building trades.
Locally and nationally, the latter perceived USW demands for less contracting out as a threat to their “union jurisdiction.” At a February 2015 meeting of the Contra Costa Central Labor Council (CLC), construction union delegates acted accordingly. They blocked any expression of solidarity with workers picketing at Tesoro just a few miles away. Among the nay-sayers was Tom Baca, a national vice president of the Boilermakers. At a Richmond banquet honoring Betty Reid Soskin just a few months earlier, he had publicly apologized for the Boilermakers’ lack of solidarity with its own nonwhite dues payers during World War II.
Now, nearly eight decades later, building trades officials like Baca threatened to quit the CLC if struggling members of another union were not wronged as well. Despite this modern-day betrayal, many Bay Area trade unionists turned out for Tesoro strike rallies. The strikers themselves did a lot of fraternizing with environmental activists long maligned by employers in their own industry. In fact, it could be said that members of Communities for a Better Environment, the Sunflower Alliance, the Sierra Club, and Movement Generation displayed more picket-line enthusiasm than the politically divided AFL-CIO body housed in Local 5’s own union hall.13
The strike proved to be a galvanizing experience for a new generation of refinery workers who had never before engaged in such a major work stoppage. The results were hailed as a victory for labor.14 But, like contract settlements in other industries where workers’ power has been eroded, the steel workers’ deal with Big Oil fell short of some announced union goals. In Richmond, refinery operators emerged from the negotiations with their hard-earned base pay intact and increased.15 They did not get broad “stop work authority” written into their local contract because management strongly rejected this proposal, according to Local 5 representative Mike Smith. “The company doesn’t mind if you stop a single job,” Smith points out. “They do mind if you shut down a whole unit that is making them hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Ironically, just a few months later, Richmond residents received a reassuring, if misleading, safety update from Chevron general manager Kory Judd. In a “Chevron Speaks” column for the Richmond Standard, Judd announced that he had issued a “Stop Work Authority” card, with his personal signature on it, to everyone on the payroll. With this card in their pocket, all workers were now empowered “to stop any work if they believe that it is not being done safely.”16 Judd noted that very few companies “encourage employees to stop or pause work in other workplaces.” But Chevron was not like them. Its own “internal surveys, audits, and other feedback mechanisms” confirmed that Richmond refinery “employees and contractors feel supported in their use of Stop Work Authority and credit Chevron’s strong safety culture.”
Judd didn’t mention Local 5’s attempt to make “stop work authority” part of a legally binding labor-management accord. Nor was Chevron’s long-time industrial union nemesis credited for anything else of note during its recent negotiations. (An e
mployee named Mike Smith was rewarded, behind the scenes, for his role in local USW-Chevron talks when the company canceled his union leave shortly thereafter.)17 Any Chevron labor organization lobbying for workplace safety rules, engaging in strike activity, or consorting with environmental groups could count on being Photoshopped out of all official portraits. Like recipients of Chevron’s election year propaganda, readers of the Richmond Standard had to read between the lines to discern who was really making Big Oil safer, for workers and the community.
RICHMOND PRIDE (WITH LESS CONTROVERSY)
In June 2015, on the second anniversary of our city hall fracas over the Gay Pride flag raising, Richmond celebrated its growing diversity, in new and old fashion, with no controversy at all. Duane Chapman, a cofounder of Richmond Rainbow Pride, had long encouraged local African American participation in San Francisco’s annual Pride parade, just across the bay and one of the biggest in the nation. But whenever he had sounded out friends in Richmond about the advisability of sponsoring a local event like it, they’d counseled him that the time wasn’t right yet. In June 2014 Chapman was among two hundred people of all ages gathered in Marina Bay Park for Richmond’s first Pride Family Day picnic, an opportunity for the local LGBTQ community to come together publicly. That such a day had finally arrived in Richmond brought tears to his eyes, Chapman confessed.18
Juneteenth—Richmond’s annual festival commemorating the end of slavery—drew thousands of spectators along its downtown parade route. Cosponsored and partially funded by Chevron, Juneteenth is increasingly a public demonstration of local ethnic diversity as well as black pride. Its participants, in June 2014, included African American cowboys, members of the Road Runners Motorcycle Club, local sports teams, church-sponsored floats, dancers and musicians, and two contingents of classic cars. The first fleet included many shiny, perfectly maintained Corvettes, while the second featured lowriders, whose vehicles were fewer in number but all capable of sudden one-sided elevation.
Richmond’s senior city councilor and most wily political survivor, Nat Bates, rode in the parade. He was waving as grandly as if he had been elected mayor eight months before, instead of losing to Tom Butt. Other participants in the procession included his longtime RPA foes on the council and various other public office holders. Members of the Black Women Organized for Political Action (BWOPA) marched with the group’s main organizer, Kathleen Sullivan. BWOPA supporters brandished signs calling for more black female leaders.
Among municipal officials, none seemed to be more engaged with the crowd gathered on sidewalks along the parade route than Chris Magnus. Some of the time he was marching just few steps away from his husband, mayoral assistant Terrance Cheung. Magnus spent the entire march detouring from the middle of the street to the sidewalks on either side of Cutting Boulevard so he could say hello, shake hands, or deliver hugs to people he recognized. The large number of Latino parade watchers was indicative of the city’s ongoing demographic shift in their direction.
When Magnus completed the Juneteenth parade route, he waited near the reviewing stand, in front of Nicholl Park, where organizational booths and a stage were set up for the rest of the day’s festivities. One newly arrived group of marchers was the Richmond Steelers, a peewee football team with plenty of energy. Encouraged by the parade MC, this nearly all-black squad broke ranks and mobbed Magnus like he was a much-larger white quarterback on an opposing team. In other cities, where public confidence in cops has dropped to its lowest level in several decades, police chiefs are more likely to be surrounded by protestors than youthful fans.19 The Steelers grabbed for the RPD “Junior Officer” stickers that Magnus was handing out and proudly affixed them to their black-and-gold football jerseys.
Yet, even in Richmond, people doing public safety work could not rest on their laurels for long. In his usual straightforward style, Chief Magnus reported not long after Juneteenth that the city was “experiencing a troubling upswing in both violent and property crime”—a 16 percent increase overall in 2015 over the previous midyear rate, with armed robberies going up 26 percent.20 More alarming was a 9 percent increase in January-to-June calls to the RPD about shootings—nearly 750 “calls for service” in all. Gunfire claimed ten lives during this period, just one less than Richmond’s homicide total for the whole previous year. By the end of 2015, homicides had doubled in number compared to 2014.
The year 2015 got off to a bad start when twenty-three-year-old Sirmonte Bernstine was killed on January 13 in Crescent Park, a federally subsidized apartment complex. Retaliatory shootings followed, as Bernstine’s gang, the Lils, targeted the Manor Boys, based in Monterey Pines, part of Melvin Willis’s ACCE canvassing turf and previously known as Kennedy Manor. Gun violence there on July 14 took the life of Fontino Hardy Jr., a graduate of Tennessee State University with a degree in criminal justice. Hardy was known for his pep talks encouraging other young people to enroll in college and learn a trade, before he was drawn back into illicit activity himself.21
What police were seeing, Mark Gagen reported in the Richmond Standard, was an uptick of “young people being manipulated and encouraged to involve themselves in street-level gunplay and violence at the pressure of older gang members.”22 “Richmond is still sucking people back in,” agreed Malcolm Marshall, editor of the Pulse. “As my father used to say, you can take the boy out of the hood but not the hood out of the boy. It’s hard to escape family, friends, and the lifestyle. The root cause is poverty and long-standing issues of violence, drugs, and guns that are not resolved.”
Like Marshall, Magnus cited the continuing lack of economic and educational opportunities and “a vacuum not necessarily being filled by great things” in Richmond.23 “Our resources, including staffing, [are] reduced—so community partnerships are more important than ever,” he wrote in an open letter to Richmond citizens. “We can reverse this recent trend, but we must take it seriously and respond now by working together.” Magnus reminded residents of the city that they needed to look out for each other. Sounding very much like a Richmond community organizer, he recommended a two-step approach: “Get to know your neighbors, then get organized!”24
Six months later Magnus was getting to know new neighbors—in Arizona. Looking for fresh career challenges, he left Richmond to become police chief in Tucson, which has a public safety department five times larger than Richmond’s. Awaiting him there was a not-very-warm welcome from the local police union. Its leaders had opposed his appointment and preferred a candidate from Dallas. During the hiring process, Brad Pelton, vice president of the union, came to Richmond with a fellow officer to interview Magnus. He noticed a framed political cartoon of Magnus, depicting his role in the post-Ferguson vigil on Macdonald Avenue. “That it was hanging prominently on his wall spoke volumes to me,” Pelton reported.25
On the Arizona union’s scorecard of his record in Richmond, Magnus was credited with “reduced crime, increased police staffing, increased officer compensation, and improved community relations.” But that didn’t outweigh his negatives, which included the fact that he had “participated in a ‘Black Lives Matter’ protest and brought in a civilian to replace the commander in the internal affairs division.” Members of Tucson’s Citizen Police Chief Appointment Advisory Committee viewed his record more favorably. They voted in favor of hiring Magnus by a margin of 11 to 3; the city council agreed, and Richmond’s loss became Tucson’s gain.
SEVEN
GENTRIFICATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
TO DEFEATED CITY COUNCILOR Corky Booze, the 2014 election results were proof that Richmond had become another Berkeley, one of the earliest converts to rent control in California. In reality, the more worrisome model for the future lay just south of Berkeley—in Oakland. There recent housing market changes and demographic shifts provided a case study in wholesale dislocation of poor and working-class people.1
As one housing analyst reported, “During the foreclosure tsunami, Oaklanders lost their homes and their family nest eggs
. In East Oakland, home ownership declined by 25 percent between 2006 and 2013. Over 11,000 homes were foreclosed. . . . There continues to be a steady decline of the city’s African American population, 24 percent or 33,502 residents, between 2000 and 2010. Since 1990, the city has lost more than 50,000 black residents.” Further accelerating the city’s “loss of racial, age, economic, cultural, and social diversity” and its increase in income inequality (now thirteenth highest in the nation), Oakland experienced “rent increases ranked first or second highest in the nation for multiple consecutive quarters.”2
A longtime community organizer and lawyer named Randy Shaw was one of the first critics of gentrification to warn that Richmond might be engulfed by similar trends. By 2014 some Oakland neighborhoods were reaching San Francisco levels of housing unaffordability. So Shaw, director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, predicted that “Bay Area urban pioneers” might eventually “need a new city to call home.” What better place than Richmond, “a city with a working-class multi-racial population and a direct BART line to San Francisco. A city with a Green Party mayor, a progressive grassroots political organization, and an already burgeoning arts scene.”3
According to Shaw, “those seeking affordable housing along with a diverse culture will not find a better Bay Area locale.” In Shaw’s assessment Richmond was already “where Oakland was 15 years ago.” While that much bigger city went from being poor, crime-ridden, and economically stagnant “to hip seemingly overnight,” the same process might take a bit longer in the shadow of Chevron. Nevertheless, Shaw was convinced: sooner or later the New York Times would be hailing our refinery town as the Bay Area’s next hipster haven.