DATELINES
Koeppel, Diana Claitor, Jane Slaughter, Allen Hornblum, and Barbara
DATELINES The Homeless Take to the Water AUSTIN, TEXAS The capital city of Texas prides itself on being a green and pretty place, especially in its central district. Thousands of tourists walk...
...The licenses of eight stations have been canceled since 1985, according to Victor Bal-divieso, the union federation's secretary for broadcasting...
...In the 1980 coup of General Garcia Meza, all the stations were destroyed or dismantled...
...Families were deeply divided among those who returned and those who stayed out...
...The IGA supermarket renamed its delicatessen Hormelcatessen...
...Finally, the rafts may also be in violation of codes governing building safety and proper sewage disposal...
...Everyone took sides, and, with few exceptions, it was the town against the workers...
...Despite a year of record profits, Hormel announced a 25 per cent cut in their hourly wage— from $10.69 to $8.25-and 1,500 workers in Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers walked out...
...It looks the way a small Midwestern town is supposed to look...
...SPAC and its supporters have been controversial since their formation last February...
...In fact, the town had always been sharply divided, with the divisions etched into the landscape...
...Barbara Koeppel (Barbara Koeppel is a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board...
...We've been blown up and down the river five or six times, because our anchor wouldn't hold...
...Since November 1987, the DGT has dunned all of them and is requiring the clandestine stations to reconstitute themselves legally—which will include a deposit of 10 per cent of their declared capital...
...January 31 is almost at hand...
...The children are blond and tanned and healthy...
...The goose has his own small floating pen attached to the main raft, which is called, of course, the S.S...
...Over the next three years, daily newspapers owned by two of Bolivia's three "tin baron" families ran articles calling for closure of the station dubbed "The Miner's Voice," which, they said, functioned from inside the largest mine and caused continuous trouble by advocating subversion...
...In July, his work was reduced to one night a week...
...It is estimated that the army has employed violence against miners' stations seventy times...
...Broadcasters were injured and killed...
...As the workers took their Boycott Hormel campaign to the rest of the country, townfolk defiantly supported the company...
...It's held this town hostage for years, always threatening to leave if it didn't get what it wanted...
...Condoms in the Cells PHILADELPHIA In February 1986, Mikal Geddes, thirty-three, became the first inmate in the Philadelphia prison system to be diagnosed with the AIDS virus...
...If they die, forty-two years of history and heroism—rare examples of autonomous union radio—will die with them...
...In 1979, the Center logged a total of 219 cases of child abuse, sexual assaults, and other violence...
...Another nine are classed "clandestine" because they never had licenses...
...Today, those stations face extinction...
...The trouble—company demands for one concession after another—culminated in the long, bitter strike that began in 1985 when the meatcutters, having already taken major wage and benefit cuts, refused to put up with any more...
...When he graduates, he says, he will settle anywhere but Austin: "I never want to see it again...
...Had Austin been something other than a company town, most of the meatcutters could, after a time, have found jobs elsewhere...
...Because of the strike, Barbara Collette (Frank's wife) lost her job as an agent at Sterling Real Estate...
...The popular revolution of 1952 made it possible for the miners' stations to rebuild, and their history since then has had its ups and downs...
...With lapsed licenses, ancient equipment, and underpaid staff, only five are broadcasting...
...The strike held the nation's attention for a time...
...He is sympathetic, though...
...Then, out of nowhere, appears a white water tower, a Buick dealership, some late-model garden apartments, a turn to the left, and you're in Austin—population 23,000...
...The strike also cost Austin its myth of class harmony...
...FRANK short life taught the miners the value of their own media...
...After their first two weeks on Town Lake, the director of the Parks and Recreation Department sent a formal notification that the city of Austin considered the SPAC rafts to be in violation of certain laws...
...Main Street cuts Austin in half...
...It's a Catch-22," Burke says...
...The government is selling and closing mines...
...They all need repairs to their cables and antennas and repair or replacement of consoles, microphones, and record players...
...Renteria and Williams agree on the rafts' relative safety, away from streets and alleys where many have been stabbed or robbed...
...There was no racial tension because almost everyone in town was white...
...They're out there for the same reason scared men built Venice on the water—to get away from danger...
...The idea seemed fitting, since townspeople bring large amounts of food to the ducks and swans and tend to ignore the hungry and homeless people in close proximity...
...By then," she says, "I was so involved in the strike, there was no way I could back down...
...When the strikers and their families wore P-9 Proud buttons and T-shirts proclaiming Cram Your Spam, the others donned shirts announcing, I Love Hormel...
...Frank Collette, who was in the Air Force for twenty-one years before coming to Hormel in 1982 as a meat-cutter, found a three-week stint in June, as a security guard, for $4.55 an hour...
...It destroyed their myths and they resented it terribly...
...You want something like this resolved harmoniously," says Charles Jordan, director of the city's Parks and Recreation Department...
...Commissioner Clifford urged the prison board to reject such fears...
...A few have even taken to the water...
...When the plant reopened in 1986 and 500 members of P-9 crossed the picket line, "it was like a civil war," says Bob Richardson, a social-studies teacher...
...It was bizarre," says Geddes, who notes that "sex was commonplace" in the prison...
...All it took were some jolts to dislodge the mask, and jolts began to be felt in the late 1970s as trouble mounted at the Hormel meatpacking plant, the employer, since 1.891, in this one-company town...
...In 1985, the total was 321...
...The union has negotiated an agreement with the DGT by which the debt is reduced from $100,000 to $64,000 and the miners need to pay 5 per cent on the deadline...
...Close friends walked on opposite sides of the street to avoid meeting...
...We were quite concerned at the outset, but it really has not been a problem...
...The Central also formed a commission to seek assistance abroad, but that can help only in the long term...
...So everybody's afraid and what Hormel wants, it gets...
...Prisoners should have access to condoms and to disinfectants for needles," Clifford said...
...some brought food and beer on Thanksgiving and stayed to chat...
...The Miner's Voice" was bombed by the army in 1949, but its UNITED NATIONS/J...
...They say we are breaking a city ordinance against living on Town Lake, but we aren't...
...In early May, SPAC members held a news conference to announce they had purchased a tiny yellow gosling named Homer, which they said they were prepared to kill on the steps of the Capitol if their demands weren't met...
...So the guys make sure anybody on the raft has the right permits, and they have a fishing line in the water at all times...
...They planned to recruit members at a barbecue, but doubted they could afford enough meat...
...People saw their life savings, invested in their homes, vanish overnight as foreclosures flooded the market and values plummeted...
...For some the answer is to leave town for good...
...Or about how everyone was against you...
...People spat at me, pushed me down stairs, and jeered at me...
...In early December, the weather in Austin was sunny and up to seventy-five degrees in the daytime, but the president of SPAC—and captain of the main raft—said they had already experienced high winds and rough water...
...Jane Slaughter (Jane Slaughter is a staff writer for Labor Notes...
...Some said Austin was nearly perfect...
...After a few blocks, the central business district comes into sight, but it is hardly bustling...
...When the tin miners resolved in 1946 to start the first station, they assessed themselves one day's pay apiece...
...People did so well that 80 per cent of the families owned their own homes...
...Smack in the middle of southern Minnesota farmland, the flat fields go on forever...
...The next day, Goode called a press conference to announce a health emergency in the prison system, ordering condoms to be distributed as part of a comprehensive AIDS education program...
...Two years later, AIDS awareness and sensitivity had become policy in the Philadelphia prison system...
...Their deadline is January 31, 1989...
...P-9ers insist they can't live on that, and they continue to hope the national boycott will put enough pressure on Hormel to increase wages and improve working conditions at the plant...
...SPAC and its support group, the Mad Housers, announced they would install other shelters around the city and launch more vessels on Town Lake in an effort to put pressure on the city and social-service agencies...
...Others acted out...
...But the myth of the perfect town masked contradictions, basic ones...
...And, since the government is determined to break the back of the miners' union, it has made certain the telecommunications agency (DGT) insists on payment...
...There were no slums and no welfare lines...
...The boat people, who seldom number more than two or three at a time, have had visits from passing canoes...
...We can pretend it does not exist, but we will only be deceiving ourselves...
...Of the twenty-four stations the miners operated in the 1960s, sixteen remain...
...What happens now...
...One additional recommendation, however, was far more controversial...
...They are making Austin look bad," says Captain Mike Pearce, owner and operator of a large paddlewheel tour boat called the Lone Star...
...And there are no people in view...
...A Company Town Decays AUSTIN, MINNESOTA The sign stands alongside the main road into town...
...This time, only one member dissented...
...The tin miners have always been the backbone of the Bolivian labor movement, but their union has shrunk to a fifth of its former size...
...We did a lot of research on city ordinances and codes," says Lori Renteria, spokesperson for the Mad Housers, a group of community activists, architects, and contractors who helped build the rafts...
...The wage, he guesses, would be "somewhere in the $7 to $7.50 range...
...Thirty thousand have lost their jobs, leaving only 7,300 active miners...
...A Vietnam vet came up with an idea to kill one of the swans on Town Lake, and that turned into the idea of taking a bird hostage, to draw attention to the homeless," says Renteria...
...He pointed out that eight inmates had died of AIDS since 1986...
...Here, the whole town was affected...
...In such an atmosphere," says Blowers, "where tensions have simmered for years and everyone feels terribly threatened, the extremely brutal crimes since 1982 are not surprising...
...City council member Robert Barnstone says the council is dealing with so many critical issues they simply have no time to focus on new programs for the homeless...
...They're safer out on the water," Barnstone says...
...People were shocked that something like this could erupt so ferociously in their Garden of Eden," says Blowers...
...The following day, local activists marshaled their forces and appealed to Mayor Wilson Goode to intervene...
...Headlines like Goose Cooked if City Ignores Homeless Plight filled the papers, and raised an outcry from the public and the Humane Society...
...The Inter-Faith Chaplains Committee of the Philadelphia Prisons also took issue with the proposal, claiming that it would "encourage homosexual activity, pose a serious threat to straight prisoners, and set up a conflict of values and social mores...
...That could happen if the company reopened its slaughtering division, which still hasn't resumed operation...
...Though he withdrew his suggestion for needle disinfectants, Clifford would not back down on the condom issue, despite hostility from some quarters...
...The crime rate has skyrocketed...
...So the urgent problem is to find $3,200 immediately...
...With a return to civilian rule in 1982, some stations struggled back onto the air...
...In the schools, drug and alcohol abuse, which had always been a problem, went out of control...
...So all the social problems like alcoholism, drugs, wife- and child-battering, erupted...
...Cases of family problems reaching the Austin Crisis Center are up 65 per cent since 1979...
...Clifford urged the board to adopt an AIDS education program, anonymous HIV testing, and adequate treatment services for AIDS patients...
...Doors were never locked, and neighbors looked out for each other...
...If it moved, everything would just close up...
...Burke is quick to add, though, that he and many other guards see an inherent contradiction in the effort: They are being asked to facilitate safe sex, even though sexual activity is forbidden in the prison...
...Goode also directed the prison board to vote on the issue again...
...The program has not really run into a problem," says Captain Tony Burke, a prison guard...
...For Sale signs dot the manicured lawns...
...But the bulk have turned up only part-time jobs at a fraction of their former pay...
...One is a section of the Texas Water Safety Act that requires two lights on all vessels ("a bright white light aft to show all around the horizon" and a red-and-green lantern in the fore part...
...There has been no sign of wild promiscuity...
...Warden Arthur Wallen-stein of Bucks County Prison in southeastern Pennsylvania, for example, argued that the distribution of condoms "acknowledges homosexual pressuring and encourages forced homosexual behavior...
...Mikal Geddes underscored the urgency of the issue by stating that even though everyone knew he had AIDS, there were still inmates who wanted to have sex with him...
...The miners' union plans to create zones for the radios in hopes of managing to save a few stations...
...Sexual activity is present in all prisons," he says...
...It hurt worse than a fist...
...Now the cameras are gone, the strike and the local are broken, and the "perfect town" will never be the same...
...People with homes that would have brought $60,000 before the strike would be lucky to get $35,000 today, according to real-estate agent Smoky Carlson—"if there were buyers...
...Thousands of tourists walk through the lush, tree-shaded grounds around the Capitol, and the landscaped hike-and-bike trails along the Colorado River, dammed to form Town Lake, make a picture-postcard setting for joggers and sightseers...
...I never thought people could hate so much...
...But there were no opportunities...
...I won't raise kids where they'll go through the same hurt I did...
...But the fall of the price of tin on the world market and the neo-liberal privatization policies imposed by the government of President Victor Paz Estens-soro are savaging the miners and their radio stations just as effectively as the army has in the past...
...When it wanted a new sewerage system for its new plant, the city council obliged and passed the cost along to residents by adding it to our property taxes...
...Most everyone who wanted a job had one...
...Allen Hornblum Allen Hornblum is a member of the board of trustees of the Philadelphia prison system and a member of the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency...
...Though most of the homes were similar, the geography lesson was not lost on the workers...
...My friends started drinking or using drugs a lot, to forget the constant arguments at home," says Tim Hinkle, who graduated from the high school last spring...
...If they'd take the dollars they spend on beer, they could probably rent an apartment...
...The stations also carry a debt of $100,000 for licenses and use of frequencies...
...Psychologist Vicky Potter, who directs Austin's Crisis Center, says that "from the early 1980s onward, people here were severely depressed, suicidal...
...But there have also been hostile reactions, especially from lakefront businesses whose livelihood derives from the tourist trade...
...Tin Miners' Radio on the Ropes LA PAZ, BOLIVIA Since the 1940s, the tin miners of Bolivia have financed and run their own network of autonomous radio stations...
...With the strike, indignation spilled into the open...
...But the company stood firm and the international union withdrew its support a few months after it began...
...Some took early retirement and others went back to school...
...Nearly all of Hormel's meatcutters lived on the east side, where the plant is, and everyone else lived on the west...
...he has since become a symbol for Austin's homeless and even attended the Democratic National Convention with James Williams and other SPAC members...
...Austin is Hormel," says Charlene Blowers, a financial worker at the city's Department of Social Services, whose father, grandfather, and uncle worked at the plant...
...Repeatedly frustrated by lack of services for the homeless and angry with policies at the local Salvation Army, the members began by working to get the homeless registered to vote...
...Other reactions included laughter, sympathy, and even slome death threats to the "terrorists...
...Two-story white clapboard homes sit back from the streets, framed by neat lawns...
...Homer...
...Everyone knew, or at least had heard of, everyone else...
...It is mid-day but, on Main Street, the stores stand empty...
...And the nation's neoliberal government has put their experiment in worker-controlled communication on the ropes...
...I was treated like a piece of trash by the staff and other inmates...
...Since 1982, Austin has been the stage for eleven particularly gruesome murders, though the last one anyone can remember before that was in the 1950s...
...So I had to resign...
...It was terrible," he says...
...We're condoning sodomy...
...one station was bombed by the air force...
...The board of trustees deliberated on the condom-distribution question for six months...
...They were always leering at me...
...This is not a houseboat," says Williams, straightening his battered captain's hat with a grin...
...And that's just one example...
...Diana Claitor (Diana Claitor is a free-lance writer in Austin...
...We're just fishing, all day and all night...
...If the miners can raise that sum, they'll have time to work up a plan to rationalize the stations and decide which ones they can save...
...Her boss, Collette explains, was warned by Hormel that Sterling could lose its lucrative arrangement with the company to handle sales of Hormel executives' homes...
...They need tape recorders, cassettes, and records...
...Edmund Lyons, superintendent of Philadelphia's prison system, sees things differently...
...Hormel Senior Vice President Charles Nyberg says the company did what it had to do— and would do it again—but adds the healing could begin if everyone out of work had a job...
...Renteria says one of the immediate goals is to persuade the city to let them establish a campground for individuals who refuse to be institutionalized or "warehoused" by the Salvation Army...
...Enjoy Austin, it says, Where the Good Life Is Here to Stay...
...The other is a city code making it unlawful for any person to occupy a water-craft on Town Lake for the purpose of sleeping overnight...
...At the Oak Leaf Restaurant on Main Street, a sign says, We proudly serve Hormel products...
...Anonymous supporters have since donated a better anchor and a heater for the cabin...
...Most of the 850 workers who refused to cross the picket line are suffering...
...A lot of people sympathize with what they're trying to say, but sooner or later, I hope they'll remove the boat houses voluntarily...
...He says the new people Hormel hired came mostly from depressed farms and can't afford the homes the strikers lost...
...The condition of the remaining stations is pathetic...
...Pearce and at least one other concessionaire have complained to the city...
...Maurice Clifford, the city's public-health commissioner, recommended that the board of trustees of the prison system adopt a series of measures to thwart the spread of the deadly AIDS virus inside the walls of the city's four prisons...
...After her arrest for picketing at the plant, her name was in the paper, and her boss gave her a choice: Lower your profile or leave...
...Finally, on February 22, 1988, the prison board voted 3-to-2 with one abstention against the proposed program...
...We have ridden out some real bad weather, with waves breaking over the edge of the raft," says James Williams, a forty-eight-year-old black man who's lived in Austin a year...
...Calling themselves "Austin's boat people," an advocacy group named the Street People's Advisory Council (SPAC) launched a small flotilla of rafts in late October...
...We found that if you get the permits for night fishing, there's no law against being on the lake...
...Also, it is beautiful out here," says Williams...
...Homer was spared when the group decided the city was making progress...
...But something is wrong with the picture...
...Church steeples soar above the buildings...
...And people paid little mind to class divisions, since both the meatcutters at the Hormel plant and the others in business or services brought home nice paychecks...
...The congress of the Bolivian Workers Central, the national labor body, has mandated a one-time assessment of one boliviano (forty cents) from each of its members, but has not yet collected the money...
...In the era of AIDS, it is incumbent upon responsible correctional policymakers to grapple with difficult issues and not run from them...
...Miners tell of bloody battles, seizure of local union offices, gunfire and bombings, as the government tried to silence their radio stations, and as they defended them with their lives...
...Hinkle went away to college last fall...
...He says, too, that they have a light up at all times and row their dinghy ashore to use public restroom facilities...
...And it hit everyone—the children, the workers, people in management, retirees, owners of small businesses, meatpackers who crossed the picket line...
...Lately, though, the banks of Town Lake have also been the digs of hundreds of homeless men and women, who eat and sleep in the shadow of new luxury hotels and high-rise office towers...
...We have bedrolls but that's because it gets cold at night, fishing...
Vol. 53 • February 1989 • No. 2
