WILL THE SUPREME COURT OVERRULE FARMWORKER UNION RIGHTS?

WILL THE SUPREME COURT OVERRULE FARMWORKER UNION RIGHTS?
By David Bacon
Capital & Main, November 20, 2020
https://capitalandmain.com/will-the-supreme-court-overrule-farmworker-union-rights-1120

 

An organizer talks at lunchtime with a D'Arrigo Brothers worker with a union button on her cap. 

 

All photos by David Bacon.  These photos are housed in the Special Collections of the Green Library at Stanford University.  https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bacon

Sidebar below: How a Labor Law Evened the Balance of Power in California's Fields


Not long before Donald Trump's election in 2016, the Pacific Legal Foundation filed suit against California's farmworker access rule in federal court on behalf of two companies - Cedar Point Nursery in Siskiyou County and the Fowler Packing Company in Fresno. The foundation is a conservative libertarian group that holds property rights sacred and campaigns against racial equity. It fought hard for the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the high court.

The access regulation, which took effect after the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, allows union organizers to come onto a grower's property in the morning before work to talk with workers. According to the labor board's handbook, "The access regulations of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board are meant to insure that farm workers, who often may be contacted only at their work place, have an opportunity to be informed with minimal interruption of working activities."

 

Two UFW organizers walk into a D'Arrigo Brothers broccoli field in Salinas, 1994.


The board requires that the union give notice to the employer before taking access, and that organizers not disrupt work. They can talk only for an hour before and after work and during lunch, and can take access for only a total of 120 days during a year.

Growers have always hated the access rule, and many at first refused to obey. Former United Farm Workers organizer Fred Ross Jr. remembers being arrested several times in Santa Maria for taking access. "This was all about power and who had it," he says. "Growers had it all, and their workers none. They wanted to dominate. For them, workers didn't even have the right to talk."

The suit filed by the PLF, Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, attracted more than the predictable support of the California and American Farm Bureaus. Amicus briefs came from a host of right-wing legal bodies, including the Mountain States and Southeastern Legal Foundations, the Pelican and Cato institutes, and even the Republican attorneys general of Oklahoma, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas. The company brief conjured up visions of "stampedes of third-party organizers" and warned, "If such a rule proliferates, property owners throughout much of the nation will see their rights greatly diminished as governments increasingly sanction invasions of their property."

 

 

 During the 2007 UFW campaign to organize grape pickers for the huge VBZ grower in Delano, organizer Yolanda Serna talks to workers eating lunch.


Had the political atmosphere in the country not changed in the 40 years since the regulation has been in effect, the suit might never have been filed at all. Agribusiness challenged the access rule from its inception and went all the way to the California Supreme Court, where the growers lost in 1976. In the last decade, however, visions of a liberal U.S. Supreme Court evaporated in the final years of the Obama administration, and Trump's election led to the appointment of three right-wing justices, giving the court a 6-3 conservative majority.

 

 

 An organizer, on leave from his job as a lettuce worker, talks with D'Arrigo Brothers broccoli cutters on their lunch break. (1994)


When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Nov. 13 to hear the growers' appeal from their loss at the U.S. Court of Appeals, many legal observers became concerned. "State court decisions over state issues used to be respected by the U.S. Supreme Court," says Jerry Cohen, who helped write the law as the legal director for the UFW. "States' rights used to be a Republican issue. Now the end product is all that matters."

That end product is a continued erosion of power for farmworker unions. "Without the rule the union seems to workers like it's not legitimate, and there really is no right to talk," Ross says. "Losing it reinforces the growers' power and control. It's one more blow to the right to organize."

The mundane genesis of the current suit was a short strike in Dorris, near the Oregon border, where hundreds of farmworkers migrate from Southern California every year to trim young strawberry plants. In 2015, according to one worker, Jessica Rodriguez, the company paid low wages, had dirty bathrooms and harassed and intimidated workers. They called the United Farm Workers, which sent organizers and filed under the access rule to talk with them on the property. The strike lasted for just a day. At Fowler Packing the union filed for access to talk with an unrelated group of workers, and the company simply refused to let organizers onto the property.

 

 

 Julio Ramirez talks to a strawberry worker in the fields of the Gargiulo Corp. in Watsonville, 1977. Ramirez was a lettuce cutter and longtime UFW member.


Over the years the access rule became a valuable tool for organizing workers. Jerry Cohen remembers his discussions with UFW founder Cesar Chavez, during negotiations with then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who signed the law during his first term in 1975. "Cesar told us to get things that were practical, that could help workers organize," he recalls. "Where workers are together it's easier for the union to talk with them."

The access regulation came into effect at a time when the UFW was strong. The balance of power between workers and growers had shifted, and by the early 1980s more than 40,000 farmworkers had union contracts. To Eliseo Medina, who grew up in a farmworker family and became a leading organizer, "The rule was a very clear example that growers were not all-powerful. It was a huge change. People saw organizers coming onto the properties, and could have a conversation at work about their future. It gave people confidence that change was possible."

In 1996, when a huge campaign began to organize the strawberry industry in Watsonville, organizers visited picking crews in dozens of fields. They taped butcher paper on the walls of the Porta Potties, and held meetings where strawberry workers wrote down their demands for raising some of the lowest wages in agriculture, for health benefits and an end to discrimination in hiring. Then in field meetings they planned marches to the company offices, where the demands were announced.

 

 

 Two farmworkers, who have left their jobs to work as organizers for the United Farm Workers, hold a meeting at lunchtime with a crew of strawberry pickers, 1997.


In 2015 the access rule was used in McFarland in the San Joaquin Valley, where workers angry over a wage cut went on strike. They called in UFW organizers, who used meetings in the fields during lunch and after work to collect signatures on an election petition. After workers voted overwhelmingly for the union, the blueberry pickers chose a ranch committee and eventually negotiated a contract with Gourmet Trading.

When Pacific Legal Foundation argued its case in 2017 before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where it ultimately lost, its attorney Wen Fa declared, "The growers have no problem in the union talking with workers. It's where they talk with the workers. ... [There are] plenty of alternative means for the union to talk with workers ... All the workers [at Cedar Point Nursery and Fowler Packing Company] live in houses or hotels. Many have cellphones."

 

 

 Susana Cervantes, a Union Summer intern and student from East Los Angeles, talks to strawberry pickers on their lunch break during the first year of a big UFW organizing drive in 1997.


The ALRA had recognized, however, that it's harder for farmworkers to organize than for other workers, and set up a much quicker process for gaining union recognition than the National Labor Relations Act did for other workers in 1936. Because farmworkers work only for a season, which can last just weeks, union representation elections take place a week after workers petition for them, and within just 48 hours if there's a strike.

 

 

 Efren Barajas, UFW organizing director, holds a worksite meeting with strawberry workers on their lunch break during the Watsonville organizing drive of 1998.


Growers are required to furnish a list of workers with addresses. "Those lists are notoriously bad, though," Medina laughs. Most Cedar Point workers actually live hundreds of miles from their seasonal jobs. Addresses in Mexico are very hard to find, and workers on this side of the border often live in isolated colonias scattered over a huge geographical area. "By winning access it was easier to get their addresses so we could visit them, especially those who were afraid to talk in front of the foreman," Ross explains.

The difficulty of reaching workers outside of work is even greater for a growing segment of the farm labor workforce- those workers brought to the U.S. under temporary H-2A visas. In 2019 the U.S. Department of Labor allowed California growers to fill 23,321 jobs with these contract laborers. "H-2A workers would be even more impacted by losing the access rule," Medina charges. "They don't have the legal right to organize - even undocumented workers have more rights than H-2A workers. They're living in barracks under the growers' 24-hour control. In Delano growers are taking over whole motels and making them into labor camps."

The union, however, has used the access rule less frequently over the years. In her defense of it, ALRB chairwoman Victoria Hassid noted that it filed for access at only 62 of the 16,000 agricultural employers in California in 2015. "There is no indication," she wrote, "that the access regulation poses a significant problem for California farms ... petitioners have not actually alleged any negative economic impact on them (or anyone else) resulting from the regulation."

 

 

 In 1994 D'Arrigo Brothers workers, after a UFW march from Delano to Sacramento, were inspired to march to the office of the company after work to demand a union contract.


Pacific Legal Foundation's Wen Fa made the growers' root argument in response: "The Constitution forbids government from forcing property owners to allow unwanted strangers onto their property, and there is no exception for union activists."

In an interview with this author, Fa claimed that growers' economic losses growing out of the access rule could be "significant," but couldn't say specifically what they are. "This case is about property rights," he said. In his winning defense of the access rule before the U.S. Court of Appeals, Matthew Weiss, deputy attorney general for the ALRB, noted that the effort to knock out the rule simply "privileges private property interests over all others."

UFW general counsel Mario Martinez says the effort to knock out the access rule is further evidence of a history of racism toward farmworkers.

"The federal government has excluded farmworkers from all labor law protections under the National Labor Relations Act for 85 years," he charges. "In light of this racially discriminatory exclusion, California granted to agricultural workers important labor protections to balance the historical imbalance of power between farmworkers and growers. A court review of California's legislation appears to be another attempt to unfairly discriminate."

The U.S. Supreme Court plans to hear arguments in the case early next year and will probably rule by July.

 

 

 Aquiles Hernandez, an indigenous Mixtec farmworker and former teacher activist in Mexico, informs Mixtec-speaking workers at Gourmet Trading about their labor rights during a lunchtime access period in 2016.



HOW A LABOR LAW EVENED THE BALANCE OF POWER IN CALIFORNIA'S FIELDS
By David Bacon
Capital & Main, November 20, 2020
https://capitalandmain.com/how-a-labor-law-evened-the-balance-of-power-in-californias-fields-1120

 

 

 D'Arrigo Brothers workers demonstrate outside the company office, 1998.


In the winter of 1976, a year after the Agricultural Labor Relations Act took effect, lettuce cutters at George Arakelian Farms Inc. began organizing a union. The men lived in Mexicali, Mexico, just south of California's Imperial Valley. Every day they left home at 2 a.m. and walked to the border. After crossing it, the company labor contractor put them into cars. As each clunker was filled, it took off for the Palo Verde Valley, a two-hour drive across the desert.

Union organizers also met the workers at the border and followed the cars. When they all arrived at the fields, however, the crews couldn't immediately start work. In the winter,  water freezes inside the lettuce. If a cutter grabs a head to harvest it, the ice cuts into the leaves and they wilt. Everyone has to wait for the ice to melt, when work can start.

Next to the fields, workers lit fires in 55-gallon drums. In those moments when they stood warming their hands and talking with the organizers, the union at Arakelian Farms began to take form. The laborers asked about the benefit plans, their rights under the new labor law and when they might be able to vote the union in. They set up a ranch committee to make decisions and convince the unconvinced.

When the ice finally melted, they began to cut, almost running down the rows with their knives. Packers followed, tossing boxes of lettuce onto trucks. No one took lunch. When the company filled its daily order, workers jumped into their cars and drove back to the border. They walked home with just with enough time to eat, say hi to their kids, catch a few hours'  sleep, and then wake up again and leave at 2.

Organizing their union this way was possible because of the access regulation, formulated by the Agricultural Labor Relations Board. The regulation allowed the organizers to come onto Arakelian's property in the morning before work to talk with the lettuce cutters. After a few weeks of field meetings, workers and organizers filed a petition for an election, which the union won 139-12.

Like many growers, however, Arakelian refused to negotiate a contract. It took nearly 10 years before the California Supreme Court found Arakelian had violated its obligation to bargain with its workers. Other parts of the law had to be changed to solve that problem, and George Arakelian Farms is no longer in business. The workers have moved on. But from the beginning, the access rule was the tool they, and others like them, used to help even the balance of power with the growers.

CAPTURING THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE IN PHOTOS

CAPTURING THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE IN PHOTOS
by Nick Rahaim
Tropics of Meta: historiography for the masses -  November 11, 2020
https://tropicsofmeta.com/2020/11/11/the-david-bacon-photography-archive-capturing-the-struggle-for-social-justice-in-photos/
Stanford Libraries, Special Collections
https://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2020/11/david-bacon-photography-archive-capturing-struggle-social?fbclid=IwAR3Wji2Df54rbubxa6xwyO2qw7wZz9wFDGXa7No5bjmBXvDhgN1BEU5di7o

 

The hands of Manuel Ortiz show a life of work

 

Manuel Ortiz held out his hands to the camera, revealing decades of toil - callouses, scars and creases embedded with soil that multiple hand washings wouldn't scrub clean. Photographer David Bacon first saw him in 2015 as he pushed a shopping cart full of cans and bottles through an alley in Yakima, Washington. Ortiz first came to the United States in the 1950s under the Bracero program and continued working the agricultural fields of California and Washington for six decades.

But when he met Bacon, Ortiz was in his mid-80s and too old to work in fields, so he redeemed cans and bottles to cobble together enough money for rent and food. With a single photo in Bacon's signature style - an uncropped black and white image set in a hard black border marking the edge of the full frame - he captured decades of hard labor that provided food for millions, but more importantly he reveals the continued strength Ortiz's hands hold to survive in a society that had continually undervalued his work.

"It's a powerful image," said Roberto Trujillo, associate university librarian and director of Stanford Libraries' Special Collections. "An elderly man's hands, just his powerful hand, scarred and worn from working in the fields day in and day out for probably all his adult life."

The photograph of Ortiz, entitled "The hands of Manuel Ortiz show a life of work," is one of 200,000 images spanning three decades shot by Bacon that are now housed in Stanford Libraries' Special Collections, which acquired Bacon's archive in the winter of 2019. The collection was launched this fall under the exhibit title Work and Social Justice: The David Bacon Photography Archive at Stanford, after more than a year of cataloging the images, original film negatives, color transparencies and digital files.

"David Bacon's career as a photojournalist and author represents working class history and social justice movements that transformed political landscapes internationally," said Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez, Ph.D., a historian who works in the Department of Special Collections at Stanford who worked closely with Bacon on the acquisition of his archive. "David's work highlights communities that are often ignored by mainstream media and brings them from the margins of society to the forefront."

Bacon, 72 and a labor organizer-turned-photojournalist, has been at the frontlines of social justice movements since his youth, starting as a student activist in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the mid-1960s. In the mid-1980s, after working as an organizer for the United Farm Workers and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, among others, Bacon picked up a camera and began training his lens on the people he had worked with closely for nearly two decades. In the subsequent years, Bacon documented workers in the fields, strikes by teachers and hotel workers in cities, poverty and homelessness in the streets, May Day marches for immigrants' rights and even the struggle of Iraqi workers during the United States' occupation of the country following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

"Activism, the feeling this work is part of a movement for social justice has been central to everything I've done," Bacon said.

His work has brought him to Asia, Europe and throughout Latin America and has revealed the human faces behind many political struggles. But there's a common thread tying every photo together: People banning together to fight corporate greed, globalization and politics that both divide and displace workers and their families.

"What has always impressed me with David's work is how he purposely tried to capture the humanity of people who are struggling to make it, to just survive," Trujillo said. "His work also deals with labor and laborers at an international scale that's quite impressive for the work of a single man."

The David Bacon Photography Archive complements the Bob Fitch Photography Archive, which boasts 200,000 images from the civil rights movement and farm worker struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Together the two archives provide nearly 400,000 images covering six decades of social movements in California and beyond.

The hands of Manuel Ortiz show a life of work captured in the single image, through the David Bacon Photography Archive at Stanford, a life's work in photos will be maintained in perpetuity. Scholars and writers scouring the archives of labor and immigrant rights activists including Bert Corona or of organizations like California Rural Legal Assistance and National Council of La Raza, all held at Stanford Libraries' Special Collections, now have access to the faces and human form behind the primary-source documents on the struggle for social justice.

 

 

Bert Corona, father of the modern immigrant rights movement, and his son, Ernesto

Bert Corona looks intently into Bacon's camera lens, but there's something enigmatic in his expression - a bemused seriousness or perhaps a stern contentment. Over Corona's left shoulder stands his young grandson, Eduardo, who's approaching adolescence and gives a quizzical look as the tip of a small American flag rises toward his face. The following year, 2001, Corona will pass at 82 years old.

"That image of Bert just stuck out," Trujillo said. "It's Bert, it's just Bert. It shows his anger, his humanity, his compassion and his passion for his work."

Corona's name might not have the recognition of some of his contemporaries in the labor and Chicano rights movements of the middle 20th century, but his impact still shapes the political landscape in California today.

"He was the father of the modern immigrant rights movement because it was Bert who said that the Mexican people, especially Mexican workers, living in the United States, especially in LA, were going to be the basis for radical social change, and he was right," Bacon said. "A lot of the work I have in archive chronicles and documents the latter part of that history."

In the 1930s Corona became an influential member of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) where he organized low-paid, mostly Spanish speaking workers in Los Angeles. Outside of labor organizing, he was active in many early Mexican American political groups including El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española and the Asociación Nacional Mexicano Americano. By the rise of Chicano movement in the 1960s, Corona was already a respected elder statesman who was one of the earliest champions of the rights of undocumented workers when much of the labor movement was hostile to them. For Bacon, there's a direct through-line from Corona's early activism to the May Day marches that bring millions to the streets demanding justice and dignity for those without papers.

This concern for the undocumented likely grew from Corona's binational childhood on the border. His father was an anarcho-syndicalist who was a comandante in Francisco Villa's Division del Norte during the Mexican Revolution, but had to flee after post-revolution politics in Mexico made it dangerous for him to stay in Mexico. He moved to El Paso, Texas where Corona was born. This also marks a similarity with Bacon's own life: Bacon's father was a printer and union leader in New York City who ended up on a McCarthy-era blacklist for alleged communist ties and lost his job in 1953. So at a young age Bacon moved with his family from Brooklyn to Oakland, California where his father was able to find work.

Corona's father would later be granted amnesty by the Mexican government only to be murdered shortly after for his political activity. The Bacon family was never exposed to violence, but the experience of being uprooted at an early age because of political persecution informed Bacon's politics and shaped his approach to photography.

 

 
On the Mexican side of the border wall between Mexico and the U.S. families greet other family members on the U.S. side.

In the global economy capital faces few barriers while crossing international borders, while people face many. Few images capture this fact as starkly as three family members standing at a rusted border wall with chipped paint worn by weather and sun. An older woman has placed her hands on the wall, intently looking at a family member on the other side who is hidden from view. Her face is full of love, but there is little joy in her expression, rather a longing for an embrace she's legally prohibited from giving.

Bacon took this photo at Parque de Amistad, or Friendship Park, in Tijuana, Mexico in 2017. Every Sunday families gather at the park, close to where the border wall runs into the Pacific Ocean, to speak with loved ones through metal grates. The family pictured came 1,500 miles from the state of Puebla in central Mexico for the chance to see their family.

Much of Bacon's work has focused on the border and migration, as neither are separated from the struggle for justice in fields, factories and hotels. In fact he has written numerous books on this nexus, including: The Children of NAFTA (2004), Communities Without Borders (2006), Illegal People - How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (2008), The Right to Stay Home (2013) and In the Fields of the North/En Los Campos del Norte (2017).

While borders, walls and inhumane immigration policies keep people separated, the solidarity in the struggle Bacon has spent a lifetime documenting knows no borders.

 

 
Jane Algoso cuts dead fronds from the trunks of banana trees

Jane Algoso should have been in school, but the 11-year-old held a sickle to cut dead palm fronds from the trunk of a banana tree in Mindanao, Philippines for 50 peso a day. The child wore rubber boats to navigate the muddy ground in the Soyapa Farms banana plantation. Algoso looks strong and healthy, but she's in the middle of a chemically intensive monoculture controlled by the Dole Food Company.

Bacon travelled to the Philippines in 1997 to report on child labor and strikes by four cooperatives against the poverty-level prices Dole paid for their harvest. In a struggle to survive, many farmers pulled their children out of school to help in the fields. Bacon's article and photos ran on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle on Christmas Day that year. His writing and pictures of Algoso and other children working in plantations added to the growing international pressure on Dole to meet the demands of the striking farmers and pay fair prices. With better pay farmers would be able to send their children to school.

"After they won their strike prices went up," Bacon said. "I went back to the community 20 years later to meet with the same people and I saw they were living a good life compared to what things were like before."

While Bacon went to the Philippians to document Filipinos organizing against exploitation by a large corporation from the United States, many photos in the David Bacon Photography Archive also document Filipinos organizing in the United States. From the earliest days of the United Farm Workers movement, Filipino Americans organized alongside Mexican Americans for justice in the fields.

Under globalization that started to accelerate in the 1990s, unions, strikes and protections against child labor were seen as "barriers to trade." Activists from across the globe descended on Seattle, Washington in November of 1999 to protest the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference and free trade agreements that would hurt working people in the pursuit of greater profit and economic growth. The example of children working in banana trees was one among myriad grievances brought by activists. 

 

 Police arrested demonstrators as they sat in and blocked intersections

 

A police officer in full body armor stood motionless holding a baton with eyes resting intently on something out-of-frame. At his feet were protesters sitting on the pavement with their hands zip tied behind their backs. A young woman's mouth hung slightly ajar with a look of exasperation on her face. To her left, a man with a bandaged head and scrapes on his face looked at the police officer with displeasure.

Bacon went to what would later be known as the Battle of Seattle and reported on the protests against unchecked global capitalism. More than 40,000 people took to the streets, in a coalition of labor unions, indigenous groups, environmentalists and international NGOs. There were marches, rallies, teach-ins, and a few acts of vandalism.

Some sat and laid in intersections to block traffic in direct actions to disrupt the WTO talks, many of whom were arrested by police. As demonstrations intensified police met protesters with rubber bullets and teargas. The global talks failed amidst the maylay and hundreds of people were arrested by police - 157 of whom were found to have been detained without probable cause and received settlements from the city of Seattle.

Thirty-five years prior in Berkeley, California, Bacon left a demonstration in handcuffs. Early in the Free Speech Movement he took part in the occupation of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley in December 1964 and was the youngest person arrested. Bacon was still attending Berkeley High School but was enrolled in classes at the university at the time.

"Our finals were given while I was in jail and the university didn't let us take an incomplete or retake the final," he said. "For all intents and purposes I was thrown out, many others were too."

So Bacon, bypassed his formal academic studies and went to the factory floor before becoming a full-time union organizer like his father before him.

 

 

Outside the labor camp, the children of strikers at Sakuma Brothers Farms set up their own picket line on a fence at the gate

 

Six children stood on a bench behind a barbed-wire fence giving toothy, excited smiles to Bacon's camera in 2013. They had set up their own picket line as their parents went on strike for union recognition and better pay in Burlington, Washington, about an hour north of Seattle. One boy raises a fist in solidarity and a girl holds a placard that reads Justicia Para Todos, justice for everyone.

Most of their parents had migrated from to the United States from indigenous communities in Mexico for work and for a better life for their families. But work in the fields picking blueberries at Sakuma Brothers Farms left them both physically exhausted and in poverty, raising their children in labor camps. They formed a union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and organized for official recognition, better wages and living conditions.

Bacon's photo of the children not only showed who would benefit most from a just labor deal, but became the image Familias Unidas por la Justicia used to promote their efforts. The young girl holding the placard was incorporated in the union's logo and was printed on t-shirts.  

"As a photographer I'm also a participant," Bacon said. "I want people looking at the pictures to feel what it is to do the work of farm workers and others, but I also want the images to be useful to the people who are in them."

Three years later in 2016, workers at Sakuma Brothers Farms, the largest berry grower in Washington state, formally voted to form the union, even though their union rights as farmworkers were not recognized by the National Labor Relations Board. In an article about the organization effort for the Nation, one union member told Bacon, "From now on we know what the future of our children is going to be."

An archive of one's life work is inherently backward looking. A collection of photographs documenting social struggle often lacks the lightness of being. But, the humanity and dignity shown in the David Bacon Photography Archive gives hope. The markers of the slow progression of social justice many images capture give direction to the path forward, guiding toothy-grinned kids as they mature into adults.

Nick Rahaim is multimedia journalist and storyteller based in Monterey, California. He was a member a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting team at The Press Democrat who covered the North San Francisco Bay wildfires in 2017. Rahaim's articles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Vox and Hakai Magazine among many other publications. In addition to journalism, he has worked in commercial fisheries from the Bering Sea to Southern California for the better part of a decade. Check out his blog at outside-in.org and follow him on Instagram and Twitter @nrahaim.