This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. CallZone Media. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. And I'm your host, Mia Wong. This is one of the most acute places where everything is falling apart and one of the most acute attempts to put it back together again. We're just going to get right into it. With me to talk about a potential bread strike that there is significant organization going on for right now in Minneapolis as a reaction to the federal occupation is Tara Raghavir, the director of the Tenant Union Federation. Tara, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Mia. So, OK, let's rewind a little bit. Can you talk a bit about what the specific conditions of the occupation and also just sort of the preoccupation world for tenants got us to a point where there is essentially the largest rent strike we've seen in a century being organized right now? Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, thank you so much for having me. And I am recording live from the Twin Cities where we've been in a really intense organizing drive now for many weeks. And of course, the people of the Twin Cities have very ferociously fought back against this federal occupation for nearly three months. But I appreciate your question because I think actually to take us back a little bit is critical to understand the circumstances we find ourselves in now. So the first and most basic thing to say is the rent is too damn high. Yep. People cannot afford the rent in any corner of the country. You know, it's been true for many years now that a person earning minimum wage cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment in any American county, whether that's urban, suburban, or rural. And as our rents go up, the conditions of our homes get worse. So what we have taken a saying these days is that we're paying higher rents than we've ever paid for the worst conditions we've ever endured. And I know you know that as a tenant and as a former tenant organizer. But so many of our people are living this reality every day. And, you know, I organize, I'm based in Missouri, and I helped to found and organize with Casey Tenants. And increasingly, we're organizing tenants in places like Raytown, Missouri, on the outskirts of Kansas City. And the stakes are so high, and I really want to make sure listeners are aware of this. All of us are aware of it, but just to put a fine point on it, when you get priced out of a place like Chicago, you might end up in a place like Kansas City. When you get priced out of Kansas City, you might end up in a place like Raytown, Missouri. When you get priced out of Raytown, Missouri, there is no place else to go. And you're just stuck renting from the landlords of last resort, the people who are very keen to exactly how desperate the tenant condition is today. And then they exploit that by keeping us living in filth and hiking the rents at every turn. So that's some of the context that brings us into this moment. And that will be the context underlying every crisis following this one. And I think that's a really important thing to note because the story I'm about to tell you about what's going on here is then also a story of possibility about what might go on in every crisis that we encounter from this point on. So we started organizing a tenant union, a Twin Cities-wide tenant union at the end of January. And the reason for that is that the tenants of the Twin Cities had essentially been organizing unions for the two months preceding that as a way of fighting ICE. Every building has a group chat right now. Every building has someone distributing whistles and zines so that people get information about how to spot ICE, what to do if ICE is there. people are organizing mutual aid to take care of their neighbors. That is essentially the work of a tenant union. So all we've done in the last couple of weeks is add some kind of structure and formality to the way that tenants have already gotten organized under this federal occupation. Could I ask a quick question here about how the sort of citywide federation came together? Yeah. Because that's something I've seen attempted before, but it is pretty difficult. Yeah, it's a great question. And I think this won't surprise you that in a moment of crisis, it's actually easier than in other circumstances, unfortunately, to get people organized. So a process that might have otherwise taken months to sort of align all the various entities organizing tenants in the Twin Cities took a matter of four and a half days. That's astonishing. Yeah. It's the best I've ever seen anything like this move. Right. And that's not to say it was easy, right? It took a lot. And, you know, it took a lot from us as the Tenant Union Federation, but more to the point, it took a lot from tenants here who have been organizing in their own formations for many months preceding this crisis. So there's a local organization we're working with called Inquilinos Unidos. They've been organizing for 10 years and they have a base of mostly Latino and Somali tenants all across the city. Then there's a crew that's been organizing in South Minneapolis, the South Minneapolis Tenants Union. Then there's tenants who have been organizing in St. Paul. Then there's tenants who have been organizing autonomously in their properties and forming tenant associations and marching on the landlord. So what we tried to do as quickly as possible was kind of assemble all of these forces and really focus ourselves on the project of building something that was bigger than some of its parts that could create the potential for enduring power out of this moment. And the thing that we said in those four and a half days of sprint as we tried to assemble this force is the tenant union is good for protection today and power tomorrow. So this is just an experiment, right? We actually don't know what's going to come of this, but it's an experiment that I personally feel extremely invested in because I, like you, have lived through many moments of uprising and activation in the last several years. And unfortunately, more often than not, that uprising and that activation eventually evaporates And the tenant union offers one potential vehicle to hold some of that activation into the future and to channel it into real and enduring power Yeah. There's another aspect of this before we get into what's happening right now that I was really interested in, which is how did the sort of connections and organizational bonds with labor unions start happening? Because that's another really cool feature of this that's pretty unique. Yeah, totally unprecedented. And even I, my mind is kind of blown, right? A sort of contextual piece that's important is that the people of Minnesota are built different. There's a longstanding alignment, partnership, relationship among organized labor and between labor and community organizations here that sort of doesn't have a comparison anywhere else in the country. And I might be speaking out of turn, but I've never seen anything like this. I've never seen this depth of alignment among organized labor between labor and community. And so that context is really important to understand because then I think in this moment of crisis, labor is much more open to a call from community groups and from tenants than they might be in other types of situations. So, you know, we really leaned on the local relationship and the depth of relationship between groups like Inquilinos Unidos and these like labor tables that have existed. And, you know, further important context is like groups like SEIU Local 26 were leading the call for this general strike day on January 23rd. And there was this incredible table of labor leadership that came together to sort of lead that day. Can you explain for our listeners, like when you're talking about like a labor table, can you explain what that is? Yeah, I mean, essentially, as far as I understand it, there's just a really regular conversation that labor leaders are having together. And these days, I think more often than not, it's not just labor, it's labor. and then they've pulled in partners from community groups and tenant unions and some of the like resistance formations as well. And that also is remarkable, right? I'm saying this as though it's kind of like, you know, fact of the matter. It's amazing that labor leadership in a context like this is in touch enough that they understand who's leading some of the decentralized autonomous resistance work and is not only aware of that, but pulling them into these kinds of war rooms that are now existing and, you know, they're talking on an almost daily basis as far as I understand it. So the ask moved pretty quickly. I think we brought a vision and a strategy to some of the closest labor partners and their willingness to join in on the strike drive comes from an intense clarity about the stakes for their members. Many of these unions include membership that cannot make the rent on March 1st. And so they're not taking this lightly, right? This is a big risk. They're sticking their necks out for something that is a total moonshot. We don't know whether or not we're going to be able to pull it off. But what we know is we needed to try for some additional leverage that we didn't have a couple days ago. I'm astonished by effectively every part of this because every fourth thing you say is like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. But yeah, how fast this came together is astonishing. The willingness and speed with which labor is mobilizing is astonishing. And yeah, I don't know. This is really fucking cool. Yeah. And I guess the next thing I wanted to ask about outside of sort of the how did this organization come together is what are the specific demands being made? Yeah. So there's three main demands related to the strike drive. One is ICE out. And a part of that that I feel like you'll be interested in is ICE is and the federal government is pretending that the reason for the invasion is economic. They're like, this is an economic intervention. ICE is here to fix the economy by deporting a bunch of people who are taking your jobs. Part of what we're trying to do is highlight what is the reality, which is that ICE is bad for the economy. ICE has devastated the economy. We're trying to heighten that contradiction between what they say they're here to do and what is actually occurring. And so we will demonstrate, if we authorize a strike, what actual economic disruption looks like if tenants exercise their economic power. So that's one thing. Ice out. Ice fully out. There's all this talk about a drawdown now, but there's still ICE agents here kidnapping people on a daily basis. The second thing is a statewide eviction moratorium. And this has been a demand for the last two and a half, nearly three months. The governor has not moved on it. The state legislature has not moved on it. Eviction court is running, quote unquote, as normal during a time where there are 3,000 federal agents in Minneapolis and St. Paul. So demand number two is end evictions. No evictions under federal occupation and frankly not for a long time until something resembling real recovery is possible. And then demand number three is real rent relief. And the real is important here because it's not enough just to get tens of millions of dollars that we would then be expected to apply for and turn around and give to the landlord. So when we say real rent relief, we mean tens of millions of dollars that come with strings attached. If landlords benefit from what is effectively a bailout because of how bad ICE is for the economy, then they should be accountable to a higher standard of tenant protections. So one, ICE out, two, eviction moratorium, three, rent relief. These are fairly moderate demands and they remind me a lot of a series of both demands and also just the way that policy works between the initial parts of the pandemic where there were a lot of in a lot of cases there actually were like eviction moratoriums that you know were never enforced as strictly as the letter of what they said but was a thing that was implemented in conditions where suddenly people just literally couldn't work because massive external force. Totally. Yeah, a lot of what we are working with right now is groundwork that was laid during the COVID-19 eviction crisis or the early years of it, right? The bill that we introduced in the state legislature this week is literally modeled after the Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act that we wrote back in 2020 to try to get rents and mortgages canceled when people couldn't go to work and couldn't leave the house because of the pandemic. And I think that's actually an important thing, again, to keep in mind because crises like this will continue happening under today's conditions, right? We're hurtling towards deep and encompassing authoritarianism. There's escalating climate catastrophe. We're going to be in this situation much more frequently and at higher degrees of stress pretty much for the rest of our lives. So it's good actually for us to start learning from the work that we did five years ago and applying it here to like borrow and steal from our past selves to build from something rather than start from scratch. I wish we didn't live under these types of, you know, cascading crises, but that's the situation we're in. And I've been feeling so often in the last month that the only touch point in my life I have to this moment is the early months of the pandemic. Yeah. And I think that gets at the depth and seriousness of the crisis in a way that I feel like is not understood outside of Minneapolis I mean I think you know like my connections I'm from Chicago my connections in Chicago there was a lot of that experience but even even in Chicago it was kind of there were places that were like that and then you could go like three neighborhoods over and everything was sort of operating normally for the most part until the next sort of raids came and that I feel like I don't know it's it seems to me from listening to you talk about this that that's been the catalyzing force for all of us, that it is just constant crisis everywhere. Yeah. And I think you're right that people outside of the Twin Cities maybe don't understand the depths of the devastation. But just to put a fine point on it, conservative estimates show over $47 million in lost wages among people who have not been safe to go to work in the last three months. $47 million in lost wages. I just had a conversation with a dad yesterday whose kids go to a school where there are 80 families where the parents have not been safe to go to work. They haven't been safe to take their own children to school. And so the other parents in the school have been organizing support around them for the last two months. And they just did a round of calls through all those families this week. None of them can make March rent, right? So even if we're living under a supposed drawdown, the crisis is still so alive. And I think that's also why you see organized labor lining up alongside us in this strike drive. They know like Local 26 has 200 members that cannot make the rent on March 1st. So I think that that sort of like economic side of this story is not really known, felt, or understood outside of the Twin Cities right now. But everyone here knows and feels it because they've turned their lives inside out for the last three months to organize, you know, millions of dollars in mutual aid. But here's the thing is we cannot go fund me our way out of this scale of emergency. It requires state intervention. And that's what we're calling for. I want to come back to that, that 47 million number for a second, because I think when we hear numbers like that, we're used to hearing them in the context of, you know, state agencies or multi-billion dollar companies. And this is not that. This is not a situation where these people have billions of dollars and you're losing some fraction of that. This is something where every single one of those dollars matters so acutely. It's not $47 million coming from Google. It's $47 million coming from people like you. And that is an unfathomable humanitarian crisis. Yeah, it's a huge crisis and one that kind of ludicrously, the leaders at the state and city level have suggested that everyday people should solve. Yeah. $47 million for everyday people is enormous, you know, through extraordinary efforts. the people of the twin cities have organized something in the neighborhood of six million dollars in rental assistance for their own neighbors like mutual aid style yeah 47 million dollars or 50 million dollars 75 million dollars is nothing for the state to figure out right at the city level there is you know something to the tune of 60 million dollar pot that's funded through sales taxes that goes into the maintenance of the downtown infrastructure they pulled some of that money just this past week to support small businesses. Yeah. What about the people, right? What about the people who have had to scrounge together what they can to take care of themselves, dip into their savings, put together funds to take care of their neighbors? That can't continue like that forever. And it's ludicrous that they've been asked to do that until now. So, you know, the strike drive is really about making that point in public that the state needs to intervene We need solutions. We need some level of commitment from the state, the governor, the state legislature, and from the cities in order to protect people, to keep them in their homes for now, and to make them whole in the long run. I think the other element of this too and something that I remember dealing with during tenant organizing is that on a very basic level this is the most brutal possible time that you can be evicted It is February right now It is going to be early March which is whether that can just kill you And on top of that, on sort of political level, we're very used to talking about eviction as like a kind of process that we're used to happening. But it's like, no, we're sending a bunch of people out into whether that will kill them and then also just into the arms of a federal occupation. And it's the only metaphors I could think of is it's like, yeah, you're evicting people into the hands of the Gestapo, which is one of the most evil things that can even possibly be contemplated. Yeah. And yet it's just what business as usual has been. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to even find the words to describe the evil. And as you said, it's not dissimilar to the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic before there was a vaccine. Eviction courts in states like mine in Missouri were just open. You know, the courts were open in my county starting in May of 2020, a full year before we had a vaccine. and people were being evicted into the streets during a time when we were told to stay home in order to protect ourselves and our neighbors from a deadly virus. So it's a really similar thing. You know, the quote unquote business as usual of state sanctioned violence and every eviction is an act of violence. The sort of normalcy and the mundanity of that violence is practiced every day and in front of our eyes right now. And I think that that point about mundanity is important to draw out, right? Because I think what we've seen in the Twin Cities in the last three months is really visible, in-your-face state violence as the ICE agents have come and pepper sprayed and beat people up and, of course, shot and killed people as well. the day-to-day violence of eviction is actually harder to mobilize people around because it's so boring it's so bureaucratic it's so taken for granted that the state treats us like this that the state exists to protect property over people and their lives and their needs and that's an interesting thing to think about in this moment too where there may or may not be a drawdown of the federal agents, but the longstanding economic impacts of this invasion are here. And it'll be an interesting test of people's solidarity and focus and endurance to continue showing up in the months after the agents go away. Assuming they do, which is also... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, assuming they go away, right? But I, you know, I have faith. I have more faith than I've ever had in my life that the people of the Twin Cities who have so righteously fought this invasion are showing up and will continue to show up even after a time when the agents are gone, assuming that happens. And that's a critical test. That will be a turning point because we live in a world where this mundane violence actually does happen all the time, even outside of crisis. Yeah. And the ability to turn the sort of rupture in these moments of crisis into an actual change to the way that everything works. I think to some extent is the thing that we failed to do after 2020 and is the thing that sort of, you know, the foreclosing of the possibilities of the uprising and of the mutual aid from the pandemic is what allowed the sort of monsters that rule our world today to sort of tear their way through. Yeah, exactly. So I know that you have to go very soon. Is there anything else you want to make sure people know? And are there ways that people outside of the Twin Cities can support y'all? Yeah, absolutely. We are running phone banks now through March 1st to increase our numbers for the strike drive. So depending on when this airs, it would be amazing for folks to join those phone banks. They can sign up at TwinCitiesTenants.org. There's a link to sign up to join the phone banks. tenants wherever they are should get organized and should get trained by tenant union federation we've got yeah our big union school training that's a virtual three-month training coming up this summer there will be more information to come on our socials and our website in the next couple of weeks and months and they should follow along people should follow along on social media we're learning a lot yeah and we're going to be sharing a lot of those lessons in public and I think an important note to end on perhaps is that this is not a vibes-based organizing drive. This is not social media only. You know, we're believers that words mean things. And when we say we're running a strike drive, we mean that shit. So we're running a really intensive organizing effort. That may or may not work. You know, we are trying. We're trying something big and unprecedented. And part of that attempt and part of our seriousness is also acting with extraordinary discipline. So we will not authorize a strike if we are anything less than ready to be on strike, depending on the situation with our demands and whether or not they're met. people should stay tuned because i think in the way that this plays out we will also be modeling some of what we're learning in real time around what it takes to exercise both vision and strategy and discipline as a collective in this kind of new territory yeah and this is quite frankly one of the coolest things i've ever gotten to cover on this show this fucking rocks love it and yeah I hope it goes well for you all. And I hope you fucking win. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me, Mia. Of course. Thank you for coming on. And yeah, to everyone else out there, I don't know. I was just some random college kid when I started doing this. So you too can do tenants organizing and you too can do incredible things when the moment calls for it. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
