It Could Happen Here - A Second Electrolysis Union Appears

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

Mia talks with Layne and Andy of the Gender Affirming Care Workers Alliance about organizing trans workers and building community through struggle. Links: [e-mail]  https://linktr.ee/GACWASee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Also Media. Welcome to Iqadapen here, podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together again and occasionally discovering that there is in fact a second union. I am your host, Emil Wong. Now, a little while back, I did an interview with a group of electrolysis workers who were working for a company called Rio U Electrolysis, and we talked about their unionization efforts and the kind of horror show that was going on there. Now, what I didn't mention at the time was that in the process of talking to those workers and that union, I learned that there was in fact a second union that had been

organized, kind of unrelated to the first union, at the other location. And that is who we are talking to today, to get an update on what has been going on in general with the entire situation and also talk about their union and a thing that you will kind of commonly experience randomly unionizing places, which is that sometimes there is another organizing effort at another one of the locations at the same place that you were organizing and you don't know about it because everyone's keeping it secret. So, yeah, to talk about this, I'm joined by Lake and Andy from Gender Affirming Care Workers Alliance. Yeah, both of you two, welcome to the show. Hi, thank you for having us. Thank you.

Yeah, I'm very excited to talk to you both. And I guess before we get, it's the initial organizing. What was it like finding out that the other shop was also unionizing? Oh my God. It was terrifying. So, like, our number one priority

during our Lakewood campaign was secrecy. We absolutely knew how hostile management was towards any kind of improvement of workplace conditions. So going from almost spy versus spy level

of Opsack to figuring out that Vancouver was also unionizing and was doing a walkout. Like, I think that was when we learned. Oh, God. Was when the day that they kind of imploded. And we were terrified. Like, we did not think there would be any way out of that for Lakewood. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. That's a rough way to find out when, yeah, the other union is like, oh, God, okay, we have to do a walkout. and we have to go on strike because they're firing us. Yeah, I mean, it was certainly understandable. I wouldn't say we knew why the walkout was happening. When we found out that the walkout happened and that a strike was starting, our campaign kind of came to a halt. Like, realizing there was another campaign happening made us had to, like, reconsider what we were doing.

Like we had our own grievances and we were really just in the process of getting people on board. We had maybe a core group of five, but we had 13 or up to 13 in the end, but we had like 10 to 12 electrologists because that number was constantly changing. We had to stop and reassess. Yeah, that makes sense. And obviously we wanted solidarity with Vancouver. We wanted to do whatever we could to support them, but we also didn't want to lose our jobs. Yeah. One of the first things we decided at Lakewood is that we weren't going to ask anyone to lose their job in order to unionize.

We weren't going to put anyone in a position where they would then become unstable. Almost every single worker at Lakewood, like desperately needed this job. Yeah, yeah. Without it, we would risk homelessness or other things. Yeah. So we kind of got stuck. I mean, it was a tough situation to be in knowing that we would have been on their side. and with more information and more planning,

we would have probably joined them, but we weren't there yet. Yeah, yeah, and this is, I guess, partially also, like, you know, one of the things is difficult about doing campaigns is that sometimes, like, sometimes campaigns move at the speed that the workers are organizing at, and then sometimes they move at the speed of, like, oh, my God, the boss is firing everyone, we just have to go now.

Yeah. And that's, yeah, that's always one of the issues is, like, As much as you want to be setting the tempo, sometimes you're responding to, like, what management is doing, and that can get very rough, very quickly. Absolutely. I think Vancouver did great with their circumstances.

Like you said, management set the pace, and they had to respond. At Lakewood, we were really trying to do the opposite. We wanted to put ourselves in a position where we were taking an action and management was responding. And in the end, we did. We paused when Vancouver went on strike.

We tried to assess how best we could help them without just also imploding Lakewood. Part of what we realized is that management had not realized any campaign was happening at Lakewood because they were going to use this as no votes in the election. They wanted us to be considered one bargaining unit because they thought that we would say no and that union would lose the election. Yeah. So our spy versus spy shit was successful. Yeah.

You were doing well. Management deceived. Yeah, perfectly. Yeah. So do you want to rewind the clock a bit and talk about sort of how organizing efforts started? It was not connected to the other campaign at all. It wasn't, but I think we were dealing with a lot of similar issues. Yeah.

In our first, like, year as we got onboarded and saw how things were versus the position that was promised to us and sold to us. Everyone kind of started catching on to things and started building a list of grievances. There were concerns about the lack of training and patient safety. There were concerns about the lack of time to do our job, you know, working during breaks, working during our lunches. There was really unclear and inconsistent disciplinary actions being taken left and right. Yeah.

Like one person would be told they could do something. Another person would do that and get written up for it. Yeah. It felt targeted. At some point, Lake would realize that there was no position you could be in where your job was safe. Yeah. You could be management. You could be the owner's absolute favorite electrolysis.

You could be the best at your job. You could keep your head down and do absolutely nothing. And one day you would be disappeared for whatever reason. if you got one. Yeah. It was like a span of like two or three months where we lost maybe five employees. And everyone heard a different reason if one was given. Hmm.

Which is a pretty clear sign that something is going wrong. Exactly. Yeah. And I think I was the second employee to be disappeared at the location. Jesus Christ. Yeah. There were two employees where we were told they were. resigned and everyone very, very much knew that these are employees that wouldn't have resigned.

These were employees that were ready to start careers and build their life around Real You. We all believed in Real You's mission. But yeah, eventually we just realized it didn't matter. Yeah. There was no job stability for anyone. And that was a really big issue because that's what all of us came to this job for. We were hoping for long-term careers that paid us livable wages. Yeah. And also we're safe for us to be ourselves in. There's not a lot of jobs where trans women get to be trans women. Yep, yep.

And like this was a job that almost celebrated it. And I know for me personally, I was really excited for the opportunity to be able to help the community. Yeah. I come from Florida. I'm born and raised, unfortunately. Yeah. Where transitioning for a long time was kind of a pipe dream. Like, it was not a realistic goal of mine until.

moving to Washington and now I get to take or I used to get to take part in people's transition every day for my job. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. And that's I think like one of the kind of cruelest parts of all of this and like what management has done. It's just like ripping that away from both you and from the community. Absolutely. And it didn't have to be that way. No, it really didn't. Yeah. And I guess speaking of the cruelty of management. Yeah. Andy, I guess, You want to talk about when you said getting disappeared. What was going on with that? So I had brought a lot of the grievances that I was seeing and had towards the owners of the company, Anna and Leah,

alongside the manager of the clinic at the time. And anytime anything anything wrong with the business was brought up. hostilities just grew. And they kept growing the more and more that we said, hey, you know, there's issues with the training, there's issues with the amount of time that people have to do your jobs. And it was honestly a really hostile environment created by Anna. And before I had got up. and disappeared.

I was in my educational program for electrolysis. I was in the process of completing that before my termination. And I had brought up some of my concerns

because as I was learning more and more about electrolysis, I realized that so many of the things we had been taught were just wrong. Yeah. And because Anna and Leah didn't want to address it and didn't want that information being out there,

I was put in the position where I either had to sign a non-disclosure to forgive my student loan debt. or I could choose to just be fired and then assume the debt. Jesus. I mean, they just literally forced you out of the company. Correct. It was an involuntary resignation. Yeah, that is only voluntary and like the strict Hobbsian sense where Hobbs considers that if someone has a gun at your head

and tells you to do something and you do it, you still voluntarily made the decision. I don't know about you. I don't hold to the strict Hobbsian interpretation. voluntary. I don't think I agree with that. I think that if you were coerced into a decision, it's not voluntary. I don't know. Like, oh, God. Obviously, I think the other part of this that's just really a grotesque is what you were talking about in terms of just the education being wrong, because this is something that's really common in trans health care. We're like,

there should, yeah, there is just a bunch of stuff. The medical professionals are being taught that was developed from something someone figured out kind of in the 80s and has never been updated in the course of like the last 25 years of the development of science and then just also the development of there being more and more trans people who have been you know just like experiencing treatment and it's frustrating I think because you really rarely ever get a scenario where there are trans people who actually are in a position sufficient enough in any kind of medical institution to even like get to talk about it. And the fact that their response was to just like disappear you and like force you out of the company is really bleak. Yeah. And on that note, I would say most of the employees received about two weeks training before working on patients. Oh boy. of that. And the educational program that I went through was four months. So if you kind of compare the timelines there of how we were trained in the job versus the education that I got, it just wasn't enough.

Yeah. Not only was it not enough, but anyone who voiced that it wasn't enough put their job at risk. I mean, there's more than one Lakewood worker that went to management saying, hey, I don't feel well trained enough. I don't feel informed enough. And they were met with, well, more than one situation in which they were like directly asked, like, do you feel comfortable working on patients? Do you think you're capable of this job with the implication or the direct like verbal statement being if you don't? Maybe you should find somewhere else to work. Yeah. But all of us signed up for this job with the agreement.

Like, we signed these loan agreements with the idea that we'd be going to this in-depth training. Like, the owners themselves, during my interview process at least, talked up SAT Masters constantly. Like, this is the place to go to learn about how to provide electrolysis for transgender clients specifically. Yeah. And then I worked there for 16 months and never saw any training after my first few weeks. Like, I think the entire 16 months there after my first few weeks. there. After my first month, my sessions were only observed three times. Jesus. Yeah.

Only three times. And I was not on the electrolysis provider before this. This was my entry into it. Their training was the only training I got. Yeah. And the only reason my sessions started being shadowed at all is because providers themselves started asking for like auditing sessions. There is an instance that I would like to bring up. I was overseeing the training of New Hire. And during this training period, I had a patient on my books who had requested to never be on my books again, which, you know, totally fine, totally valid.

But the fact that they were put on my books after requesting not to see me again was an issue. It's not totally fine or totally valid to do that. That's not fine on management's part. And so as I am training this new hire and we're going into this session, the patient wasn't comfortable with me being there in the room to provide training to the new hire. So I had to leave the new hire alone with that patient. Jesus. Because they weren't comfortable with me being there. Yeah, that is just absolutely unacceptable.

way for any of this to be running, especially with a delicate healthcare thing that can cause injury to people. Exactly. If we can back up for a second, can you explain a little bit for people who didn't listen to the first episode or people who don't remember about the absolutely wild, I guess, nominally student loan, like, indenture program thing? That's the key component of this whole story. So just about every worker until like some of the most recent workers got a job at Real You Electrolysis with the understanding that we would be hired and trained and receive pay while being trained by Real You. But that at some point they would send us to Zat Masters in Centralia for an Electrolysis training program and to get us license. via Oregon State. Washington doesn't have electrolysis licensure requirements.

You could buy a machine and start providing. You shouldn't, but you could. Yeah. So the idea was that they would pay for our Zappmasters training. They would pay for our machine. They would pay us while we were learning this job and starting with them. And they total all of that at around $19,500 plus interest.

So 19 to 21,000 is the number that gets thrown around. Yeah. They would pay for that and forgive it if we agreed to work for them for four years after they license us. So this four-year timer doesn't even start until we're finished with school and get our license in Oregon. Yeah. It included a clause where not only do we have to work for them for four years, but we can't work for other electrolysis clinics. Which these kinds of employment agreements are literally called trap. agreements. Yeah.

If that kind of clues you end to anything. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's insensitive inter-servitude agreements. Like, and that's like, oh, God. Listen, hindsight is 20-20. Jesus Christ. Yeah. A lot of us had the foresight to know it wasn't a good

situation, but we were coming from worse situation. Yeah. I think a way to think about this also is just that, like, you know, there's two parts of us at our predatory. One is the recruitment that is designed, you know, based on, I mean, just lying to people about how this is going to go.

And then there's the secondary part that's the exploitativeness of the agreement itself. And I don't know, I think we have this very, very annoying tendency to look at being an inherently exploitive situation to something as, you know, something that like through a neoliberal

personal choice, you could just avoid being in these situations entirely. And that's just like not true. No, unfortunately, if you have a regular job, you are being exploited. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the fact that, like, going back to the sort of like Hobbesy and consent thing, it's like, well, okay, like, is anyone actually, like, you know, operating freely in a set of conditions where, yeah, like, if you don't take the job, your alternative is that you don't have food and you, you know, you can't pay your rent and you don't have a home anymore. Exactly. I mean, when I came to Real You, I was homeless.

Yeah. before being employed with them. You're not the only one. I think many of us were. Yeah. And that's something that I think is also really bleak about the way that this was structured, which was like one of the things that we talked about the last episode was that Anna Landry, like very specifically said that she was targeting trans people because you could just like treat them a little bit nicely and they would do anything for you.

And yeah, it's like, you know, this is a deliberate targeting of a population. that has an unemployment rate that is, what, like, four and a half times the general unemployment rate in the U.S. that is at all times and at all places operating in, like, Great Depression levels of unemployment. And that's, yeah, you know, whose, like homelessness rates and, like, rate of having been homeless, like, orders of magnitude higher from the general population. And, I don't know, it's extremely bleak that, you know, the opportunity to both, like, help your community and also make a just absolutely seismic, like, class increase from, like, being

homeless and struggling to feed yourself to, like, having stable employment is ultimately kind of this, like, debt peon ship trap. Yeah. I mean, you put it pretty clearly. Capitalism sucks. Like, Jesus Christ. Bad economic system. Good Lord.

Oh. Agreed. God. So speaking of capitalism, we should probably throw to ads. And then when we come back, we could talk more about resisting capitalism, which is to say how the organizing got going and what's been happening since. Yeah, sounds good. Sounds good.

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Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And we are back. Yeah, so let's get into a little bit more of like how the organizing process starts. and how it sort of went. I think Andy might be a good one to start with this, because unbeknownst to everyone, there were three different starts to our union efforts. Andy, before you got got.

Yeah, I was looking into the possibility of trying to start a union at the shop. I was reaching out to different union organizations, and I was also looking at what government agencies that I could be reaching out to about some of the things that we were experiencing at our workplace. Yeah. So that would have been around November of last year?

Yeah, that was around November. And then Andy disappeared. There was a string of firings. And I would say our efforts started again around January of this year. Kind of just started with one of our workers chatting with their patients. The trans community is also pretty involved in organizing mutual aid unions.

So, like, when you're shooting this shit with your patient and they hear, like, a workplace ripe for organizing, they tell you. Wait, that is maybe the sweetest thing I've ever heard. Like, it was pretty good. Trans people are so good. This wouldn't have happened. Oh, trans people truly, truly amazing. So yeah, we had a patient who was an IWW member who told us, look, you got to start.

You got to get in contact with the GAB and start learning how to organize. So we did. That's amazing. Okay, it's not quite salting because it was someone who was a patient and not like an employee, but it's like, it's kind of like an accidental salting. Oh my God. None of this would have happened without our patients. They've been supportive the entire way. When things in Vancouver started happening, we all started having patients ask or tell us that, look, I don't want to put you an awkward position, but if y'all started unionizing, that'd be dope.

Yeah. It was really nice getting a support. court. It sucked that we couldn't talk to them about it because like we said, we were kind of doing spy versus spy level of offset. We didn't want management to know. So our patients didn't know until kind of the last month. Yeah. Which sucked. I mean, these people that we've been seeing weekly or more often for months, weeks, up to a year, it sucked not getting to tell them what was going on, knowing that they cared. Yeah. And it's this really stark example of, like what community actually is versus what it's sold to us as. We're like, yeah, you have this thing where, you know, you have genuine community with the

patients that you're treating in a way that's staggeringly, unbelievably rare in any kind of trans-health care field. And, you know, and from that community, you get, hey, you get, hey, you should organize and, like, you know, people trying to help do the organizing. And then, you know, you have this sort of, like, the corporate version. community, which is the boss is running a terror campaign and like disappearing your trans co-workers. Yeah. It's a pretty stark contrast.

Yeah. Honestly, part of why it went on for so long is every red flag that management had, there were at least one, if not two green flags between your coworkers and your clientele that made up for it. Yeah. But going back to organizing, January, we got in contact with the Tacoma GMB for the IWWW. GMB is general membership branch. So it's essentially just the local IWW to us.

And we had a organizing rep who would do kind of like monthly calls with us at first, just telling us how to organize what conversations to have and how to get people interested. The AEIOU conversation, agitate, educate, inoculate, organize push. One of those. Yeah, yeah. You got it. Because none of us had any organizing experience. So we had all of this energy to write our conditions, but we didn't know how to do it.

So we started having conversations with the IWW and just slowly started building up our group of trustworthy workers that we knew wanted this. It wasn't hard. Most of us lean left, if not radical. So finding union sympathies was not difficult. finding the grievances was even easier. I mean, these things are pretty clear in the workplace. Yeah. Boss is once again the best organizer.

Yeah, exactly. What really did it for us is when paychecks started bouncing. Yeah, I just still, sorry. I just don't want to hold on this for a second of like, what do you mean the paychecks are bouncing? What the fuck? Like, Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's about how we felt.

Like at the end of March, they swapped us from direct deposit over to paper paychecks. Our first one was in April, and there was at Lakewood only one person who had it bounce. I think Vancouver also had some issues, but like we said, there was no communication between the branches, so we didn't know what they were dealing with. Yeah. And management kind of did their best to keep the locations separate. Mm-hmm. Like, Lakewood was told things about Vancouver to kind of view them negatively. and the same with Vancouver.

Yeah, which again is this real sort of image of like what the world's ruled by bosses is, which is like, yeah, they're deliberately trying to isolate people from their community and deliberately trying to separate people and instill sort of like fear and hatred against each other. And then you get put in this position where it's like, it becomes difficult to actually like do the kind of like community building and the kind of like solidarity and organizing that you want to because everyone also has to, like, hide from this boss surveillance state.

I feel pretty bad. Like, all the way up until we heard about Vancouver's walkout, I kind of referenced Vancouver as, like, the Vancouver cult. Because it sounded like everyone was really happy and fine with how things were going. And Anna and Leah were just doing what they want in Vancouver, and everyone was fine with it, and everyone was happy with it. And it was okay over there. So, I mean, that was part of why we didn't contact them initially.

We didn't know who it was safe to. Yeah. Lakewood had our own experiences of, like, talking to a worker we thought was on our side, and they immediately turned around and go talk to management. Oof. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Communication just wasn't there between us and Vancouver. So when checks started bouncing, the total number was always unclear.

Yeah. The first paycheck, it was just one. that second paycheck in April, it was already a few more people. Jesus Christ. So when they told the first worker, they had no idea why that check bounced. And then the next paycheck, more checks bounced. It was like immediately obvious they were being. Yeah.

Untruthful. Dishonest. Like, like, one paycheck bouncing is already unacceptable. Like the correct number of paycheck second bounce is zero. But it's like the moment there's more than one. Suddenly it's like that it becomes a lot less likely that it's like they fucked up and more likely that like something deliberately like malicious and messed up is happening here. Exactly. Each paycheck, the frequency kind of just went up.

Like how many people have their paychecks bounce. And the way that it was handled was just rewriting them. Like it was your responsibility to figure out it had bounced, go to management and ask them to fix it. them fixing it was either reissuing you a check or asking you to try cashing it again. Oh my God. There was one paycheck

where after it had bounced for me and my partner, they did just tell us to try every day because they couldn't tell us when they would have the funds to pay us because some money comes in and out every single day. It was a pretty wild situation to be put in.

Yeah. Like, Jesus Christ. Like, just, like, absolutely. absolute nightmare. Oh my God. So when checks started bouncing, it kind of clarified what we could organize around first. Yeah. I mean, if you're not getting paid, you don't have a job to unionize. Yeah, that's that's that's that's that's like the most like nothing to lose in a world to win situation. You could possibly aback you. Yeah, exactly. Like we're getting paid. We're doing real work for fake money. Like, come on. Right. So we kind of settled on that as like our first.

grievance and demand to organize around is we're demanding guaranteed pay. Which isn't even, like, it shouldn't be a demand. It's their legal responsibility. It's like, yes, you must form a union in order to have the right to be paid, which I've been saying this kind of joke about what it's like being trans for a while, where it's like to be a trans person in America is to like aspire to the status of a mere proletarian where you only get regular exploitation instead of like the even honestly worship you get here it's like yeah we had to form a union so they would like pay us and it's like god like oh we just wanted real job yeah like oh my god oh going back to when we started talking to the iww in those first like

initial union-ish meetings. It was still just very few of us and we hadn't put words to it yet. But we kind of realized that we weren't super interested in going the route of the NLRB with a election for a union and then collective bargaining for a contract. We had contracts. We know how Real You writes its contracts. We weren't interested in another one. We wanted the ability to react to changes in the workplace with flexibility, which is what the IWW was offering. They focus on solidarity unionism that doesn't use the NLRB,

but instead uses worker power via direct action to get management to the table and to meet your demands. Because a lot of this was rushed, we didn't get a chance to really get the terminology and our options. But one of the terms they used was involuntary recognition.

That's fun. We were running underground until we were ready to go public, but we were fine with being a public union. We just didn't need the NLRB's backing. Yeah. We had the worker power in the workplace, and we were going to do direct action

to get what we wanted. So yeah, I think the word we were using was involuntary recognition. Yeah, like, I love that. That's great. Right? Yeah. So going back to March and April,

knowing that we weren't interested contracts and that we were going to go the route of direct action. We just had to choose a demand to start with. The bouncing paychecks was a pretty easy one. So we started having meetings and talking about what kind of direct action we could do and what kind of escalations we could have if we were organizing around the demand for guaranteed pay. And that demand, essentially we were asking them to resume direct deposit or deliver our next check in the form of guaranteed funds like cash, money orders, cashiers,

check, something that won't bounce. Yeah. We wanted our money on the day it was due. Uh-huh. Like, I want to say this, too, that, like, there's, like, a theory version of this in capital where Marx talks about how, like, labor is the only commodity that you pay for at the end and not at the beginning when you purchase it, where, like, every other commodity, you have to, like, pay for it before you get it.

Whereas with labor, you pay for it after. But, like, if you tried this with, any other commodity other than labor, this is a crime, right? I mean, it's a crime for labor, too. Yeah, it is a crime for labor, but it's like, but it's also like, like, if you, if you do this at a grocery store, like, you will be arrested. Yes. And when a corporation does it, it's like, okay, if you want the law to help you for doing,

again, the same thing that will get men with guns to take you away at a grocery store, right? You have to form a fucking union and organize. And I don't know. I hate this fucking system. It's so unbelievably exploitative and it's so clear in these sort of moments. Like who is designed to protect and who it's not designed to protect, where like the punishment for the same, literally the same crime is like one of you gets you arrested

and the other one gets you like a union campaign? Yeah. There's also something that I'd like to mention. Yeah. For those who managed to go through this Appmaster program, one of the things that was supposed to happen was that those employees during their education were supposed to receive stipends to cover their living expenses during their schooling, many of whom which were either not working at the time or working at reduced hours. and some of them saw stipends or partial stipends and some of them from what I understand received nothing at all. Jesus.

But we're still working at those reduced hours trying to support themselves while also going to school. Yeah, which is, again, also A, I guess, like, it's a form of wage theft and also B, it's a thing where, like, the difference between the bosses making slightly less money that year and a bunch of workers who are mostly trans and in really horrifying

economic conditions, not having that money is a difference between someone like maybe buying, I don't even want to say buying a slightly less fancy car because it's not even that much money for them. It's like, I don't know, like they have one day where they don't go to like an unbelievably expensive restaurant versus like, can I feed myself at night?

Yeah, they get one less personal massage. Yeah. We might end up homeless. Yeah. Yeah, that was part of the situation that was starting to really weigh on me near the end. It's because part of what I had signed up for was agreeing to work part-time and do schooling part-time. And it was supposed to be like anywhere from five to six days a week with the two, which was going to be a bit much for me. But at some point, they decided they wanted all their workers doing school full-time so that they could.

get through it quicker, but they didn't adjust the stipend they were offering. So you were expected to stretch the same amount of money over time where you weren't getting any income at all. And that money was $4,500, which is not enough for the like three months of rent and food and gas. No. Gas because it's in central. Yeah.

So yeah, like I had had multiple conversations with them about it and they would not give me a clear answer on whether we would be able to continue working or if we wouldn't get to work or what we would do about our income situation. And that's the situation that I ended up in was for the last two months of my schooling, I had to float myself on very little income because I had only received enough to really cover the first two months of the school. And schooling took like six to nine months if you were part time. Oh my God. If you were part time, it took six to nine months.

Yeah. Yeah. And four months if you were full time, which I was going full time. Yeah. And then also like the second thing with that too is it's like, it's not only are you like spending time doing training for this job unpaid. Like that's also taking in time where you can't work another job to get more income. Well, if you wanted to work another job, you had to get their approval. Jesus Christ.

Yeah. They made it pretty clear. or they wanted you committed to reel you and nothing else. Yeah, it's cult tactics. And then also the classic, like, wonderful capitalist double freedom where you have freedom from the ability to eat and then the freedom to sell yourself. Yeah.

God. I mean, I could always choose to go homeless and hungry. Yeah, so the law and this makes the efficient equality bans both the rich and the poor from sleeping under a bridge. Yeah. So we chose our demand. and we came up with our plan. We had our actions settled,

and we had a plan for if management responded, if they didn't, if they escalated. We had our options, and we felt secure going in. At that point, like when we first started our actions, we only actually had five workers participating, more that were sympathetic,

but all that felt that they weren't in a position to do direct action, action and lose their job. We saw Vancouver lose their jobs when they took action. We knew it was a very real possibility. Yeah. But we started, I believe on June 29, we delivered our demand for guaranteed pay to our manager.

The IWW calls it a march on the boss. Yeah. It was like less than five minutes total. The five workers presented our demand. We gave two testimonials for like how it's been impacting us directly. and then we left. We sent a follow-up email to the owners of the company because we had handed it to the manager

and we're waiting for their response. We put it out there and we just had to wait. The next day, the manager caught one of our workers on her own to respond, essentially telling us they could not afford to pay us any other way that they were paying us. They could cut us. paper checks on each payday and that was it. That wasn't one of the options we gave them. Yeah. I just can't get over the like, yeah, sorry, the only way I could afford to keep running my

business is if I'm allowed to not pay you and that that's the thing you have to accept. If I'm allowed to hand out checks that can't be cashed. Yeah. So when they told us no, we looked at our plan and we took our next action. We submitted a bunch of elements. We submitted a bunch of and I claims for our checks that had been NSF or insufficient funds. An L and I claim, labor in industries is kind of like the protective body body for workers in Washington. For each check that we had received that bounced, we had a right to file a workers' rights complaint. The problem with those complaints is that they're not anonymous. Your employer gets told when one is filed, who filled it, and why they filed.

it. Unfortunately, that wasn't an option until we were all doing it together, unless we wanted to lose our jobs one by one. Yeah. So when they told us no, we started by submitting our L&I claims. It all happened so quick, and it was one action after another, that it kind of blurs together. So I think we submitted our L&I claims. When we gave them our demand on the 29th, we gave them a deadline for our next payday. So July 3rd is when we were due to get paid again. And we said, by then, you have to agree that you're going to give us guaranteed pay or deliver guaranteed funds. The next day they had told us no,

and on Friday they delivered paychecks like any other payday. They didn't really acknowledge what we had asked. They didn't acknowledge that they weren't meeting our demand. They did not tell us there were any issues with these checks or that they might bounce or that there weren't the funds. They at no point asked anyone to delay cashing their checks because they didn't have the funds. Like that was part of the issue is like sometimes businesses run into financial issues

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Oh, my God. And many, many more. Open your free high-heart radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Tutoro. And listen now. For people who haven't, like, thought of this before, there are, like, actual consequences for attempting to cash a check that doesn't cash? Absolutely.

Like, that gets taken out on you, the person who's attempting to cash the check, like, as well as the people upstream who are doing the bad checks. Like, we actually managed to avoid that at Lakewood for the, most part because once checks started bouncing, we were scared of that happening. Yeah. So we started cashing them at Chase, which is who reel you banks with. You don't have to have an account with Chase to go get your check cash with them. You just have to pay a $10 fee and have forms of identification.

So the people who went to Chase and had their checks bounce there, it never hit their account. Yeah, that's good. There were never any fees or any negative marks on our accounts. For the people who couldn't do that, there were. Yeah. There were NSF fees. At least one Lakewood employee now has had their account completely shut down for 90 days while it's investigated for fraud. Yeah, which is terrific because it's like, okay, the people who are committing the fraud are the bosses.

But now you don't have a fucking bank account for 90 days. Which is just a nightmare. Part of our hope had been that by cashing them at Chase, Chase would flag the account because their account was with Chase and they were consistently issuing these checks that they couldn't afford to cash. And we were consistently cashing them at Chase who had to acknowledge there weren't the funds there. Unfortunately, they told us a couple of times that there was just nothing they could do

on their end. Love capitalist class solidarity. Great stuff. So we did our demand, we did our L&I claims, and then they delivered our paychecks as if nothing had happened. Yeah. So over that weekend, we finalized our plan to stage walkouts. Mm-hmm. Starting on Monday, from 12 to 1, workers would leave Rale U to go to the local chase and attempt to cash their checks.

Mm-hmm. and we did that until each worker got paid. It normally took like 15, 20 minutes, and then we spent the rest of the hour, doing our direct action, not returning to work. But when it was 1 o'clock, we returned to work. We were ready to see our patients. We all messaged our clients the night before if they were affected,

and if we had the time, we offered them replacement sessions. We did our best to follow the rules as much as we could while breaking them. We were trying to send a message to management. we weren't trying to disrupt patient care. Yeah. Yeah. Every step of the way, we were doing our best to disrupt actual patient care to the least amount possible. Yeah. So that went on for three days. On Monday, none of the checks cleared. On Tuesday, we got six of them, and on Wednesday we got the last one.

I did forget to say that was when we picked up two more workers. There were a couple workers who weren't comfortable prior to then taking part in direct action that were ready and did join the walkout with us. Management ignored the walkouts. We got absolutely no response. We sent email updates each day. You know, like this many checks cleared. This many didn't.

We're going to keep going. At any point, if they had just told us, yes, we'll give you guaranteed pay next payday. we would have stopped. Yeah. They didn't. Yeah. So we got paid on Wednesday. A few days went by when we still weren't hearing from them.

So we escalated again. I think after that we did a sick out. So there was a day where everyone called in sick. And most of the workers weren't in the office. Yeah, yeah. Which is pretty noticeable, especially when management doesn't come into the office. And all that's left is your newbies.

Yep, yep, yep, yep. We did that, again, still no response. We sent another follow-up email being like, you continue to not meet our demands. We're going to continue to take action. At any point, we will call a ceasefire if you come to the table and either meet our demand or tell us why you can't. Tell us what your plan is to do to meet it in the future.

And they still didn't. So we moved on to what's called the Good Work strike. every provider that was taking part, we showed up, we did our jobs, we treated our patients, we cleaned our rooms. We just didn't sign our notes because that meant that management

wasn't able to bill for them. Because if we weren't getting paid, neither should they. Yeah, it's a version of the bus strikes where like you just run the buses but then don't charge anyone. Yeah, exactly. That was exactly the line of thinking.

There was another group of nurses in a hospital that stopped charting so that patients would be billed, but they kept performing the work. That rocks. And that's exactly where I got the idea from. Hell yeah. We had patients that we wanted to take care of. Yeah. But we didn't want to give Real You money when they weren't meeting their obligations.

Yeah. That rocks. That went on for a few days. And then on our day off, we got a bunch of information on that Thursday. It was revealed that management had been told Real You was going bankrupt and would be closing probably the 24th. Oh, boy. So they learned that Thursday. And we didn't know what they would tell us, if anything.

Yeah. And payday was Friday. So they were either going to meet or demand or not meet it again. Yeah. And so that plus the information we got on Thursday, we decided to do another stick out so that we could reassess. We wanted to see what they were actually going to do. We wanted to see if the business was going to be open. Yeah.

Because there's just red flag after red flag. Some of us are expecting them to close up and run away at any point. Yeah. I mean, they opened on Friday. Checks were delivered. Two of us received fake ones. Oh, yeah. Yeah, let's talk about the fake checks for a second.

Um, what the fuck? I can't get over this. What? Listed. We like to joke that whatever you think the worst option is, real you will choose a worse one. So at least two employees, we're certain more. We're just not sure who exactly and how many.

But we were given checks that were kind of handwritten. Like, the only things printed on them were like the color that check paper is. And one of the lines on the back, where you endorse it, everything else was hand-drawn from who it was made out to, how much it was, the lines those were written on.

Yeah, like, it sent alarm bells ringing pretty quickly. Like, that's not even monopoly money because monopoly money is printed. This is like, yeah, no. It was like a crafts project. Yeah, it's like they've invented a form of payment like fakers and company store money.

Like, it's unbelievable. Yeah, we got those and we were pretty suspicious, but we took them to chase anyways. And the teller was like, look, I can't, I can't even cash this to tell you that it's bounced because there's no way for me to verify it's real. The security markings that are supposed to be on the back are not there. It's like, sorry, poor fake fella is just like, yeah, sorry, I like can't cash like, like, just like child's drawings of money. This is not an acceptable form of payment. Yeah. Jesus, riced.

Oh, no. They unfortunately couldn't really tell us what to do about it. Yeah. So we had to reach out to our management and ownership to be like, hey, we could not cash our checks. We need real ones issued. Uh-huh. Let us know how you're doing that. Uh-huh.

Also, on Friday, we were out of work. We were waiting for news. And I think that's when they sent out the email about the business closing. At like 156, workers got an email to their company email, which meant most of us could not access it because we don't access work emails from home. That's when they sent it out. And like 30 minutes later, they sent out a patient announcement. Jesus, trust.

And that's how most of us learned. Yeah. We learned as patients first that really was closing in one week. Yeah. Which is just horrifying stuff. That was when it really hit me. Yeah. When I opened my patient portal and read the announcement, I felt like I was seeing it, like all my patients were reading it.

Yeah. And like I was losing access to needed care out of nowhere. Yeah. It was heartbreaking. It was devastating. stating. There's no words to describe how I felt for all of my patients. Yeah. Some of them knew it was coming. Most of them didn't. A lot of them didn't get last sessions. I mean, when we got the notice, we as a union realized that if we worked that last week,

whether or not we'd get paid was up in the air. Yeah. I mean, if they chose not to pay us, we would have to go through bankruptcy court and get in line to get paid. Yeah. So instead, we decided to strike. We spent the last week that Real You was open on the picket line, telling patients what was actually happening. We weren't boycotting. We weren't asking anyone not to go in and have their last sessions. We were encouraging that. Any of the providers that were left, anyone who had sessions, we wanted them to get them before they couldn't. Yeah. But we also didn't want to provide free labor. Yeah. Yeah. And it wasn't an easy decision. I mean, it's one that the group had to talk about and go back and forth on. I mean, none of us

thought that our last sessions were going to be our last sessions. We all wanted to see our patients one more time. We didn't want our patients last session to be their last session. Yeah. But we also didn't want to be exploited even further. Yeah. I mean, we made it clear what we were willing to do and we followed through. I mean, I think it's really like the most pure example of just the dilemma that healthcare work and also like non-profit work. And anything where you're taking care of people, it's you're put in this dilemma where like the way that exploitation by the bosses works is like they're going to exploit you and pay you less

because of your care for the work that you're doing and the people that you're helping. And this is like the most pure like, yeah, the choice you've been given by your bosses is to probably work for free to help your community and make these people a little bit more money before they fuck off or go on strike and have to deal with, you know, like have to try to get your patient's treatment somehow. Exactly. It's horrifying.

It's an impossible choice. Yeah. It sucked. None of us wanted it to go that way. It didn't have to be that way. It didn't. And I think it's really unfortunate because multiple steps along the way, they could have scaled back operations to focus.

on fixing the internal issues with the business. Yeah. It's not like they didn't have people telling them what was happening. Mm-hmm. It's just they chose to stick their head in the sand like an ostrich and keep going. Yeah. And, you know, and ultimately, like, you're the people who are paying the price for their mistakes and, you know, their greed and arrogance and malice. Yeah.

But, um, we survived. And I know that a lot of my fellow workers agree with me that this was an experience we would rather have than not have. Yeah. We found a lot of solidarity and community. And I mean, we've built relationships that are going to last past this. We're hoping to move on and work together again and something better. Yeah. Yeah. And my understanding is that the long. term goal is to try to set up a co-op to be able to do this without sort of the exploitation of the bosses. I mean, yeah, that is the ideal. I think every union member's dream would be a worker cooperative or somewhere where they have some form of either ownership or say in the process. We would love to create something where our patients and our workers are working in

tandem together to create the care that they deserve. Yeah. Like you mentioned earlier, there's just such a lack of, like, standards of care for trans, like gender affirming care. We don't talk to each other enough. We don't value the patient experience enough. We figured out a lot of things in the 80s and didn't bother doing more research. Yeah.

We want to do that. We want to fill that hole. And we have a lot of workers that are very committed to that, that are very excited by that opportunity. It's a long-term goal in the short term. We're hoping to get more people educated like we were promised and back to providing. We're hoping to find new placements for our patients that have like urgent care needs, like people who have surgeries that are coming up. We're working on a database of like local electrolysis clinics who has availability, who treats what areas and who takes what insurance is.

So if we have patients that are looking for new places, they can reach out and we can point them somewhere. But we're always looking for more resources too. We're in our information gathering phase. We're trying to resource compile, just get everything we can for our workers so that we can take those next steps. Yeah, absolutely. And what's devastating about this all is really you was one of the few places that actually took insurance. Not many electrolysis clinics do, so it can be very difficult for people to find and afford care. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's, I don't know, like, yeah, that's like another one of the heart-wrenching things about this is like all of the patients whose medical care was ripped away by this. And the fact that it's y'all trying to figure out how to help them and not the bosses is like such an indication of which side people are fundamentally on. I mean, how they handled the closure is a pretty clear sign of that, too. Yeah. If you cared about your patients finding new places before their services were disrupted, you would have given them more than one week notice. Yeah. I mean, you require two weeks notice from workers before they leave.

Yeah. I think our patients deserve better. Yeah, they absolutely do. And you also deserve better. Yeah. Yeah. We have better. We've made better.

We're going to create better. but it would have been nice to have what we thought we were getting. Yeah. Speaking of that, are there ways for listeners to reach out and help? So right now we have a link tree. It's a little bit bare bones because this happens so much sooner than it was supposed to. Yeah. There is a GoFundMe that is for worker stability.

Not all of us are going to qualify for unemployment, and it's going to be a while before we can find new jobs, because electrolysis clinics and being transgender just, it's a tough combination. Yep. But we also have an email for anyone to reach out to if they have questions for like if our patients are trying to contact us or if they need somewhere new to go. Yeah. If we have any electrolyologists in the community that have openings, we would love to know so that we can send people to you. Yeah, absolutely.

If anyone who has knowledge starting cooperatives, that's also a resource we're really interested in. We want to do this right. Yeah. And we want to talk to the people that have experience doing it. Yeah. Do you have anything else that you want to make sure people know? So there are a couple different electrology associations that clinics can align themselves with. One of the ones that I'm thinking of is called the...

American Electrology Association or Electrolysis. And they have a code of ethics and standards that they require the businesses that are partnered with them to adhere to. It's an association that you have to pay a subscription fee to, but in turn, you get resources for your business and are able to have somewhere to reach out to when you have questions about the ethics in your business or how things are being run. I think something really important to note is that Real You was not partnered with any of them. And there are electrology conventions that will happen that a whole bunch of different electrologists,

surgeons, you know, from different places, we'll get together to discuss the health care

that they're providing. And it's from my understanding that Real You did not have the

best reputation in these circles. Yeah. I mean, the truth is near the end,

Real You was having to form their own education program. They were forming their

own school. because their connection with Zatmaster and with the rest of the electrologist community was just so poor like they couldn't maintain it. Yeah. But for the patients, finding a clinic that is associated

with one of those associations provides them an extra level of protection, especially since Washington State, is not licensed for electrolysis. That is a really, really good point. If you are a patient and you've heard what was going on behind the scenes at real you and you're concerned about continuing your care, one of the ways to protect yourself against the practices that you want to avoid

is by finding a clinic that's associated with one of these professional institutions. Correct. Somewhere that has standards you have to meet. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a good place to end with, you know, the twin promises of workers being able to do their jobs and care for the communities and communities being able to get the care of it they need. Yeah, this system simply delivers neither of them. The only way out of it is to fight for a better one.

We're swinging. I can say that. Yeah. I mean, our group is full of fighters. I'm hopeful. I am too. And every step of the way, every action I have taken has been from a love for my patience and the work that I do and intend to continue doing. Hell yeah.

I'm pretty excited to close this chapter and start the new one where we can only go up. Yeah. Hell yeah, hell yeah. Thank you to both so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having us. Hopefully this was exciting as part one. Yeah. Thank you so much.

Yeah, I'm happy to. And hopefully we get to talk to you all again when like the co-op starts. Should be lovely. Absolutely. Part three will be about our successful co-op beginnings. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Looking forward to it.

Hell yeah. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcast from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzone Media. or check us out on the IHeart Radio 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. Hey, Portlandia fans.

Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia A.O. rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guestrars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here.

You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. A.O. Rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist, Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all?

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