It Could Happen Here - Dollar Lunch Club and Mutual Aid Organizing After the UC Strike

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

James talks to several members of the UCSD Dollar Lunch Club about how their mutual aid group evolved out of  the no vote campaign and how we can use food as a tool for organizing and building community.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Eliane Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is about today, about

labour organising and about what happens after a strike in a labour organisation. I'm joined, I'm James, if you hadn't guessed, and I'm joined by several people from the UCSD Dollar Lunch Club. We're going to talk about the UC Strike and we're going to talk about mutual aid organising in the wake of the strike. If you all would like to introduce yourselves, that would be great. I'm Alex. I use she, they pronouns. I'm Matt and I use he, him. Hi everyone. My name is Maria. I am a PhD student at UCSD and I use she, her pronouns. I'm Anna and I use she, they pronouns. Amazing. Thank you very much guys so i think people probably haven't heard much from us about the uc strike since we last sort of uh had some episodes around december and january and obviously it's been a couple of months since then so the resolution of that strike was kind of

contentious right and a lot of the organizing that that you guys have been doing came out of the campaign to vote no on uh the i guess the ballot after the strike right and uh to vote no on the tentative agreement uh which ultimately didn't succeed right the tentative agreement there was a yes vote and i wonder if you could all explain kind of a like it's obvious how the yes vote was organized right with within the structure of a union which which exists to uh which i had obviously made disagreement with the uc in this case and then it's a job of the people who made that agreement to then get a yes vote on that agreement but can you explain a little bit about how the no vote campaign came together and maybe if someone

could also explain some of the substantive issues that you felt weren't satisfactorily resolved in that tentative agreement. Yeah. The no vote was the end of a very long process of us feeling like the bargaining team was making progressively worse and worse decisions and basically using submission as a tactic to improve gains in bargaining. We felt like that was not a great tactic. So the upshot of the no vote campaign was that fundamentally we felt that the bargaining team had not fought hard enough. They had made repeated sacrifices of our core demands, drastically cutting our 54,000 wage demands, our COLA, and that we felt particularly since it was, uh, during the winter break and we had

some time, um, to, you know, stretch it out a little bit further that if we had gone back to the bargaining table at that point, that we would have been able to recoup some of those demands. I don't think there was like a consensus that it was like obvious that uh like union resources would exclusively be used for yes vote stuff either maybe partially but that was one part of like the major conflict um was that like when some of us were trying to do like a text banking campaign, um, for like, uh, no vote stuff. Um, I know of at least one person who like feared for their career because like

their colleague was like, you're misusing like personally, I personal information that like, this isn't why people like agreed to give it to the union and like you can't just take it and use it for like you know campaigning for your no vote stuff but then we were like this is for a union purpose why can't we like contact people on the same topic that all of us are getting a bajillion mass texts about um and so like i do think that was also a point of contention within that but like like the union does not share resources uh amongst like um amongst people who are campaigning for different sides of ballot issues. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it wasn't like a,

there wasn't like a, like an open channel where like people could have an open discussion, at least using the text banking function, at least. Yeah. We, we, we had been told that in the event that a bargaining team did not have a unanimous vote in favor of TAing the agreement, that

both sides would have the opportunity to use union resources in order to campaign for their preference, and that didn't turn out to be the case. Yeah, that's upsetting um so how did you organize because it was it wasn't like the no vote campaign is is only the four people here right like it was a very substantive campaign that the large number of

people supported and voted for it wasn't like this is a kind of 99 yes situation so how did you all organize for the noote campaign when you didn't have access to those resources? It was a pretty distributed network of, for instance, Signal chats. So a lot of Signal, WhatsApp, Discord groups. And it was very grassroots. So if you knew someone in one of those groups, they would add you. Yeah, I'm sure Matt and Allison have more to add. I think they were in some very large group chats. Yes. And those group chats were both on the UC San Diego campus as well as statewide. So, you know, this wasn't just something that UC San Diego was voting on, right?

This was all of the California campuses. We also had a strike center, which involved in towards the end of our active picketing before winter break, a number of people from all different departments migrated from their pickets to a more central location. And although it was not synonymous with and was unofficially kind of seen as the dissidents side, the vast majority of people who participated in the strike center were ended up being no voters when the time came. I think Anna is pretty right in saying that a lot of the organization was like a distributed

decentralized thing across signal chats. Like in my experience, there was, for example, the Disability Justice Coalition, who've done a lot on you know uh accommodations and disability rights and things like that and so they were approaching things from different angles than other chats that were like you know doing like oh here is a list of emails from you know UCI of grad students in this department please feel free to email it and you know like so there was like a diversity of tactics there if that makes sense so um it was like a lot of like petitioning emails talking one-on-one with people so me personally and several people that I know like set up meetings with like their lab mates and just be like, Hey, how are you doing? So have you heard of what's going on? Things like that, which I think

are very normal union things to do. I did find that like official, like not maybe not official, but in my department, we had two people kind of take up like union liaison roles, and they tended to be more like yes voters rather than no voters. And I found that their form of communication to us never had that kind of like reaching out to other people, they would say like, hey, there's a campus OC happening at 5pm.m., but they wouldn't reach out to members of the department to get everyone's opinion until like week three, week four of the strike. So, you know, I think what no voters did excel at was reaching out to people individually

and like actually like going out to different labs, to different departments and talking with people like either one-on-one or within small groups. So me personally, as well as another member of the Dollar Lunch Club, actually canvassed around graduate housing. So we, during the ratification vote, we were literally like holding stacks of paper and saying like, hey, this is kind of the layout of what you'll be paid for each month that the union, like the UAW is not showing you. Like if you're in, you know, in this year, you're going to be getting a barely like $200 raise for these several months, that kind of thing, which is like very, you know, that information just was not

made accessible or made clear by the UAW. And for me, that was purposefully done, at least in my opinion, that was purposefully done. So I think the diversity of tactics there that the no voters incorporated, and it was only after we started canvassing around graduate housing that we started seeing yes voters also canvassing around graduate housing and tearing down the posters that we had put on other people's doors. Yeah. So it got contentious. But I think because we didn't have those official resources that the UAW usually or at least our chapter of the UAW usually can depend on such as like, oh, an official mailing list. And then we'll just like send you or basically spam you a bunch of updates. We had to work around that by doing more personal meetings by, for example, in the last week of the strike, facilitating group lunches, right, where multiple departments would come together,

facilitating group lunches right where multiple departments would come together bring food cook like nine ten instapots worth of stews for everyone and then that would be an opportunity for me to talk to people that I have like never talked to in my life from like completely different departments and tell them like hey I don't think this is looking really good for us especially like we have very different conditions, very different working conditions. And just overall, you may be part of the SRU, I'm part of 2865. Here's how we should talk. So again, that was because the UAW was not utilizing those avenues of getting people to talk to each other. So I'm not sure I kind of went off topic, but I wanted to, like, really hammer home that because we didn't have all those resources, we had to rely

on kind of these, like, how should I say, like, very distributed piecemeal strategies of like, oh, well, let's do something here. This isn't going to work for this department. Let's do that for this department, you know if if that makes sense it does i think it's really cool because i think that's how there's a lot that people can learn if they're interested in organizing their own workplaces right whether it's organizing for a vote on a tentative agreement or if it's just organizing to form a collective bargaining in the first place or to deal with a particular issue with your bosses whatever it is those grassroots things work especially when you don't have the uh this

giant sort of uh massive union uh apparatus i wanted to say like um just with like what it feels like like to be in like all of the different chats um because at, at the peak of everything, I was like probably sending you like a dozen different Google docs a day. Um, it was all just like, like we'll start a different group chat, uh, for, uh, it was all just, we'll start a different group chat for this specific purpose of like, nobody's talking about disability justice and so we want to talk about disability justice in here and we've decided this this forum is not good and then somebody in the chat goes like well i'm with people who are also interested in like furthering this topic and i don't see them any of them doing something like you know um

like analyzing uh like reanalyzing the like housing market data and not just like taking the uaw's word for it or like like doing a little bit of like forensic accounting on the university and then posting the Google doc and saying like, Hey, uh, I, I did some like forensic accounting on the university. Um, this is something that we can use in arguments and also is like evidence of X or Y. Um, so yeah, just a lot of people, it helps also, it helps to be in a union full of grad students. Yeah, you do have a lot of useful skills. It can also be very taxing organizing that way. Like it can be really,

I know it's a lot of being on your phone and it's a lot of like your phone vibrating and you're having to switch your focus from some like in-depth discussion of disability justice to a discussion of like why the rent is so damn high in santa cruz and uh so like it can be really like i guess i don't know i'm not a person who does well with that kind of shit and so like i wonder if there's anything because this happened a lot in in 2022 right when we look at how the the george floyd

uprising or the uprising for back lives whatever you want to call it was organized it was also a whole lot of signal chats that um i know for a lot of people i spoke to like they just couldn't handle the signal chats um so i wonder if there's anything that you learned during that organizing process that you would like to pass on to people who are interested in organizing going forward? One thing I'll say is it became pretty clear that, you know, the people who had created the Signal chats or the WhatsApp chats were the ones who were able to monitor, manipulate, shut it down, which happened to our campus picket leaders organizing chat after the no vote had already failed. This was a couple of weeks later

during the joint council meeting of the UAW. And, you know, the discourse and the arguments that were happening there, while certainly very painful and vociferous, were also, you know, very connecting to the campus. Lots of different departments were on there. So we still got a lot of ideas about you know what other departments were thinking of um and and with the uh locking down of that chat which was kind of a unilateral action on the part of one of the moderators um that just really ended a lot of campus discussion um and i in my opinion furthered the divide between the two sides uh and the other thing that i'll say is, you know, it's really hard from a historical perspective, from a communications perspective, to see like that people who are typing slower

are not getting their opinions out. People who are in multiple chats are getting certain types of information that other people are not getting. And my words of advice to any mass movement that is attempting to use these kinds of chat applications are one, to be sure that you are monitoring for accountability. I realized very late in the game that you can actually download WhatsApp transcripts. So I downloaded the entire transcript

just in case it got nuked. Screenshots also, people would say, well, I said this to this person. I'd say, no, somebody took a screenshot of that before you deleted it. And the other thing is to always know, to always have backups, always have back channels because there were so many instances of, of, you know, moderator led or, uh, UAW sanctions chats that, um, did not permit discussion.

And in the absence, you know, we were talking about that shit in our, in our back channels. Yeah, I think that's good advice. Ken has just joined us and I'm just going to allow them to introduce themselves before we go forward with discussing these organizing tactics. Go ahead, Ken. Hi, I'm Ken. I am a graduate student in the literature department. So I've been organizing with Dollar Lunch Club from day, like week zero before the strike started with Anna. And yeah.

And me. Well, that was from day one. That's true. I wanted to say with respect to the question about like, uh, just on my phone fatigue, um, I think a large, like part of like why we are now like this group of us here is dollar lunch club is because we were just like, we all have on my phone fatigue and we want to do something actually like uh community building and like meaningful uh for like ourselves and other grad students um and yeah getting off the phone and making soup together has been very uh uh

very good for that yeah maria do you want to add to that? Yeah, I was going to say the same, like, because I think, I think phone chats are vital, right? Like I'm thinking about how important Facebook messenger chats were to the teacher strike a couple of years ago. So those were like really important. And they were really important in our strike as well. But I think because of the limitations of like, as Matt mentioned, someone can just unilaterally say none of you can reply, only I can post updates. They can nuke the entire chat, disable it, all of that. Because of that, it really tells you like, oh, you can't just rely on online organizing. A lot of times you're going to have to do in-person organizing, which again, as Alex said really well, like a continuation of that community building so that we maintain contacts so that we maintain having conversations with people that generally we wouldn't really be meeting every day or maybe wouldn't even be meeting like like once a quarter that kind of thing you know there's people that i talked to in scripts that i never would have

talked to if we weren't doing some of these lunches together and finding out their situation. So they're in a kind of tough situation that I think would be good to talk about soon. But I guess what I would say as advice for other people who are trying to unionize their workplace is to get people kind of engaged, you have to start with some of that community building. And I think food is one of those really good places to start community building. It could be also other types of activities. So all throughout the strike, there was, you know, times when people would be like, hey, let's do yoga by the beach, you know, or let's do yoga on this picket, or let's do a dance on this picket, or let's do like a fashion show on this picket. Those are all like fun activities that I think

people who like do not want to be at their workplace all the time, people who like just want to catch a break, you can engage those like disengaged people that are just not paying attention to politics by offering activities that are important for community building and for getting to meet people that you wouldn't have talked to before. So I think that's kind of like vital to a union functioning is building all of these contacts. And then when you have talked to someone several times, when you have had lunch with them several times, then you can really get into the nitty gritty of like, well, how do you feel about the contract? How do you feel about, you know, unionizing? How do you feel about so and so? I think that kind of community building is something that like our the UAW 2865 at least really just like neglected.

least really just like neglected. So my, my example here is, um, on one of the pickets, not the picket that I was on, but on one of the pickets, I later talked to, um, a guy who was saying like, oh yeah, our picket is really militant. We're supposed to be like shouting at people, uh, on the street the entire time. And, you know, our picket leader, she's like going all out and she, you know, has lost her voice because of that and all of that. And I was thinking like, okay, but what do you, don't you want to rest? You know, like what, like, do you do anything for fun to keep people going to the picket? because his picket had dropped in numbers so much that they had to combine numbers with another picket. Right. And to me, that was like, you are making this really, really stressful for people. That's not to say that, you know, like, uh,

preventing people from parking there isn't important. It is, but most people can only do that for a couple of days. And then they're like stressed out and they do not want to contribute to that strike situation anymore. They just want to sit at home and not do work. Right. Which is kind of what a strike can be. But to keep people on the picket lines and to keep in contact with them because they're coming on campus or, you know, at the workplace every day, you have to make it like pleasant to be there. the workplace every day you have to make it like pleasant to be there and so that that was one of the things that I learned from one of those pickets where like you aren't doing any community building like your community building is a single basketball hoop that you brought and you put on the parking lot and like that's not enough you have to do like food you have to do some kind of rest you

have to do some kind of art so in one one of the other pickets that I participated in, there was like chalking everywhere. We were making like a Monopoly board, but like you would just be losing $200 every time you passed a step and things like that, right? You have to let people express themselves in this way for them to keep coming back and back and being engaged for you to

be able to facilitate conversations and to ask like hey what do you think about the contract hey what do you want to do uh i i think community building is the most important thing and that can be online but it also should have an in-person component to it yeah i think that's really well said fun is a way like like intentionally making time and space and energy for having fun as a community and just like doing things that are just like like this is because all of us need to eat and all of us need a break like that is a way to like keep up your um to like keep up your stamina um and like help people keep up your stamina for something taxing like a strike and also like to help people find the kind of meaning that helps them like want to come back and continue devoting energy to the thing um and yeah that I just wanted to echo uh that like that like it was

only through like finding this group that I was able to like find people of of similar minds on this it was not in the like UAW department organizing committee meetings that I could find like minds on this our our picket I don't think ever like like died off like other pickets did and our picket I'm referring to like most of the other people here we were together on one picket part of that is because we were allowing like space for so many different activities to do like there is um one person in my department who kept coming despite my department being like really politically disengaged because we had like a button maker and we could make buttons and he was like hey this is fun i'm just gonna like continue drawing buttons for people i

like doing that and it was like go for it you know like as long as you're here as long as we can communicate with you and like uh hear your opinions and see what you want out of the contract and you keep on coming like we love that you know like if you allow space for different people to do different things if there's like a diversity of tactics I think you're going to get people a lot more engaged than if you have this like top down, like, no, we should only be preventing people from parking here. We should only be shouting at students to not go to class. Like there has to be a diversity of tactics. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

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available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts that would be a good time i think for us to explain exactly what dollar lunch club is and and what it does so does someone want to take take on explaining that a dollar lunch club is very much like i would say ground up organizing tactics i guess um. Um, it's, it's everything is sort of collectively decided in a weekly meeting. And in the past quarter, it's, it's been lunch. It's we've been providing lunch for, um, it's targeted at grad students, but really, um, welcoming all of all community members, uh, regardless of like affiliation with UCSD, although it's

mostly UCSD students and grad students that have been attending. But we've been doing lunch for a dollar two to three times a week in different places on the UCSD campus. Some of it is just lunches. Some of it is sort of like ad hoc catering, I would say, of different kinds of organizing efforts or interdepartmental lunches. So it's not totally fixed in terms of location or affiliation. And all of the members are doing this totally voluntarily. And the $1 that we collect for the lunches or greater donations, if community members want,

goes straight into just sustaining the lunch project and groceries and um but mostly yeah there's been a lot of efforts to sort of diversify and make the make our lunches as sustainable cost-wise as possible um so this last quarter, folks have been working with the Food Recovery Network to sort of supply some of the ingredients. It is very much donate what you want. As Ken said, we generally suggest a dollar donation, but it's I think one of our signs says eat first, donate maybe. So it's very much pay what you want pay what you can yeah and I wanted to say and um like Matt was most uh directly involved in this transition but what it grew out of was the fact that like uh the humanities picket um started doing daily lunches together and um after the strike ended because of

the ratification vote um uh matt and uh some other folks who had been doing those lunches were just like we should keep doing this. This feels good and right. And more people like me jumped on afterwards. And we all have been making it into this mutual aid thing for like, we need to like, you know, humanize ourselves to each other and like, the community bonds that we notice we're missing so that way maybe in the future people will care a little more about people that

maybe they couldn't care less about this time around. I want to just jump in and give credit where credit is due. Ken and Anna actually were the originators of the strike food. And I jumped on

day one because I knew I was a professional cook for a while. I was really into food and I wanted to do that. And so I guess you could say it was the three of us and then it expanded fair fair I don't I don't have my origin story nailed down yeah you got to get it on pat it's uh it's something I miss greatly from like uh leftist organizing in in certainly in like southern Europe uh which is you know where I spend a lot of my life. Like you're always well-fed at anything,

whether you're in Spain or Italy or even in France. And like American labor organizing lacks that. So it's cool to see you guys doing it. Yeah, kind of to summarize what Alex was saying, for me, the goal is very much two-pronged. One is food justice. So food for everyone. I think everyone should have it. It's great to hear that that's kind of a built-in thing in Europe. I didn't know that, but it sounds

pretty on brand. Um, disappointingly, that is not the case here. So yeah, everyone needs food. Um, so that's, that's one goal. And then for me, the other goal is to get people talking across departments. So I think a big issue in the strike was that some departments were paid much more than others. And I think for that reason, the ones who were paid more were often less radical because they were kind of already slightly more comfortable. Of course, no one is paid a huge amount as a grad student, but they had, I guess, you could say more to lose and maybe were less pressed to urgently start earning more. And of course, accessibility needs and there are many other considerations. Basically, if you're already somewhat comfortable with your living situation, you're less likely to be super radical. And so I think just not even being in the same spheres together, people in those more comfortable departments kind of did not really have any reason

to interact with people in the less comfortable departments and they just didn't see them at all. And so just like what Alex is saying, um, that food is a way to humanize us all to each other. Um, it's very hard to have everyone in the same room together without, you know, seeing and talking to each other. Um, so food was a way for us to do that. And I thought that that was a really important, continued, slow moving goal. So weekly lunches are a way for us to invite people from across the campus and say, hey, there's free food here and it's also really good. So you should come by and eat some. And while you're here, talk to some students from the humanities department and recognize that they have real needs and they are people too and maybe next time you vote you should keep their thoughts in mind and vote a little bit less selfishly if you can so that that's what it is for me I think getting a little deeper dig a little deeper into the origin of like how this all started.

My department has been like very suspicious, I guess, of the UAW previous efforts for fair, for fair reasons, you know. And so in terms of getting folks out to strike, and then also to be on the picket line, it was definitely a struggle not just not really so much in that folks didn't believe in the cause but they were like pretty aware that um you know as as literature students you're not the university or the union's priority um you know because humanity is you know the you know that trend right and so um there was also a lot of the whole um strike pay system scared a lot of folks and it was like i have to switch switch from this, uh, you know, like different kind of labor, which is not really about me physically being in a place for 20 hours a week into this labor that

is like me walking around for 20 hours a week in order to make sure that I am not going to go broke. And basically, there was not a funded, there wasn't funded snacks or lunch by the UAW. And I had actually, Matt and I, or yeah, Matt and I had asked at an early meeting, I guess, about getting a sort of like seed fund of like maybe $50 to just get us rolling on the lunch. And the UAW staff was like, nope, lunch is just not included in our budget. Sorry about that. Like, if you want to do that, you'll have to figure out how to get this organizing going on your own. And so part of doing the fundraising from the beginning was about that. And actually,

the Strike Food funds that I also want to throw some credit to Anna also as like one of the people that was like most focused on building sort of the fundraising materials and actively fundraising in different places and making sure that then ultimately, in terms of being able to supply food lunch funds to other pickets, that was something that we started doing about midway through the strike, because we had had some fundraising success. And it was kind of crazy because it was, I remember just like the last day of the strike itself, just being at another picket where, you know, that had sort of developed more of its own like lunch culture, like using some of that, like that fundraised cash and like also using efforts from other folks, but

just the picket being like somebody at the picket being like, damn, they got to get on that lunch thing next time. This was key. And I was just like, no. Yeah. But yeah, like exactly. The lunch is like how you how are you going to expect to have people building community you know and you know the the cheapest the the cheapest like lunch you can i mean outside of basically during the strike people were eating all of the food out of the food co-op, which is another community group that supplies food on campus. But outside of that, pretty much there is not a meal to be had on campus for less than like $13 without tax. So, yeah, that's about that. Alex, can I add something before you?

Just like a tiny thing based on Ken's point. I was going to say at one point, I think it was week two or week three of the strike, we were making so much food. We were feeding like probably a hundred people and then we would have leftovers and we would literally walk the leftovers to the other pickets.

And it surprised me so much that the other picket would just be eating like chips and donuts. And here I am like dropping off like cooked, you know, like bean burritos or like salads or things like that, like actual food for them. So like, to me, this was like, not even a failure on the UAW's part it was like very intentional of like well you're kind of on your own you know so that's like the power of food to me is like well-fed people are going to keep coming back you know people that don't have to spend like a bunch of money on getting like donuts I don't i don't think they're going to keep coming back you know yeah what ken was saying earlier about props to anna nobody moves a secondhand

instapot in san diego county without anna knowing about it is one of our our group jokes thank you Thank you all. Yeah. We love you. You too. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I wanted to offer some contrast to like, uh, how, uh, like the other folks's departments have been,

um, like have been responsive to things and like what the attitudes are. Um, so I am in the computer science department. Uh, we have plenty of money comparatively. Um, and we are, I think steps, uh, what the previous steps were like steps eight and nine. Um, and we organized a lot with like the electrical engineering department,

which is like step, uh, which is like step uh like also like step seven eight nine um and i remember very vividly this town hall we had before the the ratification vote got announced where like uh there was some temperature checking about like how does everybody feel about this um like if we if we put this up for vote and everybody was just like, oh, you know, it looks all right to me. I think I, this, like, you know, not incredible, but, like, I'd be able to handle this. And then I come in and get my turn and go, like, guys, everything I'm hearing from the other side of campus is them panicking and very upset. I don't think we should do this if the rest of the campus is panicking and upset. And I was just like, not heard and kind of ignored um so

yeah um a lot of the community building stuff like when we talk about like trying to get people to like humanize like other people that they didn't seem to care about um we're talking about like the departments that didn't need as much help like some of mine and like um the strike for me personally was like it definitely transformed a lot of like, my friendships for that reason. Because like, I don't know how to be friends with people that are like, I see and hear that the people that you're talking to i see and hear that you're talking to people who are absolutely freaking the hell out because like we'll have struck for six weeks or so and they'll still be poor but like i don't know how to be friends after that i just wanted to touch a little bit more on the idea of feeding strikers and the massive logistical boon that that was for a movement. Does anybody recall offhand how many weeks the strike went on?

Oh, or say six. UAW rules were in order to qualify for strike pay, we needed to have 20 hours of striking a week. So that boiled down to three shifts. You could do them every, you know, you could do two in one day and one in another day. But by and large, at least most of the people on my picket were there, you know, five days a week. But let's just say you got three shifts. Lunches we've already established at the UC San Diego campus is around $13 a person, right? So that's $39 you're spending just on lunch, not on gas, which for me is quite expensive because I live somewhat far from campus. because I live somewhat far from campus. So 39 times six is $234. And when we struck for these high wages, you know, that was worth it. We put in our effort and our sweat. But at the end

of the day, those of us in the arts and humanities and ASEs are seeing this year a $200 raise per month. So just in our lunch, that would have obviated the raises that we got during the strike. So I think, you know, this shows really the necessity for mutual aid in workers' movements like this, because nobody else is going to beat us. We have to beat ourselves. Yeah, I think it's good to put numbers on it like that. It's a serious expense, and it's not getting any cheaper. Another way that I see this is it's not just for workers. The way that I see what Dollar Lunch Club is doing by saying, hey, we will provide either free or very cheap a dollar, you know, for lunch on these days of the week.

Basically every week, whoever wants to come can come, whoever wants to help can help. Go for it. That to me is basically like a soup kitchen like it is a I the way that I see it is it's like a communist anarchist type project of making like I'm not sure if I can say it's building power but I feel that it's not just building community but like allowing people to worry less about expenses which means that they can put their energy into a lot of other things. Like the way that I would want Dollar Lunch Club to continue to evolve is that we would be able to offer lunch for, you know, people who can't afford the like $12 campus lunches every day

of the week, all week, like, imagining the difference of, you know, like, okay, there's 10 weeks and a quarter, five days in a week. So like 50 days that like you might be buying lunch, at least half of those days, the difference of $1 lunch versus like $10 lunch is like hundreds of dollars, right? So to me, if we can provide that, you know, as we grow in time to all five days of the week, you know, on several locations on campus, and we provide that for a couple of hundred students or community members or what have you, we will be making a material difference in these people's lives. We will be showing them a different way that like organizing or not even just organizing but like that accessibility to food can be organized if that

makes sense that it doesn't you know like getting food doesn't have to be this like capitalist project of like i am ordering this sort of thing and I am getting this back. It can be like the more along the terms of like what we're doing, which is like we are seeing what food has been donated to the pantry that we work a lot with the basic needs hub, the food pantry and so on to get a bunch of like donated produce out of which we make foods. Right. So we're reducing food waste. We're trying to, you know, contribute to like food justice, making food as free, as cheap as possible and allowing people to be like, hey, actually the cafeterias that you see on campus, you getting lunch doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to, you know, like you pay, you know, like two bucks for an apple or things like that. And then another thing that occasionally we've been doing is also foraging. So here in Southern California, there's a lot of edible non-native species such as like mustard,

curly dock, wild radish, things like that. And so we can like forage those and even make food out of them along with food from the food pantry. So I, you know, not that we're really doing this right now, but my dream would be to really kind of revolutionize the way that food culture is in UCSD and show people like, no, it can't be a food kitchen where you don't have to

like expressly worry about where you're getting your meal the next day. You don't have to pay $3 for a banana. You don't have to do any of that. You can have like a better future. You can have like a better experience at the university or just like in life in general. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, uh, I think that's really, I know, like I teach the community college sometimes. So, um, it's a little different from the UC, but maybe not as different as people might imagine. Um, and like one thing that I've noticed, I get always have food in my office and I, a lot of my students are in food precarity and have been for a while and like certainly around like the time of the fucking travel ban when when people's parents were stuck outside the country and and they you know defend for themselves it's a way

that like we can move from this moment of alienation which is like you know your interaction with panda express uh where you you give money and you get a box of food you eat by yourself uh to like a moment of solidarity which is cool um yeah it's great you're foraging too um i wanted to foraging episode one day so i have to have you back for for that welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Some of my best food memories are like eating beans with people, you know, like Food Not Bombs things. I do a lot of work with refugees, so like Food Not Bombs things in 2018 with the migrant caravan or people making pancakes at the G8 protest in the early 2000s. Some of my best memories, not of just food, but like of forming community around food. not of just food but like of forming community around food so like when you're doing this stuff like is there any someone wants to someone here says say like hell yeah i want to do that on my campus at my workplace in my town whatever like logistically it sounds like you guys have a corner on the instapot market but like aside from that like are you cooking vegan food so it's it's more accessible for more people you know what kind of stuff like, are you cooking vegan food? So it's, it's more accessible for more people, you know, what kind of stuff like that would you advise for people? Uh, I can jump in on this.

Cooking, cooking to scale is an entirely different beast than, uh, cooking for yourself at home and, um, you've already identified beans as being really, uh, legumes, um, and grains bought in bulk. She didn't come as a surprise to anybody who thought about it for a hot second that when you buy in bulk, it's far cheaper. But it also comes with downsides, like when you're soaking beans, you often have to soak those beans a long time ahead of time. And what we have been doing, which I think my comrades have touched on, is sourcing from

a great variety of local food banks and farms and donations, both during the strike and afterwards. and donations, both during the strike and afterwards. One thing that I would say we struggled with in the initial phases of Dollar Lunch Club when we were still actively striking was that, you know, the absolute best of goodwill in the world, everybody wanted to donate foodstuffs. And that meant that our meal planning was significantly harder because, you know, we have half a can of tomato paste and we have 25 cans of p to solicit both cash financially, setting up a, what's it called? A Venmo.

And also, for people who can't give money, we put them to work. And that was because people wanna help. And we felt kind of bad after a while, turning people away who are offering to go to the store. And at one point in the strike, I think we got like 25 prepackaged Indian meals, which we ended up giving out to people for lunch. But as far as feeding people on site, being very specific about what kinds of things you're looking for ahead of time,

meal planning well in advance with a sort of basic framework of, okay, we got bean and we got a starch. What do we have to throw into the bean pot? The last thing I'll say is as Anna has rightly been champion for, the actual cooking devices are super important too. And that was one of, that has perpetually been one of our biggest struggles because you know, we don't have a colander, so we can't drain the beans and we have four Instapots,

but there are different sizes and the lids for two don't work. With wear and tear, stuff is breaking right when you need it the most. So, you know, if you are getting money donations, I think it's really important to budget for the pots and the pans and can openers and these kinds of things that really make a difference in getting food hot and out on time and in large numbers. Yeah, I think that's very good advice. Maria had something to add. I have actually a lot of things to add logistics wise, because in our meetings, we talk about some parts of this. And so one of the big things that we talked about um over the

strike but also after the strike when we were like hey let's let's continue this project is how much of our things should be like reusable versus like disposable right that was like a big topic of like well okay we're using disposable forks and we we don't like that environmentally, because we're putting like a bunch of plastic into, you know, the trash, right? And we have to buy plastic each time, but then like, we don't know, okay, you know, like, should we should we buy like, you know, a bunch of metal spoons, but they're going to be a little bit more expensive than the disposable ones. But you know, maybe the costs will even out after a while. And like that, that kind of, you know, discussion has to be had about like everything. So, you know, about like bowls, about like the pans in which we cook in, like mixing bowls,

like all kinds of things like that, where we're thinking, you know, like based on the funds that we have based on our usage of some of these products, is it worth it getting, you know, have based on our usage of some of these products? Is it worth it getting, you know, like reusable things, which unfortunately we'll have to like clean afterwards. So they add to the labor, but thankfully they don't, you know, pollute the environment in the way that disposable things do. So for us, because we do care a lot about lowering our usage of plastic, we did pivot to using more reusable things. So I think for a group that may be interested in, you know, like facilitating something like this in their workplace or in their university or something like that, I think that is one important discussion that you want to have. What is the time course that you see of this project continuing? And is

it worth it getting, you know, like reusable versus disposable tools for the people that possibly you're going to feed? Another thing that is related to this is when you're first starting to cook, really you're trying to borrow things from other people. So a lot of the things that like during the strike, we had just borrowed people's Instapots. Like people brought in their Instapots.

They labeled them like, oh, this is, you know, Dana's Instapot. And then we use those Instapots. After the strike, we couldn't do that anymore. But there were some people that were willing to be like, hey, I'm actually like moving out and I'll donate all these Tupperware to you. And so we took the Tupperware and I'll donate all of these Tupperware to you. And so we took the Tupperware and now we have like a little Tupperware program where if people don't forget to bring their Tupperware to put lunch in, we just like label it, UCSD dollar lunch club, UCSD

mutual aid. And we just give away the Tupperware. And oftentimes, you know, it's brought back to us that kind of thing. And that again, facilitates food usage. So there's a lot of places where you can find things that you might need in this kind of thing. So can openers, I have found a bunch of jars that people, you know, after they're moving away, they leave for free around graduate housing. So like, there's a lot of things that you can get, which you don't really require funds for. There's also buy nothing groups on Facebook that I think are particularly effective for this. So a lot of people that are just like, oh, yeah, I'm like updating my kitchen. I'm throwing away a bunch of these utensils that you can just get for free. So that's been really helpful for us as well.

And as someone who does a lot of sourcing as well. So we tend to shop from Goodwill and other thrift stores to make sure that, you know, our buying and consumption of some I think you have to make it be fun for you, the person that's cooking and cleaning and organizing apart from making it fun for everyone else who gets, you know, like free food, cheap food, tasty food. Right. So something that I, I really like about dollar lunch club is that we've been really allowing our members to like run wild with the ideas that they have. Right. So for example, we, I mean, Anna and I have been talking about utilizing all the frozen bread that has been donated to us and making French toast, vegan French toast out of that. So we are really excited for doing something fun like that because usually in a

lot of like soup kitchen places, you, you have foods that are like, Hey, this is nutritious, but you know, like, I don't want to eat beans all day. I'm someone who like does like beans, but not everyone else wants to just eat, you know, like mashed beans all day, that kind of thing. And so having a, like a variety of things that we cook like we pretty much like cook all kinds of curries a lot of like rice dishes a lot of stews um pesto and spaghetti like pasta you know just like all very different kinds of meals that make it fun for the people who are arriving so like I mentioned pesto I made pesto a couple of times. And like a lot of people are like, ooh, pesto, basil, that's gonna be great. And that was with like the forage mustard that I was talking about before. And like, when you have that kind of variety, and when you have like interesting, fun foods, when you can like make boba in like an Instapot, or you could grab a toaster oven and make garlic bread, which is things that we've done. You make it a lot more fun for the people that are cooking as well.

And it just becomes like a community building thing, not just for the people eating, but for the people doing that labor. So that's like, that's what I would advise people. Like, yes, you are under very tight budgetary constraints. We try to like for some meals, like because there's so much donations, sometimes there's zero dollars. Sometimes we have to buy things and we try to have it be less than twenty dollars so we can like feed 30 to 40 people and you can like have that, you know, money that's donated for like one dollar um have that be for like next time that kind of thing uh did i yeah so like make it fun for yourself uh so you can like continue doing that work and you won't burn out in the way that you you might otherwise even as you were trying to

budget yeah yeah i just wanted to say um like in terms of roles um so we always have like somebody who like knows how to like pull a recipe together more um we always have to have somebody who like does dishwashing and like each of these roles can have like one or two or three people in it uh in it and then there's always like people who just like do the like labor of prep um and um like yeah that can be all the same person and or it can be multiple for each um and i want to say usually i am a person who either like like i show up to uh peel veggies that people tell me need to be peeled and i show up to wash dishes um because i'm not a person who is like i have trouble making decisions about food i do not want to be in charge of food stuff. And that has been like, okay.

And that has meant that like, I do not have to like get nervous and worked up about like, I don't know how to make decisions about food here. I can just show up and peel carrots. And it's like kind of helped me like maybe get a little bit of a better feel for like cooking stuff um so that way when i am like just cooking for myself um i do just think of like okay if i was uh like uh if i was in you know like dollar lunch prep mode, I know I have rice and I know I have beans. And so I'm set.

And yeah, and a lot of times just like taking away the like the dirty dish bin and sort of like leaving out maybe like a few washed bowls by the sink along with a sponge and a bit of soap people get the cue and they'll wash their own dishes um it's yeah yeah yeah yeah i think that's great actually having space for for different skill sets and different preferences within your organizing is always key okay guys, guys. Where can people find, like if they want to ask you for bean recipes or follow along, see pictures, whatever. Is there like a dollar lunch club social media they can find?

Or do you have individual ones you want to share? So I think Alex can talk about the website. Oh, you have a website. Yes, I made us a website. So we are most active on Instagram. Ken put our handle in the chat. It is

dollar underscore lunch underscore club on Instagram. And yeah, the website is dollalunchclub UCSD separated by dashes and then dot github.io because you can get free domain names if it's your github username uh hot tip of the day

um but uh yeah primarily on instagram nice yeah it's great uh all right well thank you very much for your time guys i really appreciate it and uh yeah i hope more people do the same because as you said i think this is really important way to organize thank you so much we really appreciate it it could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzoneemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here

updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. to the destruction of Google search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez, was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba?

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.