Public Comment

I have to say I’m rather appalled. In the last edition of the Daily Planet, there was an article regarding the United Healthcare Workers SEIU strike and protest and the noise complaints from surrounding Alta Bates area neighbors. Peter Shelton was specifically noted as having his 5- and 7-year-old boys woken up on the morning of the protest. The police, union representatives, the union vice president, the chief of police, a city department director, a city council member and hospital management were all quoted as regretful and solemn about correcting future such problems. 

I live in Northwest Berkeley in the widening zone of Pacific Steel emissions of manganese, nickel, other heavy metals, burning plastic and noxious gases and neurotoxins. My 3-year-old daughter has had to take prednisone to be able to breath. She was taken to the emergency room, hospitalized for three days and I curled up in a tiny cot next to her and slept that way while she tried to sleep with tubes in her mouth. Some of the protesting workers may well have been monitoring her during our stay. We have no history of asthma in either family and had no such problem before moving to this neighborhood. 

Yet when I, and hundreds of other families, in our area have brought this serious health risk that has been allowed to exist for decades to the attention of city officials—my councilmember, Linda Maio and the now re-elected mayor—I have gotten dismissive platitudes about protecting the union workers’ jobs at Pacific Steel or simply no response at all (from Tom Bates.) 

So am I to understand that if your child is woken two hours early on one morning in their own bed by union workers, then the city, police department and union are vigilantly remorseful and ready to prevent any further such harrowing experience. But if your child is being sickened every hour of every day of every year, continually on steroids and hospitalized for days by union workers working in a 70-year-old building that’s polluting the air and causing asthma or worse, then everything is just fine and we parents are overreacting and silly to complain? 

This blatant backwards sensitivity and injustice is infuriating. Parents with children suffering ill health from the neglected problem of Pacific Steel in Northwest Berkeley should not have to read such overprivileged nonsense. Or perhaps it’s actually helpful to realize how very classicist and racist this once liberal city of Berkeley has become: the wealthy white neighbors in Rockridge have been woken up early on one occasion and that is enough to quell union protests concerning unfair working conditions—but hundreds of families are being poisoned in a predominantly low income, historically ethnic neighborhood and that’s not important enough to bother the unions or stop production until the emissions can be assessed and cleaned up. 

More than 80 percent of Pacific Steel workers live outside a 15-mile radius of Berkeley; they are not Maio or Bates constituents. And even if they were, if a local restaurant posed a health risk, would the mayor and Ms. Maio insist it stay open and serve in order to employ the waitstaff? How about toxic toy manufacturers and cigarette companies, should we keep all companies running to capacity to employ their workers no matter what? 

I don’t think the city cares much about children’s health, workers’ rights or environmental impacts. It cares about money. Moneyed upper class citizens in wealthy neighborhoods getting upset. Or one of the largest, oldest steel foundries with taxable polluting product getting upset. If the union sides with the money, it’s listened to, if it doesn’t, it’s told to be quiet: there’s rich people sleeping. 

Pear Michaels is a Berkeley resident.