The “Housework of the Movement” series examines the behind-the-scenes work on which social movements rely. It seeks to show who does this work and why we don’t always see it. This interview is the first in the series, which engages with women and gender-oppressed people to document the kinship-forming, relationship-fostering, and conflict-resolving labor that builds organizations capable of imagining, constructing, and winning social transformation. In a culture focused on individual achievement, the project seeks to amplify the deeply collaborative processes that drive and sustain movements. Mary Jirmanus Saba did this interview with Adrienne Williams for the Housework of the Movement project, which she started with Balraj Gill.
Mary Jirmanus Saba: We first met during the May 2020 Amazon workplace walkouts for which you had been doing some organizing. Before that, had you been involved in political organizing?
Adrienne Williams: I had been doing the Amazon organizing for probably two weeks at that time. But prior to that, I had done some organizing at a charter school where I worked.
MJS: Could you just tell us about your experience at the charter school? Do you think it was an important moment in your radicalization?
AW: To understand why I was doing what I was doing at the school, we have to go back to when I got my degree in graphic design. In California, I couldn’t make a living as a graphic designer. At the time I was 36 years old. I had just become a mother. I had to leave the industry. I had been on welfare (which was a whole other nightmare). Life can be very isolating. When you are broke or on welfare–it sucks to have a degree and be on welfare–there’s no help in that system. People get off welfare despite the system, not because of the system. If I worked 20 hours a week, I could get full-time childcare. So, I started substitute teaching for an organization called Sling Education, which sent subs to charter schools and private schools.
Subbing was eye-opening. I saw charters in Oakland that didn’t offer English classes. Children there who couldn’t write. After six months of subbing, I took a full-time job at Summit Public Schools. I had no idea at the time that it was co-created by Mark Zuckerberg [of Meta]. My little ones–these were seventh and eighth graders–were online five, six hours a day, and then expected to do two hours of online homework every night. The amount of time they were on a screen was affecting them physically and emotionally. They were experiencing neck pain, back pain, migraines; their eyesight was breaking down. The kids weren’t learning. There was no expectation for them to complete tasks on time. Even the ones that weren’t passing got A’s a lot of the time.
Slowly, I started talking to parents who were unhappy. A lot of parents pulled their girls out because there was no protocol for sexual assault. Because of such poor administration, I started talking to parents, talking to kids, trying to counsel them.
Ultimately, I couldn’t work under those conditions and quit the job in 2019. I started talking to reporters and reaching out to organizations like the ACLU and NAACP, but they refused to help, even though they acknowledged that I absolutely had a case.
That’s also when I decided to work as an Amazon delivery driver. Instantly I saw similar problems: surveillance, health and safety violations, not paying people for all their work. The same thing as the school but in a different package.
That realization made me think about what my grandma used to tell me: If you ignore the problems God puts in front of you, he will just continue to place that same problem in front of you until you address it. It just hit me while I was at Amazon, I guess I have to do something about this because I couldn’t keep moving to new jobs and having this be my life.
MJS: Can you tell us more about your working conditions at Amazon and why you started organizing there?
AW: It was so difficult. I was so tired. I was so nervous. It was always hovering over my head that I could be fired at any time for any reason. If you get too much overtime, you’re fired. If you somehow upset a customer, you’re fired. Dogs chasing you…biting you.
I started loosely, just kind of talking to my coworkers, seeing how they felt about things, seeing what they thought a fair wage was. Things like that.
And then COVID hit. Things became supercharged. We had to clean our own vans. Nobody was expected to wear masks until it started getting around on TV that we should. Then all of a sudden it was like, oh, wear a mask. Before that, I was bringing masks for myself and my colleagues with lung issues. We really didn’t know what COVID was.
I had to homeschool my daughter for the first three or four months of the pandemic. That’s when I started working with you, Mary. The worst thing they ever did was leave me at home for three months without pay because I kept stewing. It took me five months to get unemployment benefits. Amazon did not care about its employees, or if we would survive.
As I was figuring out how to pay rent, feed my family, clothe my daughter, I started meeting with more people. I met people who had created a gig workers collective. I met people who were part of UNITE HERE. That was my first exposure to labor organizing. And it snowballed from there.
MJS: How have your relationships helped you and shaped you? You mentioned your grandmother earlier. Do you imagine her as a political influence? Who are the people who influenced your political upbringing?
AW: I never thought about it in that way. My grandma and grandpa were very churchgoing. She worked for social services in the 1970s. She always had this idea that not everybody is employable. And so we have to take care of them. Period. “They’re not bad people,” she would say, “but not everybody’s employable. Life happens, things happen. And so how do we take care of people who cannot necessarily take care of themselves?”
I feel like she was very practical. She was very stylish and used to always shop in this place called Thrift Town. She would take the women to shop with her. She got reprimanded because others thought it was disrespectful. “You’re looking down on these ladies, blah, blah, blah.” And she was like, ”First of all, they’re on welfare. They can’t go to Bloomingdale’s. Second, my whole outfit is from Thrift Town and I look fabulous.” She was trying to show them they could be fabulous on the little money the government provided.
There were other things she would say that I would pick up on. I’m the eldest. I was her favorite. It wasn’t even a secret. We were very similar; I looked like her. And this is my white grandma, not my Black grandma. She just enjoyed my company. And so she would tell me things about the injustices she saw when she was young and growing up in Arkansas. I remember her telling me one time that it bothered her as a little kid that people would make Black people call her Miss Betty. She said it always made her uncomfortable because why were they making a grown man call her something that nobody else called her.
It’s a complicated relationship when you’re a mixed kid, because a lot of well-meaning white people don’t realize that they’re participating in racist actions and views and conversations. So it was nice to have a member of my family who was just aware. Some of the stuff she told me was helpful–even to this day.
MJS: What was meeting other organizers like for you?
AW: It was wonderful because I never thought of myself as an organizer. I mostly understood myself as a mom who needed to pay my rent until I started meeting other people who were doing the same thing and had similar stories.
A lot of times when I was organizing at the school or at Amazon, people who didn’t want to rock the boat, whether they realized it or not, would make me feel like I was too intense. Because I wanted to do something about our working conditions, to change things, people made me feel like something was wrong with me. The underlying question was: Why can’t you just keep your head down and get along?
The biggest thing about meeting other organizers was just recognizing that there are other people who think like me, and they’re not too much. It helped me to be more confident and understand what I was doing was right.
MJS: People like Dana Frank, Sara Evans, and Angela Davis have said that organizing is the housework of the movement. That’s the work that so many women have anonymously performed. What do you think about that everyday labor?
AW: This makes me think about my “crash course” in organizing. I was creating strategies. I was writing. As I was spending time organizing with people whom I thought to be like-minded people, I was suddenly pushed to the background–my strategies and ideas were stolen and utilized by a “leader” whose only obvious goal was for him to be famous.
My picture was used to advertise the Juneteenth ILWU [International Longshore and Warehouse Union] Port Shutdown in Oakland, but only he was invited to speak at the rally. Being so visible put a target on my back and we had to make a big fuss to get me a speaker slot. What I realized was they wanted to use my face as a woman, to encourage people to show up. My friends talked me into speaking because I was fuming that this dude from our organization was swooping into the Bay Area–my area–and was invited to give a speech, even though he hadn’t been doing the actual organizing work, and was actually anti-union at the time. I wasn’t trying to be in the spotlight but I felt like I was thrust into it to keep my colleagues and my community safe from folks more interested in fame than in workers.
MJS: What would it look like for you if that hidden and unrecognized work that you’re describing was understood as the organizing work?
AW: There’s this idea of one chosen Messiah that’s going to save us all. And that is just a fairy tale. If that behind-the-scenes work was respected and there was light shown on it, it would show that we rise and fall together.
In my experience–and this isn’t any disrespect to men–I feel like women are more collaborative. They’re willing to give space to each other to shine. Whereas I think there’s this competitiveness that comes with a lot of men who want to block everyone out. When something works, they can say it’s all because of them. Yet, there is not one person I can think of whom we didn’t need. Everybody had a different skill.
None of us are going to have all the skills. Some are better writers. Some are better talkers. Some are better on their feet, quick. Some need to ruminate and then they come up with brilliant ideas. We need all those people.
If women were allowed to just be people, and we looked at them just as people, we’d be further along. There’d be way more collaboration. Groups would be winning a lot more. And regular folks would realize, you gotta put some skin in the game too. You do what you can, but you can’t leave it on the back of one organization–you’ll always lose if it’s just one organization.
MJS: What would it look like to create the kind of structures or resources to be able to effectively make that shift?
AW: We need to think about real safety nets–things like childcare, food, education. Working-class folks are not fighting just one system. When I started out, I was fighting a new landlord–a slumlord and just a horrible person. I was fighting the education system because it was crumbling. I refused to let my baby be another statistic and swept under the rug like she didn’t deserve a good education. Working people are fighting the medical system. They can’t afford basic things like checkups and medicine. And we’re fighting our bosses.
That’s a lot to take on as a single mom, and even if you have a partner, even in a couple. We have to figure out how to create safety nets for people so that we can fight back. So that if someone is fired or faces some other kind of retaliation, they have people they can rely on. If you’re going to lose your apartment, there are people who come through to help. We need a situation in which as long as you’re fighting the good fight, we will figure out a way to help you with that.
There are still people who are going to fight and claw their way into little incremental changes, but they shouldn’t have to. We shouldn’t be stressing people out to a point of illness because there are only a handful that are willing to fight. I think more would be willing if they knew that their whole entire lives weren’t going to fall apart, that they won’t end up homeless–especially out here in California where homelessness is such a big issue.
MJS: In your experience of organizing, what resources would have specifically helped you organize better?
AW: Money is always helpful. But also education for the rest of the workers would have actually been helpful for me. What a lot of people don’t realize, especially people who are more affluent and don’t understand a community like Richmond, is that a lot of us already have these networks of things we do to subsidize a shitty job. There needs to be a real education as to what’s happening–like why data is important, why surveillance is important, how much money the tech companies are making. And again, we need a financial safety net so that when these workers really get mad and really start organizing, they are not fired en masse.
It’s scary to be just you and your five-year-old daughter and knowing that Amazon is asking for personal information about you. People need to have a number to call to get help. To be able to call someone and say, “Hey, can you send people to come sit on my porch for me or follow me somewhere because I feel unsafe?” We need safe places where people can stay when they are being targeted by the company.
Who helps people move? Who helps people go grocery shopping? Who helps people with their sick parents? All of these resources would have actually helped me as an organizer. A lot of times people were pretty apathetic to the pandemic, to other people’s poverty, to other people’s illness or stress because they had their own poverty and illness and stress. When you are trying to just survive, it’s very difficult to spread yourself out and worry about other people’s survival. I faced a lot of brick walls, not because people didn’t care, but because people were like, I can’t deal with that.
It would be helpful for organizers to be able to say, hey, here’s what else we can offer. You don’t have to worry if you need childcare. If you need groceries, let me know. If you feel unsafe, let me know. If I could have come like that to people, I guarantee you I would have gotten more people on board. But I couldn’t. There were so many conversations that ended with me saying, “Yeah, I understand.”
Without a safety net, people were reluctant to even talk to me.
Especially as I was becoming known. It makes it very difficult for an organizer, especially when I was a delivery driver. I only went into the Amazon warehouse twice a day. I would arrive, pick up my packages, and drive out to drop off. At the end of my shift, I would sign out at my boss’s desk within the Amazon warehouse or check out with the Amazon people. Once they knew I was organizing, they were on me like white on rice. All of a sudden, I couldn’t go into the staff breakroom. It was just a room with some vending machines. I couldn’t chill there anymore. They knew when I was in the room. If I talked to somebody, it really could have put them in danger, as well as myself. If you can cut down on the danger that people are put in, that’s going to help organizers be better organizers.
MJS: So how do we do that?
AW: That’s the cycle again. Honestly, I would start with Citizens United.None of us can compete with that Supreme Court ruling that deems corporations as people and money as speech. I don’t have the amount of “speech” that Mark Zuckerberg has. I don’t have the amount of “speech” that Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos have. So what I say doesn’t count nearly as much. That has to change because workers don’t have the money to lobby politicians. We’re never going to have that. How do we win if our success is based on how much we can pay powerful people?
What we need is to be able to create those networks of care. We need to find ways to take care of each other in the process–to have that really be the center of the work, or at least a real serious base for it. But I don’t know how you even do that effectively without money. This is where I get kind of sad and depressed, because I know people want better. I’ve talked to so many workers who want better pay, who want better medical benefits, who want their kids to not go to a crappy rundown school where it’s unsafe. But I can’t offer them more than a shoulder to cry on and maybe a hundred dollars, if that. But if all of a sudden, I had 10,000 people who needed a hundred dollars, I can’t do that. Nobody I know can. I can offer babysitting sometimes when I’m not working constantly and stretched to my limit.
I can say all day what we need, but even those needs take finances. That’s why union-busting is allowed to happen. That’s why the surveillance and the targeting is allowed to happen. I don’t think our government wants us in a position where we can fight back against all those things. It feels very deliberate.
Things are actually going backwards. In the Civil Rights movement, people did put their lives on the line and die. Things are reverting back to before that time. Was it worth it for them to lose their lives if we’re falling right back into the same old thing? That scares me. I have a little kid. I don’t want her to be fighting the bloody battle because old folks call for it. No, there’s other ways to do it.
I struggle to say, oh, I need revolution. Because that just means a bunch of our young folks are going to die. I was in this one group with some old academics and they just kept calling for, “Oh, we gotta fight the bloody battle in the street.” Well, who’s going to fight for that 70-year-old? So they’re calling for us to put our bodies on the line and die. For what?
MJS: I think we’ve articulated an agenda for ourselves as organizers and for this project, the Housework of the Movement. Do you have any closing thoughts? What is it that keeps you hopeful?
AW: What keeps me out there in the fight is, as much as this stuff kind of makes me sad, I actually enjoy my job and enjoy my work. When you look at history, the underdog has won before. It can happen again. But I think we have got to look at it in new ways because the old way of doing things is not going to work in this new technological world.
What keeps me hopeful is having found my place and my people. So when I get sad, when I get down, when I get frustrated, I actually have people I can reach out to, and vice versa. I have people who reach out to me. I think that keeps me hopeful–knowing I’m not alone. I know there are other people who see this for what it is and are working on it. That makes me way more hopeful than I was three years ago, thinking I was the only one who noticed any of this stuff.