Tom Kertes

United Workers – Human Rights Zone Campaign

Baltimore Indypendent Reader: Our Harbor Day (May 1, 2010)

United Workers ally and former leadership organizer Tom Kertes said, “Without time and work and community there will be no justice.”

“Our involvement makes history,” said Kertes. “Our solidarity is our power.”

Free Speech Radio News Coverage of the Human Rights Zone March (April 20, 2009)

Baltimore Sun: Workers Unite for Human Rights [PDF] (October 26, 2008)

The Inner Harbor laborers, who work in restaurants and janitorial services, were joined by United Workers Association members from Camden Yards who successfully waged a three-year battle for better wages and working conditions.

Last year, the Maryland Stadium Authority agreed to pay workers – who were making $7 an hour to pick up trash at Camden Yards – the state’s new $11.30-an-hour “living wage,” beginning last spring.

“Workers have identified the same issues that were found at Camden Yards as being present in the Inner Harbor, so we are transferring our efforts from Camden Yards to here, and we hope to be victorious,” said Tom Kertes, a UWA leadership organizer.

“We’re putting the Inner Harbor on notice. Workers here are demanding that we start the process, and employers have a responsibility to their workers,” he said. “And on April 18, 2009, we are going to publicly identify the worst offender.”

Kertes said the UWA has yet to speak with business operators in the Inner Harbor, but, he said, “We will be doing that very soon.”

Kertes said that the UWA is not a union and does not engage in collective bargaining.

“We believe instead in moral outrage,” he said. “Every low-wage worker is entitled to the same longtime respect other workers are given.”

On Moving to Canada

Fox Radio Asks Me “Why’d Ya Leave America?”

Toronto Star: More Americans Heading North (August 6, 2007)

For 34-year-old labour organizer Tom Kertes, the move last April from Seattle, Wash., to Toronto was based on human rights.

“The words `human rights’ are foreign words in the U.S.,” Kertes said. “They only apply to other countries.”

He also cited the war in Iraq and the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans and the failure of the Bush administration to clearly disavow such practice as contributing factors to what is a major decision.

Seattle Times: Expatriates look fondly on U.S. but aren’t coming back (November 11, 2008)

They are the ones who actually did it.

Of all the people who said during the past eight years that they’d had it with the United States, that they were leaving the country, these are the ones who really did move to Canada.

But last week, after they’d settled into new lives across the border, they watched on television as the country they left seemed to change with Barack Obama’s election.

Tom Kertes, 35, felt homesick as he watched the partying on Seattle’s streets from Toronto.

He and his partner left Capitol Hill two years ago, largely because of anti-gay politics in the United States. But a sliver of regret arose as he watched.

“One thing that has been hard for me is feeling like I am missing out on this experience by living outside of the States. And part of me feels a little guilty for not being part of the election in a more direct way,” he said last week.

“Then I start to feel disconnected from my life here in Canada.”

Living abroad, even as close as Canada, he got the same pangs he gets on the Fourth of July, “when I put out an American flag on our window, I just feel a little less homesick,” he said. “And it’s not like I ever was a ‘rah, rah’ patriotic American back home.”

But then as he kept watching the results last Tuesday, California voters passed Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriages.

And, he thought, maybe America hadn’t changed that much.

He’d left amid the debate in the U.S. over same-sex marriage. “I got tired of feeling like a political football,” he said. In Canada, which allows gay marriage, he’ll marry his 41-year-old partner, Ron Braun, in May.

He won’t be coming home, Kertes said.

He was part of a wave of Americans moving to Canada in recent years, which hit a 30-year high in 2006, according to an analysis of immigration statistics by the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies.

Living Wages Hunger Strike & Victory at Camden Yards

Baltimore Sun: Maryland agency approves $11.30 ‘living wage’ next year [PDF] (September 7, 2007)

Under pressure to raise wages for part-time janitorial workers at Camden Yards, the Maryland Stadium Authority voted yesterday to pay them the state’s new $11.30-an-hour “living wage,” starting next spring.

The 5-2 decision came after the men and women who clean the state-owned Orioles and Ravens stadiums on game days postponed a hunger strike this week to give the agency time to come up with a binding living-wage agreement.

The hunger strike, which was to have started Monday, was called off yesterday.

Members and leaders of the United Workers Association, a human rights organization founded by homeless day laborers in Baltimore, called the stadium authority’s vote a victory after three years of trying to obtain higher wages and better working conditions at the stadiums.

“I’m very excited. We all are,” said Carl Johnson, a UWA organizer and former Camden Yards worker.

“The next step is to make sure workers who are currently working at Camden Yards will have a fair opportunity to keep their jobs in the next season and get a living wage,” Johnson said.

The workers who pick up trash at the stadiums during and after each home game now earn $7 an hour.

Ghetto Tax – Higher Costs for Poorer Neighbourhoods

Baltimore Sun: Poorer City Residents Pay More for Goods (July 19, 2006)

In the Baltimore region, 31 percent of neighborhoods with family incomes below $30,000 had a bank or credit union, the fourth-lowest percentage among the areas studied, the report found. In contrast, 60 percent of Baltimore area neighborhoods with family incomes between $30,000 and $59,999 had a bank or credit union.

Fellowes said a $15,000-a-year Baltimore-area wage-earner could save $600 a year by going to a bank instead of relying on a check-casher, and that the same worker would save more than $400 a year in auto insurance if he or she lived in a high-income suburban community rather than a poor city neighborhood.

Bonnie Howard, a senior associate at the Casey Foundation, which works to improve the lives of disadvantaged children, said the issue of financial well-being was an “important element in the family-strengthening agenda.”

“The children who are most vulnerable are those who don’t have economic stability,” she said.

The Abell Foundation is funding a similar study that will take a more in-depth look just at Baltimore.

Tom Kertes, spokesman for the United Workers Association, which represents low-wage workers said he welcomed any attention to poverty but added the study’s conclusions are “not news to us.”

“We call it the ghetto tax,” he said.

Culture, Art and Politics

Baltimore City Paper: “Unite and Conquer – Brief Notes on a Project For a Revolution In Baltimore (Exploring the Contemporary Museum’s Ambitious Current Exhibition)” (July 7, 2006)

Not all the activist groups initially understood why they were being asked to participate [in the Contemporary Museum's exhibition]. “I was very, very skeptical at first,” says Tom Kertes, communications organizer for United Workers Association, a coalition of low-wage laborers. Kertes splits his time between Seattle and Baltimore, where he helps UWA fight Peter Angelos and the Maryland Stadium Authority to raise the Camden Yards cleaning crew pay from $7.50 an hour to the city’s living-wage minimum of $9.08. “I had no idea what to expect or even why we were being invited. I went into it the first time and thought, ‘Look, we’ll work with you and you can be artists. You’re artists, and if you want to make stuff, there is stuff we need made.’ And they kept saying, ‘Great, we’ll make it, but that’s not what we want to do.’ And we’re like, ‘OK, then what do you want to do?’ And what they wanted to do was be a part of social justice.”

Kertes remembers the first few meetings, where the activists seized the opportunity to talk to each other as the artists and curators sat there and listened. And then they started tailoring the show to fit the activists’ needs. “We would go to these dinners and we’d just spend two hours talking,” Kertes says. “And when it was over we’d look at Cira and everybody apologized, thinking we hadn’t talked about the show. And she would say, ‘No, you’re doing what we wanted you to do.’”

The informal effort eventually led to the formation, outside of Headquarters, of a citywide human-rights coalition involving UWA, CampBaltimore, Red Emma’s, the Men’s Center, Save Middle East Action Coalition, Critical Resistance, and Indymedia, an activist network Kertes believes would have been impossible without the show. “Networking is expensive,” Kertes says. “Networking is hugely important. That’s all groups do. We go out and talk to people. Who are we going to talk to? Who is our priority? With us, it’s low-wage workers. We have 500 members, and that’s essentially what we’ve built and spent these past five years getting, those relationships with those folks and the relationship with people who are going to directly impact them. And so to have a staff person or a volunteer person call up all the nonprofit and grass-roots organizations in a city and get them together in a room is expensive. The museum did that.”

Kertes cites a recent UWA all-night vigil that drew more people than ever, a direct result of being able to call other activists to get the word out. And for a May event that may have involved a protest with arrests, Kertes asked the group for volunteers, because “our workers have to work,” he says. “So six MICA students and people from CampBaltimore volunteered. We need that–and that wouldn’t have happened if Headquarters hadn’t existed. I think that was an important function of it, even if it was kind of incidental.”

Just as the curators and artists maybe learned a bit about social justice, Kertes admits he learned a bit about art, too. “This whole idea about what is art and what we mean when we use the word art and what are art museums for–I never thought about it,” he says. “I’m not an artist. I would meet people and we would be talking about what we did in college, and they would say sculpture majors or painting majors, and that’s pretty funny to me, because I’m like, What is that?

“I have a much more developed view now,” Kertes continues. “I never considered an art museum’s role in gentrification. I didn’t have any idea of the complacency of places like the Contemporary Museum historically. I never thought of that, like, What do contemporary museums do typically? They promote celebrities and celebrity art. And what’s the reason for doing that? Well, there’s a lot of money to be made in doing that, so it supports these institutions, and then they sell this commodity of glamour and style.

“Headquarters came out of the Contemporary Museum, but it will be interesting to see, when this curator leaves, if the museum goes back to being essentially a public relations and marketing machine for expensive works of canvas and being a satellite to New York art dealers.”

Opposing the 1st U.S. War in Iraq (1991 – Grade 12)

Source: Silverdale Reporter

In Context: “We’re the Solution” (Spring 1991):

The cradle of civilization was being smashed to smithereens by, among others, the military forces of my country. I was paying for this, and doing darned little about it. I was feeling pretty dismal. Waiting for a ride under a viaduct on a rainy evening, I noticed a nice-looking young man carrying signs that told me he had been demonstrating against this death and devastation. I thanked him, and told him it cheered me to see him.

As we chatted, I learned that he was a high school student in a military town, that he was using organizational skills developed over years of youth advocacy and lobbying for education reform to encourage other students to express opposition to the war – and that it was unexpectedly tough going. I was so impressed with the literature he had prepared and with the apparent scope of his efforts that I asked him to write something about his work to get people active and involved in change. He submitted this description of an event he conceived, organized and brought to fruition as we went to press. Tom is eighteen years old.

Opposing the 2nd U.S. War in Iraq – or did it never end?

Source: Seattle PI – October 10, 2002 (reprint of related article)

Seattle Times: Letter to Editor (May 3, 2007)

Dear Editor:

With the stroke of a veto pen, President Bush turned his back on both the American troops and the will of the American people Tuesday. He did so by refusing to admit defeat and bring our soldiers home. ["After veto, a hunt for middle ground," Times page one, May 2].

President Bush’s war in Iraq was sold on lies because Americans are reluctant to use force unless there’s an absolute need for it. We had neither the need nor the right to invade and occupy Iraq, and more than 3,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have paid the highest price for the president’s illegal occupation of Iraq. We are now trapped in a civil war in a distant land, with no end in sight.

It’s time to change the course. That starts by returning American troops home before our continued presence in Iraq makes matters even worse.

President Bush is not alone in blame or responsibility for the tragic outcome of the occupation of Iraq. The Democrats who refused to stand up to the president’s lies and who stood by when the war was before Congress share in Bush’s blame. Thankfully, the Democrats are facing their mistake head-on, and are doing what’s required to correct it.

Just because we made a mistake does not require that we continue it.

I pray the Democrats hold their ground by refusing another penny for Bush’s war until there’s a firm plan to do the right thing and bring our troops home.

Tom Kertes – Seattle