The geography of Depression is spreading. Yesterday we looked at how Mendota and other Central Valley towns are facing Steinbeckian scenes of poverty. Today brings another account of dire economic straits – this time in the San Bernardino/Riverside region of Southern California long known as the “Inland Empire”.

Tom Woodruff, director of Change to Win’s Strategic Organizing Center, offered this overview of the Depression in the Inland Empire, where unemployment is above 12%, and how the Employee Free Choice Act can help improve dire conditions:

The area’s fractured employment model has turned a recession into a depression. There are now tens of thousands of laid off warehouse workers with no unemployment, no safety net at all, just barely getting by.

Ignacio Sanchez lost his warehouse job in October and now struggles every day to feed his family. Ignacio was a “lumper,” unloading the large containers that come to the warehouses from the ports. He now spends his days watching over his five year-old daughter and searching dumpsters for cans and food. When he finds food, he has to hide where he got it from his daughter because if she knew, she might not eat it.

Olga Romero, who worked 14 hour days repacking shoes at a warehouse, was laid off three months ago with no warning or cause and has been unable to find work since. She can only afford to feed her family rice and beans for dinner, and worries about the days ahead. “There’s no future with these bad jobs,” she says. “I need a real job to take care of my family, not another temp job.”

As conditions worsen in the Inland Empire, the big retail companies that created the broken business model have not accepted responsibility for the damage they have done. They hide behind the temp agencies and third-party logistics firms in an elaborate shell game.

The Inland Empire became a warehousing and shipment center for the nation – handling the products shipped from China to LA/Long Beach and putting them on trucks and trains to the nation’s big box stores. The basic economic model was unsustainable; the employment itself was temporary and lacking in most basic benefits. And it goes without saying that most of these jobs were non-union.

Just as pro-labor legislation like Section 7(a) of the 1934 National Labor Relations Act and the Wagner Act of 1935 helped pull the nation out of Depression and ensure that the recovery would build a strong and lasting middle class, the Employee Free Choice Act can play a similar role in places like the Inland Empire:

More than one million new jobs will be created in the goods movement industry in Southern California by 2030, according to projections. For only pennies on the dollar, the retail industry could turn them into high quality, middle class jobs that support a family. These are jobs that cannot be outsourced and could play a major role in revitalizing our reeling economy. But only if the nation’s biggest retailers are held responsible for the treatment of all the workers in their supply chain.

I have to confess that I am not sure the goods movement industry’s future growth in SoCal will be so vast, and I am skeptical that relying on imports from China at the expense of domestic manufacturing (the Inland Empire used to be a major center of blue-collar work in the US, including the Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana) is a smart move. But in any case, we need to ensure that California’s workers have the opportunity to organize unions for economic recovery.

Because we are learning the same lessons today that we learned 75 years ago – that we will not have economic security and shared prosperity unless the people of this nation have the power to wrest wealth back from the oligarchs.