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Google Founders Sergey Brin And Larry Page Step Down From Top Roles
Google co-founders Sergey Brin (left) and Larry Page announced Tuesday they are stepping down from their leadership roles but will remain board members of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
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Updated at 6:07 p.m. ET
Ending an era at the Internet’s biggest search company, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are leaving their leadership roles and CEO Sundar Pichai will become chief executive of both Google and its parent company, Alphabet.
Page is stepping down as CEO of Alphabet, while Brin is resigning as its president. They will remain board members of Alphabet, a company that oversees not just Google but also research into artificial intelligence and self-driving cars.
Page and Brin founded Google in 1998 when they were Stanford students. They made Google into one of the world’s largest, most profitable companies, dominating online search, digital advertising and video.
“We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company,” they wrote in a letter Tuesday. “And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President.”
In an email to Google employees, Pichai said that in his more than 15 years with Google, “the only constant I’ve seen is change. This process of continuous evolution — which the founders often refer to as ‘uncomfortably exciting’ — is part of who we are.”
The restructuring at the top of Google comes as at time of increased turmoil for the Internet giant.
Google, the company that was known for the motto “don’t be evil,” has been known for its open and freewheeling culture, with employees encouraged to speak out. But lately, management has been cracking down on dissent and criticism.
Google fired four engineers last week for accessing internal information. But the workers said they lost their jobs over their labor-organizing efforts. They said they will file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.
Last year, thousands of Google workers around the world walked out in protest of sexual harassment and bad behavior by executives.
Google, along with Facebook and Amazon, is under scrutiny into whether it’s too powerful.
Regulators in the U.S. and Europe are looking into how dominant Google is in search and advertising. Some critics are even calling for the company to be broken up. There’s no indication that any of this is connected to Page and Brin stepping aside. It’s just another sign of how the company is changing.
Page and Brin acknowledged that Google is no longer the same company they founded. “Since we wrote our first founders’ letter, the company has evolved and matured,” they wrote Tuesday.
White House Announces Program To Distribute Free HIV-Prevention Medication
The White House announced Tuesday it will begin distribution of free HIV-prevention medication to people without prescription drug coverage. It’s part of Trump’s plan to end HIV in the U.S. by 2030.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
President Trump has a plan to end HIV in America by 2030. And today, administration officials announced the first real-life program to help them get there. The program will provide a free HIV prevention drug to people who are at risk and who don’t have prescription drug coverage. Without insurance, the drug costs more than $20,000 a year. NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin has more.
SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: Over a million people are at risk for HIV infection, according to government estimates. But only a fraction of them are on PrEP, or preexposure prophylaxis. Truvada is the PrEP drug that’s been on the market for years now. The idea is you take this daily pill, and then if you’re exposed to HIV, you won’t get infected. It’s very effective. It doesn’t have a lot of side effects. But then there’s the monthly price tag.
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DANIEL O’DAY: The current list price is 1,780 in the United States.
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: OK.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: That’s Daniel O’Day testifying before Congress in May. He’s CEO of Gilead, the drug company that makes Truvada. A generic is available overseas for around $6 a month. The program announced today doesn’t change that U.S. price tag. Instead, it allows certain people to get the drug for free. Here’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar talking to reporters this morning.
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ALEX AZAR: To receive medication through the program, an individual must have no prescription drug coverage, test negative for HIV and have a valid on-label prescription for PrEP.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Azar says taxpayers will initially pay Gilead $200 per bottle for distribution. He said they’re trying to find a cheaper system. This all comes at a bit of an awkward moment for the government and the drugmaker. Last month, HHS sued Gilead over patent infringement.
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AZAR: We are now in litigation. Gilead has filed against us. We have filed against Gilead. This is not related in any way.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Prevention efforts with PrEP and other tools like condoms and clean needle programs are only part of the plan to end the HIV epidemic. It also calls for more HIV testing and for people who test positive to be on treatment. Nearly 40,000 people get infected with HIV every year. That works out to about 100 every day. And those numbers haven’t budged in years.
Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR News.
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Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
A Second Can Mean So Much In A Football Game
At Saturday’s Iron Bowl, the first half seemed over. Then officials put a second back on the clock. Auburn used that second to kick a field goal, and they ended up beating Alabama by three.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I’m David Greene. A second can mean so much in football. At Saturday’s Iron Bowl, the first half seemed like it was over, then officials put a second back on the clock. Auburn used that second to kick a field goal, and they ended up beating Alabama by 3. Now an Auburn dean is rubbing it in. Joe Aistrup told professors they could add a single second to final exams. He wrote, when every second counts, Auburn men and women make great things happen.
Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Brazil, Argentina Now On Receiving End Of Trump Tariffs
President Trump is abruptly reimposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from Brazil and Argentina.
Trump announced the move in a pair of tweets Monday, saying he was acting in response to “massive devaluation” of the two countries’ currencies. Brazil and Argentina had been exempted from Trump’s 25% tariff on imported steel and his 10% tariff on imported aluminum since May of last year.
Brazil is a major supplier of imported steel to the U.S. The declining value of currencies from Brazil and Argentina has given their exports an advantage in international markets, which Trump said is bad for U.S. farmers.
During the global trade war, China has cut back on purchases of U.S. farm goods such as soybeans and turned to South America for alternative supplies.
In his tweets, Trump also called on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates further in hopes of weakening the dollar, which would give a lift to U.S. exports.
“Lower Rates & Loosen,” Trump wrote, arguing that a strong dollar “makes it very hard for our manufacturers & farmers to fairly export their goods.”
…..Reserve should likewise act so that countries, of which there are many, no longer take advantage of our strong dollar by further devaluing their currencies. This makes it very hard for our manufactures & farmers to fairly export their goods. Lower Rates & Loosen – Fed!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2019
While interest rates do affect the value of the dollar, the Federal Reserve has not traditionally been guided by that. Instead, the central bank aims for stable prices and maximum employment, leaving currency policy to the Treasury Department.
Trump has repeatedly urged the Fed to cut interest rates. The central bank has cut rates three times since July, by a total of 0.75%. Fed officials are widely expected to leave rates unchanged when they meet next week.
Trump originally imposed the steel and aluminum tariffs in March of 2018, relying on authority from a seldom-used law from the 1960s, designed to protect domestic industries deemed vital to national defense.
The move did give a temporary lift to American steel and aluminum makers. However, it also raised prices for U.S. companies that use the metals. Since then, steel prices have fallen amid slumping demand. U.S. Steel announced layoffs this fall and posted a third-quarter loss of $35 million.
‘There’s No Good Dust’: What Happens After Quartz Countertops Leave The Factory
The Cambria factory in Minnesota manufactures slabs of engineered quartz for kitchen and bathroom countertops. If businesses don’t follow worker protection rules, cutting these slabs to fit customers’ kitchens can release lung-damaging silica dust.
Cambria
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Cambria
Every day, 20 to 30 trucks roll into a factory in Minnesota. They’re filled with quartz — some of it like a powder, and some of it like sparkling little pebbles, in big white sacks.
“It’s about 30 million pounds of quartz a month,” says Marty Davis, the CEO of Cambria, a company that manufactures material for kitchen and bathroom countertops. “About a million pounds a day.”
All of this quartz gets transformed into a kind of engineered stone that looks like granite and marble, but with more durability and stain resistance. Quartz countertops have really taken off over the past decade, and factories around the world are churning out slabs of the stuff under different brand names.
However, if countertop-making businesses don’t follow worker protection rules, cutting these slabs to fit customers’ kitchens can release lung-damaging silica dust.
Natural granite contains silica too, but all of the quartz that goes into engineered stone means that it contains about twice as much.
So far, 19 countertop workers in the U.S. are known to have developed severe lung disease after cutting engineered stone along with other stone; two of them died of their illness, and others have been told they will eventually require lung transplants.
Manufacturers such as Cambria say that their slabs of composite stone are completely safe when cut and polished with the proper precautions.
“There’s clear regulation and clear guidance and governance on how to process materials safely to control dust and respiratory inhalation of dust,” Davis says.
He invited NPR to tour his factory. Above the entrance is a sign that says: “Through these doors walk the finest countertop makers in the world.”
Cambria produces around 30,000 slabs of quartz countertop material every month, says Davis, who adds that the company has also spent millions of dollars on air-handling systems to control dust.
“There’s no good dust. Zero,” says Davis, who gained an appreciation of safe manufacturing practices while working in his family’s dairy business.
Cambria receives raw quartz that is then combined with a binder and pigments to produce engineered quartz slabs, which are then sent out to workshops around the country.
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Cambria
A sign warns of silica at the door to a huge room filled with mechanical mixers. There, workers wear respirators as they combine quartz, pigments and a binder. The mixture gets spread out onto what looks like a giant baking sheet, then goes through a machine that vibrates the material in a vacuum to remove any voids.
This produces a soft, compressed slab that feels almost like cookie dough. It hardens when it gets heated, then cooled and polished. The factory is filled with rows of finished slabs in different colors, ready to be sent out to countertop-makers.
Davis says these slabs go out to thousands of workshops, and he can’t follow his product to each one.
“How do you police your customers?” he says, noting that the dangers of silica have been known for decades. “There are many products that we make in our world that, if processed or consumed improperly, are dangerous.”
He says the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has clear rules on controlling worker exposure to silica. “If you follow and adhere, your employees will be safe,” Davis says.
His company’s own countertop fabrication shops prove this, he says. In addition to manufacturing slabs, Cambria runs a network of five shops that cut slabs to order.
“They’re clean as a whistle,” says Davis, adding that one of his own sons works in the shops.
In these workshops, and at the main factory, Cambria uses devices to do real-time monitoring of silica dust — something that Davis says goes above and beyond what is currently typical for the industry.
But some workers in countertop shops run by other companies say they weren’t protected from silica.
Juan (who didn’t want to use his last name because of medical privacy) says he had a job making countertops in Washington state, and a lot of what he cut was quartz.
For the first couple of years, his workplace practiced dry cutting — that means no spray of water to keep the dust down. There was so much dust, he says, he couldn’t see someone working 20 feet away.
Juan, who is now 38, says he wore a simple face mask that didn’t provide enough protection and that no one told him about silica, or the danger.
“At first you don’t feel the changes a lot,” Juan said in Spanish, speaking through an interpreter. “Then later, with time passing, your body starts telling you that you’re missing air, that you’re suffocating and you’re tired.”
In 2016, after four years at the shop, he developed a cough that wouldn’t go away, no matter what medicine he took. About a year later, a friend who was a chiropractor advised him to get his lungs tested.
At first, his doctor told him it wasn’t necessary. “Then when he did the tests, the doctor almost cried. He said, ‘I’m sorry, you’re right, your lungs are very damaged,’ ” says Juan, who has a wife and three children.
He says he can’t carry groceries and gets exhausted just walking from his house to his car. He’s being evaluated for a lung transplant.
“After this happened, they made lots of changes in the company,” Juan says. “Now they don’t cut like they used to. They bought a lot of machines and the machines do most of the work.”
Dry-cutting methods generally are cheaper because they do not require specialized equipment or water recycling systems. One survey of countertop shops in 2012 found that the majority reported using dry methods all or most of the time in at least one fabrication step.
Margaret Phillips, an occupational health expert at the University of Oklahoma Hudson College of Public Health in Oklahoma City, has done silica sampling in shops to assess worker exposures.
Water applied to cutting equipment, like this computer-operated saw, is one method to control silica dust exposure when cutting quartz slabs.
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Michael Conroy/AP
“If workers were doing mostly dry fabrication, so they were grinding, polishing, cutting, without any use of water on their tool to suppress the dust, then exposures tended to be very high,” Phillips says. “Like 20 times over the current OSHA limit, maybe even 40 times, or more. Dry fabrication is exposing workers to very, very high levels of silica dust.”
Her research has found that even just a few minutes of dry fabrication was enough to put a worker’s exposure over the permissible limit. “Any amount of dry fabrication could really be a problem,” she says.
Some shops don’t do dry cutting, like Capitol Granite near Richmond, Va. There, big computer-controlled machines cut through slabs while dumping up to 35 gallons of water a minute on the blade to keep down the silica dust.
“We do not do any dry work whatsoever. That’s the only way that you can eliminate any risk affiliated with silicosis in the shop,” says owner Paul Menninger.
He says if it were up to him, dry cutting would be illegal.
In his workplace, machine operators and workers doing touch-ups with handheld tools don’t have to wear respirators, because silica is well-controlled. Menninger knows this because he recently invited in an inspector from OSHA, who tested the air.
But he says there are a lot of shops, especially smaller operations, that government inspectors never get to. And the stone cutting industry is unlicensed.
“It’s not like plumbing or electrical or HVAC or any of the other trades,” he says, “whereby there seems to be a standard or an international code.”
Yet consumers rely on the industry and regulators to ensure that products are made safely, says Carolyn Levine, a Washington, D.C., resident who recently replaced her natural granite countertops with engineered quartz.
The lung illnesses found in the countertop industry are alarming, she says.
“Having regulations and precautions is important, and this is a good example of why,” Levine says.
She had never heard of engineered quartz before deciding to replace her old granite countertops, which she had for more than 12 years.
“I just wanted something lighter and brighter,” Levine says. “I had two guys give me estimates.”
They both were emphatic, she says, that compared to granite, the superior product was quartz.
‘Immigrant Food’ Restaurant, Trump’s New Neighbor
NPR’s Don Gonyea speaks with the co-owners of Immigrant Food, Chef Enrique Limardo and Peter Schechter, about their new restaurant, which is located one block from the White House in Washington, D.C.
DON GONYEA, HOST:
Just before Thanksgiving, I broke away from my desk at NPR headquarters and headed to a new restaurant here in Washington that’s been getting some attention lately, mainly for its name and location.
We are one block from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s right over there. The restaurant behind me is called Immigrant Food. It’s a place that celebrates the thousands of immigrants who have helped make D.C. the city it is, with flavors from Ethiopia, El Salvador, China, Iran, India. That’s just to name a few. So we wanted to find out more about this restaurant that refers to itself as cause casual, so we’ve come to chat with two of the co-owners. Let’s go in.
PETER SCHECHTER: We wanted to create a restaurant that wore pride of immigration and immigrants right on its sleeve, right on its name – you know, a celebration of the food and the gastronomies that immigrants brought to America throughout the centuries.
ENRIQUE LIMARDO: It’s like combining 20 restaurants in just one place.
GONYEA: That’s award-winning chef Enrique Limardo. He’s created the menu at Immigrant Food. We heard first from another co-owner, Peter Schechter. He’s a longtime political adviser and global policy expert. There’s a third co-owner as well, Ezequiel Vazquez-Ger. All three owners come from immigrant backgrounds. They opened the restaurant in part because of the rise of anti-immigrant rhetoric.
SCHECHTER: We now live in a country where at least a portion of the country feels that sort of we’ve got to be closed to immigrants. And so we thought that it would be a wonderful thing to create a restaurant, in part because people unite around food. Our hashtag is #unitedatthetable.
GONYEA: The name is so simple it is almost generic. It is generic – Immigrant Food.
LIMARDO: Yeah. It’s Immigrant Food. It’s nothing more to say. That is exactly what we are doing here. So when Peter brought the idea, I just fall in love because as an immigrant from Venezuela, I just left my country because of the situations, political and economics. And I came to America because it’s the land of opportunities and pursuing the – you know, the American dream and all of that. So I just fall in love with the idea.
GONYEA: But we’re sitting here – as we said, the White House is only a block away. Immigration has become one of those issues that people argue about, and it seems the volume is so high. Do you try to stay clear of the politics? Are you embracing it? Are you taking another path?
SCHECHTER: We want very much that this restaurant be all about values. We’re trying to espouse a fundamental value because we believe that America’s story is the story of immigrants. And so we want to push those values forward because we believe that immigrants are fundamental not only to the past, to the law of what America is, but to the future of what America will be.
Americans continue to be the lifeblood, you know, of energy, the innovation. If you look at the Nobel science prizes that America has received, 40% of them have gone to people who were not born in America and immigrated to America. If you look at the CEOs of some of the companies that we love, whether it’s Tesla or Amazon, these are people who are either immigrants or whose parents were immigrants.
GONYEA: The restaurant is described as cause casual, in part because it also acts as an educational space. The owners donate meeting space within the restaurant to nonprofits dedicated to immigrant services.
SCHECHTER: The space we’re sitting in right now, the upstairs of the restaurant, is something that we will donate to the organizations for English classes or citizenship classes or board of director meetings – whatever they need.
GONYEA: Customers are also given the option to donate to these groups. At the end of the day, though, this is a restaurant with an award-winning chef running the kitchen. And he makes sure the food is also part of the conversation.
So in describing this place to people, I’ve been saying you can get Ethiopian, and you can get Salvadoran, you can get Iranian food. But I’m not correct in saying that. You can get those things, but they may not be in the form that you – yeah.
LIMARDO: One other thing that I always said – that we don’t want people just to attach the idea that it’s very traditional from Ethiopia, for example. Or this is what’s prepared by the nonna (ph), my nonna in Italy. No. We want that people just remind those flavors and reminds the idea from Italy or from Greece or from China or from Vietnam. And they are going to expect something very powerful because it’s the mixture of those cultures is very strong. And it’s a celebration in the palate. You know, it’s explosion in the palate.
GONYEA: And Limardo says this fusion of flavors works.
LIMARDO: It’s like chemistry. I just – with this challenge and this concept, I just realize in this point of my career that you can fusion almost everything if you use the right amount, and it’s going to be delicious.
GONYEA: Chef Enrique Limardo and Peter Schechter of Immigrant Food, a new restaurant just steps from the White House here in Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
As University Hospital Hounds Debtors, Doctors Say It’s Doing Harm
The University of Virginia Health System has sued more than 36,000 patients for unpaid medical bills. NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks Dr. Michael Williams, who is fighting the practice.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
In recent months, doctors at the University of Virginia Health System discovered something that shocked them. Over several years, UVA had been suing some 36,000 patients who had unpaid medical bills. UVA was going after their wages and savings and even driving some into bankruptcy. So some UVA doctors decided to publicly push back. Dr. Michael Williams is one of them, and he joins us now.
Good morning.
MICHAEL WILLIAMS: Good morning to you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you and some of your colleagues went public in a letter to Kaiser Health News. You said UVA’s billing practices violate the oldest ethic of Western medical practice, the Hippocratic oath that says, first, do no harm. Can you explain that?
WILLIAMS: Yes. Well, all of us take that oath very seriously. I can think of no physician who doesn’t. And so to find out that patients for whom we had prescribed therapies, performed surgeries, conducted procedures and the like were being sued, up to and including the point of taking their homes, felt like a betrayal to those of us who signed the letter and many others here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: How did you learn about this?
WILLIAMS: Well, we learned about the rest – the way, I think, the rest of the world did. There was the story that broke in Kaiser Health News. And none of the faculty that I know were aware of the depth and breadth of the situation and/or how much harm had been done.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Shouldn’t you have known sooner that this was happening since this is a place where you work?
WILLIAMS: Yes. Well, it is – yes. It is one of the more complex systems that you’ll come across. The physicians at UVA, like many other health systems, actually don’t work for the medical center. It’s a separate business entity. So we are, as physicians, not privy to the billing and collection practices of the hospital.
So on the one hand, we currently have no mechanism by which to know this information. On the other hand, I have to agree with you. It is incumbent upon us as physicians to educate ourselves on these matters and other things that are similar to – things that can cause harm like this.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what should be different about how UVA goes after people who owe it money?
WILLIAMS: UVA will still have to go out people who owe the system money. There is no other way to describe the U.S. health care system currently as anything but a business. We – I’ll speak for myself – are in favor of loosening the level of aggression with which we pursue outstanding accounts and certainly the elimination of lawsuits. I would rather see the health system and the practice group collectively understand our patients’ context and then probably make different choices based on that context.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I was about to ask, Dr. Williams, does that mean that you might prescribe things differently? What impact could that have on your patients’ health and the choices that they may make?
WILLIAMS: I think in doing no harm, we also need to be into – weigh the balance of the financial harm that we will incur if we prescribe a specific course of action or therapy. We physicians need to, in my view, say, what are cost-effective, as well as clinically effective, therapies that can be offered that will achieve the patient’s clinical outcome that we’re looking for together and yet take into mind the patient’s – as I said, their context?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The university has responded with two changes. They will screen out or go easier on a wider range of debtors, and they’ve established an advisory group to overhaul their billing practices. Do you think it’s enough?
WILLIAMS: Well, the – I think it’s not enough. I think it’s a good beginning. I think having community voice as part of this conversation is essential. But as I said, both patients and physicians have to understand the economics of this whole business that we’re in together.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Listening to you talk about this, I can’t help but think that this puts an additional burden on doctors, who are already – if you speak to doctors – overburdened with a lot of different paperwork and having to think about patients. I mean, does that not add an extra layer to what you do?
WILLIAMS: Absolutely. And that’s the job. We have become safe when it comes to infections related to catheters. And we’ve become safe when it comes to patients who fall. We’ve become safer when it comes to things like sharp injuries from needles and sutures and the like. If we continue to cause financial harm to this degree, we have rendered our patients no safer.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Dr. Michael Williams is a surgeon and head of the UVA Center for Health Policy. Thank you very much.
WILLIAMS: Thank you for having me.
Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
UAW Reaches Tentative Labor Agreement with Fiat Chrysler
Jeep vehicles are parked outside the Jefferson North Assembly Plant in Detroit on Feb. 26, 2019.
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Carlos Osorio/AP
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles reached a tentative labor agreement with the United Auto Workers on Saturday, becoming the last of the big three Detroit automakers to arrive at a deal with the labor union this year.
The four-year agreement, which covers hourly workers at the company, would secure a total of $9 billion worth of investments involving 7,900 jobs, according a statement from the UAW. The agreement must still be approved by the union’s national council, and then pass a ratification vote by the company’s 47,000 union-represented workers.
“FCA has been a great American success story thanks to the hard work of our members. We have achieved substantial gains and job security provisions for the fastest growing auto company in the United States,” said Rory Gamble, the acting president of the UAW, in a statement.
Fiat Chrysler confirmed the agreement in a statement but did not provide additional details on the outlines of the deal.
The tentative agreement comes at a moment of upheaval for the UAW. Earlier this month, the union’s president, Gary Jones, abruptly resigned in the face of allegations that he misused union funds. Jones has not been charged with any crime. His attorney told the Detroit News that he resigned in order to avoid distracting “the union from its core mission to improve the lives of its members and their families. ”
The day Jones resigned, General Motors filed suit against Fiat Chrysler alleging that the company bribed UAW officials to get favorable labor contracts. Fiat Chrysler said in a press release that GM’s lawsuit was “without merit” and dismissed it as an attempt to disrupt its recent agreement to merge with French automaker Groupe PSA — a merger which if finalized, would make the combined company the fourth largest carmaker in the world by production volume.
The UAW said a ratification vote on the agreement with Fiat Chrysler could come as soon as Dec. 6. If approved, the union will avoid a replay of its bruising negotiation earlier this year with General Motors. Those talks gave way to a grueling 40-plus-day strike that brought operations to a halt and cost GM — and the companies that supply it — millions.
The College Football Game That Put A Dent In Desegregation
Fifty years ago, two football teams tangled in Florida. It was a momentous contest: It helped to change the course of race relations during a difficult Civil Rights period.
DON GONYEA, HOST:
We’re remembering an important football game today on the program. It was 50 years ago that a college game in Tampa served as an important milestone in Florida history. As Kerry Sheridan of member station WUSF reports, it was the first time a predominantly white school played an all-black university in the Deep South.
KERRY SHERIDAN, BYLINE: It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1969. The University of Tampa, a mostly white football team on an eight-game winning streak, was taking on Florida A&M. The Tallahassee team was also winning a lot but was unranked because it only played black teams. Five years earlier, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination and ending public segregation.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Now, in this summer of 1964, the civil rights bill is the law of the land. In the words of the president, it restricts no one’s freedom so long as he respects the rights of others.
SHERIDAN: The South didn’t change right away. Segregation persisted. In 1967, race riots roiled the nation, including in Tampa, after a white police officer shot and killed a black man suspected of burglary.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: In 1967, 126 cities were hit by racial violence, with 75 incidents classified as major riots.
SHERIDAN: A year later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. By 1969, tensions remained high. Yanela McLeod teaches history at Florida A&M and is working on a documentary about the school’s football coach, Jake Gaither, who lobbied for years to play a white team.
YANELA MCLEOD: He was a civil rights activist who did not have a contentious kind of methodology, but it was more behind-the-scenes, and one of nurturing and fostering humanity.
SHERIDAN: He was near retirement in 1969.
MCLEOD: The one thing he wanted to do was play a white school because he wanted to show America that black people, coaches, quarterbacks, they didn’t fall in line with the stereotypes of inability and intellectual deficiency in which society claimed they operated.
SHERIDAN: On game day, nearly 47,000 people poured into Tampa Stadium, recalls historian Fred Hearns.
FRED HEARNS: The atmosphere was absolutely electric.
SHERIDAN: At the time, he was a 19-year-old sportswriter.
HEARNS: I had to remain neutral. I couldn’t cheer. But deep down inside, I was pulling for Florida A&M University to win because I felt it would prove to the whole world that African American football players could defeat a white team – a predominantly white team – and that Jake Gaither, who was a legend as the coach of the Florida A&M Rattlers, could out coach a white coach.
FRAN CURCI: I knew they had better players than we had.
SHERIDAN: That white coach was Fran Curci, who still lives in Tampa and is 81. Gaither died in 1994. In 1969, colleges in the north were already luring some of the best black athletes from Florida. Before he was hired as a coach at the University of Tampa, Curci insisted he be able to recruit their first black football players. And he did, signing one in 1968, followed by three more a year later.
CURCI: The name of the game in football is you got to win. And the only way – I wanted to get whatever athlete I can get. I don’t care if you’re white, black, purple, whatever he was. I had to have athletes that we could win with.
SHERIDAN: Inside the stadium that day, McLeod says, by and large, black people sat on one side, white people on the other.
MCLEOD: This is really good college football. And so you’ve got two good coaches, two excellent quarterbacks – Jim Del Gaizo for Tampa and Stephen Scruggs for FAMU. And they get on that feel, and they hash it out in a game that goes back-and-forth, back-and-forth. It’s a nail-biter.
SHERIDAN: Steve Scruggs, the quarterback for Florida A&M, describes the outcome in McLeod’s documentary.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
STEVE SCRUGGS: It was a monumental game for A&M and Tampa. It was a monumental game. Somebody had to lose, and thank God it was them this time.
SHERIDAN: The score – Florida A&M 34, UT 28. Afterwards, Tampa coach Fran Curci sprinted toward the winning coach, and the crowd held its breath.
CURCI: I ran across the field. I headed right for Jake. And both stands were just, oh, my God, now what’s going to happen? And I put my arm around Jake, and I said, Jake, you had the best team. You deserve to win.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SHERIDAN: Author Samuel Freedman wrote about the game in his book, “Breaking The Line.”
SAMUEL FREEDMAN: All these fears that had been whipped up about how it was going to lead to fighting and rioting did not come true at all. So it became this very important emblem of desegregating public space. In fact, this is one of the largest, if not the largest, mass act of desegregation in the South.
SHERIDAN: And 50 years later, historians still marvel at how a single football game in Tampa ended an era of segregation in sports by erasing the myth that white players were superior to black athletes. For NPR News, I’m Kerry Sheridan in Tampa.
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