Peter Costantini ~ Seattle
Mushroom
workers rally, Sunnyside, Washington, April 18, 2023. Photo: Peter Costantini
The Yakima River runs southeast from the Cascade Mountains through
central Washington state to merge with the Columbia a little north of Oregon.
From the small city of Yakima on down, its course broadens from a winding canyon
into a wide valley bounded by austere low ridges of gray-green sagebrush and tawny
grasses. In mid-April, the new leaves of the willows and cottonwoods light up
the riverbanks with luminous chartreuse.
“De colores, de colores se visten los campos en la primavera …”
“Colors, the fields are clothed with colors in the spring …”
(From an old farm workers song)
The valley beyond the river bottom was once mostly semi-arid
rangeland punctuated by basalt cliffs. But as irrigation systems spread across it
in the early 20th Century, it morphed into rich farmlands. [Drennan 2013] Expanses of vineyards stretch across the valley and climb the hills.
One part of the Yakima Valley Highway has been renamed “Wine Country Road”, and
at intersections, signs point to wineries and tasting rooms.
“De colores, de colores son los pajaritos que vienen de afuera …”
“Colors, the little birds that come from far away are full of colors …”
Tall frameworks of wood and wire stand waiting for hop vines
to grow up them. The Yakima Valley produces more than three-quarters of the
hops grown in the United States. Apple and pear orchards are beginning to
bloom. In fields of corn and beans, the first green shoots are just poking up.
Here and there, big center-pivot pipes are watering fields
in circles. Along the highway, an irrigation canal snakes under the roadway. A
little ways down the road, on the rusted silo of an abandoned farmstead, a
hand-painted sign reads: "Land for sale, 19 acres, first water
rights".
“De colores, de colores es el arcoíris que vemos lucir …”
“Colors, the rainbow that we see shining is full of colors …”
Sunday after church, a pickup is parked on a country road next
to a field of old corn from last year, three foot stalks with dried husks and
cobs still on them. What looks like a family - a man, a woman, and four kids - is
walking through the field, taking dried corn and stuffing it into cloth
shoulder bags. Maybe they’re gleaning.
A little further down the road, a small, worn house, probably
of farmworkers, sports a purple and yellow sign in the front yard: "A new
UW Husky family". Their kid is starting at the University of Washington, the
state’s biggest public college.
“… y por eso los grandes amores de muchos colores me gustan a mí.”
“… and that’s why I like the great lovers of many colors.”
The town of Sunnyside drapes over a hill about 30 miles
southeast of Yakima city. The town’s 16 thousand residents are 86 percent
Hispanic, and Yakima County is over 52 percent, in a country where the Hispanic
population is approaching one-fifth of the total and growing. Yearly per capita
income in Sunnyside is $15,570 and the poverty rate is 18.6 percent, compared
with $43,817 and 9.9 percent for the state of Washington. In other words, average
yearly income here is a bit more than one-third that of the state, and poverty
is almost twice as high. [U.S.Census Bureau. “QuickFacts”] In some neighborhoods, weather-beaten trailers
perch on small lots in mobile-home parks. On top of the hill, the houses are
bigger, with manicured lawns.
At the south end of town, across Interstate 82, Midvale Road
is lined with industrial processing and service facilities for dairy, candy, feed,
fertilizer and equipment. Massive white warehouses are buttressed by pipelines,
silos, and cylindrical tanks. At the end of this agribusiness stronghold, rows of
long white structures looking like opaque greenhouses are identified by a sign:
“Windmill Farms”. Inside, on multi-level bins in windowless, climate-controlled
rooms, mushrooms are growing. The delivery trucks parked outside the farm still
have “Ostrom Farms”, the name of the previous owners, painted on their sides.
Along the road outside the mushroom farm one April afternoon,
workers, their families, and their supporters walk a picket line. Big and small
crimson flags bearing a black Aztec eagle on a white circle flutter in a stiff
wind. Red, white, blue and green undulate as well: a young boy hoists an
American flag as an older man waves the Mexican tricolor. Homemade signs
say “We Feed You” and “La Union Es La Fuerza” (“The union is strength”). Another
one reads: “Queremos unión
– Protesta - United Farm Workers of Sunnyside – Tu derecho pero también tu obligación”
(“We want a union – Protest – … – Your right but also your obligation”) in
brown and red lettering centered around a clenched fist.
From a portable sound system, the Mexican ranchera (country)
music of singer-songwriter Joan Sebastian and Los Tigres del Norte lends an
upbeat accordion and guitar cadence to chants of “¡Si se puede!” (“Yes
we can!”) and “¡Vamos a ganar! (“We’re going to win!”)
These mushroom workers are picketing Windmill Farms to
demand that it right some flagrant wrongs that Ostrom Farms, the former owner,
inflicted on its workers before selling the farm. The new owners, they say,
have not remedied most of the problems.
Over a year ago, Ostrom workers began to raise complaints about
working conditions, wages, and management with Ostrom. And they started working
with organizers from the United Farm Workers union. When they got no response, 70
percent of them voted September 2022 to form a union to bargain with the
company. Ostrom responded by laying off all its workers and selling the farm to
an Ontario company, Windmill Farms, controlled by a Toronto-based private
equity firm, Instar Asset Management. Windmill told the former workers that
they could reapply to work there, but might have to accept new conditions
restricting their workplace rights.
Before the sale, Ostrom had replaced most of its workers,
who were predominantly Hispanic women living in the area, with male “guest
workers” brought in from Mexico on H-2A temporary agricultural visas. H-2A
workers have limited labor rights and can easily be fired and deported. A few of
the original workers were hired back, but some not at their old jobs.
The workers and their supporters are demanding that Windmill
rehire workers who were fired, address their grievances, recognize their union
and bargain a contract with it. Members of other unions have come from around
the state to show solidarity.
The president of the United Farm Workers, Teresa Romero, has
come up from California to encourage the mushroom workers. The veteran labor leader
takes the microphone and addresses the crowd in Spanish:
“We’re here today fighting for all of you. But we can’t do this
without the support, without the leadership, that you’ve demonstrated. It’s not
easy. Many of you have been fired for demanding your rights. But what I want to
show you is that we’re going to keep fighting for the workers who are still
inside and who are afraid. And the fear they feel is very justified because
many of you were fired. But the important thing is that this is our cause, our
struggle. Here we are and we’re not leaving! Thanks to all who are supporting
us from outside of the farm workers movement, but who realize how hard it is to
organize for workers in the fields.” (She repeats some of her speech in English.)
She ends her speech with ¡Sí, se puede! (“Yes, we can!”), the
traditional farm workers grito. And the crowd continues cheering, “¡Sí, se puede!”.
Next, a 50ish man with a goatee and sunglasses, in a red baseball
cap and blue windbreaker, smiles at the assembly. José Martínez was one of the
leaders in forming the union. He was fired by Ostrom, but then rehired by Windmill.
His Spanish is hoarse and passionate:
“I want to send a very clear message to the company: we
don’t want to destroy you. The only thing we want is that you treat us with
dignity, equality and respect as human beings. And to have a union, that’s what
we’re fighting for. All together we will win. Thanks to all of you who have
come from different places, states, to support our cause. We’ve begun to fight
for this, and we won’t leave until we reach this goal. ¡Viva la causa! ¡Viva César Chávez! ¡Viva la unión!
¡Siempre pa’adelante!” (“Long live the
cause! Long live Cesar Chavez! Long live the Union! Always forward!”)
Daniela Barajas, who follows Martínez, was fired by Ostrom but
found a job with a different company. In forceful Spanish, she tells the crowd:
“We’ve just begun to fight, we’re here and we’re going to
keep on going. Although I have more than a year that I’m not working in the
mushroom farm. I was one of those who was fired, but I continue supporting
them, for the people who are there, for their families, for those who don’t
have jobs to feed their families. They have a right to better treatment at
work. That’s why I’m here supporting them, and I’m not going away. I’m going to
keep supporting them, and I invite all of you who want to build a movement like
this to come and support them. Stay with us, because the struggle will
continue. And we won’t leave here until they recognize a union there. The
struggle will continue.”
Her speech is echoed by chants of: “¿Que queremos? ¡Unión!” (“What do we want? A union!”).
The union’s Secretary of Civic Action, Juanito Marcial, drove
over with some other workers from the Seattle area, three hours to the west, to
offer solidarity to the mushroom workers. The Chateau Sainte Michelle winery in
Woodinville, Washington, where he works, is the site of the United Farm Workers’
first contract in the state. Workers won it in 1995 after an eight-year
struggle, and it remains in force. [Rosales Castañeda
2009] Most of the UFW’s membership, however, is in California where the
union began.
Marcial recalls that history in Spanish: “We’re here, the
comrades who work at Sainte Michelle under a union contract. And I want to tell
you that we now have an average of 27 years [under the contract], the only
agricultural site that has a contract [with the UFW in Washington], and that
we’re enjoying various benefits for workers. The workers here today are saying to
the mushroom workers that you are not alone. And we’re saying to you, comrades,
that this is just the first step, we can’t weaken. Hasta la victoria siempre!
(Until victory always!)”
The Pacific Northwest Regional Director of the UFW, Victoria
Ruddy, closes the rally by thanking the workers who are still standing and fighting
after a year of struggle. “As don José says, ‘¡No vamos a parar hasta ganar unión!’ (‘We
won’t stop until we win a union!’)’”
The crowd ambles
over to a nearby park for a picnic to the tune of Joan Sebastian’s song,
El Ilegal (The Illegal), on the sound system.
Al norte llegué sin un centavo. Con dolor me
alejé de mi país. …
Qué hermosa es la Unión Americana, Illinois, California y Tennessee.
Pero allá en mi tierra mexicana, un poquito de cielo es para mí.”
“I arrived in the north without a
cent. With grief I left my country. …
How beautiful is the American Union, Illinois, California y Tennessee.
But back in my Mexican land, a little bit of heaven is waiting for me.”
- Joan Sebastian. “El Ilegal (Audio Oficial)”
New bosses, still no union


Signs at UFW rally, Sunnyside,
Washington, April 18, 2023. Photos: Peter Costantini
The road that led the mushroom workers to their April 18 rally
outside of Windmill Farms was riddled with corporate switchbacks and legal
potholes.
In 2019, Ostrom Mushrooms closed a mushroom farm that it had
run since the 1960s in Lacey, western Washington state, and laid off more than 200
workers. It moved its operations to Sunnyside, in central Washington. The firm
received generous support from different levels of government to subsidize its
move and construction of a new $60 million plant on 43 acres. The State of
Washington included $1 million in its supplemental capital budget to offset
construction costs for infrastructure at the Port of Sunnyside, which sold the property
for the site to Ostrom. [Meyers 3/18/2018] Ostrom also received low-interest construction loans and an
energy efficiency rebate from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a local public
electric utility. [Donofrio1/30/2022]
In Sunnyside, Ostrom hired a new workforce of more than 200 workers,
most of them Hispanic women living in the area. [Sundeen 6/24/2022] During peak harvest times, the operation employs about 300
workers, CEO Travis Wood told Joel Donofrio of the Yakima Herald-Republic. At
the time, Wood complained of a shortage of labor. He pointed to the advantages
of year-round work and controlled-climate conditions inside the facility as
factors that ought to attract agricultural workers. [Donofrio1/30/2022]
As an investigation by the Washington State Attorney General
found, “In mid-2021, Ostrom hired new management to improve its
production. This new management believed Ostrom needed to replace its largely
female workforce because its female workers had childcare obligations and could
not work late hours or weekends. Ostrom’s management decided to replace its
domestic workforce with workers from the H-2A guest worker program.” [WAAGO 5/17/2023]
Over the ensuing months, the Ostrom employees began raising issues
about their wages and working conditions with management. They elected a
leadership committee to pursue their grievances. Organizers from the United
Farm Workers began to consult with them, as did Columbia Legal Services, a
non-profit organization.
In June 2022, the workers tried to submit a petition to Ostrom
calling for “fair pay, safe working conditions, and respect”. It alleged that managers
had threatened and bullied workers, instituted mandatory overtime shifts and raised
production quotas to excessive levels, according to Jasper Kenzo Sundeen of the
Yakima Herald-Republic. Workers were
overworked and undervalued, said Ostrom worker Joceline Castillo. “We’re done
taking the hits, we’re going to hit back.” [Sundeen 9/18/2022] But Ostrom management stonewalled
the petition.
Meanwhile, in August 2022, Washington State Attorney General
Bob Ferguson filed a civil complaint against Ostrom under state laws. Ferguson accused
Ostrom of discrimination and unfair employment practices because of employees'
sex, citizenship, or immigration status, and of retaliating against employees who
opposed these violations. Ostrom had replaced most of its workers, who were local
female residents, with male guest workers from Mexico, whose H-2A temporary
visas give workers fewer labor protections. However, the H-2A program requires
that the employer demonstrate that it cannot hire enough workers from the local
workforce, which was evidently not the case, before bringing in foreign guest
workers. [Yakima County Superior Court 5/16/2023]
The complaint also charged
Ostrom with “engaging in unfair and deceptive practices … by misleading actual
and prospective domestic pickers with regard to job eligibility requirements,
wages, and availability of employment.”
However, Ferguson was unable to directly address retaliation
against union organizing or the use of H-2A workers to replace resident workers.
These issues fall under federal law, while the state attorney general can
enforce only state laws.
The National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 federal statute that
regulates labor relations and union organizing, excludes farm workers and
domestic workers from its coverage. So the Ostrom workers were not able to go
through formal legal procedures for union recognition or to benefit from the
law’s protection against retaliation for union organizing.
In September 2022 the workers announced that they had held a
vote under the auspices of the UFW: seventy percent chose to form a union. They
asked management to recognize their union and bargain with them on wages and
working conditions. Ostrom refused.
The Ostrom workers and UFW organizers upped the ante in
their campaign by marshalling community support. They continued periodic informational
pickets at the Ostrom farm in Sunnyside. And in a reprise of the farm worker
boycotts of the 1960s and 1970s, they began to ask consumers not to buy Ostrom
mushrooms, but instead to seek out the mushrooms of two unionized farms in California.
In November, workers demonstrated outside of Metropolitan Market, an upscale
grocery store in Seattle, to highlight their efforts to form a union. [Hoang12/8/2022]
In November, the State Department of Labor & Industries responded
to a complaint and found working conditions at Ostrom that could cause injuries
to workers, Daisy Zavala Magaña reported in the Seattle Times. The agency fined
the grower only $4,000, a slap on the wrist, but another complaint was still
being investigated. [Zavala 11/19/2022]
Then on February 14, the campaign hit a roadblock. According
to the UFW, Ostrom Mushroom Farms management held a company-wide meeting with
its workers to tell them that they were all fired immediately. As of that
midnight, Ostrom’s Sunnyside facility would be sold to Greenwood Mushroom
Sunnyside IA, LLC, a new entity owned by Windmill Farms, a corporation based in
Ashburn, Ontario, Canada. Windmill also uses the Greenwood Mushrooms label at
farms in Ontario and Pennsylvania. In turn, Windmill is owned by Instar Asset
Management, a Toronto-based private equity firm.
The fired Ostrom workers were told they could reapply for
jobs under the new management. But they would have to fill out new applications,
possibly accept different jobs from their current ones, and sign arbitration agreements
which would prevent suing the employer or unionizing.
The Windmill and former Ostrom workers pushed ahead with their
campaign, despite more of them now being unemployed. Some of the original
workers who were rehired complained that they ended up in worse jobs with lower
pay.
Under Windmill Farms management, working conditions were
still “pretty bad”, according to workers committee leader José Martínez, who had
worked at Ostrom for three years. “They want you to go fast” to meet an hourly
quota of picking 50 pounds mushrooms, he told me. “They put you on probation
for 90 days. If you don’t make [the quota] they’re gonna let you go.” The
biggest problem, though, is “there’s no communication with them. Sometimes one
supervisor comes and tells you one thing, and then another one comes after and
changes the whole thing.” His biggest hope, he said, was that “they accept the
conditions the way we want, to have a union there and everything is gonna be
fine.”
Just a few days after the rally, though, Martínez was fired
by Windmill. Management claimed he wasn’t meeting production demands, he told Zavala.
But he suspected he may have been fired because of his pro-union activism. [Zavala 5/17/2023]
Finally on May 16, the Washington State Attorney General’s Office
announced that Ostrom and Greenwood, the new company owned by Windmill, had signed
a consent decree. Without admitting guilt, Ostrom agreed to pay $3.4 million
into a fund to compensate workers who suffered discrimination or retaliation
for reporting it. The AGO “estimates that more than 170 workers are eligible for
compensation,” Communications Director Brionna Aho told me in an email. In the
agreement, Greenwood agreed to discontinue the “unfair and discriminatory
employment practices” that the Attorney General identified under Ostrom, and established
a framework for compliance training and monitoring to prevent future violations.
[Yakima County Superior Court 5/16/2023]
“Ostrom’s systematic discrimination was calculated to force
out female and Washington-based employees,” Ferguson said in a statement. “I
want to thank the workers who spoke out against this discrimination in the face
of so much danger and stood up for their rights. My team fought for them and
today we secured an important victory.” [WAAGO 5/17/2023]
The settlement won substantial compensation for the workers
and avoided a drawn-out court battle. But because it was based on state law, it
could not compel recognition of the union or rehiring by Windmill of the
workers fired by Ostrom, nor could it address the prohibited use of H-2A guest
workers to replace resident workers. The AGO believes, however, that the U.S.
Department of Labor, which approves businesses for the H-2A program, “is aware
of our claims about Ostrom’s abuses of the H-2A program that gave rise to the
AGO’s case under Washington state law.”
A worker still employed by Windmill, Isela Cabrera, told
Jocelyn Sherman of the UFW: “We are in this fight, and we are not going to stop
until we get a union contract. I am very happy for my coworkers who experienced
humiliations and retaliations by Ostrom management. I hope this announcement [of
the consent decree] will help begin to improve conditions at Windmill Farms –
as this new management continues to commit favoritism and retaliation. We want
our fired friends to get their jobs back and for Windmill Farms to recognize
our union.” [Sherman 5/17/2023]
UFW President Romero told me that one focus of the union
campaign will be on persuading Instar’s investors, some of whom may be union
pension funds, to pressure Windmill Farms to recognize the union.
Putting the heft of the state movement behind the mushroom
workers, the Washington State Labor Council (the state branch of the national
AFL-CIO) and other unions announced the formation of a Solidarity Committee. April
Sims, President of the WSLC, emphasized: “All workers deserve fair treatment at
work and the freedom to join together to negotiate for better wages and working
conditions. Workers at Windmill Farms are getting neither of those things. We
are proud to stand in solidarity with these brave mushroom workers and we will
fight side-by-side until we win a union contract at Windmill Farms.” [Groves 6/2/2023]
Catching a national wave of union organizing
Windmill Farms & Ostrom’s truck,
Sunnyside, Washington, April 14, 2023. Photos: Peter Costantini
The Ostrom / Windmill mushroom workers campaign joins a nascent
national upswelling of union organizing across many industries. These initiatives,
however, are swimming against half a century of economic and political riptides
hostile to labor.
Union membership is at a nadir in the U.S. In 2022, only 10.1
percent of wage and salary workers were unionized, the lowest level recorded; [US BLS 1/19/2023] whereas
in 1955, 33.2 percent were unionized, a ratio more than three times as high. [HistoryCentral “Labor Unions in the 60's”] In the private sector, only 6.0 percent
of workers now belong to unions. [US BLS 1/19/2023] Union
activists are frequently though illegally fired for organizing, and workplace
protections are often poorly enforced.
National labor laws continue to discriminate against
agricultural and domestic workers. They were excluded from the labor reforms of
the 1930s at the insistence of racist Southern lawmakers, because most workers
in those two fields at the time were Black, Mexican or Filipino. This malignant
relic of Jim Crow has never been excised, and the old free-range bigotry
continues today oppressing low-wage workers in those industries. They are still
mostly people of color, and among those workers most in need of strong labor
protections. [USNPS no date]
If the former Ostrom workers had been in an industry other
than agriculture or domestic work, though, they would have been covered by the
National Labor Relations Act, which provides a legal framework for worker
efforts to unionize and forbids retaliation. And if regulations on hiring
temporary agricultural workers that require businesses to first show a dearth
of local resident workers had been enforced, the Ostrom workers could not have
been legally replaced by guest workers.
Despite these obstacles, a labor resurgence seems to be gaining
momentum nationally, particularly among young and immigrant workers. In some
service and other low-wage industries, organizing drives are proliferating.
High-profile union campaigns at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Recreational
Equipment, and other major employers are making headlines. [Shierholz 1/19/2023] A
2022 Gallup opinion poll found that 71 percent of the U.S. public approve of
labor unions, up from 48 percent in 2010 and 64 percent before the pandemic. [McCarthy8/30/2022]
The Ostrom / Windmill campaign is also a protagonist in the renewed
activism among agricultural workers. The United Farm Workers, founded by Cesar
Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong and others in the early 1960s, recruited mainly
Mexican and Filipino laborers up and down the West Coast. At its zenith in the
1960s and 1970s, it won numerous contracts and palpably improved conditions in
the fields. Its boycotts of grapes, lettuce and wine from some producers expanded
public awareness of the widespread exploitation and abuse of farmworkers by
agribusiness. This community outreach also drew new activists into the movement
around the country and trained them in organizing.
On the political front, the UFW spearheaded major improvements
in labor laws, mainly in California. In 1975, a campaign led by the union won
the state’s approval of the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which
recognized farm workers’ right to organize. [NFWM 6/2018]
Over the next two decades the UFW’s organizing waned and
membership shrank. But in this century, membership has reportedly doubled and
the union has led new campaigns for farm worker rights and against wage theft
and sexual harassment. [Perez10/15/2020]
A few other states with progressive governments have also backfilled
labor protections for farm workers and immigrants. In Washington state, a Democratic
administration and legislature recently passed legislation guaranteeing that farm
workers be paid at least the state minimum wage, which is currently $15.74 per
hour, [WADLI “Wages”] and time-and-a-half overtime pay for more than 40 hours worked
weekly, starting next year. [WA DLI“Overtime”]
The 1995 UFW contract won by workers at Chateau Sainte
Michelle, the big Seattle-area winery, is still in force today – as the union
members at the Sunnyside rally testified. The former Ostrom workers are urging
consumers to buy mushrooms grown instead on two California farms with UFW
contracts. According to the union, over three-quarters of the fresh mushroom
industry in California is unionized. Its contracts also cover thousands of
workers on vegetable, berry, winery, tomato, and dairy farms in the West Coast
states. [UFW web site, “OurVision”]
Other unions as well have successfully organized farm
workers in recent years. Familias Unidas por la Justicia (Families United for
Justice), [FUJ] an independent
union based in northwestern Washington state, has won union contracts for berry
and tulip workers, many of whom are Indigenous Mexicans. The Coalition of
Immokalee Workers in Florida and farm worker organizations in a few other
states have also won significant gains for their members. [Coalition of Immokalee Workers]
That black Aztec eagle in a white circle on a crimson flag
may have to soar long and high outside of Windmill Farms and its owners’
offices to win a contract there. And the multi-colored banners of many unions
may have to billow tirelessly outside of other farms, factories, mills and
warehouses - and also city halls, statehouses and Congress - to construct livable
work environments and ensure a decent living for all human beings who do “essential”
work.
Yet despite the legal and political barriers erected against
them, agricultural and other low-wage laborers are pursuing new strategies with
old-fashioned grit to defend their workplace rights and build collective power.
“¡No, no, no nos moverán! ¡No,
no, no nos moverán!
Como un árbol firme junto al río, ¡no nos moverán!”
“We shall not, we shall not be
moved! We shall not, we shall not be moved!
Just like a tree that’s standing by the water, we shall not be moved!”
(From an old farm workers song)
Author
Peter Costantini made his living for 20 years working
blue-collar jobs in construction, shipyards, electrical manufacturing and
office-equipment repair. For part of that time, he was an activist in the
Laborers International Union of North America. He also volunteered on United
Farm Workers boycotts in the 1970s.
He worked a second shift as a community organizer. After
co-founding the Seattle Tenants Union, he served on the Executive Board of the
National Tenants Union. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was deeply involved in
solidarity with Central America. He taught a short course in microprocessors at
the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in Managua, Nicaragua.
The first immigrant Costantini met was his father, who
crossed over from Abruzzo to the Bronx as a 12-year-old in 1928. He has
volunteered with immigrants for the past 40 years, and has written about them
for 30.
(Full bio: Americas Program - Our People)
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Music
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=kKopB66ujuQ