The Sparrows Point Local

The fab workers' union at PMG's Patapsco chip fabs — known to everyone simply as the Local. They are the descendants of the Sparrows Point steelworkers: the mill that ran Baltimore labor for a century is gone under the water and the corps, but the families stayed, and now they run the chip fabs built on the same ground. They make the hardware the whole region depends on — and they know how to stop the line.

The Patapsco fabs are on strike, three weeks in. PMG hired Carrion to break it.

Role in the world

The Local is industrial labor with a century of fight in its memory. The grandparents broke the color line on the steel floor; the parents organized the fabs; this generation is holding a strike against a corp that would rather automate them out of existence than bargain. They run PMG's chip fabs — the bulk of Mid-Atlantic hardware — so a stopped Local is a stopped supply chain for half the Beltway.

Their fight is not only for this contract. The deeper want is worker control: that the fabs serve the workers and the city that depends on them, not just PMG's margins — that the people who run the line have a say in what the line makes. Win enough of that, and the question of who owns the schematic libraries the fabs draw from starts to look answerable.

Public faces

• Yvonne Dorsey ("Miss Yvonne") — third-generation Sparrows Point and the face of the Local; running the strike; pragmatic, beloved, bone-tired.

Allies and friction

• Allies: the Free Stack and the Sangam (open-fab peers — the schematic-commons fight); the Drownline Co-op (militant solidarity, bodies on the picket); the Slingers (fellow trades; sheath-makers honor a picket)
• Friction with: PMG (the employer); Carrion (hired to break the strike)

Where they operate

The Patapsco River industrial corridor — the chip fabs, the union hall, the picket lines at the fab gates. Sparrows Point ground; the smokestacks of the old mill are still visible across the harbor.