Non-American Pickers

Garbage is burning in an open fireplace seemingly constructed for that purpose, but there is no one around for miles, or at least no one who might have started the fire. It was left to burn in the rain and has been doing just that. Fueled by a plastic 50 gallon drum and other detritus probably not meant for burning, it gives the deserted area a particularly apocalyptic feel.

Fewer than 20 years ago there would have been no place to park on Farmer’s Circle Road in Bishop’s Head, an area that, even for a rural region, seems like the middle of nowhere.
Cars belonging to crab pickers, oyster shuckers, and waterman would have filled the sparse parking lot and lined the graveled shoulder of the road. Refrigerated trucks hauling all manner of seafood would have come through daily — even on a Saturday afternoon, or rather especially on a Saturday afternoon with part-time workers added into the mix, the area would have bustled through October.

Access to the offices of the former seafood processor Meredith and Meredith is barred by nothing more than a locked aluminum door — the kind that tells would-be intruders the aluminum door itself is the biggest prize to be had in the building. Entry can be gained to the back of the building and the marina beyond by an ancient boardwalk. The wood feels soft and looks even more unstable in the constant rain. Courage or foolhardiness, then, is the only requisite for gaining access to the rest of the building. Sitting open for inspection are the storage areas and processing rooms — all fallen into such states of disrepair that they will surely make their way into the fire pit across the street.

Joe Robinson backs his white working pickup truck into what used to be a loading dock that now stands storage to a few hundred sun-bleached oyster shells, two dented Bud Light cans and an overturned Diet Pepsi. Robinson is a waterman who drinks, he says, more than he ought, and makes his living running crab lines — long cables capable of snaring dozens of crabs at a time — rather than potting. He is too old and tired to heft the crab pots from the bay to his boat as he did when he was younger. While not in disrepair, per se, his boat is no more likely to haul in crabs by the ton than is its owner. Beyond all of that, though, Robinson knows the crab industry here at the end of Farmer’s Circle Road is dead.

“You can look around,” he says, “you can see nobody’s going to do anything with this place.”

Robinson shrugs, lifting his hands slightly. He reaches into the bed of his truck, grabs a paper Food Lion shopping bag from the back, and heads through the processing plant’s husk to where his work boat is docked.

The dissolution of one of the most successful seafood processing plants of the Eastern Shore’s past, and the vision of what has become of it, keeps other processors up nights. There are probably one hundred reasons for the failure at the end of Farmer’s Circle Road, but many of those still in the business point to a single tipping point: Meredith and Meredith’s refusal or inability to jump through the bureaucratic and logistical hoops required to hire guest workers under the H2B program.

The H2B program is a federal guest worker program that licenses non-agricultural businesses to hire workers from other countries to work for less than a year at jobs the businesses can annually demonstrate will not be done by United States workers. In order to demonstrate this, a company must advertise the job, participate in job fairs, and employ other recruitment tactics. After this fails, as it does year after year, the company may request a certain number of visas through the H2B plan.

Jack Brooks, a principal with J.M. Clayton in Cambridge, the largest picking house in Dorchester County, has made himself an expert on the H2B program over the last decade when the housing boom and post-9/11 immigration policies appeared to conspire against his business.

Close your eyes and imagine you’re in the fresh seafood section of a supermarket experiencing the sanitized, slightly metallic smell of fresh fish for sale. Open them, and you’re in the low-ceilinged hallway entrance to J.M. Clayton’s, the area’s largest crab picking operation. The building has not, with the exception of the color photos on the walls, changed significantly in nearly the last 100 years. One of the photos is relatively new and could pass for a United Way promotional still: a group of almost perfectly ethnically diverse individuals smiling and holding a scarlet banner that reads, “Thank You Senator Mikulski.” It is worth noting a significant number of the people in the photo are not, and will never be, registered voters. They are Mexican nationals, part of the H2B worker program.

Brooks, who runs the plant with his brothers Bill and Joe, treads lightly when telling Clayton’s story. When people say, “Those were different times,” or “Things were different back then,” they generally do so to excuse or explain unenlightened behavior. These phrases tend toward euphemism or racial- or gender-bias apologetics, excusing moral lapses by linking them to social mores. When Brooks talks about the first 100 years of the business, he uses the phrase literally but still gingerly in explaining the economic realities of the early 20th Century.

Even the best times have been hard for watermen on the Eastern Shore. The point Brooks never quite makes out loud but alludes to often is his has never been an industry of exploitation. This is a morally critical point as well as a financially critical one in an area that boomed during post-slavery industrialization. In a low-margin industry with so many factors against success, there just have never been enough people willing to pick crabs to exploit. With no larger labor pool to speak of, crab-picking is one of the few industries wherein each employee, but particularly the lowest-level employees, is precious and necessary. A company’s interests reside in operational harmony, and always have. The history of crab labor, and the extreme difficulties it continues to face, however, is and must be tied to the cultural development of the United States.

J.M. Clayton, as the other crab picking and packing houses, is superficially tied to the racial disputes of the day in what is probably the least fair way. The industry has always employed those who cannot find other work, relying on bottom-level laborers doing a filthy job for piecework pay. These laborers have been both white and black, though the African-American contingent lasted deeper into the 20th Century, and their eventual departure from the industry is an accident of history rather than part of a larger design.

The seafood industry’s business model hasn’t changed very much since pasteurization allowed for the shipping products over long distances. The expected market price is $X per pound and, traditionally, the workers would receive a per pound fee based on that expectation. In the picking houses, the industry relies almost exclusively on women as much if not more because of their smaller fingers than traditional gender roles. Men aren’t barred from picking crabs, they just can’t make as much money doing it as their wives, mothers and sisters can.

With time, patience, and experience, women made careers of picking during a time when rampant poverty and poor access to education made careers completely beyond many women’s reach. Nicole Jones, an African-American woman who first entered the J.M. Clayton building in a box and was stowed under the picking table by her mother until Jones was old enough to learn to pick crabs, was such a woman. Having come up in the industry during the boom times, it was a job she continued well into her 80s. When she retired, she did so proudly but as one of the last of her kind: the product of a labor and social structure that long outlived its usefulness.

Jones was born to a family with almost feudal ties to the crabbing industry. Traditionally, the women rose the earliest, preparing lunches for their husbands who labored as waterman or dockworkers, and doing household chores. When the men left, the women made their way to the picking houses of Cambridge and Hooper’s Island to earn money picking the previous day’s catch. Crabs are picked cold as the cooling process loosens the meat from the shells ensuring the most meat per crab in proportion to the time invested picking.

When the boats came in, the women went home and prepared the evening meal. The men came home from a long day on the boat, ate, and slept. Girls accompanied their mothers to the picking houses from a much younger age than boys accompanied their fathers to the docks for work, but the cycle was the same. Generation after generation came up in the waterman, crab-picking or oyster-shucking industry, learning to carry their weight as they went and teaching their children the same. By the 1960s, though, parents weren’t the only ones teaching their children.

“Once the kids started having more educational opportunities, once they were able to go to college, they had no interest in continuing in this business,” Brooks says. “And who could blame them? I don’t.”

As with any job that depends upon nature, crab picking has a starving season. In the early 20th Century, this was merely a fact of the hard lives those who relied on the Chesapeake Bay for their living endured. Men had year-round jobs or took such winter work as was available. The money earned by women who worked from April to November picking crabs amounted to much more than a cushion during the long winter. These families depended upon the women’s salaries as much as any other source of income. And as seasonal work went, it was as reliable as any other industry. The most consistent aspect was also the one that drove American workers away from the industry as soon as other opportunities arose. In even the best years, pickers are laid off the week before Thanksgiving, which became increasingly difficult for pickers to accept. A lower-paying job anywhere that offered 52 weeks of employment over 32 weeks was almost always preferable. Add to that the expanded opportunities gained from college, the military, and even the growing manufacturing sector in the region, and it isn’t difficult to see how spending one’s day surrounded by a pile of crab carcuses began to lose its luster.

By the middle of the 1990s, proportionately few African-Americans were left in the crab-picking industry and even fewer whites. The jobs began to fall to new-immigrants and the occasional migrant worker.

Enter the beginning of the industry’s reliance on the H2B program.

Each year the government issues 66,000 H2B visas. These visas are for non-agricultural seasonal workers. Participants in this program are not on track to begin the process toward citizenship but rather take their wages back to their country of origin. Brooks and many of his colleagues were never really able to count on the H2B system. No one likes to be regulated, and many of the seafood industry’s objections stem from this initial distrust of government meddling.

The rules include the requirement that a company guarantee an income minimum for the guest worker and that they provide transport, shelter, and other basic wage and workplace protections. These rules seem, superficially at least, to reflect fair labor practices consistent with what we’ve come to expect for U.S. workers of any kind. It is only in the light of the mad dash for workers that it is easy to see, or at least understandable, why the seafood industry has taken up a full-fledged battle against H2B regulations.

With only 66,000 visas available nationwide, the seafood industry must compete against, for instance, the landscaping and hospitality industries for workers. The visas come available in November and are often gone by December. Landscapers have a better than average idea how many contracts they will have from year to year. Similarly, the hospitality industry has a history of predictable ebbs and flows of income to justify their requests for the workers. These aspects are non-existent in the seafood business. Waterman might have an idea of the kind of year they may potentially have in April but, until the season is fully underway, it is impossible to tell how many pickers a given region will need. Brooks and the other industry leaders must, then, make a guess as to the number of employees they will need a full six months before they know for sure.

For a time, this was mitigated by a provision that allowed the industry to bring on workers as they needed them, but the provision was ended.

“In August and September, I might need 85 pickers,” Brooks says. “In May I don’t really need much more than a dozen, so I have to try and decide if its worth it to bring in the extra people and hope I can find crabs for them all summer.”

The boats are done for the day and several male H2B workers are sorting crabs by size. Josh Brooks, Jack’s son, has a brief conversation with them in Spanish.

“I don’t really speak Spanish,” he says. “All I can speak is Crab Spanish.”

Crab Spanish or not, Josh is comfortable talking with the dockworkers, each of whom is Mexican, and most of whom return annually to work at Clayton’s.

The bulk of the workers take residence in small houses provided to them by the factory and also by law. The homes are clean and well maintained by the residents as well as by the owners. There is a fee exacted for the housing, but it isn’t much. The fee covers little more than the power and upkeep. A number of workers stay with family off the property, or friends who have immigrated. According to Josh, few H2B workers he has met have much interest in migrating. Many own their homes in Mexico, and it is not uncommon for workers to stay in the business a decade before quitting altogether.

Just off the side of the dock is the steaming room where hundreds of crabs at a time are steamed in giant kettles used daily and for decades in a process that has changed little. As the women finish up their work in the picking room, the men steam the last of the day’s catch and set it to cool overnight. There will be plenty of work to go around in the morning, and, this year, plenty of people to do it.

Just off the steaming room is an impressive conveyor belt contraption. It is still shiny and not a tenth as old as the kettles, but its newness is from disuse. Officially it is an automatic crab picker but now it has become, unofficially, a doomsday device, the eventual use of which will signal the beginning of the end of Maryland’s crab industry.

Before the workforce dried up, the auto-picker was both a sideline and a bit of insurance. In a good year, crabs that couldn’t be picked because of size or volume were picked on this machine and sold as backfin crab meat, the less-expensive alternative to the highly-prized lump crab meat that dominates the better crab cake recipes in Maryland’s better restaurants. In a bad year, or so they thought at the time, J.M. Clayton’s could produce more backfin crab and make up in volume what they were unable to pick in quality. The influx of cheap crab meat from Asia, particularly China, brought that plan to a swift end. Even by purchasing directly from the boat with fewer workers, operational costs for both the picking houses and the watermen mean Clayton’s and the other crab houses on the Eastern Shore cannot compete with the price-point available to restaurants and wholesalers provided by the imported crab meat.

As a result, a true Maryland crab cake is a rarity. Restaurants primarily tend to use the less expensive Asian crab, mixing in a little locally-sourced crab meat to be able to claim Maryland crab status and selling it to people who are generally none the wiser. This year, however, the state inaugurated a “True Blue” program that would certify restaurants that used Maryland crab exclusively, but in a region where every restaurant competes enthusiastically for every tourist dining dollar, the price disparity remains the deciding factor for most patrons.

Brooks abandoned the machine and revised his business model. He would sell high-end crab meat to the chefs and restaurants that catered to a clientele who didn’t mind paying more for a demonstrably better product. The rest would go to the crab houses that sell crabs by the bushel, dozen or even the all-you-can eat places.

Earlier this year, as May was about to become June on the Eastern Shore, it already looked as if it might be a good year for the crabbing industry, relatively speaking. Like farmers, waterman have years they consider, not pessimistically, in terms of disasters avoided rather than goals accomplished. This year Brooks brought in just about 75 workers, including men who work on the docks as well as women to pick the crabs. It turned out to be a good year, or at least an accurate year where the number of workers and the amount of work lined up well enough. The greatest success of 2012 was that there was no worker crisis.

Three years ago, the industry suffered more than the potential for major disaster. It had a panic-inducing worker shortage, the response to which launched Brooks temporarily into the national spotlight and brought together both liberal and conservative national politicians in a way only imminent threats to the livelihood of thousands can.

In the spring of 2009, Jack Brooks was at the end of his rope. All the H2B visas had been spoken for meaning he would not have enough pickers for the season. Collapse of his business could cause a small regional cataclysm. Nationally, while there had been some financial difficulties, including a stock market crash, talk of a housing bubble was hypothetical at its most serious.

Real estate was red hot at the end of 2008, and, although it was cooling by the spring of 2009, it was cooling from nuclear-hot to lava-hot. The construction and landscaping industries had taken a tremendous bite out of the potential labor pool and the few workers Brooks had were all he was going to get. They were working at a deficit in April and by the time August rolled around, it was pretty clear that fisherman wouldn’t be able to sell the crabs they caught.

Crabbing remains among the most intensely local businesses available to an American entrepreneur. Small local banks back the boats and the production houses and the trucks that haul the seafood. It is only superficially Norman Rockwell, though. The bankers are tough, frank and in regular touch with the millions of community dollars they have invested in the seafood and agriculture industry locally. There are spreadsheets and actuarial tables to be sure, but beyond those, there is the distinct likelihood the bank president or one of its officers will call a business owner at home to discuss how important the purchase of a new truck, for instance, really is.

The local banks (Brooks happens to do business with the Bank of Cambridge) are legitimate cornerstones of the community, floating the farms, waterman, and much of the rest of small business through the winter and reinvesting the returns in those same businesses each fall.

With very few exceptions, these community banks would survive the coming crash and subsequent corrections nearly unscathed. Ultra-conservative in the most reassuring way, balloon mortgages and financial chicanery were as out of their fiscal reach as beyond their moral one. Risky loans are rarely made at these banks. There is a practical reason for this: any loan to a person who relies almost solely upon the weather for their livelihood is risky. With all their risk in the agriculture and seafood industry, housing risk was often regarded as an unnecessary addition. Failure in the crabbing industry is more dangerous even than a drought. Farmers have crop insurance. But if watermen have crabs and oysters to sell and literally no one to buy them, it sets off a chain reaction. Bankers are caught short not only on their operational loans to the watermen and the seafood production industry, but also for the personal mortgages, car loans, and other financial instruments used by the business owners and their employees.

So when Brooks and the others went to their banks and warned them of a potential disaster — they had not enough workers and there were no workers to be had — it sent a quiet chill through the Eastern Shore financial world.

Dorchester County is traditionally the region of the Eastern Shore with the highest seasonally adjusted unemployment. Ocean City will sometimes swing Worcester County’s unemployment rate in the low-to-mid 20s, but that represents seasonal workers who squirrel away summer dollars as they flow. Bartenders, waitress, and other workers in the high-income, ready-cash service industry not only learn to budget their incomes, but have the money to do so and, because of their average weekly salaries, can survive on the modest unemployment benefits they receive. For workers such as those in the crab industry who hover around minimum wage, there is no money to stretch. Unemployment pays on a yearly average. That’s eight month’s worth of pay divided by 12 and reduced by one-third.

Dorchester County hovers between 8 and 10 percent in the best of times. In the spring of 2009, it was just over 11 percent.

Brooks and his compatriots realized they would be short workers before the last crab was picked the previous year and made a plan for a major recruiting push as the season came. Desperate, Brooks purchased a bus and hired a driver. He arranged with Baltimore social services to pick up those who were out of unemployment insurance and looking for work. The first day 15 people were signed up to come; two were on the bus. One of them was the driver.

When the driver rolled up with an empty bus the next day, Brooks was flabbergasted. Eventually, he had the driver just take a car to save on gas and finally squashed the project, placing his hopes on a job fair.

He joined with seven other businesses to hold a job fair. They solicited the help of local news organizations and the concerted effort of the social services corps. They also spent a small fortune on advertisements and billboards. As a result of all that work, they had seven applicants, five of whom never showed to their first day of work and two who quit after one day of picking.

It was on the heels of this disaster that Brooks picked up his first piece of good luck. Newscaster Tom Brokaw was beginning a tour that would take him along U.S. Route 50, from Ocean City, Maryland to Sacramento, California. His first featured stop was J.M. Clayton’s, and the national attention gave Brooks’ legislative supporters just the boost they needed just as they needed it.

In addition to the practical safeguards the crabbing industry initiated as soon as it was clear there wouldn’t be enough workers, they also took systemic action. Brooks and the other local producers, aided by Brent Gilroy, a waterman and lobbyist for the industry’s “Save Our Seafood” campaign, began petitioning Congress. Senator Barbara Mikulskii and Representative Frank Kratovil — a “Blue Dog” Democrat swept into office with the 2008 elections — had both been working with the departments of Labor and Homeland Security to see what could be done to extend the H2B program or suspend or expand the visa limits to get the Maryland watermen the much-needed fingers to pick the crabs that would soon be harvested. Making any needed or substantive changes to the law was out of the question for two reasons. The first was the nature of Homeland Security for whom any ease in migration rules or increase in the number of allowed foreign nationals was a nonstarter. The second was the influence labor — the unions and worker’s rights groups — had over the political process.

While lobbyist Gilroy is no particular friend to big labor, he admits unions have legitimate concerns about H2B rule changes. H2B workers, if allowed into the country unchecked and without tight regulation could pose a legitimate threat to organized labor. Gilroy, Brooks, and the rest of the seafood industry do not. Nothing about an unlimited number of crab pickers, oyster shuckers, or fish gutters and sorters poses even the most remote threat to organized labor writ large. But H2B workers are not limited to working in the seafood industry. Organized labor worries about the effect minimum wage labor could have on the jobs Americans still prize, such as in construction or manufacturing. These are industries with much more predictable bottom lines, and for companies hoping to improve theirs by reducing their overhead, a nearly unlimited pool of inexpensive labor is an attraction for which they are willing to fight. It is in this position, squarely between the anti-union and pro-labor forces one of the country’s oldest production lines finds itself.

Unable to make any headway in pleas for leniency or negotiations for change, Mikulski and Kratovil eventually found a back door. If they could not prevail upon the bureaucracy to change, they might be able to convince it to take another look at the record.

“There were 25,000 unissued visas uncovered by the audit,” Brooks says. He and the rest of the industry were able to secure the labor they needed for the summer, and a complete and utter collapse of the crabbing industry was miraculously avoided. That the Department of Labor could mislay half of the visas they were charged with issuing, only to find them after requests from legislators from around the country, is apparently possible. For the skeptics out there (and this writer is surely among them), there is no evidence that this storybook ending was anything more than coincidence. But for whatever reason, the complete collapse of the Eastern Shore’s seafood industry — as well as the industries in the Gulf, Mid-Atlantic, and Pacific northwest states — was averted.

By November, 2009 the housing collapse was well underway, and it was pretty obvious neither the construction industry nor the landscaping industry would be needing too many H2B visas. The temporary stay of execution that the region’s crabbing industry received has so far been extended.

Women have smaller fingers and can make more money picking crabs than can a man, which is why the industry is dominated by them. Sisters, mothers and daughters vie with husbands and brothers for a middle class living in Mexico funded by nine months of work abroad. For Mark Phillips, who runs Russell Hall Seafood in Hooper’s Island with his father, this fact is as natural as was his decision to follow his father into the business. In government, nepotism is one of the most reviled ways to obtain work. In the real world, it is commonly thought one of the best.

It is a rainy Saturday on Hooper’s Island, the birthplace of the Eastern Shore crabbing industry and, by extension, the Maryland Blue Crab. There are no shoulders to speak of along the road, and so a car must yield to people fishing along the archipelago’s bridges as well as to those walking along the side. Two mexican women saunter along, enjoying the clammy early afternoon. It is the end of a brutal summer, and every type of weather is an improvement over the violent drought with record-high temperatures that has gripped the area and sent most of the farmers to check the fine print on their crop insurance policies. The entire Eastern Shore has been declared an agricultural disaster area, and there is significant worry about getting feed for the chickens that are the backbone of the regional economy.

Saturdays and Sundays are usually a day off for the H2B workers, and many are enjoying the intermittent rain stirred up by Tropical Storm Isaac, which was still dithering in the Caribbean. The docks, though, are not without activity. Workers sort fish and the picking room is full and active. Given the choice, many of the regular workers decided that a day picking was better than a day watching the rain and so have taken the opportunity Phillips provided — or, more to the point, the watermen had provided — by fishing through Friday evening into the weekend.

Phillips had Isaac’s number long before the weather channel had it. He’s seen every part of the building that wasn’t made of brick blown into the sea and recently replaced a propane tank that exploded during a violent storm. People who depend on the weather are sensitive to it.

“That’s going to the Gulf,” Phillips says of the approaching storm. It wasn’t hope, it was matter of fact, as if he’d been asked what would happen to a lead weight dropped from a building.

If Phillips is in his 40s, he’s only just arrived there. Smoking a light, filtered cigarette while catching a break from a busy day, he’s still got plenty of energy left, which is good, because a workboat pulled in with another dozen bushels. The potential hurricane is of more than a passing interest to both the processors and the watermen. A hurricane can sweep away the crab pots or, even worse, the crabs themselves and end the season in a matter of hours. When you have enough workers and enough demand, it is the hurricane you fear most because it is the primary threat to that year’s livelihood.

Spanish music plays on the radio in the picking room and two dozen or so women chat and laugh and pick crabs like mad. These women are paid by the pound and, although there is a minimum pay guarantee, there is no provision keeping them from besting the minimum, and many do it soundly. Crabs are relatively plentiful, and Phillips says he’s grateful both that there are crabs to pick and workers willing to pick them on a Saturday. Labor Day is just around the corner, and the region will see its last major tourism push for the season. Phillips and the rest of the producers should have no trouble selling all the crabs they can get picked; watermen should have no trouble selling all the crabs they can catch, and bankers should have no trouble collecting operating loans and issuing new ones.

Outside of the picking room Phillips has a brief conversation with two of the dock workers — thin men with thinner mustaches, wearing nondescript ball caps and blue work shirts — presumably in Crab Spanish. They nod, he smiles, and the group breaks to go about its tasks.

Phillips employs two brothers whose two sisters work at a crab picking house across the creek. He also employs two sisters whose brothers work the docks for that same employer. Families working to get one another into the business is as common in Mexico as it is anywhere else in the world. It’s good work when you can get it, and, especially with a reference from a trusted and annual employee, you can get it when there are visas.

“I can’t tell you where we’d be without these workers,” Phillips says.

That is the very case lobbyist Gilroy continues to try and make to the lawmakers. “For every H2B worker, 2.5 American jobs are protected,” he says.

His citation comes from a study done by Douglas W. Lipton, an associate professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Maryland. It was a number Lipton essentially stumbled across during an inquiry into the health of Maryland’s seafood processing industry. Their presence means everyone else along the supply chain — from waterman to delivery truck drivers — has reliable work through the season. According to Lipton’s study, which used data collected between 2003 and 2007, producers using H2B workers provide 87 percent of Maryland crab meat. That number, Gilroy says, has likely increased over the last five years.

Unfortunately, balancing out organized labor’s concerns with the seafood industry’s needs remains a problem with no clear solution. The distance remains great between the two sides, and there are no real compromises on the immediate horizon. H2B reform has been taken up by both Mikulski and her Alabama counterpart, Republican Senator Richard Shelby, who have been working with the seafood industry as well as with the departments of Labor and Homeland Security toward a better understanding.

Although for now it remains his father’s area of expertise, the problem of securing workers is something Phillips may have to become intimately familiar with in the coming years. Housing continues to see monthly upticks, and construction numbers get stronger with each sampling. Just as the boom times can’t last forever, it is only a matter of time before the recession loosens, and the race to get H2B workers resumes.

With a little more than two months left in the season, Phillips remains confident in and grateful for the workers he was able to get. He returns to the docks to help finish out the afternoon’s work. Less than ten miles away, on Farmer’s Circle Road in Bishops Head, someone has collected a pile of garbage and is trying like hell to make it burn in the rain.

This story originally appeared in Sea Level Magazine, October 2011