“I did not start out as a writer interested in organized labor,” Hamilton Nolan writes in The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor; “I started out as a writer interested in why America was so fucked up. Why did we have such gargantuan levels of inequality? Why were thousands of homeless people living in the streets of cities where billionaires frolicked in penthouses? Why was it that certain classes of people worked hard their entire lives and stayed poor, just as their parents had been, and just as their children seemed doomed to be? Even while labor unions had fallen almost completely out of the public mind, it turned out that they were central to all our most fundamental problems.” In this live episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore on Dec. 6, 2024, Max speaks with Nolan about his new book, what the ongoing war on workers’ rights and unions tells us about the “fucked up” society we’re living in, and what lessons labor can teach us now about how to fight and win, even in the darkest of times. Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL–CIO, also makes a special guest appearance in the second half of the episode.
Additional links/info below…
- Hamilton’s website, Facebook page, and X page
- Hamilton Nolan, Hachette Books, The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor
- Red Emma’s website, Facebook page, and Instagram
- David Dayen, In These Times, “Meet the militant flight attendant leader who threatened a strike—and helped stop Trump’s shutdown”
Permanent links below…
- Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
- Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
- In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
- The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page
Featured Music…
- Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song
Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Analysis:
Mic check. Mic check. We’re going to go ahead and get started with tonight’s event. It is always, always, always good to see you at Red Emma’s bookstore Coffeehouse. There are many things you could be doing. The weather cleared up nicely, cold as hell, but it was a beautiful afternoon, so you might’ve been somewhere else. You chose to be here with us in community and in the struggle capitals, and that is never lost upon us. I’m the poet known as analysis. Welcome on behalf of the entire team Hamilton. Nolan is a longtime labor journalist who was written about labor, politics and class war for publications such as Gawker in these Times, the Guardian and More. Speaking of Gawker Media, he helped organize them in 2015. That became the first yes, yes, yes. First online media company to unionize. He’s based in Brooklyn, New York has a publication called How Things Work, and you can find that at his website, hamilton nolan.com, Hamilton nolan.com.
We are joined in conversation this evening by Red Emmas fan. Max Alvarez is the editor in chief of the Real News Network, the host of the podcast, working people, PhD in history and comparative literature from University of Michigan and does so much more, writes for so many things. Speaking of writing, we have one copy. How many copies did I say? One copy of Max’s book, the Work of Living. Where can people talk about their lives and dreams and the year That World ended This right over there. So you should get that along with tonight’s book. We are so glad to get into this labor history. It is very important. I need y’all to give up some real radical roof rays and red ass noise for in conversation with Max Alvarez and presenting the hammer power. I love this subtitle. Listen to this Power inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Y’all make some noise for Hamilton Nolan.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, thank you so much analysis. Thank you once again to the great Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore coffee house and gathering space. This is a really important space for our community, so just wanted as always to thank our hosts and encourage y’all to please support Red Emma’s because we need places like this to plan the next steps, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in the second part of our conversation today. And I couldn’t be more grateful to be in conversation with my man, Hamilton Nolan about that because I often find myself looking to Hamilton for answers or guidance or even just a little dose of strength that I can kind of get to help me get out of bed and keep fighting. Hamilton is a role model for so many of us in the labor journalism and labor media world, and I’m so proud of him and everything that he’s done, especially this incredible new book that we’re here to talk about today, which as analysis said is called The Hammer Power Inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Hamilton, thank you so much for joining me today and Baltimore brother and welcome.
Hamilton Nolan:
Thank you and thank you Red Emmas. This is my first time at Red Emmas and I love everything about this place already, so I’ll definitely be back and thank you all for coming and thank you Max, who by the way, if you all don’t know, is definitely one of the best labor journalists in the United States America, and we are lucky to have him here in Baltimore, so thank you for having me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you, brother. That means the world to me and who boy do we got a lot to talk about, right? I mean, I’m thinking we’re never going to be able to sum up the richness and depth and importance of this book in a 60 minute talk, right? That’s an unfair aim to have in any book talk. So I want to encourage everyone first and foremost to please buy and read this book. If you are finding yourself, like me feeling overwhelmed by anxiety, fear, anger, resentment, all these heavy feelings that you don’t know what to do with, but you are looking for something to do, you were looking for more that you can do to fight back and to keep us from falling further into the abyss. I would highly recommend that you start with this book and you’ll find a lot of hard truths and a lot of warm comfort in it through the stories of our fellow workers, past and present and through Hamilton’s fierce and righteous perspective.
And so Hamilton, I want to by way of introducing the book sort of jump into the moment that we’re in right now because everyone is sort of looking at the past eight to 10 years to try to understand what the hell happened in this country that not only led us to elect Donald Trump president the first time, but now a second time with a fully magnified GOP controlling effectively all branches of government. And there are a lot of different narratives about the last eight to 10 years that cherry pick stories about the working class and their politics, our politics and so on. I wanted to ask you, Hamilton Nolan, what does the last eight to 10 years in this country look like through the lens of labor and through the lives of the working people that you report on for a living?
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah, thank you, man. It’s a great question and obviously one I’ve thought about a lot and you’ve thought about a lot, probably everybody in this room has thought about a lot. I think I’m going to cheat a little bit because I’m going to go back a little bit farther because I think you have to go back a little bit farther to really answer that question. And I will go back to the end of World War II 1950s in America. It’s going to be short though. I’m not going to talk that one, but the context being that after World War II in this country, one in three working people in America was a union member, and what did that produce that produced what is looked back on now as the golden age of America? Ironically, look back on by Republicans in particular, I was like, wow, that’s the time we need to get back to one in three working people in this country was a union member and America was prosperous, but that level of unionization in this country meant that the prosperity that America had was widely shared.
So we had the greatest shared prosperity for a good 20 to 30 year period. It was really a golden age in the history of America. All that prosperity was widely shared because working people in this country had the power to take their share of that wealth thanks to high levels of unionization. And over time the decline of unions in America in the mid 1950s about one in three workers was union member. Today it’s one in 10, and that’s been a slow downward decline for all those years, and particularly beginning in 1980 with the Reagan era. I was born in 1979. So this kind of the story of my lifetime is that we saw this inequality, crisis, economic inequality, crisis in particular start to rise up in America. And of course Reagan’s assault on unions and worker power was a big part of enabling that. And there’s a really famous chart that a lot of you probably seen, and one line is the decline of union density in America.
It goes down like that. And then the other line is the rise of the wealth held by the top 10% in America and it goes up like that and it’s perfect mirror images, perfect mirror images. So those two things are not coincidental. Those two things are one enabled the other. And so I think to bring it up to today, I think that it’s just the nature of societies that inequality can only rise for so long before stuff starts to break and stuff starts to break down, the social contract starts to break down, the political system starts to break down. People stop believing in the American dream because it becomes increasingly obvious that the American dream is kind of a sham. And I think that is the environment that fostered a guy like Trump who is not only a Republican, but also like a conman and just clearly a scam artist and all the sort of worst qualities come to the fore.
But I remember I covered Trump when he was running in 2016 and 2015, and one thing that always stuck with me from the 2016 election was that in West Virginia, which was one of the highest states in America for voting for Trump in the democratic primary, Bernie won every county in West Virginia. So what is that? That’s people being like, we need something different. We need the most different thing that we can find. And I think that is what’s led us to Trump the hollowness of what neoliberalism produced in this country, the failure of America to share his prosperity, crushing unions crushing working people’s ability to get their fair share of the wealth that this country produces, which is still, by the way, the most wealth any nation in the history of the world has ever produced we’re rich as hell. It’s just that all the money goes to the very top. All those things I think conspire to form atmosphere where a guy like Trump can rise up. And I guess the story of the last election is that in those eight years, the opposition did not rally itself to fix the underlying problems that contributed to Trump getting in the first place. So here we are.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I want to tease that out just a bit more, right? Since it’s, again, this is in the air that we’re breathing right now, it’s everywhere, especially if anyone’s like, I understand why you would maybe not be following the news so closely these days because exhausting. So I do understand that, but it’s all that anyone’s talking about right now. So I do want to sort of ask you if you could also take this and respond to the discussions and debates that are being had right now from mainstream news all the way to independent channels like ours all across social media, Democrats abandoning the working class and reaping what they’ve sown, Republicans having this quote, great realignment and a lot of working people supporting Trump and maga. And you really, I think helped us understand some of the complex reasons that might happen. But I want to ask you if you have, what you feel is missing from those debates right now, especially in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory.
Hamilton Nolan:
I mean, I do think one thing that’s not getting really enunciated enough or made clear enough, especially in the discussion after the election of the sort of alleged working class shift to Republicans, and some of it was real. I mean, there has been a real certain amount of shift of lower income votes to Trump, but one thing that didn’t get brought up, and especially in the ways that the Democrats panic about that, and a democratic political consultant is probably the least equipped person in the world to solve that problem. They’re all millionaires who live in dc. But I mean, what I think didn’t get talked about enough specifically was that the union votes still went to Democrats by the same healthy margin that it had in the past. So actual union members did not shift to Trump, not that Harris was so great or anything, but the actual union vote stayed to the left.
And so I think that, and I’m a broken record maybe, but when we talk about, oh, the working class, how are we going to bring the working class back, raise union density, get more people into unions, and you get people into organizations that actually can do political education, people’s relationship with politics can’t just be seen ads on tv. I mean, that’s not politics. And politics is being in an organization that can help people fight for their own interests, whether it’s electorally, whether it’s in the workplace or anywhere else. Unions are the foundation of that in America. The labor movement is the foundation of that. Even though it’s gotten very weak, it’s still demonstrated even in the last election when working class people shifted to the right union members didn’t. So unions are an essential ingredient to American democracy. And when we talk about the declining in unions, it’s not just a story about economics. It’s not just people aren’t earning enough money anymore. It is a story of the loss of power, the loss of regular people’s ability to exercise power, political power in particular. And so I think that’s something that has not been discussed enough, at least in the mainstream news though I’m sure on real news. Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah, we got you baby. And I want to come back to the union question in a second, but I think you make a tremendously important point, right? Given the sort of post World War II context that you gave us in the beginning all the way up till now, and like you said, our lifetimes are effectively the arc of this decline. We are sort of like and bear the living imprints of Neoliberalism’s like rise and fall, and we bear in our family stories and experiences like the effects of a failed ideology, well failed for us. But for the past 40 years, that has been what working people across the board have experienced, and whether they are joining unions or trying to form unions in larger numbers than we’ve seen in a generation in recent years or going on strike, whether they’re burning down police precincts or voting for explicitly anti-establishment politicians like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, that being the linkage that there’s an anti-establishment rage harnessed in there, all of those things are sort of different and even interlocking responses to a crisis that’s been building for our entire lifetimes.
And I think that’s what drives me so nuts about the ways that the media talks about politics and then those of us who consume the media learn to think about politics and it limits the scope of how we can think. George Orwell wrote this a century ago, I’m not saying anything new here, but I think that’s such an important point because if you don’t have that deeper historical context, if you don’t understand that what people are responding to every two to four years, they’re responding to a crisis that’s been building for 40 or 50. And so in fact, what’s more telling about our political situation, not just here in the US but around the world, is that we are in what many analysts are calling an anti incumbent period. Because again, what we just lived through the past three election cycles we haven’t seen in our lifetime where the incumbent party was voted out each time.
Hamilton Nolan:
I mean a two party system which we have, which unfortunately, and I think the older I get, the more I realize how bad a two party system is shitty system. But in a two party system, every election is a referendum on reality. And so if reality sucks, you get that pendulum nature that we see in America and that we’ve seen for much of the 20th century and into this century as well where the ping pong and back in America, we don’t have parties that have 40 year runs on top of the government. Why is that? Because all the dissatisfaction with the status quo is always going to be channeled to kicking out the party in power.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And again, traced along that timeline from when you were born to now, not only has union density just plummeted down to barely 10% in this country, but with that is all the neoliberal poison that has eroded the very foundations of our society, our democracy, everything, corporate consolidation, deregulation, privatization, globalization. These processes have been building up and accumulating. And it’s not that it’s anything new, it’s just that it’s taken this long for so many working people to feel it at this level, I think. And so that, sorry, did you have something to jump in on? No go. Because I think that leads us to where and why unions became such a central point for you, and in the same way that they become a central point for so many people in recent years looking for hope. Yeah. So talk about your path to understanding unions as an important institution. You didn’t start there. You didn’t set out to be a union guy
Hamilton Nolan:
And both of us, the fact that we sit here and talk about union so much is weird in media, in politics, unions are still considered this sort of niche story off to the side. And when I started and became a journalist, I didn’t start out to be a labor reporter. I was just like, I want to write about why is America fucked up? Why the rich get richer in the poor, get poorer? Why is there homeless people sleeping on the street and then there’s rich people in the penthouse, basic super basic stuff that all of us are like, why is that so broken? And over the years as I reported on all those things, I found myself repeatedly being drawn back to issues, to labor issues, to worker power, to the decline of worker power and the consequences of that and the ripple effects of that, and learned about the history of unions and the history of labor and the way that that had affected our economy, the way that that had affected our politics.
And over the years, just pursuing the threads of those really basic questions. Why is America broken in the ways that it’s broken today? I ended up becoming a full-time labor reporter because I found over and over again that labor issues were at the center of all those questions. The inequality crisis was directly spawned by the attack on labor power in this country. And the inequality crisis is the thing that was destabilizing our country in all the ways that manifest in a million different ways, including Donald Trump and a lot of other things. So I mean, I just sort of increasingly covered labor over the years because I was like, wow, this stuff is so important, so important, so important. And at the same time as I was looking around the media and being like, nobody’s really talking about this that much. I mean, people cover politics in really stupid ways, and there’s not that much attention on things that are actually more, in many cases, a union election is more consequential than a political election in the sense of the impact that it’s going to have not just on the lives of those workers, but the ripple effects going to have through the economy, the way it’s going to change the balance of power economically in a city, in an industry.
Those things have long-term ripple effects down through years and through generations, and they change families and they change people’s lives, and it’s a very, very undercover aspect of America in the media, in journalism. And so I think one of the reasons I kept on writing about labor over the years was just like nobody else was. Not nobody you were doing it, but relatively speaking, not that many people are writing about this stuff. That was actually really important, and that’s still true today, unfortunately.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just a small aside, please, please support any and all labor journalists that you follow. Support Hamilton Substack. Please support the real news support freelance writers like Kim Kelly, support great labor writers. Publishing for places in these times, Jacobin all over the place, local papers, the people doing the beats in their local area, they’re the only person covering labor stories. Support it, please. Otherwise it goes away.
Hamilton Nolan:
Max, how did you get into labor?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I’ll sort of give a condensed version that hooks into the union question for the same reasons that you do. I feel a little weird when people ask my opinion about unions or I’ve become known as a union guy or someone who knows a lot about unions because I interview a shit ton of union workers and cover a lot of labor stories, but that is not where I started covering labor. I started the podcast that I’m still doing working people. Years ago when I was still a broke grad student, we were living in Ann Arbor, and I say a joke that I almost started the show as a ruse to get my dad to talk about losing our house and losing everything that I had grown up with, losing the American dream in his mind because for years it had just eaten our family away.
It had taken my father away from me, the lights rum, but no one was there. My parents’ marriage was on the rocks, and that was so stunning to all of us. I was working at warehouses as a temp worker 12 years ago when this was all happening. It was really bad. And we grew up deeply conservative Republicans pro capitalists. The crash was a huge ideological crash for us because we saw how much the system we believed in and that we believed we could work within to make a good life for ourselves was so nakedly rigged in favor of the very people who had caused millions of families like ours to lose everything. And it was our going government bailing them out, and it was our media saying, Hey, the economy’s great while I’m sitting there on a couch with my dad in the house we were going to lose in two years.
So I started doing labor journalism on my podcast because I did not want my father to go to his grave feeling like a failure. And I kept doing the podcast because I saw how much, and I knew how much pain you accrue as a human being in such an inhuman system that chews us up and spits us out until we have nothing left to give that gets us accustomed to being paid so little and treated so poorly and what that does to your heart and your psyche. I wanted people to have a space to talk about that and to tell the stories of labor through the human stories of regular people. And it was years in the making that I came to understand a, people don’t deserve this. Well, I mean, I knew that from the beginning, but there’s something they could do about it. And that’s how I came to understand, oh shit, they had unions. I am seeing people come to the same conclusion. I’m seeing how they’re improving their lives by struggling together to exercise that, right?
Hamilton Nolan:
It’s really like one of the best parts of being a labor journalist. The stuff that we do, and you would probably agree with this, I don’t want to speak for you, but it is just like when I was at Gawker during the recession out of 2008, 2009, I did this series of unemployment stories. So I just had people who had become unemployed right in and tell their story. We published this every week for 40 weeks, 40 week long series, hundreds and hundreds of people telling their own stories. I got more thank you notes from people about that than probably anything I’ve ever written. And I didn’t write any of it. It was all their stories. And just giving people the ability to tell their own stories is such a blessing. And in unions, when I’ve been on book tour most of this year, I’ve been like all over the country and everywhere I go, I meet people who would just be like somebody who has worked in their union for 20 years, 30 years, been a member, been active, been elected, been a shop steward, whatever it is, and nobody’s ever told that person that was important that you did that it was actually important.
And so I think that’s what we do. We’re very lucky because in a sense you get to let people speak and you also get to tell people that they’re legitimately important in a way that they might have never even heard before.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put. I mean, I am reminded of it week in and week out, just how much we all need that and how little we all get it. And there’s a hopeful note in that because that’s a gift that we can all give one another, listening to each other and talking to each other, showing your scars, telling your stories. That’s how workers learn that they’re being paid different rates all the way up to, again, the raw human stuff. That is, that’s what labor journalism is about. It’s not about unions, it’s about people struggling for a better life, a good life, and that manifests in the need that you can’t move anymore because of a work-related injury. So you can’t play T-ball with your kids, the life quality of life you lose because of someone else’s greed and negligence. I mean, it comes through in stories like that.
And there’s so many in Hamilton’s book, there’s so many in the work, in the articles he’s written, the interviews that I’ve done. And I think we all have a duty to sort of try to reconnect with each other on that human level for nothing else, to remind one another that we’re not alone. We’re not worthless. We deserve better than this. And every life is beautiful, and people need to be seen that way before they can see themselves that way and believe that they can even fight for a better world and that they deserve one. And so in that regard, I wanted to bring, I actually brought a prop, which was like, I didn’t expect this to be so relevant, but I have here in my hand for those listening to this, a cup from Tudor’s Biscuit World in West Virginia. I won’t go into the backstory of how I got this cup, but I found myself in Huntington, West Virginia and saw this restaurant that looked like a throwback to the eighties.
And I was like, oh, shit, I want to get a biscuit and I’m going to get a cup. But then I read your book and I was like, I wanted to throw the cup at the wall. So I wanted to ask, just by way of, again, really bringing us back to the book, there’s a really important story here about Tudor’s biscuit world. I wanted to ask if you could tell us a bit about that, the incredible person at the center of it, and also what this story says about everything you’re talking about, both the need for unions and also the reality that working people are up against when they try to exercise their rights.
Hamilton Nolan:
So the book is about, as you said, the gap between the potential that unions have to really, and I completely still believe today, and the seed of this book was being a labor reporter and getting involved in unions myself, organizing my workplace and all this stuff. And you’re like, wow, unions are so powerful. Unions are the tool. All these things that were broken, here’s the tool that can fix ’em all. This is so great. We just need to give everybody unions and we’re going to fix all these problems. And then you get involved in the actual labor movement and you start looking around, you’re like, this shit is broken, and that shit’s broken and they’re not organizing and nobody has unions and people don’t know about you. And it’s like it’s all a mess. So the gap between the potential of unions to sort of save this country innocence, and then the reality of the labor movement and organized labor being broken in a lot of ways is kind of the seed of this book.
So one of the chapters in the book I want to write about just something which should be one of the most basic things that anybody can do, which is a person organizing their own workplace. Every union started somewhere. And generally it started with one person who’s like, we should have a union here. So I went to West Virginia. Tudor’s Biscuit world is like, if any of you’re from West Virginia, you already know what it is, but it’s like West Virginia’s homegrown fast food chain biscuits and breakfast and stuff like that. People love it. In West Virginia, there was a woman named Cynthia who worked at a Tudor’s biscuit world, tiny town called View West Virginia. She had grown up in a union family. Her dad was in a union. So she, like many people in West Virginia, which has really strong union culture, knew about unions, had connections to unions.
And after she retired, she got a job at Tudors of Biscuit World. She was there for a while and she was like, these people aren’t paying our overtime. My colleagues aren’t getting their time off. The manager’s abusing us all. And she was like, we need a union. Her dad was in a union to her, it was a very natural thought to have. So she was like, I’m going to unionize this tutor’s biscuit world. She called her husband’s union, which was like the operating engineers. They were like, we don’t really do Tudor’s Biscuit world, but eventually put her in touch with the guy at UFCW who agreed to help her out with this organizing campaign, came out there to Elk View, helped her run a union campaign inside tutors, which little did she know at the time was one of the only fast food union campaigns in the United States of America.
I mean, you could count on one hand the number of even organizing drives at fast food stores in the United States at that time. So very, very unique thing that she was doing, even though to her it seemed completely natural and normal. And as she went to organize this workplace, which probably had 25 workers at this tutors, tutors sent in the union busting team, the corporate union busting team arrived, and new managers start showing up at work. And this is a very, very small town, LVUS Virginia. And so people start getting threats. Some people start getting bribes, we’ll give you a watch, we’ll give you a promotion, vote against the union. One person at one point, somebody knocked on their door and their kid was getting ready to go to I think the University of West Virginia, and they were like, the scholarship might be in danger if you vote for this union.
That was the kind of thing that was happening at a freaking fast food restaurant. And so when the vote came around and people got fired, of course, and they lost the vote by only a couple of votes, and failed to successfully unionize this tutors and filed a bunch of unfair labor practice charges, which got upheld, but everybody went and got new jobs because you’re getting paid $8 an hour, $9 an hour at this job in the first place. So it’s just such a story of an uphill battle. And the thing that she set out to do was so basic. It’s something that ideally really, you should be able to do that in a day. You work at a bookstore, you talk to the people that you’re like, we should have a union set up the election. Bam. That’s how easy it should be to form a union at your workplace. And the reality of what a struggle was for her, I think is illuminating story for us and also for the labor movement itself and for the labor movement to look at and be like, why are we unable to provide the resources that people need to successfully accomplish this thing at a fucking 25 person fast food restaurant, much less a 2,500 person factory or on and on.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to drill down on that for a second because I think there are two crucial points there. One, about the reality of the past few years and the uptick in organizing, the increasing militancy, the creativity of strike strategies, the voting in of more democratic caucuses and major unions like the UAW and Teamsters and so on and so forth. So there’s been a lot of movement in the movement over the past few years, and we’ve been there covering it, and it’s exciting, and that’s how a lot of people know who we are. But one of the things that constantly freaks me out and stresses me out and bums me out is that we are still living in a kind of time and place and media ecosystem that conditions us to have no long-term memories, no long-term commitment to struggles that even we deeply care about.
And we see the results of that when strikes the Pittsburgh Post Gazette are still going on, and people have forgotten about ’em, just like we forgot about the coal miners in Alabama. And they effectively lost just like everyone loved the Starbucks drive, but they’re still fighting for first contracts. A lot of those stores that got closed aren’t reopened. A lot of people’s lives have changed and they moved on. We keep talking about the labor wave as if it’s still going unabated, but we’re not dealing with the reality of that people trying to exercise that right, have run into over these past few years. But then there’s also, and this is what I wanted to ask you about on the larger labor, organized labor side, all the way up to the leadership of the a Ffl CIO, current president, Liz Schueller said at the convention that our goal is to organize a million new workers in 10 years. That is such a small dream for such a big crisis. So I wanted to ask you for your thoughts on that. And also we need to be dreaming bigger. What are the bigger dreams that workers and the movement need to be having right now?
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah, I mean, today 10% of workers in America are union members. That’s the last stop before single digits,
And there’s no stop after single digits. That’s the last stop on the elevator. So we are in a fucking crisis, man. And the first thing is the world of organized labor, which still, by the way, has 16 million people in America and unions have billions of dollars. And there is a considerable amount of resources in organized labor, even though it’s been weakened for many decades. They need to see it as a crisis. First of all, the leadership of the institutions of organized labor, and I compare it a lot to climate change because it’s like this slow moving crisis. It gets a little bit worse every year, but it goes slow enough that you can kind of ignore it. So it gets a little bit warmer every year and the water comes up this much, but you can kind of ignore, it’s not in your house yet.
And the same way union density goes down every year, 0.2%, 0.3%. If you’re running a union, you can kind of ignore that. It’s not really destroying what you have, but over time, that leads you to oblivion. The first thing we really need is a sense of urgency among the leaders of the labor movement. And then we need them to open the checkbooks and start from the premise that we need to double the amount of union members in this country. We need to organize the next 10 million people. What you touched on the story of Liz Schuler, the A-F-L-C-O convey, I went to the a Ffl CO convention in 2022, which is like the presidential convention of the labor movement. And there was a new president taking over the Scheller, and she made a big splashy announcement for her introductory speech taking over the A-F-L-C-O. And her big announcement was, we are going to commit to organize a million new workers in 10 years.
And everybody clapped, it’s like a million sounds big. And so I pulled out a calculator and did about one minute worth of math. And it turns out that if you unionize a million new workers in 10 years, union density will continue to go down because it’s not even enough to keep up with the new jobs that will be created in that time. So the goal, the aspiration of the biggest institution in the union world was to keep declining. And that to me is so emblematic of the fucking problem at the center of organized labor. And it’s interesting because at the same time as a labor reporter, you can go all over the country and meet the most inspiring people you ever met in your whole life in unions, in the labor movement, organizers, local presidents, activists, workers, all these people, brave people, smart people fighting, dedicating their life to this cause. I mean, there’s a bazillion incredibly inspiring stories and incredibly inspiring people inside the labor movement, but the farther up you go, the less inspiring it tends to get. And one of the things I read about in my book is I followed Sarah Nelson, who’s a great labor leader, the head of the Association of Attendants, and she sort of wrestled with the question of how to be a leader of this movement. She’s sitting right there, by the way, she’s in the house tonight.
But I think the importance of that was sort how do we wrestled the leadership of this movement into the right place, tons of great people in the labor movement, and yet the leadership is so disappointing and it’s hurting us and it hurts us every year continually until we figure out how to fix it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, you anticipated my final question before we open it up to q and a, but if I can, I actually wanted to pose my final question to both you and Sara. A) because, yeah, Sara Nelson features heavily in this book and you learn a lot about Sara, her career and just what an incredible human being and fighter she is and what she’s fighting for. But also, if we recall, we saw this woman on the news a few years ago during the first Trump administration, during the government shutdown saying, fuck this. We’re going to general strike till you assholes get back to work. And that’s what stopped the government shutdown. So I really don’t want to put you on the spots here, but I kind of do and kind of already have. I wanted to ask both of you guys, what can we take from the first Trump administration to really get our heads and hearts right for the fight ahead, moving into a second Trump administration, but also again, in the vein of dreaming bigger, what do we need to correct or expand in this next dark period that we didn’t do in the last administration?
And then I’ll ask everyone to applaud and we’ll open up to audience questions. But yeah, Sara, I would love if you could answer that question as well.
Hamilton Nolan:
Alright, I’ll give a quick answer and then you can give a more inspiring answer or whatnot. I mean, we got to get more. The response to where we’re going is to get more hardcore. And the thing that makes me fearful in this moment is not, and I don’t think the people in this room are going to be the problem. I mean, if you’re sitting in this room, we’re probably fairly copacetic in the sense of when you’re faced with fascism, you have to organize more, build the labor movements stronger, fight more or fight back harder. But I think that the Democratic Party, for example, and the portion of this country that coalesces around the Democratic party, there’s going to be a big section of that whose impulse is going to be to compromise this time and to the way that strong men like Trump work is like he makes it so pleasing him is the only way to get anything done.
And so there’s a very powerful incentive for people in the world of politics on all sides to start kissing his ass, start licking his boots, start compromising. You see the president of the Teamsters taking buddy buddy pictures with him. Why is that? It’s because it’s like, well, this is how you get things done in this. But all that does is empower him more. And so it’s like a downward spiral where you give the strong man more and more power. So I think we got to fight harder. I don’t know if we will, but Sarah, what do you think?
Sara Nelson:
All right. Glad I had some bourbon for this. No. Okay, so Max, I could give a lot of answers to this question. First of all, I just want to say that I was back here getting emotional because these two men were sharing very personally and very openly about why this shit matters. And anyway, that was some good stuff, max. That was some good stuff. Okay. So what I’m going to say though is that of course, we got to organize more. We got to take this on. We got to fight, fight, fight. We got to do what Mother Jones said. She said she told the ludlow strikers after they had been gunned down and their tent, that they were sleeping in the cold depths of the Colorado winter while they were on strike against the co barons. And their intensity was burned and women and children were burned in the process.
She came to Ludlow and she said, you will fight and win. You will fight and lose, but you must fight. And part of the story that’s not ever told is that actually minors came with guns and a lot of spirit in their hearts to chase the militia out to chase the Colorado National Guard out, and they set up their own government there in Ludlow for the next six weeks, and they had their funerals and they took care of each other. And ultimately that went away. But that part of the story is never told. And so that is the power of our solidarity. But what did those people learn from that fight? I mean, they were out in that tent city to start with because the coal company was not even following the laws of the state at that time. They were, in some ways, they were just fighting to just enforce the law because they were all immigrants who spoke 28 different languages in that tent city.
And one of the reasons for that is because the co Barrons thought we’re going to hire people from different countries who won’t be able to communicate with each other because that is also going to be a way to make sure that we don’t have a union come in. And what they don’t understand at that level, and I’ve met these people, right? I’ve been in a lot of board rooms. They do not have the corner market on smarts, let me just tell you. But what they don’t understand is that when there’s a mine explosion and the mothers are left to tell their children that not only are their fathers not coming back, but they’re not sure how they’re going to be able to take care of them because none of the mothers can get work. They’re going to have to find another man in order to survive, and they’re trying to comfort their kids and figure out how they’re going to put their lives back together.
You don’t have to speak the same language to understand what’s going on in the heart. So that’s how the union was built. And I think about the last Trump administration, and I’ve really worked at not saying his name, no, it’s really fucking important. Let me just be clear, because our union learned after Carl Icahn fired all the TWA strikers in 1989, that we had to have a different way of striking. And so we looked at creative tactics and we created this strike tactic called chaos, create havoc around our system. And the idea was that we were using this provision of the railway Labor Act that had never been used, that allowed for intermittent strikes to go on strike and off strike. And we decided we would add an element to this, the element of surprise, we were not going to tell you when or where we were going to strike.
And so at Alaska Airlines in 1993, we struck seven flights and brought this deeply anti-union company to its knees who wanted to settle a contract overnight by fax machine that gave the flight attendants a 60% raise. We asked them if they wanted to meet and talk about it. They said, no, no, no. Every time we meet with you, something bad happens. We just want this over with. And so when I’m watching the government shutdown and seeing what’s going on there, and they’re saying that this is because Trump wants to build his southern border wall for security, for national security for our country, that was a bunch of bullshit. It was a 50 year campaign by the GOP to try to privatize everything in our country because if there had been a terrorist attack, that would’ve accrued incredible power to the executive to say, I’ll take care of it.
We’re going to make all these changes. If there had been an aircraft accident, same thing would’ve happened. If nothing had happened, they would’ve said, see, it’s a bunch of bureaucracy that we don’t need, and so we’re going to privatize. And so that was really what was at stake. And once we understood that this was not a political discussion between Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, this was actually an attempt to try to distract people’s so much with the racist fearmongering, xenophobic, racist fearmongering, and keep people focused on all of that and create his own chaos campaign. I’m like, I know this one. We’re going to create a little chaos too. And so we set about talking about a safety strike for flight attendants, and we called on the rest of the labor movement to talk about a general strike because there were 800,000 people either out of work or forced to come to work for free, and another million contract workers who were just out of work with no hope getting anything in return.
This was a crisis and everyone could see it. And the cab driver in DC as I’m talking about this from one place to another, and I’m getting out of my cab and handing him the money, he turns around and grabs my hand. He’s got a tear going down his cheek and he says, thank you. You’re fighting for me too. You don’t think about this shit. But there was no work going on in DC so he didn’t have any cab fairs, so he couldn’t make a living for his family. So it’s all connected and we’re all connected, and if one person is mistreated, we’re all mistreated. But what we have to understand with this next incoming administration is that we cannot talk about Trump. We need to talk about the people who created Trump, the people who are going to give Trump power like you were talking about, and we need to hold them accountable, every one of them.
And we can’t think people think about this stuff in terms of red states and blue states. That’s bullshit. There’s working people everywhere, working people to be organized everywhere, working people to defend everywhere. And that’s how we need to approach this next administration. So the one thing I will say is that during that time, people were like, oh my God, which is what always happens in chaos campaigns. They don’t know where the ball is. So they’re like, oh my God, this is amazing. And one thing we learned is that instead of the typical strike coverage where it will say, how long can the union hold out? People are going to start crossing the line the next day, or people are not going to be able to hold out. They couldn’t say that because we weren’t telling ’em when or where we were going to strike, and they didn’t have their normal playbook. So all of a sudden they had to report on the issues that the workers were fighting for. And so we took control of the narrative, we took control of the schedule, we took control of the situation, and that’s what we as working people can do if we understand that this is all of our fight. But during that time, all these reporters were covering this and they were like, wow, this is amazing. And the one person who asked the question, yeah, but how are you fucking going to really do this was Hamilton Nolan.
So when he said, I’d like to write a book and I’d like to follow you around for a year, I was like, I don’t know. I is. This guy’s going to see right through me. And you did follow me for the worst year of my life. Thanks very much for doing that. But no, I mean, this is a really important book, and if all you do is read the intro and the last chapter, you’re going to know how to fight this next administration and how to take this on. But if you also want to hear some really inspiring stories about people who are trying to make this work and people who have won fights against all odds, read this book. And then the last thing I’ll just say is that laws do not give us power. We have power when we decide to come together and use it. Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s give it up for Sarah Nelson and Hamilton, Nolan, yo
Sara Nelson:
And
Hamilton Nolan:
Max Alvarez.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, man. I’m like, I’m crying, I’m cheering. I’m like, there’s a roller coaster here. So we want to open this up to questions. We know you all have questions for Hamilton, please, yeah, flag analysis down so we can get your questions and everyone can hear ’em also. Yeah, the recorder is going. We will have the audio for this published at the Real News. So if you’d prefer to ask a question but not on recording, Hamilton and I will be available afterwards.
Analysis:
And there’s so much to get into, so much thank you for such a rich discussion that we could talk for hours. Guess what, we don’t have ours. So we want to keep our questions and comments relatively brief and truncated so that we can get a few in. And we have one question here, and then we’re going to take a couple more hands.
Audience Member 1:
And I apologize because usually I don’t do this and I talk shit about people who do. But I’ve got three questions and you don’t have to take, I’m going to ask them, but you don’t have to take any of them. We can take one. So there are not red states and blue states, but there are red counties and blue counties. How do you do the organizing in those red counties? Two is that we’ve had a number of folk like Susan, but also high powered folk like feign at UAW, who’ve actually taken a different approach to labor. Could you talk about their approach to organizing? And then there are three different identities that we’re trying to navigate as workers. So one is our identities as consumers, the other is our gender identity. And then finally, and I think it’s most important actually, is our racial identity because all those things are related to organizing and how we think about ourselves as workers. How do you think about how our successful unions navigating those identity dynamics? Again, you don’t have to take any of them, but the questions are still important.
Hamilton Nolan:
I try to give a sort of broad answer that maybe touches on most of them at least. I think the thing about red states and blue states and red counties and blue counties goes to the heart of why this stuff is so important, particularly in this time that we’re in, where that is held up as such a strong divide in this country. And every election gets stronger. The two sides of the media, the two sides of politics, the two sides of everything. And people think that that is an unbridgeable gap, that this country is going down a road that we’re going down that is actually getting worse and worse, and the divide is getting starker and starker between red and blue. And when, to me, the one thing that can bridge that gap and that can close that gap and erase the distinction between red and blue is the labor movement.
Because I’ve been all over the country, I’ve been in red states and blue states and red counties and blue counties, and working people have common interests. And the fact that the labor movement is weak and that people don’t have access to unions is why they don’t think about that. And they don’t think in those terms. They think in terms of Fox News and CNN and M-S-N-B-C, and that’s not the real story, and that’s not the real story of politics is not Democrats and Republicans. It is working people building their power. And so I think the labor movement gets more important, the starker that red and blue divide gets, because it is the one thing that can bridge that gap and bring working people together. I always think of when the Warrior met coal strike was going on in Alabama, which was the longest strike in America, they had a big rally in Brookwood, Alabama, way out in country Alabama.
Sarah Nelson was there, a bunch of labor leaders were there, and thousands of united mine workers were there. This is country ass Alabama, and it was the most integrated event that I have ever been to in my life. I grew up in the south. I’ve never been to an event that integrated apart from maybe a football game. And this was everybody in that community there. And they were all talking about the evil private equity firm that was stepping on the necks of the workers. And I guarantee that most of those people were probably Trump voters. Oh, no,
Sara Nelson:
I’m sorry. I went to the first week of that strike, and at that first rally, people were real skeptical about the union. They were pissed, so they were out on strike, but they were not sure that they liked their union. And it was not an integrated event. The black workers were over here, the white workers were over here. They were all staying about as far as they could from the union stage where we were having this rally. And they were not talking about who the villain was either. They were just mad. And so after being on strike for six months, I’ll hand it back to Hamilton because that’s what we have to recognize too, is that when we’re out on the picket line and we are defining our issues together, suddenly what our differences are don’t matter as much anymore because we’re all human beings fighting for the same thing.
And you suddenly start to see people differently and you start to hear their stories too. You start to understand those stories better, so you start to understand why the strike matters to them, and then you start to feel connected to why you’re not just fighting for yourself, but you’re fighting for the person next to you too. And so this is where we have the opportunity to break through these gender identities and race identities, and not to wash them away, but to celebrate them and find the strength in that. Because I’m telling you, max, I’m going to fight fucking harder because I heard your story about your dad. That’s what this is about.
Maximillian Alvarez:
There you go. I mean, yeah, give it up and to pile on here, I mean, I can’t stress enough that this is the conclusion that you come to doing the work that we do at the Real News, right? I mean, you hear these stories week in, week out. You can’t help but be affected by them, and you can’t help but feel a duty to not give up on people and to help them fight the fight that needs to be had so that this kind of shit doesn’t happen on the regular. And this is by way of addressing a question about red counties, blue counties, and where the rural urban divide really kind of comes into that. Because like Hamilton has for this book, I mean, we are out there not just interviewing union workers in dense urban areas. We are out there reporting on family farmers in Wisconsin who are the last few hanging on as big agriculture has taken over the entire rural landscape and wipe generations of knowledge, of pride, of land ownership off the board and swallowed it up into the gaping maw of corporate America.
It’s still there. It just looks a little different. And the names on the sides of the trucks are different in rural America, but the same monster is destroying the fabric of our society, whether you live in a red county or a blue county, I see it all the time, not just in the conditions that workers are living under the declining quality of life and access to basic public services and higher cost of living, yada, yada, yada. But I’ve been in deep red Trump country, places like East Palestinian, Ohio, sitting on the stoops of deep red Trump voting Republicans who will say to me, he is like, yeah, look, I don’t care that you’re a socialist weirdo from Baltimore, but because you’ve been there talking about our stories, you’ve been interviewing us, you’ve heard what we’re going through and you keep showing up. And then we got unions to show up and we got environmental justice groups to show up.
We got residents from other sacrifice zones or people living near other rail lines who didn’t want to happen to their communities. What happened to East Palestine? And it was like when, to Sarah’s point, the Hamilton’s point when we’re all there standing in a room talking about the shit that is impacting all of us and how we are all effectively fighting off different tentacles of the same corporate monsters and Wall Street vampires and bought off like corrupt government systems and bureaucrats. I mean, we realized very quickly how much all the shit that they used to divide us and how it all comes down to that human connection and sharing stories that melts that shit away like that. And then when you work in common struggle to address those things, you build the working class consciousness and movement that everyone keeps talking about. There’s some great recipe.
What’s the messaging that we got to get to get a working class movement? There’s no fucking message. Just go and be there for each other, fight for one another, struggle together. See one another as human beings who deserve better than this and who are in fact the solution that we are waiting for all of us, right? You do that, you learn more about each other. You become less scary to your coworkers who look different from you, right? I mean, you’re forced to stand next to a burn barrel and talk stories about your kids in school and you realize that they’re friends and you deal with a lot of the same shit. You build solidarity through struggle, not through carefully curated messaging that I think you got to touch grass to do that. You got to talk to people to do that. You can’t just do that all online.
You can’t do it in your own little reality bubbles. We’re all living in those reality bubbles. So whatever we do, it has to help people break out of them because our social worlds have gotten so much smaller over the past 50, 60, 70 years, and that went into hyperdrive with Covid. More people went underground or socially distanced and more of their connection to the outside world was being mediated by a screen. And so we’re seeing people sharing the same physical plane, but they’re not living on the same plane of reality. And that is a big reason why Grifters like Trump and the GOP are so able to convince working people that their neighbors are their enemy. You break that through struggle. You break that through being there. You break that through being the face behind the headline and behind the kind of scary archetypes that people are fearful of. Sorry, that was a long answer.
Analysis:
I’m watching our time, so let me just take, I know we had a couple hands, I just wanted to see what the hands were in the room. So one, two. So I’m going to come here and then I’m going to move right that way.
Audience Member 2:
Thanks for this inspiring discussion. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is kind of related to what we’re talking about is that we’re in a moment of record distrust with the government and with media and the Trump administration has made clear their plan to demolish what’s left of our social safety net. And so I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what the next steps are going to be. It was a poll that found that people, people’s leading source of election news is other people, they’re not going, people are avoiding the news, they’re not trusting the news, they’re going to social media. So you’ve talked about the of organizing and unionizing and building solidarity. What I want you to dig into more is how can we use that to actually reach people and educate people and build trust and actually get information out to people who need it to hear it.
Hamilton Nolan:
I don’t know if you figured that out. Let me know because journalism is, that’s what journalism tries to do. That’s what journalism is. That’s what Max does every day. That’s what I do every day. And you have a career in journalism and you’re constantly thinking about the very question, well, we got all these great super important stories. How do we make everybody listen to ’em? How do we make people care about this? How do we make people read this? How do you make people see this? The only answer I know I could make up an answer, the only answer I know is just keep doing the work. Just keep doing the work. Just keep writing the stories. Just keep recording the interviews. Just keep publishing the podcast. Just keep putting it out, keep putting it out. And over years it will come to people. And I’ve been in a million, just like Max has panel discussions and meetings and blah blah where people are like, what’s the magical solution to make these story make everybody learn about the Starbucks union and blah blah?
You just got to keep telling the stories and telling the stories and telling the stories and write this story and write this book and write the next book and do this podcast and do the next podcast and keep talking. And for us, and that goes for everybody. If you think this stuff is important, tell somebody else. Talk to somebody else. You write the story, you do the story you tell the people. This spreads by word of mouth, it spreads through the media, spreads through independent media. There’s not a magical solution. But the thing we have going for us is that this shit actually is important and it actually is dramatic and actually is a good story and actually is something that people want to know about and need to know about. And that spreads through the power of itself.
Analysis:
See, we’re going to take two more right here and here.
Audience Member 3:
Alright, I’m going to steal 30 seconds for a quick relevant announcement. I work with the Baltimore Amazon Workers Support Network and organizing campaigns are one on the inside. Often what a support committee can do is kind of minimal, so we chip away as best we can. But there’s one thing that I want to let you guys know about tonight. We’re trying to find people who might be salts at Amazon. Assault is a person who takes the job in order to help with organizing a union. We have some friends on the inside, especially down at Sparrow’s Point. So if anybody here is interested in the work of our committee or might be assault or might know somebody who’s looking for a job or labor sympathetic or whatever, we’re trying to find people to get our friends on the inside some support. And I have one quick question and I’ll get right to it.
It’s pertinent to Amazon. To Amazon. And what about your title? I’m surprised that you guys have never gotten around to talking about why that title The hammer. Yeah, we do have a lot of different identities to work with, but some of us believe that working people should be at the heart of the matter and there’s a reason for that. The potential power of working people. Amazon, for example, fits into the whole discussion about what they call choke points, which is mainly a transportation warehousing. Amazon calls ’em fulfillment centers. Were just off the longshoreman strike. There was the railroad workers. The postal service, it seems to me has been just a scratch away from something breaking there. Old thirties song that the farmer is the man that feeds them all, but the transportation workers are the people who move it all. So that’s one kind of pressure point. I’d like to get you on that topic of choke points or any other pressure points.
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah, thank you. First of all, it’s salting Amazon, a noble thing to do with your life. I hope somebody here does that. And then when you finish, you call me a max and we’ll write a story about it. So thank you for that announcement. The book is called The Hammer because a union is a tool, a union is a tool that you wield to express your own power that you already have. When you give people the means to have a union, you’re not telling ’em what to do. I’m not telling you what position you should have. I’m not telling you what you should ask for. I’m not telling you what you want, what you should fight for. It’s giving people the means to exercise their own power. And all workers have labor power inherently. We all have power as workers because we can all not work. That’s the heart of our labor power. But the only way to exercise that power is to have the union. You got to have the hammer to do the work. And so the labor movement is a hammer to me. It’s a tool that we need to give everybody to exercise their own power.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think there’s a really, that dovetails with how I was going to respond to your question, right? Because I think I want to get to the choke points point in a second. But I think one of the pitfalls there, which you obviously know about, you guys are strategizing about this, but I’m more talking about the average person who’s cheering this on but doesn’t know a lot about how it works. I think that people who don’t know how organizing works and don’t talk about it, but they see it and they cheer it on and they see the power that we all see in unions in the labor movement, but again, have less first person contact with the realities of that, it becomes more of a strategy that forsakes the human reality that everyone needs to, we need to organize everyone everywhere. I mean there’s a moral political and in fact a self-fulfilling need to have that mentality that can be forsaken if we only focus on the most strategic points and people can then lower in their head the priority of someone organizing it.
Tudor’s biscuit world, obviously if we’re trying to take down capitalism, yeah, the choke points are more important for the amount of damage we can do. But in terms of the people harnessing the power that has been left slumbering inside of us or wasted away for our employers, the power that we actually have to make the world and to remake the world again into something better. I mean, that’s the power that you see in the eyes of people who take that fateful step in their workplaces to say, we deserve better than this and we’re going to be the ones to do something about it. We are going to change our circumstances and not just be, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, the listless play things of enormous forces. We take that step into our own power. And I see every day Hamilton sees, Sarah sees, you guys see in Amazon, when people start doing that shit themselves and they start working together, they see in fact the power that they always had.
But that if so many of us feel powerless, it’s because we’ve never experienced that. Maybe we’ve never exercised it. Maybe we’ve been, I didn’t know about unionization when I was a warehouse worker. I thought you either quit and find another job or you stay and take it. So that step, getting people to take that step into believing that they have power and that they do have power, like every working person, everyone needs to feel that be part of it. We need to fan those flames anywhere and everywhere they are because that is the larger necessity for building a grassroots working class movement of movements. People like leading the charge. That’s how we put the working class at the center. Now to quickly return to your question about choke points, again, I think there is such a huge argument for why salting at Amazon is such a noble and necessary calling right now.
And it’s what we were talking to workers about in Bessemer, Alabama when they were trying to unionize on Staten Island when they were unionizing is that look at Amazon, look at them taking everything over. I watch who watches football. Has anyone seen how much Amazon’s got its tentacles into the NFL? I mean, this is the second largest private employer in the country. This is one of the biggest international behemoths that’s only getting bigger and bigger and bigger owned by one of the most wealthy people in the history of the world. And we as working people have fucking no say over what they do. They just keep encroaching more and more into our lives. And so it was a band of workers in Bessemer, Alabama, hollowed out de-industrialized majority black, like twice the national poverty rate, Bessemer, Alabama, who were leading this charge to bring Amazon to the table and say, we are going to have a say in what you do. That’s why this is fucking important. It’s a testament to the very thesis of Hamilton’s book. You want to wield that hammer against Jeb Bezos, go salted Amazon, build that power. And then my larger point is that we just need to build it anywhere and everywhere that we can.
Analysis:
Let’s take this last question.
Audience Member 4:
Good evening. And I want to thank you first for the message and I’m seeking tools because we already have a union, but we have the public sector and the private sector. And because of the Janus rule, you have people that work with us that don’t pay the union dues. So I’m looking for tools to fight that, to fight the people that don’t want to pay into the union. But because we are union representatives, we still have to represent them. And I don’t mind representing everybody, but we can’t fight in the public sector. Does that make any sense?
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah.
Audience Member 4:
And I probably wouldn’t be here tonight if it wasn’t for my coworker here who’s very young and so excited about coming here tonight because she wants to be in the neighbor movement, but we don’t have any tools to fight with. So we here to find tools.
Hamilton Nolan:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And Janice, what you mentioned is the Supreme Court ruling that made the whole public sector right to work. Meaning that if you have a union or workplace, you can’t force anybody to pay union dues. So you get a situation where you can have a union and people can choose not to pay dues and they become what we call free riders and they’re basically, they get the union contract and they don’t pay their fair share and it can eat away the power of the union. And that’s what you’re experiencing and what people like you in public sector unions all over the country experience. I think one aspect is, one thing you see is that people who go through an organizing campaign and they go through that struggle to win the union, they tend to be really jazzed up and fired up about the power of the union.
But sometimes when there’s a union that’s been in a workplace for a long time and people just get hired into it, they kind of take it for granted. They take that contract for granted. They don’t really appreciate the struggle that went into building that and winning that and maintaining that. The work that people like you got to do just to maintain the power of that union. And so it can become hard to inspire people. And what I saw reporting in my book and reporting all over the place is that unions in right to work states, unions that are successful in right to work situations. They just do a shit load of internal organizing all the time. Meaning that they are constantly talking to the members of that union about what the union is doing, why it’s important, why you need to come to this meeting, what the meeting’s about, what issues are facing us, what issues is the union fighting on.
Everything. You have to constantly be talking and internally organizing the people in that workplace. There’s a chapter in my book about the culinary union, Las Vegas, which is a private sector union, but it’s in a right to work state. Nevada’s a right to work state, and yet this union has managed to successfully organize the entire casino industry in Nevada, the entire Vegas strip. They’re one of the most powerful unions in Nevada. And how do they do it even though it’s right to work and people could choose not to pay dues. They do it by constantly, constantly, constantly talking to all the members in that union. They got lists, they’re coming to your apartment and knocking on your door, hi, I’m here from the union, I’m here. We’re having a citywide meeting four times a year. We’re getting everybody together in the union. We’re talking about our issues. So it’s just work, work, work, work, work. Constant, constant talking to people. And I don’t think there are any shortcuts to that process. And it can be a real pain in the ass as you know if you’re doing that work is hard. But just talking to people about what the union is, what is it doing, why it’s important, and why they need to pay those dues and what they’re getting for those dues is the path that I see work in unions that make that work. Powerful,
Powerful.
Analysis:
I was trying to figure out what word I wanted to choose, but your words are the right coda for this discussion that has been very, very necessary. Loved all the questions they were necessary questions and the beginning, not the end of a conversation this evening, but certainly the beginning. Some more convos and organized. I need you all to give up a final red Emmas round of applause for Max Alvarez and Hamilton Nolan.
Hamilton Nolan:
Thank you Red Emma’s. Thank you, Max Alvarez.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
