Longtime Working People listeners will be familiar with Max and Mel’s extended work discussing the supply chain, the workers who keep that system running day in and day out, and the dangerous and exploitative working conditions that many workers labor under. Our global economy relies on these workers to stay running–and bosses around the world use this pressure as a cudgel against the workers.
For today’s episode of Working People, we’re zooming out and taking a look at the global supply chain with Judy Gearhart, research professor with the Accountability Research Center at American University and host of the Labor Link Podcast, a podcast about “the brave individuals organizing the workers who make our stuff.” With decades of experience collaborating with organizers and rights advocates supporting worker struggles in the Global South, Judy is uniquely positioned to bring the stories of these workers forth to her listeners.
Hi, I’m Judy Gerhardt. I’m a research professor with the Accountability Research Center at American University at the School for International Service, and I host a podcast called the Labor Link Podcast, which is about workers organizing and global supply chains.
Hello everyone. It’s your host, Mel er, and welcome back to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. If you love what we do and are looking for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks that you’d like us to talk to.
(01:18) And please support the work we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. Long time TRNN supporters will be familiar with my previous work on the US supply chain and the integral role that railroad workers played in maintaining the network of goods and services that keep our country running as we learned in 2022. Without the workers, these networks don’t run. Bottlenecks happen and the national and global economy can grind to a stuttering halt. If you haven’t read my previous coverage on it, then please check it out at the link in our show notes on today’s episode of Working People, we’re going beyond the borders of the US and trending our focus on the international workers who keep the world’s global economy running.
(02:04) This is likely going to become a series of interviews with workers from all over the world, but I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself. So to start this conversation, I thought it would be important to bring on someone who’s been doing the important work of giving a platform to the workers who make these global industries run. I want to talk to her about her life and research and dig into the important work that she’s doing now. As always, it’s my goal to give you our listeners the context you need as we pull back the curtain on contemporary labor organizing both in this country and worldwide. So with us today to help us get that conversation rolling is Judy Gerhart, research professor with the Accountability Research Center at American University and host of the Labor Link Podcast, a podcast about the brave individuals organizing the workers who make our stuff with decades of experience collaborating with organizers and rights advocates, supporting worker struggles in the global south, Judy is uniquely positioned to bring the stories of these workers forth, her listeners from their website.
(03:01) The Labor Link Podcast touches on many aspects of the global economy, trade policy, international development programs, corporate accountability, and the international human rights norms meant to protect workers from abuse. The first Labor Link podcast series featured organizers leveraging transnational campaigns to build power. And this second series is on Fisher driven solutions to the seafood industry, featuring interviews with Fisher organizers from around the world who are overcoming challenges and using creative strategies to advance fisher’s rights in the global fishing industry. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Judy. I’m really excited to have this conversation.
So to start off our conversation, I first wanted to give our listeners a chance to get to know a little bit more about you and your work, your career. How did the last couple decades of organizing nonprofit work bring you to this current research?
Wow. So I have been working, I think I started about 30 years ago actually doing organizing work in Mexico and I got to know a lot of amazing people who were organizing women in the export processing factories, the macula ladora in northern Mexico. And really that was the beginning. I mean, I went to Mexico knowing that I wanted to work on economic rights. I had done that college study abroad in France when Miran, the socialists were in power, and I had been going to college in Philadelphia where it had the highest per capita homelessness rate. So that had gotten me all thinking, okay, I need to understand economic rights. And when I went to Mexico and met people who were organizing workers and the workers themselves, I fell in love with the movement. I fell in love with these people who are, they’re trying to do good in the world, but they’re also trying to build power for the people who don’t have it. And I really found their campaigns and their struggle compelling.
So it’s a little bit of a meandering story. So I went to grad school and I went and worked for the United Nations. I went to back to Honduras and worked for the International Labor Organization and for unicef, and I realized that international instruments are blunt end instruments. There was a lot of campaigning at the time about child labor in the Honduran export factories. You’ll remember maybe some people will remember the Kathy Lee Gifford scandal. That happened because there were 14 year olds making clothing for her. And being in Honduras at the time, I was really aware of the complexities of what was happening because you had 50% of kids in school got through elementary school, and by the time they were 13 or 14, if they hadn’t finished elementary school, they couldn’t go on to middle school. So they had to work. And our international campaigns ended up pushing a lot of 15 to eight to 17, 15 to 16, 17 year olds out of the workforce because all the global brands said no more child labor.
(06:25) And then you had this sort of moment of struggle. And for me it meant I could see the power of the international mechanisms, but I also knew that we needed to figure out a way to connect with workers on the ground and what kind of remedy they needed. I then landed back in New York and I got a job with Social Accountability International, working on workplace standard, voluntary workplace standard, the basis for social audits. And in the beginning I thought, this is great because at the time you had a lot of companies putting out codes of conduct that didn’t include freedom of association and collective bargaining didn’t include a living wage. So I was part of a group of people trying to convert international human rights norms into language that was atory for companies basically saying, you should do this, you should do that. This is what it means for what you need to do in your supply chain.
(07:25) And because it included those core rights, I found it compelling and I thought we could use it as an education instrument, which we did. We did a lot of worker training, we had a lot of trade unions. We partnered with the apparel unions globally, and we used that tool to help them in their negotiations and collective bargaining. But I ran into a bit of a wall at some point because the social auditing was, it was a voluntary mechanism. They reported the results of the audit, but not enough of the details. So it was confidential like so many of these initiatives. And at the time I started realizing I was not going to be able to change those core flaws in the social auditing and the voluntary compliance mechanisms. I was lucky enough to become the executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum, and then I spent 10 years working with amazing organizers and campaigners around the world and doing worker tours supporting, I was part of the team of people who helped negotiate the Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, which is a binding first of its kind transparent agreement. It’s basically a collective bargaining agreement between transnational apparel brands and the Bangladeshi unions and global unions. And that brought me to today where I’m really trying to figure out how do we take those amazing organizers and share their stories with other people so that they themselves can influence policy and also academic thinking to the extent I’m not a real academic, but to the extent that I’m part of the academy at this point.
So the work that you do with the research center then is really kind of doing these interviews, talking to these workers, gathering this information and trying to present it to not just academic audiences, but translate this into potential policy objectives for the various organizations that you work with. Is that kind of a good understanding of the kind of work that you’re doing now?
Yeah. Everything we do is trying to bridge between the global policy trade or corporate policies and what the workers on the ground are actually doing. I work with some great colleagues at the accountability research center who they work with health rights advocates in Guatemala or on education reform in the Philippines. Their work is a lot about community driven government accountability, and it was a perfect place for me to land with worker driven corporate accountability, this idea that we need to enable the workers and the organizers on the ground to influence the policies that are affecting them.
I think this is kind of a good segue to really get into what your current focus is with the Labor Network or Labor Link podcast rather. Your first, or your series, I should say that you worked on was about these transnational campaigns to build power. Before we get into your current work with the Fishers in the fishing industry, was there anything that surprised you as you were interviewing these workers about the campaigns they were engaged in or about the workers themselves?
So I think the thing that first surprised me is when I started working more heavily on research for arc, I was doing a lot of long form interviews, and when I first sat down to write the report that I had gotten a grant to write, I pulled the transcripts, which I guess many academics do all over the world, but I read the transcripts. I’m like, there’s so much smarter than me. What they have to say is so much more powerful. And that’s where I started saying, wait a minute, how do I figure out a way to put this out? So through the Labor Radio podcast cust Network, I met Evan Matthew Pap, who helped me with the first series through Evan. I met Jules who’s helping me with, who’s producing the second series, and it made it somewhat possible. I really hats off to what you do at working people.
(11:50) It’s a lot of work. The thing I guess that surprised me, if anything, other than just this realization that I need to find a way to get their voices heard was the things I discovered about people I’d been working with for years. So the first four people I interviewed, I had known for anywhere from six to 12 years at the time, and I had helped them with worker tours. And when I was the director of the International Labor Rights Forum, we had given awards to their organizations for the organizing work they were doing. So that’s why I had wanted to start with them. But it was really taking that time to do the long form interview that I learned things like the organizer from Myanmar from the Migrant Worker Rights Network in Myanmar. He was an activist from Myanmar, and I compare him and I think the show notes, he’s basically like this Mother Jones character in my head because he comes from Myanmar shows up in Thailand, and he’s just trying to make a living. He’s escaping because he was at risk of losing his life or getting jailed in Myanmar. And so then he goes to Thailand and pretty much immediately starts organizing. And one of the big issues in Thailand is migrant workers can’t form a union. They can join a union, but they can’t form a union. But that didn’t deter haw.
(13:20) And he and another expat who also had escaped cente, they started seeking out the trade unions and SA Karn, who’s another one of the first interviewees, so Sait Karn from the state Employee Relations Committee is a visionary. I mean, he basically said, okay, I may be maybe representing primarily Thai workers from public sector jobs, but we’ve got to help migrants. And he did, and he supported the Migrant Worker Rights Network and he did a lot of other things to try and bridge that gap, which is something I think the US at the time I met SA was really still beginning and improving upon, but it certainly took us a moment to try and bridge between traditional organized labor and migrant workers, and I think the movement’s better for it.
Right. There are a couple things I wanted to just kind of touch on before we move forward. Really first, to share solidarity with you as a podcast host and a researcher and the realization that you come to that, the people that you interview really are the experts in the industries that they work in. And the job is kind of interviewees to really kind of set and open up a space where these folks, these workers can talk about the experiences that they live every day, whether it be the working conditions, the organizing that they do. And that’s sometimes a tough job. A lot of folks really get uncomfortable when the mic turns on. It’s oftentimes pretty difficult to get folks to feel like they can really talk authoritatively on the experiences that they have because they ask. The same question that we ask often is, how am I a representative for this?
(15:17) Am I supposed to be here talking about this? And the reality is, yes, working people, a lot of the work that Real News does, what we do is we try to create this space where we recognize that the workers that we talk to are the experts and that they are the ones who are bringing this experience forward for our audience to understand. And that’s a tough job. And so I don’t want you to feel like you’re not doing a good job. I think it’s a really unique position to be in, and it’s a very privileged position to be able to bring these folks forward and provide this platform. And so I just wanted to acknowledge that work that you do and that it’s really important.
Matt, Mel, back at you. I mean, I really appreciate what you all do, and I would be thrilled if you ever want to interview, I’d be happy to facilitate the conversations in the context. It’s really true what you’re saying. I mean, so Tola Moon from Cambodia, who’s one of the first people I interviewed, I mean, there are many of us in the international community who see Tola as this really incredibly brilliant strategist, and he’s very low key. And his organization, the Center for the Alliance of Human Rights and Labor is currently under threat that the Cambodian government might shut them down for an analytic report that they put out about a program being run called Better Factories Cambodia by the International Labor Organization and by the International Finance Corporation. And it’s an analytic report. They’re not trash talking. They did their research and anyway, so much respect. And whenever I interview him, he ends it by saying, thank you so much. It’s always so inspiring to talk to you. I’m thinking, you’ve got to be kidding me. You’re so much more inspiring than anything I’ve ever done. I’m just some small town kid who’s fascinated by
Right? I mean, that’s the same thing here. Folks are like, oh, you’re so cool. You do all this great work. And it’s like, oh man, if you could listen to yourself, I hope you listen back to this episode and understand how intelligent and charismatic and hopeful these workers are. And the thing about work, about wage work in any context at any place in the world in this system is that it is designed to make you feel inferior, to make you feel like you don’t belong or that your contribution doesn’t matter and that you’re just another nut and bolt in this giant machine. And that’s it. The reality is that workers in every context are whole people who care a lot about what they do, who care a lot about the contributions that they have, particularly in the global supply chain. I had this experience when I was talking to railroad workers is that from an outside perspective, you wouldn’t think that folks would be able to feel like they can rise above the drudgery, I suppose.
(18:33) But the reality is, whether it’s railroad workers, whether it’s farm workers in Southern California, in central California, there is this pride in the work that you do and the contribution that you have to keeping the world running. And that’s something that bosses really don’t believe is a reality, which I feel like is kind of like an ace in the hole for us when we’re organizing, is to say, when you assign and really believe in the dignity of your work and you assert your dignity as a worker, you kind of throw ’em back on their heels a little bit. As the organizing continues, there’s such a rich tapestry of how we interact with the jobs that we do, and it’s really beautiful to kind of be in a space and begin to sort of peel back those layers in conversation as we do as podcast hosts and researchers, and to see the moments click where I guests really start to believe what they’re saying, not that they didn’t believe it before, but that they’re coming to this better realization as they’re trying to tell strangers in our audience about the work that they do. That yeah, it is important. There’s no piece of it that is not, and that is a really gratifying piece of what I do and what you do, I’m sure as a host, facilitating these conversations. So
Yeah, I will say the last one I should shout out from the first series who I didn’t mention yet, is my dear friend Ana actor from the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. And she is, I mean, she definitely is an amazing speaker. She’s actually quite well known now, amazing organizer. In fifth grade, her dad got sick and she went to work in the apparel factories. And what that woman has done with the fifth grade education, she is just continued to self-educate herself. She just is brilliant. I mean, her capacities on so many levels, and then her ability to inspire is just, it’s pretty incredible. And I have to think about more women leaders to include, although in the phishing sector, I have to get to the processing sector. That’s my next hope, because right now we don’t have a lot of women in live capture phishing.
Yeah. Well, that’s a good segue actually. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about this second series. You have four episodes out, I believe, right?
(21:13) Yeah. Hey, that’s amazing given the breadth of work that you’re doing. So this is focusing on Fisher organizers and the advancement of workers’ rights in both large and small scale fishing industries from around the world. I believe your last episode, you were talking to fishers in Indonesia, if I’m not mistaken, maybe a good way to kind of orient our listeners in this research and with these workers. Can you share a little bit about the conditions that they’re currently laboring under? I know that’s a broad loaded question, but can we kind of give them a little bit of context into what the sort of both large and small scale global fishing industry looks like? I imagine a lot of our American listeners may think of global fisheries and may immediately go to, I don’t know, deadliest catch or something, a very unique American sort of fishery that maybe doesn’t look the same elsewhere. So let’s start there.
Okay. So global fisheries, the majority of them are at capacitor overfished, and they are environmentally, there’s a struggle to make them sustainable. And the environmental, so environmental advocates around the world have been working on this for a long time. However, in 2014, actually even before that, there were some small exposes, but in 2014, major media outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian and the AP came out with a series of stories about forced labor on the Thai fleet. And then there were also stories appearing about forced labor on the Chinese fleet, the Taiwanese fleet vessels showing up in South Africa in Australia, Indonesian migrant fishers just walking off the vessel saying, we’ve been slaves on that vessel help us, or other vessels that were pulled aside for illegal unreported and unregulated fishing, IUU fishing, which to the environmentalists, to their credit, have been working for a long time on illegal unreported, unregulated fishing.
(23:38) And that has brought some cases in where fishing vessels were detained for fishing illegally, and then the forced labor was discovered. So the story that I have from Hatto from SBMI in Indonesia, the largest migrant worker union in Indonesia, they were asked to go and help the fishers who were stranded in South Africa. And then what they discovered is the Indonesian government, the way the laws were set up, they couldn’t get these fishers, the support they needed. And so then that begat a whole body of work for them. But globally, starting around 2014 with all of these exposes, the one in South Africa, the ones on the Thai fleet, there were other cases all around Southeast Asia, the global community started to mobilize, and they really started reacting to forced labor on these vessels. It is horrific. I mean, there are stories of fishers stranded at sea for 15 years.
(24:52) That’s probably one of the outside timeframes, but there are others who are out there for more. And then of course there are others who don’t come back who are killed at sea or they die from an illness at sea, and then their body is buried at sea, which is something that’s very traumatic for a lot of these people. For the Indonesians, it’s very traumatic, particularly I talked about that with Hato. And the campaigns that have surged from there have focused a lot on forced labor and illegal fishing, and it really brought a lot more work to support fishers and migrant fishers. I want to stop there. So in case you want to ask another question, but there’s so much work to be done just to address that forced labor. However, the thing I got from talking with people like or SA Karn, is we can rescue forced labor victims for decades to come, but it’ll never stop happening until we organize the fishers, until we enable them to stand up to the captain, we enable them to get remedy when they’re not paid, and we enable them to build the social movement that challenges these laws.
That’s kind of where I was headed in my own thinking. You talk about these exposes in 2014 on that are trying to tackle one issue and pulling back and peeling away layers of what seems to me to be a wholly systemic industry-wide practice of forced labor, the industry in this region and elsewhere. And that in itself feels like an overwhelming sort of experience in its breadth, in its scope in how many fishermen past, present, future may be affected by this. And so I think a good question to ask then is as this organizing has been happening, more concerted organizing has been happening over the last 10 years or so, have there been some campaigns that you’ve spoken with fishers about that they consider to be successes or effective or moving the needle and in a good direction in terms of these organizing objectives?
Yeah, so I think the first couple interviews I did are with the International Transport Workers Federation and the Fisher Rights Network in Thailand. So the ITF has been helping to set up at port and at multiple ports in Thailand fisher organizations. And so the Fisher Rights Network is growing. Again, as I said, they’re not able to form a union technically, but that doesn’t keep them from forming basically a worker center and from pursuing negotiations with the employers. What’s happening a lot in this space is you have a lot of funding and a lot of people with goodwill who are focused on the forced labor. And it’s important work. If you have been forced to be at sea for two years and you haven’t been paid, or if you have a family member stranded at sea and you just want to get them back, it’s crucial work, right? It’s absolutely crucial,
To talk about the also the and the also and right, so I’m not saying yeah, but I’m saying also and right, we need that work, but that work needs to connect in. And you have a lot of NGOs that do that work that don’t necessarily connect in. So there are some efforts now to connect these pieces together. And I think with migrant fishers, it’s a challenge to learn how to organize. They don’t come from organizing backgrounds for the most part except for the exceptions of the people who are leading some of these efforts. And so how do you bring this consciousness of what it means to organize what it means to work with your fellow fishers? I hope that you’ll get to talk directly with John Harto from the ITF who’s been organizing now going on a decade in Thailand, not quite a decade, but to hear it through his perspective as a former teamster, as an American, it’s quite moving.
(29:42) But the bravery of these fishers who continue to organize, and I don’t want to tell the story that he tells, but to hear him tell the story of the fisher that inspires him every day is just, it’s pretty jaw dropping because the guy should have died at sea and he didn’t, and he continues to organize, but that one fisher is standing up to his boss and continuing to organize. That’s what the movement’s built on. And I think, Mel, I’m not a trade unionist from history. I’ve always been on the NGO side, although I’ve always been in solidarity with and supporting worker organizing, and I’ve definitely been very deeply involved in worker centers and Latin America, but I think a lot of people beyond the labor movement don’t fully appreciate what it takes to organize the day in the day out and what it means to have your momentum crushed by a fake solution. And that’s what’s happening a lot in global supply chain solutions. So yes, absolutely, we want to get remedy for fishers who have been victims of forced labor. Yes, we want to rescue victims of forced labor, but we need to build from there to the next step of enabling fishers to defend each other.
Right? Well, the industry moves on because the workers are going to be participating in the industry as folks begin to really truly put up that fence that says that forced labor is not the way forward. So then what are the rights of the workers now that they are getting paid now that they have some movement now that they can get off these boats? It moves beyond that and creates a new culture of worker dignity in these industries. And I agree. My experience in union organizing prior to this current job where I actually am a card carrying member of CWA News Guild now was organizing in the IWW as a freelance journalist. And for folks who aren’t union organizers or maybe have never worked in any sort of quote organizing group, whether that’s political organizing, whether that’s union organizing, whether that’s, oh, I don’t know, community meetings, quite a bit of it is, what’s a good way to put it, bureaucratic drudgery sometimes.
(32:27) It’s a lot of really hopeful, really optimistic, really intelligent, really passionate people butting heads often, at least in the West. And there’s a lot of people on the outside of these organizing groups who really don’t want to see you succeed and will do really horrible things to make your job 10 times harder because what’s that really? Well-known Stokely Carmichael quote in, for example, in order for non-violence to happen, your opponent must have a heart. Essentially. We’re coming up against corporations, we’re coming up against nonprofits even I’m lucky to be at one where folks walk the walk and talk the talk, but that’s not always the case where individuals in positions of power really don’t want to share that power with a workforce. And so organizing is really difficult to try and get the folks who sign your paychecks, who create these conditions in your workplace to see you as a human being is extraordinarily difficult, which is always surprising.
(33:36) And to also bring people in who have never experienced collective organization before and empower them to make decisions and to participate and to activate them and to keep them activated and to keep their spirits up and to do all of this in order to continue to push forward in what is a marathon, a long game is very difficult. And I cannot imagine what it’s like to be in an industry that I has its baseline as the complete and utter dehumanization of its workers, forcing them into situations for 15 years, forced slave labor, and then to pull these individuals out of this enforced culture of oppression, empower them, and then continue to empower them to assert themselves and the dignity of their work collectively. It’s got to be unreal, both in just the scope and difficulty of it, but also in the sort of payoff. And I can imagine that there’s some serious euphoria of the winds that happen that keep individuals moving forward, right? It’s got to be life affirming, truly, to see that needle move a little bit year after year,
Even just to build community in migrant communities that are moving a lot. I mean, these are not stable work teams,
(35:15) So how do you build community? So you talked about layers earlier, Mel, and I think we could talk about the layers of fear factor that happen whenever you’re organizing and you know that your boss doesn’t want you to organize, you feel threatened, but add to that the layer that your identity papers being held by the captain of your vessel. And so you’ve come into port and you’re allowed to leave the vessel, but if you leave the vessel, they don’t give you your papers and then they might report you if you don’t come back. So you have to get back on that vessel, add to that, that you’re indebted to the captain because you didn’t pay the recruiter that brought you over, but instead there’s money coming out of your paycheck that’s reimbursing the vessel owner for you getting over to get that job. I mean, the payment for a job is just another whole crazy level of abuse that happens in this industry.
(36:18) And then add to that, your language inability in the country you’re in as a migrant, it just keeps adding on. And I’ll say, you said earlier that it’s become systemic. I mean, that’s absolutely true. So Indonesian migrants and they migrant fishers are disproportionately made up of Indonesian migrant fishers, at least all the cases that come in of forced labor and abuse. And the Indonesians that I have spoken with and the organizers I’ve spoken with, it’s standard procedure for them to go abroad, sign a two year contract. So they sign a two year contract on a Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese fleet generally, and then they’re supposed to get paid electronically, and that money’s supposed to go to their family or to them, however they set it up, but then they’re at sea and they don’t have access to wifi, and they have no way to see if they got paid. They have no way to communicate with their families. So our friends at Global Labor Justice, they’re supporting a campaign with Taiwan. The Indonesian fishers in Taiwan got together and started a campaign called Wifi for Fishers now, and they have slogans like No wifi, no wife, because imagine you’re gone for two years. Your wife didn’t get any money, didn’t hear from you,
Yeah. And so they really, they’re trying to figure out a lot of these vessels. They have digital tracking, they have satellite, they have the capacity to provide the wifi. In fact, there are even places where they get into range of wifi access and the captain will take their phones away. They don’t want them to communicate. So the fact that they’re on a two year contract, the fact that there’s transshipment at sea so that the fish get off, but the fishers don’t, and then often they will pull into a port and they can’t use port services because they’re not legal, they’re not allowed to go, their documents are held back. So it’s not like they can get off at port and go run to the embassy and say, I need help. I’m being trapped. I mean, that just, it’s not that easy.
One comparison that I keep coming up in as we’re talking about this, particularly about migrant status, about language barriers, about the barriers to really free movement on these boats, you hear a lot of the same concerns from organizers who are working with United Farm workers and the migrant farm workers who are working in farms in Southern and central California in Arizona along the border, a lot of them will cross the border without the appropriate visa paperwork. They’re taken advantage of by the farms that hire them. They’re housed in these often cramped, scary conditions in the middle of the desert or wherever they’re being housed. They’re subjected to extreme heat. And the farms themselves, if they’re unorganized, because some of the farms are organized and do have a relationship with UFW as a union will really kind of give and take however much they want because there’s no consequences.
(39:57) Oftentimes the government’s not going to step in a way that’s useful a lot of times because the individuals who could investigate these claims, the agencies are underfunded deliberately or otherwise. There’s just not enough people to go around to show up at these places to investigate these issues. I imagine that a lot of this is the same because you’re in the middle of the ocean and even if you get claims about workplace conditions and being abysmal or abuses happening on these boats, it’s likely pretty freaking difficult for these governments to step in international waters. So you have all of these complications. So the point I’m trying to make is what it comes down to is the workers themselves that they are the ones who are collectively able to address, call out these issues, address these issues, force consequences for these issues. And that is no small feat when you’re talking about fleets of boats in the middle of the ocean
And the distant water fleet is so hard to police and regulate, and increasingly countries don’t allow foreign vessels in their waters, but that doesn’t mean they’re not overfishing. So the Indonesian fishers, I have an interview coming up with aren’t on from salute in North s Lui, and he talks about organizing at port, both for fishers on the Indonesian domestic fleet and the Indonesians going abroad on the distant water fleet. And Indonesia, a number of years ago, said, no more foreign vessels in our waters. But now you have a domestic fleet that pays even worse, but the conditions are terrible. They’re not well financed. They’re overfishing still the same waters that were, they booted out the Korean fishers to try and let their fish recuperate, but they didn’t. They basically continue to overfish. So it’s really a struggle. And then you have the fishers who would, because you can make so little money on the domestic fleet, they’re willing to take that risk of going abroad for two years and not being in contact with anyone. But listening to you now, Mel, I’m thinking we need to find a way to, first, with all the organizing that’s happening now, enable the fishers to sit down and reimagine how this could be. If we could imagine a world where migrant fishers, whenever the vessel comes into port and the ITF is saying it should be every three months, you should be coming into port at minimum.
(42:37) And if those fissures in whatever port they’re at are able to access communications and support, it could be a completely different world. It is doable, but it takes an amount of coordination because you’ve got whatever country is flying the flag of the vessel, and there’s abuse of the flag registrations, which the ITF has a great campaign on flags of convenience, it’s worth looking at. But then you also have the port that the vessel comes into, and then you have the market state. That’s generally the US and Japan and Europe where we have some
But we haven’t really been exerting it yet. There was a big campaign of global buyers and retailers saying, supporting the employer pays principle. And we looked into that. I worked with some students last year and did some research on the employer pays principle and companies support it. They support the principle, but they have no way to implement it, and they’re not financing it. So basically the buyer or the retailer, it’s just like in the global apparel supply chains, they’re saying to the vessels they buy from, go do this, but they’re not helping finance it. They’re not going to be steady buyers from those vessels that change their policies. They’re not really taking responsibility for bega the change in the sector.
Right? Well, this is the sort of idealist, internationalist, anarchist in me, God forbid, hopefully some of my listeners don’t get mad at me for this, but it’s like, what would be great if we could just get rid of all of these borders that make this shit impossible? Pardon my language. Maybe a truly international community would benefit greatly from not having extra border barriers that make this impossible for individuals to stop off somewhere, contact family, I don’t know, get justice for the abuses they suffer in the middle of the ocean. That’s an extremely reductive idealist position for me to take. But when you hear these kinds of problems, you’re like, why? A lot of these could be solved with the air quotes, relatively simple solutions, right?
I don’t know, Mel, I’m with you. I mean, capital’s treat across borders. They’re very unfettered. I mean, there are some regulations and some things they need to go through. We could do something if you were to treat migration equally to the people migration to capital, if you created regulations that were as facilitative, things would shift and change. Yes, it’s idealist, but 30 years ago I was working on Latin America and the impact of the US drug trade in Latin American and on human rights, and I never could have imagined we’d see the day that we’re in now with marijuana being legal, if somebody doesn’t rethink migration in a more radical way, I don’t know that we’re going to get there. So keep rethinking it. I’m way out of my depth and all the different repercussions. I mean, not so out of
But I mean we would need another five hours to even start to hash out all the different repercussions because there’s a big cultural element to how do you mix different peoples and cultures and over time, and that is a segue to something I do want to mention is I’ve been doing this work starting on the egregious abuses of forced labor, but always with this eye too. We can’t just stay there. That’s like just looking at the tip of the iceberg, because the causal factors are really the inability of the fishers to have a voice, to organize, to bargain collectively. The phenomenal amount of discrimination they suffer day in and day out because as migrants, and at the same time, we can’t look at the seafood industry only through the lens of the distant water fleet. What I would hate to see is buyers and retailers finally addressing this piece, the tip of the iceberg, and not addressing the causal factors or the rest of the seafood industry.
Amazing work we did in this one piece, because I will tell you the future episodes I’m hoping to do with Fisher organizers. I’m looking at organizing in coastal fishing in Africa and Latin America, and there you’ve got a lot of tensions coming up between the industrial fleet and the coastal fishers who are really largely fishing for food security. So much of the global movement, the mechanisms we have as a global movement are trade related. And if you only look at what can I change using trade policy or global corporate policy, you’re going to miss this other layer. And with the seafood industry, these two butt up against each other, so you have the industrial fleet that’s further off the coast, that’s mostly is more likely to be doing export. And so we have mechanisms and policies that we can bring to bear on countries to change how that industrial fleet’s governed,
We need to also be looking at that coastal fleet because those coastal fishers, they’re managing the waters, the fisheries, they’re really providing it’s food security. What they’re doing, and this is where I really get to the cultural rights. Sorry, it was a long segue. It was long. It’s okay. But when you talk to coastal fishers, this is not just about livelihood and food security. This is a way of life for centuries for a lot of these people. And I think a lot of people think, oh, we just have to fish last along the coast. It’s like, well, maybe there’s got to be a different path because this is their way of life and we’re really threatening something much more profound than what we would be threatening if we’re curbing the industrial vision.
Right? Important conversations and important nuance to this entire topic. I’m actually really looking forward to future episodes that you do, and I think this is kind of a great place where we can kind of close out our conversation. Can you share with our listeners where they can find your work? We’re going to be putting links to the Labor Link podcast in our show notes. Are there maybe one or two representative episodes of the last two seasons that you think our audience would be interested in or an episode that’s a good maybe primer for the second series that any of our interested audience members can kind of start with?
Yeah. I think for the Fisher Driven solutions this current season, start with the first one with John Harto. As much as I’m really working to enable people to listen to the Fisher organizers, I think John will really get everybody thinking about what these fishers brave they are. This is really choosing among my children here now that’s D, listen to it all. Yeah,
(50:48) They’re all fun stories. I mean, because then it segues to the Fisher Rights Network where they’re really, I mean, these guys are really, they have to be so crafty because like we talked about the fear factors, these trying to organize when and build trust with people who are so fearful. It’s phenomenal work that they’re doing. And then of course, Hoya, who’s also from Central and Cambodia organizing migrant fishers in Thailand from the Cambodians, and he’s got a fascinating story to tell. He was originally there as a Buddhist monk, and then he left and started organizing migrants. It’s just another amazing story. And then the one that is really fun and most recent is, and people should check this out, so it’s with Harto from SBMI in Indonesia, and there’s a little piece in there with Charlie Fritz from Greenpeace, and they’re talking about a film called Before You Eat that they produce with Greenpeace that really, if you want visuals on this stuff, check out before you eat or check out Outlaw Ocean. But okay, here I am promoting everybody else but my own show, and given that we share a producer, I better get on with it.
(52:09) So the way to find the Labor Link podcast, we are on Spotify and we also set up a website, so maybe it’s easier for some people. Labor Link podcast.org. You can find us through the Labor Radio Podcast network and on Spotify, and also go to labor link podcast.org.
Cool. Cool, cool. Yeah, we’ll put all of those links in the show notes so that folks can check out Judy’s work and stay up to date on what’s happening. The process of putting together a podcast is extremely difficult. We make it seem easy, but it’s definitely not. There’s a lot of work that goes into it, and one of those things is really promoting episodes that folks see them. So we’ll be adding a bunch of links to those episodes because they are incredible conversations, and you absolutely will find something interesting and impactful in what you’re listening to. And this will be my final note before we get to the closing paragraph here, but one thing that I learned in the research that I did for the National Supply Chain Network as it relates to railroaders, is that things that seem boring on their face really are pretty intricate, interesting and precarious when it comes to the supply chains, both nationally and internationally. You might go a little crazy going down that rabbit hole to realize just how precarious global supply chain networks actually are. I’m sure folks can remember the ever given Suez Canal disaster and how that completely choked up the global supply chain almost immediately, right
Yes. And how long it took to recover from that. Just one small piece can kind of knock the card pyramid down. So if you find that your knee-jerk reactions to say, oh, that boring stuff, then peel back a little bit of the onion there and take some time to look into it because it becomes endlessly fascinating, infuriating, enraging, and ultimately, you begin to see these sort of moments and spaces for productive and transformative organizing when you start to understand these systems. So that’ll be my final little note here. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Judy, please come back anytime. Let’s link up and continue talking and talking with folks and send me all the interviews that you can. I can’t wait to speak to the folks that you speak to. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on.
Yeah, yeah. I appreciate the work that you do as well. And as always, I want to thank you all our listeners for listening, and thank you so much for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons. And please go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so that you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. Once again, I’m Mel er and with much love and solidarity, I’ll see you next time.
German automaker Volkswagen said Wednesday that it has sold its operations in northwest China’s Xinjiang region, where Beijing has been accused of widespread human rights abuses against Uyghurs.
In a statement, the company cited “economic reasons” for its pullout from Xinjiang, home to about 12 million predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, where it also has a test track in Turpan.
“While many SVW [SAIC-Volkswagen] sites are being, or have already been, converted to produce electric vehicles based on customer demand, alternative economic solutions will be examined in individual cases,” the statement said.
“This also applies to the joint venture site in Urumqi,” it said. “Due to economic reasons, the site has now been sold by the joint venture as part of the realignment. The same applies to the test tracks in Turpan and Anting [in Shanghai].”
The plant was sold to Shanghai Motor Vehicle Inspection Certification, or SMVIC, a subsidiary of state-owned Shanghai Lingang Economic Development Group for an undisclosed amount, Reuters reported.
Volkswagen declared in December 2023 that the audit of its Urumqi factory showed no signs of human rights violations.
But after analyzing the leaked audit report, Adrian Zenz, senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, found that contrary to its claims, the audit failed to use international standards and was conducted by questionable examiners.
Zenz, an expert on Xinjiang, concluded that the audit’s methodology was faulty and insufficient and that the report was “unsuited to meaningfully assess the presence or absence of forced labor at the factory.”
Zenz called the news a “huge victory for the Uyghurs.”
“This step was long overdue, he told RFA. “Sadly, it took public pressure and showcasing the full extent of the sham of the audit.”
Strong international pressure
Gheyyur Qurban, director of the Berlin office of the World Uyghur Congress who has led anti-Volkswagen activities, said Volkswagen’s withdrawal from Xinjiang was not due to economic reasons, but was linked to strong international pressure over the Uyghur issue.
He said the World Uyghur Congress, a Uyghur advocacy group based in Germany, pressured the automaker to leave the region and forced it to defend itself before the international community.
A Volkswagen I.D. concept car is displayed at the Beijing Auto Show in Beijing, China, April 24, 2018.
In the statement, Volkswagen also said it was extending its joint venture agreement with SAIC until 2040 to introduce new vehicles to meet China’s growing market demand for electric cars. The original agreement was in place until 2030.
The news came as the G7 Foreign Ministers’ meeting issued a statement expressing concern over the situation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and Tibetans in Tibet persecuted by the Chinese government.
The G7, or Group of Seven, comprises the major industrial nations — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States and the European Union.
“We remain concerned by the human rights situation in China, including in Xinjiang and Tibet,” said the statement, which urged China to abide by its international human rights commitments and legal obligations.
But Rushan Abbas, chairperson of the executive committee at the World Uyghur Congress, said that the carefully worded statement was insufficient.
“The genocide persists, conditions worsen and concrete actions remain lacking,” she said, referring to China’s violence targeting the Uyghurs, which the U.S. and some Western parliaments have recognized as genocide.
“While de-risking supply chains is vital, it must be paired with bold measures to hold China accountable for state-sponsored forced labor,” Abbas said. “Awareness demands action. We urge G7 nations to move beyond rhetoric and lead in holding China accountable for its human rights abuses.”
Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alim Seytoff for RFA Uyghur and Roseanne Gerin for RFA English.
WASHINGTON – The United States has banned another 29 Chinese companies from exporting their goods to America due to their alleged use of Uyghur slave labor. It’s the largest single blacklisting since the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act became law in 2021.
The listing, announced late Friday by the Department of Homeland Security, brings the total number of Chinese companies barred from exporting to America due to Uyghur forced labor to 107, following the blacklisting of three other Chinese companies earlier this month.
The companies include producers of agricultural, aluminum and polysilicon products, as well as copper, gold and nickel miners, it says, accusing them of “working with the government of Xinjiang to recruit, transfer, and receive workers, including Uyghurs, out of Xinjiang.”
A worker packages spools of cotton yarn in an Aksu factory in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, April 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Washington accuses Beijing of carrying out a “genocide” of the mostly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority in far-western Xinjiang, including by forcing Uyghurs to work for little or no pay. Chinese officials deny the claims and say many Uyghurs are in fact in vocational training.
But that has done little to convince U.S. lawmakers. The 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which was passed on a bipartisan basis, allows the Department of Homeland Security to ban Chinese firms that it believes are using slave labor from selling their goods to Americans.
The Number 3 Detention Center in Dabancheng in western China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
The blacklisting also comes amid an ongoing investigation by the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party into claims that U.S. venture capital firms are funding companies involved in Uyghur slave labor and thereby financing “genocide.”
Pressure campaign
In a statement, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said that the latest bulk blacklisting shows Washington’s resolve “to ensure that goods made from the forced labor of Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang do not enter the United States.”
Rishat Abbas, the chairman of the Istanbul-based Uyghur Academy, told Radio Free Asia that the blacklisting represented “a critical move in the fight against forced labor in supply chains” in China.
“By restricting goods from over 100 Chinese companies linked to the exploitation of Uyghurs in East Turkistan, this action sends a strong message to the Chinese Communist Party,” Abbas said, using the preferred Uyghur name for the Xinjiang region of China.
Abbas added that the mounting international pressure was pushing Beijing toward a position where it may soon be forced “to reassess its policies of oppression toward the Uyghur population.”
Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns.
Workers in the food industry earn some of the lowest wages in the U.S. economy, and after a long day of preparing, cooking, or serving food at work, many struggle to put food on their own tables. A hefty 29% of U.S. jobs were linked to the food and agricultural industries in 2021, and job growth in food sectors is on the rise. But the low pay has consequences. According to the U.S.
It is the largest successful union election in recent memory: 10,000 nurses will be joining the Teamsters. They work for hospital conglomerate Corewell Health at eight hospitals and one outpatient facility, all in southeast Michigan. “We’re so excited we can hardly stand it,” said Katherine Wallace, a nurse at the hospital in Troy, who has been a core part of the campaign since October 2023.
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Lori Chavez-DeRemer, one of most pro-union Republicans to recently serve in Congress, to be his Labor secretary. Chavez-DeRemer lost her reelection bid to represent Oregon in the House by a narrow margin. Her campaign was backed by about two dozen unions, including those representing flight attendants and grocery store workers. Sean O’Brien…
This story was co-published with In These Timeson Nov. 22, 2024.
For all his promises to deliver for US workers, Trump’s political agenda poses an existential threat to organized labor. Project 2025’s planned assault on the National Labor Relations Board, which governs collective bargaining in the private sector, for instance, could put a screeching halt to unionization efforts across the country. “A potential Republican trifecta, along with Project 2025, will be catastrophic for unions, including my own,” Jimmy Williams, general president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), said in an official statement released after Trump’s electoral victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. In this special installment of The Real News Network podcast, produced in collaboration with In These Times magazine, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Williams about the threat Trump’s agenda poses to organized labor, and why now more than ever the Democratic party has to embrace working class positions.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone for a special installment of The Real News Network podcast produced in collaboration with In These Times magazine, The Real News and in these times are both founding members of the Movement Media Alliance, a coalition of grassroots aligned social justice driven journalism organizations committed to accurate, transparent, accountable, principled, and just media and to working collaboratively to amplify our impact. Follow the link in the show notes to learn more about the Movement Media Alliance and please subscribe and donate to The Real News and to in these times because we can’t keep doing this work without you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Donald Trump is headed back to The White House in two months and now that the GOP has won a majority in the House of Representatives, the fully magnified Republican party will effectively control all three branches of government, the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary.
So what room does that leave for? Organized labor to affect policy in the coming years and is the very existence of organized labor in this country at risk. Today we’re going to discuss what a second Trump administration will mean for unions and for the labor movement writ large. Looking back at the first Trump administration and looking at the political appointments Trump is already making for his second administration, what should we be preparing for when it comes to workers’ rights on the job, the right to organize the makeup and functions of the National Labor Relations Board and the general living standards and working conditions for working class people around the country. And what about the Democrats outgoing President Joe Biden famously said he was going to be the most pro-Union president in American history, and I make no apologies for it. So was that true? And even if it was true, has the uptick in pro-union rhetoric from Democrats in recent years actually corresponded to concrete policies that put working people union and non-union?
First, is it time for a labor party in the United States and will it be possible for that to be anything more than a pipe dream as we confront the realities of a Republican trifecta and an entrenched Democrat Republican duopoly in a statement released after Trump’s electoral victory over vice President Kamala Harris. Jimmy Williams, general president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades stated plainly and powerfully working people deserve a party that understands what’s at stake and that puts their issues front and center when campaigning and governing a potential Republican trifecta along with Project 2025 will be catastrophic for unions including my own. But if the Democrats want to win, they need to get serious about being a party by and for the working class. So for in these Times Magazine and the Real News Network, I’m honored to be joined now by none other than Jimmy Williams himself. Jimmy, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
Jimmy Williams:
Yeah, and thanks for having me too. I appreciate it as well.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, we need your voice now and we need to get folks’ heads and hearts right for the fight ahead, and I’m really grateful to you for making time for this. So let’s dig in here. I know we only have a little bit of time with you. I want to start by talking concretely about what a second Trump administration will mean for labor and for you and your union specifically. So can you tell our audience a bit about your union, your members, and what you guys are preparing for with Trump coming back to the White House and a Republican trifecta controlling the federal government?
Jimmy Williams:
Yeah, we’re primarily a construction union, but we also represent folks in the manufacturing sector. We also represent public employees around the country. And so we’re a pretty diverse union, but primarily a private sector construction union. And in preparation for an incoming Trump administration a second time around, we’re going to see a tax on every front. We’re going to see it in the private sector through the NLRB. We’re going to see it in the Department of Labor through weakened standards when it comes to things like apprenticeship programs, prevailing wage in Davis Bacon. And we’re going to see it literally in everything we do oversight is not going to be there out there in the Department of Labor. So we’re preparing for an absolute all out attack on every level. You can’t take anything off the table with this group. Project 2025 laid out an absolute destructive path for labor unions, specifically public unions, but private unions as well. And so we’re just sitting here as wounded ducks, but the attacks are coming and they’re going to come fast.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Can you say a little more about Project 2025, right, because there’s been a lot of talk about this master plan, right? And Trump himself on the campaign trail tried to distance himself from project 2025 at least rhetorically because it was deeply unpopular in the public sphere. But there’s a lot in Project 2025 that appears like a corporate CEO’s wishlist for remaking American society like to be the exploitable kind of well of cheap labor with no rights that every boss wants. So I guess for folks who are afraid of project 2025 but don’t know specifically what’s actually in there, is there anything specific in the plans laid out in Project 2025 that you want to stress for folks are going to have deep implications for workers and for unions?
Jimmy Williams:
Yeah, I mean the labor movement itself represents so many different industries, but it literally is going to be an attack on the federal employees, public employees first stripping them of collective bargaining rights, limiting what you can and can’t negotiate. There was even things in there about setting up corporate controlled unions to compete with the already existing unions. There’s the all out call for repeal of Davis Bacon and absolute attack on the apprenticeship programs allowing corporations and business to construct their own apprenticeship programs. And all the guardrails that the labor movement has provided for working people for generations are all on the chopping block. And my father always told me, show me who you hang with and it’ll show me who you are. And Donald Trump has surrounded himself with believers in this agenda with the folks that wrote it, and he’s appointing people already in positions of power that believe in this approach to government. And when somebody shows you who you are, you got to believe them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think one thing that is really important to stress for folks watching or listening to or reading this, that we’re talking about labor policy and labor law specifically and how that’s going to impact the labor movement and working people, but of course so many other kind of policy plans or stated intentions from the Trump administration, even if they are not focused on say the National Labor Relations Board, are still going to have deep impacts on the lives and conditions of working people around the country, including Trump’s most infamous campaign promise to wage, the largest mass deportation operation in this country’s history. Now, Jimmy, this as you know, is going to impact your industry a lot. I mean, we even saw examples of what happens when an industry that does have a lot of undocumented workers in it that does have a lot of contract labor, non-union labor mixed in with union labor, right? When you have these harsh anti-immigrant policies like Ron DeSantis does in Florida, you’re going to end up with a lot of construction sites that are empty or filled with folks who don’t know what they’re doing. So I wanted to just kind of get your perspective as an expert and a union leader in this industry. How is the attack on immigrants and these plans for mass deportations? How do you expect that to impact the construction industry as such?
Jimmy Williams:
It’s going to have dramatic impacts on our ability to organize, and both parties have gotten immigration wrong throughout the course of my time. As an organizer, I’ve been in my role as president of the union for the last three years, but prior to that I was our organizing director. And I can tell you under an Obama administration, under a Trump administration, under a Biden administration and in the upcoming future, both parties have gotten it wrong. The workers that come here are being victimized dehumanized. They have no path to organize, there are no rights in the workplace. And this idea that a mass deportation program is going to somehow solve the problem that this country has had for my entire lifetime and for two generations of preying upon immigrant workers, it’s just the wrong approach. And quite frankly, both parties have gotten it wrong and I cannot see any pathway where this is somehow going to be helpful for the construction industry and for union workers and union employers because workers are just going to go further and further into the shadows. They’re going to have less and less rights. We have members within our union that have been members of our union for over a decade that are going to now have the right stripped away and are going to be working under the fear of deportation. I mean, this is just the wrong approach to how this country should handle the working class, and it has been wrong for quite some time.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to, in the few minutes we’ve got left, I want to kind of zero in on what you’re saying about both parties getting this wrong and also circle back to your statement about what Democrats have gotten wrong in terms of serving a working class base and building a sort of class politics, a populous politics that could counter the corrupting impact of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. But just to kind of pick up on that last point of yours, I wanted to ask what role unions can and need to be playing in defending our fellow workers, especially undocumented folks, migrants the most vulnerable in our midst and in our ranks. As you know, unions have not always been great on this issue. I mean, there are really encouraging signs from your union, from unions like the laborers local 79 up in New York where construction and demolition union workers have been reaching out to non-Union undocumented workers, workers who were formerly incarcerated. And instead of seeing these low wage exploitable workers as the enemy of union workers, they’re trying to bring them into the fold. They’re trying to organize ’em, defending their rights. So how do we keep our union brothers and sisters and our fellow workers out there from falling into the trap of seeing this attack on our fellow workers, particularly immigrants as somehow beneficial for American born union workers here?
Jimmy Williams:
Yeah, it starts with we have to continue to organize in their workplace because if you stop, the labor movement can never turn its back on the working class regardless of what political landscape we live in. Secondly, in my opinion, we have to be able to tell the story in a much better fashion. I mean, Donald Trump has controlled the narrative that all immigrants that come to this country are here to sadly commit crimes, take jobs away from you. I mean, all the fear and things that were said during the last 10 years, quite frankly since he stepped on the political world, we have to push that back with the real narrative of workers are here, they want to work, they need the rights to organize. And I think that’s where the Democratic party has missed it from the get go and trying to put together an approach that sounds like the Republicans only lighter. It doesn’t work for working people. And during this time, if the labor movement and if unions turn their back on the folks that are here working and want to work and don’t provide defensive comfort, defensive relief, then we’re going to miss it for generations.
Maximillian Alvarez:
The last time you and I spoke was three years ago when organized labor and its advocates and many within the Democratic party, were trying to pass the Pro Act, the protector right to organize act right. I wanted to ask if we could just sort of use that as a springboard to kind of talk about what Democrats could have been doing and should be doing more to yet really appeal to and serve a working class base. What was the Pro Act, right? What would it have meant and how would it have changed people’s lives if it had actually become law? And why did it fail? Why didn’t Democrats kind of push it harder or was it not fully up to them?
Jimmy Williams:
Yeah, it wasn’t fully up to the Democratic slim majority in the Senate. You needed 60 votes in order to pass the Pro Act fully, and there’s zero Republican support for the Pro Act. So you can’t fully blame the Democratic Party for not being able to enact that law during Joe Biden’s time. But what you can blame the Democratic Party is for missing the tone and realizing that the Democratic party has to be about movement building. And the story about how broken our labor laws are hasn’t been told by the Democratic Party. We get little crumbs on the edges here and there. And truthfully, what’s needed in this country is to organize a movement about giving workers more rights on the job. The Pro Act does that it fixes 80 years of lost labor laws in this country. It fixes all the wrongs that have been done over the course of my lifetime and others.
And that story needs to be told to the American public as a whole, people don’t realize that the basic rights they have right now in their workplace and let alone how difficult it is to organize your workplace in the wake of how screwed up our system is. Look, I can tell you just in the construction industry currently, the model that’s used in the non-union sector is to misclassify everybody as an independent subcontractor. Well, those workers don’t even have rights to organize a union in their workplace because they’re being abused and victimized as self-employed independent contractors to pro act fix that the Pro Act made elections and corporate interference illegal to where currently if you wanted to organize your workplace, you have to go up against your boss in a way that is totally weighted towards management and it equaled the playing field to get to elections quicker, to get to bargaining quicker. And those are the things that workers need in this country. And the Democratic Party has failed to tell that story to the 80% of the world that doesn’t come from a union household.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I know I’ve only got you for another minute or two. So by way of rounding out, I kind of want to zero in on the last sentence of the statement that you put out after Trump won the general election. You said, as I read in the beginning, if the Democrats want to win, they need to get serious about being a party by and for the working class. Now again, the last election just sent a very big sign to all of us that they don’t want to do that. So I wanted to ask you, what would that look like? What should that look like? How do we get there concretely? And for folks out there who are maybe just done with the Democratic Party, what role can they still play in advancing this movement through their unions and through other forms of engagement outside of the Democratic party?
Jimmy Williams:
I mean, I think the question is right in front of them right now as far as the party goes, and are you willing to allow the labor movement to set your economic agenda for the working class? Or are you going to continue to try to woo over corporate interest and blend them with a message that somehow is supposed to help build out the working class? Because this last election was an absolute refusal to think that the Democratic Party actually works on behalf of the working class and going forward, if the labor movement isn’t allowed to set the agenda for what the Democratic Party’s message is for working class people, they’re going to continue to fail. They’re going to continue to lose. They need to really take it serious as they figure out how to rebuild a message that is going to be attractive to working class people. Quite frankly, at this point, I don’t have much faith that the corporate interests that are still involved in the Democratic Party are going to see that power either, and that’s the fight ahead within the Democratic Party and the Labor movement needs to call balls and strikes, needs to be independent of either party. It needs to know when and how to engage in our electoral politics the right way.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So that is general President of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, Jimmy Williams. We’ve been speaking with Jimmy for this special we collaborative report by in these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. Jimmy, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time, and thank you again, brother, for all you’re doing for the movement.
Jimmy Williams:
Thank you, my man. Take care.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So that is Jimmy Williams, general President of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. I want to thank Jimmy for joining us today for this important conversation. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. And one more time before you go. If you want to see more reporting like this from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world, then we need you to become a supporter of the Real News Network and in these Times Magazine. Now follow the links in the show notes and donate today. I promise you it really makes a difference for the Real News Network. This is Maximilian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.
Taya Graham and Stephen Janis examine the recent election through the lens of wealth inequality and how it affects our democracy in ways both extreme and unseen. Joining them is noted economist Dr. Richard Wolff, who will help them unpack the ubiquitous tendrils of rapacious wealth and how it allows billionaires to manipulate us in ways that are often unacknowledged.
Studio: Adam Coley, David Hebden, Cameron Granadino Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham Written by: Stephen Janis
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Taya Graham:
Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Real News Network, livestream special inequality watch edition. Today, me and my reporting partner Stephen Janis and I will review the recent election results through a particular lens, the evolving business interests and the resulting political economy surrounding billionaires. We’ll examine how this small group of people have impacted the perceptions and vibes of voters, and ultimately how it influenced the outcome of our recent presidential election. It’s a particularly important discussion because there are many theories floating around at the moment about why Donald Trump won and how progressives can address this. That means that first, though, we must understand what determined how people voted. In other words, we have to go beyond finger pointing and posturing and examine the underlying influences that created the atmosphere that made this election so confounding. Let’s remember up until election day, the race between Harrison Trump was considered too close to call, and yet as it stands now, Donald Trump will be the first Republican to win the popular vote since George Bush in 2004.
And what’s even more intriguing is that since his victory, the old debate that has consumed the Democratic Party since 2016 has reemerged specifically, do Democrats need a kowtow to the more moderate wing or embraced the progressive movement? Each is claiming they have what this party needs to win. But what if, and I’m asking what if that debate is wrong at its core? What if it’s not just incomplete, but rather Mrs, the whole point entirely? What if the election was decided before it happened? What if unseen unacknowledged forces set the terms of the debate in such a way that even a billion dollars in campaign spending, which is incidentally what Harris raised, doesn’t really matter? Well, that’s exactly the idea we’re going to explore today. We are going to give you our audience a different way of thinking about what just happened. Hopefully a fresh insight into how to define and perhaps examine the politics of the present.
It’s a little cultural primer that we hope will give you an analytic foundation to build upon, to talk about how we can fight back, not with rhetoric, but with reason. It’s a way of thinking about the politics of the present, which seems unable to address ongoing threats like climate change, lack of affordable housing, or fair wages for working people. And to help me unpack all of this, I will be joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janice, who normally hosts a police accountability report with me. But we have also in the past produced a show called The Inequality Watch, which is what we will be doing today. Stephen, how are you? And can you talk a little bit about why we also focus on inequality?
Stephen Janis:
Well, I mean, as many people have pointed out, well, first of all, I’m very happy just to be on YouTube.
How can I complain? But as we pointed out before in the past in our inequality reporting, inequality defines the world in which we play out these ideas. Inequality defines how we vote. Inequality defines so many aspects of our life, and it touched on so many things, including our main topic of policing that we really just can’t avoid it. So that’s why today we’re going to be breaking it down and looking at it not just as a phenomena, but the mechanics that make it work, right, the things that make it happen, how it produces the results, how it produces the sort of literal media mechanisms that define the debate. So we’re going to be unpacking and pulling apart this system and trying to examine it in a way that will maybe bring fresh insight as said to our viewers.
Taya Graham:
And I want you to remember, we will also be talking to you, the people who are watching us live right now, like Lacy r and Rosie Rocks and Noli D. Hi guys, good to see you. So please make sure to like the stream and post a question or a comment in the live chat, and we will try to answer as we go along and you might even be able to ask our guests, the economist, Dr. Richard Wolff, a question two now to start this conversation about what we’re going to do today. I want to begin with a few thoughts on what we will not do. This show is not about discussing or blaming a specific constituency or political strategy. We are not going to point fingers and definitely not at voters. We are not going to discuss what the Harris campaign could have should have done differently. No. Instead, we’re going to focus on the aspects of this past election that are quite different. So Stephen, can you talk about how this angle is a little different than your typical mainstream media coverage?
Stephen Janis:
Well, I mean, it’s kind of looking at the field as it were in terms of how, like we said, the media political economy is constructed around us, how we are immersed and how we’re like fish swimming in water. We don’t recognize the water, but the water actually defines how we think, feel, perceive ourselves. So we’re going to go a little bit beyond saying maybe if the Democrats said this, or maybe if the Republicans had done this or that, we’re going to go into the pretty much the epistemological, for lack of a better word, or the foundations that create a media kind of circus that we’re all immersed in sometimes not totally aware because it’s become so ingrained into our personal lives and who we are, how we think about ourselves. So we’re going to go into that and look in depth in detail and come up with some ways of thinking about some tools to analyze it and some ways to think about that maybe people haven’t considered yet. So that’s kind of the point of this whole thing.
Taya Graham:
Well, I think you make a good point and it’s going to raise a few questions which we can break down in the moment. But first I would like to give those of you who are watching us a little bit of a preview of the format of the show. So we’re going to make what I hope is an interesting argument about the election we just witnessed, and we’ll do so by examining the uber rich or billionaires in a way that I hope will help us understand the role in all of this better. And then after we do this breakdown of the topic, we will be joined by an exceptional guest, Dr. Richard Wolf. He really needs no introduction. Other than that, he is one of the four most thinkers on economics, social justice, and equitable society. And he will have the opportunity at his thoughts. He’s also a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he’s the author of several books such as Capitalism Hits the Fan, the Global Economic Meltdown, and What to Do about It. I also feel pretty that he will have something to say about our breakdown topic, which is billionaires.
Now, I think we can’t talk about electoral politics and economic inequity without starting with the phenomena that represent both. Of course, again, I’m referring to billionaires, the class of people who live amid unimaginable abundance with super yachts and private jets and guarded bunkers and personal islands while the world crumbles around them. They’re the type of people whose power makes ’em pathological to the point where the amount of wealth they possess and how they obtain it literally turns our social and economic system into toys for their amusement. Let me review some of the mind boggling statistics and facts about billionaires wealth inequality and its outsized impact on electoral politics. Let’s just consider some of the relevant facts. So since 2020, almost two thirds of all new wealth went to the top 1%, according to Oxfam, the richest people in the world make six times more than the bottom 90% of humanity.
Collectively, that’s 2.7 billion a day. America’s 806 billionaires are now richer than half of the population combined a lot richer according to Mother Jones. Billionaire wealth in the US has collectively doubled since 2017. The rest of us, not so much, and the rest of us that’s over 65 million households. Billionaires emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes than the average person does in a lifetime according to a 2024 Oxfam report. It really does make you feel a little bit annoyed when you take your time to actually sort your recycling. And a billionaire is casually riding a private jet, undoing your efforts to conserve your planet. I mean, you’re trying to make sure to keep your local river clean, taking items to the dump. You donate old electronics, you’re trying to save a tree by recycling your cardboard. I even cut the plastic rings of my six pack so I don’t kill dolphins, but one private jet full of Kardashian undoes the whole work of my entire neighborhood. So, so much for our recycling program.
Now, this is a statistic I like attacks of up to 5% on the world’s multimillionaires. And billionaires could raise 1.7 trillion a year enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty. And so that’s why I have trouble understanding why many people don’t agree with me that this would be a worthwhile thing. And instead they take the time to defend billionaires who exploit our tax code instead of giving back anything to the country and the people that made their wealth possible. But perhaps some of you folks can comment in the section and help me understand there might be some Elon Musk supporters out there who can help educate me. Yeah, of course. But the pathology of this unimaginable wealth is of course not the only issue here. It’s how they extract extreme wealth and how that process has evolved. That’s critical to our discussion. I mean, perhaps we should be thinking about their role in our electoral politics beyond the more obvious consequences of a wealth imbalance, political donations and dark money alone, a way of classifying them that will shed new light on exactly how their power shapes us and by extension and how we vote.
And so Stephen, I think you’ve developed a way to make a point about billionaires.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, because I think we’re living in what I would call the conflict industrial complex, and I was kind of curious as to why, because it’s not just a matter of Facebook, it’s a matter of how people have profited off it and thus created a political economy around it. We came above the way of thinking about billionaires, and we have three classifications for sort of a new form of billionaire thinking. The first one would be we have the carbon billionaires who are the Koch brothers, for example, for top or people who make their money off petrochemicals oil or whatever they are the first classification of billionaires. The Koch brothers, for example, have spent $145 million trying to convince people that climate change is a hoax. So that’s the first class of the new form of billionaires who are informing how we think about ourselves. The second one who be conflict billionaires, and those are the people who have made their money by sowing conflict, by destroying democracy, by using social media to make us all hate each other and not really think about that we’re being treated unjustly.
And that would be like a Mark Zuckerberg who’s worth like $140 million or even now Elon Musk, who has stepped into the conflict arena and feels like to a certain extent, he wants to be part of this massive project to undermine us with conflict driven social media. They literally make money off our anger towards each other, and that’s pretty extraordinary. And then the last would be capture billionaires who are like hedge fund managers or private equity who do use extractive processes to take wealth out of the community and hoard it for themselves. And those processes themselves of extraction create anger and resentment because they leave communities, companies hollowed out by extracting the wealth, not building something, but rather just taking money that would otherwise go to the community or resources. I think it’s important all these processes create psychologies around them that are really important to think about because if you’re working at a store, you’re working at a company and suddenly it’s totally in debt and a bunch of private equity investors have taken the money out of it, it creates resentment and anger, it creates inequity and the same thing.
And then you have, you go home and you get on Facebook and the conflict billionaires are selling you ads and pushing content that makes you paranoid in some sense or makes you mistrustful and I think take the empirical side out of our lives. So all these three kind of different billionaires I think create a different class or a different political economy that you’re going to talk about that make us sort of unable to have discussions about or unable excuse, have discussions about some of the more important issues, more of the complex problems. It’s very hard to do collective complex problem solving when your entire reality is conscripted by conflict entrepreneurs or conflict billionaires or carbon bill use who are literally intentionally getting rich off distortion. And so we are in this distortion media complex, this social media conflict media complex, and these billionaires are the ones who are profiting off it, and I think they have an outsized influence on how our electoral process goes. So that’s why I wanted to kind of outline that for people.
Taya Graham:
I thought that was a great outline. And just so you know, there’s been a really, what I think an interesting conversation about it in the chat.
Stephen Janis:
Oh, really,
Taya Graham:
Life under the microscope said, let’s not forget UPS, newer CEO Carol Tom gave Amazon $1 every and any package deal robbed UPS enforced layoffs that haven’t happened in over 30 years, built a Frankenstein’s monster, a dollar a package at a time by selling out union later. And I want you to know life under a microscope that hits my heart right here I am a union steward myself. And blue Unicorn gave, I thought a really interesting response when everyone’s businesses have to close, but the government gives monopolies to Amazon, et cetera. That’s called fascism and not capitalism, just saying.
So let’s get back to you, Stephen, and your breakdown. So let’s review. For those who are watching, you’re saying that these billionaires, the carbon, the capture and the conflict are critical to how we think about the election. In other words, how they make their money actually affects our how we think. So maybe I can try to break this down a little bit here. So one way I thought about this is in every massive wealth extraction business, we use a term to describe and analyze how it influences governance, and that’s what we call a political economy. So in other words, economic power translates into political power causing a feedback loop that perpetuates all the worst aspects of it. As a billionaire makes more money in a specific industry, then they use it to gain more political power and influence, which in turn enables them to extract even more wealth. And then the resulting system becomes captured to the point where the political and financial system sort of fuse into a perpetual moneymaking machine that needs and
Stephen Janis:
A misery
Taya Graham:
Machine
Stephen Janis:
Too.
Taya Graham:
That’s a really good point. It’s a misery making machine too, but the worst part is that it leads to ineffective regulation and it puts working folks into dire straits. So if this political economy is based upon the industries we’re discussing, and if it’s particularly pernicious, well, you can see the results. A fractured democracy soon to be staffed by people best known for generating means. I mean, I think our hometown, Baltimore is a good example of this.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, and you’re right. Oh, go ahead with that.
Taya Graham:
Well, because I would just say, I mean for decades, our city, for those of you who don’t know in Baltimore city, Maryland, we’ve struggled with poverty and doled out hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives to developers to build luxury housing. And all that generosity has been funneled back into the campaign coffers of certain local officials to the extent that the city council actually voted down a $30,000 study just to see if it’s effective. And that’s not the end of it. Stephen and I actually testified in our state capitol to urge leader there to approve a transparency bill that would’ve been paneled a group of experts to study their effectiveness throughout Maryland. And guess how much this work group would’ve cost taxpayers $0. But that bill failed because for some reason it never came up for a vote in our house of delegates. Isn’t that interesting?
Stephen Janis:
That’s very true.
Taya Graham:
So I think that’s a really good example of the power of money. I mean the power would
Stephen Janis:
Of political economy. Yeah, the power of political economy and how it changes the entire landscape of a city, a city that’s poor, that gives tax breaks to the rich and then won’t even study them. It makes for a totally ineffective policy. What happens in these conflict economies with these conflict billionaires is that the ability to effectuate good policy becomes absolutely impossible because the inequity becomes ingrained into our media, into our discourse, to a point where we can’t really even begin to continence complex policies and come up with collective solutions, whatever they are. And I think that is really one of the biggest problems that we’ve kind of identified because we talked to voters. You and I were in Milwaukee, we were covering the election. We talked to voters who were young, who weren’t aware of student loan, some of the student loan things that the Biden administration had done, a plethora of programs trying to reduce the student loan debt.
They didn’t seem cognizant, a young woman who didn’t seem cognizant of the problems with not having a national right to abortion and a lot of things, it really struck me and I’m saying, how is it possible that they’re voting in this way? They seem totally, in some ways, not informed in a way that is beneficial to them. They’re informed in a way that is beneficial to billionaires. To me, that was like, wow, how did they achieve that? Now, I don’t want to sound naive or pollyannaish, but that really was an amazing revelation to see a lot of voters who really had been somehow convinced to vote, in my estimation against this is not criticizing the voters.
Taya Graham:
No, not all.
Stephen Janis:
I’m saying some media ecology that they’ve been immersed in, like I said, like fish and water.
Taya Graham:
Michael Willis liked that comment, by the way. Hi, Michael Willis, and I’ll say also hi to friends and code out there. Now, before I get too involved in the live chat, I think this might be the perfect moment to have our guests weigh in on the topic of billionaires and their role in our current state of both our political and economic affairs. His name is Dr. Richard Wolff and he’s one of the most popular thinkers on YouTube and beyond, and he has been a singular voice in the debate over economic policy, workers’ rights, rampant inequality, and of course our topic today, the vast wealth of billionaires. Professor Wolff, thank you so much for joining us.
Richard Wolff:
Well, thank you very much for inviting me. I’m honored by it and I’m very glad to participate.
Taya Graham:
Thank you so much.
Richard Wolff:
If I may, I think you’ve been bringing up a point that I would like to take even further.
Speaker 4:
Please do that.
Richard Wolff:
The existence of the billionaires in shaping to take your analogy, the water that we as fish swim in
And that shapes us even though we’re not aware with each little moment where that happens, I want to review with people what it means that we even have billionaires. It means that those 800 odd folks, and I mean the word odd in all of its senses, that those 800 odd people dispose of purchasing power. That’s what it means to have a lot of wealth. They can buy, they can buy the way none of us can. They can buy a television station or a dozen, they can buy an advertising agency or a dozen. They can do things that shape the discourse that we all engaged in and nothing exemplifies it so beautifully as Elon Musk buying Twitter. Absolutely, there you have as naked, but it wasn’t. It is Mr. Bezos buying the Washington Post years earlier, and we could all go on what would be necessary in the United States and what those billionaires make sure we don’t have would be a proper accounting of what portion of the airwaves that are all around us like water around fish. One portion of all of that movement, electronic and otherwise of ideas and thoughts and positions is under the control of a handful of people in the way that they operate their wealth.
How many economists, or a couple more statistics, the 10% richest people in the United States own 85% of the stocks and bonds. What does that tell you? It’s a very small community within our population that holds all the strings. It’s not just the billionaires, it’s them too. We might call them aspiring billionaires. They just haven’t got there yet, but they are already behaving in a way that will make them fit in to be as polite about this as I can. Let me give you a couple of examples that might not have yet occurred to folks. I would argue, and I mean this very literally, that the three most important economic realities crashing in onto the lives of the American people in the years leading up to this latest election and continuing as I speak, were not part of the debate. Were not part of the election.
If I can quote famous philosopher, here was the powerful presence of an absence. One are the three topics. Well, let me give you the one in order as I see it, of importance. The United States came out of World War II in 1945. King of the Hill, every other conceivable competitor of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan. I’m not pretty much exhausted if you want put Russia in there, but Russia was never an economic competitor of the United States. They were all decimated in and by the war, their finances were gone. Their railroads had been bombed. Their people had suffered in a way that the United States simply did not. One group of bombs fell in Pearl Harbor and then never again throughout the rest of the war, et cetera. That meant that in the 70 years afterwards, roughly 1945 to the early part of this century, the United States prevailed in the world.
It dominated its products, went everywhere, the one currency that could be used on any corner of the globe, the US dollar. Where did you go if you were a poor country to borrow money? You went to Washington or New York? On and on and on. Why am I telling you this? Because I have to be the bearer of the bad news. So please remember, you do not shoot the messenger even if you don’t like the message. Our empire was profound, was as global, if not more so than the British empire that preceded it. But like every empire it’s born, it evolves and then it passes away. We are in the passing phase. It’s all around us. The dollar is not the reserve currency of every central bank across the world as it was. The dollar is not the agreed international currency the way it was. The role of America’s exports is much smaller in world trade than it was. I could go on, but you get the picture.
Stephen Janis:
Well, professor Wilson, I wanted to ask you a quick question. How much did inequality have to do with this diminishment of the empire? Just to generalize
Richard Wolff:
Question. I’m getting to that. I would
Stephen Janis:
Argue. Alright, my fault.
Richard Wolff:
No, no, not understandable. I’m getting to that.
Speaker 5:
Go
Stephen Janis:
Ahead.
Richard Wolff:
In every empire of which we have a record, and it’s quite a few ours, the British, the Dutch, the French, the Persian, I mean we do know a good bit about it. It’s been part of human history to say the least. One of the things that happens when empires begin to decline is that those people at the top, the 10% to 5%, if you like, the 1% who occupy the positions of the CEOs and of the political leadership and so on, they are in the best position to hold on to what they have, which means that the costs of the declining empire are offloaded onto the middle and the bottom. We are living through that offloading, and again, the examples are all around us. Once you’re willing to see, we have in the United States as a struggle won by the working class, a minimum wage begun in the depths of the depression back in the 1930s. The current minimum wage federal level is $7 and 25 cents an hour
Upon which you cannot live. It was last raised to that lofty level in the year 2009. It is that today. That means that for the last 15 years, every year prices went up sometimes just by a little 1%, sometimes by a lot last few years by six, seven, 8%. But for every one of the last 15 years without changing or raising the $7 and 25 cents an hour, which remained the same, you were salvaging the livelihoods of millions of people whose minimum wage was never raised, not by Republicans and not by Democrats. What kind of a society would do that to the poorest people of among you who are working. That’s why they get the minimum wage. It’s extraordinary. The social security distributions have not kept pace with inflation. The cost of our groceries have not kept pace with what are we doing? We are whacking the middle and the bottom, the vast majority of people, and one big explanation is the change in the world economy. Let me give you a second statistic. In economics, we have a statistic called the GDP, the Gross domestic Product. It’s a very crude measure, but it’s what we have to give you roughly the size of the footprint of an economy.
The United States used to be the biggest GDP in the world. It still is. It still is, but it has now a new reality. If you put together the GDP of the United States right now and those of its major allies called the G seven, that’s the United States, Canada, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. If you put it together that total GDP is less, a lot less than the GDP of the People’s Republic of China and its allies in something called the bricks. This is a world changing reality. This is a new world economy that has in it two big blocks, the US and its allies and China and its allies. One of them is falling in relative wealth and the other one is rising. And the American people have to understand they’re in the one that’s falling and you’ve got to come to terms with that. And we just went through an election that pretended none of this is going on.
Stephen Janis:
That’s a really good point. And Dr. Wolff, I want to ask you a question because you were, as I was listening to you, I kind of had a question.
Richard Wolff:
Please.
Stephen Janis:
Are you saying to a certain extent that inequality is bad for growth? In other words, the furthermore inequality gets its roots in an economy, the less economy is productive and growing, it’s actually antithetical. Even though the elites will get more wealth for themselves, they’re actually hurting themselves in this process by creating a more unequal economy. Is that what you’re saying or am I understanding that?
Richard Wolff:
Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. What I would say is inequality,
Speaker 6:
Which
Richard Wolff:
Has often been used as a justification, it’s a necessary thing to allow if you’re going to have economic growth. Well, if that was the strategy we lost,
Speaker 5:
Okay, interesting.
Richard Wolff:
I would argue that the link there is a very dubious
Speaker 5:
Understood
Richard Wolff:
Link.
Speaker 5:
Understood.
Richard Wolff:
And it’s more scary for the American people because the difference between the United States and China is not the difference that Americans keep talking to each other about the difference between a so-called private enterprise economy, US Britain, so forth, and a fill in the blank state run economy. China has a hybrid by intent. They are 50%. A private capitalist economy equally run partly by Chinese businesses and partly by foreigners that have set up there including a big chunk of American business. And the other half is the government. So they’re not like the Soviet Union where everything was government or almost, and they’re not like the United States where everything’s mostly private. They are a new thing in the history of the world, a hybrid. Now why is that important? Because over the last 30 years, that system that they operate has grown faster than the United States or Britain or the G seven or anybody else. Every time I have to explain this to the American people, I have to stop and say, I am not endorsing Xi Jingping. I’m not celebrating China. They have a host of problems.
Speaker 5:
I’m stating
Richard Wolff:
A reality of fact. I’m arguing only that the United States is behaving like a three-year-old child confronted with a barking dog who puts his or her little hands in front of their eyes in the hope that if you can’t see the dog, it won’t be there and you know that a mature child will grow older and a year or two later we’ll have understood you can put your hand there, you can not see it, but the dog will probably be there just so much. We are not doing that. We conducted an election in which the two candidates acted like none of this was happening, whereas those of us who are by profession spend our time studying this. We’re looking at each other and I’m talking about my conversations with right wing economists, folks in the center, not just my leftwing colleagues, and we all look at each other. What is going on here? There’s a level of what psychologists call denial that is frightening.
Taya Graham:
I would have to agree and Professor Wolff, someone in our comment section once upon a time, I think summarized our conversation really well so far. They wrote, billionaires are dragons hoarding their gold for themselves and no one else, and they rip through working class people to keep it. Thank you so much for that comment Once upon a time, I think they made an excellent summation. Professor Wolff though I do want to ask you what influence you see on how billionaires impacted our most recent election? I mean, I think there’s a pretty obvious example of Elon Musk, but I know this topic has a lot more facets just than him. Maybe you could describe for us some of the ways that you saw billionaires influence our election.
Richard Wolff:
Well, for me, it was all about the subtle ways in which you do or do not pay attention to candidates. I mean, the choice is made in a little moment of a reporter’s behavior or a little moment later when the editor works over what the reporter submits. I mean, we all know that if you have anything to do with journalism, how that works and the mood is created and in our country we find it very worthwhile to enjoy the latest antics of Elon Musk. What is this about? What is this heroism that is applied to this fellow? I mean a mature, and I don’t want to insult anyone, but a mature look at our economy, especially aware that the automobile, the gas powered automobile is the single largest cause of air pollution in the world. This fact that we all have this automobile whose major function is to sit on the street or in the garage most of the hours of every day, a level of inefficient use of resources that dwarfs all the other ones. We typically talk about, and we have known for decades that we could do a major job on improving our health and saving this planet. If we went from the private automobile to a system of high quality, rapid well done mass, transportation,
Buses, trains, trolleys, all of that well known, the engineering has been done, the economics have been done. So what we needed in the world was a transition from the private oil driven car to mass transit, but we didn’t get that. We got something else and Elon Musk gets the credit or if you allow me the blame, what did he do? He figured out how he could make the kind of money a production of a private vehicle can get you to earn
If he could just get rid of the bad pollution from the gas. So he gave us the electric private vehicle which will sit in the garage and on the street for eternity being wasted in terms, it’s unbelievable. We should have had a social response to this saying, that’s not what we need, Mr. Musk, and we’re sure as hell not going to reward you by being, which he currently is. Let me remind you all, I keep track of these things. His current estimated wealth is 350 billion, an amount of money that you ought to wonder given to him because he replaced one efficient, inefficient system of transportation with another one and has made sure that we don’t have mass transportation and we could remove from him 300 of his 350 billion. He would then have 50 billion. He’d still be among the 800 billionaires of this country, Richard and everybody else, but we would have $300 billion with which we could attack half of the problems that are now judged to be beyond the reach of our solutions. It’s level of self delusion that we are going through as a nation that historians will look back on, shake their heads with wonder.
Taya Graham:
That’s such an excellent point. And so I just have to follow up because Elam Musk, along with Vivek Ram Swami, who’s a multimillionaire, who on multiple levels has defrauded his investors, his shareholders in the American public with the accident Alzheimer’s drug that fell through, and then of course he practically ran Rovan, his company into the ground, lost $926 million for that company and he’s going to be helping Elon Musk run the Department of government efficiency. So I’m just curious from your point of view, as an economist, what might your concerns be and what would you expect to happen when these two folks get a hand off the federal government and they’re controlling another facet of our lives,
Richard Wolff:
It’s part of the creation of the notion of the hero as the person who has a lot of money. I mean, it’s just an amazing mental leap, which smart people as most Americans are, wouldn’t do that. They know better than that. It’s bizarre. But look, we have a president who ran around becoming an important politician by telling everybody he was rich and telling everybody they ought to equate the fact that he’s rich, not with the fact that he inherited a ton of money from a father who had buildings in Brooklyn, but no, no, he was some kind of smarty, even though he’s got a dozen bankruptcies. It’s extraordinary. And you see it now with Ron Swami and with Elon Musk so far, by the way, they have announced only the following that I’ve been able to glean. They are going to make the government efficient and their initial plan is to lay off all the workers that are working from home, alright, just between you and me and the lamppost, that is the dumbest idea I have ever heard. Cruel. What kind of rational? You’re not going to investigate what each of these workers does, how it could be done in some other way. What would be No, no, no. They have a quick and dirty rule. That’s how they lost all that money making decisions like that. The opposite of what we teach people in university don’t ever make a sweeping decision like that unless of course what you’re doing is posing for the camera rather than solving a social problem.
And when you have billionaires, that’s what they do. We are going to watch Elon Musk standing next to the rocket ship over and over and over for the next five years and half of them won’t get off the ground, the other half will crash and he’ll have a good excuse for each one and he’ll be on the evening news. And this goes back to the question you asked earlier, that decision by the TV company to put Elon Musk standing next to the X rocket that he is going to send into the moon. That’s a choice. And you’re not going to show what’s happening to the average diet of the American people, what’s happening to the housing crisis. You’re not going to see that every now and then you’ll get a report, but you know what we’re going to hit the people with. Here’s the billionaire, and you’ll see ’em doing something sexy and dramatic and maybe driving off in his expensive car. And you don’t have to be a genius to understand that at the very best. That’s a mixed message that’s not helping us solve our social problems. It’s escapism.
Stephen Janis:
That brings up an interesting question, professor Wolffe, because I was thinking about that. I mean, it seems like during this past election that healthcare never came up, that climate changed, never came up. The student loan programs how we finance higher education never came up. Why do you think that is? Is that part of this billionaire? I was noticing today when I was watching CNN, they were talking about social security. They had an expert on, he never mentioned the fact that they could pretty much cure social security’s financial ills by just raising the cap on salaries and what people have to pay at what level they don’t pay anymore. But why was healthcare and these really important issues that affect every American not part of debate in the last election? I don’t really remember hearing it and people didn’t seem to be aware of it. What’s driving this sort of avoidance of real policy?
Richard Wolff:
Here’s the way it works. The politicians take an enormous amount of money which they can raise, and they hire professional pollsters. They set up groups all around the country, composed carefully of people from different walks of life, people with different religions, different jobs, all of that. And then they ask them, what question are you excited about? And they advise the candidate what to speak about based on where the, but you know what this is. You are now taking the pulse of the people to whom the billionaires direct all of their opinion. So you’re not
Testing people’s opinions, you’re testing how well the billionaires have done their job and they do their job perfectly well, and you can’t do that because what’s going to happen then is that the subterranean issues, the ones that are really affecting people, the sinking feeling when you can’t have eggs in the morning because the price of the eggs went crazy, or you can’t stay in your apartment because the landlord is upping the rent next month. And all of those moments, those are kind of gone. Those are somehow put without anyone saying it into the realm of your personal life, your personal dilemma, your personal failings.
Taya Graham:
Absolutely.
Richard Wolff:
And you know what happens? People are bitter. They feel it, but it’s not the allowable conversation. You can’t talk about sex and you can’t talk about other topics that are taboo in our culture. Those become taboo as well. And so there’s a bitterness and when it shows up when people who know they’re being screwed vote for Donald Trump because they’re voting for that other thing that they think is socially acceptable, a rich man living in a penthouse in New York and the bitterness doesn’t go away. It’s like learning that you can go to the mall 50 times. The bitterness that drives you there doesn’t go away no matter how many packages are in your garage.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, I mean it’s almost like a spiritual crisis, but somehow fused with policy and it’s just odd. I think you made some great points about that because I just feel like there’s been a growing and growing disconnect between actual policies that affect people’s lives and the ability to discuss them. And I think, I mean, it is kind of metaphysical. The billionaires come out and they set the tone of the bait and they distract you and force you to consider issues that really don’t impact your life. And that was how people were making decisions this election tell you,
Richard Wolff:
And you’re teaching them the last point. You’re teaching them, you really are without meaning to and without having the title of teacher, you’re teaching them, these are the important issues that you really should be thinking about. There’s something wrong with you if you’re dwelling on the price of the eggs in the supermarket, you should be really excited pro or allowing trans people into certain bathrooms. Our society is falling apart and I have no disrespect. I want the trans folks to have all the rights. Everybody else does. However, the sense of proportion here is craziness. There were, I think 80 bills introduced in state legislatures as well as in the federal one about trans people’s rights to access public toilets. What are you teaching people? I could give you many, many other examples there. What are you telling people? It’s extraordinary. The billionaires are very crucial in that decision making.
Stephen Janis:
I think. So what’s anything in the chat state?
Taya Graham:
Oh my gosh, the chat is great, and I just want to mention one thing dark Earth said must took over Tesla to make money not to help humanity. He exploited our desire to improve environmental issues. We have to line his pocket. He’s a conman, not a philanthropist. I love our viewers. Those an let’s
Stephen Janis:
Remember, he got four $56 million from the Obama administration too. Oh,
Taya Graham:
That’s right. Democrats helped make
Stephen Janis:
Him a coordinator. I think. I mean, professor Wolf corporate socialism is actually thriving right? In America.
Richard Wolff:
Absolutely. They all, and the beauty of it is each one of them when they go to the Congress, because I’ve been involved in this because go to the Congress, the argument that usually clinches it, they refer to another billionaire who came last year or two years ago and got a big chunk of subsidy. Why not me? And everybody nods poor me. Why not him?
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. Wow. It sounds like badly when billionaires out.
Taya Graham:
It sounds like tips and Baltimore tax
Stephen Janis:
Increment financing. Any comments in the chat or
Taya Graham:
Anything? Oh, we’ve got great comments in the chat,
Stephen Janis:
But Oh, you want to ask a question? Go ahead.
Taya Graham:
But let me just ask sometimes I just want to point out something. So the Biden administration saved Teamsters pensions. They released roughly 36 billion to preserve roughly 360,000 retirement payees. But the Teamsters didn’t endorse Vice President Harris. And the reason why I think of it’s because you mentioned those cultural war issues. So I’m just wondering, even when Democrats do something that ostensibly seems good, saving teamsters pensions and they still don’t earn an endorsement, does that mean the culture war issues are transcending self-interest or is maybe there’s something else going on here?
Speaker 5:
Good question.
Richard Wolff:
I would argue very strongly with you that this is not a problem of culture issues. This is a problem that what’s ailing the teamster, the truck driver or whoever you’re talking about, they organize lots of people beyond truck drivers.
Speaker 5:
Yes, true.
Richard Wolff:
If they are facing existential crises over the last 40 years as the American economy ran out of its empire gas, you had enormous social changes. One of the most important was the end of rising wages. By that I mean what we economists call real wages. That is the money you get adjusted for the prices you have to pay. Our working class has a real wage now about where it was in the 1970s. Let me give you an example just to shock you. Over the same period the last 40, 50 years, the real wage of the average Chinese worker has quadrupled.
This is again, nothing to do with celebrating China. China has lots of problems. I’m aware of them, but that’s a fact you have to deal with, it explains something about politics in China versus politics Here you have denied those workers the rise that the previous a hundred years had given them in this country. It’s one of the things made United States special. It gave workers rising real wages every decade for over a century. No other capitalist country did that. That’s why Americans feel that they live in an exceptional, they did for a long time, but that stopped in the 1970s and suddenly the advertising to the American working class family didn’t stop. You were still given the notion of what the American dream should be for you. You should have your own home. You should have one or two cars. You should send your kid to college.
How in the world are you going to do that if your real wage is stagnant? Well, we found the answer and the answer is, and people have to try to get their heads around this. The answer transformed the lives above all of women. Because the women, particularly the white women, but to some degree the non-whites as well, they left the home. They weren’t anymore the housewife, the homemaker, the mother, the care. They had to, they did all those things, but on top of it, they went out and got a job. They had to because the men’s wages were not going anywhere, but they kept the social network alive. They kept the emotional nexus going in the family. It’s mom who did that? Not bop. Very rare. And when you put the women under that stress, you blew up the family. We have a level of divorce in our country that’s among the highest in the world.
Our women no longer have children. They’re not going to go back to what they had before. All of these things are creating anxieties in the men that is extreme tensions between men and women, which you could see exploding. I mean, we have a vice president we’re about to have, who wants the women to go back inside the house, have babies and shut up and says so that that’s a sign of something. Those are the issues that have to be addressed. And the drivers in the teamsters who support Trump, I want to take my hat off to them. They have half of what they need, a recognition that the conventional politicians and my humble opinion on both parties are not there for them. They haven’t solved their problem, haven’t changed any of this. They’re interchangeable. They want something different. And Mr. Trump, by his very crudeness, offer them something different. I don’t think they believe in him, it’s just that they don’t believe in the conventional bushes or Clintons or bidens or unfortunately what came after.
Stephen Janis:
How much do you think Trump’s appeal is a product of the conflict media industrial complex? We talked about not just responding to the anxieties of people, but actually fueling or playing off the anxieties created by a conflict media system that makes everything seem dysfunctional. I mean, I would think if I were a teamster and a Biden administration saved my pension, I would be very supportive. But it seems like this is a psychological thing, like there’s a ops that makes us actually think even when things are good that they’re really bad. I, and I feel that frustration as a reporter when I interview people because I really feel like they are not being communicated with effectively in any way to understand what maybe their self-interest, I don’t want to be arrogant about it, but how much is Trump really a product of the conflict media industrial complex, not just the anxiety, these anxiety of voters?
Richard Wolff:
Well, I think it is not either or my understanding, really. My understanding is that all of these things are going on.
Speaker 5:
They are.
Richard Wolff:
I would caution you though, even when the teamster, and we can pick the W worker or teacher or anybody else,
Speaker 5:
Absolutely.
Richard Wolff:
When they’re aware that the Biden administration voted to do something good for union pensions,
If you talk to them for more than five minutes, you’ll discover they know that. But they have no confidence. They don’t have any confidence anymore. That won’t be taken away either by a Republican or a Democrat next week because they’ve become an interchangeable group. They want, look, Mr. Trump, in all due respect had two big ideas. He said to the American people, you’ve been screwed for 40 years, which is true, and you are upset about it, which is true, and I am going to protect you from any more of this, and I’m going to take us back to before this bad stuff happened, mago, we’re going to go back and I’m going to protect you from the two dangers. The first protection is I’m going to put up a steel wall against all of those immigrants and the second protection is I’m going to put up a tariff wall against all those Chinese products. And look, these are very dramatic images. I can tell you as an economist that he can’t do any of that. Or to put it another way, if he does any of that, he’ll come to regret it and fast because it will loose economic chaos in this country that will then be blamed on him.
Stephen Janis:
Well, can you drill down that in the tariff part? Because Howard tariffs, that is such an axiomatic thing, and just give us a little bit about tariffs because a lot of us don’t know how they work, but a lot of economists say that’s a disaster waiting happen. Can you talk a little bit about that for us?
Richard Wolff:
Sure, sure. First of all, what is a tariff? Tariff is just a given to a particular kind of tax. It’s a tax that is applied when an object is produced outside the United States, but brought inside to be sold. So a bottle of French wine that is sold in your local liquor store, that’s an import. And the duty used to be called import duty, is a tax on that import. So first of all, enjoy with me that a Republican leader, that’s the party that has been anti-tax all its life, is now proposing an enormous facts, but hopes that you won’t notice it by calling it a tariff. So here’s how it goes. Mr. Trump has variously suggested he’s going to throw a tariff against everybody. He has mentioned rates that go from 10% to 60% and possibly more in the case of China because he wants to punish them.
Then he says things, which by the way, if an undergraduate said this in any economics professor’s class, he would immediately flunk. But the president calls around and he says, I’m going to hit the Chinese with a tariff. Well, that shows he’s either a hustler or an ignoramus and I don’t know, I’ll let him choose which one he wants. Why? When I’m going to use the example, a real example. 15 years ago, the world began to compete every car company to compete to produce an electric car. And we’ve all heard about Mr. Musk and Tesla. They did it, but the best car, the best electric car and truck in the world today, best quality and also the lowest price is a electric vehicle produced in China and by a corporation whose name you will learn even though you’ve never heard of it. It’s called the BYD corporation, B as in boy, Y as in yellow, D as in dog.
The BYD corporation makes the best cheapest electric car. Let’s suppose you can get one of those for $30,000, which you can. Alright, if there’s a tariff and you are an American and you want to buy one, you would have to come up with first 30,000 bucks that go to China to pay for the car. Then you’d have to pay a 100% tariff that was imposed on these cars by Mr. Biden, a hundred percent means another 30,000. So you would have to pay $60,000, 30,000 go to China. They get their money with or without a tariff. It’s Uncle Sam who gets the tariff. You are an American, you pay it and it goes to Uncle Sam. But because of that, you’re not going to buy a Chinese car because it’s 60 grand for you. You’re going to buy a less good car made by Ford or Tesla or GM or whoever you buy it from. They’re going to charge you say 50 grand, not what you ought to pay, but at least it’s less than the 60, which you would have to, that’s how it works. Here’s the irony. It’ll make the inflation in this country go crazy, which is why he can’t do it, because the price of everything will go up. I mean, in the morning you have cup of coffee that comes from abroad. We don’t grow coffee in quantities in this country that has to be imported. You put sugar in it, that has to be imported also. Okay, get ready for $25 lattes in the morning. That’s going to hurt.
Speaker 5:
Wow.
Richard Wolff:
Talking about that. Who’s going to get to blame Mr. Trump and his nutty way of thinking? You can’t do it. But it is a wonderful, and here I come, the media again, they take all this seriously. President elect Trump is going to whack the Chinese with a tart. It’s all nutty that this is Madison Avenue advertising gone crazy, distracting people from all the real issues that are changing and threatening their lives, and they go into this zone of make-believe. It’s like in an amusement park when you’re in the dark tunnel and the world isn’t the way it really is.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. See, I think you want
Taya Graham:
A professor Wolff, I think as reporters, although we are local independent reporters, I think it’s only fair to note the role that wealth plays in influencing and perhaps in some cases even controlling what our mainstream media teaches us about our electoral politics or even the politics surrounding capital wealth. So there was this post I found from existential comics that I found it online and it seems like it summarizes it perfectly. And it says, the billionaires who own the news have the millionaires who report it, sit there and tell you with a straight face that you don’t deserve $15 an hour. Professor Wolff, could you share some of your thoughts on the role that the media plays in influencing us? For example, like policies like advocating for a $15 per hour minimum wage, which you cited earlier, it hasn’t changed in decades.
Stephen Janis:
Well, yeah,
Taya Graham:
The federal minimum
Stephen Janis:
Wage. The federal minimum. Minimum. Some states have said like Marilyn has said, higher $20 an hour minimum wage,
Richard Wolff:
By the way, right? There is a wonderful story. In other words, you don’t need a leftist economist like me to point out that $7 and 25 cents is an outrageous to a working person.
Taya Graham:
Absolutely. We
Richard Wolff:
Have more than half the states in this country have found it so odious that they have raised the state minimum wage way above that. The last time I looked, the state of Washington on the west coast had the highest state minimum wage at about $19 an hour. Okay? That’s almost three times what the federal government, what in the world is going on. That is a chaotic reality. It means that a worker in a state enterprise in Washington has as a minimum three times what a worker governed by the federal law has anywhere else in the same country. So yeah, I mean, it is outrageous, but it is only one of many, many, many outrageous, how many folks know really in their gut how much money has been spent on the war in Ukraine. Put aside what you think about the issues of the war itself, but just are you as an American ready to forego what those hundreds of billions could have done for the problems of this country in order to fight that war in that country?
And remember, more than half of Americans polled, could not tell you where Ukraine was on the map. Couldn’t find it. So what exactly are we doing? We have a media that is full, not so much of what it does, but what it omits from doing. Why are we not told about the housing crisis? Let me be an economist with you. That’s the worst thing about the inflation. The cost of housing has gone crazy in this country. True. You probably know that just from your own friends and family. But if not, let me assure you, the numbers are incredible because the top 10% decided in the pandemic that it’s important to have a house in the country. And so that’s what we have produced houses in the country that are second homes for people and we have concentrated the rest of what we build in high rise luxury housing in a dozen cities that have become enclaves.
Let me give you a dystopian vision of what the United States is becoming. We are becoming what we used to call a third world country. We have pockets of wealth, certain cities and the suburbs around them, and they exist in a sea of misery of people who cannot access health. If half of what is a promise to be done to Obamacare is going to be done by Mr. Trump, they will not access healthcare. They are already being priced out of the education system. They can’t afford that. They can’t carry those loans. I mean, what are we doing in Germany and France? My background is French and German. I speak those languages I have since I’ve been a child in Germany. Higher education is free. Let me just explain. It’s free. No tuition, no fees. You cover your food and your room and board that you have to take care of, but you do not pay. And not only is that available to all German citizens, it’s available to anyone. There are 25,000 Americans getting their college degrees in Germany. They don’t have to go into debt. And the same is true in half a dozen other European. What’s going on here? Americans in tone to themselves. We live in the greatest country. We live in the grid. We aren’t doing that anymore. That’s over. That’s with the empire. Bye-Bye.
Ought to be discussed.
Stephen Janis:
It’s interesting because I was an adjunct for like 12 years and I never made more than three or $4,000 to teach a 16 week class with 22
Taya Graham:
Students. If I remember, you were being paid $2,500 to teach a class.
Stephen Janis:
So even in our higher o’clock
Taya Graham:
Class,
Stephen Janis:
Even in our higher education system, we have this kind of caste system and it seems to just, but Professor Wolff, I’m just curious because you’re bringing all these things up historically. Is there any historic perspective? I mean, how egregious is our economic inequality right now? What level are we in terms of from historical standards? Are we unequal in our basic economic system here? I mean, how bad is inequality here? Historically speaking,
Richard Wolff:
It’s very bad. But the picture of our history, and I’m glad you brought it up. The picture of our history is remarkable. In the 18th century and in the 19th century, we were stable for a good while and then we began when we were an independent starting in the 19th century, when we were independent, we began to have a trajectory in which real wages, as I mentioned earlier, went up every decade. It was extraordinary from around 1820 to around 1970s, 150, really
Speaker 5:
That long,
Richard Wolff:
150 years of a steadily rising standard of living.
Stephen Janis:
So I clearly missed the boat.
Richard Wolff:
What
Stephen Janis:
I said, I clearly missed the boat.
Richard Wolff:
No, so to speak. Wait a
Stephen Janis:
Minute,
Richard Wolff:
Profits rose even faster. So you had a slow steady inequality, but it was very bearable because you were giving the working class a rising standard of, so they were willing, the working class, I mean I’m generalizing obviously, of course, but they were willing to tolerate the inequality which wasn’t growing quickly because their situation was improved. They could have better housing, better diets, better clothing do for their children, all of that. Then the first world war comes the 1920s and the 1920s are a period of rapid inequality without a rising standard of living.
And that blew up in the Great Depression and the anger, and this is so important for Americans to understand the working class revolted in the 1930s against not just the unemployment and all the horrors of the crash after 1929, but in a delayed reaction, they reacted against the inequality that had become so stark in the 1920s. And then we had, and this goes to your question, a compression, we went the 1930s were a period where inequality not only didn’t get worse, it got much better. Interesting. The gap between rich and poor narrowed. Now partly this was because the rich really got wiped out by the stock market collapsed and all of that. But meanwhile, the gap and that developed after World War ii and that’s when I grew up, and I assume you did too when we developed this idea that the United States is a magical place where everybody is in the middle class. Sure, we have a few rich ones and we have a few desperados, but we are the great example of a classless middle class. We all have our home, we have our car Saturday, we wash it in the driveway, blah, blah, all of that. And it was true.
Stephen Janis:
It
Richard Wolff:
Was true. We had compressed it. United States was exceptional in all of that.
Stephen Janis:
And we even had like a 92% market
Richard Wolff:
Starting,
Stephen Janis:
Starting
Richard Wolff:
In the seventies. The good jobs were moved to China and elsewhere and the immigrants came in and the real wages stopped going up. And we have now become wildly, we are now more unequal than we were way back when. But it’s been an up and down ride. And the importance of that is when people say, well, there’s nothing you can do that’s not correct. Let me remind you not to make a hero out of Franklin Roosevelt, but here’s the facts. Here comes a guy who comes from the elite of the United States whose family had had a president earlier, Thedo Roosevelt and so on. What did he do under the pressure of the unions and of two socialists and a communist party? He created the social security system in the middle of the Great Depression when the government had no money, we passed the law that says if you reach the age of 65, the government will give you a check every month for however long you live, an extraordinary act. Then we pass the unemployment compensation. We had never done that before
Speaker 6:
Because
Richard Wolff:
Your job through a layoff, we’ll give you a check every week for a year or two. And where did the money come from? He taxed corporations and the rich, I enjoy that so much. I have to repeat it. He taxed corporations and the rich to pay for a program for the middle class and the poor. So no one should listen to people who say, you can’t do that. We’ve been there, we’ve done that.
Stephen Janis:
I mean, didn’t we in the fifties have a 92% marginal tax rate?
Richard Wolff:
That’s right.
Stephen Janis:
And I heard recently that some of this was because Roosevelt and then subsequently even Eisenhower felt that if we didn’t provide a higher standard of living if comparatively to the Cold War countries we were fighting, then it would seem like we were a failure. That’s right. So there’s people like economists like Thomas pti who say inequality is not a natural outgrowth of economic growth. And also said, it’s been a symbolic what in the seventies? How do we come to this change where suddenly we don’t care about the middle class collectively and we get on this ever-rising inequality, what changes? Is it political, cultural? I mean what really gives us, is it Ronald Reagan? I mean, what really starts this change on this armored trajectory towards where we are now?
Richard Wolff:
I would argue, to answer your question, I would argue that the experience of the 1930s that I just summarized
In which corporations and the rich were taxed in order to provide social security benefits, unemployment compensation, the first minimum wage, it was passed in the 1938 and a government hiring program, the biggest program of all 15 million people put on the government payroll paid that. Where did all that money come from in a depression when nobody was paying taxes anymore? It came from corporations in the rich. And I would argue it traumatized that class in the American political system. And they said in 1945 when that war was over and when that president died, they were going to roll back the new deal. And that’s been your lifetime and my lifetime. We are going through what I believe is the final stages of literally getting back to what it was that blew us up the 1930s. And it is a nice round number a hundred years ago. And here we are about to go right back into the same scenario unless this time we got other people giving us the leadership to go in a different direction.
Taya Graham:
It’s really interesting that you started speaking about Franklin Delano Roosevelt because I actually have a clip that I picked out from Senator Sanders that I would love for you to react to Professor Wolff if we could just roll that for him.
Speaker 7:
Thanks, KA. It’s not just Kamala Harris, it’s the demo. In other words, let me read you something if I might please. What I think is one of the most interesting speeches ever given Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural speech in 1936, middle of the depression. So he starts his speech. He says, look, these are the things we did. These are the obstacles that we had to overcome. And then he says, after being president for four years, he says that, I quote, I see millions of families trying to live on income. So Omega, that DePaul of family disaster hangs over them day by day. I see millions of night education, recreation and the opportunity to better their lot and a lot of their children. I see one third of a nation ill housed, ill cloud, ill nourished. In other words, what Roosevelt did is said, look, we are making progress, but I look out all over this country and I see tens of millions of people who are hurting. Instead of doing that, when the Democrats said, well, we passed the inflation adjustment act, and I understand the economy is pretty good and Donald Trump’s a bad guy, and we all defend the woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. There was no appreciation, no appreciation of the struggling and the suffering of millions and millions of working class people. And unless you recognize that reality and have a vision of how you get out of that, I think you’re not going to be going very far as a political party.
Taya Graham:
So professor, building off what Senator Sanders said, how does a party communicate that they understand the struggles of working class people? Now I know the Republican party seems to understand how to amplify their anger and understandable outrage, but is there another way to do this? And beyond just rhetoric, what sort of policies could Democrats offer to prove they really do understand what people need? Or are there any recent policies that they could expand on or try to improve?
Richard Wolff:
Good question. Well, I think the answer is easy and readily at hand. They have chosen not to pay attention, not to try, not even in part, and instead of speculating, let me give you an example of what other capitalist countries, our allies in Western Europe, what they do for the working class and they don’t have a Trump and they’re not about to get a Trump either. Even the people that they think over there are like Trump are light years away from what Trump is or what Trump is about to do. Okay, so let me start. Part of my family is French. When I visit them in France, we talk, they have a health insurance that covers them from the day they are born to the day that they die. If they are injured, if they get sick, they have a health program to go to that does not cost them anything.
You don’t meet people carrying around a load of medical debt. I already gave you the example of higher education. They don’t have student debt either. They have a vast array of subsidies in France, if you have more than one child, you get a subsidy from the government to help you pay for the cost of that child for 18 years. And they’ve been doing that for decades. Bernie likes to give examples of Denmark. Oh, that’s one place. But there are a lot of programs. Lemme give you another one to shake you up because my guess is your audience hasn’t heard it. In 1985, a legislator in Italy named Marcora got a law passed by the Italian parliament. Here’s how the law works. If you become unemployed in Italy, you have a choice. You have a plan A and a plan B. A plan A is you go on what they call there the dole. That’s like going out unemployment here, you got to check every week, et cetera, et cetera. But you can choose plan B. What’s plan B? You got to get at least nine other unemployed people like yourself. Then the 10 or more of you go to the government and you get from the government by law the entirety of your unemployment compensation a year or so worth as a lump sum, each of the 10 of you get it on condition that you use it to start a worker co-op business.
Taya Graham:
That’s amazing.
Stephen Janis:
That is amazing.
Taya Graham:
I’m sorry, I’m just flabbergasted.
Stephen Janis:
No, we’re saying that’s an amazing policy. That’s incredible. Yeah, we were just where I can do it.
Richard Wolff:
By the way, the business community in Italy has tried more than once to get rid of it. They have failed. It’s on the books as I speak to you, it was passed in 1985. Incredible Americans don’t know it. Guess what? Italy has more worker, co-ops than most other countries in Europe for this reason. They have supported this. If you go to Bologna, if you go to that area of Italy known as Emelia, Romania, 40% of the economy, there is worker co-ops, they teach how to set ’em up in the university. The greatest worker co-op is in northern Spain in a place called gon the GON Corporation is a family of 200. It’s the seventh largest corporation in Spain. This is a new way to organize work, work and those people don’t pay a few people millions while everybody else can’t send their kid to college because the workers themselves decide on the pay scale.
And so inequality is way less than what we have. Okay, why aren’t we trying that? Why isn’t the Democratic party saying, and by the way, just a footnote, Bernie’s platform, when he ran in whatever it was 2016, had in it supporting co-ops, but it was a single line and most people didn’t know what to do. It looked like a throwaway line, but it isn’t. It’s a very serious, what would you say if you said to the American people, we’re going to get rid of this crazy quilt of medical insurance where every time you have a claim, there’s a fight between the doctor and the insurer. Are you covered all of it? Part of it stop. We’re going to give you a blanket that no one is going to have to pay. If you have a baby, no one is going to have to pay. If you get injured, you’re not going to go into debt. We’re not going to do that and we’re going to go, I don’t have to go to Europe, go to Canada as a perfectly functioning system. And by the way, the people fight very hard in all of those countries to keep that.
Even the conservatives in Canada did not dare come out against their single payer system.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, no, no, I know. So Professor Wolff, as we get to the end of our discussion, I wanted to ask you a question because I’m thinking it’s like we live in Thomas Friedman’s world or whatever his name was, Milton Friedman, excuse me, Milton Friedman. But how can we collectively fight inequality? I mean, it’s such an abstract concept yet seem so ubiquitous. Is there a way to actually fight it on a collective basis? I mean we see the products that unions have made in other organizations. Can you reverse inequality? It will take some sort of social calamity like the depression to actually reorganize our economic system. Is there literally a way you or I can actually battle against it besides speaking out about it? I mean is there anything concrete you can think of besides the neoliberal project, which seems to have failed at this point? Anything you think can think of?
Richard Wolff:
Yes. I mean I do think that at this point, given everything else going on, and I agree with the way you’ve rendered it, the most important thing is what I would, and I mean this in all honesty, what you’re doing, the two of you, the kind of program you’re designing, the kind of conversation you’re organizing, the materials you gather, these are very, very important. You are changing some minds who will in turn change other. That’s how this works.
But I would say yes. And the example I gave you a minute ago, I think could stimulate the American people in ways little else could. Let’s talk about worker corp. An enterprise that is not run by a tiny group of people, a board of directors or the owner, whatever you want to call them who make all the decisions, what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the product and the revenue from the product. Why is that not a democratic decision? Why are we not all the janitor who cleans up at the end of the day, the machinist who works by the machine, the clerk who keeps the come on. We are all affected by what happens in that business. Why is it not run democratically? If we vote for a mayor because what the mayor may do affects us as residents, then why are we not voting for the people who run the enterprise since everything they decide affects us as employees?
I mean, I think a reconstruction is that bold. You bet. But you know something. I think we’ve run out of all those proposals that aren’t bold or if I may dare say so that aren’t radical. Yeah, we need radical because the reformist idea, look, we just had a demonstration. Kamala Harris said, let’s give $25,000 to a family buying a home for the first time. Good idea. Let’s not tax tip income. Good idea. Let’s improve the childcare tax credit. Good idea. But these are small. They’re very important. They’re good ideas, but you’re not dealing with what the people are upset about. Even if those things came to pass, the people know, yeah, it might help a bit, but it’s not dealing with what we have gone through for 30 to 40 years.
Speaker 4:
So
Richard Wolff:
Why are we not, why are we not? What are we afraid of? Bernie proved, I have my disagreements with him too, but I think we’re all in his debt. He went out into the public arena, did not get rid of the label. Socialist kept it, accepted it, and millions of people came to support him. I believe currently he’s listed as the most popular mainstream politician in the country. This is more than I thought we had to work with.
Stephen Janis:
And I think he also played into what not played, but actually he had the one sort of quantity that is essential when you’re going to go into the current social media battles, which is he had authenticity. And I think that resonates more than almost anything. And I think that’s some of the reason people like Trump because they think he’s authentic, because he’s willing to say anything. But Bernie Sanders was actually a counter that it’s just unfortunate that the Democratic party neoliberal him out of the
Taya Graham:
Absolutely
Stephen Janis:
With the neoliberal hip check. Got him out of there. So
Taya Graham:
Why
Stephen Janis:
Don’t you wrap this up?
Taya Graham:
Sure. And as a matter of fact, I’m just going to mention I saw a comment from one of our folks here. Kat Cleric said Democrats were more scared of Bernie than Trump. I trust none of them. Which I thought was an interesting comment, but before I let Professor Wolff go, I know we have five minutes left with him. So I just, I feel like if we didn’t address immigration that we really would be remiss in this conversation
Speaker 5:
Point. Absolutely.
Taya Graham:
Now I will say I personally believe that there will be an incredible humanitarian cost to deporting 11 million people, but I’m hoping that the cold, hard economic facts of enacting this policy might cause people to reconsider their support for mass deportation. So I was hoping maybe you could share some of your thoughts on the economic impact of this policy, what it would cost for the US government to try to do this, what the repercussions would be on the average American. I mean, if people are worried about the price of eggs and bacon deporting the people who work in agriculture and food production, doesn’t seem to me to be the way to lower those prices. But what would you say would be some of the economic consequences?
Richard Wolff:
Yes. Before I do, let me also say, and maybe I’m wrong here. I hope not for better or worse, and often it’s worse, but sometimes it’s better. America is a very religious place and all of the major religions here, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they all say that what Allah or God or whatever it is you believe in wants you to do is to welcome the refugee, to open your arms, to open your heart, to give him a meal, to do all the things that the Bible and other holy books tell us to do. I think you’re going to see maybe sooner than you imagine an immense reaction in this country, which will be driven by a well-deserved guilt on the part of this population for what they are doing. And I feel that as strongly as I feel the guilt that will descend on the Jewish people for what has happened in Gaza.
But putting that aside, here’s the economics that you’ve asked about. The Department of Homeland Security says there’s somewhere between 10 and 12 undocumented, a million undocumented immigrants in the United States. So as an economist, let me make one thing clear. We are a rich country of 330 million people. The economic problems we have, which are severe, could not ever have been caused by 10 to 12 of the poorest people on the planet. The notion that the immigrants are a cause of the problems we face is stone cold, ridiculous. It may be a clever scapegoating, it may work to get you votes, but it has nothing to do with reality. Number two, there are certain industries that concentrate undocumented immigrants. Agriculture is a big one. The restaurant business is a big one, construction is another big one, and then there’s a whole host of other industries, but those are the big ones in those industries.
Undocumented immigrants are a major part of the labor force. Not only that, they are a more important cause of the profitability in those industries than their mere numbers would tell you why. Because an undocumented immigrant can be and is regularly abused by the employer for the obvious reason, which if you have any contact with these folks, they’ll tell you 10 different stories. I’ve heard ’em all. It’s Friday afternoon. Everybody’s going to pick up their check at the front office before they go home. Jose arrives, he stands in line, waits for his check. The boss says, Jose, we’ve had a terrible week. We didn’t make the money. I can’t pay you this week, but if you come back next week, I can be sure to pay you. What is Jose going to do? Answer nothing. He dare not go to any government office
Because he is an undocumented, he can’t show a paper, he can’t show a residence allowance, nothing. He’s terrified of going anywhere near the labor office. There’s nothing he can do. And the employer knows it. The employers look for these people because of this, and I’m not going to here take your time and mine to talk about the abuse sexual and other that this situation invites in all the ways you don’t need me to tell you about. Okay, now let’s imagine you deport them. First of all, that costs billions because you’re talking about 10 to 12 million people. You have to house them, you have to move them, you have to feed them in the process. You have to deal with the mte million lawsuits that will immediately crop up around all of this. This is going to take time and it is going to cost personnel and it’s going to be an immense expense, but that’s the least of it.
Here comes the big one. Every one of those industries is a crucial player in the inflation level of the United States. Who’s going to pick the lettuce? Who’s going to pick the fruit? Who’s going to do all that work? Who’s going to clean the dishes in the back of the restaurant? Who’s going to clean up at the end of the evening when the patrons of the restaurant go home? Well, the answer is you close the restaurant and that has economic consequences or you close the farms and that’s really not an option. Or you’re going to have to hire Americans and Americans won’t be afraid to go to the labor office if you don’t pay them. So you’re going to actually have to pay them and you’re probably going to have to pay them a good bit more than the immigrant for all the reasons you normally pay immigrants less than native workers, which means the cost structure of these industries is going to take off.
And you know what? They’re all going to do. Those employers. They’re going to raise their prices, they’re going to want to do that to recapture the extra costs that will come. And the government has not proposed anything that will substitute here. I’ve heard one professor tell me, oh, we don’t have to worry. AI will take care of this. You know what AI does? It makes people like you and me superfluous, but are we ready to go and wash dishes at the back of the restaurant? Are we ready to pick apples? Really? You’re going to cause social upheaval going to cause inflation. Mr. Trump can’t do that. Inflation is half of why he got elected.
Speaker 5:
True.
Richard Wolff:
How can he turn around and then be the person who has to go on TV and try to explain why he promised to deal with inflation only? It’s gotten worse and he won’t be able to tell the truth. I’m deporting everybody because then the argument will be as clear as day for people. So you’re going to have to watch now as the various cabinet secretaries bizarre though. They have to undo what it was he’s promised.
Speaker 5:
Well,
Taya Graham:
Wow. What I’m just going to say is what someone in the comment said, it’s the hiking enthusiast, and they said, I wish Professor Wolff would get on the news and yell at all of us. We deserve it bit. So we’re going to have to make sure somehow you get on that mainstream media. I think it would be interesting to see you on CNN in between those prescription commercials you’d love to hit us with.
Stephen Janis:
It’s usually because listening to him, especially not talking like you’re not here, but this long expansive march of inequality, it feels like it’s created a drought in this country and then social media conflict media comes in and just lights it on fire. Oh gosh, it’s such a great service. But it feels good because it’s great to hear his historical perspective on how equality has had this slow march and just you can kind all the kind of social problems we’ve had kind of mirror that kind of growth and that sort of rise and fall and then rise of inequality. I think it’s really important that we understand historically where we are, which is really on the precipice I think as he says, or as you say Dr. Wolff. So
Taya Graham:
I just have to ask you, Dr. Wolff, before you leave us, I’ve been looking at our commenters and I would say that people here, they come from a variety of political affiliations and I think
Speaker 4:
Whether
Taya Graham:
You’re a Democrat or a Republican or a libertarian or a socialist, people care about the undue influence of billionaires and money in our government. And especially I think the new appointments by the President-elect have set off a new set of fears, but can we actually trust any politician to stand up to them? I mean, I saw Delaware Democrat, Senator Coons on Fox News saying that the department government of efficiency could be constructive and should be embraced. So if we take this as a sign that Democrats and Republicans won’t push back, what can we do to push back against billionaires? What can our friends in the comments that are watching you right now, what can they do to help fight this?
Stephen Janis:
Don’t buy a Tesla.
Taya Graham:
Don’t buy a Tesla. Okay. Step one. Other
Stephen Janis:
Than that though, don’t
Taya Graham:
Waste $60,000 on a Tesla.
Richard Wolff:
Yeah,
Taya Graham:
Okay.
Richard Wolff:
I think the best advice I can give you, I wish I could say more, but the best advice I can give you is tune into programs like this.
Become somebody who pays attention to the Real News network and to the others that are trying, including me and the team I work with trying to get this out. I would give you this hope, if that’s the right word. Things are becoming clearer. All of us, myself included, are seeing more clearly than we have most of our lives, what is in fact happening to us. And we had to learn the slow and hard way to explore the other arguments to see that they didn’t do the job. But that, for example, the historical, which has been crucial for me to understand
How we got into the rut I think we’re in helps you understand, but also to navigate that rut because you have a sense of where it’s been. You have a sense that the working class in America went to the left the last time the system collapsed. It’s not impossible at all. That’s what happened. That’s why we have a social security system and it hasn’t been able to be gotten rid of, even though George Bush for sure made a major effort to do that, that you may remember. So I think there are parts of the society that are there are wondering with us. I think that the only way Mr. Trump won was because the promise of Mr. Biden that he would be somehow a big difference from Trump never materialized and that people held him accountable and went back to Trump. But I don’t think Mr. Trump’s first race nor Mr. Biden’s, nor is there any reason to believe the upcoming Trump has even an idea of the problems they have, let alone how to solve them. Which means my best guess is we will be running Mr. Trump out of town, figuratively in four years, at least as enthusiastically as he came in this time.
Taya Graham:
Wow.
Speaker 5:
Well,
Stephen Janis:
Words of wisdom.
Taya Graham:
Absolutely. Professor Wolff, we appreciate you so much and I know our viewers did as well. We just really appreciate your intellect and your insight and of course your vast knowledge of history, which really gives us some context and the idea that we are in the waning days of American Empire. Well, I might have to have an adult beverage tonight. That’s a lot to take in Professor.
Richard Wolff:
Yes. I think Glasss of wine is more or maybe even two.
Taya Graham:
Yes, maybe even two, maybe even three. Honestly, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you.
Richard Wolff:
My pleasure. I look forward to this and I’m glad that we were able to get together.
Taya Graham:
Yes, absolutely. Me as well. Thank you so much.
Richard Wolff:
Thanks.
Taya Graham:
And I just wanted to say thank you Moffitt Studio for your support. That’s really kind. We got a donation.
Speaker 5:
We got a donation. Nice.
Taya Graham:
Really appreciate it. So Stephen, if you don’t mind, I know that we have a little bit of limited time here, so is it okay if I, do you want to share some final thoughts? No, go
Stephen Janis:
Right into your
Taya Graham:
Thing. Are you sure?
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, yeah.
Taya Graham:
Okay.
Stephen Janis:
I mean, I think we’ve all said enough
Taya Graham:
That’s true.
Stephen Janis:
I mean, I could talk about economic inequality all the time. There’s so many other facet ways of looking at it, but it was just fascinating to hear him lay it out historical, like I said. So we got to keep reminding ourselves,
Taya Graham:
Right. Well, that’s why we have to
Stephen Janis:
Present,
Taya Graham:
Start doing our inequality watch show on a more regular basis because there is a lot more to talk about. We’ll, that
Stephen Janis:
We are going to do more inequality reporting in the coming months and year, hopefully. So.
Taya Graham:
All right, I’ll hold you to that and I think they will too.
Stephen Janis:
Okay.
Taya Graham:
Okay. So again, I just have to thank our amazing guest, professor Wolff for all his insight and his very provocative thoughts about our topic today. And I really hope he’s going to be back on the Real News Network with us soon. And I also want to thank everyone who commented and asked questions. I wish I could have engaged with every single question and comment, but of course I couldn’t. But I’ll try again next live stream. And we really do appreciate you taking the time to contribute to our discussion. But I would just ask before you go, just hang in there with me for a few minutes longer. I understand that sometimes we just want to tune out that the challenges we face seem simply too overwhelming. These are historical existential problems that require collective action, but can seem almost impossible for us to address individually.
We are too divided and too distant from each other. And I understand that feeling. I really do. But this is not the time to disengage. I know it’s cliche, but this really could be the most important historical turning point in generations. I mean, 2024 might be hotter than the hottest year on record, which was 2023. If that doesn’t trouble you, then how about the fact we’re facing an expanding war in Ukraine and extremist pro Netanyahu administration that will only make the humanitarian crisis in Gaza even worse, and a new justice department that was going to be run by Mac kids, but not anymore. So no comment on that. But what makes this worse is after listening to Professor Wolff and my discussion with Stephen, we are hurdling towards these disasters at the behest of a few rich people Ill-equipped because of their ill-gotten wealth. We are literally forsaking our future and the future of generations.
So a few people can buy a bigger yacht, but it’s not just the extravagant and extreme wealth that disturbs me. There are other aspects of this discussion of inequality and the people who drive it that I find truly troubling now, namely how we rarely connect the inequality with the irrational assertions that pervade our debates over who should have power and how they should use it. And what bothers me even more is that instead of having a political discourse around accountability to power, much of our discussion simply amplifies cruelty. I mean, just think about it, whether it’s the anti-immigration rhetoric of people eating pets or calling into question the candidate’s racial identity or calling government programs that help working people handouts, almost all of that rhetoric seems to revolve around how cruel we can be, how we can admonish someone or dunk on them or discard them.
It’s like we’re becoming kind of a Roman circus where the most derisive statement or the least charitable characterization or most bad faith argument always wins to day. Where a person’s intellectual medals determined by how much you own someone, not by understanding them, and a general discourse that rewards and emphasizes mockery and ignorance and worst of all, the constant chaos and discord these platform engenders is making someone rich enough to literally own us. So it reminds me of a chapter of a book I read in high school called The Invisible Man, where rich white businessmen tossed small denomination coins at black men who fought viciously for these mere pennies. And then when they would reach to actually grab the coins, they would be electrocuted. And this was all for the delight and entertainment of the powerful who sat back and watched with glee. So fast forward to now, and I have a question.
Just set aside the racial aspect of the novel for a moment and consider this. How different are toxic platforms like X, meaning Twitter or Facebook from that scenario I just described? I mean, just remember, Facebook whistleblower told Congress that the executives at the conflict media firm were told that by simply making posts appear chronologically would make the platform less destructive, but they declined to do so. Choosing profits over people and commerce over community, which led to ethnic violence and civil war in Myanmar and Ethiopia, and some might argue is encouraging a civil war here in our own United States. And the reason I reiterate this question about media ecology, which the billionaires have used to enrich themselves is because as we discussed during the show, they have literally manipulated us to act against our own self-interest. They have genuinely pitted working people against each other to advance an agenda that not only harms us, but the entire world we all live in.
My point is, is that we have to disentangle ourselves from this conflict-ridden malice machine. We have to ignore its underlying message that nothing can be achieved and that people’s lives cannot be improved through concerted action. Now, the way we do this is not just to fight, but I would say fight for something specific, fight for Medicare for all, fight for climate action now. Fight to strengthen unions and to raise wages, fight for a policy that would improve life for everyone, even it’s just a local ordinance that might only impact a community where you live. The point is to fight for something specific, tangible, concrete, not imaginary, not to be the king of Twitter or the dunk master, be the instigator of change in the world we actually live in. Now, I know all of these ideas are complex problems with sometimes even more complex solutions, and they don’t always lend themselves to the simplistic kind of exchange that typifies Facebook or TikTok, but it is incumbent upon us to try and it’s our job as journalists to help you by investigating for people like Stephen does, or by holding discussions like these and listening to the expertise of brilliant thinkers like Dr. Wolff.
I think collectively we can all bring about real substantive change. And I know we can because we have before. So let’s put the billionaires of the world on notice that we’re not going to fight amongst ourselves anymore. We’re going to fight you. Well, that’s my little speech. I hope you enjoyed it.
Stephen Janis:
I did,
Taya Graham:
Because I certainly meant it and I hope it inspires you. I feel a little fired up right now.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, I just canceled my Twitter account because of you. So thank you, Taya.
Taya Graham:
See you on Blue Sky.
Stephen Janis:
Right.
Taya Graham:
And of course, thank you all for being patient with us and joining us again, and we do have to thank our awesome friends in studio, David Cameron, Adam and Jocelyn, Kayla, James, and of course our Editor in Chief Max. And thank you out there for joining us. We appreciate you. This is Taya Graham. And Stephen Janis reporting for the Real News Network. Thank you so much.
On Nov. 12, unionized nurses at Ascension St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore held a rally in front of the Marriott Hotel downtown, where the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) was holding a meeting. St. Agnes nurses rallied with supporters from around the city, and they were even joined by fellow Ascension nurses who traveled from Wichita, Kansas, and Austin, Texas.
According to a press release from National Nurses Organizing Committee / National Nurses United (NNOC-NNU), the purpose of the rally was to “highlight how Ascension has failed to follow USCCB directives to Catholic health care organizations to both serve and advocate for patients ‘at the margins of society’ and ‘treat its employees respectfully and justly.’… Baltimore nurses have been in negotiations since Feb. 2024, following a successful union election in November 2023. Ascension has failed to bargain in good faith with Saint Agnes nurses on language that would improve safe staffing and protect patients from cuts to services, lawsuits for billing disputes, and surprise billing or excess charges.” In this on-the-ground episode, you’ll hear speeches and chants from the Nov. 12 rally, and we speak with Gideon Eziama, a registered nurse with over 20 years of experience who has worked at Ascension St. Agnes for the last six years, and Lisa Watson, a registered nurse at Ascension Via Christi St. Francis Hospital in Wichita, who traveled to Baltimore to stand in solidarity with her coworkers at Ascension St. Agnes.
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.
Crowd Chants:
What do we want? Safe staffing! When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Safe staffing! When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Safe staffing! When do we want it? Now!
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, which helps people find the show and reach out to us if you have recommendations for folks you’d like us to talk to or stories you’d like us to investigate and please support the work we do at The Real News Network by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.
My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got another important on the ground episode for y’all today. As you guys know, back in July, we published an episode in which I reported on the ground from a rally that was held by unionized nurses at Ascension St. Agnes Hospital here in Baltimore. The rally was held outside the hospital in an effort to raise awareness of the union’s fight, to secure a first contract, and to show management that they’re not backing down from their core demands for safe staffing levels and an operational model that puts patients and patient care first. Now, in that episode, you heard Chance and sounds from the picket line, and you heard me interviewing Nikki Horvat, a registered nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at Ascension St. Agnes, and a member of the bargaining team. Today’s episode is an important follow-up report on that struggle, and it’s a struggle that doesn’t just concern nurses at Ascension St.
Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, but healthcare workers across the Ascension network as the National Nurses Organizing Committee slash National Nurses United has stated the Catholic Hospital system is one of the largest in the country with 140 hospitals in 19 states, and also one of the wealthiest with cash reserves, an investment company and a private equity operation worth billions of dollars. And because of its nonprofit status is exempt from paying federal taxes. So last week on November 12th, Baltimore nurses and their supporters, which included fellow Ascension nurses who had traveled from Wichita, Kansas, and even as far as Austin, Texas, held a rally near the inner harbor downtown in front of the Marriott Hotel where the US Conference of Catholic Bishops or the U-S-C-C-B was holding a meeting according to a press release from the union. The purpose of the rally was to quote, highlight how Ascension has failed to follow us CCB directives to Catholic healthcare organizations, to both serve and advocate for patients at the margins of society and treat its employees respectfully and justly.
As a proud Catholic, I’m deeply saddened to see Ascension’s mission disintegrate. In the years I’ve worked at St. Agnes Hospital, said Melissa Rou, a registered nurse in the intensive care unit and member of the bargaining team. The church teaches that all human beings should be treated with dignity, but at our hospital we see indignity on a daily, even hourly basis with rampant unsafe staffing and workplace violence due to ascension’s relentless pursuit of profits. And as the press release continues, Baltimore nurses have been in negotiations since February of 2024. Following a successful union election in November of 2023, Ascension has failed to bargain in good faith with St. Agnes nurses on language that would improve safe staffing and protect patients from cuts to services, lawsuits for billing disputes and surprise billing or excess charges. So on the morning of November 12th, I went down to the rally and I spoke to some of the workers there about what they’re fighting, how that fight is going, and how things have developed since the last action that we reported on back in the summer. I got to speak with Gideon Isama, a registered nurse with over 20 years of experience and who has worked at Ascension St. Agnes in Baltimore for the last six years. I also spoke with Lisa Watson, a registered nurse at Ascension via Christie St. Francis Hospital in Wichita who traveled all the way to Baltimore to stand in solidarity with her coworkers at Ascension St. Agnes. Take a listen.
Bradley Van Waus:
What do we want? What we want it. Thank you, Gideon. Thank you to all of our community allies here today for the Catholic Labor Network. Thank you to the city council President elect. It’s a great day here in Baltimore. Good morning, Ascension Nurses. So my name is Bradley Vanis and I’m the Ascension director and it’s so great here to have nurses from Wichita, Austin and Vol are from our four Ascension hospitals and Washington Hospital Center altogether today. So today we’re calling on the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, the highest authority of the Catholic church in the United States to hold ascension accountable for their state and mission. They are an arm of the Catholic church and the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops needs to exercise their authority over them. Today the bishops are discussing a text called Dignity Us in Pita, highlighting the indispensable nature of the dignity of the human person. How do we feel as such a health has done in this department?
Does Ascension Health treat patients with dignity when they short staff their hospitals? No. No. Do they treat human life with dignity when Asension closes labor and delivery unit than inner cities at rate higher than any other hospital corporation? No. Does Ascension help treat its workers? Its nurses with any shred of dignity? No. Do they treat you with dignity when you miss your meal breaks? No. Do they treat you with dignity when their electronic medical record goes down and they still expect you to work? No. And did they treat nurses in Austin or Wichita with any dignity or they force you to swipe twice to get what you deserve? No.
Say Agnes nurses. Is there a lack of movement at the bargaining table making you feel dignified? Yes. No, no, no, no. They’re not making the field. So Ascension likes to hide behind the veil of Catholicism. They like to throw around the word ministry even though they run a venture capital operation worth billions. That would make some folks in Silicon Valley quite jealous. But nurses of patients alike within Ascension hospitals know the truth. Catholic social teaching is very clear about the dignity of the rights of workers, including the right to organize even within Catholic health there. Ascension should be setting the standard for how hospitals should treat workers and patients, but they see that 10 are lowering that standard. Nurses, you are the moral compass of this hospital corporation. Are we going to let them abandon their mission for profit? No. Are we going to make sure that nurses and patients are treated fairly? Yes, absolutely. We know one thing here. When we fight, we win. And our fight is one of moral imperative. We’re pulling the veil out over a CI’s greeds. We can’t stop until we win what we deserve. When we fight, we win. We fight, we win, we fight, we win.
Fr. Sinclair Oubre:
Now the leadership has to listen and act and give you a fair contract. It is by far, far too long. Now you deserve this contract. You deserve to walk back into that hospital with the security, the staffing, the pay, and the care and concern you deserve as sisters and brothers, as siblings united in the workforce as human beings. So we’ll be with you every step of the way. We’ll continue to call on bishops to come down and listen to your workers and listen to the voice of justice. They know that you’re a new and unsettling force. That unsettling will lead to something. I like to think it’ll lead to victory. It may not look like it now, but trust one another and trust in the movement you are building. And Baltimore deserves to give you all not just a huge amount of thanks, but also deserves.
We need to also take our obligation to walk with you and ensure that if retaliation takes place, we will be there. We will be there to call it out and to call this hospital administration to change their ways. They are not acting in a holy way. They’re not acting in a just way we’ll be. And we’ll be with you every the way. Who’s got this power? Jesus power. What kind of power? Union power. Word and power. Moses Power. Jesus Power. Catholic power. Church. Power. Justice, power. Keep it on. Keep fighting. You are going to win. And we will love to celebrate that when that happens on a day very soon. God bless you all and make peace. Speak on you, your families, your workplace, and especially the people you bring. Healthcare, your arts, your skills as healthcare providers. God bless
Crowd Chants:
Who got the power? We got the power! What kind of power? Union power!
Gideon Eziama:
My name is Gideon Eziama. I work at Ascension S in Baltimore. I’ve been announced there for almost six years now. I started working in 2019, June past June again to six years, but I’ve been in nurse for 24 years now and I worked almost different hospitals, butch union and non hospitals.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Gideon, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I really appreciate it, man. We are standing here in the inner harbor in downtown Baltimore, out in front of the Marriott Hotel. Y’all just held a rally here and we were actually there with y’all at St. Agnes Ascension Hospital here in Baltimore when you and your fellow coworkers were demonstrating in the summer, and that was about six months into the bargaining campaign after you guys successfully unionized. So I was wondering if we could just catch listeners up on what’s been happening since that action that took place in the summer and now
Gideon Eziama:
Actually during that summertime, we have already given them by then among the beginning team. By then we have given them everything they needed from our own union side. Since then, the management side have been stolen. Whatever we have given them. That’s why we came here because the bishops of USA are having conference. So we can energize them to give them a call to facilitate and move fast so that whatever we’re looking for, so they could fasten up the contract and we can get a fair contract for the union.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And can you remind listeners a bit about what you guys are fighting for in that contract? I know that we heard chance about safe staffing levels, right? The union has strongly pushed for patient first like policies. So can you just tell listeners a bit about the key areas that you’re fighting for in this contract?
Gideon Eziama:
The key area actually the first one is the first self staffing. Self staffing is the key. When you have a safe staffing, have less what I call the outcome of that hospital will be great. When you have a safe staffing, the input, the safety of the patient and the safety of the employees, both nurses, everything but the doctors and everything is less. But when you have no safe staffing, everything becomes risk. When the patient is not well treated, the family becomes an issue. So that’s what we’re looking for. The first thing we’re looking, and that’s what we’re looking for is self staffing. Any other thing follows. But the first thing is just self staffing. Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And you’ve been, you said working in healthcare for over 20 years, 24 years. 24 years. I’m wondering if you can put this struggle into perspective as someone who has worked in healthcare while healthcare in this country has changed since the time I was born. So can you tell listeners a bit about what you have seen change in the healthcare industry from a worker’s perspective in your 24 years working here?
Gideon Eziama:
As I said, I’ve been working in the healthcare department for 24 years. More than that. When we were working there, it used to be patient care. Now, Ascension as an example. Patient is normal patient. Patient becomes a commodity. It’s replaced. It’s like when you go to a shopping center, you go to inside the, let’s say you go to Walmart. When a commodity is taken out of shed, something else is place. That’s what it’s always productivity. That’s what they’re looking for. They’re always talking about less product, less productivity, more productivity. So it’s not more about how many patients, what is the outcome of the patient we are taking care of. It’s always patient is treated as being a commodity. So when we say safe staffing, that’s what we’re looking for so that the patient will not be treated as commodity. So we’ll be treated as a patient and being taken care of.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And given this sort of larger change in the industry that has been happening at private healthcare companies, but also not profit healthcare, this sort of industry wide shift towards understaffing, piling more work onto fewer workers, treating patients like commodities and getting them in and out as quickly as you can, what does that translate to for you on a day-to-day level? How does that change your working conditions?
Gideon Eziama:
I’m giving you as example of ascension. It becomes a profitable, they call it profitable environment. They always talk about the profits. He can’t believe how much the ascension is sipping in up, how much they’re making millions, billions. If you read articles, if you can go to articles, check Wall Street, you check ascension, see how much they’re making. And it’s not something I can start to explain here. It’s more in detail on this. So when they treat patient as a commodity, so what they’re looking is for what is the profit we’re making? It’s no more about how many patients are taking care of the outcome of the patient. What is, it’s always like the productivity. What is the profit, what is this, what is, it becomes a profit making ventures as of now. That’s what it is.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And can you tell folks out here listening in and around the city of Baltimore, I guess where things stand now in your contract fight and what folks listening to this can do to stand in solidarity with y’all?
Gideon Eziama:
When we study Union Ascension hire is a law firm. The law firm, they specialize in Boston, the union, and they kept this firm in our contract negotiation. And this law firm doesn’t care about negotiation. All they care is to store everything. So they will keep making their money and they’re making millions. So essentially Steve giving them millions because they know they have access. Instead of spending that million to the nurses and to the patient they’re taking care of. No, they’re just giving it to the lawyers and spending their money wrongly. That’s what it is.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And for folks listening to this, is there something they can do to support the union to make their voices heard to the hospital?
Gideon Eziama:
Yes. All we’re asking for is a fair contract. When we have a fair contract, we have a safe staffing. So anybody that can come over, what are we doing? We’re not getting, I worked last night and I’m working this night again, I haven’t got my sleep. I’m doing this. I’m not getting paid for it. Yes, we are all here, cold chilling. We did this, we’ve been doing it for almost a year now, getting to make sure that we have what we call self staffing and our patient is taken care of. That’s what we’re looking for. We’re not looking for something else. That’s what it is. So people that will see when they see us, they think that’s what it is. When I became a nurse, I became a nurse to take care of the patient. And when my patient is not taken care of, when the management ascension is staffing to make sure the gain is coming into them, not the welfare or the wellbeing of the patient we are taking care of, it gets meall. It looks like he cry by the bedside. So that’s what we’re crying for. Give us self stopping so we can take care of our patients. That’s what we’re looking for.
Lisa Watson:
My name is Lisa Watson and I’m a nurse at Ascension St. Francis in Wichita, Kansas for 19 years.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well Lisa, thank you so much for talking to me today. We are standing here on the inner harbor of downtown Baltimore, and you’re a long way from home, but you came out here to stand in solidarity with your fellow healthcare workers. I was wondering if we could first just start by having you tell us a little bit about why we’re here and what brought you out here to Baltimore today.
Lisa Watson:
So I am here to stand shoulder to shoulder with my union brothers and sisters. These nurses have been met with terrible acts from ascension of union busting and instead of taking this money that they have for their union busting and pouring it into their patients, that’s why we’re here. It’s very unfortunate that patients are not put over profits in a Catholic institution. They have all of these values and this mission that they boast on TV and what is happening inside these walls is the exact opposite of that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Can you tell us a little bit about what this looks like over there in Wichita? Are y’all dealing with the same issues that workers here in Baltimore are raising?
Lisa Watson:
So Ascension nationwide has been cutting staff to maximize their profits. Actually, there was a New York Times report a few years ago about how they do this all over the country. So what they’re doing here has definitely been happening everywhere. The nurses in Wichita and Austin have contracts. So we are able to push back and exercise our federal given rights not only to unionize, but to make things better for our patients. This has never been about money. This has been about being advocates for our patients. And so we could do that a lot better with a union contract. Baltimore nurses have put their contract on the table, they have given all their proposals, but Ascension refuses to bargain with them and are dragging their feet.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I’m wondering if you could help our listeners put this into historical perspective as someone who’s been working in the industry for years. I think for a second the country’s attention was focused on the crisis in healthcare. During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, folks realized that how understaffed, overworked, overburdened our healthcare workers are, how burnt out they are. But I don’t think folks understand how that has been building over time. How have you seen that change take hold over the course of your time working as a healthcare worker?
Lisa Watson:
So my unit was covid for a couple of years and it was the hardest years of my life. But when Covid was over, the hospitals staffed us like it was still Covid, like it was still a pandemic. We are not in a pandemic. There are more nurses now with licenses in the United States than there ever have been. There is not a nursing shortage. There’s a shortage of nurses who want to work under these conditions. It is unfortunate that Ascension continues to put us in these situations. These are our licenses, these are patients’ lives and we have got to put them first. So I work in an intensive care unit and we are supposed to have two patients. We have three patients a lot of the time, and that’s what’s happening in Baltimore too. We cannot be in there to notice those subtle changes in our patients. We have got to be at bedside to take good care of our patients and we cannot be when Ascension staffs us the way that they have been staffing us there. Staffing grids are all about maximizing profits and keeping less people at the bedside, which does not align with their values of the dignity of life.
Maximillian Alvarez:
How does it change struggle when you’re going up against a explicitly Catholic kind of institution? I guess because one of the things we’ve been hearing from events like these is workers challenging ascension to live up to its own stated principles. So what does the struggle look like within the largest Catholic healthcare network in the country? How is that a positive and a negative for this struggle here?
Lisa Watson:
The struggle with Ascension is really disheartening. As a Catholic, I believe that every life is important and I want to take care of my patients. I want to go home. At the end of the day, I want to lay my head on my pillow and I want to know that I did right by them. And I can’t do that every day at Ascension. These nurses in Baltimore can’t do that every day. So it is very sad that the largest Catholic, not-for-profit organization hides behind their Catholicism and does the exact opposite. That’s why I’m wearing a shirt that says Act Catholic. I have worn this to numerous events because Ascension is not acting Catholic. It is degrading the faith. It is absolutely against every moral teaching of the church. Even the Pope has said that he believes in unionization and the right for workers to stand up for themselves and to have a livable wage. And ascension is doing the exact opposite. So they’re hiding behind their Catholicism. And that should make every Catholic mad. It should make every Catholic question what Ascension is doing and stand behind these nurses and especially these bishops. I mean, they’re here having a convention and they should be looking at the big picture. This is a national convention, this is a national corporation. This is a national problem. And they should see problems with what’s going on at Ascension.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And just one more question. I know I got to let you go. You’ve had a long week, you’ve traveled far and wide. I want to let you get some rest, but I want to just kind of pick up on that last point. Like you said, this is a national issue and it’s going to take national and international worker solidarity to confront, and you physically standing here are living proof of that. Could you just talk a little bit about the importance of showing up for each other? I mean, maybe not everyone has the ability to travel across states for something like this, but what can folks out there do to stand in stronger solidarity with their fellow workers? And why is it important at this moment right now?
Lisa Watson:
So we are taught to stand up for our friends and to be there when people are sick and to do the right thing. So we need to do it here too. We have got to stand up for other unions and for people who are trying to unionize. We have federal rights and we will exercise our federal rights. I will be here every day exercising my federal rights. My husband is union. I understand the importance of unions. I understand how things are supposed to work and if we have federal protections, we should not let a hospital stand against us. We should definitely be standing up every day. So we have to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters. We’ve got to show up. We’ve got to do the right thing every day. We got to do the right thing even when nobody’s watching. And so I am very proud to be here standing up for my coworkers, for my brothers and sisters.
And if we don’t do this, everybody loses. All of these patients lose across the United States. We have got to stand up every single day everywhere because we will all need healthcare at one point in time and people should not be dying in the hospital because things are missed. It’s very unfortunate. We are here to show solidarity with St. Agnes and let the bishops know that the Ascension Hospital change is making a mockery of the church doctrine in Baltimore, I have witnessed firsthand how Ascension focuses on profits over patient care. I have experienced their disrespect for nurses. When we advocate for our patients and ourselves, we have to stand together to make a difference. We want a strong contract in Kansas and we use this as a tool to improve our conditions at the hospital. And that is what we want for the St. Agnes nurses
Crowd Chants:
Who got the power? We got the power! What kind of power? Union power! Who got the power? We got the power! What kind of power? Union power!
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us this week. As always, I want thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network Daily. We’re doing grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you’d never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
In the constellation of renewable energy technologies that the U.S. has sought to deploy in order to battle climate change, offshore wind has had perhaps the rockiest path in recent years. In 2023, high interest rates and the global supply chain shocks brought a slew of developments across the country to an end. Even without these macroeconomic obstacles, offshore wind is a mammoth undertaking. It’s difficult to overstate the sheer scale of the endeavor that is the construction of an offshore wind farm. The largest turbines are the length of football fields and require specially built ships to transport them.
If offshore wind can take off anywhere, it’s New England, whose waters provide the highest wind capacity factor (the amount of energy a turbine can produce over time) in the continental U.S. In October 2023, three states — Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts — signed a first-of-its-kind multistate procurement agreement to collectively share the costs and benefits of adding new offshore wind generation. The vision behind the plan was to reduce the cost per megawatt of the electricity generated. So far, the results of this deal have been uneven: two of the states have selected developers for new projects, but Connecticut has not.
But the election of Donald Trump could arrest the region’s momentum before it has had a genuine chance to take off. Trump has made a point of demonizing the technology (“I hate wind,” he is reported to have bluntly told oil and gas executives at a fundraiser) and has repeatedly made false claims about its impact on wildlife. In a campaign rally in May, Trump pledged to ensure that offshore wind projects come to a halt “on day one” of his second term. That could have been mere campaign-trail bluster, but of the clean energy technologies that the Inflation Reduction Act flooded money into, offshore wind is perhaps the most vulnerable to an unfriendly president.
In addition to the political calculations, the question of whether this coalition of states can build and deploy the offshore wind projects amounts to a test of American industrial capacity. To bolster the case to state governments for doubling down, there is growing support in the region from a somewhat unlikely corner: New England’s industrial unions, a group of whom published a report last week, in partnership with the Climate Jobs National Resource Center, outlining an ambitious vision for supplying the region with not only offshore wind turbines but a locally based industrial manufacturing base to support it.
“This entire industry that we’re trying to get launched has thousands and thousands of job opportunities, whether you’re talking about port construction or port renovations to make sure that offshore wind can be developed at a larger scale, whether you’re talking about component manufacturing, whether you’re talking about vessel manufacturing — all of these things are going to be critically important,” said Patrick Crowley, the president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO. “We’re not talking about just individual energy projects. We’re talking about developing an entire energy industry and everything that goes into it.”
At a launch event for the report on Tuesday, Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said the unions’ proposal “supports the region’s continued progress building a robust, worker-centered offshore wind industry. This is an incredible opportunity to lower costs and create good jobs for working people in our region while achieving energy independence, cleaner air and a climate-resilient future.”
There are just three operational wind farms in the country. According to Timothy Fox, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington research firm, those power stations generate only about 200 megawatts of electricity — a fraction of the 50 gigawatts (50,000 megawatts) that states have committed to building, if their renewable energy targets are tallied together. The federal government has approved leases for wind projects that would generate 15 gigawatts of energy, and the onus now is on states to build the turbines — and to require their utility companies to buy electricity from it.
The Climate Jobs National Resource Center’s report calls for building 9 gigawatts of offshore wind energy in the waters off Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts by 2030 — scaling up to 30 gigawatts by 2040, and 60 gigawatts by 2050.
To meet these goals, the report suggests states employ “a climate and jobs strategy, built around new investments, active government facilitation of industry growth, and reliance on a skilled union workforce.” It argues offshore wind’s success will depend on a combination of investment in the region’s ports, regionally based component manufacturing, domestically built installation vessels, coordinated transmission planning between the states involved, and strong labor standards.
To maximize the benefits of offshore wind, the three states will need to coordinate their efforts on a range of tasks, from building transmission lines (which often requires tricky interstate negotiations) to collective procurement — and that’s one area where, Crowley argued, unions are uniquely positioned to help, by leveraging the power of their mass membership across state borders and political influence in Democratic state governments.
“There isn’t another organization except the labor movement that has a presence in all of these states in such a way that, if my counterpart in New York, Vinny Alvarez, calls up and says, ‘Patrick, there’s a hearing at the Rhode Island Coastal Resource Management Council about a transmission line for a project that we’re doing. Can you get a couple of people to go testify?’ — ‘Absolutely.’ And we’re there within hours,” Crowley said.
As an example of this leadership in action, Crowley cited the tri-state procurement agreement, which he described as “a paradigm shift in thinking that I don’t think would be possible except for the labor movement pushing this agenda.” He cast the agreement as a departure from the standard practice by which states attract investment and industry: “All of these states compete with each other when it comes to the economic marketplace,” Crowley said.
“We’re dealing with something right here in Rhode Island,” he continued. “One of our major employers, Hasbro Toys, is being courted by Massachusetts to move up from Providence up to Cambridge to move their headquarters there; we might lose a thousand jobs and Massachusetts will gain them. We’re not going to stop that kind of competition. But when we can eliminate it from the beginning, at the beginning of this industry — oh my God. This is a total economic paradigm shift that I don’t think folks have fully digested yet.”
But to get the unions’ vision past the finish line, especially against the headwinds of an unfriendly federal government, will be no easy feat — and crucially depends on private investment. This is also somewhere that Crowley believes unions can play a role. “The labor movement, through our pension funds, has access to a vast amount of investable capital,” he said. “And maybe what we’ve got to do is be creative about how we can leverage the funds that are in our pension systems, both private and public sector, to be a funding mechanism for developing this industry.”
Jeff Plaisted, an electrician in Massachusetts, worked on the crew that laid six miles of cable from the Vineyard Wind wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard to a power substation on Cape Cod, passing under the streets of the town of Hyannis.
“Since the Vineyard Wind project broke ground, and that project really got off the ground,” Plaisted said, “we had full employment in Local 223” — southeastern Massachusetts’ branch of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, of which Plaisted is now the business agent and organizer of membership development.
The project brought an unusual amount of work to the region. “We had travelers from other jurisdictions coming and signing our book to work in our jurisdiction because we needed the manpower from outside what we had to offer just to fill the job calls. That substation in Hyannis had 70 to 80 electricians on, and we very rarely see jobs in our jurisdiction that require that kind of manpower,” Plaisted said.
When Plaisted began working on the Vineyard Wind project, “What surprised me personally is the magnitude, the size of the turbines themselves,” he said. The job itself was a far cry from the normal work of a union electrician. “You’re not just stripping wires. The splicing operations, everything involved with it is highly skilled and very technical. The guys that are offshore, they’re taking a boat to work, five-plus hours offshore,” Plaisted said.
He is part of a growing number of union leaders who have spent the Biden years making the case that organized labor will need to play a starring role in the nationwide transition away from fossil fuels — not just in offshore wind, but in the vast landscape of industrial work, from electric vehicles to transmission buildout, that the transition will require.
Plaisted said that trade unions are reckoning with the fact that “climate change, it’s not a theory. It’s an actual thing, it’s not a belief system, it’s an issue that we’re going to have to deal with. If the goal is to get off fossil fuels, then everything should be brought to the table — solar, wind, battery. And union labor is the way to make those things happen,” Plaisted said.
Their efforts were bolstered in some respects by Biden’s attachment of labor-friendly requirements to many of the grants for clean energy, as well as an unusually friendly National Labor Relations Board. But unions now face a set of strategic decisions around how to engage with a Republican administration expected to be far less friendly to organized labor. “We’re at a crossroads,” Brothers said.
Under a new Trump administration, unions’ efforts may be directed more locally. “We’ll fight in Congress and in the halls of agencies,” said Jason Walsh, executive director of the Bluegreen Alliance, a coalition of unions and environmental organizations, in an interview before the election. “But I would expect our members and the members of our partners to be in the streets more, in the fullest sense of that term, and on the shop floor, and working much more in state capitals, while not taking our eyes off of all the dangerous actions that a Trump administration would pursue.”
On August 11, 2022, workers in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) penned an open letter about their experiences in the program. “As it currently stands,” they wrote, “the [SAWP] is systematic slavery.” The article was written by Jamaican workers, but they asserted that migrants of other nationalities had faced similarly dehumanizing experiences. “It feels like we’re in prison,” they continued. “[Bosses] physically intimidate us, destroy our personal property, and threaten to send us home.” Workers were “treated like mules” by unaccountable companies that the Canadian government had empowered to repress migrant workers’ labour rights and political voice.
The SAWP was created in 1966, a time of labour militancy for much of the Canadian working class – in fact, in the mid-1960s, Canadian workers were striking more than one thousand times per year. The SAWP, which allows Canadian businesses to employ workers from Mexico and the Caribbean on temporary visas, provided Canadian companies with workers who existed in a more precarious position than Canadian employees. Therefore, they were less likely to cause labour disruptions.
From the very start, workers in the SAWP resisted their dehumanization and exploitation. In 1966, a group of Jamaican workers refused to work on Saturday, the Sabbath day of the Seventh-day Adventist faith. One year later, Trinidadian workers engaged in wildcat strikes, hoping to pressure their employer to rectify their poor working conditions and unequal pay between Canadian and Caribbean employees.
Gabriel Allahdua, whose 2023 book Harvesting Freedom is the first published account of the life of a migrant farm worker in Canada’s SAWP program, wrote: “I began to notice the echoes of slavery, indentured labour, and colonialism in my experiences as a migrant farm worker.”
Ottawa launched the SAWP at the same time that Canadian capital was globalizing. While Ottawa was promoting Canadian investments around the world, the Canadian government also spent money in nations like Allahdua’s home country, St. Lucia, to persuade workers into joining the SAWP. Workers were presented with a rosy, misleading notion of Canada’s government and society, bolstered by Ottawa’s funding of education initiatives overseas. With this hopeful image of Canada in their minds, many workers initially felt privileged to join the SAWP. However, even for those who were optimistic about their lives in Canada, there were often early warning signs. Allahdua himself noted that, in the early 1990s, the Canadian government was funding unpopular resource extraction projects in the region. “This was an early red flag about Canada for me,” he wrote.
When Allahdua arrived in Leamington, Ontario, the greenhouse and migrant worker capital of Canada, his preconceptions about the country were “completely shattered.” His employer worked him for fourteen hours or more each day, and there were no mandated breaks. It was, to use Allahdua’s word, an “authoritarian” system. According to Canadian law, migrant workers were not entitled to the following: “daily and weekly limits on hours of work; daily rest periods; time off between shifts; weekly/bi-weekly rest periods; eating periods; overtime pay.” At the same time, companies exercised total surveillance over workers’ lives. All activities were logged so the bosses could track workers’ movements; meanwhile, employers flaunted their power over workers, openly telling Allahdua and his fellow migrant workers “If you only knew how much money I’m making off you” and “We own you all.”
When workers tried to unionize, they were fired, as Allahdua observed when a group of Mexicans who tried to unionize were simply replaced with Guatemalans. “The element of fear is built into the SAWP and serves as a powerful tool for employers,” writes Allahdua. “A populace in fear cannot fight back.”
As Edward Dunsworth explains in his introduction to Allahdua’s book:
…workers in the SAWP are tied to a single employer, unable to freely choose or change who they work for. Those employers wield an immense amount of power over workers, and not only during the workday. Workers live in employer-provided housing, and they often find their social and private lives – where they go, who visits the bunkhouse, and so on – monitored and controlled by their bosses…A further disincentive against rocking the boat is the fact that employers enjoy essentially free rein to fire workers and send them back to their home countries should they be dissatisfied with them in any way. In the SAWP, then, farmers are not only participants’ employers, but also their landlords and immigration agents.
Effectively, the Canadian government has stripped an entire population of their labour and political rights in order to benefit Canadian businesses.
In addition to dehumanizing the migrant workforce, the SAWP is useful to Canadian capital because it suppresses wages. A 2014 study from the C.D. Howe Institute admits as much: “The goal of a temporary foreign worker (TFW) program is to accommodate shortages of labour that otherwise would cause wages to rise substantially or possibly stop production because of the difficulty of finding resident workers.” A 2012 analysis of Canada’s migrant labour regime also notes that the program “has the broader function of regulating labour supply in a fashion optimal for employer bargaining power.” In other words, it serves companies’ profitability by attacking the rights of workers.
“From the standpoint of capital,” write professors Geoffrey McCormack and Thom Workman in The Servant State: Overseeing Capital Accumulation in Canada, “migrant workers make the perfect worker: obedient, non-confrontational, cheap, unlikely to organize a union…”
Alone in a foreign country, Allahdua and his coworkers lived in low-quality company housing in which visitors were not allowed. Many of his fellow migrant labourers had low literacy rates and did not understand the contracts they had signed. “The program is calling for people of colour,” writes Allahdua.
The program is calling for people who are illiterate, or who are struggling with English, or who have English as a second language. The program is calling for people who are largely ignorant about labour issues and human rights issues. These are the kinds of people that the program is really calling for – people who are easily exploited. To me, this was the slavery and colonial handbook being used in modern Canada…So many of these [injustices] make me think about the conditions of enslaved Africans during the colonial period in the Caribbean (and elsewhere) and of the indentured labourers who came afterwards.
In 2022, the Canadian Migrant Workers Centre interviewed 30 migrant labourers who had fled their workplaces. The results show that racism and abuse are ingrained in the everyday functioning of Canada’s migrant labour system.
29 [of the 30] had experienced financial abuse. This came in the form of unpaid wages, unpaid overtime, excessive hours, forced return of wages to the employer, and extortionate recruitment fees. Seventy percent of the workers experienced employers who were verbally and psychologically abusive. They had faced verbal insults, threats of deportation, and/or racist and discriminatory remarks. Thirty percent of the workers experienced physical abuse by their employer, and 10% experienced sexual abuse.
A United Nations report released in 2024 accused Canada of relying on modern-day slavery. Released by UN investigator Tomoya Obokata, the report notes that Canada’s foreign worker program is a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” In researching the report, Tomoya investigated working conditions in Ottawa, Moncton, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. According to the UN’s findings, Canada’s migrant labour regime “institutionalizes asymmetries of power that favour employers and prevent workers from exercising their rights.”
One year prior to being accused of contemporary slavery, the Canadian government approved the hiring of 239,646 temporary foreign workers, more than double the 2018 total. Despite global condemnation, Canada has continued to impose “contemporary slavery” on migrant workers so Canadian companies can increase their profits. Many employers now use temporary workers as a permanent labour supply.
By promoting neoliberal policies and imperialist interventions abroad, Canadian foreign policy helps create the conditions that force citizens of the Global South to migrate to Canada, where many are deprived of their rights so that Canadian companies can profit. Ottawa’s globalization agenda, aimed at promoting Canadian profits abroad and restricting foreign states’ ability to rein in capital, “directly feeds into the displacement of workers from their countries of origin – and their subsequent migration to countries like Canada,” as Amanda Aziz of the Migrant Workers Centre writes.
When migrant workers displaced by globalization organize to improve their pay and working conditions in Canada, they are often abused, fired, and deported, as many personal testimonies reveal. This needs to change. Canadians must organize to dismantle the system of “contemporary slavery” that our leaders have allowed to grow, in spite of UN warnings, on behalf of Canadian businesses.
A wave of anger is cresting at post offices across the country. Letter carriers are looking at the big raises that other union members have won — 38 percent over four years at Boeing, 62 percent in six years at the East Coast ports, $7.50 in five years at UPS. They’re comparing those gains to the tentative agreement their president handed them in October: 1.3 percent a year for three years.
Donald Trump rode to reelection on a campaign packed with racist rhetoric that promised mass deportations of immigrants. So far, Trump has appointed anti-immigrant extremists like Stephen Miller, Thomas Homan and Kristi Noem to top positions in his administration. The new Trump regime threatens millions of immigrant workers in the U.S., including farmworkers, many of whom are undocumented.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a decision on Wednesday barring employers from requiring workers to attend meetings that are political or religious in nature — including meetings meant to quell workers’ unionization efforts. Such gatherings, known as “captive audience” meetings, are held during workdays, and involve employers trying to coerce their employees into taking an…
What happened in the 2024 elections, and what happens now? Donald J. Trump is headed back to the White House, Republicans will control the Senate, and it’s possible they will control all three branches of government when the dust settles. Democrats’ “blue wall” crumbled in the face of the MAGA-led “red wave,” but that picture gets more complicated when we survey the results of other key races and ballot measures across the country. So, what really happened on Tuesday? What do the results tell us about the political landscape and the balance of power in the US? How did Democrats lose so soundly, how did Republicans pull off such sizable wins? And what implications do the elections have for the future of civil rights, immigration, protest and social movements, public policy, the climate, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and America’s place on the world stage?
In this post-election livestream, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Marc Steiner, host of The Marc Steiner Show, are joined by a range of guests to help break down the wins, losses, and strategies for moving forward from the 2024 elections. Guests include: scholar-activist and artist Eman Abdelhadi; Rick Perlstein, columnist at The American Prospect and author of numerous books like “Nixonland,” “Reaganland,” and “Before the Storm”; Laura Flanders, host of “Laura Flanders & Friends” on PBS; John Nichols, National Affairs Correspondent at The Nation; Bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project; and TRNN reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, who have been on the ground in Wisconsin all week.
Studio: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara, Jocelyn Dombroski
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome, everyone, to our postelection breakdown livestream here on The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and we are so grateful to have you all with us.
Marc Steiner:
And I’m Marc Steiner here, host of The Marc Steiner Show on The Real News. I’m also happy to be here.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Donald J. Trump is headed back to the White House for a second term. Republicans will control the Senate, and it’s possible they will control all three branches of government when the dust settles: the executive, legislature, and the judiciary. Republicans currently have the lead in the battle to control the House of Representatives, with 207 seats compared to Democrats 194 seats. But enough races remain competitive and uncalled as of this recording that the future of the House is still uncertain.
In the presidential race, however, Democrats’ blue wall crumbled in the face of the MAGA-led red wave. Trump not only won the key swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, but he also flipped Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. All of those states, with the exception of North Carolina, went for Joe Biden in 2020. And Trump currently has commanding leads in Nevada and Arizona.
In these last harried months before Election Day, Democrats made a cynical, dangerous, and fateful calculation. They bet that a winning coalition of today’s never-Trump Republicans, i.e. yesterday’s neocons, undecided “moderates”, and all manner of people terrified into submission to vote against Trump would counteract the precious working-class youth, Arab and Muslim American, progressive and other voters that they have hemorrhaged by recklessly continuing to fund and support Israel’s genocidal regime, by presenting Harris’s platform as a lockstep continuation of the Biden administration, and by failing to articulate a strong, populist vision that spoke to working people’s deeply felt lack of economic security. And they were wrong, catastrophically wrong.
So what happened on Tuesday, and what happens now? What do the results tell us about the political landscape and the balance of power in the United States? How did Democrats lose so soundly? How did Republicans pull off such sizable wins?
That picture does admittedly get more complicated when we survey the results of other key races and ballot measures across the country, and we are going to talk about that today as well.
But what implications do the elections have for the future of civil rights, immigration, abortion rights, protest and social movements, public policy, the climate, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and America’s place on the world stage? On today’s livestream, we’re going to dig into all of this. And this will not be the only livestream we have to address these issues.
But we’ve got lots of incredible guests with powerful voices and vital perspectives coming on over the next two hours to help us unpack your biggest questions about the elections. We’ve got scholar activists and artists and Amman Abdelhadi; we’ve got Rick Pearlstein, columnist at the American Prospect and author of numerous books like Nixonland, Reagan Land, and Before the Storm; we’ve got the great Laura Flanders, host of Laura Flanders and Friends on PBS; John Nichols, national affairs correspondent at the Nation; Bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project; and Real News reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, who have been on the ground in Wisconsin all week.
And we’re going to bring on our first guest, Amman Delhi in a minute, but by way of getting us there, Marc, I want to turn to you at the top here and just get your thoughts on where we are right now and how we got here.
Marc Steiner:
We’re in a very scary place, and I think I have to lay some of what happened here at the doorsteps of the Democratic Party, who placed a very narrow campaign, thinking they could go to the right to win, which was absurd. And we see what’s happened.
I think that it’s interesting to me how the Democrats have lost their ability to find their roots. By that I mean their roots were in labor unions and organizing and the Civil Rights Movement and organizing. They’ve lost the organizing roots. They weren’t out there at the grassroots. They weren’t pulling people in. They weren’t doing a media campaign that talked about not just the dangers ahead if Trump wins, but talk about what the vision was for a different kind of America. They didn’t do any of that, and I think they put the nails in their own coffin.
Maximillian Alvarez:
They tried to articulate in a vision and it was not a compelling one. I think that’s also a clear takeaway. It just wasn’t hitting. And we’re going to talk about why, over the course of this livestream and over the course of our continuing coverage and your coverage all the way up to the election and beyond has been incredible, so thank you for all that work, brother.
And thank you all once again for joining us. We know you’ve got a lot of questions, we’re going to try to get to as many of them as we can, but please do send us in your questions and we will try to address them in more segments, more livestreams with more guests in the coming days and weeks.
Right now I want to bring on our first incredible guest, Eman Abdelhadi, scholar, activist, and artist who has been doing incredible coverage for outlets like In These Times in the runup to this week’s elections. Aman, thank you so much for joining us on the Real News Network today. I really, really appreciate it.
Eman Abdelhadi:
Thanks for having me, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, we need your powerful voice, sister, now more than ever. And you know as well as we do that right now, a lot of people in a lot of high places are going to be looking for people to blame this week’s results on, and one of the utmost obvious and softest targets that they’re already going after is the Gaza Solidarity Movement. Anyone and everyone who expressed genuine concerns over Harris’s continued support of Israel’s genocidal Zionist regime.
So taking those narratives out of our heads for a second and asking you to help us unpack this, what role do you see, from your perspective, what role has Israel and Harris’s support for the Zionist genocide seemed to play in this election writ large? And then, what is a second Trump presidency going to mean for Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and all of that moving forward?
Eman Abdelhadi:
I think we have to think about the voter who has been watching children under the rubble every day for the last year, for over a year now, watching a genocide unfold on their phones every single day. And knowing that this system, that this ruling elite has been completely committed to this genocide, has gaslit us about it over and over.
Then this moment of asking this voter to put all of that aside and show up to the polls and vote for the people who have not just enacted this genocide but have patronized the people protesting it, have criminalized the people protesting it, and are offering very little else, are not saying, okay, put aside the genocide because we have this great amazing vision for you on this other ground. They’re not doing that either. And so I think a lot of those voters stayed home. Kamala lost 10 million votes from previous elections.
I think that there’s this way that we ask the left to put on their big boy pants and, as a recent article said, to basically be these hyper-rational, focus on strategy voters, whereas we make a lot of room and leeway for other voters’ proclivities. There’s a sense that you are just going to be able to put aside Gaza. I think a lot of people didn’t, and they weren’t being offered anything meaningful — And, in fact, they were being told that they shouldn’t care at all.
Now, will Trump be worse on Gaza? It’s actually hard to tell. His rhetoric is certainly a lot worse. His foreign policy was really hard to pin down, I think, in his last presidency. He’s certainly no friend of Arabs. He’s no friend of Muslims. He’s no friend of the Palestinian people. His rhetoric has been terrible.
But I think that people need to understand that, in terms of US support for Israel, there has been no red line and there have no been no checks on the Israeli government. So it’s hard to imagine a worse case. It’s hard to imagine things getting worse in terms of the Middle East, which is what we’ve been threatened with this whole time, this whole campaign — Oh, it’s going to get worse, it’s going to get worse. And I think what voters have been saying is, what is worse than a genocide and an open tap of weapons and support that no amount of brutality has stopped?
So I don’t know what’s going to happen with Iran. We do know that Trump tends to be an isolationist. I think he’s less committed to the vision of the world with US leadership that Clinton and Bush era politicians seem to be arguing for. I don’t know what that’s going to mean on the ground. I think it’s going to be a question of what becomes lucrative for him.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And what about, I guess this is a question that’s on a lot of our minds. It’s a question that makes me think of the fact that the last time we were together in person was there in Chicago, covering Gaza solidarity protests around the DNC in August.
Right now, I think the knee-jerk reaction from a lot of folks is we gotta hit the streets. We gotta hit the streets even harder. We gotta protest even louder. And I’m not saying that we don’t need to do that, but I am saying that the first story I reported on in Trump’s first term was when his administration was cheering on the mass arrest and the attempts to charge mass amounts of protesters, journalists, legal observers at the inauguration protests with felony riot charges. So we are entering a new terrain when it comes to grassroots action, protest actions, and otherwise.
So as you see it, as someone who’s covered these protest movements all year, where do you see us heading in terms of the terrain of struggle, particularly as it pertains to protests moving forward in the Trump administration?
Eman Abdelhadi:
We always knew that whoever was going to be in the White House, headed to the White House in January, was going to be an enemy. And the question is which enemy do we have? And right now we have an enemy that, it has no qualms about calling the military, has no qualms about criminalizing protests.
Now, a lot of us have been facing off against the police and these repressive tactics under the previous administration. So I think we need to think about our tactics not from a place of fear and from a place of, well, what are they going to do, necessarily, in response, but more where are we as a movement? We need to think about where our movement is in terms of its potential, in terms of its energy. And I think that street mobilizations and street actions have been really important for growing our base, but we’ve also hit up against the limits of them a little bit.
And so I think that what I’m seeing on the ground is a lot of people turning towards organizing and power building as opposed to mobilizing just street actions. Thinking about your workplace, your school, your neighborhood, thinking about your local politicians and your local political scene and whatever other institutions are within your sphere of influence, and thinking about how do I hold these institutions accountable to their relationship with the state of Israel to their complicity in the genocide?
For me, it feels clear that the American public is going to have to divest from Israel before we force the ruling class to do it. And we are going to have to do that through all of this bottom-up work and grassroots organizing.
So I think we should still be on the streets. I think we have to protect the right to be on the streets, but I also think that we have been expanding into other tactics as well.
Marc Steiner:
I watched this whole thing unfold and the Democrats just blew it. Kamala Harris and her team did not come up with an alternative to what’s been happening. I don’t expect the Democrats to go, oh, we’re pro-Palestine and goodbye Israel. I don’t expect that at all. But what I did expect and what they should have done at the very least is to say, we are going to end the violence right now. We’re going to do something to build peace in the Middle East, to build a peace platform. And it may have saved them votes, but B, it just set it apart.
Because you can’t… It was just really disappointing to watch this unfold. And I think that I’ve been in this struggle around the Palestinian Israeli struggle since 1968, and we’ve been fighting against this occupation for that long, and organizing and coming up with strategy is what has to happen now. The Democrats have seen what they’ve blown, and I’ve talked to a couple of people in the Democratic Party over the last two days, and people really have to push to change the way they approach the subject, period. It’s just obscene. And that’s a huge reason why they lost.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and to turn that into a question for Eman, I mean, again, I don’t want to ask you to speak for whole swaths of voting constituencies here, but again, having watched what we watch, having heard what Marc just said, I mean, what would a better alternative vision have been or needs to be moving forward to get the faith back from so many folks? Not just Arab and Muslim Americans, but working class voters, youth voters, folks around the country who feel like even in the face of a threat like Donald Trump, that the prospect of things getting better is just so hopeless that they stay home or they don’t put their faith in any of the options on offer. What does an alternative to that even look like?
Eman Abdelhadi:
I think a left wing candidate… Listen, I don’t think our full liberatory potential as human beings is ever going to be on the ballot in the current system as it is. We’re never going to have liberation on the ballot. But I think that, even within the current system, if you had offered people a left-wing, truly progressive alternative with actual policies.
At the DNC, she said, we’re going to build the most lethal fighting force on earth. She said this to her voters who largely are anti-war, anti weaponry. And there are these ways that they could have even lied. What’s so wild about having watched this campaign, it’s like, you could have lied and said you were going to do more than you did and then ended up doing what every Democrat has done, which has moved to the right when you’re in office.
But they couldn’t even offer that platform. And I think that speaks to the intense disjuncture between this party and the people who are supposed to be its base that somewhere there’s this consultant class of Democrats who truly believes that if you send Bill Clinton to Michigan to speak to Arab communities about how terrible Gazans basically deserve to die, that was a good election strategy on the eve of the election.
So I think there’s so many ways that they could have done things differently. And within our lifetimes we’ve seen that. We’ve seen the energy around the Bernie campaign. Bernie is not as far left as I would like him to be, but I even knocked on doors for him. We saw the energy that could happen if you had an actual progressive candidate on the ballot.
And here in this election, we saw that she lost states that voted for left-wing policies. In my own home state in Missouri, voters voted overwhelmingly for Trump, and they also voted for a minimum wage hike.
They’re trying to spin this right now as America moving to the right ideologically because they voted for Trump. And I don’t think that that’s what we’re seeing here. I think what we’re seeing is that there’s a referendum on Democrats’ economic vision, on their vision of the world as a world that’s led by US hegemony, and they’re losing that referendum, that people have voted against it.
And those two things, the domestic side and the international side, are two parts of the same coin. We need a candidate who says, I care more about Americans lives here. I’m going to actually invest in working class people here, and I’m going to do that more. And it’s more important than protecting the interests of corporations or weapons manufacturers or Israel. And well, we haven’t seen that. And I think if we had seen that there was a moment where Kamala could have pivoted to that and she did it and she lost as a result.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And also worth noting that not only did Missouri vote to raise the state minimum wage, but it was also one of the seven states that voted to enshrine abortion rights in its state charter. I mean, along with Arizona, Colorado, New York, Maryland, here in our home state, Montana, Nevada. I mean, as I said at the top, the picture does get more complicated than just sort of the red Trumpian wave when you look at all the way up and down the ballot. And I want us to continue to unpack that over the course of this live stream. But it does sort of raise an important question here, Aman, that I wanted to pose to you because I know we only have you for a few more minutes here. But as we said, the pundit class, the consultant class, like Democrats at the top of the party, they, they’re going to do what they always do and they’re going to look for a way to blame voters for the outcome that voters kept telling ’em they were going to get if they didn’t change course.
But they don’t really seem to have a case to make here the way that they tried and succeeded in doing in a lot of ways after 2016 because now granted, in terms of the national total voter results, there are still a lot of results in populous states like California that are going to be counted. So we’re expecting that the total voter turnout will be closer to what it was in 2020, but it still appears to be less than what it was in 2020. And there also appear to be key dropoffs in democratic support. But those dropoffs do not correspond to the amount of people who voted for say, Jill Stein or Cornell West. So it doesn’t even feel like Democrats and sort of like their supportive pundits in the media can even say all those people who voted third party are the difference that could have swung this to Harris. It feels like something else is going on here. I just wanted to get your thoughts there with the caveat that more is going to become clear in the coming days and weeks. Exit polls need to be taken with a huge pinch of salt, but based on the results that we have, what do you actually think are the takeaways that people should have rather than trying to just blame this all on uncommitted folks or people who voted third party?
Eman Abdelhadi:
I think the takeaway is that the Democratic party has abandoned working class Americans, and it’s abandoned any pretense that it was the sort of more peace anti-war party. And as a result, its base has abandoned it. And I think there’s this way that if you don’t offer something exciting and something interesting in a world, in a country that is increasingly disillusioned with the whole system is increasingly disillusioned with voting, you’re just not going to win. And so I think that’s the key takeaway. But I think broadly as a leftist, as someone who, like I said, doesn’t believe liberation is ever going to fully be on the ballot, but that the ballot is worth engaging and that it’s not something to throw away and that it is important and that we should participate as leftists, we should be seizing any ground that we can. And I think we have to think broadly about the world we need to build and what the hurdles are to getting there and how to push for that. It became clear to me around the DNC that the sort of electoral possibilities of ending the genocide and Luda had been reached that we were not going to push her any further, and that it was time to focus our energy back to local organizing. So I think for each of us, there has to be this question of what do I need to do to protect the people around me and to advance the causes that I care about in this moment of incredible weakness for the left
Maximillian Alvarez:
Brother? Mark, any final questions you have for Aman?
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, I am very curious, from all the work you’ve done and what we face now in the Middle East and building a coalition that makes some changes here in America, how do you see that unfolding? How do you see that happening? We talked a bit about organizing and more, but because it infuriates me watching these Democrats not be able to make the leap to say, end the war in the Israel Gaza, stop it because we are the only country on the planet that has the power to stop it. So I’m curious, what do you think the next moves are to push that and to push that as an idea for Mass Americans to take hold of and to change the Democrats if you can?
Eman Abdelhadi:
Yeah, I mean, I think that we need to make commitment to this war extremely costly. I think we do that by leveraging our power through things like unions. I think we need to basically create both social and economic costs to continuing to support this war. I mean, we sort of did do that in terms of the vote. I mean, I think Kaza was a part of why she didn’t win, but I think also this is a long-term battle where we need to basically build power, whether that’s through street mobilizations, that disrupt business as usual or through moving labor has been solidly on the side of Palestine, but there needs to be more work in that arena. I think the broader problem is that we are left after decades of neoliberal in a version of this country that makes it incredibly hard to leverage any people power.
The fact that we have so few unions that we have and we’re stuck in these kind of ideological debates without a lot of actually points of leverage. So I think a lot of the work that’s been happening on the sort of cultural realm of realm has been really important. But what we’ve seen is that hasn’t translated into policy. So yeah, it’s hard to say beyond. And I think organizing locally, so here in Illinois for example, we are organizing around a divestment campaign for Illinois bonds. So I think there needs to be a sort of systematic attack on all of these links that bolster the Israeli government and it’s sort of murderous campaigns. I wish I had a silver bullet. I wish
Maximillian Alvarez:
You all had it right?
Oh no. None of us have a silver bullet, but I mean we only have a couple minutes left with Aman, and then we’re going to welcome on our next guest, Rick Pearlstein and Laura Flanders. And so by way of asking you this kind of final question, Aman, mark and I were talking about this leading into Tuesday about what the message was going to be if Harris won because I think for the left or whatever that means today, or for people who have principled commitments that you could define as more left-leaning or progressive, there was going to be a very sobering reality on the other side of a Harris win, which is that the progressive wing of the Democratic party is at its institutionally most powerless point, and it takes two election cycles to wash the Bernie Sanders stain out. And Harris would’ve gone into her administration feeling next to no compulsion whatsoever to even cater to that Bernie side, that progressive side of the Democratic party that Biden felt compelled to cater to in 2020.
There was going to be a real soul searching question of what is the left, where is the left, and what do people who believe in that vision of the world, where are we and what do we do moving forward into a Harrison administration? Now we got Trump. So in a lot of ways, the equation’s the same institutionally. We ain’t got no power in that administration. We have less and less in all three branches of government. So that is both a terrifying prospect and a critical one because for all the reasons that we can justifiably say people want an alternative so that we’re not in this same situation in four years, that needs to start now, that needs to start yesterday. And a lot of people are feeling maybe too scared and too anxious to even begin thinking in those terms. So I wanted to give you the sort of final word here. If you could speak to people who are in that position, people who desperately want an alternative but are currently fearful of what a next Trump administration’s going to be, don’t know where to start, don’t know what our goal needs to be beyond just defense of ourselves, our communities, and our livelihoods. What would your message be to those folks right now?
Eman Abdelhadi:
I would say start with the local level. I would say we need to build a bench of progressives that can move through these. I mean, in 2018 after there was a blue wave of folks that were elected all over really on all levels of government who were progressive and on the progressive end of the party and all of that kind of dissipated, they got eaten up into the, either they sort of got co-opted into mainstream democratic party politics or they sort of got marginalized. But I think that it’s important to think about these moments as of potential mobilization. And so I think on the electoral level, we need to build a bench of progressives who can sort of move through local elections and eventually kind of make their way up. And we need to keep them accountable through the movement, not by constantly immediately canceling them all the time, but constantly holding them back, accountability to their base. And then I think people need to organize. I mean, the reality is I didn’t feel I had very much power in the previous administration either, and no one that I organized with felt like we had power vis-a-vis last administration. And so I think we need to build coalitions and organize again in our spheres of influence, whether that’s our workplaces or our schools or our districts, and build these coalitions that can either be used electorally or more importantly for broader movement wins.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So that is the great Aman Abdelhadi. You should read anything and everything Aman has ever written. Follower on social media, scholar, activists, artists. Aman, thank you so much for joining us on The Real News. Thank you for everything that you’ve done and we’re sending all our love and solidarity to you from here in Baltimore.
Eman Abdelhadi:
Mentioned that I’m sending it right back, max. Thanks so much.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you, sister. Thank you. So we’re going to bring on our next guest in a moment. We’ve had them on before. In fact, we had them on together to help us break down the Trump conviction news that feels like it happened 10 years ago, but it was only a few months ago. And we said rightly then. And we were addressing this to all the folks out there who were taking a premature victory lap and hoping that the legal system of checks and balances would sort of just take the Trump problem off the country’s plate back in the spring. Our message was very clear. That’s not going to happen. What in the Trump era would make you think that he’s just going to go away or that the system is going to treat them with the same callousness that it does working people like us? And here we are months later in a much different world.
And so we’re very excited to have our guests, Rick Pearlstein and the great Laura Flanders joining us today at this critical and dark moment to help us make sense of this. Laura, of course, is the host of Laura Flanders and Friends, which you can catch every week on PBS. She is a journalist legend, a hero of mine as is Brother Rick Pearlstein, the most brilliant mind analyzing the American right that the American left has ever produced. Laura, Rick, thank you both so much for joining us today on The Real News Network. We really appreciate it.
Laura Flanders:
Alright, it’s great to be with you. Glad to be here Max. Good to see you, Rick.
Rick Perlstein:
Yeah, it’s a comforting place to be and a very uncomfortable time.
Maximillian Alvarez:
That’s good to see you both. Well Mark, let’s open it up with you.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, I like hear both of your analysis about what just happened here, how the Democrats blew this and the growing power of the right. I’ve been covering the growing power of the right in this country for some time now here for Real News. And what we’re seeing now is they almost have a trifecta politically in Washington dc. It could be extremely dangerous from everything from civil rights to labor rights to the future of our country and our democracy, everything’s at stake. I’m curious, how did we get here? How do you think at this moment we came to this point?
Rick Perlstein:
Can I start Laura,
Laura Flanders:
The historian? Rick, go for it.
Rick Perlstein:
Yeah, I mean I’m going to lean away from any preliminary judgment at this point that the Harris campaign necessarily blew it. I mean, maybe they did, right? But I’m just going to give a little example of my day-to-Day life. My car got towed and at the impound lot in the middle of a neighborhood in Chicago, the Mexican American clearly working class clerk, we got into a conversation about the election and he said he was for Trump, and he said he heard that every undocumented immigrant was getting a $9,000 check. I just got the latest issue of the Economist, and the cover is the American economy is the envy of the world.
Speaker 6:
Now,
Rick Perlstein:
Of course, we still have a profoundly unequal economy. There’s lots of vultures, for example, in the housing market who are just stripping people clean. But if you look back also at say in the Biden administration, the fact that we had a party where young black men were called super predators, and now they’re nominating public defenders to the bench, or the fact that Kamala Harris chose as her running mate, basically a Scandinavian social Democrat who when the federal government took away the Biden administration, let’s be frank, took away the Covid stimulus checks for families. He just brought ’em back. So I don’t think it’s as easy as just saying the administration and the campaign rejected the left, and that’s why they lost. I mean, here I am in Chicago and we elected the Bernie Coalition and they just screwed up everything and the mayor as a 15% approval rating, I’m going to really place the blame on the fact that people only know what the candidates are saying or doing through mediation.
And that medium is the media, right? I just got a text from a friend of mine who works at a major metropolitan newspaper, basically in a blue state, a blue city in a red state, and he said, journalism deserve what it has coming to it. Discussion in the newsroom. This is a newspaper newsroom about Project 25. So very clear, no one’s seriously grappled with anything before today. Just one more example, inflation, right? I mean, there’s this huge debate over inflation, right? Did anyone in the media ever say that the president really has no control over inflation? Right? So I mean, to me, the reason the word fascism is useful is because it’s only possible in this kind of deranged information environment in which it’s just very hard for people to just grasp reality. I mean, here we have this guy, I, Elon Musk, and I was looking at Axios today, and Axios report was, well, maybe Elon Musk isn’t so dumb after all, maybe he’d made an amazing investment by buying Twitter and by saying that, they’re saying this is a guy who basically was turned over the keys to something that’s going to be like state media, a state propaganda raus.
He’s going to be the nation’s gables and one of these newsletters of the elite capitalist masters of the universe in Washington. All they can say about this is great business move. So yeah, I wish it was as easy as saying, Kamala screwed up. I kind of dug what she was doing. I think that it’s a calamity and a disaster that she wasn’t able to say anything about Gaza that was productive in any way, shape or form. But quite frankly, mass occurring brown people is not a big problem for a lot of Americans, as we’ve seen from them choosing Donald Trump. So I think the biggest crisis moving forward has to be dealing with this media that just does not know how to represent the truth to citizens in a way that allows them to act like citizens.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Laura, let’s toss it to you.
Laura Flanders:
Well, so many things there. I mean, I want to come back to the media. Of course. Huge, huge issue. I will give just a few quick takes on the Harris campaign for sure. I don’t think there’s anything she could have done that necessarily would’ve turned a totally different result, maybe incrementally different. But I do think it is really hard to run on and also against the economic record of the administration that you’ve been part of for the last four years. I also think it is really hard to run against autocracy and war and for human rights and be part of an administration that is flooding weapons to a foreign autocrat committing. I think it’s super hard to run a bottom up. People powered We are democracy in Action democratic campaign that nonetheless relies on big dollar donors by private interests. That’s our system that is fundamentally instills a level of hypocrisy and servitude into our political process.
Finally, I think it is really hard to run as the nation’s first woman of color president in a continent as big as ours with 330 million people and do it in 106 days. So those are my hot takes on the Harris aspect of the story. The other aspect of the story though that I think Rick is getting at so well is it’s not about one party or one campaign or let alone one politician. There have been structural phenomena playing out here over decades that finally came to roost this election. Did the media ignore important aspects of what was actually happening under the Biden administration? Absolutely. I mean, when Nicholas Lehman writes in the New Yorker, in the issue that comes out the week before the election, Biden Nos is working, why is nobody noticing? You’re like, well, because the media, so-called most of our most influential media speakers are those cable network pundits who never leave the studio.
So while Nicholas Lehman, bless him, goes out there and actually talks to working class people at the factory, making the school buses, making green school buses with union labor in a neighborhood that needed employment, employing people that were historically disadvantaged, all thanks to millions of dollars coming in from the Biden administration, it’s too little too late. And where was the reporting all this time about how this policy was actually playing out? I’m with Rick. I was never a huge Biden fan during the financial crisis. We remember the role that he played benefiting privileging banking over others. But heck in this administration, Biden nos showed the markers of the influence of the Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren wing of the party. It really did. And there was a lot to actually run on and talk about. Not happy talk about how inflation is nothing and everybody’s lives are great and the market’s great, therefore you should feel better than you do.
But actual real life stuff about what’s happening on the ground, that’s about as positive as you’re going to get from me about a democratic administration. But I do think there were things to report on there that simply got missed, and Harris could have run on some of that, but she was so intimidated, I think by the frames that the media had put on this election, which was that everybody was upset about the economy. What do we mean by the economy anyway? Who’s out there talking about what that means? We have many economies in this country, people getting by in all sorts of different ways and people being helped by government programs in all sorts of different ways. We could have talked about a lot of it. So I think there’s the problem of the media, what they actually do today. There’s the problem of how much advertising money they absorb.
What if they just said, tomorrow we’re not running these ads, but instead they accept the cable companies, which are for-profit corporations, part of international global corporate capital, accept millions of dollars of advertising money to run ads that are lies. And we know that they were lies that worked lies around trans people, men in sports, not true. That’s not the issue. And lies of every other possible kind, and this comes back to our bigger fundamental problem we have. Well, two, they both have to do with capitalism. One of them has to do with you cannot have a democracy. I mean, Bernie’s, right? We shouldn’t have billionaires. You can’t have a democracy when you have billionaires allowed to pump as much money as they want to into our elections. It just doesn’t work. Secondly, we have had an extractive economy that has extracted culture and value and understanding and care and attention as much as it has extracted precious minerals from underneath the ground of our communities around this country, and concentrated all those resources and attention and information and caring in a few hands in a few places.
So we do have a lot of this country that has been ignored for way too long in terms of the culture, what they see reflected back to them through their media, the kinds of people they see, talking back to them about the nature of the world. And I think that that is a longstanding problem that has been going on for years when people feel ignored, alienated, scared, alone, remote, disinvested in, not cared about. It is really easy for one to create a sense of community of the aggrieved and a community of the aggrieved that are led to believe through endless messaging that it’s not the wealthy and the extractors that are the problem. It’s the scrappy immigrants who are coming to take their jobs. And that’s what happened this time and we’ve, it’s not magic, it’s not rocket science, it’s not breaking news that that’s been going on, but that is, I believe at the heart of what happened today and leaves us with an enormous job of how do we reinvest attention, caring, consideration, not to mention resources into communities that don’t make it into our news.
Marc Steiner:
A couple of things here that popped up as both of you were talking. One has to do, we don’t have to belabor this, but the Democrats had a billion dollars to spend. They could have told the story, hired organizers really pushed a different agenda, exposed the things you were just talking about, Laura, all across the media. They could have done that and had people on the ground organizing. They didn’t do it. They did not organize this. And I guess having spent years as an organizer and running campaigns, give me a billion dollars, I’ll help you change it. That really drove me nuts. But the other thing is, let’s talk about what’s going to happen now.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let me hop in there real quick. I want us to end in the sort of what happens now question. But I guess by way of getting there, I want to comment on the economy and a question about the media. That’s cool, right? Because again, agree with what you guys are saying, taking it all in, appreciate your perspectives that as always, and I want to just also offer kind of a perspective here as folks watching this know, yeah, the Real News Network is a nonprofit newsroom. We’re not competing with CNN or stuff like that, but we’re small, mighty, we care and we try and we talk to working people around the country week in, week out. I interviewed tons of them on my show working people all the time. And what I can also want to add to the conversation here is that in those conversations, you will hear how the people’s perception of the economy and people’s lived experience, it produces a sort of mixed bag.
When we’re talking about the economy, it is not as simple as saying Omics is working. Why aren’t people talking about it depends on what people were talking about. I interviewed railroad workers last week on my show saying, Hey, Biden and Congress broke your guys’ strike. How are people feeling right now? How are they going to vote? The answer was, people are feeling demoralized. Our strike was broken under Biden’s administration and the rail companies got everything that they want. Then two months after we were forced to accept a contract, the derailment in East Palestine happened. They’ve been left behind. Railroad workers feel just as demoralized as they did three years ago before the country started to care about ’em again. They barely got any sick days. They got a little pay bump, but they’re still being run into the ground. So in terms of omics working for them, it’s not right in terms of public school teachers and counties all across the country, especially in places like Minnesota where I’ve interviewed folks, they can’t hire educators because the pay is so low and they can’t retain folks, nurses, healthcare workers, education workers are constantly telling us that they are being burnt out because they’re having more work piled onto fewer workers at pay that is not keeping pace with the cost of living.
If you add into that young people who are dealing with a massive debt burden from getting the education we were told to get when we were young, those student loan repayments started up a few months ago. Housing costs still are skyrocketing. Omics is not working for a lot of folks there, and they’re feeling it. Now. Again, Trump’s not going to address that, but it paints a really complicated picture. As Laura said, there are many complic economies.
Laura Flanders:
Well, it’s complicated picture though, max, that I mean, if you had been, I bet if you had been running head for office, you would’ve said, listen, it’s not working for everybody. We want to do more, do it better. I mean, if you were a Democrat, you would’ve run on, we’ve been at least doing this and we could be doing more instead of we agree it’s been a big problem, which is what she basically ran on. So instead of saying, we need more of this and this is what’s been happening and this is what still needs to be done, she ran away from the whole story, which I think was a big mistake.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I mean, I think also people have a very distorted picture, which brings us back to the media about what the scene is for working class people and organize labor in this country. Folks still think we’re in the midst of this great organizing wave when the organizing wave that emerged out of Covid is still running through the mud of an underfunded NLRB in a viciously anti-union corporate class that has managed to stall so many of those unionization
Rick Perlstein:
Efforts.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So again, complicated picture point, very well taken. This brings us back to the question of the media, because I wrote this piece last week in these times in the Real News, a deeply personal piece trying to address this question because I went back home and visited my grandfather who’s dying of Alzheimer’s, who’s obsessively watching Trump and Fox News and OAN, and I sat there in his living room watching the screen that he watches that connects him to the world outside of his window. And the world looked very different than the one that I see watching the world in my social circles through the media that I consume, the reporting that I do. And that is a huge unspoken crisis that we are experiencing in the digital age right now where you could be seeing and imagining a very different country than the person who sits next to you on the bus, depending on what channels you watch, what apps you use, what podcasts you listen to.
So there’s been a fracturing of not only the mass public that maybe television commanded a large audience of 30, 40 years ago, but that has sort of translated into a very fractured sense of the country that we’re actually living in. And so Mike, I wanted to ask Rick, the media is one of the core pillars of the Infernal Triangle that you’re writing about so much at the American Prospect. Can you talk a bit about that sort of reality warping and reality and casing sort of effect of the fractured media ecosystem we’re living in now? And Laura is someone who has been working in media and journalism, you’re on still public tv. How do we fight that?
Rick Perlstein:
Right? I mean, imagine if your work and your reporters in Wisconsin or East Palestine, if that was happening on the scale of the resources of a New York Times or a Washington Post or a CNN instead of your hard scrabble crew, literally probably literally a thousand fold resources, we would’ve a different country because the politicians would receive different signals because they’re very solicitous of what the media says about them and what’s going out there. And we take something like crime and crime committed by migrants. Every educated person knows that immigrants commit violent crimes at a level far lower than native foreign people. So logically speaking, if you want a less crime ridden country, you’re let in more immigrants, not less, and the lie that immigrants are invading, I mean, which is just like fascist rhetoric. I mean, the idea that a poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free are the people who are the threat to the country.
It is like something out of Nazi Germany or Prof and the Soviet Union I spent a couple of weeks ago, I was in New York and I went to Ellis Island, so I really saw Ellis Island. I don’t know if some of you guys who are older might remember that Ellis Island was rehabbed and kind of reopened after a long closure in the 1980s during the Reagan era. At the same time, they restored the Statue of Liberty. There were all these scaffolding around it, and it was really a time when the civic religion just had a basic grasp and basic beliefs that immigrants were a good thing. And one of the things I found so fascinating was they had all these oral histories in which people told their stories what it was like going through Ellis Island. And one guy was like, there was a law that you had to have $25, so we would just kind of pass the same $25 down the line.
And the immigrant inspectors looked the other way. They knew we didn’t have $25. And the fact that this was upheld in the museum is a story that we were supposed to celebrate showing the gumption and hustle of immigrants instead of the story now, which is told also by unfortunately Kamala Harris, did she ever say once that we want more immigrants, the immigrants are good. She said, we are a nation of immigrants, which is a very mild thing. Instead, the story about immigrants passing that $25 down the line would be, wow, these immigrants are cheating us. And that’s somehow become this kind of bipartisan thing, and it is backed by this lie that’s also passed on in the media because the Republicans say it. And if the Republicans say it, we have to report it without fact checking because fact checking would be bias that America is suffering a epidemic of violent crime. So yeah, I mean, I think really it’s very fundamental. And then you get to the issue of social media and their algorithms that basically valorize people basically lying in order to create fights, which creates more engagement. I think that the revolution now flows through the media, right? I mean, if we had an honest media that provided a reasonable picture onto the world, everything would change. Everything would change.
Laura Flanders:
I mean, Rick, you mentioned Bels, and I wrote a piece for The Guardian earlier this year that referred to Musk as today’s Bels. And I didn’t just mean because of the role he is playing in communication, but structurally, I mean people perhaps don’t remember Bels, the communications director for the Hitler administration, as it were, the Hitler regime. He didn’t just do propaganda. He distributed cheap radio sets to Germans all across the country so that they well boosted the economy of the people that owned the manufacturers, but also gave people a free new medium that they could engage with and get their news from that they were excited about. It was very similar to Twitter or X. And I think that that idea of distributing not just content, but also form the pipes as well as what runs through the pipes, owning your own media platforms.
I mean, the Trump team have several of them now. Trump has his own, which is increasing in value after the election, and Twitter Musk has x. I think that we, and always Max, when I talk about the failings of the media, I am not talking about you or me or the whole media, independent media ecosystem that has provided us our community over all these many decades. And it’s exciting to know that there are new generations of independent media makers and movement media makers and a new alliance that I know that you’re part of the Movement Media Alliance that’s thinking about how can we independents move more closely together, work more closely together, help one another survive better. I assume my days on public television are numbered because I think public television is to be zeroed out of the budget, at least according to Project 2025,
Not than anybody at public television covered that part of Project 2025, but hey, I read that chapter with Care and Concern. I think they mentioned it on page like two. But I do think that this media piece also, another thing that I’ve thought about a lot is we have monopoly media, and when I talk about extraction, the extraction takes resources from a place, attention, people care, all of that and concentrates it somewhere else. And if you think of what’s happened in our media, national networks have taken over where there used to be local media and that local media that reflected back to you perhaps what was happening in your town, the little league scores and the stores and what’s happening in the church and the food pantries and anything would reflect back to you, your actual reality. In most parts of this country, there is no such thing. And I think that is another phenomenon, that it’s not just the addition of propaganda mechanisms, but the subtraction of the other media that made people feel that they lived in a community with other folks.
Marc Steiner:
I’d like to ask a quick question in time. We have here,
Maximillian Alvarez:
We’ve got a few minutes for our next segment, so take us out.
Marc Steiner:
Okay. So when you have people like Elon Musk, JD Vance in positions of huge power, these are both very bright and shrewd men in, and you have Project 2025, which they’re going to implement. We touched on it just briefly, it was brought up, but it seems to me one of the biggest issues we’re going to face is people like that running the government and implementing Project 2025. I’m curious, what’s your analysis of that is, what do you think? Is it going to take us and what’s the struggle against it? Rick, you want to jump in First?
Rick Perlstein:
Project 2025, I mean, one thing that is very important to understand about Project 2025 is how just thoroughly comprehensive it is. I tried to read through the whole thing and it gets to the most molecular granular levels of these agencies. You’ve never even heard of
Marc Steiner:
It. Does I read it?
Rick Perlstein:
Yeah. So is the contrast to kind of power building on the left is we don’t have that kind of granularity about where the levers of power live. It’s like we say the right things, we have the right ideals. But one reason I personally preferred Elizabeth Warren over Bernie Sanders is she knew those millions of federal agencies and who worked there. And just to kick a quick example, one of my friends running for office running for governor said he supported Elizabeth Warren because he told a story about how when he was running for governor, he said he was trying to create this certain financial reform, and in order to do it, he had to pass this law. And Elizabeth Warren said, no, you don’t have to pass this law that’s already a federal law. You just need it enforced by this person and this place and dah, dah, dah, dah. So I think that kind of granularity, that kind of seriousness about power, that kind of really unglamorous stuff is what Project 2025 accomplishes that there isn’t much, much of a parallel to on the left.
Laura Flanders:
Yeah, I would agree. I mean, I think that we talk about the writers being anti-government, but Project 2025 showed just how good they were at thinking about the role of government and what government can do.
Marc Steiner:
The
Laura Flanders:
Other aspect, of course, of that whole initiative is not just the policies on paper, but the people that were recruited to line up to be appointed into these offices in a way that enabled there to be a lot of scrutiny of those candidates long before any transition team comes into play. So unlike the last Trump administration, they won’t be the same kind of lag in populating government. And I would just echo Rick, while they populate with loyalists, we need to look closely at local government and see where we can also shore up positions of influence at the local level. Because heck, we have got to look at any possible place in our entire government system where we can fortify resistance, fortify mechanisms that would act as at least a slowdown on this administration’s plans
Rick Perlstein:
Based decisions. Where were we are that are going to have an effect on this resistance. And I wrote a column, Google it, what will you do? And it’s about the faces, the kind of questions all of us will individually face under an authoritarian government, whether we’re in a government job or we’re lawyers or we’re working class people, we might have to stand in the gap.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, we’re going to go to Wisconsin in a minute, but while we still have Rick Pearlstein and Laura Flanders on with us, I want to kind of ask you guys in a second to sort of just help center our viewers and listeners right now. Where does the fight go from here? And what is your message to folks right now who are feeling scared, anxious, uncertain about why they need to be part of that fight? But I wanted to also just really underline the point about the importance of independent truth telling, principled, transparent, honest media. And if you support us here at The Real News, first of all, thank you. Secondly, please go support Laura Flanders and Friends if you don’t already. It is vital. The entire team there is great. They do incredible work week in, week out. And as you’ve seen here over the past 30 minutes, we desperately need Laura’s voice heard by as many folks as we can.
Same goes for Rick. So if you are watching this, you support the Real news, please go support our friends at Lo Flanders and Friends. Please support the American Prospect where Rick’s invaluable column is published. Every week. So I wanted to put in a plug there for both of our guests and their incredible work, and I wanted to throw it back to you guys to kind of have the final word here again. What would you say to folks out there watching and listening about where the fight goes from here, why they need to be part of it, and yeah, how we steal ourselves for what’s to come?
Rick Perlstein:
I don’t know.
Laura Flanders:
Well, I had a question for Rick if we had more time, and I guess we don’t, but I’ve been thinking how does this moment compare to the worst of the Nixon years and is there any courage or any comfort to be had in the idea that we have seen bad times before? I’ll tell you,
Rick Perlstein:
Yeah. Nixon had a lot of this in mind for his second term, and that was all scotched by and Watergate in a lot of ways was the political elite and institutions in this country having the courage to stand up to, to someone who really had authoritarian designs in mind. So I’ll just say that we need all of us, whether we’re democratic office holders or radical grassroots activists, to figure out some way to find every possible lever of accountability and make it hard, make it hard. And that can just mean putting your body in front of us, in front of an immigrant who’s going to be deported, just make it harder.
Laura Flanders:
Immigrants, just very briefly, max, I will say, and first off, thanks for the pitch. If you absorb any independent media out there, fund it, send a contribution, whatever it is, support whatever avenue of information that you value, send them some money. Secondly, I had a show, we recorded a show yesterday that will be aired tomorrow at five and all frontline activists, and one of them is Lene Yosef, who works with the Haitian Bridge Alliance, the only Haitian-American organization working with migrants on the border. And this is an organization she personally with her organization brought a citizens lawsuit against Trump and Vance over what they had done in Springfield, Ohio. And she knows for sure she’s on any kind of enemies list that the administration’s going to have. She said, I’m Haitian, I’m indomitable. Don’t think for a minute that we are going to pause in our action.
And while I was there, white lady saying, oh my God, worst night ever. She’s like, eh, we’ve seen many worst nights. And the other guests that we had on the show too, who have spent years fighting segregation in North Carolina or genocide on the reservations, they all looked at me like, get over yourself, get down to work, get busy. I think art culture, we’re going to need to really exercise our imagination and every possible tool of connection and place of connection that we have that into which we can invite the next generation and every other kind of wise that will help us build a better day and connect us to one another. So save the places that you care about and invite new people into them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Absolutely. Hell yeah. So that is the great Laura Flanders host of Laura Flanders and friends on PBS and the great Rick Pearlstein author of numerous books, including Nixonland and Reagan Land. And you can catch Rick’s column, the Infernal Triangle at the American Prospect, Rick. Laura, thank you both so much for joining us at this critical moment. We need your voices now more than ever, and we appreciate you joining us and sharing them with our audience today. Take care of yourselves, and we’re sending love and solidarity to you guys from Baltimore. Good to see you both.
Eman Abdelhadi:
Great work. Yep,
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right back at you. Si. Thank you guys. So we have another hour to go here. We really appreciate y’all sticking with us and we really want to hear your questions, your comments, your responses to what’s being said here. As I said, at the top of this live stream, this will not be the only chance that we have to address the questions that are on your mind. We want to take the questions that you’re asking us now in the live chat, in the comments of this video and respond to them in future live streams and segments. So we are going to stick with you, we’re going to stick with this. We’re in this for the long haul, and we’re going to keep doing what we can to get you the information and perspective that you need to act. And today, in the second half of this live stream, we’re going to kick off the hour by going to one of the key battleground states that all eyes were on heading into Tuesday.
It was a key pillar in the so-called Blue Wall in the Midwest, including Wisconsin, Michigan, and both of which went for Trump. And we actually had our intrepid reporters, my incredible colleagues, Mark’s incredible colleagues, Steven, Janice and Taya Graham on the ground in Milwaukee this week where they also were reporting from during the RNC earlier in the summer. And they’ve had a hell of a week. And we want to sort of get an on the ground update from them on what they’ve been seeing, hearing, feeling there on the ground in Wisconsin as folks went to the polls. And as the results started coming in, we are hoping to also be joined by John Nichols, national affairs correspondent at the Nation to help us also get some perspective on what Wisconsin can tell us about the larger political realignment taking place in this country. But for now, I want to bring in my amazing colleague, Steve and Janice and Te Graham. Guys, thank you so much for first of all, the incredible work that you’ve been doing. The entire team here is so proud of you and so grateful.
Speaker 6:
Thank you
Maximillian Alvarez:
For your hustle and for everything that you’ve done to execute our mission. So I wanted to start there. I know you guys are tired, you’ve had a hell of a week. So why don’t we start there? A, how you doing and B, can you just sort of give us a sense of what this has all looked like from your vantage point reporting there on the ground in Wisconsin from Monday to now?
Stephen Janis:
Yep. It’s interesting because Tay and I always say when we reported on the ground for presidential elections since 2016 for the Real News, and there’s always moments that we have where we encounter someone or something that kind of gives us a cue. And I would say that this particular, we were on the ground out going to polls like we always do, and we went to Centennial, what was it, cental? Centennial Hall? Yeah, Centennial Hall. It
Taya Graham:
Was for awards 180 3, 180 4 and 180 5.
Stephen Janis:
But basically it serves Marquette and University of Milwaukee. And we interviewed several people and there were a couple of things that came to mind. First of all, there was a young woman who we thought was that you presume would be talking about reproductive rights or whatever, who said, and she’s like, I voted for Trump. And Tye and I both looked at each other and we’re like, wow, that does not bode well that we’re in downtown Milwaukee. And then another young man who was a student as well voted for Trump. But what was interesting about it relating back to our previous guest, was the information ecosystem from which they made this decision seemed so murky. And so really not within the realm of how policy actually works. And it harken back from me to what we had talked about right after the debate, Kamala Harris, where she soundly defeated Donald Trump.
And we asked the question, would it matter? And I was just reading articles today in the New York Times about a Republican strategist who was stunned that after that horrible debate performance by Donald Trump, that Kamala Harris didn’t rise up much of the polls. And these students kind of exemplify that because they’re getting their information from places I think that don’t really have a concrete rendering of the vagaries of policy. And in this case, I think te you want to talk a little bit about with the young man, talk about the young man that was really interesting, you challenged
Taya Graham:
Him
Stephen Janis:
And just talk about that.
Taya Graham:
So I don’t think people realize how much the culture war that has been promulgated by the Republican party has been incredibly effective. So this young man we spoke to was actually from California. He’s an Asian American, and he essentially said, and in not so many words that he didn’t want his media to be woke. And what he cited was JRR Tolkiens, second thank you Rings of power and on Amazon Prime. And he cited that he did not want, I guess present deism put into his fantasy. And I said to him, quite pointedly, I said, so you didn’t like the Black Lady dwarf is what you’re saying? And he smiled and he looked down and he said, well, that and the L-G-B-T-Q ideology that I found in the art as well. And I did challenge him a little bit. I said, well, isn’t Art supposed to reflect the zeitgeist of the age? Isn’t that the point of any form of art, whether it’s a book being adapted that it’s supposed to reflect the culture of the time? And he said, no, I just want to escape when I watch whatever creative form that he’s interested in. So I was somewhat surprised by that. So essentially he’s saying, I’m rejecting woke ideology, and that is why I’m voting for Trump.
Stephen Janis:
The thing is, what you saw in some of the voters was the Democrats have a very sort of professional rollout talking points and somewhat, I think seemingly in this media ecosystem, an inauthentic approach as opposed to Trump who kind of permeates and gets through that morass of social media because he seems to them, and I’m saying to them to be a more authentic alternative. I mean, that’s the only thing I can figure because their grasp for the policy aspects of both the Democratic administration and what really is going to happen. I mean, this young woman was like, well, Trump improved abortion rights because he sent it to the states.
Taya Graham:
Exactly.
Speaker 6:
She
Stephen Janis:
Said that to us and maintain, and I kind of looking at each other, a
Taya Graham:
Little puzzled, little puzzled,
Stephen Janis:
And I mean you can talk a little bit more of that, but I think that just to emphasize that this is a social media tumble world they’re in and the Democrats are coming forward with a very professional campaign, but maybe that doesn’t work.
Marc Steiner:
Right.
Taya Graham:
The one thing that I can tell for certain from all the different people that we spoke to at the polls is that the Democrats did not do their job communicating to the public effectively. And for people can discuss for the next four years how Trump was so effective, whether it’s that he’s the perfect man for the social media ecosystem that we have, that he’s able to push through in a way that as Steven said, sort of granular policy analysis simply doesn’t
Die. It simply dies on the vine. But these young people, I would say, and I don’t mean to say this, to be rude to the Trump voters in any way, we went to the Republican National Convention and also the people at the polls, when I spoke to delegates at the Republican National Convention, they could not cite specific policies. It was based on their feelings about Donald Trump as a leader. And that is exactly what that young woman said. She could not name a single policy from his previous administration that she liked, but she just felt that he felt stronger as a candidate. And so it’s an emotional connection and for whatever reason, Democrats have not been effective at making that sort of connection with the public.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a really critical point. The emotional economy of vibes is playing a huge role in shaping voter attitudes and perceptions of the reality that they’re living in. I want to return to that point for sure in a minute, but I’m excited to welcome on our other guests for this segment, the great John Nichols, who is national affairs correspondent of the nation, has been writing on and analyzing Wisconsin and its place in the political terrain for many years. We’ve had him on Mark’s show. He is a brilliant, brilliant mind and we’re so grateful to have him on to help us unpack this. John, are you there with us?
John Nichols:
I think I am. I can see folks.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Beautiful. Thank you. Good to see you. Good to see you, man.
John Nichols:
It’s a pleasure,
Maximillian Alvarez:
John. How are you? Good to see you. Thank you. Good
John Nichols:
To see you my friend.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you so much for joining us, man. We know you don’t have much time. We know you’re working your butt off right now, so while
John Nichols:
We amazing, we’re still trying to figure this one out. Okay.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. So while we’ve got you, I mean, I want to give our audience access to your rich perspective here. We need it right now, and there is a lot to be unpacked about the current results in Wisconsin that I want to ask you to try to of help our viewers and listeners understand what they’re seeing and where it came from, but to also offer us some larger historical perspective here. I mean, I was watching on M-S-N-B-C, they were showing the map from 2008 to 2024. It’s basically mirror images of each other in terms of, especially in the rural counties across Wisconsin that have now just deep red when they were blue not so long ago. And this of course is taking place in a longer political trajectory in a state that in many ways is the heart of modern progressivism. So I wanted to ask if you could, a, help us just unpack what we are seeing now in Wisconsin, what is happening in Wisconsin and what that tells us about the national scene right now and how the heck we got here. What can Wisconsin tell us about how we got here?
John Nichols:
Well, that’s a great way to frame the question frankly, because Wisconsin, of course, we begin with the fact that it’s the ultimate battleground state, more of a battleground state than any other in the country. Now, in the last seven presidential elections, the last seven presidential elections, five of them have been decided by under 35,000 votes, four of ’em by under 25,000 votes. So you can’t find another state in the country that has that pattern of deep divide. This is a state that has a democratic senator and a Republican senator. It’s a state that had a Republican governor, now it has a democratic governor. You know what I mean? It is kind of constant Out of this election. We just had a result that made our state legislature, our state senate, almost exactly tied. And so in that context, obviously small movements in one direction or another mean a lot, and you are basically right to focus on rural, and that’s a place where progressivism was in Wisconsin at its strongest.
At one time, it was a combination of Milwaukee socialists and rural populist farmers. It was very effective coalition, and interestingly enough, it helped the Milwaukee Socialists faded and so did some of the progressive tradition, but still, you had a state that voted democratic in 19 88, 19 92, 19 96, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012, right, this hope had. And then Trump comes along and he cracks into that. He doesn’t win by much in 2016, and he didn’t win by much this time, 20, 30,000 votes is what you’re talking about. That still makes Wisconsin, and when all is said and done, Wisconsin will end up being closer than most of the battleground states. Here’s the fascinating thing about Wisconsin though Tammy Baldwin, US city, US Senator, who’s clearly to the left of Kamala Harris on a number of issues, she won. She pulled it off. And just as Trump won Wisconsin, it looks like we had roughly 30,000 votes.
Baldwin won by roughly 30,000 votes. So there’s a space there, but I think you have to be careful to assume that there were Trump people voting for Baldwin. There was a drop off. There’s I think a portion of Trump voters who just vote for Trump and don’t even vote for the rest of the Republican ticket. That’s something to take into the mix. But there were some folks who actually did cast a Trump Baldwin vote. It seems bizarre to us in many ways because that doesn’t compute. Tammy Baldwin an out lesbian who supports Medicare, has supported Medicare for all, who has been very progressive, not always and not as good as I might want on some issues, but pretty solid record winning in a state where Trump’s winning. How does that happen? What’s going on there? Why do you have this? Well, the answer, and we saw a little bit in Michigan with Slotkin winning the Senate seat narrowly over there, the answer is that Tammy Baldwins did something that the National Democratic Ticket didn’t do, and that is she wedded her campaign to trade unionism to the working class, to the labor movement.
And this morning, just not long before I joined you today, I was at an event where she formally declared victory. She didn’t do it at a hotel downtown, hotel like Canada, like Democrats always do or almost always do. She didn’t do it in a office, some office someplace, or even frankly at her alma mater or the University of Wisconsin campus. She did it at a union hall on the edge of town, and the place was packed with union members wearing their shirts, steam fitters, electricians, teamsters, all sorts of other folks. And when she walked in the room, there was this epic cheering. And that’s frankly what Democrats need to have. They need to have union members cheering them on. They need to have an excitement about their candidates. Just as, I guess as an example, the Christian Wright gets very excited when a Republican walks in the room.
And one of the things that Baldwin did in Wisconsin last, I’ll say this because I want to hear more of your questions of course, but one of the things that Baldwin did in Wisconsin was a wholly different set of ads. You wouldn’t have recognized them as compared to the Democratic party in a lot of other places. Her ads, one set of her ads featured teamsters who were sitting one after another, sitting in a chair talking about when they lost their pensions and when they were in very dire straits, the plan closed, the pensions taken away, and each teamster after another talked about an aspect of the story. It’s a very short ad, but they’re saying, when we lost our pension, we thought we were going to lose everything. And a couple sitting there saying, we thought we’re going to lose our house. These are real working class people talking about a profound issue. And then toward the end of it, one of ’em says, and so we called Tammy Baldwin and she went to work for us. And then, I’m paraphrasing here, but the close of it was, if you’re in trouble, if you’re having a hard time as a worker, you need Tammy Baldwin on your side. I mean, that is a kind of classic outreach to working class multiracial, multi-ethnic voting class. And she had other ads with people working in shipyards, people working on farms, and so she ran a campaign that reached out to the working class and it paid off. She won. Other good Democrats didn’t. That’s something to pay attention to.
Marc Steiner:
I extrapolate that a bit more when I think about Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s always been, people look at it as a progressive state, but it’s always been a deeply divided state as well. Politically. George Wallace did well there, Joe McCarthy bloomed out there. And so I wonder what you just said about Tammy Baldwin. What does that say strategically to you about what progressive leaders in this country have to do to build a majority and to take the fight to the working class and bring people together? I mean, what is the Wisconsin lesson?
John Nichols:
Well, the Wisconsin lesson is a pretty simple one for about 150 years. Wisconsin hasn’t liked elites, hasn’t liked people in New York or Washington or LA or other places that tend to tell ’em what’s going on, and there’s a reason for that. Wisconsin was historically a farm state, and the farm products that they produced had to be shipped by train. The railroads charged extreme rates, and that was very damaging to people. And so they developed this sensibility that which we do not control is probably going to harm us. And it’s one of the reasons why historically Wisconsin was a more anti-war state. Wisconsin tend to think wars came from Washington, Wisconsin was a state that was historically very strong union state, very strong and a lot of different issues, and also very anti-corporate in a lot of ways and very anti-monopoly, et cetera, et cetera. Our politics has become so muddled in recent decades that I think most people don’t necessarily see that Democratic party as an anti-corporate, anti-monopoly party. So if you’re going to get those votes, you have to remind people of that, or there’s a real chance that they’re going to vote for somebody else who sounds like they’re attacking elites. That’s how you ended up with a Robert and Lafa, the great progressive winning and son Robert and Lafa Jr. Winning a Senate seat, which ultimately went to Joe McCarthy. Now, you and I don’t get very excited about Joe McCarthy. We don’t like where Joe McCarthy was coming from, but in his time, he was seen by somebody who was attacking a certain set of elites.
And that’s sort of the thing to understand that even came in through Russ Feingold more recently as a US Senator from Wisconsin losing his seat to Ron Johnson. All of this kind of a muddled politics. You have to cut your way through it. And what Baldwin did was her way through it, she said, Hey, by the way, I am the candidate of unions and of working class people. I don’t just tell you that in a speech or something. I don’t put ’em on my ads. I’m going to actually use them talking to the people of this state. It didn’t mean that she deemphasized issues other issues, her strong support of abortion rights. She’s arguably the leading supporter of abortion rights in the Senate. Didn’t mean that she played down her stances on a host of issues, but she turned up volume on these working class issues and it paid off.
I think you saw a little bit in Michigan with Slotkin in her Senate race as well, but you didn’t see it in the presidential race. And I think that’s a subtlety of this thing. Kamala Harris had extremely strong union support and unions went to the mat for really worked hard all over the country, even when the Teamsters didn’t endorse her, Teamsters Regional and local councils jumped in to backer and gave her a tremendous amount of support. And so they did a lot of internal work. In fact, fascinatingly enough, the exit polling shows that one of the few demographics that didn’t decline for the Democrats in this cycle was union members. So the unions did great work with their members. The problem is that the Harris campaign, which did many things right? I’m not here to just purely complain about the Harris campaign, but they did not put that broader emphasis on working class issues at central to their campaign.
And so as a result in the non-union working class, they experienced a lot of loss. And again, that multiracial multi-ethnic challenge that they faced. And I guess here’s the simple thing I would offer, yes, for Wisconsin lesson itself, so maybe to some extent upper Midwest, and that is this, people need to clearly know where you’re at and you need to remind ’em. You can’t assume people remember it from past elections or things like that. Our friends here, were just talking about the social media landscape and all these other ways that we get our information. Now, it’s bifurcated. It’s not the same daily newspaper or local radio station. It’s all sorts of sources. And in that Caity, you lose sight sometimes of core messages. What struck me is that Kamala Harris, who again, I thought did many things right, but why didn’t she, in every single speech say, we are going to raise the minimum wage to a living wage? Why wasn’t that part of every speech? Why wasn’t it part of every speech to say that Donald Trump renegotiated NAFTA and made it worse, actually undermined the auto parts industry in all sorts of industries and call it Trump’s nafta. Why not say that? Why appear everywhere with Liz Cheney, but almost never with Bernie Sanders and only rarely with Sean Fain?
I mean the equation, it’s so easy to this out, and it always frustrates me that the Democratic Party has such a struggle to get to it at the national level. Again, some people like Baldwin and soccer and figuring it out, but why not? When you’re in that situation, why not take the step, deliver the message, appear with the people that are going to be useful to you politically? This isn’t just moral politics. I think being pro-union is a morally good stance. This is also practical politics, and the fascinating thing about it is that I looked at the data, all those places that Kamala Harris went with Liz Cheney, all that outreach to conservatives, the percentage of conservatives voting for Kamala Harris in 2024 was down from the percentage that voted for Joe Biden in 2020. They didn’t get anybody over. Nothing happened there in the suburban areas that they went to where they actually had these sit downs with Liz Cheney. They didn’t move numbers. Things didn’t get better for them there. And so it was wasted energy that could have been spent going to not just physically, but messaging wise to working class people of all races and in all communities.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, man, that’s making my blood boil, man. That’s a powerful analysis though. No, really helpful and vital information. And I do have a follow-up question if we got time. We only got Brother John Nichols for a few more minutes. I did want to give my colleague Steven, Janice te Graham, the chance, if you guys are still with us since you guys have been reporting there in Milwaukee. If you guys had a question for John based on what you’ve been seeing there on the ground, I did want to prioritize that, but no pressure if you don’t.
Taya Graham:
Well, first off, I just want to say I’m so glad that he mentioned Senator Tammy Baldwin. We were actually at a Harris Waltz rally. What was the name of that event center? Was that, was that the State Fairgrounds
Stephen Janis:
Expo? State Expo?
Taya Graham:
It was at the state Expo,
Stephen Janis:
Yep.
Taya Graham:
And we were there and there was so much excitement when she came onto the stage. I mean, people love her here, and I feel like I wish I could be a fly on the wall as the Democratic Party is doing the autopsy right now. Because I think there’s a lesson, and perhaps you can confirm this for me, that they did not learn either from watching Senator Baldwin or from seeing how much Senator Sanders was actually able to generate enthusiasm, which is when the Democrats, as they normally do when they start doing a national campaign, they start moving towards the middle thinking that they’re going to bring people over instead of perhaps taking a different alternative of leaning into being authentic and just leaning left, just going completely into progressive policies, completely embracing unions and instead of worrying about being characterized as leftists or Marxists or what have you, just so you know what, we’re going to be progressive, we’re going to stop trying to play the middle because I think they didn’t learn anything from Senator Sanders campaign or Senator.
John Nichols:
Yeah, I think it’s a brilliant question and you’re spot on. Bernie Sanders came to Madison about eight days before the election, Monday the week out, and they had about a couple hours basically to organize the event. It was in one of the main theaters on State Street in downtown Madison, big, big cavernous theater. It was packed. I walked over to where the event was, there was a line out the door around the block because Bernie Sanders was coming. He had a OC with them as well. They got up there, delivered a peer progressive message, and people were on their feet excited, engaged, and they talked a lot about these issues that we’re talking about. But there’s a deeper thing in your question that I think is really vital and that is leaning into a progressive stance. I think Democrats often think that makes ’em look weak or something
That somehow, oh, you’re off in this place, or whatever. It’s the exact opposite. It’s Sanders has proven, when you come out as a genuine progressive and you’re proud of it and you speak about it strongly, people come to you, and I think that’s even people who aren’t ideologically necessarily with you, but they’re like, wow, that’s somebody who really means it. And I can give you an example on an issue that we haven’t talked about, but I think it’s vital here, or at least relevant, and that’s Gaza Joe Biden’s stance on Gaza is that he would like what’s happening there to stop. He officially says, oh, we want the killing to stop. We want the horrors to end. He says that as the president of the United States of America, one of the most powerful countries in the world and a very close ally of Israel, and does that project strength, no, I think it projects weakness.
I think it says on this fundamental issue that tens of millions of Americans care about, you’re not willing to step up, you’re, you’re not going to use the power of your office to take a stand. And I think the same thing happened to Harris on that, such a muddled position on Gaza. So little messaging that I think could have reached a ton of people. And then you look around the country, you say, well, it’s a drop off in votes, obviously, among many Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, but also on campuses, right? Where students were so passionately concerned about these issues. And I guess what I would tell you is that on a host of issues, having a strong position makes people who don’t even necessarily agree with you say, wow, that person believes in things. I know that they get to Congress, they get to position power, they’re going to fight for me.
And that is an intangible. In fact, you two were talking about just a second ago where you were talking about these kind of personality things and kind of all the media influences and things like that. Well, in that cacophony, if you’re a strong voice, it has meaning, right? It gets heard. And again, I think that takes us back to what we’re talking about with Baldwin a little bit on these working class, on these union issues. She jumped right in. She stood there strongly and said, this is who I am. She’s running against a very wealthy guy from California, as you know, from watching the state so well, it was perfect. It’s a perfect juxtaposition. And so what I would say for the Democratic Party as regards, our very good question there that led us into this whole discussion is the Democratic Party, I think needs to have a radical rethink, a deep, deep rethink about this because this campaign should not have ended this way at the presidential level, and frankly, even at the congressional level, it just shouldn’t have ended.
Where it did something about that doesn’t suggest strength on Trump’s part. In my view, it suggests weakness on the Democratic party’s part. If that is the case, then the most important thing I would say about this rethink is please don’t say you want to rebuild the Democratic Party. Because the fact of the matter is, we have had this cycle on and off for decades now where the party wins and you say, oh, it’s perfect, and then it loses, and you say, well, we’ve got to rebuild stuff. But you keep going back to some of the models of the past. Politics has evolved. The Republican party is a very different party than the one they ran against in the past. And the messaging, the outreach to the Republican party now in many cases, aimed at working class voters at very frustrated, angry folks who have in many cases reasons to be angry at the system, if that’s what you’re up against, don’t rebuild, build something new,
Speaker 6:
Build
John Nichols:
A political party that is multiracial, multi-ethnic that respects people where they’re coming from, but also respects the fact that they’re struggling economically that in this capitalist system, it just doesn’t work very well for them. And speak to that in a way that is of the moment and looking to the future, talk about these issues we’re talking about. But finally, and perhaps most importantly, talk about the issues that are never discussed. Do you want to know what builds anxiety in America? There’s a lot of stuff. Inflation builds anxiety, right? No question of that. The inability to buy a house, all sorts of economic issues for women, the threat to their bodily autonomy, right? They assault on abortion rights for L-G-B-T-Q, people who were literally targeted in advertising throughout this campaign all over this country. All of that builds anxiety. You know what else builds anxiety, ai, artificial intelligence, the rise of machine learning. People’s lives are being radically transformed on a daily basis. How we communicate, how we work, how we study. I mean, you talk to a university professor, they’ll tell you everything is different in the classroom because everybody’s using chat, GBT and all this stuff like that.
That was never brought up in this campaign, a democratic party that brought up how technology is changing our lives. It is a very future oriented party, but also one that understands the anxiety of working class people in this country. So again, a new democratic, if we’ve got to be stuck with a two party system, let’s have a new democratic party that actually takes in all the stuff that you are talking about that you are, that all these people are talking about and gets us to a point where ideally, ideally the counter to a cruel and angry, and I think in many cases, awful Republican message, right? One that is very dark and it has nothing to do with the history of the Republican party or anything like that, but then it’s one that’s really aimed at dividing people, aimed at, aimed at really building out that anxiety. The counter to that is a party that’s capable of looking at the future, explaining it, and offering a better route forward.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Very well put, John. Yeah, I mean, I wish I could keep this segment with everyone here going for another half hour, but I know brother John Nichols has a deadline to meet.
John Nichols:
I’m actually writing about some of the things we’re talking about.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let me help out. That’s good. We can’t wait to read it. Everyone who’s watching this needs to go and read it. Steven and Te, I’m going to ask you guys if you can hang on for just a little bit, and brother John, I will say thank you and goodbye here. If you’re able to hold on for 30 seconds, cool. If not, we thank you so much. But I just wanted to add there because I’m worried that folks are taking, once again, the wrong sort of lessons from the political map here, especially as it pertains to the rural and urban divide in places like Wisconsin.
John Nichols:
Let me give you 30 seconds on that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Please, please. What are the anxieties in rural Wisconsin? We were reporting there on the CAFOs, on climate affecting their crops. I guess for folks who are just thinking that people in rural America, they’re all driven by racism and uneducation and whatnot, what are the anxieties that folks there’re feeling to?
John Nichols:
Well, I come from a town I was born in, had 970 people when I was born, and so I grew up in the most rural places, and that was actually one of the biggest communities members of my family had ever lived in. They route back to places with 300 people and 200 and farms. And so that’s where I come from. And one of the things that I always start with is telling people that rural America is multiracial, multiethnic, and far more diverse than I think our national media even begins to understand. If you look at the main streets in rural towns, they’re being revitalized particularly by Latino immigrants, but also by Asian American immigrants. I mean, there are real amazing things happening. There are now small towns in Wisconsin that are majority immigrant families, right? Because people have come, they have revitalized those towns, they’ve rebuilt those towns.
It’s an amazing thing. Now, it doesn’t mean that rural areas aren’t predominantly white in many states, but I always remind people that roughly a quarter of black Americans live in rural counties, mostly in the south, but a substantial population that the boom areas for obviously the Latino population, but also for Asian American population is rural areas because they’re moving there, they’re working there, they’re creating things. And so if we understand it as that, first off, we have to recognize rural America isn’t what our media tells us it is. It’s much more, it has a lot of diversity, a lot of distinction within it. The other thing that I always emphasize to people is this, that those blue and red maps are useless. It’s they’re a nightmare because they don’t tell you the actual percentages in those counties. Many of those counties that you look at that are red on the map are 45% blue, right?
They’ve got fights within a real battles. And what in Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin would not have been reelected if it wasn’t for rural Democrats. She got a great vote out of Madison, a very liberal town, great vote out of Milwaukee, a multiracial, multi-ethnic town. I mean, she got great votes in these places, but she also held her own in the rural areas. She was endorsed for reelection by the Farm Bureau. I mean, that’s wild. But it was there because she’s been good on farm issues. What that means, what that translates to is that for the Democratic Party, which has been such a mess on so many issues for so long, is that they need to get better on rural. They need to talk to these folks. There are rural Democrats out there doing the work. They’re opening their headquarters, they’re knocking on doors. I can take you to the places and show you people that are putting so much effort and energy into this, but they do need messaging from the national level. And one of the things I would tell you is that the Democratic party will do dramatically better in rural areas if democratic nominees for president simply include three lines in their speeches. Not another rural post office will close if we are elected, not another rural school will close if we are elected and not another rural hospital will close if we are elected.
Speaker 6:
You
John Nichols:
Go out and say just those three lines in a speech and you stick to it, you watch some of those numbers shift. The reason Trump and Republicans do well in rural areas is often because people don’t think there’s a big difference between the two parties, and then they default to the anger of the division, right? But if you gave ’em a real alternative, I think we open up a whole new avenue for politics that does not deny the reality of ugly politics and people who do vote on the basis of race and typically toward folks or something that happens. I know that’s there not denying that, but what I’m saying is one of the counters to that is an outreach that actually says to rural people, we see you. We hear you. We want to respond to your actual problems, not to try and make you hate somebody else or not to try and make you see somebody else as a problem. There’s space there. There’s so much space there. And even though we’re staying longer than usual, I love talking about these rural politics issues because it’s frankly one of the spaces where both parties have so much to learn because both parties tend to treat rural folks as an afterthought that they just throw slogans, good slogans are bad at rather than actually going out and talking to the people. So I really thank you for giving me a chance to say that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you so much. John Nichols, the great John Nichols national Affairs correspondent at the Nation. We can’t wait to read your piece. We depend on your work. So please, yeah, keep doing it, brother, and let’s have you back on very soon.
John Nichols:
I appreciate it. And hey, I really appreciate what you folks do, and I love the reporting that you folks have been doing in Wisconsin. Some people come here and they just come for a minute and they pop in on the tarmac of the airport. You’ve got some reporters that have embedded themselves, and that’s a really big, big deal. It makes the reporting so much better. So thank you for treating Wisconsin and America seriously.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Great to see you, John.
John Nichols:
Thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, speaking of those incredible reporters, Steven, Janice and Te Graham, do we still got you guys over there in Milwaukee? We may have lost Steven and Te here can hear us. No, they’re still here. You never hear Steven. Of course they’re there. They’re always there. Steven and TE are always there. That’s what you get with these incredible folks on the police accountability report and elsewhere. I wanted to a bring you back in, ask if you guys had any kind of additional thoughts after what John just said about Wisconsin, but also we are going to be wrapping up this live stream by bringing on our final guest the great Bill Gallego. So the Mexico Solidarity Project Bill’s been on Mark’s show recently. We’ve been working with him on some really great historical segments. Bill is also has years of experience in racial justice, Latino justice organizing, immigrant justice organizing, climate justice organizing.
And so one of the things we wanted to talk to Bill about is helping to unpack the sort of narratives that are emerging about changing voter trends, specifically in Latino populations, Latino men, like being one of the current groups that are being talked about the most is having swung more for Trump. But this is also an area of reporting that you guys have been really committed to and have done great work in recent months where Taya has been out there going and talking to black and brown Republicans about how they are thinking about the election and voting for Trump. So I wanted to include that as a way to sort of bring Bill in here and continue the conversation that we’re having. So I’m going to toss it to you guys here. And yeah, we’ll have Bill Gallegos on the other side to hop in as well.
Taya Graham:
Well, I would be happy to speak on the black conservatives that I spoke with. I spoke to Tia Best, who is National Engagement Director for Moms of Liberty. I spoke to, I think dozens, literally dozens of black Republicans at the Republican National Convention the last time we were here in Wisconsin. That was so kind to hear Mr. Nichols give our work such a compliment. That was a huge boost. But back to the black conservatives, something I thought was interesting is that they said black people are naturally socially conservative. So this shift to the Republican party should be expected. But I’d like to say that the loss of black male voters was not that huge. I think depending on what states you’re looking at, 74% up to 80% of black men voted for Harris in any other ethnic group that would be considered a landslide. There was a slight peel off of black male voters and male Latino voters towards Trump. But in general, black voters held for Harris and held for the Democratic Party, whereas the Democratic Party was hemorrhaging votes from youth and actually so many different minority coalitions that in theory should be under the tent of the Democrats. But the one talking point I kept hearing from black conservatives is that we’re socially conservative. Black folks are church folks. It’s natural that the Democratic party is moving away from us. We didn’t move away from them, and that is what I’ve received from black conservatives.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So I want to bring in Brother Bill Gallegos here as well, because this is an issue that we’ve been talking about with him and that he’s been talking about and trying to get folks to pay attention to in the many months leading up to this election. Right. So Bill, do we have Bill Gallego? So the Mexico Solidarity Project with
Bill Gallegos:
Us, I am here and I’m glad to be here, and I’m really glad to be here with the folks in Wisconsin from John with you all, and I really appreciate it. I got to say my take is probably somewhat different than what we’ve been hearing so far. I think race was at the center of this campaign, and the only really significant increase in the electoral voting patterns was from white folks, and they overwhelmingly went for Trump, and his campaign didn’t start a year ago. This has been his consistent message since he started, but especially since he lost the election in 2020. There’s been a consistent message that centered race using immigrants as the focal point for it. But I think it was clearly aimed at dealing with this feeling that white privilege is at risk, the particular role of white people in controlling society. And we know it’s the 1%, but I think for a lot of white folks, this idea, Trump pretty much said, I will protect white suburban women from these immigrants coming into your neighborhoods and ruining not only the physical threat destroying your property values.
So I think I am very concerned that this will get lost in the postmortem that we’re doing on the elections. I know I just saw something from Bernie where he said, the problem is is that we focused on identity politics instead of class politics as if you focus on the attack on black and brown voting rights. That’s not a class issue. That’s a huge class issue. And the working class is not just white folks. It is a multiracial working class majority women, and some of the most dynamic sectors are those in the black, brown, Filipino communities. So I really feel like we should be very critical of how the Democrats ran this campaign. I’m particularly critical of for years and years and years and years, they have been told, do not take Latinos for granted. Forget the Cubans. I mean, they’re, I don’t care what you do.
They’re going to go with the Republicans, and we know the historical roots of that. But for the Central American community, the Dominican community, the Puerto Rican community and the Chicano community, that is not the case and has been solidly democratic even in the last elections at 20 and 20, 22, 70 to 75% of Latinos voting that most political parties in the world would kill for those numbers, they shifted this time, and we should look at that. But I think we really, really need to understand just given the history of this country as a racial capitalism, how deeply embedded that is not just in the politics, but in the psyche, the political psyche of this country. And if we run from it, I think it was what somebody said is that Kamala tried to run and hide on immigration. That was the exact wrong thing to do. All that did was give a much more open space to the racist messaging that was consistent from the Republican party and has been consistent for years starting with the Tea Party. When the Tea Party came out, it wasn’t just against Obamacare. That was that one of the first organized organizations outside of one of those anti-immigration rights groups that start talking about anchor babies
And making that a part of their campaign and putting it into the Republican program. So I think we have to really take on this issue, not identity politics versus class politics. We had to see the connection here. And for example, when John is talking about the rural areas, farmers, well, nobody’s caught more hell than black and brown farmers. They’re barely holding onto the land that they’ve got all those years when the Department of Agriculture was giving loans to white farmers so they could hold onto their land and not giving it to black farmers, not giving it to Chicano farmers. And then when the Biden administration tried to set in some reparation money, that’s effectively what it was for black farmers. The Republicans killed it. So yeah, I want to talk about rural areas. I mean, my family were farmers in New Mexico and Colorado and the folks are trying to hold on desperately trying to hold onto that land there as well as black farmers in the South.
So yes, we have to help our white farming brothers and sisters understand why they have to be the hardest fighters for black folks to get the money that they’re entitled to continue their farming and make it generational for Chicano farmers to hold onto their land that Monsantos trying to grab up there in Northern New Mexico. So I come at it a little bit differently I think, than we’ve been hearing, and I think we have to be careful about this thing that advancing class dynamics somehow doesn’t include issues like voting rights and gerrymandering and women’s reproductive rights. Those are class issues. Those aren’t elite issues. Those are class issues. The women that are going to be dying from these back alley abortions, not going to be rich white women.
Marc Steiner:
That’s right.
Bill Gallegos:
It’s going to be poor working class white women, and it’s going to be mostly women of color. So I think as we’re all sorting this out, and it’s too early to make any hard and fast conclusions, but we do know there are some things that we do know that the Republican party has become a party of apartheid of white minority rule. They pretty much say it, and Christian nationalism, and that’s rooted in mainly the white evangelical, evangelical churches. So I’m not discounting the impact of Latino evangelical churches. I think they did have an impact in this election, but I think we need to really get ahold of that. The second thing is I think we really need to understand that we’re not talking about a qualitative shift in political conditions now, I mean a quantitative shift, there’s a qualitative shift in political conditions when they’re talking about replacing 40 or 50,000 federal workers in all federal departments.
That’s huge. That is a vastly different attitude than we’re talking about. If there was a democratic administration and we have to be ready talking about a labor movement and a working class movement ready to defend those workers, because we can’t just roll over and say, well, Trump’s going to bring in all these folks that project 2025 talked about. So we have to be ready to defend those workers in the interior department, the Food and Drug Administration, the EPA. We had to be ready to do that. And we know that the right wing has been wanting to target the labor movement. They feel the most vulnerable sector is the public sector. So when they talk about eliminating the Department of Education, that’s only a piece of the puzzle. What they really want to do is just destroy the power of teachers unions. They saw the strikes in Arkansas and Oklahoma and California and every other damn place, and they want to crush that.
And they make it very clear. It’s very clear that’s a big part of their agenda. So when we talk about class issues, I think that’s a key part of it. But we also need to understand that we are facing now a qualitatively different set of conditions when Trump talks about an ethnic cleansing campaign. Yet that’s different than even the deporter in Chief Obama or some of the shit that Biden has done. This is something qualitatively different, a massive ethnic cleansing campaign that even if we take the lower estimate of 15 million undocumented immigrants and we make a low estimate of maybe two or three of their family members will be impacted, that’s 40 million people directly impacted. That will have an impact on small business infrastructure and these poor black and brown communities on unions where the most dynamic sector of the union movement has been among immigrants and Latino women especially.
It will have an impact on social organizations. It will have an impact. I mean, the impact would just be enormous. And Trump understands this, which is why he is saying it will be a military campaign. This is not just sending in the border patrol with a few trucks and vans. They’re talking about it. The only way you could do it, and we have to understand that the connection internationally is where they’re talking about setting up a series of concentration camps along the border because the overwhelming majority of these people will be Mexicano. What kind of pressure are they going to put on this new left wing government in Mexico on the shine bomb administration to take these millions and millions of working people. So we had to be ready to stand with our brothers and sisters in Mexico who will want to support their government in standing up to the United States.
And it’s not just a political question because the United States has enormous political leverage over Mexico’s economy, enormous. When they make threats about we’re just going to wreck your economy, we have to take that seriously. But this is going to now become this question of immigration and this ethnic cleansing. It’s already an international question. Are they really going to ship a hundred thousand people back to Haiti? Are we going to sit and watch and let that happen? Where’s the labor movement? Yes, Sean Fein, I agree with you in 2028, we should all go out on strike. But now, right now, the labor movement needs to come out and stand for its immigrant, right? Brothers and sister workers. We have to say that not a single ice agent will ever get into our schools. We have to create sanctuary cities everywhere that we can. So I think we need to just in terms of the media, I’m worried about you all. I mean, I know they want to go after public television and public radio, that’s for sure. I think that’s scaries me. But they hate the Pacific Radio Network. You can’t be sure about that. They hate the Real News Network. Y’all are vulnerable unless we build a strong and broad resistance movement. The few voices that we had, I mean I know they got my address, max, I’m guessing they got yours.
They know where to find us. We haven’t been hiding, and this is going to become very vulnerable. I’m worried. I know I work a lot in the climate justice movement. Most of these grassroots organizations are funded by foundations. These foundations are going to be under enormous pressure. There’s going to be congressional hearings. Are you giving your money to be under pressure to just start funding services and not organizing? So there’s so many that now including Greg Palaces, talk about the complete elimination of the Voting Rights Act, all of the other things that, the civil rights protections that we’ve had, the restoration of Jim Crow, this is real. This is real. It’s in Project 2025, but it’s also been very consistent in the messaging of the MAGA rights since they’ve taken over the Republican party and they got to the Latinos. I heard Maria Noosa talking about Spanish language, social media.
The Republicans had 10 messages to every one that the Democrats put out on Spanish language, social media, and those are young Latino men who were already some ready. I ain’t going to vote for a woman, a black woman. Are you kidding me? To deal with in our community? So I think we just as we’re kind of brushing the smoke away and trying to pick through the ashes to see what happened, how did this disaster come about? We understanding we need to understand. This didn’t just happen since Biden dropped out and Harris came in. There’s real strong roots to this campaign.
A lot of factors, a lot of white workers are concerned anybody about the economy. It’s black and brown women who got the worst of it, or ever before all this stuff was going on and did not run to the Republican party, did not run to the Republican party because there’s a level of political sophistication and understanding. I don’t think anybody has any illusions that the are going to bring out a totally liberatory society, but understanding that at least there’s some leverage there. And now I have to believe Miley when he says Trump’s a fascist and he believes it earlier. That’s talking about we really have to, I agree with that, but stand now that the Palestinian movement that we’ve had the last four years is going to be considerably more risk under a Trump administration.
Marc Steiner:
We all will.
Bill Gallegos:
They will try to drown it in blood. And they’ve already said that their immigration policy includes deporting anyone who’s been part of the pro-Palestinian movement, who’s an international student. So this is the reality that we face now. It shouldn’t panic us. What it should say is we have to build a broad based resistance movement, which is going to include some really folks that we ordinarily ain’t going to work with, but we have to build a broad based resistance movement both at the local level. I totally agree with that. We have to root it locally, but it has to be broad. And I’m not even getting into the whole climate thing here where Trump’s pretty much about ready to toast the planet and he says it. And the first communities that are going to feel the impact of his policies are poor, black and brown communities that are already choking like no other community on the toxicity and pollution that comes out of us capitalism. There’s a lot of areas you can say just a little
Maximillian Alvarez:
More about that Bill have, sorry. I want to underscore the fact that you have deep roots in climate justice movement. You know what you’re talking about on climate for everyone watching this is not just like, oh, the climate’s going to get worse. I want you to listen to Bill in terms of what the implications are for our shared planet right now.
Bill Gallegos:
Well, I’ll just start by saying this, that under the Biden administration, the environmental justice community one policies that we have never had with anyone, not even Obama. So for example, justice 40, which is a federal policy that a minimum of 40% of all federal environmental spending will go to frontline communities. Frontline communities are those that get the worst 40%. This is a larger allocation of federal resources than the war on poverty. It’s a hundred and some billion dollars, 190 some billion dollars that could potentially get to frontline communities. It’s been slow rolling out because the federal bureaucracy is very complicated. There’s every federal department gets a certain amount of money and they all have their own rules and regulations, but there are organizations that are trying to help frontline communities access these funds for cleanup, clean energy development, job development, all of those things, mitigation.
So certain percentage of that is for affordable housing. So this was a huge victory that we’ve never had. It’s going to be gone. They’re saying that anything that has to do with equity will be gone. So those resources probably won’t survive a Trump administration. The Biden administration also adopt some very positive policies related to certain carcinogen, toxics and other forms of pollution that affect respiratory problems. Not everything we wanted. And they did open up a lot of drilling, and I’m not going to paint a picture that this was, we’re not talking about Iron Daddy Roy making policy for the Biden administration, but there was a lot that we won. I don’t want to just say it was because of the goodness of Biden’s heart, but because this movement has been organizing for years and we had support from a lot of the big green groups, the Sierra Club, the NRDC, earth Justice supported the Climate Justice movement in making these demands.
So this was pretty significant victory for our movement that is now at risk. And I don’t see how we hold onto the things that we’ve won. And Trump is pretty much saying it. He’s going to put polluters in charge of the EPA, if not close it down the Department of the Interior. We’re not going to have Deb Halland in there. We’re going to have somebody who wants to just open all public land to corporate development. So we’ve got our fight cut out for us as a climate justice movement. What I think we need is we need unity within that movement because it’s been fragmented and we need unity with a broad sector of our sisters and brothers in these national green groups as well as with labor. We’ve always gotten played labor versus the environment, but now’s the time when we’ve got to come together.
And we’ve always said that it’s not one or the other that clean jobs should be union jobs. We don’t want it to be a sweatshop and that there’s already this one of the fastest areas of job growth in the energy sector. So we need to make certain that that happens so that as we phase out of fossil fuel and that whole dependency on that fossil fuel economy, there’s a real just transition. But all of these things are now going to become qualitatively more difficult because of the fact that the Republicans probably got Congress, the Senate, and the White House and a Supreme Court that’s going to give many damn thing that they want. So we have a challenge, but hey, in the lifetime of some of us, I’ve seen Jim Crow go down. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen women win reproductive justice. I’ve seen our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers win the right to the marriage.
I’ve seen foreign workers with the right to a union. So I’m always optimistic. But I have to say that I wouldn’t compare this to the Nixon administration. This is something qualitatively different here. We didn’t have Nixon administration, the John Birch Society was considered fringe. Now they run the party. Those kinds of racist and reactionary forces run and control one of the big ruling class parties of this country. And I saw the list that Standing for Democracy had. There’s something like 30 billionaires that had been funding this project, funding this kind of MAGA project 2025 thing. So there’s huge sections of the ruling class that are behind this.
Speaker 6:
So
Bill Gallegos:
I’m sorry a little bit from our randt here, but I guess what I really want to make certain is we don’t lose sight of the importance of the fight against racism and misogyny in this and not pitted against class politics. Those are class politics and they’re so central to any kind of change that we want to make, whether it’s in the environment or public health or education or just in the area of democracy of protecting and expanding voting rights. It’s always at the center because that’s the country we have the history starting with the dispossession of genocide of native peoples, the enslavement of Africans, the theft of half of Mexico’s territories. That’s the history that has shaped the country we have now and really contributed a lot to the electoral results we have now. And if we run from it, we lose. If we take it on, we have a chance to win.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Ain’t got to apologize for that ramp, brother, because I feel like that is absolutely the truth that folks need to hear right now, the sobering truth, but a truth that is not without hope. And Mark, I want to kind of toss it to you in a second to sort of offer your closing thoughts in that realm as someone who like Bill has seen American history change in significant ways that my generation only learned about in books, but you’ve seen it happen and we have also seen major change in our lives. I remember when gay marriage became legal, I mean as one just minor, not minor, but one example. It’s not minor,
Marc Steiner:
Right? Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. So I do want to give you the closing kind of word in a second about where we go from here and your closing messages for our audience. But I did just kind want to pick up on something that Bill said about the importance of race and understanding the dynamics here and how it shapes our vision of the world that we think that we’re living in, right? Because if you do the thought experiment here where you have aliens from Mars sort of airdrop in and look at what they’re seeing, what they’re going to see in this election is a monster’s ball of billionaire oligarchs surrounding another billionaire oligarchy serving politician from Musk like the richest man in the world, literally campaigning with Trump, taking over X, using it as a propaganda platform to the billionaires that own the Washington Post and the LA Times, putting their thumbs on the scale and not letting their papers like endorse a candidate to the crypto bros and the financial Wall Street interests that array to defeat senators like Sherrod Brown that are excited to get Lena Kahn out of the government by all objective accounts.
This is a billionaire’s takeover of what remains of our fledgling democracy. But so many people don’t see it that way because conditions that we’ve been discussing for the past two hours have allowed and enabled people to instead identify people who look like me, people who look like Bill as the enemy, people who don’t perform gender the same way that you do or identify the same way that you do as somehow the enemy, right? I mean, they have managed to convince working people that their fellow workers to their left and their right because of their race, because of their immigration status, because of how they identify, are somehow more responsible for our woes than the fucking billionaires up there who are destroying our planet, destroying our democracy, and are going to do a whole lot more damage in the coming four years. That is an incredible feat that the oligarchy has pulled off and they have done it through ages throughout history. This is the eternal struggle of working people to realize who their true oppressors really are and to be able to cut through the noise and haze that makes us feel as if somehow our fellow workers who are different from us are responsible for our woes. And I say that
Bill Gallegos:
I want
Maximillian Alvarez:
To that not just as a reporter, not just as a historian, but I say that as a person who is deeply worried right now that people in my own family are going to be deported. I want you people watching this to understand I’m not just a fucking face on a screen, I’m a human being just like you are, just like your neighbors are. And we are terrified for very justifiable reasons and we need to not succumb to that terror. We need to feel it but not become it. But I need people out there to understand that the terror is real and that it is going to change the terrain of struggle for all of us, and that we are going to need you to stand with us and we are going to need to stand together to face whatever we are facing. Bill, I’m sorry to cut you off. Please hop in there
Bill Gallegos:
And Mark. No, absolutely. You’re right. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t carry around proof of citizenship with me and I’m widow, but they hear Gallegos, it’s dirty Mexican and I live in a community in southeast Los Angeles. It’s a black and brown working class community. Almost every house on this block is going to be at risk. Yeah, this is for real. And it brings me to one part of my rant that I didn’t get to drop in here, which is how the left and progressive woman in this country has consistently overlooked the Chicano Latino community as an important social force for change. There continues to be mostly black and brown framework, and that’s only because black folks, the black liberation struggle has insisted on being taken seriously. But it is another one of those things where I’ve been looking at a lot of these webinars that happen to talk about the elections and so on.
Almost never do I see a Latino or Latina voice here in those conversations. There’s a big one that’s happening later this afternoon. There’s a huge network, national network that’s developing as a resistance network, which I think is really important. But when I looked at the five or six speakers that they have, they’re not a single one comes out of the Chicano or Latino, not the Puerto Rican community, not the Dominican community, not the Mexican American community. I mean, I know there’s only 37 billion of us, but I could help them find some, but, but I think this is a strategic problem. Do we want to win or not? Are we serious about building the kind of multiracial movement that really has a chance to impact our lives in the immediate and also for the transformative agenda that we have? So this is kind of a consistent issue that I raise.
I’m on the editorial board of the Nation magazine. I raise it to them all the damn time. I raise it in other arenas where, hey, we’re here if, and the unfortunate thing is that the left within those movements, both within the Puerto Rican liberation struggle and the Chicana liberation struggle is very small. It’s weak. It’s, I think, stupidly fragmented when it doesn’t need to be. But that’s a problem because that leaves the political field opened to more mainstream forces, more less progressive forces. I mean, after all that happened with what the MAGA Wright and Trump said about the Puerto Ricans, they’re going to reelect this Puerto Rican pro-Trump governor. What’s going on there? Well, I don’t blame the Puerto Rican people. I’m blaming us. Where are we? Where’s the attention that we’re giving to that movement? And especially the democratic. They’ve got all these resources, but I’m also talking about the labor movement and the women’s movement. All these different movements need to direct their attention to an area where they have not had it. And that means not just with words, but with resources, with organizing. And don’t just come out every four years and ask for our vote.
The Democratic party now is reaping what it has, sowed it, reaped it in this last election. I mean, I was shocked by even if I think the results are a little, their initial, clearly there was too many Chicanos and Puerto Ricans and other Latinos that were voting for Trump and the right against their own interests, maybe under some illusion that well, we’ll finally get admitted into the club like the Italian immigrants did and the Polish immigrants did. Since the 1840s, we haven’t been admitted into the club. I don’t think it’s going to happen. Now, Puerto Rico’s been a colony for how many years. They haven’t been admitted into that particular immigrant club. I don’t think it’s going to happen now, but I think there’s people who are desperate to believe that and that’s affected them. So yeah, we got a lot of work cut out for us. But what I’m really, really want to emphasize is for our folks on the left in progressive movements, don’t ignore us, you guys, real news. You’re one of the few programs that ran something on the Chicano Moratorium. We hear a lot about Kent State and we should about the murder that happened when Nixon invaded Laos and Cambodia and the people that were shot there, but the Chicano moratorium against the Vietnam War, three people were shot there. Why isn’t that an annual
Commemoration? And not just in our community, but in the broader progressive, anti-war and peace community, why is that not taken seriously as an important historical event that has meaning for us? I guess I feel like I can raise this because I feel like I’m among friends in comrades when I’m raising this to comrades on progressive moments. And on the left, I feel like I can be honest and frank with you because you say that you’re for complete equity and equality and self determination and liberation and all of those things. So I’m going to take you at your word and say, stop doing what you’re doing and start broadening your attention and enrich the movement that we’re trying to build.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think that is a powerful point to end on from our amazing guest, bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project. He mentioned an episode of Mark’s show, the Mark Steiner show, where we had Brother Bill and other guests on to talk about the history of the Chicano moratorium. You should go listen to that episode. We released it back in August. So if you want to keep the conversation going after this live stream, go listen to that. But for now, we are a little over time. I have had such a great time. It’s been very helpful for me to unpack the events of this week over the past two hours on this live stream. We are going to do more of these. We want to respond to more of your questions. We want to bring more guests on. So I wanted to ask folks before I toss it to Brother Mark Steiner here to close us out with his final thoughts.
Please subscribe to this channel if you’re not already become a member of this channel. If you’re not already, if you want additional perks and access to us and more engagement with us and our journalists, please write into the real news and let us know the topics you want to cover, the folks you want us to have on. And please, please, please support the work that we do here. Go to the real news.com/donate. Click the donate button over here on YouTube to donate to the Real News now because we can’t keep doing this work without you, and we know we are heading into hostile waters here and we’re going to need that support to hang on for as long as we can and to keep fighting for you. So our future depends on you and our collective future depends on what we all do next. And so with that, I want to sign off and thank you for joining us. And I want to toss things over to Marksteiner to give us his closing thoughts and we’ll see you back here on the next live stream. Thank
Marc Steiner:
You all so much for watching. I’ll make it short and sweet because we’re a little bit over time, but this, we are in a very important moment here, a critical moment. And I just want to go back for two seconds to think about the things that Bill just pointed out. People like John Nichols pointed out and others on this broadcast is that if the Democrats had taken the ideas as you heard some of the people say on this program and turned them into a media organizing campaign, we’d have a different outcome of this election. If we fought for the truth and showed the truth to the world, to our country, it would’ve had a very different result than what we see today. I think that’s a really important point for us to realize. And now the thing is we have to do that ourselves and we have to organize and we have to make a broader coalition of all the media organizations on the left that’s being worked on.
We’ve got to bring people together to say no, there’s a different way. And we have to do it because we’re not just facing a Republican party, we’re facing a neofascist rise. These are very dangerous people who are now in charge of the United States government. They’re going to destroy the government Department of Education and more read Project 2025 on understand what they’re about to do us. And we have to stand up together to fight to stop it. We cannot allow it to happen. This is our country. It’s all of us. It’s the greatest heterogeneous nation in the history of the planet. We can stop them. We have to stop them. And that’s part of our work right here at The Real News. And I want to thank you all for joining us.
Bill Gallegos:
Thank you all. Really appreciate it.
Marc Steiner:
Thank
Maximillian Alvarez:
You guys. Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe and donate to the Real News Network. Solidarity forever.
We speak with historian Robin D. G. Kelley about the roots of Donald Trump’s election victory and the decline of Democratic support among many of the party’s traditional constituencies. Kelley says he agrees with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who said Democrats have “abandoned” working-class people. “There was really no program to focus on the actual suffering of working people across the board,”…
Janine Jackson interviewed ProPublica‘s Nicole Foy about immigration and labor for the November 1, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: One of the weirdest and most harmful things so-called mainstream news media do is to take concerns, social problems, experiences, hardships—and reduce them to “electoral issues,” meaningful solely to the extent that candidates talk about them, and defined in terms of what they say—rather than starting with people, and our lives, and judging candidates based on whether their proposed responses are grounded and humane.
Immigration would have to be near the top of the list of phenomena that exists, has existed, worldwide forever, but that corporate news media seem comfortable larding with whatever ignorant hearsay and disinformation politicians of the moment care to spout. Anyone interested in just, human-centered immigration policy has to keep their eyes on the prize through the fog of horserace coverage.
Journalist Nicole Foy reports on immigration and labor at ProPublica, where she’s Ancil Payne Fellow. She joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Nicole Foy.
JJ: I want to talk about your recent piece that gets at a lot of things, but it really is a story of a person. And so, before anything else, please just tell us, if you would, about Elmer De León Pérez, and what happened in January of this year.
NF: Yeah, so Elmer was a young, only 20 years old, Guatemalan immigrant who was living in Houma, Louisiana, which is a little bit southwest of New Orleans, one of the areas that’s quite frequently threatened by hurricanes. He was working at a shipyard in the Houma area. He was a welder, pretty skilled welder. He made a decent amount of money, and was called upon to do some pretty difficult tasks, including helping build a ship for NOAA, which people may know for weather forecasting and hurricane forecasting. This shipyard that he was working at had a number of government contracts for ships.
He was building this ship for NOAA on that morning in January, when, essentially, his coworkers realized that he didn’t show up for lunch that day. And by the time he was found in the tank of the ship where he was welding, he was already unconscious, unresponsive, and, later, first responders did not continue trying to resuscitate him because he was already showing signs of rigor mortis, meaning that he had likely died some time ago.
And in the aftermath of all of that, his family, which, even though he was only 20, he had a young son with another immigrant who also lives in Houma, and he has an extended family, from Louisiana to all the way back in Guatemala, who cared quite a bit about him. They not only struggled to get answers about what happened to him for a long time, but they’ve yet to receive any sort of compensation, or even really acknowledgement, from the company he was working for, and even though he died on the job.
JJ: So this is a person who dies on the job, working for a government contract. So what is it that made you want to report this out? It can’t be because you thought this is an anomalous case.
NF: Yeah. The way this story started is kind of interesting, actually, because my editor and I were initially very interested in finding a story that explained what happens when immigrant workers die on the job. I had been telling him how often you see families raising money, whether through GoFundMe, or asking for help on Facebook, often because they’re trying to get their loved ones’ bodies home to their home country, whether they’ve been here for years and years, and they really would prefer to be buried in their hometown, or because they had only been here for a couple of years, and they’re just trying to get their bodies home.
We were really interested in that concept, because it struck us as something really, I think, indicative of, I don’t know—I think it spoke to a number of things about how immigrant workers exist in the United States. We rely on them so heavily now, and have always, and yet their families are often left in really difficult financial straits just to do what they would consider, I am assuming, is the bare minimum, which is get them home, get them buried in the land that they may have wanted to return to, or that they came from. And we were really struck by that.
So I was looking into a number of different cases. I was poring through GoFundMe and Facebook and through OSHA fatality-on-the-job records and pulling different cases, and there’s so many. You spend a lot of time doing this, and you see just how many immigrants are dying on the job, everywhere from California to Louisiana to Texas. And reading the GoFundMe pleas or the Facebook pleas of their family asking for help, to try to have a funeral, send the body home.
Elmer De León Pérez (right) with his father, Erick De Pérez (family photo)
And we were really interested in his case, because as we were doing reporting, not only was I able to find all of the different, just really moving videos that his family had posted on Facebook, of trying to raise money, and then eventually they filmed his body arriving back home to his hometown in Guatemala. And the way the community really came together in a common way was really moving. And also then we, as I looked into his employer and where he died, realized that this was a company that has a number of government contracts, to build and repair ships for the Navy, for the Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers—you name it, there’s a government agency that needs a ship.
And so that’s kind of how we got started there, is we were interested in what happens to immigrant workers, to their families, when they die on the job, what kind of care is taken for them. And then we discovered this really truly heartbreaking case of someone who was building a ship for our country, and still his family couldn’t get the help that they say they need.
JJ: This is where journalism connects the human story with a data story, with a broader story, a policy story. The story about immigrant workers and the workforce, it’s like the worst kept secret in the country, the idea that farmworkers, and shipbuilders as you’re talking about, that these industries rely on, they couldn’t operate without, immigrant labor. And yet we’re still supposed to accept this weird capitalist story about only Americans can work here, and immigrants are actually stealing jobs. And it’s such a weird disconnect between what a lot of folks know is actually happening, and the storyline that people are being told.
And I think that’s what’s so important about this story: Organizations, companies, rely on immigrant labor, but they rely on them in a particular way. And that has to do with the contratista, the idea of the legal designation that is given to these workers. And that, of course, is important in Pérez’s story.
Nicole Foy:
NF: Yeah, I think, too, what I found really telling, reporting this story, is that it really is such a common story for immigrants who don’t currently have the legal authority to work in the US, the ways that they still have to pursue in order to support their families. And it was really interesting to see that playing out in an industry that you don’t really see as part of the immigration debate, shipbuilding, and particularly shipbuilding for government ships.
This particular shipyard, they don’t have contracts to build nuclear submarines or even battleships or anything, but they’re building support vessels or research ships for NOAA, for so many different branches of the military and for the government, that are pretty essential to our country’s defenses, and also just to keep our country running properly. And that’s not really something that you see in the immigration debate, is that we also need workers desperately for those types of jobs.
I think people still think of welding in a shipyard as a job that should pay so well, and does pay so well, that everybody is competing with each other for them. But the economic facts of our country right now are very different. We don’t have as many blue collar workers as we used to, and we have quite a lot of work that needs to be done. So that’s why you see immigrants in these jobs that, again, I think there’s often this narrative of “they’re taking these jobs from workers,” but the shipbuilding industry in particular is suffering greatly from a really dramatic lack of workers to do the jobs that they need, whether it’s welding or another job in a shipyard.
I just thought that was another good example of his life and the work that he was doing. It’s another good example of how, if you’re commonly thinking of immigrant workers, you may be thinking of agriculture, you may be thinking of maybe restaurants or construction. And certainly there are many, many immigrant workers sustaining those industries.
But they’ve become very essential to the fabric of our entire economy. It’s not very easy to disentangle them from the work that we need to do as a country. And that’s something that I don’t think a lot of our current rhetoric accounts for, is how many different jobs and how many different types of jobs around the country that these workers are fulfilling, that we’d miss them quite a lot if they weren’t there.
JJ: Let me just ask you, you tried to get responses from employers and from folks to say, “What’s going on here? What happened here? Why are you not accountable for this?” What happened with that exercise in trying to say: A person died, a person died, his family deserves compensation. What happened there?
NF: I did my absolute best. ProPublica takes it very seriously that we want everyone to have a chance to tell their side of the story. And so I did everything possible. It wasn’t just phone calls and emails. I came by the shipyard several times. I hand-delivered, actually, a letter with a list of questions to one of the shipyard executives several weeks before the story published, just in an attempt to try to get some answers.
I also spoke very briefly with the contractor that actually employed Elmer. I talked to him briefly, but he declined a comment on the advice of his lawyers.
I don’t know why Thoma-Sea, the shipyard where he was working, didn’t want to comment, because they told me very little. I did my best to reach out to them.
But I think it was really important to try to get their side of the story, especially since we also looked into the campaign finance records, and saw that, even though there are so many immigrants like Elmer, he was not the only one working at the shipyard, the company’s main managing director, top executive, has donated fairly heavily to many Louisiana politicians who have been vocal about their desire to either close the border, restrict immigration, and, honestly, what they think about immigrants in their own state.
JJ: I was struck, as I’ve said, throughout the piece, by how many powerful people and company representatives said they just had no comment. And it reminds me, it takes me back to independent reporting. It’s the families of the immigrant workers who are killed and then ignored and not given compensation; they look to the press, they need to speak, they want to get their voice out. And the powerful people, what’s in it for them? They don’t need to speak or justify or explain themselves. And it makes me mad, because I think Journalism 101 would send you back to those powerful people and demand some sort of answer from them.
The other thing is that you show up at this person’s home, and they’re like, “Oh, it’s really disrespectful to show up at the home of a company CEO where a worker has died on the job. It’s really disrespectful of journalists to bother us at home.” And I just think, there are people who need a press, an independent press, and there are people who don’t need it. It drives me angry. So I just want to say, the difference between getting access to people who are harmed and people who are harming, as a reporter, that’s a very different thing.
NF: Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I just wanted to make sure that everyone gets to tell their side of the story. As a reporter, I try not to approach something speaking as if I know everything, but want folks to share their side.
And genuinely, too, I think a lot of people, including Elmer’s family, are still seeking answers. I was trying my best to get answers as well.
JJ: There are very particular legal regulations that folks hide behind, in a way, in terms of delivering protections. You’re not an employee, you’re a contracted worker, or you’re a subcontracted worker, and that allows them some degree of cover.
NF: And also, too, at the same time that it allows them some degree of cover when it comes to liability in an accident, it’s also what makes it possible for many of these companies to hire immigrant workers who do not have authorization to work. So it’s one of those things where it’s sometimes the only way that an immigrant worker can get a job, as they’re trying to maybe support their family, support themselves.
But it can leave them very vulnerable, because these layers of contractors can make it much harder for them, or their families if they pass away, to claim any type of support or resources. They still can, but the workers’ compensation system is pretty difficult to navigate without a lawyer in a straightforward case. And when you add on different barriers that contractors may face, and then certainly folks who don’t speak English as their first language, and then also you have legal status mixed in there, and folks being really worried that coming forward could endanger them.
All of that does tend to make it easier for the company to have these systems in place, and certainly disincentivizes many folks who need these resources, need benefits, need some type of financial compensation. It disincentivizes them from stepping forward, or just fighting through what can be a pretty difficult process.
JJ: And, not for nothing, incentivizes the companies themselves to set up this system in which their workers don’t have access to this kind of compensation.
NF: Yeah, I would imagine that—I can’t speak for anybody’s motives, but I do think they’re going to get the workers that they need, one way or the other, and some ways leave their workers with much more limited protections.
JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, if you have thoughts about the way that immigration and immigrants are covered, what would you have to say in terms of…. I had kind of a rant at the beginning about how I really am unhappy when immigrants are reduced to an electoral issue, when they’re human people and they have a story. And I feel like that’s what reporters should be doing.
But do you have thoughts in terms of the way that big media cover immigration, or just thoughts about something you’d like to see more or less of in terms of, big picture, the way the story is covered?
NF: Yeah, I think there are a lot of really wonderful immigration reporters out there who are doing their best to bring facts to a pretty charged conversation, honestly, a recurring conversation. I mean, I have not been in the industry for decades and decades and decades, but this is definitely the thirdelectioncycle that I’ve covered where immigration has been a pretty significant issue, whether because candidates have made it so, or people are concerned about folks arriving at the border. And I can say, as a journalist who is trying to present facts, it can sometimes be distressing to see the same misrepresentation of the facts repeated, sometimes without pushback or factchecking.
But the truth is, and I think the Elmer story shows this, is that candidates can say as much as they want that immigrants are stealing jobs, and the actual reality on the ground just does not really reflect that. And, at the same time, there’s a pretty significant narrative about, maybe, people who believe that immigrant workers get more than they do. I think you can see, in this case, that not only are many not getting more than a citizen worker, their families are often left abandoned and without any resources when something tragic happens.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with reporter Nicole Foy. Her article, “An Immigrant Died Building a Ship for the US Government. His Family Got Nothing,” can be found at ProPublica.org. Thank you so much, Nicole Foy, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Nov. 5, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
After seven weeks on strike, Boeing workers voted Monday to ratify a new contract that includes a 43.65% wage increase over four years—a significant improvement over the 25% increase that the aerospace giant offered in September.
Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Districts 751 and W24 approved the contract in a 59%-41% vote around two weeks after rejecting a tentative deal that called for a 35% pay increase over a four-year period.
The contract approved by workers also includes a $12,000 ratification bonus, improvements to retirement and healthcare benefits, and improved overtime rules.
“Strikes work,” labor journalist Kim Kelly wrote in response to the contract vote.
Jon Holden and Brandon Bryant, respectively the presidents of IAM District 751 and W24, said in a joint statement that “working people know what it’s like when a company overreaches and takes away more than is fair.”
“Through this strike and the resulting victory, frontline workers at Boeing have done their part to begin rebalancing the scales in favor of the middle class—and in doing so, we hope to inspire other workers in our industry and beyond to continue standing up for justice at work,” said Holden and Bryant. “Through this victory and the strike that made it possible, IAM members have taken a stand for respect and fair wages in the workplace.”
“Livable wages and benefits that can support a family are essential—not optional—and this strike underscored that reality,” they added. “This contract will have a positive and generational impact on the lives of workers at Boeing and their families. We hope these gains inspire other workers to organize and join a union. Frontline Boeing workers have used their voices, their collective power, and their solidarity to do what is right, to stand up for what is fair—and to win.”
IAM’s international president, Brian Bryant, called the contract “a new standard in the aerospace industry—one that sends a clear statement that aerospace jobs must be middle-class careers in which workers can thrive.”
“Workers in the aerospace industry, led by the IAM—the most powerful aerospace union in the world—will not settle for anything less than the respect and family-sustaining wages and benefits they need and deserve,” said Bryant. “This agreement reflects the positive results of workers sticking together, participating in workplace democracy, and demonstrating solidarity with each other and with the community during a necessary and effective strike.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and an outspoken supporter of the Boeing strike, congratulated IAM members on Monday “for winning a hard-fought victory.”
“I also congratulate Machinists President Jon Holden as well as Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg for working to reach a deal that ensures Boeing will continue to build quality planes that contribute to our country’s security and mobility while valuing and respecting the fact that there is no Boeing without the IAM,” Jayapal said in a statement.
As did the union leadership in their remarks, Jayapal specifically thanked Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su of the Biden administration for helping secure the deal, citing “skilled leadership” that brought “both parties to the table and to an agreement.”
After seven weeks on strike, Boeing workers voted Monday to ratify a new contract that includes a 43.65% wage increase over four years — a significant improvement over the 25% increase that the aerospace giant offered in September. Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Districts 751 and W24 approved the contract in a 59%-41% vote around two weeks…
Workers are battling an overhaul of the U.S. Postal Service that would cost thousands of jobs and slow the mail for half the country. In the name of efficiency, a letter mailed within Cheyenne, Wyoming, would travel to Denver and back. And if you miss a package, your local post office would no longer have it. It might be 45 minutes away. In March, Buffalo became the first place to fend…
Two years ago, the US was on the cusp of seeing its first national rail strike in decades. Then, President Joe Biden, at the urging of the rail companies and with the help of both parties in Congress, preemptively blocked railroad workers from striking in December of 2022. Workers were forced to accept a contract that did not address the vast majority of issues that have been putting them, our communities, and our supply chain at hazard. How has this all shaped railroad workers’ attitudes and approaches to the upcoming elections? In this urgent panel discussion, we pose this question directly to three veteran railroaders, and we have an honest discussion about how working people should act strategically within and outside the electoral system to advance their interests.
Panelists include: Hugh Sawyer, a veteran locomotive engineer with 36 years of experience, a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Division 316, and a founding member and acting treasurer of Railroad Workers United; Mark Burrows, a retired locomotive engineer with 37 of experience, who has served as co-chair and organizer for Railroad Workers United, where he still edits RWU’s quarterly newsletter “The Highball”; Ron Kaminkow, a recently retired former brakeman, conductor, and engineer who worked for many years in freight rail before working 20 years as a passenger engineer at Amtrak, a founding member of RWU and delegate in the Northern Nevada Central Labor Council.
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor
TRANSCRIPT
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A corrected version will be made available as soon as possible.
Hugh Sawyer:
My name is Hugh Sawyer. I’m a working locomotive engineer in Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m completing my 36th year. I’ve been a locomotive engineer practically my whole career and I’m a proud member of the Teamsters as I belong to Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineer and Trainman Division three 16 in Atlanta, and I’m also a founding member of Railroad Workers United and the current treasurer of that organization, which we’re organization of rank and file rail members from all the crafts that are just working together to make a better, hopefully better work environment and better contracts in the future for the rail members that are left in the industry.
Mark Burrows:
My name is Mark Burrows. I’m a retired locomotive engineer. I started railroading in 1974 at the Chicago Northwestern, 12 years there and then 25 years at the Canadian Pacific from 91 to the end of 2015. In my latter years I was a delegate for the UTU now, the Smart Transportation Division for our 2011 and 2014 conventions. I’ve been a long time member of Railroad Workers United since 2011 and am currently the editor of our quarterly newsletter, the Highball.
Ron Kaminkow:
My name is Ron Kaminkow, recently retired from the railroad as of last year. I hired out with Conrail in Chicago in 96, taken over by Norfolk Southern in 99, worked for the NS in 2004. I left the Norfolk Southern, came to Amtrak, which is the railroad I just retired from. I’ve worked on the railroad in nine different states, run trains over basically every rail carrier major class one carrier, having been an Amtrak engineer out of Chicago in particular, and Milwaukee, we run on all these different railroads. Founding member of Railroad workers, United served as the General secretary for many years also as the organizer and now serving in the capacity of a trustee for that organization. Still a member of Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen honorary member Division 51, and I am still the delegate to our local Northern Nevada Central Labor Council.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends, and your family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you got recommendations for working folks that you’d like us to talk to or stories you’d like us to investigate and please support the work that we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.
My name is Maximilian Alvarez and we’ve got a critical episode for y’all today. We are just days away from the US elections and America stands on the precipice of a dark and uncertain future. Polls are showing that the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is incredibly close and we may not know which candidate legitimately won for days, if not weeks after November 5th, but what we do know because it’s already happening is that there will be a tug of war over the legitimacy of the results. And I want to just give a note on that really quick because as researchers at Trusting News, a research and training project that helps journalists demonstrate credibility and earn trust, writes,
“The United States doesn’t have a nationwide body that collects and releases election results. Instead, journalists gather data from local and state agencies that report election results publicly.
The Associated Press gathers this data and makes it available to the public and to other newsrooms to count the votes and then declare winners. They’ve been doing this in presidential elections since 1848. Elections in the US are highly decentralized and complex. While uncontested or landslide races may be called right after polls close, competitive races may take days or even weeks to call, and while some states like Florida count most of the ballots on election day, other states like California can take weeks.”
So just take note of that and make sure that your family and your friends know how to interpret what is going to play out in front of us next week. Be critical, be watchful, be patient, and don’t let yourself become a tool of cynical actors who are trying to manipulate you and above all else, just go vote. Listen, we’ve talked for years on this show about how and why our political system sucks.
I mean, we know that you’re not going to find any naive defenses of that system here, but every conversation that we’ve had with workers has also shown in one way or another that the results of national, state and local elections still shape the ground upon which we all live, work, and organize. History has shown us, for instance, that if you’ve got a hostile underfunded national Labor relations board run by bosses and corporate hacks, that’s going to drastically change the entire landscape of rank and file organizing around the country facing an even more daunting path to victory and are getting a first contract. Many new union drives would be stifled and many existing unions may find themselves not going on strike, not expanding to organize new members, but instead defensively fighting for their right to exist. Ballot measures like the infamous Prop 22 in California, which passed in 2020 and which we covered here on this show.
These things can legally cement a permanent underclass of workers who make less than minimum wage and have virtually no rights as employees. So take elections seriously, even if politicians and their elite donor class don’t take you seriously. And that’s really what we’re here to talk about today. As you guys know, two years ago when the potential for a national rail strike was building, we conducted many, many interviews on this podcast and over at the Rail News Network with railroad workers from across the industry. We talked to engineers, conductors, dispatchers, track workers and more. And through those interviews, we help educate the public on the long brewing crisis in the country’s supply chain, a crisis driven by the insatiable greed of massively profitable rail companies and their Wall Street shareholders, a crisis that is affecting all of us as consumers who depend on the rails way more than we realize, and a crisis that has been most acutely felt by workers who have been run into the ground and trackside communities like East Palestine, Ohio.
As you guys also know at the request of President Joe Biden, with the urging of the rail companies themselves and with the help of both parties in Congress, the government preemptively blocked railroad workers from striking in December of 2022 and forced workers to accept a contract that did not address the vast majority of issues that have been putting them our communities and our supply chain at Hazard. Then two months later in February of 2023, the Norfolk Southern train derailment and toxic chemical disaster happened in East Palestine. Now, a lot of folks have been asking us how this has all shaped railroad workers’ attitudes and approaches to the elections, and plenty of folks have even cited the blocking of the rail strike as a key factor in their decision regarding who to vote for or whether to even vote at all. So as we always do here, rather than try to hypothesize or ventriloquize what we think workers might say, we’re going to go straight to the source and talk to workers themselves.
As you guys heard at the top of this episode, we’ve got an incredible panel of veteran railroaders here to help us navigate this. So let’s dive in…
Brothers Hugh, Mark, and Ron, it is so great to see you all and so great to be chatting with you all today. Thank you so, so much for making time for this. I really appreciate it and I’m really excited to talk to you guys about this today because as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of folks really want to know and really need to know what you think and what is being talked about on the rails, right? And we came together ourselves two, three years ago out of our reporting on the struggle of workers on the railroads that led us to connect with Railroad Workers United and so many great folks from across the different crafts, the different unions.
We’ve had Ron and Mark on different recordings on the Real News and working people. Brother Hugh, it’s so great to have you on the show and to introduce you to our listeners. And I want to kind of just quickly start there because since our listeners became over time, so familiar with Railroad Workers United and some of you guys, I mean, I think it’s at least worth starting on a positive note that since our intense recording interviews panels live streams during the last contract fight and potential railroad strike, brother Ron Kako has finally retired since then. And so, Brother Ron, folks just want to know, are you enjoying your well-deserved retirement?
Ron Kaminkow:
Yeah, very much. I’m catching up on many, many years of deferred personal life, all sorts of hobbies and interests, but also remain active in the labor movement. Definitely hope to remain active in Railroad Workers United for many years to come. So yeah, it’s a good thing. I highly recommend it.
Maximillian Alvarez :
Well congratulations from all of us here at Working People to you, brother Ron. Congratulations on making it to retirement, man. You deserve it. I hope that you’re enjoying every single second of it, and I know our listeners are sending nothing but love and solidarity to you and to Mark and brother Hugh. You’re going to be there soon, baby. Don’t worry. We we’re pulling for you too sooner or later, sooner or later, man. And let’s kind of go back to that moment right when we all started connecting back in 2022. I mean, because as I mentioned in the introduction for this brief moment, during that contract fight as we were moving stage by stage through the Railway Labor Act provisions that were getting us closer to a potential national rail striker rail lockout, we were learning through interviews with rank and file railroad workers, just how big of a catastrophe has been brewing on the rails for many years and how damaging this has been to railroad workers themselves, to communities that have railroads running through them or terminals stationed near them, not just places like East Palestinian, Ohio, but places like South Baltimore here that lived next to the CSX terminal that we’ve also reported on.
So it was in the process of those conversations that we learned so much of what you and your fellow railroaders had to teach us about the kinds of conditions you’ve been working under for many, many years. And it felt like for a brief moment in 2022 and into 2023, a lot of folks around the country finally woke up to a lot of the realities that workers like yourselves were describing to us on this podcast. And then as we know, which we’ll get to in a minute, the potential rail strike was blocked by the Biden administration and both parties in Congress, the East Palestine derailment and poisoning of an entire region happened in just a couple months later, people were paying more attention to the number of derailments happening around the country. And then as is the case with anything, whether it’s a war in Ukraine or East Palestine itself, like the news fades from the headlines, people move on, the attention wanes. And so I wanted us to start back at that moment and we’re heading into a new contract bargaining period in 2025. So I want to give our listeners an update before we dig into the upcoming election. Just give us an update on how things have changed or not changed for railroad workers and for the rail industry since the potential strike was blocked two years ago.
Hugh Sawyer:
Well, I’ll jump in on that and just say that I worked for Norfolk Southern. So we had, as you’ve already mentioned, the East Palestine disaster. And there’s been a hedge fund group and COR that’s come in and tried to take over the board of directors, and I think they’ve been successful by the way, and creating a situation in which they were able to oust the CEO Alan Shaw. And so we have a new CEO and I’m sure that we’re going to see further action to get their people onto the board of directors. And the goal, of course is to strip the railroad of its assets. I noticed in the third quarter results, they mentioned our 3.1 billion gross profit and what have they try to make the numbers look good, but if you read the fine print down there, there was close to half in land sales and what have you.
So we’re selling off our assets and what have you, and this is not bode well for the long-term health of the railroad. And we also, in my opinion, I got to stress that this is my opinion, it’s not the opinion of Norfolk Southern. Of course, we defer maintenance on locomotives, we defer maintenance on rail. Maintenance is still going on out there, but not at the level that it used to. And I think we’re just kind of trying to strip out the good of the railroad and leave the husk there for the taxpayers ultimately to pick up, which I should point out, the railroad Workers United is involved in trying to push to the public public rail ownership, that concept that we own the highways, we own the waterways, federal government regulates those things and runs them and maybe they should run the railroad, the infrastructure of it and just let anybody lease space it, so to speak, and that way they can maintain the safe level of maintenance and what have you that I feel like we’re kind of stripping away over time.
So with regards to the contract, when the Biden administration stepped in, they went through the steps and they had a public presidential emergency board. Keep in mind those are recommendations. President Biden could have sat there and thrown all those recommendations out or adjusted them to the degree that he wanted to present to Congress and he didn’t. And his attitude, oh, we’re going to put a bunch of other union people out of work. And I mean, he said that and he just felt like he had to shove this down our throat. Now we got a fairly good pay raise, but that really just got us from years where we had been going backwards. That got us up to some point that we needed to work from, but we got none of the working condition issues that we wanted. Now ultimately, we got some sick days, but I got to tell you, for your rank and file workers, yeah, we would like to have sick days like the rest of the country, but that was hardly the top priority for us and getting some kind of a lifestyle a reasonable, we’re on call 24 7 and for me, I’ve sat here for the last two years.
I used to be on a car job that at least had a specific time that I went to work. I was on a schedule, I had scheduled off days, all that’s gone now I’m back on a pool job where I was 20 years ago. And we just keep going backwards. We keep cutting off and they’ve cut a lot of yard jobs and what have you. Their goal is to have a great big happy extra board where you’re on call 24 7, 365 days a year. And despite any propaganda coming from Norfolk Southern, I just don’t think they really care about our lifestyle. They care about theirs, but they don’t want to give us a reasonable off time. I would like to, I would think with 36 years of seniority, I’d be on a high paying pool job with a good schedule and what have you. That’s where I would’ve been if this was 20 years ago,
Mark Burrows :
I’ll just jump in and add on to Hugh’s point about the whole railway labor process when the government decided to directly intervene, and not only could Biden have made a proposal, but Congress itself could have crafted and if there was one shred of sympathy for the just demands of rail workers, which contractually was mainly about the quality of life issues, everybody spinning on extra boards and working on their rest and fatigued and no life and potentially getting fired to take off for your daughter’s wedding or your kid’s T-ball game or whatever. And draconian attendance policies.
A, it’s worth noting that the main, while fatigue is certainly in and of itself a safety issue, a major safety issue, but all the other safety issues which we regularly, the long and heavy trains, the deferred maintenance, many of the factors that contributed to the East Palestine disaster, those were not even on the table and being discussed and they’re not now in the current round, but it was mainly about the quality of life issues. And so if there had been a shred of sympathy, Congress had the latitude, like Hugh said, the Presidential Emergency Board, they put out recommendations and that’s it. They could have crafted an agreement that could have been addressed the most egregious working conditions, some of the basic just demands of the workers as it is, the tentative agreement at the time was based upon the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations and they hid behind the time factor to just say, oh, we don’t have time to discuss any details. We’re just going to go with this. So it didn’t have to turn out that way. Now there have been, and a lot of the scheduling issues were left in a TBD category to be determined and negotiated later, and that’s common. And then that seldom works out in workers’ favor. On some railroads, on some properties, there have been some minor like smoothing the roughest edges, whereas many workers didn’t have any days off just spinning on the 24 hour call extra board going to work on two hours notice there are some property agreements.
It seems like the average seems to be like an 11 and four, so you work 11 straight, you’re on call, 11 straight days, then maybe you get four days off, but those are not even four real days off. That’s at Canadian Pacific. When they sold an agreement to get two days off, it wasn’t two days off, it was 48 hours. The average person who works a 40 hour week their weekend when they get off from Friday afternoon at four o’clock in the afternoon and go back to work at Monday morning, that’s like 64 hours if my math is correct. So a real conventional weekend is like 64 hours. So selling this 48 hours as a weekend is bullshit. And so any of these 11 and four, it’s the same thing’s, not really four days off, it’s four times 24 at best, and the first day is spent recovering from working like a dog and then you got less than three days to salvage what’s left. So smoothing off some of the roughest edges, but for the most part it’s still extremely rough and intolerable. I would say.
Ron Kaminkow:
I would just jump in and agree, I’m out of the industry now, but I keep my ear to the rail. For example, Norfolk Southern, the new quote leadership just came out with a report and nothing has changed. And the idea that things were going to change when the railroad was under the microscope due to the contract fight due to East Palestine, due to all the hard work of RW and our media committee just beating the bushes and promoting all that’s wrong with the rail industry, rail industry kind of got a black eye and they started to make nice. And so just an example, rail industry said, oh yeah, I guess the close call reporting thing that they have in the airlines we’re under the microscope, so we’ll agree to do it. And then as soon as they’re out of the spotlight, they all just rele on that and go, no, no, no, this close call reporting thing got problems.
It’s not going to work with the way we run the railroad and we find it unsafe and all this kind of thing. And so it’s just one example. Same thing, Norfolk Southern after East Palestine, we’re going to make nice with the shippers, we’re going to make nice with our workers and the report, if you all want to read it, it’s quite lengthy, but what Norfolk Southern is now saying is, yeah, we’re going to strip the company down. We’re going to save a lot of money by cutting out the fat, which means doubling up, pushing on the workforce, requiring more work, less employees and the usual PSR stuff. And so for a while there, precision scheduled railroading was getting a black eye, but time goes by and they sort of concede a little here and there, but the new leadership at Norfolk Southern is simply reasserting.
Yeah, we’re going to have real PSR like Ancora was demanding and go for the jugular. We’re going for a below a 0.6 operating ratio now. And all of us on the railroad knows what that means. That means job cuts, that means shop consolidations, that means job eliminations, more pressure on workers to get the job done, do more with less, this kind of thing. That’s what the code word is. And so to take up where Hughes Sawyer mentioned Railroad Workers United is in favor of public ownership of the railroad because we just don’t see anything really changing. There’s a few tweaks here and a few tweaks there. Amtrak is suing Norfolk Southern and I believe Union Pacific for failure to run the trains on time. So there’s a little bit of fluff, there’ll be a few concessions made, maybe a few court cases won a few sick days granted here and there, but at its essence, nothing has really changed Max, I think. And if you asked any railroader today, are you happier today than you were back two years ago when that contract fight was on? I would hazard a guess that most are about the same level if not less happy than they were two years ago.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I mean, that’s really sad and sobering to hear, but I think really important for people out there to hear, especially if they’re thinking that we won something and that things have changed. Maybe they’ve bought the sort of PR machine trying to spin that contract as a huge gain. And don’t get me wrong, our listeners were rooting for railroad workers to get that pay bump all the way. But through our interviews with y’all, they understood as you guys helped us understand that the problem is so, so much bigger than a pay raise or a couple sick days. The sickness runs very, very deep. And for anyone continuing to follow it, I would highly recommend that folks follow journalists like Josh Funk who in March was already giving an update for AP. That, to make Ron’s point, is more of the same. I’m just going to read one sentence here.
This is from March, 2024, quote, “BNSF laid off more than 360 mechanical employees this week, just days after Warren Buffet told shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate that owns the railroad, that he was disappointed in BNFs profits.” So again, more of the same, more cuts deeper to the bone, piling more work onto fewer workers, automating what they want to automate, making the trains longer and heavier to the hazard of workers themselves and the communities whose backyards these trains are bombing through. I definitely want us to do a deeper follow up on this after the election because as we said, regardless of the outcome of this election, right, I mean the new contract bargaining period is coming in 2025. And so I want our listeners and viewers to be fully up to speed on that and to know what they should be looking for and how they can show support.
But I want to kind of build on this discussion and take us into the heart of darkness as it were. Like we all know that, that we are days away from what may very well end up being the most consequential election in our lifetimes. We hear that every year feels like it may be true this time. And as always, I want to be clear that as a 5 0 1 C3, the real news is not in the business of telling anybody how to vote. We are here to give y’all the information and perspective that you need to act and to make an informed decision for yourself. But as we discussed earlier today, like the railroad workers, as y’all were saying, infamously had your potential strike blocked under the Biden Harris administration in 2022. But I would remind listeners that that was also with full bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats in Congress, some dissented symbolically, but importantly, but by and large, this was a bipartisan effort, but it happened under the Biden Harris administration.
And as we discussed in our reporting from that period, the industry, the rail industry itself was further deregulated under the Trump administration. And so we know that railroad workers specifically and union workers in general are not a monolith. And I do not want to ask any of you guys to try to speak for the whole of rail labor or your union or even the company you work for, right? Again, just help us put our ears to the rail here, and what insight can you give us right now into how all of this is shaping your and your fellow railroaders attitudes and approach to the current election. A lot of people on the left, and even people within the world of labor have cited specifically the crushing of the rail strike as a reason not to vote for Harris. But we want to know what do railroaders themselves have to say? How are you guys navigating this moment and what are you hearing your fellow workers talking through as they are navigating this moment as we head into November 5th?
Ron Kaminkow:
Well, max, I’d say obviously it’s a mixed bag. It’s not a monolith, whether you’re on the railroad or at UPS or whether you’re a teacher or what have you, a myriad of different political opinions. But first of all, I think it’s important that railroad workers and all us citizens understand that in Biden breaking that strike, he didn’t do it alone. He asked Congress and Congress willingly, both Democrats and Republicans provided the legislation to break the strike. So that’s the first thing. Secondly, we haven’t had a national rail strike in 30 years. The vote in 1992 to break the strike, I believe was 400 to five. And so right off the bat, you know that it was complete bipartisanship, both Democrats and Republicans. So I have a little list here that I think it’s worth everybody, whether you’re a Democrat, republican or what your political persuasion is.
The great railroad strike of 1877, which was the first general strike in this country, one of the greatest labor uprisings to that point, that strike was largely broken by a Republican Rutherford b Hayes, but it didn’t take long. In 1894, just 17 years later, the great Pullman strike where Eugene Debbs was sent to jail and so forth, and the American Railway Union was destroyed. That was the great Democrat friend of labor, Grover Cleveland, who was president for that one. And then the shaman strike in 1922 that lasted for months. That involved a half a million shaman who maintained diesel or steam locomotives and so forth. Warren Harding Republican businessman intervened in that strike. And then back to 1946, the miners, steelworkers and railroaders all went on strike. The great friend of labor, Harry Truman, Democrat, threatened to draft every railroad worker into the military as a way of breaking that strike.
Pretty creative, innovative way to break a strike. And then we had 1985 National Strike Reagan, and then 1991, the CSX that developed into a national railroad strike Bush the first. And so now here we are 30 years later or with Biden in effect, breaking that strike. And it’s important for people to understand this just because this bipartisanship of Democrats and Republicans over the course of 150 years, they are doing their job, they’re doing their bidding, whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat, their job is to protect the interests of capital. And railroads have historically been some of the most powerful capitalists in our country. And when they say dance, the government does so and so I think what I’m trying to point out here is I’m not excusing the Biden administration at all for its actions. In fact, he shot himself in the foot. He had the opportunity to very easily state that if there’s a national rail strike, the fault lays squarely at the doorstep of the Class one carriers who won’t even provide a single day of sick time for these hardworking railroaders, 85% who at that time did not have sick time.
And he could have emerged as a hero. And I think that the National Carriers Conference Committee would’ve simply collapsed and agreed, but no Biden, not only was it offensive, it was just downright stupid politics basically. But hey, he owns it and he has to live with it. But I think it’s important that railroad workers understand. And like I say, everybody understands this has been a bipartisan effort of 150 years of breaking our strikes. And so railroad workers are not happy as a general role with Republicans or Democrats. I was at the founding of US Labor Party back in Cleveland. I think it was 1995 or six. One of the rail unions actually said, enough is enough. We’re tired of seeing our strikes broken. And so the brotherhood and maintenance away employees was present at the founding conventional Labor Party. And it’s just an example of railroad worker frustration that we do not have a party that represents our interests. And I’ll just leave it at that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Can I follow up on just one quick point there? And I think so appreciative, Ron, that you gave us that deeper historical perspective because Lord knows we need it right now when we’re in this sort of hyper digitalized, fast-paced news cycle where we all have the long-term memories of goldfish, that’s a dangerous place to be. We need to remember history to know how to forge our way ahead into the future. But you said something that I know will really perk our listeners’ ears up, right about the political stupidity of Biden, like asking Congress to break the strike in 22 and how he could have played it differently, which he did when the International Longshoremen Association went on strike just a couple of weeks ago. And so I have to ask the question that’s on my mind I know is on listeners’ minds, and I am not pitting unions against each other. I’m just saying explicitly in a case where Biden handled two consequential strikes very differently, were you guys watching that and thinking, how would your contract potentially have ended up differently if he had approached the rail, strike that way, the way that he vocalized support for the ILA?
Ron Kaminkow:
Yeah, I don’t want to hog the show, but I got to answer this. It’s fascinating. And I think a couple things. Biden I think learned a lesson, especially when Sean Fein told him directly, publicly, stay the hell out of our bargaining. Do not mess with us. Unfortunately, in the rail industry, we did not have a union leadership. First of all, we didn’t have a railroad workers union. We had 13 divided largely impotent little sections, but craft by craft that couldn’t speak collectively. That all took separate votes on separate contracts. And so there was no voice of unity to tell Biden to bug out. And hey, between us, I’m convinced that since the rail union leadership did not speak out publicly, not a single one of ’em made a statement that Biden and Congress should stay the hell out of this strike. We did hear that from Sean Fe in the auto workers.
We did hear this from ILA, had we actually had some real leadership that could have spoke with a unified voice, that could have been militant and told the US government, stay the hell out of our strike. We got this. Let us settle this. They may not have been so quick to intervene and order us back to work. So one could easily postulate that Biden was taking his cues from the rail union leadership. I mean, I hate to say it, but we did not hear a squeak from not a single rail union leader asking the government to stay out. So anyway,
Mark Burrows:
I’d like to chime in and then definitely want to hear what Hugh has to say, but while we’re on the subject, I want to back up. First of all, as far as railroad workers’ reaction to Biden saying, oh, I respect the collective bargaining process and I’m not going to invoke Taft Tarley, or whatever the vibe I’ve gotten from talking to workers as well as just online posts. Obviously there’s a lot of cynicism. Many rail workers see right through that. That’s kind of like those who are paying attention. That’s an obvious no brainer. Ron mentioned this, I believe it was 83, there was a BLE strike in 83 that lasted actually three days. We actually had that feeling of being out there and they weren’t trying to run without us. They were taking their beating like men, if I can say that without being out sounding sexist.
And then Reagan intervened after three days and imposed the presidential Emergency Board recommendations. And I don’t have the exact totals, but I remember distinctly that it was basically like a nine to one ratio. I think the Senate vote was more than 90 to 10, and the house vote was something like 4 55 to 30 or something like that, but I mean easily a nine to one ratio. And so then the next year, the 84 elections, so now the UTU news comes out with its recommendations for their preferred candidates, and most of them are Democrats, some of them are Republicans, but they have the check mark incumbent. And the vast majority of their recommendations were for incumbent senators and representatives who had voted to break this strike back in 83 in the same way they did in so no repercussions. Like Ron was saying, no repercussions, no calling out. This is just like smart TD President Ferguson right before Biden when he was employing his membership to ratify the contract or Biden or the government will. He just said, well, we’ve reached the end of the process, so this is it. We’ve done all we could. And I would argue, no, you haven’t done all you could without challenging, challenging their right, challenging the moral and ethical legitimacy to do this. There’s a whole history of how the Railway Labor Act came into being in the first place was for this very reason to curb railroad militancy.
And then also, I think it was 2011, the BLE was about to go on strike. I was working the afternoon shift and we were ready to get off our engines at the stroke of midnight. And then Obama, great friend of labor, he issued a presidential back to work order. Now, the only reason that didn’t turn into a big government intervention was because then the BLE just kind of implored its membership to here. You might as well ratify this or they’ll ram it down your throat. And they always hold this threat, ratify this. It’s not the best contract, whether it’s a tentative agreement or ratify before government intervention, I suggest you ratify it because it could always be worse, which is true, just as the government could make a more favorable contract to the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations, the government can always make it worse. So that threat has merit to it.
And then of course they wield it like a 20 pound sledgehammer. And so after Obama did the last minute, I think he invoked a cooling off period. It had gotten to the point where the last cooling off period was over. And so he invoked one more and then the membership ratified it. But so that was another example of if not direct government intervention, what I always call the gun to the head threat of government intervention. And now both the operating craft unions are just shamelessly encouraging their membership to support Harris thousand as if 2022 didn’t even happen in the same way that the union leadership did back in 84 as if busting the strike back then. So yeah, the history, I think Einstein said continuing to do the same thing while hoping expecting different results is the definition of insanity. So there you have it. Take it away.
Hugh Sawyer:
Okay, and let’s see. I don’t know where to start, but right now we’re in an election that I don’t even think what Biden did to us in 2022 is even a thought hardly at this stage of the game because the threat from is my opinion, Donald Trump and the 2025 project and what have you, forget about our pathetic problems in the rail industry. I mean, we’re talking about theoretical dismantling of this country if Donald Trump gets elected. So I think we’re beyond that. Having said that, I feel like a lot of my fellow workers down here in the south rail workers think this is the WWF or something. It’s some kind of entertainment industry. And so a lot of them and down here we’re like sheep. We run around in herds and what have you, and depending on where you live, I now live way out in the country where I grew up in the city.
They all convinced each other that they’re going to vote for Donald Trump and they’re voting against their own interests, but they’ve convinced themselves that he’s the man and they don’t want that horrible person Kamala Harris up there who’s black and female, let’s be honest. And I’m living in the south. So I want to go back and say something about the rail industry. Ron went through the history of strikes and how they’re broken. What everybody needs to understand is how important we are to the economy when we go on strike, the economy comes to a halt. I mean, stock market is affected on day one. I don’t know if this is still true, but they used to tell us in New York City, 24 hours after the rail industry shuts down, that you’ve got food shortages and what have you. So this is why I think Democrat or Republicans are so anxious to prevent a strike and prevent that economic blow. My thing about Joe Biden and breaking our strike, you could have imposed a lot of what we asked for and the way of work related rules and so on and off time and that sort of thing. He could have imposed a good agreement for the workers and chose not to.
But in fairness, he’s surrounded by people around him. I just think he was told, Hey, we give him a 25% pay increase that solves all the problems. And he went with it, but he was desperate not to have an economic slowdown. By the way, I’m going to go back to public rail ownership. The amount of freight that we’re moving in this country has been going down for years as a percentage of the freight. That’s ridiculous. These railroads are not operating in a patriotic mode in a, Hey, we’re the basic part of the economy that we keep the whole capitalistic system going. And without that thought process in there, this country, and by the way, a lot of the inflation I think is brought on by the cost of the logistics network. A lot of which those costs increases are due to the railroad just jacking up their prices and performing less for that money.
And so people need to look at things from a bigger scale than just the rail workers. And really, you could pay all of us a million dollars a year. What few railroad workers are left? And it would still be a pimple on the amount of profits railroads are making. But the greed is, I mean really you’re talking about you want to go to a 50% operating ratio, would you give me a break? And we were making money hands over fist, and it was at 80% what have you. So at some point, that’s why the American public needs to take back the ownership. We gave the railroads, the rails, the land, everything. And in exchange for a common carry, they would carry the goods for everybody. Rural America, the cities, everybody. They have violated their part of that agreement since almost day one, and it’s time to hold them responsible and we need to go in a different direction for the health of the American economy.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, man. And I want us to sort of end this conversation, right, with a kind of, let’s get real, let’s talk strategy here. Let’s talk about how working people of conscience who are trying to do the right thing for themselves, their families, their communities, their country, people who are trying to navigate this, what words can we have to offer them about how to navigate this election and whatever’s coming after it. But I want to just by way of getting there, just ask two clarifying questions here because again, these are questions that I’m seeing come up a lot online in the news. People ask me directly, and it feels like based on what you guys were saying, there are two key points here that I just wanted to ask for a little clarity on. So in one sense, would you say it’s fair that, by and large, the majority of railroad workers are not the majority of railroad who are thinking of voting for Trump or planning to vote for Trump, that they’re not primarily motivated by a feeling of betrayal from the Biden-Harris administration that’s driving them to Trump?
So that’s kind of just one clarifying question I wanted to pose to you guys. And then the other which, Hugh, it was kind of coming out in what you’re saying, is do you think a lot of folks on the rails are thinking of their votes as a rail worker? What is going to be good for me and my union and the industry? It sounds like what you guys are saying is that in terms of the folks who are planning to vote for Trump, they’re not thinking with that side of their brain. They’re thinking more in this WWE kind of terms that you were saying Hughes. So I wanted to ask if you guys could just comment on both of those before we kind of make the final turn here.
Hugh Sawyer:
Well, I’ll jump in and just say, I don’t think the screwing that we got in 2022, and that’s what it was, has any factor today. Everybody’s caught up in the news cycle that everybody’s caught up in on what’s going on today. And they definitely are not looking at it from a union, does this really benefit me as a rail worker and what have you, this may down in the south? I don’t think they’re thinking that at all. And we’re right back to the demoralized place we were two years ago before people got excited and said, wow, we’re going to go on strike and we’re going to really achieve something, and now they’re just back to their hang dog, make another day, and that sort of thing. So that’s my feeling that what happened back two years ago is not a factor today in how people are voting. And I don’t think they’re voting in their own interest. I can’t imagine any worker voting for Donald Trump in that bunch. I mean, really, we’re going to add another 8.2 trillion in debt, which was added under our glorious leader Donald Trump, when he gave that big tax cut to the rich. I mean, when will let anybody get it and somebody’s got to pay taxes in this country, it’d be amusing to me if everybody paid taxes, including the rich. So I don’t know.
A lot of union people are going to vote against their best interests, but I am hopeful that we’re going to eke it out as we did four years ago. It’s a lesser of two evils, and we can do more to change the Democrat party, I think than we’ll ever be able to with the Republicans who are led by people who are out to great Nazi Germany. In my opinion,
Mark Burrows:
My observations are,
Ron Kaminkow
Yeah, I’ll second that emotion.
Mark Burrows:
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Ron Kaminkow:
Well, I was going to say it is the lesser of two evils. This is the game that I personally feel that we’ve been playing my whole adult life when it comes to election time. I rarely have a candidate on the ballot that I’m excited about because I don’t see them as really representing the interest of working people. They’re always beating around the bush, even when they sound pro-union like Biden. Then he does something like goes along with the corporations and breaks a strike. It’s the same old, it’s been happening ever since Jimmy Carter first election that I was party to 44 years ago or what have you. So we got our back against the wall, and we’re looking at a regime potentially that could assume power in January that has shown itself to be somewhat fascist in nature. The Hugh alluded to that 2025 project of the Heritage Foundation that Trump has now said he doesn’t know anything about, but of course he does.
And all of his big time supporters are very excited about implementing such a thing. But railroad workers, like many workers aren’t necessarily in tune with what their interests are. And politics is complicated. And so yeah, we had this horrible guy, Ron Bori, who was head of the FRA, and he was all for single person crews, and he was all for granting waivers to the industry and getting rid of long-term safety regulations during covid on trumped up reasons. Grant given by the carriers, RO Batory lifelong, CEO of rail corporations was ready to give the industry everything it wanted. He was a Trump appointee. He could come back and if not him, someone just as bad if not worse. But people don’t necessarily connect these kind of dots, max, it’s really a shame. Elaine Chow, head of the Department of Transportation comes out of a big billionaire shipping magnet family.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of Pete Buttigieg, but God damnit. I mean, at least the guy isn’t from some billionaire shipping company who’s obviously going to side with the interest of big shippers. And so same with Pori, CEO, Amit Bose, he is what he is at the FRA, but he’s a hell of a lot better than having a CEO. These are the people we bargain with. These are the people who have implemented precision scheduled railroading. These are the people who want to eliminate crews, eliminate jobs, combine shop facilities, get rid of all of us if they had their way and gave us precision scheduled railroading. We don’t want those people heading up these agencies. And of course, when you have a billionaire president who’s very favorably disposed to all of his wealthy friends, this is exactly what we’re going to get. I don’t think Emett Bowes is great. I don’t think Pete Buttigieg is great at head of the DOT, and I could go on and on. But at times we have to look at the situation and just go, if you’re going to play the game, choose the one that’s going to hurt you the least. And right now that happens to be the Harris ticket.
Mark Burrows:
I just want to chime in, in my observations and discussions and posts, there is an element, some rails do have an andi-Biden hatred, and I saw one discussion Trump’s talking to Trump. Trump and Musk want to fire all workers who strike, and then, oh, well, at least he wouldn’t do what Biden did or whatever. So what’s going on there is what’s going on all over the country where workers are forced to make this choice. I mean, I go back to the first election I really paid attention to, like Ron was talking about 44 years ago with Reagan against Carter. And that’s when I came of age politically, and that’s when I became convinced of the need for an independent political party based on it. I organized militant trade union movement. And so I’ve been advocating for that for 44 years. But these last three election cycles has been Trump versus a lame Democrat Clinton, who in my opinion, if they had not stolen the nomination from Sanders, there’s a very good chance that Sanders could have beat Trump because so many of these workers who had voted for Obama and then got disillusioned about that, they voted for Trump.
Sanders, I believe, could have won some of those voters. So then four years later, Trump and Biden, now Trump and Harris, just a female version of Biden. And so people held their nose to vote for Clinton, and people held their nose to vote for Biden. And now people, some are going to hold their nose to vote for Harris, and some are so repulsed by them that they don’t even care about Trump. And then some will sit it out and who knows where we land. But we cannot allow ourselves to continue this cycle of, I mean, this is lesser equalism on steroids, maxed out circuits, overblowing. I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that the more of us that are convinced of the need for an independent political party, how we get there, what form it takes, we have to figure it out.
But the more of us that are convinced of that, we can start collectively having that discussion. And then if our union leaders don’t support that and help push it along, then we have to find, develop leaders from our own ranks to help make that happen. But this, I’m not an expert on the history of Nazi Germany and fascism, but the basic common thread is Hitler wasn’t taken seriously until, and the social Democrats were too impotent to mount any challenge. And I don’t want to be, fascism is around the corner, but there’s a common thread, okay, that’s the direction they want to go. And the Democrats have proven themselves incapable of mounting any resistance, and we could end up with Trump, and who knows where that will take us. But whoever ends up, we need to organize and resist, organize, resist, and ultimately come together and form an independent political party, use our numerical majority and our economic power and figure it out. Because we can run this show a whole lot. I’ll leave it there
Maximillian Alvarez:
Workers can run this shit way better than the billionaire class. Of that I am certain. And I appreciate as always your guys’ incredible insight and passion, and I just really hope that folks out there are taking everything that you say to heart. And I just, yeah, on a personal level, just really appreciate the kind of sober but principled kind of analysis that I always get from you guys because folks need that regardless of what sort of political tradition you’ve come out of where in the country you are right now, right? We’ve got to look at this situation soberly and not as Hugh was saying, sort of get caught up in that kind of herd mentality or the kind of online rage fueled sort of manufactured consent. I mean, if you feel yourself getting unmoored from that and you feel yourself being led where the media wants you to follow and where these politicians want you to go, take a step back, center yourself, listen to your fellow workers, talk to the people around you, have these kinds of conversations now before it’s too late.
And in that vein, guys, I want to just sort of build on the great points that y’all were making and sort of look forward here. As we said, we’re going to have y’all back on, have more brothers and sisters from the rails on to talk about the contract fight coming up and where we can as a working class, kind of learn from our past mistakes, learn from 2022, so that we’re forging ahead into the future, having learned those lessons and being better prepared for what’s coming. I know our listeners feel that. I know you guys at RWU are always planning, organizing, mobilizing in that direction, and we’re going to talk about that in a future episode. But we’re recording this on October 30th, and this is going to come out just days ahead of the election itself, which is taking place less than a week from now.
And as you guys have laid out in brutal detail, our political system sucks. And the system wide change that we need as working people is not going to come from elections alone. We know that we need to understand that, but the results of elections still shape the ground upon which we live and work and organize. And so when it comes to addressing the ongoing crisis on the railroads, the crisis of democracy that we’re in, the corporate destruction of the supply chain, and all the threats that poses to workers and to our communities, like what role do electoral politics have to play in that struggle? And what would you guys say to your fellow workers out there listening to this about how working class folks need to proceed strategically within and outside of the electoral system to advance our interests?
Ron Kaminkow:
Max, I think there’s a lot of examples from history, not just in this country, but in countries around the world where without a social movement to propel the political, the electoral struggle forward, you’re kind of pissing up a rope. I mean, everyone says FDR changed the country and this and that, or Lyndon Johnson facilitated the Civil rights movement. But had there not been a movement on the ground in both instances in the thirties and in the fifties and sixties, nothing would’ve changed. And so if you put all your eggs, the basket of electoral change, I think you’re doomed to failure. By the same token within the unions, if you elect reformers in my union, the brotherhood of locomotive engineers and trainmen, we actually do have one member, one vote. Very few unions in this country have that, and we deposed a long-term President Dennis Pierce, and replaced him with somebody else. It looks good on paper, but without a movement in our union that a caucus that’s organized to pressure the new president and to make sure that he moves in a direction that’s more accountable to the members and starts to take creative action and break from this bureaucratic srait jacket that we’re in.
You are just tweedle dee and tweedle dumb. And I think the same thing holds. One of the most unfortunate things that I’ve experienced in my life is that most people, unfortunately, are looking for a savior. And whether that savior is Jesus Christ or Muhammad, or whether that savior is a partner or that savior is a politician or a union leader, or a rich, wealthy person like Elon Musk or Donald Trump, unfortunately people don’t understand that the only way change is really going to come is, and when I say we, I mean tens of millions of regular working class people take matters into our own hands. We’re not just going to go vote next week and everything’s going to be okay no matter what we believe and who we vote for. Everybody has to sort of grow up and take responsibility and understand that politics isn’t something you do every four years in a voting booth.
Politics is something you do every day. You wake up and you say, what do I do today to further the cause of my class, of my neighborhood, of the people that I’m in this world with, that I identify with? And so you go to your union meeting and you go to the picket, you go to the rally, you raise hell. And I don’t think we’re ever going to get out of the quagmire that we’re in and less and until a critical mass of tens of millions of common regular, everyday working people inside and outside of unions start to basically say, we are going to take action. This is what happened in the 1930s. Workers spontaneously started taking over factories and this is how the modern labor movement was born. Modern labor movement didn’t come about by a bunch of bureaucrats spending a bunch of money and calling elections. Literally millions of workers occupied factories went on general strikes built a solidarity and a momentum that literally changed the body politic of this country. And that’s what we need to do I think going forward, no matter who wins this election that is on our agenda as working class people.
Mark Burrows:
I just want to add on my personal hero, and I know I’m not alone. Eugene Debs not only for his rail labor organizing, but his relentless fight to his dying day for social justice and for a better world of peace, justice inequality. And he fought and advocated tirelessly to build this kind of movement that Ron is talking about. And one of the things when he was trying to inspire people to build this kind of movement, he would say, don’t take my word for it. Go research it yourself. Go learn and study the facts yourself about how this system works, about how this all works and what’s really at play here. What’s really going on. And if you do that, then I’m confident that you’ll arrive at the same conclusions that I have. And so I mean 44 years ago I was just a hotheaded rebel without a clue. But I had mentors to start opening my eyes about what was possible.
I had a lifetime of ideological brainwashing that I had to unlearn just like, well what about this? What about that? And back then I needed mentors and then books to learn and study to undo and unlearn what all the propaganda that, because these corporations that we talk about, they also control the mainstream mean media. They control the flow of information. Today we’re blessed with outlets like with yourself, the Real News Network and others, democracy Now and others, where people who are beginning to question can go and learn the truth. Your series on the Middle East under the Shadow, so much important information and education. And so Ron was talking about the responsibility. We have a responsibility educate ourselves because only then can we make informed decisions. If we’re just buying the boss’s propaganda, then this is what we’re left with Trump against Harris. So there is a responsibility to think for ourselves and then we can act in an informed manner in our best interest. I’ll just leave it there.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Sorry, Hugh, I muted you one more time. I apologize.
Hugh Sawyer:
I don’t blame you for muting me, but well, let’s just say at least something positive. We’re stuck with this two party system and we can talk all we want about a third party and what have you. And I certainly advocate that. But right now there’s no reason why we can’t take, I believe, a portion of the Democrat Party and move it over to our way of thinking. And we have to exist in the political system as it exists and we need to, instead of just talking about it, we need to start putting forth candidates in the system that exists.
And I mean, you have some people like AOC and what have you. I mean there are people out there and I don’t necessarily agree with every, there’s nobody I agree with a hundred percent, but I appreciate people that are trying to lead us in a different direction and I have no problem throwing my support behind ’em. And the issue for me is finding more candidates that support our positions who are workers or have been workers themselves and let’s start putting them in the office. I fully admire the Republican party in that they have gone out for years now on a grassroots campaign to take over school boards and on up. And now they’re able to impose the Supreme Court justices on the whole country and what have you because they put their mind to it. So we’ve got the example in front of us that a group of people can make a change. I don’t think theirs was a change we wanted to make, but for the interest of people. But we can respond to that. And the Democrat party has not been doing a good job in responding to it. But I think we can force ’em to.
So I just want to say that it’s not hopeless. We can affect change in this country.
St. Louis — Voters in Missouri, Nebraska, and Alaska will soon decide whether workers in those states should be entitled to paid sick leave. If approved, the ballot measures would allow many workers to accrue paid time off, a benefit supporters say means workers — especially those with low-paying jobs — would no longer have to fear losing wages or possibly the jobs themselves for getting sick.
WASHINGTON – U.S. customs authorities have added three more textile producers to a burgeoning list of Chinese companies banned from trading with Americans due to their use of Uyghur slave labor.
Goods produced by Esquel Group, Guangdong Esquel Textile Co., Ltd., and Turpan Esquel Textile Co. can no longer be imported into the United States after they were added to the Entity List, said a statement issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Thursday.
The statement says Esquel Group is based in Hong Kong, while Guangdong Esquel Textile is based in nearby Guangdong province. Turpan Esquel Textile, meanwhile, is based in Xinjiang, it says, where most Uyghurs live under strict surveillance by Chinese authorities.
The blacklisting is due to the firms’ role in the “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other religious and ethnic minority groups” in the Xinjiang region, it says, citing their use of Chinese government-run “poverty alleviation” programs there.
Beijing says the programs are voluntary and intended to train Uyghurs in vocational skills, but outside observers and the U.S. government say they are thinly veiled slave-labor operations. The United States in 2021 said China’s treatment of the mostly Muslim Uyghurs is a “genocide.”
China’s government has strenuously denied those claims and accused the United States of making up the claims to tarnish its reputation.
All three of the blacklisted firms are accused of sourcing cotton picked by Uyghur slaves in Xinjiang. Cotton is one of the most commonly cited goods tied to forced labor, with cut-price Chinese fast-fashion outlets like Temu and Shein accused of selling clothes tainted by slavery.
The latest listing brings the total companies on the Entity List to 78.
World Uyghur Congress executive chair Rushan Abbas told Radio Free Asia that she welcomed the blacklisting of the companies but believed many more companies tied to Uyghur slavery could still be added.
The group urges “continued efforts to ensure all supply chains are free from complicity in these atrocities, safeguarding American consumers from unknowingly supporting the Uyghur genocide,” Abbas said.
“All businesses must scrutinize their supply chains to ensure they do not, even indirectly, benefit from these atrocities,” she added.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns.
This week on CounterSpin: Reading the news today, you might not believe it, but there was a time, not long ago, in which it was acceptable to say out loud that immigration is a boon to this country, and immigrants should be welcomed and supported. Now, news media start with the premise of immigration itself as a “crisis,” with the only debate around how to “stem” or “control” it. That the conversation is premised on disinformation about crime and wages and the reasons US workers are struggling is lost in a fog of political posturing. But immigration isn’t going away, no matter who gains the White House. And children torn from parents, families sent back to dangerous places, workers’ rights denied based on status, won’t be any prettier a legacy, no matter who it’s attached to.
Journalist Nicole Foy reports on immigration and labor at ProPublica. She wrote recently about the life and death of one man, Elmer De Leon Perez, as a sort of emblem of this country’s fraught, dishonest and obscured treatment of people who come here to work and make a life.
We hear that story this week on CounterSpin.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at recent press coverage of NPR‘s overseers and the Washington Post‘s non-endorsement.
On Monday, Oct. 21, 2,400 behavior health workers at Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California locations walked off the job in their ongoing struggle for a fair contract. Over the summer, negotiations between the health system and the bargaining committee, represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers, failed to close the gap between their proposals, opening the door for a strike. The workers are now well into their second week on strike.
The healthcare giant refuses to bargain seriously with the workers, offering paltry raises instead of agreeing to the workers’ demands for better pay, pensions, and safer staffing levels at the Kaiser mental health clinics in and around Southern California. These gains, the union believes, would allow Kaiser to compete with other health systems, drastically improve patient care quality, and solve many of the scheduling issues that have plagued the health system since before the start of the pandemic.
The union hopes that by striking, they can show management that they are serious about securing a fair contract for their members. Last week, on the first day of the strike, Mel sat down with Chris Reeves and Lisa Caroll, two behavioral health workers who work in Los Angeles and San Diego, respectively, to talk about the state of negotiations, what workers are demanding, and how it feels to be out on the picket line in the struggle for a fair contract.
Featured Music: Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Lisa Carroll:
I am Lisa Carroll. I’m a licensed clinical social worker. I work at San Diego Medical Center in the ICU. I also am on the executive board for NUHW, the Southern California division, and I also am the medical steward for all the medical social workers that are in the San Diego area, both inpatient and outpatient. I also have a wonderful partner over in Care at home. She’s a new steward and I’ve been mentoring her this past year just because the work is so important, ensuring people up is so important. I’ve been with Kaiser 17 years and I’ve been a steward for 15 of those years.
Chris Reeves:
My name is Christian. I am a registered nurse at Kaiser. I’ve worked there for about six years. I’m a union steward and I’m also a member of the bargaining committee.
Mel Buer:
Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Working People. I’m your host, Mel Buer. Working People is a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you love what we do and are looking for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to.
And please support the work we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. On October 21st, after contract talks broke down, 2,400 behavioral health workers with Kaiser Health System in Southern California walked off the job on strike in a bid to bring their employers back to the table and negotiate a decent contract. In the first week of the strike, the union joined two bargaining sessions with the healthcare provider in an attempt to close the gap between proposals while workers continue to walk the picket lines at multiple locations in Los Angeles and San Diego. Chief among their demands is for Kaiser to secure safe staffing levels and reduce appointment wait times for their patients, as well as bring parity between the Southern California workers and their Northern California counterparts in pay retirement benefits and scheduling.
As it stands, SoCal workers are suffering under worse working conditions than their counterparts in the north. Bargaining for these gains however, has been difficult with the employer consistently bringing unsatisfactory proposals to the table. In a recent press release sent to the media on Monday October 28th, the union provided an update after bargaining once again broke down with Kaiser on the 25th contract. Bargaining has broken off after Kaiser Permanente negotiators on Friday. Once again invited workers to the table only to offer practically nothing new. While Kaiser’s nearly 2,400 mental health professionals are seeking the same amount of time as their counterparts in Northern California for critical patient care responsibilities that can’t be done during appointments, as well as the same pension benefits that Kaiser provides nearly all of its other California employees. Kaiser’s primary new proposal in bargaining on Friday was an additional 25 cents per hour for bilingual workers With me today to discuss the contract negotiations and the strike are Chris Reeves, a psychiatric RN with Kaiser and Lisa Carroll, a licensed clinical social worker and medical social worker with Kaiser. Thanks for coming on the show.
Chris Reeves:
Thank you for having us. Yes, thank you for having us.
Mel Buer:
You guys have been on the picket line all day. How are you feeling after the first day on strike?
Lisa Carroll:
Think physically a little challenged, but I think mentally and emotionally. It was for in San Diego, it was really good turnout, really good energy, really good media coverage, really good political support. So I would say it was a great first day and we even had nurses come out from Unac and a couple clerks come out from Local 30 to walk with us, picket with us during their clocked out time. So it was a really positive first day.
Mel Buer:
Great. How about you, Chris? How was your first day?
Chris Reeves:
I completely agree. It was actually very invigorating. Even though I’m extremely tired, I feel fired up. I think a lot of us really just kind of fed off of each other and really just felt the energy. There was a lot of energy, a lot of passion out there, a lot of frustration that we were able to get out, but it was very inspiring to see everyone come together. We had a really awesome turnout at LAMC today, and a lot of support from the public as well, so that was really nice to see and experience.
Mel Buer:
That’s really great. I think before we get too far into the weeds of the strike itself, I think it would be a really good place to start perhaps maybe to kind of discuss the makeup of the unit. So there are 2,400 behavioral health professionals in this Southern California unit. Can you kind of speak to the types of job titles, professions, what kind of your day-to-Day work looks like within the unit?
Lisa Carroll:
In medical social work, you’ll have people that are social workers in a hospital, you’ll have social workers that are in an outpatient clinic. You’ll have social workers that are working with hospice, home health, palliative care. So one of the reporters today said to me, because I work in the ICU, well what does an ICU social worker do? And I said, all the things that the doctors and nurses don’t do and shouldn’t be doing. I mean, they have medical things that they need to do, but if somebody’s ended up in an ICU, needless to say, either they’ve had an acute event or they have a chronic condition that has brought them there. And so they need social, emotional, financial, legal, psychiatric, behavioral health support as does their family because while the medical folks are putting the person back together again with a plan for stability, I have to do that for their life. So that coincides so that when they leave the hospital, they’re able to see a pathway to supporting themselves, their families, things like that.
Chris Reeves:
Yeah, so I work in the Pan City area. It’s a pretty large service area and it’s made up of two clinics. And among inside those two clinics, it’s an outpatient behavioral health centers and addiction medicine as well, which is made up of licensed clinical social workers, marriage, family therapists, psychiatric nurses, psychologists who are used in a very specific and specialized capacity as well as I think I mentioned psychiatrists, the physicians. So it’s a huge team. It’s everything under the sun. We also have medical social workers as well. And so we’re divided in teams. We have a team of what we call return therapists who are seeing patients. Usually it should be weekly or biweekly, but because of the poor access that our clinic has chronically suffered for many, many years, most patients are only able to be seen once every four to six weeks, sometimes eight weeks, sometimes longer by those return therapists.
We also have a BIOS group who really sees the patients who are more acute. We’ve seen some changes to that too because all those programs are very impacted. And so those are the providers, the social workers, therapists who are providing group services, case management for ongoing and more frequent follow up care for addiction medicine. There are addiction medicine counselors also. We do have physicians that work in that department managing the gamut of substance abuse and obviously psychiatric and substance abuse. A lot of times they go hand in hand. Those are very complex patients. I personally work more so directly with the psychiatrist and supporting them. They have extremely large caseloads. They actually have no caps on their caseloads. And so we have pediatric and adult psychiatrists, some who also have more specialized care such as eating disorder. And so the psychiatric nurses there really support patient messaging specifically all of the messages that are coming in via telephone or call centers as well as the physician emails.
And so our primary role is to complete assessments to provide education, to also do follow-up medication, follow-up, answer questions and address issues. Patients who are experiencing acute episodes, especially if they’re having exacerbations of their symptoms, patients whose symptoms are not well managed on their medications and really in the last several years doing a lot of care management through the phone and through messaging because a lot of our patients are on wait lists and are not able to see their providers. And so that is the bulk of our job. We do work with the interdisciplinary team and we get messages from our therapists and social workers, and we do provide follow-up for patients who have seen their therapists who are having untreated symptoms as related to medication or side effects, things of that nature. So we also have to follow up on those things. And last, I don’t think I mentioned, we do have a team of crisis therapists as well who work in the department, so we also work closely with that group as well.
So just from hearing both of you describe your respective spaces in behavioral health within the Kaiser system, that’s a lot of work to have to pay attention to. That’s a lot of focus on patient care as it should be. Right. I think this is a good place to sort of hone in on what’s been going on in your negotiation since July. So you’ve been negotiating a contract since the end of July, and what you’re asking for in regards to some of your proposals, especially as it relates to caseloads, as it relates to better quality of patient care without, I dunno, burnout ruining the caregiver’s life in terms of just time spent and pay for that kind of work. Lisa, can you kind of speak to some of those proposals and what the union is asking for?
Lisa Carroll:
I think one of the things that I wanted to start with is even before bargaining, the union leadership met with Kaiser leadership and Kaiser initiated that meeting and they asked us, what will it take to restore the partnership with your union? And we were very clear with the same three asks that were consistently repeating, which is in 2015, they unilaterally took away all of our new hires pensions as a punitive action because we had raised the mental health access and denial and lack of care and all the suicides and everything to Sacramento. And so we had to be, I guess, taught a lesson. They refer to it as bad behavior. They think we’re behaving badly again right now. The second part of that is that we are not asking for anything that any of the other labor unions don’t already have. So whether it’s the service and tech units or the nurses units, we’re asking for the same type of wage increases that they’ve received.
And there have been multiple periods of time where we’ve been given nothing five years here a year here. So over time, our wage scale has really eroded. So I know one of the things Kaiser has said in the news is that they’re paying us, I think 18% over market rate. I have no idea what numbers they’re talking about because we have to compete for the same group of people to come work for Kaiser, as does Sharp Scripps and UCSD in San Diego, and they have all equal or exceeded Kaiser’s wage scale. So either somebody’s not doing their job or I don’t know how to explain that, but that’s a real problem. UCSD still offers a pension, so we’re not able to attract, recruit, retain people. One of the things we did in a past contract, which Chris would remember, is we set these pathways so that you could bring in people who weren’t licensed, who could work on their license and earn their hours, and then hopefully that would be a way of attracting and recruiting and retaining employees.
But the workload is so horrific, and the competition is so good that they get their licenses and they leave and they feel really badly about it because they’ve been a part of a team. I think the only thing that we really have going for us is sort of lifeboat mentality. We all have been in this lifeboat together. We have all fought together. We all want to stay together and we want to navigate this lifeboat into better waters, but I can’t stand in the way of somebody choosing to leave where they’re going to get better compensation and a better work life. So for myself as an example, I cover an ICU and a step down unit that’s roughly 40 beds when the pediatric social worker who also covers a telemetry unit is off, I also cover her beds. So I’m expected to cover anywhere from 40 to 80 beds on any given day. And so that’s child abuse reporting. That’s a PS reporting, that’s finding a representative for somebody who no longer can cognitively designated representative and getting access to their funds to pay for long-term care. That’s getting people connected to dialysis centers. That’s getting people connected to transplant coordinators.
We also do a lot of goals of care conversations in my particular area as well as pediatrics, depending on how ill they are. And we have to be able to refer to our home care partners in home health, our palliative care or hospice, their staff has been cut in half as a savings effort for that department, which just means profit. There’s no savings. Kaiser members pay for these benefits and then they’re denied care. And they wanted, Christopher will remember this from the bargaining table, they wanted the hospice people to see five patients a day. Well, I don’t know if you’re aware of how big San Diego County is, but unless they live in the same cul-de-sac, that would actually be physically impossible. And the way the regulations read is that they must be seen by a licensed clinical social worker that there is an assessment that’s required within 30 days, actually really within the first week to 10 days of service.
And so those things are not happening. So that’s actually Medicare fraud, and I don’t know what part of being investigated, they don’t understand, but they’re making this whole thing so very public that we will make things very public too. And it all could have been avoided. We were happy to have this conversation at the bargaining table, but the proposals, well, I wouldn’t even say Kaiser has come back. They’ve maybe proposed two or three things that they’ve spent time on that are fit onto a half of a page. Not a lot of thought went into that. And those offerings are very, wouldn’t you say, Chris? Very 2020 2021. I mean, they don’t reflect the economy that we have in Southern California or the wages necessary to maintain housing and live in Southern California. So that’s what’s been going on at the bargaining table. Our group, NUHW, has just done such a fantastic job working on proposals, trying to come back with counter proposals, trying to achieve agreement.
And pretty much what we get from Kaiser is deny, deny, deny. This is something they keep repeating. We’re happy with the way things are. So they’re happy with three month waits for medical appointments, three week waits, six week waits, three month waits in psychiatry for appointments. This is viewed, our professional group is viewed as a non-money maker. So it’s okay that it’s a factory that churns out and spits out labor people because they don’t want to spend the money. And that sends a very distorted and hurtful message to Kaiser’s members because their purchasing a benefit that they’re not going to receive its deception.
Chris, do you want to speak more about the conditions that you’re seeing in Los Angeles and really about this? Let’s hone in on this conversation about Kaiser’s members are paying for this benefit, and Kaiser itself is making access to this benefit for its membership nearly impossible, while also making the ability for the providers themselves to be able to do their jobs just as impossible. So you would think going to the bargaining table that they would be willing to listen to what I’m sure is quite a bit of negative feedback from their own members as well as these proposals to try and solve these issues from its union membership in order to create a better space of care, right?
Chris Reeves:
Yes. Yeah. So as Lisa mentioned, we prepared vigorously months before we actually were able to get bargaining dates from Kaiser. We actually tried to engage with Kaiser in bargaining in early spring because the conditions for our workers were so bad and for our employees were so egregious, and they did not give us any bargaining dates until basically the start of fall, so July 31st. And so since meeting with them, we’ve brought forward many proposals. And like Lisa said, it’s usually met with either complete silence, rejection, not interested, or we like things the way we are. We’d like to keep the current contract language, but the thing that Kaiser is failing to recognize is the things that they’re doing, it’s not working. Them being fined that record 50 million fine. And I believe it was $50 million, right, Lisa from DMHC, that hasn’t changed much in the last year.
And so to be honest, things have gotten worse. I really truly feel like that has just, it started started things getting worse. It was already bad, but things went from bad to worse because then Kaiser was under the microscope and they started implementing all these different tools to kind of get by and manipulate the system. And so that actually put a lot of hardship on our providers because they had to start doing a lot more documentation and doing all of these tools basically to provide protection to Kaiser, but not necessarily to improve patient’s care, their access to care or the quality of care that they’re receiving. And so you’re right, access is impossible. They are paying for, our patients are paying for memberships, and they’re not able to see providers when they want to as often as they need to. Even they’re not able to see the providers according to the standards their own providers have set.
So the provider might say, please come back to me in two months or three months or six months. And you’re seeing patients who are going well beyond that because there’s no appointments right now, the clinic books appointments about three months out and every Monday a new schedule opens up for the providers on a week by week basis. And by Monday morning we’re completely out of appointments because the patients learn that that’s the day you need to call. And they’re basically fighting in line trying to get that appointment. So by Monday afternoon, they’re all gone, which that shouldn’t be the case. I mean, we’re talking about all the appointments are gone for the next three months. And so that’s when we get messages because those clerks are, they don’t know what to do. They don’t want to tell the patient, we can’t do anything for you.
And so they say, oh, talk to the nurse. Maybe they can get you a sooner appointment, but we don’t have any magic keys or access to appointments that just don’t. So what happens is we end up having to assess them and really say, how sick are you and what can we do right now to put a bandaid on it? I often say that, which has truly been the most difficult thing for me and my job, is putting a bandaid over a bullet wound because I realized as important as the work that we do, it’s just a very small piece. And there are just critical things within the foundation of Kaiser mental health system that is just broken and it’s not working. And so as a result of that, we’ve seen a mass exodus between all medical professionals. We’re talking a lot of therapists, there have been doctors, there have been nurses, people who have come on, they’re like, forget this.
Especially the ones who haven’t been invested and trying to see things get better or who have been here long enough to say, you know what? Things just haven’t gotten better. I’ve been here for a long time. It’s not changing. I’m out. But we’ve had a huge high turnover rate, including providers who have left Southern California to go to Northern California because there are a little bit better staffing and retention tools there, including the pension that was maintained. So it’s very interesting, the ability to do our jobs have gotten significantly more difficult. One of the things that Kaiser has done to address their access is to try and take away patient management time. And they want to tell people, the public, that the clinicians are saying, oh, we want to see our patients less. But the truth is, is that they need that time to do their job.
And we’re not asking for anything different than what Kaiser gives to our colleagues, our counterparts, because that time is important to be able to call patients back and answer their messages to address case management things, whether that’s following up with family or facilities coordinating care, filing the necessary and mandated reports such as filing a child protective service report or an adult protective service report. There’s a lot of things that go that are, it’s a part from the things that we do with the patient. And so our clinicians are really having to choose, am I going to sit there and look at my patient and make eye contact and engage, or am I going to try to do both and try to get this note done because I know I don’t have enough time and we’re basically being treated like an assembly line. We’re really working in these factory-like conditions where they don’t have enough time to do their work.
And so with the time that they’re given and they have to make those decisions, but yeah, it’s pretty terrible. Our patients are waiting months to see their doctors sometimes after they’ve gotten their medication adjustment over the phone, that still doesn’t get them an appointment. It gets what they need address maybe in the moment, but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to get them a face-to-face with their provider. And so we’re seeing burnout everywhere, and that’s the reason why we asked Kaiser to come to the bargaining table early on, why we did a lot of preparation on proposals to help address the staffing issues, the workload issues. And then lastly, we are trying to take care of ourselves and our families. We’ve had five years basically of wage increases. We are behind everyone else, and I completely agree with Lisa. I don’t know who is doing the math at Kaiser, but they need to hire someone else.
Mel Buer:
Well, someone who just moved from Los Angeles and who I have a decent job and it’s difficult to plan for a future when you don’t know if you’re going to be able to have a salary that is comparable to the rising cost of living every year over year. I don’t know, man, as kind of a lay person. My mom is in healthcare. And so all throughout my life there have been these sort of at-home conversations about you take care of the workers and the patient care gets better all the time. Right? And it just seems to me as a sort of lay person that this is a logical solution to a serious problem. We’ve seen this problem explode in the age of Covid and what the pandemic did to an already stressed out healthcare system, and especially to the sort of explosion in mental health crises that was accompanied by extreme isolation and these crises both within the workforce at these hospitals and outside of it.
It just seems logical to me that if you want to solve this problem, you would do whatever you could to retain good staff to solve this problem. It just doesn’t. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think I’m sure, and let’s talk about this a little bit, but I’m sure that you’ve had these conversations with folks who are interested in coming to talk to you at the picket line and perhaps before, and any sort of the sort of messaging campaigns that you’ve done about these negotiations. Are you getting that same sense that you’re coming from a rational position from these folks who are outside of the union who are supporting you on the picket line?
Lisa Carroll:
Absolutely. I mean, every single media person that I’ve talked to, every single political party, union party, every single person is like, yeah, we don’t believe Kaiser. We know that they have abundant resources, that they’ve made significant profits and that they’re making a choice not to support their workers. What we did the math today when we were on the line that what they’re paying a scab to come in, one person to come in and do one of our jobs would pay for six people to have the pension. That’s a clear choice.
Mel Buer:
It’s a hard choice. And it’s always a power move, isn’t it? Right. Because when it comes down to it, they can plead poverty all the time. And I hear this on picket lines all over the place that these giant corporations from Kellogg’s to John Deere, from the studios who were throwing rider under the bus last summer and the summer before,
All of them are pocketing obscene profits, like more money than I could ever possibly imagine to have in my life ever. Right? Yeah. In order to do what? So that they can continue to be the bosses really and not seed any power in the workplace, even though consistently across the board, Chris, as I’m sure the workers are the ones who understand the job most intimately and also understand how to fix the problems at the job, not someone sitting in an administrative boardroom at the top of the hospital choosing who to fire. You know what I mean?
Lisa Carroll:
So at the bargaining table, we gave them a calculation on how to plan for how much time a person needs to do these other activities that aren’t the immediate face-to-face therapy session. It was a simple math formula. I mean, I’m not a mathematician. I could understand it. And here you have a table full of people going, I don’t understand. And we’re looking at them going, how do you have your jobs and not understand this? So you’re either lying or you really shouldn’t have the job
Chris Reeves:
That you have. Right, Chris? Totally. And honestly, I really have taken it as I think they’re feigning ignorance. I honestly think that they’re playing games because it absolutely makes no sense whatsoever. And I think that it’s really important for people to realize really what the numbers are, because in math ain’t math, and it really isn’t. Kaiser is the Goliath of healthcare organizations. They have abundant resources and they to fix the issues, and we have given them so many proposals and really have painted a very clear picture of what’s happening within their mental healthcare system. And it really begs the question of, do you really, and to me it’s very clear that they don’t. It’s very clear that they prioritize everything else over mental healthcare for their patients and their members, but they’re not lacking in resources. We did the math for them that it would literally cost them about $2,000 to restore the pension for about 1700 members who don’t have it so that we can be like the 96% of Kaiser members who do have it.
But I think at this point, really it is really begging the question, do you actually care about your employees? And I think that Mel, you made a good, great point because we did really see a significant demand in mental health care and addiction medicine services with the pandemic. It was very interesting because of course there was a critical short staffing in the hospitals, so we did need providers to take care of those patients who were coming in medically ill. And so at one point they were trying to pull the few of us that were working in psychiatry, the nurses to put us in the hospital, which was fine. A lot of us were willing to go if they did the training, but it was like, who’s going to take care of our patients? Because at the end of the day, we saw our first patient before any of these hospitals saw their first patient because people were getting anxious and they were fearful.
And so our demand and our volume had already started increasing before that virus had really reached even our shores, if you will. And so since then, it’s just kind of skyrocketed. People have not only because of the isolation and the different things that happen socially, but they had time on their hands. And social media I think also has been a big influence. And so the things that we were hearing people calling in and saying, I want to get evaluated for anxiety and depression and all these disorders. They heard it on social media. We knew something was happening, we felt the shift. I always go to management and say, Hey, something’s happening here. We’re getting a lot of calls. We let them know our patients are much sicker. We’re having a lot of patients who are struggling with addiction. A lot of people started drinking and using substances during the pandemic to cope, and they just didn’t listen.
We warned them because a lot of times we’re getting those calls first. We’re already seeing it. We have a lot of patients who are learning about A DHD, autism, things like that from social media. We started seeing an uptick, A DHD evaluation started a huge portion of our access. So we absolutely do tell Kaiser about these things very early on. Do they listen? No. Do they prepare for it? No. Do they plan properly or have any insight? No. Things are always rolled out in our department without proper planning. Things that just make absolutely no sense for the workers or for the patients. It’s egregious. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how such a huge organization has such major problems and how things move very slowly. It’s very interesting.
Mel Buer:
Well, everyone’s a number instead of a person instead of a human being, right? From the patients to the workers who are taking care of the patients, everyone is a number and that number brings in a certain amount of profit. And if you can’t bring in that profit, then your number that gets shoved off the end of the Excel spreadsheet, which is just a horrendous way to look at healthcare in this country. And we could have a long, maybe we’ll have you back on with the other healthcare providers that I talked to and just have a long conversation about broadly what this type of system has done to reducing humanity in this country and into these sort of unique, not unique little boxes, check boxes for how much money they can get out of us on an individual basis without actually providing anything in return. Absolutely.
And I don’t mean to be so cynical about it, but it is something where I benefit greatly from mental health services myself and I did during the pandemic and will continue to do, and I did before the pandemic. And I understand how important and crucial this work is. If I didn’t have it then I wouldn’t feel like I could land on my feet after 2021. And I know many, many people in my life just from individuals that I talked to all over the country on picket lines or elsewhere, that also benefit from these services. It’s a no fucking brainer to fund them. And what that means is if you, the workload, frankly, pay the employees a competitive wage, increase the staffing levels, allowing for individuals to feel comfortable in a career where they don’t need to give in to these high turnover rates, then you’re going to see more patients offer more services, make more money.
If that is what you’re concerned about as an administrator is getting butts in seats and people coming through the doors and all of that nonsense to everyone but them, it makes perfect sense to listen to you at the bargaining table and find a way to solve these problems. But as we know, and again, I don’t mean to sound so cynical, but as we know about Kaiser, they don’t listen to their workers and they always end up pushing their workers out on strike to the detriment of everyone involved, which sucks. So I think maybe a good way to sort of end this conversation before we get to the what can my audience do to support you is what is Kaiser’s kind of response to the strike? Are they beyond just the full blown PR machine that always comes out of the corporation when you walk out, have you received any sort of indication in bargaining or otherwise that they’re hearing you and that they want to solve this sooner? Or is it just they shut the doors and you got
Lisa Carroll:
To, we’ll find out on Wednesday when we go back over the weekend, because I’m on the executive board, there is some internal medical advocacy in Southern California and it sounds like they’re willing to make some movement on the wages and also patient management time. But I will believe it when I see it because I feel like this is Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football, but they’re still taking a hard line with the pension because of our bad behavior. That’s literally what they say. And we’re not asking for anything that their unions don’t have. We’re just asking for equity.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. How does that not just immediately tip off some lawyers to honest to God retaliation?
Lisa Carroll:
Honestly unfair labor practice?
Mel Buer:
Yeah. I dunno. Maybe they’ll shoot themselves in the foot and give you guys an upper hand with that because that’s obscene. That’s outrageous. Outrageous.
Lisa Carroll:
And I think they like that tear in the fabric. If you can kind of think about that as a piece of clothing, because as long as they maintain that tear, then they can do the same thing to the other unions. They haven’t, but they want to.
Mel Buer:
Yeah, they can threaten that, look what we did to these professionals that we can do to you tell the line kind of thing.
Chris Reeves:
Yeah, I still think, I just feel like their response, to be honest, I’ve been hopeful throughout this whole thing, even in their first talks that they wanted to work with us, but I’ve seen the complete opposite. And so like Lisa said, I’ll believe it when I see it because right now all we’ve seen is them just to try to cover up what’s going on. Them being very deceitful them trying to be very confident saying, oh, we got this patients, don’t worry if your provider’s out on strike, we’re going to have other places where you can go for your care. In our vast external provider network, they’re calling patients and they’re saying, oh, well, do you want to just wait for your provider to come back? They’re doing the documentation that they think is going to protect them, but I feel like they’re doing all the things except for actually doing what.
They’re exactly everything except for the right thing. I think that’s well said because they can end this very quickly, but it doesn’t seem like they want to. They’re closing schedules for weeks out. They’re telling patients about their comprehensive plan. They’re buckling down telling people that they’ve actually, they haven’t taken any things away and they’ve offered all of these things, but they haven’t addressed the issues. They haven’t brought anything meaningful to the table at all whatsoever. Many days they come to bargaining without absolutely nothing. We ask them, do you have anything for us? No, it’s very curt and it’s very obvious that they’re not taking it seriously. But I think today, I think that we show them that we’re forced to be reckoned with. I don’t think that they anticipated the number of workers that said enough is enough. I did want to mention too, one thing that everyone can do, because this is a huge sacrifice for everyone.
And so if they want to help and support our cause, they can go to home.nw.org. That’s the main page for our campaign website. And there is a way to donate to hardship funds for Kaiser patients. There is a way for them to share their stories and a link to Kaiser Deny website so they can really actually tell the public exactly what’s been going on, how hard it’s been, how hard it has been to get appointments or services that they’ve requested or that they need. So that’s a huge way for people to support and bring awareness to what’s really truly going on at Kaiser.
Mel Buer:
Lisa, is there anything else you wanted to add? Is there a strike fund for striking workers or do you not have
Lisa Carroll:
Something? It’s all through the exact same resources that Chris just reviewed.
Mel Buer:
Okay.
Lisa Carroll:
Great. And I always say just call Greg Adams and tell him what you think. The more people that blow up his phone, the better.
Mel Buer:
That’s great. That’s great. Honestly, that would be great. Final thing, picket locations for anyone who wants to come join you on the picket line, there’s one in la, at least one in LA and one in San Diego.
Lisa Carroll:
Aren’t those also on the website?
Chris Reeves:
Yes, those will be on the website tomorrow. We are going to be in Woodland Hills, and so we’re expecting a large turnout in Woodland Hills, but that will also be every location. That’s going to be a day of action. It’ll be listed on our website tomorrow, will Beland Hills.
Mel Buer:
Okay. Is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience before we break for the night?
Lisa Carroll:
Oh, thank you. It was a nice conversation. I really appreciate your awareness.
And as always, I want to thank you all for listening and thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons and go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real newsletter so that you can never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. Once again, I’m Mel Buer and with much love and solidarity, I’ll see you next time.
The cannabis market in the United States has exploded in recent years, with total retail sales from medicinal and recreational marijuana projected to exceed $50 billion per year within the next three years. Recreational marijuana is now legal in 24 states, and three more have legalization initiatives on the ballot this November. Sales from recreational marijuana alone surpassed $30 billion last…
As a mist of rain sprinkled the fields around him in Homestead, Florida, Ford bemoaned how expensive it had been running a fossil fuel-powered irrigation system on his 5-acre farm — and how bad it was for the planet.
Earlier this month, Ford installed an automated underground system that uses a solar-powered pump to periodically saturate the roots of his crops, saving “thousands of gallons of water,” he estimated. Although they may be more costly up-front, he sees such climate-friendly investments as a necessary expense — and more affordable than expanding his workforce of two.
It’s “much more efficient,” said Ford. “We’ve tried to figure out ‘How do we do it?’ with the least amount of adding labor.”
Jeremy Ford leans on the wheel of a tractor with automation in October 2024 on his farm in Homestead, Florida. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
A growing number of companies are bringing automation to agriculture. It could ease the sector’s deepening labor shortage, help farmers manage costs, and protect workers from extreme heat. Automation could also improve yields by bringing greater accuracy to planting, harvesting, and farm management, potentially mitigating some of the challenges of growing food in an ever-warmer world.
But many small farmers and producers across the country aren’t convinced. Barriers to adoption go beyond steep price tags to questions about whether the tools can do the jobs nearly as well as the workers they’d replace. Some of those same workers wonder what this trend might mean for them, and whether machines will lead to exploitation.
On some farms, driverless tractors churn through acres of corn, soybeans, lettuce, and more. Such equipment is expensive, and requires mastering new tools, but row crops are fairly easy to automate. Harvesting small, non-uniform and easily damaged fruits like blackberries, or big citruses that take a bit of strength and dexterity to pull off a tree, would be much harder.
That doesn’t deter scientists like Xin Zhang, a biological and agricultural engineer at Mississippi State University. Working with a team at Georgia Institute of Technology, she wants to apply some of the automation techniques surgeons use, and the object-recognition power of advanced cameras and computers, to create robotic berry-picking arms that can pluck the fruits without creating a sticky, purple mess.
The scientists have collaborated with farmers for field trials, but Zhang isn’t sure when the machine might be ready for consumers. Although robotic harvesting is not widespread, a smattering of products have hit the market, and can be seen working from Washington’s orchards to Florida’s produce farms.
Frank James, executive director of grassroots agriculture group Dakota Rural Action, grew up on a cattle and crop farm in northeastern South Dakota. His family once employed a handful of farmhands, but has had to cut back, due in part to the lack of available labor. Much of the work is now done by his brother and sister-in-law, while his 80-year-old father occasionally pitches in.
They swear by tractor autosteer, an automated system that communicates with a satellite to help keep the machine on track. But it can’t identify the moisture levels in the fields, which can hamstring tools or cause the tractor to get stuck, and it requires human oversight to work as it should. The technology also complicates maintenance. For these reasons, he doubts automation will become the “absolute” future of farm work.
“You build a relationship with the land, with the animals, with the place that you’re producing it. And we’re moving away from that,” said James.
Jake Klocke, of PowerPollen, prepares a pollen applicator in August 2024 near Ames, Iowa. Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
Tim Bucher was raised on a farm in Northern California and has worked in agriculture since he was 16. Dealing with weather issues like drought has always been a fact of life for him, but climate change has brought new challenges as temperatures regularly hit triple digits and blankets of smoke ruin entire vineyards.
The toll of climate change compounded by labor challenges inspired him to combine his farming experience with his Silicon Valley engineering and startup background to found AgTonomy in 2021. It works with equipment manufacturers like Doosan Bobcat to make automated tractors and other tools.
Since pilot programs started in 2022, Bucher says the company has been “inundated” with customers, mainly vineyard and orchard growers in California and Washington.
Those who follow the sector say farmers, often skeptical of new technology, will consider automation if it will make their business more profitable and their lives easier. Will Brigham, a dairy and maple farmer in Vermont, sees such tools as solutions to the nation’s agricultural workforce shortage.
“A lot of farmers are struggling with labor,” he said, citing the “high competition” with jobs where “you don’t have to deal with weather.”
Since 2021, Brigham’s family farm has been using Farmblox, an AI-powered farm monitoring and management system that helps them get ahead of issues like leaks in tubing used in maple production. Six months ago, he joined the company as a senior sales engineer to help other farmers embrace technology like it.
A PowerPollen pollen collector is driven through a cornfield near Ames, Iowa in August 2024. Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
Detasseling corn used to be a rite of passage in the Midwest. Teenagers would wade through seas of corn, removing tassels — the bit that looks like a yellow feather duster at the top of each stalk — to prevent unwanted pollination.
Extreme heat, drought, and intense rainfall have made this labor-intensive task even harder. And it’s now more often done by migrant farmworkers who sometimes put in 20-hour days to keep up. That’s why Jason Cope, co-founder of farm tech company PowerPollen, thinks it’s essential to mechanize arduous tasks like detasseling. His team created a tool a tractor can use to collect the pollen from male plants without having to remove the tassel. It can then be saved for future crops.
“We can account for climate change by timing pollen perfectly as it’s delivered,” he said. “And it takes a lot of that labor that’s hard to come by out of the equation.”
PowerPollen intern Evan Mark prepares a pollen applicator on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024 near Ames, Iowa. Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
PowerPollen intern Evan Mark prepares a pollen applicator, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, near Ames, Iowa. Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
Pollen is collected in a container after being removed from corn in a field, as seen on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, near Ames, Iowa. Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
The machine harvests corn tassel pollen, which collects in a container. Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
A corn tassel is visible in a PowerPollen corn field, as seen on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, near Ames, Iowa. Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
Erik Nicholson, who previously worked as a farm labor organizer and now runs Semillero de Ideas, a nonprofit focused on farmworkers and technology, said he has heard from farmworkers concerned about losing work to automation. Some have also expressed worry about the safety of working alongside autonomous machines, but are hesitant to raise issues because they fear losing their jobs. He’d like to see the companies building these machines, and the farm owners using them, put people first.
Luis Jimenez, a New York dairy worker, agrees. He described one farm using technology to monitor cows for sicknesses. Those kinds of tools can sometimes identify infections sooner than a dairy worker or veterinarian.
They also help workers know how the cows are doing, Jimenez said, speaking in Spanish. But they can reduce the number of people needed on farms and put extra pressure on the workers who remain, he said. That pressure is heightened by increasingly automated technology like video cameras used to monitor workers’ productivity.
Automation can be “a tactic, like a strategy, for bosses, so people are afraid and won’t demand their rights,” said Jimenez, who advocates for immigrant farmworkers with the grassroots organization Alianza Agrícola. Robots, after all, “are machines that don’t ask for anything,” he added. “We don’t want to be replaced by machines.”
Associated Press reporter Amy Taxin in Santa Ana, California, and Dorany Pineda in Los Angeles contributed to this report. Walling reported from Chicago and Horn-Muller reported from Homestead, Florida.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 24, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
The union representing striking Boeing employees announced late Wednesday that its members rejected a tentative labor contract in a strong majority vote, news that came less than two weeks after the company divulged plans to slash 10% of its workforce following years of aggressive spending on executive-enriching stock buybacks.
The tentative deal, which was announced by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) and Boeing over the weekend, included a 35% general wage increase spread over the duration of the four-year contract—short of the 40% pay boost the union initially demanded.
IAM said Wednesday that 64% of members who voted opted to reject the proposal—though the union did not immediately disclose turnout figures.
IAM District 751 president Jon Holden and IAM District W24 president Brandon Bryant said in a joint statement that “we will continue to negotiate in good faith until we have made gains that workers feel adequately make up for what the company took from them in the past.”
“After 10 years of sacrifices, we still have ground to make up, and we’re hopeful to do so by resuming negotiations promptly,” said Holden and Bryant. “This is workplace democracy—and also clear evidence that there are consequences when a company mistreats its workers year after year. Workers across America know what it’s like for a company to take and take—and Boeing workers are saying they are fully and strongly committed to balancing that out by winning back more of what was taken from them by the company for more than a decade.”
“Ten years of holding workers back unfortunately cannot be undone quickly or easily,” they added.
Brian Bryant, international president of IAM, expressed support for the districts’ fight for a just contract in response to news of the contract vote.
“The entire IAM union, all 600,000 members across North America, stand with our District 751 and W24 membership,” said Bryant. “Their fight is our fight—and we support their decision to continue this strike for fairness and dignity for Boeing workers.”
Day 41 – Strike Update October 23, 2024
Tonight, IAM District 751 and W2 Members voted by 64% to reject the company's latest offer and continue the current strike. Here are the remarks IAM District 751 President Jon Holden gave during the announcement.
The vote marked the second time Boeing union members have rejected a tentative contract deal since last month, when workers walked off the job after dismissing an offer that included a 25% pay raise over four years.
Reuters noted Wednesday that Boeing workers have been “venting frustration after a decade when their wages have lagged inflation and critics have complained that the planemaker spent tens of billions of dollars on share buybacks and paid out record executive bonuses.”
Between 2010 and 2019, Boeing spent an estimated $68 billion on stock buybacks and dividends. The company’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, is poised to bring in $22 million in total compensation next year.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement Wednesday that “while the recent tentative agreement from Boeing made important strides forward, it is clear from today’s vote that Boeing’s offer did not reach the demands of striking machinists.”
“Workers are recovering from years without pay increases, the decimation of their defined-benefit pension plans, and a previous management who did not respect them or even the quality of work,” said Jayapal. “Today’s vote makes it clear that Boeing still has more work to do to earn the trust of workers and to put more on the table for a fair contract.”
“I have been proud to stand with the machinists throughout the strike,” she added. “Every worker deserves fair pay, good benefits, and a safe workplace. I hope to see both parties come back to the table to negotiate a deal that is acceptable to the union, because at the end of the day there is no Boeing without the IAM.”
After 40 days on strike, 33,000 Machinists rejected an improved contract offer from Boeing by 64 percent on Wednesday. The offer included a 35 percent wage increase over 4 years. Members of Machinists (IAM) District 751 and District W24 build passenger jets and and freighters, including the 737, 767, and 777. Most work at Boeing’s huge factories at Everett and Renton, Washington.
Every election year many of the U.S. trade unions scramble – or stumble – into action to elect “labor’s friends”. More likely they are involved mostly to try to stop those bent on liquidation of the unions, always the greatest part of the motivation to mobilize voters. Identifying the sworn foes of the union movement is not that difficult today – these forces openly declare their hatred of unions. As best expressed by the pathologic opposition shown toward the unions by most of the Republican Party elected officialdom today.
So far as picking friends, and then hanging the trade union seal of approval on them, the labor movement repeats year after year every imaginable “lesser-evil” decision-making gymnastics. Decade after decade this bar for support has been lowered by the unions, paralleling the slow but steady capture of the labor officialdom by the Democratic Party apparatus. Merely recognizing the very existence of the unions, or at best making fuzzy promises are all that’s required for Democrats to win labor’s political support. Track records of candidates are rarely – or selectively – kept, and the failure or refusal to deliver on promises by a candidate is almost never grounds for excommunication on labor’s part.
Dangerous Man-made Fog
Outside observers of labor’s political action processes are frequently confused or mystified. But this should come as little surprise, since the bulk of the union activists – and certainly the membership – would likewise be unsure of what exactly is going on. As the unions are systematically assaulted by corporations and governments, frequently shrink as a result, and are blocked by corporate lawlessness from growing and rebuilding, the political and electoral union decision making and implementation becomes more and more clouded and obscured. In a labor movement predominantly “led” by administrators and not authentic labor leaders, the already warped political environment is destined for further distortion under these conditions.
Few Choices Allowed
An assessment of labor’s political action, its methodology, its outcomes, and its challenges must begin with the incredibly limited choices that are permitted in the first place. With virtually all political direction being supplied to the unions today via the Democratic Party and its operatives, all independent thinking or third parties are routinely banned from any consideration of labor’s support.
Even at the lowest electoral levels the Democratic Party machinery seeks out and squashes all political thinking outside the “box” of mainstream Democratic policy and practice. A glance at the documented roster of attacks meted-out to any challengers of the two-party setup is chronicled in detailed fashion at Ballot Access News. It is imperative to recognize that the failure of virtually any independent political alternatives to develop and take root in the labor movement is not just a freak accident, or the result of no base of support for them, it is the result of systematic interference and opposition to it by all levels of the Democratic Party. This lack of alternative political forces for labor has dramatically accelerated the decline of the labor movement.
Occasionally, unions still experiment with support for Republicans – as they are the only other party allowed in the corrupt two-party ”system” embraced by labor. But this phenomenon has been reduced in recent decades as the Republican Party has moved ever rightward. When left-of-center Democrats do emerge within the Democratic Party, the unions are advised by these outside guiding forces to be “realistic” and avoid any left taint. Few other choices exist in this barren political wasteland.
If left-leaning Democrats do manage to build some support among the unions they will still face an all-out assault by the Democratic Party apparatus. Only left elements are to be feared, and always opposed. Pro-business, right-leaning and outright reactionary Democrats are reflexively supported by their Party officialdom. Unelectable but politically “safe” candidates are often supported by this machinery with upstarts and progressives routinely confronted with Democratic Party operatives working to oppose and defund their campaigns. Only Democrats acceptable to the party machinery enjoy full support.
DNC Incorporated
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is the leadership group governing and controlling much of the party apparatus, and it maintains an extensive focus on the trade unions. It is a multi-billion dollar corporate-type organism comprising many different sections. The overwhelming majority of DNC and wider Party funding originates with the corporate and wealthy donors. The unions do possess a coveted resource base of hundreds of millions dollars in political funds along with tens of thousands paid staff who can be press-ganged into supporting Democrats at all levels. The DNC resource universe also includes many thousands of functionaries from DNC-controlled consulting companies and non-profits, along with supplementary staff from elected lawmakers and lower level organizations.
This “DNC Incorporated” reality is little known or understood, although the union membership pays a steep price. These elements systematically influence and interfere in union affairs, play favorites in internal union elections, and sometimes profit handsomely from various consulting contracts with the unions. Staff are exchanged among the unions and the wider DNC operations, leading to diluted union loyalty at minimum. Meddling within the unions by the Democratic Party takes many forms and fringes on outright corruption at times. Jobs and perks for family, friends, and cronies, an endless stream of VIP trips and photo-ops, posh dinners and cocktail parties are all offered to a union “leadership” willing to play politics at the expense of their own members.
Air Force One
As recently as the Clinton Administration, it was a common – but true – cliché among the Washington, D.C., trade union leaders and functionaries that the “price” for union support from a Democratic President was nothing more than a luxury ride on Air Force One for the union leader. Continuing a long tradition going back to the days when travel was done by presidential train, union leaders by the score then gathered family and paid flunkeys to all hop-on and “enjoy the ride”. Photo-ops were of course abundant, where union photographers snapped streams of publicity stills to show the rank-and-file the importance and status of their union leaders riding on the “Presidential special”.
But during the Clinton Administration the overall political standing of labor was steadily reduced by the White House and the DNC apparatus, with this high-profile practice nearly abolished today. This symbolic demotion of labor by the Democrats leaves more room today on Air Force One for large donors and business leaders, reflecting the increasingly taken-for-granted status of the labor movement. Rather than labor leaders jet-setting on Air Force One with the President, current labor bigs are instead relegated to attending contrived meetings with White House staff. Or taking seats at luxurious dinners and receptions where at best they can quickly shake hands with the President and exchange a mere few words.
Gone are the days when labor leaders would participate in serious conferences at the White House with the President and his staff, sometimes from both parties, where serious situations were deliberated, and sometimes even significant demands were made of the President on all manner of trade union issues. The unions have today been reduced to mere props for the DNC operation, and to visually reinforce the subordinated status of labor for all onlookers. Some of today’s labor leaders live for the rare photo-op with a President or Cabinet member, to see it splashed on Facebook or in the occasional union publication. All presumably to prove the important standing of the leader.
O’Brien and His Polls
The recent flap over Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and his refusal to support a presidential endorsement of either Harris or Trump showcased another crisis for organized labor. A social media firestorm was unleashed by Teamsters and outsiders, all weighing-in with opinions on the merits and demerits of the O’Brien decision. But one of the primary points was lost in the momentary bedlam. Few know that union after union repeatedly poll their own membership to ascertain their political opinions. The goal being for the union “leaders” to safely support only those candidates and issues which a majority of their membership already supports. There is no political education associated with this process. There is no role here for authentic labor leadership. Most unions long ago abandoned internal trade union education, including political education, increasingly shrinking away from any discussion of difficult questions like political candidate choices and broad political positions.
This near-total abdication of the responsibility of union leaders to actually “lead” on the political front is one of the most disastrous crises now debilitating the labor movement. Real political debate and decision making are replaced with feelgood campaigns, inane pronouncements, mindless slogans, and polls commissioned by a leadership seeking “which way the wind is blowing” among their membership. O’Brien’s handling of this situation lacked any substantial discussion or facts, and his decision and methods both likely left all sides unhappy. This momentary heartburn for O’Brien of course masks the historically opportunistic basis for much of this union’s political strategy over the decades, a legacy that he is all-too eager to revisit.
Opportunism Replaces Education
This tail-the-members style of political action is all too common in the labor movement. It is on its face an absurd style of operation, given that the responsibility of the union leadership is to actually lead, and not merely trail behind the perceived opinions of the membership. In the case of the recent Teamster kerfuffle it also masks the political opportunism of much of that union’s leadership, who want only to endorse the winner of the presidential election in November. Hoping for favors of some kind from either Harris or Trump, whoever wins, this strategy has been revealed repeatedly as a monumental failure.
The 1980 endorsement by the Teamsters of anti-union bigot Ronald Reagan remains the pinnacle of rank opportunism on labor’s political front. Hoping only to curry favor with Reagan as a means to avoid a federal criminal investigation of the entire leadership of the union, the gifting of the union’s endorsement to Reagan ended in humiliation and debacle. Lesser versions of this political horse-trading by union “leaders” continue today. Ultimately, it is an embarrassment that any union would have to poll its own members to determine the thinking of the membership, and it likewise is dangerous to promote this herd mentality. Adherence to real trade union principles is not easy today as all outside forces act to draw the members into the employer way of thinking. Trade union leadership must confront and counteract this, and certainly must not encourage more of this failed political drift.
The unions have for many decades faced a dire need to once again engage the membership in real trade union education, grappling with controversial subjects a part of that. Labor history revealing to members the heroic foundation of their unions, their militant beginnings in many cases, recognition of the class struggle reality today, and a serious discussion of alternatives to both our political and economic systems are all in order. Recipients of labor’s votes, money, and logistical support must also be held to account, with the unions willing to walk away rather than endorse and fund barely worthwhile candidates. An end must be put to the frequent labor support issued to obviously unfit candidates, usually pro-business Democrats and those who seek labor’s support in return for nothing – or almost nothing. Ultimately, a sound regimen of support for an independent course of action is required so as to break free from the control of “DNC Incorporated”.
More and More Cash
Suffocating the entire political operation of the labor movement today is the question of financial contributions for the legions of mostly Democrats who chase after the unions as if they were ATM machines. These sums routinely now exceed more that one billion dollars in a national electoral cycle, and when the many hidden financial supports offered by the unions are taken in to account the amount is likely more than twice that much. Democrats today obtain the vast majority of these funds from the pockets of the rank-and-file membership – but with all decisions determining its distribution decided by union leaders based almost exclusively on their personal direction.
While political fundraising is certainly a necessary reality, the monies when collected are often secreted away by union leaderships who offer few if any reports to the membership about where the contributions and expenditures have been made. This scandalous situation must be ended, with all participants in union political fundraising provided with a full accounting of how much was raised, from which parts of the unions, and then followed with detailed and verified reports of just exactly which candidates were supported and what other spending was completed. These gigantic political funds are too easily converted to private slush funds in the sole control of union leaders. In such a situation the domination of the Democratic Party over the union officialdom allows for ample opportunities for union monies being applied to unproductive or even counterproductive purposes.
Sobering Reality Today
The once deep wells of progressive and sometimes leftwing political principles, practices, and beliefs among layers of the union leadership and membership have largely dried up, or been deliberately drained. This spreading political desert covering the unions is largely ignored until election time, when Democrats come out of the woodwork looking for money, volunteers, and huge numbers of votes from the embattled union garrisons. The unions frequently deliver all this dutifully, receiving at best an uneven and sporadic “return” for their immense efforts and expense. Vast opportunities exist to mobilize the membership with authentic campaigns of worthwhile political education, but are instead supplanted by hollow, low calorie political sloganeering and mindless cheerleading for Democrats regardless of their quality.
Political Action or Playing Politics?
Legendary founding UE leader James Matles — UE, The Union for Everyone | Members Run This Union — commented in the late 1960’s to a UE Convention delegate who had asked him “What’s wrong with labor’s political action?” Matles calmly observed that when the UE was founded, in its early years, the general labor movement leadership viewed political action as a negotiation with the politicians, with exact commitments being won as the price of the unions support. The political goal was to win tangible gains for union members broadly, as well as for the working class as a whole. He said, “When we conducted our political work back then you could see air between the bellies of the union leaders and the politicians.” But later, as the union movement grew, became wealthy, became infected with reactionary employer principles, and eventually was split by corporate and business union forces, Matles observed that “Today there’s no air anymore. You can’t see through. Their bellies are touching, and they are no longer engaging in political action, they are playing politics. That’s what they are doing today, they are playing politics.” A return to principled left trade union political action is in order, and only such a return can arrest the political decline that has delivered our labor movement to the brink of ruin.
Janine Jackson: One of the weirdest and most harmful things so-called mainstream news media do is to take concerns, social problems, experiences, hardships—and reduce them to “electoral issues,” meaningful solely to the extent that candidates talk about them, and defined in terms of what they say—rather than starting with people, and our lives, and judging candidates based on whether their proposed responses are grounded and 
