Factually! with Adam Conover - Is The Labor Movement Failing? with Hamilton Nolan

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

The labor movement is in a state of flux. Support for unions is the highest it's been in decades, including the explict support of the Biden administration, yet actual union membership has plummeted to a historical low. With only 10% of the workforce unionized, is the labor movement missing its best chance to organize more workers? This week Adam sits with Hamilton Nolan, labor journalist and author of The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor, to reconcile the popular support of unions with the grim reality of declining membership. They discuss what led to the current moment we find ourselves in, and the best strategies for workers to find solidarity no matter their trade. Find Hamilton's book at at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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That's okay I don't know anything Hello and welcome to Facts Early. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. So, what the hell is going on in the American labor movement? On the one hand, news seems really good. Americans are more supportive of unions than they have been in my entire life.

66% of Americans say they approve of unions. You have to go back to the 1960s to find a number that high. And I saw this up close and personal last year because the public came out of the woodwork to support the writers and actors during our strikes. It was awesome and inspiring and spoke to a latent desire in the public to step up and do the same thing

in their own workplaces. The labor movement also benefits from the explicit support of the Biden administration. You know, it might seem normal or not that big of a deal, but a president speaking up for organized labor, joining workers on the picket line is not something that has happened for literal decades. And having the National Labor Relations Board, an extremely important government institution

led by people who actually believe that institution should fight on behalf of workers or should frankly exist at all is huge and historic, creating an environment where unions have a chance to grow for the first time in many years. But while public and political support for unions is peaking, actual union membership tells a much different story. In fact, the rate of union membership fell to a historical low last year of just 10 percent of workers. So what the hell is going on?

Is all of this positive news a mirage? And who is to blame for organized labor's inability to take advantage of this moment? Well, to answer that question, we have an amazing guest who is one of the foremost labor reporters in this country today. But before we get to that interview, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all the conversations we bring you every single week, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover to join our community of interesting people who love learning about the world and complaining about how fucked up it is.

We'd love to have you there. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And of course, if you wanna come see me on the road doing standup comedy, head to adamconover.net for all my tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to this week's guest. Hamilton Nolan is by far one of the best labor journalists working today.

You can read him at In These Times, The Guardian, and his own newsletter, How Things Work. His recent book, which I learned so much from, is called The Hammer, Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Please welcome Hamilton Nolan. Hamilton, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me, man.

This is your second time on the show, I believe. Maybe third, no, second. Second, yes. Second time. Really thrilled to have you here. You're one of our foremost labor reporters. You have a new book out. So let's start here. Why is it that at the labor movement's

sort of height of popularity, I'm getting fucking three million views on every single video I do about this minor entertainment industry kerfuffle. People are obsessed with labor, yet unions are at their lowest peak, lowest point ever for membership. Why is that?

Yeah, good question. And that's kind of what my book is about. The big answer is unions are at a low point of membership because that's what capital wants. They want to step on the neck of working people and crush the power of unions, the strongest thing that working people have going for them. And that's been going on for 60, 70 years or more. Also, part of the reason is that the labor movement itself has gotten perhaps a little bit lazy, a little bit institutional,

a little bit used to being beaten down over those decades and decades and decades. And the labor movement has not done a great job of facing up to the power of capital in the long run. And so that kind of duality, it is certainly primarily the fault of corporate America that unions are weak because corporate America has been undertaken a very purposeful attempt

to kill unions for more than a century now. And really as long as unions have existed, that's capitalism for you. But also we in the labor movement and you're a part of the labor movement also, we have to accept our share of responsibility too, that we have to take seriously our job to give unions to everybody.

And there's a lot more that we can do with that. So let's start with the corporate piece of it first, like how has corporate America waged this war against labor? Well, if you look back at the 20th century, the history of labor in America and labor power, unions got stronger up through the thirties, twenties and thirties. There were big, huge fights. I mean, there were really literal wars, you know, shooting wars in America to establish

union rights in a lot of places. Labor got very powerful through World War II, after World War II. It was so powerful that the force of capital got scared, essentially, past a law called the Taft-Hartley Act, 1947, which rolled back a lot of the power and restricted a lot of the power of organized labor in America.

This is a law that, like, union people are still mad about, like, literally, I have union lawyers, like like fucking tapped Hartley. Anti-labor, it's a hundred years old. Right, 77 years now, and we're still complaining about it. Yeah. But that sort of started, union power in America peaked in the mid 1950s.

One in three American workers was a union member and it's been going down ever since. Now it's one in 10. And throughout the 60s and 70s and 80s, corporate America really professionalized the practice of union busting, the practice of dissuading employees from unionizing, essentially lying and scaring working people

out of unionizing, combined with legal restrictions on the ability of unions to organize and strike and combined really particularly starting with Reagan, you know, with a political program that was really designed to unleash the power of corporate America and rein in the power of the working class. Yeah.

And sort of that combination of things has been really successful over the past 60, 70 years in driving the power unions down to where it is today. When you say they've professionalized preventing workers from joining unions, from dissuading them, what kind of tactics are you talking about? So I mean, anywhere if you work in a Walmart, for example, and you decide you want to unionize, the company will parachute in a professional team of union busters.

There are consulting firms that do this. Big companies spend millions and millions of dollars on this stuff. They legally have to report it. So we know how much they spend. We know Amazon just spent $3 million last year, union busting. They bring in a team of people. They will have what are called captive audience meetings, which means a mandatory meeting for you and everybody at work, where somebody will stand up and lie to you about how bad unions are.

These professional consultants essentially know how to lie and stay just on the right side of the law. So maybe not a legally liable lie, but telling workers, you know, things like a union is here to take your dues money. A union is an outside party that will get between you and the manager. There's like a very common list of things that union busters say. I mean, I can almost recite them in my sleep. And it's interesting as a labor reporter, because you can see the most high end company and compare it to Walmart and Amazon. And the union busting lies are exactly the same.

The script is really the same from top to bottom. And it's all about trying to convince workers not to get more power than they already have. Yeah, and there are entire law firms, their entire business is fighting against unionization. They're extremely sophisticated at it. But I think you'd probably argue that the labor movement has not become as professional and sophisticated as organizing,

like that in the arms race, the unions are not winning. Right. You know, organized labor, structurally speaking, is the counterbalance to the power of capital, right? So labor, in a sense, for everything to be in balance in our economic system and our political system, you want labor to be as strong, at least as strong as capital, ideally stronger. And when you think about what capital means in the United States of America and in global capitalism, I mean, companies that are worth a trillion dollars, two trillion dollars, that's like the Amazons of the world. These are the companies that we in the labor movement have to deal with. And then when you look at the labor movement,

it's infinitely smaller than that. It's to a large extent is like, not quite volunteers, but sort of young people who believe in this stuff. And there's a lot of spirit and there's a lot of enthusiasm in the labor movement, but there's no way that you can hold up the resources of organized labor next to the resources of companies. I mean, even in the writers guild, you know,

in our battle with these, you know, CEOs that we won, you know, I was on the negotiating committee and at some point I'm sitting around going like, hold on a second. It's just like me, a bunch of writers like Ellen, Lisa, like it's like we got, you know, there's like 50 people on our side, more than that, but you know, something like that versus, you know, David Zaslav, all the people working for him, Ted Sarandos, all the people working for him, right? It's like, you're feeling, oh, we're really a ragtag kind of group and we're the most successful at this.

You know, we had a big victory. A lot of other unions do more with less. Right. Yeah, I mean, there were probably individual CEOs in that room who could have written a check to settle the whole strike themselves out of their own bank account, and the whole thing would have been over.

So yeah, it does drive home like the disparities between workers and bosses in terms of how much we're dealing with here. And companies, you'll see companies regularly spend more money fighting their unions than they would have spent to settle a contract with their union. I mean, I've learned like companies don't wanna give workers money, but ultimately they'll give you money

before they'll give you power. They really don't wanna give you power and they will spend a shitload of money to not give you that power. And why is that? Because the power is the goal for them or is it that they know that if you have power, that leaves you even more money?

I think it's both, but yeah, power, they don't know what you'll do with the power. So it scares them. I mean, they don't wanna have to listen to you. They want total control. They will, you'll see when you negotiate contract, and you've been in the room negotiating those contracts, they'll fight over the money,

but they will ultimately grant you the money before they'll grant you more control over what the business does. And there's an entire legal section in union contracts called management rights that they invented solely for the purpose of being like, we reserve the right to run this company and you can't. And I've seen that happen in negotiations

where the company will say, okay, we'll give you the money, but we want the power to change your working conditions at any time, hire or fire you or whatever. And all this stuff where, whoa, I don't wanna give you all that power. Like they say, oh, I'll give you money, but I want more power in return. Right, companies want workers to be a slot in a spreadsheet.

They want labor to be an entry in a spreadsheet and they don't want it to be a slot in a spreadsheet. They want labor to be an entry in a spreadsheet and they don't want it to be a wild card that might tell them or do anything in particular. Or worse, people, they don't want it to be, they want it to be a slot in a spreadsheet, not a person who has power who they have to listen to. Yes, they want it to be a cost in a ledger that can be minimized and that's pretty much it.

Okay, but if we look at historically, this decline and the company's getting more sophisticated, since Reagan, a lot of people date it to Reagan becoming president as like when this really kicked into overdrive and when the decline happened, what prevented the unions from ramping up to meet the moment when, there's one of the most powerful movements

in America. Yeah. As you said, extremely powerful politically. Yeah. You know, labor ran many cities in the country, et cetera, et cetera. You know, huge reserves of money, at least compared to a lot of other, you know,

nonprofit or sort of social justice organizations. So what explains the slide, apart from all the bad shit that these companies were doing? Right. You know, there's a few things. I mean, when unions were very powerful in America, they became powerful institutions. And like all powerful institutions, they were, you know, some of them fell prey to the things

that corrupt powerful institutions, the mob, and, you know, the corruption of unions, the institutionalization of unions, and losing that vision of themselves as a social movement as compared to just sort of a institution that functions like a business. And when Reagan came in, he famously fired the air traffic controllers

who were on strike, the Patco strike it's called. And when he did that, it really put a lot of fear into the union world that lasted for decades. I mean, people who are around and working in the union world at that time will tell you for 10, 20, 30 years after that, people got scared to strike,

everybody pulled back and the entire sort of labor movement became more conservative as a result of that. And why was that particular strike? I know it was so important, but what about this particular, because other strikes have been broken, other strikes have lost. What made this one so different?

You know, this was a strike that, I think what made it different was that people didn't think that Reagan would fire them. I mean, the calculation that went into those air traffic controllers striking illegally, as a starting point is that you're not gonna get fired. If you think of anybody who strikes illegally, think of the teacher strikes that went on five

or six years ago, the teachers will strike, but part of the calculation going into the decision to go on strike is that they're not actually gonna fire us. You know, they need us. And so when Reagan did fire those air traffic controllers, it really signaled that he was gonna take a much more cutthroat attitude with respect to labor. And also, you know, it's signaled also to corporate America that it was open season on unions.

Right, because if they do the same thing to their employees, the government is not gonna come to the employee's rescue. In fact, the government is doing this shit itself. Right, it makes a difference if you know that the federal government has your back or doesn't have your back. Right.

And, you know, right now, Got it. Union, it's easier for unions to feel, for example, like the Biden administration has the back of unions primarily, but in the case of race, Right. And right now, Got it. It's easier for unions to feel, for example, like the Biden administration has the back of unions primarily, but in the case of Reagan, obviously that was the ultimate in the other extreme of having corporate America's back deregulation,

all that stuff went along with that anti-labor attitude. Yeah, the government not only doesn't have the workers back, they're willing to risk fucking up the entire transportation infrastructure of the country just to prove a point that they don't have the workers back. That's a big signal. The institutional position of the Republican party, definitely since the Reagan era,

has been that unions shouldn't exist for the most part, except police unions possibly, which are a Republican constituency. But the Republican party does not want unions to exist and will do everything that they possibly can legally, not just to restrict the power of unions, but if they could outlaw unions, I guarantee they would pass that law in one second.

So I mean, that is the stakes, that's the stakes. And it's pretty high stakes. And there are tons of states across the country that you've seen over and over again where Republican governors will pass laws that crush unions, particularly public sector unions, and they'll carve out police unions. It's nasty, man. Well, so I imagine under that assault, my guess is a lot of unions would become like more conservative, more like less,

hey, let's make less waves. Let's just try to cut a deal. Let's do things sort of by the book and not be as willing to like start shit and organize new workers. Yeah. I mean, and obviously there are exceptions, but yes, as a sort of big picture model of what the labor movement was doing over those decades, you know, it was definitely an instinct to pull in and protect what they have. Protect what they have, which amounted to being on a shrinking island,

you know, is how I think of it. It's, you're on an island and the water is rising. And the case of unions, that means that your membership is declining slowly, slowly, slowly over time. And the impulse is to protect, protect, protect what we have rather than having that realization that we need to bust out of this.

We need to get out and grow our membership or else we're gonna decline into nothing. Well, because even if you stay still, the number of people in the country is growing, the economy is growing, new jobs are being added. You need to be unionizing new people or you will become smaller as a percentage. And that means your power goes down.

Like if you're the UAW and you're like, okay, we got all the workers in Detroit, but then some company opens a plant in some other state and it's non-union workers, then the car industry is a little bit less dependent on unionized workers. It means you have less power. That's right.

I mean, every union, all unions have to grow with the economy, exactly what you said. I mean, you can look at our union, the Writers Guild, look at media, which is a fast changing industry. There's a union called the News Guild, which is a great union, but they had print media for a long time, newspapers and magazines, and that's what they saw themselves as doing.

And when the online media rose up, which is the industry I was working in, the News Guild didn't really try to organize it because they saw that as something outside of what they did. And then the Writers Guild came in and said, hey, we're gonna organize that. And that's how they got a bunch of online media members. But, you know, it's just an example of like unions thinking, this isn't our industry,

instead of thinking like we have to be wherever the economy's going. Well, and the idea of print journalists thinking this isn't our industry, instead of thinking like we have to be wherever the economy's going. And the idea of print journalists looking at online journalism and saying, that's a different industry, we don't need to cover that. Now it's been over 10 years, that's obviously ridiculous because it's obviously the same industry.

And you could look at the entertainment industry the same way, if we were sitting around going, I mean, part of my work as a union activist is to be like, we need to get this shit covered because if we sit around and go, well, that's a different YouTube or whatever is a different world from us. I'm like, hey, my whole part of the industry,

late night, you know, that sketch comedy, stuff like that, it's all on YouTube, dropout, online services. And like eventually we're gonna need to cover these things or else we're gonna see those like take over and we'll be the little, you know, on the little island. Yeah, and you know, you know, this is one of the flaws of the craft union model is that the craft union model traditionally takes a very specific view

of like what we cover, you know, we cover screenwriters who write for film and television period, and this is what we do. I mean, our union is a bad example because we were organizing union and we do a lot mean, our union's a bad example because we're an organizing union and we do a lot of good things. So I'm not trying to- We're a bad example of a bad type of union.

Right, right. Or type of union you disagree with. But the philosophy is very inflexible versus the view of like all of the workers of the world are our responsibility and let's look at our industry and let's look at what's adjacent to our industry. Let's look at where our industry is going, where it's moving and always try to be ahead of that.

So let's get into this ideological difference a little bit because look, on my platforms, I have been boosting unions so much and the labor movement and my audience enjoys it and there's a lot of talk, especially during the strikes last year, during what the UAW and the Teamsters are doing, there's been so much support, but there hasn't been a lot of talk, especially during the strikes last year, during the, you know, what the UAW and the Teamsters are doing, there's been so much support, but there hasn't been a lot of discussion in the public

about, you know, what are the differences between unions? What are the approaches that they take? What are the ideologies or philosophies that they have and which are more or less successful, which are conservative, which are progressive, et cetera. And so I'd love, you know, for our advanced audience who is really following this stuff and is ready to go past 101 into 201.

What are some of the differences between how unions think about their membership, organizing, negotiating with the companies, et cetera? Yeah, well, for the sort of the whole history of unions in America, you can go back 100 years and they were still having the same debate. You know, there's two sort of general philosophies, the craft union model, which is the theory that you organize highly skilled workers and that's how you build power.

You get very highly skilled workers and often they're called guilds, like the writers guild. And then there's another vision, industrial unionism, which is, hey, we need to organize all the workers and that's how you get power. And so the push and pull between those two philosophies kind of defined a lot of the battles within the labor movement for the whole 20th century and still today.

Now, how's that manifest within individual unions? A lot of it really depends on who's running the union at any given time. You can look at a union like the UAW, it's an auto workers union. And yet they have tens of thousands of grad students and grad student workers in the union. What do grad student workers have to do

with auto workers? Nothing, you know, but it's a union with the philosophy of organizing. Yeah. You know, it's a union that said, our job is to organize unions. At some point, some grad students came to them and said, hey, we want to start a union.

They said, you know what? Our job is to represent workers. And we got some workers here who we think we can organize. Let's do it. Exactly. So people in the labor movement who have that philosophy, you'll see a lot of unions that sort of pick up

all these different industries. And a lot of it is because of just that, people come knocking on the door, people want a union. I mean, I'm a labor journalist and for years I've had people emailing me, just regular people all over the country being like, I work at a Best Buy in Colorado and I wanna unionize. How can I do it?

And I would try to track down a union organizer in their area for them to talk to. And it's hard, man. It was hard. And some unions were just not interested in that at all. And other unions would be very interested in it. So over time, you kind of see the differences of those philosophies and a lot of it just comes down to who the people are working at the unions and running the unions in particular. Yeah. I mean, I've seen that happen here in Hollywood. There

are a lot of people in Hollywood who don't have unions, choreographers, production assistants, music supervisors, I got on the list, there's a lot more. And there's a lot of organized groups who are trying to get those workers into unions. And the first thing they do is they go shop around and they go to all the different, they go to IOTC and the Teamsters and the Writers Guild

and say, hey, will you guys take us on? And sometimes the answer is yes, but sometimes the answer is no. And it's not always for a bad reason, but it depends on the ideology that the union has and the logistics of if they think they can serve the people well. And it's easy to see the drawback, right?

Because if you're a new group of workers that doesn't have a union and you start to go to unions with that craft union philosophy, and every one of them is like, you're not what we do, you're not what we do, you're not what we do. It's like, where does that leave you? It leaves you nowhere as the new workers. And you can try to start your own union,

but that's a harder road. Very hard to start a new union. And historically, the unions that did have a strong industrial union philosophy, like the United Mine Workers, for example, back in the 30s, when they launched the CIO, those were the unions that were funding new unions in other industries.

So the mine workers were helping the steel workers to start their own union. That's the kind of like build up philosophy that made the labor movement powerful in the first place. But it's also, I look at it from the position of the unions too, and serving on the board of a union currently, you're keenly aware that your first duty is to your members

who elected you or who hired you to be on the staff and whose dues pay for your salary or for the building that you're in and everything that you do. And it can be tricky sometimes to say, like, hey, let's spend those resources on people who are not in the union, as opposed to people who are.

There is a natural incentive to sort of focus on your folks. How do you think about that? Yeah, every union is funded by the dues paid by the existing members. So there is always a pressure to cater to existing members first. And of course, you know, unions have to serve their existing members. That is a big core function of what you use. I mean, that's what we're here for, right? The union is made up of the existing members.

It is literally an organization for them. Yeah. But, you know, it's like food and water serving the current members and organizing new members. You have to do both. You know, you cannot, you can't be like, I'm just going to eat food and not drink water. Yeah.

You'll die. And that's how it is for unions too. You know, you have to do both. You must always be organizing new members and unions have to keep that in mind. It shouldn't be, it is not an optional thing. And the, you know, the tendency or the temptation of unions to just think of serving current members

as our job and sort of leave the new organizing off to the side is how we got here from one in three workers to one in 10 workers. You know, that direction will inevitably take us down. Like we all have to take the responsibility of organizing new workers also. Well, in this book, you profile a lot of really extraordinary efforts to organize new workers

under like really difficult circumstances. And part of the problem, by the way, is that organizing workers who are not in a union to eventually be in one is one of the hardest things you can possibly do. It's like up there with winning an election for the first time, maybe, or might even be harder than that.

So just tell us some of those stories. Because I mean, I've read the book, it's incredible. So these stories are out of this world. Just share a couple with us. You know, one really inspiring campaign that I write about in the book was the campaign to organize the childcare workers right here in the state of California.

This campaign went on for 20 years, 20 years before it was successful. And it was multiple unions that came together and said, we want to unionize in-home childcare workers. So these are people who take care of kids in their own house, low-income kids. So these are people who are getting paid by the state, a subsidy by the state to take care of poor working

people's kids in their house. There was 40,000 workers like that in the state of California. When you think about trying to unionize a group like that, they're all separate, right? They're all sort of their own separate little business. This is literally like a lady who is at home all day and they need some extra income for the house

and she's watching other people's kids. Exactly. And it's like, okay, I'm gonna become a childcare worker and I watch Franny's and Mary's kids and I's like, okay, I'm gonna become a childcare worker. And I watch Branny's and Mary's kids and I get a little money from the state. And I've never even talked to anyone else about this. Yeah, exactly. And very common for these to be immigrant women,

women of color, tons of different nationalities, tons of different languages. So a huge task to organize this group of people. And also it was illegal for that group of workers to collectively bargain in the state of California. It was not legal for that to happen. So was it specifically illegal for that type of worker or was it a classification issue?

It was the fact that they were considered independent contractors, right? So independent contractors cannot collectively bargain by law. So when the union said we want to unionize this group of people, they had to get that law changed in the state of California. And that took 20 years. And it kept getting vetoed over and over again by a series of governors.

And the whole time they're having to go to this group of workers and be like, keep coming to Sacramento, keep coming to Sacramento for this fight, keep coming up here to lobby, keep coming to the rallies, keep doing this. And these people were doing it for 20 years purely on the faith that they would succeed, which they finally did. They got Gavin Newsom to change the law and now they have successfully unionized this 40,000 strong group of workers in California and won a contract. So it's like, it's such an amazing example of what can be done when unions have the vision,

the scale to do something big. And also from the perspective of the workers is really incredible when you think about what these women did who work extremely hard all day for very low pay to then also in their spare time, organize and build this union. for very low pay to then also in their spare time, organize and build this union. And also to do work, they're doing work in their homes often.

That is like a kind of work that is really real but is like really historically devalued in the US. Incredible. And during the pandemic, this group of workers in home childcare workers truly kept the country from falling apart because everybody in America who was deemed an essential worker had to put their kids somewhere

if they were gonna keep on working. So if these childcare workers had stopped working, everything would have fallen apart because nobody could have gone to work, everybody would have had to stay home with their kids. So they were kind of like a key piece of infrastructure in this country keeping us together during the pandemic. And many of them got sick.

And so they're extremely deserved. It's hard for me to think of anybody more deserving of a good union contract than these women who do this kind of work. So that's like one of the great, most inspiring profiles I wrote. Let me just ask you before you move on, how did they organize them, right?

Again, you're talking about 40,000 women who are working in their own homes, maybe a couple know each other, but they don't have a, they're not getting together for a convention every year and at a Javits Center somewhere. So how did they organize them? Yeah, it was really a huge task.

This was the United Domestic Workers and SEIU together. So multiple unions coming together, they kind of divided up the state between them. And the organizing, I remember speaking to one of the leaders at the United Domestic Workers in San Diego, and she was talking about just what it took to organize the childcare providers in that area. And she just started naming the languages that they spoke.

And it was like, okay, if we want to organize these workers, we got to have somebody who speaks Vietnamese, somebody who speaks Russian, you know, somebody Ukrainian, somebody from Thailand, somebody from Mexico, like, just the breadth of it was incredible. So I mean, the answer is just hard work,

hard, hard work. And again, like having that buy-in from the workers, it's not like just outsiders came in and did this, this was like spread through the childcare providers themselves. And the same women who, I interviewed a woman right here in LA who had taught many other women in her own neighborhood

the business of childcare. So she had kind of seeded a bunch of other businesses around her just because she's a nice person. But that came in handy for the union organizing because then when it's time to union organize, all right, she's the one who knows all these people. That's the type of person an organizer looks for. Who's the leader, who knows everybody else

and who's down with this. But I mean, 40,000 workers, that's 40,000 individual conversations or really 80 or 120,000 because you gotta talk to people more than once. And actually talking to those people and saying, hey, here's what we're actually trying to do. We actually need you on board.

Like it's not just sign a petition. It is like, we need you in the movement and individually convincing or helping those people understand. Yeah, and like to get an idea of how much they believed in that, you know, thousands of those people were paying dues to that union,

even before it was a union, you know, even in the years when they had not gotten the law changed, you know, they still got thousands of those women to be dues paying members of that organization to fund it, you know, they still got thousands of those women to be dues paying members of that organization, to fund it, you know, to keep it strong. And like that level of belief is really humbling. That's especially for folks who are probably not making a lot of money.

Absolutely. To chip into an organization that says, hey, in 20 years, maybe we'll have gotten through step two or three of our plan to get you a contract. And so what did they win? Do you remember any of the benefits from their contract, like what these workers have now? Yeah, so they, I mean, it's gonna be a process, right?

Building that contract from zero up to something great is gonna be a process that will probably take decades as well, but what they started with, you know, is trying to get healthcare funds for these workers, getting PPE for the workers, getting training funds for the workers. And one of the most important things is that, you know, these women get paid by the state, right?

They get paid a state subsidy to take care of low income working people's kids. And what blew me away was that the way that the state figures out how much to pay them is it does a survey to kind of figure out how much it costs them to take care of the kids. And then it, it sets the pay at less than a hundred percent of the survey. So literally the state of California finds out how much it costs these women to provide childcare, and then it says, all right, the pay is 90% of that.

And that is the method. It's crazy. It's crazy. And so that, you know, that is like a central fight, obviously, economically. But yeah, like that. And why did the state do that? Because they could. Because there was no way for that group of people to fight back. And now they have that? Because they could. Because there was no way for that group of people to fight back and now they have that. So yeah. I mean, not to spend too much time on that, but what an incredible victory that is and

like an organizing feat. And it goes to show how much you can accomplish when you actually do organize this way. You also profiled Sarah Nelson, who's been on this show, go and watch that interview if folks have and she's incredible. But I think you can give us a little more context about like who Sarah is and like what she's attempted to do over the past couple years. Yeah, Sarah Nelson is the head of the Association of Flight Attendants, which is the biggest flight attendant union in America, about 50,000 members. She was a flight attendant who then became a union activist, rose up through the ranks,

and became president of that union. She was one of the first union leaders that I ever interviewed that I really felt like, wow, she is saying things that I believe. All the problems that I have with the labor movement, she's saying the same things. And she's a very, if you haven't seen her speak, she's an incredible speaker, very fiery, very progressive, inspiring person to listen to. incredible speaker, very fiery, very progressive, inspiring person to listen to, and is one of the kind of most high profile union leaders in the United States of America. And so I followed her throughout the book.

She's sort of a central character in the book. And as I started writing the book, there was an open question of whether she would run for the presidency of the AFLCO, which is kind of the highest position in the union world. Yeah. As like the head of like the consortium of all the different unions. Right, yeah.

And she didn't end up doing that, but you know, I write about why and what happened and also kind of her struggle with the idea of how you become a leader in the labor movement, given the fact that the labor movement is so all over the place, it's so disparate. Like, and you know, some of her visionary ideas, I mean, the same kind of things.

It's easy to sit here and talk about these big ideas. Neither of us are a union president. When you're actually a union president, you have to really deal with this stuff and be in the room. I think holding that job can make people reign in their vision a lot. So to have a union leader that still has that kind of visionary view on what the labor movement can be and how we get there, I think is very important.

It's remarkable for someone in that position to have that sort of fiery view of it. Tell me about the AFL-CIO though, because this is the most powerful organization in labor. I think most unions in America are a member of it. It's, you know, it's political endorsements are very powerful, et cetera, et cetera. But I think you have a few beefs with the organization.

Yeah, I mean, look, the AFLCO is the biggest union coalition in America, 65 dozen unions, something like 12, 13 million members in the AFLCO. It's the biggest and strongest labor organization in America. And so it is essentially the heart of the labor movement. It is the central table where unions in America sit. And given that, when you think about scaling up the labor movement, when you think about reviving the labor movement and turning around this 60-year period of decline that we have, the AFLCO is the obvious place to start. The AFLCO is the organization that you would like to see leading this sort of revival.

And instead, the reality of the AFLCO tends to be that it's basically kind of a little in-house lobbying firm for unions and not much else. The AFLCO has never historically taken a big role in new organizing. The AFLCO has very much catered to the biggest unions who are members of it and has not tried to be a leader of the labor movement. And so, one of the things that was so exciting

about the idea or the possibility that somebody like Sarah Nelson might become the head of the AFLCO is that it could create a shift, you know, in what that organization does and how it sees itself. Just having the AFL see itself as an organization that has a responsibility to lead us out of this decline would be a big shift. And I've interviewed heads of the AFL-CIO,

I interviewed for the book, Liz Shuler, who is the current head of the AFL-CIO. And I mean, one question that I remember from that interview is that I said, you know, is it possible for us to turn around this, this long declining new membership? And her answer was with labor laws, the way they are. No, it's not. And, you know, that's, that's not the optimism I want to see in the middle of the labor movement.

I bet you didn't put it quite that bluntly, but yeah, you didn't see the optimism you wanted to. Yeah, so we need ambition in the labor movement. We need visionaries in the labor movement because we're up against a lot. We're up against a lot. And we need the very, very best people leading the labor movement.

And so when you see large organizations like that not inspiring you, it's a bad thing. And, you know, a lot of people who work in the union world don't really take the AFLCO seriously. They're sort of like, that's a bureaucracy, whatever. I've heard that perspective for sure. I'm maybe one of the few people who kind of, who still believes in the potential of the AFLCO, you know?

But to me, when I look at it, like kind of an old crumbling mansion, you know? You can look at it and see what it could be if they whipped it into shape. Well, and a classic way that, you know, visionary people have created change is by looking at an organization that like didn't really do that much before and stepping up and say, I see what it does. I see what it can do if I whip it into shape. I think about like, I don't know, like the big biography of Lyndon Johnson years ago, did that in the Senate and shit like that. shape, I think about like, I don't know, like the big biography of Lyndon Johnson years ago, did that in the Senate and shit like that.

Oh, I'm gonna turn this ship around and turn this into a power base where it was not one before. Right. And that's certainly possible, but yeah, it requires that sort of level of vision. It needs some, yes, we can energy. Right. Some si se puede.

And one of the sort of differences of view at the heart of this is like how the labor movement thinks about building political power. You know, the AFLCO and a lot of the biggest unions in America for a long time, mostly their view of political power is that we write a big check to the Democratic Party. You know, we write a big check to the Democratic Party. We write a big check to the presidential campaign and the Democratic Party.

And that is our relationship to political power. Now, I'm being simplistic, but that is the direction that unions have seen their relationship to political power building for a long time. And the other point of view is no, your political power comes from organizing workers. You organize workers and by organizing new workers, you create your own power. Organizing workers naturally creates political power along with labor power.

And so that kind of difference in viewpoint, what if instead of giving $100 million to Joe Biden's presidential campaign, you spend $100 million organizing workers? Or better yet, both. You want both kinds of power. Right, and also if you organize more workers, you'll have more money, you'll have more dues money,

and you can give more money. So like everything needs to start with organizing new workers, and it needs to be seen as job number one, and it's not right now. Yeah. Yeah. Folks, I'm honored to say that the podcast

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That person's powerful, whatever. But like power means you can make other people do what you want, even if they don't want to do it. Or you can get what you want in the world. If there is no one who is willing to give it to you, you can just say, we're going to fucking take it. And that's what we have in the writers guild. I saw us do it.

If you don't give us what we want, the wheels of industry will halt until you do. You don't think you're gonna give it to us, but the end of the day, we know you are. And we don't ask, you don't beg, you don't donate, you don't vote, you say, no, fucker, you give it to me. And that's the unique thing about the labor movement is that it has that.

And so you would think that that would be what the labor movement would focus on, not saying, hey, let's try to be really friendly with a couple of politicians, with Joe Biden, or any politician, but instead focus on fucking taking it. Right, I mean, labor power, what is labor power? At its heart, labor power is your ability to not work.

Your ability to withhold your labor, the power of the strike. That is the heart of labor power. And the cool thing about that power is that it's sort of the one power that working people have that capitalism can't take away. You know, so even if you are the lowest paid worker in America, you know, at the shittiest McDonald's in America, still that business needs you to work, you know, or else you wouldn't have that job in the first place.

So it doesn't matter who you are or how oppressed you are. The fact that you have a job and somebody wants you to work means that you have labor power. You know, you inherently have that power because you have the ability to not work. And so the whole labor movement just about getting people to be able to tap into that. Yeah, I think about those childcare workers who,

as you said, they have a lot of things that would make you say don't have power, right? Because, you know, largely women, largely immigrants, I'm gonna guess many undocumented immigrants doing that kind of work. Those are folks who, you know, typically America would say don't have a lot of power. They don't know each other, you know, they're spread out,

they're low wage, all these other things. At the same time, they have a lot of power. They don't know each other, you know, they're spread out, they're low wage, all these other things. At the same time, they have a ton of power because as you said, society needs them to function, not even just during the pandemic, all the time. Why is the state of California paying 40,000 people to watch each other's kids? Because someone needs to watch the fucking kids or people won't be able to go to work. And so they have that power and if you can collect it together, you can extract something out of them. Yeah. They have it, you have it, I have it. Yep. And we all have it and everybody has it, who works, you know?

And that like, you know, one of the cool things about watching an organizing campaign in a workplace is like seeing that switch turn on for people, seeing people understand that they have that power. And when they understand that, they really gain a new sense of agency over their own lives. Because America teaches, America doesn't teach us that, obviously,

for obvious reasons. We are not brought up to think that way when we go into the workforce. People are taught to think of the boss as kind of the dictator of the workplace. And if the boss sucks, you leave, or you work harder and you work your way up and you impress them. You know, and that's how people are taught. But when people understand that they have the power to strike, they have the ability to not work.

And that's leverage. It's a whole new viewpoint. And what's a shame is the fact that so much of the labor movement has forgotten that. And I mean, so much of it has not, they don't use the strike weapon, you know? They use softer weapons. They try to, oh, we go along, we play nice, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, how many unions do you think nationally, I mean, this is hard to quantify, but actually use labor power in that way versus what proportion are the sort of go along, get along, let's not make waves kind of union? I mean, it's hard to put a number on it, but I can say that they do track strikes in America. I mean, there are statistics for major strikes in America

and that figure has fallen drastically along with the decline of union density. So as the portion of people who have unions gone down, the number of big strikes in America has also gone down by, I mean, a huge, huge percent. Even if you look back to like the 70s, strikes were much more common than they are today. And, you know, strikes, as you say, are extremely important, not just because, you know, they're our ultimate way to flex our power, but it's important for people to see strikes.

So something like the writer's strike, particularly when it's in Hollywood and there's famous people involved and it's in the news every day, that is like a billboard for the whole country, for all working people, people that don't even have unions, to is like a billboard for the whole country, for all working people, people that don't even have unions to be like, here's unions, they're fighting and they're going to win, you know, and they did win and like the,

the value of that Justin sort of advertising value of like labor power exists, you can strike and not only can you strike, you can win and we're going to show you that we can win is like incredible. And so really strikes are good. I mean, strikes are hard. As you know, strikes are painful for people. So it's not like something you throw around casually, but in the big picture sense it's good for America to have more strikes because that is what's going to propel the will for other people to organize

forward. Yeah. I mean, if you have power, you need to demonstrate that you have it every once in a while, and that's painful. And our strike caused a lot of pain for our members, for members of other unions, for non-union workers, because the whole town stopped for a little while. But at the same time, you have to do it

so that you don't have to do it for the next 15 years. Right, yeah, right. And the Writers Guild, what? It's kind of like clockwork, right? Every 10, 15 years, you gotta have a strike. And why is that? The company's just pushing again. They're like, are they still, do they still have the will? Do they still have the will?

And you gotta just demonstrate that every once in a while. And the outflowing of support that we had was, to me really demonstrated a lot about labor in America overall that, you know, we're at the, you know, hopefully we're at the bottom of this historic decline. Hopefully we're close to bottoming out in labor membership in terms of wages being pushed down,

companies suppressing worker power. And the result is that people are not making money. They can't feed their kids. They can't, you know't send their kids to school. All these problems, people feel powerless in their lives. And so a big visible strike like ours happens and people go, oh, holy shit, I wanna do this. These people are fucking shit up.

I wanna fuck shit up. How do I do it? And I mean, the level of interest was off the charts. And to me, it showed this incredible latent potential in the American workforce that people want to stand up and do this. You know, you could go to why is Starbucks having so much success or the Starbucks union is having

so much success because like just average kids out and fucking at a working at a Starbucks at like Appalachia or whatever, or, you know, SoCal or Wyoming, I don't know where all over the country watches on the news, I wanna do this, oh, let me talk to my fellow workers, oh, let's make it happen. But at the same time, every year, the number of unionized workers goes down.

So what I'm wondering is, do you feel that there's a risk that the labor movement is missing this moment, that five years from now, we're not gonna feel this way, it's gonna be, pandemic's gonna be further in the rear view, et cetera, et cetera from now, we're not going to feel this way. It's going to be pandemic is going to be further in the rear view, et cetera, et cetera. And that, you know, we're going to have missed the wave. There's absolutely a risk, you know, and I, I, I like to be an optimist about it, but, you know, looking at it analytically, there's a very real risk that that we will miss this moment, you know?

And it's important to remember that this moment of opportunity for the labor movement, this is not how it always is, you know? Whatever you're living through, it can kind of feel like this is just how it is. But you talk to people who were in the labor movement in the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, they'll be like, this is new, you know? Those people who've been around for that long,

people who have been in the labor movement for 50 years will tell you that right now is the most energy that they have seen ever in their career in the labor movement. So again, that increases the responsibility on all of us, you know, all of us who are in unions, all of us who are in elected positions in unions, everybody who is a part of the labor movement, we have to seize this moment because it will pass. It's not even a question of whether it'll pass. It will definitely pass. When the economy turns, when the recession comes, things like that can make it that much

harder to do labor organizing. So whenever you have a good moment, you have to seize it. That's the time to throw everything into that task of organizing those new workers and bringing them into the labor movement. Because if, at least if you organize new unions and you bring people into the labor movement, then when the recession comes, they're already here.

They're already with us. You know, we got them. So we got to get them now. You know, now's the time to invest. You got to make hay while the sun shines. Exactly. You got to spend that money right now. Well, let's talk about the laws that are, you know,

a real obstacle. You said Liz Schuller essentially answered you that like, until the laws are changed, we can't fix things. That is a real impediment. Like, you know, I've talked to plenty of organizers who say, well, if it weren't for this law, that law, that law would be so much easier. Right. These things really are a raid against us. For example, the fact that in this country, independent contractors can't be unionized

right. Is is just one example. So, yeah, tell us a little bit about that. And also how have things changed under President Biden, you know, who claims to be the most pro-labor president of all time. Yeah, I mean, labor laws in America are very tilted against organized labor. That's a starting point to know. And it's, you cannot argue with that fact.

And that's been true, unfortunately, for most of the 20th century and the 21st century. There's tons of restrictions on what unions can do, who can strike, their entire sectors of workers carved out. For a long time, domestic workers and farm workers were carved out of labor rights as a way to appease racist Southern Democrats way back in the day when they were trying to pass those laws in the first place.

But, you know, one of- And also who are domestic workers and farm workers? Right, black people. Black, yeah. Migrants, people like that, yeah. Yeah, so no, it wasn't even hidden. I mean, that was the purpose. You know, but really, if you think about it,

the fact that in some countries, they have what's called sectoral bargaining. So you can take an entire industry and negotiate a contract for that entire industry that covers all the workers and all those workers are in the union. In America, you have to organize company by company, shop by shop. And so just that part of our system, you know, obviously makes it so much more labor intensive to do labor organizing. You know, you can't just organize the whole fast food industry and negotiate one contract, right?

You have to go store by store. And you look at something like the Starbucks campaign, for example. One of the reasons that's taken so much work is that even though they successfully unionized 400 Starbucks stores, which is amazing, Starbucks has 20,000 stores. And it's like, you have to keep going until you can beat that company over the head enough to get them to do a contract for the whole company.

So just the structure of that makes large scale labor organizing difficult. All these things are things that people think about a lot and often try to change the laws in favor of. Here in California, they've just, for example, pass a $20 wage for fast food workers. Well, what is that? Well, that's kind of a step down the road towards sectoral bargaining. It's the state saying, we are going to have basically a wage board for this industry, a way of negotiating benefits for a whole industry at once. So like there are green shoots,

there are steps down the road, but the setup is hard in America. And you know, Biden often says he's the most pro-union president, which is true, but at the same time, it's a very low bar. You know, and even just looking at democratic presidents, Obama and Clinton, and even all the way back to Jimmy Carter,

those people had kind of what has been the traditional relationship between the Democratic Party and unions, which is sort of the Democratic Party says, give us money and we won't try to kill you. And the Republican Party is trying to kill you. So that kind of what unions have gotten from the Democratic Party traditionally

has been just like, we won't actively try to destroy you, but we're not gonna spend a lot of political capital, go out of our way to help you. I remember reading about, when Obama was elected, he was massively supported by unions and they hoped that he was going to pass a national card check,

which would have made it much easier to organize. And it was basically a political promise that he did not keep keep because he was like, well, if they don't actually give the unions what they want, what are they gonna do? Like go somewhere else? Exactly, exactly. And that has been the calculation of the Democratic Party.

And Clinton, of course, did a lot of actively bad things for working, I mean, neoliberalism and NAFTA and all that stuff was bad for working people and the power working people in America. But again, the Democratic party has always been able to make that calculation, like, where are you gonna go? We're the only game in town. Biden, to his credit, from the perspective of unions,

at least, has been willing to spend political capital to try to help unions. He's appointed some really good people. The general counsel of the NLRB, Jennifer Abruzzo, has been really aggressive about trying to make labor regulations better and do what she can, and that has helped. Also a past guest on this show.

Yeah, very good labor attorney, came out of the union world, you know, and she and everybody else at the NLRB is one of the reasons why a campaign like the Starbucks campaign has been able to succeed because You know, it's not just the workers organizing those stores They also have the federal government being like we're actually going to enforce labor laws And it's kind of sad that really what we're looking for from the federal government is like enforce the law, you know

That's what we're talking about here. We're not talking about like making new laws. It's just like having the will to enforce the laws and to put the penalties on those companies is like that's what we get out of democratic administrations. So Biden, you know, he has been pro-union, but but really most democratic presidents can kind of take unions or leave them. So it's a low bar. Shout out to Claritin for supporting this episode and providing us with samples.

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a year ago, I knew union people saying, these people are never gonna be able to get a contract. You know, they've got 1 40th of the stores. Great, but how do you force the company to come to the table? Well, if the federal government is there going like, hey, fuckers, you know, and making them look bad in the press, that can like cause a change of heart.

Yeah, absolutely. You have to hammer those big companies with bad PR. And, you know, legally and from the federal government, Howard Schultz of Starbucks wanted to be a union buster. He did not want to give an inch to that union. And they fired activists. They did all types of dirty things. And the difference was, yes, under the NLRB now,

they got hit with charge after charge after charge for that. And Howard Schultz got dragged in front of Congress and had to get yelled at by Bernie Sanders and like, you have to create that pressure on those companies from all those angles to get them to come to the table. And, you know, a company like Amazon, for example, which, uh, you know, there was a successful union drive at the warehouse in Staten Island. So, you know, theoretically Amazon is obliged to sit down and collectively bargain

once its employees have unionized like that. But instead, what do they do? You know, they take it to court and they will be in court for a hundred years if they need to. And then even if the court case goes, they can go, ah, you know what, we're busy. We're busy for the next week, two weeks, three weeks.

Ah, call us after the holiday. They can do that forever, you know, because they're not under an obligation to get a contract in a particular period of time. Right, and that, you know, that is another weakness of labor law. Like there is not a written date. And, you know, when Bernie was running for president,

for example, part of his labor platform was like, when you unionize, the company has six months to negotiate a contract. And if they don't, it goes to mandatory arbitration and basically somebody will impose a contract. And like, that's a simple thing that should exist, but that doesn't exist today. And because there's no clot,

companies just delay and delay and delay. Yeah. And the problem also with relying on just the federal regulators at the NLRB or whatever, is like, well, if there's a new president, it's gonna be all new people. You're gonna have an NLRB that's like on the company side and is ruling against, I mean, even the writer's strike, there was that famous thing with the trees

that universal cut down, where they like trimmed the trees in this horrible way. And we like fired an unfair labor practice charge and all this kind of thing. But that requires having a sympathetic ear at the NLRB who actually gives a shit about right and wrong rather than someone who's just gonna tilt their, put their finger on the scale of the company side.

Yeah, and these things sort of reveal why labor power is more important than political power, because right, there will be Republican presidents sooner or later, and when there's a Republican president, that president will appoint an anti-union lawyer to be the head of the NLRB. And the NLRB will not be that interested in enforcing all the things that it is now.

And the one thing that doesn't change is labor power. We will still have the power to strike. That's the power we have that doesn't change and doesn't go back and forth with different administrations. So it's important for the labor movement and for unions always to like, keep our focus in the power that we have in our pocket,

which is the power to organize and the power to strike and not to get too too wedded. It's nice to have supportive politicians, but that's always gonna come and go. And it is just so transformative when you realize that you have that power because we, I didn't realize until I experienced it how much I had been told my entire life

how limited my power is. I can vote, I can buy one thing instead of another thing, I can donate money and that's pretty much it. And I can like hope and pray. Or I can go to a protest and I can hold a sign and then go home. Right. And I can, and all of those things are a way of begging for change or asking for change rather than making it actually happen.

And it became, it's like a whole new dimension of civic participation that is not toothless. It's like real. Yeah. I mean, one of my sappiest views maybe about the labor movement is like, people in America almost never really get to experience democracy, true democracy. Like even though we all hear about democracy

and we're a democratic country and it's so great, like look at, you go through your life, you're born, you're in a family, that's a dictatorship. You go to school, you know, school is a dictatorship, they tell you what to do. Then you go out and get a job and your job's a dictatorship and they're telling you what to do. Like where is this democracy that we hear so much about

in terms of lived experience for regular people, you know? The only relation they have to it is elections and really how much power do you, a regular person, have in the presidential election? None, effectively. So like, then you see people get into unions and they have this actual lived experience of being in a truly, if you're in a good union at least,

a truly democratic organization for the first time and seeing like the power that can come from true democracy and can be exercised on behalf of people in that organization. And I really think that that experience transforms people and like the whole conversation that America is having and especially having right now with the threat of Trump about the danger to democracy, you know, and that we need to save and protect our democracy. Nothing strengthens democracy more than unions

because it is giving people the lived experience of democratic participation in the payoff that comes with it. And the, in the broadest sense of democracy, like not democracy in terms of you vote for the person who is running the thing, which is the smaller sense that we're all brought up with, but the larger sense of average people get a say in how something is run. If an organization

is democratic, then the members get to decide. And A, unions are supposed to be democratic, but when a union is truly doing its job, then the workers at a company get a fucking say in how it runs and you can actually force your company to work democratically and like bend it to your will and say, no, no, we get a say, you can't do this shit without asking us. Yeah, it's really awesome. And I mean, I have a chapter in the book, for example,

of the culinary union in Las Vegas. This is a union that has the casino workers in the union. Very powerful. And you know, one of the things that always impressed me so much about that union is that, you know, when the Nevada caucus happens every four years and all the presidential candidates come to Las Vegas, where do they go? They go to that union hall. They go to the culinary union hall and they sit down a room full of a hundred people who clean rooms, you know, at hotels on the Vegas strip and they take their questions and they talk to them. And like, why do they do that? They do that because that union has organized the shit

out of that town for 80 years and has turned itself into a political force, you know, based on the unity and the solidarity of those workers. And you'll see politicians will come and bend the knee to the power of that union after the power that organization. I mean, that union literally got credit for getting Joe Biden elected because they knocked so many doors in Nevada, which was a pivotal state.

And if you don't have that union on your side, you got nothing. And the members of that union, a lot of them are extremely low wage, undocumented immigrants again, people who, if they didn't have a union, would be making absolutely no money instead. Not only are they a political force,

they have an incredible healthcare plan. Yeah. They've got all, yeah, they're treated much better than they would be otherwise. Yeah, like anybody who doesn't understand the power of unions, you know, I tell them like, the reason there is a middle class in Las Vegas is because of the culinary union, you know?

Otherwise, it's not because casino companies are nice, you know? The reason why you can work in a casino cleaning rooms and then be able to buy a home and be able to have healthcare for your family is 100% because of the power of that union and nothing else. Yep.

And this is a union where the members of the union feel they own the union. It is theirs. It's the kind of, you know, they're wearing the pins. They're going to the meetings. They're not just like, oh, I pay dues and maybe they'll help me out. Right.

They are like, we are the union. We are taking an active role in it. Yeah, they do what good unions always do, which is they're constantly organizing, not only are they organizing new workers, but they're organizing internally. They're always talking to their members, they're always mobilizing their members,

they're having city-wide meetings with their members, they're keeping everybody engaged, they're like, here's the fights we're in, here's what we need to do. And when you constantly keep that engaged and mobilized membership, you're ready to strike. And when you're ready to strike,

that gives you the inherent power that we've been talking about this whole time. Well, so you also make the argument that this kind of power is like the cure to what ails America, right? That this is a fundamental form of democracy, but also that this form of democracy, like, you know, America's really fucked up,

but that union power is the only thing that will fix it. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, I think sort of the one of the big picture arguments I make is that look, the biggest, the biggest thing plaguing America, underlying a lot of the other political problems that we think about is this 50 year plus rise of inequality, economic inequality in America. And it's very well documented. political problems that we think about is this 50 year plus rise of inequality, economic inequality in America. And it's very well documented. You can look at charts. It really

took off in the 80s along with Reagan. The rise of wealth at the top 10% and the top 1% and at the same time, mostly stagnant wages for the middle class. You know, it's fucked up our economy. It's fucked up our politics, because it gives a huge amount of power to people at the very, very top. And the classic American dream that people think of of having a one-income household and being able to buy a home and send your kids to college,

that's dead. That doesn't exist anymore. And it makes people cynical and it lays the groundwork for people like Trump. So like, when you think of a problem that big, the rise of economic inequality, you say, how can we turn this around? There's only two ways. Either the government can do it through the tax code and regulations and they can tax

the rich and funnel money to the poor. They haven't done that for 50 years. That's how we got here in the first place. So it's a poor place to put your faith in. And the only other way to fix the rise of that inequality is for working people to gain enough power to take back their own fair share of the wealth. And how do working people do that?

They do it through unions. I mean, that is the mechanism. So unions actually are the most powerful tool to fix the most important problem in this country. And that is how I look at unions and that is how I look at unions and that's how I look at the labor movement. And when you understand the power and the potential that we have, then again, you appreciate the responsibility

that we have to give that tool to as many people as we can. Can we make you the head of the AFL-CIO? Like, that's such a, I mean, that's such a strong vision. Like it's so, it's inspiring to hear you say it. How do we get the labor movement to do it? When it's a big diffuse movement, not everybody agrees. Every single union, I say this all the time, every single union is a nation unto itself

with its own politics, its own pressures. You talk to me, you put me in front of any union head and I'll say, you guys should organize. And they'll say, well, let me tell you my challenges and what we're dealing with. And I'd say, my God, you know more about it than me. You're doing your best, right? So how do we create this transformation in the movement, given those conditions and the hostility of the laws

and all that? Yeah, look, it's gonna take a lot of work and you can see bright spots out there. It's happening in certain places. Sarah Nelson's union, for example, the Association of Flight Attendants, 50,000 member union that's currently engaged in trying to organize 28,000 new flight attendants at Delta.

So you're talking about a more than 50% growth of the union in one campaign. That's the scale we need. The UAW went on strike against all the auto workers, won that strike and came right out of it and said, we're gonna unionize every non-union auto factory in the South. And those elections are just about to start this week. You know, again, 150,000 new workers, like that's the scale. So you see it in certain places, but you're right. You don't see it everywhere in the labor movement.

And, you know, I think about, I'm not a religious person, but one thing I'll say is that I look at the evangelicals, you know, people that really believed in that stuff, they were like, oh my gosh, we have to go out in the world and save people's souls. And they did it, you know? They got on boats, they went all over the world. They're like, we gotta do it because we believe in this so much.

Well, a lot of them were also, you know, trying to like steal valuable resources and using religion as an excuse, but it did help, the money helped. It's not a perfect metaphor, but you kind of see what I'm getting at. There's a lot of true believers who really spread the message. They spread it successfully

to a billion people throughout the world. And like, that's the spirit that we need in the labor movement, because we actually do have something helpful to offer to people, and it's not gonna get to them if we don't spread it. And also, ours will also earn us a lot more money than we would have otherwise. That's right. And everybody gets a raise.

Right. You think about telling people, it's like trying to sell people a raise. This is pretty easy to sell, actually, when people understand it. OK, well, if people have been converted by that to your new religion of unionism, what do they do, right? For folks who are sitting at home going, well, I fucking wanna do this. I wanna participate. How do they get involved?

Absolutely. The number one thing that everybody should do is try to unionize their own workplace. Wherever you work, it is your right to unionize. You can look up on the AFL-CIO's website. They can put you in touch with a union organizer. There's an organization called EWOC, E-W-O-C.

Incredible. Emergency Worker Organizing Committee, that you can go to their website and they will put you in touch with the organizer also. So those are easy contact points. Talk to an organizer, figure out how to organize and unionize your workplace, man. Wherever you work, it's another of the coolest things

about the labor movement is like, it doesn't matter who you are. You have a job. Yeah. You can organize your workplace and you can become part of this movement and you can get involved in a union. And suddenly you're part of a really strong organization.

The other really important step is to just talk to your coworkers, right? And say like, hey, hey, I'm a little pissed off. Are you a little pissed off? Yeah. Ooh, maybe we should, I heard about this thing, Ewok, there's this great podcast episode. You should check it out.

Totally. Yeah, listen to a bunch of your podcasts, read my book, and then you'll know a lot about unions. Subscribe to my Patreon, and that's gonna help you. No, no, no, it's not that kind of podcast. Yeah. But no, it's like, you know, read some stuff about unions

and get an idea of why you're interested in this and then exactly talk to people at your work. That's organizing is mostly just about talking to people. And that's what I love so much about the Starbucks campaign, because every single time one of those stores goes union, I'm like, there's some firebrand, you know, some like 22 year old was like, read, read the right book, saw the right podcast and was like, you know what? Yeah, let's fucking do some. And then talk to their coworkers. And they all got together and had a group mind

and said, let's do this together. And then they won. It's incredible. And one of the most awesome things about being a labor reporter is like every single workplace you go into that has a union has that person. You know, there's like one hero in every place

who like started it. And you wish that you could like put all those people on the cover of a magazine or something, but they're out there and that can be you. Yeah. I mean, the number of stories like that in the labor movement is incredible and it can be you and it should be you and be the change you wanna see in the world. That's a cliche.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for being here, Hamilton. It's incredible to have you. Thank you, man. The book is called The Hammer. You can pick it up, of course, at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people get it?

Where can they find your, you have a wonderful newsletter. Where can people find that? Yeah, hamiltonnolan.com. I write a sub stack called How Things Work. You can go there, subscribe, check me out. I write for In These Times Magazine, another great magazine, and the book is wherever books are sold.

Oh yeah, thank you so much for being here, man. Thank you, man, appreciate it. Well, thank you once again to Hamilton for coming on the show. Once again, you can pick up a copy of his book at factuallypod.com slash books. And when you do, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well.

I also want to thank everybody who supports us on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Khan. Over five bucks a month, gets you every episode of this show ad free. For 15 bucks a month, I will thank you at the end of this show and put your name in the credits of every single one of my video monologues. This week I want to thank Jim Myers, Evan Lowe, Ethan Jennings, Paul Schmidt, Chase Thompson-Bow, and Scooper. Thank you so much, Scooper, for your support of the show.

Of course, if you want to come see me do stand-up comedy in a city near you, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. I also wanna thank my producers, Tony Wilson and Sam Roudman, everybody here at Headgum for making this show possible. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next time on Factually.

I don't go anywhere. That was a Headgum Podcast.