← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update: US Labor Unions: Past, Present, Future
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Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those looming down the road, those facing our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and currently I teach at the New School University here in New York City. Well, we have a rich and full program for you today, and so I want to jump right into it, but there's always an announcement or two at the beginning. As some of you know, we have begun forming Democracy at Work action groups around the United States. Indeed, we now have 15 of them in 15 major American areas. If you would like more information, if you would like to form such a group and would like to have us help you in the various ways that we can, please go to our website. And the best address to use is action, because we call them action groups. Action.dedemocracyatwork.info. democracyatwork is all one word. So again, action.democracyatwork.info and indeed our general website, democracyatwork.info is a Treasury of all kinds of useful things. If this program interests you, there you will find interviews, video, audio, written materials that expand far beyond what an hour program like this one can possibly do. This website, democracyatwork.info and its companion, rdwolf, with two Fs.com these are the websites we maintain. We update them several times every day and they are available to you without any charge ever 24 7. That's a service we provide. Do make use of them. In addition to all those materials, they allow you to communicate with us as to what you like and want us to do on this program or what you don't like, that's up to you. It allows you, with a click to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It allows you to help us spread the word by going beyond the 80 radio stations, for example, that already show this program, as well as the TV stations that already do. Finally, as many of you know, we now produce a television version, a video version of this radio program. It is uploaded within a few days onto our YouTube channel. If you'd like to see the program, if you'd like to see it after having heard it and hear it again, you can get us on the YouTube channel. And if you go there, please look for Economic Update, which is the name of this program, and please subscribe to our YouTube channel, because then you're informed of everything we post there. And it's a Good boost for us as well. Okay, let me turn then to the shorter updates before we get to the more major part in the second half of our program. The last week was dominated by economic news of all kinds. But perhaps one of the most glaring stories, which is an economic story at base, had to do with United Airlines. They behaved in an extraordinary way. By now, my guess is you've all heard about it. But if not, let me briefly recoup. United Airlines, like virtually all airlines, typically overbooks its flights. That is, they sell tickets to more people than there are seats on the particular flight. They justify that by saying some people don't show up, so they want to have paying customers for the folks to replace those folks who don't show up. In other words, they want to make more money than they might if they had to take the risk of simply booking as many seats as possible. All right, so what happens, which is indeed the story that happened last week. What happens when you indeed get more people with valid tickets that they have paid for on a flight than there are seats? What United Airlines did is remarkable. It offered to pay money to people if they would give up their seats. Not enough people did that. So now they had a problem. Of course, they could have solved the problem by keeping upping the price until they made it valuable for somebody to. But they didn't want to do that. They didn't want to spend that money. Ooh. And what was it for? They had four employees. They wanted to move from one city to another, and they wanted them to sit on that airplane in those seats for which they had sold tickets to the public. How nice. And when they couldn't get enough people at the price they were willing to pay, they sent in big, tough security men who dragged a doctor out of the airplane. Out of the seat he had paid for that he was 100% legitimately in. Hurt him along the way. There are photos of him with a bloody face, etc. They have now apologized. But let's be clear, folks. This is about money. This is about an airline that wants to make money. Those of you that have flown recently know that airlines have been very creative. They charge you to go to the bathroom. They charge you to have a bag, even if it's a tiny one that only your pet mouse ever occupies. They charge you for anything beyond bread and water. Well, I take that back. No bread, just a water. That's what they do, and you know it. For your bag, for how fast you get on the plane, how soon you get off the plane, Pretty soon I expect we will be charged for using the lavatory if we have the bad taste to need to do that. So this is just another way for them to squeeze yet more profits. That's what this is about. And when confronted with the choice between giving up some of their already bloated profits versus hurting another human being, utterly, unjustifiably, United Airlines knew which way to go. Get the profit, hurt the passenger. That's what they did. This is a kind of capitalism gone mad in which even the conventional boundaries of what you can do for profits are violated. And they're violated all the time. Just a week earlier, there was a story didn't get the same public attention in which two young women were forced off an airplane. Same thing, overbooking. They didn't protest, they went off. But they weren't happy. And they were told that they had to get off because of the leggings they were wearing. In other words, their dress didn't fit, even though it's a normal dress millions of people wear every day. But it was an excuse to make more money, to be able to do what they want, to make more money. The next time you hear the praise of capitalism for the system that brings us economic well being and efficiency, please remember this story. It's one of many. It is not something only United Airlines does. But when you behave this way and when other passengers use their phones to catch videos of what you're doing, then you're caught. The president of the company with unspeakable bad taste tried at first to deflect the tension. But when his profits were attacked because it turns out that the doctor was of Chinese background and United Airlines future depends on selling tickets in China and China's social media world went nuts, he had to reverse himself and finally apologize. As if it makes much of a difference. Let me turn to my next story. As most of you know, because we've documented it, going to college at this point in the United States is an extremely dangerous economic gamble. Less than ever before does a bachelor's degree at the end of four years of college get you a good job and good income. But even though it's less effective in doing that than it's ever been, it's more expensive to get the degree than it has ever been. And in a bad economic situation which most American families find themselves in, the solution has been to turn to very dangerous economic, not to speak of dangerous personal decisions to get this degree in the hopes that even though it isn't as valuable as it once was, it's importantly, better than not having such a degree. So what have people done? One of the things they've done is load up on a quantity of debt that is unsustainable. And if you had any doubt about its being unsustainable, please know the rate of default on student loans is far larger than the rate of default on any other kind of loan in the United States. Students can't pay. They've spent too much money getting an education and then discover they can't earn enough to be able to live, let alone have a normal life and, and pay off the enormous debts they've run up. It's a crazy situation and it is costing this country in all kinds of ways, not least of all, more and more young people saying, I'm not going to get caught in this debt trap that has been set for me. For a country that needs to compete in the years ahead in a world economy, this is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot. You're making an educated workforce harder and harder to to emerge in this country because you're making it absurdly expensive and ridden with debt. But debt isn't the only thing young people have done to get through school. I'm going to give you two other examples that have been in the news this last week. The old story is what's called sugar babies. That's right. Those are college students, particularly young women, who make a deal, typically with a business traveler who comes to the city, wherever their school or college is periodically to be. I'm going to be polite now, an escort for the time that this business traveler is in town in exchange for the traveler picking up the tuition or maybe even the room and board of such a young student. This young student accompanies the business traveler the three or four or five times that he or she is in town. This. I'm being as polite as I can. You all understand what I'm telling you. There are tens of thousands of sugar babies in the country. There are whole websites devoted to linking or connecting the sugar baby who needs help paying for college and the traveler who wants what he or she wants. But we're still not done. The new one that I only recently learned about is called an isa. Comes out of Purdue University Income Sharing Agreement. Isa. Here's what it is. An investor, I kid you not. An investor gives to a college student the money for his or her college tuition, his or her college expenses, and the student writes a contract, which is valid in court, agreeing to give this investor a certain percentage of their income for, say, 10 years after they graduate. In other words, we are bringing capitalism into the relationship between the student and what he or she learns. And we're allowing investors to cash in on a system that puts students in an impossible debt trap. So students have a choice, literally sell your body or sell your future income, or borrow more money than you can possibly pay back in order to get a degree that is less effective for getting a good job than it's ever been. Welcome to a higher education in a capitalist system that is richer than most other capitalist systems in the world. That's how it treats these things. Well, then you might think, as Hillary Clinton clearly does, that Governor Cuomo here in New York has done a great thing by passing a bill which says if your family earns less than $125,000 a year, you will be able to go to either a community college or a four year public school here in New York State without paying tuition. But there are two catches to this bill. One, you must go to school full time, 30 credit hours a week, and you must do it in the requisite two year program of the community college or the four year program of the regular full college. The vast majority, particularly of poorer people who don't earn more than 125,000, have to work to go to school at all. And therefore they can't do a full time job and full time college. They take a few extra years. We should encourage and make it easier for them. What this is doing is saying, if you're in that situation and you can't go full time, we're not going to help you, what in the world is going on? But that's only the first catch. Here's the second. If you do this, if you get tuition waved for you and you go to college in New York State under Governor Cuomo's bill, you must live and work in the state of New York for at least five years afterward. If you don't, if you get a better job offer, if your life partner comes from another state, if you have any one of a million reasons to move, you will lose the money you got because it will be converted by the state into a loan which, which you must pay back and on which you must pay interest. Now, why does this upset me? Why am I not grateful that at least some poor people will have some help for those of their students who can go to a full time. Why am I not happy? And here's the reason. Governor Cuomo, like all other governors, he's in no way unique in what I'm about to say has Spent his political career a good bit of it, giving every kind of business imaginable, tax breaks, subsidies, arrangements for this and that kind of governmental help and assistance. And in very, very few cases is there any limit on it. Is there any give back that is required, any compensatory help to the State of New York? Millions of jobs have been supported by the state with money given to a corporation which can happily leave the state a year later, two years later, four years later. Many have done so because there's no constraint on them. If we're going to help capitalists do better business in the state without conditions, why are we sticking conditions on poor people with incomes, family incomes less than 125,000, to help them through college? There is something terribly wrong in this set of priorities that governs this. So that when Mrs. Clinton congratulated Governor Cuomo by saying this is a wonderful achievement for progressives everywhere, all I could think of was the problem of her campaign. Same old, same old, too little and too late. And it should not be celebrated anywhere near as much as the glaring contrast between what is done for working people wanting an education compared to corporations wanting a subsidy. The next economic update has to do with something really very serious. It's an old problem in capitalist economies. It's called automation. And we're having a big automation really on the verge of sweeping across the American economy. This has to do with what is called self driving cars and or self driving trucks. It is now quite clear from experiments done already here in the United States and in Europe that self driving cars and trucks are coming, and they're coming pretty soon. They've basically perfected the technology far enough so that we know that, and there have been acts already in various states and so on, that it's going to happen. Here's what this means and what the focus of my story is. In the United States, the following people will be affected by the conversion or the transition from cars and trucks that need a driver to cars and trucks that don't drive need a driver. Here are the numbers and this I get From CBS News, April 9th of this year. In the United States, there are 3.5 million truck drivers. 3.5 million people drive trucks and earn their living doing that. We have 600,000 Uber drivers on top of that and 180,000 taxi drivers on top of that. Well, you put it all together and we have clearly somewhere between 4 and 5 million of our fellow workers who are on the verge of losing their jobs. What are we going to do? It means that things we need freight moved from one place to another, people moved from one place to another, which is what truck drivers and taxi drivers and so on do. We're not going to get that work done without the labor of a driver. That's an enormous labor saving technical change. And whenever that happens, capitalism has a choice to make, number one. And this is what capitalists like. They fire these workers. They tell the truck driver, you're fired, the taxi driver, you're fired, and the Uber driver, you're fired. We don't need you anymore. And the companies like that because they get the work done, the freight is moved, the people are moved, but they don't have to pay a wage, so they charge pretty much what they did before, maybe a little less. And they keep as profits what they used to pay out as wages. That's the way they want to go, because that's how they use technology for the profit that they're in business to maximize. But there is, of course, an alternative. Here's how we could deal with this. We could first of all plan on it. We live in a society in which we read these stories, but there's no government agency working on it. There's no private agency working on it. Nobody is taking responsibility in this capitalist system for the absolute tragedy of what is coming down the pike and what we know is coming down the pike. But here's an alternative to that I could offer. We will reduce the work week in the United States from 40 hours to, say, 35 for everybody. And that will mean all kinds of jobs have to be created. So employers replace the work that used to be done in those last five hours by the worker who was traditionally there. But because that worker now gets a 35 hour week, that extra five hours per worker has to be done by somebody else. And guess who that'll be? It'll be the laid off truck driver, the laid off Uber worker, the laid off taxi worker. And in that way, everybody enjoys less work than they had to do before, which is a wonderful thing for everybody. The price of everything stays the same. The profits, therefore, will stay the same because the wages paid to everybody will stay the same. Ooh. In other words, when technology happens, one way to install it helps profits and hurts the laid off worker. The second one doesn't boost the profits and uses the technology instead to reduce the amount of labor. Here's the irony, folks. Technology has always been justified on the grounds that it makes life easier. But it's capitalism that prevents that from happening. By taking the earlier route, using technology for profits, and not to save money. Excuse me. And to save labor for working people. A different system would handle technology in a different way. The last short update before we get to the major part. I have to take issue with Mr. Larry Fink. In case you don't know who Mr. Larry Fink is, he's the head of something called BlackRock. And you should know about BlackRock if you don't, because it's the world's largest asset manager. This technical term mean this is the biggest company that takes in companies and wealthy people's money and manages the investment of that money for them. BlackRock is the biggest one in the world. And Mr. Larry Fink runs that company. Here's what he has been proposing this last week, and that's why I'm talking about it with you. He is urging the Trump administration to design its supposedly $1 trillion infrastructure program, rebuilding roads and highways and all the rest here in the United States. So that it is. Here we go. Nice words, public private partnership. Well, I've been around long enough to know that the minute I hear the word public private partnership, I know which part is ripping off which other part of that game. But let me show you how it works here. Here's what Mr. Fink is doing. But Mr. Fink didn't tell us. But I will. Number one, corporations across America evade their taxes. This program has gone through that 10 different ways. They park it abroad, they hide it in tax havens around the world. They misrepresent what they're doing. They hire accountants who are specialists at all of this. You know the story. It's been in the press every year as long as I can remember. But when big corporations cut out their taxes by locating their business in Ireland or whatever they do, it starves the government here of the revenue it had otherwise would have been able to collect. And starved of revenue, guess what the government does? It economizes. Somewhere it's afraid to make up for the revenue corporations and rich people evade by taxing the rest of us. I mean, it does that, but it can only go so far. And then it gets the pushback that means the end of your political career. So the government, starved of money by tax, evading corporations and the rich is stuck. It has to economize somewhere. Guess where it Infrastructure maintenance. It doesn't clean or repair or maintain the subway, the road, the bridge, all of that. So after a certain number of years, the bridges fall down, the roads are impassable. You know the story as well as I. And now listen to Larry Fink. The government doesn't have enough money, he says, to do this on its own, and yet we must repair our bridges and roads. So here's what we'll we the private sector, big business, corporations and the rich will pool some of our money and share it with the government to build the road, to rebuild the roads and the bridges. But the only problem is, since it's our private money, you have to give us a return on our private money. So there'll have to be a toll on the bridge and a toll on the road, and you get the picture. This is a hustle, friends. This is the corporations and the rich not paying the taxes, destroying the infrastructure, and now they're going to make money by giving to the government as an investment the money they cheated the government out of before by not paying their taxes, and they want a return on all of this. This reminds me of the old story of the two gentlemen who visit the dry cleaner in the neighborhood, and they say to the dry cleaner, we're here to sell you a policy to protect you from vandalism. And when the local merchant says to the two guys, what are you talking about? Protection from whom? I don't need any protection. They both smile, they look him in the face, and with a very pleasant tone of voice, they say, you need protection from us. And then he understands, and then he pays. Mr. Larry Fink of BlackRock is playing exactly the same. You either give us the money on an investment to help you rebuild the infrastructure, or you're going to watch it deteriorate even more. We are going to make money first by not paying the taxes we ought to, and then we're going to make money again by getting a return on giving you the money we saved by not paying you taxes in order for you to do what you otherwise could have done as a public project to maintain the public roads without sticking us with the toll to pay off private investors to help. This is a hustle born and developed in a capitalist economic system, because that's how this system works, which is why it deserves the kind of criticism and debate that is so rare in the United States. And the remedy for that is the growing number of commentators, programs like this one that are trying to balance the kind of mindless cheerleading for a system that should be replaced by a sober, honest, balanced assessment of the strengths and the weaknesses of a system that has escaped a proper debate for far too long. We've come to the end of the first half of this program in the second half, which I urge you to stay with us and listen to I am going to be proud to introduce you to the person who has taught me more about the labor movement in this country and the condition of the labor movement and what it all means to the way this system works than anything I have read or known in my long academic career. So it's a big privilege and I urge you to stay with us to learn some of what this person who spent a lifetime in the American labor movement has to tell us. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
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I've got this graveyard woman, you know she keeps my kids but my soul for mama, you know she keeps me here She's a junkyard angel and she always gives me pray. Where have I going down, down, you know she bound to put a blanket on my bed. Well when the pipeline gets broken and I lost on the river bridge I'm all cracked up on a highway and the water's edge the picture comes down a two way Ready to sew me up with a thread. Well if I go down dying, you know she bound to put a blanket on my bed. Well she don't make me nervous she don't talk too much, she walks like Biddly and she don't need no crime she keeps this for 10 oh loaded with lead.
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Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's edition of Economic Update. It is my pleasure to introduce today my guest someone I have known for many, many decades. His name is Frank R. Annunziado. He retired last August after serving 15 years as executive director of the University of Rhode island chapter of the American association of University Professors. The official representative of the academic staff at that state university, Frank has worked for public and private sector unions in Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island. The unions include the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, the Connecticut State Federation of Teachers of the aft, the University of Connecticut chapter of the aaup, the Professional Staff Congress Union at the City University of New York and at URI as well. He has also taught labor topics at the University of Connecticut and the University of Massachusetts. In the early 1990s, Frank served as the director of the national center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, a program situated at Baruch College in New York City. He has published number of very important articles on the theories of Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian scholar and activist, on Gramsci and Fordism, on commodity unionism, and a number of articles on higher education and collective bargaining there. So it is an enormous pleasure for me. I've known Frank a long time. Thank you very much for coming on the program, Frank.
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Thank you for inviting me, Rick.
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Okay, I want to jump right in. I want to take advantage of your life of work in the labor movement and your life of thinking about the labor movement. So even though I'm most interested in your explaining why the labor movement is in, the condition it's in today. So let's start by having you give me an overview for our listeners and viewers. Also, what is the condition? How would you describe the condition of the American labor movement generally in the United States right now?
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Well, I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that the labor movement is on death's doorstep right now. There's only about 10.7% of all workers that are members of unions. And if you separate that public and private, you'll find that there's only about 6% of private sector workers who are members of unions. And private sector, as you know, economists, is infinitely bigger than the public sector. So I think we have a real problem on our hands. I think we all should be concerned. I'm a union baby. I mean, I grew up in a union household, so it's always been part of me. But many people have commented over the years that the great American middle class, the force most responsible for that was the labor movement, especially the labor movement coming out of the Roosevelt coalition, the Franklin Roosevelt coalition. Why did it happen that the labor movement has gotten so beat up? I think it's a perfect storm of the law. The law has been changed over and over again to make it harder and harder for unions to organize. I think it's also, you have to, you have to say that the courts have been responsible. Tremendous decisions by the courts have made union weapons less and less useful. Many of us learned years ago about the poor Danbury hatters in Danbury, Connecticut, who dared to leave a boycott against one of the hatting companies. And by the beginning of the 20th century, that was a major Supreme Court decision in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a boycott violates the Sherman Antitrust Act. Now, that law, as we all know, was developed to prevent conglomerates and cartels, monopolies and monopolies. And what was it used for? To stop unions. So things like that have really created this situation where unions are no longer able to organize to represent people except for the public sector and except for unusual places like New York, where unions maintain themselves are still strong, still viable.
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Okay, so if they're at death's door, and you yourself just now hinted at it, they did come out of the Great Depression pretty strong, at least relative to what they had been before. They got a couple of laws from Roosevelt that made it easier to organize, but they did the hard work on the ground, mobilizing millions of people. Tell us, because it is so how did this happen? How did they go from the strength they seemed to have, say at the end of World War II, 1945, to the dire situation you just summarized?
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Well, it's wonderful to think in Marxist terms about this, I think. And what happened first? What happened was the Depression. The Depression weakens our capitalist system enormously, Allows for an imaginative, courageous leader like FDR to come in and say, we're going to boost demand. I have to boost demand. That's the other capitalism can't fight him anymore. They're dead or they're dying. So he does that. He gets legislation planned and the unions respond. There's the cio, the great cio, aggressive, imaginative. They go all over the country and organize everywhere. Big steel, big rubber, the auto workers, on and on. So you have those things that happen now. Here comes the Marxism. We then have World War II. Okay, Roosevelt enters the war, but he knows that he can't win this war without labor's cooperation. So he asks them, will you agree that there will be no strikes, no lockouts during the war? And we will arbitrate all your disputes. Most of the unions agree to that. He then dumps tons and tons of money into the economics of the United States. Planes, tanks, on and on and on it goes.
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The government buying all those things, buying all that.
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What effect does that have? Well, it has many effects, but one of them is capitalism recovers. Right? So while the workers are doing well, capitalism is also doing well, I think. And so after the war, they're in the catbird seat. They run the world. American capitalism runs the world. Europe is destroyed, Japan is destroyed. The Soviet Union weakened, drastically weakened, lost 40, 50 million people. Horrible battles in the Soviet Union. So only the United States has a functioning capitalist system. And now is the time for them to get back at these unions that have taken too much for them. So immediately after the war, 1947, Republicans take back Congress. They pass all kinds of legislation to make the Taft Hartley Amendments which make it easier for employers to resist unions in organizing campaigns, create right to work, so called right to work states, by the way, there are now 28 of them in the United States whereby these states unions cannot bargain any kind of meaningful union security. And then the greatest weapon of all is struck on and that is anti communism. So the Soviet Union, which had been our great friends, our great allies, who lost more people in the war than all the other countries perhaps put together, is now our enemy. And they are in government. They are here, they are there. And so the labor unions are accused of being communist ridden, especially the CIO unions. Walter Reuther, the great progressive, beats up on the communists and the auto workers. The CIO in general dismisses five communist unions. So it's one after another after another attack on the union movement. The 50s, we see the Landrum Griffin act, which regulates how unions operate.
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So.
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It'S an unrelenting attack on unions. And unfortunately, the labor movement has really not been able to respond in that kind of a way.
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Could I ask you to amplify one thing? The purging of communists and socialists. It has been said that this deprived the labor movement of not all, but many of the most active, the most militant, the most courageous leaders that they had. And so it was under the name anti Communism, what you were actually doing was decapitating the labor movement, in a sense, taking away a huge portion of. Of the most active. Is that something that you've also.
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Your old colleague at UMass and my old professor at UMass, Saul Barkin, wrote a piece in 1962 because he was noticing then that the labor movement was declining. And one of the reasons he gives for it in 1962 is it lost its imagination and it's lost its heart. It lost the people who were providing the ideas that were magic to the American public. And that's what happened. Those people were kicked out, booted out and discredited. Now, I'm not a communist. I've never been a communist, and I've had, as we both have, had disagreements with them over the years. But nonetheless, you have to give them credit for being great organizers, and they.
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Were, so that you couldn't kind of assault them for being great organizers of a successful movement. So you had to find something else to tar them with to get them out of their positions.
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Correct.
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And the anti communism was the opportunity.
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That's right. You know, the poor Rosenbergs were killed because they were selling, you know, atom bomb secrets or whatever. The excuse was, all of that was really to discredit the role of the left in the labor movement.
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Okay. That might explain the decline, say from 1945, I don't know, into the 1970s. But as we both know, the decline has continued. How do you. What's your way of thinking about the continuing decline? The fact that even now we've become used to hearing each year that the number of people in the labor movement has shrunk from the year before. What's the lasting legacy, perhaps, of what you just talked about?
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One of the things I think that has happened is that the political leadership of this country has turned away from unions. We're not popular with them anymore. All right, and how does that manifest itself? And I challenge you. Who was the last president you would say in this country was pro union?
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That's hard.
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It's hard, isn't it?
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It's very hard.
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I'll give you an answer that I have, and you're not going to like the answer. Lyndon Johnson.
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Yes.
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Right.
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I could have thought of it maybe. I thought maybe the peanut farmer, but he wasn't much.
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He wasn't much. So we have to go back to Lyndon Johnson.
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So we're talking half a century.
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C
We're talking about, yeah, 1968. He's out of office. So we didn't have, you know, think of our last president, you know, progressive man, for sure, did a tremendous amount of good things. The Teamsters union was never, according to them, never invited to the White House. People wonder why are building trades and Teamsters so positive on Trump? One of his first acts was to invite them to the White House. And the head of the Teamsters union reportedly said, never was invited here under Obama. So that's the stuff that's going on. First of all, we have not had the political leadership saying what FDR said, I want you to join a union. And why not? Why can't they say that? Right? It's now become, no, we can't talk that way because it's not popular anymore to talk that way. The second thing is, I think, is that we are responsible. We in the labor movement are responsible for that. When I first started working with the teachers union, it was well known within the union movement that private sector unions were funding the efforts of public sector unions to thrive. So the steel workers, the auto workers dumped millions of dollars. So there could be an aft, so there could be an afscme. We're not doing that anymore. Now I think it's time for the public sector unions to say, okay, here we are, and then we're going to bring you back to life at this.
- [44:05]
A
Point, the private sector union. Yes.
- [44:07]
C
Right. And then, you know, it's the law. The law is, you know, Mr. Bumble said, right. The law is a s. And it is. It is an ass. Unions is. Now we have a labor board. Obama made it slightly better, but still a labor board that more often Than not rules, the. That employers have freedom of speech, that employers can campaign against unions. And the final thing I would say is us. I mean, it really is us. We're not as imaginative. We're not as bold. We're not as willing to take risks as we used to be or as our parents used to be. There's a new book out, and I'm reading part of it. It's kind of funny, actually. It's called the sociopathic generation, in which it blames us baby boomers for everything that's wrong in America. So let's say that's half right. Then. We're also responsible for what happened to the labor movement as well. So I think, you know, one of the most exciting things that I have seen happen over the last 10 years is the Occupy movement.
- [45:19]
A
Well, you're ahead of me, Frank, but let me just ask you to do that. What ISI mean, you've painted a dire picture. You've given us an explanation of how you see it got this way. What do you see is happening that might, no guarantees, revive something like the labor movement, the left movement that was in existence and effective in the 1930s? We know we can have such a movement because we've had it. We know it can do great things because it did. What are the chances? And how could it emerge again?
- [45:53]
C
Well, I think the Occupy movement was exciting for that reason. People criticized it because they said, you know, I heard this in Rhode island all the time. Well, there's no act two, you know, it's just. And, yeah, that's true. But nonetheless, millions of people were affected by that. I mean, millions.
- [46:12]
A
It's hard to imagine the Bernie campaign without the octopus.
- [46:14]
C
And it's hard to imagine a university campus where there wasn't a Durworth, you know, 1% on it. Right? So, I mean, I had it on my office at uri. I had it in French as well. Nous somme nou, you know, cathe van de neuf pousson, because it was worldwide, is what I'm saying. So I think those people who did that must continue doing things like that, must be. Continue to sticking their necks out. Guys my age, all we can do is support them, and we will support them, you know, with money, with our. You know, with visiting them, stuff like that. But we need. You remember in New Haven, Rick, there was a Portuguese man in Fair haven, where you lived and where I grew up, who was a union organizer under Salazar in Portugal. And we asked him once, well, how do you organize unions? And his response was quick. Because he had thought about it. He said, you have to find the half crazies. Who are the half crazies? Those are the people who will do things that no one else will do. And we still have them in our country, and they have to come forward and they have to pay attention to the labor movement. And I think it's possible, and I think they will come out. And will they do things that you and I would want them to do? Probably not, but. But they're going to bring imagination back into things and joy back into things, and that's what we need.
- [47:45]
A
Yeah, I have the same feeling. I've told this story. If the people who organized the sit in at Zuccotti park here in New York City, where Occupy had its base, if they had come to me in the summer before, which they didn't, but had they come to me and said, what do you think? You've been around a while. You've been active. We're planning to set up some tents in that park. What do you think I would have told them? Like you just said, you're crazy. No one will care. You'll get a story in the back page of the newspaper and it'll be forgotten. I'm so glad they never came. So they didn't get this bad advice from me because that imagination was the right thing at the right time. Who could have imagined that within a matter of weeks, 350 cities across America would have encampments on their downtown parks? It was a stunning.
- [48:37]
C
And around the world.
- [48:38]
A
And around the world, Paris, Paris, Berlin, everywhere. Yeah. Okay, so let me get back to something that you and I have in common that touches this point. I'm a professor. You have been a professor. We are people who are making an interview on the radio and TV now. What's our role? You said it generally before. Support, help. What can we say, though, about what's going on that might help the half crazies to see their way forward to applying their courage and their initiative to the rebuilding of a labor movement?
- [49:14]
C
What you started this program on is the one thing that we could do the most on. You providing an analysis of the news. We don't get that anymore. You know, I read every day the New York Times, and most of the times, I want to rip it up and throw it away. Right. Because it has this unbelievable bias about things, you know, you can't. You know, we were talking earlier, Julie Stein. Poor Julie Stein. You would think that she was the most evil person in the world, according to the New York Times. So you Providing these kinds of services to people, this kind of analysis for people. And we all have to do things like that. We all have to become more public. But at the same time, I think we have to keep a distance so that the younger generation could really lead this fight, which they have to.
- [50:04]
A
Do you see anything like that happening? I mean, you pointed to Occupy. Anything else that has occurred that you might point us to be aware of?
- [50:15]
C
Well, the.
- [50:16]
A
Just whatever has crossed your horizon.
- [50:20]
C
There are. It's not much that I see. Maybe because I'm in the. I was in Rhode island for so long. No, I don't mean to be critical. Rhode island is a strong union.
- [50:29]
A
Yes. As states go, it's always been.
- [50:32]
C
It's almost as strong as New York is. And there's very strong people there and imaginative people there. But no, I don't see a lot of it going on. And it may be because I'm not looking. I mean, I know there's labor notes. I know Stanley Oronowitz has just written a book, which is a very good book, by the way, and I recommend people to read it. Tom Gaogan, I think is how he pronounced his name, a labor lawyer in Chicago, has just written a book, too. Both those books, Stanley's book and Hogan's book, are about the decline of the labor movement. So people are focusing on this and are giving ideas about this, and I think that's all to the good. Hopefully people are reading them.
- [51:18]
A
Yes. Well, mentioning them here will help do that. I know at some points you taught me things about labor movements in other parts of the world. Are there things going on that you're aware of elsewhere that Americans need to think about, to know about?
- [51:36]
C
Well, you know, one of our. Both of our favorite countries is France. And I think people ought to look at France in terms of what they mean by a labor movement. They don't mean what we mean. You know, millions of people are members, are paying dues or anything like that. They mean what people will go on strike, what people will actually risk something. That's the labor movement that has made even conservative politicians, like, if you remember. Of course you do. But if everybody remembers, Sarkozy, former president. Right. He actually made a deal with the unions. Right. He said to the unions, okay, I'm willing to throw more money into the unions, but let's have the workers choose which unions they want to represent them. And five of you will be chosen the top five. What does that mean? One of the things that Stanley Aronowitz talks about, Tom Gahogan talks about in Their books is getting rid of this notion of exclusive representation to have minority unions, to have people go out there and you know, and say, we want to be recognized and we don't care if anybody else dislikes us. Right. See what happens. That's true.
- [52:53]
A
Right. See what happens. I love this because see what happens is your way of saying something that strikes me as so important. We can't stay with the model we have because it has failed us and there are a lot of reasons for it. I don't mean only to blame the union leadership or anything like that, but if you're following a certain kind of organizational model for 50 years and you're on a 50 year decline, you've got to be self critical because how you organize is one of the few things you have some control over. And clearly it's not working. So that these ideas, such as allowing multiple unions at a workplace, these are the kinds of changes and questionings of a model of that anything like a healthy union movement would have to encourage. Yep, it seems to me, yeah, especially.
- [53:42]
C
Now where I think we have a very weak federal government at this point. I mean, especially now those things need to be tried and pushed and pushed. We also ought to encourage people to say really, really radical kinds of things, you know, like, like, for example, you know, over and over again, we want socialized medicine and we're not afraid to use that term. We want what England has, we want what Italy has, we want even what France has. It's better than what we got.
- [54:15]
A
Right.
- [54:16]
C
So people need to say that. And leaders, especially young people, need to be saying things like that. Oh, they'll be called all kinds of names, but so what? Some people will listen. You know, again, I'm lucky, I'm a union family, but I go back to when my mother. In 1933, many of the shirt shops and the blouse factories left New York because the unions had become so strong. The National Industrial act was passed by Roosevelt. All right, The New York unions, the ilgw, the amalgamated CENT organizers, Yiddish organizers, Italian organizers, black organizers, and in one year they organized everything in the city of New Haven. Why? Because they said to people, your lives could be better. The NiRA says you ought to be. And it did. In those days, you ought to be working 35 hours a week, not 60.
- [55:16]
A
Right.
- [55:17]
C
They got the union in and that changed overnight. Literally overnight. So, you know, we can't be afraid of articulating what a good life could be. And how could you know?
- [55:30]
A
You see, Right. Because the greatest. Absolutely. It's the greatest criticism of America with all it's achieved, the gap between what could be in this country and what is, that's the issue to attack. Because there's no justification for giving all this wealth to a tiny 1% while everybody else.
- [55:49]
C
And it gets bigger and bigger. The gap gets bigger and bigger.
- [55:52]
A
Even after the crash of 2008, it doesn't stop.
- [55:55]
C
It doesn't stop. That's right. So I think. Yeah, I think people cannot be ashamed to say things like this. And, you know, people my age, what do we have to lose anymore? You know, that's the way I feel about it.
- [56:05]
A
Okay, so do you see yourself with a In the minute we have left? Do you see yourself doing this kind of thing in your retirement?
- [56:17]
C
My dotage?
- [56:18]
A
Your dotage? No. I don't know.
- [56:20]
C
I don't know. I love what you're doing. I think it's wonderful. But that's you. I mean, that's how you are. And I don't know if I could be the same way, but I do things in my own little ways. I try to help people politically.
- [56:33]
A
I'm going to also ask if you would consider coming back and resuming this conversation about the labor movement. Lord knows it needs it. If you have some time in the months ahead, we can arrange it again. And I hope you write. I know how good you write when you do. And if you do, democracy at work will be proud to publish what you do.
- [56:53]
C
Thank you. Sure.
- [56:55]
A
Thank you, Frank. And thank you for a lifetime of teaching many folks like me what the labor movement is about. Thank you, friends. I want to thank you all for listening. We have, as you know, partners for this program. We want you all to be partners. I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that's been our partner for a long time. Please make use of our websites, share this program with others, and if you'd like, take a look at us on YouTube where you can see all this in living color. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Change, change, change, change.
- [57:47]
C
Thing gonna change.
- [57:49]
A
Yes, it's Sam.