Noam Scheiber (6:37)

If it worked both directions and I could say something my cat and my

Mike Pesca (6:40)

cat can give me an answer, then I know it works.

Noam Scheiber (6:43)

But if it's just one way do I know that I've correctly spoken cat?

Mike Pesca (6:49)

I also am going to present a 10 year old spiel about the deaths of 2016. Do you remember 2016, which everyone was saying is the worst year and prominent people died? Carrie Fisher. Oh, I think Prince. Everyone was dying. Well, we're ten years on, but I did do a roundup of the people you might not have thought of for a while because they've been dead for 10 years. It's good spiel. I bring it to you. But first, the author of Mutiny, Noam Schreiber. If you found yourself asking can the president really do that, then check out the new season of you Might Be Right, the chart topping politics podcast hosted by former Tennessee governors Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam. That's right, a Democrat and Republican governor. And fun fact, the show is named after Howard Baker's guiding principal. To always remember the other fellow might be right. Now that's a quote that just can get behind. In each episode, the governors tackle timely policy conversations with world and US luminaries like Al Gore, Judy Woodruff, Rahm Emanuel, and more. If you need a place to start, check out their recent episode that poses the question, should a president be able to take control of a state's National Guard to restore order even if a governor disagrees. That is a thoughtful debate. It's featuring Rosa Brooks, former senior advisor to the US Department of Defense, and John Yoo, former official with the U.S. department of justice, to discuss the ability to federalize the National Guard and the unique role the Guard plays in times of crisis. It's well worth a listen. Your balanced perspectives without the shouting matches found on cable news follow. You might be right on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell them I sent you. Noam Scheiber covers labor and economics for the New York Times. His new book is Mutiny the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. We're talking about it with Noam yesterday and we had begun discussing one of his subjects who works at the genius bar at Apple. And Apple is one of the biggest, the biggest market cap company in the world. You would hope that someone who works for a phenomenally successful company like Apple would be able to earn a decent enough living. Is that the case?

Noam Scheiber (9:08)

I think Nvidia might be higher now.

Mike Pesca (9:10)

Yeah. Yeah. Some of the two or three, some of the AI or chip companies may have passed it. You would hope that a valuable person like that would be able to achieve a comfortable upper middle class life. And I don't know, maybe she will. Part of her organizing, which you detailed, got her some benefits, but maybe, you know, not more so than any other Apple employee elsewhere. But my question with her is, and you don't want to, you know, second guess everyone's choices. You write about how she came out of school and she was hoping to get into a program like at IBM or Black and Decker and those were closed to her because she came out of school at a bad time. But as you know, the economy was got really tight recently and so it was a time for anyone who was looking to either jump or to make a move, they would get gobbled up. So is there some of this where they get some of these employees, because of the macro trend you're writing about, get into these jobs and they stick to these jobs in a way that's understandable in terms of on a human level, but actually isn't the right economic move if you're trying to maximize earnings?

Noam Scheiber (10:20)

Yeah, look, I do think there's some inertia there people, you know, if it's working well enough, you know, Apple pays, you know, typically above market wages, has good, good benefits, they get stock, you know, so, you know, it's often kind of a good Enough job. So I think there's, there's something to that though. I would just take issue a little bit with the way the job market sort of evolved. We did have this moment in kind of late 2020 through 21 where, you know, the great resignation, things like that, where the job market had really tightened because employers couldn't find anyone to do jobs.

Mike Pesca (10:54)

By that time, Kaya was at her job for how long she had been there?

Noam Scheiber (10:59)

Well, full time, three, four years by that point. But, you know, the thing about the great resignation is what we found is it really boosted people toward the bottom without, without degrees. So if you were a waiter or you were, you know, a stalker in a warehouse, you know, you could just jump from one job to another to another and really see your wages increase. But people in white collar, affluent, high paying, white collar jobs, we didn't quite see the same tightness in the labor market there. In fact, it's the one really intense period of compressing inequality. We saw people at the bottom really gain in wages and in the distribution. People in the kind of middle tier to upper middle kind of more or less stayed, stayed pretty fixed. So the boom was, you know, if you were at, you know, just to go back to her story, if she's at Apple and she wants to like jump to a Verizon store or an AT&T store, she probably could have done that, you know, and made some more money. I'm not sure she could have, you know, kind of vaulted from there to like, you know, the marketing department at Facebook or something like that. You know, what we were seeing is people were kind of mostly making lateral moves for better money. Or if you were at the low end, you kind of made a half rung jump. But people weren't going from sort of like not a great college job to a really good college job. And then immediately after that, beginning in late 21 through 22 through the present, we've really seen just a big softening of the market for college grads all over again. So it was, it was really that kind of one year period and even that wasn't that great. And then we kind of just resumed the sort of historical pattern of the past 15 years where the market for recent college grads was kind of soft.

Mike Pesca (12:48)

Yeah, I wonder if she couldn't have taken not even a lateral move, but gone back to those training programs that she wanted to get into. But that probably would have represented what people don't like to do is to take a pay cut and then maybe to bet on yourself and as you say, it's only a small portion. So moving on from that, she's very sympathetic and, you know, you start with an anecdote, a funny anecdote, but a tragic anecdote about how she's late for her first appointment because she locked her keys in her car, and the campus police get their jimmy tool stuck in the car, and she drives to work, taped with it. I'm like, wow, that is. That is the first scene of a movie. If you turn this into a Netflix special, probably underwritten by the Obamas. However, there are a couple other interesting characters who don't come from those humble beginnings. There's Jazz Brisack, who studied, I have it right here, intellectual history at Oxford University. There's your guy Teddy, who lived in the woods and worked in puppet theater, bread and puppet theater, after graduating from Grinnell. And these people are not unknown in the history of unions. There are, you know, the smart college boy who comes in and tells the machinists the thing or two. But they do seem. Are they overrepresented in your book? They overrepresented. If you look at who's leading the unions, I know there's a whole bunch of people. But you chose to focus on these two. Are the leaders of the unions less blue collar and typical of the worker?

Noam Scheiber (14:19)

Yeah. So I think I would separate those two. So Jazz Bridzak, you're absolutely right to focus on. On Jazz. I actually wrote a profile of them, you know, a couple of years ago also. So Jazz grew up in, you know, a variety of different places. They kind of moved. They were sort of transient when. When. When they were a teenager, ends up going to the University of Mississippi, does extremely well at the University of Mississippi. Wins a Rhodes scholarship, goes to Oxford, then comes back and decides that they want to be a union organizer. So they go to Buffalo, help unionize a local coffee chain there, and then they hatch this idea of like, well, what if we didn't just unionize this local coffee chain, but we picked a fight with the biggest coffee company on the planet? So, yes, they initially thought it was just going to be like a Buffalo thing, but then they succeeded with the first two or three stores in Buffalo, and then it just starts catching fire across the country. So Jazz comes out of a tradition that I write about called salting, which is exactly what you're talking about. The kind of undercover organizer. You go, you apply for a job. You know that what you really want to do is unionize the place. But obviously you want to keep a low profile and Just do your job well and kind of on the down low, start reaching out to coworkers. So this is something that goes back, you know, at least 100 years. It's kind of waxed and waned.

Mike Pesca (15:36)

And I think we have the Wobblies and the Molly Maguires would use. And this is. Right. And this is why Jazz Brisak is, if you look them up, a lot of interviews, going undercover to undercover organizing.

Noam Scheiber (15:49)

Yep.

Mike Pesca (15:49)

Right. And we should also say that Jazz detail from your book, the kind of person whose head sweatshirt was adorned with a headshot of Karl Marx, who turned up for the annual Rhodes dinner wearing an antifa T shirt. So real Marxist radical, not a coffee slinger. An organizer.

Noam Scheiber (16:08)

An organizer, yeah. Jazz is a person of the left, and they would. They would never deny that. So Jazz is very much out of

Mike Pesca (16:14)

this now, by the way, an Obama Foundation US Leader. So I guess there's some tacking to the middle.

Noam Scheiber (16:19)

Yes.

Mike Pesca (16:20)

This person wrote a screed against Pete Buttigieg's campaign for yes, class confidence.

Noam Scheiber (16:24)

As I said, people who graduated from college know how to know how to get by. So, yeah, so Jazz is very much of this tradition. But I think what's interesting about the Starbucks campaign, and, you know, I remember writing about this in real time. They. They union. They successfully unionized these first two stores in Buffalo. It's very much a salt driven operation with these undercover organizers. They actually advertise in kind of union publications. Like, if you're looking, you know, they were a little vague, but if you're looking to, you know, To. To do something, you know, to advance the cause, you know, you know, you know, ping us here. But then it just started spreading incredibly organically, and they're actually, you know, in the dozens. First dozens and then hundreds of stores that unionize across the country. They. You. What you end up is with people who kind of have a bit of a similar sociological profile. You know, they went to college. You know, a lot of them volunteered for Bernie. They knocked on doors, they have similar politics. But. But they are absolutely just downwardly mobile college grads who have never been union organizers. They're not coordinating with anybody. They're not plotting with anybody. And Teddy Hoffman, the guy that you mentioned, who is kind of the main character in the specific store in Chicago that I write about is exactly of that profile. Someone. He goes to Grinnell College, pretty prestigious college. He wins this fellowship, the Watson Fellowship, prestigious fellowship. He moves to Chicago, he works at Starbucks, just, you know, thinking it'll give me health care while I figure out my next move. Turns out for some of the reasons we've talked about, kind of inertia, he's there a little longer than he anticipates. Then he just starts kind of dusting off his resume, starts networking, you know, starts interviewing. And then the pandemic hits and it's like, ah, you know, so his timing just could not have been worse. And so he's just kind of stuck there for another year or two. And as he's stuck there, he's just getting more and more radicalized and more and more angry. And then this spark, you know, gets lit in Buffalo and he's like, oh, whoa. And so he's, he's, I think he's kind of typical of the Starbucks demographic in that respect, in that he sociologically is kind of fits a profile, you know, probably left politics, college grad, not working the job of their dreams. But it's very much an organic thing. You know, they see what's going on, this thing just starts really catching fire. And all of these pretty able, frustrated, college educated folks across hundreds of Starbucks in the country suddenly decide that, yeah, that actually sounds like a pretty good idea, let's go for it, right?

Mike Pesca (19:02)

I do wonder how much their commitment is primarily to getting their fellow baristas three more dollars an hour and how much is to the revolution? Because there's a lot of stuff in here. They don't compromise on their ideals. And I'm sure they would say both. And. But when it comes down to it, what. When the. I was going to use a coffee metaphor. When the grind hits the grinder, what. Why are they in it?

Noam Scheiber (19:31)

You know, I think it's really hard to disentangle the material reasons from the ideological ones. I think you put your finger on something important. I think there is a level of frustration that has built up from working these jobs that just feel kind of disrespectful toward them. And obviously there's not the kind of career arc available in these jobs that they hope that they would have coming out of college. They also see how other co workers, often without degrees, are treated and they feel like they're kind of disposable. I think that was a big feeling during the pandemic, which really, you know, becomes the sort of the straw that breaks the camel's back in a lot of respects. So I think it's very much a, it's a combination of material things. You know, I'm frustrated at the low pay and the lack of a career trajectory. It's disrespect I feel just, you know, mistreated by both management and customers. And then it's this ideological piece which is, I think, you know, just by their own nature, unions are a good thing. I think a world where we have more solidarity and not less, where we have more collection, collective action and not less is a good thing. And if I can advance that cause, then, then great. So I do think almost all, in almost all the cases that I write about, those three things are present.

Mike Pesca (20:55)

In the Starbucks case, there was a tweet from some members affiliated with the union, not exactly backing Hamas, but calling for, right after the October 7 attacks, calling for self determination for the Palestinians. And then Howard Scholz, the former CEO, still has a huge role to play in Starbucks, got into it, affiliated himself with some Orthodox Jewish organizations. Big back and forth. I had one of the Starbucks union organizers on the show. She was very quick to say, no, no, no, that wasn't us, that was just one store. But, you know, you tell the whole story, and the story is more that the union very much stands by that tweet and that sentiment, and they think that it was great for them. In fact, one person in the store, alluding to the Gaza tweet, said, at my store, it was a huge turning point for our militants. So there is an example where if I was a worker in the store, no matter what I thought of the Israel, Palestine question, I might say, how is this $3 more an hour? And their answer is, what?

Noam Scheiber (22:03)

Yeah, so I break it up into a couple, couple phases there. I think the first phase, as you, you described was that tweet that the tweet said solidarity with Palestine. And as you said, it had a picture of a, of a big tractor just tearing a part of a fence down in Gaza.

Mike Pesca (22:26)

And this was like on October 11th

Noam Scheiber (22:29)

or something, it was very, very soon. So that was highly controversial. I think initially within the union, there was a lot of anxiety about that. The tweet ends up getting deleted within half an hour or an hour. I think people both on the front lines of organizing these stores and even workers in the stores and within the kind of bureaucracy of the union were very anxious about that. They had different calls that I describe in there where even people who were sympathetic to the Palestinians are saying, yeah, is this really what we want to be inserting ourselves into? I'm not sure, you know, if this is our role. Yeah, there were other people concerned about a backlash. So I think there was, even if among the union members, I would say, you know, at least 2/3, 1/3 or maybe 3/4, 1/4 were sympathetic to the Palestinians rather than the Israelis. There was a lot of practical concerns, you know, about whether this is the right thing for us to. This is the right fight for us to pick at this point. But what happens is then the kind of phase two is Starbucks responds, right? They eventually sue the union for trademark infringement. Starbucks, you know, in its defense, is, you know, sort of suddenly drowning in chaos because it's getting both, it's getting it from both sides, right? It's getting, you know, people who are supporters of Israel saying, why are you, you know, siding with the Palestinians? And then it tries to sort of back, backpedal. And then people from the other side are like, why are you, you know, siding with the Israelis? It was an impossible position for Starbucks.

Mike Pesca (23:56)

And as you point out, they want to sell a lot of their very high profit Frappuccino pink Unicorn drinks to kids and youngsters. Right. Youngsters are more in favor of it.

Noam Scheiber (24:06)

Yeah. Who are just hanging out on TikTok.

Mike Pesca (24:08)

And you know, add to this, the corporation is just saying being identified at all with this issue is not good for business. The union is saying, maybe so, but if it causes a headache for the CEOs, that's good for us and not just for revenge purposes. Sorry, go ahead.

Noam Scheiber (24:23)

Exactly. So. So that'. Exactly. So Starbucks ends up in this absolutely impossible position. I'm very sympathetic because they were damned regardless of what they would have done. So they decide to sue the union for trademark infringement. First. They just try to kind of distance themselves from this tweet and say, look, we're not the union. They do their own thing. We have not taken a position here that doesn't work. So then they sue for trademark infringement. The lawsuit then ends up creating this backlash to the company. And as you say, Howard Schultz sort of inserts himself and tries to talk to an Orthodox Jewish group that had kind of basically tried to organize a boycott against Starbucks. So it's this huge mess. But what ends up happening, I think the way it nets out is there is a huge backlash to Starbucks. And that backlash actually gives the union some leverage because suddenly you have just a whole number of sort of grassroots led pro Palestinian voices, you know, on TikTok, you know, protesting in, physically in person at their stores. You even have a hit to sales in various Middle Eastern countries, which is so significant that the CEO, on their first quarter earnings call in January of, or in I guess it was January of 2024, has to say, this is like impacting us, you know, so that Just ends up the, the company basically just decides like, we, we just need an end. We're in a quagmire. We need to sue for peace because we cannot be fighting on these multiple fronts. It's a complete.

Mike Pesca (26:00)

Wow. It's like, it's like the conflict itself. Oh, my God.

Noam Scheiber (26:04)

Yes, you could, you could make an analogy. And so not too long after that, In February of 24, the CEO of Starbucks at the time, Laxman Narasimha, basically directs his lawyers and his HR people to say, you know, strike a deal. Let's, let's strike a deal. Because this is just engulfing us and it's becoming chaotic and we just cannot deal with it anymore. So I think it does in a very real way give them leverage that they then turn into sort of a peace treaty with the company. They get some wins out of that. And that probably wouldn't have come. Well, I shouldn't say that. I think the CEO at the time, Laxman R. Simha, actually was a pretty pragmatic guy. So I think he already saw that this union fight was not something that was good for Starbucks long term. But the October 7th stuff and the backlash to Starbucks after October 7th really kind of heightens the urgency of him striking some kind of deal. And so I think it does end up advancing the ball for the union in ways that you just could not have anticipated beforehand. I mean, and you cannot count on replicating for any other union campaign in the future.

Mike Pesca (27:08)

But also Europe, your report on Laxman's open mindedness and seeing the big picture and seeing that fights with the union, it doesn't matter about the fine details, fights with the union aren't good for business. But he's out. He's out now, right?

Noam Scheiber (27:21)

Yes. Yep.

Mike Pesca (27:22)

Yeah, because of that. Because he was so open minded and concessionary.

Noam Scheiber (27:26)

You know, it's tough to say exactly. But it is clear that as you say, Howard Schultz, who was a longtime CEO and still a major shareholder at the company, he and Laxman very quickly did not see eye to eye. And this was one of the issues on which they did not see eye to eye. In the book, I talk about this moment where Bernie Sanders summons Howard Schultz to come testify about his, quote, union busting activities. And Howard Schultz is very frustrated at this and really resents the way that Sanders is characterizing Starbucks response to the union. And I think Howard had hoped that Laxman, his new CEO, would come and kind of sit shoulder to shoulder with him at that hearing to kind of demonstrate that he and the current CEO are On the same page, Laxman declined to do that, declined to join him at this hearing, testifying before Bernie Sanders and the Senate Labor Committee. And that just kind of heightened a rift between them, I think that never, they never really recovered from. And so, yeah, after about a year or so, Laxman is out. And then they, they brought in actually the CEO of Chipotle at the time, Brian Nichol, to come take over the company from there.

Mike Pesca (28:41)

And we have more of this conversation because as you can tell, I'm quite interested and Noam knows quite a lot. So to listen to the whole thing, to help, help support the show more than help really keep it afloat, go to subscribe.mike pesca.com a100really89 I'll give it to you for 89 year long subscription, get you all the bonus content and all the shows ad free. Or you could just subscribe to the ad free option that subscribe.mikepeska.com. And now the spiel. I want to do a remembrance of those who passed, but I edited my list to only include those who maybe don't come to mind immediately. The effect I'm going for is I'm like, oh, that's right, he died. Or I remember that. Or wait, she was still alive. So not Prince, not David Bowie, not Muhammad Ali. Those, those guys are on the top of your mind. I'm sure. Maybe there'll be one or two in this list who you remember. But as I selected from the list of luminaries, what I did was what's the best way the gist can remember these people? And I thought, you know, the, the most touching and sensitive fitting would be to pair these people with some quasi inappropriate wordplay. For instance, I have to admit that news of the passing of Henry Heimlich got me a little choked up. At first I thought it was a gag. But no, he did live to be the age of 95 and now has a clear passageway to the next life. For some, like Dodger great Ralph Branka, I just wish their deaths would wait till next year. For others, like Arnold Palmer, I ask, what's it all for? For we come from the earth and to the earth we must return. This was the case for Maurice White, who not only returned to the earth, but also the wind and the fire. Often for many benefit concerts on pbs, death came suddenly to some, like Antonin Scalia, who could not have been surprised or even disappointed. As a devout Catholic, he knows not to question the Lord's original intent. May his soul rise to heaven. This would be the worst time for the jurist to be part of a dissent. Yes, some, like Scalia, were believers where infidel Castro. We have a revolutionary and an atheist who is the target of CIA poisoning plots, but no cigar. Fidel was bad news for sure. Others, like English actor Kenny Baker, are too good for this earth, no matter how bad a man is. Some hate to speak ill of the dead. I'm on morally safer ground when I praise the 60 Minute journalist Morley Safer, a man of intellect and empathy who brings to mind this famous literary quote. If you could learn a simple trick, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You can never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. That was said by one of the great characters in all of literature, Hannibal Lecter. Oh wait, no, I'm being told it was Atticus Finch, the creation of the departed Harper Lee. Lee, for almost her entire life authored one book, as did her co departed celebrity big Ange from VH1's Mob Wives. Hers was called Bigger Is Better, Real Life Wisdom from the no Drama Mama. And began. His literary achievements did not seem to rival To Kill a Mockingbirds. But then Harper Lee's lawyer and agent found some early version of her masterwork. She packaged it up and now Harper Lee is known by the kids today as the author of the mediocre Go Set a Watchman starring that racist A hole Atticus Finch. Whereas Mockingbird was precise and glorious, Watchmen was halting and muddled. Go Set a Watchman. Yeah, it's around 4, maybe 4:30, let's say 5ish Finkel. 5ish Finkel, the star of Yiddish theater and picket fences, passed away in 2016. Interesting 5ish Finkel. Fact. He was born Phil Philip Finkel, changed his name to 5ish. Absolutely true. He did it to be a better box office attraction in the Yiddish theater. How much more money could he earn? About 5ish. We remember young old blue eyes, Frank Sinatra Jr and actress Patty Duke, who only got paid once even though she played cousins. Identical cousins, two of a kind. That was in an era before TV shows needed premises. And on February 16th, we lost Mike Greenstein at the age of 95. Who? Well, his dad was Joe Greenstein. Joe Greenstein built himself as the Mighty Adam and he performed feats of strength around America. So Mike did the same thing. Built himself as Mighty Adam Jr. And I will read a line from his obit. Living his later years in Rockaway Queens. Greenstein was a strength athlete by profession known as the Mighty Adam Junior. He was capable of pulling a car with his bare teeth nearly to his dying day, but not beyond, thus thwarting his plans to be his own pallbearer. So Greenstein died, as I said, on February 16. And they say bad news usually comes in threes. Well, it did, because on that day we also saw the passing of former UN Secretary General Boutrose Boutrose Gali. The day prior to that, Dutch football player Hans Posthumous passed away, fulfilling his destiny. Similarly, in 2016, we saw the death of Alan Rickman. Younger generations know the English actor as Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films, but those of my generation, well, we remember Rickman as the evil mastermind in Dying Hard, Hans Gruber, whose death scene gave new meaning to the phrase, look, ma, no. Hans and I will end with a quote from when the Dolphins Leave the Earth and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as well as what fans of Barney Miller and Tessio said of the leathery, droll character actor whose door countenance encapsulated so much of the downtrodden of the seventies, Abe Vagoda died. He actually really did die this time. So long, and thanks for all the fish. And that's it for today's show. Corey War produces the gist. Kathleen Sykes runs the gist list, Ben Astaire is our booking producer, and Jeff Craig runs our Socials. Michelle Pesca oversees it all. Benevolently improve and thanks for listening.