RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 323 Labor, Unions, and The Path Forward with Steve Early
Episode 323 of RevolutionZ has as guest Steve Early who discusses the vital role of the labor movement in the days of Trump. What is going on at work and in unions now? What are union organizers emphasizing? What might we expect from and contribute to worker activism in coming months? To address these matters, Early discusses coalitions between unions and veteran organizations, strategies against privatization, reaching out to attract and involve new union members, independent political action and working-class candidates, forging solidarity between public and private sector unions, integrating climate issues into labor activism, nurturing solidarity across diverse worker demographics, and more. At a time when some feel labor is lost, early shows it is not only not lost but on the move and pivotal to winning against Trump and then for positive change.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. My guest for this episode is Steve Early. Steve has worked as a labor organizer, lawyer or freelance journalist for the past 50 years. For three decades, he was an international union representative for the Communication Workers of America in New England. He has written five books about labor or politics, including with Suzanne Gordon and Jasper Craven, a recent study of veterans issues called Are Veterans Winners, losers, friends and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs, which is from Duke University Press. He is a longtime member of DSA and the Richmond Progressive Alliance in his new hometown of Richmond, california. He was a co-founder of Labor for Bernie in 2016 and has served on the editorial advisory committees of four labor-related publications Labor Notes, new Labor Forum, working USA and Social Policy. So, steve, welcome to Revolution Z. Perhaps we can start with what ought to be a prominent concern of everyone who opposes Trump and seeks a better world. What should we work and hope for, and perhaps even expect from labor in the coming months?
Speaker 2:labor in the coming months. Well, I think we're already seeing, amidst a lot of understandable doom and gloom in the wake of Trump's shock and awe offensive in the last few weeks, hopeful stirrings of resistance. My spouse and I, because of our writing about Veterans Affairs in the last few years, have been working with multiple unions that represent federal employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and they include the American Federation of Government Employees, which is the biggest of them, the National Federation of Federal Employees, which has got a big active local here in San Francisco, national Nurses United and several other unions, and I think all of them so far are rising to the occasion. They're having emergency Zoom calls and special membership meetings. There's been a surge of new membership signups. Federal employee bargaining units are open shop. There's no union security clauses. People are free to join or not join.
Speaker 2:A lot of people seem to be getting the wake-up call that this administration Trump 2, is even more hostile than Trump 1, where federal employees and their jobs and the services they provide are involved.
Speaker 2:So I think that's an encouraging first start in one sector of the federal government and one of the things that I think that they're trying to do, as these VA unions have done in the past is build coalitions with the patients they serve, the 9 million veterans who use the VA hospital system.
Speaker 2:They're trying to work with the more progressive veterans organizations that are willing to take Trump on and with families and communities that would also be impacted by what will otherwise be big staffing cuts and, eventually, facility closings and a downgrading of the nation's largest public health care system, which is the VA, and its replacement by even further privatization and outsourcing of services.
Speaker 2:So I mean that's one key front and you know the workers involved are not traditionally in the forefront of labor militancy. There were a bunch of them federal employees having a very good kind of caucus and cross-union networking session last year at the Labor Notes Conference in Chicago. That was attended by over 5,000 activists, activists. So people are getting their act together, hopefully not too late, but doing all the right things, and I think that's a very positive sign. And you know, too often people are more removed from that, understandably. We see the headlines, you know, watch their news feeds and it's a kind of a doom loop of oh my God, could it get any worse? And then the next day it's worse. But beneath this gathering storm there is a fight back emerging, and that's good.
Speaker 1:What shape specifically do you think it can take? What shape specifically do you think it can take? So, for example, suppose Trump and what's his name, kennedy Jr, move to remove people in the health industry, that part of it, that part of it, what does the workers in that industry and the unions do in response and to ward off, to reverse and to ward off any further actions? What kinds of steps might they take?
Speaker 2:Well, I think you know we have a bit of a blueprint for that. Again, going back to the example of the VA healthcare system, because shortly after Biden got in though campaigning in 2020 as a great friend of veterans and a foe of VA privatization, somebody who said he would told veterans groups he would never defund their healthcare system or close a single hospital, his Secretary of Veterans Affairs, dennis McDonough, unveiled a plan for widespread facility closings in both red states and blue states, and the pushback, as I alluded to, really came from a coalition of VA unions, patients, families, veterans organizations, but also politicians, community leaders, people concerned about the impact of hospital closings in rural areas all around the country. And this plan was torpedoed not just with help from Democrats in Congress, who are often hard enough to rouse, but by right-wing Republicans in states like North Dakota and South Dakota, who suddenly became big foes of privatization when clinics and hospitals serving veterans in their state were at risk of being closed. And so I think a similar contradiction is certainly going to emerge in the field of veterans affairs, because when Trump goes after that portion of the workforce, 30% of the workers are veterans themselves, and this is supposed to be a pro-veteran administration.
Speaker 2:The vice president, jd Vance, is a veteran. Too many veterans voted for the two of them, probably 55% of those based on exit polls, as opposed to 45% for Harris. So people are, as in many other cases, not getting necessarily what they hoped, what they expected, what they were promised by their great friend Donald Trump, and I think we shouldn't be too jaded about the organizing possibilities that arise as a result of people getting that realization. Many people on the left you and I, others would say, hey, didn't people get the memo during the first four years of this guy, I mean? But there's lots of reasons why people gave him a second chance and I think he's on his way to blowing it with many of them because he's not delivering and really has no intention of delivering on many of the promises that he made to working people.
Speaker 1:Indeed, we agree, but I worry a bit because it seems to me Trump is not the moron he's reputed to be and he's learned a lot, something that not everybody does, including not everybody on the left, but he has learned a lot. And now I could have this backwards and wrong, so you correct me if I do, but if Biden puts forward a plan to do X, he then expects it to go through a process and the fight is over. Okay, will X be implemented? I don't think that's going to be what happens with Trump. I think, with Trump, he's simply going to fire everybody he wants to fire in a steadily increasing crescendo, but the fight is going to be to reverse something that is already accomplished or is already enacted, and that seems to me a little different.
Speaker 1:And I wonder whether you know, you hear these reports of people who are longtime employees and they get this notice that they're fired and they tend to get up and leave. They get this notice that they're fired and they tend to get up and leave, and I'm wondering whether it's conceivable that the right response is to say no, I'm not leaving, and for others to almost like a sanctuary that protects a potential deportee, deportees, a kind of a similar type stance from labor no, you can't fire them, they're not leaving, and that would be a confrontation that would be quite remarkable and quite promising, I think. Is there any hope for that kind of a stance?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. I mean, the first step really is this flood of people who are not members joining the federal employee unions with here in the Bay Area, which represents a couple thousand workers at the VA hospital in San Francisco, they've had a series of kind of emergency membership meetings welcoming new people, assigning people all kinds of tasks. They're doing a lot of outreach, they're networking with counterparts in other VA facilities around the country and they're trying to coordinate with the four or five other national unions that jointly or separately bargain with the VA. And they know from the first Trump administration that the political appointees that have once again been installed are pro-privatization ideologues. They have to be a little bit careful about how they present that plan, because privatization of the veterans health care system is not popular with veterans, even conservative ones for the most part. But there's definitely, as you mentioned, going to be an attempt to push people out the door. But I think the unions have been doing good education work about this phony, you know, buyout offer and making it clear to their new and old members that this is not an enforceable employment promise from their employer and I think more people are looking to the unions with greater confidence.
Speaker 2:American Federation of Government Employees has joined or filed by itself a number of suits already to challenge the impending assault or already underway assault on civil service protections, no-transcript people of civil service coverage and their job titles.
Speaker 2:And you know replacing them with more than a few hundred political appointees. You know how far you can go in an agency that, on the health care side, employs 300,000 people and provides direct services. I mean the way they're going to undermine. That is the way it's been undermined for 10 years under both Democrats and Republicans in the White House, which is outsourcing more services. So you create a crisis situation where you can't provide direct care because people have been pushed out, the door laid off, our facilities have been closed. Then that's certainly going to accelerate the privatization process and there'll be versions of that in other federal government departments where private contractors, corporate interests, are more than happy to become a substitute for the government delivering services under this. You know grand Musk theory that we downsized the government and replaced its functions with, you know, services provided by the companies like the ones he runs. We'd all be better off. But that's a quite untested theory.
Speaker 1:I have another I guess it's a related question about strategy or tactics or what's possible. I wonder whether the government sector and the private sector could have a degree more solidarity. Yeah, what are the prospects to give an example of the UAW sticking up for workers in other sectors and then vice versa? That too would be a kind of direction of confrontation which would really raise the stakes dramatically. Is there potential for that?
Speaker 2:I think it's already happening.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's not a big part of their new organizing but because the UAW has become in recent years much more of an amalgamated union the majority of its 350,000 members actually don't work in the auto industry anymore of its 350,000 members actually don't work in the auto industry anymore.
Speaker 2:They've been, as you know, doing a lot of organizing in higher education, certainly out here in the University of California system, but one of their recent organizing victories was helping a group of 5,000 federal employees at the National Institute of Health get organized in the DC area.
Speaker 2:They just got their first contract wrapped up under Biden, which was good timing, and now this new local, which is, you know, composed, I think, of people who in some cases were part of the graduate student employee union organizing movement in higher education, getting advanced degrees, didn't stay on the academic track. Many of them are researchers, people with masters and doctorates working at the National Institute of Health but already predisposed to unionization. So they supported this drive, they created a UAW local and right there you have a linkage between a, you know, still predominantly private sector union and a group of federal employees that's also joined this federal employees union network that was solidified last year at the Labor Notes Conference, which involves people from all the federal government departments and all the different unions, to try to coordinate on a cross-union basis at the rank-and-file local union level. You know, even when national union headquarters are doing some of that, but never as effectively as can be done when it's worker to worker, member to member.
Speaker 1:So I think, yeah, the World W is going to be sticking up for attacks on the public sector.
Speaker 2:Some other unions that have already jumped into bed, disgracefully last year and played footsie with Trump like Sean O'Brien, the head of the Teamsters, ed Kelly another great Boston character head of the firefighters Both of them were at the inauguration celebrating Trump's victory, hardly in the interest of segments of the Teamsters or the firefighters. Both unions represent federal employees and certainly a number of other public employees, but I think their ill-advised trying to play both sides of the street last year is ultimately going to come back to haunt them, hopefully.
Speaker 1:A different approach to what I think is a similar issue. On the left, outside the unions, there is a very explicit forefront attention to focus on race, gender, trans, ecology, war, Palestine issues, but at least to my perception and this might not even be fair, but it is what I seem to see much less regarding labor, it gets a kind of lip service because, of course, if you're on the lift, you care about workers. It's a kind of lip service because, of course, if you're on the lift, you care about workers, but it feels often like the assumption is that's not really relevant, that's not really so important because they're not going anywhere and the other part of the battle, so to speak, is where Trump can be stopped. And that view not only is it callous, but it's also incredibly wrong. And so I wonder if you have any feelings about that, if you felt similarly at all, and what might be done about it.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't run across that. I mean I understand that the constellation of single-issue concerns that you just listed there is a major— oh, I'm not trying to get rid of any of those.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, I'm trying to add labor, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but my sense around here maybe this is just being too assimilated to the Bay Area after living here now for 10, 12 years. This is a lot of overlap and you know I belong to East Bay DSA. People are very close to their generational cohort, directly involved in the ongoing Starbucks Union campaign, trader Joe's organizing activity on both coasts. You know again the common denominator for those who continued on the academic path after college universities some kind of first brush with the labor movement through the higher ed unions, either as an adjunct teacher or as someone in a graduate program, becoming a member of the UAW or the hotel workers or the AFT or any one of a number of unions that represent people in these grad student employee unions and the diaspora of that kind of organizing. You know a mix of private sector and public sector has really had a positive and cross fertilizing influence. I mean I don't think that Starbucks thing would not have gotten as far as it has under very difficult circumstances if the cultural compositional workforce wasn't what it is. People came to work at Starbucks in many cases with political political identities and connections and past exposure to one of Bernie Sanders' campaigns or anti-war activity or struggles about race and gender, black Lives Matter in particular.
Speaker 2:I have a lot of confidence in young people rising to the occasion. You know, here in Richmond on Sunday, even before some of the long-established immigrant defense organizations got their act together and they're pretty on the ball about defending Richmond as a sanctuary city high school students at the two Richmond high schools organized a big march. A couple of thousand people down a main street, no older people telling them what to do or when to do it or how to do it. But obviously you know some positive influences among the faculty in both schools and connections to community organizations here. You know that for 20 or 25 years have been fighting for immigrant rights. But you know these are 17 and 18 year olds, so they are rising to the occasion. I think there's examples of that emerging, you know, all around the country. And again, you know I've been a writer coach in both high schools and had many conversations.
Speaker 2:You've been a what coach, A writer coach oh okay, they have a program where older people with time on their hands can go into the high schools and spend, you know, one-on-one coaching sessions and it's a really good program.
Speaker 2:I've met a lot of kids in both high schools which are predominantly, almost entirely, people of color, both high schools. And you know everybody's got a job and so everybody's out. You know working in a pizza parlor at night or in a grocery store or working in a family business, and I would have many, many discussions about, you know, workplace conditions and workers' rights and unions. And you know, because people are already having work experience under sometimes adverse conditions, having a hard time staying awake, you know, with the reading at lunchtime because they'd been working a night shift at a grocery store. So I you know I don't think people see unions as a lost cause, as a separate cause, but around here, you know, very much a cause integrated with these many others that we're talking about.
Speaker 1:Well, that's happy to hear that. Right, that's reassuring, a very positive prospect there. Let me ask yet another question. We know that, however peculiar it is in many respects, lots and lots and lots of workers voted for Trump and a great many of them haven't decided okay, that was wrong. Now I'm going to switch sides, so to speak, or anything like that, and I'm wondering to what extent are I mean you could imagine the labor movement thinking to itself well, we can fight based on what we have or thinking to itself, we need to enlarge what we have by reaching out to those people who we don't have, and I'm wondering which of those seems to be prevalent and, if the latter is there, how that reaching out takes place.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think a lot of people in the labor movement who've been involved in organizing, who've been involved in organizing and I could cite my own example have, you know, had the kind of experience that lots more people had last November on election night. You know, talk about a national pity party right and a blame. These dumb people let us down, these racists, these homophobes, these sexist assholes. They stabbed us in the back, don't they know what's in their best interest? Well, strangely enough, during my long stint as a union organizer, I spent many sad evenings, too many, at parties, what were supposed to be celebrations after a National Labor Relations Board election, in a private sector workplace where management had conducted a vicious anti-union campaign and the hopes of 100 people, 200 people, 1,000 people, of organizing a union based on having signed up a majority of their co-workers In the course of a two or three week union busting campaign, their union majority had been turned into a minority and they had lost, often very narrowly. And you know, at these post-elections events I can tell you, you know, people tend to be the first reaction unless they're very exceptional organizers is bitterness and resentment and frustration and anger and blaming co-workers. They let us down, they stabbed us in the back. They said they were going to vote for the union. They lied what fools. You know now the company's really going to screw with them and us, and all of that's true. But you know now the company's really going to screw with them and us, and all of that's true.
Speaker 2:But you know a lot of organizers have had to work with groups like that around the idea that, hey, a year from now we can get another election.
Speaker 2:The challenge in those kind of settings and I think it's the challenge we face nationally is you know, when you get in these union election situations, even when you've been unexpectedly beaten, you know 40, 45 percent of the vote. That's a base and you don't walk away from it and what you do is try to work with the people to expand that base, try to keep the union alive. On the shop floor you can get another shot at gaining recognition and overcoming management interference with the organizing. But you know the initial human reaction is very much like that of what we saw a lot of people on the left and certainly among liberals, of wanting to blame the other half of the country for just being deluded fools, when in fact you know a lot of complicated reasons why people didn't vote the right way and why millions didn't bother to vote at all, which might have been the biggest deciding factor for, you know, trump's reelection.
Speaker 1:But I'm still wondering one worker, another worker, worker number one, wants to fight against Trump. Worker number two still has a mega hat. Is the only way that worker one is reaching worker to sort of a model effect? We do this organizing, we battle eventually there, or are they literally trying to talk?
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, that talking actually in the Teamsters is a good example. I mean, it went on throughout the last four or five months of the election because, without getting too deep into that complicated internal politics of the union, it was a very complicated situation that the National Union basically adopted a stance of neutrality after doing a lot of internal polling which, in the first round, showed that the members who participated favored Biden over Trump. And the union did a later poll and when Harris was on the ballot they supported Trump over Harris. The National Executive Board of the Teamsters, with this kind of divided constituency, didn't officially endorse anybody. Teamster locals and joint councils representing more than a million members. The majority went ahead and endorsed the Democrats, and a very interesting kind of ad hoc group, kind of a spinoff of Teamsters for Democratic Union, called Teamsters Against Trump, spent three or four months campaigning around the country doing exactly what you just asked about. It was often UPS workers who, with the backing of locals that were anti-Trump, got some funding, got off the job and went out and tried to campaign, worker to worker, against Trump. You know more the focus on fighting him, this fascist, anti-union asshole, as opposed to promoting the largely non-existent virtues of Harris, thus the name of the group.
Speaker 2:It wasn't Teamsters for Harris, and I think they you know, I've been interviewing some of the activists who were off the job working on this for an article and they found it to be a very positive experience. They had a lot more credibility than people on one side of the issue or another at the international union level in terms of the union telling them what to do and how to vote. But you know they got run off in, you know, workplaces where people actually had in history have been able to freely campaign when it was an internal union election UPS Barnes in the South and so it was not always a pleasant discussion, even with fellow union members, not out-of-state canvassers, non-teamsters, paid canvassers. I mean this was fellow workers volunteering for a cause in a situation where you know the union had basically, at the national level, said, well, we're not going to take a stance. And so I think there's definitely going to be ongoing work in the teamsters because there is a lot of distress with the rather traditional game that Sean O'Brien played.
Speaker 2:You know he spoke at the Republican convention, made a big deal about how unprecedented it was for someone who'd been a lifelong Democrat like him to be here among all his new Republican friends, josh Hawley and Donald Trump and JD Vance. Well, you look at the history of the Teamsters over the last 60 years and for most of the presidential election cycles going back to when Jimmy Hoffa was a supporter of Richard Nixon, the Teamsters supported Republicans for president.
Speaker 2:So it's only been more recently that they've been adopting a more traditional kind of pro-Democrat labor union stance. Anyway, you know the Teamsters are going to remain contested terrain because you had a network of people who felt that the union had to take a stand. Too much was at stake for Teamsters and other workers and around the broad range of non-labor issues that Trump is going to have a negative impact on. But I think any time that you know the rank and file and this was really the story of labor for Bernie in 2016 and 2020.
Speaker 2:Challenges, top leadership, decision making about political endorsements. That's a or does something independently about them. That's a positive development within labor.
Speaker 1:Okay, but bringing it to the more individual level, you are in a bar talking or wherever talking with a….
Speaker 2:I'm not against bars. I spend too much time in them.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you're in a bar, you're having a beer with someone who you know and it turns out that that person is supporting, still supports, is saying things supportive of Trump. Yeah, what I'm asking is I mean, you have a shitload of experience in all these circles and I'm asking what do you say? In other words, how do you approach such a discussion? Right, what do you say? In other words, how do you approach such a discussion?
Speaker 2:I think it can help people who are, you know, even with family members, even with friends, et cetera, et cetera. I would liken it to the conversation with people union organizing contexts, who present as hostile to unionization, skeptical about it or had a bad experience with the union in a previous job and you're trying to win them over. Or you know, in this scenario that I mentioned earlier, you know they voted against the union last time but you've got another representation vote coming up and you know you're trying to get them in the yes vote column this time, I think, shaming and column this time, I think, shaming and denunciation, and making people feel like they made a bad, foolish mistake. Probably not a good approach, but you know gently probing, asking how do you think it's going, or anything about what he's doing or they're doing that's disappointed or surprising to you. You know trying to hone in on the things that a person might not have expected to happen. You know there's a lot of magical thinking and denial that goes on in the world, that most people are not totally attuned to politics 24 by 7.
Speaker 2:I mean, the Times did a great profile a month or so ago about a very interesting kind of blended family in Georgia where a retired union guy might have been a teamster, was really strong pro-Trump you know, stereotypical MAGA guy.
Speaker 2:But his daughter had married an undocumented Mexican-American immigrant who had become a pillar of the community, active in their church. And suddenly, you know, this guy, this father-in-law's candidate, gets elected and the son-in-law is at risk of deportation. The Times story was a profile of someone who was like, oh, I never thought it would affect my family. Oh, there must be some way that we can get some help to stop this, this. But it was all viewed in kind of personal terms but a belated, you know, realization that a crackdown on immigrants could affect someone in their own life. And you know, meanwhile, the daughter and the son-in-law and their kids, this guy's grandkids, trying to figure out well, where can we move to, you know, not be rounded up. So I think there's going to be quite a few real life situations like that, not always in the first few weeks or first few months and I think, looking for indications of that, rather than just pounding people over the head by what a bad mistake they made, would be more effective in winning them over long term.
Speaker 1:I could see the organizer or the activist talking in that situation also having difficulty relating to the idea that, wait, you're concerned because it's your family. What about when it was all those other people? Can't you find some degree of solidarity? Can't you understand that the issue isn't just that's Trump. Trump is also concerned when it affects him. He's just not concerned about anybody else on the planet. And I can see leftists having a hard time staying in that conversation. I'm not saying they should evacuate, you know, leave that conversation but I think I can imagine them having difficulty and I wonder whether there's a way to get past that difficulty.
Speaker 2:I think, you know, for some people it will will be eye-opening and consciousness-raising in a way that it won't be for others, who will remain perhaps focused on their own. The administration, you know, stopping funding for programs at risk because someone's trying to make some post-election point in Washington about the need for reducing spending or reducing the size of the federal workforce, or bypassing Congress or whatever. I just think there's going to be a series of these wake-up calls and some people will respond, you know, with the light bulb going off in a better way. But you know we've got to take what we can get in terms of a belated realization that this is not good for the vast majority of people in the country.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering if you have other issues or concerns that you'd like us to address that I haven't asked about.
Speaker 2:I know you know the readers and supporters, many of whom over the years have been understandably dissatisfied with the performance of the Democratic Party as a standard bearer for labor or any other progressive cause. So I think one post-election development is kind of a revived interest in the possibility of independent political action by labor. You know some supporters of the Labor Party that had its heyday back in the 1990s are, you know, having lessons of the Labor Party for working class politics today? Discussion in a couple of weeks, including people from the UAW, the UE. One of the campaigns I tried to help with as an out-of-state volunteer and publicist and fundraiser for last year was a very interesting campaign run by a working class guy in Nebraska.
Speaker 2:Dan Osborne, who'd been a leader of the Kellogg strike a few years ago, worked in a Kellogg cereal plant in Omaha, is now a building trades guy and, encouraged by fellow union members in a state that is not a stronghold of unionism, he ran an independent campaign for US Senate. He'd never run for anything other than local union office in his life and got 47 percent of the vote last year against a MAGA Republican a MAGA Republican and I think really showed that under certain circumstances somebody from a working class background with some credentials as a union leader in this case a strike leader and ties to the community. He was also a veteran and running on a broadly progressive blue-collar agenda. He wasn't great on every issue could really be more effective taking on Trump supporters, trump-backed candidates, than conventional corporate Democrats. And I think Dan, since he went back to work as a steam fitter, has helped set up a thing called the Working Class Heroes Fund. He's trying to raise money to help train and develop other working class candidates. You know he's trying to help them find situations in which independent, union backed candidacy would be viable.
Speaker 2:In many cases it would be, you know, a third party situation and you'd be accused of being a spoiler and a splitter and you'd be helping the Republican win.
Speaker 2:That's the perpetual dilemma of third party candidacies, of which I have voted for many throughout my life. But I think there's a revived interest in independent political action by laborers. The Democratic Party, clearly, you know, has a bigger and bigger billionaire class problem of its own and the result in terms of electoral politics is not good in terms of the candidates they field, what they do when they win it if they get elected. And of course, you know there's been this well-documented indication of widespread working class voter alienation from the direction of the Democratic Party. So I think some stirrings of life on the independent political action front are positive and people should stay tuned to see whether the Working Class Hero Funds and other efforts I mean it's just a situation of total disenfranchisement. You know there was a study, academic study done, I think, a year or so ago, that looked at the class backgrounds of the roughly 7,300 people who serve in our state legislatures around the country and they found that only 80 of them were previously employed in working class jobs.
Speaker 1:Well, what do you want? 80 out of 7,000? That's pretty good, good Lord.
Speaker 2:So nothing against, nothing against. And you know the handful of valiant working class heroes who have been elected to state legislature. You know they tend to be a teacher, a nurse, maybe a white collar government employee. Blue collar people are just almost totally unrepresented for all kinds of reasons. And so when somebody like Dan, you know, does as well as he does, I think it's inspiring.
Speaker 2:We obviously need to start at a lower level in most places city council, like here in Richmond, where people have successfully been running progressive candidates for 20 years state and county bodies. Running for the US Senate is kind of a high bar in most states, but I think there are models for a different kind of electoral politics that would have broader appeal. And again, I think we have to be ecumenical about the candidates, the program. You know, if we want everybody to run on the perfect 30-point DSA you know what is your position on this issue kind of checklist we're not going to be able to develop the broad support. We need to turn the tide. I say that as a 42-year DSA member, not putting people down with higher standards perhaps than I have for political purity.
Speaker 1:All right. I have this feeling that Trump is either as stupid as people think and the luckiest fucker on the planet, or maybe he's dumb in lots of ways, but in certain domains the guy is a bit of a savant. You know he can track where people are at. He somehow knows that he can do things that all of us would say that's insane, You're going to lose everybody. And he does them and he doesn't. So I do have this feeling.
Speaker 1:At one point earlier, when you were speaking, you said we hope, I hope it's not too late, and I actually think that's a serious sentence. Not that it's too late already, but that there's a serious issue there. He's not only about policies. In fact, I don't even think he's mainly about policies. He's mainly about reconstructing the government. So he gets whatever he wants and he's busy doing it, and at the same time he's throwing one policy after another at the wall, and whatever garners some support and whatever he can claim to be a victory, he'll use that to increase his chances.
Speaker 1:But really he's trying to reconstruct the government. I mean it's almost as if I suppose Sanders had won the first time around and he was a little further left than he is Not much but a little, and he hadn't been able to do anything, or at least he hadn't been able to do all he wanted to do. And after somebody in the interim, he came back. What would one hope for? One would hope that he was going to learn the lesson and reconstruct the damned government in such a way that it would serve people well, that's the lesson that trump learned, and so the the in time part of the reference that you made is I don't think we've got forever yeah you know he's, he's, he's trying to build up an apparatus and a condition.
Speaker 1:It won't make him invulnerable, but it will certainly increase the duration that's required to get rid of him and his ilk. Right now is the moment to strike.
Speaker 2:And I agree. And obviously the clock is ticking most ominously on the climate change front. You know, as a relatively newly minted Californian out here for now 10, 12 years lived in. New England for 40 years had never heard of something called fire season. Well, now it seems to be all four seasons in California, and I think you know what's different in New England. Yes, in California, and I think you know what's different in New England.
Speaker 1:Yes well, you get an inch of snow and it's a snowstorm, Whereas I remember a foot, a foot and a half.
Speaker 2:Well, if I'd known that. You know, I think one thing we haven't talked about, and clearly is a challenge for the left, you know, because the recent polls, again, you know, confirming what issues people were really concerned about and they felt the Democrats hadn't done anything about. You know, one of the things that's not ranking high enough on people's list of concerns is climate change, the impact of climate change and not thinking of that or not connecting that to economic issues and their economic situation.
Speaker 2:So you know, really California's got to become a laboratory for how people can help others connect the dots, because I think the climate change is not impacting the economy here or people's individuals' lives and finances and jobs. I mean, in the wake of these latest LA fires, the number of people who will not be able to get house insurance is going to skyrocket and those who are still able to get it are going to be paying even more. A huge worker-consumer issue and one that's not going to get better, and every time there's one of these disasters out here or anywhere else.
Speaker 2:people lose work, they lose income and then the loss of existing housing exacerbates the housing shortage and the housing affordability crisis. So, yeah, we don't have many decades to get back on track, to do something to stop the impact of fossil fuel transportation and refining and use. As a neighbor of Chevron in industrial Richmond, we're aware of it every day and California really has got to up its game so that, you know, the oil companies, the oil industry, the people who contribute to the problem, have to pay to help fix it and that they are out of business sooner rather than later because their business model is much sooner Suicide backed and, but I think just recently we'll see some.
Speaker 2:You know there's already been some organizing in the wake of the LA disaster, around trying to create, you know, a fossil fuel industry fund, super fund.
Speaker 1:Governor Newsom, I'll can get, but they just they can't. Apparently, in New Jersey it was, there was just a cancellation of a couple of big wind farm projects. That were serious and large scale projects and you can just imagine, you know the governor and whoever is sitting around and thinking, eh, it was a good idea, but Trump doesn't like it. You know sort of either forces, which is always essential, but also somehow awakens a different mindset. You know that. You know civilization's at stake here.
Speaker 1:You're going to have to show a little bit of guts. I guess we'll see.
Speaker 2:You know the University of Berkeley Labor Studies Program just collaborated with the Refinery Workers Union here in Contra Costa County it's part of the steel workers and various environmental groups on a really good, very detailed and plausible just transition study and report. There was just another disastrous fire at the other end of the county in Martinez over the weekend. Huge problems for refinery neighbors up there. It's not Chevron, it's another disastrous fire at the other end of the county in Martinez over the weekend. Huge problems for refinery neighbors up there. It's not Chevron, it's another company. But I think out here, out of necessity, people really are in local government, in the environmental groups, in the labor movement seeing the handwriting on the wall and you know the challenge is coming up with a plausible plan for phasing these facilities out and there has to be an expansion of non-fossil fuel-based energy produced wind or solar, anything but fossil fuel and there has to be a plan for transitioning people to equivalent employment. And the companies continue to play the card, letting them retire with some dignity if they're older.
Speaker 2:Continue to play the card of trying to pit environmentalists against their own workforce based on the threat of refinery shutdowns here in the Bay Area. That would be catastrophic for the short term, for the communities involved and the workers and their families affected. But I think people are developing kind of credible plans and programs of the sort you need, with at least some of the unions buying into them and supporting them. That will be able to counter that traditional position.
Speaker 1:That's good. I guess we struggle on and see what happens.
Speaker 2:Optimism of the will over pessimism and intellect. I hope I haven't leaned too much into the former.
Speaker 1:No, I think this has been a positive presentation. Let's call it whatever you want to call it for our audience. And so, unless you have something else that you want to get in under the wire, Well, I just want to congratulate you on the new and improved Z.
Speaker 2:You've done a great job of developing a next gen of supporters.
Speaker 1:I'm no longer, you know, emeritus Well, that's when people are willing to do that.
Speaker 2:That is a positive thing too.
Speaker 1:There's a good bunch of people on the staff doing good work.
Speaker 2:Yeah they're great, so glad there was a handoff like this. It's not the case, as you know, in many institutions.
Speaker 1:Which is hard to understand sometimes. It's just another one of the things. Are you in it for yourself, are you in it for just the narrow effort, or are you in it?
Speaker 2:to win it.
Speaker 1:Are you in it to try and make things better? Anyway, all right, all right. Well, thanks a lot Steve.
Speaker 2:And let's be in it to win it. I like that.
Speaker 1:Yes, you know where I first heard that.
Speaker 2:You want me to guess?
Speaker 1:No, One of the singing contests on TV, not America's Got Talent, but the other one.
Speaker 2:Dick Clark's American Bandstand. You're clark's american bandstand.
Speaker 1:You're dating yourself, no that's, that's now you're dating yourself. No, a current yearly competition. I can't believe I can't come up with the name of it, but anyway, one of the judges would, and he had a point, it's sort of interesting. He would pick out among the contestants people who he said were in it to win it. They weren't screwing around, they really were focused. And he said and for him that was the difference between you know, you're having a chance and you're not having any chance in hell.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and.
Speaker 1:I think there's a lot of truth to that. Anyway, all that said this is Mike Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.