Factually! with Adam Conover - The Labor Movement Refuses to Be Destroyed By Trump with Julie Su

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

Trump despises the average worker and has spent the past several months doing everything he can to demolish the labor protections that Americans of previous generations fought and died to win. We’re at an inflection point for the future of American labor, with our very livelihoods in the balance. Julie Su has been a civil rights attorney, California’s Labor Commissioner, and then acting Secretary of Labor in the last Biden Administration. Few people in America are better equipped to describe the unique challenges the labor movement faces in this moment and how exactly we can roll up our sleeves to fight back. This week, Adam sits with Julie to get real about what the average American needs to be doing to protect our rights as workers. --SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now, you probably need more. On Up First from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes. Because no one's story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the Up First podcast from NPR. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way.

I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again.

You know, Labor Day was just a little while ago. And if you know anything about me, you know that. that's an important day to me because I care about the labor movement very deeply. I owe so much of my life and my career to the fact that I'm a member of two strong militant unions. Our strikes in 2023 being a part of those strikes was one of the most important things I've ever done in my life. Because it taught me that when average people get together and fight like hell for what we deserve, we can force those in power to give us what we want. not ask, not vote, not donate or hope.

We can force them to make the world better and to do what we demand them to do. That lesson was so important to me because it also showed how the labor movement has transformed America itself over the centuries. The labor movement is what gave us the eight-hour day, overtime pay, workplace protections. The labor movement even made America

more fundamentally democratic because when people have a voice, in their workplace, they have a voice in the very country itself. And it convinced me that a strong labor movement is essential towards making America a better place going forward. So, you know, I should have been celebrating all of that this Labor Day. But, you know, instead of flipping burgers and honoring the American worker, I spent a lot of it pretty depressed because things are actually looking very bad for the labor movement

in America right now. In fact, despite some historic victories over the past. couple of years. Things are worse than they have ever been in over a century. In February, Trump fired a member of the National Labor Relations Board, leaving it without enough members to perform its duties of protecting workers and validating union elections, which means that workers who want to form new unions are going unprotected. Then in March, he ordered 22 federal agencies to throw away the collective bargaining agreements with their workers and their unions. And as a result, in August, nearly half a million federal workers had their right to organize,

taken away from them. Liz Schuller, the president of the AFL-CIL, called this the single largest attack on the labor movement in our history. And the most disheartening part of it is that this man, this president, who did these things to harm working people, was elected largely by the working people that the labor movement seeks to represent, which shows us that something is deep. deeply, deeply wrong with the labor movement, with the American economy, and with our very political culture. There's no other way to put it than that all of this is incredibly depressing. Again,

the labor movement is something that's very important to me that I've spent a lot of my life fighting for and that I believe is the way forward in America. And we are taking the biggest step backwards for labor rights and for the rights of working people in a century. So what the fuck do we do about it? Well, the truth is that we're not powerless. We have the same power today that workers have throughout history, the same power that built the labor movement itself. And my guest today reminded me of that.

Her name is Julie Sue, and I'm so thrilled to have her on the show. She is a brilliant organizer, litigator, and advocate. She has spent decades as a champion for workers and especially immigrant workers. She pioneered new ways of combining worker organizing with litigation of policy reform. In 2001, she won a MacArthur Genius Grant for her efforts on behalf of undocumented tie garment workers. And from there, she became California's Labor Commissioner. And then she spent the last couple years as the acting secretary of labor in the last Biden administration. She is unquestionably one of the most important voices in the labor movement today.

And one of the best people equipped to help us understand the challenges that this moment faces. So I cannot be more thrilled to have her on the show. Before we get to that interview, I just want to remind you that if you want to support the show, and all the conversations we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Con. Over five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show, ad free. You can also join our awesome online community. We would love to have you.

And of course, if you want to come see me do stand-up comedy on the road, wear your union t-shirt, or just give me a fucking fist bump for workers' rights. I would love to come see you. I'm doing a brand new hour of stand-up comedy, touring it all over the country. October 5th, I'll be in Los Angeles, California at the Lodge Room. one of my favorite venues in the city.

Please come out to this show, October 5th in L.A. October 17th through 18th, they'll be in Tacoma, Washington, October 24th, and 25th, Spokane, Washington, November 5th, Des Moines, Iowa, November 6th, Atlanta, Georgia, November 13th, Philly, November 15th, I'm doing the Bell House, another one of my favorite places on November 15th. This is part of New York Comedy Festival. December 4th, I'll be in D.C., and December 5th through 6th, I'll be in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. please head to Adamconover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. And now please welcome the incredible labor activist, Julie Sue. Julie, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. Last time I saw you at a conference in D.C. we were both at. And you at the time were the acting secretary of labor. You've been out of the government for a little bit now. Just what is your reaction to what has happened to labor rights in America since? It's been a lot of activity in a very short period of time. Yeah.

It's been a lot of very damaging and devastating activity in the last eight months. So to kind of put it in context, right, we had a president that came into office promising to put working people first. And in many ways, everything that we did in the administration was a rejection of the idea that in order for the economy to do well. somehow working people have to suffer. This administration, the last eight months, has not only reversed everything that we stood for,

but has waged an all-out war on working people from their own federal workforce, the things that people have had to endure, the job loss, the... Yeah, hundreds of thousands of people fight. Oh my gosh. And then the just stripping unions, right, taking contracts and ripping them up,

as if that's okay, the shutting down of entire agencies that do important things, and then just the chaos of all that, right? Firing people who keep our drinking water safe and oversee our nuclear arsenal and our national parks and then realizing, oh, actually, we needed them. And then asking them to come back and then making them leave again, it's just been horrific. And how fucked up is it that some portion of the country has been cheering for these firings where I'm like, we're cheering for layoffs. We're cheering for people being fired.

Like, it's a bigger issue, but we've lost the cognizance that these are like fellow Americans that we're talking about who just like lost work, who many of whom may be voted for the current president, you know, or donated to the party or they're part of the communities in which we live. These are people. They're not, the idea that people can be a waste that we. need to trim for that to infect like the government itself and like really the the psyche of the entire population of the country. It's part of it's so repulsive, but it's part of the MO for

Donald Trump and his administration, which is to collectively vilify some entity. In this case, government bureaucrats. In other cases, it's immigrants, whatever it is. And use that as a way to essentially dehumanize them, do exactly what you said. So you're not thinking about this is a human being who took an oath is doing a job in many ways decided to take a job that paid less than another job that they could have had. And then many of them spent decades trying to perform a public service. So you're not thinking about that anymore. I have a member of my extended family. I don't want to say who because of the climate right now. But like I remember she she got a government job, right, inspecting stuff coming across the border. And the whole family was so

proud because it was such a great job and she was helped she was serving the country and it was like for so many people government work has been so like oh you're you're something to be proud of absolutely you are a public servant right you you are servant and many of them are veterans who served in our armed forces and then left the armed forces and came to serve in a different capacity that is many of them are people of color you know the federal employee jobs really helped create the black middle class in this country because people could get those jobs when discrimination prevented them from getting other jobs. And so there's so many benefits to, to, to, it's an example of a job that somebody could actually do and build a life and

and have a home and retire with dignity on. And this administration, at every turn, is clearly sending a message that they believe that workers just have it too good, right? Workers They're too secure. There's too much time off, too many union protections. And it's despicable because they're doing all these things while somehow touting themselves as being pro-worker. Yeah. And they're specifically attacking like the very institutional structures that have supported workers for a century since like the New Deal era. And they're doing it in like innovative, creative ways.

You know, they're coming up with bureaucratic ways to, you know, stop like the NLRB or the labor department from even functioning by just, like, throwing cannonballs at you. Can you give me an example of that? Because I'm sure you know the details better than I do. That's exactly why I say it's a war on workers. It's being fought on many fronts. So what they're doing to their own employees is one thing. But it's also then declaring open season on all workers. So your point exactly about the NLRB is right, right? The NLRB, the National Labor Relations. board is the board that if a worker wants to organize a union and the employer engages in illegal union busting, let's say fires all the union organizers, refuses to engage in good faith,

then the workers can go to the NLRB and say, hey, this is illegal, this is unfair, and the NLRB can protect them. It's supposed to protect them. Under this administration, that NLRB has been gutted. The NLBRA cannot function. It doesn't have a quorum. And it's basically making the idea of workers being able to organize without interference and without intimidation, illusory. And literally what happens now is, I remember during the last administration, you know, the workers who were trying to organize at Amazon, trying to form unions at Amazon, Amazon would do something really sneaky and evil. And then the workers petition, the NLRB, the NLRB, rules against Amazon, sometimes rules for them. But,

author rules against them and says, here's what Amazon has to do. We have to rerun the election. We have to do X, Y, Z. Now, if you apply to the NLRB, they can't even answer, right? Because they're like, oh, we only have three out of five people at the meeting because the others have been fired and they haven't been appointed and yada, yada, yada. And so we can't even give you an answer. That's right.

Which is like, it's not even ruling against workers. It's making the very body that could rule in favor of workers. just, it's dynamiting it. Exactly. And it's basically gutting the NLRA, right? The National Labor Relations Act. Another example is, well, the vast majority of workers in this country

are not unionized. And so when there's a violation of their rights in the workplace, let's say they're not paid what they're supposed to be paid, right? That's called wage theft. It is one of the most costly ways that people lose money in this country.

Yeah. It's that what they do. Bigger than, than like many petty crimes, like shoplifting. Exactly. It's better than the, it's bigger, not better, it's worse. It's bigger than the combination of several kinds of property crimes combined. Yeah.

And where those workers go when they've had their wages stolen from them by their employer is to the U.S. Department of Labor, the department I used to run. And they say, I wasn't paid minimum wage or I wasn't paid overtime. I was forced to work, you know, 60 hour week and was always. only paid for 40 hours, somebody needs to investigate this and help me get my wages back. That department, my department, has been cut by over 20%, which means that when workers have a complaint, they are, there's no one to respond. And of course, the civil servants inside are doing their level best to try to keep on doing their job. But it was, you know, the battle

against wage theft was not a fair fight to begin with. And now it's, made even worse. And then you add on top of that everything that Donald Trump has done to the economy. So now there's your job growth is slowing. So there's fewer opportunities out there. And so it just, you know, prices are rising. So it adds to the insecurity that workers already feel and it makes it harder and harder for them to make sure that their basic rights are actually real. They're talking the workers in the federal government, the protections that protect them, the institutions that would protect them. And just they're putting so much emphasis on the needs. I mean, look, it's a government run by billionaires,

right? Like four billionaires and against working people. Exactly. You in your time in office were trying to fight on behalf of working people. I know you by reputation, because in my work in, you know, the labor movement in Hollywood and in L.A., people would say, oh, Julie Sue, we love her so much. Oh, she's so great. Oh, blah, blah, blah. And I know that when you became acting secretary, you were never officially confirmed, right? And part of that's because my understanding is you have a little bit of a reputation as a, as a radical on behalf of workers. And so I'd love for you to talk just a little bit about what is your philosophy that you think people in the labor movement respond to and people in the business community, right?

Or maybe the anti-labor people, what do they find threatening about you? What is, what is special about your approach? Well, I, I could speculate. You can boost yourself up a little bit or you can do it humbly if you want, but no, I just, You know, what is this about for you? Well, look, so I have been someone who has fought alongside working people, basically my entire career. And I did that mostly here in California where the labor movement is really strong and where labor protections are really vibrant. And I played the role of enforcing labor laws here in California.

and when Joe Biden said that he wanted to be the most pro-worker, pro-union president this country had ever seen, I said, sign me up for that. What can I do to help? And I'm really proud that we took an approach that really rejected the decades-long trickle-down economics idea that as long as the rich do well, everyone else is going to do well. And so we enforce labor laws with the ferocity that that requires. We made sure that when federal dollars were going out into communities, that they weren't just building things. They were actually helping to build lives, giving people a real opportunity. We believed in collective bargaining and unions. It wasn't just a talking point. We believe that workers should have a real voice in the job

and that the ability and the right to organize belongs to them and to them alone. And so I came to the table on a number of high-stakes labor negotiations where I and the president, President Biden, rejected the long-standing practice of thinking about unions and labor strife as something to be controlled, something to be mitigated, right? We should avoid strikes and economic disruption. We saw these negotiations as an opportunity for working people to finally really get their due. And for many workers who were bargaining, they were making up for many years of contracts that did not reflect their true value. And so I was proud and honored to be able to come to the table and say, we're not here to tell workers that they should stand down. We're here to help them achieve what they actually deserve. And sometimes employers would say, well, we really can't do that wage increase.

It's so far above the market wage. And I would say, well, maybe it's time we start questioning why the market wage is so low. Yeah. Rather than telling workers that demands are too high. That might be the fucking problem. If the market wages, I mean, we've seen the line graph over and over again, how low wage growth has been. The market wage is in fact the problem. That's what we're trying to change.

Do you have any specific examples from your time that were big successes, you feel? Yeah. I mean, you know, there's so many. I think obviously the reason why union organizing has been so impactful and really, you know, there's been so much vibrancy around the labor movement over the last, you know, four years before President Trump came into office is because of, you know, radical union leaders that said, I'm going to organize workers standing up for themselves and, you know, saying enough, right?

I refuse to keep on being treated this way. But it also mattered to have a president and administration under Joe Biden that really believed in worker rights. And so, you know, it mattered that we had a president who said to those Amazon warehouse workers, the right to organize is yours and yours alone without intimidation without coercion. It mattered that we had a president who was going to walk a picket line and did walk a picket line, right? And so I think that those things helped create an environment in which now unions are more popular than any other institution, basically. And so during our time in office, we saw workers from auto workers to airline flight

attendants, from hospitality to health care, from delivery drivers to dock workers to actors and writers actually say, enough is enough, and I deserve my fair share. And again, it was just a privilege to be a part of those kinds of cases. specific example I'll give you is on the ports, right? Port longshoremen on both the West and the East Coast had contracts that expired under our time. And on both of them, I got involved in helping to achieve really record wage increases and other kinds of improvements to their contract. Again, all credit goes to them, the parties. The employers who understood that they had to do right this time by their workers and the union members themselves who were willing to put it

all in the line. But it mattered that when the employer said, hey, look, you guys have tools as an administration to stop this strike. I would say, oh, that's not why I'm here. If you think that that's what we're here to do, or they would say, well, back in, you know, 1992 when we did this, or, you know, this is what the president did. And I said, do you remember who the president was then? And do you know who my boss is? That is not why I'm here. And it made a big difference. And I'm proud of it. You know, I'm not proud to say so, but I need constant stimulation or I get bored. I need something to look at, a podcast to listen to, a little tasty treat here or there.

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you can start seeing real improvements in your mental health, better with people, better with Alma. Visit helloalma.com slash factually to get started and schedule a free consultation today. That's hello-al-m-a.com slash factually. I mean, how do you balance when you're working for a federal administration the desire to be on the side of the workers, which I believe is obviously sincere on your part, and I think often I saw a very sincere on President Biden's part with the desire to like avoid disruption of the rest of the country for everybody else, right?

The ports was an example of that. I remember, you know, all the headlines about like, oh, what could happen as a result. There was also the railroad workers strike. Was that before your time? That was, I was deputy secretary at the time. And I worked with Secretary Marty Walsh. And I remember, I remember President Biden being criticized in portions of the labor movement for how that was handled. I also remember reading, oh, maybe after it was settled,

you know, there was a lot done to make good by those workers. But, you know, I looked at that and said, okay, I mean, you know, railroads are, are an extremely integral piece of infrastructure for the country. And so if you're the president, you're thinking about that, there's disruption to other people. But also, if you're on the side of the workers, you're thinking, well, that, because it's so essential, that's what gives them power. Like, their essential nature. So you can't take that away and say you're so you're too essential to strike um so it is uh it is one of those cases in which if you're being uh if you're part of the administration you have a dual purpose that's pulling on you in both ways um and so uh yeah how do you handle a situation like that

how was that handled i think it goes to what we mean by disruption and i think again the prevailing norm was that workers going on strike is disruptive but i think If you genuinely believe, as I do, that worker exploitation is also deeply disruptive, right? Unfair contracts are deeply disruptive. And they're not just disruptive to workers and their families. They're disruptive to the economy. When you have as much inequity as we have, it's not good for the economy either, right? When you have these obscene levels of difference between what C.E.

makes and frontline workers make, that is disruptive. I'm snapping. So snap it. Like, yes. So we have to, I think, define disruption and then say, okay, how do we then end that? And some of that is not going to be comfortable for people. And it's definitely not going to be pretty. But it's really, really important.

And I also, the wonderful thing about unions and bargaining and the right of workers to do that is that I deeply believe that collective bargaining and union contracts are good for all sides. I think, I really believe that. And so, you know, being on the side of workers is also being on the side of an industry that gets stability, right? A, a structure that helps to ensure that everybody gets to be valued. Everybody gets, right, you know, gets a say. And so I think those things really drove me. And it showed, like at the end of every negotiation, not everyone, most of them, the employers were also like, you know, like, thank you.

This is, this is better for us. And we can now move forward together with greater security. And it's a good thing. Yeah, this is, I remember trying to make. this argument during the writers and actors strike where you know we'd say that the reason the success of hollywood is built on this talent is built on this being a play just speaking for the writers where did the hollywood movie came from it came from generations of writers coming to hollywood because this was the one place a writer could get paid right um literally novelists

great novelists came here or playwrights to write movies because like okay well at least they fucking pay you in hollywood i don't get paid in the theater industry and you know chicago or whatever. I can go to Hollywood and get paid. And if that's no longer the case, then you no longer have the movies. And so, you know, it'd be like shaking them by the coattails saying, we're trying to save your business. Yeah, right. Right. And the problem is that the logic of business always necessitates. Well, they're only looking out for the shareholders. We just have to like save them money. And they ignore the fact that they're cutting off their nose to spite their face. Because like, if the workers don't have any money, at a base level, who's going to, at a base level,

who's going to buy your shit? Yeah. Like if you're not paying them enough to buy things. 100%, right? That's also part of why, you know, we have an affordability crisis. Yeah. People are frustrated. They're anxious.

This all makes sense because it's hard to afford housing. It's hard to afford transportation. It's hard to afford food. And that is real. But the affordability crisis is on the one hand about what things cost. And on the other hand, about what people make. about whether you could have enough in your pocket at the end of a work day to afford the basics of life. And it's also about not just the basics, right? I feel like, you know, we for too long

have kind of taken this, you know, people should, working people should just be happy with what they have. And why? Like, why should we be telling workers they have to settle? There should be, you should be able to afford the basics and you should be able to know that you can put up your feet at the end of a hard day and feel genuinely secure. You should be able to have a job where you can actually take time off when you need it, not just when you have a kid, not just when you have a medical emergency, but because you want to, right? There's things like that that I think why working people are frustrated is that on all of those things, people have been falling behind.

Well, and you, you were one of the people in the administration who was working on those things in a really clear-eyed and, like, strong way. and we have now seen things go the other way. And I have to say that for me, it's caused a little bit of a crisis of maybe not confidence, but of faith, right? Because look, I had a lot of criticisms of the Biden administration. I still do, especially in terms of just the sheer politics.

You know, I think the politics was really horribly mismanaged in countless ways that we don't need to get into. But in terms of like economic policy, you guys were doing things that I had advocated for for years and I actually didn't believe anyone would try or I thought maybe a Bernie would do it, right? But like, you know, the Biden administration did all this stuff. Lena Kahn is the head of the FDC. Who could I pick better, right?

You in there at the labor department, I can't think of many other unionists, you know, I would want. I'm not trying to overly compliment you. I'm like, I'm talking to you and I can tell that we have the same values and that you have the same analysis that I do. and other departments as well. But like on those on those core economic issues, you guys were actually doing the shit that I was like, this is what we need to do, both to help people and to like, you know,

revitalize like left politics in America so that working people know that they're being fought for on a really basic level. You guys did it. You did it for, you know, as long as you could, you know, two to four years, depending on how long you were in office. And then we saw Trump come to power running a campaign that appealed more to working class people despite the fact that he was doing the opposite.

If you look at the numbers of who voted for him. And you have the major unions, the largest union in America stumping for him, despite the fact that he's now demolished. And they're still doing it. He's now demolishing every labor protection. And they're still supporting the guy. So what was the disconnect that you guys were in there actually fighting? Lena's in there trying to break up the monopolies that are making everything more expensive. You guys are in there actually fighting for working people.

Jennifer Abruzzo at the NLR, who also past guest on the show, wonderful person who was really actually fighting for work, doing the real work. And yet politically, it paid off not at all. In fact, the opposite happened. what do you think happened? So I would love to hear your answer to that. We're still trying to figure it out. That's the answer. We're still trying to figure it out.

I guess I want to say two things. One is I think that is obviously a critically important question. I also think it isn't the only question, meaning that often gets posed as, okay, then is what we did was what we did wrong. And I don't think the two go together that way. I think it was absolutely right that we say we can build an economy where workers come first, where people in the middle and people at the bottom actually are our focus and where we measure our success by how well they are doing. Where we prioritize unions, where we prioritize good labor standards, where we prioritize just days pay for a hard day's work, every worker coming home healthy and safe.

expanding things like child care and health care, right? All of those things. And we do as much with our power as we can. We can't raise the national minimum wage. The president called for that. Congress didn't do it. We couldn't do it ourselves. But with every lever that we had, we did do it. We raised the minimum wage for federal contractors, right? We added overtime for four million people. And this administration has gutted both of those things. And so I think it's important for us not to assume that because of the outcome of the election, that somehow that was wrong, right? Those things worked. And if I have any analysis of, like, you know, what went wrong, I think that we didn't do enough of them. I think we didn't do them fast enough.

And there's a whole kind, all kinds of like structural and other issues that I think need to be addressed if we're serious about fighting for working people that this moment really provides even greater urgency for, but I think, you know, we can't equate whether those policies were right with the outcomes of elections. But the second point. I agree with you that we have to stand by the policies. What did we then miss, you know? I mean, you know, I think we were trying to reverse decades of decline, right? We talked about the anxiety that working people face. And when people are anxious, you know, it was hard to do everything, it was impossible to do everything we wanted to do in the four years that we had. But we also inherited an economy on the brink of

disaster, a raging pandemic, and our recovery was faster than anybody anticipated and more robust than anywhere in the world. Now, when- By the numbers, unfortunately not in public sentiment, right? That's right. And so that's why I say we had more work to do, right? And I think there was a lot, there were a lot of things that we still needed to do. And sort of the difficulty of this moment for me is not just how terrible this administration is in destroying everything that this country stands for, but also in just feeling like that we, with more time, we would have really been able to build on the foundation that we laid in, you know, at the beginning of the administration. I could see that. I mean, give you or Lena another four years and you could have, you know,

put those changes in, you know, made them more deeply rooted, made more people feel them. Unfortunately, we're on a four-year election psych. I will fortunately and unfortunately, but in this case, you know, they weren't able to happen quickly enough. How much of the problem was not promoting them as the wrong word or trumpeting them or whatever, but like making the political face of the election and the party about that. I think about just to talk, I thought a lot about my last conversation with a former chairman con and you know she was in there fighting right but when Biden was running for election and then when Kamala took over they ran away from what she was doing and part of that was because the Democratic Party was full of people who were

like no we want to keep merging right the Wall Street class in the Democratic Party wanted her out and there was like a big debate right in the party of like should we Should she be reappointed or not when, like, she was doing the work that, you know, had it been, and she had more time, had it been trumpeted more. She was doing the work on the affordability crisis. That was what people actually cared about. So is there a problem in the politics of the Democratic Party right now? And so much of that work was actually wildly popular. Yeah.

It was very, you know, people don't want to pay more for things than they have to. They don't want to be stuck in, right, contracts that that they, that they shouldn't. be stuck in. People want to make decent wages. They want to be able to hold a good job. I think all of those things that we did were actually, you know, they were popular. But at the same time, again, trying to be self-critical about it, I think that reversing the decades of just people feeling that they've been falling behind required more than we were able to do in the time that we had. And some of it is also, you know, like I got to look in the eyes of people that we were actually fighting for. I got to crisscross the country, meeting with workers

who were in a program learning a skill that was going to result in a good job right there in their community, someone who's had to leave their family in the years prior because there wasn't a job there and now they got to come home. Or someone who wasn't sure that their pension was going to be there for them when they retired, right? Guy who was 65-year-old carpenter who said to me, I didn't think that I was going to retire or I would have to choose to let somebody else take care of me and that was not going to happen. And what you guys did made the pension that I was counting on actually there. That is something that we did. And I carry those stories with me because they're reminders that real people are touched by what we do and

then by what we don't do. But some of those things, you know, we were hoping to expand the number of manufacturing jobs far beyond the 700,000 or so that we did, that did get created under our watch. But you got to build factories that haven't existed in order to open them. Right. And you got to reverse the relentless offshoring through policies that take a little bit more time. And so I don't say that to try to excuse any of it. You know, I also think that we should have been bigger and we should have been bolder. You know, my message to my team the whole time that I was in office was what are we doing to unleash our full power, the full power of the Department of Labor for the good of working people? That's a different question than. what are we doing to, you know, bring cases that, you know, like count up the number of inspections that we've done, right? That's a different question than, you know, are we bringing cases that we're sure we can win? I think you've got to bring cases that you're not sure you can win because that's how

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One more time, that's gusto.com slash factually. I mean, do you think that there is a tension in the Democratic Party or did you feel a tension in the administration between, you know, like the left or the labor side, right, folks who are like really working for working people and then there's the consultant class or the, you know, the Wall Street side or, or et cetera, like, because sometimes. It feels like not everybody's pulling in the same direction, right? And when you say, like, we should have done more, I'm like, okay, great, you were doing great work. Others who you're simpatico with were doing great work. But was that, was the public not feeling it because that's literally not the direction that everybody was pulling in, you know? Right. So here's what I would say.

I mean, you've already mentioned a couple of them. Lena Kahn, Jenna Bruseau. Yeah. We had a U.S. trade representative in Catherine Tye, who used the word. word's worker-centered trade policy, right, understood that we could show up in the world in a way that measured our success by whether working people here and abroad were actually doing well. Rohit Chopra, right, at the Consumer Protection, CFPB, financial protection bureau, right,

who was in there every day willing to unleash the full power of his bureau to fight for working people. We had people inside the White House, Heather Boucher, who hoped to run the president's investing in America investments. These are all people who I think understood our assignment. And the thing that I will say is that what helped me a lot in my job is anytime I heard, well, that's not my job because labor is your job. I could say, oh, do we remember who we work for? Because this president has promised that this administration, his whole administration, is going to be on the side of working people.

So it's everyone's job to make sure that working people do well. And, you know, again, I just think we have not seen that before, ever, I think, in any administration. And I feel like the story of the true impact of that has also not yet been fully told. Yeah, and I think a lot of the impact of your work, unfortunately, is going to be credited to the wrong president because there's a lagging effect by way it takes some of those factories that you were talking about are going online in the next couple years and guess who's going to be taking credit for them. If we can, like, zoom out and talk about the labor movement more broadly because you said, you know, as part of the labor movement. And sometimes I'm like, you know, who are we talking about when we say that, right? because are we talking about those of us who are in union leadership or, you know, really going to the conferences or whatnot, are we talking about people who are currently in unions? Are we talking about the entire working class of America? We mean, sometimes we mean one of the other of those by that word. But I wonder part of the problem is that like just the complete disarray the labor movement is in more broadly in America right now, especially in terms of messaging. Like the fact that you and others like you were fighting so hard on behalf of working people and the working people of America did not know it.

And in fact, so many of them, perhaps most, I don't know the figures in front of people, it seems like most of them voted for a guy who actually hates them and is trying to hurt them, right? And is able to claim that he's helping them and they agree to the extent that again, so the largest unions in America have pro-Trump memberships. know, even if their leaders are, you know, know which way is up, you know, they're having trouble communicating it. It just, it seems like the, the collective sort of like working class consciousness, you know, the class consciousness or whatever of the working class in America took like decades and decades to build starting the late 19th century. And it just feels like it's, poof, it's gone.

Like, how do we, people don't even have the language in their heads when, you know, when you're describing what you're doing to understand how it would help them, we're so far behind. Yeah. So I don't want to be too rosy about this, but I do want to push back on something. You couldn't get darker and more negative than what I just said. Those are my darker thoughts. So anything you can say will be rosy. So a couple things.

On the election, just on that one point, I think that we tend to focus on a couple of loud voices in the labor movement. But if you look at who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, the one segment of the population that actually voted more in favor of Kamala Harris than for Joe Biden in 2020, it was union members. So among the many other benefits of being in a union, right, political consciousness is still one of them. So the number of people, so more people voted for Kamala than Biden, the number went up in the percentage of union members, exactly, right? And that's sort of consistent with, you know, if states that have more unions have better paid leave laws and higher minimum wages, right? It's like people understand because unions do political education and, and, and have an effect on politics. But I'm saying I don't want to be too rosy because, you know, I think it's important

to acknowledge what some of the challenges are. Now, I do think that part of that is the idea that, you know, working people have felt abandoned by both parties, right, by politics in general. That's not an original thought. I do think it's very, very, very true. But leadership matters. So watching, for example, my friend, President Sean Fane, really, first of all, organize, right? and bargain with the passion and, you know, unwillingness to bend that he knew his members deserved

was incredible. And then to translate that into, I'm going to be clear about where, who stands for us, who's really going to fight for us? And that mattered in his union. It mattered in terms of the, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, whether people voted, first of all, because again, right, if we really are going to be honest about the election, the people who stayed home are as responsible for the mess we are in as the people who actually voted for the union buster in chief. But I think getting people out there and getting

people to understand what was really at stake, it mattered. Yeah. Leadership mattered. And I think that's a glimmer of hope for us, right, which is that people, union leaders in particular, up, we just, we're coming off of Labor Day, right? I was glad to be home and marching alongside the AFL-CIO president, Liz Schuller, right? Our local leaders here, Yvonne Wheeler, Lorraine Gonzalez-Fletcher, like people who have been deep in fighting for the labor movement and making sure that workers understand not just why a union's good for them, but also what their power is outside of the workplace is, is, is, is, that, that, that movement is there, and we need to keep on building it.

I am all about that, and that's part of the movement that I am trying to further myself. I try to do it in my work here, and yet I have to admit that, like, on a national level, right, workers in general, you know, that's the people who are currently organized, smallest share it's ever been of the national workforce, right? We're at our lowest union density. And, you know, I was knocking doors in working class neighborhoods. In Arizona, right, for Kamala, because that was my little bit of donating my time to try to avert something bad from happening. And I've actually since talked about how I'm not sure that that's the best tactic. You know, I'm like reconsidering my, like having somebody fly in from out of state to knock doors.

A lot of people who are doing that organizing in communities might be more important. But, you know, working class people would open the door and they wouldn't be like, yeah, the political system is helping me or or you know i'd be there i was i was there working with the union right i was wearing their gear and they weren't like wow the union's here to help me you know they were like one guy was like hey man i'm trying to watch a fucking football game it's my one day off this guy yelled at me and i felt so bad he's like this is my one day off i'm watching a football game get the fuck off my porch right and like this guy had a hard fucking life you know and and and and the the consciousness of that there is a movement

and a way of thinking about labor and a form of democratic power that he could have is so far from his experience that like it would have taken me three hours on that porch, right? To like read him all the way in. Yeah.

You know, and so that's the hole that we're in. And because of, you know, 40, 50 years of corporations lying to people, busting the unions, you know, successfully. And we've lost a Titanic war over the last half century. And that's what we're amid the wreckage. Yeah, right. And, you know, Donald Trump is decimating both unions and government, right? So I have a similar story from the government side where I was knocking on doors in Michigan and somebody also opened the door and was visibly agitated. Like also, like, you're wasting my time, but said, look, I'm going to vote for her. Obviously, I'm going to vote for her. I'm not an idiot. But you people in government, people, like government in general, never comes to me until you need something like my vote. And when I need you, where are you?

And so that's another, right? Like it's sort of like institutions, not delivering for people is something that I think, you know, we need to overcome. Which goes to your earlier question about who are we talking about here. Yeah. Because we are talking about the labor movement. We're talking about workers who have put on the line, have a voice on the job, have shown what it means to organize. But we're also talking about the vast majority of America's workers who are not in unions. Some 60 million of whom who say they want to be in a union,

but can't do it. It's too hard to join a union still in this country. That's something that is fixed. Because they would have to form one from scratch, yeah. That's hard. But we also have, you know, this is why in this moment, Donald Trump's singular ability

to divide and conquer is something that he is, like, deployed, right? As one of his most powerful weapons in his war on workers. So saying that, you know, I'm, you know, Donald Trump is the one who's slashing federal funds for infrastructure projects, right? He's the one that is cutting wages. He's the one, under his administration, he's the one saying, again, workers have too many holidays, workers are paid too, you know, too much. We don't need antitrust enforcement.

But he's also saying that the reason why you're not doing well is because of that immigrant who lives in that next community, right? And so it's because somebody who didn't deserve it, who, you know, looks more like me than you, right, who's the, is the person who took your job. He's saying that. And because of the anxiety of people have felt for a long time, there's an appeal to it. And so when we talk about who do we mean, we have to mean all of us, right? We have to mean not just those who are already unions, but the neighbor, right, the worker who is,

working the night shift at the, right, like at the, whatever, the, you know, stocking shelves, right, at the grocery store who's not at a unionized grocery store. And we have to realize, you know, how to how to make our case that we're all in this together. And, you know, part of the problem that you're pointing out of some folks in positions of power saying, hey, we're going to let Trump do what he's doing is that he's able to say, well, yeah, I'll sprinkle a little bit of crumbs for this little group of people so that they'll speak out for me while, right, like, you know, eliminating anything good for everybody else. And unless we're able to stand all together, that's how he wins.

Yeah, and he's been doing it to the labor move. I mean, we do have, you know, I went on Sean O'Brien's podcast and talked to him about this stuff, you know, about, uh, this is early on in the Trump administration. And, you know, they had just, uh, advanced the new labor secretary. And he had the complaints about, oh, you know, well, the Democrats with NAFTA. Let me tell you what they did. And, and all of that. And, you know, they took away our jobs. And so why should we trust them? And I'll work with anybody who wants to fight for workers. I haven't spoken with him since, uh, you know, uh, Trump canceled, uh, collective bargaining rights for about a million workers or, you know,

made it impossible to work with the NLRB. You know, I believe, like, talking to Sean, I'm like, there's a real unionist in there. But, you know, he fights for a lot of stuff that I think is really important, especially here in Hollywood. He's really been very key and critical. But it looks like he's falling for this sort of divide and conquer strategy where it's like, well, I got a lot of members who like Trump and maybe he'll give me some goodies if I bow and scrape and work together.

with him. And that's the largest union in America. And one of the most historically radical and militant unions, one of the most important unions in American labor history. And if you look at what Donald Trump is all about, right? At his inauguration, Jeff Bezos was yucking up with him. Right. And Jeff Bezos, the, I don't know, fourth richest man in the world whose company is a behemist has grown so much and has now created a situation where people expect, right, same day, next day delivery. And so he has a whole workforce of delivery drivers who are not his employees by design, right, who are not paid well, who are not insecure jobs, who don't get any benefits, who are

punished if they ever try to unionize, right? some of those drivers that the driving companies that he has helped to form and then uses, he cuts off the minute they try to unionize, is also affecting not just Amazon drivers, but organize, unionized, Teamsters, UPS drivers who are losing their market share to this behemoth that is revolutionizing the way package delivery is done. Yeah. Right. So that's also why it's got to be about every worker, right?

It can't be about give me some crumbs for this one thing or even worse, right? Like, let me come to, you know, show up in a photo op and not about actually delivering for, that was not a pun that I intended to use, not actually standing on the side of those workers. and the more you allow the non-unionized, exploited, low-wage, you know, like, if you're not an employee, you are not entitled to a century's worth of labor law protections in this country, like minimum wage, like overtime, and like the right to organize. Amazon is perfecting the art of calling people non-employees, right? And those practices are deeply, deeply devastating.

Trump's Department of Labor is now making it easier to call people independent contractors and not employees. So all of this is connected and all of this is hurting also those union members, right, who, who, you know, are being told it's the immigrant down the street. Yeah. Who's your problem? Well, this is, I mean, this strikes at a number of like perennial problems in the labor movement.

One of them is, I would have to assume, if you just look at, say, the Teamsters membership or union membership overall, why do so many union members like Trump? A lot of it's because they're exploiting cultural issues. And what do we say when we, what do we mean when we say cultural issues? We're talking about racism. We're talking about like exploiting racism, which is one of the things that hobbled the labor movement from the beginning

was like one of the great sins of the labor movement was not allowing, you know, white unions not allowing black laborers in because, oh, they'll dilute or they'll, you know, to use horrible language. And so that's one.

But the second is to me it often seems like there, if the labor movement or the idea of unions has one systemic problem, it's that we create these unions that are looking out for their members, as well they should. The members tell the union what they need. The union fights for the thing. The problem is that that creates a structure that is really fighting specifically for those members. And so then you end up with a structure where, for instance, well, let's not take risks to grow our union because then we're using the dues of the people who we currently represent to go get new people, really we should just be looking after the people we have.

Or, hey, let's support, well, I mean, even Sean Fain was a little bit supportive of the tariffs, right? Because, oh, well, this could benefit my members in this narrow way, even though it might not benefit Americans or working people overall. Maybe Sean O'Brien is making the same calculus. It is a thing that happens sometimes within the movement where like a union will focus a little bit too much on the narrow needs of its own members for sort of a short-term gain and not on the needs of all working people.

And it's a hard thing to ask of a union leader to say, hey, don't worry about the members who got you elected or who pay your salary. Worry about all working people. Right. Right. I'm really in agreement with it's a hard thing to ask. I'm not even sure it's always a fair thing to ask because there are, I mean, you know, why is it all on unions, right, to fix this thing that we are in? The idea that they can and should

fight for their members, and that's what I saw again, like in the bargaining context, right? Just seeing that, you know, record wage increases, you know, record benefits, you know, retirement security that most workers don't have. I think that when unions fight for those things, it does have a ripple effect of benefit for other workers, if only because when you raise wages for some workers, you raise them in an industry, you're going to raise them generally. Going back to Sean Fane, right, after his negotiation with the big three, we saw non-union auto companies raise their wages too. Right. Now, it's cynical, right? Or, you know, let's talk about the airline industry. I talked about airline flight attendants, right? From the, you know, the APFA to the

AFA, right? Sarah Nelson talks about this all the time. I love her and she, you know, the idea is that when you raise those wages for your members, others in that industry, other airlines are going to increase their wages too. Now, they do it for a horrible cynical reason, which is if I can keep it just high enough that my flight attendants don't want to organize, right? It's, but it's, it's like with Delta's is, exactly. They've been trying to unionize Delta for flight attendants for years. But Delta's wages are like, well, they're not so bad, but the reason they're not so bad, like they should be better, but it's because they're competing with the other unionized airlines.

And so it's like the work of all those union flight attendants for the other airlines. That's right. That's right. That's right. And those wage increases have a benefit, right? Like I work with Julie Hedrick's on, you know, their negotiation with American Airlines. And the thing that you hear from the company side is, well, if I do this here, I'm going to have to do it for all of my contracts with all of my work. And my response was, yes.

So, you know, I, so there is a benefit. There are things that unions do for their members that have much broader effects. I think on the tariff issues, since you raised it, I think it's important also to say, right? You know, this idea that the trade policies of both parties, but of Democrats also, let me just do, you know, this critique right now has helped to accelerate the. the offshoring of jobs and has created the competition for, you know, decent working conditions in this country and elsewhere in ways that are bad for workers in, you know, across the globe is something that I think the Democratic Party definitely has to own as a problem, right?

So for either Sean Fane or anybody to say, hey, tariff policies can actually benefit working people and benefit American industry, right? and benefit, like, iconic American companies. That's not a crazy, that's not a crazy thought. I've never heard Sean Fain say, oh, and the chaotic, ridiculous, you know, just whoever happens to stroke my ego gets the benefit way of doing it of Donald Trump is the right thing. Never heard him say that.

You're right. I saw some quote where he said, hey, tariffs aren't always bad in all cases or whatever, but I think that the way the administration is currently is waging them is senseless. And it's just, it's just an old man who read about tariffs in the 50s and, like, wants to, wants to keep doing it that way. And it's, like, manifestly hurting people. Yeah, it's the one word he seems to have, like, locked into his brain as related to something policy minded that he could say. And the Democrats, like, need to acknowledge, you know, when, when Bill Clinton did so much to open up trade in these ways that were damaging, it was because he had accepted, like, the Reagan consensus. Like, this was Democrats abandoning their values and abandoning working people and going down, like, going down the wrong road for decades.

And, yeah, that needs to be owned. People didn't bother to answer the question. Is free trade actually free for workers? Right? And I think, you know, that is something that we also did look at and try to address in the Biden administration. But the way this administration is doing it is not. good for anybody. And that's why, you know, this president's failing on every front. And, you know, my, my, what keeps me up at night is that by the time people feel it and, you know, they're feeling

in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, like, just the daily sort of assault that, that, that this administration is. They're obviously feeling it in immigrant communities that have been just, you know, vilified. And, and, and the really gross way. that militarized power has been used to, in a very racist way, attack those communities. But the way that, my fear is that when people really feel everything that's happening, it's going to be, the harm is going to be so great that it's going to take us a long time, even longer to reverse. And it took us, you know, four years to reverse the damage done the first time around at Trump One.

And this time he is much more aggressive and much more unhinged. Yeah. Well, I think we need to expand our view beyond reversing what Donald Trump did and just to keep it to labor. We need to rebuild to what we had in the 40s and 50s, which took close to a century to build. And it was a century of warfare. It was a century of it started with violence in the streets, you know. Right. People died.

People died. People were shot by their own government. People were shot by private security, by the Pinkertons and all this. You know, the people who have watched this channel know this. So I guess, you know, one thing that Sean O'Brien and I might agree on is that, you know, the labor movement has spent too long just assuming that Democrats, the Democratic Party would protect them when the Democratic Party really only had a 50-50, you know, like would do so on Wednesdays and Fridays, but not the rest of the week. And where I think I differ from him is the answer is not to go to the Republicans. The difference is to like go back to building power for workers from the jump. And I wonder how we do that because it strikes me that when we talk about how Donald Trump has demolished labor rights, he's taken a wrecking ball to them via extra legal means. You know, he's just, I just want to appoint anybody the NLRB and then they can't function. I'll, you know, fire these people illegally and and or take away their bargaining rights illegally and I don't, fuck you try to stop me. And do we in the labor movement need a less legalistic, uh, court approved, uh, you know, play play it by the rule books approach or do we need to get out there and get in the streets and start fucking shit up and, you know, in, in extra legal ways?

Yeah. So as someone who has participated in and as a deep believer in, you know, nonviolent civil disobedience, right? I definitely believe that we need to be using every tool in our own arsenal. And we need to be much more open-minded about what those tools actually allow us to do. I think that, and this is not just a lot. party issue. I think this is just a complacency issue in general. I think there's been for a long time this idea that, you know, we're only permitted to do this much, right? We're only permitted to ask for this much. We only deserve this much. That complacency, I think, has also sort of come home to roost now because, again, Donald Trump gave voice to the frustration that's ultimately embedded in that. And when I said, I asked my team to unleash their full power, sometimes the response was, no, no, we're already doing that. This is all the power that we actually have. And when you take a hard look at not new laws you need, not Congress to act, but just things

that we were allowed to do, laws that were on the books, penalties that you could slap at lawbreakers, ways that you could actually define the employer as the whole corporation, not just the one work site. Once you did that, you could see that there was more power that we had that had not been utilized for a very long time. Powers that have been long dormant. I am a big believer that we need to take the dust off of powers that we have as government, that working people have, that communities have, and say, let's.

fully unleash them. Look at, we're seeing right now just how big the federal government is, even with all the cuts, when you train all of its resources on destruction. Yeah. Imagine if we took all of that power and those resources and train them on how do we make life better for working people. Yeah. Well, my question, though, is how do we get working, how do we harness the power of working

people themselves to do that because, yes, we need the government to work on behalf of working people. And we also need the protection of the government for, you know, strikes and things of that nature. But also, you know, my lesson from our strike is that working people have power all by ourselves, right? Yes, we were doing a legally approved strike. You know, we had the LAPD labor detail making sure that, you know, the companies didn't harass us when we were picketing because we were legally allowed to do so. And that's like an important thing to have, right? So it's important to not have the government be against you. It's very, very helpful. It really helps you achieve your goals. But the folks who built the labor movement, they didn't have that. They just did it

straight up through their power. And we, you know, forced these companies to agree to things that they said they would never, they never would simply by refusing and staying on the picket line for five months. Now we, thank you. Well, I appreciate that. We had a lot of structural. And structural advantages, you know, I'm very lucky to be a member of the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild because we have a lot of structural advantages that a lot of workers don't. We have a, we have a hundred year history of our union. Yeah. Writer's goal has been militant for that long.

So I'm not trying to say that it's easy. It's very, very difficult. But like what it taught me is like the workers themselves are the ones who have the power. Right. The problem is how to how to harness it from this low ebb. You know, my friend, you know, Hamilton, Nolan, the writer. Yeah, yeah. Wonderful writer.

He wrote about. And wonderful union leader who helped unionize digital newswriters in New York wrote about after, you know, when Trump is taking the labor rights away from so many federal workers, he's like, these workers need to rise up. They need to have wildcat strikes. We need to recognize that as a labor movement. This is a do or die moment. And, you know, I said to him, I think over text or something, I was like, hey, man, these, those federal like government unions, they've been operating with complete federal. protection for like 50 or 60 years. They've never organized.

They've never had to organize their workers. It's just been, hey, you get to be a part of the union and you get the benefits and you don't ever have to fight for them. They are starting from a dead stop, you know, so we can urge them all we want. But we got to, you know, in the Writers Guild, our muscle is strong. We always keep it strong. There's a lot of workers out there where the muscle is not strong yet. And so how do we build up?

You just use the word that I was thinking of, right? It's a muscle. Yeah. Exercising power is a muscle. which means both that if you don't use it, it atrophies, but the more you use it, the more you have of it, right? It's not one of those things I, you know, I've heard a lot of people say, to me when I was in my position, well, you know, we have limited capital for X, right? Capital meaning power. Yeah. And I would always say, no, the more you use it, the more you build it, it's a muscle. And so I actually, again, maybe I'm overly optimistic about, some of these things. But I think that tying the threads of the many things that you just said

together, I think there's room for optimism because, again, in the four years under President Biden, we saw a resurgence of the labor movement, not driven by the most pro-union president, not driven by, you know, like just federal investments or a great NLRB, but by workers themselves in places that most people said, oh, they'll never be organized because they're too vulnerable. The jobs are too temporary, whatever that is, right? Whether, you know, from, from workers building school buses in Fort Valley, Georgia, right? Mostly black and white workers who came together and got a first contract in under a year. I challenged them to get to a first contract in under a year because we haven't even talked about how delays in getting

to first contracts is another way of punishing workers, right? But to Starbucks baristas, right, to graduate student workers, lots of people in workplaces where work. organizing was thought as a far-fetched, right, pie in the sky, a few people might dream about it, but it would never happen. And so under President Biden, 400,000 private sector workers joined unions. Now, sure, in a population, like, you know, the size of the United States, that's still incremental change, but it's positive incremental change. Yeah. And then you have, and now here, I'm also not just like throwing away empty praise here, but what you you guys did demonstrating that writers and actors are actually working people too.

Yeah. And our union members and being in a union makes a really big difference. I'll also say that writers, because of your creativity, have the best picket signs. Best picket signs. And I'm sorry to all the other. I've been on a lot of, you know, but, you know, AI has never been to Fat Camp. I've never had childhood trauma. I repeat those a lot.

But, you know, like those victories... really help to inspire other people to test out their muscle as well. Yeah. And then I think that the one tiny little bit of glimmer of hope in this administration is that the attacks are so disgusting. They're so racist. They're so anti-union that, you know, the Labor Day actions on the streets are not normal because people haven't felt like they've had to do that.

And my old team, federal employees are organizing and drawing on courage that they did not think that they would ever have to use. But once you do it, it's hard to tell people not to do it anymore. And I think that that is going to be really critical as we continue to fight, but also, to your point, rebuild a world that we deserve, that we really want. Yeah, I mean, there's this narrative that the, the government blessing of unions, right, the National Labor Relations Act and all the associated New Deal policies that sort of brought about labor peace. There was warfare, literally people

being shot and dying, right? Violent strikes, violent reprisals. And, you know, the point was part of it, we're going to have peace. We're going to like make this legal. We're going to have a system for adjudicating it, et cetera. And that brought about, you know, the middle class, but it also made the labor movement kind of lazy. There's an argument. There's an argument. that folks make that okay well now we can just rely on you know the government oh actually just one of the parties well actually just one of the parties on on a couple days a week right um and that's what we've been doing for decades but now that those things have fallen i have heard people say hey maybe the the dynamiting of the nLR b and l nlr is maybe those things were holding us back and maybe you know

what we need is to be forced to fight is to be forced into a corner do you agree with that No, I mean, I hate that because I feel it's a positive spin on a negative situation. Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's, I guess it's sort of saying the, you know, like, like, I think that we should be able to have both, right? I think we should, you know, say that workers should be able to be militant, exercise all their power, have their voices heard and make demands for what they should have. And I think that every single other lever, but especially government, because government's supposed to exist for the public good and unions provide a public good, should also be on their side. So, you know, of course I think that exercising the muscle is really good. I hate the circumstances under which it's having to be done right now. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good way to put it. Well, let's, you know, end this on a positive note.

or because you were you're telling us about how you know once people start fighting that they remember the fight and they keep doing it so um uh you know for folks who want to start fighting for for working people in their own working area where do they start what do what do you suggest folks do well i just learning from the workers i've been so privileged to advocate with and you know live live my life with i think you start you start you start start with talking to somebody else, right? Everybody is an organizer and everybody is a leader. That is the fundamental principle behind organizing and what makes union strong. And in this moment where our entire democracy is on the line, it is an exercise in democracy. So you talk to

someone. The number of workers I met, again, all across the country, who were either fighting for a union or I had just gotten their first contract who said, When I started, I never thought I'd be sitting here with this thing that I have now, right? It all started with them actually talking to someone at work, talking to another worker, realizing that you're not alone. And sometimes it's about being the one who says, don't you think we deserve better? And that is a spark that fuels an organizing drive. And not everyone's going to get on board at the beginning, right? Not everyone is going to believe in it.

Not everyone has the same risk tolerance. And I think being that first spark to say to somebody else, I think we deserve better. I think we can do better than this is where it begins. And then I think for everybody else who is horrified by what is happening in this moment, I think it is our job to wake up every day. and speak up about it, to, you know, be honest about it, to make sure that if you, right, it's the, you know, like people recording what's going on is really important,

recognizing whatever privileges we have, each of us, and using them to say that what's happening is absolutely not okay, is, I think, really important. But the idea that, you know, we deserve better and saying that to somebody else so you're not doing it alone is, I think, really important, because that's also about, it's not just that we have to fight back of what's going on now. It gives us a chance to really imagine what we deserve. That's really beautiful. Is there, is there anything that you feel, I mean, look, I'm a member of union leadership myself. I'm on the board of the Writers Guild West. Is there, is there something that those of us who have the benefit of being in these

mature unions should be doing? What is the responsibility of the, of the rest of the movement right now in your view? I think it is, gosh, I mean, I, I feel kind of funny telling other people what they should be doing because I'm constantly struggling with, am I doing enough? You know, but I think recognizing that there are powers that have not been utilized fully is really important for everybody. And then what does it look like to really utilize them? And, you know, we had a whole conversation about this, Adam, but I really feel like recognizing

that today the fight we should be asking who is hurting and what can I do about it even if it's beyond

the usual circles that we've had. I think that this moment calls on us to do that. And then just for union leaders, I think telling the story because it is true that not enough people even good politically

conscious, you know, active, politically active people don't fully understand what unions do. Yeah. Why they're so important. And I think everybody needs to take a hard look at

if you're in a good job, that has job security, that has benefits, that has paid vacations, right? That has no forced overtime. That none of those things are required by law. Yeah. You have those things because you have a union. And, and just I do think it's a time to tell

of story. Yeah. And to return to your earlier point about, about if someone is suffering, um, uh, that's to, to extend our circle to them. That's solidarity, right? Which is that that's the most important union word. And, and we don't, we need to extend our circle of solidarity from just those of us who are doing the same job or in the same union or in the same part of the movement to like all working people and like, you know, grow the movement and support all of them. I have solidarity with pretty much everybody except for Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. You know what I mean? 99.9% of people in this country are working people.

Yeah, that's right. I was going to throw in everyone who's enabling and excusing and lying for them also. Yes. Yes. We can make our not solidarity list because it's a lot shorter than the solidarity list. 100%. Right? That is right.

And if we remember that we're all in it together, I think we'll, and we'll fight for each other. We'll hopefully get out of this, maybe. Where can people follow your work or learn more about what you do? So I have a substack. You do! Okay. Everyone's an influencer now. I'm excited.

There's so many of what we talked about are things that I've been thinking about and writing about. So that also really warms my heart. But Julie Sue Labor is where I am on all kinds of platforms. Amazing. Julie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much. This conversation is something that will keep. keep me going for a while.

That's a very nice thing to say. Thank you. Thank you. Well, my God, thank you once again to Julie for that incredibly inspiring conversation. If you'd like to support all the conversations you bring you every single week, head to Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. We would love to have your support. For five bucks a month, you get every episode of the show ad free. For 15 bucks a month, I will read your fucking name at the end of the show.

Can you believe that your name or d'I-ass username? It's not a goddamn-ass username. It's very clever and funny. Tony, bleep when I said ass, please. I want to be complimentary towards the nice people and their nice usernames. This week, I want to thank, let me pull up the names. I want to thank Jake, Callan,

hey, look at distraction, Uber Elder, Evaro Eggburger, and Tracy. Let's pull a couple more from the middle of the list. I also want to thank Spencer Campbell, Antonio LB, Margie, Lacey, Tigenoff, Samantha Schultz, and Kelly Lucas. Thank you so much for supporting this show. Head to patreon.com. If you'd like to join us, we'd love to have you. Of course, you want to come see me on the road in Los Angeles on October 5th, New York City, November 15th, Philadelphia, D.C.C.Pittsburg, Spacan, Washington, Tacoma, Washington,

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