Factually! with Adam Conover - The Reawakening of American Labor Unions with Steven Greenhouse

Episode Date: November 27, 2019

Labor and workplace journalist, Steven Greenhouse, joins Adam this week to explain the comeback of labor unions in recent times, the disconnect between politicians and common workers, the advantages of unionizing and much more. This episode is sponsored by Atlas Coffee Club (www.atlascoffeeclub.com/factually) and Exploding Kittens (www.ExplodingKittens.com/factually code: FACTUALLY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

Plus, they throw in a handy guide filled with info about each snack and about Japanese culture. And let me tell you something, you are going to need that guide because this box comes with a lot of snacks. I just got this one today, direct from Bokksu, and look at all of these things. We got some sort of seaweed snack here. We've got a buttercream cookie. We've got a dolce. I don't, I'm going to have to read the guide to figure out what this one is. It looks like some sort of sponge cake. Oh my gosh. This one is, I think it's some kind of maybe fried banana chip. Let's try it out and see. Is that what it is? Nope, it's not banana. Maybe it's a cassava potato chip. I should have read the guide. Ah, here they are. Iburigako smoky chips. Potato

chips made with rice flour, providing a lighter texture and satisfying crunch. Oh my gosh, this is so much fun. You got to get one of these for themselves and get this for the month of March. Bokksu has a limited edition cherry blossom box and 12 month subscribers get a free kimono style robe and get this while you're wearing your new duds, learning fascinating things about your tasty snacks. You can also rest assured that you have helped to support small family run businesses in Japan because Bokksu works with 200 plus small makers to get their snacks delivered straight to your door.

So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I'm Adam Conover, and the fabric of our society sometimes changes in ways that we don't really notice until long after the change has occurred. Let me give you an example. Earlier this year, I was going through some of my grandfather's old things. He passed away in 1981 before I was born, and going through a box, I came across a booklet from the funeral home that did his funeral, and in it was a little form for his personal information. It had a space for his name, his address, the church he was affiliated with.

And then there was a space I didn't expect. It asked for his union membership. The assumption made by the people who designed this form was that unions were such a fundamental part of American life that my grandfather would want to take his union affiliation with him to the grave. And this actually made a lot of sense at the time. In the early 80s, one in five American workers were in a union. And if you go back to 1955, when my grandfather was just starting his family and his working life,

that number was over one in three. But jump to today, and the numbers are paltry. Only 6.4% of private sector employees are members of a union. And it seems like we've lost our cultural memory of what these institutions were and what they were for and the massive role they played in American life. See, unions weren't just groups of workers who walked around with signs and blew up inflatable rats once every couple years. They were political and social organizations that provided a sense of community and solidarity to their members. Today, our politics are fixated on the idea of the alienation

felt by working class people, right? Economic anxiety and all that. But by giving workers a seat at the table with owners and politicians, unions gave working class people the sense that they mattered. You know, it's no wonder that union membership results in higher rates of civic participation. If you want people to care about politics, they need to feel like they have a say, right? Well, for decades, unions were the voice of the working class in America. Like if we go back in time, look at the history, in the late 19th century, just like today, American workers were under the thumb of huge new capitalist forces.

In factories, mines, and on the railroads, workers had very little job security, and they were subject to unsafe conditions and excruciating hours. And abuse was rampant. But then workers began to organize into unions to fight for their common needs. Now, this was never easy and it was not always peaceful. Workers fought and died along the way. But through a stunning series of labor actions like the Pullman Strike, which involved a group of 200,000 rail workers, or the Uprising of the 20,000, in which female textile

workers in New York City took to the picket lines, unions eventually won the basic protections we all take for granted. And when I'm talking basic protections, I mean very basic. Like, maybe we shouldn't have eight-year-olds working in hellish factories for 14-hour shifts. Basic. Someone actually had to come up with and fight for the idea that kids should not spend their days in abusive labor conditions. And it wasn't the bosses. It was unions who did that. And hey, let me ask you something. Do you like having a life outside of work? Well,

you can thank the labor movement for establishing the eight-hour workday and the 40-hour work week. You can also thank them for paid sick days and paid vacations for the idea that you deserve a weekend. And hey, do you like the idea of not growing old and abject poverty? Well, the labor movement also pushed social security, Medicare, and the idea of employer-backed healthcare. Well, let's come back to today. There are now new monopolists on the scene, from media monopolies like AT&T to tech monopolies like Amazon, and they are once again using their power to erode working conditions for millions of Americans. These new capitalist powers have started to again restructure the nature of work to suit their bottom lines by cutting wages, benefits, and by employing more and more workers in the, quote, gig economy. And it might not be a coincidence that all of this is happening now,

when the unions that formerly protected us from such abuses are at their lowest ebb. But there are signs of change. Labor activism again seems to be on the rise, from the Fight for 15 movement to Red for Ed, unionization drives throughout the journalism industry, and interest in joining a union is at a four-decade high. So progress is not guaranteed, but there are at least signs of hope. And to discuss this history and the light at the end of the working day tunnel,

our guest today is Stephen Greenhouse. He's a former labor reporter for the New York Times, and he's the author of Beaten Down, Worked Up, a new book which is a wonderful overview of the history of America's labor movement, past and present. Without further ado, please welcome Stephen Greenhouse. Hey, Stephen, thank you so much for being here. Great to be here. Really great to have you. I love the book. So, look, I'll be honest. I, for most of my life, have not really understood what unions did and what they were for. Even when I had to join the Writers Guild when I created Adam Ruins Everything, I thought, oh, I just got to pay these people a couple thousand bucks. I don't know what they do. And then only since being

a part of it have I realized, oh, there are huge benefits to being in a union. I'm curious if you've had a similar experience yourself. So I was a reporter for the New York Times for 31 years, and I was a member of the Newspaper Guild. And I was so busy trying to be a great reporter that I wasn't focusing enough on my own bread and butter issues. But many times we did work 60-hour weeks, and we'd debate whether to put in for overtime, and the union would say, put in for overtime, put in for overtime,

and management would say, oh, we're not a highly profitable company, really behave on this. So there were a lot of tensions. But in my last year at the Times, before I took the buyout, there was a big contract negotiation and the union really played a big role helping win us significant raises and protect our benefits. Yeah. You told a story in the book about how just like the threat of a labor action caused the management to give raises. Is that the case? Yeah, yeah. So in my very first daily newspaper job in northern New Jersey-

Oh, different paper. Yeah. We were working about 70 hours a week. And we were getting paid. This is back in the 1970s. We were getting about $220, $240 a week. And it was crazy how hard we were working, how little we were getting paid, this is back in the 1970s, we were getting about $220, $240 a week. And it was crazy how hard we were working, how little we were making. So I and a few friends said, we should do something about this because we were really told not to put in for overtime.

And we arranged to meet with the union organizer one Friday night at a restaurant, about 50, 60, 70 people signed up. And that afternoon, that Friday afternoon, when we returned from the local diner where we all went out to lunch, there was this mysterious, magical notice on the bulletin board saying, guess what, everybody? You've gotten a 20% across the board raise. Wow.

And that was clearly management was scared about a unionization effort. And that was great. People were celebrating. But that did take the wind out of the unionization effort. OK. But does the threat to unionize cause the management to respond that strongly? Yeah. So this was in the 1970s when I was in my 20s.

And unions were much stronger then. And companies were much more fearful of unionization drives and worried that a union is going to be so powerful it's going to make their lives difficult. So they, recognizing the power of union, often gave big raises to discourage dissuade people from unionizing. But the wild thing is unions can still be powerful. Just last month, or just in the last couple weeks, the LA Times union won a new contract. I think as we record this, I think they're still ratifying it, but it seems likely that they will. And I saw the rundown of what they won.

And this is at a paper where it's been historically anti-union. They've never had a union before like the New York Times has. So they unionized for the first time. The Times, as they were unioning, was in danger of downsizing or shutting down. And instead, the folks who have they were unioning, was in danger of downsizing or shutting down. And instead, the folks who have put this union together, when I look at the stuff they won, they won like they can't be fired except with cause. They have IP rights over their reporting. They have a diversity mandate.

And the overall raise is something like I think they added like 10 or 15 percent to their payroll or something like that like people are getting like huge cost of living raises etc um it's like when i look at that i'm like how did this not happen sooner right because the benefits were so massive and i know that's not the case everywhere that people unionize, but I was like, wow, how did it take so long? So the L.A. Times, the journalist got a great, great contract. You're absolutely right, Adam. And one of the craziest things is the L.A. Times had a reputation as being the nation's most anti-union newspaper. There's a horrible incident around 1910 where some union folks blew up the L.A. Times building. Not a great day for labor.

Back in the more violent protest days. And they were angry at the paper because it was so anti-union. It became even more anti-union for decades and decades and decades. It's what will happen if you try to blow something up, yeah. So about a decade ago, there was a new owner there that was really bleeding the newspaper, sucking money out of it, closing bureaus, laying off people. And the journalist there – and the LA Times was a great, great newspaper in the 1990s and 2000s, one of the three or four best newspapers in the country. And these journalists there, people I know, people I'm friendly with are like, what the hell is going on?

These owners' trunk are bleeding us dry. They're turning what was a great newspaper into a lousy newspaper. So they formed a union to just try to stand up to management, make management do a better job. And what happened was they pressured the old management out, and a new, much better, richer, more enlightened owner bought the paper. And he's much more concerned about news values and putting out a great product. And then the journalists at the early times did this amazing job negotiating a terrific contract. Some people say the best contract ever reached by a newspaper union. And as you say, Adam, it has all these great benefits.

It's kind of an advertisement to others about here are the advantages you can get if you join a union. Large raises, job security in the form of you can only be fired for just cause. If for some reason you get laid off, you get good severance. So it's a really, really good package for a union. And there have also been cases where in media, other newsrooms have unionized and then they just shut it. They shut the paper down and they lay off everybody anyway. But even in those cases, the union is able to get those workers severance, which is more than they would get if they hadn't unionized. So I wrote some articles about, and in my book, I discuss a little about the unionization of digital media. And some of the very first ones to unionize, Gawker, Vox, Vice, they got terrific contracts. Some of the lower paid writers, journalists got 30%, 40% raises because their minimum was so insanely low.

Try to live in Manhattan or New York City on $32,000 or $34,000 a year. Then, unfortunately, there was another unionization drive at Gothamist DNA Info, which was owned by a very conservative billionaire. And as soon as the union won the vote there, he announced he's closing it down even before he even got to the first step of negotiations. So generally unionization has very much helped digital media, but sometimes they're real conservative, right-wing anti-union folks who are going to say,

I'm not going to put up with this. I'm going to shut you down. Which is not great. But again, in those cases, I believe those workers still got severance. So those publications are open again under new owners. I'm not sure if they still are union newsrooms now that they have new owners. WNYC here in New York, the radio station actually took over the closed Gothamist, which is good. And they're now unionized again.

And everyone's happy again after a few difficult months and years. Well, again, my question is, it wasn't until I joined the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild and started seeing how it benefited me to have a union, right? Oh my gosh, without a union,

I wouldn't get lunch every six hours on set. Without a union, I wouldn't get residuals for creating you know, creating a television show. You know, residuals are this basic thing where, hey, after they re-air it, since you created it, you get a little piece of the pie that the union negotiated. I started to see those benefits really directly. And I'm sure the folks of the LA Times see the benefits. But before that, I didn't have a cultural understanding of what even a union was, what it was for, the history of them in this country. It was something that other people are in. There was the Simpsons episode where they went on strike. I had this sort of vague, I was like, oh, is the mob involved? I had this sort of general idea. idea, but it wasn't part of my understanding of how America works at all, which is striking after I read your book, because I realized how woven into the fabric of American life unions have been, and the labor movement has been, for the last hundred years.

Yeah, I mean, just tell me, what is that understanding that we've lost? What was that role? So let's go fast backward to the Industrial Revolution, maybe the late 1800s. Take me there. Corporate America just stomped on everyone and everything, and the robber barons, and workers got out of line. They might get fired or beaten up badly. And workers understandably said, this is crazy. Our factories are dangerous.

The mines are dangerous. A lot of factory workers were losing hands and arms, and they were barely making enough money to live on. So they said, how do we change this? And they realized through collective action, through gathering together, through all the fingers forming a strong fist, they could do more. And they really fought hard through many strikes. And in my book, I write about a very famous strike in 1909 when 20,000 female garment workers walked out in New York City. And nowadays, one thing that gets me is that I think a lot of young people think that God handed down the 40 hour work week. No, it was won by months and years of struggle. I write about the strike in 1909, the so-called uprising of the 20,000 female garment workers,

and they were fighting to reduce their work week from 56 hours to 52 hours. Wow. And some of these female garment workers here in Manhattan that I quote said, you know, we went to work at 7 a.m., we left at 7 p.m. in the fall and winter. That meant we never even saw the sun. We went to work before the sun came up, and we left after the the sun went down and they had to pay for the needle and thread sometimes they had to pay for the stupid chairs they sat on and people think me too only happens now no it happened back then when a lot of uh male bosses oh yeah of course it did like yes the number of

the amount of harassment that they must have gone through at the time must have been massive and the workplaces were deadly. I mean, that uprising was in response to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, correct? It was actually right before. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. One of the interesting things, Adam, is so there was the strike. And the most anti-union company that led the employers group to refuse to settle, to refuse to recognize the union, was the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. And they were an extremely truculent, not wanting to deal with the union. They hired thugs. I described how they

hired thugs to beat up some of the striking workers. And the New York City police were terrible, terrible, terrible, beating up these young women, not arresting these thugs that the companies hired. And it was the Triangle Waaste Company that was the most anti-union, that most tragically and unfortunately, there was this horrible fire in 1911 where 146 workers died. And the place was a horrible fire trap. It was on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors. They were keeping the exits locked so that the women couldn't leave for a moment to keep them on the job.

And so, of course, they all perished once the fire broke out, right? Yeah. I mean, they were worried the women might steal some needles and thread, or they were worried maybe union organizers might come in the back door. You know, at the time, the fire department's tallest ladders only reached to the sixth floor. So when the fire began on the eighth floor, Sorry, folks, there's nothing we could do. And it was this, you know, one of the great industrial tragedies of the U.S. And, you know, it became Franklin Roosevelt's labor secretary, was at the time of the Triangle Fire working for the National Consumers League.

She's an amazing figure. I want you to tell me about her because she just leaps off of your book. And I mean, I read that chapter and I was like, there needs to be a movie about this woman. Yes, there is. And I often think she should join Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. She's an amazing woman. To my mind, one of the most underappreciated people in American history. So she grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, went to Mount Holyoke when very, very few women went to college. Her la-di-da parents wanted her to teach, so she taught in this fancy private school north of Chicago. She got very involved with poor people at Jane Addams Hull House in Chicago, a settlement house.

She saw how bad life was for factory workers. And she disappointed her parents by deciding to dedicate her life to helping poor people and workers. And she got a job in an anti-sweatshop group in New York. There are horrible women working crazy hours. There are subterranean bakeries where the air was terrible and people were getting all sorts of lung disease.

And she was visiting a friend right next to Washington Square on a Saturday afternoon having tea and right then this horrible fire broke out, the Triangle Fire, and she ran over and she literally saw the people jumping out of the ninth floor windows or the eighth floor windows of the Triangle Fire. And she really said, you know, we have to change this.

And she became New York Governor Al Smith's labor commissioner, then New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt's labor commissioner. And she led the effort to, you know, the nationwide effort to develop much better and stronger safety laws. And then FDR made her his labor secretary. And she was the very first female cabinet member in American history. And she was in many ways the mother of Social Security and the mother of the 40-hour week and the mother of child labor prohibition. She was a great, great American, vastly underrated. She was a great, great American, vastly underrated.

And so tell me about how this strike by the garment workers or any of these examples you give, like what progress were they able to make? So I read about several key strikes in the book. One was this strike by the female garment workers in 1909. And they won a 52-hour week down from a 56-hour week. They won something that was, we think, preposterous nowadays. They had to pay for the needle and thread and often pay for their chairs. And so they won a right not to have to pay for that. They won more holidays off, and they won most of the companies, except for the trial company, agreed to recognize the union. And that was a major, major gain. So if you're listening to this at your desk at

your office and you didn't have to pay for the chair that you sit in, you should thank these garment workers. So I was just speaking at Rutgers University and a student there said, you know, I don't think I'd ever want to join a union. Why would I ever want to pay union dues? And I said, let's unpack that for a second. I said, you know, union dues might be 1% of your pay. And let's look at, you know, what you get if you're a union member. And I said, there are academic studies showing that union members generally make 13% more than non-union members.

Oh, yeah. non-union members. If you're a union member, the likelihood of you getting employer-sponsored retirement plan and health benefits is much, much greater than if you're not in a union. And the plans you get are much, much richer. Then we talk about, we worry about the gender pay gap. So for unionized women, the gender pay gap, they make 94 cents on the dollar compared to unionized men. Not perfect, 6% too low, but still good. Still much better than for non-union women who make only 78 cents on the dollar. The gap is less for unionized women. Yeah, much, much, much less. It's about one-fourth as large.

Wow. And then, as you were saying with the LA Times, Adam, and you get something called just cause protections. If you don't have a union, then generally you could be fired for anything and everything. If you come into work one day and your shoes are untied, your boss might say you're a slob, you're fired. Or he might say you arrived two and a half minutes late, you're fired. Or why aren't you smiling this morning, you're fired. And a big advantage of a union contract is you can only be fired for just cause, you know, if you're proved to be incompetent and you get a hearing to help make sure that you're not fired arbitrarily. And that

really helps lead to more job security. It emboldens people to speak out if there are problems at work. Now, I don't want to get into the flip side of this too much, but just because it occurs to me that, you know, one of the things you hear people say about unions, oh, this is just for lazy workers, then they can never be fired. And they're just going to sit around with their thumbs up their butts because the union protects them. And I don't know, what do you say to that? So there have been times, yes, when that's been true. And here in New York City, where I am, Adam,, Adam. Some teachers should have been fired long ago. And thanks to the union, thanks to protections that are arguably too strong, they could hang on. And unions, on one hand, they have a responsibility, even a fiduciary duty to protect their

members. So even if a company wants to fire an incompetent person or someone who's dishonest, the union on the first instance might feel, hey, we have to protect them because that's our job. And they have to figure out how to draw the line about, well, it's not good for us as a union. It's not good for our employer. It's not good for society, for incompetent, dishonest people to remain on the job screwing things up. So it's not easy for unions to draw that balance. And we see that especially nowadays, Adam, with police unions, which are too often rushing to defend people who've done unconscionable things.

But they feel, in the first instance, we have to defend our people because we don't know for a fact what happened. Right. Police unions are a really interesting sort of special case that often, at least when they're in the news, it's for extremely different reasons than, say, when the United Auto Workers were just in the news for going on strike. You know, police unions, it's a different matter.

And it starts to get a lot more complex, I think, about when de Blasio became mayor and the policemen were all turning their backs to him in a show of disapproval and that sort of thing. When he was, because he was making comments about police violence, you know, I was like, that is a very odd occurrence. I would ideally hope for a police union that would support there being less violence against innocent New Yorkers, you know, or New Yorkers of any kind. But the problem is, you know, union leaders feel in the first instance, they got to protect their guys, their, you know, or New Yorkers of any kind. But the problem is, you know, union leaders feel in the first instance they got to protect their guys, their members. If not, they're worried.

Well, if we're not seen as being a trillion percent behind, people who are accused are going to be voted out of office. So the politics are very weird. But, you know, I have a chapter about another public sector union representing sanitation workers in Memphis. And they're – This is a wonderful story. Yeah. They're the workers, you know, we're treated terribly. public sector union representing sanitation workers in Memphis. And there- This is a wonderful story. Yeah. There, the workers were treated terribly. You know, I write about a 22-year-old who just returned from the Korean War, Elmore

Nickelberry. And he was looking for a job. He couldn't find one because, you know, it's last hired for African-Americans. And he finally, you know, he stood outside a sanitation depot for weeks and weeks. And finally, the manager came out and said, boy, do you want a job? And Elmer Nickleberry told me he was so sick of always being called boy. And their job was to go into people's backyards and take the garbage out to the street and put it in the garbage truck. And they had these plastic, these 18-gallon plastic tubs,

and they'd carry them on their head or on their shoulders. And there were usually holes in the plastic, and the garbage juice would leak down. Maggots would crawl down their backs. And they'd be working in 90 and 100 degrees in the summer in Memphis, and there weren't even showers back there. And this was a fully segregated job, right? These were only African-Americans.

Yeah, the tub toters were generally all black, and the bosses were generally all white. And I read about this, Elmer Nickelberry, he worked there for 14 years. And after 14 years as a sanitation worker, he was making just five cents more than the federal minimum wage, which translates now to about $12 an hour for this really difficult, unpleasant job. And they were played like dirt. And so there was this horrible accident where two sanitation workers were crushed to death in the back of a truck. And finally, finally, finally, the 1,300 workers went on strike. They stood up and they started carrying these very famous iconic signs, I am a man. They were tired of being called boy, I am a man.

And they weren't getting anywhere because the mayor was a trillion percent against negotiating or recognizing a union. So some African-American ministers said we have to escalate this and they invited in the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And he really turned it into a national fight. It became part of the civil rights movement. Yeah, it became part of the Poor People's Campaign to make sure people who work hard are not left in poverty, and it became a labor struggle and a civil rights struggle. And unfortunately, Dr. King was assassinated while battling for the sanitation workers in Memphis.

And this gentleman, I write about, Elmar Nickelberry, and I interviewed him 60 years later when he's in his 80s, but he's wonderful man. And he explains that, finally, finally, finally, we won this battle with the city. We got showers, thank God, finally. We got big raises, finally. We used to have to pay for 100% of our health costs, medical costs ourselves. We finally got health insurance. And he said, and most important, they started calling us a man, a sanitation man, and we were no longer called boy. And it's like when you interview someone like that, it just brings tears to your heart, to your eyes.

Wow. And your book is so full of incredible stories like this. And I want to hear some more, but I do want to comment that when you're talking about these movements with the ladies garment workers or the sanitation men, these are dovetailing with the other great social movements that we had in the 20th century, the women's rights movement, the civil rights movement for African-Americans, where they're really like of a piece where that, you know, that movement by the sanitation workers, I think was probably an improvement for every African-American in that town to not have such a large segment of the population be

treated so poorly, right? Absolutely. Great point. The ladies garment worker union, same thing. You've got women who are being treated more respectfully at work and et cetera. But our memory for that move for the labor movement is so much shorter and more dissipated than it is for these other movements. You know, part of our narrative of social progress in America is of rights for women, rights for African-Americans, rights for other minority groups. is of rights for women, rights for African-Americans, rights for other minority groups. And we don't tell the story of the labor movement in the same way, even though they're one and the same in many of these cases. That's a great point. So one of the reasons I wrote this book was exactly that concern. I feel far too many Americans have no inkling of what the labor movement's about and all that it's accomplished over the years. As you said, it's brought us the 40-hour work week, the eight-hour day, overtime pay,

minimum wage. It played a crucial role in bringing Social Security, a crucial role in bringing Medicare and the Occupational Safety and Health Act. And people forget about it. And partly it's because unions have grown much weaker. I think partly it's because there are a lot of conservatives who say, we don't want our public schools teaching about unions. And partly it's because I think unions have not done a great job advertising, explaining what they've accomplished. So in this book, I try to really, you know, in a very readable, hopefully riveting, arresting way, said this is what unions have done.

They struggled. They fought. People got beaten up. People got shot to death. People got arrested fighting for safer factories and safer mines in the 40-hour week and an end to factory bosses harassing women. And I write about this famous strike, maybe the most important strike of the 20th century, the Flint sit-down strike, where General Motors was by far the nation's largest company. And it fought savagely to keep out unions. It got the police to beat the hell out of strikers. It had lots of company spies. And again, 2,000 auto workers in Flint, Michigan,

generally from the Ozarks, from Appalachia, from Slovakia, from Slovenia, from Germany. A lot of them were immigrants. And they sat down for two months inside this key General Motors factory. And that really shut down production through much of the GM empire. And finally, finally, finally, with some nudges by Franklin Roosevelt and his labor secretary, Francis Perkins, GM cried uncle. And it agreed after years of resisting

to recognize the union. And that really led to a mass wave of unionization across the United States in the late 1930s and the late 1940s. And then it was the UAW, United Auto Workers, I explain in the book, that in the late 1940s mounted some big strikes against General Motors. And General Motors, which was sick of strikes and sick of labor militancy and eager to expand hugely to provide cars for the veterans who just came back from World War II, and then millions of families moving to the suburbs. It said, look, union, let's figure out a great peace pact, a great treaty.

You promise not to strike for a few years, and we'll give you a great contract with very large raises. And there was this five-year contract that gave workers an absolute increase in pay of 20% after inflation, which was a huge increase, 20%. And it gave the auto workers the best health benefits and the best pension benefits in the country. And that became this amazing model that was followed by hundreds of companies and hundreds of unions. And I explain in the book that that contract won by the United Auto Workers in 1950s became really seminal to create the middle class in America. And unions became this huge success, and that was one of the reasons, Adam, that people kind of stopped talking about unions.

They had their big struggle. They succeeded. They created the middle class, and people started thinking, oh, we don't have to think about unions anymore. They've won. They succeeded too well. Yeah. In many ways, that's true. Incredible. And, you know, I really like that framing that they asked for peace

because I saw a piece by Hamilton Nolan, who's a writer for the former Gawker blogs, right, which are a union shop, and he was talking about how it seems as though the people who own today's businesses don't want labor peace and that they're not interested in labor peace. I thought that was really interesting that like the approach of General Motors was, wow, this is a struggle that we're going to keep having.

We're going to always have strikers. We're going to always have angry workers and it's not worth it. So how about this? Let's have peace. Let's make them happy, right? Let's compromise and come to a fundamental compromise that will last. And that's what created the middle class. But it seems like our large corporations, our capitalist engines have not been interested in doing that recently

and have been okay with unhappy workers, with unrest. And you see that sort of unrest growing. with unhappy workers, with unrest, and you see that sort of unrest growing. So I explained that in World War II, labor and management, you know, corporations and unions really cooperated hugely and wonderfully to defeat the Nazis and the Axis powers. And even into the 1950s and 1960s, there was a lot of cooperation between labor and management. And you remember, maybe it's before you were born out of, you know, after World War II, European and Japanese industry were flat on their back. So the U.S. was king of the hill, king of the mountain. So, you know, our industry, you know, our industries rocked, we dominated the world and it wasn't so hard to pay workers, pay unions well. But come like around 1980, when the European and Japanese economies are doing much better. And we've faced imports of Volkswagens

and Toyotas and Hondas and steel from Brazil and Romania and Russia and Belgium. All of a sudden, American industry started feeling, hey, we have to start holding down our costs because we face much more competitive pressure from abroad. So they started cracking down on their pay. They started cracking down on unions. And around the same time was the rise of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics and extreme free market theory and Joseph Hayek. And so there's the sense that, you know, there's free market uber alice. Anything that gets in the way is bad. And unions were seen as gumming up the work. So there's this rise of this huge anti-union movement in the United States that was unlike any anti-union movement in other industrial countries. And I have a line

in my book that's really gotten a lot of attention that I say, in no other industrial nation do corporations fight so hard to beat back, indeed, quash labor unions. And I was a reporter, the New York Times European Economic Correspondent for five years. And I covered Germany and France and Italy and Sweden and Spain. And companies in Europe, maybe they're not in love with unions, but they see that unions are partners that they need to work with, that they should try to create a more prosperous company and more profits and a more prosperous overall economy. Whereas in the United States, I'm sorry to say, a lot of companies see unions as an arch enemy that they're trying to crush. And there really has been a concerted effort across the US among many companies and among many conservative politicians. We should extirpate, we should wipe out, we should annihilate unions because they interfere with the free market. And besides, lo and behold, they also often support Democrats.

And I think one of the reasons what we saw with Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin back in 2011, was he didn't like unions because they demanded higher wages. And that might – the government unions because that might mean higher taxes. But I think most of all, he and his billionaire backers wanted to get rid of the public sector unions because they backed Democrats. And they thought by wiping out the teachers unions and the social workers unions, they would make it easier for Republicans to remain in power. But what a strange reaction rather than to say, hey, there's a group of people who don't vote for me. Maybe I could get them to vote for me if I supported policies that those people favor, which happened to be the people in my state.

But instead they say, no, let's wipe out that group of people. So one of the main points of my book, as I say, worker power in the United States has declined, I'm sorry to say, to its lowest point probably since World War II. Yeah. That in politics, in the 2015-16 election cycle, corporate America donated $3.4 billion, while unions just gave $213 million. To political campaigns?

To political campaigns. To political campaigns? corporate profits and the stock market were at record levels and why Republicans are doing nothing to raise the federal minimum wage, even though that wage has not been increased in more than a decade. So I think things are skewed in many, many ways against workers. Public opinion polls show that by a three to one margin, 82% to 18%, Americans want a higher minimum wage, but like 85% to 15%, they want a law that would guarantee all workers paid parental leave. We are the only industrial nation that doesn't have a law guaranteeing all workers paid parental leave. We in South Korea are the only

industrial nation that don't guarantee all workers paid sick days. We are the only industrial nation that doesn't guarantee all workers paid vacation. I was a reporter in Europe where the 28 nations of the European Union guarantee every worker at least four weeks paid vacation. Germany, five weeks. France, six weeks. When you describe that to me as an American, I'm like, what do they guarantee? Four to five weeks a year of paid vacation? That's unbelievable to me. And I interviewed this McDonald's worker who says, at my McDonald's, there are all these people who haven't had a vacation in 10 years.

They don't know what a vacation is. So we hear certain people boasting that's the best economy ever and America's great again. Then you talk to these workers who say, WTF, you know, things are really tough for us. And these politicians are really out of touch. They have no idea what many typical Americans face at work. Well, I want to talk more about the dynamics today, but I just want to hear one more history story from you because you're talking about the forces that work against unions being the forces of capitalism, et cetera.

But some of the wounds have been self-inflicted. And you talk really compellingly about the air traffic controller strike in the 80s, which I had heard about, but I didn't really understand what it was and its impact and why it happened. Can you just give us – the story is really fascinating. Can you give us that really quickly? Sure, sure. Just a little bit. So I covered labor for The New York Times for 19 years, and I wrote lots of stories, unfortunately, about union corruption.

And unions in many ways shot themselves in their own foot. They discriminated against women for far too long. They discriminated against African-Americans, Asian-Americans. But that's gotten much, much, much, much better. against African Americans, Asian Americans. But that's gotten much, much, much, much better. That was a big weakening in the early labor movement that they had a lot of the unions that had racist policies. And had they not, they would have had more power

and they would have been able to win bigger gains for their workers. Absolutely. And they've learned their lesson. And now they're trying much, much, much harder to reach out to women. 50 years late. Yeah, immigrant workers and Asian American workers and Hispanic workers. So the air traffic controllers strike. So Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, sworn in January 1981. One of the few unions that backed him for president was the Air Traffic Controllers Union,

which was a group of federal employees. And like all federal employees, the day they began work, they pledged never to go on strike. But the air traffic controllers were convinced that they were mistreated, that they were abused. And they do have a very stressful job, you know, handling lots of airplanes to make sure nothing crashes, to juggle all these flights at once. So they, in their contract negotiations, having, you know, after having endorsed Reagan thought, we are going to get a great contract. And they wanted to basically a 30%, 40% increase in pay while having their work week reduced from five days to four days. And their demands were really, I would say, fairly exorbitant. And Ronald Reagan, whose administration was not very pro-labor, there were a lot of very conservative pro-business people. So this union went on strike because Reagan said,

we just can't give you everything you're asking. And the workers went on strike. It was an illegal strike. They thought they would shut down the nation's airports, and within a few days, the Reagan administration would cry, uncle. But instead, it was kind of a make-my-day movement for Reagan. It really gave him an opportunity to show how tough he is and show the world, I'm not going to let this stupid union

push me around. And he really fired 11,300 of these air traffic controllers. And it sent a strong signal to corporate America that, hey, it's okay to get tougher towards unions. It also sent a message to unions across the country that you better be very, very careful if you go on strike because management is going to be much tougher. And the number of strikes in any given year dropped from about 200 a year to now just about 10 or 12 a year. So there's been a real decline in the number of strikes, a real decline in labor's aggressiveness to demand higher wages, you know, because, you know, because corporate America has gotten much more aggressive in trying to beat back unions. And they feel that, well, we got a green light from Ronald Reagan to do that. So this was really a massive strategic error that, and you wrote about how

this was like a very new and experienced union that went way too, you know, went way too intense. And that error really blew a hole in the side of the labor movement that was really symbolic of the decline that it faced. It was kind of an object lesson in like how not to hold a strike. They didn't line up public support. They didn't line up support of other unions. They were so arrogant and out of touch. They were sure, free-gone-strike, we're going to shut down the airports. After three days, all these businessmen and everyone's going to say, we need our airports back open. And Reagan's going to say, OK, I surrender. But Reagan got all these military air traffic controllers and retired air traffic controllers to keep the airports running. And

after a week or two, it was clear to the union, hey, we're going to lose this. Plus, they were all fired. So it was a disaster many times over for the union. I'm sorry to say. Well, that brought us to the lowest point, which we're at, I think, today. So let's move on from the history and talk about the present. But we've got to take a quick break right after this with more Stephen Greenhouse. So, Stephen, we're at the labor movement's lowest ebb today, pretty much. Six percent of private employees are in a labor union, which is way down from what it once had been.

Some of us are lucky enough. Myself, the people at the LA Times, people at the New York Times are lucky enough to still be in unions. But workers today are facing so many challenges. I mean, for the first part, so many workers are not even classified as employees anymore. They're freelancers who receive no benefits. They have no job security. And those numbers are just growing. We've got the gig economy, everything else. But I understand there's still some signs of hope. There's maybe reasons to believe we're

reaching a turnaround point. We can only go up from here. What are those signs? So let me tell you a funny story. So I first turned in the manuscript to this book on February 19th, 2018. And it was kind of a quiescent, quiet, depressing period for labor. Aside from the fight for 15, there weren't many signs of activism, of hope. So that was February 19th. February 22nd, there was this humongous explosion in West Virginia where tens of thousands of teachers walk out. And I said, holy shite. It's like, wow.

And that kind of began an important wake-up moment. You were like, give me that manuscript back. Yeah. And I really had to adjust the manuscript. And I really had to adjust a ton of the manuscript. So it was West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, these humongous strikes that people would often complain to me. Why doesn't the media write more about labor? And then there were these teacher strikes, and they were like, lead story on the TV news,

lead story on CNN, lead story in the New York Times. And it was really an awakening for workers in unions saying, we've been pushed around long enough, we're not going to take it anymore. And those strikes were quite successful. And then they kind of passed the baton. There was this big strike by Marriott workers last fall, then this big strike by stop-and-shop workers in New England early this year, and now the General Motors strike, and now the Chicago teacher strike.

So there's been a reawakening of labor. So on one hand, you're right, Adam, that workers have sunk. Unions have sunk to the weakest level in years because in the 1950s, more than one in three workers are in unions and now in the private sector, just one in 16. But there's been an awakening recently where I think a lot of workers feel, to borrow the name of my book, so beaten down that they got worked up and they're fighting back. Look at the teachers. I think they felt in these red states, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, they're giving big tax breaks to the rich and the corporations while they're freezing salaries for teachers. Yeah, money is just getting sucked out of these schools.

Yeah. And they say, we're not... So one of the important messages of labor now, especially with the teacher strikes, is they're saying, we're not just fighting for an extra 0.3% increase in our pay. We're fighting because the schools are being starved. There's not enough, that class sizes are increasing. We're fighting for your kids. Yeah, we're fighting for your kids. And we're fighting, oh, these 30-year-old textbooks that are obsolete, we need more money to buy good, modern, up-to-date textbooks.

Yeah. And even in the GM strike, Adam, the very first day the GM strike started, Terry Dittus, the main negotiator for the UAW GM said, we're not striking just for you. We're not striking just for us. We're also striking for you. You don't want factories going over to Mexico and China. We're fighting against that. You're worried about the future of jobs for your kids and grandkids. We're worried about that. We see that 7% of GM's jobs are temp jobs that pay just $15 an hour. And he basically says, that sucks. General Motors, this iconic industrial giant has all these temps and is just paying them $15 an hour. We want an end to that,

not just for us, but to help improve the overall job market for more Americans. I think a lot of unions are trying to show that they're not just selfishly fighting for their members, but they're fighting for a broader public and fighting for social justice to improve jobs, to improve pay, to improve benefits. I've seen that myself. I remember when I was in New York 10 years ago, and there's a lot of talk about the rubber room, which is where they send the teachers who they can't be fired, but they don't want to employ anymore. And, and that's sort of seemed to be framed very negatively as how it reflected on the teacher's union. And it seemed as though the narrative was, oh, the teachers are just out for themselves. And I don't know if

that's true or not because, uh, you know, I wasn't paying very close attention to the time, but that was the tenor of the media coverage, right? That's what it seemed like. But just this last year in LA, we had a teacher strike. And it was the most positive experience I had in the city all year. I went out to the picket line because I'm a union member. I wanted to show my support on the first day, held a sign, had a nice time. And you got rained on too. You were really courageous. Yeah, I got rained on.

Well, no, the teachers were the ones who really got rained on. But let me tell you how beautiful this scene was because I was just holding my little sign. Oh, the writers support the teachers. I was watching what happened. And kids were still going to school, right? Because a lot of kids still need a place to go, right? And as the kids were walking into the school,

the teachers who were standing out there picketing were saying to the kids, have a good day at school. How's it going, Brandon? You know, welcome to school, the teachers who were standing out there picketing were saying to the kids, have a good day at school. How's it going, Brandon? Welcome to school, right? They were still being part of the life of the school, right? They were showing their care for the kids. And the strike was clearly about, we need smaller class sizes. We need more investment in our schools. We need less corporate power in we need less, you know, less corporate power in schools and more people power. And the city rose up in support of the teachers. It wasn't like all these greedy teachers are trying to get all the money, which is what it was like 10 years ago.

It was, no, these teachers are fighting for our kids. And, you know, the reason the strike happened was because the school district wanted to see, oh, is this – will the town support the teachers or not? And they did, and the strike was settled in a week because – and the teachers got so much of what they were looking for. And then the – like a month or two later, the school district and the teachers partnered on a ballot proposition to try to raise more money for the schools. They said now we're partners in making the school better. The ballot proposition failed because they screwed it up in some ways we don't need to get into, but it was really cool to see that change happen. Absolutely. So my book was ready to go to the printer, you know, late 2018, early 2019. And

then was the LA teacher strike, which was really a amazing strike in many ways. And the very last thing I told my editor, hey, I need to add something to the book about the LA teacher strike. And I added a section about the strike. And the strike was amazing for several ways, as you say. So before the strike began, the school district offered the teachers union a 6% raise. So after this week-long strike, where tens of thousands of teachers walked out, at the end of the strike, what did they agree to? A 6% raise. I think that they were showing very much that we're not fighting for ourselves. We're fighting for the broader community.

So what did they win? They won smaller class sizes, more librarians, more nurses, more guidance counselors, you know, more green space for kids, you know, fewer random searches of students, you students, which are especially students of color, limits on charter schools that they felt were draining from the school district. And this became a very important symbol of, again, we're fighting not so much for ourselves. We're fighting for the so-called common good. And the story you told me about the LA teachers reminds me of something in my chapter about the West Virginia teacher strike. There was this huge strike in West Virginia where there were a lot of very poor kids,

and a lot of kids rely on school lunches to get through the day. So even when they were striking and picketing in front of their schools, the teachers also made sure that someone was providing lunch to these thousands of kids who rely on free school lunches. It was just very touching. It shows how dedicated the teachers are. Yeah. And it really puts a bullet through the heart of this argument that, I'm sorry, it's a violent image. I shouldn't have used that. But I used to feel that, hey, well, the problem with the union is, as you said earlier, sometimes the union's only looking out for its members, right? And maybe it you know, it's not looking out for the rest of society and maybe it's good for the members, but maybe that ends up hurting other people.

And so maybe that's why I should be a little bit skeptical of unions as a force generally, right? But when the unions are bargaining for the common good in that way, they really are helping everyone. And also, you know who only looks out for itself? A corporation, a big company. A big company never has social good in mind,

or at least they haven't recently. So, you know, unions are really, have started to seem to me to be, oh, this is the way that like average people can come together and say, this is what we need. You know, like it wasn't just the teachers speaking for themselves. It was the teachers, the teachers felt like they were speaking for the broader community. So the parents were like, It was the teachers. The teachers felt like they were speaking for the broader community. So the parents were like, yes, thank you, teachers, for going out and fighting for me. Or, you know, another example is there's all these media companies that are unionizing now, the digital newsrooms, but also, you know, newspapers and things like that. And I read the L.A. Times.

It's important for me to have a good newspaper in my community or, you know, heck, my favorite video game website, Kotaku is unionized, you know, and I support them in their contract because as a consumer of this, I want good reporters. I want well-funded media. And I know that these companies are trying to strip mine all of the good writing out of there and just want to, you know, show me clickbait and crap. And so I'm supportive of them because I'm like, this will improve the quality of what I'm reading. Like, that's a smaller version of the same thing. But that really seems to be when the unions are most successful. Absolutely. So I'm going to get academic for a second. So John Kenneth Galbraith, the famous economist used to say that unions are very important as a countervailing power to corporate power. The corporations became,

this is back in the 1950s and 60s, corporations became way too powerful. They became too large. They reduced competition. And unfortunately, unions are not nearly as strong as they once were. So they're no longer as much of a countervailing power to prevent these oligopolies or to ensure that there's competition, say, in cable TV prices. And what for me was really interesting about the teacher strikes is that the Republicans and billionaires like the Koch brothers had like a stranglehold over the legislatures in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona. Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona. And the Democrats didn't have a chance because the Republicans had so much, the corporations and the rich were giving so much money and making sure that the Republicans

were elected. So the teachers became the kind of one countervailing power to say, what's going on here, all these tax cuts for the rich and for corporations and big tax cuts for fracking, which is certainly not good for global warming. This has to stop. And we, the union, are going to throw our bodies in the way to try to fix things to create a more public-minded state government and more public-minded school system. We need to stop these freezes of school budgets. And we need to reduce class sizes and buy new textbooks.

And the teachers have really been this interesting battering ram to help build a fairer school system, fairer economy, fairer nation. Well, so let's talk about that, because you say they're the countervailing force, and that means that in some way, when a union really has its strength, it needs to be bargained with. You can't ignore it. You can't shove it off to the side. You're like, oh crap, these people, these are citizens coming together, making their wishes known in a way that we can't ignore, right? That has to be grappled with. So how do they do that? What is the power of a union? How is it grown and how is it maintained? So two answers. So one is, you know, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, where many

Americans, you know, one quarter of the American population was out of work. People were, you know, really starving. And Franklin Roosevelt said, how do we lift the nation out of depression? How do we put more money in people's pockets? And he said, we need to give them more bargaining power vis-a-vis their employers so they could demand higher wages. And how do you do that? Through a union. So this landmark law was enacted 84 years ago, 1935, the National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers a federal right to unionize with federal protections if you sought to unionize. And under that law, if the majority of workers at a workplace vote for a union, then the company has to recognize the union and bargain with it. And that is a crucial tool for giving workers more collective power to demand higher wages and better conditions and safer workplace. And fast forward to 2019, what we saw with General Motors, what we saw with the Marriott

strike in this past fall in San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Honolulu, Boston, Detroit. A lot of these workers are in cities where housing prices were rising insanely fast, and they say, our wages aren't keeping up. And it was really only through a strike that they were able to press their employer to recognize how squeezed they were because they couldn't afford rent, and they had to move two hours away from downtown. So workers see that collective action is often the best route to get better pay. Now, I've spoken with a lot of libertarians, a lot of conservatives who say, oh, we don't need unions. Workers don't need unions. They don't need to go on strike. What they should do to improve their lot is to go to college. And I write about a fast food worker in Kansas City who works two full-time jobs at Burger King and Taco Bell. And he and his fiancee are raising three daughters.

And he says, I'd love to go to college, but, you know, I have to raise three kids and not everyone can go to college. Right. And I tell people, all these people tell me, well, you know, every hamburger flipper, every bed pad emptier, every home care aide, every janitor, if they're unhappy about their pay, let them go to college and they'll be able to make more money. A, how do a lot of these people begin to afford college? B, I often tell these people, every high school class has a bottom 30%, and that 30%, you know, might not go to college. And see, I say, even if all 5 million hamburger flippers and janitors and bedpan emptiers and home care aides went to college, we'd still need another 5 million to do that job. Yeah. There'd still be bedpan flippers. Yeah. Like, you know, we shouldn't consign them to poverty. And I think people have this notion that, you know, only people go to college should have a decent living and everyone else, tough luck.

That's not right. I think if you work, do an honest day's work, you should make a good enough living so that you could support your family. Yeah. What a strangely cruel point of view. I mean, it's fine to say, hey, if you want to earn more money, work hard and figure out how to do it. And I believe that, you know, that's something that people can do in their lives. It feels good to do. And I would never disempower anybody in that way. But yeah, someone's got to flip the burgers.

And the question is, do we want to live in a society where burger flippers can't feed their children and can't feed themselves and can't afford rent. You know, we live in a, look, you know, the city I live in, people have jobs that, we have homeless citizens in the streets of Los Angeles who are working for a living, work 40 hours a week and are still homeless because they can't afford a place to live. Now that's housing prices as well, which I've done plenty episodes about and will continue to do episodes about, but also part of the problem is the wages for these jobs. And like, that's still a problem. Even if every McDonald's burger flipper goes to community college and then gets a better job, well, who's going to flip the burgers? Someone's going to, and how much should they make? I can't tell you how many times I've written stories and

business folks would call me on the phone and say, you know, there's people making $10 an hour, $12 an hour, $8 an hour at McDonald's. You know, they shouldn't even be demanding higher wages. They should just go to college. I say, you know, you're not in touch with reality. A lot of these people can't afford college and they have families to support right now. And who's going to pay for the college for them? families to support right now and who's going to pay for the college for them. And as we were saying, Adam, and then even if the million hamburger flippers get college educations tomorrow, we're going to need another million people to flip burgers. And why should they not have enough

money to feed their families? You hear this bizarre argument that, well, McDonald's is for people who are just trying to get a little work experience in between their summer break on college. They're like imagining themselves as like a privileged kid who's like, oh, I'll just work at McDonald's for a summer or whatever. And then go back to Harvard, right? And like, it's such a bizarre thing to say because when you go to McDonald's,

who is working there? These are not people who are like teenagers who are like looking know, like teenagers who are like looking to get a little work experience and make some money to buy a, a corsage to take their girlfriend to prom. Like you're being waited on by 50 year old people who have children, you know, it's, it's just on the face of it. Not true. Well, tell, tell me about the, tell us about the fight for 15, which is, uh, uh, you know, which is another labor movement now that really was started by folks working in fast food. So I was the labor reporter for The New York Times, and I was the very first reporter who wrote about the Fight for 15.

And it was a movement that the strategists thought, we as a nation are not paying nearly enough attention to the millions and millions of low-wage workers. And, you know, the unions that helped found it said, we helped elect Barack Obama. And why isn't he doing more to battle for workers? Yes, it was good that he got the Affordable Care Act enacted and that provided health care for 20 million people and have it. But they felt, we're still a low wage nation with tens of millions of people not making enough money to live on. So they founded this movement where they really want to mobilize thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of workers to try to fight to raise wages. I remember when the very first day the fast food workers went on strike, November 29th, 2012, it was here in Manhattan, about 200 workers

at 20 restaurants. And I thought, this is cute. This isn't going to go very far. And they were demanding $15 an hour. And I said, you know, that's unrealistic. That's pie in the sky. You're crazy. They were making $7 at the time, right? Something like that. $7.25, $8. And again, try to live in New York City on $8 an hour. And so here we are less than seven years later.

Seven states, your state, California, my state, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Maryland have all enacted a $15 minimum wage. And that's kind of raised pay for over 20 million people. And this movement really caught on like prairie fire. So many Americans are so frustrated with the low pay. And the Service Employees Union, which really underwrote this, and the community groups that joined it really saw that something is very broken. And a lot of these low-wage workers were more than happy to go on strike for several days and demand higher pay. And lo and behold, it was their collective action that got these city

councils and state legislatures to enact a $15 wage. And the hard part is trying to unionize And yeah, it, that's crazy. So fast forward five, six years later, Andrew Cuomo, New York's centrist, business-friendly governor, embraced a $15 minimum wage, which was kind of amazing. And Kendall called me like five minutes after Cuomo announced it and said, Greenhouse, you're crazy. I don't know what you're talking about. We achieved $15. And I said, you're right. And they did this amazing campaign, which got, as I said, started in one city, New York, in 2012. And then within a year, year and a half, it has spread to 150, 200 cities in the United States and another 100, 150 cities abroad. And it shows that a very good idea with some very good organizing and publicity can really catch fire in an amazing way. And we've seen that with the Me Too movement. We've seen that with the climate movement. It's true the Me Too movement is a labor movement

as much as it is a women's rights movement. Absolutely. I mean, I've given speeches where people say, why is there more attention to labor issues? I said, the Me Too movement is a labor issue. It's about women being mistreated, not just women, but mainly women being mistreated at work. And I say that if workers had a true voice at work, then we wouldn't have had these decades of corporate managers ignoring the

complaints of workers who say they're improperly sexual harassed. And the fact that all these corporations, hundreds of corporations just ignored those complaints shows the lack of respect that many corporations feel towards what workers have to say. I mean, it really shows, again, that something is broken and far too often American corporations don't want to hear, don't want to listen to what workers have to say. Yeah. And that is really fundamentally what a union is about or what they're striving for is that like, hey, we work for this company. We would like to have a say in what happens at it, right? Both in our conditions and what it does. We would like to profit from its success. We would like to be able to influence it. And by taking collective action, they can make sure that that happens.

And when that doesn't happen, it's a bad thing because they're alienated. People are frustrated. People are, that's not good for anybody. Ideally, everyone works together better when everyone's voice is being heard. Absolutely. So among the main points of the book are that something's really broken, that the system is rigged against workers. I say the one thing I agree with Donald Trump about is that the system is rigged. It's badly rigged against workers and in favor of corporations and the rich. I would argue that Donald Trump has rigged it further against workers and in favor of corporations. And I also argue that far too often American workers are treated with a fundamental lack of respect and lack of dignity. But the opening paragraph, forgive me, I'm going to read the first paragraph of my book as an example. Just like mind boggling of how some companies treat people with so little respect. I say, throughout Mary Coleman's six years as a cook at a Popeye's restaurant in Milwaukee, she remained stuck at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

One afternoon when she arrived for her shift after an hour-long bus commute, her manager told her to go home without even clocking in. Business was slow, he said, and she wasn't going to be paid for the day. I mean, that's just mind-boggling. Here's a loyal worker. She's worked there for many years. She takes an hour-long bus ride. She pays out of her own pocket. She shows up, and they say, sorry, we don't need you.

Go home. We're not paying you. And you've wasted two or three hours commuting back and forth. I mean, it shows how little respect some managers have towards their workers. And we've got to wrap it up, but I have to get your take on this because one of the problems now is that the way work is changing in America is systematically making it more difficult for workers to organize. The amount of gig work, the amount of freelance work,

the degree to which people don't even know anyone else who works for the company. Like let's talk about Uber and Lyft drivers, right? Is the, is the most glaring example. Uh, last year there was an Uber and Lyft driver strike there. There was a, in a Los Angeles, they tried to organize an Uber and Lyft driver strike. And I didn't take an Uber and Lyft that day. I was happy not to, I took the bus instead, had a nice time on the bus. But almost nobody else even knew about it, right? I saw articles going like, you know, people saying, hey, I asked, I polled Lyft drivers.

Most of them hadn't heard of it, right? Because they don't, there's nowhere for them to talk to each other, right? There's a couple of forums they could log onto. They could go onto Reddit or whatever. But like, they don't see each other around the water cooler. They don't have peers. They're literally randomly chosen by an app and they're only Lyft driving a couple hours a day. And so like, what are the prospects for collective action of any kind in that sort of situation? Especially when we see more and more businesses trying to structure work in that way. There's so

many Uber for X businesses now. Great question, Adam. So I have a chapter on the gig economy. People call it the sharing economy. I call it the sharing the scraps economy. Nice. And I just spent two weeks in California on my book tour speaking in Berkeley and UCLA and Occidental and Stanford. And this is very, very much on the mind of policymakers and people in

California. Corporate America, as it always tries to do, is struggling to figure out ways to cut its ties, minimize its ties with its workers, to try to put more of them in a temp box or independent contractor box so they don't have to treat them as employees and help pay their social security and don't have to provide workers' comp or unemployment insurance. And by treating them as independent contractors rather than employees, they can't form unions. So this big new law was passed recently in California, Assembly Bill 5, that basically says no Uber, no Lyft. Your drivers are employees, not independent contractors.

You have to pay Social Security workers' comp, unemployment insurance. They have the right to sue for sexual harassment or racial discrimination. And that law, I think, is in ways going to become a model for other states. As many workers in the gig economy feel they don't have much of a voice. And there's a struggle to figure out how to give them more voice. Here in New York City,

there's the Taxi Workers Alliance that is also going to bat for thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers. The Machinist Union here has set up something called the Independent Drivers Guild and other association that brings together thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers. And one of the most interesting developments involving Uber and Lyft drivers nationwide, I would argue, is so here in New York,

there's a taxi and limousine commission, which also oversees Uber and Lyft drivers. And they did a study that found that 90, 95% of Uber and Lyft drivers were making less than New York City's minimum wage. And they said, this is crazy. This is unfair. All these people are working 60, 70 hours a week trying to make ends meet. And it's not safe for New Yorkers when there are people incredibly exhausted driving around town. They get into accidents. It's not healthy for them.

Do you really want to put your life in the hands of someone making $4 or $5 an hour is the question you want to ask yourself? So the Taxi and Limousine Commission issued a recommendation that was enacted by the city council that requires that Uber and Lyft drivers here in New York City get paid at least $17.22 an hour after expenses. Wow. So a lot of drivers are really happy about that. They feel that finally they will make a decent living. And when I was in LA 10 days ago, I saw that the president of the city council of LA was saying, we want to go beyond 17, 22, 17, 22 an hour. We think in LA, Uber and Lyft drivers should get 25 an hour.

And I imagine Uber and Lyft drivers will celebrate and jump up and down about that. I imagine Uber and Lyft shareholders will be very pissed off about it. But there is, again, you hit the nail on the head on them. There's a big question as the gig economy grows with DoorDash and Seamless and Uber, all these workers are, it's very hard for them to communicate with each other. It's very hard for them to meet with each other. It's very hard for them to meet with each other. And there's this real effort to figure out ways about how they can better their lot, how they could feed their families better, how they could maybe get together collectively to do something akin to what unions have done over the century, over the decades. unions have done over the century, over the decades. Well, so for the folks listening at home, let's end it on this note, because I love your positivity and your optimism here. And I share it, to be honest. And on many topics on our show, we don't have this positive of an ending.

But so the folks listening at home who are thinking, oh, man, yeah, there really is, hey, there's some power in a union. And we could use some changes at my workplace. But I don't know where to start. I've never really thought about this issue before. Where do you suggest that they start to think about organizing? So this is exactly what I faced when I had my first real newspaper job back in the 1970s. We felt we were usually underpaid and usually overworked, beaten down and worked up, so to speak. And we got together over lunch and figured overworked, beaten down and worked up, so to speak. And we got together over lunch and figured, what are we going to do about it?

And first it was five of us. Then it was 10 of us. Then it was 20 of us. And we'd meet at someone's house on a Friday night after work. And then we started talking with union organizers. And we saw that there was strong support. And I think it's important to realize, yes, you can often form a union, although you might face strong resistance from the company. But even just flexing your muscles and making your voices heard that we are unhappy, that in itself can often win big changes. Look at Google.

I was going to say. Workers at Google get paid very well. I was going to help fix this big problem of how the corporation's top executives handled sexual harassment cases. And so it's just having those conversations with the other people at your workplace saying, hey, I have a problem. You have a problem. We agree about this. Hold on a second. Together, we have strength. And we could, even just going and talking to your manager or, you know, showing a little bit of show of support for each other means you have to be taken seriously if a bunch of you are saying it all at once, right? Absolutely. You know, in strength, there is,

you know, in numbers, there is power. And, you know, people often talk about, you know, one figure has very little strength, but when you clench them together in a fist, it has much more strength. And, you. And we've heard that many times, but there is truth to that. And 1,000 workers demanding something will probably get more than two or three workers demanding something. And in the book, I argue that things are really

out of kilter in the United States. The corporations dominate way too much, that CEO pay is 312 times as much as 300 times as much as the average worker, whereas back in the 1960s, it was only 20 times that of the average worker. That CEO pay has risen more than tenfold over the past four decades, while pay for the average worker has just risen 12% after inflation. So that things are really broken and unfair.

And that's like the main point of this book, that a lot of Americans don't realize how broken and unfair things are. And then there's someone in the White House saying, I've made America great again. Well, for a lot of American workers who don't get paid sick days and don't get paid vacation, don't get paid parental leave, things are not great. And the people in Congress, the people in state legislatures, corporate executives, you know, should realize that things are very, very tough for tens of millions of workers and something needs to be done. Amen. Well, I really appreciate you coming on the show to talk to us about it, Stephen. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Great to be here. Well, thank you again to Stephen for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did.

And that is it for us this week on Factually. I'd like to thank our producer Dana Wickens, our researcher Sam Roudman, Andrew WK for our theme song. Hey, you can follow me on Twitter at Adam Conover. You can subscribe to my mailing list at adamconover.net. And we'll see you next week for more Factually. Thanks for listening. That was a HateGum Podcast.