Grubstakers - Episode 163: Bernie Marcus (Home Depot)

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

This week we talk about DIY asshole Bernie Marcus, the man who says he built his $6.6 billion Home Depot fortune from scratch. We discuss the weird lies behind his origin story, his abuse of his workers, his illegal union busting, and the fact that he's profited off of keeping Home Depot stores open during the covid-19 pandemic. Home Depot refuses to say how many of their employees they have murdered through the decision to stay open but we know that there has been at least one. Rest in peace Johnathan Ferreira, you deserved better. Some of the sources used in this episode: https://www.courant.com/coronavirus/hc-news-coronavirus-retail-workers-20200508-l6ahgqo6mndf3ijnjtexhhp4a4-story.html https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/foundation-defense-democracies-iran/

Thank you. And I don't like what I read about. We are more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. The evil has gone. Bernard Bernie Marcus. He is the co-founder of the Home Depot. He was the first CEO and chairman until he retired in 2002. His net worth is $6.58 billion. Wow, what a pretty penny. Yeah, we're going to discuss at length later on. But at first, let's jump into his bio. He was born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents on May 12th, 1929. A lot of the source material for his bio comes from the book Built from Scratch, How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew the Home Depot from Nothing to 30 Billion, written by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank. You know, just a couple of regular guys.

No employees involved in that process whatsoever. I like how every guy involved in starting Home Depot just has to write the most masturbatory memoir they can come up with. For two pages, the words just switch to fap, fap, fap, fap, fap. No one noticed. Some of the research I could have done with this book is I could have gone back to Kinlan Gong's book, I Love Capitalism,

that I read relatively early on the show, and I cracked it open and just read a couple sentences and realized this is such a piece of shit, I'm not going to put myself through this again. It is just a... I mean, you can't get... you can get the best ghost

writer in the world, and it can't polish these guys' turds. Right. These books, you try to open them and the pages are stuck together. That's how masturbatory it is. Even though Arthur Blank is his actual co-founder, it sounds like

a fake author's name. Who wrote this book with you, Bernie? Writer, fake man? You can do better than that. Arthur Blank. Yeah, sure, why not? Yeah, that's the kind of name you give Chris Hansen when he asks you what your name is.

So going back to the book, he grew up in a fourth floor tenement at the corner of Belmont Avenue and Rose Street in Newark, New Jersey. He writes that his mother in her mid-40s was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. The doctor prescribed the only hope she had of ever walking again would be if she had another baby.

And so Bernard Marcus was born on Mother's Day. After this, his mom having hands and feet that were hopelessly gnarled, but she would be able to walk after this. So was he born he was born exactly nine months after the day she was given that news i don't know exactly i mean he he credits his mom with her can do and optimistic spirit and her spirit of giving because the more you give the more you get is an adage that he uses in the book. But I mean, like, I don't know why a doctor would be like, oh, you can't walk. You need a baby inside of you.

I feel like the husband goes wink wink. I just like that there's like a doctor prescribing babies to people at the beginning of the Great Depression. Like, you know what you need right now is an extra mouth to feed. His father was a cabinet maker who worked 15 hour days but still couldn't afford to provide Bernard, his older sister Bea, or Bea, and his two older brothers Irving and Seymour, who, because

they were so poor, also worked to help the family. Now, one thing I don't get, and we'll talk more about his upbringing, but how can a father that's working 15 hour days and two older brothers working not be able to help the family afford a living? I know it was like the peak of the Depression,

but it just seems like somebody was probably a drunk. Wait, what year is this? This is 1929. That's the year he's born. Oh, yeah, but later on in like, yeah, well well it varied but worker i mean wages dropped like 20 so i'm not saying that it's not a possible problem but it seems it seems odd

that three people working in a household can't feed five people but i mean i i digress here um in the book's most bizarre anecdote, Bernard describes... Maybe that was his first alienation from collective labor. In the book's most bizarre anecdote, Bernard describes that he lived in a predominantly black neighborhood, which made him a target if for no other reason than I stood out in a crowd. Black gang kids used to challenge me to fights every day after school and whip me badly. Which brings us to the bullied youth that many billionaires share. That excerpt

continues to mention, finally the leader of the gang was so impressed with my ability to take what he was dishing out that he wanted me as a part of the gang. At 11 years old, I not only ran with his gang of 30 black kids, but I became its second in command.

They really should have beaten him harder. Then, when I was about 12 and a half, we moved away from that neighborhood, which was getting too rough for the family. Now, I don't know about you guys, but it seems to me that for two to eight months, Bernie had some black friends. Obviously, he didn't make this friendship at year 11 and he didn't move exactly at 12 and a half years.

So it seems to me that he had a group of friends that they ran together on bikes and every now and then they would squabble. But to say that you're in a gang when you're at 11 years old, when it's like, no, this is a group of black kids you hang out with from time to time. It also sounds like his family got the hell out of Dodge as soon as the GI Bill and redlining really kicked into gear. I'm just imagining the wise beyond their years gang members beating his ass like, this is for torpedoing the Employee Free Choice Act. Bam, bam.

You don't understand any of this now, but this will make you a somewhat more lenient CEO 50 years from now. That was their idea. I just feel like, I love how the story doesn't say that the gang leader saw me fight and use my strategy and was like, you know what, this guy seems like. No, the story is he was impressed with how good I was taking a beating. That's why he was promoted to second in command for how well he took it. He was the gang whipping boy.

Yeah. Yeah, it's very important. You're like vice president. He employed Homer Simpson's boxing strategy. Right, precisely. So, continuing on with the book, at age 13, continuing on with the book. At age 13, his first job was soda jerk, which he would do after school. And during summer vacations, he would be a busboy in the Catskills Mountains.

This job included room and- Soda jerk, but I just met him. This job included room and board. And you would keep the tips so he could, if you were frugal, you could make some money, which I don't know about you guys. But, like, my job was at Fred Meyer. My first job was at Fred Meyer pushing carts. And because I was under 18, I had to pay union dues even though I didn't get the union health benefits. I would have loved room and board. Also, keeping the tips, not something that's allowed at Home Depot.

Employees will be fired on the spot for keeping a tip or for accepting any tips. Right. It's not like they've been walking 10 miles a day on concrete lifting 50-pound bags for eight hours. Yeah. You got a job for jerking off. I mean, that's pretty progressive. All right. So this is my second favorite excerpt in the book all right so he continues

in the book talking about how he was interested in medicine particularly the medicine of the mind so he chose to read the writings of freud and jung this leads to an anecdote about young sorry no you're fine it's it's finally time that I mispronounce a white guy's name on this show. Yeah, it is Young, though. It is Young? All right. Actually, his first job in the Catskills was he was tasked with taking Kenny Youngman's wife, please.

So he talks about while he was a waiter at Kushher's Country Club, he became proficient enough at hypnosis that he was able to perform on stage. He was able to put a person into a hypnotic state and take them back in years, but never made a fool out of anybody. I help people with memory problems find something they lost. In fact, I did one of the original stop smoking routines. I hypnotized as many as 10 people at a time. Find something they lost. In fact, I did one of the original stop smoking routines. I hypnotized as many as 10 people at a time. It was here that I got into people's minds that I began to understand how some folks became obstacle for others. Listen, I know that we've been called an anti-Semitic podcast at times, but we literally are dealing with a guy that was hypnotizing people in his youth. Yeah, but that could be anybody's fault, Yogi, that we're called an anti-Semitic podcast.

Oh, yes. That could happen to any podcast. So, because of this incredible insight into medicine, Bernie Marcus chose to enroll at Rutgers College in Newark. Continuing with the book, after my second year, I sought a med school scholarship. One day, the dean, with whom I'd become friendly, called me. He had arranged a scholarship for me to attend Harvard Medical School. The dean then says he'll give Bernie the address where he has to send $10,000. The dean then says there was a quota on how many Jews Harvard would willingly accept into medical school. I looked it up, Stephen, and $10,000 in 1948,

around the time he had been in his second year of college, equals $106,628.22. So they wanted $100,000 worth of money in 2020 to accept a Jewish person person into harvard medical school at the time that's so much cheaper than it is now that's like that's like three that's like three times even after adjusting for inflation probably what it costs you know in in looking at reviews for this book my favorite is this one-star review on barnes and noble and it says that this guy it it's anonymously written,

and it says, fiction, and not very good fiction at that. He talks about how, the review talks about how Jewish kids were required to pay a $10,000 kickback and his family didn't have the money. He was so disappointed, he claims that he dropped out of school. This is what the review says that I love. He says, let that soak in for a minute. Any student so brilliant that he was offered a scholarship to Harvard Medical School after his second

year of college could obviously get accepted to John Hopkins or Yale or Duke or Stanford, but this wouldn't do. He was so disappointed about not being able to attend Harvard that he dropped out of school altogether. Somehow this nonsense made it past an editor. That is true.

Like, I mean, I did a cursory look for, like, magazine profiles of this guy or, you know, short biographies. And it seems like everybody just takes his autobiography at face value. And this is, like, what you get when you're a billionaire is you just get to write, like, these ridiculous stories and everybody will just print it because you have too much power for anyone to do otherwise. Like, nobody's going to really do – few people will do investigative digging on a guy like Bernie Marcus. Yeah. In the beginning of the book, it talks about how Bernie Marcus gave a speech like when they opened Home Depot to 400 people and he asked, hey, how many people here call themselves DIYers?

And only 15 people raised their hands. And then 20 years later in 99, when they did the same speech to around the same amount of people, all but two people didn't raise their hands. We had changed America. And it's like, no, you just went from

being a guy nobody knew that owns Home Depot to a guy that people in an audience went, this guy wants me to raise my hand now because he's asking for DIYers, you know? He also asked that second question at a punk venue. And like, I think most of our listeners will be familiar with the history, but we should just emphasize, this guy was born in 1929. He probably grows up in some degree of poverty as it was the Great Depression, but he gets all of the benefits

of the labor movement and the New Deal and the massive government spending program known as World War II. So he grows up in a very great economy that gives him the chance to go to Harvard and found his business. And then he spends the rest of his life trying to undo that for everybody else. Yeah. I mean, when he talks about the jobs that he was working before we get past what I'm about to talk about, it's all like waiters and busboys at country clubs. And like, you know, he in this next chapter, in this next part of the book, he says he never spoke personally to anyone from Harvard.

But I was told there was an unwritten quota system regarding how many Jewish students could be accepted into grad school. He chose to quit school the next day and hitchhike down to Florida, where he stayed for a year. His mother would later convince him to return to college, where he then enrolled in pharmacy school. So this happens where the dean says, I need 10 grand if you want to go to Harvard Medical School. He says, fuck that noise. I'm just going to leave. And then he decides to hitchhike to Florida

and stays there for a year. No fucking, and in Florida I did none of that. Just a year like fucking Jesus' story from baby to teenagers disappeared. You know what I mean? It doesn't fucking exist. Why would it happen in 18 years? That would make a compelling case for what

happened afterwards, you know? But it's shocking to me. Some of the DC scrolls, he kills a kid. Yeah, and that, I didn't want to pay the $10,000 bribe, so I have to go to pharmacy school. That story is just repeated exactly on his Wikipedia, so I don't buy it at all. After this passage, he talks about how his family was Orthodox Jews, but since he couldn't understand Hebrew, he backed off the orthodoxy but i never backed off being a jew he continues i understand the frustration that blacks faced in america years ago jews suffered the same obstacles large corporations banks and

industries were devoid of jews in positions of authority we could not belong to exclusive clubs or high society there's a great great jealousy of Jews in America, but we fought for our share. Sean, you have something to say about this, right? You've got about 40 minutes on this part. I do like how he stayed loyal to his Orthodox roots by permitting large gatherings during the COVID-19 epidemic. Yeah, I mean, like, during this part,

he mentions that, like, you know, although I was young, I, you know, I knew of what was going on during the Holocaust and how that affected him greatly and how preserving the Jewish religion, it was precious to him. So, he has since donated to several Jewish organizations that we'll talk about later on today. So Bernie Marcus finishes pharmacy school in 1954, and it picks up in the book that a father of his friend, Larry Wurzel, dies. And so Larry just gives Bernie 50% sweat equity share of his father's Millbourne, New Jersey pharmacy business, Central Discount Drug discount drug now i don't know what's going on here but it sounds like larry was hypnotized who gives a random guy fucking

half your business right it doesn't make any sense um maybe maybe the story of him only being in the gang temporarily was a bit of a white lie maybe he just kept that shit going and he's like yeah how do i explain how I got 50% equity in a business for free? And in the book's description, he says that since he wanted to be a doctor, he sort of resented being a pharmacist. So him and Larry would fight often, which like a guy gives you half of his business and you're like, fuck that guy, man. He wanted 51%, I guess. But so he didn't even buy it at a discount he just got half a business for free that seems very suspicious oh yeah that's that's that's it and that's like they talk more about him and larry arguing in this book than they talk about

him receiving half of the business i mean i guess from larry's perspective you know his his father passes away and he's like i got i need i need help running the business this guy just finished pharmacy school i might as well take him on and larry didn't have the i think the larry was just like kind enough to be like i honestly you guys i think he was hypnotized the more and more i think about this it only makes sense that larry was under and then went here's a contract here's 50 of my father's company and then when he came over all they argued about was the fact that you hypnotized me, Bernie. You fucking made me think that you were my father and you were signing over something that I wasn't. Look, all I'm saying, Bernie, is before I went out to drink, I had never touched a cigarette and now I'm a pack-a-day smoker.

So it goes on to tell the story of about this man named danny kessler and bernie marcus and larry wurtzel the guy that he split the pharmacy with got into a fight and danny kessler came in and was like hey kid choose a give me a cigar and bernie was so pissed he was like choose a window and the guy's like what and he was like i'll throw you i choose a window. And the guy's like, what? And he was like, I'll throw you, choose a window. I'm going to throw you out one of them. It's like, I don't know. There's a whole bunch of like macho Bernie starting fights with people stories in this book. And they all seem pretty bullshit.

But Danny Kessler introduces Bernie to the concept of a discount store. Danny Kessler says, hey, this store sucks. You're obviously not happy here, but you seem like a decent employee. You should check out discount stores. So Bernie the next day did. And he was hooked at the prospect of a discount store and selling cosmetics. And I think that this guy, Danny Kessler, and his partner, Henry Flick,

were kind of just running a cosmetic pyramid scheme because it doesn't seem to make sense how this rest of this part comes. I'm just saying, like, imagine being worth $7 billion and sitting down to write your memoirs and putting things like, and then I said I was going to kick this guy's ass, and I totally was about to kick his ass. I was at the top of his game at that point, you know. So Bernie was hooked at the prospect of discount stores and he convinced Larry to stay with the drugstore and then convinced the man leading the cosmetic department, Henry Flick, to sell Bernie the merchandise on credit and to operate at Spears Fifth Avenue next to Empire State

Building. All of this would fall apart as Steers would face bankruptcy, and Bernie with his business partner, Larry, owed several people money. And so at this point, Bernie owes Larry money, he owes this flick guy money, and they owe a whole bunch of money for the drugstores. A friend of Bernie's, Bob Silverman, told him of another store called Two Guys. And Two Guys is another discount store, but it was the best discount store according to this book. Bernie would then case the store 10 times in a two-week period, noting that the place was better than other discount stores.

He happened to stumble upon the owner, Herb Hushman, and it describes Bernie buttering up Herb, being like, Hey, this is an amazing store. Tell me what it's like. And Herb's like, oh, you seem nice. I'll tell you that I bought this. I take care of this. And I, you know, I buy this stuff and we sell at this cost. And then at the end of Herb telling Bernie everything that was great about the store, gleefully describing it, Bernie would then say this.

And this is a quote from the book. For the smartest guy in the world, you are the biggest schmuck i ever met in my life bernie would berate herb about the cosmetic stand which at the time was run by herb's brother the other guy in the two-guy title herb then was so convinced that he bought out bernie's inventory at spears and another store and with this he paid off the debt to henry flick and then uh paid larry off as well so he was finally cut from the drugstore and he was cut from the henry flick cosmetics and he was now just working at two guys bernie then the scribe is moving i'm sure you're not reading the plot of uncut gems and then these two weird brothers come in and call one of them a schmuck dude i'm telling you

this book reads like this like it's like it's you know you got to realize in 99 this guy was let's see he's 90 year olds now so this is 20 years ago so he's 70 years old writing this book and so i don't think any of these details are 100% correct. Right. Yeah, but Two Guys Retailers really did corner the market on sale of single cups. He's like, how about he goes to one of them and he's like, why do you feel about this being just one guy well interestingly enough uh at two guys bernie moves up the ladder and he would oversee the sporting goods department and then major appliances and by the age of 28 he was overseeing approximately a billion dollars worth

of business in hard sales from two guys uh later on two guys would lose their owner when her would die and his brother left the business outside investors tried to over expanding and failed and by 1968 bernie marcus decides to leave two guys at this point he was 39 years old so what's their names uh i don't you know i don't know it it talks about two guys trying to buy Vernado, which was an electric fan company, and that fan company was going out of business. But for two years before he joined Dalen Corporation as vice president in its North Bergen, New Jersey offices. In the book, when he says he leaves two guys, he was like, I'm tired of the snow. I'm tired of being in a place that's cold. And then literally two years later, he goes back to New Jersey.

Do you know if he mentions the Vietnam War at all in the book? He does not mention the Vietnam War at all in this book, no. Other priorities, I'm sure. Yeah. In 1972, he has an ex-wife, Ruth, two kids in college, Fred and Suzanne, and a new wife, Billy, who has another child from Billy's first marriage, Michael Morris. At Dalen, he would be handed the reins to the Handy Dan Home Improvement Centers, and this is where the Home Depot story begins.

There, he would be equated with Arthur Blank, Ken Langone, Ron Brill, and eventually Pat Farah. This is where the Home Depot story kind of begins. So we covered some of this in the Ken Langone episode, but Ken Langone was looking for a company to invest in with some research found out that Handy Dan's were some of the best stores. While the umbrella of Dalen was near bankruptcy, Handy Dan's was a profitable business. At the time, companies were set up in a 81 to 19% stock portfolio, 19% being for the public and 81 being private. Apparently

at this time that was fairly common. Ken Langone chose to buy as many of the 19% stock as he thought it would be very profitable. He then met with Bernie Marcus and they'd gotten along. But when Bernie Marcus set up a meeting between Ken Langone and Bernie's boss, Stanford Singeloff, they hated each other. Stanford Singeloff, according to the book, had an ax to grind with anyone that would work with them that rubbed him the wrong way and even had the nickname as the villain from Flash Gordon.

What the fuck's that guy's name? Oh, Ming the Merciless. Yes. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I saw him referred to as Ming a couple times. Yeah, Stanford... Basically, if you wronged Stanford, he wanted to fuck you over in the long run, which is something that we're going to cover in just a moment here. So Ken Langone was buying a majority of the public stock. Ken Langone's lawyer figured out that the 81% owner could sanitize their vote would be to directly proportionate to the minority, which would mean that the minority controlled the company.

And Langone fucking his eyes bulged when this happened. So Langone rolled into Sanford's office and was like, all right, so how are we going to run the company? And Sigloff in disbelief was like, I didn't realize the company could be manipulated this way. So Langone immediately called his lawyer to be like, all right, make me an offer. And so Sigloff said, okay, the stock is at eight, I'll buy for 10. And Langone said, no, I want 12. And Sigloff was like, no, I'm not giving you $12 a share. So Langone went to the bathroom, apparently. And then Singeloff, with his tail between his lips, said, okay, let's do 12. And Langone said, no, now I want it 14.

You said no to 12. And they played this game until a few weeks later when Bernard Marcus and Langone were having dinner. And Bernie Marcus was like, hey, Langone, sell these shares to my boss, man. He's being a real bitch about this. And Langone's like, if I sell, they're going to fire us, Bernie. He's like, dude, just do it. He's like, all right, I'll do it. And so immediately Bernie Marcus calls the lawyers and says, hey, Ken Langone's willing to sell.

And Langone goes, all right, I'm going to sell for $25.50. And the lawyer was like, why? Why $25.50? And Langone's like, because it needs to feel like a negotiation all this seems like bullshit i have no fucking idea if any of this is true it's oh oh yeah like like the the note about langone going to the bathroom in the middle of the negotiation like that's kind of thing that business psychos like jerk off to to the rest for like the rest of their life so then once langone had sold the stock to Bernie's boss, Sanford, there was a discussion

with the board about who was to be the CEO, and Bernard Marcus was a natural choice. Apparently, at this meeting, Sanford was like, fuck that noise, and would then, after this, fire Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, and Ron Brill. Three people that were involved in Handy Dan's and were a part of that Ken Langone circle that Sanford wanted to grind his axe with. Well, just so to clarify, Handy Dan's was, was this just California based at this time? And this was like the precursor to Home Depot. I assume it did most everything Home Depot does today today handy dance was in california and in phoenix and some of their stores were called angel stores which i don't know all of these construction stores have like odd religious like affiliations so i'm not exactly sure about that um so then at this point well now during the covet 19 epidemic all home depots are angel stores

um so bernie marcus and arthur are developing the plans for what would become home depot and at this time there's another guy who created a store called HomeCo, and this dude was named Pat Farah. And Pat Farah, he worked his ass off, but he had no business sense. And so they at first were like, we're going to buy HomeCo and then turn that into Bernie Marcus's dream. But when they looked at the financials, they realized, oh, that's not going to work out at all. And in terms of the mad dog loyal employee, a visionary billionaire, I think the way it looks is that Bernie Marcus had the idea. He had the vision.

Pat Farah was the loyal work dog. And then Ken Langone was a bit of the mad dog who would just fucking yell at you until you did what he wanted you to do. Before we get into Home Co., we should just mention that Bernie Marcus runs into his first labor union trouble while he's still at Handy Dan's. And this will, of course, be a running theme in his life. Right. To fire Bernie Marcus, Sanford couldn't just fire him outright. So what they did was, in some stories, it says that they were involved with union busting.

And in other stories, it said that it was manipulated. Andy, you got some on this? Yeah, I looked a little bit into it. And I pulled from, I mean, I pulled from the Wall Street Journal review of Built From Scratch. But also, they talk about it on entrepreneur.com, where they say it's, of course, fake. And then Fortune also had like a Fortune magazine had a figure. But it looks like the charge was that Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank instruct the guy Ron Brill to use $140,000 in company funds to back a union decertification effort, which is the process where the employees terminate the right of a union to be their exclusive representative. So the details are murky, but it looks like from some of these sources, they hired non-union

employees, which is presumably to pressure the union members to decertify. And in a few minutes, we're going to go on this tangent about union busting. But Sigalov apparently reported the trio to the Justice Department and the NLRB, though no charges were ultimately brought against Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blanco, Ron Brill. And of course, now the story is that the union busting thing was just a pretext to get rid of them. And one of their complaints was that they were fired without any warning, which, you know, it's too bad they didn't have a union. But I think it's a little owner firing its top executives for union busting on its head. So I'm guessing that they were probably doing something that under different circumstances Sigalov would look the other way about. But he was looking for a reason to get

rid of them. And so he pulled out the union busting stuff i don't know andy when i read entrepreneurs.com say a union busting charge is trumped up i believe them so for the rest of this home depot story i'm going to be referring to the anbhf.org the american national business hall of fame article written in 2014 on Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot story. The Home Depot, Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot story by Dr. Richard E. Hatwick, professor of economics, retired, Western Illinois University. A very good page if you want to learn the complete details of this. I highly recommend it. So Bernie Marcus, when he gets gets fired wants to sue sigalov he's like fuck that guy he sued me but then he gets advice from this guy named soul who's like

dude if you want to sue this guy it's going to cost you a whole bunch of money and you're going to have rooms in your house with papers stacked all the way up to the ceiling because sigalov's like way he would deal with bankers would be like when he would be like hey we need a loan he would just send them way too much paperwork so that the bankers couldn't look through all of it and the bank would be like fuck it just saying if he gave us this much paperwork he's probably right but bernie marcus was like no we got to tell them the truth and we got to be friends with these guys because they are a part of the business and we are family you know and so after about two years of trying to see if they wanted to fight, Bernie Marcus decides, fuck it, I'm not going to sue him for the million dollars

that I want out of this, even though I think that he fucked me. I'm just going to move on with my life. And at the time when they were figuring out the Home Depot brand, at one point, they hired a consultant to help with the process. And he decided that maybe a good name would be Bad Bernie's Build-A-Hall, which I love that name. I think it's good. They needed money to fund the venture, and at one point, Ken Langone called with news that he had lined up $2 million in venture capital from Ross Perot. The proposal was to give Perot 70% of the new company's common stock. As negotiations progressed with Perot, Bernie began to worry about Perot interfering with management decisions once the company was up and running. Bernie's experience with Sigloff made him particularly sensitive to this issue and to

the fact that a majority owner could fire Bernie if there were to be a conflict. So Bernie said, nah, fuck that noise, dude. And so Langone then turned to his network of venture investors and managed to raise $2 million from a group of them. The final financial arrangement gave those investors 50% of the company's equity. Now, we're going to continue talking about Home Depot, but first I want us to talk about the labor busting movements and how building a union in this country under the financial scrutiny that we're currently in is very, very difficult. Andy?

Yeah. So, Bernie Marcus' later in life crusade is against this thing called the Employee Free Choice Act. And it'll take a minute to explain it. And in order to explain why he's so opposed to it, I kind of have to explain the process of forming a union. So this is going to be a tangent from Bernie Marcus himself. But I'm going to start with the first result you get. If you just type in Employee Free Choice Act on Google, you will see a Google snippet above all the results that says the Employee Free Choice Act represents the most dramatic potential change to U.S. labor law in nearly 75 years. If enacted, the legislation would allow unions to sidestep employees' current right to vote in a private federal government supervised election during organizing campaigns.

And that is from a website from the Society for Human Resource Management, which is a, quote, human resources membership association and lobbying firm. So that's like a rabbit hole. I didn't have time to go down. But like the first if you look up employee free Chorsak, the first thing you see is this like union busting bullshit. So to explain what it actually is, I'm first going to talk about the process of forming a union, specifically a private sector union in the United States. And if you haven't looked into it, you can go to the NLRB union certification process page at NLRB.gov slash resources slash nlrb-process. And I suggest you do because what you'll see is this massively Byzantine flowchart for how to form a union. It has, let's see, six pre-petition steps. Basically, the process is you first have to get 30% of employees to sign a petition to form a union. Once you've done that, you have to take that petition to the NLRB regional office, and then they have to review the petition with the ability to withdraw it as well as investigate it.

And there's kind of a waiting period where then you have to negotiate with the company and the NLRB when there's going to be the actual election that will form the union. In that time, the company has a massive amount of freedom to do all kinds of different things in order to stop that process. And like even looking at this flow chart, it says like under investigation of regional determination, this is after the petition has been brought in, but is several steps before the actual union formation election. It says the petition may be withdrawn by petitioner with regional director approval. Petition may be dismissed by regional director. Prenses dismissal may be appealed to the board. It's this massive thing where if, let's say, you work at Burger King and you don't have the resources to hire a lawyer, it's going to be like a huge pain in the ass to figure out.

But if you're Burger King, you can just hire an army of lawyers to use every facet of it to your advantage. So the reality of what happens when you try to form a union was kind of listed below. I found this article from 2009 from the Center for American Progress written by David Madland and Carla Walter. And you can ignore the kind of neotand and shit right now because this is actually a pretty good article. And it talks about the complications in forming a union. They took a study conducted by the Center for Economic Policy Research in 2009, and they found that in the 2000s, in 26% of unionization campaigns, at least one pro-union worker was illegally fired.

This rate rose from 16% in the 1990s, and pro-union workers face about a 2.3% chance of being illegally fired during the course of a campaign. And so then taking the assumption that employers target union organizers and activists and that union organizers and activists make up about 10% of pro-union workers, their estimate suggests that one in five union organizers or activists can expect to get fired during the course of a unionization campaign. Wow. Yeah. And their conclusion is that current law has given – and this is the conclusion from the Center for Economic and Policy Research – is that current law has given employers a powerful anti-union strategy. Fire one or more prominent pro-union employees, typically workers most involved in organizing

the union, with the hope of disrupting the internal workings of the organizing campaign while intimidating the rest of the potential bargaining unit in advance of the NLRB supervised election. And for whatever reason, this page, I had to actually pull it off of the Internet Archive because it's no longer on the Center for Economic Policy and Research website. They also, in this Center for American Progress article, they also pulled research from this Cornell University professor, Kate Bronfenbrenner. And what she found is she looked at a random sample of 1,004 NLRB certified elections. And from that, she found that more than 90% of companies, once the NLRB election process has been set into motion,

so this is even after they've gotten 30% of signatures to start the union certification process. And they are between the, uh, that point and the actual election in that time, in that interval between those two points, um, more than 90% of companies legally force you or force workers to attend anti-union meetings. Um, and meanwhile, pro-union employees are banned from discussing union activities on the job except during breaks and break rooms, which obviously that's a massive asymmetry in power relations. She also found these statistics like as cynical as I am, I was actually fairly shocked by these. She found 75% of companies hire outside consultants to run union busting campaigns. Employers threatened to close plants in 57% of union elections.

They discharged workers in 34% of these. They threatened to cut wages and benefits in 47% of these. And in two-thirds of elections, companies forced employees to begin one-on-one meetings with their supervisors. And most of those, which is about 63% of all elections surveyed, the one-on-one meetings were used to interrogate workers about whether they or others support unionization. And in 54%, they used these sessions to threaten workers. That's 54% of all union elections, not of that subset. And I actually have personal experience with this. For example, after we talked about this in the Blurn episode, but you can go back to the Bl for everyone in my team with our supervisor, which I think is just kind of straight out of this playbook. I was just going to say to clarify, all of those retaliation tactics that you listed from firing people for unionizing, for threatening to cut wages, threatening to shut down plants in the event of a union being certified.

Just to clarify, those are all illegal retaliation. It's just the problem is the law is toothless correct uh actually it's um a little some of it's legal uh the anti-union busting that uh or i'm, anti-union propaganda in more than 90% of companies, that's completely legal. Though suddenly changing to one-on-one meetings, that's completely legal. And it's kind of a gray area on how supervisors then ask employees about their union preference. Also, the idea behind the one-on-one meetings where a supervisor will ask employees about their union preferences, the idea is to undermine the secret ballot in the union certification election. found that, and this study was done in, I believe, 2007, but they found at that time that retaliatory tactics actually increased in the years leading up to the study. Apparently, in the earlier cases reviewed, tactics like one-on-one and captive anti-union meetings remained relatively constant, but threats and retaliation increased, such as threats of plant closures, discharges, harassment, and other discipline surveillance and alteration

of benefits. And actually, Sean, yeah, in the case of things that are actually illegal, the law is toothless. For instance, if an employee is fired for unionization activity, the penalty to the company is that they simply have to rehire the employee with back wages minus any severance that employee received. So the study concluded that all of these actions are almost exclusively a private sector problem. The vast majority of unionization efforts in the public sector are relatively free from coercion. Many people actually in public sector unionization efforts only have to do card check, which is the main aspect of the Employee Free Choice Act that I'll get to in a second. But coercion, intimidation and retaliation, that's all almost exclusively in the private sector. Public sector unions don't have to deal with that usually.

And then even after the elections are held, companies will use delay tactics to stall negotiations on the contract for as long as they can. They also found that 38% of unions that were certified through the NLRB election process achieve a contract within the first year. Only 38%. And only 56% ever achieve a first contract which is so if you form a union you know you go through all the steps all the way up to legal union certification you may never even get like there's a 44 chance you're never even going to get a union contract um so the alternative is the Employee Free Choice Act, which was mostly legislation that was mostly brought up in the 2000s. It had its best shot in 2009, and we'll see how that went. It was brought up again in 2016, but it didn't go anywhere but the legislation is uh card check which is basically you just have to have a majority of people in a work uh in a company sign um a form for union certification and then you have a union

you don't have this two-step process where in you know in between those steps, a company can just have barrage after barrage of anti-union activity. It also has different penalties for companies who violate the National Labor Relations Act. It also promotes, in other words, good faith bargaining through a mediation and arbitration option so that employees can negotiate a first contract. And it actually, it undermines the delaying tactics by forcing employers to enter a binding arbitration to produce a collective agreement at least 120 days after a union is recognized. And so, in this 2009 Center for American Progress article, they said – they say, in 2007, the Employee Free Choice Act passed the House and received majority support in the Senate. But it did not receive enough votes to break the threat of a filibuster. With a new Congress and President Obama's promise to sign the bill, the Employee Free Choice Act has a strong chance of becoming law.

And here's what really happened. It was introduced in 2009 by Ted Kennedy. Democrats Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Tom Carpenter all joined the Republicans in opposing it. Also, Arlen Specter, who just switched over from Republicans to Democrats in 2009. One of the first things he did as a Democrat was oppose the Employee Free Choice Act. And Dianne Feinstein, she didn't explicitly oppose it, but she did announce that she would prefer to seek alternate legislation. One thing the Democrats tried to form a private sector union. And this is where we come back to Bernie Marcus. The Huffington Post actually got their hands on a conference call in 2008.

It was hosted by Bank of America, which at the time was receiving bailout money. Another attendee was AIG, also receiving bailout money. Bernie Marcus was on the call. And this guy, Rick Berman, who's the founder of the Center for Union Facts, which is a typical cushy bootlicker position. I'm sure he makes like half a million just publishing articles about how unions are there to take your free choice. Marcus made these statements. He's one of those weird Twitter accounts. He's one of those weird Twitter accounts who's like, union facts.

Unions are yellow. Union facts. Unions eat at least four meals a day. like such like just simple reform on an obscure law that and a lot of this flew under the radar in 2008 because of the financial crisis uh and you know obama who's going to make everything better and then um obamacare and all that kind of took up most of the news but uh in response to card check uh Bernie Marcus said this is the demise of civilization this is how a civilization disappears

I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it um he said that donations of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars

were needed and he argued it was to prevent America from turning into France hmm not the Soviet Union not Cuba he millions of dollars were needed and he argued it was to prevent america from turning into france not the soviet union not cuba he the end of civilization is america turning into france i never thought i would see it i never thought i'd see us going to 30-hour work weeks quakes. France. To paid paternal leave.

He also said if a retailer has not gotten involved in this, if he has not spent money on this election, he's referring to the 2008 election, if he has not sent money to now former Senator Norm Coleman and all these other guys, they should be

shot. They should be shot. They should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs. And then this next thing he said, I thought it was really interesting because it's an interesting look at how power actually works. He said, as a shareholder, if I knew the CEO of the company wasn't doing anything on EFCA, I would sue the son of a bitch. I'm so angry at some of these CEOs. I can't even believe the stupidity that is involved here. And I think this quote is actually very important because it highlights a lot of the structural

factors that are reinforcing anti-labor activities. Because in this case, it represents Bernie Marcus, who is speaking from the position of the property class, the shareholder. And he's talking about forcing the hand of the CEO who's basically the professional managerial class. And he's talking about – basically, the way he's saying it is that even if a CEO is sympathetic to this law, that CEO doesn't have a choice in the matter. He will be removed from his position by the owners of capital if he does not do their bidding. And it's also interesting how the kind of legal system is brought in to reinforce the class. I mean, this is kind of amateurish analysis.

But like when he says, I would sue the son of a bitch, like he's probably exaggerating. Like that case would probably be thrown out like suing a ceo for not supporting uh certain legislation but the i think it's clear that the idea in his head is in his head that the job of the government is not to be involved in helping workers rights but to protect the interests of the property class um and he he pretty much just spells it out right there in that one sentence so he also he also went on to say this bill uh maybe one of the worst things i've ever seen in my life uh he also explained that he could be on a 300 he grew up of course as we mentioned during the great depression when um actually card check i think until the 60s was

uh the law of the land but. He also said he could be on a 350-foot boat out in the Mediterranean but felt that it was more important to engage in this fight. He detailed the plan of attack. He said it was not enough if there are not enough Republicans operating as a firewall after this

election, it is going to be very difficult to hold the line. I'm sorry, this is Berman. This is the toady with Center for Union Facts saying this. He said the only way after these elections, if we don't have a filibuster proof Senate is to make the issue so hot in some states so that even a Democrat who is up for election in 2010 has to think twice about whether or not they're going to let this thing go by. Of course, we're talking about people with like bottomless resources to fight this thing, to make it completely untenable for a lot of politicians to support it without a massive media onslaught. And Marcus said that he claimed that rather than giving lobbyists money,

apparently he didn't have much faith in lobbyists, he said that the participants need to make campaign donations rather than lobbying payments. It's also, I guess, worth noting or reiterating that a lot of these people had just stuffed their pockets with government bailouts. So a lot of these campaign donations, then it's just taxpayer money going into the pockets of legislators to kill pro-union legislation.

I did want to underline something about Bernie Marcus's efforts here, just in case anybody thinks, you know, this guy is overreacting to an extremely mild reform. I would say, no, actually, he recognizes his class enemy perfectly, and he's having a perfectly appropriate reaction. Because the entire thing is, unions are an alternate power base. The capital owns the political class. So the only thing that can stop them is labor unions and labor union power. And that's actually why you see, we've talked about these New Deal union reforms, the 1938 Wagner Act. Well, actually, the last piece of major labor law passed in this country

was the 1947 Hartley-Taft Act. And that's actually the first thing the Republicans passed when they took back over the Congress after FDR left. And there's not been any labor union law since then, since 1947. And this is the legislation that allowed right-to-work states to exist before they were outlawed under the Wagner Act. So, you know, he sees after all this time in 2009, there's a possibility that a new labor union law card check might come into existence.

He recognizes this is an existential threat. This will destroy this country. And I'm going to fuck everybody who doesn't donate money should be shot. And I think he did take the threat appropriately. And, you know, it's very unfortunate that the Obama administration kind of fucking punted on this one. There's such a small change to the law, but he or some of the lawyers, more likely the labor lawyers advising him noticed that even

though this was a seemingly small change it was very profound yeah i mean i i guess i kind of downplayed the meaning of the like um the effect that the law has i i think the reason is like when you look into this uh when you look at things like this, you know, you'll get people who will say, oh, it's a conspiracy theory to say that, you know, the most powerful people in the world have deliberately made a massively complex Byzantine system for simply collectively representing your interests as an employee. But the reality is that is exactly what happened. And anything that will remove, that will potentially make that system even slightly easier for employees is fought tooth and nail for people to maintain these interests. And it is a very real thing

that these people are really are, are like it really is a conspiracy it is the definition of a conspiracy yeah yeah yeah like i mean it's kind of a historical irony that had karchek passed hillary clinton would probably be president but she wouldn't be able to govern the way she wants to so i guess they have to i guess take your guess which one is more important to democrats you know i was thinking while reading this book because they talked about wants to. So I guess they have to, I guess, take your guess which one is more important to Democrats. You know, I was thinking while reading this book, because they talked about Ross Perot, if Ross Perot was elected, would we have Clinton and the Trump families being in as much power as they currently are? I mean, that's my current theory is no,

that actually the most important election of our lifetime was the 1992 election, because that's my current theory is no that actually the most important election of our lifetime was the 1992 election because that's where you get the bill clinton administration you get nafta you get pntr with china you get glass steagle repeal all this financial deregulation telecom deregulation if people had just done nothing in the 90s i think the situation would not have deteriorated to the point where donald trump gets elected i don't know i think bush would have done the same shit um and i think even if clinton didn't make it like the powers i mean the bernie marcus is the world um maybe the ones who aren't so gung-ho for republicans the maybe the smarter ones who know that if you can bankroll some Democrats, you can still get your interests represented. They would have pushed, if not Clinton, someone else.

But to be clear, if Ross Perot or some anti-NAFTA Democrat had been elected in 92, yeah, they probably would have been pushed that way. But I think the Bill Clinton administration did extreme damage to this country. Oh, sure. So going back to Home Depot and when they opened, I think that although it's a fairly common concept now, Home Depot in its inception is essentially big box stores that cut out the people you would hire to do shit in your house. So back in the day, if you want a new bathroom, you got to go through a guy that will build you your bathroom and only he has connections to the people that have the supplies that you want

in your bathroom. Home Depot says, fuck that noise. We're the middlemen. You can build it yourself and we'll sell you everything because in our big box stores, we sell everything. That's the general concept. When it comes to opening these stores, they didn't have enough money to take care of this because Bernie Marcus theorized that he would need $25 million and they only had around $2 million. And with that amount of money, they were able to open the store, but then they need a high amount of inventory to stock it where it would be worthwhile for a customer to come in and get a light bulb for $3 and then leave with $60 worth of other crap. And so quoting from the book I've been quoting here, it talks about the finances for Home Depot before they open. So the next obstacle in the way of the grand opening was financial.

Home Depot needed a large line of bank credit in order to purchase inventory and cover startup costs. Ken Langone tried and failed to line up a bank or group of banks. In desperation, Bernie turned to the bank he had used while running Handy Dan, Security Pacific National Bank in Los Angeles. More specifically, he turned to Rip Fleming, the Security Pacific officer with whom he had worked in his Handy Dan days. With a persistent sales effort, Bernie convinced Fleming to recommend that the bank authorize a $3.5 million loan, but Fleming had trouble getting the bank to approve. In fact, the bank's loan offices

turned the proposal down three times. Fleming then threatened to resign from the bank if the Home Depot loan were not approved. Fleming had $400 million of accounts that would probably leave with him. The bank's loan offices made the Home Depot loan and were thereby to hold onto Fleming. So when they opened, it wasn't that successful. And Langone writes in his book, I Love Capitalism, that the Home Depot didn't exactly get off to a flying start.

So we put all over the store, all these shelves 20 foot high. We had these boxes and everybody thought, oh all over the store, all these shelves, 20 foot high. We had these boxes and everybody thought, oh my god, look at all these merchandise. But there was air in the boxes. There was no products. They just gave us empty boxes because they asked and they struggled. To get customers to come into the first Home Depot, Marcus gave

away cash. Early on, Bernie would stay outside with a fist of single dollar bills and give people a dollar if they'd go in and see what was in the store. So they're literally giving people to go in Home Depot, which is so fucking desperate. But after their first store, in the mid-80s, they decide that they can't overexpand because they've all seen how that fails a company. And so they cap it at 25 stores a year. Home Depot needed capital to fill

these stores that they had built up the founders turned once again to security pacific national bank home depot's champion there rip fleming retired in 1983 but he recruited and trained his replacement faye wilson in 1985 wilson put her career on the line in advocating a line of credit of $200 million. That loan was approved, and according to Marcus, it literally saved our company. In other words, the line of credit made it possible to grow Home Depot from a chain of 50 stores to one with 100 stores. And once again, I'm pretty sure it's hypnotism. Marcus is showing up at these banks and hypnotizing people and getting hundreds of millions of dollars and we're going to continue on with with the home depot work environment and there is an article from the new york times in 97 that discusses how home depot had to pay 87.5 million dollars for not promoting more women um in the book it describes it not being sexist, but a macho

work environment. They talk about how the sex discrimination suit was probably an inevitable result of the macho culture and the fact that associates were largely recruited from the construction trades and only 2.6% of America's

construction trades labor force was female. essentially they were like what we hire a whole bunch of dudes what's wrong with that they build shit and they decided not to take the responsibility of not hiring uh not hiring and promoting women in the home depot ecosystem and you know if you look up home depot racist google doesn't stop searching. It just keeps going. I mean, from clips online where a person in Connecticut went into a Home Depot and there was a noose that was tied in the corner to stories about a man that worked at Home Depot that walked off the property because somebody was kidnapping a child and he was trying to stop it.

And at first, Home Depot was like, we're going to we're going to fire this guy to another guy more recently that had an altercation with a guy calling him in the N-word at a Home Depot and Home Depot fired the employee. I mean, you know, it's a company that claims that they are associates, not employees, because employees make it feel like they're our slaves, whereas associates makes it family. And this is the culture that Home Depot has built. Here are some of the perks to being an associate. I already mentioned this is from a Splinter News article by Hamilton Nolan, where he solicited

emails from employees at the same time Isle of Capitalism came out. So benefits of being an employee, I already mentioned, if you're caught accepting a tip, you will be fired on the spot. In the event of a workplace accident, you will immediately be given a drug test. Your 401k will be eaten up by management fees so that the only money you're going to get is the principal you put in. Basically, you'll make less than if you put that money in a savings account. And one employee observed that half the people they work with give plasma every week to be able to afford food wild yeah and obviously working at home depot is uh seriously hard on your body

if you happen to be walking five to ten miles a day on concrete lifting heavy stuff um you know and you're very unlikely to get a wage and they'll play anti-union propaganda. You're very unlikely to get a wage increase and they'll play anti-union propaganda and fire you if you attempt to organize to better your working conditions. Well, it's not that they'll play anti-union propaganda if you attempt to organize working conditions. It's that when you're onboarded, you're given anti-union propaganda. Apparently, it's some of the most involved training they get. One person said that they spent more time on the anti-union propaganda

than actual practical DIY information that you would expect someone who works at a hardware store to be given uh i can actually um my girlfriend gabby found a video of it uh that i could play here um it we wanted to play during the kinland gone episode but apparently it's constantly taken down to due to dcma uh claims in this one's just someone, clearly they're being forced to watch this shit. So they just stuck their phone at the monitor and recorded. So you're going to hear like a weird beep in the middle of it. But I think it's a good idea to play it in its entirety. Oh, I did just want to mention, you know, during the Ken Langone episode we did a few

years ago, we tried to, or I tried to find this for like several hours, this video that Home Depot shows the anti-union propaganda to its employees. And I could only find a transcript because I would go to YouTube, I would go to Daily Motion, and you would keep seeing these copyright strikes because Home Depot takes them down. You know, you can't even find this video on LiveLeak where you can watch people be beheaded because Home Depot is so adamant that nobody see their anti-union propaganda except for their own employees. We respect the rights of unions to share their opinions, but we want to provide you with

more information so you can consider what a union could mean for you, your family, your co-workers, and the home team. You may be approached with information. You may be asked to sign an authorization form or someone may request your contact information. Sorry I had to wait. How can I help? Don't worry about it. You guys can see this is almost like us. Yeah, we've been working really hard. My job used to be like that until I joined the team. They helped me get a better schedule and paid time off. If you want, you can go online, launch your information, and you can get signed up right here. Oh, no, thank you.

I'm really happy working here. And besides, I already have those things here, and our company is really supportive. I only have concerns. Thank you, though. Hey, excuse me. This interaction can occur at work, at home, or online. It is now okay for you to go after your legally binding signature electronic. When you sign, you may be giving up your right to speak for yourself. We believe that

every associate can speak for themselves without having to pay their hard-earned money to a union in order to be listened to and have issues resolved. Once you sign, the authorization card is legally binding and it's hard to get back. Remember the outdoor garden interaction? She told the associate that a union helped her to get better hours. Hey, it's important to know that union representatives often make promises that cannot guarantee.

First, unions only make money by taking initiation fees and monthly dues from the board paycheck. They take this money before a union even gets a seat. Second, unions cannot guarantee anything if union promises can only come true if the company agrees to the union's request to retargeting.

So, what comes up after that is a quiz for the employee to answer questions. It says, which of the following statements are true regarding protecting your signature? Unions can guarantee hours and pay. Unions can go after your signature both in person and online. When an associate signs an authorization card they may be giving up their right to speak for themselves and signed union authorization cards are easy to

get back and someone pointed out that the body language of the uh employee that they presented after the lady asks if he wants to join a union is um that he has a gun to his head. It was nice of those unionized actors to tell us all those facts about unions. And so you're saying they get this intense training on how to resist unionization drives, but then they don't learn basic things about their job? Yeah, basically. One guy said that he had to teach himself a bunch of basic skills

for the section that he was placed in because he didn't get any training at all and was just fed up with unintentionally annoying customers with his lack of knowledge. And this is for like, you know, eight bucks an hour. Yeah, like the anti-union video ends and he's just like, wait, I mean, where's the bathroom though? So in covering Home Depot, these were a few articles I want to mention before we close out the episode. From topclassactions.com, employees and 401k members in a class action lawsuit alleging Home Depot mismanaged their retirement accounts face a motion to dismiss in federal court.

Home Depot says it cannot be blamed for the poor performance of the investment provided to its employees in its 401k plans. However, the plaintiffs are alleged that Home Depot was far more than a victim to a few poor investment choices. According to the Home Depot ERISA class action lawsuit filed earlier this year, the company's 401k offerings violated the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. Only high-fee robo-investing options were made available, allege the plaintiffs, charging up to 700% more than other options not available to 401k participants. The Home Depot class action lawsuit also claims in addition to exorbitant fees, the investment firm used by Home Depot for its 401k plans

paid kickbacks to investment partners with poorly performing funds. Compounding the problem, Home Depot refused to do anything about the dud investment funds leaving employees to fall hundreds of thousands of dollars behind in their retirement accounts. There are two great Splinter articles. One talks about Home Depot employees are hot, thirsty, harassed, and poor. I'm just going to read some of the headlines in this. It comes from 15 years no living wage, sexual harassment, pros and cons from a Long Island employee lifting 40, 60 pound bags of dirt, not allowed to accept tips. We've covered a few of these things.

And another article. All the problems you're saying would not be fixed by having a UGEN. I think we can agree on that. In another article by Splinter, Home Depot's discrimination, low pay, and poor management by the numbers. It talks about injury, racism, overwork, discrimination, low pay, inhumane work environment, sexism, wage theft, more wage theft, sexual harassment. Moving on to the fact that Home Depot murder case teaches that

employer may be held liable. This is from 2017, the National Law Review. And Home Depot has argued that the murder of Broomfield and her unborn daughter occurred off premises and that Cooper didn't commit the crime using store property, meaning the company couldn't be held liable for negligence under Illinois law, even after they were notified of this with her working there. Wait, step back a second. So we've got some names and we've got a murder. What's the actual case here? All right. So to quote this article,

NH Verge Home Depot USA Inc. will face a lawsuit claiming that the retailer's negligence led to a supervisor's murdering a pregnant employee at an off-site event. The court held that the Home Depot, sorry, the court held that the home improvement chain allowed the murderer to have supervision over the employee even after it knew he had a history of harassing female subordinates. The ruling overturned a U.S. District Court's dismissal of the case, ruling that Home Depot couldn't have known that Brian Cooper's verbal abuse and intimidation of Alicia Broomfield would have led to her murder in 2012. Cooper was sentenced in 2014 to two life terms without the possibility of parole for first-degree intentional homicide and third-degree sexual assault. So Home Depot knows that this manager is harassing this individual, and she is murdered and her child, unborn child as well, because of this.

Not including the fact that the GOP billionaire, Bernard Marcus, is saying that the coronavirus is not that big a deal. Stay open. We can make malaria medication. Fuck the employees. The Home Depot needs to stay open. Sean, I believe you have some more on this. Hey, what nuts about the medication that was disproven? Right.

Hydrochloroquine or whatever. Yeah, so Bernie Marcus is a big Trump booster and there was like going around the boycott Home Depot hashtag because he said he's going to donate a bunch of money to Trump's reelection. And, you know, some concerned trolls were like, well, he's retired from Home Depot, but he's still a major stockholder. That's where his $6.6 billion fortune comes from. And I just wanted to highlight a couple things real quick. We don't have time to get into it too much, but it should be noted Bernie Marcus is a major Israel hawk and proponent for war with Iran. So he's also gotten some positive press for saying he's going to donate the majority of his fortune. But a lot of these donations go to organizations like the Foundation for Defense of Democracy. This is a pro-Iran war organization.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracy, their official Twitter, their Iran program, FDD underscore Iran, they sent out this tweet on November 28, 2019. Hashtag Ilhan Omar was recruited by a foreign government, received funding from a foreign government, and passed sensitive information through intermediaries to hashtag Iran. So this charity that this guy, he apparently, Bernie Marcus, provides a third of FDD's budget, is tweeting out conspiracy theories about Ilhan Omar being a foreign agent. And it should also be noted that an employee of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an employee there was working at the Donald Trump administration.

Yeah, the guy's name is Richard Goldberg. He's a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was hired by John Bolton to work for the National Security Council under Donald Trump. He was receiving a salary from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies while he was working for the White House. He immediately left the day after Soleimani, the Iranian general, was assassinated. He left the White House the day after and went back to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. So when we talk about, you know, Bernie Mark is providing a third of the budget for this organization, this is what his charitable givings is. And, you know, you can just look at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies sending out all these tweets bragging about how, you know, Trump showed that he was not a, he said, the FDD sent out a tweet colloding via Twitter that Iran thought, quote, Trump was a Twitter tiger. He has proven otherwise. And that was, of course, the day after the killing of Soleimani. So he's a major advocate for war. He's called Iran, quote, the devil. this charitable money, but what I wanted to talk about with regards to this current epidemic, coronavirus, and I think this ties into the union stuff that we were talking about earlier. Because, you know, when would you more want a union than when there's an actual lethal

pandemic going on and you need somebody to step in and force workplace safety if management won't do it. And sadly enough, a Home Depot employee has died, but we don't know how many. We know at least one has, but Home Depot refuses to say how many of their quote-unquote associates have died during this COVID-19 epidemic. But the thing is, you know, Home Depots are open. Lowe's are open because they do sell some essential goods, but they also sell a bunch of bullshit, you know, gardening stuff that people don't need to go to a store to get right now. And in fact, the website modernretail.co, they quote numerous Home Depot employees saying that customers had told them that they went into a Home Depot or a Lowe's just because they were bored and they were one of the few places open. Like, this is killing people that these organizations are open. And Livia Gershon, writing in the Daily Beast, writes up how a Home Depot worker in Washington, D.C. told her that he would like to see U.S. Home Depots do what the ones in Ontario, Canada have done and offer online ordering and pickup or delivery only.

He said it's galling to see shoppers packing the store with carts full of mulch and other non-essential items, even if he is getting a $100 bonus for working under the current conditions. A hundred dollars for my family's health is not really the value I'm looking for, he said. So, you know, Home Depot in the U.S., they could switch to this model they've been forced to adopt in Canada, which is the stores are closed except for you order online, you pick up, you can't just walk through the fucking store. And the consequences of them not adopting this are an article that came out just a couple days ago in the uh uh the hartford uh the hartford corrent is a hartford connecticut local paper and i'm just going to read a bit about it it talks about jonathan ferreira is a 20 or was a 26 year old home depot cashier who died of covet 19 he was the head cashier at the home depot store on the berlin

turnpike in Connecticut. He never took a sick day, according to his parents, but on Monday, April 6th, he could not drag himself out of bed for his early morning shift. He was just so tired, said his father, Paulo Ferreira. Three weeks later, he was dead of COVID-19. He had

trouble getting a test. He couldn't get tested. He was forcing himself to work, but he didn't know. He didn't know he had COVID-19 until it was too late. The Home Depot would not provide an accounting of how many of its employees have died during the pandemic. However, they have offered

to pay for Jonathan Ferreira's funeral. Ugh. Oh, that's nice of them. The thing is, we just don't fucking know how many people are getting sick and dying, but we know that they have no union and no representation and nobody willing to step in and tell management no. And they are keeping these stores open in the U.S. totally needlessly because, you know, Home Depot has actually been doing well during this pandemic because people are stuck at home. They want to do home improvement projects or, you know, know people are bored so they walk into the only store that is open and they kill the fucking employees and i just want to read one paragraph here

about what happened to jonathan frera because i think we hear this in the u.s 80 000 people dead and it's a statistic it doesn't register so i'm just going to read this from the Hartford Courier. At 1.30 a.m. on May 1st, the hospital called Paolo and Elizabeth Ferreira, his parents, with bad news. His blood pressure had completely dropped, Paolo recalled. They called us a couple hours later and said there was nothing else they could do for him.

They asked if we wanted to say our last goodbyes. Through FaceTime, they shared a few final words with Jonathan while a doctor held his hands. My last words to him were, Jonathan, we love you very much. We will never forget you and you'll be with God, his mother said. He was unable to respond,

but his parents say they are comforted by the doctor's assurances that their son could still hear them. 80,000 people dead. These are not statistics. These are real human lives, and we don't know how many people of those were killed by Home Depot, but we know at least one was. And this is a body on Bernie Marcus's hands and all of these fucking executives and shareholders. And you know what? Just fuck these pieces of garbage. I am absolutely disgusted with them and what we allow capitalists in the U.S. to get away with. I think their job providers kind of support them in addition to being deadly it's part of this reopening is going to be like largely pointless

like nobody has any money or the people who do will rationally decide to stay home because they still fear the virus yeah they'll pay they'll pay someone else to go get it you open your well maybe if you will but you open your store and then we're in we're still in the nothing has changed as far as there being a depression going on actually i think i might talk about on the next episode i was i wanted to talk about it this time it kind of ran out of time with research but there's an interesting um new york times article about how a lot of the reopen protests, the groups behind them are funded by a Coke backed company, which is especially interesting because, of course, the Cokes get their money from oil and the price of oil has been dropping because no one's driving the car around. Right. because no one's driving the car around right so there is also like a billionaire connection that where like you know the drive to reopen um seems to be coming uh and seems to be bankrolled

by uh the uh oil and gas gas industry and the people at the top yeah those like the group the Yeah, the groups that are protesting to reopen sooner than we should are like when you see interviews with them, it's like small business owners and like managers of stores and just not workers. the the the grunt work of like organizing a protest like i don't imagine that your typical like boat store owner is gonna know how to do that i imagine that there are you know um people who are professionals yeah professionals who come from the tea party movement who you know have have a lot of the um uh email lists and what have you to organize these things. Yeah, and one other thing about Jonathan Ferreira, like I said, he was working there as a head cashier for two years. He made $12 an hour, no raise in that entire time. And this is a 26-year-old. He had his entire life ahead of him, and he was fucking killed for $12 an hour because this store was open when it should have been fucking closed.

You know, when you look online for Bernie Marcus, like whether it's his Facebook group or various articles, the propaganda of Home Depot runs deep. I mean, if you look at the guy, I didn't even realize he was Jewish until I did all this research on him because he looks so waspy in terms of just like good home family values. And one of the things people will often point to in terms of the Bernard Marcus lore is all of his charitable givings. And although we've kind of run out of time here, the two I just want to mention very quickly. One is this medical clinic called the Malizia Clinic and how its focus on treating the insured has some in the community questioning its nonprofit mission.

And so this is a clinic that they've started that the concept being that like we're going to start a clinic and it's not going to be about quantity. It's going to be about quality. But then if you look at the reviews of the clinic, you got people saying like the doctor only saw me for three minutes because they're just so overworked. And the people that are funding this operation are Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, Howard M. Jenkins, previous CEO and current chairman of the Executive Committee of Public Supermarkets, Dan T. Cathy, President and Chief Operating Officer of Chick-fil-A, Robert S. Martin, Chairman and CEO of Boar's Head Provisions. Robert W. Fisher, chairman and CEO of Investors Equity and Wesleyan International Corp.

Judge G. Conley Ingram, former Georgia Supreme Court justice. I mean, none of these people are fucking doctors is the point I'm trying to make here. And the idea that they're like, we're just going to put a whole bunch of money into the medical industry. And in a few years, we're going to own the idea of how to do a clinic quicker and faster and more efficient because we've made money is fucking bananas. Bernard Marcus also gave 200 million to the Georgia Aquarium. And although my stance on aquariums are that they're prisons for animals, be it as it will. In 2015, there was a aquarium trainer footage that had one of their trainers abusing dolphins.

And then a few months later, he was found dead after the video surfaces allegedly documenting his dolphin abuse. At one point, the aquarium was like, this is a fake video. This isn't real. But then this dude just ends up fucking dead.

I don't know exactly what's dead like uh blackfish dead or dead like someone saw that and killed him i don't know exactly i mean like the the article talks this is from um uh newsweek it talks about the taji dolphin action group a dolphin advocacy organization, found him kicking, hitting, and yelling at dolphins during training sessions. And like, all right, you know, you got to call them training sessions. It's just this animal is my slave. Like, I mean, it's this animal that's wild is now someone that does tricks for fish so that an aquarium can make money from it. But he ends up fucking dead.

And yeah, don't don't fuck with dolphin prison gangs they have connections on the outside they can hurt you you know the propaganda for home depot is deep in this country if you look at the facebook group when people try and call out some of these accusations there's just mobs of people that are willing to support bernie marcus because they got a fucking power drill for 20 bucks cheaper. I mean, it's ludicrous. It's also wildly astroturfed. I mean, if you, as I mentioned with the first Google result for the Employee Free Choice Act,

like if you, the first Google result is, of course, propaganda against it, AstroTurf propaganda. And the next several Google results are the same kind of thing, where it's all bullshit about how, like, oh, a union will trick you into joining their union by putting your name on a card. And they're doing it so that big union, you know, those union bosses with their cigars can just swim in piles of your union dues. You know, it's all shit like that, just all over the internet. Sounds like you're jealous of people who have protected their signature, Andy.

It's just, you know, things that are all over the place. That's clearly, like, I don't think any reasonable person who like if you explain to a regular person who hasn't been exposed to a lot of this stuff what a union is and what it does um for workers like no one would buy into this it's all just propaganda um and i think and you know someone mentioned in the comments to this a home depot anti-union thing you know if you don't know much about unions then your first job this is the first thing you see you know that's um that might just like form your opinions, which is the goal, is that that's what's shaping people's opinions, this massive campaign that's run by, you know, the richest people in the world.

Yeah, I think if we've learned one thing from this episode about Bernie Marcus, it's the duality of old Jewish men named Bernie. The light in the dark side. I call him Bernard Marcus because I think that hurts his supporters. This man is the two-face to Bernie Sanders' Harvey Dent. Well, as we all know, a billionaire that gets

a divorce doesn't eat butt. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Yogi Poliwal. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Steve Jeffries. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. We don't have time to go into it, but I do just want to say Bernie Marcus has been supporting Trump's trade war with China.

Home Depot, as of 2006, is number two after Walmart, number two U.S. importer of goods from China. So don't believe his bullshit. It's all propaganda. Stay safe. Take care. Thanks two U.S. importer of goods from China. So don't believe his bullshit. It's all propaganda. Stay safe. Take care. Thanks for listening. Bye.