It Could Happen Here - The Union Makes Us Strong, Part 1

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

We talk with John Hieronymus, a nurse steward with Nation Nurses United about long COVID and the history of labor organizing in the US. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and occasionally also about what you can do about it. And today we're going completely full into a what you can do about it episode. And specifically, we're going to be talking about unions, union organizing, the basics of what they are, and also some of the history of it. And to talk with us about this, I have brought my good friend,

John Hieronymus, who is a nurse steward with National Nurses United in Chicago. Hi, John. How are you doing? I'm doing good. Yesterday was my first full day back at work after being out on light duty from having COVID for this last year. And so I got home yesterday and was pretty tired because I haven't walked that much in a day. Oh, no, it's fine. But I mean, it was a good day. I got lots of hugs from my co workers. I didn't I didn't forget anyone's name, which I was terrified of. And didn't fuck anything up. And when I got when I got home, I hopped on. on after i got my kids from school i hopped on a union organizing call with 20 nurses from a hospital in the south we're very excited about

so um i was it was it was a big day that that rules oh yeah yeah i guess i should also do a do a very very brief long covid check-in because this is another thing that i think people aren't talking about that is also like a huge labor issue which is that yeah like long covid fucking sucks and like i like i know like my like like one of my cousins had it and you know that they've been in bad shape for a long time. Like they still can't taste properly. I think you got, from what I remember, like pretty bad, like in terms of, yeah. Sorry, if you don't have to, we don't want to, but. Oh, I don't care.

I mean, I think people should like know that this is still going on. Like the pandemic is still happening. People are still getting sick and some are still dying, which really sucks. And the long COVID thing is real. The, my, I didn't get sick in the sense of showing up,

having to be in like a hospital or ICU or anything like that. My book, I got sick and the recovery, like the year or the month or so after I got sick was when things actually got bad because something happened with my nerves and I had a neuromuscular variant of like the long COVID symptoms. And that led me to having all kinds of issues with basically just being exhausted from basic things, anything more than just getting up and walking around, I would have to like lay in bed afterwards. And it would add multiple episodes of the past year where I would cross some invisible line in terms of like endurance and then be stuck in bed

for a week. And so it's been a long thing, but I've been slowly getting better and people who fall into that neuromuscular thing do slowly get better. I think that's the upshot people with heart problems. Those tend to be permanent and aren't getting better, which sucks. But yeah, I mean,

it's just like, I think that a lot of people, it's a very weird, surreal thing to watch what is effectively like a, like a, a global public health catastrophe, get politicized the way it has and treated the way it has been by everybody involved. So, um, anyway, I just, uh, I'm doing better with that and it's shaped me over the last year and it shaped union organizing. And, um, I'm glad that I'll say this to people who are thinking about unions. I'm glad that I had the union kind of backing me up. Um, even when I had to pull them a little bit in the right, the right direction, uh, it's much better to have that kind of collective power behind you when you're uh dealing with those kind of problems so that's actually a good way into looking at just sort of in general what a union is because i think there's there's there's two things here there is what a union is legally and what a union actually is in terms of just the people in it and the sort of power behind it. And so I was wondering if you could, well, one, I mean, just on an incredibly basic level, explain what a union is like legally, like what is legally defined as doing, because I feel like that's also something that is not as well understood as it should be. Yeah, for sure. So in the United States, there's a series of laws that kind of regulate

the kind of collective bargaining and collective organization of workers at work. workers at work. An important thing to understand is that those laws are mostly designed to constrain workers' power to affect their working

conditions. And so when you look at what a union legally is, unions are for the most part, they're legal organizations that kind of like operate on a dues basis. So if you're in a union, you're paying dues out of your paycheck. If you work at a unionized workplace, those dues will get subtracted out regardless of your membership or activity within the union. One thing that people don't understand is that you can,

if you don't want your dues to go to anything besides supporting organizing at your particular workplace, you can request, unions are legally required to offer you that as an option um and then those dues get taken out of your paycheck and they get used to do things like rent a union hall um pay staffers to help you with your organizing um they get taken to do lobbying various types of political activity and so for a lot of people unions will feel like a professional association that lobbies on their behalf rather than a collective expression of the will of workers in a particular workplace but um or it'll feel like patronage machine for you know democratic party that sort of stuff um but that being said um unions all have bylaws they all have mechanisms by which they're you know theoretically democratically accountable to the membership. And there are oftentimes campaigns by workers

to change how unions operate. And then also, when you're setting up a union, if you're in a place that doesn't have a union and you're looking to get a union because you're fed up with not having any kind of power over your workplace or you feel like people are getting discriminated against or bullied. You feel like you haven't gotten a raise, those sorts of things. You can pick the union that you decide if you want to get a collective bargaining agreement, which is a legal contract kind of like dictating how your workplace operates in a uniform way, you can pick the union that you want to organize with. And there are unions that are better to organize with, that are more democratic, more collectively

accountable. There are unions that are more organized or more focused on actually building the union power and organizing new workplaces. And then there are unions that are kind of like they're, you know, and I'm going to say that kind of blur in the U S there's like a blurry line between rank and file unions and business unions. Cause even rank and file unions are kind of constrained by the same pressures that business unions operate under.

Can we, and I'll explain the difference. I'll tell you the difference in a second, but I just want to say that when you're getting a new union, it's really important for you to critically look at what your options are and who you're organizing with because unions have different cultures and different amounts of different kinds of politics. And you should be aware of that before you and your coworkers decide to commit to working with one union while you're getting a union organized. And then I can explain that next part if you want me to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, yeah. So, and you know,

if you get deep into union history and deep into organizing and figuring out like what unions are and what they do and how they've worked kind of in the past, you basically you would have a factory that might have like 20 different unions of each individual group of people um and each individual skill set would be underneath the union and it was used as a way to kind of control um who was able to do the work and who was getting hired in to do the work and And a lot of times that would end up in the United States being segregated. And there would be these called union scabbing, where you would go in and do work against people who are striking because your union was fine and you were cool with your boss. And these other people, whatever their problem is, you're just going to keep doing,

the boss will offer you more money and you'll do the work. Right. So, and a lot of that has kind of carried into what we call trade unions, uh, in the U S a specific and trade unionism is particularly, um, uh, prominent in, uh, in uh in construction so you'll have carpenters and you'll have you know masons and you'll have you know pipe fitters and iron workers and all these different guys and they all kind of come together and work as a crew for like a construction company and oftentimes their union operates more like a contractor than like a collective like uh yeah expression of the the power of those workers so um then there are more there are unions that are would be considered

like industrial unions so industrial unions industrial unionism was invented by a union a hundred years ago called the Industrial Workers of the World. And they were like, what if we took all of the workers in an industry and got them into one big union, right? And then what if all those workers in those different industries were talking to each other and building their power? And the goal would be that you would become so powerful that you could basically take over industries as workers and run them on a democratic basis so that you wouldn't have you kind of liquidate uh capital and i i want to say this briefly also like yeah so the bosses did

not like this i mean the iww like the iww was so feared that like like there's something about the everett massacre where it's like it got to a point in the early 1900s where just a group of iww people showing up to a place was enough to get like the the the entire like an entire city police force and like rounding up literally every right winger they could do and deputizing them and then just opening fire like into the crowd because like the iww had showed up on a boat like this was yeah yeah these people were like people were terrified of them and i think the other thing i think is really interesting about the early iww history is that is the so you know part of the response to them is like they they are just massive this is what

the first red scare was basically was an anti-iww thing and also you know they shot people they arrested people they like they deported people and but they also you know a lot of the things that i think we we have this tendency to look at as like a socialist reform or for example like putting workers on corporate boards right or like like in internal democratic self-management but that's like you know that's still sort of boss controlled right it's like well okay you have like a council of people who can make recommendations or like that's like, you know, that's still sort of boss controlled, right? It's like, well, okay, you have like a council of people who can make recommendations or like even down to, you know,

we're going to have our own internal like corporate unions like set up by the company, but you know, the corporate union gives you a workers council and the council can sort of control production. But you know, it's still run by the bosses. And like all of these things were stuff

that like the Rockefellers set up or like even the early neoliberals would set the stuff up because they were they were so scared of people like they were so scared of people just taking over stuff democratically just running it just literally through the union that they were like we will literally give you democracy in the workplace we will give you like we will give you like workers on corporate boards literally just so long as you don't like take everything over yeah i i think that it's it's hard for people to imagine how intense like the struggle for getting any kind of rights in the workplace yeah i've been in the workplace have been in the United States in particular. I think a lot of people think that, you know, uh, maybe not so much anymore, but when I

was younger, you know, 20 years ago, people would be like, Oh, you know, we're in America. We've got, you know, like we've got all these things, like we get, you know, an eight hour work day and we've got like a weekend and all this stuff. Like, and the thing is, is that literally people were murdered to win those things right like if you like the reason why we have an eight-hour workday is because there was in chicago uh a famous uh a famous strike that um ended up with a massacre of of, it was like a police riot. And then they rounded up a bunch of union organizers, socialists, and anarchists who were like involved in the labor movement at that time. And then, uh, the state of Illinois hung them. Um, and so, uh, the wife of one of the, um, of one of those people, who was uh murdered at the haymarket uh or they call them

the haymarket martyrs uh albert parsons was one of them uh her or his wife lucy parsons who was uh had a very a veritable kind of like not quite sure what her background was but we do know that she was probably a former slave uh albert parsons was a former confederate they got married in the south became southern republicans trying to like participate in radical reconstruction and then they basically had to flee because they were um with their lives to the north and uh but after that whole trial and all that shook out north and uh but after that whole trial and all that shook out uh lucy parsons became a labor agitator um across the united states fighting for the eight-hour day and uh and they memorialized the haymarket martyrs and something that i think some of your listeners will know about maybe they

won't but you know mayday mayday a lot of people's like oh that's russian or some foreign sort of thing now that is a an american labor tradition that like started here and it was because of a specific like the the labor movement and the movement for the eight-hour day in the united states so um and that's kind of like once you go from the iww and industrial unions as an idea it got crushed in the 20s because it was so terrifying. as a first union to not only try and build workers organization, but to challenge workplace organization and to make those push back on how production was happening and fight something called the speed up where I think a lot of people who've worked have experienced this time where a boss will come in and say, we're going to do things differently. And they'll either get rid of a worker and put all the extra work onto

people who remain or they'll change things so you're doing more with the same amount of time yep um they got you know they provoked a backlash um there were like spectacular like general strikes uh the first general strike in america uh in seattle there were iww members who are key members of the seattle labor council which took craft unions and got their radicals together and coordinated a general strike which is where there's a lot of tweets about general strikes but general strikes require a lot of organization and coordination. And we can talk about that later if we want to, but key thing is that IWW was always pushing for the organization necessary to pull off a general strike and they did it.

Yep. And so amongst those different things and there were mine wars in Colorado, mine wars in Virginia, West Virginia. Mine wars in Colorado, mine wars in West Virginia. They were the first union that was explicitly anti-racist. They weren't perfect, but they organized multiracial unions in Philadelphia, the docks, and various other places. They were one of the few unions that really took the first steps into organizing in the South

in a way that a lot of unions have kind of failed to since. And because they were so effective and so frightening, they got crushed. Yeah, I mean, also, one other thing I want to say about them is that the IWW fought in the Mexican Revolution because a lot of the IWW fought in the mexican revolution because you know

a lot of the iww members in california in particular were like a lot a lot of indigenous people a lot of sort of a lot of mexican immigrants so yeah they had these huge ties and like they they like they i think i think to this day this is still true uh outside of puerto rico like they are the only leftist movement that has ever like taken control of an american city like they they took to lexico and mexicali and like a bunch of the sort of the border area yeah and that that's that that's you know part of why it just escalates to everyone starts shooting them because well and and they were truly an international union because they were they focused on like uh longshoremen and organizing

and docs that sort of thing there were uh members of the iww organizing basically everywhere in the world and they were considered part of like what was like a a global movement and we call them syndicalists which is kind of like a an italian term or French term, um, which is this, the, you know, like, like the Latin version of union of syndicate or syndicate. Uh, and, um, there were similar unions across the world up through the early 20th century until right about the time when the Russians, uh, the Russian Revolution happened. And then there were subsequent crackdowns. And because these people were who, I mean, the IWW was a mix of native-born Americans and immigrants,

and they were painted as this foreign sort of force. They were un-American. That was like the whole nexus of un-Americanism as like an idea. And the U.S. state was able to mobilize after World War I to really put that down. And so there's a lot of history there. But the idea of the industrial union didn't go away right the the union the iww was effectively dismembered and scattered but a lot of people who had experienced as iww members who had been in those strikes um didn't like just disappear they didn't all get

deported or sent away um a lot of them kind of tucked their heads down and went back to work, you know, and in the 1930s, we saw the rise of another industrial, the next step towards industrial unionism. So it was called the CIO, which is the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Yep.

Now there were multiple at that point, there was the the CIO, which is the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Now, there were multiple. At that point, there was the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Party of America, and former members of the IWW and various anarchists who were participants in the organization of the CIO. And the thing about CIO was, was that when they came together, it was in the great depression had really kind of kicked off and they were able to organize like really explosively across all these new industries. So they like the UAW, United Auto Workers, was like part of the CIO. And they pioneered forms of strikes called sit-down strike, which was basically a factory seizure. All the workers would just say, we're not going to walk

out. We're going to lock ourselves in and we're going to sit down and it's our factory now and now you're going to have to negotiate with us and uh it became this thing where it was like millions of people were in like the iww at any one time was like hundreds of thousands of people and the cio became a thing where it was millions of people and um and at least at the beginning when they had their uh when they had we're at the peak of their like power and militancy um they were able to mobilize workers to take over factories uh take over factories from some of the most powerful corporations on the earth on earth and you know and at the same time um while they're doing this the uh the police and uh company um company security and vigilantes which had never

gone away from like the iww were doing the same sorts of things. So they would regularly beat strikers. There would be regular labor massacres, disappearances of various labor organizers or labor leaders, or even just random workers that they thought were like, Oh, you're a unionist. You know, get in the back of this, get in the back of this truck and then they are never seen again. And then laws started to be enacted. I believe out of fear that if this,

if this movement didn't get somehow put under brought in under control that there would be a revolution and so uh so that's when we started to see the enactment of laws like the national labor relations act which made having a union like that was the first time when being in a union was considered legal at the federal level, and that the FDR, the New Deal Democrats, basically attempted to broker something called a labor peace, where they would say, we're no longer going to mobilize the state against workers in the way that we have previously now local police would still side with bosses that sort of thing but uh and those sorts of massacres and uh that sort of stuff didn't really go away until like the 40s um but um that was the beginning of because what you see is unions get channeled into once you have like a million people in a union you have just enormous amounts of resources all these dues coming in you have the beginning of the labor bureaucracy whereas before it would be you know there would be hired you know paid labor organizers but they were always shifting around and they were they were brought up as communists or socialists, and they had ideological commitments to building the power of the union and the power of workers that if you are just someone with some ambition and decided that you want to become a – anyone at this point who wants to can become a paid union staffer. If you're like, you know, if you care to, and a lot of people, um, then being a union staffer was a different thing

than it is now. It was, I think I'm trying to remember the name of, uh, the president of, I think it was John Lewis, John Lewis, who was a Republican back in the day, uh, said, you know, I think famously said at one point, it's like, if you want to build a union or if you want to build a house, you call a carpenter. If you want to build a union, you call communists. And so, uh, and so they would literally would go to like the, the, the, you know, the communist party and say, we need organizers you know the communist party and say we need organizers and the communist party did a lot of work to training people to be organizers and they were militant they were ready to throw down because to them they were looking at this as part of a you know class

struggle against you know bosses and you know a way of overthrowing capital um that kind of went through until uh world war ii and uh when world war ii hit that's when the soviet union which in many ways controlled what was happening with communist with cp usa basically said we need a labor peace because we need to support the war effort and so that's when unions started uh signing contracts with no strike clauses and they started um agreeing that they would no longer strike um and and they started agreeing to things like speed ups. There used to be a time when these mass industrial unions, the stewards would walk around with a whistle on their neck. They'd have a whistle on a lanyard. And any time that workers decided that this is like an example of how powerful these unions were, not just like as like an organization, but every day at your workplace.

If you thought that something was not right, or you were not being treated fairly, or somehow the contract was in breach, you would go to your steward and your steward would pull out this whistle and would blow the whistle. It was called a whistle stop strike. And everyone would set down their tools until management would come out and they would either agree to pay more or stop what was happening and fix it. And so, um, there was a time when strikes would be, uh, you would have intermittent work stoppages. So you wouldn't go out like indefinitely. You wouldn't go out on strike for like three months, though that happened. Uh, you wouldn't just, and it wouldn't go out like indefinitely. You wouldn't go out on strike for like three months, though that happened. You wouldn't just, and it wouldn't just be your factory. It would be, hey, we're getting on the phone and we're calling our friends down the street at the next, at your supplier.

That's called secondary strike. So if you're working at like a steel mill and your steel mill is dependent on Coke from the next factory over, you're calling up your friends in the same union down the way, say, stop sending Coke, stop sending materials, brought these things to us. We're on strike. You guys,

you all set your tools down, you go on strike and it would, and these strikes would like massively expand. So you would see things instead of seeing, you know, we just went through striketober right yeah uh and we just and so we saw like what we call a strike wave but in in some ways it was a strike wave but i think that we still don't i think it's so far

away from living memory of what a real strike wave is where people would go on strike in one factory and then the next factory in the next factory the next area it literally would be a wave of people um going on strike and this was all the result of all the organization that people had and the militant attitude that people had about like how they were going to be treated at work Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcast it's worth mentioning that one of the so the national labor relations act which gets passed 1935 which is like the you know this is the beginning of labor peace like you know it's

okay we'll give you the right to a union but you cannot do secondary strikes like like this is this is explicitly banned in this if i'm remembering this right is that there's a specific thing that says you can't do secondary strikes anymore and you know and this was this was you know the the the the the basis of this piece was that like yeah as you sort of said before it was like well okay so the the the state will put their guns down but the workers also essentially have to put their guns down and yeah and this this starts this whole process of, you know, once you lose, like, that kind of consciousness, and once you lose the practical experience of doing this stuff, it kind of, it fades. And over time, you know. Atrophies. Yeah, atrophies.

And the unions get weaker and weaker. Because, you know, like, without, like, you know, once you've set aside, right, and you've decided that you're going to essentially you know okay we're going to we're going to follow the laws we're going to sit down we're going to do this we're going to like negotiate in good faith we're going to have all of this sort of um you know we're going to go through the national labor relations board and it's like well at that point people like people people's willingness to pick the weapons back up that they'd put down just sort of continues to diminish. Well, I think what happens is, I mean, and so there was like a 10 year period.

So first there was like the first five, you know, five, 10 years of CIO was when we received like this really like intense militancy within these unions and halfway halfway through like, you know, the passage of that first law in the 1930s, that's when we started to see the erosion. And we constantly see, I think a thing that people don't understand is that our bosses are always trying to

assert their control over work. And we'll see that like bosses will do all kinds of contortions as long as they get to stay in charge and that they're unquestioned. And I don't think we understand quite how long the long game is for management, for our bosses, and for capital. And so it starts with the National Labor Relations Act, and then it goes through World War II. um, it goes through world war two and during world war two, that's when the CIO goes from, you know, you know, millions of people to like tens of millions. And it becomes like a thing where like, that's when, you know, like 50% of Americans are in a union. Right. Um, because I

mean, to the extent that, uh, that to the extent that, that um there were those compromises happened it didn't just compromise it wasn't just like a failure of like oh like we're just going to start capitulating it's like there were interests inside the union they're looking at like well this is a lot of resources and power that we have now but wait until like it's you know 50 percent of america's paying union dues and there were people inside the democratic party who were willing to trade um that uh labor piece for the you would start to see you know that's when politicians would show up to um to union halls to talk and try and get you know and that's when you know the democratic party

it would be it wouldn't be unusual to hear a democratic politician um say things about like labor that you would like that no politician would say today and now that doesn't mean that they were like on the side of the workers but you know you'd have literally um president eisenhower telling the president of u.s steel to get fucked over like a general like you're like you're you're trying to shut down like you know this is like the the steel industry is the lifeblood of backbone of the american economy um you know and you're trying to shut this down you're trying to kill the golden goose like get back to work let the pay these people what they're asking. But, you know,

so you would see the people who kind of floated to the top of those unions trading their trading away their workers power and their workers wellbeing for more and more money. First off, there'd be more money. So you would, you. So they would start getting raises that were really substantial and it would boost up a union steel worker or union auto worker into what we consider the comfortable middle class where people could buy a fishing cabin or something up on a lake, send their kids to college, all these sorts of things that were just kind of unobtainable sorts of things that were just kind of like unobtainable

sorts of things if you were the same in the same industry 20 years earlier yeah and um and that felt like wins you know to people and also in the 1940s after world war ii they passed the taft hartley act which basically meant that they they unions. Well, they did. Okay. They wrote into law that it was illegal to be a communist or an anarchist in a union. And so there are literally still unions that still have language in their membership parts where they're like, I declare I've never been a member of the communist party i'm not an uh you know an anarchist uh i mean like i've i have friends who've pulled that out now it doesn't have any effect now but that was they basically took all the people you know the people that uh

that were you know the people that you would have called to build the union uh 20 years later or before were getting thrown out of unions and that didn't happen in every like there were attempts to do that in all kinds of countries uh they tried to do it in the uk and the unions in the uk told uh basically told the government to go fuck themselves and they you know it's like but because the leadership of the, of the CIO industrial unions began to see themselves more in alignment with our ruling class and our, you know, like the democratic party, they decided that they were big enough that they didn't have to have militants involved anymore.

And that's when, you know, uh, people were literally would get fired out of, did either militants and staff would get fired or they would get fired out of factories if you're like a rank and file worker. And that's where we would have union bureaucrats would, and, um, would, you know, would basically start making concessionary contracts. And this started, you know, back in, you know, a lot of people are like, Oh, you know, back in the fifties unions are really powerful and they were powerful to get, you know, like raises, but those raises came at the expense of control over the work process. They came at the expense of the speed up. And as unions, because the rank and file workers, like you're saying, rank and file workers, and they see these tools getting put down and they're more reluctant to pick them up.

First off, it's because of the amount of money that they're getting paid. But they did push back. and but they did push back they were like this is i mean like uh there's a really great book called the next shift um by uh gabriel winant it's all about the shift from steel the steel industry as like the center of the u.s economy to health care um and how unions basically started to erode away their, like, throw it, like, hand over their power in exchange for money. And then when they were told, like, there was an attempt to get socialized medicine under the Truman administration. And when they were basically, they hit a speed bump and it got shot down, they decided that instead of trying to win those broad social reforms for everybody, they're like, well, we can use our power to strike to basically construct a private welfare state for our workers. And so that's when you begin to see, um, things like, uh, the, they call them like the gold plated insurance plans for certain types of, uh, unionized workers. And those would kind of, um,

and those are kind of used as like a private welfare state for all those workers. And it was built with the assumption that you're going to have low cost, uh, workers, uh, basically doing all this care work. for all those workers and it was built with the assumption that you're going to have low-cost workers basically doing all this care work and oftentimes it'd be women of color and through that you start to see this real sharp decline from the 60s in in like uh in union um militancy um and that's when factory when capital starts moving factories out of city centers where it's very easy to organize a factory when everyone lives within walking distance of the factory and when they're done with their shift at the factory they're all at the bar outside the, uh, outside the factory gates.

You can just like, if you want to have a union meeting, if you want to organize even a wildcat strike, all you have to do is show up at the right bar. And that's where everyone is after they're done with their shift. Um, they started moving and dispersing the industrial capacity of the United of, you know, the, the U S urban core out into suburbs. So that's now where you'll drive through rural Indiana and you'll pass like five factories and they're surrounded by nothing but cornfields. It's because it's a lot harder to organize, uh, auto workers when they all live 30 minute drive from each other and none of

them hang out at the same bar anymore. And then you start to see, and all through that time, the commitments to anti-racism are eroded. So you'll see jobs start to get segregated out inside. It's like steel mills and things like that. But then, you know, there's also the rise of, uh, rank and file movements to push back. So, um, all the while we're talking about this, there's always workers who remember what these things were like and why, and the power that they used to have, and they would do the best that they could to get organized. So, um, there's a really good, um, documentary you can find on YouTube called Finally Got the News. It's about the Dodge Revolutionary Union movement in Detroit, which was a rank and file reform movement organized by black auto workers.

They got like a fair amount of support from white auto workers because they were basically there's you know uh interviews with uaw bureaucrats and they're just like you know we're getting people these raises why are they upset that they're like getting maimed in the factory right or why are they getting upset that you know you know black workers are constantly getting put into the shittiest jobs or the first to get laid off that sort of thing and that's's a, it's a really, I suggest anyone has time. And that came out of like the, I think that was immediately after the was getting organized after the assassination of Martin Luther King and all the riots that were happening in

the, in the sixties, like that late sixties period. In the seventies, there was the teamster, the teamster rank and file rebellion my grandpa was a teamster trucker uh my grandma was a uh teamster she was a like a punch card operator but yeah sorry yeah yeah no i mean like teamster these unions got so big and they have all kinds

that's how you end up with like there's's UAW teaching assistants now, right? Yeah. Like, how do you end up with these huge like unions? And during Teamster Rebellion, and my grandpa would tell these stories like we're going on, there would be a wildcat strike and they call it out over the CB radios. And the way they would enforce the picket line wasn't just like, oh, we're going to like stand in the road or something. They would hang Coke bottles full of rocks over the overpasses, just high enough up that cars would pass underneath them. But if you hit one and you were in a truck, you'd fuck up your day.

And that was a really powerful pushback by rank-and-file workers against what they saw was the erosion of their power. Because I think there's this, sometimes amongst people backed by rank and file workers against what they saw was the erosion of their power because i think that i think there's this sometimes amongst people who consider themselves to be left or whatever there's like this kind of doom and gloom like oh it's only like we're only losing right but and there's been a lot of as the 70s happened and capital is kind of reconfiguring itself in the middle of all the economic upheaval inflation. Basically they got to the point where we can't maintain labor peace and maintain profits.

Right. So they could maintain labor peace and have something more like a socialist system, or they can maintain control over the work process and just do everything in their power to destroy the power of workers. And they decided to do that. So I think we were coming out of this kind of era where you know if you were in a union and working in a factory um there was a real

threat that they're like well we're just going to shut this factory down and you know nafta gets signed well first it was the Petco strike with Reagan. Reagan gets elected and air traffic controllers decided they're going to go on strike. And Reagan decided he was going to break it. And they brought in, they basically, there was this big recession. It was like this huge mess where people were really desperate for work. And, um, you know, they said, we're going to hire anyone to be an air traffic controller and we're going to break the strike. And that was the first real, the first,

like that, the, the beginning of the end of that final, like that big moment era of industrial unionism in the United States. And we went from a place where, you know, UAW had millions, the United Auto Workers had millions and millions of workers. And if you drove a car or a truck and it was made in America, it was made by a union worker to this point where now the UAW is around 50,000 people. I was shocked when I heard that literally like two weeks ago. You know, we just had the big UAW strike at John Deere and there's been,

and you know, all through this, while this is going on there's various union corruption scandals. And that's again, the cause of like when you kick out all the people who have an ideological commitment to improving the lives of working people and building the power of working people out of this organization that's only existence is to like build the power of working people um then you uh then you end up with people who are basically criminals like you end up like there would be uh i think reagan scat like like Ronald Reagan was, uh,

was a union member, but he was like the union member for like a corrupt, like there was like, there was like a battle between like the CIO controlled union in like Hollywood and like the corrupt, like mobbed up union and the mobbed up union. Like that was the side of I'm 90% sure that was the side that reagan picked yeah and uh and yeah so it's like you could kind of and there was a lot of like media where they would be like

you know the waterfront and various like movies and things talking about union corruption and i think that union corruption is real and it's a it's when it happens it's a huge problem it shouldn't like it's in other countries like in like in germany if they found out like a union official like misappropriated like 2 000 euros it would be a nationwide scandal like um also in uh in like european countries like you pay union dues on a voluntary basis, right? In the U S legally, since we're a closed shop system, like once you're at a union, uh, a union workplace, your dues get taken, whether, you know, whether you're happy with the union or not. Now there are people who say that's really important because unions need every penny

they can to fight for what they have. But when unions have to fight for membership and make sure that their membership knows that they're getting what they're paying for, you get a little bit more responsiveness. and thinking about joining a union or creating, getting a union in the workplace, just understand what a union is and how they work and where your money's going to. And if you're unhappy with that, the best thing to do is to get involved with your union, to try and like get connected with your coworkers who have similar complaints and change the union. Because there's a saying, any union is better than no union that's not always true but it generally is welcome i'm dan thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of My my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast there's like a very small chance that like you're like living in 1929 china and like your union is like is

controlled by like a combination of the knt and like literally the chinese heroin trade but you know that that like yeah that like doesn't mean there are things where you'll have like there my dad worked at a factory and there was it was a Teamster organized factory. And like some of the stewards were bullies and literally like there were some people who were dealing drugs out of it. And they gave the, the workers like tried to bring in another union and the, and the management decided to offer to also try and decertify the union at the same time and the workers voted to desert and the thing is is that now that factory shut down and gone um and i guess like the thing is is that you have to it's far better for workers to assert their

rights within their union where they have some modicum of democratic control over what's going on than it is to just throw up your hands and like there's and do nothing. Because if you do nothing, the boss is always doing something. Yeah. Like that's the thing is like management is always organizing. They're always coming up with ways to like, to undermine the control of workers at work work to pit people against each other um

we can get into it later but like uh they want they'll use racism and those sorts of things to dole out favors or curry favoritism and like you know pit people against each other so i think that it's important to just say that that the union is going to be your only effective way to push back. Well, the union or collective action, because I guess I also want to say that there are times when organizing union isn't action that is protected as, you know, as labor organizing, but it's not done within a union. And because America is a really messed up place and you have right to work states and places where like being in a union is like literally illegal. Sometimes putting the time, you like, you can't get into a union and therefore you have to come up with other solutions or sometimes because of the nature of a workplace like getting a union is like is very hard or like basically impossible that doesn't mean that you can't organize and i think that that's the thing that everyone needs to understand i think there's a lot of like boosterism of unions amongst younger workers because people just don't understand how they work or they haven't experienced them themselves.

And I think that the main thing is, is that you've got to be very careful with your time and understanding like building a union can take like 10 years from the beginning of we're upset to now we have a collective bargaining agreement. Or now we have a collective bargaining agreement or now we have a collective bargaining agreement. It could be another five or 10 years before you actually get to the point where you're organized enough to go on strike. And people oftentimes think that that's like they look back at the history of things and they're like, oh, it's so easy. But back then people were taking all i mean they it took them years to build the the u.s labor movement into what it was at its peak it took decades right and i think that we're kind of used to this instant gratification kind of stuff we have to understand that it's like if you're going to be in a workplace where you're there for enough time to build the trust

and relationships and understanding of how the work workplace works and keep your job and be someone that people don't look at as like a shirk or whatever not that i don't think that people should you know people should work as hard as they can and not any more harder than that but whatever um uh but i think that you know i'm anti-work but you know that's a whole other thing unions are the best way to limit the amount of work that you have to do um if you're gonna if you're going to uh you know work as a wage laborer um but i'll just say that it's like i think that people don't that it's difficult sometimes to understand how much work goes into getting to the point of getting a union, but it's always worth putting the time in to get there. And you may not win the first try, but if the conditions are right and things like, you know, we make our history, but not in conditions of our choosing.

Sometimes things don't work out. But not doing it is, I think, it's detrimental to you and your co-workers. And even times, like I've talked with people who've been involved in campaigns where they got fired, but then all of a sudden conditions improved afterwards. And they look at that as like, oh shit, we didn't get our union, but everyone got raises and they changed some things at work. And that's actually a victory. So, you know, I think that think of each other as like collective building, collective power and the amount of time it takes to do that is daunting, but I think it's the sort of thing that we need to do if we're serious about changing how we can actually like how our lives work and how much power we have outside of work because unions are also places where we do things that affect outside of our work as well.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.