Rev Left Radio - Workers Fighting Back: The UAW Goes on Strike!

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

Teddy Ostrow and Maximillian Alvarez from The Real News Network join Breht to discuss the recent "stand up" strike launched by the United Auto Workers labor union. Teddy and Max discuss the strike, explain the causes of the strike and the demands of the workers, the UAW union president Shawn Fain and the democratic election that put him in leadership, what this strike - and others like it - mean for the American working class, the importance of solidarity in the labor movement and beyond, why the working class should own what it produces, and much more!   Teddy's Interview with UAW President Shawn Fain Labor Notes  In These Times  The Upsurge Podcast    Outro Music: "Rich Men Earning North of a Million" by Billy Bragg   --------------------------   Support Rev Left Radio on Patreon or make a one time donation

You know, but what I want to emphasize is that this, right here, this is the historical froth from which a socialist movement can be born. Yes. By which I mean a movement of working people that fights for working people and believes the people who make, you know, society run should run society. And that's us. It's not the parasitic oligarchs and corporations and their bought-off politicians vampirically sucking out all of the wealth that we create. for them and then using that fucking money and the power that comes with it to pillage the rest of the globe

through military conflict or financial occupation and domination. And that movement begins and lives, I think, everywhere. Regular people start fighting back and fighting for a better life.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Rev Left Radio. Today I have on Teddy Ostrow and Max Alvarez from the Real News Network, and Teddy is from the Upsurge podcast, on to talk about the UAW strike. Now, obviously, this strike is an ongoing, evolving process with many moving parts, and anything that is happening today could be changed tomorrow, but we're going to try to get this out as soon as possible to just help our audience get a better insight into what exactly is going on.

So before we jump into those questions, though, Teddy and then Max, Can you guys introduce yourselves and let the audience know who you guys are? Sure. So, my, thanks for having me on. Thanks for having us on, Brett. I am Teddy Astro from the Upsurge podcast, which I do in partnership with in these times and the real news. It's a podcast that originally was focused on the implications for the labor movement of the UPS Teamsters contract campaign, pivoting now to what's going on at the UAW.

But otherwise, I'm a journalist in Brooklyn. write for The Real News and these times, the nation, the Republic, all around, primarily about a working people labor movement. Nice. Thanks. Hey, everyone. This is Maximilian Alvarez. As Brett said, I'm the editor-in-chief of the Real News Network here in Baltimore. It's great to be back on the show, brother. Thanks again for having us on. It's been a minute. But I always love coming on this show. Absolutely love and adore all the great work that y'all do. Apart from directing the newsroom here at The Real News, I also do a lot of reporting myself, primarily like Teddy, focusing on the labor movement and the struggles of everyday working people. I do that on my podcast, Working People, which is in its sixth season now where I do long form interviews with workers, including many UAW members and auto workers over the years. I also, you know, do coverage for the Real News Network for my guest labor segment at breaking points called The Art of Class War.

And this time last year, I also published my first book, which was called The Work of Living, which was a collection of interviews with 10 workers recorded it at the end of year one of COVID-19. Yeah, absolutely. It's the first time I'm talking to a Teddy. Very nice to have you on, Teddy. and yeah, me and Max go back quite a while now. You've been on several times, but it has been quite a while since we've had you back on. So very excited to be able to touch base with you again. I can't recommend working people, the podcast that Max runs more.

Real News Network in general is absolutely great. And the work of the living is something that anybody interested in the working class perspective on COVID. In American Life should absolutely check out. And whenever I see your beautiful face, Max, pop up on breaking points. I always put a smile on mine. So it's very cool to see you out there doing it. in your thing, man. Thank you, brother. I appreciate it. Absolutely. All right, well, let's go ahead and jump into these questions. We only have Teddy for about 20 to 30 minutes here, so we're

going to try to front load this conversation with a lot of Teddy's responses, and then when he has to leave, me and Max will finish the conversation out. But the first question I have for you, Teddy, is for those totally out of the loop, can you kind of just tell us basically what has happened with the UAW in the last week or so and sort of where we're currently at in the struggle? Right. Sure. Yeah. Well, let's go. started at midnight on September 14th, the deadline established

by the UAW basically the contract explorations of the big three automakers that's four jammed and Stalantus ran out and now the UAW called three plants across the three automakers out on strike and this is historic because

it was the first simultaneous strike at the big three in the union's history and this is roughly 13,000 workers in total total out on strike out of about 446,000 total across the three companies. These are plants in Michigan, which is where I am right now. I traveled here from Brooklyn to cover this, in part actually, for the real news. In Ohio as well, there is a plant and in Missouri.

So this is a pretty unique time. It's a unique strategy and being used by the union. They're launching what they're calling stand-up strikes, which is harkening back to the union's sit-down strikes of 1936. And 37, which your listeners may be familiar with, these are the actions that really built to this union, which would itself go on to really propel the rest of the labor movement forward after World War II. But this strategy was the secret selection, basically, of specific plants to stand up or to strike with the possibility of further plants standing up or even, you know, potentially at one moment, all plants going out on strike. That is a possibility according to the union. And they've said, you know, this is to maximize leverage of the negotiating committee to keep the companies guessing, you know, where they'll be struck next.

So we're talking about a Solantis plant, Toledo Salantis, which is formerly Chrysler, Toledo Assembly Complex in Ohio, GM's Wentzville Assembly Center near St. Louis and the final assembly in paint departments at Ford's Michigan Assembly plant. We're talking about these plants that make Jeep Wranglers, for example, Ford Broncos, Chevy Colorado's. And, you know, they're calling them stand-up strikes because this is sending a message. You know, they want to renew this union. We're seeing renewed militancy in this union, which has suffered just tremendous loss since its height of around 1.3 million members. Now they're down to below 400,000. At one time, GM had 400,000 members out on strike in 1970 by itself. You know, so that just goes to show where we're at now.

And they're trying to do this, the renewing the union, by fighting and winning a bearer. very, very good contract, hopefully for its big three members. And this strike is really about the past and the future. It's about making up for what was lost in wages and benefits and dignity, especially after auto workers have been made to go through, just a series of serious concession since the Great Recession, the bailouts of Chrysler and GM. And we're talking about companies that have made a quarter trillion dollars in North American profits in the past decade.

They're bleeding poverty, but we have CEOs making $20, $30 million. compensation while workers' wages have fallen by 30% in real terms. And like I said, this is about the future because the EV transition is a foot. And winning big, winning big at the big three is a major first step to go on the offensive at EV plants, which as of now are largely emerging is non-union. And the jobs are just paid worse. The conditions are worse. The UAW is trying to make sure that the green transition is indeed a just transition, that EVs are an excuse for lowering the standards of the industry. Yeah. Yeah, really essential insight and information there. You mentioned the stand-up strike. I think it's a very interesting sort of

strategy and approach to a strike. There's many advantages. One of them is like, yeah, the companies don't know exactly which plant is going to go on strike at any given time. A smaller percentage of workers go on strike at the same time, making it sort of financially more feasible for the union to take care of those striking workers who are not getting paid while other workers can continue to draw a good paycheck. And of course, this stand-up strike has the capacity to increase over time. So more and more plants, if the bosses don't capitulate, more and more plants can then go on strike. And the bosses really don't know which one at any given time could break out in strike. I think I saw something and correct me if I'm wrong, but something

like a leaked memo where the union was trying to trick the bosses by pretending to leak something about where the plant, where the strikes might take place and then they shifted the actual plants where the strike took place. Is this something that you're aware of and you can help us understand? Right. I actually, I actually am not sure if I've seen whether that specific memo that was supposedly leaked was if that was confirmed. However, it's very clear that the strategy is working. These companies have confirmed to let's like in these times that they were surprised by where the union decided to strategically strike. You know, they stockpiled, I think reporting from labor notes.

Luis Felice Leon saw that they were stockpiling parts in certain plants. They just had no idea what was going to happen, which is a pretty awesome place to be in for the union. So I don't know about that specific. I don't know if that was specifically confirmed. However, it's very clear that what they are trying to do is working. And we're already seeing, you know, some temporary layoffs in Kansas City, for example, because the Wentzville plant supplies some parts to them. And also here in Michigan, you know, only some departments at the Ford plant had actually been called out on strike and now the others. Some other workers in there, about 600 workers are now being temporarily.

And that means that they can go on unemployment. So this certainly is working. I would not be surprised at that. leak is indeed true. Nice. Well, and like just to just to kind of hop in on that, because I know I've been getting a lot of the folks asking me about this as well. And what we, what we do have so far is like kind of firsthand accounts from rank and file workers to different plants, attesting to the manifest confusion of management since this, since the first three plants that have gone on.

strike last week have initiated those strikes. And, you know, there has been, they've been hints that, that even, even just by, you know, workers, you know, sort of like kind of talking loudly around management to sort of like keep them guessing. And with Fain himself not officially announcing the three plants that would be called first to stand up and strike last Thursday. He waited until two hours before the contract deadlines, the contracts expired. So that was like 10 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday. So, you know, we have been hearing reports on the ground of a lot of confusion from management. As Teddy said, we have gotten some confirmation in reporting at Labor Notes and in these times that, and in these times even got quotes from some of the

companies. I think Stalantis was the main one. Stalantus tried to kind of pretend like, you know, oh, no, we made, we made like all the necessary arrangements. But they also admitted that they did not know which of their plants was going to be struck. So I think that they're trying to kind of put on a bit of a front here. But I just wanted to sort of kind of address something really quick and then toss it back over to Teddy while we got them is I imagine folks listening to this. Some maybe not all, but, um, Many folks may be asking the same questions that Teddy and I are getting all the time from people, which is like, why is the UAW taking this standup strike approach? Why not just call all, you know, what is, 146,000 workers to the picket line at once shut the whole thing down and induce maximum pain upon the big three automakers? I think Teddy kind of already covered some of the main reasons why they're approaching this strategy. But I would just say for folks that we should recall that, you know, in 2019, GM workers went out on strike en masse, and they still got screwed over, right? I mean, so I would caution people against assuming just a priori that, like, calling the full membership out on a full out strike is automatically better for the workers. Historically, that's not always the case. now we can get into this later maybe after teddy hops off but like the UAW as a union was in a very different position in 2019 than it is now and in fact you know I spoke to many workers at that time including workers who were being laid off at the historic Lordstown plan in Ohio many of them expressed great dissatisfaction with their union leadership many of them told me firsthand that the members were confused they didn't even fully know what they were striking about and they sure

hell didn't have a contract campaign, which Teddy has covered extensively, you know, like we've seen this time around through Sean Fain and his administration, really trying to make sure that the membership knows 100% what the demands at the bargaining table are, trying to be as transparent as possible between the union leadership and the membership to give folks updates on how bargaining is going, you know, and, and just kind of communicating correctly with the membership via things like Facebook Live and so on and so forth. So this is a much more transparent, a much more democratic union than it was in 2019, and we can get into the specifics of why and how that came to be. But the point I just wanted to stress up front is that I understand

people's kind of skepticism about the stand-up strategy. This is a novel strategy that we are witnessing unfold in real time and frankly you know none of us know for sure if it's going to work in the long room but as teddy said we are seeing some pretty encouraging signs that it is working over the past few days to create confusion um to sort of take a guerrilla style strategy to the bosses put the bosses on their back heel um and ultimately you know the the attempt or the the effort is meant to maximize pain on the automakers while minimizing pain on the union membership. So, as Teddy said, with the effects of the stand-up strikes, we're already seeing temporary layoffs happen at certain plants, which means that those workers who are temporarily laid off

can collect unemployment, which means that everything is not coming out of the strike fund, which is sizable. But if that strike fund is supporting 140 plus thousand workers at once, it's going to drain much more quickly than it would if we take this approach. Likewise, the last thing I'll say, as Teddy already mentioned, the stand-up strategy does give the UAW the ability to continually ramp up pressure and pain on the employers. Whereas if you call all your members to the picket line at once, that's it. That's the only card you really have to play. After that, it becomes a war of attrition to see which side can withstand the economic pain for longer. And as we know, these are immensely profitable companies that pay their executives, exorbitant salaries.

So, you know, it is not inconceivable to think that the autumn bakers could withstand that pain for longer than the strike fund itself could last. But Sean Finn can literally, if he gets another shitty proposal at the bargaining table, he can walk out, call more locals to strike. and ramp up the pressure on the big three. So I would just urge folks to, you know, I understand your questions. We want to answer them as best that we can. But don't assume that an all-out strike is automatically the better option here. You know, I think a lot of members are saying to me that they are right now trusting the process.

They believe in this leadership. They like seeing the bosses at least a little perturbed and put on their back heels for now. So we're kind of in wait and C mode. Yeah. Yeah, great in essential context. And yeah, great point about the strike fund as well. You know, this is a strategic approach thing. This is about strategy and tactics.

You have something like the strike fund to consider. And so a stand-up strike really helps sort of, you know, have a few workers or at a few places come out at once, not putting everybody on the picket line, helping that strike fund last longer and thus helping the strike to have more options and more longevity. But, Teddy, bouncing back over to you, what were the amazing? main causes of this conflict that led to this strike from the workers' perspective, and what are the current demands on behalf of the union? Right. I want to underline one thing before I just get to that. What Max said, I thought was really important about the difference between now and

2019. So, you know, when workers were, I raced on over to the Ford Michigan Assembly plant, like right when workers were coming out, you know, hunking their horns as they left the parking lot, And I was talking to people and I said, you know, how do you feel? What are you, what are you thinking? And they said, you know, they were shocked. They were shocked. Like the company were shocked. But the differences is that they were ready.

They were ready and they weren't necessarily ready at GM, like the roughly 49,000 people who walked out in 2019, but they were ready this time because they knew there was a real uniform line when you spoke to workers everywhere. And I went down to Toledo Ohio as well. There was a uniform line on what the workers were demanding and why. And to get into that, you know, this fight really is about getting a bigger piece of the pie for the workers who have been exploited by the big three for a long time. You know, they've been worked to the bone in tough conditions. They have long hours.

They have low pay in certain cases. And even top pay in this economy right now, especially after like years of high prices, increasing prices, it's not enough. $32 an hour, which it's really hard to raise a family on. You know, so it's no wonder that some of the key demands are major raises. I believe now it's standing at around 36% they're demanding. They were asking for over 40% over four years before, which would be in line with the raises that the company executives made over the last four years. You know, there was also the reinstatement of COLA, the cost of living adjustment,

which was one of the things that was lost after the bankruptcies of GM and then Chrysler, which is now Stalantis. So this is a key piece of the auto contract since I believe around 1950. With prices going up over the past few years, these workers' paychecks are just getting hit really hard. But really real wages have been going down for over the past 50 years. So this isn't just like a recent story. A really big one also that is key is that ties into a number of issues is the elimination of wage and benefit tiers in the company. And this is a really complex issue.

I mean, basically it's about equal pay for equal work, but there are different types of other workers working in different types of jobs and different types of plants, and there are some stark differences there. So some people in parts production and distribution, for example, they're paid less than those on the assembly line. But then also importantly, there are tiers that cut across the board. Workers who work the same job have different wages and benefit tiers. It takes a different amount of time for them to get to their top wage wages.

So, you know, folks who were hired after 2007, for example, don't get pensions and they don't get good at retiree health care like their predecessors. So in Wayne County, at the Michigan Assembly plant, the night workers walked out. I spoke mostly with tier two, tier two workers. And they were saying the same thing. I want cola. I want a pension. I want retiree medical care. And also, you know, in order to get the top rate, these workers had to work years and years.

Eight years to make as much as someone else on the assembly line, for example, who is doing the exact same job. This hurts solidarity. This is unequal. Sometimes, you know, it takes even longer than eight years because another major issue they're trying to address is that these companies exploit temporary workers, or they're called TEPTs, especially Stalantis. They hire people, you know, with even worse wages and benefits. They can lay them off at any point in time, and they just drag these people along for years and years in certain cases before making them permanent, making them eligible for better pay and benefits and their seniority. UAW is saying, no, you know, hire them within 90 days, which was a condition in previous contracts. And I'll just, an anecdote from the picket line, you know, I spoke with some temps on the picket line at the Salantis Toledo, it's that way complex over the past few days where they make some Jeep models.

One tab I spoke to has been temporary. temporary, temporary, they call it. For five years, he tapped out at $19 an hour. And multiple people I spoke to there said, you know, the same thing. There was almost a talking point. Why am I here doing a physically taxing job when I could go to a fast food restaurant and get practically the city wages? And they weren't putting down the incredibly difficult work of fast foot workers who deserve far more. But we're talking about jobs that have been heralded in our country, in our history in our culture is building the middle class. These people feel incredibly betrayed. You know, another has to do with a shorter work week, about 32 hours, work week paying it in

40 hours. This is a pretty incredible demand to bring back. Walter Ruther said it nearly 100 years ago. Sean Fane, the UAW president is now bringing it back. And this is an important one to understand because I think the UAW is being disparaged. It's, you know, wanting to have workers work for less, but for more. Well, here's the thing. Not only are their wages deficient, but they work long and they work hard. These workers work 10, 11, 12 hours shifts, 60, 70, even 80 hours a week at times. They're harming their bodies doing it. They don't get to see their kids grow up. And just in general, the 40 hour work week, thankfully, Sean Fane is calling it out for what it is, which is an outdated standard for our lives. We deserve more time for ourselves. And that companies can afford it. So something to understand about that demand as well is, I think, that some folks do see it as sort of a pie in the sky, you know, but still an important one to fight for. Folks on the picket line are telling me, you know,

they don't necessarily believe they'll get 32 hours, but their expectations are being raised, which is the first step to get people willing to fight for more. So even if they are being bumped down to 40 hours a week, that would be a big deal. You know, and finally, this is the last one I'll end on, you know, there's a right to strike over plant closures, and there's been 65 plant closures

across the big three of investors. 20 years. These companies, and in particular, in particular recently, Stalantas, they just pick up and leave, either to a union unfriendly state in the south or even to Mexico, where workers make roughly $5 an hour doing the same work. Sometimes they'll say the plant is not officially closed, but it's on standby or it's unallocated, whatever was where they want to use, which keeps workers guessing as to whether the work will come back, but often this is just false hope. you know and this just decimates community it tears families apart as someone has to get up and leave maybe five six seven times to keep their seniority to keep their good pay to work at another plant across the country people just get sent around all the time or they risk staying in their community and and risk financial ruins so i spoke to someone on the picket line at the jeep plant who had moved to ohio from belvedere illinois after the plant there was idled, effectively laying off

1,300 workers. And that plant is currently being used as a bargaining chip right now. Stalantus told the press that they put down a proposal to reopen that plant, but now they're taking it back. This person who I spoke to left their entire family just so that they get out of their job. It's just not right.

These workers want the ultimate leverage to strike, you know, their strike to put an end to plan closures and an end to tearing communities apart. You know, the last piece is, the EV transition, which we can get into. That isn't most directly affected in these negotiations, but it is certainly a part of the bigger picture. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thank you for all that fascinating information. Your point about the 40-hour work week and the demand for 32 hours, yeah, even if this one strike doesn't get the 32 hours, what it does do is it sets a certain

precedent that, you know, future labor struggles and strikes might be able to pick up and carry forward, right the first time we demanded eight-hour work days back in the day. It wasn't the exact first time it was demanded. It was given. It was a long struggle. But when those things are proposed, it sets a certain precedent. It sets a high watermark for what workers want. And later down the road, those things are often achieved. So that's a beautiful thing. I did hear an interview with an older worker at one of these big three auto workers in the UAW who had put in all the years. And so it was in a much more secure position than some of these younger people who were hired after 2007 or whatever. And it was a perfect moment of solidarity because he was like, we're striking, you know, from my perspective, for these younger folks, you know, these younger workers coming in who aren't getting the same deal that I got when I came in many, many years ago.

And so even though I'm relatively comfortable individually, I'm willing to put it on the line to make sure that those coming up behind us have what I have and even more. And that's the beauty of a union. Yeah. Well, sorry, man. I didn't mean to interrupt you. I just got so excited because, like, I really want to impress upon people. You know, having been interviewing workers for, you know, the past, you know, five years is that this has become a really common thread among many of the strikes that we've seen in recent years and union-based struggles because Kellogg's workers told me the exact same thing when they were on strike a little while ago. John Deere workers said the same thing, right?

I mean, UPS workers were telling Teddy and me the same thing, which is that people, I mean, it is a, I'm so excited to see the labor movement go on the offensive for once. And like, it is open season, I think, on tiered wage and employment systems, which have become an absolute scourge across industries. I mean, the temps have already and always existed in different industries before, but they really became a weapon of choice for the bosses after the financial crash in 2008. I myself am a product of that. Brett, as you and I have discussed in past times that I've been on the show, you know, like in 2012, 2011, I myself was working as a warehouse temp in Southern California and a factory temp there. And I was noticing that these warehouses and factories were employing increasingly more and more, a greater percentage of their worker base was increasingly filled with temps from the agency like myself. For all the reasons that, you know, anyone listening can't imagine and that Teddy already enumerated. When you are a temp, you are, you know, pay the lowest, you have functionally no rights.

You could be fired at the drop of a hat. you can be harassed, you can be exploited more than any permanent employee, you are working side by side with people who are doing the same work as you, but you're making half what they're making. And so that, you know, naturally builds a sense of resentment towards your fellow worker, which the bosses know, which is what they, why they love kind of introducing these multi-tiered systems on the shop floor, not just because that means that they get to pay less, they have to deal with fewer benefits, you know, or no benefits at all for this class of worker.

And given the fact that you are in such a precarious situation, and as I and my fellow temps were, you're not going to speak up if you, if something's wrong on the job. If you were being asked to do unsafe work, if you are injured or sick, you obviously have way fewer days that you can take off. Sometimes they won't let you take any off. you know, like maybe you get a nice manager who will say, okay, you've been doing this quote unquote temp work for a year. We'll let you have one day off to go visit your mom in the hospital, but you better be back tomorrow. Otherwise, we're going to give you a job to someone else. That was

very much, you know, like what I experienced, and that is what temp workers in the auto industry have described to me and to Teddy many, many times over. But I want to also just, if I may, just zero in on that demand for a shorter work week, because this obviously, is getting a lot of play in the mainstream press right now. And people, you know, from Jim Kramer to, you know, the pundits at CNN and MSNBC are literally crapping their pants at this like suggestion, at this suggestion that workers should work four days of the week but be paid as if, you know, tantamount to working a full 40-hour work week. And everyone, you know, is up in arms and saying, this is ridiculous. Why should anyone get paid for work that they're not doing? No one else gets that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And what I would say to those people is how is a 32-hour work week paid for, but being paid for 40 hours of work any less ridiculous than working 60 or 70 or 80 hours a week and being paid for a 40-hour work week? Because that is the situation that more and more and more working people in the auto industry and in this country in general are fucking in right now. like how is that not ridiculous that people working people in this country are working longer they're working harder we've seen the graphs we are more productive as a workforce than we have ever been in this country we are generating more profits for our employers than we ever have the auto industry is a great example of this as teddy said this is not the same auto industry that was at the verge of total collapse in 2008 which the taxpayers bailed out two of those big three automakers GM and crisis to the tune of $80 billion at the same time that UAW members opened up their contracts and gave concessions in order to keep these companies afloat. And they lost cost of living adjustments, which would adjust their pay according to inflation, which really would have come in handy over the past two years, as we have all been getting pummeled by inflation. That workers gave that up amidst the financial crash to keep those companies afloat. And they were explicitly promised that they would get that back when things turned around, when these companies were back in the black when they were more financially stable. But they also, you know, they lost a defined benefit pensions.

There was the introduction of new tiers, the explosion of temp workers, right? So all of these were pitched as sort of temporary stabilizing measures to keep the auto industry afloat at a moment of financial catastrophe across the world. So then what happened, you know, like a few years later, when workers made these companies profitable again, and they were in a quote-unquote position of strength, which is what the CEO of GM Mary Barrett called it, when she, after GM had received, like all the other big three, massive windfall profits from Donald Trump's goddamn tax cuts, the tax cuts and jobs acts. So, like, they got all that money on top of turning a profit after, you know, like coming back from financial ruin in the recession. And how did they repay workers who made those sacrifices? They repaid them by more plant closures, more layoffs. Like, you, Brett, you and I, like, talked about this, I think. Like, this is very personal for me, not because I've worked in the auto industry, but the first season of my show working people when I was starting the work that would become my life's work, I got so obsessed with the GM layoffs because I.

I knew people who worked there. I talked to people in Detroit. I talked to people in Lourdes Town. I talked to people in Oshua, Canada, who all described to me what it felt like to come back on Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving on 2018, and to learn that GM, even though it was making major profits, was going to be eliminating 14,000 jobs and shuttering plants

or unallocating plants like the one at L. Lordstown. This is how working people have been repaid for their sacrifices in the auto industry. And it has only gotten worse through COVID. It has only gotten worse as Mary CEO, Mary Barra, GM is now making $29 million a year. Shareholders and their stock buybacks and dividends are through the roof. Like this is ridiculous. And yet people are focusing on auto workers getting paid for work they're not doing. It's like, well, no, like we're doing more work that we're not getting paid for. That is. is the goddamn problem. Yes. Yeah, I want to just emphasize another, I want to throw another wrench into what Max is saying, which is just so spot on. These temps that we were talking about

that increased in percentage of across plants, across the big three, uh, following the Great Recession, they are technically part time, but they do not work part time hours. They work more than full time hours. They're paid quote unquote part time wages as if being part time,

justifies paying someone less than someone who works full-time. It's just ridiculous. And I think another key piece that I think ties into all of this that I'm not sure we emphasize quite yet is they're repaying these workers with, you know, awful working conditions, long hours, poor pay. And these jobs harm people. They do.

A key part of the 32-hour work week, is that you don't have to spend as much time doing these tasks that, right, the people on the picket line I've seen, it's disturbing how many people I see with wrist guards on, who told me they just had surgery. A woman on the, on the picket line at the Jeep at the Jeep Toledo plant told me that she just had surgery on her right arm for carpal tunnel, and she can't hold her two-year-old in her right hand and she can't and she's about to get surgery on the other arm these jobs harm people and then what happens is they go and they take away the retiree medical methods they take away the pensions the things that are supposed to repay the loyalty that these

workers give to the companies for 30 years 35 years it's just ridiculous it's super insulting and i just it's it's honestly just disturbing being on these picket lines and seeing people who talk about feeling broken and feeling betrayed. These jobs were supposed to be, you know, family sustaining. They were supposed to brighten their future and they're learning that it wasn't. So many of these people had families, had grandparents, had fathers and mothers and sisters and aunts in these plants before them who get the pensions, who get the retiree medical benefits, and they've been betrayed following the Great Recession. and they're clearly out there on the picket line, you know, fighting for war and what they deserve.

Absolutely. It's downright evil what these companies are doing to working people across this country, inside and outside the union, etc. Teddy, I do want to be very respectful of your time. I know you have a lot of work to do. Do you pretty much have to get out of here now? You know, I'm too fired up after Max, spitting too many facts. I think I have to stay for a little bit. I'm sorry. All right. Let's go. For an article I'm writing from Max, the real news. You know, this is important, so let's keep going. Cool. All right. Well, yeah, absolutely. So let's get into it. Now, Sean Fain has been mentioned many, many times. And he's sort of emerged as the face and the voice of this strike and has generated a lot of buzz and support via his more overtly militant posture, his swaggering rhetoric, his Eugene Deb style energy. And he certainly won me over when I heard him quoting Malcolm X in the context of launching the strike. He talks about economic justice and he talks about pairing it with social justice. These are beautiful things coming out of a union, and a union leader. It's times like these when we all need to ask ourselves some hard questions. As Malcolm X once stated, if a person tells you they want freedom, but in the next breath,

we'll tell you what they won't do to get it, that person doesn't believe in freedom. We have to be willing to stand up and get our demands by our own. any means necessary. So how far are you willing to go? Are you willing to go the distance? Are you willing to stand in solidarity with people you don't know across the entire country? Are you willing to stand up for what you deserve, for what your family deserves, for what Kokomo deserves for what the entire working class deserves. It's time for the UAW to stand up. So for those that don't know, I'm kind of very curious, especially given the discussions we were having earlier of 2019, confusion between the workers and the union leadership, et cetera,

who is Sean Fain and sort of how did he rise to prominence within this union? Daddy's actually gotten to interview Sean Fane. I haven't gotten to interview him yet. I'll link to that in the show notes. Yeah. And everyone should listen to the upsurge, go support it. It's a phenomenal and necessary show that we are honored to syndicate here at the Real News Networkwork. But you got some great stuff there to go listen to if this conversation titillates your interest. But what I would just say, because there's one component here that we haven't talked about yet, which can feel like a bit insider baseball when you're kind of talking amongst folks who are kind of plugged into organized labor and so on and so forth. But. you know, I think a lot of people around the country are kind of just now learning about the incredible seismic and historic shifts that have been going on within the UAW itself in recent years, right? I mean, like, just taking a quick step back to kind of like get us a lay of the land, you know, we already sort of know, you know, like what has happened to the labor movement because of what has happened to the auto industry. The auto industry in many ways has become a sort of cipher for the labor movement writ large, and it has become sort of the example we point to when we talk about deindustrialization in the American heartland, right? The common narrative that I heard growing up as an ultra-conservative, you know, kid was just that, you know, the unions got too big.

They demanded too much. The poor auto industries couldn't compete on a global stage, especially with, you know, like the foreign auto companies in Japan and Germany. And so, you know, it was ultimately the union's fault that like the auto industry began its decline in the auto manufacturing industry in the United States, I should say. The industry itself is still around, obviously, but as Teddy said, what has been happening over the past 50 years is, you know, plans. moving to, you know, the non-union or anti-union south, firing off unionization efforts there as much as they possibly can. Or, you know, like with the sort of opening of, you know, trade policy and a shift towards sort of free trade policies that enabled more corporations to offshore those jobs, right?

You do have a really pivotal moment in the late 20th century where unions that had a much bigger bargaining chip and that UAW especially and but along with the teamsters and so many other unions formed the backbone of the industrial working class in this country which itself formed you know like the basis for you know

a thriving middle class in this country. All that has like been eaten away and you can you know there are a number of reasons for it but what I'm just trying to kind of paint the broader like historical picture here is that you know like unions were put on the back foot

when this sort of shift began to happen, right? Because we started seeing what happens when plants in places like Flint get closed and the entire community just gets decimated and it becomes this sort of cautionary tale of what

happens when working people get too big for their britches, a little too uppity, they demand a little too much and then they have literally everything taken away from them in their communities and that has sort of been in the minds of the union leadership as well as the membership over our lifetimes, which is, you know, if you go to the bargaining table and push a little too hard, if you, the auto workers can always say, hey, if you guys want to be the next Flint, keep going the way that you're going. If you want to keep your jobs, then you better take more concessions. And that's what we've been seeing, you know, bargaining, with each round of bargaining after each round of bargaining is more and more and more concessions being taken from workers, more and more of that, of the basis that made this good union job, middle class job, a job that you could sustain a family on, a job that you

could build, you know, communities around because you had so much economic activity going on and people with money in their pockets that they could put into local restaurants, buy homes, pay taxes, all that stuff, right? So like, we have seen that sort of crumble, especially in the auto industry, but it hasn't gone away. As we know, there's still a lot of plants around the country. There's still a lot of workers in this industry. but they have been squeezed more and more and more over the course of our lifetimes. And the union leadership has, you know, if not been like a willful participant in this, then a begrudging participant in this over recent decades.

And, you know, frankly, one of the things that everyone knows, like with the teamsters, is that we, and we on the left here in labor, cannot be, you know, hesitant about calling this out. We cannot pretend as if the UAW union and its leadership have not been rife with corruption. For Christ's sake, the Department of Justice, you know, like the FBI investigated the UAW, and that was the years-long investigation that ended with many union leaders, including two former UAW presidents, ending up in prison. And it was actually because of that investigation and the consent decree that resulted between the UAW and the DOJ, that the UAW, like the Teamsters were, after the Hoffa corruption, the mob ties back in the 80s and 90s, when that all came to a head and the Teamsters were forced to have Democratic elections in their union leadership, which allowed them decades later to elect the reform candidate Sean O'Brien, which Teddy is covered on his podcast.

Something similar has happened in the UAW. They were under a federal consent decree. the union membership had the chance two years ago to vote on a referendum that if passed would enable UAW members and retirees to have direct democratic elections of their union leadership. But one vote, one member, one vote policy. And that referendum passed. That was in, I think it was December of 2021, like at the very end of the year. So that passed and that laid the ground for the membership to challenge the, the administrative. in the UAW that it essentially had a, you know, authoritarian one-party rule for like 70 years, right? And so Sean Fane backed by the, the Reform Caucus, Unite All Workers for Democracy, very similar to Teamsters for Democratic Union in the Teamsters Union. You know, like they went in all out and they won every seat that they contested, including the seat for president. Now, Sean Fane got in, he kind of squeaked in, but the fact that members, were given a chance to say look your union has been going in this direction for like over half the century this is your moment to decide whether or not you want to go in a new direction and they did they said yes we are tired of the concessions we are tired of the bullshit that we saw in 2019 when our union leadership that wasn't really telling us what was going on at the bargaining table just suddenly called us all to go on strike at g em and then like accepted a shitty contract after we had like taken that major financial hit uh after after 40 days on strike, right? I mean, to like, this is also the background to how Sean Fame got elected as the new UAW president. And now I will shut up and toss it to Teddy go from there.

Yeah, fascinating stuff. Go ahead, Teddy. No, you did an awesome setup, Max. I think, you know, just one thing I want to emphasize is just how betrayed auto workers felt when following the concessions of the bailouts of the great. session that the union descended really into outright corruption. The UAW does not have a history of corruption. It is not the Teamsters Union. Their corruption, which is more recent, that really starting to come to light from

2018, 2019, was a result of these historical processes that Max is kind of describing. And a lot of the corruption, which occurred, was followed through these joint training centers between the UAW and the big three automakers, which were created as a labor and management sort of partnership. The beginning of the concessions that we've seen that have continued through today, those joint training centers started in the 1980s when we started to see more complacency in the union, which was fought back by the reform movement that predated UAWD, unite all workers for democracy.

that's the New Directions movement. There's a direct through line from the 1980s and 90s through to now. Out of which the rank and file movement came, they pushed for the member referendum that Max described to get one member one of top officers in the union. And Fane was the first democratically elected president of the UAW. And this is really important. And, you know, I'll talk a little bit more about Fane,

but also I want to be somewhat careful because I do think it's important to base who we talk about the importance in the wrecking file. I actually tweeted a photo of Fane on Twitter, which ended up going viral. And I just took the photo because I thought it was cool. I quoted him at this rally and it blew up. And then I quickly tried to, you know, comment again, say,

whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, fan is cool. But, you know, if you want to listen to the workers, the perspective of the workers themselves, you know, you got to follow places like the real news and these times other journalists. But anyway, I think that's important to emphasize. But it's true. At the top, at the top of the UAW, they've come out swinging. You know, they're talking in class troubled terms. That this is a fight not only about the auto workers, but about the broader working class, fighting back against the billionaire class, which has stolen the wealth that they create. So at a rally in Detroit recently, a rally for saving the American dream, I attended it. I saw Bernie Sanders speak. The governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, Rashida Thlebe, and multiple union leaders, Sean Fane, of course. And across most of the speeches, not all of them, there really was sort of this us and them thing.

And we've seen not just changes in rhetoric, but in changes in terms of transparency. You know, Sean Fane gives these live streams to the members quite often updating them in bargaining, outright asking them to, if, you know, your local isn't organizing, do it yourself, frankly. You know, and when you speak to people, they feel this kind of. see change from previous administrations. The demands they used to make of the big three were called the president's

domains. Now they're called the members domains. And it's no wonder that while in the past, you would go to the picket line in 2019, eventually there emerged sort of central demands. But at the beginning, you talked to someone, they didn't know what

they were fighting for. So this year they ran a contract campaign, which might be the first time that they've done that at the big three. admitting everyone on the same page, organizing the shops, Racket File doing that themselves, you know, signing pledge cards,

racket filers would, during their 10-minute breaks, just chat with workers, you know, get 10 people, 15 people, 30 people, and it grew every time they would talk. So the UAW,

it should be said, you know, has a deep culture of abiding by strikes. People generally don't cross the ticket line. That's not a problem, but there isn't a grassroots organizing culture necessarily, like TNU has tried to build pretty successfully, I would say, not completely,

but at the Teamsters Union. And that's what the union, in order to be stronger to win more fights, that's what they're trying to facilitate. And it clearly looks like it's working, you know, despite there being more work to do. This is just the beginning of what they acknowledge as being a five to 10 year process of trying to push this union in a better direction after 50 years of concessionary bargaining and unionism and 10 years of just outright corruption that has fomented major feelings of betrayal. Like you talk to autoworkers, the betrayal they feel is really, really tangible. And they're looking at this.

You go on the picket line. You ask people what they think of Fane. They may not even know who Fane is, but they feel something different is happening within the ranks within the energy and we're seeing it play out right now and hopefully it will be effective in the in the in the form of a successful strike yeah absolutely and to your point like you don't want to overemphasize the leader too much because it's the rank and file that is you know really the crucial bedrock of these strikes but in so far as there was this democratic election that elected sean fein you know he can be seen as like a true representative of the rank and file

and so that relationship there is democratic is open and so he's a real reflection of the desires of at least a majority of the rank and file, which is fascinating and wonderful. And I absolutely love the rhetoric. And I love how he frames it not just in the context of, you know, we're just trying to get as much as possible for our union members, but he frames it in the context of a much broader class struggle against the billionaire class and for all working people.

And these strikes, even when they are isolated in an industry, they do raise the floor for all workers in the economy. So even if you are not in a union and even if you're not in this union, you're not on strike you want to see these things succeed because they really help the working class as a whole as the impacts ripple out and affect the entire economy over time so i did want to stress that let me get to this question though which is just sort of now that we understand what's happening we understand the major players involved i mean we're recording right now on september 18th things can change very quickly in your opinion and based on your guys's understanding of this strike and how it's playing out what's like a most like trajectory. I know it's impossible to predict and I'm not asking you to make a prediction, but just kind of tracing out where things are right now and where they could lead, maybe a best case scenario even for the workers, giving what's coming in the next couple of days. I'll let Max do the crystal ballquestion.

I mean, you know, like I said earlier, you know, we are kind of in wait and see mode right now. We're going to wait and see how the big three auto makers respond to this strike. It is historic, as Sean Fane himself noted, when he made the announcement on Thursday of which three locals he was calling to stand up and hit the picket line first, that it is the first time in the UAW's history when all three of the big three automakers have been struck simultaneously, even if the membership across those, the UAW membership across those three automakers are not all going out on strike collectively, but instead, you know, they're the stand-up strikes, targeted strikes at three of the different plants, you know, that's still, you know, really significant. And, you know, I think it's going to, a lot is going to happen in the next 72 hours that it's going to tell us, like, how the auto industry is responding. to this strike. But another question is how the membership responds to it. You know, and I think based on what I've been hearing, what Teddy has been hearing, what, you know, he mentioned our comrades in these times and labor notes. I really want to shout them out because we've got, we've got like a collaborative media like agreement here between our three outlets, labor notes in these times and the real news, to basically share anything and everything that we have with each other, share contacts. If we publish something, everyone else is free to republish it because the most important thing right now is getting as much good worker focus coverage on this struggle as we possibly can at a time when we're trying to counteract the corporate serving propaganda coming from mainstream media. And I think that's really exciting. But across our respective efforts, I do think that you are hearing a very positive response from the majority of the membership. People are fired up.

Even if, you know, folks that I've talked to or not 100% sold on Sean Fane or like even this strategy, they are very much fed up in the same way that their union brothers and sisters are and they are ready to do something about it. And they feel like what happened in 2019 was not enough to stop this kind of long historical onslaught against the working class that we've been. describing over the past hour. And so, you know, I do think that of this strategy, the stand-up strategy, is smart in the way that it is protecting the strike fund, that it is giving the UAW more hands to play if they need to ratchet pressure against the big three. And it is giving members like a kind of like constant titillating a sense of action, right, where they may be called upon to.

strike next um you know and and right now uh you know folks who are still working at plants that have not been called to strike they are still currently protected under status quo uh you know like from the previous contract so it's not as if they're suddenly being thrown to the wolves uh but it does mean that that contract is expired which means the no strike clause that is in effect that was in effect until thursday last week uh is no longer in effect and thus they can you know go out on strike, you know, when they want, if they want, but also the employers themselves can, you know, do temporary layoffs, even permanent layoffs. They can respond with lockouts, right? So it's really hard to say where things are going to go. What I would just say is that based on everything I have seen from the management side of the big three, I am predicting that they're going to be, you know, gnashing and thrashing, stubborn assholes. about this for a while.

Because at this point, I think that, like, they're realizing that the public and is not necessarily as on their side as they have been in the past, right? You know, it's been, it's been, frankly, all too easy to turn the public against union auto workers in decades past during contract campaigns because, you know, again, they still made more than the average working person as more and more of us were seeing our wages kind of decline or stagnate, you know, you still were making, you know, better wages and better benefits as an auto worker, even though, as we've discussed within the auto industry itself, that same race to the bottom that all of us have been experiencing outside of the auto industry

has been also taking hold there. So I think the fact that, you know, based on recent polls, at least like 75% of the public is behind the UAW, given like the militancy, and the fervor and the excitement that we're seeing on these picket lines across social media. You know, I think that that is playing into the calculations that are being made by the big three. But the big three, you know, like they are, you know, they have allowed, they have been allowed to amass so much wealth and flex so much power and exert so much power over the union, coercive power over the union in decades past. that this is going to this what we're seeing right now is a shock to them like they and they don't like it they do not like being told what to do and so they're going to yeah they're going to nash their teeth they're going to uh i think they're going to keep coming with more shitty

proposals uh that's just my suspicion based on everything that i've seen from them up until now i mean for christ's sake like two months ago uh the the the the the CEO of stilantis was chilling in like his second or third home in Acapulco and he literally sent a letter, you know, from that from his vacation home to the UAW, urging the leaders and the members to be like

to see reason, to be to be economically rational. And it's just like that's, that's who we're dealing with. Jesus. Yeah. I just want to add on to what Maxx saying. I think I pretty much agree with your analysis. I mean, we're in an interesting

spot where the UAW obviously is testing the waters on some more strategic striking and more prepared for potentially in a better position in terms of leverage. At the same time, they're demanding the same time they have the 75% of support from the public. But I want to stare this kind of in a different direction to something that we haven't talked about before.

Something that Nelson Lichtenstein told me actually yesterday, he's the author of Walter Ruther, they're the most dangerous man in America, just an expert on the UAW. A historian, he was emphasizing the fact that, like, striking all three automakers at the same time, doing what the UAW is doing,

is very much a political strike. It is a way of pressuring Biden in the midst of this EV transition that is afoot. And I think I maybe just to emphasize that piece of it, because we haven't talked about it, it doesn't, it of course plays pretty majorly somewhat indirect, into the Big Three negotiations right now, but ultimately, eventually what's going on there

that I think people should understand is the UAW eventually wants to fold in all of these new joint venture electric battery and vehicle plants that these companies are forming with these Korean battery, mostly Korean battery tech firms into the Big Three contracts. Now, they are demanding that now they can't do it. I mean, there's the allies in Congress who are calling for it as well. But because these companies are basically claiming that these separate entities that they're forming don't apply to the standards that have been hard fought by auto workers over the past, you know, nearly 100 years. But it doesn't appear that can be done necessarily right now. But what they really want is that for these joint venture plants, which are mostly non-union, to be organized by the union, to not have to be organized by the union, actually, like at the old team.

cells plant in Ohio and the wages, the benefits and the working conditions there are just far, far worse. We've seen some great reporting out of labor notes. Luis Felice Leon went to the whole team cells plant. He's shown how terrible the working conditions there were

just the serious safety hazards, the explosions, the chemicals, the evils. The EV transition is a major point of contention because these non-union battery and EV plants threaten the lower the standards of the UADU auto workers. And meanwhile, our tax dollars through grants, through loans, and tax incentives have been funneled

into this industry with barely any conditions related to labor, certainly not giving much preference to union labor. So the stakes are high for the future of the industry. As this green transition takes off and really has implications for the climate crisis itself, you know, Biden has meted out some more rhetorical support for the strikers, it appears. It seems in political terms, the UAW is actually being a bit more successful. It looks like there may be some preference given to union firms for future grants and loans, which are really pushing this industry in the United States.

But there's a reason why the UAW has an endorsed Biden for 2024, which some people are saying, oh, they actually, they want Trump's endorsement. No, this is ridiculous. It's because they are using their leverage to push harder for their members, for the labor movement to make sure that the billions of dollars, the billions, hundreds of billions of dollars going to fund the green transition are going to create life-sustaining union jobs. So the stakes are high for the labor movement and the way we take on the climate crisis. And so their strategy, whether it wins or not, those are the implications. This is very

much a political strike. Yeah. Such an important point because, yeah, this strike and the tumult around it is not just the acute, you know, interests of workers in the U.S. UAW in the here and now, but it also has this long-term impact with regards to climate change and the EV transition, and they're leveraging what they can against the Biden administration to try and make sure that whatever policies get pushed in that direction, they come with support for unions and for the UAW to be able to organize workers in these new plants and factories and industries popping up around electronic vehicles. And to Max's point earlier about the bosses sort of in the past have been able to rhetorically use this idea that, oh, these greedy union workers who are getting way more money than you other worker are getting, you know, they want even more while you're getting even less. That's, of course, their ability to divide and conquer. Within the union, right, by this tier system and without the union, outside the union with this rhetorical move.

And so what the unions should do and what Sean Fain and the UAW is doing, of course, is uniting all working people and putting their class struggle within the UAW in the context of the broader class struggle in the broader American economy, kind of counteracting the attempt for the bosses and their mouthpieces to divide the working class and try to pit some elements of the working class against union efforts of this sort. But let me go ahead and move into this last question here. I'm very appreciative of both of your times. So zooming out a little bit the strike has come during a general increase in labor strikes in America. We've seen the Kellogg strike, the UPS strike recently, Amazon and Starbucks unionization efforts, you know, elements and

industries that for a very long time were thought to be very, very difficult and maybe even impossible to unionize. They've seen success. And we've seen the railroad workers almost going on strike, the John Deere strike a couple years ago. So this is really happening in this renewed spirit of class struggle emanating out of unions, but specifically, but out of the working class more broadly in this country. So my question to both of you is, my final question here is, for those of us or anybody listening who might not be in these unions and might not be in a place to unionize their workplace,

how can we contribute to these struggles broadly? What can people who are sympathetic to these striking workers do to help out? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a number of things you can do you know if you're not in the position to organize your workplace now you should definitely still think about it and you should definitely still learn about that process learn about it and talk to your co-workers and just general set up the stakes or set up the conditions for time when it might be possible for you or if you're in a union right and it's not your favorite union

Everyone loves their union, but also the union can break your heart. And there's certain things you can do, certain resources, for example, like labor notes, to improve your own union. But I would say those are really important just for the movement in general. If you want to, and that in a way indirectly would be supportive of the UAW. You know, fight for your own workplace. Take your coworkers to the picket line, show people who support. Because as Max and I have sort of analyzed, this may go on for. a while and people need people need

the support. They need to know that the public's behind them and they are at the moment but you know as time goes on sometimes support dwindles and the workers need to know that they have the people behind them so that they can keep going and stay strong because that's what they need in order to win what they deserve. The main

things I think that you should do is you should make it out to the picket line if possible or you should contact any sort of UAW that's near you whether or not they are auto workers and figure out

how you can get involved you know or guys your own solidarity actions inform people make sure that they know what is going on and to capture the stakes

of what is happening and what is important for the auto workers yeah absolutely I would also add to that of course just getting the word out

talking to your coworkers talking to your family and friends taking an uncompromising position in favor of these strikes and just trying to do the on the ground in your own sphere of influence work of pushing the line of the workers showing how this is good for the broader economy showing how this is good for all working people pushing back against disinformation or helping people relieving people of their doubts about certain things all that stuff you know

if a million people are doing that it does have an effect over time as well so that's another thing people can do but max do you have anything to add to that i do but i yeah just i think that's a really really great point, right? I mean, like, all of us have a role to play in this, right? You know, all of us can help workers win this fight, and if we win this

fight, then we'll be that much more capable of winning the next fighting. And let's not also, let us not also forget that we still have a lot of ongoing fights that we need to win. So if you're not near a UAW local, but you want to help, I guarantee you that there are

striking workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper who have been on strike for almost a year now. They're coming up in October on a year. The management there, they want to kill those unions. They are stalling at the bargaining table. The NLRB has even ruled. These guys aren't bargaining in good faith. They're just sitting there and waiting until everyone gives up and drops out.

And then the bosses can have a non-union newspaper that they can like, you know, turn into like a bullshit content farm and pay people, you know, poverty level wages. Like that's the direction that they're going in. And so people at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette absolutely need your support. Entertainers at, you know, even smaller strikes, but like entertainers at medieval times, they have been on strike for basically this entire year. They desperately need your help. As we record this, we are seeing, we're seeing what the Hollywood executives said that they hoped would happen

by the time September and October rolls around, which is writers on strike, actors on strike are now starting to lose their homes. They are starting to be unable to stay in L.A. or New York. They could barely afford to stay there before because of the crap pay that they're getting, which is one of the reasons that they are currently both on strike together for the first time since 1960, right? But we are seeing the strategy work. I mean, these people on strike every day is a struggle and they need your support. Anything you can do, even if it's just showing solidarity online, reaching out to the union, donating to any number of strike funds or industry hardship funds, or what have you, right? Or writing directly to, you know, your representatives, writing to the companies themselves,

making it known that you stand with the workers, whether they be in Hollywood, whether they be in the auto industry, whether they be tens of thousands of Kaiser Permanente workers who could be on strike by the end of this month, right? And the Starbucks workers that you mentioned, Brett, They have been a huge inspiration to so many people across the labor force. And yet, none of them, not a single one of those stores has a contract yet because Starbucks is allowed to just willfully break the law. Like we've been witnessing a corporate crime spree in broad daylight for the past two years with Amazon, with Starbucks, with Chipotle, with every goddamn company that is union busting and violating people's rights left and right. because they can in this country with very, very minimal repercussions. So then we as the people, as working people, need to be the ones to hold these goddamn companies accountable.

And we need to hold our elected officials accountable so that they hold the companies accountable or to greater account. They actually use the power that we are investing in them with our votes. We have that sort of wherever you are, there is something that needs to be done. As I say all the time on my show, no one can do everything, but everyone can do. something and I want to kind of like kind of end on that note because I know I'm ranting a lot here but I want to bring it back as Teddy rightfully pointed out in the beginning I want to bring it back to the workers and I want to encourage everyone if this if this I hope this podcast was helpful

obviously keep listening to and supporting RevLev Radio the OG we absolutely need the show but if you can please also go check out the great episodes that Teddy is published on the upsurge and Ruby Walsh is his co-host and co-producers sir. They've been doing great work. They put out recently great episodes on the UAW struggle with the voices of workers themselves that I think are very powerful and revealing. You can go to breaking points and find my recent interviews with two different UAW workers, Chris Falzoni and Nick Leivick. You can also go to my podcast, Working People. You can listen to the recent episode that I put out where I got to interview three workers from each of the big three automakers. It was incredible. I don't think you're going to hear anything like it, you know, in mainstream media. And if you want to know what workers are thinking and feeling, that's where you should go. But I would also encourage folks to go back and listen to those, you know, old episodes from first season of my show where I spoke to auto workers at GM who were being laid off or who were working at plants that were soon to be shuttered. I beg you like, hey, forgive the crappy editing and the crappy interview style.

I was still getting, I was still finding my feet in this world, right? but listen to what the workers say in those interviews and you'll see that like this struggle that the UAW now this struggle that we're seeing across the laborer force it didn't just come from nowhere this has been building for a long fucking time for basically our entire lifetimes as I said working people have been working longer harder

we've been more productive and yet union density has been in precipitous decline to the point that we're barely above 10% of workers in this country belonging to a union and more of the profits from the work that we have been doing have been siphoned off into the pockets of the executives, the shareholders, and the 1% while worker people's wages have largely stagnated for the past 40 plus years. Or in fact, they've gone backwards when we factor in things like inflation. And this was really kind of put, this is really underlined in a great quote from a work. that Labor note spoke to in a recent piece that they published.

This is by a worker named Brandon Sesniak, who is 21 and is an attempt worker, makes $19.10 an hour of her. And he would like to have a family, but since it takes eight years to get top pay at his position, he'd be almost 30 by the time he'd be making enough to support a family. And he added this quote about the strike that I think is very revealing. So Brandon says, quote, people are angry. It's like a revolving door. It's not a career anymore. It's a job.

They want us to buy forwards, but how can we buy a ford on this pay, end quote. And that's the point that I want to end on. This is where I think the general sense of class consciousness is coming from. It's coming from our own experience. We have all been experiencing in our own way. what Bernie Sanders famously called the race to the bottom, but this is what it really looks like in the aggregate. It looks like a world in which careers that made it possible for middle class families to support themselves, those have been turned into jobs where

single individuals can just make enough to get by. It is a world in which homeowners have become permanent rentiers, like all of us in the millennial and Gen Z generations have essentially become. It is a world in which people used to save for retirement and now we spend all of our working lives working to pay off debts that we accrued at the beginning of our working lives. This is what a race to the bottom looks like and it is affecting all of us. It is affecting working people across the board as the dialectical division between the haves and the have-nots and hal-littles continues to increase and intensify and power and wealth continues to be consolidated in the hands of an ever-shrinking few while an ever-expanding mass of the gravite many continues to be you know sliding further and further back into you know basically feudalism this is the direction that things are going and so now the question is what happens next this is the question i get from everybody people are asking me is there going to be a general You know, you know, why don't, why don't all the, the workers walk off at once or is like, is this going to be the thing that leads us to a socialist revolution in this country? And, and I guess my answer is, I don't know. I mean, like, but what I would caution people with is that, you know, a general strike would be fucking awesome. It also takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of groundwork. So if you want to know what you can do to help, be part of that groundwork. Talk to your co-workers. Talk to your co-workers.

Even if you can't unionize, just break that barrier that normally keeps you and your fellow worker from talking openly about how much your situation sucks and how much screwed you actually are being, and how much you are being screwed over by your bosses, by your landlords, by your politicians, and what a solution to that would look like, a solution that actually harnesses the pain and the power of working people brought together. You know, what could that look like? Well, we don't know necessarily what it would look like here in the United States in the 21st century. But we can all be doing that tilling work to build those relationships across racial, political, gender, locational difference.

We can do what we can to start building a more cohesive sense of class itself and class consciousness. It's among our fellow workers. We can do our best to sort of deprogram ourselves and our neighbors and our co-workers from all the ruling class propaganda. end of that that is beaten into our heads from birth. Now, as I said, is this an explicitly socialist movement? Is this going to lead to an explicitly socialist politics? Um, no, maybe kind of sometimes, sometimes not, you know, but, but what I want to emphasize is that this, right here, this is the historical froth from which a socialist movement can be born. Yes. By which I mean a movement of working people that fights

for working people and believes the people who make society run should run society. And that's us. It's not the parasitic oligarchs and corporations and they're bought off politicians vampirically sucking out

all of the wealth that we create for them and then using that fucking money and the power that comes with it to pillage the rest of the globe through through military conflict or financial occupation. and domination. And that movement begins and lives, I think, everywhere. Regular people start fighting back and fighting for a better life. And we start fighting together and building power in

our numbers and our organizational capacities to sustain a working people's movement that needs to attack on all fronts. Like this is what we can do to help. Be part of building that movement and be part of that full frontal attack where we need to go on the offensive. our workplaces, telling our bosses, hey, you can't treat me like that. You can't talk to me like that. I deserve better than this. But we also need it even in our own unions, as the UAW has shown us. If your union local sucks, you need to reform that union. You need to get the assholes who are in there and not serving the members out. And you need to take control of it and make it a weapon for the rank and file. But you need to also run for school boards. You need to go at these

moms for liberty weirdos and all these nut jobs who are trying to take power wherever. they can in our city governments in our state legislatures and in Washington and D.C. The point is that we need to start building power and winning and when we start doing that, where it goes from there, you know,

is really up to us. That's what I want to lead people with. What happens next depends on what we do now. But everywhere you look, there is a front to be fought upon. So pick your battles and let's go win this fucking thing. Amen. I

just want to add one last thing you just killed it and they're ending out max i love everything you said you're absolutely right but i just want to say on the other side you know you're listening to this great podcast right now there's mainstream media right now hard at work scaremongering trying to you know putting putting out corporate talking points they emphasize how much damage might be done to the economy what what they really mean is the company's profits and i and you know this is unfortunately really, really convinced St. Joe a lot of people. You know,

the mainstream media have shown they don't particularly care about the needs of workable people. But we're at a really unprecedented moment where those corporate talking points are kind of cracking in people's line. They're starting to understand people kind of

understand that they're wrong. You know, that the damage that will be done to working in America will be much higher if the auto workers don't find for a better contract and set the standards that will raise the livelihoods of all them. And then we're seeing right now 75% public support of the strikers. People know which side they're on, but it's always important to help them out a little bit, push back on the mainstream Indian narratives. They're endlessly fed. And so within the workplace, with your family,

wherever, start talking about it because this is, this really is a seize the moment to moment. Yes, absolutely. So our guests have been Teddy and Max from the Real News Network and from the Upsurge podcast. I'll link to both of those shows in the show notes, also in these Times and Labor notes. Speaking of another thing that people can do to help is help these outlets who are doing real on the ground. Journalism for and by the working class, the Real News Network in these Times, labor notes, all working together to bring us this information that we can then disseminate in our own spheres of influence. So support all of that, and I'll link to all of them in the show notes.

Again, thank you so much, Teddy and Max, for all your wonderful, fascinating work. We tip our hats to you, we salute you, keep it up, and Rev. Left is here anytime for both of you to come back on for any reason whatsoever. Thanks for having us on. all day overtime hours for bullshit pay well nothing's gonna change if all you do is wish you could wake up and it not be true join a union fight for better pay you better join a union brother organized today you'll see where the problem really lies when the union comes around. Rich men earning north of a million want to keep the working folk down.

Want to keep the working folk down. If you form a union, you'll soon find out working people are all the one kind, so we ain't gonna punch down on those who need a bit of understanding some solidarity. That ain't right, friend. health and you're putting on the pounds doctor gives you opiates to help you get around well wouldn't it be better for folks like you and me if medicine was subsidized and health care was free join a union fight for better pay come on and join a union sister organized today It comes down to the self-same thing if you're black or white or brown.

Rich men running north of a million want to keep the working folk down. Want to keep the working folk down. Well, we know your culture wars are there to this. while libertarian billionaires avoid paying tax you want to talk about bathrooms while the flood waters rise the forest is on fire and the wind burns our eyes something's wrong here well they want to divide us because together we're strong are you gonna take action now you sung your damn song if you don't like the rich man Having total control, you better get the union to roll.

Join a union. Fight for better pay. Come on and join a union. Organized today. Don't matter if you live in the city or some little country town. rich men earning north of a million rich men earning north of a million I say rich men earning north of a million want to keep the working folk down want to keep the working folk down if you're selling your soul and you're working all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay join a union.