The Daily Beast Podcast - How Unions Could Help Democrats Turn Red States Blue

Episode Date: March 3, 2024

Journalist Hamilton Nolan tells The New Abnormal why declining union membership has strengthened the Republican Party. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedin, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus edition of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here.

Today we have an extra special guest with author Hamilton Nolan who will join us to talk about his new book, The Hammer, Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. All right. Well, we have another chapter to mention J. Trump, slip into another zone of reality. I don't know what multiverse, all this he's talking about is happening again, but I don't want to live in it. And I don't want to understand it better, but here we go.

Once and even after birth, I mean, even after birth, you remember the governor that former governor of Virginia that said the baby will be born and we will decide to kill the baby after birth. We will make a decision with the mother. This is the first time I heard that. but there is legislation in some states where you actually have the right to do that. So they're the radicals. You're not the radicals. We're not the radicals. They're the radicals.

And you have to say that. Politicians have to say that because nobody believes that after a certain period of time, nobody believes that you should be doing this. It's like 97% agree. A hundred percent agree. That's a fucking lie. What state is he talking about? Where is infant killing, baby killing,

the books. What state is that in? See, I've seen a few movies recently that have this multiverse concept in it. I believe that that's in that great state of one of those. Oh, yeah. That seems right. I think it's the state of insanity. The state of his imagination? Yeah. And then they clap.

They clap, though. Well, of course they clap. Yeah. But I would say this. As somebody who watched a little bit more of this, that was some very tepid clapping. A lot of the clapping was like Rouris. These people are like, I think this is where we're supposed to clap. Like, this is like Jeb Bush, please clap level clapping.

Do they hold up a sign like that we can't see where they're like, clap, clap, you know, like the studio audience? They have to. At least it's better than the Bill Mar dubbing in more clapping and laughter later in the post process thing. Oh, God. Don't get me started. No, Andy. We're trying to get you started. But no.

Look, post-birth abortion. I mean, what? I don't know. In like four months, it's going to be like, you know, he's going to be out there saying, well, in some states, they have legislation that up to the child being eight years old, you can decide to abort them. It's like every day they just move the lie a little further. It sounds just as good as embryonic personhood, you know?

So there you go. One of the fun things about conservatives is they love telling people how to raise their kids. And yet when we see how they raise theirs, the real horror show themselves. This could be Lauren Boberts constantly going on about the Biden crime family while her son is arrested for things that we keep seeing that are even more horrible each hour as we tape this. But here we have the soon-to-be-head of the R&C, Lara Trump. And she's going to tell us about her parenting rituals. Every night, Eric and I have a tradition. We stop whatever we have going on and we go do bedtime with the kids.

and while they say their prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance, of course, I often think to myself, what kind of country will they live in in 10, 20, or 30 years? What the fuck kind of cultish shit is that? Who directs their children to say the Pledge of Allegiance at bedtime? Real Americans? Oh, my God. Someone calls CPS. This reminds me of when they,

the two of them took the wrong cups and in and out. Do you guys remember this? Somebody pointed out that they took the wrong cups. They took the free cups for water and filled up soda with them at the in and out right when Trump first got elected. Because she doesn't quite seem to get where the Pledge of Allegiance goes. I also would like to know what version of the Pledge of Allegiance they're actually doing. Because just like Donald Trump doesn't play, you know, the Star-Spangled Balliner at his rallies anymore, he plays the January. He plays the January 6th like theme song by convicts.

So I'm curious as to what. The theme song is so good for that. Yeah, I'm curious as to which pledge they're doing. Look, all I know is every night before I go to bed, I get out my knees and I take out my pocket constitution and I read an article of it. And so I'm fully on board with what Laura Trump is saying here. And I think all of you are, I suspect you're. you're both communists. You know, I do think we did get a answer about the clap side, though,

because this is also from CPAC. Did you notice no one clapped after this Pledge of Allegiance thing, but she paused for it? They always paused for the weirdest shit. I know. And she was so proud of that line, too, the way she said it. And the Pledge of Allegiance, of course. Waiting for laughter, still waiting for applause, still waiting for applause.

The bottom line, all these people are freaks. Her, Charlie Kirk. The list is endless. Like every single one, Matt Walsh. The biggest freak. Yeah, all these conservative luminaries are just at heart, they're freaks. And not in the good way. There are good freaks out there.

And, but these people are just, they're just bad freaks. Well, that parade is going to keep going on on this because that's what we do on Sundays. Here we have a Trump lawyer Elena Haba on Newsmax doing what Trump sitcom fans do best, making an ass of themselves as they defend the insane claims that he makes. My goodness. So Judge Engeron says that he wants this $350 million within 30 days. Now, I know that you're planning on appealing this, but you've still got to put up the full amount pending that appeal. Does Donald Trump have that kind of money sitting around?

Yes. I mean, he does, of course he has money. You know, he's a billionaire. We know that. Are we sure with the of course, mayor? This was what, Jesse, the day before he made his offer of $100 million? You would be correct. There needs to be a milkshake duck term for this.

Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Okay. I'm going to apologize for this last one in advance. Here we have aspiring presidential candidate RFK Jr. Oh, God. I got to be honest, as usual.

it's hard to know what in the hell this dude is thinking. I can easily think that he's living in another multiverse with half the things he says and things are true. Here he is going to talk to us about how we solve racism in America. By giving out business models? Well, you'll see. So I don't think you can change that part of human nature. What you can do is you can make kids resilient against it. And the way you do that is by giving them a great education so that they know that they have potential.

And the other thing is to give them business models, role models, and opportunities within their own neighborhood. You know, black men who are running barbershops, who are running bars, who are running dance studios, who are running local businesses, restaurants, et cetera, and who are part of that community. And, you know, when I was a kid, my uncle was the first Irish Catholic president of our country. And when he ran for president, there was a tremendous resurgence in it. anti-Catholic sediment in this country. And a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. I remember cross is being

burned when I was a kid against an anti-Catholic president. A lot of other, I was called a Mick, a mackerel snatcher, all these anti-Catholic slurs when I was a kid. But it never bothered me. If somebody called me that, I would think that guy's got a problem.

But I didn't think I have a problem. And that, because I had a great education, I had a family who loved me, I had role models, country had confidence in my own future. Oh, you know, those kind of things had no impact on me. I'm sorry. His last name is Kennedy, right? So all of the things that he's talking about, he just compared his childhood upbringing to black children to aspire to what exactly was his connection that he was, that he was making? Because the anti-Catholic slurs didn't reach him at

Camelot that the systemic racism that is implanted in the DNA of this country, we black folks should just shrug off and then open a barbershop. Was that what he was offering? Shut the fuck up. Why do people listen to it? I can't. I can't. I'm going to take a clear.

That's what it is. I have not heard the slur mackerel snatcher. I never in my life. Since I was a young kid in the 19th century. I was personally waiting for him to start singing Taylor Swift, shake it off. God. I love how his first thing is, well, you can't change human nature. People are always going to be racist.

I guess that makes that sort of of a piece with his whole, you can't stop viruses. It's just amazing to me. The fact of the matter is you can change human nature. And he sort of actually gets to that by talking about education and stuff like that. But yeah, that's the answers. That's how you change human nature. If you really believe that, like, people are born racist or whatever, then you change that by educating them. But, of course, these are the same people who are against whatever they consider critical race theory and DEI initiatives and stuff like that.

And everything that might actually educate people as to how they should not be racist and, you know, every other form of bigotry. I wish that you would stop trying to make white children hate themselves, Andy. I know. Like, I want. I wish you would be better. I just want other white children to feel about themselves the way I feel about myself. I want them to hate. I want them to have self-loathing the way I do.

Levy, 2028, baby. Let's go. There we go. The biggest story of my lifetime is that the rich have gotten richer and the rest of us haven't. So writes Hamilton Nolan in his new book, The Hammer, Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Nolan was a longtime writer at Gawker and currently covers labor and politics for both in these times, and The Guardian, and he joins me now to talk about the book. Hamilton, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Talk about your own experience in union organizing at Gawker,

because you've been fairly outspoken about how this book probably wouldn't have happened without that. Yeah, I was a row for Gawker starting in 2008, and I wrote a lot about class war and inequality and politics and labor issues, but we didn't have a union and really none of the online media companies that had grown up around that time had a union until 2015, when we decided to unionize Gawker Media, and we did that successfully, sort of was the first of many online media and old school media companies that sort of started unionizing around that time and are still unionizing today. At Gawker, we signed our first union contract just before the company was bankrupted by lawsuit, funded by Peter Thiel. So we all got to keep our jobs and we all got to keep our salaries because of

that union contract. So from the very beginning, you know, we saw the tangible value of having a union contract. And I think that it's been really heartening to see that sort of wave of unionization change in this industry for the better, at least to some extent. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, a statistic you cite in the book is that in the 1950s, one in three American workers was a union member, but that figure is now one in 10. You put the blame for that primarily on, you know, as you say, business interests and their political friends, but you're also not shy about noting that many unions have more or less stopped trying and sort of particularly in terms of, you know, recruiting new members. Why is that? It's a good question, you know, and I do think that it's

important that everybody in America who cares about, you know, public policy at all should really understand the scale of the loss of union power, you know, over the second half of the 20th century and continuing up to this day from one in three to one in ten, that's been a big factor that has allowed inequality to flourish in this country and is sort of driving a lot of the other bad kinds of trends that people worry about. So it's a huge problem. It's really an existential problem for organized labor and for the ability of working people to exercise power in this country. And like you said, you know, it is true that the primary reason for the loss in union density has been union busting and bad labor laws and all these things that unions will talk about when you ask them about it.

But also the institutions of organized labor themselves have gotten very complacent and sort of have acted. And this varies from union to union. There are good unions always and they're good organizing campaigns always. But when you pull back and look at the numbers, what you see is organized labor as a whole has not aggressively tried to organize new people on the scale that they need to to turn around that decline. And they sort of acted in a way to protect what they have rather than trying to reach out and organize millions of new people like they need to reverse this long-term decline. And so there's a lot of institutional reasons for it. Partly it's just that unions are funded by dues from existing members. So there's sort of an always present pressure to tend to

the needs of existing members rather than new members. But what we can say for sure is like they need to turn this around and they need to organize on a large scale or else they are headed it straight into oblivion. Yeah, the sense I got from the book is that at some point, the union sort of decided that they needed to play defense instead of offense. Is that a fair way of putting it? Yeah. And, you know, when you talk to union people who've been working in that world for many decades, you know, Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in the early 80s and that sort of set the tone for this long, dark period for unions in America where the entire atmosphere was very anti-union. Unions got a little bit scared. You know, they were scared to strike.

They were in a negative political atmosphere. And so this philosophy that some people call Fortress unionism sort of rose up into prominence, which is like, you know, unions need to hunker down and protect what we have and wait for the winds to change, you know, wait for the situation of society to change. And the reality is like, it has changed. It has changed. And particularly post-pandemic, They have millions of workers now who say that they want what unions have to offer. Unions and public opinion polls are extremely popular today, as popular as they've been in 60 years. And so the conditions on the ground have changed. And what we're not seeing, though, is the institutions of organized labor jump up and take advantage of the situation they have right now.

Yeah, one of the really interesting things in the book is the way you sort of, like every couple of chapters, you go back to the story of a remark. woman named Sarah Nelson, and you sort of continue her story throughout the book, intertwining it with the story of unions in general. Tell our listeners who she is. So Sarah Nelson is the head of the Association of Flight Attendants, which is the biggest union of flight attendants in America. She was a flight attendant herself, grew up in a small town in Oregon, sort of an all-American small-town childhood, raised by Christian scientists, grew up, became a flight attendant, got involved in the union and went on to become a union activist and then the president of the union for the past 10 years. She really came to national prominence in 2019 during the government shutdown. The

Trump administration's government shut down when she got up and gave a speech calling for a general strike. And that made a lot of people stand up and pay attention because it was, it was sort of more radical than the type of thing that the average union leader usually says. And so I follow Sarah Nelson in the book because I've always considered her to be one of the most inspiring labor leaders, one of the most radical labor leaders, and one of the people who understands sort of the scale of the problems that unions face and how to take them on. And her union, for example, is 50,000 members in the union, and they're currently in the midst of a drive to organize 28,000 flight attendants at Delta.

That's a union drive right there that would grow her union by 50%, which is just a good example of at least trying to tackle organized. and challenges on the scale that we need to do. Yeah, I mean, it's really amazing. And it's really interesting in the book, how you note that she had an injury while jogging that revealed an underlying congenital health condition with degenerative hips. And that sort of stopped her from running for the presidency of the AFL-CIO. And you sort of come up with an alternate history where that never happened and what that

could have meant for the future of union organizing. and it was just a really fascinating way of portraying it, I thought. Right. So, I mean, for people who don't know, you know, the AFLCO is a coalition of 60 unions, the biggest labor coalition in America. I write a lot in the book about things that the AFLCO could be doing, things that I wish the AFLCO are doing. The AFLCIO is sort of the institution at the center of the labor movement.

And yet we don't see them really pursuing new organizing and a revival of unions in the way that we wish they would. So when I started writing the book, there was a lot of speculation around the idea that Sarah Nelson might run for AFLCO president. And sort of the left wing or the radical wing of the labor movement was extremely excited about this prospect because she is the type of leader that a lot of people felt like would maybe kick the ass of the AFLCO and rev them into action. And she did, you know, as you touched on, end up having a lot of health struggles and other

issues that I write about in the book, you know, she didn't end up running for that position. Part of the story of the book is her struggling with the idea of like, how do you lead this very disparate labor movement and is it even possible to do such a thing? And I think that's an issue that she and all of us are still, are still kind of grappling with. Yeah, let's talk some more about the AFL-CIO. There was an interesting thing you wrote about them. You said, by any reasonable analysis, it has for the past 50 years failed to accomplish its most important goal, building or even maintaining power for the working class. Give me some of the reasons for that. And I also should note that that's a belief that that's not some wacky radical belief you have. Many labor

activists 100% agree with you. Yeah, you know, I mean, I should say up front, like, I am probably more interested in the AFLCO, even than most labor activists. You talk to union organizers and stuff like that and you start talking about the AFLCO and they'll kind of roll their eyes and yeah they see it as sort of this bureaucracy that is that is not particularly involved in the day-to-day reality of organizing unions you know but from my perspective you know the labor movement needs to have a center there needs to be something marshalling all of all of organized labor's resources in a common direction and the AFLCO is that center it is the organization that sits at the middle of unions in america there are something like 13 million members of the AFLCO. So there's a lot of potential power there. And the AFLCO

could be the ones who are directing this revival of unions in America and coordinating a lot of different unions in a common direction to pursue these big organizing goals like Amazon and places like that that are not ever going to be organized by one single union. You know, these are things that we all need to come together around. And the failure of the AFLCO to really think at that scale is something that's gone back throughout its history. I mean, this organization has been around for 100 years, and it's always been kind of seen as the conservative wing of the labor movement. So in that sense, it's nothing new, but when you think about the potential of what the AFL CIO could do, if they really marshaled all these resources and all these

unions in a common direction, it's very frustrating. You know, they tend to be political creatures. They tend to focus on Washington. They're focusing very much on Joe Biden's reelection. And what they don't tend to focus on is the project of organizing millions of new workers, unfortunately. Now, one union that you do actually praise pretty heavily in the book is the culinary workers union local 226 in Las Vegas. What have they been doing that makes them so good? Yeah, you know, there are great unions throughout America, to be clear, not that I saw, I don't want to sound too critical. And I do profile. the Culinary Workers Union in Vegas, which is such a great example, it is the union that

essentially has organized the casino industry in the state of Nevada, and particularly the entire Vegas strip. All those workers who, you know, serve the food and clean the rooms are all members of the culinary union. And they're a very extremely well-organized union. They've been around for 80 years. They have systematically organized all those workers. And then they continue to organize the workers, even when they're members to keep them marshalled and engaged and ready to fight. They are willing to go on strike and they have gone on strike over and over again throughout the years to maintain their power in that city. I mean, they've had strikes that lasted six years and they are willing to go to the mat and do whatever it takes. And because of all that, they are a really fantastic

example of how you can use labor organizing and labor power to create political power and not vice versa. So in other words, you know, when all the presidential candidates come to Nevada for the Nevada caucus, they all go down to that union hall and pay homage to that union, you know, and it's not just because the union wrote them a check. It's because the union is essentially an army of mobilized and organized workers ready to take political action. And that's something that we can replicate in any city in America. It's interesting that you put it in the way you just did because something I wanted to ask you about is that it seems to me that there's a through line in your writing, and not just in the book, but in the stuff you write online and for in these times in the Guardian. And that

through line is your staunch belief that labor power is political power, as you just said, of the culinary union. And for example, in the book, you talk about how both North Carolina and Georgia are purple states, while South Carolina is about as reliably read as it gets. And you say that that's in no small part due to how union unfriendly the state is and due to the lack of resources put in that state by the national unions that they would need in order to change that. And there was a sentence you wrote, you wrote, stronger unions in South Carolina would benefit the Democratic Party and a stronger Democratic Party would benefit unions. In theory, each of those institutions could build one another up in a virtuous cycle. In reality, the lack of resources and lack of a plan leaves both

groups unsuccessfully trying to tread water. And I read that section and I was like, that's sort of the ballgame right there, isn't it? That's really one of the main points I would love people to take from the book is like, you know, that virtuous cycle, for one thing, requires long-term thinking. I mean, if we are locked in the vision of election to election thinking, you can never break out of that single. If you go to the Democratic Party and say put a lot of money in South Carolina, they'll roll their eyes and say why, because we're not going to win South Carolina in this election. But if you have a long-term view, you know, you can understand that one of the biggest reasons for the decline of the Democratic Party in southern states as well as in Midwestern states is the decline of unions. Those two things go directly together. You know, I have a chapter in the book about West Virginia.

Perfect example of a state that was a blue state when it was heavily unionized. and the decline of unions led directly to that state becoming a red state because people lose that connection with the progressive type of values that naturally come along with being a union member. And so I think that the Democratic Party thinks of unions as just transactional allies, like, yeah, you know, they'll write us a check and they'll be on our side because Republicans hate unions. But we need to think a lot more deeply about this in terms of the fact that becoming union members and the process of organizing people into unions changes people and reveals to people new values and gives them those sort of progressive values through lived experience, not through being

lectured to or by watching cable TV. You know, it's a way to teach people about democracy. And so investing in labor organizing is going to pay off long-term politically in ways that sort of transactional election-to-election politics never will. Yeah, it's kind of interesting because you, in a sense, you sort of flip what I think of as the, I guess it's the chicken and the egg thing. You know, I always think we always learn like, well, these states have very little union representation because they're red states. And what you're saying is, no, these are red states because they have very little union representation. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, to be clear, that was a deliberate project to push union density down in those states, you know.

But when you think about the Midwest during the days of heavy manufacturing industries that were heavily unionized, the auto industry, and those unions were some of the strongest political forces in those states. And when you take away that union density, A, you sort of cast out all these people into the void and you leave people hopeless and you leave people with lower service industry jobs that don't pay them as much. Their lives get worse. all these things that lead them to become cynical and sort of provide the fuel for a guy like Trump to rise up. But also you destroy these powerful political institutions, which is what the unions were, and relegate them to the sidelines. You know, you are destroying all the groundwork for progressive political power in those states by allowing unions to collapse. So like, it would be great to see the Democratic Party really prioritize organized labor in a way that we haven't seen maybe, until Biden, although Biden himself could also be doing a lot better.

Yeah, for sure. I want to end by talking about something that you actually write at the beginning of the book. You say that you didn't start out as a writer interested in organized labor. You started out as a writer interested in why America was so fucked up. And I want to pair that with the quote I used to start this interview where you wrote, the biggest story of your lifetime, is that the rich have gotten richer and the rest of us haven't. In your mind from reading the book, it turns out that all of this, why America is so fucked up, how the rich have gotten richer and the rest of us haven't,

is in fact tied to the history of organized labor in this country, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was born in 1979, right, on the cusp of the Reagan era, and you can look at the economic charts, and you can see the explosion of economic inequality in this country really took off, you know, right around the time I was born and has been growing ever since. And you can overlay that with the chart of union density

and see that union density has been declining at the same time that inequality has been rising. So, you know, like I said, as a journalist and as a writer, I'm not the most well-educated person, but I'm a curious person. And so I always wondered, you know, what is driving these things? Why do we have poverty? Why are the rich control everything? As you investigate any of those questions and trace them back to their source, you will find that the decline of worker power is one of the key sources of all of those trends. And when you have as much wealth as we have now pooled at the very top of the income spectrum. And when you have 40 or 50 years of relatively stagnant wages for the middle class, and you have the collapse of the sort of

classic idea of the American dream that you can have a one income household and you can send your kids to college and buy a home, those ideas are dead. And a big reason why they're dead is the decline of unions. You know, the decline of unions is the thing that allowed the American dream to collapse. And so over the years, I found myself writing more and more about labor issues as I understood their importance and how much they sit at the core of all these problems. And I think that our political discourse would be a lot healthier and more productive if we brought labor issues back to the center of it, because one of the sad impacts of the decline of unions is like people don't think in terms of capital and labor as much as they used to when unions were more

prominent. But the reality is that, you know, that analysis is still the one that sort of reveals how we got here. The book is The Hammer, Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. It's out now. Hamilton Nolan, thank you so much for joining us. It was an absolutely fantastic read, and I learned a hell of a lot about where unions are and where they need to go. Thanks again, Hamilton. Thank you for having me. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, Please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder.

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