The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3564 - Texas Democrats Put Up A Fight; Trump Laps Reagan's Anti-Union Extremism w/ Julie Su

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

It's Hump Day on the Majority Report On today's show: The Texas State Representative Democrats continue their fight against gerrymandering. Former Acting Labor Secretary under the Biden Administration, Julie Su joins the show to discuss Trump's war on workers and unions. Check out her piece in The American Prospect In the Fun Half: Wesley Bell gets drowned in boos at his Town Hall as he denies the genocide in Palestine. Israel's Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir hangs pictures of demolished Gaza in Israeli prisons to torture Palestinian hostages. Then, Gvir-Ben releases a video of him entering Marwan Barghouti's cell to taunt him and boast about erasing Palestinians. Kristi Noem pulls a PR stunt as she takes a paint roller to a panel in the southern border wall and announces that the government will be painting the entire wall black. Trump thinks the black paint will make the wall too hot to climb. Arizonans in the Maricopa County area checkout Alexander Smothers' campaign for Congress. Scott Bessent struggles to find a way to frame the Putin summit in Alaska as a victory. Megyn Kelly has Majorie Taylor-Green on her show to "debate" whether it was a genocide or not. All that and more. The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors RITUAL: To get 6 bottles of wine for $39.99, head to NakedWines.com/MAJORITY and use code MAJORITY for both the code AND PASSWORD.   DELETEME: Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to joindeleteme.com/MAJORITY and use promo code MAJORITY at checkout. SUNSET LAKE: Head on over to Sunset LakeCBD.com and use code Majority for 15% off your first order. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech Check out Matt’s show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon’s show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza’s music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder – https://majorityreportradio.com

You are listening to a free version of The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. To support this show and get another 15 minutes of daily program, go to Majority.fm. Please. The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Wednesday. August 20th, 2025. My name is Emma Vigeland and for Sam Cedar, and this is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA.

On the program today, Julie Sue, former acting U.S. Labor Secretary under the Biden administration, will be with us to talk about Donald Trump's war on workers. Also on the program, Texas votes today on Trump's mandated gerrymandering. plan got to appease the king. Meanwhile, Newsom's proposition to redraw California's congressional maps has a 22-point advantage in polling in the state. Cuomo denies collaborating with Trump. Sure, buddy. I'm sure Politico just made that up.

Or, didn't he say it at the fundraiser? Yeah. Yeah. Fake news. Fake news. Corporate America says the price increase dam is about to break due to the Trump's tariffs. Three more Palestinians starve to death as Israel escalates its bombing campaign in Gaza City and calls up 50,000 reservists for a ground invasion.

Catherine Clark, the number two House Democrat, walks back. back her comments calling Israel's Slaughter a Genocide. Primary them all, folks. Dozens of Microsoft employees walk off the job in protest of the company's surveillance of Palestinians. Elon Musk walks back his third party plans and reportedly comes crawling back to J.D. Vance. Trump targets the Smithsonian Museum again

because he's pissy that it focuses too much on slavery being bad. The lost-caused presidency. Trump's also threatening to kill funding for Virginia schools because the state is resisting the administration's war on transgender kids. A fifth person dies of Legionnaire's disease in Harlem, as cases rise to north of 100. This is also amidst a COVID surge in the country. country. And lastly, Boston mayor Michelle Wu refuses to comply with the Trump administration's demands to roll back its sanctuary city policies. All this and more on today's majority report. Welcome to the show, everybody. It's an majority report Wednesday. What? It's hump day. It's hump day. I wish I had that caching on my, uh, on my soundboard. So people,

would know when my royalties are coming. We have a great show, really looking forward to talking to Julie Sue about Trump's war on workers. There were many, many aspects of the Biden administration that we heavily criticized specifically his foreign policy. But things like Lena Kahn's stewardship of the FTC, Jonathan Cantor's work at the DOJ and Julie Sue's work as Labor Secretary, really strong stuff. So it's going to be a good conversation with her reflecting on the past nine months of this administration. But the big

story in the news today is obviously that Texas is voting on the gerrymandering demands of King Trump today. He wants to either rig the midterms in his favor or if he loses, create some sort of excuse embedded in it. This effort by Texas Republicans would subtract five Democratic seats in the state. Texas has 38 congressional districts, and it's already heavily gerrymandered. It's something like two-thirds of those districts are gerrymandered in favor of Republicans already. This would make it more extreme.

That's not reflective of Texas because, yeah, blue Texas is still a mirage every election cycle, but they do get into the 40 percentage points that doesn't match with the one-third of the representation in the state. And... I mean, Greg Casar's district, one of the better reps whose district will be implicated by this gerrymandering,

but his current district already stretches from Austin to San Antonio. I mean, is it just like a lot... They make it really thin in between. It's like the mythical bridge in between. Show this district, actually. I mean, this is what it is. Like, you can just get a sense.

They are, they want that as thin of a connection between the two urban centers as possible in order to make it so that these voters, particularly voters of color, are concentrated in those districts. And they're trying to make this, they're stretching it to the limit. The upside is, is that I think we anticipate, frankly, that. there's not going to be the same level of enthusiasm for Donald Trump in the midterms. I don't want to put the car before the horse. I'm not saying that the Democrats overwhelmingly win because there's a piece by Ken Vogel in the New York Times today about how they are lagging behind in voter registration, which speaks to the weakness of the party,

not to the weakness of Donald Trump. But if this goes through and it looks like it will, these districts are going to be more pink as opposed to deeper red. which means that if there isn't the level of turnout that Trump experienced in 2024, and this would match with the three other previous elections, presidential elections that he's run in, where Republicans can't generate the same enthusiasm with him, not at the top of the ticket, then this could put some of those pinker districts in peril for Republicans in Texas.

But still, this is like a rosier, not to continue with the president, pink color vision here. But this is a bit of a, that's like a glass half full interpretation of this. Because Brennan Center did an analysis prior to the election last year, and really the margins in the House are very similar. So you can take these numbers, I think, and carry them into this year, that Republicans have 16 seats where they have an advantage to do the gerrymandering in the second. and in the Midwest, the biggest gains are in the more populous states like Florida and Texas.

So Democrats have been at a disadvantage on this front for decades. And Republicans in this effort in Texas, it was so outrageous that dozens of Democrats fled to Illinois, I should say, to try to deny the ability of Republicans to vote on these maps. and we ran into some of those stavours in Chicago. People should check out Matt and David's interview on Left Reckoning with... Yeah, we had Gene Wu and Ramirez Ramos on. And they, at that point, Gene Wu kind of said that they wanted to run out the clock on that special session. And, you know, there's a little bit of dissension with some reps wanting to.

to run the clock out through the possibility of doing this at all this year, which would have required them, frankly, fleeing, you know, who knows if the FBI was going to get involved, if Trump was going to lean on the FBI to say, hey, can you track these state reps down? Pretty insane situation. But it's unfortunate because I feel like this is starting a race to the bottom when it comes to gerrymandering. And the upside, though, is that Democrats haven't engaged in that race at all and Republicans are closer to the bottom. So this is like I think it seems like a bit of a split between some of the Texas Democrats that they're coordinating with the party nationally because this California plan is coming. And then some of the Texas Democrats so they're

worried, of course, about representation of their state from a state level. But you, you already see like the state representatives in Texas, they make just like hundreds of dollars for their work. They have made it so difficult to be a Democratic representative, small D, in that state that everybody else has side jobs. And some of these representatives were like, my kids are starting school and we're getting hit with hundreds of dollars of fines. In the best of times, it's a huge pressure on representatives to have some sort of benefactor who is willing to pay for you. And with these representatives, it is Anna Maria Rodriguez-Ramos and Jean Wu, who, we spoke to specifically, but they, you know, they came to us, their staffers weren't there. They are up in the area, but like, it's a very lean operation because of it's going to cost a lot.

Right. And Beto O'Rourke was trying to raise money for them, and Abbott threatened him with jail, like, literally threatened him with, like, saying that was a crime to raise money for these folks to sustain themselves through this, which is, you know, I mean, a type of insanity, I think. It's why we support raising pay for members of Congress. Absolutely. I mean, this is something that I think even I think Robert Carroll gets into in the LBJ books about how you need a modern government. It requires not only the representatives to be paid in a way that they can be independent from outside financial pressures, but also staffers. Yep. It makes it so they're less likely to be corrupted.

So that's what how the Texas government is set up. But there have been still acts of resistance here. Once the Democrat, many of those Democrats returned, the Republican Speaker down in Texas said when they returned that they needed to sign permission slips to consent to a public safety officer in the state, following them around. And the form would force them to consent to being arrested if they left town. And this is extremely illegal. The Republican speaker does not have that capacity to restrict the movement of the representatives

outside of them, I don't know, going through some sort of legal process where they would have had to be charged with a crime first. So Texas representative Nicole Collier decided to kind of stage a protest here. She refused to sign the permission slip and stayed overnight in the Texas State House. Here she is on with MSNBC yesterday explaining her decision. You've been there now almost 24 hours. You posted a photo of yourself trying to sleep at your desk. How long are you going to stay?

As long as it takes, I mean, you know, this is the fight that all of us have in resisting, you know, the end of our democracy, basically, I mean, if we continue to let them take our freedoms, we won't have any to protect. We won't have any to defend. So we got to start and we got to stop and we got to push back. When you talk about the pushback, this all comes after Democrats, including you, pushed back by leaving the state during the first special session to stop the Republican redistricting plan. What made Democrats decide to come back and what was earned by slowing this process down, given that the maps are now on a glide path in this second session? Sure. You know, about two weeks ago, no one knew the word gerrymandering, but because of the

work of the Texas House Democrats, gerrymandering is a household name. We have been able to stop this first special session, and now we're continued to fight through a legal battle on the floor. But in that process, we have seen government. Reverend Newsom take action in California to neutralize the maps that are being proposed in Texas. So they are fighting fire with fire. You know, what's different now is that, you know, typically they say take that high road. Well, you know, that high road has crumbled. We're on a dirt road.

And we're going to meet them on that dirt road and get down and dirty just like they are. And so my fellow Democrats are ready to continue the fight with the grit that is necessary to challenge the presser and yet these newly drawn congressional maps i like that phrase about the dirt road um and this is what needs to be done that like the the partisan fight is really key here we are having our own battles within the democratic party that are really existential about rooting out apac money rooting out supporters of genocide who are always more often than not the same folks that are not going to oppose legalization, or not legalization, legislation, I should say, that is more robust, things like Medicare for all, child care for all, because if you can be bought on

the issue of genocide, you can be bought on every other issues. Those are the battles we're waging, but the stuff that we should be encouraging within the party is partisanship like this. Now, Matt's point is well taken. There's this weighing of how are we going to support the Texas citizens versus how much are we going to coordinate with the National Party because they're probably returning with the understanding that this California redistricting effort has legs. So, but still calling attention to the corruption here is key. This was another moment down in Texas

where some of the other representatives in solidarity with Collier ripped up the permission slips that they were handed by the Republican Speaker. John Lewis, when he crossed the Edmund Paris Bridge, he said, I am smiling in my mug shop because I know I'm on the right side of history. Then he said something else. He said, you two must find a way to get in the way. Collier got in the way. And today, a lot of her colleagues are joining her. Who's ready to tear up this slip? Who's house? Who's house?

Who's house? Never let them forget that. That's Representative Mahela Plesa. So that's good stuff. We'll see. I mean, the vote's going to go through. I mean, I certainly like the, um the posture and the willingness to uh to mix it up i unfortunately you know what was said in the

clip in the msnbc clip of we're back for another session and now we're going to fight the legal battle on the floor well that's lost yeah and um i mean it was lost the moment they return that's right but but the pressures on them i mean i i they don't so what's happening is is an attempt to salvage a fighting spirit from what is kind of a route. And there is a consolation to balancing this reps out with California reps, but that's not, doesn't do a super abundance for the folks in Texas who are going to lose their representative, right? Oh, what? Doesn't do a great deal for the folks. That word is ruined. Who are going to lose their reps, right? Like, you know, if we have to lose Doggett or Qasar, that's a loss.

Yeah. And it's nice to have, you know, new reps in California, but what does that mean for democracy in Texas? It's a, it's a way to salvage maybe, and maintain a fighting spirit, but in, in what is ultimately a loss. That's true. It would be nice if national Democrats who also don't have power had this same fight. Like, that's the lesson for me here is, is that what Collier said in the interview is true in the sense that, they are at the very least making it a national conversation. And when you don't have power, that's oftentimes the best you can do. However,

I understand maybe there being some disappointment on this front. They also, when Crockett was a state rep, they did this in 2021. And they stayed for longer, did they not, to object to a decision? And so at the very least,

we have some fight, some life in the party. I'm trying to be out of it. There's at least a response. On this Wednesday, right. It is an insane power grab. And to hear people criticize, like, it's insane for Trump to say, hey, go in the middle of the period of gerrymandering when we're not supposed to be doing it for another five years. Give me some more seats.

He literally just said that. I would have, you know, we started the show off yesterday with that union rep in Canada saying, I'm willing to go to jail. I kind of think we do need to get to a point where those bluffs are called when it comes to saying, okay, maybe we do stay out for the rest of this session and for a few months. So these, we're not, they're not able to steal representatives from us. Yep. In a moment, we're going to be talking to Julie Sue, but first, a word from some of our sponsors. I mean, this is one of my favorite sponsors.

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Thank you. We are back and we are We are back and we are joined. Now by Julie Sue, who served as acting U.S. Labor Secretary in the Biden administration and is currently a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. Her latest piece in the American prospect is entitled Union Buster-in-Chief. Julie, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Thank you. It's so good to be here with you. So good for you to be with us.

This is an important conversation because prior to the election, there was a lot of branding by the report. Republicans and their efforts to make it seem like they could be pro-worker in at least aesthetic. And there's this talk about right-wing populism. You don't really see that reflected in their labor policies, do you? I mean, you see the exact opposite, right? Which I suppose is not surprising, given that everything they've said is, you know, they're doing something different to hurt every sector of our communities.

But on workers, it's so clear that they've launched a full-on war on workers. And in many ways, the federal government employees have had to sort of born the brunt of that because this president has both sort of modeled the worst kind of behaviors of an employer and then said to everyone across the country, you know, this is the way that we're allowed to treat people. And it's been the exact opposite of a pro-worker administration. You mentioned there his targeting of federal workers. And early on in your piece in the American prospect, you draw a comparison to Ronald Reagan firing the striking air traffic controllers during his administration.

Can you speak about that parallel and why it's so troubling that Trump seems to be expanding upon it? Yeah. So in 1981, right, Ronald Reagan basically replaced striking air traffic control workers and essentially got the union and sent a very clear message to those workers that they were fully expendable. And this not only was a massive attack on those workers, it also really catalyzed decades of, union-busting activity by private sector employers, too. And so for many of us who care about workers' rights, that's been an example of how government abuse of power can really undermine workers and worker organizing in dramatic ways. You know, the contrast to that is what President Biden did, which was recognized that what presidents say matters,

what the federal government does matters, and be very explicitly pro-union and pro-worker. And we saw the effect of that, too. Federal government unions grew dramatically under the Biden administration. And so I draw the parallel because Donald Trump has taken that 1980s playbook and completely radicalized it, modernized it for his particular brand of war on workers. And at every single turn, he has ripped up union contracts. He's got closed down entire agencies.

he has cut, you know, anywhere he can, he has found a way to pull the rug out from underworking people. And it is going to be devastating for decades to come in all kinds of ways unless we put a stop to it now. Is the precedent of targeting a public sector union the is important to understanding this dynamic here? because, I mean, I guess that's immediately under, you know, his direct control and the umbrella of, you know, the federal government. So that's the first place I guess you would start. But I wonder what that means even more than just it's his war on the federal workforce. That's right. So the problem here with everything that's happening is that it's both Donald Trump and the federal government as employer.

And the federal government is much more highly unionized than the private sector. The private sector is just under just around 10%, and the federal government is over 30. And so it has long been a place where people trade in much higher paying jobs for public service and for the good things that come with a union job, right? Security, decent wages, benefits, a good retirement, things that everybody should have but are not required by law. You get them because you have a union. And so the attacks are both an employer saying that I'm just unilaterally not going to

respect that contract, longstanding contracts in this situation, but also the President of United States saying it's open season on workers and on unions in workplaces. And we've already started to see that, right? The ways that this president has eliminated the ability of, it's really hard. hard to join a union in this country. It's really, really hard once you want one to actually get one. There's a lot of hurdles you have to get through. And when you eliminate the institutions that are in place to help make that happen, it just becomes harder and harder for workers to get what they're legally entitled to and what they want. And the president's latest actions are

another way of sending a clear message that you are not entitled to a union. You're not entitled to organize. You're not going to get those kinds of protections. Can you take us through the firings of this administration and the Doge attacks? It was around 150,000 workers who were fired under Doge. They were utilizing loopholes about protections or lack of protections, rather, for probationary employees to achieve that. But he's now stripped 400,000 federal workers of union protection. So this is a dramatic escalation if you just don't mind laying out the timeline of this assault.

So let's be very clear that this administration. administration from day one has been built on hypocrisy about, you know, we're going to care about workers, but we're going to do everything we can to undermine our own workers' rights. So from the very beginning, it was about insulting them, you know, saying that they're, that they're not really working, right, calling them the deep state. It's all these things that, the setting the groundwork for, you know, being able to do whatever you can. And then, and let's also be clear that these actions are actually not legal, right? There's no backstop at this point to this administration's activities. Now, there have been lawsuits filed, and those have helped us slow, but, slow the

attacks, but what we see is a constant, as you put, escalation. So from the very beginning, it was undermining and discrediting federal employees. And then it was a whole battery of firing probationary employees en masse. Now, again, those actions have been slowed, but it has not stopped this administration, because the other thing you can do if you're a bad employer is just make work so miserable that people are put in a really terrible position having to decide to stay because they care about the mission, stay because they want to do their jobs, and leave because the job has become untenable. And that is something else that the president has done. So giving these ridiculous assign assignments, you know, essentially

tearing away the mission of organizations. Again, on a daily basis, all kinds of seemingly small ways of making work miserable. So, you know, you walk away from your desk and you don't know if you're going to get escorted out the building, right? There's all kinds of stories of the misery that workers have had to put up with. And so then many of them ended up leaving, you know, basically being forced out because they could no longer do their jobs in a way that was consistent with their mission, right? Being told that your job is the exact opposite of what you're supposed to be doing, right? Instead of enforcing labor laws, you're supposed to be helping to round of immigrants, for example. It's just, it makes the jobs untenable. And now, this latest

move of just saying we're not going to respect the unions at all is a way of telling their workers that they're alone, right? There's no one to protect them. They're basically at-will employees. Now they can be fired for anything. And that the unions themselves will be weakened by not having enough members, which takes away one of the most important things that have always stood against autocracies and dictators, right, which are unions fighting against their abuse of power. You mentioned this as illegal. How is it legal for the president to unilaterally tear up?

What is it? It's a collective bargaining agreement. Exactly. I mean, it's not legal. The problem is that the courts have proven to be. an inadequate check on power. Even though there are victories that take place at certain stages, right, the president has been very clear.

He's not going to comply with what courts say. And so that's part of the problem, right? When you have a person in power who is enabled by others who, you know, ratify and magnify the lies and the abuse. And then you don't have a backstop. You really have a lawless situation. And so the actions are not legal. Now, challenging them in court is an important step, but it's really not enough. And I think where the real power comes from is where it's always come from, which is working people who are willing to say no, not on my watch. And all of us need to support the efforts of those workers who are having to draw on courage that they never knew

that they would have to use. Is it your opinion that this unprecedented attack on what should be a legally protected collective bargaining agreement is a canary in the coal mine for this to spread into the private sector because this is something we can also touch on? Trump has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and they can't reach quorum. So if this goes on longer, this means that basically any deliberations about unionization are frozen. That's right. I think what's clear is that all of the rules that we've been relying on to protect workers, protect the right to organize, as inadequate as those rules. were to date, all of that is, you know, it's a whole new, it's a whole new world in which

none of those rules matter. And so, again, the analogy to Reagan is apt because when Ronald Reagan did that, it really opened up a, you know, I call it open season because it really was a declaration of war on workers and on unions that private sector employers picked up their weapons and continue to fight. And that resulted in a large decline in unionization, right? It really, you know, we see the effects of it today. And, and so this president is doing it again, but with absolutely no hold barred. And so, you know, taking away the institutions that protect workers' rights to organize, but also the message, right? There's all kinds of ways that employers bust unions, but hide it under the guise of, you know, they were fired for different

reasons. We actually had to make cuts there because we, you know, right, like, you know, this, it was a cost-cutting effort. It wasn't about busting the union. All kinds of things are perfectly legal, like captive audience meetings that actually end up, you know, targeting union organizers and, and hurting workers. You asked me, you know, about, you know, what the difference is in leadership. When Joe Biden was in office, he not only made very clear to workers who were organizing that the right to form or choose a union is yours and yours alone, right? We had the strongest agencies across the federal government protecting workers' rights to organize enforcing labor laws, enforcing against wage theft and health and safety violations, all part and parcel

of making workers vulnerable, right, when you don't have those things in place. And ensuring that workers got fair contracts. Now all of that has been reversed. And so I think, you know, the rules, there are no rules anymore that protect workers. from the federal government's perspective. And the federal government here, just if I could ask you to expand on the status of the National Labor Relations Board and the firing of Gwen Wilcox, where are we at there? And are you already hearing reports of this having like chilling effects on unionization efforts? I mean, there's important stuff right now happening down in the south.

The UAW is leading drives down there. to get these southern states that have very disadvantageous environments to unionize in, they're trying to get over that hump. But my fear is, of course, there's no bored to hear some of these disputes that are definitely going to come. And as we know, it's completely disproportionate when the employer has all these resources and the union doesn't. Absolutely. So again, Donald Trump has basically unilaterally rescinded the NLRA by not having a quorum on the National Labor Relations Board, right? So he fired Gwen Wilcox. A court initially said that she should be reinstated, and now that has been put on hold. So she's also fighting her legal battle. The other problem, of course, we need to fight in the courts, but those battles take a long time and they're not adequate for the urgency of the moment that we have. So there's no quorum at the NLR. which means that when there are unfair labor practices that are brought forward, the board really cannot act. And that is, to your point, there are difficult organizing drives being taken on by incredible unions with incredible leadership, right?

Going into some of the hardest places to organize and saying these workers deserve better and that, you know, when those workers want to say, we get a stay in our wages, we should be able to come home healthy and safety in the day. We should have benefits like union workers across the rest of the country that those workers are. are unable to get an election, right, to have the unfair labor practices heard. And that's also extremely devastating. The other thing, just kind of connecting all the threads of a president who will declare open season on his own workers and its impact on the private sector is we've already seen that sometimes when workers win their initial right to have a union, that private employers are using the lack of an N-RB to not negotiate a first contract, right?

They're saying there is no NLRB. That's absurd. It's, there's completely no bar to that, right? Negotiating good faith is the employer's obligation. But to your point, the fact that all of these laws and rules and bodies that are supposed to protect workers are being systematically dismantled is allowing employers who would bust their unions to do so, to use that as an excuse to do so. Are there no, what is the recourse in the courts outside of the National Relations Board is there? I'm ignorant about like the statute here, if you don't mind explaining. Well, right.

So, I mean, in a little bit, this is kind of untested, right? Because the NLRB is the board that's supposed to hear unfair labor practice claims. And now without one, it's, you know, it is sort of this, this wild, of exactly what are workers entitled to, especially because, you know, if you go, the reason why the NLRB exists is that you have real experts there who understand the National Labor Relations Act, right, who understand what an unfair labor practice is, who can, who can adjudicate those claims in a, in a more expedited manner. When you rip that away, you really leave workers with very little recourse. So, you know, workers are,

finding their way, right? They're testing, going to court. There's other, you know, states are trying to step into the breach, right? So states like California and Massachusetts have proposals before them that would say in the absence of a federal National Labor Relations Act, we should be able to protect the right to organize, right? Normally that's covered entirely by federal law. And so I think there are people who are stepping into the breach and try to do creative things. But the reality is that is really dismantling a decades-long system that has not been enough, but has been one way that it's been a really important way that workers have been able to exercise their right to join a union. And this is the fact that it's being dismantled by a president who said

that he was going to stand for workers is truly outrageous. Well, I mean, no taxes on tips is what I guess basically comes out of that, which is just obviously. says nothing about, I mean, the right to organize. That, I guess, brings me to expanding our conversation slightly because we're in the middle, I think, of a really turbulent time in our economy. And there, the Biden administration was plagued by accusations of inflation when we know that, in part, greedflation was driving much of this with corporations having record profits, but prices still being high after the naturally occurring bottlenecks from COVID, they extended that and capitalized on it and took home record profits. And that

persists through the Trump administration. But the other piece in our economy that I don't think is getting talked about enough is the underemployment crisis of folks who are working multiple jobs at very low wages, including the burgeoning gig economy, which is reliant on many of these workers to be profitable, and they functionally have very little protections. As someone who works in the administration and works on a lot of these matters, what is your perspective on what that means for workers' rights in the economy if these kinds of jobs continue to be some of the only things that are available to folks. Yeah, great.

So just to break that down for one moment, right? Part of the answer to that is that we recently saw in the latest jobs report that job growth is slowing under this president's chaotic and damaging economic policies. So you have, you know, slowing growth. That means fewer job opportunities for people who are looking. Unemployment is going up. That's real life suffering for people who are just trying to make a, decent living. Then you have what you said, which is this growing gigification of the economy. And the, you know, a century's worth of labor protections, including the minimum wage,

overtime, and the right to unionize attached to workers who are employees, right? You get, you get those protections if you are an employee. If you're not, you don't. And so there's been this also decades-long effort to undermine worker protections by calling your employee something else, calling them an independent contractor, calling them a gig worker, and then saying they're not entitled to rights. And so that's been damaging for organizing, right? Workers have a harder time organizing if they're nominally cut out from the National Labor Relations Act. It also means that workers don't feel like they have rights, right? They feel like they can't, they're not entitled overtime because they're not called an employee. And to your point, this has resulted in a whole

sector of really of insecure work, right, of working people who are working full-time year-round but cannot afford the basics, who cannot get by, who cannot build toward a more secure life. And so those are also your choices that corporations have made, that industries have created, that have really sort of weakened labor law protections, but also been big contributors to poverty wages and poor working conditions. And for my, in my analysis of it, this was only made possible really in a bipartisan manner in over the course of, I don't know, 30 years,

where the focus on consumer prices being low was always kind of the driver of economic policy really across administrations for a while. Now we have Trump who is obsessed with tariffs and wants to actively raise prices. It's not quite clear if he even understands what he's doing, which is a great sign for us. But like, I mean, just what was encouraging

about your work in the administration, was that it was yours and Jonathan Cancers, Lena Con, et cetera, like, it was a departure from some of that consumer focus. Can you zoom out and talk about that dynamic a bit? And if you feel that there's a growing kind of like intellectual community on your guys' side of things that is going to be more Keynesian, maybe? Yeah. I mean, we understood and understand that consumers and workers,

are the same people and that when we talk about how the prices of things are too high and the need to address affordability, of course that's true. That is 100% right. But the price of things is only one half of that equation. The other part is what people make. The other part is how good your wages are, how much you have in your pocket at the end of a workday in order to afford the necessities of life. And the more you undercut workers, the more you undercut enforcement and allow wage theft to run rampant, the less people feel secure, the less people can afford also because their jobs just aren't enough for them to get by anymore.

And that is something that we fought against in the Biden administration. We fought against it by increasing enforcement. We fought by doing everything we could in the executive's power to increase wages, right, including the wages. of federal government contractors, and to fight monopolies that engage in the kind of behavior that's harmful to both workers and to consumers. And so both sides of that equation really matter, and that's why the attacks on workers are ultimately also attacks on, right, a whole, you know, a vision of an economy in which everyday people can actually have some say, right, can have some ability to make choices about their lives.

And a good job is really fundamental to that. Yeah, very much so. Lastly, you mentioned wage theft. For all the talk about crime running rampant all across the country, very little discussion about the number one form of theft in this country, which is wage theft. Can you give our audience a sense of, first, your work on this in the administration and secondly, also the scale of this level of theft

and how pervasive this problem is in the U.S. Yeah. So wage theft is essentially stealing wages out of workers' pockets. And it's 100% right what you said, that there's all this talk about crime that is intended to vilify certain communities, right? It's a focus on really a non-existent crime problem in order to create the ability for this administration to exercise a whole bunch of police power in horrific ways on communities.

When the real crime, working people, not getting what they're supposed to be paid, not getting a just-day's pay for their day's work, is very real. And this administration has completely decided that they don't care about that, that they're going to come down on the side of the billionaire corporation. who have essentially driven a lot of the practices we just talked about, driven the gigification, driven the subcontracting, driven the things that have torn away labor protections, waging dollar protections for workers.

You know, there is a response that the federal government can give to that, and that is to enforce the labor laws. But this administration has also cut the Department of Labor by 20%. And so, you know, the whole thing about, you know, no tax on overtime, on tips. Those things don't help anybody if people don't have a job to begin with. If they're not getting paid overtime, right, which this administration has also refused to, you know, adopt our expansion of overtime pay to workers. And so we are in a situation now where, you know, for working people, it's really dire. The upside is that working people see it,

right? I've always said this, that in government or anywhere else, people say, well, workers are too vulnerable to do this thing, right? Workers are too scared to organize, to stand up, to fight back. In my experience, working people have always been more willing to fight than those of us in positions of power. It's not been their fear that's held everybody back. It's been our own. And that's definitely, this is why, you know, it's a moment for us to lean into the strength and the courage of workers. We're organizing against really great odds who are standing up against, you know, a horrific attack on their rights and their livelihoods,

including to go back to the beginning, right, federal employees, but well beyond that and recognize that call out this administration for the pure hypocrisy of what they're doing to working people. Well, Julie, Sue, I really appreciate your time. Julie served as acting U.S. Labor Secretary under the Biden administration. Currently a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, You can also read her latest piece in the American Prospect, entitled Union Buster in Chief. Thanks so much for your time today.

I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. With that, folks, look at that. I think we're going to go under an hour both days just to shuffle you all into the fun half. I think we're going to say shut Sam up. Just to, yeah. Right.

That too. We will head into the fun half where we'll take your calls and read your IMs and do some clips and all of that. Yeah, Matt. Left reckoning last night. Matt left reckoning. We went into sort of the fall of Evo Morales and Bolivia, kind of a sad story, inability to figure out how to sustain a movement that's frankly been in power for two decades in Moss and the movement towards socialism. Uh, and we also had, uh, uh, Kelsey Bond is running for city council in Atlanta as a DSA member. People should tap in on that and also two MPC members who won, uh, given on the national political committee of the DSA.

So a little DSA wrap up. And, uh, David gave his take, uh, which is, uh, informed mine, frankly, about these Texas state reps. Um, and so we talked about that. Patreon. Patreon.com slash left reckon. We are closing in on 50,000 subs on YouTube. So go subscribe to us. Go subscribe.

Get them to 50. Okay, folks. All right. We will head into the fun half. See you on the other side. You are in for it. All right, folks, 64, 6, 4, 6, 25, 7, 39, 20. See you in the fun. Oh, no. Are you ready? Oh, yeah. Who sent us this? Danarchia. Alpha males are back. Back. back, back, boys, and the alpha males are back, back, back, back.

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