There Are No Girls on the Internet - Marginalized people are the lifeblood of organized labor — BEST OF TANGOTI

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

More and more workers are unionizing across the country.  Metalhead and labor journalist Kim Kelly on the exciting new wave of unionization and what it means. Follow Kim Kelly on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GrimKim Check out Kim’s new book Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fight-Like-Hell/Kim-Kelly/9781982171056 Join our newsletter: Tangoti.com/newsletter And you can follow our very own iHeart Podcast Union on Twitter: https://twitter.com/iheartpodunion  And instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iheartpodunion/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. We're in what feels like a little bit of a renaissance when it comes to organized labor and unions. More and more workers, whether their baristas at Starbucks or journalists, are seeing the power of unions and organizing as a collective. And even though we maybe used to have an idea of a union member as being a white guy working at an auto factory or a steel mill, the face of who we understand as somebody who needs a union is really changing too. More and more media workers and office tech workers, for instance, are trying to unionize.

This shift is something that labor reporter Kim Kelly is really happy to see. I'm Kim Kelly, and I'm a independent labor reporter and the author of Fight Like Hell, the untold history of American labor. So how did you become someone who cared about labor and telling the story of all of these different fights? So I guess the short answer is I got involved in organizing my workplace. That's kind of a direct pipeline right there, right, to caring about the labor movement, joining it. But it was a longer answer.

It was like, well, I'm from a union family, from a very, like, rural working class, kind of isolated place. And everyone who raised me was a construction worker, a steel worker, a teacher. Like, everyone was in the union. It wasn't something that we really talked about that much or really it was, you know, really discussed. it was just part of the job, part of life. Like, oh, yeah, dad's in a union. That's why we have health insurance. That's why he has to go to those meetings sometimes.

That's why he's on strike and we can't go to Walmart, you know, things like that. And it wasn't really until I was at Vice, where is the heavy metal editor. And some colleagues pulled me aside or were like, hey, we want to form a union. What do you think? I'm like, hell, yeah, and let me get involved in that. But I realized that there were even, it was even an option, like that there were unions for people like me, someone who at that point was writing about death metal on the internet. But it turns out there was, and we joined it.

Kim got more and more involved in unions through organizing around her own union at the media company Vice. And we organized like almost, I think by the time I got laid off in 2019, we'd organized like five or six hundred people in the building and we'd bargain two different contracts. Like we'd gotten raised it, we'd improve the workplace. We'd done a ton. We'd accomplished a lot. And I was deeply involved the whole time because

being in a union had always kind of appealed to me as an idea as something that fit into my political, like my political views and my worldview and just kind of felt nice to join that family tradition. But I didn't really start writing about it with any sort of regularity or depth until after we unionized. And I was already freelancing a lot, working advice, because they didn't pay us shit until we organized. Another big endorsement for unionizing a workplace. Yeah, I was freelancing in time. And really, really, it just kind of happened by, not by accident, but unexpectedly, because I was writing a little bit of just freelance stuff about the prison industrial complex for teen book. And I pitched them on a profile of

Mother Jones, the labor leader. I thought, oh, okay, your audience is predominantly like younger women. Like, here is a cool icon we can talk about. And my editor said, yeah, that's a cool idea, but I don't think our audience necessarily knows what a union is. So why don't you write about that first. I was like, okay. And I wrote a little explainer because at that point I'd kind of learned more about the movement, about the history, from talking, the organizers who worked with, from reading books on my own, from just getting all fired off about union stuff as like a baby organizer. And I wrote that article, and it kind of was like mini viral. People paying attention because in 2017, people weren't necessarily used to looking to Teen Vogue for their like anti-capitalist

analysis yet. They're like, what is this? And essentially like, it's that helped me out as a freelancer, where I was like, okay, that went well. What if you let me do a whole column? And they're like, yeah, okay, we'll try it. And I was like four years ago. And really just having that experience, organizing and kind of learning on the fly. And being a big nerd and loving history books kind of made me feel like I was allowed to write about labor. Like I had a leg to stand on.

And once I kind of gave myself that permission, I really just dove in and started writing more and writing more, talking more people, just kind of fell in love with the idea, right? I've spent my whole life up until then writing about heavy metal, which is still a great love and still a huge part of my life. But I was kind of looking for something new, and the union happened to be there at exactly the right time. And once I realized I was going to more union meetings than heavy metal shows, I thought, okay, maybe it's time to actually try and do this. And here we are. Wow, what a trajectory. I know, it's so interesting to me.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it really, I see a lot of through lines in your work. I remember the vice unionization fight, and I heard radio where my podcast is hosted. We just recently did, which was a big deal. I guess it's a good question. What do you think of this idea that, I don't know, I often, I think that everybody could benefit from a union. I think the benefits are unions are for everybody. But I often hear this kind of pushback that like, oh, what does an office media worker need a union for? What do you say to things like that?

Oh, it makes me so mad because it's just the – and there's always, like, stupid, like, rich white guys on Twitter that just feel the need to have opinions about, oh, well, Bradst students don't need a union, video game workers don't need a union, journalists don't need a union, you're not working in a coal mine or in a factory? Okay, do you have a boss? Does you rely on someone else's decisions to pay your bills? Do you have to go to an office? Do you have coworkers? Are you getting mistreated or are you getting disrespected? like are you going to a job? Do you work for someone?

Then you need a union. It is ridiculous to act as though different categories of work or whether you're doing like the white collar, blue collar sort of dichotomy or whatever other artificial division that somebody with an interest in preserving capital likes to lean on. Like it's never been the case that only one type of worker, one demographic of worker, is allowed to have a union or is encouraged to have a union or is encouraged to have a union or is benefited from having a union. Like, every type of worker can benefit from having a union.

And that's not necessarily. You don't have to go through the specific process of, like, filing for an election, dealing with NLRB, doing all of the kind of bureaucratic red tape BS that a lot of workers are kind of forced to deal with now to form a union. You can just get together with your coworkers and try and make some shit happen. Like, there's no one way to be a union member. There's no one way to be a union. and they're all valid and important.

And honestly, building collective power with your coworkers is the most effective and empowering thing that you can do because one worker on their own can only do so much. But a bunch of us, whether it's five or 50 or 500, that's how you move mountains. Whether you work in an office or you work in a coal miner, you work in Amazon, or you're a gig worker. Like, someone is trying to screw you over,

and the only way you can stop that is by getting together with a bunch of other people who are feeling screwed over doing something about it. Oof. I love how you put that. And that's the thing that I really love about talking about labor and the collective organizing. And it's something I really see as a value that it's about people banning together, oftentimes against massive, powerful companies like Amazon that have like teams of

lawyers and PR and all of this. But even with all that institutional power, they're not more powerful than the collective. They're not more powerful than people coming together. Is that something that you see in these union stories as well? Yeah. I mean, Jeff Bezos is the new J. Gould. Like, we talk about they're in the new Gilded Age, the railroad barons. Like, they controlled the rails.

They controlled all the capital. But the workers built those rails and the workers shut them down a whole bunch, like, then struck fear into the hearts of the capitalist class. Like there's always more of us than there are of them. And I think that's something that workers sometimes forget because we are so disenfranchised and isolated and beaten down. But the people on top never forget that. And that's why they get so frightened and anxious when they see workers organizing because they know that they're outnumbered. And that if a whole bunch of people want to make them do something, you know, we've done it before and we'll do it again.

The history of labor in this country is very complicated. There's a lot of wins, there's a lot of losses, there's a lot of struggle and bloodshed and beautiful things and terrible things. But every step forward that we've made as a country has come from workers, has come from regular working people downing their tools and saying, all right, I've had enough of this shit. Let's do something. And that is something that has not gone away. And especially now, I think that's something we're going to keep seeing more of because it's easier for people to be connected to one another. It's easier for people to see other folks taking communication. control, whether you're, you know, a Starbucks customer, you buy stuff from Amazon, you go to

REI, you have a friend who works as a grad student. Like, someone in your life is probably part of some kind of organizing effort. And if they're not, you can help them start or you can start your own. Like, the possibilities are endless. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group, the yard words, right? That's the name.

The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

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Back in April, Amazon warehouse workers on Staten Island's JFK-8, the Amazon warehouse with the most employees in the state of New York, won a historic bid to form a labor union. It's the very first Amazon facility in the United States to have a successful union election, which is huge. So we know that workers at JFK8, the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, they won a union election, and they kind of went against some of the conventional wisdom. You know, they started their own independent organization instead of trying to sort of join an established national union.

And I've read some of your writing on this. And it sounds like to you, it really just comes down to the workers. Can you tell us more about kind of like what you mean by? this. Yeah. So here's the thing. Like what Amazon Labor Union organizers did was incredible and inspiring and so important. And it's also not anything new. Right. The idea of building a union from the ground up of building real human bonds and connections and solidarity, forming a community to fight instead of, you know, following a prescriptive playbook, doing what you're supposed to do because that's how it's done. That's how it sometimes works. Like, everyone has to do.

anything. This is the thing. I mean, that's one of the reasons they're so successful. They kind of threw out that playbook and drew on whether or not it was intentional. They drew on these kind of historical examples of workers in their position doing the exact same thing. Because the workers that organized at JFKA predominantly like younger folks, queer and trans folks, black and brown workers, immigrant workers, multilingual, multigenerational, of a vast, multiracial, multigender, multi-everything kind of coalition. And, And that is how workers have won throughout history. And that is not something that you maybe find in every mainstream labor history book,

but that is just true. That's just how it is. I mean, one of the parallels that I, as a labor nerd, I like to draw between JFK8 and history is what Dorothy Lee Bolden was able to do in the 60s in Atlanta. And she was a domestic worker from the age of nine, like really the majority of black woman in women in that city in that time that had a job. They worked in domestic service. And she realized like, okay, we're not being paid enough.

Our work isn't being treated properly as labor. We're being treated like garbage. And you know what? Like there's a lot of us. Maybe we can do something about this. She actually lived a few doors down from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And she was commisering with him one day. And he told her, like, Dorothy, you know, you can just do something yourself.

Like, if you want to change things, if you want to organize things, like, just do it. And she did. organized the National Domestic Workers Union of America, which wasn't a recognized, like, standard labor union. It wasn't operating within that framework. It was an independent organization. And at its peak, the membership roles hit, I think, 10,000 people. So all black women domestic workers in Atlanta. And they built power and they built political power. They educated one another. They shared resources. In order to join, all you had to show up with was a dollar and a voter registration card, showing the intersection between different movements for justice.

And it's such a cool example because she did it her way and she made a huge difference. You can see there's a direct line from North Lee Bold was organization in the 60s to the current National Domestic Workers Alliance, which I mean in Philly a couple of years ago, they managed to pass an incredibly impactful bill that helped get health care for domestic workers in my city. Like everything builds on the work that someone did before, whether it's in 1960 or 1860. and I'm just excited to see what's going to happen in 50 years when someone younger than me writes a book and interviews Chris Smalls and asks what inspired him, right? Because we're all part of the link. We're all links in a very long chain.

And, you know, one link can do something cool, but that whole long chain, that's how we get close to where we need to be. Oof, I have chills. What a description. I used to talk to a lot of union meetings. I love a story. It's historical.

It's Amazon versus the people and the people are spoken. That's Chris Smalls, the president and founder of the Amazon Labor Union. He started working in Amazon warehouses in 2015. During COVID, when everybody, myself included, was ordering a ton of stuff on Amazon, Chris started to speak out about how warehouses were putting workers at risk by failing to meet basic COVID mitigation protocols. So Chris organized a walk out in protest. He was fired that same day, for, according to Amazon,

failing to meet social distancing protocols. So basically, Amazon was claiming that Chris was the one who was failing to keep Amazon workers safe, not them, which is a little sketchy. So Chris organized. He started the Congress of Essential Workers, which later backed the formation of the Amazon Labor Union. Amazon suits like former Obama administration spokesperson

turned Amazon PR and policy chief, Jay Carney, and David Zablotsky personally smeared Chris in leaked notes, they called him not smart and not articulate. In fact, they thought Chris was so not smart that their plan, according to these reports, was to make Chris the face of the movement, because certainly that would tank it. Only it backfired. Chris, it turns out, was an incredibly effective organizer and spokesperson, and would go on to usher in the very first unionized Amazon warehouse in history.

I mean, it's, so you've just hit on a couple of things that I am fascinated by, One, I do think we have this issue, not just in labor organizing, but in organizing in general, where it's so tempting to have there be one face. Like, this is the person who started this whole thing. When the reality is it's often so many different stories and voices coming together. And I get the inclination to make it about one central figure that, like, that is such a powerful, motivating thing just in our culture, but that sometimes it can obscure what you were just talking about, that it's a lineage. It's about a lot of people coming together and inspiring

each other. Yeah, I saw it was, it was interesting because Twitter is always going to Twitter, but I saw there was some criticism because people were excited about Chris Smalls, who was the leader of Amazon Labor Union, who was kind of the spark that started that whole movement when he was fired in 2019 for protesting about COVID safety. Like, you got to hand it to the guy. Even like sometimes it is okay to lionize someone when they have done something incredible. And I think it is important for us to have those working class heroes. Of course, like no one person does everything. People are flawed.

People are complicated. You know, hero worship is not something that I would recommend. But acknowledging and appreciating someone's skill and someone's importance to a movement, that doesn't take away from the collective effort. That's just kind of giving somebody their flowers. and they deserve them. And I think something that, you know, President Smalls has done in a really wonderful way

is making clear, like, the Amazon Labor Union Organizing Committee, like all of us did this. All of us ran this together. Like a lot of the other organizers are public too, Derek Palmer and Angelica and Justine Medina. Like, it was clearly a very collective effort, but, you know, I think it's okay

to get excited about having one person, you know, getting a little bit more attention. because, I mean, we need more heroes. We need more heroes that look like us and sound like us. And especially the fact that like a young, handsome black man with gold teeth and tattoos is like the face of the labor movement in America right now, that is phenomenal. Like that is going to keep the movement moving. That is going to bring more people in. We do not need more white guys in suits.

Like we got some good ones. Shout out to them. But like the white guys in suits are also a lot. of the time the people that have their boots on our neck. I think it is very important to recognize who the working class is and what they look like, what we look like and sound like and talk like to build us connections to bring more people in and show that there's so much more room in the movement for every other type of person. And I don't want to talk too much shit on the white guys and some of them are great, but some of them are. And they've had plenty of a time to bask in their

attention over the years. I think it is perfectly fine to give someone else a shot. Absolutely. Every single time I see a photo or a video of Chris Smalls and is fitted in his due rag, talking to an elected official, I'm like, yes, this is like, it just feels good to see. It just feels like, and honestly, if I'm being honest, him being, like, his trajectory is what got me fired up about the Amazon fight. I will never forget the way that Amazon suits used this like very clearly racially coded language to refer to him and discredit him. He's inarticulate. He's not smart.

He's not a deep thinker. And I feel like every black and brown person, every immigrant or anybody connected to one of those communities knew exactly what these Amazon suits were trying to do. And what's so funny is that, A, they were really downplaying the multiracial workers that keep their company running, that like they would be. nothing without. And I think that they really kind of shot themselves on the foot because in the end, they made Chris like this lionized face of their movement kind of in spite of their trying to discredit him.

And boy, they couldn't have picked a more effective spokesperson, right? Like, wrong one for that. They even said in some of their little leaked internal memos, like, we're going to make him the face of this. And I remember when they won, he tweeted like, you know, thanks. Like a call. That was the worst mistake. ever made. It's like it just shows this massive disconnect between the people in the C-suite doing

whatever the fuckers they do all day and the people actually working and living these communities and trying to build power, trying to survive. Like, why wouldn't people respond to a character like Chris? Like, why wouldn't people want to talk to other folks in the organizing community to speak their language and live in their neighborhoods and take the bus with them? Like, why would someone listen to some rich guy in a suit when they could talk to, to someone that they're used to seeing, like, out in the neighborhood, who, like, someone whose cousin, you know, like, why, it's, it's like a century apart. But thinking about the way that the workers in the organizing committee at Amazon were able to build power and bridge these

kind of artificial divisions. It reminds them this example. There with me, again, I'm a giant nerd. I just wrote a whole book about it. But in 1946, the Great Sugar Strike in Hawaii. And at that time, and probably still, but especially at that time, the sugar game plantations and the islands were owned entirely by white guys who lived in the mainland. And they were worked by native Hawaiians, as well as Chinese, Korean, Puerto Rican, Filipino, Japanese, immigrants, but predominantly Asian workforce from all sorts of different places, lots of different languages. And the bosses had a very explicit policy of treating different workers differently, unequally. So like some workers made more than others. They kept all of the workers in different segregated camps so that

Chinese workers and Filipino workers, Korean workers, wouldn't really see one another, wouldn't really talk to one another. And they did that because they wanted to make sure the workers wouldn't organize. They wanted to be able to use different groups of workers against one another. As in like earlier strikes, Filipino workers were brought into active strike breakers when Japanese field workers went on strike. There are a lot of instances of that kind of thing happening. And when it came time to strike in 1946, the I have, ALWU in National Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union, a really cool radical union. Their history is rad.

There's time to strike and they realize, okay, we can't let them break us apart like that again. We need to pull people together. And how do we do that? They brought in translators and made sure everybody in every meeting felt heard and understood it was happening. They had different groups of workers cooked for one another and share recipes and build community that way. Same thing they did in the parking lot at Staten Island.

They brought people together on a human, level and show them, you know, you're all being exploited. You're all being treated like garbage. You're all being, you're all in this together, whether or not you chose to be. So why not embrace it and try to become more powerful together? And it worked. And they won. They won like the first big raise in like 20 years. And that's exactly what I thought about when I heard about, you know, the barbecues and the Joloff rice and all of the, just the very personal, intimate kind of organizing and connecting those happening in the parking lot and in the breakroom and Amazon and JFKA.

Like, when you connect with people as people and listen to them and hear them, that's when magic happens. Like, it sounds so basic, but I feel like people in charge don't get that because they don't see us as people. Yeah, that's, and I think it really goes back to what you were saying, that people coming together, people uniting in the power of, like, community and shared vision and a collective, that's such a powerful force. It's not surprising to me that the powers that be, whether it's, you know, sugarcane owners or Amazon,

it's like, oh, we got to keep these people divided. We got to keep them. We have to really inflame these divisions because when they come together, there's more of them than there are of us. And they are very powerful. And so just figuring out ways to really rely on those community bonds, I think, is so important and valuable. Yeah. And unions have screwed that up over the years, too. The labor movement is not, the track record is not great, especially when it comes to like, I mean, even now, right? So earlier, I always think about this example, it's so mad, the American Federation of Labor, which was like an earlier organization that later got folded into, they both say, oh, that's a whole thing.

But in like the 1800s, 1880s, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, the AFL were big supporters. They're all about it. And that was obviously incredibly xenophobic racist legislation that kept Chinese workers and other Asian workers out of the country for decades. And at that point, those labor leaves embrace that because they didn't want people to come in and take their members jobs. And now that is a familiar refrain that we've seen throughout the centuries. Like at one point it was women, and it was black workers, Chinese and other Asian workers. Now it's Mexican, South American, Central American workers who are being painted with that brush. Like there's always this reactionary impulse in some corners to say that, oh, these other people are coming in and taking everything we built.

Well, how do you think you built in the first place by organizing people and trying to help workers? Like, that kind of mentality has harms the movement and harms so many workers over the century. just the thought of seeing a new group of workers coming in who are more vulnerable who are desperate for work who are in a marginalized position and thinking, oh, no, they're going to mess with our guys, our people, instead of thinking, oh, we need to organize them and bring them in so we can help them out. And like, our union will be stronger as a result. The unions who have done that are still around.

Like, they are more effective than the ones that were, you know, exclusionary. And I refuse to kind of get with the times. realize that all workers deserve a union and all workers maybe deserve to join your union, depending on what you do. It's like, I think a good example of unions kind of, and this isn't necessarily like that type of division. This is more like just workplace division. But I think about the United Auto Workers who are obviously the storied industrial union.

Like, I touch it in the book and they're, you know, they've been around forever. They're synonymous with like Detroit and the Rust Belt and like, you know, the automotive of industry. And right now, out of their 400,000 members, a quarter of those 100,000 people, they're grad students. They work in education. They work in colleges and universities in California and across the country. And that is the big shift. And that's a great, like, that is how you evolve. That is how you grow and stay relevant. Like, sure, an adjunct professor at, you know, University of California has a different experience from someone working in a plant in Flint, Michigan, but that doesn't mean that they still don't need those higher wages,

those better working conditions, that protections on the union contract. Like, we're all in this together. And the sooner that people realize that and act and organize around that principle, like, sooner we're going to get shit done. The sooner we'll get free. I mean, it's so simple, the people have fucked it up so much of the years. More after a quick break. podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because your parents made a huge, donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Huber me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Last night, a blown call changed a game.

This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear.

The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context and ask the questions everybody wants answered. SportsSlice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to SportsSlice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slices Life 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Let's get right back into it. So this is probably where I should say that I have a pretty complicated personal relationship with Ammit. If you walked into my apartment building on any given day, there's probably a few Amazon boxes

shamefully stacked up in the trash. And I honestly don't want to tell you how much I order from them. Let's just say, it's a lot. And I'd be willing to bet that I am not alone. It's just the truth that our, myself very much included, individual actions impact what life is like for workers at Amazon warehouses. So what should we do? So to that vein of sort of the sooner we've been,

realize we're all in this together. I have to sort of admit something, something that I'm like, it's one of, it's probably, there's probably not many things in my life that I am like more deeply personally ashamed of than my personal relationship to Amazon. I got very hooked on it during the pandemic. And what I really mean is like, I was clearly sort of like relying on it to experience like a short term serotonin boost of like new shit at my door because I was depressed and sad. Like most people. I hear you. Oh, God, there's a Sephora box right behind you, right behind this laptop that you can't see.

So I, yeah. And I think there are probably people out there listening who can relate, you know, do you think that there is a need for all of us to sort of recalibrate around the human cost of companies like Amazon and sort of just like what it means? You know, I've listened to Amazon workers talk about how they're not robots. But I think it can be hard for people, especially people who. might kind of have to rely on Amazon for whatever reason. Like maybe they have a disability. Maybe they're a new mom.

And like, you know, it's just like how shit gets done in their household. I don't know. I guess I wonder, how can we, is there a way for us to sort of meaningly recalibrate so that people, to sort of feel more attuned with the fact that like, yeah, the reason why I was able to get a new hat in 24 hours is because of a person who brought it here and a person who put it in a box for me. Right. And that's hard.

That's like one of the great conundrums of, modern existence, right? Like the idea of like no ethical consumption under capitalism, I'm probably not even smart enough to discuss all the implications of that, right? But, and I do think that it's important to recognize that individual people should not necessarily be on the hook for the actions of massive corporations and the failed government that it's allowed things to get to this point. I mean, I personally try to avoid Amazon, but like half the time that just means I'm trying to find someone on Walmart.com, you know, like it's not, we're kind of, we're stuck in this current reality. I mean,

You can do little things like instead of pushing for two-day shipping, go for like the later option. You know, like if you're able, just go to the store. Like if you are not, because a lot of people, like you said, are dependent on delivery services because they're disabled. They're immunocompromise. They have other stressors on their life. That means that they need to use these services. And I think that is fine. Like people need to survive and people need to thrive in the ways that they're able to.

But yeah, I think that ditching Amazon would be cool. But then if everyone in the nation was like, we're going to boycott Amazon and then did it, that would be cool. That would have an impact. But the U.S. government still pays Amazon to use the internet. Like there's all the, their tentacles are so deep into everything we consume and every part of our existence as like beings who use technology that there's only so much that individual consumers can do. So I don't know. Like try to avoid it if you can. But like half the time my mother-in-law sends us crap off Amazon anyway. She does not listen to me. She's Italian. It's a hard question, right? I think even what you're talking about now, like this step of realism, like I got this because a person brought it to me, a person impacted, that person might be in pain, that person might be having a hard time. Even just internalizing and understanding that aspect of things will probably impact

your consumer habits and it will probably impact the way you see, you know, petitions about workers asking for better working conditions or the way that you support. union drives. Like, I think the first step that any person can take, in my other situation, is to recognize the human cost of this, you know, these consumption patterns, this set up, this whole, you know, capitalist health scape we're trapped within. Like, and then what you do from there is kind of up to you. But I think that putting the onus on individual people to fix all this stuff isn't really fair when we have a government and a social system. And, you know, in a capitalist society to blame.

You know, you can, if we all got together and did a boycott, that would be cool. But I don't know. It's a hard question. How do you go up against a giant when you're not? Like, because consumers, there's probably way that consumers could organize against Amazon, but I don't know what that would look like. A boycott a strike. I feel like people, I see people talking about, oh, we get a boycott Amazon all the time

whenever news comes out of how terrible they are. I'm like, yeah, avoid them if you can. but I think we need some kind of greater concentrated strategy if we really wanted to take them down. And then what will come after them? How are we going to go after Walmart and Target? Like that's cool too, but it's a big thorny thing. And if it comes down to it, at the very least,

don't pick 24-hour shipping. Yeah, that's a good, like practical. If you've got a little bit of a problematic relationship with Amazon, like I do, at least, you know, you can make that experience, if you're going to buy from them, make that experience a little less crappy for some of the workers who are doing the work to bring you your serotonin boost or the like, life-saving medicine that you need or what have you. Right. Yeah, it comes down to remembering that there are people in those warehouses. And a lot of them are in pain. A lot of them are struggling.

Some of them are going to lose their lives because the way the Amazon operates. And I mean, maybe I'm not a big electoral guy, but, pressuring your elected officials to try and do something about Amazon and corporations like that, that could be an avenue for people too. I feel like there's a lot of different ways to slay a giant or at least, you know, cut a couple pounds of flesh off of them. And hopefully one thing we'll see from the success of Amazon Labor Union Drive and, you know, hopefully more rumblings that we'll see across the countries, that people will realize what's happening and realize the role they play and just maybe reevaluate the way that they interact with that system. And, you know, if they

have friends at Amazon, maybe tell them about the union, the union would be a good step too. Yeah, I like that. I mean, it's so interesting because I was reading the story yesterday, I think it was yesterday, about how the food delivery service Grubhub had this free, they were going to do free lunch for three hours yesterday. And it basically was a shit show. All the kitchens were really backed up. And come to find out, they didn't tell any of the kitchens or the delivery drivers that this

was happening. And so part of me was like, are they just so divorced? from the idea of like human labor that they didn't even think that they needed to give these people a heads up on what they were doing? I mean, they don't consider those people

employees, even though they clearly work for the country, and they don't consider them like equal partners when they're dealing with these in pet restaurants. I mean, Grubhub is so shady. I was just reading today, like I live across the corner from like an incredible Indonesian restaurant

and they're posting an Instagram like, please don't order for Grubhub. We didn't ask to be on there. They don't have our prices right. like we're trying to get them to take it down. Like they will do that. They'll try and encroach on independent businesses like whole operations just because they think it might get them more of a commission.

Like they don't care about the people they quote unquote partner with at all, whether they're business owners and restaurant workers or the delivery workers. Like it does come down to that idea that the people that are doing this labor are invisible to the people that are making these decisions that impact their days. Like, oh, they'll figure it. out. Oh, there's plenty of drivers. Oh, there's so many ways to justify treating people poorly if you don't have their welfare and their well-being at the top of your mind. And that's clearly what happens with these tech companies. They don't, like, the fact that so many people that work for tech companies are

resigned in this weird nether realm of gig work instead of just being given a W-2 and clearly acknowledge as the employees they are. Like, when someone won't even acknowledge that you work for them, like, they're certainly not going to acknowledge your humanity. If they don't value enough to give you the proper legal paperwork, they do not care how your day is going. And that is the problem. It is a problem. I mean, it's, I, it's so interesting to me how oftentimes tech company, like, when we're talking about organized labor, it's often conversations about tech companies. Do you, do you see technology and labor as linked? Oh, yeah. I'm not, I'm not a technology guy, and there's definitely reporters who do really good work in that space, especially folks at motherboards,

Shout out to Edward on Wiesow and Lauren Gurley. They're really on top of those intersections. I'm kind of a dummy when it comes to tech stuff. But even just in terms of what you see happening, whether it's in like the gig work world or the increasing surveillance that companies are able to levy against union organizers, Amazon's little banned word list on their internal chat, or the whole big brother aspect of them being able to monitor everything you do.

Like technology and labor have always been connected. I mean, going back to the Industrial Revolution, right? that new technology that came in back in the day pulled people out of uprooted society, pulled people into these factories and these dark satanic mills, totally kind of reconceive the way people related to labor and wage labor specifically. I mean, one of the things about tech work and like gig work, I keep harping on this gig work, gig economy thing, but I think it is so insiduous. And it is such a big issue in labor right now is that that's not necessarily a new thing either.

because when you think about like someone who is a gig worker you're giving you're given little assignments and you get a little bit of money for every little piece that you do you don't have a specific set work day or set hours you're just kind of picking up whatever scraps come your way and trying to piece together something you can survive on

that is a very old concept going back to like the early 1900s something called piecework garment workers in New York City specifically at that time spend all day laboring at the factory and all day I mean like 12 plus hours and poorly ventilated, hot or cold, locked door, just nightmare places. They, and a lot of them were women, a lot of them were children.

These folks would go spend all day in the factory and then come home and they would bring home more scraps of fabric or unfinished projects and work on these pieces and they would get paid by the piece. And basically, like, they're kind of the predecessors of the folks that are stuck in this predicament right now because they didn't have, I mean, they had their day. job, but they were trying to make more money, so they're being paid so poorly at their day job by doing these bits and pieces. And of course, they got short-changed. Of course, they were, you know, this isn't like in the era of candlelight. So imagine someone hunched over sewing a shirtwaist

at 1 a.m. in the morning before they have to wake up at 5 to go to the factory. Like, that is not that far removed from what today's delivery drivers and rideshare app drivers and all of the other things that are now being grouped into this sort of amorphous gig work, remote work, just this weird morass of garbage. It happened before. And regulations and labor laws and progress in that space kind of chipped away at that. And right now we're kind of in this weird Wild West zone where tech companies can do whatever they want, which seems like maybe somebody in charge to do something about that. but half the people in charge are like friends with the tech people. So it's a little bit of a different world, but some things really haven't changed.

Yeah, I definitely see that as well. So I want to talk about the book a little bit. So Fight Like Hell, the untold history of American labor, you're really right about the ways that people who have been historically marginalized, like women and black folks and indigenous folks, were the lifeblood of labor and always have been. and like our stories and our voices were always there. Even though, you know, I feel like the face of what we think of as a someone involved in a union is like a white male.

I guess my question is, one, how do we make sure that we're telling a more authentic story of what the face of labor actually looks like? And are there any, do you have a favorite figure or a person who you want to get more shine in the history of labor? Yeah, well, okay, I'll give it the second part in the second. But I think, like, it's one of the most important things to realize and recognize is like, you know, the subtitle is the untold history. And that's not to say that folks haven't been telling these stories the whole time, right? Like the workers told them in the first place, and then contemporary journalists and chroniclers wrote them down. And then historians and academic research as an archivist, they dug into the past and pulled out all these pieces and preserved them and analyzed them and, you know, tucked them away somewhere safe. So then, like, journalists and nerds like me could come in and kind of pull together and synthesized.

the size of that information and bringing out further people to see. I think so much of it comes down to people that are in a position to elevate these stores and write about labor, write about history, do it in a way that's accessible and intersectional and inclusive. It's not that hard. Like, literally, you could, like any labor book you could pick up, like, there are black and brown and indigenous and queer and disabled folks and women and every other gender, like in those stories, too. It just depends on what you choose to focus on. And I think that is something that people can be more mindful of. And certainly not folks in the academic space who are like very specifically research specific groups or eras like, whether it's like Judy Young who wrote a book called Unbound Feet of Social History of San Francisco that was hugely impactful for my research into that area.

Or Dr. Tara Hunter who wrote to enjoy my freedom, which is about Black Women's Labor Post-Reconstruction. And academics have done this work, but it is not necessarily on offer to everyone. You can't necessarily walk into a library and pick up their books. So you should be able to. There's a little bit of a gap between what's available to folks to academic space and what's available to folks that maybe walk by Barnes & Noble on their way home from work. And it's really important to me to pull together as much as I could from that history and, you know, pull from tons and tons of research and different historians and newspapers and magazine articles and interviews and put it together in a way that made it very clear that everyone else has always been here and has done incredible things.

And I hope that people will read my book and then read the bibliography and follow those breadcrumbs and find some more of those important writings because this is just the beginning. This is kind of an intro to a lot of these folks. Like one of the people, to your second question, one of the people that I was so excited to write about because I thought I knew so much about her. And then it turns out I was wrong. I was a woman named Lucy Parsons who, and I knew about her just from my involvement in like radical space. She's kind of like an anarchist icon. And I had read an earlier biography of her from the 70s. I'd read her in writings.

I thought I had a pretty good grip on who she was. But then this story named Jacqueline Jones put out a book a couple of years. ago called a goddess of anarchy that was this exhaustively researched biography of Lucy Parsons' life. And it turns out that the common wisdom about her and her life was pretty wrong during her lifetime. And Lucy Parsons, she was kind of a chameleon. It was kind of to her. She decided to shape shift a little bit and hide who she was in order to be more impactful in her work and more easily relatable to the white factory worker she was trying to organize, right?

because she presented herself as a mixed like Spanish and indigenous maiden from Texas. That's what she said she was. And she said she was from there. And she moved to Chicago with her husband, Albert Parsons, in the late 1800s. And they set up shop and started organizing in the anarchist community and the labor community. Like she was a dressmaker. And she organized women garment workers. And she had like a very interesting overlap when it comes to like labor and intergist politics,

revolutionary politics because at that time a lot of those folks were the same people like that was a very not incestuous but a very interconnected community like it kind of still is now right like radicals we've always been here we've always been getting up to mischief in the labor movement elsewhere but um so yeah she was she and she was a co-founder of the industrial works of the world iW like she she had an impact in the labor community certainly and in labor history but lucy parsons was not who she said she was she was born in virginia on a plantation. She was a black woman who was born enslaved who moved out to Texas following emancipation, and then she kind of built up her own mythology to protect herself. And for other reasons that

I don't know what went through her head. I haven't met her, but she was just this fascinating character. And she intersected with so many different pieces of so many different movements. But I tried to write a better in a way that showed like how important and interesting and like radical and milton she was, but also acknowledged like she was not perfect. Like even outside of her own identity and, you know, the way she presented herself, like she did, like she made some pretty gnarly decisions in her life and you can read more about it. But it was a challenge to write about a figure that I've admired for so long and to kind of address a little bit of the uglier and messy humanity of a person like that. But I was really excited to include her because I

I feel that she's very well known in radical circles, but labor people, unless you're, like, in Chicago and have a specific interest in that point in time, you probably don't know that much about Lucy Parsons. So you probably have a pretty negative view of her and the other anarchists. And I was hoping to kind of, I don't know, present a more balanced view of someone who I think is a really important historical figure. That's fascinating. And it really does go back to recognizing humanity and sort of if you only know Lucy Parsons as this. you know, hero figure that you miss out on all these other parts of who she was and how, and what made her her and how she showed up in the world. And is, I don't know, isn't it better to have a messy, complex, honest, human person to, to, to, you know, look to for guidance than a

hero than someone who like, you know, is, just isn't, isn't all of those things? Right, because that just makes it seem like a storybook kind of situation or a fairy tale. instead of a flesh and blood person, a historical thing that happened. And so many of the people in this book are complicated, or they've been, either people that have been kind of left out or they have been included, but not in the fullness of their whole experience. Like, I start out the book in one of the earlier chapters talking about the Triangle Sherways Factory Fire, which I feel like a lot of people know about that.

That's a big one. And Clara Lemlich, one of the organizers of the Garmin Workers Union that was kind of in that milieu, right? Like she was part of the uprising of the 20,000 in 1909. That was before the Triangle Factory Fart, but they're connected. As Claire Lemlich, who is often painted as this just kind of spunky girl who stood up in a meeting and said, we're going to go on strike. Like, she was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who had been organizing for years. She had gotten her ribs broken by the cops on the picket line.

Like, she was an organizer. She was out there. Like, she was not just a spontaneous romantic heroine. Like, she was in that strapped. struggle. And like the connection with the triangle of shirtweed's factory fire is that the work that Clara Lemlick and other organizers, predominantly at that point, Eastern European, Jewish women and Italian women, the work they had done, if the owners of that factory had signed on to the agreement that those organizers and that strike forced like most of the other garment factories

in that area of Manhattan to sign, those workers probably wouldn't have burned to death. Like, they were one of the only factories that didn't sign on to these more increased safety of courts. So, yeah, I'm going, I guess, a slightly different direction. But it just shows that, like, these human people that are so connected to so many other things happening, like, you're in, no one's just a hero. You know, sometimes you're someone who got beat up by the cops and decided, okay, I'm going to keep going. I'm going to force this system to change because it's not fair. Starting with a Starbucks and Buffalo in 2021, Starbucks baristas have been unionizing across the country

in states like California and Utah. And a lot of this energy is being sparked by a new generation, younger folks. 77% of young adults support unions, according to a September Gallup poll. And I have to say, that feels pretty darn hopeful. We're in this moment where it feels like a lot of big wins for labor, you know, the first Starbucks unionizing, you know, the JFK-8.

I'm seeing a lot of interesting chatter about unions on places like TikTok where younger folks hang out like Gen Z. So they're really fired up about unions. Are you hopeful that we're entering this new era of union power? I am always hopeful to the point of almost being a polliana about these things. And I think that is, it's definitely a conscious decision to be hopeful and be optimistic. Because the labor movement has kind of been in decline since really before I was born. and I'm 34. So I guess, like, the entirety that I have been on this earth, the numbers of union density

have been falling, you know, anti-union legislation has been, you know, cutting us off at the knees. There have been all of these factors, like manufacturing, Lord knows what happened there. Like, there have been all these factors kind of pulling the movement out of the movement, like kind of putting a damper on things, we'll say. And, you know, facts aren't always fun. Numbers are not always fun, especially when you're looking at you university. But we are in a moment where, like you said, specifically, the younger generation is interested and fired up and paying attention. And not only are they paying attention, they're doing something. They're organizing. I mean, the Starbucks workers and Amazon workers, like, those are younger people. Like, not only are they younger people, they're queer and trans, black and brown, immigrant workers, like workers from these marginalized backgrounds that have always formed the backbone of the labor movement, but have not necessarily gotten their do, like these are the workers propelling things forward. And that is important and significant.

And even some of the conversation I've seen, like on TikTok and other places where maybe a traditional labor union isn't the answer for some specific groups of people, that doesn't mean that then thinking about it is inconsequential. And that doesn't mean they're going to find a different way to organize and find a different way to harness their labor. Like I got an email from a person, actually I get email them back, about a bunch of independent. sellers on Etsy who want to form an independent seller's guild and that is an it that is very interesting like I need to do a little bit of reading to figure out what to tell them because like that's kind of a whole bunch of small business owners coming together and they want to organize against this

bigger company that they are kind of in dialogue with like that is not like that's tricky that's a little complicated but it's very interesting like that is not something that would have happened five years ago or maybe even a couple years ago like all of these new organizing wins and some of the setbacks and some of the losses. Like that is all working in concert to get people excited and give people an option. So I think a lot of folks for a very long time have maybe either felt or been made to feel like the labor movement isn't for them. Like unions aren't for them. Like back when I was advice, when someone asked me if I went to unionize, I was like, we can do that.

We work Williamsburg. Like there's kombucha in the fridge. Like really? Like my dad's an operating engineer. I can be in the same movement as him. And I could. And so can anyone else. There are a lot of ways to form a reunion,

a lot of ways to organize with your coworkers and build power. And I think this current generation, and gosh, it feels so, makes it feel so old to say that. I'm like, not old, I promise. But definitely people younger than me are doing really big things. And I don't think that's going to stop. Like, I know that Amazon and Starbucks are going to pull out every stop and use every nefarious legal means and probably extra legal means they can think of to try and slow this wave down and try to stave off union negotiations and put a stop to this.

But I don't think you can put that lightning back in the bottle. And I think if the corporations keep actively trying to bust up these unions and break down these organizers' spirits, like there are going to be consequences. You can't be a big, quote unquote, progressive company and be a union buster. and have anyone take you seriously. I think the tide has turned in a very real way. And I'm sure that there are labor historians and economists who have a whole bunch of, like, you know, like my broader perspective at numbers

and, like, have a lot of things to say about that. But as someone who's just, like, studied unions a lot and talked to a lot of workers and was very excited about unions in general. Like, this feels like a very cool time to be alive and to be paying attention. And I am so grateful to those younger workers who are kind of pushing the movement in this direction

where it's needed to go for so long. I love it. I love a hopeful ending. I'm just, I believe that we will win, even if it's after I'm dead. Kim, where can people keep up with all the amazing work you're up to and get the book? So you can buy the book anywhere. I mean, fuck Amazon. If you got it, you can get on Amazon.

But I always tell people to, if you can either order from like bookshop or Indybound or like an independent bookstore or get it from the library. Like the library changed my life. I wouldn't be here without it. So if a library has it, just get it there. I don't care. I just want you to read it. And I am aggressively online.

I am on Twitter at Grim Kim, and on Instagram is Kim Kelly writer. And I have a Patreon thing. I think it's just Kim Kelly. And I'm too old for TikTok and all that. But maybe if I figure it out, hopefully you'll find me on there. But you'll give me a little time. I'm in my 30s, man. I'm falling apart.

Awesome. Is there anything that I did not ask that you want to be? to make sure it gets included? No, this is incredible, but I guess the last thing I will say is that I wrote this book for workers and for regular people to read on their breaks or on the bus or when you get home from a long day, to pick it up and page through it and hopefully find people in the pages that ring true to you. I want people to see themselves in this book and to recognize that they are part of this

incredible history and they're part of the future too. Like the labor movement has always belonged to all of us, whether or not the people in power have wanted us to recognize that. And the only way we're going to get closer to being free is by working together and recognizing that power and fighting like hell to take what's ours. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our merch store at tangoody.com slash store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi?

You can reach us at hello at tangoadhi.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed creative. Edited by Joey Pat. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.

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Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where SportsSlice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves,

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