Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Strike! Strike! Strike! ...with Alex Press

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

With strikes in a wide variety of private sectors popping up all across the country — Kelloggs, Kaiser Permanente, coal miners in Alabama, John Deere, The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), Taxi Drivers on hunger strike in NY, and more — the United States might be on the verge of a strike wave, and we’ve brought on the perfect guest to explain exactly what’s going on. Alex Press is a staff writer at Jacobin Magazine, host of the Primer podcast, and author most recently of the Jacobin articles, “US Workers Are in a Militant Mood” and “Halyna Hutchins’s Death on the Set of Rust Was “Not a Freak Accident.” The Conversation will bring you up to date on all of the labor activity currently underway, but will also zoom out to explore the state of the labor movement more broadly, taking a deep dive on how the pandemic has transformed the movement, unpacking what’s really behind the so-called “labor shortage,” and getting to the root of why workers are starting to stand up to bosses in a way that we haven’t seen for quite some time.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. It helps keep this podcast free and sustainable. Please do that if you can. Thank you. And now, on with the show. Strikes show where the power is, right? I mean, the whole illusion of employment is that the boss knows best, that it's the company that employs you, you know, and you're lucky to have a job. But in fact, as soon as workers withdraw their labor, everything grinds to a halt.

And that is an illuminating moment for everyone involved. It can be a politically transformative moment. It isn't necessarily going to lead anyone who's been on a strike to become like a socialist, but it does provide a moment where you can link up one employer's abuse and exploitation to the broader kind of ecosystem in which it operates, which is capitalism.

That empowers the boss to do that, that encourages them, that protects them when they do such things to workers. You're listening to Upscreen. Upscreen. Upscreen. Upscreen. Upscreen. Upscreen. Upscreen. A spooky podcast of demonic documentaries and cryptic conversations that invite you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.

I'm Della Pumpkin. And I'm Robert Gravemound. Happy Halloween. In this blood-curdling episode, we're talking strikes. Yep, it's not just Shocktober, it's Striketober. With strikes in a wide variety of private sectors popping up all across the country, the United States might be on a verge of a strike wave, and we've brought you the perfect guest to explain exactly what's going on. Alex Press is a staff writer at Jacobin Magazine, host of the Primer podcast, and author, most

recently, of the Jacobin articles, U.S. Workers Are in a Militant Mood and Helena Hutchinson's death on the set of Rusk was not a freak accident. This conversation will bring you up to date on all of the labor activity currently underway, but will also zoom out to explore the state of the labor movement more broadly, taking a deep dive into how the pandemic has transformed the movement, unpacking what's really behind the so-called labor shortage, and it will get to the root of why workers are starting to stand up to bosses in a way we haven't seen, well, for quite a while. All right, Robert is going to take it from here. Hi, Alex. Welcome to Upstream. It's really great to have you on. I'm wondering, to start, if you could introduce yourself and talk a bit about how you came to do the work that you're currently doing.

Yeah, sure. So I'm Alex Press. I'm a staff writer at Jacobin Magazine. I write about labor and I freelance all over the place in that respect. So I recently wrote, for example, something we're probably going to talk about, about IATSE. I wrote about that for the New York Times recently. I also host a podcast called Primer, which is about Amazon. How I wound up doing this is I never planned to be a writer or a journalist. I actually, the first thing I ever wrote was really a kind of facade, an excuse for getting in the room with certain workers at my university where we were starting a grad student union. So I pitched The Nation an article about our adjuncts having problems getting a first contract.

My sort of sly, clever thinking was this would be a great excuse to have one-on-one conversations with the adjuncts who were leading that campaign so they could tell us what to expect when we started building our union. But one thing led to another, and I never stopped writing about labor organizing. I did leave my PhD program to do so. So that's sort of the domino meme where one is starts a grad student union and the next is winds up a labor writer. Yeah. So that's how I got into this. Yeah. The very well-known pipeline.

Union organizer to, oh, I'm not that good at union organizing. How else can I contribute? And so that's how I wound up here. Very cool. And yeah. So thanks for sharing that. And yeah, so I want to talk about to start a talk about the strikes currently going on across the US right now in a wide variety of different industries. Some people are calling this strike-tober. what kinds of workplaces, what are some of the demands and the working conditions. And I mean, feel free to get into as much detail as you want. I know that you're focusing specifically on IOTC. But you know, there's like strikes at Kellogg's, or maybe not all of these might not actually be like authorized yet. But there's like coal miners in Alabama, John Deere, taxi drivers on hunger strike in New York, Kaiser Permanente. So yeah. Yeah. So I am writing about a lot of those. I've talked to the Kellogg's workers who are still on strike at every cereal

plant across the country. There's a strike that has just been ended at Heaven Hill Distillery, which produces brands like Evan Williams. Of course, 10,000 workers are on strike at John Deere right now, which is the biggest current strike, as we've both mentioned. Now, IATSE was on the precipice of a strike, which would have been the largest strike since 2007 in the private sector in the U.S. It would have been 60,000 people. And then one to sort of keep an eye on in the horizon is that Kaiser Permanente, the health care giant. There are several unions involved in that one. And they're all they've all been authorizing strikes and they're headed towards a strike. And that would be something like 40,000 people. So that will be big. And yeah, so what's important about this, and I've sort of written about this as there's sort

of two sides of the coin on this. For workers who are unionized in the private sector, we're seeing an uptick in strikes. And it's not just in one type of work, right? It's not just food manufacturing, which is Kellogg's and the Frito-Lay strike and Nabisco and Heaven Hill, but it's also healthcare workers. It's also the film and TV industry. It's also John Deere. It's, you know, so on and so forth. So that's really significant because it represents like a broad kind of shift, right? As we say in the labor movement, you know, strikes build upon each other. That's sort of one thing we sort of think of as it can be this sort of inspiring educational moment for workers. And so every win in a strike is a win for everyone. And notably here, you know, as you said, people are calling this striketober. I think what's important is that people understand that it's not just a straightforward uptick in strikes or something like that. There's the uptick in the private sector.

Normally, it's public sector workers who are striking more often. They're unionized about six times the rate of the private sector in this country. So there's some it's like a third of public sector workers are union compared to six point maybe three percent in the private sector. They haven't been striking almost at all, largely because they're focused on negotiating returns to work. A lot of them took contract extensions to sort of focus on the COVID specific issues. So that has actually been less than usual. And then the flip side of that coin that I referenced is what's happening for workers who are not in unions. And these numbers are what people are calling the great resignation. So the Department of Labor recently

put out numbers that looked at August. And in August, some 4.3 million workers in the U.S. quit their jobs. That's about 2.9 percent of the country's workforce, just insanely high numbers. And that reflects the fact that, you know, sort of to simplify the story, if you have a union, you can stay and fight. If you don't, you can quit. So workers know they have more leverage right now and they're quitting. They're trying to find better deals and navigate the labor market on their own if they don't have another way to sort of extract fairer working conditions and wages and benefits from their boss. So those two things are going on. And I think it's fair to say that that reflects that workers in the United States are more willing

to fight right now. They know that they deserve it. They've been worked so hard during the pandemic. And so they're either quitting their jobs if they don't get fair deals, or they're going on strike to win them. So yeah, let's let's sort of like, dive into a specific case here. Let's look at IATSE, which you have been, I believe, you just said you wrote a 2000 word piece on it. And there is all of the everything that's going on with the recent accidental shooting and killing of a crew member on a set that, you know, involved Alec Baldwin, super high profile actor. I'm wondering if you can actually talk a little bit about the conditions which led to that shooting and the tragic killing

of that crew member on the set of this low budget Western called Rust. And yeah, just I'm interested in sort of unpacking the labor conditions and how that relates to the IATSE workers wanting to go on strike and the work conditions in general in the film industry, which, you know, these people have been getting a lot of us through the pandemic, through creating all this content. And something that we just don't think about is that for many, these places are factory floors, right? Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, one IATSE member recently, when I was writing a different story said that Hollywood is a very successful factory, which I think is an apt way to put it and something people do not really think about because you see the famous people, you see the celebrities and the very well compensated actors and so on. And you just think of glamour. Right. And that's sort of how they get you in the industry is that you're constantly told, even if you're doing manual labor, as many IATSE members are, they're electricians,

they're grips handling cameras, they're doing craft services. They're still sort of told you should be happy that you're in this industry. Isn't it so cool? Isn't it so glamorous? And so, yeah, specifically to get into what happened on that set on Thursday night. So Helena Hutchins is a cinematographer and she was the person who was shot and killed by Alec Baldwin. The director, Joel Souza, was also wounded. And that story, it became apparent very quickly that this was all about labor. And so what was going on on that set, as you mentioned, it's a low budget film. There were corners being cut at every single step of that production.

So the producers were very dead set on sticking to their 21-day shooting schedule, and they were cutting costs on labor. So even before the incident happened, crew members were complaining about the fact that they had not been paid proper paychecks, that production was not willing to put them up in hotels near where the shoot was happening on this ranch outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, that one member of the crew had actually slept in his car because he was too tired to drive the hour home to where they were staying after a very long day on the set. And again, sort of what the broader conversation about IATSE has been is that film crews are very sick of the long days. So 12 and 14 hour days are standard. In the film industry, you're often

worked through your meal breaks. They have something called a meal penalty. So a production can simply pay the worker some agreed upon amount to work them through lunch. And many crew members point out that this is mere pennies for these big studios often. So they always are working them through lunch. So you wind up having worked 16 hour days, say, with very few breaks, and then you're expected to drive home. So people are constantly getting in car crashes. This is one of the things that really got me to stick to the film Labor Beat after I first wrote about it at this point, I guess almost three months ago, was that every worker you speak to who does this IATSE work, this sort of more manual below the line as it's called labor,

all of them have gotten in car crashes after work. They just mention it even just in passing as it's not even the thing they're complaining about. And so that was really shocking. So that was what was going on on this set even before this happened. And in fact, Thursday morning, six of the union crew members walked off the set. Their concerns hadn't been addressed. The prop gun had misfired twice a couple of days prior. They said there were no safety meetings or maybe few safety meetings. I've heard none. And so they left. And what happened was the production replaced them immediately with non-union crew members. And they threatened to call security if the union crew members didn't leave the property. And that was just six hours before the shooting happened. And so it just goes on and on. I mean, I've spoken to people who worked with

some of the people responsible for safety on set. One mentioned that the assistant director, Dave Halls, who's in charge of safety on set, despite that title being assistant director, that's really the person who's the go-to on safety. His nickname on a prior production they had worked on, at least among one, some of the co-workers, was Safety Last. So he said he would joke about how people are double-checking weapons and things like that. So yeah, at every level, this is about producers cutting corners. And that is exactly what those IATSE contract negotiations were about.

That was the thing that really fired the members up. They said, we need more rest periods. We're working too long with too little breaks afterwards. It couldn't have been more kind of explosively timed for this tragedy to happen in that those 60,000 IATSE members are still contemplating how they're going to vote on that tentative agreement that was just reached. And many of them are already critical of it. They say that the turnaround times, the amount of time they're guaranteed from when they leave set to when they come back are not enough. And this only in a very extreme way shows how bad the problem is. Yeah, no, I agree with you in the timing could not have been more like explosive, like just such a stark example of

everything that these these workers have been complaining about for so long just kind of sort of come to a head. And a really almost, you know, sort of disturbing detail is that actually Alec Baldwin himself had posted a video in solidarity with IATSE just days ago. And one of the crew members started writing in the comments on that post complaining about the working conditions. He was the one who wrote that this crew member had spent the night in his car. And Helena herself, the woman killed in this incident, had posted a photo just two days before the shooting that said, here's our IATSE solidarity on the set of Rust. And so she was a local 600 member of IATSE.

Wow. The Alec Baldwin thing kind of reminds me of when you see like President Biden tweeting out something like, oh, man, we really need to do something about climate change here. And it's like, like you, you're the president. Totally. Not to make light of such a tragic thing, but yeah. No, I mean, and to underline that, I mean, one thing that's important that I didn't really get into is that Alec Baldwin was not just the famous actor. He is a producer, a full producer on this production. And while a lot of actors take a producer title often to pretty much protect themselves from abuses on set to have more say. Alec Baldwin is very famous. You know, he's part of a production company. So in this way, you know, some people might say

actors aren't really producers on these sets. Alec Baldwin very much does have responsibility for the choices that were made. You know, I think it's less that he's responsible for having accidentally misfired that gun. He was told, at least all the reporting is that he was told it was not loaded. But being the money or the production or the big name, that's where his responsibility is. Yeah, yeah, totally. And we posted a screenshot of a tweet on our Instagram a couple days ago, sort of outlining that.

And I was just remarking how many people, it's just so interesting that we have so little understanding of sort of the processes that go into producing the content or you know the products and services that we consume as americans like i don't want to get too into it but you know yeah alec baldwin doesn't seem to be culpable as you know the actor that that fired the gun, but as the person, in many ways, in charge of the labor conditions and the cutting of corners and and all of that. But anyways, I do want to move on to let's talk about John Deere and what's going on there. I've read and listened to some stuff talking about how this strike could actually be one of the strikes with like the most leverage in terms of impacting the

American economy. And especially in terms of like the agricultural machinery that John Deere makes and the fact that they don't really have many backup plans in terms of their supply running short. So I'm wondering if you could sort of outline that whole situation, just why are the workers there going on strike? What does it mean sort of in this larger sort of outline that whole situation, just why are the workers there going on strike? What does it mean sort of in this larger sort of labor movement action that we're seeing right now? Yeah. So the short simplified version of what led to the strike is that, first of all, John Deere has reported record profits this year, $4.7 billion in profit recorded in the first three quarters of the year. Stock shot up. Its CEO got 160%

raise. Then meanwhile, the tenant of agreement that the John Deere workers were offered, their UAW members, was 5% raises a year, which is below inflation right now, as well as being asked to take concessions, actually. So they were wanting more and they're being asked to accept less. So John Deere already has a two-tier system in its union contract, and they were suggesting or demanding, the company was demanding, that they accept a third tier. So their proposal was that every worker hired after November 1st would no longer have a pension. And so the UAW members at John Deere, in fact, against their own leadership's recommendation that they ratify this tentative agreement, overwhelmingly voted it down.

So they rejected it by 90 percent with 90 percent of members voting, which is a lot of members. Right. It's hard to get membership to vote on anything in the first place. And so that level of mobilization really shows that they were incredibly frustrated. And so that's what led to this strike. You know, and I think it is important beyond even the specific leverage at hand in that it's just illustrative of what's going on right now, which is that workers have been overworked during the

pandemic. This is a common refrain among so many workers that are striking or threatening to, you know, IATSE, it's central, Kellogg's, all the food manufacturing workers that have been striking. This is a central complaint is that they were working 70 and 80 hour weeks. So mandatory overtime. Very few regulations on that in this country, unlike some other countries. And so that was happening. You know, John Deere workers felt that they risked their health and the health of their family to keep this company afloat. And as you say, it's John Deere is so central in a lot of ways to the U.S. economy that they really felt that they were asked to sacrifice for the sake of a broader good and that, you know, the response they're getting from the company is, you know, is actually you need to

accept even worse conditions. We're not rewarding you at all for that. But yeah, to your point, I mean, John Deere does occupy this sort of strategic point within its sector. There's very few kind of backups for that sort of product that they put out. There's a reason that the Secretary of Agriculture showed up on the picket lines of John Deere this past week to walk with the workers. It's because it's the type of industry that really quickly gets the attention of the people in power in this country. You know, not exactly in the same way as, say, the steel industry or the auto manufacturers in past decades when strikes happened and presidential administrations intervened very quickly. But it's

not that different. And so that's part of why this is being taken very seriously. Also, sort of at a smaller scale around the John Deere plants, you know, the whole community is a part of it, right? It's either your family member works there or several family members work there or you work there. And so this becomes this very intense situation in the community. So right now, you know, on the picket lines, people are reporting that like every business in the area is supporting the workers and not just because they're good people or like in solidarity, but in fact, because they understand that those workers' dollars are very directly tied to their own fate as businesses. And so this becomes a really existential question

for everyone anywhere near a John Deere facility. And what kind of backlash have the workers at John Deere, the ones that have walked out, what kind of backlash are they facing from John Deere? I know that there's some stories that have to do with, you know, hiring scabs, or the police clearing the road for, you know, buses of, you know, these hired workers to replace the strikers. There's also like more humorous stories of them trying to transfer people from office jobs into the warehouses. I'm wondering if you could talk about the backlash at John Deere, and maybe also just in a broader sense, too, because strikes are such a potent tool, you know, in the toolbox of workers,

they're often responded to with a very, very heavy hand. And I'm wondering if you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah. So part of the story here of workers being more willing to strike in the private sector that I didn't mention is that it's harder to replace them, right? Sort of the way people are talking about it is a tighter than usual labor market. I prefer not to use the term labor shortage. I think it's kind of inaccurate. But it is true that it's harder for these employers to replace the workers when they strike, which is what

traditionally happens at this point in this country. So that's part of the decision-making process for these workers who struck at John Deere. And yeah, I mean, the humorous thing is that John Deere's plan that it is now implementing with some sometimes comical results is it transferred its salaried white-collar workers to the industrial floor to deal with like, you know, trying to repair tractors and do manual labor that these people have no idea how to do, right? You know, there's been reporting, Jonah Fuhrman has really covered this, I think, the best of anyone in this country. You know, he's been writing about how he's getting all these leaks from those salaried workers inside the plants that are saying things like, you know, we had to buy steel-toed boots to prepare for this job. You know, someone crashed a tractor into the facility, inside the facility, right? And they

had to file an incident report. Apparently, OSHA has been contacted several times about incidents inside these facilities. And in fact, you know, while I think it's fair to criticize the salaried workers who are doing this scabbing, you know, their case is that they were told you're going to get fired if you don't agree to do this. And so some of them are speaking up publicly, which is, of course, very risky for them to do, saying that they stand with the people on strike and that they're very upset about John Deere's treatment of those workers. But at the same time, you know, there has to be a serious talk about how to collectively resist doing that type of labor, even if under duress as they're doing it. And so, yeah, as far as how the other things John Deere has done is one thing they're doing is trying to defeat the picket lines via the courts. So they're getting injunctions against the strikers issued that,

you know, prohibits them from staying strong on the picket lines and blocking people from entering, scabs from entering. So that's one thing that's going on. There was a period, I haven't read the latest things in the past few days, but there was a period when they were going to take away these strikers' health care, their health insurance, which is, I think, a key thing that employers are doing right now. So I've talked to Kellogg's workers. I'm in touch with them a lot. I've written about them, their strike. They also have had their health care taken away. I spoke to one man on the picket line who mentioned that someone who'd worked at the facility for decades just got diagnosed with cancer and can't get chemo because he has no

health insurance now. So this is another way that employers sort of fight back against a strike is, you know, as we say in the socialist movement, you know, tying health care to employment gives the boss an advantage every time because it's just incredibly coercive. You show that you'd rather let your workers die than give them a fair contract. So those are some things that are being done. And again, it's yeah, it's because strikes show where the power is, right? I mean, the whole illusion of employment is that the boss knows best, that it's the company that employs you, you know, and you're lucky to have a job. But in fact, as soon as workers withdraw their labor, everything grinds to a halt. And that is an illuminating moment for everyone involved. It can be a politically transformative moment. It isn't necessarily

going to, you know, lead anyone who's been on a strike to become like a socialist. But it does provide a moment where you can link up one employer's abuse and exploitation to the broader kind of ecosystem in which it operates, which is capitalism. That empowers the boss to do that. That encourages them. That protects them when they do such things to workers. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Alex Press. We'll be right back. The Joe Hill's best song. Sorry, we almost missed a bit. Chorus is, there is power, there is power in a band of working folks. When we stand hand in hand, There is power in a band of working folks When we stand hand in hand That's a power, that's a power That must rule in every land One industrial union grand I'll teach you the chorus There is power, there is power In a band of working folks When we stand hand in hand

That's a power, that's a power That must rule in every land One industrial union grand That's a power, that's a power that must rule in every land For an industrial union grand Have you got that again? You understand the chorus? Everybody got it now? All right. Would you have freedom from wage slavery And come join the grand industrial band

Would you from misery and hunger be free Come on, do your share land to hand. There is power, there is power in a band of working folks when we stand hand in hand. That's the power, that's the power that must rule in every land One industrial union grand Oh, would you have mansions of gold in the sky And live in a shack that's a way in the back Oh, would you have wings up in heaven to fly And start here with rags on your back

But there is power, there is power in a band, working folks, when we stand hand in hand. That's a power, that's a power that must rule in every land. One industrial union grand. Oh, if you like sluggers, just eat in your head. Don't organize, all union despise. If you want nothing before you are dead, shake hands with your boss and look wise. But there is power, there is power in a band of working folks. When we stand hand in hand, that's a power, that's a power

That must rule in every land One industrial union brand So come all ye workers from every land And come join the grand industrial band But then we are share of this earth's shell demand Come on, do your share, lend a hand. There is power, there is power in a man to work in both. When we stand hand in hand.

That's a power, that's a power that must rule in every land. One industrial union brand. One industrial union brand. That was There is Power in a Union, written by the Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World, Joe Hill, and performed here by the great American labor organizer and folk singer, Utah Phillips. Now back to our conversation with Alex Press.

So I just want to touch on something you mentioned earlier. You said that you don't really like the term labor shortage for what's going on right now. And so, yeah, I'm wondering what you think might be a more accurate way of describing what's happening. And maybe also, if you could expand on how the pandemic has given sort of like new energy to the labor movement in the US. Yeah, so it's definitely the case that, you know, wages are going up on average for workers. So they've risen by, I think, like just under 5% compared to a year ago. So workers are able to get more now. Bosses sort of need them more. People refer to it, you know, sort of sarcastically as actually a wage shortage in that you'll see all these stories go viral that are like local news stories. This happened where I am in Pittsburgh. There was an ice cream shop somewhere in the city that,

you know, the local news reported, we couldn't find anyone to work here. But then we raised our wages to $15 an hour and we got like 400 applications. And so people, of course, are like, see, this is the problem is that just because you can't hire anyone at $10 an hour does not mean that people don't want jobs. And in fact, you know, while people got money during the pandemic, you know, many of those benefits have been shut off, have long been shut off now, expanded unemployment and things like that. You know, there has been, I think one structural thing is a lot of people have retired early who were sort of on the cusp of that, but would have waited a few years had the pandemic not

happened. So that is affecting things. So there are some kind of structural things that are changing, but on the flip side, just sort of the subjective side of workers' experiences going through the pandemic, that has also influenced this willingness to fight. Like I mentioned, you know, so many workers, millions of them, were told that they were essential. They were praised. They were showered with sort of laudatory comments about how they were really the ones, you know, steering the ship in this poorly handled pandemic. And then they're seeing that they didn't get anything for it. You know, they aren't getting real raises. A lot of them are still enduring incredibly unsafe conditions or risky working conditions.

And again, that mandatory overtime is a huge complaint, especially in, you know, health care, among other types of workers where people, especially nurses, are short staffed right now. And so they're being overworked as well. And so a lot of workers I've spoken to in a range of industries have said that like, you know, the pandemic forced me to think about my priorities. Is work all that matters? Is it fair to risk my life for the health of my family for this job that treats me like crap? For this boss who's willing to kill me rather than take standard safety measures during a pandemic. And a lot of people said, no, I have nothing left to lose. And so if that means I'm going to fight and I'm going to get fired or I'm going to go on strike or I'm going to quit and

switch industries, so be it. I'm happy to do that because I've seen where this is going to lead if I don't take a stand. Yeah, totally. Why should I risk my life for a job that doesn't give a shit about me, right? So I want to go back to the term labor shortage, though. I've heard it be described also as a capital strike. This idea that the owner class is withholding higher wages, I think it can be exemplified pretty well by a recent development. So Wisconsin State Senate just approved a bill allowing 14-year-olds to work as late as 11 p.m. The bill's author, Republican State Senator Mary Felskowski, remarked on the bill, quote, It's a great opportunity for these young people to get some work experience. How else do you get going?

This is about opportunity for young people. So I'm wondering if you'd like to comment on this and maybe zoom out a bit to respond to this idea that it seems like the capitalist class would rather bring back child labor than pay their workers a living wage. Yeah, I mean, I'm ambivalent about that use of the phrase capital strike. I think that's often really stretched beyond its kind of useful definition. I think this is just how capital functions. You know, one example of a capital strike that I think does fit that definition is the name of the grocery chain, the supermarket chain is escaping me right now. But, you know, there were localities on the West Coast during the pandemic that sort of mandated an ordinance, passed an ordinance to raise wages for grocery

store workers, given the risk that they were putting themselves at during the pandemic and the importance of what they did. And there, that chain, they actually did close some of the stores in protest of that measure. So to me, that's more specific or like Uber and Lyft threatening to leave California if they pass enforced labor laws there, which are currently not being enforced or being resisted by those companies. That is more sort of explicit. Here, I think it's just capital never wants to raise wages and they're always looking for ways around it. And their allies in elected positions, like the one you mentioned, are always happy to help

them do it. So it's not surprising that they're passing something like a child labor law, because that's just what happens, right? Anything to keep the wages down and to keep the costs down in general. That's just, you know, if you think about it that way, you will never be surprised by stories like this. And it's important to remember that, in fact, while that might be sort of a particularly explicit example of violating some established laws. So many of the things we think of as established labor laws are violated systematically right now. I mean, I mentioned

Uber and Lyft. The misclassification of gig workers, so-called gig workers, means that they are exempt from labor laws. That's how they are functionally being treated right now, is they're not paid minimum wage. They're not given any kind of, you know, recourse for workplace safety violations and so on. And again and again, in all these ways, you know, recourse for workplace safety violations and so on. And again and again, in all these ways, you know, the idea that people have the right to a weekend, that's just laughable for a lot of workers across this country. So this is just yet another example of anything but following the law, you know. And again, it's not like workers are getting huge raises. We are not in some sort of inflationary crisis. It is literally that

employers do not want to raise wages at all. And that's what leads to those measures. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to get into your work with Amazon in a bit. But first, I just kind of want to like follow up with this sort of threat of the pandemic. And yeah, like, it seems like in the last few months, a lot of workers who are working remotely during the pandemic are now being told by their employers that they need to start to transition back into the office. Oftentimes, the reasoning goes something like, you know, we've got to get you back into the office to maintain, you know, workplace culture. And if this was a visual medium, I'd cut to a picture of a fluorescent lit cubicle right now. But I'm wondering sort of what do you think is going on here? We're very much still in the middle of a pandemic. So why do you think employers are in such a hurry to get workers back into their cubicles? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question.

So, you know, there was this story very early on in the pandemic that was about workers in the United States who are working from home. And I can't remember which publication published it, but it was about an uptick in whistleblowing by those workers. You know, now they don't have the boss standing behind their back watching them work. And also so many meetings are taking place over Zoom, over platforms that can be recorded. And so workers were in fact doing that. So it was almost like the surveillance was being flipped and workers felt more autonomous and free to sort of speak up about problems. And again, that part of that is the basic thing of proximity to management, that you're actually on your own. So I think that is part of it, is that, you know, control is control, whether we're in the 21st century or the 19th. And management, even as we have these remote platforms and the internet

and everything, it's still, people are still very uncomfortable with letting their workers do their own thing. You know, there were some, there's mixed studies on this, on whether people are more productive while they're working from home or not. I certainly sort of always was trying to get away with working from home even well before this pandemic and tried to make the case that I was more productive to convince my management of that. But part of it might be, you know, the sense of worker autonomy that, you know, you let them out of your site for one minute or one year, especially, then all of a sudden, they're going to get ideas about what they are and aren't capable of and whether they really need you in the extent that they do. I mean, there is a there's sort of a counter case here

in that it's incredibly alienating for people to be totally isolated in their homes while they work. I think there's something that should be said by people on the left about, you know, the fact that you are completely removed even more from your coworkers, that not being under the same roof does make certain things more difficult, including collective action. But I don't think that's a case for going back to the office by any means. I think it's just something to sort of note that we don't want people, at least I don't want people just being alone in their homes all the time. I think that sounds like it would lead to a very dark place. What do you mean? Everything's great. Yeah, I'm doing wonderfully, personally. But yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day,

it really is about that mechanism of control rather than sort of anything more specific than that. But it's something that I would love to have more time to sort of look into as far as what dynamics are shifting, such as that workplace whistleblower stuff. I think that sort of points to what an employer might be troubled by if workers are getting more willing to sort of report abuses when they don't have the boss breathing down their neck. And I'm going to ask you about sort of the most up to date updates on Amazon. I know there's a new a new push for a strike happening over on the East Coast. But yeah, could you I'm pretty sure at this point our listeners know about the the conditions, you know, the stories of workers having to shit and piss in bags and wear diapers and stuff like that. and stuff like that. But I'm just wondering, yeah, so maybe if you could just tell us a little bit about some of the work that you've done around Amazon and what you'd want people to know. Yeah. So, you know, I started writing about Amazon before the pandemic because I saw it as sort of

one, it's the vanguard of capital. It's the vanguard of what labor relations are going to look like if Bezos gets his way. And so it seems important as an objective study, right? Sort of a case study for anyone who wants to understand sort of the dynamics at play in the workplace and in the broader economy. And then the pandemic happened. And, you know, as one, I often quote this guy who's a financial analyst on Wall Street, who said that the pandemic acted like a growth hormone for Amazon. You know, it was out of Bezos's wildest dreams. So it expanded at an almost unprecedented rate. So hiring spree of hundreds of thousands of new workers, you know, the square footage of their warehouse and distribution facilities right now is just skyrocketed.

And so Amazon really is swallowing the world, especially swallowing the United States. But, you know, their intentions are both global and actually beyond that, given Bezos's interest in space exploration. You know, he's sort of like an alien figure. He wants to establish an export processing zone on another planet. And so, again, it's sort of this vision of this dystopian future that I think, you know, sort of offers some insight. So that's a reason to focus on it. Anyway, that's a long way to answer to that. I would say what people need to know about the working conditions is that they're terrible, right? So everyone knows those sort of horror stories. But I think one thing that I talk about a lot that I think is worth emphasizing is the more mundane experience of what working in an Amazon

warehouse is like. It's incredibly alienating. You are largely managed by an algorithm, by a handheld device you hold in your hand that tracks your productivity. It tracks what's called time off tasks. So any seconds you spend not doing your job, not picking and sorting items, it alerts you to that and it tells you to speed up and it starts asking you what you're doing. And if you've been off task too long, then you get a human manager showing up and asking you what's going wrong. And so that is the sort of day to day experience. The warehouses are very loud.

There's not a lot of time or ability to speak with your coworkers. You're often at a physical remove, especially in the more robot heavy warehouses where you actually are basically standing in one place and the robots are bringing you shelves of items to sort. in one place and the robots are bringing you shelves of items to sort. And so, you know, you can't listen to music during it, though a lot of people sneak in headphones in certain ways and sneak in cell phones. But generally, you know, it is like the most just mind numbing and physically numbing type of labor. So people's joints are ruined very quickly at Amazon. This is part of why people commonly quit within their first day of working at one of these warehouses. It's like 150% turnover. Yeah, something like that, which is incredibly high. And I think that is something that maybe people didn't really

understand as much when there became the first formal push for a union in the United States at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, is that, of course, Amazon employs incredibly well-funded anti-union consultants and the cutting edge in destroying union tactics. But also just the basic way of the work is the best union busting strategy you could possibly imagine. So, you know, when you think about organizing with your co-workers to form a union, you know, it takes months and months. You know, you guys are meeting at the bar.

Maybe it's hard to find a time for two weeks for everyone to agree to meet at some pizza place. And then it's another two weeks before you sort of come to an agreement about who else should be on the committee, the organizing committee. And so this spirals very quickly. There's a reason that union campaigns in the U.S. take a very long time, in large part because labor law is stacked against you. But also it's just hard to organize your coworkers. And so imagine an Amazon warehouse where everyone is more exhausted than at, you know, if you're at a workplace that's like a white collar workplace, whatever be. And people are quitting within a week all the time. You know, we're talking about turnover, full turnover before the year is out. How are you going to do anything but tread water? And so I think that is a very

important part of the story when you look at both ongoing union campaigns and any new ones. That is kind of the key question. How do you build momentum and build actual shop floor militancy that's consistent without losing the people as you're doing it. Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about understand there's a new unionization drive at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island? Yes. Yeah. So that is JFK 8, which is one of the more infamous Amazon warehouses in the United States because it's where Christian Smalls worked. So they fired him very early on in the pandemic for helping raise the alarm about the lack of COVID safety precautions that were being taken. He was actually in a somewhat supervisory, almost managerial role. And he felt that, you know, the people under his charge were not being treated well and there was not enough communication.

So he helped organize a rally outside of JFK. And that is what quickly led to him being fired and all of these big headlines about how Bezos was in the room when the company's head lawyer called Christian Smalls, who is black, inarticulate and said things like, you know, we should make him the face of this broad Amazon worker organizing because he'll discredit that campaign by being inarticulate. And so Christian Smalls is involved in this effort. He helped form an independent union called the Amazon Labor Union. So it's not affiliated with any existing unions such as RWDSU, which is the one that organized in Bessemer. And so, yes, they just filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to hold a union election.

Importantly, you know, so I know Chris Smalls, you know, we've been in touch, we've talked since he got fired. And so, you know, I don't want to sort of be too much of a damper. I just think it's important for people to, again, keep in mind the kind of immense obstacles to success here. So, you know, when you're trying to collect cards, you need to collect 30% of the workforce need to be on that petition when you file with the NLRB. Can you just back up for one second, maybe for some folks listening who may not know exactly how the voting for a strike works? And yeah, if you could maybe just unpack that a little bit. Sure. Voting for a union, to be clear. There's no strikes being done. Sorry. Yeah. Sorry.

Voting for a union. Yeah. So if you go the formal route, and I say if because I think we should mention that there are other efforts underway that are not going through the NLRB. But if you go through the NLRB, you file for a formal union election. The NLRB's rules here are that you need to file with 30% of the total workforce at your workplace. They need to have signed union cards saying they want a union, right? And so that is a problem in many ways. Again, I talk at every level. Labor law is sort of stacked against workers. It doesn't seem to make sense why you should need everyone in the workshop on the work floor countries, especially Europe. But in these constraints of the U.S. sort of system of union elections, that's what you need to do. So you file with the NLRB, then the employer gets involved, the employer provides a list of all the employees. And so you start comparing lists and so on and so forth. Eventually, you know, the employer can object at so many parts of this process. They can say, as they did in Bessemer,

that actually, no, you have the wrong type of workers. You forgot these 2,000 other workers. And so they can expand the bargaining unit. And so on and so forth, all these things. And then eventually, though, you will, you know, ideally, the NLRB will schedule an election and oversee that election. And so what they did in Staten Island is they've filed that NLRB petition. I haven't spoken to Chris. I don't know the details beyond that. I would just say, again, sort of the difficulty here is how are you keeping track of these workers that are filing in and out? who were employees when they signed that card be able to vote even if they've left? You know, so questions like that have to be determined. But I think it's also worth mentioning that there is something called Amazonians United, which is going the other route.

So they're not filing for a union election with the NLRB. They describe themselves as just building shop floor power. So they're operating in several warehouses across the country. And all they're concerned with is building workplace power, building people on the shop floor willing to pick fights with management and win them. And they believe that that is the way to get around Amazon's high turnover

is that you just can't win through one warehouse at a time. And so, yeah, we cover these sort of competing perspectives on the show all the time because I don't think anyone has a perfect solution to this. I think it has to be figured out through attempts, which is why I sort of see Bessemer as like a good, it's good that, you know, this attempt has been made because it's going to take a lot to win. And it's also worth mentioning that the Teamsters, which are one of the most powerful unions in this country, have embarked on a commitment to organize Amazon workers. They voted on it at their convention.

They're devoting a lot of resources to it. They're doing it at a national scale. And they're training rank and file Teamsters on how to organize Amazon workers in their community. And so that is another sort of part of this broader picture of what future organizing at Amazon looks like. Just thinking when you were talking how cool it would be if there was like a course in, I mean, high school, never, but like, you know, even like a community college course or something that was just like organizing a union one-on-one or even like this is how union laws work in the U.S.

or just like any kind of information because I know I am like have a lot to learn about how all this stuff works. And just the laws, not just the laws, but like the on the ground organizing how difficult that can be. And oftentimes see people just, you know, sort of casually remark like, Oh, yeah, just like start a union. Yeah. And it's like, right, if only it were that easy. I do think it's worth mentioning here. I mean, yes, that's true. That's this incredibly opaque process. And, you know, largely, again, the fact that it's so difficult is really on the blame for that is on capital and their sort of confidants and allies in elected positions. You know, I think there are certain things in the labor movement that we don't really make easy enough or accessible enough. And so one thing I do feel like I need to shout out is Labor Notes, which has published straight up like one on one guides on how to organize a union, how to go on strike, how to win, how to be a good shop steward.

You know, Secrets of a Successful Organizer is another sort of project they put out. Successful Organizer is another sort of project they put out. And so things like that. Similarly, there's an like the numbers have never been higher, or at least haven't been this high in a long time as far as approval ratings among people in the United States about unions, you know, the majority of people are pro-union in this country, at least, you know, in sort of survey results. But how do you get a union, right? So there's all these people that want one, but they have no idea how to get there. And it's because this process is just incredibly sort of tedious and difficult and obscured. Twitter. Thank you. And Jacobin and the Primer podcast. And before we wrap up, I'm wondering, we like to sort of ask this sort of closing question generally to our guests, call it sort of the upstream question. So not sure if you're familiar with the whole upstream metaphor, but

really, it's it's sort of just boiled down to going upstream to look for the root causes of many of the problems that we're facing today. And that's sort of what we try to do on this show. And I'm wondering if you were to go upstream, what do you see as the root or foundation of the challenges we've been talking about in this conversation? And you're not allowed to just say capitalism. That's too bad because that's what I was going to say. I don't want to shock you. Actually, you can. I don't want to shock you, but I'm a socialist. And so I think that it's capitalism. But specifically, I mean, we're talking about workers' rights and exploitation. And again,

as I mentioned with the sort of political possibilities of strikes, is that the exploitation you experience in your workplace is facilitated at every step of the way by capital, right? That is what makes you have to sell your labor and others be able to profit off of it, right? That is the relationship and it's about having nothing else to live off of except your own labor, right? And having to give that to someone else and be contingent on them imposing whatever conditions they may on you, right? We talk about the dictatorship of the workplace in the United States. You know, you leave your rights at the door in so many ways. And that's because, again, you know, there's this sense that that's what you need to

do to survive. And so I do think that if you're going to write about labor for a living, you can't possibly look at anything without mentioning capitalism. I mean, it's all downstream from there, right? I mean, things I've mentioned in this conversation, labor law regime in the United States that stacks the deck against workers at every step. That too, in fact, you know, is part of this process where capital is, you know, every time there were advances by the labor movement in this country, there's a reaction. Congress passes laws like the Taft-Hartley Act. Congress empowers employers at the cost of their employees. And that happens constantly, right, in so many ways. I mean, we talk about health insurance being tied to employment rather than having universal health care.

This also goes into what is best for capital here. Labor has a part in that story of that issue, right, that unions felt they could never win universal health care. And so they decided to instead focus on getting their members stronger health insurance at the cost of the fact that the majority of the U.S. workforce is not union and doesn't have those good health care plans. But at every step, I think it's fair to say that that is what's upstream from the strike at John Deere, from a producer shooting an IATSE member just a couple of days ago. I mean, again and again, you look at it and you say, oh, this is about prioritizing profit over workers' lives. you've been listening to an upstream conversation with alex press staff writer at jacobin magazine host of the primer podcast and author most recently of the jacobin pieces u.s workers are in a militant mood and helena hutchinson's death on the set of rust was not a freak accident

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