Chris Duffy

This is where we can also bridge the line between the two books, because you talk, I thought, very, very movingly in your more recent book, From the Ashes, about you draw a line between people who worked in coal mines and people who were working in care work and how for the coal miners, striking was very difficult.

But in some ways, the care workers struggled more with the emotional side of striking because they didn't want to leave the people they were taking care of, even though the conditions were

I also thought that a really moving piece of Kevin's story is that.

Kevin's experience of being in coal mine with a labor union involved a lot of really caring for other people, for the men that he was down there with in a dangerous situation and knowing that you could trust people and that they had your back, even if the bosses or the organization didn't.

And that that actually was a directly transferable skill to caring for people because it was in some ways that the union was care work.

It was just care work that they hadn't thought of in that way.

When I was teaching in an elementary school, it's never like I was politically right-wing.

But I realized that I had some ideas about unions that...

ended up changing because I was working at a charter school without a union.

And I believed I didn't like choose the school because I just chose it because that's where I could get a job.

But when I was working there, I believed like, oh, well, the union would just hold us back.

It would just like protect the worst teachers.

It would like make it so that.

And over time, I came to understand that like there's all these structural forces at play and there's all these reasons why this job is really hard.

And there's all these reasons why these kids are struggling or not struggling.

Yeah.

And

Having an organized piece where we all were in it together would actually be like a dramatic thing, even if this particular building didn't need it.

It's a broader thing than just that.

: This may be a kind of question that you don't get that often, I think, which is like, a person is listening to this.