Erik Loomis

So in the early 20th century, American workers engaged in strikes of all kinds. Some of them were radical. Some of them were not radical. A lot of the biggest issues were around politics, right? For union members, for workers, are we engaged in some sort of radicalism or do we really believe in like an American capitalist system that

maybe need some adjustment, but is something that we can generally work with. And, you know, there's very few, quote, general strikes in American history for a number of different reasons where workers from across multiple industries, across a city, never really across the nation, have come together to, say, shut down a particular city for a given time.

And Seattle in 1919 is one of the most important and interesting ones. And, you know, one of the fascinating things about this strike and about the other limited general strikes is how rarely they've actually come out of self-proclaimed radicals, whether it's the IWW, the Communist Party, etc. And that was the case in 1919 as well. It really just started with longshoremen strike.

Shipyard workers had gone two years without a pay raise. You had 35,000 workers walk away from their job. They thought they were going to get a raise after the end of World War I. It didn't happen, etc., etc. They go on strike. A couple of weeks pass. Pressure's really growing on the workers.

For the Seattle labor movement and the labor movement more generally, they really see this as an attempt to roll back gains that the labor movement had won during World War I.

And so the general strike of Seattle begins with the Metal Trades Council, which were just traditional American Federation of Labor non-radical unions, because they just felt like they all had to come out in order to support these workers, because an attack on these longshoremen workers, that was an attack on everybody.

And over the next few days, they basically shut the city down, but also engaged, and this is an important thing, I think, throughout the way we talk about these things in terms of the relevance for today.

They engaged in a social movement unionism where they made sure they were able to feed the people, where they made sure hospitals were staffed, where people were having fun, where essential workers may still be working because the people of the city have to continue to be able to live there and support that strike.

And it's able to succeed more or less until national labor leadership, scared of the potential radical implications, shut it down. And in fact, that becomes a disaster. Seattle labor movement falls apart in the aftermath. But that's one of those moments in which you do see unions come together.

across ideological lines to support a larger principle of unions surviving, of workers having dignity, and of trying to move a fight forward in which all of us can come together to make a positive change.

OK, first of all, to your first point, you're absolutely right. I mean, I often get people emailing me and stuff and say, oh, you know, what do we need to do to get the general strike? And, you know, there's a lot of sort of fantasies in the political world, I think, of what I would call politics without politics. Right.

We're like people come together in some way without the messiness and dirtiness of organizing and the complexities of dealing with real people and just like good things are going to happen. It's like the general strike requires like the workers that you hate to also be part of the strike. It requires Trump voters to be part of the strike.

It requires your racist uncle on Thanksgiving that you can't stand to also be part of the strike. It's going to be messy. And I think that's really a really, really critical point to not romanticize the strike or romanticize labor or romanticize change, but rather to understand what it really takes to create that change. And that leads to your second point about the public.

I think a lot of people would like to think, I mean, there's a kind of a... of a messaging around the labor movement today inside the labor movement that I don't think is very helpful. And basically it is the kind of quote that gets thrown around a lot is the strike gets the goods.

Like if we just go on strike, it always works and only the union can sell us out, you know, from our power going on strike. But historically that is not the case and nor is it today. Strikes could be an amazing political tool or they could be a complete disaster. And it depends in no small part on that issue of public support.

General strikes are actually technically illegal in the United States now. It's part of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. So it would be really hard to actually have a general strike take place in this country because it would be an illegal act. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but it would be illegal. But you have to have public support in some way or another.

And when unions have had broader public support, when they've engaged in a kind of unionism that builds support through the community to understand that what's happening here is that we're going on strike and inconveniencing you in many cases for the benefit of us all versus we're doing that for the very small benefit of our personal desires and needs, it leads to two very different kinds of outcomes.

The famous story, and some of your listeners may be familiar with this, is that in the beginning of 1937, auto workers in Flint, Michigan took over one of the plants for General Motors and sat inside and refused to leave to force GM to come to an agreement with this brand new union they were forming called the United Auto Workers to bring unions into the auto industry for the first time.

And workers were scared, right? I mean, like, because GM basically controls Flint. That was common in the auto industry. Ford controls the town of Dearborn, for example. And that meant controlling the police forces. And so this small sort of vanguard, I guess, of workers decides to sit in in this one factory. They're able to do so.

And the idea is, in part, that if the workers just go out on strike, the GM will be able to bring in replacement workers. This makes that impossible. So they're sitting down on the job. And there's been kind of a myth that forms around this in a sense that part of the strategy was GM would not have wanted the cops to destroy their own facility.

But in fact, GM was fine with the cops destroying their own facility. They want to do anything to keep that union from forming. So you have men inside and then you have their... wives, sisters, daughters, mothers on the outside in what was called a ladies' auxiliary, providing support services, giving talks, making sure food got to these guys, etc.

And this begins to build a kind of community solidarity where people are coming out in support of the workers. And then one night GM, you know, tries to get the cops to come in and tear it up. And GM, you know, the workers inside start throwing stuff at the cops and the cops retreat. And this happens in front of everybody. And, you know, there was a lot of outrage.

But the critical thing that they did actually came the previous year. And this is an important point in terms of thinking about the relationships between unions and politics.

The most important thing that workers require to win strikes is to neutralize what tends to be a frequent corporate political alliance, where the state supports the corporation in whatever is going to happen to bust that union. And workers in Michigan had elected a guy named Frank Murphy to be the governor. And Murphy had campaigned on never using state forces against the unions.

And so GM is calling out Murphy to send in the National Guard. And Murphy, who's a very nervous guy, basically has an anxiety attack over this and disappears for a day or two. Cool. And then comes out and says, no, I'm going to stand up. We're not going to do that. And when Murphy refuses to send in the National Guard, General Motors gives up.

And they sign a one-page document that is the first contract in auto worker history.

The reality is people don't necessarily care what happens to workers very much. I mean, I think that's – if they don't see it, they don't necessarily think about it. But they do often care if they see it. I mean, basically you have janitors who were kind of at the forefront of a lot of the terrible work –

situations that are now incredibly common, in this case, subcontracting, where basically the owners of these gigantic downtown office buildings were ending their direct employment of janitors and instead using subcontractors to bring in the janitors for much lower wages.

And SEIU, Service Employees International Union, which today is one of the largest unions in the country, in part by organizing this kind of worker, is able to bring a lot of these workers together. A lot of them had escaped places like El Salvador and Honduras. So they're like fleeing right-wing paramilitary violence. And so they're not really that scared of the L.A.

cops in comparison to what they had dealt with with, say, U.S.-supported militias in El Salvador. Right. One day, right, the cops just start, I think in 1990, the cops just start beating them in the streets. And, you know, like one woman who's pregnant, miscarriages. I mean, it's ugly.

And as you point out, you know, if you're a company that's renting a floor in an office tower, all you care about is that the garbage cans are emptied and the bathroom's clean. Like, you don't care about anything else. And all of a sudden, these people are watching, like, Salvadorans get beaten by the LAPD on the streets. And they're like, what on earth is going on here?

And it was a huge mistake by the LAPD and by the corporate leaders, and it leads to a big victory that spreads across the country and sort of brings a lot of janitors and other low-wage service workers into SEIU and makes it the powerful force in American labor unionism and American progressive politics that it is today.

In the 70s, like. Planes crashed all the time. Of course, this may be happening now with Trump and the gutting of air traffic control. So this may become more relevant again. But air traffic controllers do not have the technologies that they have now. I mean, you're basically like dots in the sky on a radar screen and trying to get them to not run into each other. And it was very stressful.

And the way the FAA worked is that most of the leadership were old officers, often from the Vietnam War. And a lot of their everyday traffic controllers were rank and file guys from the Vietnam War. And their bosses basically treated them like they were enlisted men, telling them what to do, yelling at them, just adding to the stress.

And this was not appreciated by a bunch of ex-Vietnam vets who were pretty angry anyway about their experience in the war and everything else that was going on in the 1970s. So they form this union. It gets quite a bit of publicity. And it's a very radical militant union in certain senses, not politically radical, but radical when it comes to direct action.

So they spent the 70s slowing down the airlines, you know, engaging in what we call work to rule, which is like following the terms of the contract in a very specific way, which like malicious compliance is what we would call it now, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But they were politically conservative men by and large, right?

I mean, we know that there was a lot of sexism and racism toward women and workers of color there. It's a bunch of politically conservative white men who have a very strong militant culture. Bring in the Carter administration. And Jimmy Carter was terrible on labor issues. I mean, this flat out Jimmy Carter began the period of Democrats really turning away from the labor movement.

Reagan actually did not have an extreme anti-labor record as governor of California. He had signed bills for, you know, say, expand collective bargaining rights for public sector employees. Hadn't he led a union? He was. He himself had been the head of the screen actors. Right. So from the traffic controllers, they sort of see, well, Carter's terrible.

We actually like a lot of the tough talk that Reagan gives about forward policy. So let's endorse him. And then they had planned for a long time to go on strike in 1981. But, you know, then you look at the things they were wanting on their strike. There was no sense of solidarity with other workers there. Let's put it that way. They didn't care what the flight attendants thought.

They didn't care what the pilots thought or the machinists. They were out for themselves. And some of the things they were demanding were free flights to Europe. which is not exactly going to give you that solidarity. And notice well that in the 70s, you know, it was a terrible time for private sector workers. You had the recession after 73 and the oil crisis.

And so you had a scenario in which wages for private sector workers and union rights were declining and government workers were winning these great contracts and they were rising. And so there was a lot of anger among kind of a general public that fed into this larger anti-government backlash. about greedy public sector workers. And the air traffic controllers kind of summarize that.

So they go on strike against Reagan. And Reagan, even though he had appreciated their support, was like, this is an attack on me. It was technically illegal. And so he fires them all.

And the AFL-CIO had begged PAC co-leadership to not do this. They knew what Reagan stood for. Reagan did not respond well to people trying to bully him. Um, and, uh, They didn't care. And this is when I think we have to push back a little bit on some of the rhetoric that's very popular on the left today when we talk about unions, because it's ideology. It's not really rooted in fact sometimes.

And some of this is the more democratic a union is and militant it is, the more successful it will be. Just empirically, that is not the case. PACA was a very militant union, a democratic union that had overthrown its own leadership for not being militant enough. And they lead a strike that is an unmitigated disaster and that then emboldens the entire private sector.

to realize that they can act toward their unions like Reagan acted toward the air traffic controllers, and they start doing the same thing, and the 80s become a catastrophic decade for the labor movement.

Strikes basically go from, you know, in the 70s, really tremendously common, huge strikes the whole decade, to almost nothing by the end of the 80s, through the 90s, and really through the 2000s as well. You need to be scared to strike. You got to be smart about these things. This isn't something to romanticize.

It's a strategy that's a very intense strategy that can work and can be transformative, but could also be utterly disastrous. And I think honest discussions of the labor movement.

and honest discussions of striking are really necessary on a broader left today that, frankly, too often romanticizes things and reverts to talking points rather than deal with the messiness of Americans and their various and often contradictory politics that do not lead to wide-scale class solidarity in this country.

Yeah. I mean, I think a great example is the United Farm Workers boycott of grapes in the 60s and 70s, right? I mean, this is an epic, legendary struggle that really is from a very small set of workers. I mean, these are pretty disempowered farmers.

Mostly Mexican-American, but at that point still a lot of Filipinos as well out in California who were picking grapes and asparagus and lettuce and other crops in really awful, terrible conditions. People are dying of heat stroke and pesticide poisoning and all kinds of other terrible things. And, you know, there's –

Some pretty serious organizing going on out there, going back to the legendary organizer Saul Alinsky, who sends some of his people out there, a guy named Fred Ross. Ross brings in a couple of local people named Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. And they eventually start leading a different kind of a movement, a workers-oriented movement that eventually becomes the United Farm Workers.

Beginning in 1965, it engages in a nationwide boycott against table grapes because the grape growers were so anti-union. This sort of galvanizes liberals across the country. It becomes a national movement. People volunteer for this and they live in like UFW houses in various cities around the country.

working, flyering, getting people to support the movement, getting stores to not buy these grapes. And it becomes a national movement that eventually leads to some pretty major victories for the farm workers and really solidifies Chavez and Huerta as legends of American organizing and American progressivism.

They were able to take a really small group of workers and make it a national cause by building on a kind of a broader sense of solidarity between that existed at that time where people in New York or LA or where I live in Providence saw these workers out in California that they barely knew existed and learned about their conditions. And people were horrified about this.

It was the appeal to a broader sense of justice that was a big part of American life in the 1960s and 70s. You know, that this was a way in which everyday people, I mean, think about it today, right? Like, you know, there's a lot of people out there who, no doubt listeners of this podcast, who really don't know what to do right now, right?

I mean, they're flummoxed, they're flustered, they're horrified, they're angry, but their anger other than like, you know, got to make sure we win the House in 26 and try to find somebody else. They don't know what to do necessarily. And that's been kind of a theme, I think, since the election. Yeah. Well, you know, part of what the UFW boycott does is give people something to do, right?

It gives them a way that they can become invested in a movement by handing out flyers, by, if nothing more, by like taking the flyer and then saying, I'm not going to support buying these table grapes, right? I'm going to boycott a store that is selling these grapes. I'm going to engage in me, you know, I'm going to engage in a solidarity action.

That might slightly inconvenience me because, I don't know, my kid likes grapes and, you know, I like this store or whatever. But I'm going to put pressure using my consumer power to live by this boycott that then means that I am actively helping these workers out in California who I've never seen because I've never been to Fresno.

And I'm going to use my little bit of power to do something to help these workers. So I think it's not just like, I mean, look, like workers are in horrible conditions today, too. I mean... the pandemic and like the meatpacking workers who are dying of COVID on the job because they're considered essential workers or an example of that. And we didn't necessarily have actions to support them per se.

But there are ways to build bigger public support by doing the work of organizing in a broader general public to have an ask of people to do something concrete to help support of labor rights or immigrant rights or the other horrible things that are happening to this country today. There are ways that we can learn from the past to engage people to do real actions. They didn't

not going to dominate their lives, but to do something concrete that leads to a bigger, broader set of social changes. What we need for that, though, is the organizing capacity and the leadership to make that happen. And that's not easy to do.

That's the kind of infrastructure that has to take place in the organizing world first to be able to engage people who are not going to come out to a million meetings, but get them to do something.

Yeah, that's a really outstanding point. I mean, I think that so often in our world, our liberal left progressive worlds, how we want to define these terms today, we've often lost, I think, the first core tenet of organizing. You have to meet people where they're at, not where you're at. Right.

And so if you're asked, is the revolution like people are not going to be there for that because they don't know what you're talking about. Right. That the idea. And you saw this a little bit with like, I mean, you know, say Occupy Wall Street. Right. Which is now quite 15 years ago and was a really important moment.

in rebuilding progressive capacity to do anything at all after the long 90s and 2000s where people just weren't really on the streets. And it's a very important moment. But look, I mean, when it becomes about just occupying the space for a long, long time, people are not going to really see that connection, right?

And that begins to sort of... People start cleaving off of that at that moment in time. And I think you see this in a lot of other cases today where... organizers end up having kind of maximalist demands that don't seem realistic, right? The organizers themselves have to have discipline. And the United Farm Workers, let me tell you something about the UFW.

You as a volunteer, you didn't have autonomy over your life. You couldn't choose when or how to engage. If you were working for Chavez, he was the boss and you knew it. And going against that meant you were out. discipline actually matters.

And like today, I feel like we are, and then it includes much of the labor movement, all these like super hyper-powered individualists that do not submit to group discipline. And that actually is really critical to making change. It's kind of against the way a lot of us feel today. But you actually do have to have discipline.

And some of that discipline is we have to have, we have to decide first what our concrete goals are. We have to decide how we're going to get there, how to stay on messaging and how to get people to then support those goals. And when we win those goals, then we declare victory and move on to a next stage of organizing. We're not really at a lot of those points today.

And I think this is part of the larger problem in figuring out how to collectively respond to Trump.

Yeah, absolutely. And so... In some ways, the Oakland strike is a little bit like the Seattle strike, you know, coming out of a union movement that was not actually that radical, right? And by 1946, understand that the union movement is now split into two groups.

There's the American Federation of Labor, which represents the older forms of unions that tend to begin to be more politically conservative. And then the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, that includes the auto workers and steel workers and the rubber workers and a lot of communist-led unions, and had really embraced that radicalism and mass organizing.

But ironically, the Oakland general strike, like in Seattle, came out of these fairly conservative AFL unions. And this was very much about what did almost everybody have in common in 1946. they had not spent any money in 20 years, right? You had the Great Depression, you had World War II, and of course, nobody's making any money during the Depression.

And in the war, people are making money, but they can't spend the money because there's nothing to spend it on. And by 1946, you have a lot of pent-up demand, and these people want pay raises. They want big-time pay raises to get the pay they deserve for the work they've done to win the war. And not surprisingly, the business class doesn't want to do that.

And so this is a situation where it starts among women, actually, department store workers. And they shut down the city for three days until, lo and behold, the Teamsters, led by a corrupt leader named Dave Beck, pulls their union out. And that was in some ways kind of devastating because at that moment, the CIO unions were about to join the strike.

But it's another one of these situations where they shut the place down for three days, and it's like a giant party in the street. The bars can't sell alcohol, but they put their jukeboxes out on the street. People are literally dancing in the street. And it's this kind of joyful moment of workers expressing this power. Yeah.

they don't necessarily win the strike or some of the political aims, but, but these kinds of things do lead to the massive pay raises and benefit raises that workers in post-war America got that turned American working class into being barely able to feed themselves to being able to buy a home and a new car and maybe send their kids to college and the kinds of hallmarks of, I think what's become called the middle class, but it's still large parts is a working class that,

that is a more prosperous working class. And so like the strike is not in itself necessarily successful, but it lays the groundwork for employers over the next 25 years to giving really gargantuan pay and benefit raises to the American working class that significantly improved the lives of American workers. And I think that's also an important point that's worth making is that

Well, for a lot of people, it's a kind of a radical, you know, being involved in the labor movement is a kind of a radical thing with the idea of socialist aims and whatever. And that's cool. I mean, I support a lot of that, too. But having grown up pretty poor, having more money in the bank is a revolutionary act.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, just from the work perspective, we know absolutely that there's nothing inherently better about a factory job than working at McDonald's or working as a home health care worker. Right. Jobs that actually exist today, as opposed to factory jobs that are not coming back.

Even if all the tariffs happen and, you know, all the production comes back to the U.S., it's going to be automated. Right. There's maybe a few workers in there, but we're not talking about 1950 anymore where you've got 25,000 people working in the same factory. That is never happening again. But I do think that there is a tremendous amount of instability in the workplace today.

There's been a huge amounts of attacks on organized labor everywhere. open attacks from Republicans and indifference from too many Democratic leaders, Joe Biden being a very important exception to that, very pro-union guy, and one of his strongest things that did not really pay off politically, unfortunately, with union workers, which is a whole other set of conversations. But

People are going to react to nostalgia, right? People are going to react to a feeling that things were better in the past. The truth barely matters. We have to deal with the reality that people do not feel comfortable and stable in their work lives. The rise of AI is only going to make this worse. And we actually really have to get ahead of figuring out what does the future of work look like

And people value work. Work is one of these things that all societies throughout history have had work in certain kinds of ways as central to their societies, often connected to gender norms. And this is something we're going to have to figure out. We can't just tell people that they're wrong.

We have to, once again, organize them where they're at to try to get them to a place that is less nostalgic and more useful and more organized to moving toward a politics that actually makes sense in the 21st century to make work life better for everybody. And we're not very close to that yet.

You can make the case that Joe Biden, in terms of actual support for unions, was more supportive of unions than FDR or Harry Truman, who actually, in truth, had very mixed records in terms of actually supporting what unions were doing and using the government to actively support unions. And you're right, it didn't matter.

My main thought is that contemporary liberals think policy matters more than it does. And they don't put enough emphasis on communication and, frankly, propaganda. So you see the signs up from the infrastructure bill on our highways and everything. And rather than have a big picture of Joe Biden up there saying, I did this for you, it's thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.

Well, that's not helping Joe Biden at all, right? Like we, on the liberal side, we have a kind of belief that good policy and like, oh, let's like raise the earned income tax credit is somehow going to connect with everyday people who feel insecure in their society and they don't really pay attention. And those are the actual voters you have to win.

I think the lesson is you have to message what you're doing. You have to tell the workers and make it convincing to them that you are the one who is going to change their lives. And it's funny, if you go back to the 30s and you like watch movies or art or anything else, the level of propaganda that FDR is pulling off would be shocking. Right.

I mean, it is just and you can see why people who hated FDR really hated him because he's engaging in activities that we would find so radically over the top in terms of promoting himself that it honestly makes Trump look like a piker when it comes to propaganda.

So it's 1913, and you have a lot of militant workers out there. I mean, a lot of people who are immigrating from Eastern and Southern Europe bring over ideas of radicalism with them, particularly Jewish immigrants who are fleeing persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe. And a lot of them had already committed to socialism.

And so they're bringing these ideas into the American labor movement and really energizing it and turning it into a modern movement. And, you know, the American Federation of Labor is like real scared of immigrants. It's a real problem for them. They're very anti-immigrant.

Since the AFL is not organizing these apparel workers working in these like textile plants in Lawrence, Mass., at Fall River, New Bedford, Patterson, New Jersey, the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, are going in and doing it. And the IWW is like, we romanticize the heck out of them because they're really good at culture making and images and doing cool, dramatic stuff.

They're not actually very good at organizing, to be totally honest at the time. And so they have a lot of like wealthy supporters in the arts. They have these conversations and like, let's put on a big play to like show the people what the conditions are really like in New Jersey. And so they rent out like, you know, the big hall in New York City and they have this pageant.

Let's get the workers on the stage and let's show them what's up. And, you know, we'll do these songs and dances and have these dramatic scenes. And so you have this play that's supposed to raise money and all these cultural people come out or like, yeah, you know, we're going to do this in solidarity. But the functionality is, is it does two things.

It pulls people from the picket lines and then it divides the workers themselves between those who are like chosen to be on the play and those who are not. And the ones who are not are obviously like, why are I supposed to be in the fucking play?

gruff workers are just not getting their part they're going running up to the board to see that they're not in the fucking play yeah they're really upset and so it actually helps destroy the strike like there's this idea of like let's put on this cultural thing destroys the strike and the strikers totally lose and it actually ends the iww's attempt to organize in eastern factories by and large because they figured out they don't really know how to do it it's kind of a funny story in some ways but it's an example of how just because you have like

your finger on the pulse of American culture and you are really good at producing leftist culture does not mean it's actually good for the workers. And I think that's something we always have to keep in mind. When we're trying to engage in an action of solidarity, it's not about us. It's about the workers.

Too often, I think, in this extremist individualist age in which we live in, acts that we claim to be solidarity acts are so often really just about making ourselves feel good. And it needs to come from the workers themselves, basically. And the solidarity is us doing what we can to assist the workers, not sort of imposing ideas upon them.

Yeah, well, I mean, I certainly agree with you in my much of what you said. I mean, I, and it's confounds me that in a post 2024 election, the kind of giving up by seemingly by large parts of the, of social media or the democratic party. I mean, if you look back to say the, the, the protest against the Muslim ban in 2017, I mean, it was tremendously effective, right?

I mean, people came out and they occupy those airports and it forced Trump on his heels and it gave, uh, it gave courage to judges to push back on Trump. And like, I feel like there's an attitude up here and maybe we learn our history wrong. Maybe this is a problem in that, like, people seem to think, well, we tried this one time and it didn't work, so I don't know.

And it's like the civil rights movement, it was not just a march on Washington and then everybody just sort of said, oh, okay, like, Martin Luther King is correct. Like, it didn't happen that way. It was decades of hard work of people dying, right? The Women's March, the anti-Muslim ban action, these were hugely effective actions. And it disturbs me that people have kind of like lost that.

But there is a glimmer of hope out there, which is that never in American history, including at the peak of union power in the 40s and in the 50s, have unions polled as strongly as they do today. Americans kind of love unions today, at least in theory. It doesn't mean they're part of one, because we know 10% of American workers are members of unions, 6% of private sector workers, as you said.

So very few people are actually part of unions, but they poll tremendously well. Unions are actually quite popular. The problem is the total capture of the union process, the union election and contract process by corporate America. Joe Biden typically attempted to do something about this. And that was the PRO Act, which had a lot of support in the Senate, but not all Democrats supported it.

And you're not going to get it through without getting rid of the filibuster anyway. But that would have taken away a lot of the power that corporations have to bust unions and to stop elections from happening and to be forced them to sign contracts and these sorts of things. So We're at a moment in which there's a lot of people who are looking for something, right?

And they're looking for a movement that can mobilize them and get them to do something. Because I think people do feel unmoored and lost sometimes. And so people see unions as maybe the kind of thing that could happen. And like the Starbucks union campaign is an example of how this can kind of mushroom up. Or the teacher strike wave in 2018 was another case which went from deep blue L.A.

to deep red West Virginia and Oklahoma that transcended politics and mobilized teachers around the country. But it's hard to take that kind of like vague, I really hope somebody will organize me and get your actual union, right? And that's because...

Companies can do so much to stop a union election from happening, engage in intensive anti-union meetings and put tons of propaganda on workers that makes them scared. And then even if the workers win that election, the company can delay and delay and delay into signing a first contract, which is why you still don't have any contracts at Starbucks.

And this leads to one final point, which is that Democrats actually have to be pro-union. And I would be remiss here in not talking about how disgusted I am by Colorado Governor Jared Polis right now, who the Colorado legislature passed a law that would repeal their right to work statute, which came out of the horrible Taft-Hartlack in 1947 that is called right to work.

But what it really does is allow workers to leech off the unions without becoming members. and is used as an anti-union tool in Republican states. Colorado has moved significantly to the left in its politics. They have a Democratic legislature that passes a bill to repeal this, which should be the peak demand of any Democrats in purplish states.

And Jared Polis vetoes it because he doesn't believe in unions. And frankly, if you don't believe in union rights and you don't believe in the power of unions to transform the American people, then I don't think you're a Democrat. I don't think you belong in the Democratic Party.

I think you should be read out of the Democratic Party because to me, it's just as big of a moral crime as being a Democrat and saying, I don't support gay marriage. or being a Democrat and say, I think abortion should be banned, which would be red lines for a lot of Democrats. But being anti-union is not a red line for too many Democrats.

And so we need a better Democratic Party as well to show the American working class that this is the party of the worker, and you need to rejoin the party and become the kind of Democrats, working class Democrats that we have in this country from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, thank you for summarizing the points of the book so effectively. I mean, I hope those are the takeaways. And let me, I guess, close with an example. The March on Washington in 1963, everybody knows it for the I Have a Dream speech. And of course, that's been corrupted by Republican distortions of what Martin Luther King was saying.

But what is forgotten about, even by liberals and in the way we teach this in K through 12, often at the college level, and is part of our general understanding of society, is the actual name for it is the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

And economic demands were as central to the civil rights movement as desegregation, as central to the civil rights movement as legislation, as central to the civil rights movement as equality in schools. but they get dropped from the overall memory of the civil rights movement because economic demands are, in many cases, more challenging to established power than even demands for civil rights.

I mean, the idea for the March on Washington came out of A. Philip Randolph's World War II-level movement, and he was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleepy Car Porters Union. He speaks at the March on Washington in 1963. Walter Ruther and the United Auto Workers pay for most of the March on Washington.

And the March on Washington had economic demands that included a $2 an hour minimum wage, which in the contemporary economy of 2025 is something like $18 or $19 an hour. So they're pushing for widespread minimum wage legislation as well. All of that is totally erased from our memory of civil rights, not only on the right, but in liberal world as well. And we need to think about why that is.

Why do we, even when we do teach other justice movements, And on the left, we do do that more. We teach women's rights. We teach gay rights. We teach civil rights. This is very important. These are big advances in the way we teach history. Why are we leaving labor out of that? And that's a question we all need to think about.