The Union Makes Us Strong, Part 1

We talk with John Hieronymus, a nurse steward with Nation Nurses United about long COVID and the history of labor organizing in the US.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Welcome to It could Happen Here a podcast about things
falling apart and occasionally also about what you can do
about it. And today we're doing We're We're going, We're
we're going completely full into it what you can do
about an episode and specifically we're gonna be talking about unions,
union organizing, the basics of what they are and also
some of the history of it and to to talk

(00:31):
with us about this. I have brought. I brought my
good friend John Horonomus, who is a nurse steward with
National Nurses United in Chicago. Hi, John, how are you?
How are you doing? I'm doing good. Yesterday was my
first full day back at work after being out on
light duty from having covid UH for this last year.
And so I got home yesterday and was pretty tired

(00:55):
because I haven't walked that much in a day. It's fine,
but I mean it was a good day. I got
lots of plugs from my coworkers. I didn't I didn't
forget anyone's name, which I was terrified of um, and
didn't suck anything up um. And then when I got
when I got home, I hopped on after I got
my kids from school, I hopped on a union organizing

(01:17):
call with twenty nurses from a hospital in the South.
We're very excited about so um I was it was
it was a big day that that rules. Oh yeah, yeah,
I guess that should also do a do a very
very brief long COVID check in, because this is an

(01:39):
everything that I think people are talking about that is
also like a huge labor issue, which is that Yeah,
like long COVID fucking sucks and like I like I know,
like like like one of my cousins had it, and
you know, they they've been in bad shape for a
long time, like they still can't taste properly, and like
they I think you got from from what I remember,

(02:02):
like pretty bad, like in terms of yeah, sorry if
you don't, we don't want to, but oh I don't care.
I mean I think people should like know that this
is still going on, like the pandemic is still happening. Um,
people are still getting sick and some are still dying,
which really sucks. And the long COVID thing is real.

(02:22):
Um they I didn't get sick in the sense of
showing up having to be in like a hospital or
I see you or anything like that. Mine book. I
got sick, and um, the recovery, like the the year
or the month or so after I got sick was
when things actually got bad because something happened with my

(02:45):
um my nerves and my neuro I had a neuromuscular
variant of like the long COVID symptoms, and that led
me to having all its kinds of issues with basically
just being exhausted from basic things. Anything more than just
getting up and walking around. I would have to like
lay in bed afterwards. And it would add multiple episodes

(03:06):
of the past year where I would cross some invisible
line in terms of like endurance and then be stuck
in bed for a week. And so it's been a
long thing. But I've been slowly getting better, And people
who fall into that neuromuscular thing do slowly get better.
I think that's the upshot. People with heart problems, those
tend to be permanent and aren't getting better, which sucks, um,

(03:30):
But yeah, I mean it's just like I think that
a lot of people. It's a very weird, surreal thing
to watch what is effectively like a like a a
global public health catastrophe get politicized the way it has
and treated the way it has been by everybody involved.

(03:51):
So Um, anyway, I just I'm doing better with that,
and it's shaped me over the last year, and it's
shaped union organizing. And UM, I'm glad that I would
say this to people who are thinking about unions. I'm
glad that I had the union kind of backing me up, um,
even when I had to pull them a little bit
in the direct the right direction. Uh, it's much better

(04:13):
to have that kind of collective power behind you when
you're dealing with those kind of problems. So that's actually
a good way into looking at just sort of in
general what a union is, because I think there's there's
there's two things here. There is what a union is

(04:33):
legally and what a union actually is in terms of
just the people in it and the sort of power
behind it. And so I was wondering if you could, well, one,
I mean, just on an incredibly basic level, explain what
a union is like legally, like what is legally defined
as doing, because I feel like that's also something that
is not as well understood as it should be. Yeah,

(04:56):
for sure. So in the United States, there's a series
of is it kind of regulate um, you know, the
kind of collective UM bargaining UM and collective organization of
workers at work UM. An important thing to understand is
that UM, those laws are mostly designed to constrain workers

(05:22):
power to affect their their you know, working conditions. UM.
And so when you look at what a union legally
is UM, unions are, for the most part, UM, they're
legal organizations that kind of like operate on a dues basis.

(05:44):
So if you're in a union, you're paying dues out
of your paycheck. UM. If you work at a unionized workplace,
those dudes will get subtracted out regardless of your membership
or activity within the union. UM. One thing that people
don't understand is that you can if you don't want
your dues to go to anything besides supporting organizing your

(06:08):
particular workplace, you can request unions are legally required to
offer you that as an option UM. And then those
dudes get taken out of your paycheck and they get
used to do things like rent a union hall, UM,
pay staffers to help you with your organizing. UM. They

(06:32):
get taken to do lobbying, various types of political activity.
And so for a lot of people, unions will feel
like a professional association that lobbies on their behalf rather
than a collective expression of the will of workers in
a particular workplace. But UM, or it'll feel like patronage

(06:56):
machine for you know, Democratic party, that sort of stuff. UM.
But that being said, UM, unions all have by laws,
they all have mechanisms by which there you know, theoretically
democratically accountable to the membership UM. And there are oftentimes

(07:17):
UM campaigns by workers to change how unions operate and UM.
And then also you know, when you're setting up a union,
if you're in a new if you're in a place
that doesn't have a union and you're looking to get
a union because you're fed up with not having any
kind of power over your workplace, or you feel like
people are getting discriminity against or bullied, UM, you feel

(07:40):
like you haven't gotten a raise, UM, those sorts of things.
You can pick the union that you decide if you
want to get up a collective bargaining agreement, which is
a legal contract kind of like dictating how your workplace
operates in a uniform way. You can pick the union
that you want to organize with in their union that
are better to organize with, that are more democratic and

(08:02):
more collectively accountable. There are unions that are more organized
or more focused on actually building the union power and
organizing new workplaces. And then there are unions that are
kind of like there, you know, and I'm gonna say
that kind of blur. In the US, there's like a
blurry line between rank and file unions and business unions

(08:24):
because even rank and file unions are kind of constrained
by the same pressures that business unions operate under. And
I'll explain the difference. I'll sell any difference in a second,
but I just want to say that, like when you're
when you're getting a new union, it's really important for
you to critically look at what your options are and

(08:45):
you're set and who you're organizing with, because unions have
different cultures and different amounts of um, different kinds of politics,
and you should be aware of that before you and
your coworkers decide to commit to work with one union
while you're getting an or a union organized um. And
then I can explain that next part if you want

(09:06):
me to. All right, so yeah, so, and you know,
if you get deep into union history and deep into
organizing and figuring out like what unions are and what
they do and how they've worked kind of in the past.
You'll find that there's different types of unions. So American

(09:27):
unions started as like kind of like craft guilds, where
basically you would have a factory that might have like
twenty different unions of each individual group of people UM
in each individual skill set would be underneath the union,
and it was used as a way to kind of
control UM who was able to do the work and

(09:50):
who was getting hired in to do the work. And
a lot of times that would end up in the
United States UM being segregated UM and there would be
these called union scabbing where you would go in and
do work against people who are striking because your union

(10:11):
was fine and you were cool with your boss and
these other people whatever their problem is, you're just going
to keep doing. The boss will offer you more money
and you'll do the work right. So, and a lot
of that has kind of carried into we called trade
unions in the US a specific and trade unionism is
particularly UM prominent in UH in construction. So you'll have

(10:37):
carpenters and you'll have you know, Mason's, and you'll have
you know, pipe fitters and iron workers and all these
different guys and they all kind of come together and
work as a crew for like a construction company, and
oftentimes their union operates more like a contractor than like
a collective like expression of the power of those workers.

(11:00):
So um, then there are more there are unions that
are would be considered like industrial unions, So industrial unions.
Industrial unionism was invented by a union a hundred years
ago called the Industrial Workers of the World, and they
were like, what if we got took all of the
workers in an industry and got them into one big union, right,

(11:24):
and then what if all those workers in those different
industries were talking to each other and building their their power.
And the goal would be that you would become so
powerful that you could basically take over industries as workers
and run them on a democratic basis so that you
wouldn't have you kind of liquidate capital and want to

(11:46):
I want to say that this briefly awesome, Like yeah,
so the bosses did not like this. I mean the MW,
Like the MW was so feared that like like there's
only the Everett massacre where it's like it got to
a point in the early en hundreds, where just a
group of IWW people showing up to a place was
enough to get like the the the the entire like
the entire city police force and like rounding up literally

(12:09):
every right winger they could do and deputizing them and
then just opening fire like into the crowd because like
the IWW had showed up on a boat like this
was these people were tired, like people were terrified of them.
And I think that the other thing I think is
really interesting about the early AWWS history is that is
the so you know, part of the response to them
is like they are just massive, and this is what

(12:29):
the first red scare was, basically it was an anti
IWW thing. And also you know, they shot people, they
arrested people, they like they deported people. And but they
also you know a lot of the things that I
think we we have this tendency to look at as
like a socialist reform where for example, like putting workers
on corporate boards, right, or like like in internal democratic

(12:51):
self management, but that's like, you know, that's still still
sort of boss controlled, right, It's like, wow, okay, you
have like a council of people who can make recommendations
or like even even down to you know, we're going
to have our own internal like corporate unions, like set
up by the company. But you know that the corporate
union gives you a workers council, and the council can
sort of control production, but you know, it's it's still
it's still run by the bosses. Like all of these
things were stuff that like the Rockefellers set up or

(13:12):
like even even the earlier levels would set the stuff
up because they were they were so scared of people,
Like they were so scared if people just taking over
stuff democratically, just running it just literally through the union
that they were like, we will we will literally give
you democracy in the workplace. We will give you like
we will give you like workers on corporate boards literally

(13:33):
just so long as you don't like take everything over. Yeah,
I think that it's it's hard for people to imagine
how intense like the struggle for getting any kind of
rights in the workplace. I've been in the United States
in particular. I think a lot of people think that,

(13:57):
you know, uh, maybe not so much anymore, But when
I was younger, you know, twenty years ago, people would
be like, oh, you know, we're in America. We've got
you know, like we've got all these things, like we've got,
you know, an eight hour work day, and we've got
like a weekend and all. And the thing is is
that literally people were murdered to win those things, right,
like if you like. The reason why we have an

(14:18):
eight hour work day is because there was in Chicago
a famous, uh, a famous strike that um ended up
with a massacre of UM. It was like a police riot,
and then they rounded up a bunch of union organizers,
socialists and anarchists who were like involved in the labor

(14:42):
movement at that time, and then the state of Illinois
hung them. UM. And so the wife of one of them,
of one of those people who was murdered at the
Haymarket or they called them the Haymarket murders, h Albert
Parsons was one of them. Her or his wife, Lucy Parsons,

(15:05):
who was I had a very veritable kind of like
not quite sure what her background was, but we do
know that she was probably a former slave. Uh. Albert
Parsons was a former Confederate. They got married in the South,
became Southern Republicans, trying to like participate in radical reconstruction,

(15:25):
and then they basically had to flee because they were
um with their lives to the north. And uh. But
after that whole trial and all that shook out, Lucy
Parsons became a labor agitator across the United States fighting
for the eight hour day and uh. And they memorialized

(15:46):
the Haymarket Martyrs and something that I think some of
your listeners will know about. Maybe they won't, but you know,
made a made a a lot of people is like, oh,
that's Russian or some foreign sort of thing. Now, that
is an American labor addition that like started here, and
it was because of a specific like the the labor
movement in the movement for the eight hour day in

(16:07):
the United States. So um, and that's kind of like
once you go from the IWW and industrial unions as
an idea, it got crushed in the twenties because it
was so terrifying. There's a really good, uh, a really
good essay on all that called The stop Watch and
the Wooden Shoe by a guy named Mike Davis, who
kind of explains how it is that IWW as the

(16:30):
first union too not only um try and build workers organization,
but to challenge workplace organization and to make those push
back on how production was happening and fight something called
the speed up where I think a lot of people
who have worked have experienced this time where a boss
will come in and say we're going to do things differently,

(16:51):
and they'll either get rid of a worker and put
all the extra work onto people who remain, or they'll
change things so you're doing more with the same amount
of time. Um, they got you know, they provoked a backlash. Um.
There were like spectacular like general strikes. The first general

(17:12):
strike in America in Seattle. There were i w W
members who are key members of the Seattle Labor Council,
which took craft unions and got their radicals together and
coordinated a general strike, which is where there's a lot
of tweets about general strikes, but general strikes require a
lot of organization and coordination. We can talk about that

(17:34):
later if we want to, but key thing is the
i w W was always pushing for the organization necessary
to pull off a general strike, and they did it.
And so amongst those different things and their mind wars
in Colorado, mine wars in Virginia, West Virginia. UM, they

(17:56):
were the first union that was explicitly anti racist. Um.
They they weren't perfect, but they were. But they organized
multi racial unions in UM Philadelphia, the Docks, and various
other places. They were one of the few unions that
really took the first steps into organizing in the South

(18:20):
in the way that um a lot of unions have
kind of failed too since. And because they were so
effective and so frightening, they got crushed. Yeah. I mean, also,
what every thing I want I want to say about
them is that like, like the WW fought in the
Mexican Revolution because you know a lot of the WW
members in California particular were like a lot of a

(18:40):
lot of indigenous people, a lot of sort of voted
Mexican immigrants. So yeah, they had these huge gives and
like the they like they I think, I think to
this day this is still true outside of Puerto Rico,
Like they are the only leftist movement that has ever
like taking control of an American city, like they took
to Lexico and Mexicality and like a bunch of the
sort of the border area. Yeah. That that's that, that's

(19:01):
you know, part of why it just escalates to everyone
starts shooting them because well and and they were truly
an international union because they were they focused on like
longshoremen and organizing and docks, that sort of thing. There
were members of the i w W organizing basically everywhere

(19:22):
in the world, and they were considered part of like
what was like a global movement. And we call them syndicalists,
which is kind of like a an Italian term or
French term um, which is this the you know, like
like the Latin version of union of syndicate and um.

(19:43):
There were similar unions across the world up through the
early twentieth century until right about the time when the Russians,
the Russian Revolution happened, and then there were subsequent crackdowns.
And because these people were who oh I mean, the
IWW was a mix of native native born Americans and immigrants,

(20:10):
and they were painted as this foreign sort of force.
They were un American. That was like the whole nexus
of un Americanism as like an idea, and the US
state was able to mobilize after World War One to
really put that down and so so there's a lot
of history there in that, but the idea of the

(20:34):
industrial union didn't go away, right The union, the IWW
was effectively dismembered and scattered. But a lot of people
who had experienced as IWW members who had been in
those strikes, UM didn't like just disappear. They didn't all
get deported or sent away. UM. A lot of them

(20:55):
kind of tucked their heads down and went back to work,
you know. And in the nineteirties we saw the rise
of another industrial the next step towards industrial unionism. So
it's called the c i O, which is the Congress
of Industrial Organizations. Now there were multiple at that point.

(21:17):
There was the Communist part of USA, the Socialist Party
of America, and UM, former members of the i w
W and various like anarchists who were participants in kind
of the organization of the c i O. And the

(21:37):
thing about c i O was was that when they
came together, UM, it was in the Great Depression had
really kind of kicked off, and they were able to
organize like really explosively across all these new industries. So
they like the u a W United Auto Workers was

(21:58):
like part of the c i OH, and they would
they pioneered forms of strikes called sit down strike, which
was basically a factory seizure. All the workers would just say,
we're not going to walk out, We're going to lock
ourselves in and we're going to sit down, and it's
our factory now, and now you're going to have to
negotiate with And it became this thing where it was

(22:23):
like millions of people were in Like the I w
W at any one time was like hundreds of thousands
of people, and the c I O became a thing
where it was millions of people and UM and at
least at the beginning when they had there, when they
had we're at the peak of their like power and militancy. UM,

(22:49):
they were able to mobilize workers to take over factories,
take over factories from some of the most powerful corporations
on the earth on Earth. And you know, at the
same time, UM, while they're doing this, the police and
UH company, UM company security and vigilantes which had never

(23:13):
gone away from like the IWW we're doing the same
sorts of things. So they would regularly beat strikers. They
would regularly there would be you know, regular labor massacres,
um disappearances of various um of labor organizers or labor
leaders or even just random workers that they thought were like, oh,

(23:35):
you're a unionist. Um, you know, get in the back
of this h get in the back of this truck.
And then they were never seen again. Um. And then
laws started to be enacted, I believe, out of fear
that if this, if this movement didn't get somehow put
under brought in under control, that there would be a

(23:58):
revolution and so h. So that's when we started to
see the enactment of laws like the National Labor Relations Act,
which made having a union like that was the first
time when being any union was considered legal at the
federal level. And that Uh, the FDR and the New

(24:19):
Deal Democrats basically attempted to broker something called labor Piece
where they would say, we're no longer going to mobilize
the state against workers in the way that we have previously.
Now local police would still side with bosses, that sort
of thing. But uh, and those sorts of massacres and

(24:40):
that sort of stuff didn't really go away until like
the forties. Um. But um, that was the beginning of
because what you do see is unions get channeled into
Once you have like a million people in the union,
you have just enormous amounts of resources, all these dues
coming in, you have the beginning of the labor bureaucracy,

(25:04):
whereas before it would be you know, there would be
hired you know, paid labor organizers, but they were always
shifting around, and they were they were brought up as
communists or socialists, and they had ideological commitments to building
the power of the union and the power of workers
that you know, if you are just you know, and

(25:25):
someone with some ambition and decided you want to become
like anyone at this point, you know, who wants to
become a paid union staffer if you're like you know,
if you care to and a lot of people, um,
then being a union staffer was a different thing than
is now. It was. I think I'm trying to remember

(25:47):
the name of the president. I think it's John Lewis.
John Lewis, who was a Republican back in the day said,
you know, I think famously said at one point it's like,
if you want to build a union, or if you
want to build the house, you call a carpenter. If
you want to build a union, you call communists and
so uh and so they would literally would go to

(26:10):
like the the you know, the Communist Party and say
we need organizers, and the Communist Party did a lot
of work to training people to be organizers, and they
were militant, they were ready to throw down because to them,
they were looking at this as part of a you know,
class struggle against you know bosses and you know, a
way of overthrown capital. Um. That kind of went through

(26:33):
until World War two. And uh, when World War two hit,
that's when the Soviet Union, which in many ways controlled
what was happening with Communists with cp us A, basically
said we need a labor piece because we need to

(26:54):
support the war effort. And so that's when union started
signing contracts with no strike clauses, and they started um
agreeing that they would no longer strike um and and
they started agreeing to things like speed ups. There used

(27:16):
to be a time when uh, these mass industrial unions,
the stewards would walk around with a whistle on their neck.
They have a whistle on a lanyard. And any time
that workers decided that this is like an example of
how powerful these unions were. Not just like as like
an organization, but every day at your workplace, if you

(27:37):
thought that something was not right, or you were not
being treated fairly, or somehow the contract was in breach.
You would go to your steward, and your steward would
pull out this whistle and would blow the whistle. It's
called a whistle stop strike. And everyone would set down
their tools until management would come out and they would
either agree to pay more or stop what was happening

(28:01):
and fix it. And so um, there was a time
when strikes would be you would have intermittent work stoppages.
So you wouldn't go out like indefinitely. You would go
out on strike for like three months. Though that happened,
you wouldn't just and it wouldn't just be your factory.
It would be Hey, we're getting on the phone and
we're calling our friends down the street at the next

(28:23):
at your supplier. It's called a secondary strike. So if
you're working at like a steel mill, and your steel
mills dependent on coke from the next factory over, you're
calling up your friends in the same union down the way,
say stop sending coke, stop sending materials where these things
to us. We're on strike, you guys, you all set

(28:45):
your tools down, you go on strike, and it would
and these strikes would like massively expand, so you would
see things instead of seeing you know, we just went
through Striketober, right, yeah, and we just and so we
saw like what we call a strike wave, but in
and in some ways it was a strike wave. But
I think that we still don't I think it's so

(29:07):
far away from living memory of what a real strike
wave is, where people would go on strike in one
factory and then the next factory, in the next factory,
the next very it literally would be a wave of people,
um going on strike. And this was all the result
of all the organization that people had, in the militant
attitude that people had about like how they were going
to be treated at work. It's worth mentioning that one

(29:40):
of the so the National Labor Relations Act, which because
passed nine turty five, which is like that, you know,
this is the beginning of labor piece like you know,
it's okay, we'll give you the right to re union,
but you cannot do secondary strikes like that, like this
is this is explicitly banned in this if I'm remembering
this right, is that there's a specific thing that says
you can't do secondary strikes anymore. And you know, and
this was this was you know, the the basis of

(30:01):
this piece was that like yeah, as you sort of
said before, it was like, well, okay, so the state
will put their guns down, but the workers also essentially
have to put their guns down. And yeah, and this
this starts this whole process of you know, once once,
once you lose like that kind of consciousness, and once
you lose the practical experience of doing this stuff, it

(30:22):
kind of it fades and and over time, you know, yeah,
the atrophies and and the unions get weaker and weaker
because you know, like with without, like you know, on
once you once you've set aside, right and you've decided
that you're gonna essentially you know, okay, we're gonna we're
gonna follow the laws. We're gonna sit down, we're gonna
do this, We're gonna like negotiate in good faith, We're
going to have all of this sort of um, you know,

(30:43):
we're we're gonna go through the national relations board. It's like, well,
at that point, people like people, people's willingness to pick
the weapons back up that they put down just sort
of continues to diminish. Well, I think, what is I mean?
And so there was like a ten year period. So

(31:03):
first there was like the first five you know, five
ten years of c i oh was when we receive
like this really like intense militancy within these unions. And
halfway through like you know, the passage of that first
long in the nineteen thirties, UM, that's when we started
to see the erosion. And we constantly see I think,
I think that people don't understand that our bosses are

(31:25):
always trying to assert their control over work. And we'll
see that like, UM, bosses will do all kinds of
contortions as long as they get to stay in charge
and that they're unquestioned. And I don't think we understand
quite how long the long game is for UM, for management,
for our bosses and for capital. And so you know,

(31:46):
it starts with the National Labor Relations Act and then
it goes through uh, UM, it goes through World War
two and our World War two. That's when the c
i O goes from you know, you know, millions of
people to like tens of millions, and it becomes like
a thing where like that's when you know, like Americans
are in a union, right, UM, because I mean to

(32:10):
the extent that that to the extent that UM, there
were those compromises happened It didn't just compromise. It wasn't
just like a failure of like oh, like we're just
going to start capitulating. It's like there were interests inside
the union. They're looking at like, well, this is a
lot of resources and power that we have now, but

(32:31):
wait until like it's you know of Americans paying union dudes,
And there were people inside the Democratic Party who were
willing to trade UM that labor piece for that. You
would start to see, you know, that's when politicians would
show up to UM two union halls to talk and

(32:53):
try and get you know, and that's when you know,
the Democratic Party it would be it wouldn't be unusual
to hear Democratic polity titian UM say things about like
labor that you would like that no politician would say today.
And now that doesn't mean that they were like on
the side of the workers, but you know, you would
have literally, um President Eisenhower telling the president of US

(33:18):
Steel to get fucked over like a general, like you're
you're trying to shut down, like you know, this is
like the the steel industry is the lifeblood of backbone
of the American economy, um, you know, and you're trying
to shut this down trying to kill the golden goose,
like get back to work, let the pay these people
what they're asking. Um. But you know, so you would

(33:39):
see the people who kind of floated to the top
of those UH unions trading there, trading away their workers
power and their workers well being for more and more months.
First off, there would be more money, so you would
you like, they would start getting raises that were really substantial,
and it would boost up a a union steel worker

(34:01):
or union auto worker into what we consider like the
comfortable middle class where people could like buy a like
a fishing cabin or something up on a lake, send
their kids to college, all these sorts of things that
were just kind of like unobtainable sorts of things if
you were the same in the same industry twenty years earlier,
and um, and that felt like wins, you know, two people.

(34:25):
And also in the nineteen forties, after World War Two,
they passed the taff Hartley Act, which basically meant that
they forced unions. Well they did, okay, they wrote into
law that it was illegal to be a communist or
an anarchist in UH in a union, and so they're
literally still unions that still have language in their in

(34:48):
their membership parts, or they're like I declare, I'm I've
never been a member of the Communist Party. I'm not
an you know, an anarchist. Uh, I mean like I've
I have friends who have pulled that out. Now it
doesn't have any effect now, but that was they basically
took all the people, you know, the people that uh
that were you know, the people that you would have

(35:08):
called to build the union twenty years later or before,
we're getting thrown out of unions. And that didn't happen
in every like there were attempts to do that in
all kinds of countries. They tried to do it in
the UK, and the unions in the UK told basically
told the government to go fund themselves, and they you know,

(35:29):
it's like but because the leadership of the of the
c I O Industrial unions began to see themselves more
in alignment with are ruling class and are you know,
like the Democratic Party, they decided that they were big
enough that they didn't have to have militants involved anymore.

(35:50):
And that's when you know, uh, people were literally would
get fired out of they either either militants in staff
would get fired or uh they would get fired out
of factories if you're like a ranking file worker. So
UM and that's when we begin to see the rise
of what we call business unionism. And that's where we
would have union bureaucrats would and UM would you know,

(36:17):
would basically start making concessionary contracts. And this started, you know,
back in you know, a lot of people are like, oh,
you know, back in the fifties, unions are really powerful,
and they were powerful to get you know, like raises,
but those races came at the expense of control over
the work process. It came at the expense of the
speed up UM and as unions like because the rank

(36:39):
and file workers, like you're saying, you know, rank and
file workers, and they see their things there, these tools
getting put down, and they were more reluctant to pick
them up, first off, is because of the amount of
money that they're getting paid. And but they did push back.
They were like this is I mean, like, there's a
really great book called The Next Shift, UM by Give

(36:59):
Your Win, and it's all about the shift from steel,
the steel industry as like the center of the U.
S economy to health care UM and how unions basically
started to erode away there like throw it, like hand
over their power in exchange for money. And then when

(37:21):
they were told like there was UM and attempts to
get socialized medicine and the under the Truman administration, and
when they were basically uh, they they hit a speed
bump in there and it got shot down. They decided
that instead of trying to win those uh, those broad

(37:44):
social reforms for everybody, they're like, well, we can use
our our power to strike to get basically construct a
private welfare state for our workers. And so that's when
you begin to see UM things like uh. The they
called them like the gold plate insurance plans for certain
types of unionized workers, and those would kind of UM

(38:07):
and those are kind of used as like a private
welfare state for all those workers. And it was built
with the assumption you're gonna have low cost workers basically
doing all this care work UM, and oftentimes it would
be women of color and UM. And through that you
start to see this real sharp client from the sixties

(38:32):
in like uh in union um, militancy UM. And that's
when factory, when capital starts moving factories out of city
centers where it's very easy to organize a factory when
everyone lives within walking distance the factory, and when they're
done with their shift at the factory, they're all at
the bar outside the outside the factory gates, and you

(38:55):
can just like if you want to have a union meeting,
if you want organized even a wildcat strike, all you
have to do is show up at the right bar,
and that's where everyone is after they're done with their shift. UM,
they started moving and dispersing the industrial capacity of the
United of you know, the the US urban core out

(39:16):
into suburbs. So that's now where you'll drive through rural
Indiana and you'll pass like five factories and they're surrounded
by nothing but corn fields. It's because it's a lot
harder to organize auto workers when they all live thirty
minute drive from each other and none of them hang
out at the same bar anymore. Uh. And then you
start to see UM. And all through that time, the

(39:40):
commitments to anti racism are eroded, So you'll see UM
jobs get start to get segregated out inside it's like
steel mills and things like that. But then you know
there's also the rise of rank and file movements to
push back. So UM, all the while we're talking about this.
There's always as workers who remember what these things were

(40:02):
like and why and the power that they used to have,
and they would do the best that they could to
get organized and so UM there's a really good UM
documentary you can find a YouTube called Finally Got the News.
It's about the Dodge Revolutionary Union movement in Detroit, which
was a rank and file reform movement organized by UM

(40:26):
by black auto workers. They got like a fair amount
of support from white auto workers because they're basically there's
you know, interviews with U a W bureaucrats and they're
just like, you know, we're getting people these raises. Why
are they upset that they're like getting named in the
factory right, or why are they getting upset that, you know,
you know, black workers are constantly getting put into the

(40:48):
shittiest jobs or the first to get laid off, that
sort of thing. And that's a it's a really I
suggest anyone has time. And that came out of like
the I think that was immediately after the was getting organized,
after the assassination Martin Luther King and all the riots
that were happening in the h in the sixties, had
like that late sixties period Um. In the seventies there

(41:12):
was a teamster, the teamster rank and file rebellion. My
grandpa was a teacher trucker. My grandma was a teamster.
She was like a punch card operator. But yeah, sorry, yeah,
yeah no, I mean like teams, these unions got so
big and they have that's how you end up with
like there's u a W teaching assistance now, right, Um,

(41:34):
Like how do you end up with these huge like
uh unions? And during teams are rebellion And my grandpa
would tell these stories like we're going on there would
be a wildcat strike and they call it out over
the CB radios. And the way they would enforce the
picket line wasn't just like oh, we're gonna like standing
in the road or something. They would hang coke bottles
full of rocks over the overpasses, just high enough up

(41:57):
to like that cars that pass underneath them. But if
you hit one and you're in a truck, it funk
up your day. Um. And that was like a really
um like a really kind of like powerful pushback by
rank and file workers against what they saw was the
erosion of their power. Because I think that I think
there's this sometimes amongst people who consider themselves to be

(42:20):
left or whatever. There's like this kind of doom and
gloom like, oh, it's only like we're only losing, right.
But and there's been a lot of as the seventies happened,
and capital is kind of reconfiguring itself in the middle
of all the economic upheaval inflation. Um, Basically, they got
to the point where we can't maintain labor peace and
maintain profits, right, so they could maintain labor peace and

(42:42):
have something more like a socialist system, or they can
maintain control over the work process and just do everything
in their power to destroy the power of workers. And
they decided to do that. UM. So I think we
were coming out of this kind of era where you know,
if you were in a union and working at a factory, Um,

(43:05):
there was a real threat that they're like, well, we're
just gonna shut this factory down, and you know, not
to get signed. Well, first it was the pet Go
strike with Reagan. Reagan gets elected and air air traffic
controllers decided they're going to go on strike and um,
and they and Reagan decided he was going to break

(43:28):
it and they brought in they Basically there was this
bigger session. It was like this huge mess where people
were really desperate for work, and um, you know, they said,
we're going to hire anyone to be an air traffic
controller and we're gonna break the strike. And that was
the first real the first like that the beginning of

(43:48):
the end of that final like that big moment era
of industrial unionism in the United States. And we went
from a place where you know, U a W had millions,
the United Auto Work had millions and millions of workers
and if you drove a car or a truck in
its main America was made by union worker to this
point where now the AW is around fifty people. I

(44:11):
was shocked when I heard that, literally like two weeks ago. Um,
you know, we just had the big U a W
striker John Deer um. And there's been and you know,
all through this while this is going on, Um, there's
various union corruption scandals. And that's again the cause of
like when you kick out all the people who have
an ideological commitment to improving the lives of working people

(44:34):
and building the power of working people out of this
organization that's only existence is to like build the power
of working people. Um, then you then you end up
with people who are basically criminals, like you end up
like there would be uh, I think Reagan scat like
Ronald Reagan was h was a union member, but he

(44:57):
was like the union member for like a corrupt like
there was like there was like a battle between like
the c i O controlled union in like Hollywood and
like the corrupt like Moss mobbed up union and the
mobbed up union, like that was the side if I'm
that that was a side that Ragant picked and uh
and yeah, so it's like you could kind of and

(45:21):
there was a lot of like media where they would
be like you know, the Waterfront in various like movies
and things talking about union corruption. And I think that
union corruption is real and it's a it's when it happens,
it's a huge problem. It shouldn't like it's in other
countries like in like in Germany, if they found out
like a union union official like misappropriated like two thousand euros,

(45:44):
it would be a nationwide scandal like um also in
uh in like European countries, like you pay union dues
on a voluntary basis right in the US legally since
we're a close shop system, like once you're at a
union uh union workplace, your dues get taken, whether you

(46:07):
know whether you're happy with the union or not. Now
there are people will say that's really important because unions
need every penny they can to fight where they have.
But when unions have to fight for membership and make
sure that their membership knows that they're getting like what
they're paying for, you get a little bit more responsiveness.
So I think that's another thing that especially people are

(46:29):
thinking about unions and thinking about joining a union are
creating getting any of the workplace. Just understand what a
union is and how they work and where your money
is going to, and that if you're unhappy with that,
the best thing to do is to get involved with
your union, to try and like get connected with your
coworkers who have similar complaints and change the union. Because

(46:52):
there's a saying it's like any union is better than
no union. That's not always true, but it generally is.
They're there. There's like a very small chance that like
you're like living in nine nine China and like your

(47:14):
union is like is controlled by like a commodation of
the K and T and like literally the Chinese heroine trade.
But you know that that Like, yeah, that like doesn't
there there there are things where you'll have like they're
my dad worked at a factory and there was it

(47:34):
was a teamster organized factory, and like some of the
stewards were bullies and literally like there were some people
who were dealing drugs out of it. And they gave
the the workers like try to bring in another union,
and the and the management decided to offer to also

(47:55):
try and desertify decertify the union at the same time,
and the workers vote it to desert. And the thing
is is that now that factory shut down and gone. Um,
and I guess like the thing is is that you
have to It's far better for workers to assert their
rights within their union where they have some modicum of

(48:15):
democratic control over what's going on than it is to
just throw up your hands and like there's and do nothing,
because if you do nothing, the boss is always doing something. Yeah,
Like that's the thing is, like management is always organizing.
They're always coming up with ways to like to undermine
the control of workers at work, to pick people against

(48:36):
each other. Um, we can get into it later, but like, uh,
they want they'll use racism and those sorts of things
to dole out favors or curry favoritism and like you know,
put people against each other. So I think that it's
important to just say that, like the union is going
to be your only effective way to push back, well

(48:58):
the union or collect did action, because I guess I
also want to say that there are times when organizing
union isn't the best solution to solving your problem at work. Ultimately,
this is all about how do you solve problems at work? Right?
And they're sometimes when you can do collective action that
is protected as you know as labor organizing, but it's
not done within a union and so and because America

(49:21):
is the really best of place and you have right
to work states and places where like being in a
union is like literally illegal. Um sometimes putting the time
you're like you can't get into a union and therefore
you have to come up with other solutions. Or sometimes
because the nature of a workplace, like getting a union
is like it's very hard or like basically impossible, that

(49:45):
doesn't mean that you can't organize. And I think that
that's the thing that everyone needs to understand. I think
there's a lot of like boosterism of unions amongst younger workers,
because people just don't understand how they work or they
haven't experienced in themselves. And I think it the main
thing is is that you've got to be very careful
with your time and understanding. Like building a union can

(50:07):
take like ten years from the beginning of we're upset
to now we have a collective bargaining agreement, or now
we have a collective bargaining agreement. It could be another
five or ten years before you actually get to the
point where you're organized enough to go on strike. And
people oftentimes think that that's like they look back at

(50:28):
the history of things and they're like, oh, it's so easy.
But back then people were taking all they mean they
it took them years to build the the US labor
movement into what it was at its peak. It took decades, right,
And I think that we are kind of used to
this instant gratification kind of stuff, and we have to
understand that It's like, if you're going to be in
a workplace where you're there for enough time to build

(50:52):
the trust and relationships and understanding of how the work
workplace works and keep your job and be someone that
keep don't look at as like a shirt or whatever.
Not that I don't think that people should you know,
people should work as hard as they can and not
any more harder than that. But whatever. Um. But I

(51:13):
think that you know, I'm anti work, but you know
that's the whole other thing. Unions are the best way
to limit the amount of work that you have to do. Um,
if you're gonna if you're going to uh, you know,
work as a wage labor um. But I will just
say that it's like I think that people don't. It's
difficult sometimes to understand how much work goes into getting

(51:34):
to the point of getting a union, but it's always
worth putting the time in to get there. And you
may not win the first try, but if you are
if if the conditions are right and things like, you know,
we make our history, but not in conditions of our choosing.
Sometimes things don't work out, but not doing it is

(51:55):
I think a it's detrimental to you and your co workers.
And even times like I've talked with people who have
been involved in campaigns where they got fired but then
all of a sudden conditions improved afterwards, and they look
at that as like, oh, ship, we didn't get our union.
But everyone got raises and they change some things at work,
and that's actually a victory. So you know, I think

(52:18):
that I think of each other as like collective building
collective power, and the amount of time it takes to
do that is daunting, but I think it's the sort
of thing that we need to do if we're serious
about changing how we can actually like how our lives
work and how much power we have outside of work,

(52:38):
because unions are also places where we do things that
affect outside of our work as well. It could happen
here as a production of pool Zone Media. The more
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(53:00):
You can find sources for It could happen here, updated
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