The State of Labor/ Forever Chemicals

Ralph welcomes labor organizer Chris Townsend to discuss the current state of the labor movement under the second Trump administration. Then, Ralph talks to journalist Mariah Blake about PFAS and her new book “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals.”

Chris Townsend has been a union member and leader for more than 45 years. He was most recently the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) International Union Organizing Director. Previously he was an International Representative and Political Action Director for the United Electrical Workers Union (UE), and he has held local positions in both the SEIU and UFCW.

We've moved up an administrative layer of labor leaders, time markers, folks who see their role as at best guiding the sinking ship, managing the decline, taking best care as they can think of the members as their lives are destroyed, as the employers move to liquidate us.

Chris Townsend

In many ways, exceeding the gravity of the political action crisis (our subordination to the Democratic Party, our membership estrangement from the political process, the lack of any significant trade union education of the rank and file other than a few cheap slogans)…is that the crisis that we face is the crisis of our very existence.

Chris Townsend

It's far easier to shrink the labor movement than it is to build it and grow it. And that's our job. No other force in the country is going to do the work of adding the many millions of unorganized toilers—I use the word “toilers” very carefully…Toil is really what we've been reduced to, and increasingly so. So there's absolutely, I would indict the labor movement loudly, daily, that there is as yet no understanding that unless we go back out to the unorganized and take the spirit of trade unionism—unity, one for all, take on the employer, organize, defend each other, move forward, recapture some of this gargantuan wealth that we create each day on the job—unless that spirit is returned into an organizing wave or at least an attempt to do this, our fate has been sealed.

Chris Townsend

Mariah Blake is an investigative journalist whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Mother Jones, the New Republic, and other publications. She was a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University. And she is the author of They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals.

PFAS are a large family of chemicals with some pretty amazing properties—they're extremely resistant to heat, stains, water, grease, electrical currents. They stand up to corrosive chemicals that burn through virtually every other material (including, in some cases, steel). And this makes them extremely useful. And as a result, they found their way into thousands of everyday products. On the other hand, they are probably the most insidious pollutants in all of human history. So they stay in the environment for hundreds or even thousands of years. Those that have been studied are highly toxic, even in the most minuscule of doses. And they are literally polluting the entire planet.

Mariah Blake

The way we regulate chemicals in this country at the moment makes zero sense. You do see changes happening in response to the unique threat posed by these chemicals on a state level. And this is really in response to citizen activism. So a number of states are passing laws that have banned the entire class of chemicals. That is not how we regulate chemicals in this country normally. We normally regulate them one by one, but at this moment 30 US states have passed at least 170 laws restricting PFAS, including 16 full or partial bans on the entire class of chemicals in consumer goods.

Mariah Blake

The amazing thing is the families of all these lobbyists have got these chemicals in their own bodies, their own kids, their own infants. I mean, don't they crank that into their daily mission as to how they're going to confront efforts by citizens around the country to ban and regulate these chemicals? How oblivious can you be? These oil and gas executives and lobbyists in Washington, their own families are being contaminated.

Ralph Nader

These were people very much like Michael, people who had never taken much of an interest in politics, who'd spent their lives trusting that there w