 Hello, I am James Butler and I'm here with the excellent Sarah Jaffe. Sarah, among her many accomplishments, is author of Necessary Trouble, which is an excellent book, host of an exciting podcast about US labour, US organising. But you've been here for the passing of the Green New Deal measures, they're kind of very exciting. Just like an hour ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you make of this though? Because I know there has been movement in the States, especially from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, young left, congressperson. What do you make of that? Is there a difference between the kind of the approaches to Green New Deal here and there? I mean, there is a lot of difference just in terms of like, there's a party here that you can actually make motions through. So that's a thing. It was funny. I was having one of those late night conference conversations that you have with somebody and was saying like the first time I heard the term Green New Deal was in 2008 right after the financial crisis in Obama's president and everybody's like, oh, what can we do? We can do a Green New Deal. And that would be, you know, again, a solution to massive economic crisis that would also have the, you know, benefit of fixing the climate crisis. We got the opposite of that. We got eight years of fracking. And there has been just, you know, very, very little movement in the Democratic Party leadership is really resistant to doing much of anything, not just on the Green New Deal, but like anything as far as I can tell right now, asking them to like show up to work as a stretch. And I'm opposed to work, but like, come on, Nancy Pelosi. So the other thing is that like, you know, to move something like this, we don't have a party to move it through. It ends up in a presidential platform, but it then still has to get through Congress. So even if Bernie Sanders, who has a radical Green New Deal proposal, which like, don't ask me too many of the details because not actually like like climate reporter mostly, but like, even if he gets elected president, right, which could happen. Sure. To actually get it through Congress, we need to also elect a couple hundred more Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezas because it's not enough to just be like, Bernie can do this. Like there are things they can the executive can do, but like, it's kind of limited. So it's it's complicated. We need more congressional candidates. I think this is I think this is something in common for the left in the UK and the US, which is that we need better, we need better left representation. Yes, yes, yes. But obviously, I mean, there's been kind of astonishing stuff going on in the US. And it's something that maybe I think a lot of our viewers don't know very much about and that would have heard on the grapevine. There's a big UAW strike coming, the auto workers against general managers. Tell us about where it comes from, what the roots of this are. So it's, I'm actually shocked that they're on strike. Like nobody, we didn't think this was going to happen. It's been quite a while since the UAWs had a big strike. This is one of the biggest since, I don't know, decades. And earlier this year, I went to Lordstown, where there's a very famous GM plant that has a history of radical worker activism of really challenging the union leadership as well as the management of the factory. And it was closed down this year. It's one of several plants that GM sort of unallocated, which is a term that nobody had heard before. Like when I was talking to the union leadership at Lordstown, they were like, this is like a new one on us. And we've been in this union for, you know, decades. I talked to a guy who worked at Lordstown in the 70s during all the Wildcat strikes, you know, they're like, what is unallocated. So what's happening in bargaining, among other things, is that GM is using these closed plants as sort of bargaining chips, saying we'll put some more manufacturing in these places. And they're talking about putting like battery manufacturer in Lordstown, which would be cool, right? Like it could be like green or manufacturing. Great. But the thing that they want out of the workforce really is they want to keep their two tier structure that they won during the financial crisis, and they want more temps. And the temps thing is really, really huge because I was actually telling the story on a TWAT panel the other night. One of the things if you look at the statistics in US manufacturing in like the 80s and 90s, is that there's definitely declined due to outsourcing, offshoring, we know that there's definitely declined due to actual automation. And then there's also just decline of like, industrial jobs on the record, because a lot of these companies are hiring them through staffing agencies, temp agencies, that because of a weird way the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates employment, they are calculated as service jobs, not industrial jobs. So we could potentially have like seen as many industrial jobs lost, not really lost at all, just made temporary. So you've got workers on the assembly line in these factories, who are employed by GM, members of the union, have benefits, have a profit sharing agreement where they could get a $10,000 check of GM profits if the company is doing well. And then you have a guy next to them who's making, you know, I don't know, 10 bucks an hour, and is can be laid off immediately has no contract and certainly doesn't get that profit sharing agreement. And the companies do this because they're easier to get rid of so you can expand and contract your workforce very easily, and also they're cheaper. So although the temp agencies weirdly like cost them money, so it's still they're not as much cheaper as you would think. So this is this is an ongoing thing about manufacturing that like the expansion of this kind of, you know, contingent workforce in these unionized plants, and GM wants to keep it. And that is what they are really, really fighting over here. They've offered some things. But that's the sticking point. But it's sort of amazing, because I sort of saw some reporting on this stuff that was saying, organized labor is back. It's been away forever. It's been great. But it's so it's this is this big, it's complicated over the strike, right? One is that like, all of us were kind of like, wait, what, like people like me like follow this crap, right? Who like spent, you know, a bunch of time hanging out around in a, you know, you at W office fairly recently, we're like they're what they want now. Yeah. So the question of like preparation and whatever is really big. There's just a big question mark on how ready they are for this. There's also been corruption charges at the very top levels of the UAW. There are people getting arrested, you know. So some people are wondering, you know, if they're sort of shoved about, you know, decided to go on strike, they didn't have to shove the workers, the workers are pissed. It certainly didn't shove anybody out on strike. And that's the thing that they're still out. The workers are tired of this crap, right? They're tired of concessionary bargaining. They're tired of two tier workforces. They're tired of this guy being a temp and this guy not. And they're out on strike and they're ready to be out on strike in like, the labor movement being back in whatever sense is a very complicated question. There's certainly more strikes happening in the US than there were. And the other thing that's happening is like there's a left. You know? So the same thing that happens here now when you get like momentum activists joining a picket line somewhere is happening with like DSA groups are going to join the picket line. A friend of mine has been out in on the like night picket shift with GM workers in Pennsylvania. So you get like there is sort of a culture around labor that's coming back slowly. It's not big enough by like orders of magnitude, not big enough obviously. But it is a thing that is, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of it's it's sort of amazing in some ways. You know, I was reading some of the reporting around this stuff and around this kind of yes. I mean, as you say, it's often very sensationalistic. There's some interesting numbers about the the number of young people joining trade unions, which has been sort of it's been a problem, you know, across the globe and certainly within, you know, within the UK is that the membership tends to be older, etc, etc. Yeah. You mentioned, of course, that there's political support. And you mentioned, of course, that there is now a left in the US. There is a left. We've got one. You know, my European friends were astonished when, you know, Corbyn won in the labor part, and it's like, Britain has a left. And I feel I feel like it's about the emergence of democratic socialism in the US. But it does seem to me that there is there is sort of some awkwardness about the relationship between democratic party and labor, organized labor. Yes. Yeah. And this is because it's very different, isn't it, from the UK? And you have the labor party here, which is institutionally linked to the trade unions. Yeah. However, oddly, sometimes. Well, certainly. However, difficult that sometimes is. There's obviously, the democratic party doesn't operate. No, no. And it's actually goes back to the 70s. Once again, everything bad goes back to like 1972, right? But in this particular case, the fight over sort of changing the way that the decisions were made within the democratic party, within the democratic primaries. This is the election that ended up with McGovern as the democratic candidate and then getting absolutely stomped by Richard Nixon. But what they did do is they took away the power of these institutional, you know, affiliates of some sort, right? It's not a relationship like this one, but like decisions would be made in smoke filled rooms by a bunch of dudes and most of them, you know, had various positions of power and one of those positions of power was leading big unions, was being George Meany was the head of the AFL-CIO at the time. And so they like deliberately did that back then in the middle of, you know, the unions were being reactionary on the war at that point, rather than on climate policy at that time, you know. And some of the people who then sort of come out of the McGovern space, like Gary Hart was one of the people who was working, was like a young idealistic guy working for McGovern and then becomes one of these like third-way Democrats. You know, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, etc., etc. This, the roots of that kind of thing, that third-way politics that sees unions as sometimes a useful piggy bank, people to be pandered to, but not actually important constituents of the party. And then you stop seeing unions as people who are like decision-makers and you just start to see like the white working class and that big old scare quote weird othering way that everybody talks about the white working class, whether it's like Leeds or Lordstown. And so that kind of relationship where essentially the candidates will take union money, the unions will endorse the safe candidate, like most of them endorsed Hillary Clinton last time around. And that was this sort of absolutely dysfunctional, borderline abusive relationship that organized labor has had with the Democratic Party. The question then for me is the flip side of that because the thing we heard here was that Trump succeeded by appearing to people who would kind of habitually or that you would think of as having been habitually Democratic voters in sort of rust belt states, people you know who's kind of commuted out of there, the bottom not out of them. Again the ever always other white working class. And so my job is to go talk to workers, that's what I do. Sometimes I do it close to where I live, sometimes I get in the car and go somewhere else. And so after Trump won I said well I'm going to go to Indiana and I'm going to go to this carrier plant which is a place right outside of Indianapolis. There's a carrier, it was a furnace factory, there's a Rexnord ball bearings factory around the corner. There was a Sumco, I forget what they made it Sumco, oh my goodness. The Sumco guys went out on strike as these two other factories were closing like as I got there and I was like I love this union. Steelworkers look at 1999, they don't care. And this was maybe famously like Donald Trump sort of got on Twitter and attacked the president of this union Chuck Jones for you know something something he should make more concessions and then we wouldn't lose these jobs at carrier. So I went to go hang out the workers at carrier and I talked to people who did right who were those guys who and they were mostly guys and they were mostly white which is not actually the makeup of the factory. When you look at the pictures of Trump going into that factor he is posing with young black women because that's actually a bunch of who worked in those factories. So yes there are there were like some faction of white guys, the union endorsed Bernie Sanders in the primary and then was neutral in the general because you know the name Clinton means NAFTA in Indiana that's absolutely true. That said most people who voted for Donald Trump would vote for a three-legged dog if it had an R next to its name. They are not like the the flip was significant insignificant places it's also significant because it should piss us off because these are our people. I talked to a guy who was telling me that he went to union training camp in Terre Haute, Indiana which is where Eugene Debs was from. Eugene Debs our formerly most successful socialist presidential candidate until Bernie comes along right. This guy's telling me about Eugene Debs how great this is and he's like we need a workers party in this country we don't have it nobody cares about our best interest he voted for Trump. What did we do wrong that that guy could see voting for Bernie and voting for Trump as not enough different. This is one of the things that like and the fact that this line did tend to break down around race and gender. The white men in those factories were able to sort of bracket the racism and sexism. There's like a small amount of people who are really motivated by it right. I assume it's probably the same with Brexit. There's like some people who really just want to chuck migrants in the sea and those people were never going to win let them have the Brexit party whatever right let them vote for Donald Trump. We're not going to win that over but a guy who's telling me about Eugene Debs is winnable. That guy is winnable. So what did we not do to get the message across to that guy? I don't blame him for not voting for Hillary Clinton. But I lived in New York so it didn't matter what I did. You know the electoral college is a wonderful thing. Trump figured out how to game it in the right places because you know he might seem often like he's losing it he might be losing it but he had enough people around him who were smart enough and Hillary Clinton really was the one who lost. That election right. So I'm not going to ask you to make predictions about who win. Do not make predictions. Journalists should not make predictions. Yeah well I mean you know it's nothing for nothing else other than looking like a fool in about a month's time. So look the last thing I want maybe to get your insight on is we have these two movements we have movement in the UK we have movement in the US and they're substantially very very similar. Yeah. But what was striking to me was someone someone said to me the other day someone's American socialist said guys I am so so envious of the Corbyn movement where you have like a democratic culture where you can disagree and criticize the leadership. It's like wow it's interesting how things look from the outside right because this is what it seems like it doesn't feel negotiation in practice. Yeah. How how you know is there is there something you think that the UK movement can grasp from the US that it's not it's not grasped. Oh that's such an interesting question right I feel like the last time I was on the bar somebody was like why has the US left more interesting and I was like I'm here for a reason right. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in both places that is again like fairly similar. Right. I think some of what's happening that's different here is just based in the fact that you have a different party structure. We have to do a lot more heavy lifting to change the democratic party largely because it isn't one. You know there's no conference you can go vote at you can't introduce a bill. So like the democratic culture is just like literally like you can do this. This is a possibility that you can do. We couldn't do that at like the Democratic National Convention put forward a radical Green New Deal motion that says decarbonized by 2030 and we couldn't do it because it doesn't like matter and even if it was put forward at the conference it would have no reflection in anything that anybody did anyway. So I think in that space one of the things that's interesting is is you know we have this sort of community organizing culture you know throwback to like actual story but this this long history of mostly kind of depoliticized but community organizing this sort of a linsky tradition like being on the ground in the community and that kind of practical skill still has a lot of value and there's people here at this conference who like you know come from that tradition who are here speaking at TWT and the interesting thing here right is that labor looked at that kind of model and said we're gonna put it in the party. So instead of being like very depoliticized it's always inherently politicized right you've got a guy knocking on the door to say hey can we help you against your landlord who's screwing you over and he works at the labor party and you know that he works at the labor party and that might be the first contact you ever had with somebody from the labor party and they're not an asshole they're trying to help you out right and that's a totally different way to put this thing that didn't exist here so much to use and so I think that like that's one of the things that is good and it is actually like labor is working on stealing that which is great not enough people know that labor is working on stealing that. Yes it's true it's true it hasn't really sprung up fully yet but it will come. Media strategy I guess. That's a thing. Anyway Sarah thank you so much for joining me this has been great and the transatlantic red wave is coming and we will be a part of it. Thank you very much. Thank you.