 Good afternoon. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers Politics in Hawaii series. I'm your host, Carl Campania. Today, we're going to be talking about the challenges that unions face today. But before I jump into that, I want to just thank everyone for joining me during their lunch hour. We are halfway through the day. We are in fact halfway through the work week. And many of us, I guess for many of us, halfway through the work week and through the day, but also many of us, most of us for that matter, got to enjoy a three-day weekend more time spent with our families. And it is actually thanks to our brothers and sisters of the union that we have those benefits. And more. That's the value. That's one of the values. There are many more, but that's one of the values, that's the history. Part of the history of unions and labor unions in this country is workers' rights, safety. We're having more safe work conditions. Having the eight-hour work day, the 40-hour work week, having a lunch hour, the ability to say, you know what, I'm going to go somewhere and grab a snack and then come back afterwards. You think that that's just common sense. And it's been a while now that we've had that. There's been a good number of years, several decades that we've had that. But we are at the precipice in many ways with what is perhaps the most dangerous and the most I'll call vicious Republican party ever at the moment that is going after and attacking all of our institutions. And we know for decades they've been attacking unions. They've been union-busting for decades or trying to. Well, this particular administration and this particular set of congressional Republicans are more cruel and are more focused on the power that they have achieved in maintaining that, that we as the working class people have much to fear. And we need to call back to those days when labor rights and civil rights and just human rights first started to be discussed and brought out and got to the point and reached the point where we are today. We cannot lose these rights that we have. We cannot lose these wages that some people have earned. And we need to raise the wages for many others. This is the basis of the conversation that we're going to have today. And I will welcome to the show and with really much excitement, I only welcome to the show Mr. Jason Bradshaw. Thank you. And Mr. Tyler Dos Santos Tam. Jason is, and we can get the full screen of everybody here, Jason is Executive Director of Political Director of AFL-CIO. And Tyler Dos Santos Tam is the Executive Director of the Hawaii Construction Alliance. Welcome to the show, both of you. Thank you. And thank you for the work you do. We, I understand, and I believe many of the people who watch the show understand the value of the importance of unions. But we also, as has been talked about on this show for over a year, recognize that there are challenges, recognize that there are challenges internally, challenges externally. The external challenges are the ones that we are ultimately worried about. The internal ones are stuff that we need to work on. Absolutely. Let's kick off a little bit. Let me start off by asking each of you to explain what you do in your respective roles and kind of what got you to where you are right now. So, Jason, I'll start with you. Well, as you saw, I'm the Political Director for the Hawaii State AFL-CIO. And what we do is we advocate for workers at the Hawaii State Legislature to fight for their rights. So we try to advocate for things such as increase of the minimum wage, paid sick days for all workers as an example, making sure that their rights are protected with workers comp or whether, through unemployment insurance, these are certain things that we try to do to protect their rights or try to expand their rights that we believe is important. We also focus on campaigns and elections. We support candidates who we believe support working families. And we go through that process and we try to ensure that we have a legislature that is willing to support working families. So that is our focus at the AFL-CIO. Okay, excellent. Let me, I have one person, because I have my little Facebook post, but I do a whole bunch of stuff on it. I had one person challenge this question. It's like, you know, they understand all the money that we give to our union bosses goes directly towards PACs, goes directly towards campaigns. And they pick their candidate and they don't let the rank and file have any input. I don't believe that's fully true, first of all, and I think that there are always conditions to situations that it's never, and my immediate question of them was, well, but it's always for a Democrat candidate who support unions, right? And the answer was, well, yes, but what would you say to, I guess, that challenge of the rank and file union members don't always feel like they have a say in what's going on? I don't know the truth of that. Well, I would say that for most of the labor unions, the PACs that are established do come from the rank and file. They are the rank and file members. So they have ability to sit on the political action committees. They have the ability to interview the candidates, ask questions, and make recommendations to the executive boards or to the staff or to whoever's in charge of determining what endorsement process should move forward. I think a lot of unions try to encourage their membership to get involved and make no mistake about it. I think some could do a better job, and some could try to figure out a way to get more involvement, but I don't think, well, I should state that a lot of them don't make the decision just from the top. There is a process where the candidates are interviewed. There is a process where a survey is sent out, for example, from some unions. They require them to fill out a number of questions on where they stand on a number of issues. The survey is generally provided to their membership. The membership has the ability to request where these candidates or the incumbents are on particular issues, and I think they try to make it as fair as possible when there is an endorsement for a particular candidate. Okay, thank you. I hit you with a hard one right out of the gate there. Something that was at least challenging, so sorry about that, and thank you for the answer. I appreciate that. Tyler, tell us, now it's your turn. Tell us a bit about what you do and what got you here. I'm the executive director of the Boyd Construction Alliance. We represent the Carpenters, Laborers, Simmons, Mason's, Bricklayers, and Operating Engineers Union, so it's the five basic crafts of the construction industry. What sort of defines these unions within the industry is that our members work for the general contractors, and thus they have some very common interests. We negotiate our contracts with the same contractors from the very large ones that you might see working on the tower cranes in Kakaoka or Waikiki, down to the small mom and pop quote-unquote contractors who maybe build custom homes or do sort of office buildouts, much smaller things like that. And so in the course of working together, they realize they have a lot of common interests, whether it's on the political front, making sure that the legislature is passing laws that help workers and protect them and ensure their safety. Whether it's messaging information to the members, they all have newsletters that go out, so we want to make sure they're talking about the same things. And when it comes to development projects that maybe will create work for them further down the horizon, we want to make sure we're being proactive and reaching out to these developers wherever they come from, whether it's the mainland or here in Hawaii, and making sure that they understand the importance of engaging with local workers, making sure that the money that they invest here in Hawaii stays here and circulates through the economy. And so my job is to kind of help those unions work together in whatever way they feel best serves their membership. Got it. Okay, okay. There's a lot going on there between the two of you. I was trying to invite a few other members from other unions to come in because I wanted to have a nice broad spectrum, but I really appreciate because you guys cover a lot of ground between the two of you. I was hoping to get an HTEA member here and want to hear a bit from them because it's a slightly different perspective with that. So perhaps future shows, certainly future discussions somewhere. So okay, what would you say as far as the state of Hawaii is concerned? Because there's a lot of people who go, well, Hawaii is a blue state, Hawaii is a union state, Hawaii is this that and the other just believe that how do things, there's no issues. There are issues. What would you say are some of your greatest challenges as far as unions are concerned in the state of Hawaii? Sure. Well, you know, one thing that you definitely point out is Hawaii is a very blue state and we have a lot of successes. I mean, we're very early on, you know, passing a workers comp law or prepaid health and things like that. But as a result of passing these laws in the early years of statehood, what we've discovered in the construction industry is a lot of the enforcement pieces are sort of stuck in the 60s and 70s. And so when we encountered an issue where mainland contractors were bringing in workers, they were calling people independent contractors rather than employees to skirt some of the labor laws, we discovered that some of the state departments just don't have the enforcement capabilities or the fines that are deterrent. So we went to the legislature last session and the session before to raise those fines and make sure that the state has enforcement capability. You know, our labor laws are only as good as the enforcement. And, you know, people are only going to follow the laws if there's a deterrent, right? So we want to make sure that that's strengthened. And a lot of these mainland states are seeing that eroded, you know, day after day in taking back these protections. And so we want to make sure that those are protected here. So I think there's sort of two challenges. One is making sure that our existing laws are well enforced, that workers are protected, and then also making sure that these things don't get clawed back. Sure. That's a big concern. And that's what we're probably going to talk about in the next segment, actually, is that clawed back process. So Jason, what would be some of your comments with regards to some of those local challenges? You are right. I mean, we're very fortunate in Hawaii to have a very blue legislature, right? In our Senate is all Democrats, right? All 25 members. So I would say our biggest challenge is really what's occurring at the federal level and what's potentially going to happen at the Supreme Court level for the state of Hawaii. You know, there is a case that potentially could be heard by the Supreme Court. And when I say potentially, very likely. And it's the Janus Viasmi case. Many of you may have been aware of what the Friedrich's case was about a year ago. The Janus case is identical to the Friedrich's case. In the sense that blue states like Hawaii or California, New York, Washington, will be impacted directly by the Supreme Court ruling. And if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Janus, then what will happen is in a state like Hawaii, for example, we will become a right to work state, at least for the public sector unions. And so in Hawaii, that would include unions like HGEA, HSTA, UPW, SHOPO, FIRE, and the professors. And basically what it does is that they get rid of the booed decision from the 70s and workers will no longer have to pay their fair share or their agency fees as they like to call it. So I do believe that is one of our biggest threats. And like you nailed it as well. We're on the verge of losing some of these rights that we fought for, you know, back in the 20s and the 30s. So we fought for so hard for, right? I think you saw it just recently in Texas where the overtime ruling, so workers no longer have the overtime rule. Obama's overtime rule was in, yeah, it just happened literally a few days ago where it was overturned. So now it's not a requirement to offer overtime or to pay overtime. I guess the number of hours is also a piece of that. We're on the verge of losing these benefits that I think many people work so hard for. And I think some of it is because maybe people take it for granted these days. They didn't, you know, it's been so long that you mentioned earlier, it's been so long since these victories were achieved that people just think, oh, we're always going to have the eight hour workday. We're always going to have overtime. We're always going to have the 40 hour. I think that's not necessarily the case. We have it until all of a sudden we don't. And then we go, what happened? And how do we get it back? And then that's a big, big fight. That's correct. Unfortunately, we are already at our break. So that goes really quickly. So we're going to jump more into the right to work and work. So let's get some, we'll dig into that. We'll get some explanation of that. Let's understand what that is and what that can mean in the next segment. So thank you again for joining us. Thank you. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers, Politics and Hawaii Series. I'm your host, Carl Campania. And once again, my guests today are Tyler Dos Santos-Tam and Jason Bradshaw, local union leaders here in Hawaii. So I'll see you in a minute. Dive Heart can help children, adults and veterans of all abilities escape gravity right here on Earth. Search diveheart.org and imagine the possibilities in your life. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers, Politics and Hawaii Series. Again, I'm your host, Carl Campania. And welcome once again to the show, Tyler Dos Santos-Tam and Jason Bradshaw, local union leaders. We have the Hawaii Construction Alliance and AFL-CIO. So thank you again for joining us. Thank you. And all right. So in the last segment, we were talking about specifically, towards the end of it, we got to write to work. And let's spend this segment talking about write to work and what that means. First of all, what that means when people hear it, what people think it means when they hear it, and then what the ramifications are. So first of all, write to work. The very first time I heard that, I'm from Chicago. So Chicago is a big union town. We know that. I'm Chicago Italian. I know more about it than a lot of people understand. I would sit down, I would, I would go with my dad and we'd sit down at large folding tables with envelopes and we'd be filling envelopes and this is what we did about seven years old. So that's how long I've been aware of all of this. But the idea of write to work didn't come about in the 70s. I didn't hear about it in the 70s. It really, I didn't start to hear about it until like, until into the 90s and then towards the 2000 when, when all of a sudden jobs started to be talked about as I moved from Chicago to Florida for a little bit. All of a sudden I was like, Florida's a write to work state. What does that mean? Write to work. That sounds like a good thing. I have a right to work. I love that. What does that actually mean? What does a right to work actually mean? Well, unfortunately, right to work is in 28 states now. So as you mentioned, it is moving more quickly in that direction. But really what it means is it means write to work for less. And not enough people say for less. What we have is we have data in the 28 states that do have right to work. Workers make lower wages. They have less benefits. They are not able to negotiate better benefits that these other states are able to do. And it is surprising when you ask people, like you mentioned, when you ask them, what do they think of write to work? Or what are your thoughts on write to work? And when we ask people, when we ask even potential candidates running for office, and many times when they don't know, they just say exactly what you said. We think it's great that people have the right to work. And it's stunning that they didn't really understand what it was. And the Republicans, I think, or the conservatives did a great job at messaging that to make it sound like it's a positive thing for the states. But the reality is when you actually look at the data, workers make less. They have less benefits in these states that are right to work. Yeah, exactly. Tyler, what are your thoughts? Yeah, you know, Jason's absolutely right. It should be called right to work for less. But you know, we can also call it by its real name, which is union busting. And it is all about weakening the power that workers have collectively. In these right to work states, people don't have to pay their union dues. And so the people that don't pay their dues end up free riding on everyone who does. And so for people like me, who's in the construction industry, that goes to paying for training and apprenticeship and all kinds of other benefits. And if people don't pay in, well, that goes away. And it also allows a lot of these companies that are non-union to underbid and undercut and skirt existing laws. And so that's why we really feel strongly that if right to work comes here to Hawaii, we need to fight tooth and nail to stop it. And really these sort of insidious ideas of calling the right to work, calling it this or that, you know, we need to scrap this from our vocabulary as well and just call it for what it is. It's right for right to work for less. It's union busting. And it's very ugly. When I first moved, I'm sorry, when I first moved to Florida and I learned and I heard about right to work, I'm like, right to work. Okay. Because of my background, I was like, okay, tell me more about what that means. And as it got explained to me, I'm like, Oh, right to work means you have the right to fire me for any reason at any time. And therefore I have no rights at all. So right to work does is a complete misnomer. It has nothing to do with the actual realities of what that employment status is. It is the right to work for less because now they don't have to pay you as much because they have just union busted. They do have the right to fire you because you showed up three minutes early today. You're not well employee and you're not well employee. And then so and I'll jump to that for a minute. As I mentioned earlier, Hawaii is a strong blue state with strong union presence. And yet, and you'd mentioned, I myself have been hired as an independent contractor. I myself more often than not get hired as an at will employee to work on construction related projects and try as I might and when I'm in those positions in project management role and otherwise, to bring in my union brothers and sisters, try as I might, I get pushed away, I get pushed back because nobody wants to they say pay the price of that. So I leave there because I have my opinion about that. But what I wanted to hear as far as you as are concerned, when someone says, Well, I don't want to pay the extra price. I don't want to pay the cost of union. What would you say? What do you say to that challenge to any non local developer or even local developer that doesn't want to use union labor? What is your statement to them? Well, I think we need to sometimes look at the union dues is sort of sometimes like insurance, you know, not a lot of times we don't like to pay for car insurance, you know, I mean, but you're glad you had it when you got into that accident, right, because that accident may have costed you 10, 15, 20 thousand dollars, but your insurance will be able to cover to hopefully they're going to cover it right. I think with with the union, that's exactly where it's at. It's insurance. They're there to protect you. Should you have an employer that wants to fire you because you showed up two or three minutes late or for whatever reason an employer wants to fire you because you're an at will employee right. They're there to be able to negotiate better wages and benefits on your behalf. You can you can go through a grievance process. There's a number of protections there for you when you're paying your union dues and unfortunately in a right to work state, but many people don't realize is you don't have to pay your union dues, but the union staff has to represent you. And that makes it very challenging for the union. But certainly. Yeah. So, but that's the union busting. Exactly. So, but when it comes to Tyler, when it comes to a non-local developer coming in and say they want to build something in Kakaako and you say, that's great, spectacular, wonderful. How can we as a union help you develop and build that? And they say, well, we don't want to go union. Right. What do you say? Well, you know, a lot of these folks come in just looking at the bottom line, but they forget about, you know, what comes afterwards, how to make sure that your work site is productive, that your workers are well trained, that if something happens that, you know, you're going to be covered by workers comp and all these other things that you don't have to pay a huge premium later. And so we try to explain this to a lot of folks and in many respects, we are successful in doing that. But again, with this sort of messaging that comes from, you know, straight out of the conservative playbook here, a lot of that falls by the wayside. So we have to work very hard to sort of fight against that. Yeah, and that is. I mean, it's a corporateist perspective. It's understanding it only from the corporate level. Now, certainly at the union level, on the development side, when you're talking about your level of union, I guess, effort, it's, you also have to work with the corporations. You have to work with them and find an equal balance in there. Did you find that to be a struggle sometimes in these conversations and trying to make sure that the interests are being met? I think it's all about, you know, education and making sure that we can have sort of an open dialogue and open conversation with these folks. Frankly, there are some people who you're never going to convince. And that's fine. You know, that's just how it is. And we can fight against them. Or for those who are open, you know, with more open dialogue, I think you get further with honey than vinegar. But, you know, that being said, that's not the case against a lot of these people that, you know, want to push right to work, that want to skirt the law, that want to force their employees to become independent contractors so they can get around paying for their workers' comp, get around paying for their health care, get around things like overtime. And that's one of the things, when I get hired as an independent, the reason I set up, I eventually, at first I started being a contractor as an independent contractor. I'm like, okay, that's great because I make, wait, I'm not making any more money. I have to pay, wait a minute. So then I created, I started my own business. So therefore, I got to create a better situation. All right, so fine. I recognize how to do that. But then I have to make sure that I understand how to get into these contracts and how to make sure that what I'm being paid and all of that is being dealt with correctly. So to go back, so that's a big issue of that itself and knowing how to do that. And that's where, if you've got a union, if you're working with unions, you have support and help in doing that. You've got a whole team of people that are making sure that you're being paid appropriately in a certain scale and that the benefits and everything that comes along with that is being dealt with appropriately. And you're not on your own. And that's one way of looking at that. So, okay, let's go back to right to work. We only actually literally have a few more minutes left. Let's go back to right to work specifically. What is, you mentioned the Janus case coming up. When is that coming up? Well, we don't, there's no specific timeframe right now. We anticipate probably early or 2018. So we're thinking spring of 2018. Now, it could be heard as early as this fall. The Supreme Court hasn't made the announcement yet, but when they do, we'll be made aware. It's already been heard in the Seventh Circuit. The Seventh Circuit obviously ruled in favor of Ashmi. So now the right to work organizations are petitioning the Supreme Court to hear the case. And this was the, was Janus heard in Seventh Court or was that the Fredericks? Janus. Fredericks was heard in the Ninth Circuit. Okay. And that one, so just to get an understanding, that one, the whole scope of this, that one got heard and that one went to the Supreme Court. But at the time, the Supreme Court was eight members, right? We got, you hate to say we got lucky. I mean, you know, but you know, you know, so unfortunately Scalia passed. I mean, but because of that situation, the court was now four, four conservative liberal. And so the court ruled four to four on the Fredericks case. And so because it was a tie vote, the lower court prevails. So the Ninth Circuit prevailed. So at the end of the day, the right to work for everyone across the country didn't happen because they went with the Ninth Circuit ruling. But that may, will not be the case for Janus. Not for Janus, because we now know that Gorsuch is there and he's going to, we know, we know where he is on that. That's correct. So what can we do? We need to educate our membership. We need to educate the public and make them aware of what is potentially coming and what it means. I think, you know, we, we know the data, we know the statistics, we know what happens in these right to work states. And I think we just need to be prepared. And I think we need to understand the ramifications involved. Everyone needs to understand the ramifications involved that potentially Janus could lead to in states like Hawaii or New York or all these other blue states. So it's really education. And that's absolutely important. Educating not just our members, but educating the public overall. Yes. And trying to get a better, and that's where, that's why I started the show a little bit playing, by the way, this lunch break is brought to you by your local unions. And let's thank our unions. Let's realize the history of where we come from. And for me, that's, I mean, I'm a history major. For me, that's where I come from. Where did something begin? How did we get here? What was the value of it? And why would that value wane? Why would that value have ever decreased? And that's what, as we get used to something, as you were saying earlier, we're used to have again now, it's never going to go away. And then all of a sudden it's gone. What do we do then? So that's what we, that's what we're facing is workers rights, safety conditions, wages. We've got just your basic 40 hour work week. We have all of these potential things that we take for granted that can slowly start to be stripped away. Benefits, having health insurance. One of the biggest costs of living issues we have as a country is health insurance. And people don't like to talk about it as a cost of living issue. They want to talk about it as a separate political wedge issue to keep people separate. When reality is it's a huge kitchen table issue. And then we're fortunate that we'd have the prepaid health act. So as long as you work more than 19 hours a week, your employer is providing you health insurance. But unfortunately, other 49 states don't have that. They don't have that. They don't have it. Exactly. And that's a huge issue. And in addition to that, that only counts if you're an employee. So if somebody says, well, you are an independent contractor, we have this agreement. We don't need to provide you with this sort of coverage. But if you look like an employee and are treated like an employee and all of that with sort of all the typical rules that would apply to an employee, then you're definitely an employee and you deserve that sort of coverage. And it's ridiculous for an employer to sort of claim otherwise when the facts are. And real quick, people don't realize it. But there are, even in the Hawaii legislature, they're trying to water down the independent contractor. They make it where it's easier for employers to misclassify workers to become independent contractors. And they are doing that. Well, then we see now, we talk about how blue of a state we are. And then things like that come up. Okay, we need to explore that one. So thank you both for joining me today. There's so much more to talk about. And we'd love to have you guys come back another time and talk deeper into some of these issues. But thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for joining us. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers, Politics in Hawaii's Areas. I'm your host, Carl Campania. Thanks again to Tyler, Tyler Dos Santos-Tam, and Jason Bradshaw, local union leaders that we need to listen to, that need to hear from, so that we do not lose what we consider to be common sense, what we consider to be part of our daily life. We can lose it. And we need to understand that. So thank you for joining us. See you next time.