 I have Stephen Greenhouse here to discuss his book, and I'll do a quick intro, and then we'll let him talk about this. So Steve was a reporter at The New York Times for 31 years, and I did not know the huge variety of things that he did before he became the labor and workplace reporter. I'll just list a couple of them. So he joined The Times as a business reporter in 1983, covering industries like steel. Then he spent 2 and 1 half years as the newspaper's Midwestern business correspondent in Chicago. Then he moved to Paris, where he served as the Times European Economic Correspondent, covering everything from Western Europe's economy to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, including the Velvet Revolution in Prague. After five years in Paris, he served as The New York Times correspondent in Washington for four years, covering economics and the Federal Reserve, and then the State Department and Foreign Affairs. And so then, of course, he spent his last 19 years at The Times as their labor and employment, labor and workplace reporter, where he covered a huge variety of labor topics, including conditions for the nation's farm workers, the fight for 15, Walmart's locking in workers at night, the UPS and New York City's transit strikes, factory disasters in Bangladesh, and on and on and on. He retired from The Times at the end of 2014 and continues to freelance for, among others, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The American Prospect, The Atlantic, et cetera, et cetera. Steve is a graduate of Wesleyan University, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and NYU Law School, where he focused on labor law and constitutional law. His first book, The Big Squeeze, Tough Times for the American Worker, won the 2009 Sidney Hillman Book Prize. He has also been honored with the Society of Professional Journalist Deadline Club Award, a New York Press Club Award, and a Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Reporting. And then in August, Alfred A. Knoth published his new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up, The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, that Steve will discuss today. The book looks at key historic episodes that built America's labor unions and shows how unions and worker power helped create the largest middle class in the world, as well as a fairer, more democratic America. And with that, I will turn it over to you, Steve. Thank you. You get a hug. You like a hug? Thank you for that generous introduction, Heidi. Thank you all for being here. They're friends I hadn't seen in a long time, Nancy and others. I first want to thank EPI for inviting me today. I thank Thea Lee, John Schmidt, Pedro, and I thank many other economists at EPI, Past and Present, whom I've relied on, interviewed, used statistics from, gotten ideas from, I hope not plagiarized, including Heidi and Josh Bivens and Larry Michelle and the wonderful Jared Bernstein and Jeff Foe and many, many others. When I wrote my first book, The Big Squeeze, I poured over EPI's home this state of working America. I marked it up so much with my highlighted pens. It looked like I was a religious fanatic annotating the Bible. In my new book, Beaten Down Worked Up, I footnote EPI repeatedly. In the acknowledgments I write, I also owe thanks to the Economic Policy Institute for, month after month, providing extremely helpful statistics and reports on trends involving the nation's 150 million workers. That's very dry, but it's acknowledgments. I want to tell you an anecdote. So three years ago, I was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. And they encouraged us fellows to talk to different clubs. So I talked to the human rights clinic at the law school and the young Democrats and students against sweatshops. And I also spoke to the young Republicans. And a very bright young group. And one of them said, I see in your book, The Big Squeeze, you repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly rely on statistics from the Economic Policy Institute. How dare you? They're progressive. How could we trust them? They don't have credibility. They're progressive. And I said, they are. The EPI is the very best source of information on worker statistics. And their statistics really haven't been refuted, challenged very much. And they didn't want to hear it. They just thought, false numbers, false facts. OK, I want to answer a question that many of you might have. I imagine some of you are wondering, Greenhouse, how in the world did you manage to write a serious 400 page book when you seem to be tweeting 24-7? The truth is that I don't tweet quite that much. When I was writing my first book, The Big Squeeze, the way I chilled was to play hearts on computer for an hour or two a day. But while writing Beaton Down Worked Up, the way I chilled was to play Twitter for an hour or two a day. But to my mind, there's one big advantage of playing hearts over playing Twitter. You don't have trolls firing back and calling you an enemy of the people or a communist or something anti-Semitic or writing, how can we believe anything you say you used to work at the fake New York Times? Yes, sometimes I too feel beaten down and worked up. Five or six years ago when I was still at the New York Times, my editor at Knauf, John Siegel, invited me to lunch one day, telling me he wanted to ask me something. So over schnapps and pasta, he shared a concern that he had. He said, I worry that young Americans know far too little about labor. They know far too little about what unions have achieved over the year. And they understand far too little about what the decline in unions and worker power means for America. So he asked me, can I, Steve, recommend anyone who could write a good history of labor? I told him, John, I'm no dummy. I know you're asking me, do I, Steve, want to write a history of labor? I told him that while I, as a New York Times reporter, was accustomed to writing a fairly flawed first draft of history, I was not a professional historian who felt comfortable taking a deep dive into archival material and original sources. As my wife will tell you, I'm already a total slob when it comes to throwing away papers. And if I started bringing copies of archival material and original sources back to our apartment, yikes, we'd probably get a divorce. Besides, I told my editor, John Siegel, there were some very good comprehensive labor historians that had recently been published. Joe McCartan, Melvin Dubofsky's renewed latest The History of Labor, terrific book by Philip Dre, This Power in a Union. I told John Siegel, I know a whole lot about the current situation for unions and workers. So he and I agreed. We did some serious negotiating. We reached a settlement, without a mediator, that I'd write a not overly long history, maybe 200 pages instead of the traditional 600 or 700 pages. And then I'd also devote a major chunk of the book to describing, examining the current labor scene. In this book, I had three objectives. And before I could, I want to say, in writing a book like this, it takes a village. It really does. It's not, I'm the guy who does it and spends day after day locked in my bedroom writing. But I got hope from, help from so many people, EPI, any number of lawyers and unions and worker centers. And many, many, many workers, some of whom I didn't have room for in the book. And I really want to thank everyone. And in my acknowledgments, I even had a paragraph thanking all these public relations people who helped me. And my editors said, they're paid to do that. Don't thank them. Anyway, I had three objectives in this book. First, I wanted to write a highly readable book that explains the history of labor and the important things that unions have achieved. Accomplishments like the 40-hour work week that so many people just take for granted. Accomplishments like safer workplaces and paid vacations and pensions. Remember the bumper sticker? I love it. Unions, the folks who brought you the weekend. I devote a chapter to the uprising of the 20,000 in 1909. That was in a power worker strike on New York's Lower East Side, which was, to that time, the largest strike by women in American history. Those women were fighting for a 52-hour work week. They complained that they often had to work from 7 PM to 7 AM and didn't even see the sun during the fall and winter months. And the women were also fighting for having to stop paying for the needles and thread they used at work. A second aim of the book, I wanted to sound the alarm about a usually important phenomenon that far too few Americans understand or are paying attention to. And that is that worker power in the United States has fallen to a dismal low. I'm sorry to say I submit to its weakest point since the 1930s. As a result, lots of things are badly out of whack, making millions of Americans feel that the system is deeply rigged. We saw how that played out in November of 2016 when an orange-haired demagogue embraced the theme that the system is rigged. And now that he's elected, we're seeing how his administration is day after day rigging the system further against workers and in favor of the wealthy. My book examines not just the wealthy, but corporations, of course. I know some of you are going to correct me on that. My book examines how the decline in worker power has fueled decades of wage stagnation and increased income inequality and eschewed our system so that our politics and policymaking are far too dominated by corporations and wealthy donors. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the importance of unions as being a countervailing source of power to corporate power. Unfortunately, unions today are not so much of a countervailing power anymore. Worker power has fallen to such a low that a president of the United States has seen fit to nominate as his labor secretary the very man who served as corporate America's top gun, its lead lawyer in battling against new worker protections. And this from someone who ran in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana as a champion of workers. Donald Trump trumpets how great things are for workers now. But as EPI has pointed out, no, things aren't so great for workers. Wages for the typical work remain below where they were in 1973, 46 years ago, after factoring in inflation. There's the famous EPI chart showing that in the era when unions were strongest in the decades after World War II, employee productivity and employee compensation essentially rose hand in hand, rose at the same rate. But since 1973, with the decline of unions, employee compensation has risen less than 1-6 as fast as employee productivity. Then there's the chart that EPI and Larry Michelle just put out a few weeks ago showing that CEO pay has risen by 940%, almost 10 times, more than 10 times, since 1978, while typical worker compensation has risen just 12%. No, Mr. Trump, you have not made America great again for American workers. My book's third objective. I wanted the book to explore strategies and models to rebuild worker power, to help create a fairer nation and a fairer economy. I write about efforts to unionize Uber and Lyft drivers about the red-for-ed teacher strikes, about the fight for 15, about the amazing culinary workers union in Las Vegas, which has done wonders lifting thousands of hotel housekeepers and dishwashers into the middle class, and in turning Nevada from a red state to a blue state, even as the longtime union strongholds of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania turned from blue states into red states. In my first book, The Big Squeeze, I focused on one disconcerting disconnect. In the first decade of this century, corporate profits in the stock market kept climbing to new records, while corporations kept squeezing down wages, cutting back health and retirement benefits, offshoring jobs, making jobs more precarious, and pushing workers to work ever harder. Sadly, that disconnect has very much continued this decade. Corporations and the stock market are going like gangbusters, and workers are still not getting close to their fair share, and things are becoming ever more precarious. In my new book, Beaten Down Worked Up, I focus on another disconcerting disconnect. The Gallup poll just found that unions have a 64% approval rating of 16% as points in a decade. That's a whole lot. And that's about the highest level in 50 years. A recent MIT study found that nearly 50% of non-union workers say they want to join a union if they could. That's up from 32% in the 1990s. So this means that one in two workers say, essentially one in two workers say they want to be in a union, but just 6.4% of private sector workers are in unions. One in two want to be in a union, one in 16 in the private sector are in a union. John Paul Ferguson, then an MIT graduate student, now a professor at Stanford Business School, did a fascinating study of all the unionization drives reported to the NLRB from 1999 through 2004. He found that unions filed, I'm gonna throw a lot of numbers at you, forgive me, 22,000 petitions for unionization elections, but only two thirds of those petitions led to union elections, largely because management would fight so hard against the drive that they'd withdraw the petition. Ferguson found out that of the 14,600 elections, unions won just 8,100 times 55.8%. And that after winning, unions obtained collective bargaining agreements just roughly number 4,600 out of the 8,200 victories. That means unions won first contracts just 56% of the time they won elections. All told, Ferguson found workers who petitioned for a union election from 1999 to 2004 ultimately won first contracts only 20% of the time. And even when union elections were held, they got first contracts only 31% of the time. There's one line in my book that has gotten a whole lot of attention. It's one of these things that seems obvious to me, but not obvious to a lot of people. In no other industrial nation do corporations fight so hard to beat back indeed quash labor unions as in the United States. Kate Bronfen-Brenner of Cornell University is the leading researcher of how corporate America seeks to crush unionization drives. In various studies, including one backed by EPI, Kate found that during unionization drives, 89% of employers required workers to attend anti-union meetings. 57% of employers threatened to close operations of workers voted to unionize. 47% threatened to cut wages or benefits if workers unionized. That study also found that 63% of employers interrogated workers in one-on-one meetings about whether they supported a union that's illegal. 34% fired union supporters. 28% attempted to infiltrate the union organizing committee. Kate Bronfen-Brenner describes some especially intimidating tactics. Facing a unionization drive, IT&T Automotive Park 13 flatbed tractor trailers with shrink wrap production equipment in front of its plant in Ascota, Michigan. And next to those trucks, IT&T posted large hot pink signs reading, Mexico Transfer Job. IT&T also flew workers in from its Mexico factory to videotape its Michigan workers on the production line saying the company was considering moving to Mexico. When a food of the loom factory in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas confronted an organizing effort, it posted yard signs in the community saying, keep jobs in the valley, vote no. Food of the loom also hung a banner across the factory saying, wear the union label unemployed. So what is to be done? What is to be done to rebuild, restore, rekindle, rejuvenate worker power? The Democratic candidates are talking far more than I ever heard about strengthening unions. They seem to have gotten the message. It's funny, I first turned in the manuscript of this book in February 2018. The book came out 17 months later. But I called for many of the things that the Democratic candidates are now calling for. They must have borrowed the stolen manuscript. Just kidding. I saw that Bernie Sanders introduced the workplace democracy act back in 1992. They called for card check and called for arbitration if no first contract is reached within the first 90 days. And that became EFCA 10 years later. 15 years later. So with the playing field tilted so much in favor of employees during unionization drives, I call for giving union organizers a lot more access to the employer's property to communicate with workers. Now I find it crazy that employers have, they of course have access to workers 24-7. They show anti-union videotapes in the lunch room and the break room. I remember I was doing a story about the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. All the computer screens had anti-union, why am I blanking on the word, screensaver, sorry, senior moment, sorry. I call for stiff fines for companies that violate the law to keep out unions. John Schmidt did a study finding that basically one in five rank and file union leaders, union activists get fired during unionization drives and under the Great National Labor Relations Act, companies cannot be fined for breaking the law. So I call for much stiffer fines. As Bernie Sanders called for in 1992, I call for mandatory arbitration. If employers drag their feet after months and months go on, after recognizing union and without reaching a contract. I call for card check as well. I don't think our Congress will ever agree to issue card check that says as soon as workers get 50% plus one, they'll have a union. I think even many Democrats are gonna go bow to the pressure of business lobby and say we can't totally trust card check. So I argue that folks in Congress will be much more amenable to proving card check if it's 60% rather than 50% threshold. Some people disagree with me on that. I fear that even if these proposals, which are in the PRO Act, which is backed by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, even if these were all enacted and the PRO Act calls for many, many other things to make it easier to unionize, I still think there will be problems. I fear that if these steps were enacted, private sector union density still won't increase much. It's now 6.4%, maybe it would climb to 10% over several years, maybe it would double. Some people, if you might say, would go up much faster. I think your unions have shrunk so much and the treasuries are so limited and some of the union's organizing abilities are so limited and some union officials just aren't into doing aggressive organizing that it's gonna be hard to really rebuild unions very quickly and really reestablish worker power to begin to be where it should be. That's why Mary Kay Henry, president of the SEIU, said in a major speech in Milwaukee on August 21st that we need to go beyond these proposals for labor reform and somehow go directly to industry-wide or sectoral bargaining. And in New York's time story, I once did about the fight for 15 with my colleague Liz Alderman in Paris, we wrote about the benefits of sectoral bargaining. Why fast-forward workers in Denmark with their industry-wide bargaining average more than $20 an hour while many in the US are making just $8 an hour. People often ask me, what is the most effective, fastest thing we can do to increase worker power in the US? And yes, a lot of these reforms to make it easier to unionize would be good, but I think they take a lot of years to really make much of a difference. And I choose, so Tammy Baldwin, Democratic Senator from Wisconsin, Elizabeth Warren, they've made proposals that would enable, let workers at large corporations elect Tammy Baldwin, says 33%, Elizabeth Warren says 40% of a corporate board. There's great public support of that. And I think if that were passed, and I think it would have a better chance of passing perhaps in some of the pro-union legislation, I think it could really change the conversation very quickly in a meaningful way and maybe add worker concerns far more to the daily dialogue and maybe make corporations far less aggressive in fighting unions. I could be wrong about that. I argue in my book that many of these good ideas to increase worker power and strengthen unions face a huge roadblock. And that's America's hugely broken campaign finance system. And I don't think that's addressed nearly enough. In the 2016 election cycle, business outspent labor 16 to one, 3.4 billion to 213 million. And corporations and Republicans talk about big labor, right? All of the nation's unions taken together spend about $45 million a year for lobbying in Washington while corporate America spends more than 60 times as much, just under 3 billion. Little wonder that many lawmakers seem vastly more interested in giving 1.5 trillion in tax cuts to corporations in the very wealthy when corporate profits in the stock market were already at record levels and income inequality, the income of the top 1% was its highest in forever since the 1920s. So, you know, and I think that's another reason why many people in Congress are just not interested in raising the minimum wage, even though it hasn't been raised in over a decade, the longest it hasn't been raised since the Fair Labor Standards Act was first enacted 81 years ago. I think everyone who hopes to lift America's workers, I think every American who cares about building a fairer economy and fairer nation needs to focus far more on fixing our very broken campaign finance system. I'd like to end on this point before Heidi interrogates me. Corporate executives often say that we don't need labor unions, that corporate America and its human resources departments will make sure that workers are taken care of. In my book, I include Martin Luther King Jr.'s response to such a notion. Dr. King said, the labor movement was the principle force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute and above all new wage levels that meant not mere survival, but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation. They resisted until they were overcome. Thank you very much. Happy to be here. I write profile. All right, can you hear me now? Okay, yes? Yes, okay, all right. All right, well thank you very much. That was really wonderful. Thank you. What we'll do is I'll ask a few questions just to get the conversation started and then we'll just open it up to Q&A. So I will not monopolize a bunch of time. So I was gonna start by asking or by noting that last week, BLS released their new employment projections for the next decade. They do this every two years and the numbers were a little bit grim. Like one of the things they found of the top 10 occupations that are projected to grow the fastest, six of them currently have annual earnings of less than $27,000. They are primarily low, those six are primarily low wage jobs in the restaurant industry and low wage jobs in healthcare like personal care workers and home health aids. And so one of the things that I wanted you to, oh and those numbers came out when I think I started reading this book that day. And so the numbers were grim. I started reading this book and in the introduction there is this quote from a union organizer and I was just gonna say this John Carlo you're gonna have to bleep something. It was a union leader who said factory jobs didn't start out as good jobs, they were shit jobs. People got killed all the time. Unionization caused them to change that. And that quote in light of those numbers gave me some hope and I was just hoping that you could speak to that. But before you do I wanted to say one additional thing which is one of the remarkable things about this very remarkable book is all of the wonderful little details that are sort of scattered throughout it. And I'm gonna, for those of you who haven't read this I'm gonna do a spoiler for one of them. So there's a chapter on the uprising of the 20,000 which Steve mentioned in his opening remarks which was in a 1909 strike one of the key leaders was Clara Lemlich. And it was a strike of 20,000 women who worked in New York short waste factories. And it was very successful. And when Clara was in her late 70s and was in a nursing home she helped persuade the nursing home workers to organize. And it was, it's sort of, there's this towering figure who understands the need to not just organize factory workers but also low paid service sector workers. So that's just, I was hoping that you could speak to that that shift and what do we do in light of where the growing job is coming from? Thank you. I wish I had the answers. So one could unionize nursing home workers. It's hard, but you know, the SCN and some other unions are doing it, but it's hard. You know, management fights back, it doesn't roll over. Home care aids, that's a much more complicated issue. Generally, there's been an effort to get states to say we're the quasi employer and then they're like statewide unionization but Republicans are fighting very, and the states that have agreed to do that where the Republicans have taken over, they've stopped that. One of the reasons, so I explained in my book, so one of the reasons Donald Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania is that unionization, union membership has fallen so much. Trump won Wisconsin by 22,000, union membership has dropped by 177,000 in the past decade. Trump won Michigan by 11,000, union membership has fallen 144,000 in the past decade, Pennsylvania 46,140,000. But in Michigan, once the Republicans took over, they kind of took away the ability of childcare workers and home care workers to unionize. So that's one of the big reasons unionization rates went down. So if one could unionize home care workers, great, but it's very hard, that's why I think the fight for 15 was it had two laudable goals, raise the floor to 15 and unionize. And we see how important it is to raise the floor even without unionization. It really has changed the lives of, they say now 28 million people have had their wages lifted because of the fight for 15, and they're still trying to unionize, but it's very, very hard. You could talk about a hierarchy of what's easiest and hardest to unionize, maybe nursing homes is easy in the restaurants and home care workers are among the hardest to unionize. That's why I think, so as I say in the book, I was a reporter in France for five years, and Europeans always talked about McJobs in the United States, the 725 an hour, the 515 an hour, 525 an hour fast food jobs and other low wage jobs, and they'd say that's ridiculous. And that convinced me that we really need to raise the floor because as many people at EPI have said, I've become far too much a low-road economy. And one of those things about raising the floor is also then when workers do unionize, there's a higher floor from which they can bargain, so it has these nice ripple effects. So there was this wonderful union leader, many of you have heard of Hector Figueroa, who led local 32BJ of the SCIU in New York. He was really one of the greatest union leaders of our generation. He died suddenly of a heart attack about six weeks, two months ago. And he was the main person who persuaded Governor Cuomo, not a leftist to adopt the $15 minimum wage. He was the main person who persuaded the Port Authority to adopt the $19 minimum wage for 40,000 airport workers. And his union was really involved in the 515 on the ground floor. And I'd say, why are you bothering? Is it helping your people? He said, well, we represent a lot of janitors and window cleaners. And if we could get a $15 floor for fast food workers, that would make it much easier for us to ask for $22 and $22 and $23 for our members. That makes a lot of sense. All right, I have another question. So you included this fascinating quote from your mom. And it seemed to get picked up in other reviews of the book. So I'll give you the quote. When I was growing up, people used to say. Start with Rizan Madison. It will help. Oh, wait. I don't have it. But I know where it is. I know where it is. I can find it. Because it's right in the introduction, right? No, I think it needs a little context. OK, OK, wait. Do you want to? You read the quote. No, wait. OK. And my cousin Robin is here. So she knew my wonderful mother. My parents grew up during the Great Depression, and millions of struggling Americans poured into labor unions. And remember what my then-86-year-old mother told me during a phone conversation when I was in Wisconsin to cover Scott Walker's push to gut collective bargaining and cut public employees' health and pension benefits. My mother bemoaned the situation, saying when I was growing up, people used to say, look at the good wages. Look at the good wages. Now, look at the good wages and benefits that people in a union have. I want to join a union. Now people say, look at the good wages and benefits that union members have. They're getting more than what I get. That's not fair. Let's take away some of what they have. Yeah. So I have seen that quote get picked up. And it does resonate. But I have to say that I am a little bit more optimistic than what that quote suggests in a certain sense. And you actually pointed out some of the survey data that can give some context to that. We can ask people who are not in unions over time, would you vote for a union if there was an election in your workplace? And if you add that to the share of people who are actually in unions, that share is actually a little bit higher now than it was 40 years ago. So it does seem like workers still really do understand just how important unions are to their working lives. And I am not trying to put my theory up against that of your mother. But it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on how much of what has happened as a result of changing worker attitudes or the external circumstances, the other things you were talking about. Several thoughts. So I mentioned before that according to the latest Gallup poll, 64% of the public says they approve of unions up from 48% in 2009, which was at the trough of the horrible great recession. And people like Scott Walker were really milking that to say public sector unions, workers earn way too much money. We've got to take away their right to bargain collectively. Their health benefits, their pension benefits are too expensive. I remember I quoted him saying, public sector workers are the haves. We are the Wisconsinites are the have-nots. So the Republicans really milked this. And again, we have this huge anti-union effort funded by corporate America and the Koch brothers and many, many other folks. And part of that conversation is that unions are bad, union members earn too much. And there was a period when the wages of auto workers, steel workers, a lot of construction workers were very high. And they've come down relatively in many ways. And the Republicans have been really expert in milking this, I believe. And I think we have to explain that it's better if we try to lift everyone rather than tear down someone who has a little better than we do. People used to aspire to have. And I think it's partly a sign of growing despair that, well, we can't have as much as what union workers have. So let's tear them down rather than them thinking, hey, I could get that too. I could unionize. And I think the unions aren't doing as good a story telling the tale as they should. I mean, that's a whole lot of the problem that unions aren't organizing enough. Unions aren't educating enough. But unions are much smaller, less rich, less powerful than they used to be. So it's hard for them. And maybe the Democrats should start telling the tale too. Yeah. And as you mentioned, there is some of that going on now in a way that wasn't happening at all. So I'm surprised. So Bernie Sanders, no surprise. Beto O'Rourke, somewhat of a surprise. And Pete Buttigieg, somewhat of a surprise. They put out very astonishingly detailed labor plans. And Buttigieg is really like a masterwork of writing and persuasiveness and great graphic. It's really good. Every American should read that. And when Buttigieg was running for, I think, state attorney general or state treasurer, he ran his union out of the local Carpenter's Hall. Yeah, yeah. OK. OK, so my last question. And then I'm just going to ask one more question, and then everyone start thinking of the questions that they want to ask, because we'll open it up. But this is something that you actually talked about in your opening remarks. But I think it really can't be said enough. And I want to sort of preface this by telling a story that you told about your own life in this book. It was your first newspaper job. In 1977, you were working very long hours for low pay. People started talking about organizing. You contacted somebody from the newspaper guild to have a meeting with a union organizer for dinner, something like 50 coworkers signed up for the dinner. And the day that the dinner was going to happen, the newspaper announced that they were going to give everyone a 20% raise. So it is sort of a testament to what the threat of a union kind of used to be able to do. And you did note to that it did sort of take the wind out of the sails of the interest in unionization. But the story was a real reality check for me, because I've been immersed in the other stuff you were talking about, this aggressive employer opposition to union organizing. And it's not me, but colleagues here you'll be happy to know are doing another update of some of the, because some of that data is very old. So we're doing an update of a lot of that stuff. So it'll be great new stuff coming out, not in time for this book, obviously. But what we find is employers are avoiding unions not by giving everyone a 20% raise anymore. It is a very different scene. And I think this, an understanding of employer opposition is just really important to everyone's understanding of the key dynamics that have led to the erosion of unions, that it is not. I mean, there's this sort of narrative out there that it's just a natural outgrowth of a modern economy that we don't have unions anymore. But there's just been this extremely concerted effort. So I was just hoping you could talk a little bit more about that and what you learned in this book and what we need to do. So when I was at the New York Times, I'd have conversation with editors, and I'd say, the playing field is really tilted against unions when you try to unionize. I imagine it has 24-7 access and captive audience meetings. And in the lunchroom and the break room, they show anti-union videos and the anti-union screensaver. And then the Supreme Court, in its leach mirror decision, ruled that companies have every right to prohibit union organizations from even setting foot on company property. So you can imagine how the disproportionate access and the leach mirror case union organizer, which is that we're just putting flyers on the windshields of cars and the parking lot. And the Supreme Court essentially said private property rights far, far, far. Trump outweighed unions' right or workers' right to hear what a union has to say. So I think unions really, some unions do a good job getting out the message. A lot of unions don't. And I think one of the interesting things in this campaign is that the Democrat candidates are talking. I covered labor from their attention for 19 years. I started in 1996. Basically, every two years, I go to Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, running about labor in the campaign. And there's far, far, far, far more discussion of the importance of unions than before, partly because they're far, far, far more candidates. But I think also they want to get a leg up in the campaign. So they realize this unions are an important constituency. I think they really see how broken the economy is, favoring corporations, disfavoring workers. And I think they also see that if the Democrats lost these three important union strongholds, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and they realized that for the good of the Democratic Party's future, it would help to rebuild unions. So I think there's been more of a pro-worker message in the campaign. And their treasuries just aren't as strong as they used to be. Unions today are not like the unions of Walter Ruther, crusading unions that are constantly trying to get their message out. And when Walter Ruther and the UAW at its height in the late 1940s, 50s, won these big, great contracts, that was like page one story. Everyone knew about it. And when a union wins a good contract now, like a lot of people don't know about it. So it's interesting that in the Gallup poll, the age group that is most favorable towards unions is the 18th to 34th group. That's a 67% approval versus 64%. And people ask me, ask others, why is that so high? And I think one reason is that since the great recession, many of these people have had a hard time getting good jobs, have suffered from wage stagnation. Many of them have horrible student debt. They've seen the success of the fight for 15. And they see a lot of adjunct professors are unionizing, and digital journalists are unionizing, and grad students are unionizing, and nurses are unionizing. So I mean, and then the Retired Teacher Strike. So there's some excitement. I think people are seeing more than they did three and five and seven years ago about the benefits of unions, but still not enough. I want to say one last thing. So I was reported from the New York Times for 31 years. I covered labor for 19 years. And I tried very, very, very hard to keep my opinions out of the paper. And because if I tilted one way or the next or the other, I would get, and my editors would get phone calls right away and emails right away. So I would write very balanced stories. And just like in the first book, I was covering labor. And I saw that there was this huge squeeze that corporations were doing great. Stock market was doing great, and workers were getting screwed. And that story wasn't breaking through. I finished the book just before the Great Recession. But once the recession hit, people realized, hey, workers are getting screwed. And now, I could just see that worker power in the United States is much less than it was decades ago when Walter Ruther was a household name, and George Meany was a household name. And I think that's really warped our economy. And in ways, this is, in many ways, just a descriptive book more than a prescriptive book. Because if you accept that, people say, well, your opinion, and they say, well, I'm against opiates. I'm against opiates killing all these people. I think we should do something about it. I think it's bad that income inequality is so huge. I think it's bad that worker power has gotten so weak. So you think about, how can we fix that? And then they become prescriptive. But I think the book is largely descriptive in laying out these very serious problems. We should have. I saw this is the first hand. Then we can go over here. Could I stand up for this? Yeah, totally. Hi, I'm Brian Turner. You described the decline of relative living standards and union power over the last 50 years. But really going back, throughout our country's history, American unions have been weaker than those in other countries, our labor laws have been weaker. We never had sexual bargaining. Everybody else has health care and paid vacations and the rest of it. Employer opposition is stronger here. Why? What accounts for the difference? Does anyone have Nelson Lichtenstein's phone number? That's a great question. And people far learneder than I have discussed that. Among the reasons I have read are that in Europe, the state grew strong and pro-worker before corporations grew strong. And that in the United States corporations, and Larry, you might have commented, and that here corporations grew very strong before the government grew strong. And corporations have had, I submit, far greater sway over government and policy than in most European countries. And people talk about American exceptionalism. We're the cop of the world. I think part of American exceptionalism is why has socialism been far weaker here than in Europe? And I think the fact that socialists and social democratic tendencies have been far weaker here has meant less of a critique, less of a check on corporate power. I imagine there are studies into this, and I haven't seen, but I imagine that our campaign finance system gives far more power access to corporations than the very rich than is the case in most other industrial countries. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but I'd be surprised if I am. Again, we're the country where people fled oppression to grow it on their own and become entrepreneurs and to become a ratio alters and to pursue individualism. And I think the individual, lift yourself up on your bootstraps, mentality is much stronger here than in Europe. I remember when I was a reporter in France. In France, in the newspapers, they always use the phrase solidarity, solidarity, solidarity. The government put forward this measure for solidarity to raise supports for poor children. And it's just part of the everyday conversation. Here it's like, if you use the word solidarity, people think you're a communist. There are a lot of reasons. I don't know the exact reason. And I'm sure people in the audience have other reasons. So we'll go here and then there. So hi, Richard Collenberg with the Century Foundation. You contrasted two strategies on the one hand, putting workers on the boards of corporations and then what's known as labor law reform. Motion Marvin and I wrote a book called Why Union Organizing Should Be a Civil Right. Trying to get beyond that term labor law because I think that puts people asleep. But I imagine that when you said that the strategy of putting workers on a board is likely to be more effective, maybe the most controversial thing you said in this crowd. So I'm wondering if you can spell that out a little bit more. I took it to have two parts. One, that it would be easier to pass that reform than labor law reform and also that it would have a bigger impact. So could you spell that out a little bit? So as I said, I might be wrong about that too. But I think if you tell the public that corporations have been far too obsessed with profit maximization, I mean even Jamie Diamond admits that now. And that we have to fix it because corporations, they brought you opiates. They brought you climate denial. They brought you huge income inequality. We have to fix that. And a quick way to begin to fix that was to elect workers, maybe somehow community members, onto corporate boards. And I was at this forum that Wilma Liebman had set up with a corporate law professor at Columbia University. And he was saying it would just be a total waste of time letting workers elect 40% of the board. They're not going to do anything. It's just going to get in the way and screw up efficiency. He might be around. But I like to think it would change the conversation. In Germany, there's co-determination. Workers have 50% representation on the supervisory board, which is not the acting board of directors. It's the supervisory board. But clearly, the German companies invest far more in their workers in training than American companies do. We've seen far less offshoring in Germany, outsourcing Germany than we've seen here. So there are many, many reasons for that. But I think one is that workers are elected to the board. And Rick, I'm not contrasting, making it easier to unionize with electing workers to the board. My feeling is let 1,000 flowers bloom, try various strategies, and hopefully we'll win on some and hopefully some will stick to the wall. I'm going to write about this terrific group in Florida, the coalition of Mockley workers, which has done wonders for lifting living standard working conditions for 35,000 tomato pickers who really had the worst conditions in the country. Many were kind of held in virtual slavery. And their strategy was to pressure Taco Bell and pressure McDonald's and pressure Burger King to get them to get the tomato growers to raise wages and make sure that they improve conditions. So I'm not saying there's one strategy, especially with unions representing just 6.4% of workers. 15 or 16 private sector workers are in unions. So we need many, many strategies to try to lift people. Okay, hi, Steve. I'm Linda Foley. And my question is, your former employer, The New York Times, is in the process, I guess, of still publishing a really wonderful project called The 1619 Project about the history of slavery in the United States. And I just wondered if maybe you could address a little bit the fact that we live in a country, I mean, this difference between other industrialized countries and the United States in attitudes toward the value of labor and the value of workers and how that relates to this whole history that we have of being a country whose economy was founded on slavery and keeping people enslaved and devaluing work. This is Linda Foley, the wonderful former president of the Newspaper Guild. Thank you for that good question. So when my book first came out, someone asked me the fact that the United States had slavery, that horrible institutions, does that affect labor relations? And I kind of punted on that, I hadn't thought it through. And then a few days later, I was speaking in Richmond and someone asked me that question again. And I realized that, especially in the South, in the South, workers are treated in a fairly, let's say in a more exploitative manner than generally than in the North. And they're far more anti-union than in the North. And I think part of that stems from slavery that there's this mentality that we don't wear the masters and we don't treat the workers that well. They work on the plantation. And then, so in the initial 1619 project in the New York Times Magazine, and I strongly, strongly recommend this art by the great Matthew Desmond, the sociologist at Princeton, he did this great article explaining in chapter and verse how the fact that we were a nation with slavery has led to, he's in the phase, the brutality of union-busting American capitalism that because half of our nation had slavery, a lot of the mentality was you treat your workers like dirt. And the fact that slavery ended did not end that mentality. I mean, we had the sharecropper mentality for years and years. And you look now at how some companies in the South treat their workers. And I think the mentality is worse there and it's carrying into the North, unfortunately. One of the big problems we in the United States have had, say, compared to Germany or France is we have this non-union or anti-union region where companies in the heavily unionized North they run down there and that's really dragged down unionization rates and wages and working conditions. And I really strongly recommend that Matthew Desmond piece. It's great. Who are you next? Yeah, Mark, you can go. I'm Mark Simon. One of the chapters in your book is on the read for Ed, bargaining for the common good, teacher strikes of the last two years. And it strikes me that those strikes in almost every case did two things. Number one, they won overwhelmingly. And number two, they had huge parent and community support almost across the board. Do you think that bargaining for the common good as opposed to bargaining for the narrow self-interest of union members is an important development and important strategy for the success of American labor? Thank you for that. I think it is an important strategy. That's why I devoted my whole chat about the read for Ed teacher strikes and I focus on West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona. Those are all arguably bargaining for the common good. Yes, they wanted higher salaries but they realized that with all the tax cuts for fracking and for corporate tax rate and for the rich that education budgets are getting squeezed. There wasn't enough money for new textbooks, classroom size was getting worse. So it was, yes, we need higher pay, our pay has been frozen for too many years but our kids are getting short shrift and we're fighting for them as well. And I wrote about the LA teacher strike which is probably the foremost example of bargaining for the common good and the St. Paul Federation of Teachers already a separate half chapter about. So I think bargaining for the common good is this important strategy and some people will say, well the Sierra on the 1930s, they were bargaining for the common good. Yes, they were in many ways. They were fighting to build a middle class and lift the nation in the 40s and 50s and build a middle class. And I think unions, the people who are really pushing the idea of bargaining for the common good, Steve Lerner, Joe McCartney at Georgetown and others, they realized that kind of as Heidi and I were discussing too many people think unions, maybe union workers have it better than others, the whole unions are self-interested or selfish. I think part of the bargaining for the common good is to overcome those notions and I think they also see unions have grown too weak and if unions are to be more successful they need to win over our allies and work hand in hand with allies and bargaining for the common good is a very good way to do that. The hard question is how do you do that in a private sector? In the public sector, police say or teachers say we need better salaries, we need more cops to assure more and teachers to assure better classes or assure safer streets. When you're a private sector worker it's hard and the big marry up strike that unite here, the hotel workers union had last fall, they came up with a slogan that was very much had bargaining for the common good mind. The one job is not enough and whoever developed that slogan is brilliant because it has really caught on in a big way. So it wasn't just embraced by the striking marry out workers in Boston, Detroit, San Diego, San Francisco, Honolulu and some other cities. It's been embraced by a lot of low wage workers and so I think union see to the extent we could be seen as fighting artists for ourselves but for a broader common good, it's good for us and it's good for society. And I write a chapter about the Los Angeles Alliance for New Economy which is a pro union group that works very closely with environmentalists and they see their real benefits for workers and for the environment and for fighting global warming by having unions work hand in hand with environmentalists. Yeah, go on the back wall. All right, good afternoon, sir and welcome to the district. My name is Julian Kyle Lewis from the illustrious Howard University here in Washington. The perception of a livable wage varies among different factions of Americans and in this day and age what a lot of college graduates are seeing is the fringe upon where you require a smaller medium sized business to have like a 40 hour week like cut line so where they're only hiring workers up to a 39 hour per week range to avoid having to offer them health insurance and different benefits like that so that they can earn like a true livable wage. So is there any way that you can see any of these political candidates targeting that aspect right there where you're trying to get a full-time job but your company can barely afford to decide whether or not they wanna offer you health benefits in addition to the amount of hours that you would need to cover your circumstances. Could you elaborate upon that? Thank you very much. Sir, thank you for that question. So I'm a big believer in healthcare as a human rights, healthcare for all universal coverage. We could have a debate about whether we should have Medicare for all or Medicare for anyone who wants it but I think health coverage should not be tied to one's job, healthcare should, we are the only industrial nation that doesn't have universal health coverage or the only industrial nation doesn't have paid parental and maternity leave or the only industrial nation doesn't have paid vacations for all workers or the, we in South Korea are the only two industrial nations that don't have laws guaranteeing paid sick days and I talk about, in my book, I talk about America being a country of anti-worker exceptionalism and that notion is kind of caught on and it's like people don't realize how maybe wages in the United States are good comparatively to a lot of other countries but the lack of benefits American workers have is appalling compared to many other countries and employers are not required to give anyone healthcare and some have rules saying we guarantee it to everyone with 40 hours, some say we guarantee it to everyone with 35 hours, some say everyone with 30 hours and then all of a sudden people, they'll put a lot of people at 29 hours and 34 hours and 39 to deny it and companies are gonna game the system and with the Affordable Care Act, there was a 30, I think a 30 hour threshold so a lot of companies gave people just 29 hours but I really think the solution is universal coverage so that, again, we're the only industrialized nation where if a factory closes with 1,000 workers or a coal center closes with 1,000 workers, those workers and their families might lose their health coverage. I mean, that to my mind is crazy. Whether you have health coverage should not depend on whether you're lucky enough to have a job. It should be you're born into a society where everyone is guaranteed health coverage. I don't know if that's an adequate answer but. There's a person in the back. Thank you. There's less coverage of labor if labor means unions. There's more coverage of labor if labor also means workers. So I covered labor and workplace matters from the New York Times for 19 years. Nancy Cleveland did a great job covering that for the LA Times so many years and there was a period when I was the last full-time labor reporter at a daily newspaper. The Washington Post no longer had one. Wall Street Journal no longer had one. The LA Times no longer had one. And that was a problem. That was probably like in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. And newspapers were really in a steep financial downturn. They were reducing the size of the newsroom. I think a lot of the labor reporting slots were among the first to go. But come the Great Recession, I think a lot of the media said, hey, workers are taking on the chin. We really have to write more about workers. And I think there's been an upturn since then in writing about workers in contrast to unions. And a lot of economics reporters are writing far more about workers and labor than was the case 10 and 15 years ago. But unions are not nearly as active as they were 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. The successful contract, they have far fewer really successful contracts than was the case with Walter Ruth and the Treaty of Detroit in 1950 to this. And I think a lot of editors just don't, it's funny, so at the New York Times, Dave Jones was the national editor for about 20 years. And back in the 60s and 70s, he was Detroit correspondent for the New York Times. He cared about, when he was national editor, he cared about labor because he grew up in that milieu. But the people who succeeded him, they just, it wasn't part of their life nearly as much. And that's the whole issue in society. So unions are smaller. We've gone from more than one in three unions to just one in 10 in unions. Unions do not have, Jimmy Hoffa, Walter Ruther, George Meany, A. Philip Randolph, those are basically household names in their day. How many union leaders now are household names? So like, and how many great union leaders are there who are like really grabbing headlines? You know, Randy Weingarten does a lot of great stuff, Mary Kay Hemi do a lot of great, one of the great things about the fight for 15 is that, and the red strikes is they got a lot of attention. They got a lot of news coverage. And when unions really do big things and bold things, they get attention. But a lot of the times they don't and a lot of unions are playing small ball. And small ball doesn't get attention. Tom Gagan in his most recent book says, the dumbest thing a union can do is go on a strike in a small town in the middle of somewhere with 1,000, 2,000 workers without first getting strong community support and lining up strong news coverage because you're just walking the plank because it's very, very hard. So there is more labor coverage now than there was 10, 15 years ago largely because of the rise of all these digital news sites, which like tilt liberal. Hamilton Nolan does a great job at Splinter. He used to be a Gorker. Dave Jamison does a great job at Huffington Post. Alexis Fernandez Campbell does a great job. These people do an excellent job and really should be read. They do very good daily coverage of labor. Maybe the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, or the Margaret Rosels at the LA Times that was doing a very good job. There's less maybe in the daily papers. There's still very, very little on TV and radio. But some of the websites do quite a good job. Jordan Barab. There's kind of a vicious circle or maybe a chicken and a chicken egg issue here. On one hand, you used to say, and we all say that one way to strengthen the labor movement is to deal with campaign finance reform, pass the Pro Act, et cetera. But a lot of the obstacle to getting those passed is the fact that unions are so weak. So basically what we're saying is the way for unions to get stronger is for unions to get stronger. So how do you break into that kind of vicious circle? Again, I don't know the answer. I remember years ago. I've long been a fan of public financing of campaigns because I think just criminal and the Koch brothers or Tom Steyer, if I may say, have like a million times the voice of a Wal-Mart worker or a school teacher or a steer worker. I think that's really broken. And I remember a lot of union leaders were saying, oh, I'm aware against public finance. That's not a good idea because they think that, well, we give $2,000 to this candidate. We get special access. So what if a corporate pact gives $50,000? We unions get access because we give $2,000. And as I said, concluding my remarks, I think we as a nation have to pay far, far, far more attention to fixing our campaign finance system. And it's great that the first bill passed by the new House of Representatives was a campaign finance bill. But Mitch McConnell will allow a vote on that over his grave. But it's a very important issue. And I don't know how we get from here to there. It's not as if the Koch brothers or the Koch brother or Sheldon Adelson are just going to roll over and say, yes, overturn Citizens United and make it harder for us to donate, make it harder for the Koch network to give $700 million in a campaign. But a lot of people criticize Barack Obama because they say, you failed to get the employee free choice act passed. And people forget it's really, every time a Democratic president has tried to enact legislation, make it easier for unions, it gets blocked by Republican filibuster. That happened with LBJ, who arguably was more expert at dealing with the legislature than any president since. It happened with Jimmy Carter, was blocked by Republican filibuster. Bill Clinton wanted to push a law that banned strike replacement, that didn't get anywhere. And with Barack Obama, I don't think he ever really had the 60 votes. So it's really, really hard. And the way the Constitution sets up the Senate, allowing and basically arguing for Republican domination of many, many states out west, it makes it that much harder. But I don't think we can begin to overcome that until we have campaign finance reform. And I'm saying, it just has to be a bigger issue on the public agenda for people who want to create a fairer economy and nation. And I don't know how we get from here to there. Yeah, John Wetmore with pedestrians.org. What do you see as the relative roles in law and policy at the federal level versus the state level? And is there any local level? So the United States has enterprise bargaining, workplace by workplace bargaining, which makes it harder for unions to get power. They have to organize and bargain workplace by workplace by workplace, sometimes a few workplaces together. So there's been this call recently, and I read about this in my book, and then Mary Kay Hemi discussed this in her big unions for all speech on August 21st. We need to go to, we need other ways to get around enterprise bargaining. We have to somehow move to industry wide bargaining, sector bargaining, so people talk about wage boards. And the best example of this, believe it or not, was with Andrew Cuomo in New York, when the fight for 15 was pushing this business friendly centrist governor to embrace a $15 wage for fast food workers, he set up a wage board using a mechanism that was first enacted during the Depression, as many state governments tried to create a living wage. And living wage is that difficult phrase, how do you define a living wage? Figure out what a living wage is in the whole industry, and the state board would set that. And so basically Andrew Cuomo created this wage board with business reps and union reps, and with he being the 800-pound gorilla, decided he wanted a $15 minimum wage, and that's what happened as for the wage board. And this idea has been catching on. So again, in New York City, so we see this big fight in California now about whether Uber and Lyft drivers should be defined as employees or independent contractors. But in New York City, there was a study finding that 95% of Uber and Lyft drivers are making less than the hourly minimum wage. So the Taxi and Limousine Commission said, this is screwed up. These people are working 60 or 70 hours a week. They don't see their families. They're hardly supporting their families. So they set a $17.22 minimum wage, minimum pay after expenses for Uber and Lyft drivers. So that's kind of sectoral bargaining being done at the local level. And then right about this also, in Seattle, the city council set up a domestic standards board for the city's 30,000 domestic workers, housekeepers, home care aides, nannies. And that 13-member board panel is going to set wage levels, amount of vacation, hours for this group. And so Mary Kay Henry in her speech said, we need a law that would allow states and cities to experiment. Justice Brandeis talked about the states perhaps being the laboratories of democracy, that the National Labor Relations Act would be a floor. And then cities and states could experiment above that. Again, I don't see this Congress enacting that, but maybe that could happen. There was a question back there. Thank you, thank you, thank you. My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, and I thank you. So Larry follows me on Twitter. So I had this tweet the other day saying, it would be great for some history graduate student or education graduate student to do a study about what does Texas and Mississippi and Georgia and Alabama teach to their grade school students about labor, compared to, say, Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania. That would be very interesting. And one thing that might be done is the teachers unions and others try to really look at what is taught about labor. And don't just teach about the triangle fire. Teach about the Treaty of Detroit and the coal miner strikes and the Pullman strikes. And there's a lot to be taught. And so we read stories about how the right wing expertly uses YouTube to move people further to the right and become more racist and more white nationalist. Maybe union stuff isn't quite as sexy as KKK. I mean, it's a challenge. It's a challenge. And YouTube might not be delighted to try to create algorithms that promote unionism. But unions haven't done nearly enough over the years. And the Democrats haven't done nearly enough. And I mean, you're right. Your impulse is right about how to do more. But it's not easy. And also, on your point about whether it should be we, and I don't know if you mean WE or OUI. But some people say, let's talk about collective action. That's the phrase, instead of unions. Let's, through collective action, through working together, we could get more. And maybe. But unions are the structure that historically has done the most to raise workers. American law kind of says, if you want to gather together and be most effective, NLRA creates these tracks that you're to follow. But then you get groups like the Coalist and Mockley Workers and the Law Center for the Alliance for a New Economy and the Workers' Defense Project in Austin and SOMOS in Santa Fe that are making strides, not as much as the UAW did, but the fight for 15 was union-backed, but it was not a union, formal unionization effort. But then it achieved a whole, whole, whole lot. You should make a bumper sticker out of that. You'd make a lot of money. And there are movies like Norma Ray, too. I mean, why has another movie like Norma Ray been made in the last five or 10 years? Let me also say yard signs. We have them in Chicago. I'm Kathy Hurwood. I used to work for Congress, and so I wanted to raise what some members of Congress have been doing, because apart from legislation, there's solidarity action. And it was very amazing to me. We could get a dozen members of Congress on a letter to a corporate CEO asking for neutrality or to sit down at the bargaining table. And just 12 members would get a big response. Now we got a response two weeks ago. I don't know if everyone knows. There was an ethics charge filed against 15 members who sent a letter to Red Rock Casino. It was by the Orwellian Fact Foundation for Accountability and Civil Trust. And they're arguing that they broke ethics laws by encouraging the corporation to get involved. So that's a comment. The question that I have is, it strikes us that focusing solely on wages could be a problem in the sense that if you win something, you don't get the union. It was fight for 15 and a union. And we had to say and a union all the time. One of the things that we were trying to do in Congress was to raise a lot of other issues, for example, on-demand scheduling, workplace safety. With nurses, we raised the fact that a unionized nurse felt free to blow the whistle on safety problems where an unorganized nurse didn't. Should we be looking at and localizing it a little bit, depending on solidarity actions and areas? But should we be looking at a broader package than just wages? I've never said we should only look at wages. And I took it upon myself a few weeks to go to say, just as Newt Gingrich had his contact for America, worker advocates should have a contract for the American worker that calls for all the things that European workers have that we don't pay parental leave, paid vacation, paid sick days, universal health coverage. Good training is in Germany. And yes, we need higher wages, but we need the work. You see these polls, OECD polls, other polls, work-family balance, stress for workers in the United States. We're way near the bottom. So our wages are in ways pretty good compared to other countries. Our wage gains have not been pretty good. So it's kind of what the various groups of workers want. Different workers, Google workers get paid very well. But 20,000 of them went out on a protest like, wow. And they were upset about sexual harassment. So you'd have to kind of look at what various groups of workers want. The coalition of Mockley workers, the crew leaders would tell a lot of women, you want to work tomorrow, get into the truck with me for a few minutes. And there are a lot of millions of workers, and they have millions of issues. I just want the YouTube thing and all that. And I remember back in the Anita Hill hearing, and this is the me too era. Rather than, I mean, while we're saying our wishes, sure, educate people about labor in school. But there is nothing in school that you even learn about your basic rights as a worker. What is sexual harassment? What about safety and health in the job? What about the minimum wage? What about overtime? What about the National Labor Relations Act, et cetera? And it's almost amazing that we have that condition, where we're supposedly educating people for the workplace. They even talk about it like that. But they're never real. You know, and it's easy to explain why it is like that, but we should make it different. Thanks. And thank you very much, Steve, for this book and what you've done and what you're doing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. As you say, I'm partly in response to Ellen's question. I wrote this book because a lot of young people don't know book is, as my mother and grandmother used to say, about labor and what they've accomplished, and their rights. And I tried to write. There's some wonderful labor histories out there, but they're 700 pages and they get way, way in the weeds. And this one I tried to explain soup to nuts in a readable way that isn't for professional historians. And for people to see the issues out there and how a lot of workers are horribly mistreated in 1909 before the uprising of 20,000, a lot of workers are still horribly mistreated nowadays. And something has to be done to lift rights for workers, make it easier for workers to speak out, whistle-blowing laws need to be strengthened. Rich Collenberg and Moshe Marvitt proposed moving to just cause standards for when workers are laid off or fired, that you can only fire them for just cause. And if we had that standard and Bernie Sanders would call it for that now, then workers will feel much more empowered to speak out about problems at work. Now, if you speak out about problems at work, they might fire you. They'll say we fired you because you were 90 seconds late, not because you're a loudmouth, or for no reason. Well, they need a pretext. From your words to God, from your lips to God's ears. I mean, oh, thank you, thank you. Can I hire you as my public relations agent? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So I'll be signing books. You got it. Go for it. OK, thank you. Thank you. And thank you again for having me here. Good to see you, Jordan. Yes.