 And what a journey we are on with this coronavirus. My goodness, there was no beginning and definitely we don't see an end. But between there, between the beginning and wherever, we have real people with real issues. And today we are going to talk with my dearest friend. And you know I only talk to dear friends. My dear friend, Eric Gill. And Eric Gill is, as everybody in Hawaii knows, Eric is the treasure of local five. And you say local five. See, even I have a local card man. Everybody knows when you say local give five, you talk to Eric. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to talk to Eric. And we're going to talk about what this means to his workers, his 12,000 hotel workers. And even those, and there's some of those that have food service with the air airlines, right? And some of them work at Kaiser. So he's got all kinds of them. And I think now I don't know this, but I think that because he is a part of all of the hotels in the Americas, or at least in the United States, and all of them are facing the same issues that tourism is quiet right now. So that's what we're going to talk about, what that means to his workers, and if there is a path forward. So Eric. I love her. Hi, dear. So what, where would you like me to start, Marcia? At the beginning. Okay. Now you have, did I get it right, 12,000 workers in the community? We're a little short of 12,000. And about 80% of that is hotel. We have about 20% in healthcare. And we also have about a thousand workers in the airports. So all of our people are essential workers in that sense. You know, we are hotel workers are doing dangerous work to the extent they're working right now. They're working in an environment with a lot of kind of travelers coming through and, and it is a dangerous environment. And so obviously are Kaiser workers working in healthcare facilities. And, you know, by definition, healthcare facilities, you know, are dangerous in a sense that you're, you know, you have sick people there and COVID people there and so on. And our airport workers as well. You know, right now, we don't have a lot of work in the airports because the airports have basically closed. But that's going to change over time. And, and so it's really a question for all of our laid off workers in the hotels and at the airport on when they're going back, how soon is it going to back and high on people's list is are they safe going back to work? Many people do not want to leave the safety of their homes and go to work right now. Obviously, that can change if they don't have the unemployment. And that in fact is what the government to these some elements in the government want to do is take away their employment to force people back to work. And that's something we really want to be careful with. Forcing people back to work in a pandemic is, is going to be problematic if they try to take our senior workers, the most vulnerable workers who are older and have more health care issues and the most, the most likely people to get badly sick if they do get sick. And you're going to force them back to work and tell them they don't get unemployment if they don't show up. Is that what we're going to do? It hasn't happened here yet. Okay. In other words, I'm not seeing that happening here yet. But we haven't had many people going back to work yet. Yeah. And so, so that question is still out there. But certainly on the part of the federal government, where, you know, the only thing that Trump used the war powers act to do was force meat cutter workers back to work in plants that were deadly, where people were dying. And we had big outbreaks of disease. And the only thing the federal government used this war powers act to do is force them back to work. They didn't do anything to get masks made or test kits made. They didn't do that. But they're all they're there to threaten workers, they got to go back to work. And I think that is an underlying theme in this whole pandemic. We got a health care issue here. But underlying that is a economic crisis, because all these companies are closed. And in the middle of that economic crisis, people are acting the way they are. And our corporations are got their money, rubbing hands trying to get trillions of dollars of our tax money that they don't even need. And they're fighting workers having a way to make a living because they want to force workers back, desperately looking for work because they got no money and no health care. And so it's not an accident that the government did nothing to extend health care in the CARES Act. And although there's a bill before the Democratic Congress right now to provide some health care relief, McConnell just said dead on arrival. Don't any Republicans want to do is- Yeah, answer this for me. I do not understand for hundreds of, I don't know how long, people in the United States did not have health care. Now in Hawaii, 1974, your unions were part of it, working with the legislature to get prepaid health care. And then when this Obamacare comes along and they fought tooth and nail to keep it from happening, right now the Trump people in the court to get rid of Obamacare. What is it that people, these time-lucky mugs don't want ordinary people to have health care? What is that about? It just blows my mind. Well, there've been studies, for example, that political involvement on a part of people is directly affected by their security on their health care. In other words, working people, if they don't have health care, they're focused on getting health care for their families. And then they have to work for cheap and work long hours to get it. And so it takes them out of politics. So from the point of view of the corporate people that own many of our politicians, it's just fine if people don't have health care because that makes them more desperate for employment. It makes them work for cheaper and work longer to make those benefits. So it's dollars and cents and we're paying for that now because the greediness of our corporate masters and the politicians that they own are such that we've got huge gaps in our health care system. And right now that's a danger to every single person except the corporate people because they got private jets and they got their little bunker in New Zealand and that's where they are. We're not all in this together, guys. The rich guys are off to their private island. Yes, I love it, a private island. But if you watch the pundits on national television, they have these big salaries, million dollar salaries, and their employment packages include the best health care. They have no concept of what ordinary people are dealing with in terms of health care. Now, your people, for instance, your union people, their health care, is that from the union or from the hotel that they're working at? Well, we bargain for health care. Yeah, in other words, we bargain. The law says that they have to have health care in this state. It doesn't say that in other states. But the law says that employers have to provide health care if people work more than 20 hours a week for four consecutive weeks and so on. And that's single health care. So in other words, the law in Hawaii says the employer has to provide health care for the worker. The employer doesn't have to provide health care for the workers family. Nor does the employer have to provide health care for retirees and that sort of thing. So what we do is we bargain up from the law. The law is the minimal standard that all employers have to do. And that's helpful to us because what it means is that unlike in other states where you have a good union contract with good health care that covers families, our spouses and our kids have employment and they get medical in Hawaii. So in others, we don't have to take the full burden of everybody's families because the law provides for spouses and us to get health care through their own jobs and that takes some burden off of us. So we have a benefit structure that is negotiated by the union and it and basically we bargain for higher standards than the law provides. And in particular, we bargain for family health care because that's what's important to our members. They are working for money so they can pay the rent but the health care is right up there. It is what people are working for. And so we have a trust fund that we have built over the last 50 years and so and I didn't start it. This was started by my predecessors and it's an excellent fund and we are self-insured. So we're able to provide benefits for our members now through our reserves but we're spending down, we're spending, that's the question. And in other words, we're not out of benefits now for those people in our trust fund. We just extended benefits through September, for example. So those people in our trust fund are okay for now but there's many workers not in our trust fund yet that we weren't able to get the employers in yet. For example, our airport workers who are on a monthly plan paid for by the employer. And some of the monthly plan employers have paid coverage for April and May but not for June. And some of them have paid for June but not for July. And in fact, it's there is no promise beyond that. So we have thousands of people and the people outside of our trust fund, which is pretty much everybody else, you know, ILW has a trust fund but it is a monthly payment vehicle. And so at some point their trust fund will run out of the ability to buy premiums for people. Our trust fund is going to run out of the ability to pay claims because we don't pay premiums but we pay claims. And so the question is how many claims we're going to have, how high the cost of the claims and how long do our reserves last before we have to close down our coverage? Now it would be a tragedy for this state to allow our trust fund to run out of money because it's not just, it's not just the 20,000 lives that we're covering but we also cover 24, 2500 retirees who would be out of coverage if the fund is unable to pay for that coverage. And the retirees are the ones who are most vulnerable to this virus. They have medical bills, you know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. And if you look at it, I mean, without a doctor right now, you can't even get tested under the current state policy. You have to have a doctor refer you. A doctor has to confirm two out of four symptoms of COVID and so on and so forth. So people without coverage just don't have access to the healthcare system at all. And how are you going to find out if they're sick and how is it good for any of us that we got people running around in town sick and they don't know it and have no way to find out? That is crazy. So it's absolutely impermissible for our government to allow anyone to be uninsured at this point. And yet we're about to see thousands and thousands of people who had coverage all this time losing coverage in two weeks. Now, how can the legislature help? Because you are not just you, but all the private unions. How can the legislature help or will they help? I guess it's a question. Well, from what I'm told, the legislature's budget proposal that they are going to be voting on this week or whenever they vote on it, doesn't include anything for private sector healthcare. I'm told that it does include money to continue employment for public workers. And I think that's fine. It would not be good for anyone for our public workers to be laid off. Certainly not good for our teachers to get laid off. Certainly not good for us to force public workers and teachers to take pay cuts where we start losing teachers we need. So I fully support the legislature keeping our public workers working. That it would be foolish in the face of this economic crisis to put thousands and thousands of more people unemployed. But that doesn't do anything for those of us who are not government workers. And that's a lot bigger group. And all of the hotel workers are not government workers. The airport workers, not government workers. There's few healthcare workers, government workers now that the state is starting to privatize. And so basically the legislature hasn't done anything to help the, I understand it, they're not even planning to do anything in this bill to address healthcare for workers who are losing it. And Congress has a bill and that bill would work. And that would basically provide COBRA payments. COBRA means people have COBRA, it's an acronym, but it is expensive. And workers can't afford to pay COBRA out of their unemployment. And so the COBRA payment by the government though would allow that worker to have that coverage for each month that the government pays the COBRA. And that COBRA payment in our fund would also fund the coverage for those retirees out there as well. And so the best way for the government to ensure continued coverage for hotel workers is to do it through our fund. Because we can get that additional help. We cover the retirees too. And these are, these are thousands of hotel workers who work, you know, 40, 50 years in some cases, building up the funds that, you know, that, that we are now using to cover everybody. And it would be such a tragedy for retirees to lose medical, especially, especially now when there are people, you know, many people my age are retirement age now in the hotels and people. You can't be retirement age. I remember when you were a little boy, you cannot be retirement age. I don't know how. Okay, well, I'm not then, but all those people my age are. And, and, and so, you know, and without a lot of, without work to go back to, people are, people are retiring. And, and they should be retiring now. I mean, if there's not work to go back to, and they can retire, they should. Are some of those hotels open now? Of our hotels, very few. And most of the hotels that remain open are smaller nonunion places. And I don't have relationships with them to find out everything what's going on with them. But, but most of the hotels that are open now are operating on very low occupancy. And, you know, basically a shoestring operation. We have one of our hotels that is currently still open. They mainly cater to flight attendants and flight crews at this point. So they're running about four to 8% occupancy depending on the week. So we have a few workers working there. And we got another hotel where they got quarantine people. What does that do to your workers? Are they safe? No, they're not. No, they're not. The hotel is never intended to be quarantined facilities. But the fact is they open up hotels to healthcare workers who are quarantining away from their families because they, they're not allowed to go to their workplace and they don't want to go home and get their family sick. So they end up checking in the hotels and when hotels, hotels can't find out if people are sick or not, partly because people don't know. Anyway, we got 20% of the COVID positive people who don't have symptoms. If they don't have symptoms, they couldn't have got tested because it requires symptoms to get tested. And so at any, in any group of large enough size, you're going to have X number of people who are, who are COVID positive and potentially contagious. And so the fact is hotels are not set up as quarantine stations, which is exactly what the problem is for the current policy on the state. So the state says to tourists, to discourage tourists coming in. And I think that was right. We should, we shouldn't have everybody flowing in here when we're trying to make sure we don't have a bump of disease that makes us a sick community. So that was right to discourage people coming in. But the way to discourage them was to make them go to two weeks of quarantine and the word's out already. They don't have to, there's nobody who can keep them in there. And there's no hotels aren't set up to keep people in their rooms. They're not. And neither are they set up to. Before they leave, that they tell people, you know, if you go to Hawaii, that you're going to have this quarantine. Most, it seems to me that the travel agents or whatever on the other end should tell people, this is what you're going to do, that all those attractions are not open. And what's the good thing in a hotel? Yeah, well, they're not. And then you can see on the paper this morning, you know, the illegal vacation rentals that have been illegal all this time are doubly illegal now because they're taking people to evade the quarantine as well. So they're enabling people to come in and evade the quarantine requirements. And so as we're talking about reopening hotels, we have to address the question and the fact that there's no way to be sure who's sick and who's not. And therefore we have to adjust our operations to be cautious and proactively take precautions to avoid spreading sickness, which means you have to treat every room and every guest is potentially ill. And also for the workers, the guests have every right and consideration to they don't want to come to a place that's sick. And so they don't want to catch it from a worker. One of my members are any other hotel workers. So we need, we need very aggressive testing for hotel workers and all essential workers, healthcare workers, especially should be tested on a weekly basis. We should do that. And, and, and it's, it's just wrong, in my opinion, for, for the state to take the position that we don't have to. I think we need to change that. If, if, if guests are going to come here, then we need to have some assurances of their health. And how do we do that? And right now there's only two ways to do it. You put them in a room for two weeks and see if they get sick, which is quarantine. That's what quarantine is. That hurts everybody in the hotel, though. Well, yeah, I mean, it's not, we still have to adjust the hotel operations, but basically there's only two ways to deal with the incoming guests, right? Either we're going to quarantine them to find out if they're sick, or we're going to test them to find out if they're sick. And right now we do have in the one hotel we have open, at least one of the flight crews is doing three times a week testing of their flight crews. So, and they're doing it on arrival at the hotel as well. So they have a test that is a 15 minute turnaround. And they can, they can run that and find out within 15 minutes, if anybody's COVID positive, in which case they can send them off to an appropriate facility that is equipped to take care of sick people. And if they're not, then they can put them in hotel rooms and, and we don't have to quarantine them. So there's only these two approaches. And the quarantine discourages people from coming here. That's what the intent was. That was the intent. Yes. It was the intent. And that was fine. I mean, that was, it was effective in shutting off the flow of tourists coming here and defying things. You know, it was all of them pictures on Cuyil beach, raising them my ties and partying up and acting like they don't care that triggered that whole thing. But obviously, we're going to have to take some long, longer term measures here. But if we, if we just keep the quarantine on what we're telling, we're just telling guests not to come here. And if that's the case, okay, but let's not talk about reopening hotels then. Well, you know, I was tested at doctors of Waikiki, which is in one of your hotels at the Princess Coyolani. And the hotel is closed, but they're still operating in the hotel. And they were testing people, the drive-thru testing. And I was tested because I'm a caregiver. And it seems to me that since they're located in a hotel that that would be a perfect place to test these people coming in simply because that's where they are. But I don't run things. So I'm Yeah, well, arrival testing, you know, it can be done at the hotel, you know, then the question is going to be who pays for that. But it can be done at the airport as well. This 15-minute turnaround test is, I forget the name of it, but you've got to spend 25 grand on a machine and you've got to spend 30 bucks to pop on the test kits or something like that. So it's not cheap. And somebody's got to pay for that. But if the if the state did arrival testing, they could just tax the airlines for that. And it would be included into fair costs. That's what I was going to say. Couldn't you add that to the cost? To the ticket? Well, certainly they would, right? I mean, airlines aren't going to start spending money. They're going to figure a way to get their money back. But they have their way to do that. They just included in the ticket price. And, you know, and I've talked to our union brothers and sisters that represent the TSA union, you know, the people doing this, they're screening at the airport. And they're able to do this. They're able to run a line with testing line. And they would need training and appropriate equipment and all that stuff. But but that's one way to do it is do it at the airport. Yeah, that's not happening right now. So what's happening with this flight crew is they're doing it on arrival at the hotel and at the hotel, they took a meeting room and they just repurpose it and do tests in there. And, you know, there is a certain, you know, there's it's a 15 minute turnaround time, but it also the machine you can only do so many an hour. You know, so there's there's all this debate going on a different tests and and and what they find out and how long they do it and all that stuff. And testing is a very controversial thing because the federal government blew it, didn't test people, they didn't ramp it up. Now we don't have enough tests and Trump just keeps making excuses for it, but they blew it. And so they're making this whole controversy about testing, which is crazy if we're going to try to reopen our economy. You know, we can't safely reopen our economy without widespread testing. I don't think we should reopen hotels without widespread, you know, without testing of workers and guests. And that's going to be a real issue because as employers seek to reopen, they're not going to want to pay this cost. No, no. And somebody's got to pay it. Yeah, it's not free. And so, yes, somebody's got to pay for it. I've heard of one hotel on the neighbor islands that is planning to reopen, I guess next month sometime. And and they're paying for 500 tests for the entire workforce. Which is I think that's appropriate. It's not enough though, because, you know, tomorrow you could get sick. We need to test people on a regular basis. And the money for that needs to be found. And, you know, so all this, you know, all these governors are going to reopen the economy and all these crazy guys reopen the economy is like, we only have a few seconds left. But those, all those red states did not take Medicaid that when that was offered. So they some of these people have nothing because they didn't have Medicaid. And those are the red states. And they didn't take it. And now, of course, they want to go back to work because they have nothing. No Medicare, no health care. And those are the, you know, wherever you see the corporations in charge, which you know, the red states are basically that's where they are. Now the blue states, the corporations are in charge too. But you know, when when the Democrats have a reason to try to position, they, they pretend to be on our side and they try to get us stuff. And that's what's happened in this past CARES Act bill, you know, trillions of dollars out to corporations that don't need it. They don't need it. The corporations don't need a bailout. No, they don't. They can borrow money at 0% interest. They don't need a bailout, but they're getting trillions of dollars. And we got half a billion. And so that's the nature of what's going on here. This economic crisis is being used as an excuse to transfer billions of dollars, trillions of dollars of our money, our tax money, being borrowed against our taxes. And they're giving it to corporations that don't need it. And the Democrats put a lipstick on that pig and get us a little bit of unemployment, but no health care. We have a minute left. What can we do as just people of Hawaii? We've got four people in the Congress. What can we do to call them, talk to them, write to them, do whatever we can to support them in getting us over the home? Yeah, we've talked about that. We talked to Senator Hirono and stuff. And our congressional delegation is not the problem here. And Senator Hirono is really the only one on a committee that makes a difference in this next piece of CARES Act legislation. The rest of our delegation aren't on the key committees and these things are blowing through and very few Congress people actually have much to say about it. There's a few people in Congress that make these decisions. There's people on Pelosi and the people on McConnell. And of those two, the only ones that are going to take any pressure from us is the Democrats. You know, McConnell doesn't care unless you're in Kentucky. He doesn't care what we think. But we do want to pile on to the Democrats and make sure that they don't cut us out of these bills in some compromise because that's what happened so far. We got trillions of dollars went out to corporations and 500 billion of it had some strings on it to keep people working. And the rest of it just went out to those guys. And it's gone. And those are the same guys that got us into this mess, the same guys that took all their stock by backs and took the excess cash and put it in their own pockets and built up their own stock price. And now they don't have money and they don't want to pay for medical and we're giving them money, really? So that's the nature of our Congress. And we need to put some backbone in the Democrats so that they stand up for us instead of bargaining us and getting us lipstick on a pig. We should at least get the lips. Well, that vision of never mind. No, these corporations that hogged all of our tax money and they're throwing us a nickel on the dollar and saying we should be grateful. But some of them are now saying we shouldn't even have the unemployment because then people don't want to go back to work. Get it straight. People don't want to go back to work. They're scared. They don't want to die. And you're not paying. Everybody wants to go to work, but people want to come home to their family safe and not get their family sick and not get their mom dead. And that's what that's what is being done in this country is there's an attempt to even take back the unemployment they gave because it doesn't force people to go to work when they want to reopen the economy. So they make money and they don't care if we die or not. And that's the nature of the government in this in this nation. The corporate corporate interests control our politicians and they don't care about us at all. Well, my dear friend, as always, I enjoy spending time with you. And I do thank you so much for all you do and all you have done. Oh, real quick, for anybody that doesn't know, I adored his mother and father. They were the beginnings of the Democratic Party in Hawaii. And his father was in Congress. And he wrote and he was the floor of under in the Congress under LBJ for the Civil Rights Act and worked hard to pass it. So he's been my hero for a couple thousand years. And this young man in DC was a young man when all of that happened. And so that's why I said I've known him all of his life. So again, thank you and all you do. And I appreciate it. And we'll see you next time.