 Hi, welcome to the State of Working America podcast where we seek to elevate workers' voices to make sure they're heard in the economic policy debate in Washington and beyond. I'm Pedro Dacosta, your host today, and I'm here with my colleague, Rami Jackson, and I can't think of a more appropriate guest for a podcast such as this, than Stephen Greenhouse, who's the former labor reporter at the New York Times for a long time and is now an author. And most recently, he's written a book called Beaten Down Worked Up, The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor. And given that this podcast is sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, as I was reading it, I picked up a lot of the, it was kind of a humanization of a lot of the research teams that EPI has been working on since its inception in the 1980s. So thank you so much for joining us, Steve. Great to be here, Pedro and Rami. So I wanted to start really by just jumping into the book, which you, you know, we held an event at EPI. It was a really nice chat. We had a nice discussion about it. And you really tried to give a sense of the arch of labor activism history in the United States. And I think to tell some of the underappreciated stories of just how significant the gains were for workers in the past century or so. So one of the main reasons I wrote the book is that I think far too many Americans know far too little about labor unions and what they've accomplished over the decades. You know, many people think that, you know, God handed down the 40-hour work week. No, it was decades of struggle by workers in the unions that brought us the 40-hour work week. I have a chapter about, you know, an amazing strike by 20,000 female garment workers in New York in 1909 and how they were out for two months in the dead of winter. And they were fighting, not for a 40-hour work week, they were fighting for a 52-hour work week down from 56 hours. And people also often forget that, you know, thanks to unions, we have employer-sponsored health coverage, we have paid vacations, we have paid retirement plans. And there's a lot of truth to the bumper sticker unions, the folks who brought you the weekend. I remember that bumper sticker in my old newsroom at Reuters. One of our union activists had it prominently on his desk. Can you tell us some of the more fascinating historical, you know, incidents that you came across in your research? So as I said, I feel Americans know far too little about unions and what they've accomplished. And I feel it's especially true about young Americans. So I really tried to write an accessible book with some of the highlights of, and most compelling, most arresting highlights of labor history. So I wrote about this famous 1909 strike of female garment workers. And I wrote about the horrendous triangle fire, which really helped spur unions to, you know, fight for better safety conditions. In that huge tragedy, 146 workers, most of them women, most of them immigrants, died in 1911. So one surprise I encountered in researching the book is that the great Frances Perkins, who is FDR's labor secretary and the first woman ever to serve in the American Cabinet. She was having tea with friends on Washington Square on a Saturday afternoon in 1911. And they hear fire whistles and screams, and Frances Perkins runs over and sees women and men jumping from the windows of the triangle fire to their deaths. And she said, that was the day the new deal was created. And she became head of these commissions to study ways on how to improve safety for workers. She became Governor Al Smith's industrial commissioner, then the industrial commissioner for someone named Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and that catapulted her to become labor secretary. And she was an amazing, amazing woman. You know, it was really, she was in ways, the mother of Social Security and the 40-hour week and the minimum wage and child labor laws. So that's one amazing story. Another amazing story is about the great Walter Ruther, who to my mind is one of the very best labor leaders of the 20th century. And he grew up in West Virginia. His father was a socialist leader of the Brewery Union. And Ruther moved to Detroit and got a job at a horrible automobile factory where people getting injured all the time. And Ruther, having imbibed his father's militancy and activism, became a union leader. He's a phenomenally bright, charismatic union leader. And by the, you know, in his 30s, he became head of the National United Auto Workers. And he and his two brothers were involved in the Flint sit-down strike in 1936-37 that really led finally to the unionization of what was then the nation's largest company, General Motors. That created a huge wave of unionization. And again, it showed that, you know, people going on strike and sacrificing. And again, that was a two-month strike and a dead of winter in Flint, Michigan, which is much colder than Manhattan. And so that led to, you know, 400,000, 500,000 people being unionized in the auto industry. And then after Ruther became president of the UAW, he really clinched these amazing contracts with General Motors. A five-year contract that greatly raised wages and provided the best health coverage and pensions for any unionized workers in America. And that became a humongous model that hundreds of other companies copied. And that union contract really became a key element in building America's middle class. So when people say who built the middle class, it was in many ways America's labor unions that built the middle class. Could you talk about the convergence of the, another historical detail a lot of people don't know. And I actually came across fairly too later in my life than I would have rather come across the fact is how much the civil rights movement, despite some early racism in union activism, how much did labor movement intersected with civil rights activism, and how at the front lines of labor activism people like Martin Luther King were. In fact, his death was actually related to a strike. Can you talk a little bit about that? Thanks for asking a great question. So the labor movement unfortunately has a very mixed record on race. And in the early, in the first half of the 20th century, there was huge racism against Asian American workers, huge racism against many African American workers. At the same time some unions were enlightened, the CIO unions were all for allowing in people no matter what the race. And A. Philip Randolph, again, one of the labor greats and someone who doesn't get far too little attention in American history, he was the head of the sleeping car, the brotherhood of sleeping car porters union. And that was a union largely of African Americans and they became like a big part of the African American middle class. They played a huge role in the civil rights struggles of the South. The head of the sleeping car porters in Alabama was the person who kind of chose Rosa Parks to, he kind of mentored her about how to commit civil disobedience. They were the ones who bailed her out after she was arrested. And A. Philip Randolph, people think that Martin Luther King Jr. was the person who organized the famous March on Washington 1963. It was really A. Philip Randolph. So the unions, some unions were really ambivalent about... And it was a march for jobs and justice. March for jobs and justice. And some unions, unfortunately, were very ambivalent about Dr. King and thought he was pushing too hard. But on the other hand, there are some courageous union leaders, Randolph and Ruther, who really led the way in supporting the civil rights movement. And when the rubber hit the road and LBJ was pushing to, Linda Bains Johnson was pushing to enact civil rights laws, the unions played a very big role in helping that overcome opposition from southern senators and get that enacted. So I have a chapter about the Memphis Sanitation Worker Strike, which was a great victory for labor and civil rights, but at a tremendous cost, the death of Dr. King. And it started with the death of two workers, right? Yeah. So I profile a sanitation worker in Memphis, Elmer Nicolbury, who came back from serving in the Korean War and couldn't find a job in Memphis. And he was tired of everyone calling him boy. And I write that I quote him saying, I was treated better. I was treated with more respect in Korea than I was back home in Tennessee. And he gets a job as a sanitation worker and they're treated like dirt. I mean, it's, you know, it's, you know, talk about legacy of slavery. It's just all the whites of bosses, you know, the whites of bosses, the, you know, black star, the tub totes who carry the garbage and there aren't even shower, you know, they work in 90, 95 degrees. They come back all sweaty with maggots all over them from carrying garbage. And there aren't even showers in the garages. And the workers have paid terribly. Elmer Nicolbury told me he had worked there 14 years and he was making only a nickel more than the federal minimum wage. Which would translate to only like $12 an hour after working 14 years lugging garbage. So one day in the afternoon, very rainy day, two workers get, you know, to escape the rain, crawl into the back of their garbage truck, you know, where there's, where there's the compactor to escape the rain. And suddenly the compactor starts up and crushes them to death. And the workers were outraged and they had told the city for, for years, you know, the trucks are obsolete, they're dangerous, they malfunction and the city had ignored their pleas. So finally, finally, finally the workers, you know, got, you know, we're feeling really beaten down, got very worked up and they went on strike the 1,300 workers. And day after day after day they walked through the streets of Memphis carrying these iconic signs, I am a man. And sadly the mayor of Memphis was like a trillion percent ever against ever recognizing a union or bargaining with a union. So the strike was dragging on. Some great African-American ministers got very involved. They said we need to escalate this and we need to turn this international fight. We need to invite the great Martin Luther King Jr. to help raise its profile. And Dr. King came in, gave some astoundingly moving speeches. You know, he talked about how it's great that we have won the right to sit at a lunch counter. But if you can't afford to pay for the lunch, you know, what good are those civil rights we've won? And Dr. King was amazing. And he was in Memphis to help organize a huge march. And a few days before the march he was killed. And finally, finally, finally the city council realized we have to settle this thing. The mayor still refused to deal with the union. But the city council pushed by Lyndon Johnson said we have to get this damn thing settled. It's a disgrace to the nation. So finally, finally, the strike was settled. And I quote Elmer Nicolberry saying it was terrible when Dr. King died. I cried terribly. He even hit under his bed. He was just so overwhelmed by it. But he said, you know, we finally got showers. We finally got the ability for, you know, black workers to be promoted. We finally got health coverage. And finally they started calling us a man, a sanitation man. That's incredible. I mean, it's just a truly powerful story. I don't even know where to go from there. But where I do want to go from there is to the current state of the labor movement and where we are today. And I'm just wondering there does seem to be a revival in labor activity and organization and enthusiasm. And I'm wondering what pockets of activism excite you the most or, you know, make you hopeful about the future, whether it's teachers, the fight for 15 or what? So let me answer with a funny or not so funny story. So I turned in the manuscript of this book, February 19, the Monday morning February 19, 2018. And I was feeling pretty down about labor. There wasn't that much organizing going on. The only thing exciting was the fight for 15, which had gotten, you know, six, seven states to enact laws for, you know, $15 minimum wage, which is very exciting, but there wasn't that much else going on. So it's kind of a quiet, creosate period for labor. Three days later, February 22, 2018, there's this humongous explosion in West Virginia where tens of thousands of teachers walk out and I say, holy cow. And, you know, it's like labor. Did you really say cow? Yes. Like labor was in ways reborn, you know, Phoenix-like, that all of a sudden, you know, labor seemed seriously quiet and the teachers in West Virginia were just tired of being stepped on year after year. They saw, you know, West Virginia is very much a red state and it was, pay for teachers was 48th in the nation. And the governor, the richest man in West Virginia, Jim Justice, a billionaire had just announced, hey, I'm going to be really generous to you. I'm going to give you a 1% raise a year for the next five years. And meanwhile, the Republican legislature kept giving tax breaks to the rich and tax breaks to the corporation and basically froze the rest of the budget, froze the education budget. And as a result, the state health care agency was not, was forcing the teachers to pay more and more and more and more each year towards their premiums. So whatever minuscule raises they got were eaten up by increased health care premiums and the teachers basically said, enough of that. And, you know, through this, you know, through Facebook, this Facebook page went from like 10 workers to 100 workers to like 20,000, 30,000 workers very quickly. And this mass movement formed and one of the most interesting things about the West Virginia strike and why it happened there is they said, we have this legacy of militancy, of mind strikes, of the battle of Blair Mountain and that we're not going to, you know, we don't let people step on us. My daddy always told me, you got to, you know, stand up for yourself. And so there was this amazing strike and soon the baton was passed to Oklahoma and was passed to Arizona and then there's the teacher strike and most recently the Chicago teacher strike. So, you know, there's a big difference from, for every 2018 when I originally turned to my book when it seemed fairly quiet for labor, there's been a real resurgence of strikes and activism. And we've seen, you know, the General Motor Strike just ended a few days ago there's the big stop and shop strike, a success in New England in April. There was a very successful Marriott strike by the United here in eight cities. So like labor is percolating again in ways it has in the years. I mean, in 2018 was the biggest year of strikes in 32 years since 1986. And I think what's happening is workers, you know, have seen, you know, the stock market doing well, corporations doing well, the 1% doing well and they feel they're only getting a little bitty bit of wage increases and they say this isn't fair, this is not how the system is supposed to work. I think they've grown increasingly frustrated and fed up and emboldened and you know, when the unemployment rate is so low, I think people are more willing to take a risk. And I think also there's a Trump effect that people are just pissed off, you know, they see the Black Lives Matter movement, they see the fight for our lives movement, they see the climate justice movement, they see the Me Too women's movement and people are just taking it to the streets like never before and I think that has also encouraged unions and people ask me what I think about the future of unions and I say I just saw this statistic saying that one in five high school students has marched in the streets over the past year in either a climate justice strike or movement against, you know, for gun control against guns. And so like there's more activism now in labor and other ways than there has been in years and partly and perversely that's been fueled by Donald Trump. Excellent, excellent. Thank you for sharing that with us because seriously like I love seeing this like resurgence of labor but I have to ask you Steve, what do you think has been holding back unions? Has it been anti-union policy or have unions just been ineffective like advocates? So in my book I explained the rise of unions and what enabled them to rise and workers' courage, workers willing to sacrifice to engage in strikes, unions' ability to rally many types of people. Then I described the downward arc of unions and why they declined and part of it is globalization which has wiped out basically 40% or helped wipe out 40% of our factory jobs. We've gone from 19.5 million factory jobs in 1979 to just around 12.5 million now and that's partly globalization, it's partly technologically. I think that's a big thing. I think the Republican Party and business have gotten much, much tougher towards unions. I have this line in the book that many people have picked up which says that in no other industrial nation do corporations fight so hard to beat back indeed quash labor unions. I had been the economics correspondent for the New York Times in Europe for five years based in Paris and I wrote stories in Germany and Austria and Italy and Spain and France and Sweden and the UK and corporations there maybe they don't love unions but they see unions as legitimate institutions that represent the interest of workers and that we the corporations have to deal with unions to help build more productive, more profitable corporations. Here in my sense as many, perhaps most corporations see unions as the enemy and they want to annihilate them, they want to gut them, wipe them out and I think that's by far the main reason that unions have grown weaker in the United States but as you say, part of it is that some unions haven't done nearly enough to organize workers, some haven't done nearly enough to inspire workers but I imagine some union leaders can say I could spend $300,000 of my union local's money trying to organize these 500 workers. We could get higher three organizers to have them work for six months and it's going to cost us a lot of money but because of the massive corporate anti-union assistance our chances of winning might only be 48%. So union leaders can make a rational decision that as much as we'd like to try to unionize people it might not be a wise use of our resources, it's complicated and I think that's a big reason that if we have laws that make it easier to unionize that would change the equation that would help encourage more unions to unionize. The problem is in the private sector now only 6.4% of workers are in unions that's down from 35% at its peak in the 1950s. So unions are so weakened, their treasures are so attenuated that even if they want to do a huge amount of unionizing they don't have the resources needed to organize the millions and millions of workers who might want to unionize. So in very encouraging note for unions right now, two encouraging notes for unions. So the latest Gallup poll finds that 64% of Americans say they approve of unions that the highest approval rating among people in your age group 18 to 34 with a 67% approval rating. And second is a recent study by folks at MIT finding that 50% of non-union workers say they would vote to join a union today if they could. Fascinating. So you have 50% saying why don't you say they want to join a union but in the private sector only one is 16 in a union. And what's getting in the way overwhelmingly corporate opposition? That stat is really important I think and it's really opened my eyes. As a young union activist journalist I was kind of frustrated with the older leadership of the guild because you've thought oh you know you're really operating in a different environment. We need to be more creative and kind of more youthful about our strategies and I think there's something to that about our messaging. You know there was a lot of weird messaging for instance like we had, we walked outside and said keep our jobs in the USA and like half of the workers were like not actually American. It was kind of very strange union stuff. But at the same time not working at EPI I've kind of appreciate just how deep the attacks are just as you mentioned just the level of beat back that exists. There's a study done for EPI by Kate Brantner-Cornel. She's in a series of studies saying that like 60% of employers threaten workers that they'll close operations if they unionize. Like something like 40% of the things that the numbers say. We're going to cut wages and benefits if you unionize. 34% fire pro-union workers during unionization drives. I mean it's really- And those workers have no recourse. When I was writing for The New York Times I tell my editors you know the playing field is really stacked against, tilted against workers in unionization. They say that's not true. American law is so fair. No, it's really usually stacked in favor of corporations making very hard to unionize. You asked me before Pedro, you know where do I see bright spots now for labor? Certainly with the teachers. The teachers are waking up. They're not really taking gunk anymore from anybody. And they're tired of the years of austerity with tax cuts for the rich and corporations while schools are starved and class sizes increase and kids have to deal with obsolete books and not enough librarians and nurses and we've seen big fights about that in Chicago and LA and St. Paul and other places. So the teachers are kind of a bright spot. The fight for 15 I think when it began almost exactly seven years ago, November 2012, it was 200 workers going on strike in New York City, maybe 20 restaurants. I was the first journalist to write about it and I thought this is quaint. This isn't going to go very far. And I'm glad to say I was wrong. Seven states have enacted $15 in a wage and by some estimates, thanks to the fight for 15, 24 million workers have had their pay increased and that's a huge deal. Other bright spots are in my field, in fields involving many educated workers. Adjunct professors, they're unionizing probably faster than any other group in society right now because you have all these people with PhDs, they're teaching courses for like $2,000, $2,000 each. Maybe they get, that translates to $15 or $20 a course. It's crazy. Graduate students are rapidly unionizing. I think I just saw a news release saying that the graduate students at Harvard are threatening to go on strike in early December because Harvard refuses to reach a contract with them. And my field, journalism, there's been a huge wave of unionization in journalism, both in legacy media like the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Journal have long been unionized, but not the LA Times and Chicago Tribune which generally were by far the nation's two most prominently anti-union newspapers. And then in digital media, there's been an amazing amount of unionization in Vox and Vice and Salon and Slate and Huffington Post and you name it. And I think what happened is you get these smart educated people and they expect to make a decent living in journalism. They're working in Manhattan or Washington where rents are pretty high and they're getting paid $34,000, $35,000 a year and your rent might be $1,500, $2,000 a month. They try to live on that, so they said we're well educated, we do important work, we're working 50, 60 hours a week and we should be paid more than $35,000. The Occupy generation. The Occupy generation. And the rapidity with which we've seen unionization across digital media is just astonishing. So Steve, with these elections coming up with the presidency, how do you feel, I'm sorry, not these elections, the election for the presidency, how do you feel with these various labor agendas that you're seeing amongst these Democratic candidates? I read an article that said that this is the first time in a while that Democrats are really taking labor seriously and just using workers as props and showing up to strikes and just snapping a nice photo. This is where people are actually getting down and actually writing some real policies. So what's really exciting to you? Great question. Let me put things in context. I was covered labor for the New York Times for 19 years and every even number of years, the Times had sent me to Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan to write about what labor was doing in the campaign to attract unionized gun owners and other things that it's doing to attract labor. And I'm sorry to say Hillary Clinton did not do nearly enough. You mean the New York Times was in search of the elusive Trump voter before Trump existed? I wrote a ton about that for the New York Times. It pisses me off to no end when people say journalists didn't write about that. I wrote about it. Maybe other folks did not write enough about that. But Hillary Clinton did not campaign, did not work hard enough to attract union voters and blue collar voters. I'd say the same about John Kerry. I'd say the same about Al Gore. Obama knew it was important to go after that constituency and he did. And so I think the candidates realize that Hillary made a bad mistake by overlooking blue collar America, not focusing enough on blue collar Americans. And so with a dozen or two dozen candidates running, I think there's several reasons why they focus so much on labor. And yes, they focus far more on labor than any time in my memory. And they've put out some very smart platforms. And I believe they've done that first because they see the system is really rigged against workers. I mean wages have gone up very, very, very little, even though unemployment is the lowest it's been in 50 years. And we are the only industrialized nation as explained in my book that doesn't guarantee paid parental leave, paid maternity leave to every worker. We're the only industrialized nation that doesn't guarantee paid vacation to every worker. We in the South Korea the only industrialized nation that don't guarantee paid sick days to every worker. We are the only industrialized nation that doesn't guarantee health coverage to every worker. So I think the candidates see the things that broken for workers. So they want to do something about that and seriously in their hearts. And they also want to woo workers. And I think they also see that, hey, why did we lose in 2016? Because we lost these former union strongholds, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. And they realized that the most surefire way to win in 2020, 2024, 2028 is win back those three states and strengthen unions in those states. And in my book I have a whole political discussion saying, yes, we know about Scott Walker seeking to gut unions in Wisconsin. And that really hurt unions. But people don't realize that as a result of what Walker did, unions in Wisconsin lost 44% of their members. They've lost 177,000 members in the past decade. And Donald Trump won Wisconsin by 22,700. Michigan, the Republicans there passed a right to work law. They passed several other anti-union laws. Union membership in Wisconsin has fallen by like 120,000. Sorry, Michigan has fallen by 120,000 in the past decade. Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,700 votes. There's a study by some professors at Boston University in Columbia that found that when a state enacts an anti-union fee right to work law, the percentage of Democratic voters, the Democratic base turnout falls by 3.5%. Really? Trump won Michigan by 0.2%. Trump won Wisconsin by 0.8%. Both of them recently enacted right to work law. So it's the ultimate GOP twofer. You get to be pro-corporate and pro-voter suppression. Yes, yes, yes. And you help hold down. You help fight big government. You help hold down taxes and you help make Medicaid worse and food stamps worse. It's like everything that they dream of. That's about as elegant as a macro model. So Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Beto before he dropped out, Cory Booker, Biden. And people just have very good labor platforms. They're very elaborate and they put real thought in. Now some people are saying, oh, maybe this is just window dressing. But it's important that they've sat down and they've had really smart people sit down and formulate these labor platforms. And I recommend that people read them. The one that Pete Buttigieg did is just a terrific read. Whoever had to do this, it's a great read. It's a great way to understand what's wrong with what's wrong with the economy for American workers. So I want to ask you lastly about one issue that's election related, but also labor related, which is healthcare. We were talking a little bit about it before we went on the air. And as you know, progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are campaigning on Medicare for All. There's some union resistance to Medicare for All because after all, many unions have negotiated sort of platinum plated plans. As they call them, that they don't want to give up. That's even better than the Cadillac plans they have. And so I'm just wondering, how do you see the healthcare? Because it's such a unique, another unique thing about the US versus other industrialized countries where the only place where employment is the healthcare is tied to employment. So how do you see the labor issue connecting to healthcare in the electoral cycle and in the context of the Medicare for All debate? So you're right, Pedro. There is a split within labor. Some progressive unions really support the idea of Medicare for All. They think it's a tragedy that we're the only industrialized nation where every citizen is not guaranteed health coverage. And as a result, many people die. Many people go bankrupt for not being able to afford health coverage. So some of them support Medicare for All. Others worry, hey, if we adopt Medicare for All as a nation, whatever the general plan that's developed is not going to be nearly as good as the Cadillac plans that many unions have. And they worry that this will hurt their members. And I think some union leaders also think that a big incentive for people to join unions is to get good union health plans. And if you provide everyone with health coverage, as a matter of right, it might take away one incentive for people to unionize. So this is being fought out. And I think that Medicare for All is an important issue, but I worry that it's dominating too much of the discussion and is turning off a lot of people. And I think the Democrats have other issues that are far more winning issues like a fair attack system, like doing something serious about global warming when the Republicans are doing nothing about global warming. I say even something like passing laws to guarantee paid sick days, paid vacation, paid parental leave, the Democrats should really trump at that. I argue and the Republicans will run to the corner and do businesses bidding and say, we can't do that. We can't have paid sick days like every other country. We can't have paid parental leave like every other country because business doesn't want it. I think there are other issues that will appeal to Americans even more than Medicare for All. And Medicare for All is unfortunately, you know, if we had to start from scratch, of course, we'd want universal health coverage without, you know, a Medicare for All system, I think. But it's very hard to go from where we are now to there. And I think a lot of unions, you know, realize that. So some unions say, yes, let's try to make this huge leap to Medicare for All. Others say it's going to be too difficult. It's going to turn off too many voters and it's going to hurt some of our members. So maybe that's not the best issue for the Democrats to focus on. Thank you so much. The book is beaten down, worked up the past, present, and future of American labor. The author is Stephen Greenhouse. He was our guest today on the State of Working America podcast. Thank you so much, Steve, for joining us. Great to be here. Thank you, Steve. And thank you, Rami, for helping me hold down the floor. I appreciate it. Thank you. Let me come on in, Pedro. Of course, my pleasure. You've been listening to the State of Working America podcast. You can download this on iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcast, or you can go to epi.org slash podcast. Thank you so much for listening.