Working Life Podcast

Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Episode 200: CEOs like to play a three-card monte shell game. They want everyone to focus on their rhetoric about all the supposed wonderful things they do—say, creating a “green” friendly product—and, at the same time, when people aren’t paying attention, they run their company using fear, sexism and racism. That sums up the world of Elon Musk—which we talk about today. Musk is anti-union and runs an operation that makes workers sick at sky-high rates, as I documented almost more than two years ago on this podcast in Episode 80. And it appears pretty evident he’s a sexist and a racist. He’s facing one federal lawsuit claiming that in 2015 and 2016, at Tesla’s factory in suburban Fremont, CA, black workers were subjected to repeated racial epithets, racist cartoons, and supervisors engaged in, or did little to stop, the racism. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreo

Episode 199: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 What’s a worker’s life worth? To you and me, it’s priceless. Capitalism, though, doesn’t see it that way—a worker’s life is a cost of doing business, a life easily disposable when it comes to making profits. And the corporate world has an accomplice in this immoral scam where workers are disposable: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Smithfield Foods, a massive pork processor making billions of dollars every year, did almost nothing to stop workers from getting the virus at its Sioux Falls, South Dakota plant. In just under three months, more than 1,300 were infected, 43 ended up in the hospital and four workers died. OSHA’s response? A fine of $13,494 as part of a single violation OSHA cited the company for—that’s $3,373.50 for each worker killed or a little over $10 bucks for those infected. Jessica Martinez, executive director of National

Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Episode 198: The most important political figure in your economic life—to be sure, the boss of a company has got a lot of power—is not the president of the United States, no matter who that is. It’s probably the head of the Federal Reserve Board. We know interest rates are at historic lows and mortgage rates are crazy low because the Fed has intervened to keep the country from collapsing even further into the abyss we are in, an abyss Republicans in Congress don’t seem to care about. Which is why what the Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced recently is pretty important—the Fed will keep its main attention on employment. Is this just a pandemic-linked shift that will eventually go away and send the Fed back to doing the bidding of the banks and the bond markets? I poke at this topic with my favorite Fed watcher, Dean Baker, senior economist with the Center for Economic and Poli

Episode 197: The last name “Hoover” is, if I can use this term, a brand name in conservative circles. Herbert Hoover was the 31st president of the U.S. who served during the Great Depression, taking office in 1929 the year the stock market crashed—an apt historical reference for today perhaps since the economic implosion we are living through is the worst in a century dating back at least to the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 His great-granddaughter Margaret Hoover has kept the Hoover flame alive—both in her attention to Herbert’s legacy and her own work as a conservative commentator. Margaret and I have known each other since the 2016 election cycle. We have vigorous, but respectful, disagreements about actual policy. In the wake of the two parties’ political conventions, Margaret joins me to talk about politics—and she reveals for the first time publicly that sh

Episode 196: It’s never enough to remind people every single day how many workers are out there on the frontlines risking their lives in the pandemic. I’ve talked about those folks regularly on the show: the transit workers, retail workers, and teachers. And, surely, the workers who put food on our plates are right up there on the list—like the folks that are crammed together in poultry processing plants who are getting sick by the thousands and dying by the hundreds. Alexandre Galimberti, Senior Advocacy and Collaborations Advisor for the US Domestic Program at Oxfam America, talks with me about how the corrupt, greedy poultry industry is exposing workers to horrendous conditions. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Last week I was driving about town, doing a few errands (while always wearing my mask) when I passed by a bank. There were hundreds of people lined up at the bank, pieces of paper in their hands, wi

Episode 195: Voting in America, compared to many other countries, is not easy. That’s always been true. Donald Trump’s relentless effort to undermine the vote in November, in this case by crippling the postal service and trying to make it impossible for ballots to be counted on time, is surely corrupt. But, the undermining of the vote is made easier by a rickety election system that has existed for decades. Miles Rapoport, a former Connecticut Secretary of State and, now, Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at Harvard’s Ash Center, talks to me about the threat to voting this Fall, what we can do and his bigger project to implement a national mandate that everyone must vote as a civic requirement. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 If you wanted to pick a country that has been ravaged for decades by economic, political and physical blows a grimly appropriate choice would be Haiti—a country that is the p

Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Episode 194: Today the show is all about Hollywood. Hollywood, California and Hollywood, Florida. Hollywood, California is in a rumble. For most performers in the entertainment business, residuals are the foundation to making a living—either a solid middle class living or somewhat less than that. Over many decades, residuals have been tied to various things such as repeat showings of a movie in syndication or sales of DVDs. Now, it’s all about streaming. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 For performers this is a huge change and it’s really about a fight to make sure generations of performers, some not born today, will be able to earn a respectable living. How do performers get paid in a streaming world? The performers’ union, SAG-AFTRA, just scored a big streaming deal win for per

Episode 193: The pandemic has ripped a hole through every state budget in the country to the tune collectively of over $550 billion. That red ink is more than half a trillion dollars in money states won’t have—which translates into millions of people losing their jobs, services being decimated that we all rely on, attacks against people of color who are employed disproportionately in decent-paying government jobs and an economy that won’t recover if aid is not dispatched. Pronto. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 And it doesn’t have to be this way, if ideology wasn’t more important for Republicans, and some Democrats, who should be pouring money into states and closing these big deficits—deficits that, remember, were no fault of management by state leaders. The deficits were caused, essentially, by one person, Donald Trump, who dismissed the pandemic, called it a hoax, made fun of people who tried to sound the

Episode 192: By the time you are tuning into the show, Jeff Bezos, one of the great scars on the economic landscape, will have finished his song-and-dance testimony before Congress, during a hearing that mostly focuses on the massive anti-competitive power of the big tech firms like Amazon and Google. But, long before today, Jeff Bezos has always been the poster child for the CEO who doesn’t give a shit about workers and only cares about a single thing: how to become even richer than he is. The man is a scar on humanity. My observations about Bezos leads off the show. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Then, Congress passed NAFTA 2.0 earlier this year. I’ll just say right away—the first NAFTA was an abomination, the newer one was just horrendous—and we also have to be clear that, with or without these so-called free trade deals, capitalism marches on and abuses people, as we saw in last week’s episode when I tal

Episode 191: China’s leaders and wealthy elites are willing partners of global capitalism, opening up its doors, willingly, to Wal-Mart and huge multinational companies so those companies can produce trillions of dollars of stuff using cheap slave labor—in good capitalist style. Since 2017, China has been conducting a steady campaign of mass transfer of more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities into a vast network of ‘re-education camps’ in the far west region of Xinjiang, which Uyghur activists call “east Turkestan”. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Think of the Japanese internment camps in the U.S. during WWII or apartheid in South Africa—the key difference, is that this is being driven a lot by the thirst of global capitalism for cheap, slave labor. Tens of thousands of Uyghurs are being forced to work in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brand

Episode 190: Here is something we can all agree on I think—drug companies are blood-sucking, greedy cheats who cannot be trusted with the health and welfare of tens of millions of people. Am I right? And that’s even more true as we watch the global scramble to be the first company to profit big-time from a vaccine for COVID19. So, I’m going to focus on the Big Pharma corruption today with a friend and investigative reporter, Gerald Posner who is the author of a mind-boggling expose “Pharma: Greed, Lies And the Poisoning of America” Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Looking for the single most important thing you can do between now and the end of July to slow the pandemic? As I mentioned last week in outlining my proposal for a $6.5 trillion stimulus bill, badger everyone you know, and of course your members of Congress, to get behind Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s bill, and a similar bill in the Senate co-sponsored by

Episode 189: Let’s go really big! I outline a $6.5 trillion stimulus—more than double what the Democrats in the House passed—because that’s what the people need over the next year: $1.3 trillion in wage guarantees; $715 billion for state and local governments; $600 billion for a “Pandemic Medicare For All”; $1.5 trillion to cancel all student debt; $200 billion for a rent and mortgage freeze…and a lot more. Fight me on the specifics—but let’s expand the debate and the way people think about what is possible, what is needed and what should be done. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Just a few days ago, China imposed a new National Security Law which is aimed at shutting down the mass protests that have consumed Hong Kong for more than a year. In the crosshairs especially are union activists who have been signing up people to dozens of new unions which doesn’t thrill China’s leaders who manage the linchpin for th

Episode 188: Big companies don’t give a second thought to making big profits during the COVID-19 pandemic even if that means thousands of workers—and their families—will get sick and die from the virus. Actually, it’s a feature not a bug, no pun intended—in food processing, all those workers who make sure you get beef or chicken on your plate, are getting sick by the droves, and the only way that happens is because companies, big rich companies, keep dangerous plants operating unsafely because to make things slightly safer would cost them a few bucks. That’s criminal in a normal world. Debbie Berkowitz, director of the worker health and safety program at the National Employment Law Project, joins me to look at the threat to workers—a threat that is growing as the pandemic surges. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 A few days ago, Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to cut the bloated Pentagon bi-partisan budget by

Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Episode 187: Private equity vultures love a great economic crisis. Circling above their wounded corporate prey, they wait until a company is too weak to survive, and, then, swoop in to pick up the pieces at a bargain price—which usually involves cutting thousands of jobs, too. And, now, a new rule will allow private equity firms to put their grubby hands on everyone’s 401(k) plans. Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the nation’s leading expert on the carnage wrought by private equity pirates, exposes the looming attack on our savings in a riveting chat. Then, while millions of people are trying to get a job or an unemployment check, not to mention just stay safe, states are facing what even The Economist magazine calls “The Calamity Ahead”—a brutal shortfall in revenue because of the economic collapse. Politicians of both pa

Episode 186: I pull back the lens a bit on the Black Lives Matter movement to consider how the uprising is touching the consciousness of workers around the globe, especially in Africa. Chris Johnson, the regional director of Africa for the Solidarity Center, joins me in a conversation about the close relationship between racism and economic oppression, and how African workers are linking the BLM movement to their own economic oppression. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 How would you like to have a governor who saved a man five hours before his state-ordered execution? That’s a choice New Hampshire Democrats will have in the September primary to choose their nominee for governor—he is Andru Volinsky who joins me to talk about his long-time civil rights advocacy, not to mention his work on jobs, climate change and taxes. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at A

Episode 185: The big news—it’s the first regularly scheduled Working Life TV Show!!! View the show now and sign up at: www.youtube.com/WorkingLifeWithJonathanTasini But, all our audio podcast listeners will still be able to hear the show in the long-time format. The unemployment system is in chaos—jammed phone lines, crashing websites. People can’t get the checks they desperately need to pay for simple things like food, utilities and rent. So, I decided to devote the lion’s share of the show to dig into why this happening—and give concrete tips on how to access the system. Do not give up—that’s the message Judy Conti, government affairs director for the National Employment Law Project and I deliver in our conversation (you can see the slides Judy and I are talking about here: https://www.workinglife.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Working-Life-TV-slides.ppt) Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 As hund

Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Episode 184: In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr gave a speech entitled, “The Other America”, in which he said, “It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job.” This was a theme he repeated time and time again throughout his life because he saw the unbreakable bonds between the twin evils of racism and economic oppression. He made those links right up to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 when he marched in support of striking sanitation workers. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast And if King were alive today, he would link the murder of George Floyd and mass uprisings taking place across the nation with the economic oppression, the scourge of capitalism, that has brutalized people of color for decades. That’s what I talk about today featuring segments with two guests, Janelle Jones and Valerie Wilson, who outlined the realities of economic

Episode 183: If I say that drug companies are sleazy leeches whose CEOs make millions of dollars while basically killing thousands of people who can’t afford outrageous drug prices, you’d shrug your shoulders and say, “yeah, well, duh.” Drug companies make these huge profits largely because of an absolutely insane system of patents, which you could stop with a change in the law. It’s especially important to get this idea in our heads right now with the rush to create a vaccine for COVID-19, which makes drug companies salivate over the prospect of pocketing huge profits for something that should be ours to own—which is what I talk about with Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Here is a prediction that I’d go to Vegas and bet a huge pile of money on: when it comes to making up big state budget deficits looming in the coming months because of the pandemic-caused economic crisis, and eventually in a year or t

Episode 182: Calling people “gig” workers is a subtle trap. “Gig” can sound anywhere from upbeat to just a mundane description. The truth is the “gig” economy is just another way of exploiting people and it’s a dream for all capitalists to have a pool of workers who can be used and abused at the beckon call of a supply chain or a big tech company, at the lowest cost possible. And not a surprise—lots of gig workers are at great risk during the pandemic. I explore the lives of “gig” workers in a conversation with Bama Athreya, an economic policy fellow at the Open Society Foundation and a veteran social movement activist. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast The pandemic has put domestic workers at risk. Think of it logically: you can be locked down in a home with your client, essentially enslaved, with nowhere to go and no social distancing space. You could easily be trapped in a home, forced to stay inside because of a curfew, without personal protection equipment. Elizabeth Tang, t

Episode 181: Here’s a no brainer observation: It would be hard to find any areas of agreement between the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs. Well, I got one—it turns out that the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs, along with scores of heads of states, labor folks and business titans, are on the same page about one idea which hasn’t gotten a lot of attention—creating $3 trillion in grants for worldwide distribution by the International Monetary Fund to countries needing immediate financial aid to contend with the pandemic. You’ll learn all about this fascinating global tale in my conversation with Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast And speaking of money, Morris Pearl, the chair of Patriotic Millionaires, joins me to explain how we can free up $200 billion for financially-strapped charities by just a little jiggering of the rules for philanthropic foundations who sock away tax break-driven contributions from rich people. Su