Working Life Podcast

Subscribe to the show today! Support Working Life @ https://www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePo...​ or @ actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 I have discussed a number of times the union organizing campaign at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. So, as the ballot counting is now underway, I thought today we could add two aspects to the conversation, while we await the final results which could take a number of days. First, people don’t really know how the hell the ballot count happens, what’s the process, what does it look like so I thought it would be worth checking that out a bit. And, then, second what happens if the union wins? That second one is a doozy—because the fight just begins even after a union victory: the road to getting a first contract is torturous because a company like Amazon will fight tooth and nail to obstruct, delay and undercut the union at every turn, all in an effort to frustrate workers who want to see tangible results from their vote. We all need to know that, if the union wins, ever

Subscribe to the show today! Support Working Life @ https://www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePo...​ or @ actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 I’ve spent a lot of time on the crisis facing workers around the world who before the pandemic even hit us faced some pretty dire economic realities. Tomorrow, a high-level group will convene, virtually naturally, to talk about creating an international social fund to assist lower income countries to come out of the year-long pandemic economic shutdown. Cathy Feingold, director of the AFL-CIO’s international affairs department and deputy president of the International Trade Union Confederation, which represents 200 million unionized workers worldwide, gives us the scoop. Rick Larsen has been a useless member of Congress. You can’t find a single initiative that he championed in the 20 years he’s represented the 2nd Congressional District in Washington. His best claim to fame might be that there isn’t a corporate dollar he hasn’t been willing to pocket, from defense contracto

Subscribe to the show today! Support Working Life @ https://www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast or @ actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 It’s those zombie voices again. The ones who rise up from the dead, or from a hidden policy corner, to start the drumbeat of fear about “debt” and “deficits”, all in order to block progress for the people. There is no debt or deficit crisis. We have plenty of money in the richest nation in human history—and we should be spending big right now, especially with interest rates at rock-bottom lows. So, today is your antidote of information to combat the claim of a debt crisis (by the way, I wrote a book about this topic a decade ago—you can download it for free). Shervin Aazami, a progressive activist, is running for the Democratic nomination for the 30th Congressional District in California. He’s challenging a long-time corporate Democrat, Brad Sherman, who, among other horrendous positions, voted for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and opposed the Obama Administration’s nuc

Subscribe to Working Life today! Support us @ https://www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast or @ actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Episode 217: It’s all about North Carolina today—the fight for better wages and the campaign to get a progressive person in the U.S. Senate, all of which is connected to my two guests today who represent the theme of the just-marked International Womens Day. The sad outcome of the push to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour tells us two things. First, there is a big house cleaning needed to make way for politicians who actually care about workers. Second, no matter what happens in elections, we need to keep up the street heat to mobilize millions of people to stop the immorality of people working full-time but getting paid poverty wages while billionaires get even richer. First up, then, is Precious Cole. Precious lives in Durham, North Carolina and works at Wendy’s. She has been working minimum wage jobs for half her life and, like millions of other workers, has, year

Episode 216: Subscribe to Working Life today! Support us @ https://www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast or @ actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 The number that sticks in my mind today, and has since I heard it, is 40 percent. While over half a million people in the U.S. have died of COVID in one year, while millions of people have become sick, while millions of people have lost their jobs, savings and homes, and many people have been forced to wait in long food lines to get enough to feed their families—while all that was happening, the billionaires—the top 0.05 percent in the country, the Waltons, the Jeff Bezos’ of the world—saw their collective wealth go up 40 percent. Which is one good reason to have a wealth tax. This week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal rolled out an “Ultra Millionaire’s Tax”. The tax would only be on the wealthiest 100,000 households in America, or the top 0.05%, who have a net worth of $50 million, and it would raise $3 trillion over a decade. Since, and I’m just spit

Episode 215: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 You aren’t going to be surprised by this news: Big Pharma is killing people. All over the world. And the real kicker here is: after you, the taxpayer, gave billions of dollars to Big Pharma companies to come up with a vaccine for COVID-19, Big Pharma is keeping that vaccine from getting into the hands of millions of people in poorer countries—which will come back to hurt every American as well. Under the World Trade Organization rules, Big PHARMA gets *lengthy* monopoly protections for medicines, tests and the technologies used to produce them. Trump wouldn’t join virtually every other country to grant a waiver for poorer countries to get access to the vaccines so lives could be saved. Next week, Joe Biden has a chance to do the right thing. I discuss this urgent effort with two warriors for progressives: Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who has represented the 9th Congressional dist

Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Right before our eyes, in these very days and at this time of crisis, you can see so clearly this bankrupt system, defended and promoted by greedy CEOs and spineless politicians, but a system people are trying to rebel against and take down. And that’s the picture of two really important fights—the fight to get millions of workers a $15-an-hour minimum wage and the organizing campaign at Amazon. It’s infuriating to keep reading about these so-called Democrats, and, of course, every single Republican, who oppose raising the federal minimum wage to $15-an-hour? How deeply out of touch are these people who oppose giving people a semi-livable wage to try to survive on? So, in service to my listeners, I’ve given you four—just four!—easy talking points to argue for hiking the immorally low minimum wage. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secur

Episode 213: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 “Bi-partisanship” is an idea that should make everyone sick to their stomach. When someone is out to kill you, or your nation and community, making a deal for the sake of “bi-partisanship” or, its related political spineless copout “compromise”, makes no sense when the end result is injustice and a worsening of our lives. That’s what I start out with today—a topic I also wrote about in my new newsletter, which you can subscribe to here. Quick, who said just a couple of days ago: “We believe that $15-an-hour is the minimum that anyone in the U.S. should earn for an hour of labor” and, then, demanded that Congress raise the minimum wage to $15-an-hour. If you said Bernie Sanders, wrong! Though of course he does believe this. It was…wait for this…Amazon. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life

Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 How many of you dealt with that chaos when it came to wrestling with the unemployment insurance system last year? Some of the rhetoric we heard was, “well that chaos was just the pandemic crush overwhelming the system”. Yes, that’s true in a very narrow sense—the system collapsed in many places, meaning people who were desperate to get a check to pay rent or for food had to wait months and months for a first check…and lots of people just gave up. But, here’s the truth, folks—that’s a feature not a bug. So, as enhanced unemployment benefits are about to expire at the end of March but seem likely to be extended in a new stimulus bill, is this chaos going to continue to be as bad as it was a year ago? Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project and a leading national expert on the unemployment insurance system, tells us the status and how we fix the br

Episode 211: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.” The discerning quick minds among you will know that that’s a snippet of the speech by Michael Douglas’ character, the corporate raider Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 film Wall Street. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Truth is, Jeff Bezos makes Gekko look like a penny ante small-time crook. And the crooks who control government on behalf of big corporations are in the same Bezos league when it comes to the massive shift in wealth that they engineer—and that’s the theme of this week’s show. The one enduring fact of any government is the way in which the real powers—corporate and private wealth—push the levers behind the scenes. It’s the Revo

Episode 210: I am guessing everyone who listens to this show considers himself or herself an environmentalist and cares about the planet. You believe in science—a shocking notion—so you get the climate change emergency. We know we have to do some pretty radical stuff to keep this spaceship habitable for generations to come. Here’s the problem: there isn’t enough real thought by environmentalists and politicians, with numbers to go along with the thinking, how to take care of workers who will be hurt by the closing down of the fossil fuel industry. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Grasping climate change is serious is not contrary to also being worried to death you won’t be able to pay the bills if your coal mine shuts down, or a refinery stops production or the truck you drive to deliver food to people has to be all electric. Joe Biden has plenty of language in his campaign positions calling for high-paid union jobs

Episode 209: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Soccer, football, whatever you call it—it’s not my thing at all. Give me baseball every day, 365 days a week. But, what is my thing is making sure workers in every sport aren’t exploited—and that has been a reality for years when it came to the rights of workers who worked on the staging of soccer’s quadrennial World Cup, including the upcoming one in 2022 in Qatar. A worldwide outcry put a brake on some of the worst abuses in Qatar and set the stage for even more workers’ protections for the 2026 World Cup, which will be staged in North America and Mexico. Cathy Feingold, the international affairs director of the AFL-CIO and the deputy president of the International Trade Union Confederation, joins me to outline the campaign already underway to keep the heat on the host countries and the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Support the Working Life N

Episode 208: Back in the spring, I had a good chuckle when I found a topic of agreement between the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs, as well as agreement from lots of heads of states, many labor folks and business titans—creating trillions of dollars in grants, not debt, to give to poorer countries needing immediate financial aid right away to contend with the pandemic. I’m circling back to this idea I first explored on the podcast in May, this time in a chat with Isaac Evans-Frantz, director at Action Corps, and Don Wiviott, a farmer advocate based in Iowa. Fasten your seat belts! The fight to raise taxes on the very wealthy and corporations is heating up, and, perhaps, the best options for victory will come at the state level. To look at the state of play, I chat with one of my favorite very smart people who knows everything about taxes, Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. In case my email slipped by yesterday—there is still time to pitch in to our Giving Tuesday

Episode 207: Ideology is in the way of a simple plan to end the pandemic in 30 days. Yes, 30 days: Lock down the country and pay everyone up to an annual wage of $90,000 to stay home. I’m resurrecting the argument I made months ago because the debate about a stimulus is on the agenda again—after Republicans have basically said fuck you to the entire country for months when it comes to aiding the people. My explanation of the plan leads off the episode. Then, high up on the list of pandemic utter chaos has been the way in which political leaders at the local and state level have mishandled how to safely reopen schools so teachers and kids don’t get sick. To get a sense of the current state of play for teachers, I zero in on Arizona where voters just approved a new tax hike to fund education and, at the same time, the infections are on a steep rise. Joe Thomas, the president of the Arizona Education Association, joins me to talk about the union’s renewed public push to put in place life-saving measures to mak

Episode 206: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Three questions post-election are on the menu this week. First, how does Tom Perez, the chair of the DNC, still have a job? Perez has been incompetent for a very long time. He was the choice of the Democratic Party elites back in 2016—a guy who knows zippo about the mechanics of an election. And, voila—the party loses seats in the House, fumbles the chance to take the U.S. Senate, and even worse, fails to take back legislative chambers at the state level. Perez’s failures will echo for years to come. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Second, Georgia, Georgia, Georgia…these two run-off races will mean the difference between millions of people being able to pay for food or keep their homes, not to mention whether people like Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley and Elizabeth Wa

Episode 205: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 It’s the permanent government—the corporate lobbyists who have friends in both parties. It is at the heart of why we don’t have Medicare for All, why the Pentagon is rolling in dough and why banks and Wall Street rip us off. Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, talks about what the strategy looks like to limit the influence of the corporate elites in a possible Biden Administration. The pandemic has ripped through the world, killing and sickening millions. But, if you look at the economic hits people have taken, the pandemic has exposed the complete and utter failure of the system in the U.S. to make sure people can hang on. Both Europe and the U.S. had to shut down their economies and both took hits in output—but why has the unemployment rate been so much lower in Europe in the first half of the year than the U.S.? Maria Figueroa, the Direct

Episode 204: The catastrophic failure to shrink global inequality has given COVID-19 the perfect breeding ground: tens of millions of people are at risk of hunger, extreme poverty, sickness and death because, overwhelmingly, most countries do not spend enough on public healthcare, and they have weak social safety nets and poor labor rights. Now, this is a feature, not a bug, of the supply chain of global capitalism—keep people poor, enslaved and desperate as a way of making huge profits. To be sure, as I discussed in a recent episode, workers in Haiti, one of the poorest countries on the planet, were barely hanging on before the pandemic—now, they’ve been shoved deeper into the hole of economic deprivation. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 But, the U.S. ranks last out of the wealthy G7 countries and trails 17 low-income countries like Liberia when it comes to laws that stop anti-unionism or where there is a livable

Episode 203: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 When Donald Trump and his minions are eviscerated in less than three weeks so the country can survive, I can’t think of a better illustration of the fight still to come for progressives than taxes. Joe Biden’s tax proposals are, well, meek. Every time Joe Biden made a big deal during the TV mud wrestling verbal sparring with Trump that he wouldn’t raise taxes for anyone making under $400,000, I yelled back, “why the hell not?”. Really, you won’t ask people earning, say, $250,000 a year—a quarter of a million dollars—to pay higher taxes? I dig deep into Biden’s tax ideas with one of my favorite guests, Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. While millions of people wait, in desperation, for Congress to pass a new stimulus package, a whole lot of other important stuff is also tossed by the wayside including the $25 billion to shore u

Episode 202: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 For a sliver of time, the political world was talking about how Donald Trump cheats on his taxes. Virtually every rich person does what Trump does: they use the tax code to dodge paying their fair share, which costs the country tens of billions of dollars every year. Rich people move their money around, hide cash in trusts, foundations, hard-to-understand complex partnerships, a web of limited liability companies, and, especially for those who run companies, in overseas operations. And they have an army of accountants and lawyers whose sole job is to hide as much income, use the tax laws as aggressively as possible to confuse the under-resourced IRS staff, and, then, to fight in court to keep every nickel the IRS somehow manages to find. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 All of thi

Episode 201: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 I’ve been thinking a lot about firefighters these days, what with the jaw-dropping video we see virtually every day of these monstrous wild fires scorching millions of acres of forests in California and Oregon. For the record, these fires are absolutely driven by climate change—so what we see today will be a feature every single year, with all the widespread devastation of communities and the loss of human lives and wildlife. Recently, I was sheltering in my home like tens of thousands of other people because the fires in Oregon created air that was off the charts hazardous. I mean that not as hyperbole—the measurements were too high for your average air quality reading to capture. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 But, damn, if we, regular people just going about our business, c