The Union Makes Us Strong, Part 1

National Nurses United in Chicago. Hi, John, how are you? How are you doing? I'm doing good. Yesterday was my first full day back at work after being out on light duty from having covid UH for this last year. And so I got home yesterday and was pretty tired because I haven't walked that much in a day. It's fine, but I mean it was a good day. I got lots of plugs from my coworkers. I didn't I didn't forget anyone's name, which I was terrified of um, and

didn't suck anything up um. And then when I got when I got home, I hopped on after I got my kids from school, I hopped on a union organizing call with twenty nurses from a hospital in the South. We're very excited about so um I was it was

it was a big day that that rules. Oh yeah, yeah, I guess that should also do a do a very very brief long COVID check in, because this is an everything that I think people are talking about that is also like a huge labor issue, which is that Yeah, like long COVID fucking sucks and like I like I know, like like like one of my cousins had it, and you know, they they've been in bad shape for a long time, like they still can't taste properly, and like they I think you got from from what I remember,

like pretty bad, like in terms of yeah, sorry if you don't, we don't want to, but oh I don't care. I mean I think people should like know that this is still going on, like the pandemic is still happening. Um, people are still getting sick and some are still dying, which really sucks. And the long COVID thing is real. Um they I didn't get sick in the sense of showing up having to be in like a hospital or

I see you or anything like that. Mine book. I got sick, and um, the recovery, like the the year or the month or so after I got sick was when things actually got bad because something happened with my um my nerves and my neuro I had a neuromuscular variant of like the long COVID symptoms, and that led me to having all its kinds of issues with basically just being exhausted from basic things. Anything more than just getting up and walking around. I would have to like

lay in bed afterwards. And it would add multiple episodes of the past year where I would cross some invisible line in terms of like endurance and then be stuck in bed for a week. And so it's been a long thing. But I've been slowly getting better, And people who fall into that neuromuscular thing do slowly get better. I think that's the upshot. People with heart problems, those tend to be permanent and aren't getting better, which sucks, um, But yeah, I mean it's just like I think that

a lot of people. It's a very weird, surreal thing to watch what is effectively like a like a a global public health catastrophe get politicized the way it has and treated the way it has been by everybody involved. So Um, anyway, I just I'm doing better with that, and it's shaped me over the last year, and it's shaped union organizing. And UM, I'm glad that I would

say this to people who are thinking about unions. I'm glad that I had the union kind of backing me up, um, even when I had to pull them a little bit in the direct the right direction. Uh, it's much better to have that kind of collective power behind you when you're dealing with those kind of problems. So that's actually a good way into looking at just sort of in general what a union is, because I think there's there's

there's two things here. There is what a union is legally and what a union actually is in terms of just the people in it and the sort of power behind it. And so I was wondering if you could, well, one, I mean, just on an incredibly basic level, explain what a union is like legally, like what is legally defined as doing, because I feel like that's also something that is not as well understood as it should be. Yeah,

for sure. So in the United States, there's a series of is it kind of regulate um, you know, the kind of collective UM bargaining UM and collective organization of workers at work UM. An important thing to understand is that UM, those laws are mostly designed to constrain workers power to affect their their you know, working conditions. UM. And so when you look at what a union legally is UM, unions are, for the most part, UM, they're legal organizations that kind of like operate on a dues basis.

So if you're in a union, you're paying dues out of your paycheck. UM. If you work at a unionized workplace, those dudes will get subtracted out regardless of your membership or activity within the union. UM. One thing that people don't understand is that you can if you don't want your dues to go to anything besides supporting organizing your particular workplace, you can request unions are legally required to

offer you that as an option UM. And then those dudes get taken out of your paycheck and they get used to do things like rent a union hall, UM, pay staffers to help you with your organizing. UM. They get taken to do lobbying, various types of political activity. And so for a lot of people, unions will feel like a professional association that lobbies on their behalf rather than a collective expression of the will of workers in a particular workplace. But UM, or it'll feel like patronage

machine for you know, Democratic party, that sort of stuff. UM. But that being said, UM, unions all have by laws, they all have mechanisms by which there you know, theoretically democratically accountable to the membership UM. And there are oftentimes UM campaigns by workers to change how unions operate and UM.

And then also you know, when you're setting up a union, if you're in a new if you're in a place that doesn't have a union and you're looking to get a union because you're fed up with not having any kind of power over your workplace, or you feel like people are getting discriminity against or bullied, UM, you feel like you haven't gotten a raise, UM, those sorts of things.

You can pick the union that you decide if you want to get up a collective bargaining agreement, which is a legal contract kind of like dictating how your workplace operates in a uniform way. You can pick the union that you want to organize with in their union that are better to organize with, that are more democratic and more collectively accountable. There are unions that are more organized or more focused on actually building the union power and

organizing new workplaces. And then there are unions that are kind of like there, you know, and I'm gonna say that kind of blur. In the US, there's like a blurry line between rank and file unions and business unions because even rank and file unions are kind of constrained by the same pressures that business unions operate under. And

I'll explain the difference. I'll sell any difference in a second, but I just want to say that, like when you're when you're getting a new union, it's really important for you to critically look at what your options are and you're set and who you're organizing with, because unions have different cultures and different amounts of um, different kinds of politics, and you should be aware of that before you and your coworkers decide to commit to work with one union

while you're getting an or a union organized um. And then I can explain that next part if you want me to. All right, so yeah, so, and you know, if you get deep into union history and deep into organizing and figuring out like what unions are and what they do and how they've worked kind of in the past.

You'll find that there's different types of unions. So American unions started as like kind of like craft guilds, where basically you would have a factory that might have like twenty different unions of each individual group of people UM in each individual skill set would be underneath the union, and it was used as a way to kind of control UM who was able to do the work and

who was getting hired in to do the work. And a lot of times that would end up in the United States UM being segregated UM and there would be these called union scabbing where you would go in and do work against people who are striking because your union was fine and you were cool with your boss and these other people whatever their problem is, you're just going to keep doing. The boss will offer you more money

and you'll do the work right. So, and a lot of that has kind of carried into we called trade unions in the US a specific and trade unionism is

particularly UM prominent in UH in construction. So you'll have carpenters and you'll have you know, Mason's, and you'll have you know, pipe fitters and iron workers and all these different guys and they all kind of come together and work as a crew for like a construction company, and oftentimes their union operates more like a contractor than like a collective like expression of the power of those workers.

So um, then there are more there are unions that are would be considered like industrial unions, So industrial unions. Industrial unionism was invented by a union a hundred years ago called the Industrial Workers of the World, and they were like, what if we got took all of the workers in an industry and got them into one big union, right, and then what if all those workers in those different industries were talking to each other and building their their power.

And the goal would be that you would become so powerful that you could basically take over industries as workers and run them on a democratic basis so that you wouldn't have you kind of liquidate capital and want to I want to say that this briefly awesome, Like yeah,

so the bosses did not like this. I mean the MW, Like the MW was so feared that like like there's only the Everett massacre where it's like it got to a point in the early en hundreds, where just a group of IWW people showing up to a place was enough to get like the the the the entire like the entire city police force and like rounding up literally every right winger they could do and deputizing them and then just opening fire like into the crowd because like

the IWW had showed up on a boat like this was these people were tired, like people were terrified of them. And I think that the other thing I think is really interesting about the early AWWS history is that is the so you know, part of the response to them is like they are just massive, and this is what the first red scare was, basically it was an anti IWW thing. And also you know, they shot people, they

arrested people, they like they deported people. And but they also you know a lot of the things that I think we we have this tendency to look at as like a socialist reform where for example, like putting workers on corporate boards, right, or like like in internal democratic self management, but that's like, you know, that's still still sort of boss controlled, right, It's like, wow, okay, you have like a council of people who can make recommendations

or like even even down to you know, we're going to have our own internal like corporate unions, like set up by the company. But you know that the corporate union gives you a workers council, and the council can sort of control production, but you know, it's it's still

it's still run by the bosses. Like all of these things were stuff that like the Rockefellers set up or like even even the earlier levels would set the stuff up because they were they were so scared of people, Like they were so scared if people just taking over stuff democratically, just running it just literally through the union that they were like, we will we will literally give you democracy in the workplace. We will give you like we will give you like workers on corporate boards literally

just so long as you don't like take everything over. Yeah, I think that it's it's hard for people to imagine how intense like the struggle for getting any kind of rights in the workplace. I've been in the United States in particular. I think a lot of people think that, you know, uh, maybe not so much anymore, But when I was younger, you know, twenty years ago, people would

be like, oh, you know, we're in America. We've got you know, like we've got all these things, like we've got, you know, an eight hour work day, and we've got like a weekend and all. And the thing is is that literally people were murdered to win those things, right, like if you like. The reason why we have an eight hour work day is because there was in Chicago a famous, uh, a famous strike that um ended up

with a massacre of UM. It was like a police riot, and then they rounded up a bunch of union organizers, socialists and anarchists who were like involved in the labor movement at that time, and then the state of Illinois hung them. UM. And so the wife of one of them, of one of those people who was murdered at the Haymarket or they called them the Haymarket murders, h Albert

Parsons was one of them. Her or his wife, Lucy Parsons, who was I had a very veritable kind of like not quite sure what her background was, but we do know that she was probably a former slave. Uh. Albert Parsons was a former Confederate. They got married in the South, became Southern Republicans, trying to like participate in radical reconstruction, and then they basically had to flee because they were

um with their lives to the north. And uh. But after that whole trial and all that shook out, Lucy Parsons became a labor agitator across the United States fighting for the eight hour day and uh. And they memorialized the Haymarket Martyrs and something that I think some of your listeners will know about. Maybe they won't, but you know, made a made a a lot of people is like, oh,

that's Russian or some foreign sort of thing. Now, that is an American labor addition that like started here, and it was because of a specific like the the labor movement in the movement for the eight hour day in the United States. So um, and that's kind of like once you go from the IWW and industrial unions as an idea, it got crushed in the twenties because it

was so terrifying. There's a really good, uh, a really good essay on all that called The stop Watch and the Wooden Shoe by a guy named Mike Davis, who kind of explains how it is that IWW as the first union too not only um try and build workers organization, but to challenge workplace organization and to make those push back on how production was happening and fight something called the speed up where I think a lot of people who have worked have experienced this time where a boss

will come in and say we're going to do things differently, and they'll either get rid of a worker and put all the extra work onto people who remain, or they'll change things so you're doing more with the same amount of time. Um, they got you know, they provoked a backlash. Um. There were like spectacular like general strikes. The first general

strike in America in Seattle. There were i w W members who are key members of the Seattle Labor Council, which took craft unions and got their radicals together and coordinated a general strike, which is where there's a lot of tweets about general strikes, but general strikes require a lot of organization and coordination. We can talk about that later if we want to, but key thing is the i w W was always pushing for the organization necessary to pull off a general strike, and they did it.

And so amongst those different things and their mind wars in Colorado, mine wars in Virginia, West Virginia. UM, they were the first union that was explicitly anti racist. Um. They they weren't perfect, but they were. But they organized multi racial unions in UM Philadelphia, the Docks, and various other places. They were one of the few unions that really took the first steps into organizing in the South in the way that um a lot of unions have kind of failed too since. And because they were so

effective and so frightening, they got crushed. Yeah. I mean, also, what every thing I want I want to say about them is that like, like the WW fought in the Mexican Revolution because you know a lot of the WW members in California particular were like a lot of a lot of indigenous people, a lot of sort of voted

Mexican immigrants. So yeah, they had these huge gives and like the they like they I think, I think to this day this is still true outside of Puerto Rico, Like they are the only leftist movement that has ever like taking control of an American city, like they took to Lexico and Mexicality and like a bunch of the

sort of the border area. Yeah. That that's that, that's you know, part of why it just escalates to everyone starts shooting them because well and and they were truly an international union because they were they focused on like longshoremen and organizing and docks, that sort of thing. There were members of the i w W organizing basically everywhere in the world, and they were considered part of like

what was like a global movement. And we call them syndicalists, which is kind of like a an Italian term or French term um, which is this the you know, like like the Latin version of union of syndicate and um. There were similar unions across the world up through the early twentieth century until right about the time when the Russians, the Russian Revolution happened, and then there were subsequent crackdowns.

And because these people were who oh I mean, the IWW was a mix of native native born Americans and immigrants, and they were painted as this foreign sort of force. They were un American. That was like the whole nexus of un Americanism as like an idea, and the US state was able to mobilize after World War One to really put that down and so so there's a lot of history there in that, but the idea of the industrial union didn't go away, right The union, the IWW

was effectively dismembered and scattered. But a lot of people who had experienced as IWW members who had been in those strikes, UM didn't like just disappear. They didn't all get deported or sent away. UM. A lot of them kind of tucked their heads down and went back to work, you know. And in the nineteirties we saw the rise of another industrial the next step towards industrial unionism. So it's called the c i O, which is the Congress

of Industrial Organizations. Now there were multiple at that point. There was the Communist part of USA, the Socialist Party of America, and UM, former members of the i w W and various like anarchists who were participants in kind of the organization of the c i O. And the thing about c i O was was that when they came together, UM, it was in the Great Depression had really kind of kicked off, and they were able to

organize like really explosively across all these new industries. So they like the u a W United Auto Workers was like part of the c i OH, and they would they pioneered forms of strikes called sit down strike, which

was basically a factory seizure. All the workers would just say, we're not going to walk out, We're going to lock ourselves in and we're going to sit down, and it's our factory now, and now you're going to have to negotiate with And it became this thing where it was like millions of people were in Like the I w W at any one time was like hundreds of thousands of people, and the c I O became a thing where it was millions of people and UM and at least at the beginning when they had there, when they

had we're at the peak of their like power and militancy. UM, they were able to mobilize workers to take over factories, take over factories from some of the most powerful corporations on the earth on Earth. And you know, at the same time, UM, while they're doing this, the police and UH company, UM company security and vigilantes which had never gone away from like the IWW we're doing the same

sorts of things. So they would regularly beat strikers. They would regularly there would be you know, regular labor massacres, um disappearances of various um of labor organizers or labor leaders or even just random workers that they thought were like, oh, you're a unionist. Um, you know, get in the back of this h get in the back of this truck.

And then they were never seen again. Um. And then laws started to be enacted, I believe, out of fear that if this, if this movement didn't get somehow put under brought in under control, that there would be a revolution and so h. So that's when we started to see the enactment of laws like the National Labor Relations Act, which made having a union like that was the first time when being any union was considered legal at the

federal level. And that Uh, the FDR and the New Deal Democrats basically attempted to broker something called labor Piece where they would say, we're no longer going to mobilize the state against workers in the way that we have previously. Now local police would still side with bosses, that sort of thing. But uh, and those sorts of massacres and that sort of stuff didn't really go away until like

the forties. Um. But um, that was the beginning of because what you do see is unions get channeled into Once you have like a million people in the union, you have just enormous amounts of resources, all these dues coming in, you have the beginning of the labor bureaucracy, whereas before it would be you know, there would be hired you know, paid labor organizers, but they were always shifting around, and they were they were brought up as

communists or socialists, and they had ideological commitments to building the power of the union and the power of workers that you know, if you are just you know, and someone with some ambition and decided you want to become like anyone at this point, you know, who wants to become a paid union staffer if you're like you know, if you care to and a lot of people, um, then being a union staffer was a different thing than is now. It was. I think I'm trying to remember

the name of the president. I think it's John Lewis. John Lewis, who was a Republican back in the day said, you know, I think famously said at one point it's like, if you want to build a union, or if you

want to build the house, you call a carpenter. If you want to build a union, you call communists and so uh and so they would literally would go to like the the you know, the Communist Party and say we need organizers, and the Communist Party did a lot of work to training people to be organizers, and they were militant, they were ready to throw down because to them, they were looking at this as part of a you know, class struggle against you know bosses and you know, a

way of overthrown capital. Um. That kind of went through until World War two. And uh, when World War two hit, that's when the Soviet Union, which in many ways controlled what was happening with Communists with cp us A, basically said we need a labor piece because we need to support the war effort. And so that's when union started signing contracts with no strike clauses, and they started um agreeing that they would no longer strike um and and

they started agreeing to things like speed ups. There used to be a time when uh, these mass industrial unions, the stewards would walk around with a whistle on their neck. They have a whistle on a lanyard. And any time that workers decided that this is like an example of how powerful these unions were. Not just like as like an organization, but every day at your workplace, if you thought that something was not right, or you were not being treated fairly, or somehow the contract was in breach.

You would go to your steward, and your steward would pull out this whistle and would blow the whistle. It's called a whistle stop strike. And everyone would set down their tools until management would come out and they would either agree to pay more or stop what was happening and fix it. And so um, there was a time when strikes would be you would have intermittent work stoppages. So you wouldn't go out like indefinitely. You would go

out on strike for like three months. Though that happened, you wouldn't just and it wouldn't just be your factory. It would be Hey, we're getting on the phone and we're calling our friends down the street at the next

at your supplier. It's called a secondary strike. So if you're working at like a steel mill, and your steel mills dependent on coke from the next factory over, you're calling up your friends in the same union down the way, say stop sending coke, stop sending materials where these things

to us. We're on strike, you guys, you all set your tools down, you go on strike, and it would and these strikes would like massively expand, so you would see things instead of seeing you know, we just went through Striketober, right, yeah, and we just and so we saw like what we call a strike wave, but in

and in some ways it was a strike wave. But I think that we still don't I think it's so far away from living memory of what a real strike wave is, where people would go on strike in one factory and then the next factory, in the next factory, the next very it literally would be a wave of people, um going on strike. And this was all the result of all the organization that people had, in the militant attitude that people had about like how they were going

to be treated at work. It's worth mentioning that one of the so the National Labor Relations Act, which because passed nine turty five, which is like that, you know, this is the beginning of labor piece like you know, it's okay, we'll give you the right to re union, but you cannot do secondary strikes like that, like this is this is explicitly banned in this if I'm remembering this right, is that there's a specific thing that says

you can't do secondary strikes anymore. And you know, and this was this was you know, the the basis of this piece was that like yeah, as you sort of said before, it was like, well, okay, so the state will put their guns down, but the workers also essentially

have to put their guns down. And yeah, and this this starts this whole process of you know, once once, once you lose like that kind of consciousness, and once you lose the practical experience of doing this stuff, it kind of it fades and and over time, you know, yeah, the atrophies and and the unions get weaker and weaker because you know, like with without, like you know, on once you once you've set aside, right and you've decided that you're gonna essentially you know, okay, we're gonna we're

gonna follow the laws. We're gonna sit down, we're gonna do this, We're gonna like negotiate in good faith, We're going to have all of this sort of um, you know, we're we're gonna go through the national relations board. It's like, well, at that point, people like people, people's willingness to pick the weapons back up that they put down just sort of continues to diminish. Well, I think, what is I mean?

And so there was like a ten year period. So first there was like the first five you know, five ten years of c i oh was when we receive like this really like intense militancy within these unions. And halfway through like you know, the passage of that first long in the nineteen thirties, UM, that's when we started to see the erosion. And we constantly see I think, I think that people don't understand that our bosses are

always trying to assert their control over work. And we'll see that like, UM, bosses will do all kinds of contortions as long as they get to stay in charge and that they're unquestioned. And I don't think we understand quite how long the long game is for UM, for management, for our bosses and for capital. And so you know, it starts with the National Labor Relations Act and then it goes through uh, UM, it goes through World War

two and our World War two. That's when the c i O goes from you know, you know, millions of people to like tens of millions, and it becomes like a thing where like that's when you know, like Americans are in a union, right, UM, because I mean to the extent that that to the extent that UM, there were those compromises happened It didn't just compromise. It wasn't just like a failure of like oh, like we're just going to start capitulating. It's like there were interests inside

the union. They're looking at like, well, this is a lot of resources and power that we have now, but wait until like it's you know of Americans paying union dudes, And there were people inside the Democratic Party who were

willing to trade UM that labor piece for that. You would start to see, you know, that's when politicians would show up to UM two union halls to talk and try and get you know, and that's when you know, the Democratic Party it would be it wouldn't be unusual to hear Democratic polity titian UM say things about like labor that you would like that no politician would say today.

And now that doesn't mean that they were like on the side of the workers, but you know, you would have literally, um President Eisenhower telling the president of US Steel to get fucked over like a general, like you're you're trying to shut down, like you know, this is like the the steel industry is the lifeblood of backbone of the American economy, um, you know, and you're trying to shut this down trying to kill the golden goose, like get back to work, let the pay these people

what they're asking. Um. But you know, so you would see the people who kind of floated to the top of those UH unions trading there, trading away their workers power and their workers well being for more and more months.

First off, there would be more money, so you would you like, they would start getting raises that were really substantial, and it would boost up a a union steel worker or union auto worker into what we consider like the comfortable middle class where people could like buy a like a fishing cabin or something up on a lake, send their kids to college, all these sorts of things that were just kind of like unobtainable sorts of things if you were the same in the same industry twenty years earlier,

and um, and that felt like wins, you know, two people. And also in the nineteen forties, after World War Two, they passed the taff Hartley Act, which basically meant that they forced unions. Well they did, okay, they wrote into law that it was illegal to be a communist or an anarchist in UH in a union, and so they're literally still unions that still have language in their in their membership parts, or they're like I declare, I'm I've never been a member of the Communist Party. I'm not

an you know, an anarchist. Uh, I mean like I've I have friends who have pulled that out. Now it doesn't have any effect now, but that was they basically took all the people, you know, the people that uh that were you know, the people that you would have called to build the union twenty years later or before, we're getting thrown out of unions. And that didn't happen in every like there were attempts to do that in

all kinds of countries. They tried to do it in the UK, and the unions in the UK told basically told the government to go fund themselves, and they you know, it's like but because the leadership of the of the c I O Industrial unions began to see themselves more in alignment with are ruling class and are you know, like the Democratic Party, they decided that they were big enough that they didn't have to have militants involved anymore.

And that's when you know, uh, people were literally would get fired out of they either either militants in staff would get fired or uh they would get fired out of factories if you're like a ranking file worker. So UM and that's when we begin to see the rise of what we call business unionism. And that's where we would have union bureaucrats would and UM would you know,

would basically start making concessionary contracts. And this started, you know, back in you know, a lot of people are like, oh, you know, back in the fifties, unions are really powerful, and they were powerful to get you know, like raises, but those races came at the expense of control over

the work process. It came at the expense of the speed up UM and as unions like because the rank and file workers, like you're saying, you know, rank and file workers, and they see their things there, these tools getting put down, and they were more reluctant to pick them up, first off, is because of the amount of money that they're getting paid. And but they did push back.

They were like this is I mean, like, there's a really great book called The Next Shift, UM by Give Your Win, and it's all about the shift from steel, the steel industry as like the center of the U. S economy to health care UM and how unions basically started to erode away there like throw it, like hand

over their power in exchange for money. And then when they were told like there was UM and attempts to get socialized medicine and the under the Truman administration, and when they were basically uh, they they hit a speed bump in there and it got shot down. They decided that instead of trying to win those uh, those broad social reforms for everybody, they're like, well, we can use our our power to strike to get basically construct a private welfare state for our workers. And so that's when

you begin to see UM things like uh. The they called them like the gold plate insurance plans for certain types of unionized workers, and those would kind of UM and those are kind of used as like a private welfare state for all those workers. And it was built with the assumption you're gonna have low cost workers basically doing all this care work UM, and oftentimes it would be women of color and UM. And through that you start to see this real sharp client from the sixties

in like uh in union um, militancy UM. And that's when factory, when capital starts moving factories out of city centers where it's very easy to organize a factory when everyone lives within walking distance the factory, and when they're done with their shift at the factory, they're all at the bar outside the outside the factory gates, and you can just like if you want to have a union meeting, if you want organized even a wildcat strike, all you have to do is show up at the right bar,

and that's where everyone is after they're done with their shift. UM, they started moving and dispersing the industrial capacity of the United of you know, the the US urban core out into suburbs. So that's now where you'll drive through rural Indiana and you'll pass like five factories and they're surrounded by nothing but corn fields. It's because it's a lot harder to organize auto workers when they all live thirty minute drive from each other and none of them hang

out at the same bar anymore. Uh. And then you start to see UM. And all through that time, the commitments to anti racism are eroded, So you'll see UM jobs get start to get segregated out inside it's like steel mills and things like that. But then you know there's also the rise of rank and file movements to push back. So UM, all the while we're talking about this.

There's always as workers who remember what these things were like and why and the power that they used to have, and they would do the best that they could to get organized and so UM there's a really good UM documentary you can find a YouTube called Finally Got the News. It's about the Dodge Revolutionary Union movement in Detroit, which was a rank and file reform movement organized by UM

by black auto workers. They got like a fair amount of support from white auto workers because they're basically there's you know, interviews with U a W bureaucrats and they're just like, you know, we're getting people these raises. Why are they upset that they're like getting named in the factory right, or why are they getting upset that, you know, you know, black workers are constantly getting put into the shittiest jobs or the first to get laid off, that

sort of thing. And that's a it's a really I suggest anyone has time. And that came out of like the I think that was immediately after the was getting organized, after the assassination Martin Luther King and all the riots that were happening in the h in the sixties, had like that late sixties period Um. In the seventies there was a teamster, the teamster rank and file rebellion. My grandpa was a teacher trucker. My grandma was a teamster.

She was like a punch card operator. But yeah, sorry, yeah, yeah no, I mean like teams, these unions got so big and they have that's how you end up with like there's u a W teaching assistance now, right, Um, Like how do you end up with these huge like uh unions? And during teams are rebellion And my grandpa would tell these stories like we're going on there would be a wildcat strike and they call it out over

the CB radios. And the way they would enforce the picket line wasn't just like oh, we're gonna like standing in the road or something. They would hang coke bottles full of rocks over the overpasses, just high enough up to like that cars that pass underneath them. But if you hit one and you're in a truck, it funk up your day. Um. And that was like a really um like a really kind of like powerful pushback by rank and file workers against what they saw was the

erosion of their power. Because I think that I think there's this sometimes amongst people who consider themselves to be left or whatever. There's like this kind of doom and gloom like, oh, it's only like we're only losing, right. But and there's been a lot of as the seventies happened, and capital is kind of reconfiguring itself in the middle

of all the economic upheaval inflation. Um, Basically, they got to the point where we can't maintain labor peace and maintain profits, right, so they could maintain labor peace and have something more like a socialist system, or they can maintain control over the work process and just do everything in their power to destroy the power of workers. And

they decided to do that. UM. So I think we were coming out of this kind of era where you know, if you were in a union and working at a factory, Um, there was a real threat that they're like, well, we're just gonna shut this factory down, and you know, not to get signed. Well, first it was the pet Go

strike with Reagan. Reagan gets elected and air air traffic controllers decided they're going to go on strike and um, and they and Reagan decided he was going to break it and they brought in they Basically there was this bigger session. It was like this huge mess where people were really desperate for work, and um, you know, they said, we're going to hire anyone to be an air traffic

controller and we're gonna break the strike. And that was the first real the first like that the beginning of the end of that final like that big moment era of industrial unionism in the United States. And we went from a place where you know, U a W had millions, the United Auto Work had millions and millions of workers and if you drove a car or a truck in its main America was made by union worker to this point where now the AW is around fifty people. I

was shocked when I heard that, literally like two weeks ago. Um, you know, we just had the big U a W striker John Deer um. And there's been and you know, all through this while this is going on, Um, there's various union corruption scandals. And that's again the cause of like when you kick out all the people who have an ideological commitment to improving the lives of working people and building the power of working people out of this organization that's only existence is to like build the power

of working people. Um, then you then you end up with people who are basically criminals, like you end up like there would be uh, I think Reagan scat like Ronald Reagan was h was a union member, but he was like the union member for like a corrupt like there was like there was like a battle between like the c i O controlled union in like Hollywood and like the corrupt like Moss mobbed up union and the mobbed up union, like that was the side if I'm that that was a side that Ragant picked and uh

and yeah, so it's like you could kind of and there was a lot of like media where they would be like you know, the Waterfront in various like movies and things talking about union corruption. And I think that union corruption is real and it's a it's when it happens,

it's a huge problem. It shouldn't like it's in other countries like in like in Germany, if they found out like a union union official like misappropriated like two thousand euros, it would be a nationwide scandal like um also in uh in like European countries, like you pay union dues on a voluntary basis right in the US legally since we're a close shop system, like once you're at a union uh union workplace, your dues get taken, whether you

know whether you're happy with the union or not. Now there are people will say that's really important because unions need every penny they can to fight where they have. But when unions have to fight for membership and make sure that their membership knows that they're getting like what they're paying for, you get a little bit more responsiveness. So I think that's another thing that especially people are thinking about unions and thinking about joining a union are

creating getting any of the workplace. Just understand what a union is and how they work and where your money is going to, and that if you're unhappy with that, the best thing to do is to get involved with your union, to try and like get connected with your coworkers who have similar complaints and change the union. Because there's a saying it's like any union is better than no union. That's not always true, but it generally is.

They're there. There's like a very small chance that like you're like living in nine nine China and like your union is like is controlled by like a commodation of the K and T and like literally the Chinese heroine trade. But you know that that Like, yeah, that like doesn't there there there are things where you'll have like they're my dad worked at a factory and there was it was a teamster organized factory, and like some of the stewards were bullies and literally like there were some people

who were dealing drugs out of it. And they gave the the workers like try to bring in another union, and the and the management decided to offer to also try and desertify decertify the union at the same time, and the workers vote it to desert. And the thing

is is that now that factory shut down and gone. Um, and I guess like the thing is is that you have to It's far better for workers to assert their rights within their union where they have some modicum of democratic control over what's going on than it is to just throw up your hands and like there's and do nothing, because if you do nothing, the boss is always doing something. Yeah, Like that's the thing is, like management is always organizing.

They're always coming up with ways to like to undermine the control of workers at work, to pick people against each other. Um, we can get into it later, but like, uh, they want they'll use racism and those sorts of things to dole out favors or curry favoritism and like you know,

put people against each other. So I think that it's important to just say that, like the union is going to be your only effective way to push back, well the union or collect did action, because I guess I also want to say that there are times when organizing union isn't the best solution to solving your problem at work. Ultimately, this is all about how do you solve problems at work? Right?

And they're sometimes when you can do collective action that is protected as you know as labor organizing, but it's not done within a union and so and because America is the really best of place and you have right to work states and places where like being in a union is like literally illegal. Um sometimes putting the time you're like you can't get into a union and therefore

you have to come up with other solutions. Or sometimes because the nature of a workplace, like getting a union is like it's very hard or like basically impossible, that doesn't mean that you can't organize. And I think that that's the thing that everyone needs to understand. I think there's a lot of like boosterism of unions amongst younger workers, because people just don't understand how they work or they

haven't experienced in themselves. And I think it the main thing is is that you've got to be very careful with your time and understanding. Like building a union can take like ten years from the beginning of we're upset to now we have a collective bargaining agreement, or now we have a collective bargaining agreement. It could be another five or ten years before you actually get to the

point where you're organized enough to go on strike. And people oftentimes think that that's like they look back at the history of things and they're like, oh, it's so easy. But back then people were taking all they mean they it took them years to build the the US labor

movement into what it was at its peak. It took decades, right, And I think that we are kind of used to this instant gratification kind of stuff, and we have to understand that It's like, if you're going to be in a workplace where you're there for enough time to build the trust and relationships and understanding of how the work workplace works and keep your job and be someone that keep don't look at as like a shirt or whatever.

Not that I don't think that people should you know, people should work as hard as they can and not any more harder than that. But whatever. Um. But I think that you know, I'm anti work, but you know that's the whole other thing. Unions are the best way to limit the amount of work that you have to do. Um, if you're gonna if you're going to uh, you know, work as a wage labor um. But I will just

say that it's like I think that people don't. It's difficult sometimes to understand how much work goes into getting to the point of getting a union, but it's always worth putting the time in to get there. And you may not win the first try, but if you are if if the conditions are right and things like, you know, we make our history, but not in conditions of our choosing. Sometimes things don't work out, but not doing it is I think a it's detrimental to you and your co workers.

And even times like I've talked with people who have been involved in campaigns where they got fired but then all of a sudden conditions improved afterwards, and they look at that as like, oh, ship, we didn't get our union. But everyone got raises and they change some things at work,

and that's actually a victory. So you know, I think that I think of each other as like collective building collective power, and the amount of time it takes to do that is daunting, but I think it's the sort of thing that we need to do if we're serious about changing how we can actually like how our lives work and how much power we have outside of work, because unions are also places where we do things that affect outside of our work as well. It could happen

here as a production of pool Zone Media. The more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could happen here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.