Our fellow citizens are being attacked for no reason. And we need to stand up for our federal workforce because they keep this country running. That's National Treasury Employees Union President Doreen Greenwald on the Power at Work podcast, talking about the attack on the rights of federal workers by the Trump administration and NTEU strategies in defending its members. I have no job right now, but you know what?
I feel like a waste to lift it off me because I'm not going to that damn place anymore. You know, it was just, it was just too much finally. Tesla Fremont Assembly Worker Branton Phillips, after working for years at the plant, which has over 20, 000 workers, He talked with Work Week Radio about why he quit in protest this week after opposing the union busting racism and health and safety dangers at the plant caused by owner Elon Musk. We've had a lot of heat days. Yep. And well deserved as well.
People getting to, everyone's suddenly a meteorologist. And a lot of people are pretty excited once it gets to 35 That's 35 degrees centigrade, which is 95 degrees Fahrenheit. On Fire Up Plumbers from Melbourne, Australia, the fellas talk about summertime. Oh my goodness. They threw everything at a fellow Randolph. Uh, I mean, to the point, uh, he was broke. He went broke, uh, trying to organize and they, uh, attack his, his wife's business. but he never gave up. He never gave up on a movement.
Rassian Clayton, an AFSCME member who heads up the A. Philip Randolph Institute Arizona chapter, talking about the work of the institute and other issues in labor, On words and work the current sort of, way in which we talk about everything in terms of. Vibes is sort of like us, prepackaging ourselves as, data subjects and like presenting ourselves in ways that we know algorithms want to interpret us.
and in a very special live art and labor show Okay talks with liz pelly about the state of diy and our extractive relationship With big tech i'm chris garlock and that's all coming up on this week's edition of the labor radio podcast weekly Let's get started, as we do every week, with Harold's quick rundown of shows you should know. Social media guy, Harold Phillips here again, folks. And how you doing?
I don't think there's any way to avoid the news of all the horrible things coming out of the Trump administration. I know you've been paying attention and our labor radio show and podcast producers have been paying attention to here's a few shows you should know for the week of February 16th. Madison Labor Radio shares stories on nurses defending their status at a Wisconsin Supreme Court hearing, the North Carolina Amazon vote, the King's Superstrike, and more.
Elliot and Michael talk about the Trump administration's attack on working people on Labor Radio on KABU. Gene talks about the lessons he learned at the No Cuts rally in downtown Dallas, held by Dallas Labor and retirees on Workers Beat Extra. And Linda and Mark look at the first couple weeks of the Trump administration, the Democrats weak response, and more on Voice of the People.
But believe it or not, folks, some of our labor radio show and podcast producers are talking about more than just the Trump administration. For instance Ryan talks with Alyssa Sanchez, whose husband survived a devastating 62 foot fall while on the job, about the harrowing day of the accident, the critical injuries her husband sustained, and the profound impact it had on their lives. On the Powerline Podcast.
And the Reimagining Value Action Lab's What Do We Want podcast has been away writing, reading, and getting ready to serve up more on fascism in 2025. This week they released a chattier, less structured version of their usual schtick, recorded over the holidays, live in front of a studio, well, Living room, audience. I know it's really easy to get locked into all the horrible stuff happening right now. But there is other stuff to look at. And think about that affects working people's daily lives.
Our labor radio show and podcast hosts know that, and that's why when you take a look at some of the over 200 labor radio shows and podcasts we have [email protected]. You're going to find people talking about a variety of issues, not just Trump and Elon. If you want to find out what they're talking about right now, when new episodes get released, be sure to follow us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, and, yeah, Twitter. For now, at LaborRadioNet.
And hey, it's okay to take a break from the news. Go ahead, turn off the TV. Stop the scroll. Take the headphones out for a while. We'll be paying attention. And you can check in with us when you're ready. Back to you, Chris. Hey, thanks Harold. Here's the show. Hello, powerful people, and welcome back to Power at Work. My name is Seth Harris, and I'm a senior fellow at the Burns Center for Social Change. Welcome to this Power at Work broadcast.
This is the sixth episode in our series, What Could Happen Under Trump? Today, I will talk with Doreen Greenwald, who is the president of the National Treasury Employees Union, one of the largest. Unions of federal employees in our country will discuss President Trump's all out assault on federal workers and the American people who are served faithfully. By those workers. President Greenwald, welcome back to Power at Work.
And I say from the bottom of my heart, I wish it could be under better circumstances. Seth, thank you for the invite. These are really trying times and I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. So let's, let me start at a high level. What do you think president Trump is trying to accomplish? Why is he attacking federal employees? Why is he damaging and undermining the federal government that he leads?
Well, first of all, I think he does not have a good understanding of what the federal government does. You know, what we've seen these last several weeks has just been an outright attack on all federal employees. It's been an attack against every federal agency. It is an attack on the services that they provide to the American people. I've never seen this. I was a federal employee for over 35 years. The government provides incredible services, things like You want to have your food inspected.
You want to make sure your water is safe. You want to make sure your national parks are cared for. Um, we just saw this week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency designed to protect consumers who fight for the little guy, who protect veterans from schemes, and elderly from getting, um, having their money taken from them.
Out of people who have bad ideas and are trying to, to rip them off that agency alone in a little over a decade has got over 20 billion B billion dollars for the American people. And this administration is working to destroy them and shut them down. This is not about efficiency. I've heard that. I mean, everybody wants to make sure. That their government operates effectively and efficiently for the American people. I'm a taxpayer. I don't want to spend more on taxes than I need to.
But that is the way you approach it. You audit. You go through these records. You determine what is wasteful. And you change it. And you start by asking the people who do the work where those areas are. Russell Vaught, who's now the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, actually was quoted as saying that we wanted to, he wanted to traumatize Federal employees.
That was part of the point of project 2025, which he helped to lead the right wing agenda that President Trump is now implementing almost word for word. Um, it was to hurt federal employees. So given that and given what you've described going on in the government right now, I'm, I'm, I'm eager to know what is the mood. Among your members. What is the mood among your local leaders? Let me make a couple points about what you just said.
First of all, anybody who would say that their intention is to traumatize federal employees. What does that say about that individual? As I said before, federal employees take an oath to the Constitution. They care about the services they deliver for the American people. When that letter went out asking them to resign, I read in the news they were hoping 5 10 percent of people would jump at the chance.
Their bailary got 2 percent that jumped at the chance because people don't want to leave because they understand how important the work they do is for this country. You also see things. Where people are, are really just desperate to understand why they have been vilified in this way. These are your family, your friends, everybody knows a federal employee. They're good people. They care about the American people. They're proud to serve the American people.
Our fellow citizens are being attacked for no reason. And we need to stand up for our federal workforce because they keep this country running. Many people don't see a federal employee because things just run smoothly. They don't understand the amount of federal employees it takes. to make sure those things happen. And so I really urge people to pay attention to what's going on here. This is not a Washington DC moment. This is about our country and where we want to be going forward.
Thanks very much for watching this broadcast. We will see you on Power at Work very soon. This is Steve Zeltzer with Workweek. I'm talking with Branton Phillips. He was a worker at the Tesla plant in Fremont, California. And last month, Branton, you did resign from that company, Elon Musk company. You've been working there for many years. What led you to resign from Tesla Fremont plant? A number of things, actually. Um, again, if you follow what I've done or try to do at the.
Tesla plant was trying to get a union in there. We try to really work for the workers That was he was fine a long time ago, and you're fighting just one one obstacle, but literally in the last year I've and this is political, you know, but last year I've watched literally this This uncensored maniac, that's Elon Musk, just basically start to ruin America. Like, I just can't see anything easier than that.
And it's one thing to go in every single day and work for an ideology that you thought was really good. And maybe it's still good, you know, with the whole solar, you know, with everything to do with, um, Transitioning to sustainable energy, but at the same time, you're looking at a CEO of a company that's just looting, ruining America into the ground right now, running it completely into the ground. It's just disgusting. This is not the America that I want.
And finally, when I went in there, I didn't see Tesla, I saw Trump. That's just, it's just as simple as that. And I just, I had a choice, and so I made that choice. You know, morally ethic, I can't work for them. And you were trying to organize a UAW. How did he treat the UAW? I know that 700 workers were fired by him. Did he shut down that organizing effort? Oh, of course. Of course. And completely, as far as I'm concerned, completely illegally. You know, from the very jump.
They did everything wrong. What happened when that was taking place? Oh, they literally, they literally, I call it victimized the workers. Anybody with a shirt on, which was our right to do back then, to represent what we wanted in that company. You know, for the benefit of the workers. Anybody wearing a shirt that represented the UAW, they were literally, not only found, organized black balled, that was it. They were fired. They were just taken out.
And all of them supposedly had um, I guess it was, uh, uh, their performance wasn't up to snuff. So everybody learned to every six months, grab your performance reviews, print them out. That way you have them right there. Because the moment they let you go, you can't go in and actually say anything about how your performance was. And these were a lot of good workers. And of course, a lot of them. A lot of them were back in the newbie days too, which, you know, it's just wrong. It's just wrong.
It's just killing me right now. It really does. It just disgusts me. You know, I, I, I have no job right now, but you know what? I feel like a waste to lift it off me because I'm not going to that damn place anymore. You know, it was just, it was just too much finally. And black workers at that plant have said it's like working at a plantation. What does that mean, and how were black workers treated at that plant? Uh, very poorly.
It's part of the problem and this is, um, I think a lot of it stems from this. The young kids these days, uh, will use the n word just repeatedly as a positive thing and just a normal talk. A lot of older people don't like that. Black and white, um, my stepson used to use it all the time. Great at home because it kind of bothered me, you know, I'm old school white, you know That was never a good word into a lot of blacks.
That is a terrible terrible word But hey, I didn't understand in the very beginning and he thought it was funny It was funny as they would tell older gentlemen those kind of words and it was it was meant as a You know, joke would be comical. This is not funny. And again, we never had any kind of sensitivity training ever in there for the first three or four years. It was just rampant. People were looking at ladies up and down just like it's a club scene inside there. It was wrong.
And young kids had to be taught how to be respectful to other workers and how to act around other workers. That was never done. Not done till just lately. I know the one guy in the elevator, he kept saying, please don't say the N word around me. I talk about myself, and it's just not a good one. The kids were laughing at him. You know, and it just killed him. You know, and then I'll go back to the plantation.
It's like, oh my God. And, and, and It's just they don't understand the sensitivity was never there. Okay. Well, thank you, Branson. And the struggle will continue. So thanks for joining us. Well, okay. Thank you, Steve. morning and welcome to the 4UP show proudly presented to you by the Plumbers Union I'm Rusty, we got a full crew in here, and we've got a special guest. The hair's done, all slicked back, lookin black, I don't reckon he dyes it, looks absolutely phenomenal. Right?
It's all natural. Ha ha, natural. Good morning, Rusty. I didn't know you were so grageant. Yeah, yeah. Nah, goin goin alright, fellas. How are you, Rusty? All good? Yeah, look at my hair. I look like Paddy McCrudden. It's shit ass. All I need to do now is go to Thailand. Exactly right. Exactly right. Anyway, I'll get straight into it. Obviously straight left to right. Herx, good morning my friend. Good morning mate. Good morning listeners. Actually, we've lost our listener. He's here today.
I'm here. You've lost one listener today. Oh, don't worry. There's one listener out there that does like to listen to us. You know, um. Gladly guys. It's good to, good to have the support. Yeah, bloody aye. I, uh, I don't mind. I don't want to get, I don't, I don't, I don't want to get sued, but anyway, right? I do like, um, oh, they had the Grammys or whatever and, um. Obviously you saw, uh, what's her name? Bianca Sestori or whatever her name is.
Yeah, she's pretty much wearing nothing, you know what I mean? And, um, you know, there was other celebrities there as well. Pam Anderson looked pretty well and pretty nice as well. My wife's gonna kill me for that. Anyway, I promised her I wouldn't say anything. That's alright. G'day Sandra, I know you're listening. Yeah, mate, trust me, she is and, uh, there'll be toothpicks in me eyes when I get home. Anyway, we didn't usually do what we usually do was a, uh, sorry, pickles as well.
How we going buddy? Yeah, good. Russ. We've actually got the ultimate professional in you here this morning, John. So I think half our content of, of, uh, of hanging, hanging shit on his, uh, not gonna be there, but it's really good to have you. We mate, it's, uh, good. Plenty of ammunition. Good, good. That one of us is organized for the day, so. Yeah, going well, Russ. It's um, it's really started to fire up for the year.
Yep. Um, I think the first couple of weeks back were sort of just easing into it. But now everyone's back on site. Um, needless to say, the members have been pretty happy the last couple of weeks. We've had a lot of heat days. Yep. And well deserved as well. People getting to, everyone's suddenly a meteorologist. And a lot of people are pretty excited once it gets to 35. Yeah, well double 196 doesn't work anymore. It's alright, yeah, yeah.
Double 196. I actually do remember calling that flat out. That was my job as an apprentice. Yeah, back in the day. Yeah, everyone was on that, weren't they? Yeah, now it's just the, uh, the power of your phone, hey? So, yeah, nah, it's been a good couple of weeks since John was saying, I think, um The three of you have got obviously a vast majority of the work, especially with these data centers coming through. It's, um, it's been really, really hectic.
So, uh, looking forward to 2025. It's been a great summer, hasn't it? It's been a good summer. Warm. Nice and warm, man. Yeah, it's nice and warm. It's not too good. Not too good this year. So, anyway, someone's jinxed me. Burning leaves, you reckon. Leaves are burning, or? Nah, just, I don't know, mate. I just don't. They're no good. No good. Too hot. Too hot. Too hot. What tomatoes are we talking about anyway? I went away for a weekend.
Come back and uh, the mother in law had fed the cat, but didn't water the garden, so I lost all mine. About week one of the school holidays. We're now suddenly Gardening Australia. Not Warwick Burke, it's Don Burke. It's now the garden show, but anyway, we won't go there. Great to have you, mate. Thanks for coming, Johnny. And, uh, cheerio, boys. Lovely. Awesome. Hello, this is Ted Przelski. It's another episode of Words and Work.
All right, we've got, uh, Rayshawn Clayton here, uh, member of AFSCME Local 2960 from up in the Phoenix area. He also is the president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. First of all, what, what, what kind of work as a, you know, you told me you were asked me and what kind of work did you actually do as the way I got into the union was, uh, through the AT& T call center center was my first job. Well, not my first job, but that's my first union job.
Um, so upon getting hired, the same day you get hired and do your orientation, they come to the union, come and ask you to sign your membership card. I immediately signed my card after I did my 90 days, I immediately got active, uh, mostly doing political work for CWA, uh, 7050.
Uh, then upon the work I've been doing, I was elected to, uh, area vice president, then eventually I was elected to, uh, executive vice president of that local, and continue doing a lot of activist work, political work, uh, a lot of organizing, uh, for the local and for the district. And then AFL CIO gave me an opportunity to be an organizing specialist for the state, mostly for Maricopa. I have a counterpart in Tucson, Ryan Kelly.
Um, but for here in Maricopa, what I do is support all unions and their organizing efforts, whether it be internal organizing or external organizing. And that's what I'm currently doing as well as the APRI. So, um, how did you go from just being, uh, an active union member to being part of A PRI? Uh, I met, uh, was the AF was the Arizona A-F-L-C-O director, Fred Yata, and, uh, Joe Digs the previous president.
Uh, we had a conversation in a parking lot and you know, it's always about creating opportunity for young union members and they took a. They presented an opportunity to me, and I learned more about it on my own. I'm guilty as one of the ones who did not know who he was at first. But after I did my research and I watched the movie Ten Thousand Men Named George, and then I implemented it in my political program that I was running with CWA.
So we watched that movie every year because it just showed the power of the vote, the power of the people, having power with opposed to having power over. So it was really profound for me. And I just want to spread a message to all union people, all union members, because uh, it's important. It just, it's environment, everything we work hard for. you mentioned 10, 000 black men named George. Uh, and, um, actually talk a little bit about that movie. Well, 10, 000 men ain't George.
I mean, that, that movie, it embodies in with almost two hours, show you the whole process of, uh, to be recognized as a union and the fight that you have to have and the determination. Oh my goodness. They threw everything at a fellow Randolph. Uh, I mean, to the point, uh, he was broke. He went broke, uh, trying to organize and they, uh, attack his, his wife's business. I I think she's a beautician. They call her a communist and they had people who look just like him attack him.
And, and, and, but he never gave up. He never gave up on a movement. Even when you had people inside, um, the movement who was feeding information, uh, back to management and you have it in today's union. Like when you organize, you have people who favor management and will act like they're for the cause and tell all your business to management. Okay. And they make the efforts harder for you.
It wasn't until the, uh, white conductors, um, stuff realized that if they take a, if the black pool, poolman portals take a step forward, that helps them in a sense to get a new bargain deal for their sales. And you can go back to meat packers and all stuff like it takes one unit, one group of people to take a step forward and then you, you push forward a lot of another group of people too as well. And then people have to realize that we all in this together and. Resonate today.
People have to realize we're in this together. If we want to move forward, we want to get labor moving forward. You want working people, you want to bring back the middle class, we have to work together to get that done. Well, hey, thank you. Hey, no problem. Thank you for having me. Good. Fun. I love these. Podcasting live from Ridgewood, New York, it's Art and Labor Live!
Tonight's guest is intrepid reporter Liz Pelly, here to discuss her new mood machine, the rise of Spotify and the cost of the perfect playlist. Now, put your hands together to welcome Liz Pelly and our hosts, OK Fox and Marshall Moran! Hi! So, you um, you ground the book with your experience in DIY. A scene that helps participants of it demystify the process of booking and playing shows.
You cite Anoni, one of the greatest of all time, calling these smaller music, uh, economies an ecology, terminology you later ran with in the book. Is DIY's current embeddedness to the internet weakening those ecologies and is a balance possible? book, um, uh, came out last month. I started working on it in 2022, but it's sort of building on reporting on the streaming economy and the impacts of platform capitalism on music that I started doing in 2016.
And as I just, I, in the first couple of chat, um, first couple paragraphs of the book, I describe how, when I first started working on my first article about Spotify, um, it was a time where I was Working at a DIY music venue, and I was, you know Bar tending there and booking shows there and surrounded by, um, musicians every night and kind of taking in a lot of people sharing their own lived experiences of the ways that they felt that music was being affected
by, um, platform monopolies and I mean, you know, maybe not using that language is more people being like Spotify sucks. And I'm like, Oh, like, you know, people are talking about the impact of platform monopolies on creative labor yeah, so you, you've been on this for a long time and like, and the, the, The Silent Barn ecosystem and, and similar ones like it that were all like kind of federated together, um, like cultivated stars like Mitski, like that came from our labor. We did that.
We did that. We did that. I booked Mitski in undergrad. You booked Mitski at Silent Barn. Like that shit like gets lost in like the mythologies of these big, uh, Uh, brands that take over from the, the grassroots groundwork that happens to make them these big. in these conversations, I do feel like I tend to sort of have a lot of focus on the labor of recorded music.
You know, something that gets talked about a lot is there's so much labor that goes into making recorded music, like the songwriters, producers, engineers, mixing, mastering, and how, um, in the current, um, digital music landscape. So much of that work just gets like invisiblized, whether because it's like not credited or because you have people like Daniel Eck going in the media and saying that the cost of making content is zero now.
Um, but I think you're right too, that like, even beyond recorded music, like, um, when you have, uh, a creative economy that just kind of like, you know, imposes the celebrity culture of winners and losers onto even independent music. You do also get a lot of work that goes into, you know, um, DIY and independent music scenes also being invisiblized in this other way, these other ways too.
I'm thinking about I wrote like an article like right around when sign the barn closed where I was thinking about Look that up. It's very good I'll post that in the show notes It was for logic and it was this article that was sort of about like what it meant for DIY spaces to become like increasingly reliant on, um, at the time I was talking about Facebook, but you know, now I think I would just like apply it more to like meta or, um, uh, like Instagram.
And I was thinking a lot about how it's kind of interesting. Like there's a chapter in the book where I'm talking about like this concept of, um, auto surveillance, um, or, you know, when, when the state doesn't have to surveil you, because you've learned to surveil yourself.
And like, you've kind of already learned to sort of like, um, uh, you know, I quote this, um, amazing writer and academic named Robin James, who talks about how, like the current sort of, um, way in which we talk about everything in terms of. Vibes is sort of like us, um, prepackaging ourselves as, uh, data subjects and like presenting ourselves in ways that we know algorithms want to interpret us. And in some ways, like, I think.
Around the end of Silent Bar and I was sort of thinking about the ways in which all the platforms that we had started using both for internal communications and to promote our own events had sort of started to kind of like impose their own logics onto both like the ways in which we were communicating with each other and also the ways in which we, you know, even DIY spaces were sort of like interfacing with the public, um, and imposing kind of like a kind of like normalized presentation.
I don't know. I don't know. Thank you, everybody! Hey, that's a wrap for this week's edition of the Labor Radio Podcast Weekly, a roundup of some of the programs aired over the past week on more than 200 labor radio and podcast shows. They're all part of the Labor Radio Podcast Network shows that focus on working people's issues and concerns. We've got links to all the network shows at laborradionetwork. org.
You can also find them use the hashtag laborradiopod on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And hey, don't forget to let us know what you think of this show. Drop us a note. Info at laborradionetwork. org. You can be part of the network. You don't even need a microphone. Labor Radio Podcast Network t shirts are available. They're union made. You'll find them in all sizes and two colors at laborradionetwork. org. This podcast is recorded under a SAG AFTRA Collective Bargaining Agreement.
The Labor Radio Podcast Weekly, edited this week by Captain Swing, I produce the show, and our social media guru, always and forever, is Mr. Harold Phillips. For the Labor Radio Podcast Weekly, this has been Chris Scarlock. Stay active and stay tuned to your local Labor Radio Podcast Show. We will see you. Next week.