When someone won't even acknowledge that you work for them, like they're certainly not gonna acknowledge your humanity if they don't value enough to give you the proper legal paperwork, they do not care how your day is going. And there's a problem. There are no girls on the Internet. As a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss Creative, I'm Bridget Todd, and this is there are no girls on the Internet. We're in what feels like a little bit of a renaissance when it comes to organized labor
and unions. More and more workers, whether they're barista's at Starbucks or journalists, are seeing the power of unions and organizing as a collective. And even though we may be used to have an idea of the union member as being a white guy working at an auto factory or steel mill, the face of who we understand as somebody who needs a union is really changing too. More and more media workers and office tech workers, for instance, are
trying to unionize. This shift is something that labor reporter Kim Kelly is really happy to see. I'm Kim Kelly, and I am an independent labor reporter and the author of Fight Like Hell, The Untold history of American labor. So how did you become someone who cared about labor and telling the story of all of these different fights. So I guess the short answer is I got involved
in organizing my workplace. That's kind of a direct pipeline right there, right to caring about the labor movement joining it. But this was the longer answers, like, well, I'm from a union family from very like rural working class, kind of isolated place, and everyone who raised me was a construction worker, steel worker, teacher, like everyone was in the union. It wasn't something that we really talked about that much.
We really was, you know, really discussed. It was just part of the job, part of life, like, oh, yeah, that's in a union. That's why we have health insurance, that's why he has to go to this meeting sometimes, why he's on strike and we can't go to Walmart,
you know, things like that. And it wasn't really until I was advice whereas the heavy metal editor as some colleagues pulled me aside or like, hey, we wanna form a union, what do you think, Like, hell yeah, and let me get involved in that, that I realized that there were even it was even an option like that there were unions for people like me, someone who at that point was writing about death on the internet. But
it turns out there was, and we joined it. Kim got more and more involved in unions to organizing amound her own union at the media company Vice, and we've organized like almost I think by the time I got laid off in twenty nineteen, we'd organized like five or six hundred people in the building, and we'd barked in two different contracts, like we've gotten raised, we'd improve the workplace.
We've done a ton, we'd accomplished a lot. And I was deeply involved the whole time because being in a union had always kind of appealed to me as an idea, as something that fit into my political like my political views in my worldview, and it just kind of felt nice to join that family tradition. But um, I didn't really start writing about it with any sort of regularity or depth until after we unionized, and I was already freelancing a lot working advice because they didn't pay a
ship until we organized another big endorsement for unionizing your workplace. Um, yeah, it's freelancing in time, and uh, really It just kind of happened by not by accident, but unexpectedly because I was writing a little bit just freelance stuff about the prison industrial complex rou team book, and I pitched them on a profile of Mother Jones, you know, the labor leader. I thought, Okay, your audience is predominantly like younger women, like,
here's a cool icon we can talk about. And my editors said, yeah, that's a cool idea, but I don't think our audience necessarily knows what a union is, so why don't you write about that first? I was like okay, and I wrote a little explainer because at that point I kind of learned more about the movement, about the history, from talking the organizers who work with, from reading books on my own, from just getting all fired up about
union stuff as like a baby organized there. And I wrote that article and it kind of it was like many viral people paying attention because in seventeen people weren't necessarily used to looking to teen Vogue for their like anti capitalist analysis. Yet they're like, what is this? Essentially like it that helped me as a freelancer, And I was like, okay, that went, well, what if you let me do a whole column and they're like, yeah, okay,
we'll try it. And I was like four years ago, and really just having that experience organizing and kind of learning on the fly and being a big nerd on loving history books kind of made me feel like I was allowed to write about labor, like I had a leg to stand on. And once I kind of gave myself that permission, I really just dove in and start writing more and writing more, talking more. People just kind
of fell in love with the idea. Right because I spent my whole life up till then writing about heavy metal, which is still a great love and still a huge part of my life. But I was kind of looking for something new and the Union happened to be there at exactly the right time. And once I realized I was going to more union meetings than have metal shows, I thought, Okay, maybe it's time to actually try and do this. And here we are. Wow. What what a trajectory. Yeah,
I mean it's it's it. Really. I see a lot of through lines in your work and I I remember the Vice unionization fight and um, I heard radio where my podcast has hosted me this recently, which is a big deal. I guess it's a good question. What do you think of this idea that I don't know. I often I think that everybody could benefit from a union. I think the benefits are there for unions and for everybody. But I often hear this kind of pushback that like, oh,
what does an office media worker need a union for? What? What do you say to things like that? Oh? It makes me so mad because it's just and it's always like stupid, like rich white guys on Twitter that just feels the need to have opinions about Oh, well, Brad, students don't need a union. Video game workers on need union. Journalist don't in the union. You're not working in a coal mine or in a factory. Okay? Do you have a boss? It? Does you rely on someone else's decisions
to pay your bills? Do you have to go to an office you have coworkers? Are you getting mistreated or getting disrespected? Like? Are you going to a job? Do
you work for someone? Then you need a union. It is ridiculous to act as though different categories of work or whether were you doing like the white collar blue collar sort of dichotomy or whatever other artificial division that somebody with an interest in preserving capital likes to lean on Like it's it's never been the case that only one type of worker, one demographic of worker, is allowed to have a union or is encouraged to have a union, is benefited from having a union, Like every type of
worker can benefit from having a union, and it's not even necessarily you don't have to go through the specific process of like filing for an election too, with an LFP doing all of the kind of bureaucratic rent a bs that a lot of workers are kind of forced to deal with. Now to form a union, you can just get together with your coworkers and try and make some ship happen. Like there's no one way to be
a union member. There's no one way to be a union, and they're all valid and important, and honestly, building collective power with your coworkers is the most effective and empowering thing that you can do, because one worker on their own can only do so much, but a bunch of us, whether it's five or fifty or five hundred, that's how
you move mountains. Whether you work in an office, where you work in a coal mine and you work at Amazon, or you're a gig worker like someone is trying to screw you over, and the only way you can stop that is by getting together with a bunch of other people who are feeling screwing screwed over doing something about it. You.
I love how you put that. And that's the thing that I really love about talking about labor and that you know, collective organizing, and it's something I really see as a value that it's about pole banning together oftentimes against massive, powerful companies like Amazon that have like teams of lawyers and pr and all of this. But even with all that institutional power, they're not more powerful than the collective. They're not more powerful than people coming together.
Is that something that you see in these union stories as well. Yeah, I mean, Jeff Bezos is the new gul Like we talked about, we're in the new Gilded Age. The railroad barons, like they controlled the rails, they control all the capital, but the workers built those rails, and the workers shut them down a whole bunch then struck fear to the hearts of the capitalist class, like there's there's always more of us than there are of them.
And I think that's something that workers sometimes forget because we are so disenfranchise and isolated and beating down. But the people on top never forget that, and that's why they get so frightened and anxious when they see workers organizing, because they know that they're outnumbered and that if a whole bunch of people want to make them do something, you know, we've done it before and we'll do it again. Like there's the history of labor in this country is
very complicated. There's a lot of wins, there's a lot of losses. There's a lot of struggle and bloodshed and beautiful things and terrible things. But every step forward that we've made as a country has come from workers, has come from regular working people down in their tools and saying all right, I've had enough of this ship. Let's do something. And that is something that has not gone away, and especially now I think we're there's something we're gonna
keep seeing more of. Because it's easier for people to be connected to one another, it's easier for people to see other folks taking control. Whether you're you know a Starbucks customer, you buy stuff from Amazon, you've got an r e I, you have a friend who works as a grad student, like someone in your life is probably part of some kind of organizing effort. And if they're not, you can help them start, or you can start your own. Like,
the possibilities are endless. Let's hit quick break at her back this this right here, Um, this is gonna be the catalysts were the revolution. That's exactly what this is. Back in April, Amazon warehouse workers on Staten Islands JFK eight, the Amazon warehouse with the most employees in the state of New York, want a historic bid to form a labor union. It's the very first Amazon facility in the United States to have a successful union election, which is huge.
So we know that workers at JFK A, the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, they won a union election and they kind of went against some of the conventional wisdom, you know, they started their own independent organization instead of trying to join and got established national union. And I've read some of your writing on this and it sounds like of you, it really just comes down to the workers. Um, can you tell us more about kind of like what
you mean by this. Yeah, So here's the thing. Like what Amazon labor union organizers did was incredible and inspiring and so important, and it's also not anything new, right, the idea of building a union from the ground up, of building real human bonds and connections and solidarity, forming a community to fight instead of you know, following us prescriptive playbook doing what you're supposed to do, because that's how it's done, that's how it sometimes works, like everyone
has to do anything like this is uh, this is the thing. I mean, that's one of the reasons they're so successful. They kind of threw out that playbook and drew on whether or not it was intentional. They drew on these kind of historical examples of workers in their
position doing the exact same thing. Because the workers that organized at JFK A predominantly like younger folks, queer and transpose, black and brown workers, immigrant workers, multi lingual, multigenerational, I'm a vast multi racial, multigender, multi everything kind of coalition. And that is how workers have one throughout history. And that is not something that you maybe find in every mainstream labor history book, but that is just true. That's
just how it is. I Mean, one of the parallels that I, as a labor nerd I like I like to draw between JFK A UH in history is um what Dorothy Lee Bolden was able to do in the sixties in Atlanta, and she was a domestic worker from the age of nine, like really the majority of black women in women in that city in that time that had a job that worked in domestic service. And she realized, like, Okay, we're not being paid enough, our work isn't being treated
properly as labor. We're being treat like garbage, and you know what, like there's a lot of us, maybe we can do something about this. She was actually lived a few doors down from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And she was commisserating with him one day and he told her, like towards it. You know, you can just do something yourself, if you want to change things, if you want to organize things, like just do it. And she did. She organized that the National Domestic Workers Union of America, which
wasn't a recognized like standard labor union. It wasn't operating within that framework. It was an independent organization and she had at its peak the membership roles hit I think ten thousand people, so all black women domestic works in Atlanta, and they built power, and they build political power. They educated one another, they shared resources. In order to join, all you had to show up with was a dollar and a voter registration card showing the intersection between different
movements for justice. And it's such a cool example because she did it her way and she made a huge difference. You can see there's a direct line from dorce Lee Bolders organization the sixties to the current National Domestic Workers Alliance, which I mean in Philly a couple of years ago they managed to pass an incredibly impactful bill that helped get healthcare for domestic workers in my city. Like, everything builds on the work that someone did before, whether it's
in nineteen sixty or eighteen sixty. And I'm just excited to see what's gonna happen in fifty years when someone younger than me writes a book and interviews Chris Smalls and asked what inspired him? Right, Because we're all part of them. We're all links in a very long chain, and you know, one link can do something cool, but that whole long chain, that's how we get close to where we need to be. I have chills. What what a description? I used to talk to a lot of
union meetings. I love us is historical? Uh? It's Amazon versus the people. The people have spoken. That's Chris Smalls, the president and founder of the Amazon Labor Union. He started working in Amazon warehouses during COVID when everybody, myself included, was ordering a ton of stuff on Amazon. Chris started to speak out about how warehouses were putting workers at risk by failing to meet basic COVID mitigation protocols. So
Chris organized a walk out in protest. He was fired that same day for, according to Amazon, failing to meet social distancing protocols. So basically, Amazon was claiming that Chris was the one who was failing to keep Amazon workers safe, not them, which is a little sketchy. So Chris organized. He started the Congress of Essential Workers, which later backed
the formation of the Amazon Labor Union. Amazon suits like former Obama administration spokesperson turned Amazon PR and policy chief Jay Carney and David Zablotsky personally smeared Chris in leaked notes. They called him not smart and not articulate. In fact, they thought Chris was so not smart that their plan, according to these reports, was to make Chris the face of the movement, because certainly that would tank it. Only
it backfired. Chris, it turns out, was an incredibly effective organizer and spokesperson and would go on to usher in the very first unionized Amazon warehouse in history. I mean, it's it's so you've just hit on a couple of
things that I am fascinated by. One. I do think we have this this issue not just in in labor organizing, but in organizing in general, where it's so tempting to have there be one face, like this is the person who started this whole thing, when the reality is it's often so many different stories and voices coming together, and I get the inclination to make it about one central figure that like that is such a best, such a powerful motivating thing just in our culture, but that sometimes
it can obscure what you were just talking about. That it's a lineage, it's about a lot of people coming together and inspiring each other. Yeah, I saw it was It was interesting because Twitter is always going to Twitter. But I saw there was some criticism because people were excited about Chris Malls, who is the leader of them the labor Union, who was kind of the spark that
started that whole movement. When he was fired in twenty nineteen for protesting about COVID safety, like you gotta hand it to the guy, even like like sometimes it is okay to life and I of someone when they have done something incredible, And I think it is important for us to have those working class heroes. You know, of course, like no one person does everything. People are flawed, people
are complicated. We shouldn't, you know. Hero worship is not something that I would recommend, but acknowledging and appreciating someone's skill and someone's important to a movement that doesn't take away from the collective effort. That's just kind of giving somebody their flowers and they deserve them. And I think something that you know, President Smallest has done in a really wonderful way is making clear like the Amazon Labor
Union organizing Committee, like all of us did this. All of us are in this together, like a lot of the other organizers are public to Dirk Palmer, Angelica and just Team Medina, like it was clearly a very collective effort. But you know, I I think it's okay to get excited about have a one person, you know, getting a little bit more attention, because I mean, we need more heroes.
We need more heroes that look like us and sound like us, and especially the fact that like a young handsome black man with gold teeth and tattoos is like the face of the labor movement in America right now. That is phenomenal, Like that is going to keep the movement moving, That is going to bring more people in. We do not need more white guys in suits, like we got some good ones, shout out to them. But like the white guys in suits are also a lot of the time the people that have their boots on
our neck. I think it is very important to recognize who the working classes and what they look like, what we look like and sound like a talk like to build this connections, to bring more people in and show that there's so much more room in the movement for every other cut type of person. And you know, I don't I don't want to talk too much it on the white guys and suites. Some of them were great, but of them are and they've had plenty of a
time to bask in their attention over the years. I think it is perfectly fine to give someone else's shot. Absolutely every single time I see a photo or a video of Chris Small's and it's fitted in his dow rat talking to an elected official. I'm like, yes, this is like, it just feels good to see. It just feels like and honestly, if I'm being honest, him being like his trajectory is what got me fired up about
the Amazon fight. I will never forget the way that Amazon suits used this like very clearly racially coded language to refer to him and discredit him. He's inarticulate, he's not smart, he's not a deep thinker. And I feel like every black and brown person, every immigrant, or anybody connected this to one of those communities knew exactly what
these Amazon suits were trying to do. And what's so funny is that a they were really downplaying the multi racial workers that that that keep their company running, that
made that like they would be nothing without. And I think that they really kind of shot themselves in the foot because in the end, they made Chris Chris like this lionized face of their movement beca like it kind of in spite of their trying to discredit him, And why they couldn't have picked a more effective spokesperson right, like the wrong one for that if they're trying to keep like they even said in some of their little leaked internal memos like we're going to make him the
face of this and I remember when they want he tweeted like, you know, thanks like a call. That was
the worst mistake I ever made. It was like it just shows this massive disconnect between the people in the c suite doing whatever the fund was they do all day and the people actually working and living these communities and trying to build power, trying to survive, Like why wouldn't people respond to a character like Chris, Like why wouldn't people want to talk to other folks in the organizing committee to speak their language and live in their
neighborhoods and take the bus with them? Like why would someone listen to some rich guy in a suit and when they couldn't talk to someone that they're used to seeing, like out in the neighborhood, who like someone whose cousin? You know? Like why it's it's it. It's like a century apart thinking about the way that the workers in the organizing committee Amazon were able to build power and
enbridge these kind of artificial divisions. It reminds you of this example there with me again, I'm a giant er.
I just wrote a whole book about it, but in nine the Great Sugar strik in Hawaii, and at that time and probably still but especially at that time, the sugar game plantations and the islands were owned entirely by white guys who lived in the mainland, and they were worked by native Hawaiians as well as Chinese, Korean, Puerto Rican, Filipino, Japanese immigrants, but predominantly Asian workforce from all sorts of different places, lots of different languages, and the bosses had
a very explicit policy of treating different workers differently, unequally, so like some workers made more than others, they kept all of the workers in different segregated camps so that Chinese workers and Filipino workers, Korean workers wouldn't really see one another, wouldn't really talk to one another. And they did that because they wanted to make sure of the workers. When organized, they wanted to be able to use different groups of workers against one another, as in like earlier strikes,
Filipino workers are brought into act as strike breakers. When Japanese field workers went on strike, there are a lot of instances of that kind of thing happening, and when it came time to strike in nix the ilw IN National Longshore Warehouse Workers Union, really cool radical union. Their histories read, uh, there's time to strike, and they realized, Okay, we can't let them break as apart like that again. We need to pull people together, and how do we
do that. They brought in translators and made sure everybody and every meeting felt heard and understood what was happening. They had different groups of workers cooked for one another and share recipes, the build community that way. Same thing
they did in the parking lot at Staten Island. They brought people together on a human level and show them, you know, you're all being exploited, you're all being treated like garbage, you're all being You're all in this together, whether or not you chose to be, so why not embrace it and try to become more powerful together? And it worked and they won. They wont like the first
big rais in like twenty years. And that's exactly what I thought about when I heard about, you know, the barbecues and the Joel Off Rice and all of the just the very personal, intimate kind of organizing and connecting those happening in the parking lot, in the break room in Amazon and JFK Like when you connect with people as people and listen to them and hear them, that's when magic happens. Like it sounds so basic, but I feel like people in charge don't get that because they
don't see us as people. Yeah, that's and I think it really goes back to what you were saying, that people coming together, people uniting in the power of community and shared vision and a collective, that that's such a powerful force. And it's not surprising to me that the powers that be, whether it's you know, sugarcane owners or Amazon, is like, Oh, we gotta keep these people divided, we
gotta keep them. We have to really inflame these divisions because when they come together, there's more of them than there are of us, and they are very powerful. And so just figuring out ways to to like really rely on those community bonds, I think it's so important and valuable, and like unions have screwed that up over the years.
To the labor movement is not the track record is not great, especially when it comes to like I mean even now right so earlier, I always think about this example that makes me so mad, the American Federation of Labor, which was like an earlier organization that later got folded into the say yoh, that's a whole thing. But I like the eight hundreds eighteen eighties, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, the NFL were big supporters. They're all
about it. And that was obviously incredibly xenophobic, racist legislation that kept Chinese workers and other Asian workers out of the country for decades. And at that point those labor leaders embraced that because they didn't want people to come in and take their members jobs. And now that is a familiar refrain that we've seen throughout the centuries. Like at one point it was women, than it was black workers,
Chinese and other other Asian workers. Now it's Mexican, South American Central American workers who are being painted with that brush.
Like there's always this reactionary impulse in some corners to say that all these other people are coming in and taking everything we built, how do you think you built in the first place by organizing people and trying to help workers, Like that kind of mentality is harmed the movement and harm so many workers over the century, Like just those thought of seeing a new group of workers coming in who are more vulnerable who are desperate for work,
who are in a marginalized position, and thinking oh, no, they're gonna mess with our our guys are people, instead of thinking, oh, we need to organize them and bring them in so we can help them out, and like our union will be stronger as a result. The unions who have done that are still around, like they are more effective than the ones that were you know, exclusionary.
And I refused to kind of get with the times and realize that all workers deserving union and all workers maybe desert to join your union depending on what you do. It is, like I think, a good example of unions kind of and this isn't necessarily like um, that type
of division. This is more like just workplace division. But I think about the United Auto Workers, who are obviously the storied industrial union, Like there's a touch it them in the book, and they're you know, they've been around forever.
They're synonymous with like Detroit at the rust belt and like, you know, the automotive industry, and right now, out of their four hundred thousand members, a quarter of those hundred thousand people they are grand students, They work in education, they work in colleges, and universities in California and across the country, like, and that is the big shift, and that's a great like, that is how you evolve, That
is how you grow and stay relevant. Like sure, an adject professor, you know, university California has a different experience from someone working in a plant in Flint, Michigan. But that doesn't mean that they still don't need those higher wages as better working conditions, that protections of the union contract, like we're all in this together, and the sooner than people realize that an act and organized around that principle, like is a sooner we're gonna get you done, the
sooner we'll get free. I mean literally, it's so simple. People have funked it up so much earlier. More after a quick break, let's get right back into it. So this is probably where I should say that I have a pretty complicated personal relationship with Amazon. If you walked into my apartment building on any given day, there's probably a few Amazon boxes shamefully stacked up in the trash, And I honestly don't want to tell you how much
I ordered from them. Let's just say it's a lot, and I'd be willing to bet that I am not alone. It's just the truth that our myself very much included individual actions impact what life is like for workers at
Amazon warehouses. So what should we do so to that vein of sort of the sooner we realize we're all in this together, I have to sort of admit something something that I'm like, it's one of it's probably there's probably not many things in my life that I am like more deeply personally ashamed of than my personal relationship
to Amazon. I got very hooked on it during the pandemic um And what I really mean is like I was clearly sort of like relying on it to experience like a short term serotonin boost of like new ship at my door, because I was depressed and said, like like most people, oh god, there's that's a four There's just a four box right behind you, right behind this laptop that you can't see. So I and I think there are probably people out there are listening who can relate.
You know, do you think that there is a need for all of us to sort of recalibrate around the human cost of companies like Amazon and sort of just like what it means do I listened to Amazon workers talk about how they're not robots. But I think it can be hard for people, especially people who might kind of have to rely on Amazon for whatever reason, like maybe they have a disability, maybe they're a new mom, and like, you know, it's just like how how ship
gets on in their household? Um, I don't know, I guess I I wonder how can we Is there a way for us to sort of meaningly recalibrate so that people to to sort of feel more attuned with the fact that, like, yeah, the reason why I was able to get a new hat in twenty four hours is because of a person who brought it here and a person who put it in a box for me. And that's hard. That's like one of the great connundrums of modern existence, right, like the idea of like no equo
consumption under capitalism. I'm probably not even smart enough to discuss all the implications of that, right, But and I do think that it's important to recognize the individual people should not necessarily be on the hook for the actions of massive corporations and the failed government that it's allowed that things to get to this point. I mean, I personally try to avoid Amazon, but like half the time. That just means I'm trying to find something on Walmart
dot com. You know, like it's not we're kind of we're stuck in this current reality. I mean, you can do little things like instead of pushing for two dayship and go for like the later option, you know, like if you're able, just go to the store, like if you are not. Because a lot of people, like you said, are dependent on delivery services because they're disabled, they're being to compromise, they have other stressors in their life that
means that they need to use these services. And I think that is fine, Like people need to survive and people need to thrive in the ways that they're able to. But yeah, I think that ditching Amazon would be cool. But then if everyone in the nation was like, we're gonna boycott Amazon and then did it, that would be cool.
That would have an impact. But the US government still pays Amazon to like use the internet, like there's all their their tentacles are so to deep and everything we consume in every part of our existence as like beings who use technology, that there's only so much the individual consumers can do. So I don't know, like try to avoid it if you can, But like halftime. My mother in law sends us crap off Amazon anyway, Like she
does not listen to me. She's Italian. It's a hard question, right, Like, I think even what you're talking about now, like this step of realism, Like I got this because a person brought it to me, A person pack that that person might be in pain, that person might be having a
hard time. Even just internalizing and understanding that aspect of things will probably impact your consumer habits and will probably impact the way you see, you know, petitions about workers asking for better working conditions, or the way that you support union drives. Like, I think the first step that any person can take, no matter the situation, is to recognize the human cost of this. You know, these consumption patterns.
This set up this whole, you know, a capitalist healthscape we're trapped within, Like and then what you do from there is kind of up to you. But I think the putting the onus on individual people to fix all this stuff isn't really fair when we have a government and a social system and a capitalist society to blame.
You know, you can if we all got together and did a boycott, that would be cool, But I don't know It's it's a hard question, like how do you go up against a giant when you're not like because consumers. There's probably where the consumers could organize against Amazon, but I don't know how. Look like what the boycott is strike. It's I feel like people I see people talking about all we get a boycott Amazon all the time whenever
news comes out of how terrible they are. I'm like, yeah, avoiding if you can, but I think we need some kind of greater, like concentrated strategy if we really wanted to take him down, and then what what kind of after them? Where we gonna go after Walmart and Target? Like that's cool too, but it's it's a big thorny thing. And if it comes down to it, at the very least,
don't pick twenty four hours shipping. Yeah, that's that's a that's a good like practical if you've got to if you've got a little bit of a problematic relationship with Amazon, like I do, at least you know you can you can make that experience if you're going to buy from them, make that experience a little less crappy for some of the workers who are doing the work to bring you your serotonin boost or the like life saving medicine that
you need or what have you. Yeah, it's it comes down to remembering that there are people in those warehouses, and a lot of them are in pay, and a lot of them are struggling. Some of them are going to lose their lives because the way the Amazon operates.
And I mean, maybe I'm going to be in the electoral guy, but pressuring your elected officials to try and do something about Amazon incorporations like that, that could be an avenue for people to I feel like there's a lot of different ways to slay a giant, or at least, you know, cut a couple pounds of flesh off of them.
And hopefully one thing we'll see you from the success of Amazon, they re union drive and you know, hopefully more rumblings that we'll see across the countries that people will realize what's happening and realize the role they play and just maybe re evaluate the way that they interact with that system. And you know, if they have friends in Amazon, maybe tell them about the union that you knew would be a good step too. Yeah. I like that.
I mean it's so interesting because I was reading the story yesterday, I think it was yesterday about how the food delivery service grub Hub had this three they were gonna do free lunch for three hours yesterday and it
basically was a ship show. All the kitchens were really backed up, and come to find out, they didn't tell any of the kitchens or the delivery drivers that this was happening, And so part of me was like, are they just so divorced from the idea of like human labor that they didn't even think that they needed to give these people a heads up on what they were doing.
It's like, I mean, they don't consider those people employees even though they clearly work for the country, and they don't consider them equal partners when they're dealing with these independent restaurants. I mean, grab mob. It's so shady. I was just reading today, like I live across the corner from like an incredible Indonesian restaurant and they're they're posting on Instagram like please don't order for rebhub. We didn't
ask to be on there. They don't have our prices right, Like, we were trying to get them to take it down, like they will do that. They'll try and encroach on independent businesses like whole operations just because they think it might get them more of a commission, Like they don't care about the people they quote unquote partner with at all, whether their business owners and restaurant workers or the delivery workers.
Like it does come with them down to that idea that the people that are doing this labor are invisible to the people that are making these decisions that impact their days, like, oh, they'll they'll figure it out. Oh, there's plenty of drivers. Oh this there's so many ways to justify treating people poorly if you don't have their welfare and their well being at the top of your mind.
And that's clearly what happens with these tech companies. They don't like the fact that so many people that work for tech companies are resigned in this weird nether realm of gig work instead of just being given a W two and clearly acknowledged as the employees they are, Like when someone won't even acknowledge that you work for them, like they're certainly not gonna acknowledge your humanity if they don't value enough to give you the proper legal paperwork.
They do not care how your day is going, and that is the problem. It is a problem. I mean, it's I it's so interesting to me how oftentimes tech company, like when we're talking about organized, organized labor, it's often conversations about tech companies. Do you do you see technology and labor as linked? Oh yeah, And I'm not I'm
not a technology guy. And there's definitely reporters who do really good work in that space, but especially folks at Motherboard shout out to Edward and Weso and Lauren Gurley.
They're really on top of those those intersections. I'm kind of a dummy when it comes to tech stuff, but even just in terms of what you see happening, whether it's in like the gig work world, or the increasing surveillance that companies are able to of you against you need organizes this you know, Amazon's little band word list on their internal chat or the whole big brother aspect
of them being able to monitor everything you do. Like, technology and labor have always been connected, I mean, going back to the Industrial Revolution, right, like that new technology that came in back in the day pulled people out of uprooted society, pulled people into these factories and these dark satanic mills, totally kind of reconceived the way people
related to labor and wage labor specifically. I mean, one of the things about tech work and like gig work, I keep harping on this gigwork gig economy thing, but I think it is so insiduous and it is such a big issue in labor right now, is that that's not necessarily a new thing either. Because when you think about gigork, like someone who is a gig worker, you're giving You're giving little assignments and you get a little bit of money for every little piece that you do.
You don't have a specific set work day or set hours. You're just kind of picking up whatever scraps come your way and trying to piece together something you can survive on. That is a very old concept, going back to like the early nineteen hundreds, something called piece work. Garment workers in New York City specifically at that time, spend all day laboring at the factory. And all day I mean like twelve plus hours and poorly ventilated, hot or cold,
locked door just nightmare places. They and a lot of
them were women, a lot of them were children. Supposed would go spend all day in the factory and then come home and they would bring home more scraps of fabric or unfinished projects and work on these pieces and they would get paid by the piece, And basically like they're kind of their predecessors of the folks that are stuck in this predicament right now because they didn't have let me, they had their their day job, but they were trying to make more money because they're being paid
so poorly at their day job by doing these bits and pieces, and of course they got short changed. Of course they were. You know, this isn't like in the era of candle lights. So imagine someone hunched over sewing a shirtwaist at one am in the morning for that to wake up at five to go to the factory.
Like that is not that far removed from what today's delivery drivers and rideshare app drivers and all of the other things that are now being grouped into this sort of amorphous gig work, remote work, just this weird morass
of garbage. It happened before, and regulations and labor laws and progress in that space kind of chipped away with that, and right now we're kind of in this weird wild West zone where protech companies can do whatever they want, which seems like maybe somebody in charge to do something about that. But half people in charge or like friends with the tech people. So it's a it's a little bit of a different world, but some things really haven't changed. Yeah,
I definitely, I definitely see that as well. UM. So I want to talk about the book a little bit so fight like hell the untold story, untold history of American labor. Um, you really right a at the ways that people who have been historically marginalized, like women in black folks and indigenous folks, um, were the lifeblood of labor and always have been, and like our stories and our voices were always there, even though you know, I feel like the face of what we think of as
as someone involved in the union is like a white male. Um. I guess my question is one, how do we make sure that we're telling a more authentic story of what the face of labor actually looks like? And are there any do you have a favorite figure or a person who you want to get more shine in the history of labor? Yeah, well, okay gives it the second part in the second but I think like it's one of the most important things to realize. I recognized. It's like,
you know that the subtitles the untold history. And let's not to say that folks haven't been telling these stories the whole time, right, Like the workers told them in the first place, and then contemporary journalists and chroniclers wrote them down, and then historians and academic research is arguas they dug into the past and pulled out all these pieces and preserved them and analyzed them and you know,
tuck them away somewhere safe. So then like journalists and nerves like me could come in and kind of pull together and synthesize that information and bringing out further people to see. I think so much of it comes down to people that are in a position to elevate these stories and write about labor, write about history, do it in a way that's accessible and intersectional and inclusive, Like
it's not that hard. Like literally, you could like any labor book you could pick up, like they they are black and brown and indigenous and queer and disabled folks and women and every other gender like in those stories too. It just depends on what you choose to focus on.
And I think that is something that people can be more mindful of and certainly not folks in the academic space who are like very specifically research specific groups or eras like um, whether it's like Judy Young who wrote a book called Unbound Feet of social History of San Francisco that was hugely impactful for my research into that area, or doctor T Hunter who wrote to Enjoy My Freedom,
which is about Black Boom's labor post reconstruction. Like, academics have done this work, but it me it's not necessarily on offer to everyone, right, Like you can't necessarily walk into a library and pick up their books that you should be able to. It's there's a little bit of a gap between what's available to folks the academic space most available to folks that like maybe walk by Barnes
and Noble on their way home from work. And it's really important to me to pull together as much as I could from that history, and you know, pull from tons and tons of research and different historians and newspapers and magazine articles and interviews and put it together in a way that made it very clear that everyone else
has always been here and it's done incredible things. And I hope that people will read my book and then read the bibliography and follow those bread Chrombs and find some more of those those important writings, because this is just the beginning. This is kind of an intro to a lot of these folks. Like one of the people to into your second question, one of the people that I was so excited to write about because I thought I knew so much about her, and it turns out
I was wrong. The woman named Lucy Parsons who and I knew about her just from my involvement like Radical Space. She's kind of like an anarchist ur icon. And I had read an earlier biography of her from the seventies. I'd read her own writings. I thought I had a
pretty good grip on who she was. But then uh, his story named Jacqueline Jones put out a book a couple of years ago called The Goddess of Anarchy that was this exhaustively researched biography of Lucy Parson's life, and it turns out that the common wisdom about her in her life was pretty wrong. Um during her lifetime and Lucy Parsons, she was kind of a chameleon. It was
kind of her. She decided to shape shift a little bit and hide who she was in order to be more impactful in her work and more easily relatable to the white factory workers she was trying to organize, right, because she presented herself as a mixed like Anish and indigenous maiden from Texas. That's as she said she was, and she said she was from there. And she moved to Chicago with her husband, Albert Parsons in the late eighteen hundreds, and they set up shop and started organizing
an anarchist community in the labor community. Like she was a dressmaker and she organized lady like women garment workers, and she she had like a very interesting overlap, uh when it comes to like labor and anarchist politics, revolutionary politics, because at that time a lot of those folks were the same people like that was a very not incestuous, but a very interconnected community, like the kind of still is now, right Like radicals, we've always been here and
we've always been getting up to mischief and the labor movement elsewhere. But so yeah, she was she and she was a co founder of the Industrial Works in the World IWW like she she had an impact in the labor community certainly and in labor history. But Lucy Parsons was not who she said she was. She was born
in Virginia on a plantation. She was a black woman who was born enslaved, who moved out to Textas following emancipation, and then she kind of built up her own mythology to protect herself and for other reasons that I don't know what what what through her head. I haven't met her, but she was just as fascinating character, and she intersected with so many different pieces of so many different movements.
But I tried to write a better in a way that showed like how important and interesting and radical and mility she was, but also acknowledged like she was not perfect, like even outside of her own identity, and you know the way she presented herself like she didn't She made some pretty gnarly decisions in her life, and you could read more about it, but it was it was a challenge to write about a figure that I've admired for so long and to kind of address a little bit
of the aguilier, messy humanity of a person like that. But I was really excited to include her because I feel like she's very well known in radical circles, but labor people, unless you're like in Chicago and have a specific interest in that point in time. You probably don't known that much about Lucy Carson, so you probably have a pretty negative view of her and the other anarchists. And I was hoping to kind of, I don't know, presented a more balanced view of someone who I think
is a really important historical figure. And that's fascinating and it really does go back to recognizing humanity and sort of if you only know Lucy Parsons as this, you know, hero figure, that you miss out on all these other parts of who she was and how and what made her her and how she showed up in the world.
And is I don't know, isn't it better to have a messy, complex, honest human person to to to, you know, look to for guidance than a hero than someone who, like you know, is just isn't isn't all those things right? Because that just makes it seem like a storybook kind of situation where fairi'sale instead of a flesh and blood person historical thing that happened. And so many of the people in this book are complicated or they've been either people that have been kind of left out or they
have been included. But not in the fullness of their whole experience. Like um I I started out the book in one of the earlier chapters talking about the Triangle Shreways Factory fire, which I feel like a lot of people know about that. That's a big one. And Clara Lemlick, one of the organizers of the Garment Workers Union, that was kind of in that media right, like she was part of the uprising of the twenty thousand in the nineteen o nine she that was before the Triangle Factory fire.
But they're connected because Clara Lemlich, who was often painted as this just kind of spunky girl who stood up in a meeting and said we're gonna want strike, like she was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who had been organizing for years. She had gotten her raps broken by the cops on the picket line, Like she was an organizer, she was out there, like she was not just a
spontaneous romantic heroine like she was in that struggle. And like the connection with the Triangle surew Tactory fire is um that the work that Clara Lemlicks and other organizers predominantly at that point used to be being Jewish women
and Italian women, the work they had done. If the owners of that factory had signed onto the agreement that those organizers and that strike forced to, like most of the other garment factors in the area Manhattan Design, those workers probably wouldn't have burned to death, like they were one of the only factories that didn't sign on to
these more increased safety chords. So that's yeah, I'm going, as I guess, a slightly different direction, but it just shows that like the these human people that are so connected to so many other things happening, like you're no one's just a hero. You know. Sometimes you're someone who got beat up by the cops and decided, Okay, well I'm gonna keep going. I'm going to force this system
to change because it's not fair. Starting with the Starbucks and Buffalo in Starbucks, barristas have been unionizing across the country in states like California and Utah, and a lot of this energy is being sparked by a new generation
younger folks. Seventies seven percent of young adults support unions, according to a September Gallop Pole and have to say that feels pretty darn hopeful were in this moment where it feels like a lot of big wins for labor, you know, the first Starbucks munizing, you know, the JFK eight. I'm seeing a lot of interesting chatter about unions on places like TikTok where younger folks hang out, like gen Z, so they're really fire up about unions. Are you hopeful
that we're entering this new era of union power? I am always hopeful to the point of almost being a Pollyanna about these things. Um, And that's I think that is. It is definitely a conscious decision to be hopeful and be optimistic because the labor movement has kind of been in decline since really before I was born, and I'm thirty four, so I guess, like the the entirety that I have been on this earth, the numbers of union density have been falling. You know, anti union legislation has
been cutting us off at the knees. There have been all of these factors like manufacturing. Laura knows what happened. They're like, there've been all these factors kind of pulling the move meant out of the movement, like kind of good damp, putting a damper on things will say, and you know, facts aren't always fun numbers are not always fun, especially when you're looking at your density. But we are in a moment where, like you said, specifically, the younger
generation is interested and fired up and paying attention. And not only are they paying attention, they're doing something. They're organizing. I mean the Starbucks workers and Amazon workers like those
are younger people. Like not only are the younger people, they're queer at transit, black and brown immigrant workers, like workers from these marginalized backgrounds that have always formed the backbone and the labor movement but have not necessarily gotten their do like these are the workers propelling things forward,
and that is important and significance. And even some of the conversation I've seen, like on TikTok and other places where maybe a traditional labor union isn't the answer for some specific groups of people, that doesn't mean that then thinking about it is inconsequential. That doesn't mean they're going to find a different way to order and eyes and
find a different way to harness the labor. Like I got to email from a person actually get them back, um about a bunch of independent sellers on Etsy who want to form an independent Seller's guild and that isn't That is very interesting, Like I need to do a little bit of reading to figure out what to tell them, because like that's kind of a whole bunch of small business owners coming together and they want to organize against this bigger company that they are kind of in dialogue with.
Like that is not like that's tricky, that's a little complicated, but it's very interesting, Like that is not something that would have happened five years ago, or maybe even a couple of years ago. Like all of these new organizing wins and some of the setbacks and some of the losses, like that is all working in concert to get people excited and give people an option, because I think a lot of folks for a very long time have maybe either felt or been made to feel like the labor
movement isn't for them, like unions aren't for them. Like back when I was advice, when someone asked me if I want to unionize, I was like, we can that, like we were we were in Williamsburg, Like there's Kampucha and the friends. Like really, like my dad's operating engineer, I can be in the same movement as him, and I could, and so can anyone else. There are a lot of ways to form a union, a lot of ways to organize with your co workers and build power.
And I think this current generation, and gosh, it feels so basic, feel so old to say that. I'm like, not old, I promise, but definitely people younger than me are doing really big things. And I don't think that's gonna stop. Like I know that Amazon and Stopbucks are going to pull out every stop and use every nefarious legal means and probably extra legal means they can think of to try and slow this way down and try to you know, stave off union negotiations and put a
stop to this. But I don't think you can put that lightning back in the bottle. And I think if started, those big corporations keep actively trying to bust up these unions and break down these organized their spirits like they're gonna be consequences. You can't be a big quote unquote progressive company and be a union buster and have anyone take you seriously. Like, I think the tide has turned
in a very real way. And I'm sure that there are labor stories an economists who would have a whole bunch of like you know, like my broader perspective at numbers and have a lot of things to say about that. But as someone who's just like studied unions a lot and talked to a lot of workers, and it's very excited about unions in general. Like it feels like a very cool time to be alive, to be paying attention.
And I am so grateful to those younger workers who are kind of pushing the movement in this direction where it's needed to go for so long. I love it. I love it. I love a helpful ending. I'm just I believe that we will win, even if it's after I'm dead. Kim, Where can people keep up with all the amazing worker up to you? And get the book so you can buy the book anywhere? I mean fun Amazon, but if you got it, you can get it on Amazon.
But I always tell people to uh if you can either order from like bookshop or Indie Bound or like a dependent bookstore, or get it from the library. Like the library changed my life. I wouldn't be here without it, So if the library hasn't, just get it there. I don't care. I just want you to read it. And I am aggressively online. I am on Twitter at Groom Kim and on Instagram is Kim Kelly writer, and I
have a Patreon thing. I think it's just Kim Kelly and um, I'm yeah, I'm too old for TikTok and all that, but maybe if I figure it out you can. Hopefully you'll find me on there. But ye give me a little time. My thirties man of Falling Apart? Awesome? Is there anything that I did not ask that you want to make sure it gets included? Mmmm? This is incredible.
But I guess the last thing I will say is that I hope I wrote this book for workers and for regular people to read on their breaks or on the bus or when you get home from a long day, to pick it up and page through it and hopefully find people on the pages that ring true to you.
I want people to see themselves in this book and to recognize that they are part of this incredible history and they're part of the future too, Like the labor movement has always belonged to all of us, whether or not the people empowered who wanted us to recognize that, And the only way we're going to get closer to being free is by working together and recognizing that power and fighting like hell to take what's ours. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our
March store at tangodi dot com Slash Store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi, You can reach us at Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangdi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Tod. It's a production of iHeart Radio and Unboss Creative edited by Joey pat Jonathan Strickland as our exegative producer. Terry Harrison is
our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amata was our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Toad. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on our Apple podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. It not have to will whi