Marginalized people are the lifeblood of organized labor — BEST OF TANGOTI

and the labor movement around the globe. So today we're revisiting our conversation with labor historian and punk rocker Kim Kelly, author of Fight Like Hell, The Untold History of American Labor, about why from Starbucks to tech workers, organized laborer is having a moment.

And even though we maybe used to have an idea that union member as being a white guy working at an auto factory or steel mill, the faith 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.

in the union. It wasn't something that really really talked about that much, or really it was, you know, really discussed. It was just part of the job, part of life, like, oh, yeah, that is in a union. That's why we have health insurance. That's why he has to go to those meetings sometimes, that's 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 at Vice, whereas the heavy metal editor and some colleagues pulled me aside or were like, hey, we want to form a union, what do you think. I'm 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 metal on the internet. But it turns out there was and.

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 and my worldview, and just kind of felt nice to join that family tradition. But I didn't really start writing about it with any sort of regularity or depth until we unionized, and I was already freelancing a lot working advice because they didn't pay as shit, until we organized another big endorsement for

unions in a workplace. Yeah, it was freelancing a ton, And really it just kind of happened by not by accident, but unexpectedly because I was writing a little bit of just freelance stuff about the prison industrial complex routine book, and I pitched them on a profile of Mother Jones, the labor leader. I thought, Okay, your audience is predominantly like younger women, Like, here's a cool I kind we

can talk about. And my editor 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'd 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 off about union stuff as like a baby organizer. And I wrote that article and

it kind of was like mini viral. People paying attention because in twenty 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 out as a freelancer, where 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 and 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 heavy metal shows, I thought, Okay, maybe it's time to actually try and do this. And here we are.

or you 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 worker, whether were you're 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 or is benefited from having a union, Like every type

of worker can benefit from having a union, and that's not even necessarily. You don't have to go through the specific process of like filing for an election with n RB, doing all of the kind of bureaucratic red tape bs that a lot of workers are kind of forced to deal with. Now to form a union, you can just get to get other with your coworkers and try and make some shit 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 miner, you work in 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 screwed over doing something about it.

coming together. Is that something that you see in these union stories as well?

are so disenfranchised and isolated and beaten 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 foward 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 shit. Let's

do something. And that is something that has not gone away, and especially now, I think we're something we're going to 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 a Starbucks customer, you buy stuff from Amazon, you go to REI, 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 take a click right.

So we know that workers at JFK eight, 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 sort of join and established national union. And I've read some of your writing on this and it sounds like to you it really just comes down to the workers. Can you tell us more about kind of like what you mean by this.

this is 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 to add JFKA predominantly like younger folks, queer and transpost black and brown workers, immigrant workers, multi lingual, multi generational, the best, multiracial, multi gender, multi

everything kind of coalition. And that is how workers have won 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 to draw between JFKA and history is 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 and women in that city in that time that had a job, they 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 true 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 doctor Martin Luther King Junior, and she was commisering with him one day and he told her, like, Dorothy, you know, you can just do something yourself, like if you want to change things, if you want to organize things,

like just do it. And she did. She organized it then that from Domestic Workers Union of America, which wasn't a recognized standard labor union. It wasn't operate within that framework. It was an independent organization and at its peak the membership roles hit I think ten thousand people, so all black women domestic workers in Atlanta, and they built power, and they built political power, they educated what 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 George Lee Bolden's organization in 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 going to happen in fifty years when someone younger than me writes a book and interviews Chris Smalls and

asks what inspired him? Right, Because we're all part of than We're all linked 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.

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 worker 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 Zablotski,

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, that 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, so you've just hit on a couple of things that I am fascinated by.

One I do think we have this issue not just 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 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.

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 whishdn't you know? Hero worship is not something that I would recommend, but acknowledging and appreciating someone's skill and someone's importance 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 Small's 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 too, Derk Palmer, Angelic and Justine Matina, like it was clearly a very collective effort. But you know, I think it's okay to get excited about having 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 class is and what they look like, what we look like, and sound like a talk like to build those 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 want to talk too much shit on the white guys and suits. Some of them are great, but some 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 a shot.

were trying to do. And what's so funny is that, a they were really downplaying the multi racial workers 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 like this lionized face of their movement because like it kind of in spite of their trying to discredit him, And boy, they couldn't have picked a more effective spokes person, right, like the wrong.

It's like it just shows this massive disconnect between the people in the c suite doing whatever the fuck is 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 that 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 could 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 like a century apart. But thinking about the way that the workers in the organizing committee Amazon were able to build power and bridge these kind of artificial divisions, it reminds

you of this example. They're with me again. I'm a giant. I just wrote a whole book about it. But in nineteen forty six, the Great Sugar Strike in Hawaii. At that time and probably still but especially at that time, the sugar game plantations in 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 prenominantly 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 that 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 the workers weren't organized. They wanted to be able to use different groups of workers against one another, and like earlier strikes, Filipino workers were brought in too active strike breakers. When Japanese field workers went on strike, there were a lot of instances of that kind of thing happening. And when it came time to strike in nineteen forty six, the ILWU in National Longshore and Warehouse

Workers Union were really cool radical union. Their history is read. There's time to strike, and they realized, Okay, we can't let them break us apart like that again. We need to pull people together, and how do we do that. They brought in translators and made sure everybody in every meeting felt heard and understood what's happening. They had different groups of workers cooked for one another and share recipes and build community that way. Same thing they did in

the parking lot at Staten Island. They brought people together on a human level and showed 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 won like the first big raised in

like twenty years. And that's exactly what I thought about when I heard about, you know, the barbecues and the jolof rice and all of the just the very personal, intimate kind of organizing and connecting those happening in the parking lot and then the breakroom in Amazon and JFKA. 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.

keep these people divided, We got to 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.

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 They'll say, oh, that's the whole thing, But I mean, like the eighteen hundreds, eighteen eighties, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, the AFL were big supporters, They're all about it,

and that was obviously incredibly xenophobrig 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, then it was black workers, Chinese and other Asian workers. 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, oh, these other people are coming in and taking everything we built. Wow, fuck 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 harms so many workers over the century, Like just the 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 guys, our 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've refused to kind of get with the times and realize that all workers deserve a union, and all workers maybe deserve to join your union depending on what you do. Is like I think a good example of unions kind of and this isn't necessarily like that type of division. This is

more like just workplace division. But I think about the United Autoworkers, who are obviously the storied industrial union, Like there's I touched on them in the book, and they're you know, they've been around forever. They're synonymous with like Detroit at the rust Bell and like you know, the automotive industry, and right now, out of their four hundred thousand members, a quarter of those one hundred thousand people they're 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 adjuct professor at 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, those better working conditions, that protection to the union contract, Like

we're all in this together. And the sooner than people realize that and act and organize around that principle, like sooner we're gonna get shit.

got very hooked on it during the pandemic. 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 shit at my door because I was depressed and said, like like most you, oh, there's a sepoura box right behind you, right behind this laptop that you can't see. So I yeah, And I think there are probably people out.

I don't know, I guess 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.

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 someone 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 day shipping, 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 mun to compromise, they have other stressors on 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 that their tentacles are so deep into everything we consume in every part of our existence, as like being to use technology that there's only so much 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 there's she does not

listen to me, she's to Tellian. So 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 pacted. 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 of the situation, is

to recognize the human cost of this. You know, these consumption patterns, this setup, this whole you know, 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, right, Like, how do you go up against a giant when you're not like because consumers there's probably way that consumers could organize against Amazon, but I don't know that will look like a boycott a strike. It's I feel like people I see people talking about, oh, we get a boycott Amazon all the time whenever news comes out of how terrible they are.

I'm like, yeah, avoid them if you can, But I think we need some kind of greater concentrated strategy if we really wanted to take them down, and then what will come after them? Would are we gonna go after Walmart and Target? Like that's cool too, but it's it's a big thorning thing. And if it comes down to it, at the very least, don't pick twenty four hours ship.

that could be an avenue for people too. 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 from the success of Amazon laboring and 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 reevaluate the way that they interact

with that system. And you know, if they have friends at Amazon, maybe tell them about the union they union. It would be a good step too.

basically was a shit 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.

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 they're business owners and restaurant workers or those livery 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 figure it out. Oh, there's plenty of drivers. Oh 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 now as the employees they are, like when someone will even acknowledge that you work for them, Like, they're certainly not going to 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.

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 levy against you need organize, you know, Amazon's little band word list on their internal chat or 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 an uprooted society, pulled people into these factories and these dark satanic mills totally kind of reconceive the way people related to labor and wage labor specifically. I mean. One of the things about tech work and like gigwork.

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 gigwork, like someone who is a gig worker. 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 workday 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 the early nineteen hundreds something called piece garment workers in New York City specifically that time, the would 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. Well, these folks 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 they're kind of the predecessors of the folks that are stuck in this predicament right now because they didn't have I mean, they had their their day job, but they

were trying to make more money. So 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 light. So imagine someone hunched over sewing a shirt waist at one am in the morning. Poor they had 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 gigwork, 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 at that, And right now we're kind of in this weird wild West zone where tech companies can do whatever they want, which seems like maybe somebody in charge to do something about that, but half the people in charge are like friends with the tech people. So it's a little bit of a different world. But some things really haven't changed.

is like a white male. 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 person who you want to get more shine in the history of labor?

important things to realize I'm recognized. It's like, you know, the subtitle is the Untold History, And that'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 as archivists, 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 nerds like me could come in and kind of pull together and synthesize that information

and bring it 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 there 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 whether it's like Judy Young who wrote a book called Unbound feed of social History of San Francisco that was hugely impactful for my research into that area, or doctor Turr Hunter who wrote to Enjoy My Freedom, which is about Black women's labor

post reconstruction. Like, academics have done this work, but it is 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 in the academic space and 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 breadcrumbs 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 your second question, one of the people that I was so excited to write about because I thought I knew so much about her. Turns out

I was wrong. A woman named Lucy Parsons who and I knew about her just from my involvement like Radical Space. She's kind of like an anarchist art 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 this history named Jacqueline Jones put out a book a couple of years ago called A Goddess of Anarchy that was

this exhaustively researched biography of Lucy Parson's life. And it turns out that the common wisdom about her and her life was pretty wrong during her lifetime, and Lucy Parsons, she was kind of a chameleon. It was kind of to 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 Spanish and indigenous

maiden from Texas. That's how she said she was, and she said she was from there. She moved to Chicago with her husband, Albert Parsons in the late eighteen hundreds, and they set up shop and started organizing in the

anarchist community and 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 when it comes to like labor and inarchist 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 it kind of still is now right like radicals, we've always been here, We've always

been getting up to mischief in the labor movement elsewhere. But so yeah, she was she and she was a co founder of the Industrial Works for 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 Texas 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 went through her head. I haven't met her, but she was just this fascinating character and she intersected with

so many different pieces of so many different movements. But I tried to write better in a way that showed like how important and interesting and like radical and militon 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 did. She made some pretty gnarly decisions in her life, and you can

read more about it. But 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

ugular and 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 know that much about Lucy Parson, so you probably have a pretty negative view of her and the other anarchists, and hoping to kind of, I don't know, present a more balanced view of someone who I think is a really important

historical figure.

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 mediu right, like she was part of the uprosing of the twenty thousand in nineteen oh 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 going to go on strike, like she was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who had been

organizing for years. She had gotten her ribs broken by the cops on a 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 of Shirtway factory fire is that the work that Clara Lemlix and other organizers predominantly at that point Eastern European Jewish women and Italian women,

the work they had done. If the owners of that factory had signed on to the agreement that those organizers in that strike forced, like most of the other garment factors in the area in Manhattan to sign those workers probably would't have burned to death, like they were one of the only factories that didn't sign on to these more increased safety cords. So that's yeah, I'm going I

guess a slightly different direction. But it just shows that like these human people that are so connected to so many other things happening, like you're in no one's just a hero, you know. Sometimes you're someone who got beat up by the cops and decided, Okay, I'm going to keep going. I'm going to force this system to change because it's not fair.

the first Starbucks unizing, 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?

at the knees. There have been all of these factors like manufacturing. Laura knows what happened there, Like, there have been all these factors kind of pulling the movement out of the movement, like kind of putting a damper on things. We'll 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 in 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 they younger people, they're queer at trands, at black and brown immigrant workers, like workers fromd these marginalized backgrounds that have always formed the backbone and the labor movement, but have not necessarily gotten their due, 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, and that doesn't mean they're going to find a different way to organize and find a different way to harness their labor.

Like I got an email from a person actually get able of them back about a bunch of independent sellers on Etsy who want to form an independent seller's guild, and that is 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. It'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 went to unionize, I was like, we can do that, like we were Williamsburg, Like there's kombucha and the fridge. 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 coworkers and

build power. And I think this current generation, gosh, it feels so it makes it feel so old to say that. I'm like, not older, 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 is Starbucks 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 wave 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 those big corporations keep actively trying to bust up these unions and break down these organizers, 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 storians and economists who would have a whole bunch of like, you know, like my broader perspective and 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 and 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.

and I have a Patreon thing. I think it's just Kim Kelly and 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 yeah, give me the little time my thirties. Man, I've fallen apart.

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 powers wanted us to recognize that. And the only way we're going to get closer to me and free is by working together. You're recognizing that power and fighting like hell of tabe What's Ours.