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Montana Right-to-Work Victory Celebrated as New Hampshire’s Fight Gears Up March 17, 2021
In a Win for Working Families, New Hampshire Says ‘No’ to Right-to-Work IBEW Members Help Kill Right-to-Work in Missouri Illinois Bans Right-to-Work Zones as Elected Leaders Hit the Gas on Pro-Worker Agenda Anti-union lawmakers and their out-of-state corporate backers are working to revive a right-to-work effort in New Hampshire. But the state’s working families and union activists hope to deal the effort a similar fate as to the recent one in Montana, where right-to-work was beaten back in the Legislature in early March after a wide bipartisan vote.
New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, a right-to-work supporter who is expected to sign a bill currently being considered by the state House if it passes. Flickr/Creative Commons photo by New Hampshire Public Radio. In New Hampshire, the IBEW and allies worked with Democrats and a handful of Republican state House members, many of whom were union members, to defeat a right-to-work bill in 2017. But the Republican-controlled Senate passed a new version this year and Republican Gov. Chris Sununu has indicated he will sign the bill if it makes it through the House.
In Montana, far-right members of the state’s Legislature introduced a right-to-work bill early during the current session, the first in 16 years in which the GOP controlled both the statehouse and the governor’s mansion. But after being passed out of committee, the full House voted it down 62-38 on March 2, with 29 Republicans joining Democrats to vote no.
The victory affirmed the importance of working families in Montana, where unions and labor were integral in building the state’s legendary copper-mining industry and have long had greater respect than in most Western states. That proved true even after former President Donald Trump won Montana by 16 points and the state elected its first Republican governor since 2005.
IBEW leaders in Montana said it was obvious from the start the proposed right-to-work law was being pushed by groups like the National Right-to-Work Committee. Eighth and Ninth District Regional Organizing Coordinator Bob Brock noted that a lawmaker who supported right-to-work mentioned “Indiana” instead of Montana when listing the reasons for his support during floor debate – an error he made because he was reading talking points submitted by out-of-state corporate interests.
“I guess I’m not really surprised but just relieved that Montana is the Montana I know and love,” said Brock, whose family has lived in the state for five generations. “We still don’t like out-of-state money flowing in here from out-of-state big money interests.”
mportance of Walsh Confirmation Cannot Be Overstated
March 22, 2021
Statement from AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka after the Senate’s vote to confirm Marty Walsh as secretary of labor:
Congratulations to Secretary Walsh. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this moment. For four years, working families have lived with a Labor Department devoted to serving a handful of elite interests. Now, the power to enforce safety and equity in our workplaces has been handed from a ruthless corporate lawyer to a proud union brother.
Working people organized, mobilized and voted to deliver that victory. But we aren’t finished yet. It’s time to build a truly just recovery that hands power back to the workers who have borne the brunt of this crisis.
That means delivering unprecedented funding to create a 21st-century infrastructure alongside a new generation of good-paying union jobs. It means raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour. And most of all, it means strengthening working people’s right to organize together by finally passing the PRO Act. Our work has only just begun, and we will be stronger with Secretary Walsh in the fight ahead.
BESSEMER, Alabama—The chilly early-morning scene at a gas station March 9 recalls the morning rush hour anywhere, as workers shuffle into a convenience store for coffee and cigarettes. But look closer—a yellow hanger on a Jeep’s rearview mirror is embossed “vote no.” A man’s lanyard jingles with keys and a blue “vote no’’ card.
Amazon workers from the warehouse BHM1, wearing lanyards and red sweaters emblazoned with the company’s logo, mix with warehouse managers in light-orange shirts and with the cleaning crew in blue vests, hired by a third-party contractor.
The lanyards, the sweaters, the hangers on the cars reveal which side each worker is taking in the union election, in which 5,800 workers are voting on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).
The election by mail will continue until March 29, with results likely available in mid-April.
Weeks away from the deadline, workers appear divided. There’s a clear faction of former union members or workers with union family ties who firmly favor unionization. The younger workers I met seemed indifferent to the election, as they have prospects elsewhere: the Army or other higher-paying jobs. They see the warehouse work very much on Amazon’s terms—as temporary, with no security.
Standing at the pump one morning at 5 a.m., a man who asks to remain anonymous tells me he isn’t sure yet how he’ll vote. “I haven’t weighed all my options,” he says. “It’s like a family feud.”
He’s been talking to co-workers who are voting yes because their family members belonged to a union. He says he’ll decide “what’s best for me” over the weekend of March 12.
‘A WHEELBARROW’
RWDSU organizers are running phonebanks and encouraging those who are solidly voting yes to bring their undecided co-workers to the union hall in Birmingham. The union is throwing all its resources into getting out the vote.
Allies such as Black Lives Matter Birmingham, Our Revolution, the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter, the Alabama Working Families Party, the Greater Birmingham ministries, and the environmental organization SWEET Alabama are leading community canvassing and planting pro-union yard signs in front of supporters’ homes.
BLM Birmingham led a caravan on March 13 to show solidarity with the workers. The workforce at the Amazon warehouse is estimated to be 85 percent Black.
Amazon has been touting its $15-an-hour starting wage and its health benefits in its campaign against the union. But at the kickoff rally for the caravan, Jennifer Bates, an Amazon worker and former union member, said, “You just offered us a wheelbarrow and called it a car. Everything looks good on paper, but once you go on the inside, you see the reality.”
Here’s how it works for my Hall on a vote. A ballot is mailed out, a return envelope, and a unmark envelope to put the ballot in. The return envelope must have a return address and the ballot must be in the unmark envelope. Then it has to be mail back to the postoffice.
The Western Massachusetts Area Labor Federation joined forces with Labor Notes last month to organize a virtual Troublemakers School. Nurses, carpenters, grocery workers, teachers, and social workers met to share strategies and build solidarity.
It’s unusual (though not unheard of) for a labor federation to sponsor a Troublemakers School. What made this experience unique is that the Area Labor Federation did most of the organizing—and used it to build their organization.
How We Got Here
The Western Massachusetts region includes four counties with a total population of more than 800,000 people. Among them are 50,000 union members, plus hundreds of thousands of non-union workers.
The region is made up of both urban and rural communities with significant wealth inequality, underfunded public services, chronic wage theft, and growing racial diversity. Like the rest of the country, Western Massachusetts has been hit hard by the pandemic. Essential services were cut back; eviction threats skyrocketed. In Hampden County—home to more than half of the region’s population and its largest city, Springfield—unemployment hit 20.2 percent in June and remained at 8.9 percent as of December.
For many years, the Western Massachusetts labor movement operated through three Central Labor Councils (CLCs): Pioneer Valley, Hampshire-Franklin, and Berkshire, which together had about 25,000 affiliated members. As small CLCs, they lacked the resources to hire staff, struggled with low participation, and had insufficient capacity to coordinate and to implement an organizing and political mobilization program.
Recognizing the limitations of this structure, in the spring of 2017, local unions began working with the Massachusetts AFL-CIO to restructure the three CLCs into an Area Labor Federation with the combined resources to hire a full-time organizer and expand organizing capacity. The Western Mass Area Labor Federation formed in early 2019 when the affiliates of the three CLCs voted overwhelmingly to merge.
Since forming, the ALF has been working to build affiliation and engagement. Monthly meetings and organizing committees bring together union leaders and rank-and-file activists to discuss regional labor fights and strategize how to collectively build power.
“It is still a work in progress, but our leadership is united around a vision of building up our region’s labor movement through a real culture of solidarity,” said WMALF President Jeff Jones, who was recently elected president of Food and Commercial Workers Local 1459. “We want all union members to get involved and build relationships where we can organize around our common struggles.”
ORGANIZING THE TROUBLEMAKERS SCHOOL
The idea of organizing a Western Massachusetts Troublemakers School came out of our WMALF Education and Training Committee. In October, a core team of delegates began meeting to discuss how we could organize a training series that would grow our area labor movement and spark discussion on common issues.
After months of meeting and planning a potential program, the Education Committee introduced a resolution at our December delegate meeting to host the school. Delegates voted unanimously to organize the event and shared their input on organizing issues and stories they wanted to see incorporated.
“I have been part of training development committees in the past, but never one that brought together people from different industries and unions,” said SEIU Local 509 member Cynthia Davis, who was on the planning committee. “It was valuable because I was embarking on a learning experience that would allow me to collaborate with folks from different cultural backgrounds, various walks of life, different work experiences, and different unions, but all with a common goal: educating and organizing the people.
“That hits differently—coming together, to learn together. There is power in that!”
HIGHLIGHTS
We kicked off with a plenary that included:
UMass Amherst workers who formed a coalition of campus unions to fight layoffs and austerity domestic violence support workers who unionized during the height of the pandemic nurses who are re-energizing their local to fight takebacks and address the impacts of Covid educators who launched a successful campaign to save five career-path programs slated to be cut at Springfield Technical Community College These talks gave attendees a sense of the range of labor struggles in western Massachusetts.
Campus organizers are hoping that dozens of new unionization campaigns may be on the horizon nationwide following the recent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision to withdraw a proposed Trump-era rule that would have barred graduate students from joining a union. During his campaign, President Joe Biden had vowed to “empower the NLRB to fulfill its intended purpose of protecting workers.”
In 2019, the Trump-appointed NLRB proposed a regulation which asserted graduate students shouldn’t be considered employees, regardless of whether or not the students assisted with teaching or research. An Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report found that the proposed Trump rule would have stripped collective bargaining rights from 57,500 unionized graduate students and blocked 1.5 million graduate students from forming a union at their school.
“At a time when worker advocates are demanding that more workers have the right to a union and collective bargaining, the Trump board’s graduate teaching assistant proposal demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding that graduate teaching assistants are an integral part of the modern academic workforce,” the report stated.
On Tuesday, the House passed the PRO Act, the sweeping labor law reform bill that would re-energize unions in America. If it were to become law. Which it will not, as long as the filibuster remains in place in the Senate. The situation now is very simple: destroying the filibuster is a labor issue. The Senate, an anti-democratic institution by design that exists to squash the dreams of the majority of our nation’s citizens, is evenly split, controlled by Democrats by only a single vote. It currently takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, meaning that ten Republicans would have to join all of the Democrats to push through the PRO Act. There is zero chance of this happening. (Frankly, I doubt that every Senate Democrat would even line up behind the PRO Act if the Chamber of Commerce lobbyists really started putting the screws on them, but that is purely academic at this point.) On top of that, it is hard to imagine any Congressional election in the coming decades that would change the composition of the Senate enough to allow the bill to pass with the filibuster in place. The PRO Act is not bullshit — it is serious, historic, pro-worker reform. That is something that is not now and will never be an issue that a large chunk of Republican senators will flock to support. The donors who pay to elect Republican senators, as a rule, are spending money to prevent a bill like this from ever passing.
Israel goes to the polls today for the fourth time in 2 years. The 4th time, not the last time, as far as I can tell. Will Bibi pull this out? Who knows.
I hope the Israeli people kick that corrupt FRightie yaboob out of office. I don’t know tho. They kicked him out years ago for corruption and he still managed to slither back into office. Sound familiar? The CO mass shooting….sigh. 😢
"In my view, we can no longer tolerate a system that allows the former CEO of Gilead (John Martin) to become a billionaire by charging $1,000 for a hepatitis C drug called Sovaldi that costs just $1 to manufacture and can be purchased in India for just $4," Our Chairman Sanders.
After a gunman armed with an AR-15-style rifle killed 10 people in a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado on Monday, progressives intensified pressure on Democrats to use their slim majority in Congress to finally eliminate the legislative filibuster and approve substantial gun safety laws over foreseeable GOP obstruction.
“We’re absolutely heartbroken for everyone who has been impacted,” progressive advocacy group Indivisible said in the wake of the massacre, the second mass shooting in the U.S. in less than a week. “You’re going to see another round of ‘we can’t do anything yet, there was a tragedy’ hand-wringing, but we must end gun violence now. Let’s eliminate the filibuster and pass real gun violence prevention legislation.”
“Enough is enough,” Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) said in a statement late Monday. “Americans should feel safe in their grocery stores. They should feel safe in their schools, their movie theaters, and in their communities. While Congress dithers on enacting meaningful gun violence prevention measures, Americans—and Coloradans—are being murdered before our very eyes—day after day, year after year.”
I do know that any given Monday I could have been at that center picking up my meds. Or swinging by the store after seeing my dad or sister. Or the teen could have been visiting friends who work there
@RepBoebert As an elected official who actually represents people in Boulder County let me tell you what you can do with your thoughts and prayers. #GunControlNow
An Unusually Optimistic Conversation With Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders didn’t win the 2020 election. But he may have won its aftermath.
If you look back at Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders’s careers, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan, looks a lot like the proposals Sanders has fought for forever, without much of the compromise or concerns that you used to see from Senator Joe Biden. That’s not to take anything away from Biden. He’s the president. This is his plan. And it is to his credit that he saw what the country needed, what the politics of the moment would support and where his party had moved, and met it with full force.
But Sanders’s two presidential campaigns are part of the reason that the Democratic Party had moved, and the politics of the moment had changed. And so I’ve wondered what Sanders makes of this moment. Is it a triumph? A disappointment? A beginning?
And I’ve wondered about his take on some of the other questions swirling around the Democratic Party: Are liberals alienating people who agree with them on economics by being too censorious on culture? Is there room to work with populist Republicans who might be open to new economic ideas even as they turn against liberal democracy itself?
Q: The 2009 stimulus was 5.6 percent of the G.D.P. in 2008. The Rescue Plan this year is 9.1 percent of last year’s G.D.P. So it’s just much bigger. And the individual policies in it are, in my view, much less compromised. So why are 50 Democrats in 2021 legislating so much more progressively than 59 Democrats did in 2009?
A: Well, I think that there is a growing understanding that we face unprecedented crises, and we have got to act in an unprecedented way. Members of Congress look around this country, and they see children who don’t have enough food, people facing eviction. People can’t get health care. We have, obviously, the need to crush this terrible pandemic that has taken over 500,000 lives.
And I think the conclusion from the White House and from Congress is, now is the time to do what the American people need us to do. And it turned out to be a $1.9 trillion bill, which, to my mind, was the single most significant piece of legislation for working-class people that has been passed since the 1960s.
Q: Let’s say I’m someone on the left who supported you in 2020. I’m looking at the American Rescue Plan and I see the $15 minimum wage got dropped, paid family leave got dropped. The child tax credit, which is my favorite part of the bill, it’s only temporary. Convince me that I should be excited about this. Why do you think it’s so significant?
A: I don’t have to convince you. We have already convinced 75 percent of the American people that this is a very good piece of legislation. And I think progressives out there understand that given a fairly conservative Congress, it is hard to do everything that we want to do.
I was bitterly disappointed that we lost the minimum wage in the reconciliation process as a result of a decision from the parliamentarian, which I think was a wrong decision. But we’re not giving up on that. We’re going to come back, and we’re going to do it.
But in this legislation, let us be clear we have gotten for a family of four — a working-class family struggling to put food on the table for their kids — a check of $5,600. Now people who have money may not think that’s a lot of money. But when you are struggling day and night to pay the bills, to worry about eviction, that is going to be a lifesend for millions and millions of people.
We extended unemployment to September with the $300 supplement. We expanded the child tax credit to cut child poverty in America by 50 percent. Now, that’s an issue we have not dealt with for a very long time — the disgrace of the U.S. having one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth. Well, we did it, and we hope to make it permanent. That is a big deal.
And obviously, we invested heavily in dealing with the pandemic, getting the vaccines out to the people as quickly as possible to save lives. In terms of education, billions of dollars are going to make sure that we open our schools as quickly and as safely as we can. We tripled funding for summer programs so the kids will have the opportunity to make up the academic work that they have lost. Tripled funding for after-school programs so when kids come back next fall, there will be programs the likes of which we have never seen.
So this is not a perfect bill. Congress does not pass perfect bills. But for working-class people, this is the most significant piece of legislation passed since the 1960s. And I’m proud of what we have done.
However, it is clear to me — and I think the American people — that we have more to do. This is an emergency bill that says, in America families should not go hungry. People should not be forced out of their homes.
Now we have to deal with the long-term structural problems facing our country that have long, long been neglected way before the pandemic: rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, address the existential threat of climate change, create many millions of decent-paying jobs, build the millions of units of affordable housing that we need.
In terms of the social issues: fight structural racism, immigration reform, fight against the growing trend of authoritarianism. We’re living in a nation today where 30 percent or 40 percent of the American people have given up on democracy — a worldwide problem. How do we combat that? We got to deal with voter suppression and the effort of Republicans to make it harder and harder for people of color, lower-income people, to vote.
There are a huge number of issues out there. Some of them are existential — they have to be dealt with. And I intend to do everything that I can as chairman of the Budget Committee to make sure that we continue to move forward.
Q: This bill, as you mentioned, passed through budget reconciliation. The things that couldn’t go through budget reconciliation got dropped from it. But a bunch of the different policy measures you just mentioned can’t go through budget reconciliation. You can’t do immigration reform there. You can’t do H. R. 1, the For the People Act, or H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Act.
A: Well, I’m not so sure.
Q: You’re budget chairman. Tell me why.
A: I don’t want to bore the American people with the rules of the United States.
Q: Bore me. [LAUGHS]
A: If you have insomnia, pick up the rule book. You’ll be asleep in about five minutes. It is enormously complicated. It is enormously undemocratic. It is designed to move very, very slowly, which we cannot afford to do, given the crises that we face today.
This is the way I look at it: We have a set of literally unprecedented crises. Ideally, it would be nice that we could work in a bipartisan way with our Republican colleagues — and maybe in some areas, we can. But the major goal is to address these crises. That is what the American people want. And if we can’t do it in a bipartisan way with 60 votes, we’re going to figure out a way that we get it done with 50 votes.
Q: I have never heard a theory under which you could do democracy reform bills like the John Lewis Voting Rights Act or a major immigration reform bill through budget reconciliation. Do you see a way around that? Are you talking about the Democrats changing reconciliation or changing the filibuster?
A: Well, obviously, I believe that we should do away with the filibuster. I think the filibuster is an impediment to addressing the needs of this country, and especially of working-class people. So I believe that at this moment we should get rid of the filibuster, and I will work as hard as I can to do that.
I’m not going to lay out all of our strategy that we’re working on right now. But what I repeat is that this country faces huge problems. The American people want us to address those problems. And we cannot allow a minority to stop us from going forward.
Q: There’s a lot of coverage, as there always is, about potential friction in the Democratic caucus in the Senate — differences between, say, a Senator Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and others. Do you find the caucus to be united on strategy more, or less than in the past?
A: Obviously, you’ve got 50 people. And when you have 50 people, the crazy situation is that any one person could prevent us from moving forward. But I think and hope that there is an understanding that despite our differences — and some of these differences are significant — we have got to work with the president of the United States, who I think is prepared to go forward aggressively in a number of issues. We cannot sabotage the needs of the American people.
So any one person really has enormous power. But I would hope that by definition, when you are a member of a caucus, you fight for what your views are within the caucus. But at the end of the day, nobody is going to get everything they want. I did not get everything that I want in the American Rescue Plan. Others did not get everything they wanted.
But at the end of the day, we have got to go forward together because we need to be united. And I think there is a widespread understanding about the importance of that.
Q: Let’s talk about the dynamics between the parties right now. A few months ago, you were working with Senator Josh Hawley on bigger stimulus checks. That was a very effective project. But then Senator Hawley votes against certifying the election. He raised his fist to the mob from the Capitol. How have your relationships with Republicans changed in the aftermath of Jan. 6?
A: Well, all in all, I don’t want to get into personalities here. But this is what I would say. And I think it’s a very sad state of affairs.
Obviously, in the last many years, only accelerated by Donald Trump, the Republican Party has moved not only very far to the right, but moved in the direction of authoritarianism. You have a president of the United States saying a month before the election that the only way he could lose that election is if it was stolen from him. After he lost the election, he says, obviously, it was stolen. And you have now a very significant majority of Republicans who believe that the election was stolen.
That is where many Republicans are. You got a lot of Republican senators, members of the House, who are refusing even today to say that Joe Biden won a fair and square election. So you’ve got a whole lot of problems. That’s one of the issues that as a nation, as a Democratic Party, we have got to address.
Q: Do you think a byproduct of how the Republican Party has changed is that it puts less emphasis on economic issues than it used to? I was struck by how much more energized Republicans were the week that the American Rescue Plan passed by the debate over Dr. Seuss’s books than by this $1.9 billion spending bill.
A: Look, the energy in the Republican Party has nothing to do with tax breaks to the rich. Republicans are not going into the streets, the Trump Republicans, saying: We need more tax breaks for the rich, we need more deregulation, we need to end the Affordable Care Act and throw 30 million people off their health care. That’s not what they’re talking about.
What Trump understood is we are living in a very rapidly changing world. And there are many people — most often older white males, but not exclusively — who feel that they’re losing control of the world that they used to dominate. And somebody like Donald Trump says: “We are going to preserve the old way of life, where older white males dominated American society. We’re not going to let them take that away from us.” That is where their energy is.
One of the gratifying things is the American Rescue Plan had a decent amount of Republican support — 35 percent, 40 percent. But among lower-income Republicans, that number was 63 percent.
So I think that our political goal in the coming months and years is to do everything we can to reach out to young people, reach out to people of color, reach out to all people who believe in economic and social justice, but also reach out aggressively to working-class Republicans and tell them we’re going to make sure that you and your children will have a decent standard of living. We’re going to raise the minimum wage for you. We’re going to make it easier for you to join a union. We’re going to make sure that health care in America is a human right. We’re going to make sure that if we do tax breaks, you’re going to get them and not the billionaire class.
I think we have a real opportunity to pick up support in that area. And if we can do that — if you can get 10 percent of Trump’s support and grow our support by addressing the real issues that our people feel are important — you’re going to put together a coalition that is not going to lose a lot of elections.
The Republican strategy right now, to your exact point, is to go to these people and say, the Democrats want to take away things that are culturally important to you. They want to take away your Dr. Seuss books. They want to take away your guns. They want to make it so your kids can’t go to religious school.
Q: How do you talk to voters who are actually worried about those direct questions — who may agree with Democrats on the economic side, but are worried the Democrats are going to take things they culturally care about?
A: It’s a good question, and no one that I know has a magical answer to it. I do think that addressing economic issues is helpful. It’s not the 100 percent solution. As you know, you’ve got the QAnon people telling their supporters that Democrats — I’m not sure what the latest particular thing is, killed babies and eat their brains or something. Is that the latest thing that we’re supposed to be doing? I don’t know.
But when people who are in trouble suddenly receive a check for $5,600 for a family of four, when their unemployment is extended, when they get health care that they previously did not have, when they’re better able to raise their child, it’s not going to solve all of these cultural problems by a long shot, but it begins maybe to open the door and say, well, you know what? This is good. Trump didn’t do this for us. And maybe these Democrats are not as bad as we thought that they were.
I think it’s going to take a lot of work. These cultural issues, I don’t know how you bridge the gap. You have people who are fervently anti-choice, and I’m not sure that you are going to win many of them over. But I think what we have got to do is do what I’m afraid the Democrats have not always done in the past. And that is treat people with respect.
I come from one of the most rural states in America, and I lived in a town of 200 people for a couple of years. And I think there is not an appreciation of rural America or the values of rural America, the sense of community that exists in rural America. And somehow or another, the intellectual elite does have, in some cases, a contempt for the people who live in rural America. I think we’ve got to change that attitude and start focusing on the needs of people in rural America, treat them with respect, and understand there are areas there are going to be disagreements, but we can’t treat people with contempt.
Q: Do you think there is truth to the critique that liberals have become too censorious and too willing to use their cultural and corporate and political power to censor or suppress ideas and products that offend them?
A: Look, you have a former president in Trump, who was a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, an authoritarian, somebody who doesn’t believe in the rule of law. This is a bad-news guy. But if you’re asking me, do I feel particularly comfortable that the then-president of the United States could not express his views on Twitter? I don’t feel comfortable about that.
Now, I don’t know what the answer is. Do you want hate speech and conspiracy theories traveling all over this country? No. Do you want the internet to be used for authoritarian purposes and an insurrection, if you like? No, you don’t. So how do you balance that? I don’t know, but it is an issue that we have got to be thinking about. Because yesterday it was Donald Trump who was banned, and tomorrow, it could be somebody else who has a very different point of view.
I don’t like giving that much power to a handful of high-tech people. But the devil is obviously in the details, and it’s something we’re going to have to think long and hard on.
Q: Do you think Joe Biden is having an easier time selling an ambitious progressive agenda than Barack Obama did, at least to these audiences, partly because he’s an older white man, rather than a young Black man?
A: I don’t know the answer to that. Let’s not forget that Barack Obama, after four years, was re-elected with a pretty good majority. He was a popular president and a very popular figure today. But I think you can’t look at Biden or Obama without looking into the moment in which they are living. I think in the last number of years since Obama, political consciousness in this country has changed.
I think to a significant degree, the progressive movement has been successful in saying to the American people that are in the richest country in the history of the world, you know what? You’re entitled to health care as a right. You’re entitled to a decent-paying job. Your kid is entitled to go to a public college or university tuition-free. That it is absolutely imperative that we have the courage to take on the fossil-fuel industry and save this planet by transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels. That it is a moral issue that we finally deal in a comprehensive way with 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country.
I think Biden is in a position where this country has moved forward at the grass-roots level in a much more progressive way. It is not an accident that today the House of Representatives is far more progressive than it was when I was there in the House.
And then you had a president who was a moderate Democrat throughout his time in the Senate, who had the courage to look at the moment and say, you know what? The future of American democracy is at stake, tens of millions of people are struggling economically. They’re really in pain. Our kids are hurting. Seniors are hurting. I’ve got to act boldly. And Biden deserves credit for that.
But what I hope very much is that understanding of the need to act bold goes beyond the American Rescue Plan and is the path that Biden continues during his administration.
Q: Let’s talk about those generational differences. You’re no spring chicken, but you were the overwhelming choice of young voters in 2020. How are the politics of younger voters different, and why are they different?
A: I love the younger generation. I really do. And it’s not just because they supported me. People say, how did you get the support of the younger people? We treated them with respect and we talked about the issues to them in the same way we talked about the issues to every other generation that’s out there. I think you’ve got a couple of factors, though.
No. 1, for a variety of reasons, the younger generation today is the most progressive generation in the modern history of this country. This is the generation that is firmly anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobia, anti-xenophobia — a very compassionate generation that believes in economic and social and environmental justice. So you’ve got that.
And then the second thing you’ve got is, this is a generation of young people that is really hurting economically. This is the first generation in the modern history of this country where, everything being equal, they’re going to have a lower standard of living than their parents. And that’s even before the pandemic, which has made a bad situation worse.
This is a generation where, on average, young workers are making less money than their parents. They’re having a much harder time buying a home or paying the rent. This is a generation stuck with a huge amount of student debt. And I was surprised, when we first raised this issue of student debt back in 2016, how it really caught on.
Because people are saying, you know what? What crime did I commit that I have to be $50,000 or $100,000 in debt? I was told over and over again, get an education. I got an education. I went to a state university. I went to a private school. I went to school for four years, and now I’m stuck with a $50,000, $100,000 debt. I went to graduate school. I went to medical school. I got $300,000 in debt. That’s insane.
I think if you look at the young generation from an idealistic point of view, it’s a generation that has expectations and views that are much more progressive than their parents and grandparents. But it is also a generation that wants the government to address the economic pain that they are feeling.
Q: It was a striking moment when President Biden released a video pretty explicitly backing the workers trying to unionize at Amazon’s Alabama warehouse. What could Congress do to help? What do you want to do to help reverse the decline of unionization in the U.S.?
A: I’m chairman of the Budget Committee, and we just had a hearing which touched on that issue. We had a young woman from a warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., the Amazon plant there, and she was talking about why they need a union. I invited Jeff Bezos to attend the hearing to tell me why a guy who was worth $182 billion thinks he has to spend millions of dollars to fight workers who are trying to form a union to improve their wages and working conditions.
What I have believed for a long time, what Joe Biden believes, is we need to pass legislation to make it easier for workers to join unions. Because if workers are in unions and can negotiate decent contracts, their wages will go up. Their working conditions and their benefits will improve. So we are working hard on that issue, and something I know the House has passed. I want to see it passed here in the Senate as well.
Q: Should Democrats be pushing for something bigger, like sectoral bargaining?
A: I believe so. I campaigned on that. But I think bottom line is that Democrats got to take a deep breath and to make the determination of whether or not they’re going to become the party of the American working class — a class, by the way, which has suffered really terribly in the last 40 or 50 years, where today, workers are barely in real wages making any more than they did 40 or 50 years ago, despite huge increases in technology and productivity. I think we got to do that.
And I think when we do that — when we have the courage to take on powerful special interests, taking on Wall Street, taking on the drug companies, taking on the health care industry, taking on big campaign contributors who want to maintain the status quo — we are going to be able to transform this country and create an economy and a government that works for all. And I think Democrats are going to have very good political success as well.
Q: The Rescue Plan will be followed up by a big jobs and investment package. What needs to be in that package for it to win your support?
A: The simple stuff and obvious stuff is, you’ve got an infrastructure which is crumbling and roads and bridges and water systems and wastewater plants. I would add affordable and low-income housing to any discussion of infrastructure. So you’ve got to deal with infrastructure, and when you do that, you can create millions of good-paying jobs.
But obviously, also, you have to deal with the existential threat of climate change. We’ve got to guarantee health care to all people as a right. You got to deal with immigration reform. You’ve got to deal with criminal justice and systemic racism. So those are some of the big, big issues that are out there.
wpDiscuz
http://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/21Daily/2103/210316_Montana
https://aflcio.org/press/releases/importance-walsh-confirmation-cannot-be-overstated
https://labornotes.org/2021/03/dispatch-alabama-biggest-amazon-union-drive-yet
fingers crossed on this one being a success. If this succeeds it will be an incalculable win for organized labor and our entire country.
It will be a powerful statement that just maybe, finally, the (proverbial) ship of state is turning. 🙄
Yep. We desperately need this victory. Glad to see so may organizations helping/supporting the union organizers.
There must be a transparent chain of custody on the vote counting, lala?
Here’s how it works for my Hall on a vote. A ballot is mailed out, a return envelope, and a unmark envelope to put the ballot in. The return envelope must have a return address and the ballot must be in the unmark envelope. Then it has to be mail back to the postoffice.
thanks. counted in the open?
https://labornotes.org/blogs/2021/03/first-virtual-troublemakers-school-hit-western-mass
wowow
https://truthout.org/articles/biden-labor-board-strikes-barrier-to-unionization-of-1-5-million-grad-students/
https://inthesetimes.com/article/filibuster-labor-union-pro-act-senate
The floor / soap box is open.
T and R, la58!! ☮️😊👍👊
Day of “it’s deja vu all over again.”
Israel goes to the polls today for the fourth time in 2 years. The 4th time, not the last time, as far as I can tell. Will Bibi pull this out? Who knows.
A mass shooting in Colorado. White guy kills 10 including a police officer, age 51 with 7 children.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExIBtyhW8AAqVsc?format=png&name=240×240
I hope the Israeli people kick that corrupt FRightie yaboob out of office. I don’t know tho. They kicked him out years ago for corruption and he still managed to slither back into office. Sound familiar? The CO mass shooting….sigh. 😢
Related to the theme:
T&R lala!
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/03/23/end-filibuster-and-pass-gun-safety-laws-now-colorado-massacre-intensifies-demands
There must be a way to get rid of him for fracking with the election, if nothing else. take away his power administratively. SOMETHING.
how did Trump get rid of the guy before him? if he quit, well, let’s make DeJoy so miserable he does the same.
should’ve put the name DeJoy in the tweet, but i’m not doing it over. today is ocean day. :o)
on the bright side, my list of sendees is longer now.
Oh, pb4, you’re the corporate socialist raking it in? I’m a little slow.
that’s me. :0)
Lengthy excerpt from an interview with Ezra Klein. (Including some labor stuff)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bernie-sanders.html
Part 2
Part 3