Episode Transcript
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Hi, folks. Dick Flacks here with another episode of Talking Strategy, Making History. Today, Daraka and I engage in a conversation with Eric Blank. Eric, who's a labor studies and sociology professor at Rutgers, out with a brand new book, We Are the Union. It's a remarkable piece of work because it has a kind of transformative effect on you when you read it, giving you a whole new way of thinking about how unions today can be organized, as Eric puts it, on scale, that is to match both the need and the demand of workers to form unions in the face of many odds, both structural and legal, in that effort. The approach he calls worker to worker organizing, deeply researched and documented in this book. And Eric is also very active in promoting organizing, and we'll talk all about that here on the podcast, so stick with us.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Hi and welcome. Eric. We're really excited to have this conversation and want to just jump right in with the motivation, the core motivation for you in writing this book. But it's not really just a book. It's a. It's a whole project to like, rethink how new member organizing and union growth can be sort of unleashed. Can you, you know, talk a little bit about why you think that's important for. For the country, for the left's political project or aspirations? Like, why should people who aren't even, or don't think of themselves as directly involved or connected to the labor movement, why should they care about growing the unions?
[00:02:23] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a good question, and I start off the book with that question because I think the overwhelming evidence shows that all of the crises that we're facing in this country and the world are rooted in the power imbalance. Are the major crises, at least are rooting in the power imbalance between working people and corporations. So whether you're talking about racial injustice, whether you're talking about looming climate catastrophe, the rise of the far right and maga, just, you know, economic inequality, of course, this is, this is all something rooted in a power imbalance. And that historically, the major way outside of elections for addressing this power imbalance are unions. And so almost no matter what your issue is, you don't have to care about the union movement as such. You should feel deeply invested in rebuilding the labor movement because this is how we address these deep problems. And so I think that it would be hard to overstate the urgency of rebuilding a mass labor movement in the US I start off with the graph in the book, which I think is probably the most important graph for understanding the moment we're in, which is the relationship between income inequality and union density. Union density goes down, income inequality goes up just year by year. And so turning that around is how we change things. And the book is essentially an attempt to rigorously ask and answer, what would it actually take to turn that graph around? What would it take to organize tens of millions of workers? And a lot of labor scholarship and labor organizers have talked sort of about tactics to win campaigns which are important, but haven't really actually addressed the question of, well, how do you scale? What does it actually take? What would it actually take to organize tens of millions of workers? And that's what the book tries to answer.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Well, one sort of attempt to at least frame that debate that I've seen you engage with and that you engage with in the book. Right. It was maybe 15 years ago, 20 starting 20 years ago with a kind of, I don't know, model that was put forward by SEIU in, in terms of how to scale up bringing lots more people, at least under union contracts or into union membership.
Can you sort of contrast your, like your vision or your, your framework for thinking about this with other attempts, recent attempts to address the decline in union density?
[00:04:50] Speaker C: Sure. I think my book parts ways in some ways with other sort of traditional left wing critiques that dismiss SEIU out of hand. Because I think SEIU was addressing a real problem, which is that the traditional model of union organizing is not scalable. The traditional model requires you to have about one staffer for every hundred workers you're trying to unionize. And it's just for logistical reasons too expensive, both in terms of money and time to organize tens of millions of workers that way. So SEIU was right, I think, to see that fact and ask the question, okay, well, how do we organize at scale? The problem, I think with the approach generally taken by SEO unit, which has taken a few different forms, has been to try to scale without building the type of deep workplace power and organizing that at its best, labor organizing has depended on and that it's best, the more staff intensive model is dependent on, in which you build organizing committees in which workers are really reaching out to their co workers, winning over majority of co workers to fight back, in which the union really is rooted in this sort of deep solidarity and structure, workplace by workplace. And SEIU essentially said that that's not feasible, that's not feasible, at least this side of labor law reform to do that. And so they initiated some very successful campaigns like the fight for 15 and maybe that's the most emblematic version, which centered on mobilizing workers and having workers speak out and taking actions to put pressure on companies and policymakers to essentially grant a minimum wage increase. And so that was good. It won huge wage increases for a lot of workers, but it didn't end up building unions. Not a single worker ended up joining a union out of that campaign. And so my book in some ways tries to take off, pick off where SEI left off and say, okay, the intuition here is right, we need scalable campaigns. But is there a way to merge this more scalable, digitally based, nationally oriented campaign like fight for 15 with the best of the prior organizing models of worker power on the shop floor? And it turns out, and I think I try to show that, yeah, you can do these things. And the recent experience we've seen at Starbucks in higher ed and journalism to a certain extent in auto, have demonstrated sort of a synthesis of the best of the two different approaches.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: Could I jump in and just ask you something which might slip by but is really crucial for our conversation? What is exactly, you call it the worker to worker approach to organizing. And this is the fundamental theme of your book. So could you give us the elevator speech about that?
[00:07:36] Speaker C: Yeah. The short version is worker to worker Unionism is a form of unionism in which workers take on the responsibilities that have been assumed to be only able to be done by staff until currently. So things like training other workers, coaching other workers, traditionally a staff personnel do that. Well, it turns out workers are able to do that as well. Things like strategizing, you know. So the big picture questions about what should happen in union drive, oftentimes workers have not been included in that, while workers have been included and have sort of asserted their strategic capacity in these drives. And then third, initiating organizing, oftentimes in the past, this would be particularly more strategic union drives. It would be the union itself. The researchers would pick a target and then reach out and send their staff here. Oftentimes it's been workers themselves that have initiated campaigns, whether it's at Amazon or beyond. The workers have often self organized and then voted frequently on which union to affiliate with. So all of these three different factors make the degree of worker ownership over the campaign higher. And I'll just flag and I'm sure we can come back to this. It's not just the case that this is important for sort of offensive unionization battles in the private sector. That's the bulk of what my book talks about, we've seen more recently. It's also the case that you need this type of scalable organizing to Beat back the attacks of the right. Because the same dilemma is there. There's not enough staff essentially to organize 2 million federal workers against Musk and Trump's attacks. And so you need to find ways for workers to take on these responsibilities if you're going to build power at scale. So maybe we can come back to. But I just want to flag from the opposite that this isn't just sort of the private sector unionization. It's also just a broader question of how working people build power, including on defeating the far right.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: Right.
And the book is quite extensive and detailed in illustrating specific cases that most of us don't even know about, even those who are pretty well informed that illustrate that this has been done, can be done.
And I really recommend people. It's a good work of sociology from that point of view. Cause you really do lay out these specific cases quite well and with many of the contingencies involved. So just, I just recommend the book which happens to have a title which I don't think we mentioned. So go. What is the title? We are the Union. Right.
[00:10:05] Speaker B: So, so I, if I could jump in there just for a second.
No, you know, I think, you know, as somebody who's got, I don't know, you could say some bus tracks on my back, some scars, battle scars of sort of internal union politics, but also the academic or left intellectual debates about what models of unionism, you know, it will take to, you know, solve cap capitalism or the decline of working class power, however we're framing it. But what I really appreciate about your book and, and the projects that it's connected to, which hopefully you can also, we have time for you to talk about is addressing that sort of third question that you just, you just laid out of how do we get these things started? And one of the, the biggest, you know, hurdles or filters you could say that I've seen in my experience that, you know, keeps the labor movement from growing is that it takes such a heavy lift to kind of aim a staff driven organizing model at a group of, you know, workers that are ready to organize. And this huge, huge gap between the popularity of unions in this moment and the percentage of union of people who are in them. You know, that's the, to me, the biggest, most important nut to crack. And where your, yeah, where, where your, your case is to me, the most persuasive.
[00:11:39] Speaker C: Well, yeah, I appreciate that. And it's, you know, it's not an easy question because the reality is, as you mentioned, workers want unions. So the issue isn't that Workers don't want unions. You know, all the polling these days and all of the research shows that you're talking about, you know, over 60 million workers would tomorrow vote for a union if given the opportunity. So the gap isn't lack of support for unions, but it's not the case. It's not the case that tens of millions of workers are just on their own initiating unionization drives. And so this is where it becomes tricky, because if it were just the case that we just have to rely on spontaneity and just the workers will rise up, which is frankly part of the operating assumption of some of the left that I push back on, then it would be easier. You just sort of have to wait and eventually they'll do it. And one of the things I try to argue in the book is like, no, that's not realistic for a variety of reasons, partly because the political economy has changed. So the type of organization, organic solidarities that existed in the 1930s when people lived next to their factories in which they had pre existing deep cultural ties with a lot of workers nearby them, in which something like a spontaneous, semi spontaneous upsurge can happen much more easily because workers already feel this sense of connection and then you get the spark going and it spreads very quickly. That's actually much harder in today's conditions because workers are more atomized from each other, they live farther from each other, they don't go to the same bars and churches to the same extent as they used to. And so the intuition of staff intensive organizing in that sense isn't wrong, is that you actually need more resources, you need more coaching, you need more fostering essentially to get things going at scale. The problem is just that you can't do that in the staff intensive model. So the book is trying to say the intuition isn't wrong. You do need these responsibilities that staff do today that they maybe didn't do to the same extent in the 1930s. But you need to find ways for workers to do that. And so there's mechanisms for that. To give just one example, the role of social media is pretty important in this because you can win a union election and if nobody hears about it, it's not going to go viral. And this is part of the problem with a lot of unionization drives in the traditional sense is you can win in one place. But there's not been much of an attempt by most labor unions to really win the battle of ideas and get people excited and to use these moments of high attention to scale up. And so to give one example of a missed opportunity, the Teamsters didn't end up striking UPS for a variety of reasons, and you can say it was tactically correct or whatever, but if your goal is to try to organize Amazon, which the Teamsters are talking about, there's this huge missed opportunity to have a strike and get the idea of worker power in the public sphere and then to pivot towards mass unionization and say, look, we won this good contract at ups. Now we need every Amazon worker to do the same. In contrast, the United Auto Workers did seize that moment. They won a great strike and great contract at the big three in late 2023 and immediately used that moment, not, you know, a week later, not 10 months later, but the day they won their strike, to call on all auto workers in the south to unionize and to reach out to their union. And so there's mechanisms then for seizing and inspiring workers to start self organizing and not just waiting for it to happen sort of semi spontaneously.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: Right.
But some of your examples that are pretty well known are Starbucks and that Amazon warehouse in Staten island where apparently the workers there decided or were led by people who decided to let's get a union right here in this particular shop and see where we can go with it. And so there is that. That's part of your story, right? That there are these self initiated efforts in many different sectors that you document that can be the initiation. And I had a question about that, which is because you talk about how some workers in a particular place, they knew what to do because they were able to get material from labor notes, which is the organizing center of grassroots strategies in the labor movement.
That was the question I had.
Is part of what's beneficial or really helpful in self organizing? The presence in the shop already of somewhat politically conscious people who have some of those connections, intellectual or personal connections, that make them ready to organize and some of them are actually there deliberately on that purpose. You want to talk about. I mean, it's not. Spontaneity is a strange word in the social movement sphere because there are elements of spontaneity, but there's almost always some.
Something else besides just spontaneous reaction to the moment, right?
[00:16:38] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, I think that the presence of large numbers of young left leaning workers in some of these industries has been absolutely central for the unionization uptick to have taken off as far as it's gone. And frankly, I think that the continued growth of that layer of young radicalized workers and getting young people excited about the labor room is going to be what I think it's what gives me hope and what gives me sort of optimism about the possibility for labor revitalization. And this isn't a new pattern. In 1930s, it was young left, you know, radical, often socialist or communist workers who took the lead. And the young piece is important because it's not just that they're left wing, but it's that they, for a variety of sort of somewhat obvious reasons, young people can take more risk, you know, fewer family responsibilities. Maybe you're a little bit more ideologically inclined. You might also just be a little naive, which has its benefit. You know, it's because if you're, if you're going up against a massive corporation like Amazon, it's good to be a little bit naive about what's entailed, you know, just being sort of the battle scarred veteran doesn't actually give you the, the fervor necessary to initiate these campaigns. So yeah, the combination of youth and radical politics is a very explosive one. And one of the interesting things, sort of from a sociological perspective is why young radicals are so interested in the labor movement today in the US because that's not actually even true in other countries. And so somebody could maybe write a good dissertation or book on, you know, explaining the divergence of the US from traditions of left wing activism in the US and the rest of the world in which your average young activist in many parts of the US until recently and across the world has sort of thought that labor was fuddy duddy and it was like old school and not is something exciting.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Well, it's, it's a little bit cyclical here though, right? Because when I, when I was a student activist in the 90s, there was also a, a resurgence and interest in the labor movement and there was attempts to, you know, take advantage of that or, or you know, use that as an opportunity with, in terms of interfaces between unions and the, you know, the campus sweatshop movement and global solidarity movements. And you know, that's when the Organizing Institute and the labor Summer program started. And it, and I don't say that as like a correction, but rather that it was another similar moment that to look at and look at like why, you know, what went right with it, but it did, you know, why it didn't in fact create, you know, seed a new upsurge in, you know, union overall union membership and so forth, I.
[00:19:22] Speaker C: Think that's a good, I think, you know, and I try to talk about the 1990s experience a bit and, but to dig into that, I think it's useful. I look at it a little bit differently. You're right that there was a similar in some ways interest of young people, students in particular towards the union movement in the 1990s. But the difference is that that was really driven by the unions. And that's good, that's actually a good thing. I'm not arguing at all that unions shouldn't be investing time and resources. But in the 1990s, like they launched, you know, spent tens of millions of dollars to launch initiatives like Union Summer to rec young people into the labor movement, to build the organizing institute, as you mentioned, to recruit essentially young students mostly into the labor movement. And they were able through initiative. It wasn't, I don't think it was so organic. It was not just like all of a sudden young people on their own, absent this big initiative from the labor movement to make a turn towards organizing. It was that initiative that got people excited and that shows if anything how much more potential there could be today if you were to have both the existence of sort of a turn towards labor despite the labor movement as a whole not making a turn towards organizing, which is the dynamic, and this is the difference between the 90s is that the recent labor uptick has happened despite almost sort of business as usual approach amongst labor. And so that's in some ways the puzzle. But imagine if the labor movement were to dedicate the similar amount of resources it did in the 1990s towards new organizing in which it was recruiting tens of thousands of young people. Like, you know, you're really talking about a potentially explosive mix. And this is the thing that drives me crazy. You know, it keeps me up at night. Is, is the extent to which that opportunity was missed. Under Biden, there was really a perfect storm of this bottom up grassroots effervescence. A good, you know, administration, good nlrb and, and the labor movement frankly sat it out. You know, there was not, there was not a major investment in organizing nothing compared to the 1990s.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: Everybody did. Well, let me just quibble on one thing, but I think it actually reinforces your overall thesis because I do think that there was an organic, yeah, sort of spontaneous or from below or student driven, youth politics driven piece to what happened in the 90s. But it was about solidarity, it was about international solidarity. It was about supporting unions and workers, like often on campus, which was awesome. There was a lot of that.
[00:21:39] Speaker C: Right.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: Like supporting campus workers. But it wasn't about students were not organizing or thinking about labor as their, in terms of their own labor, their own work. It was it would. We were, we were all very much concerned about these, like other groups of workers either here or the people making our clothes. And, and it was in the, in a context of, you know, a critique of corporate globalization and all of that. It was also a very anarchist moment rather than a socialist one in terms of the sort of campus politics ethos. So I do think like that happened and the labor movement and some people who had had their roots in campus politics that went into the labor movement, there was actually also a DSA role. And this stuff behind the scenes was like, okay, we can invest in it. But all of that is to say that, you know, the, the anti globalization or sweatshop moment is nothing compared to the moment we have now of young people thinking about their own role in the economy, their own working lives, their own situation, and really whether they're in college or not facing that. And that connection or possible opportunity and opening, I couldn't agree more, is new or hasn't happened in a while.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: But let me jump in with my own observation about the 90s and that period.
You were there too? Well, I was a faculty member. I've always been teaching in my sociology, social movements about the labor movement as a primary thing. And I'm very proud of the fact that a little trickle of people have always come from my classes into the labor movement. But what I was observing when the union summer program was launched and the organizing institute, so students would come off the campus to go into those programs, and I think many had a negative experience because it was like joining the army. In other words, they were becoming trained as staff people to follow a regime that was pretty regimented in a way and very demanding in terms of time and energy and spirit. And I was observing, on the other hand, that some of the people from the shop floor who joined the organizing institute, for them, it was very liberating. They could get off the shop floor and into a much more positive role as an organizer. So I began to think, well, this whole idea of recruiting students as union staff organizers might not work. And the emphasis should be on getting people right off who are already in the workplace into organizing mode. It never occurred to me what Eric, what you have shown, which is you can stay on the shop floor and be an organizer in that way and that, that and especially with support and training and resources for that.
And now, I mean, there's a different mode, right? Students can go and work in the. Work in the shop, so to speak, as. And there's a term in the labor movement, salting is that happening in any systematic way or is that like more of a volunteer desire by individuals or small groups of people? How does salting look? Yeah, it's a good question because you recommend that in the book quite strongly.
[00:25:13] Speaker C: Yeah, salting was an important tactic in this recent labor uptick and I think it's getting more systematic now. So Salts, for instance, initiated the Starbucks campaign in Buffalo. Salts played an important role in winning the union election at jfk, at Amazon.
And I think that the reality now is with the Trump administration giving even more of a reason for union leaderships to not invest in new organizing. And then frankly, they weren't investing even under Biden when the conditions were extremely favorable. So the idea that they're going to make a big turn towards new organizing under Trump seems to me far fetched. But that doesn't mean you can't still organize and students shouldn't still organize. And in fact, now the conditions for sort of combining the political and economic are very strong because, you know, when you organize a union against Jeff Bezos, you're also organizing against the Trump administration. Or frankly, if you organize a union at Tesla. You know, this is in a very direct way, challenge against maga. So the political and the economic have compressed and the economic is one of the places where we have leverage against maga. All of that is to say salting now is even more urgent. And I'm happy to be involved in DSA has a new salting initiative. And DSA played a significant role in Starbucks and in Amazon Salting. And so it's called Workers Organizing Workers. And actually, if listeners are interested that you can just go, you can sign up, you can Google it, but you can also just go to bit ly. So it's bit dot ly, slash salt now. So bit ly salt now, which is essentially a signup form for people who are interested in becoming Salts. So that's a great new initiative. There's a few other initiatives, including from some of the people who initiated the Starbucks drive. And I do think that for young people in particular who are trying to think about how to change the world, you know, who are upset about the state of things and trying to figure out, like, what can I do? Well, salting is one of the really powerful tactics you have.
It's also great to organize your own workplace. And that's something that I'm really involved in supporting. And maybe we can talk a little bit more about that. But if you can, why not also salt at some of the most strategic campaigns in the country, you know, Things like Amazon, Starbucks and Auto be part of making history. And I think that if we can win young people today who are, who, despite what the pundits are saying, are actually on the whole still quite left leaning and progressive oriented. And frankly, there's been a major turn even in the last, further turn in the last six months against Trump. You know, if we can get that spirit of young, youthful activism channeled into salting and organizing the workplace, that's going to be a very powerful dynamic over the next months and years.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: And the boss pays their salary, Right?
[00:27:58] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:27:59] Speaker B: That's the other efficient thing about it.
[00:28:01] Speaker C: But, and it goes a bit to what you were saying too is there's a. There's one of the reasons the staff intensive model in the 90s didn't work out so well is that there was a real culture clash with a lot of the young workers who became staff organizers because they want to change the world. And a lot of them frankly got burnt out. Not just the work was hard, the salting, organizing workplace is always going to be hard, but because, you know, they were in unions that didn't really respect the orientation towards militancy, that weren't, you know, you know, really radically minded. And so there's a culture clash, frankly between a lot of these young workers who got, or young students who got staff jobs. And you have just a more amount of agency and more amount of ownership over efforts. When you're a worker, you know, you don't have a boss in your union telling you, oh, you can't do this, you can't do that. Workers have more agency over the sort of process of the campaign.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: Exactly what I was thinking. I was comparing in the 90s with the Mississippi and other major organizing drives that took people off the campus into the wider world in the 60s. And in those times when you decide to be an organizer, you are making your own role.
In fact, we talked about rolling your own when you went out in the 60s, but that was the opposite of what it meant to go work for a union staff kind of role where you were following orders literally in a kind of. I may be exaggerating that, but I think that was a real union. Yeah.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: And something that I appreciate, you know, all throughout the book and in the sort of surrounding work is a real, I think, you know, smart balance between, you know, emphasizing what is liberation, liberatory and radical about labor organizing of like empowering folks in their daily lives and how. And like re. Injecting that spirit into the labor movement is both strategically useful and also Just like our job as the left, like that's what we want to see in society. And like not making a fetish of that, understanding that, you know, you gotta win union elections, you've gotta fight the boss and so forth. And sort of, without crashing into any kind of extreme, I think you've done a really good job of laying out how to move forward in the present, you know, horrible conditions. And I think that extends to. Even though the book is mainly about organizing workplaces, there's a lot of overlap in politics. And you know, both the way that, as Dick said, you know, the sociology that you did of documenting the biographies of some of like the people who have been involved in some of these organizing drives and projects and noting that, you know, it's people who have experienced a decentralized organizing model in electoral politics, say or issue politics, bringing that into their labor organizing. And so much of what you're suggesting sounds a lot like what has been happening in electoral politics at the grassroots level for the last 30 years.
There's some thread between the Dean Meetup phenomenon and the Starbucks campaign.
[00:31:30] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I do think it's a useful parallel. And you know, part of this has to do with this all being a response essentially to the breakdown of legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism. You know, so, so in some ways it's. These are all responses to just the center not holding like it did before. Some of it has to do with the generational piece, the radicalization of millennials and Gen Z. Some of it has to do with digital tools. So going back to Dean and you know, up through Obama and after there was distributed organizing became possible in part of these digital tools which lower organizing costs and make it possible to organize in a more bottom up way. And I think all of those things aren't just in parallel, but there's a back and forth between them as well. And this is one of the things I try to do in the book is push back a bit against the traditional far left argument about labor militancy in the US which argues essentially if the, if the mass upsurge happens, the politics will follow. And there's some truth to that. But what I try to show, and this was based in part also the research I did in the 1930s is just, it's just a far more reciprocal process of high politics, electoral politics, state politics feeding into labor upsurge and vice versa. And so we saw that really clearly, I think in the recent years through the Bernie campaign. The Bernie campaign, you know, emerged not because there was a mass labor upsurge. But it did contribute to one or, you know, or the beginnings of one. The, one of the themes of the book is the extent to which people who'd gone through the Bernie campaign as volunteers or just people sort of radicalized and encouraged by it, ended up going on to organize their workplace. And so you can see that electoral politics can feed into the bottom up organizing and then vice versa. I think now we have somewhat of an opportunity for the unions to fill a bit of the void and for rank and file militancy to fill a bit of the void, frankly, of the sort of roll over and play dead Chuck Schumers of the world who aren't fighting the fascists like they should. And you have Bernie and AOC out there getting hundreds of thousands of people excited. But frankly, the labor movement has this opportunity that it hasn't seized, but it could seize on asserting itself as sort of a political center around which you can cohere a new majoritarian polit based off of solidarity and based off of sort of economic dignity. And I think one of the exciting dynamics then of the recent labor uptick, for all of its limitations, because it's still really incipient, is that it's bringing kind of a fresh blood and a left wing energy into the union movement which will have repercussions not just for organizing, but on politics.
It's crazy to me. I was a labor organizer for the Bernie campaign. It was crazy to me that we couldn't get most unions to support Bernie, who was just clearly the most pro union candidate. So it's a very self defeating the way that unions have engaged with politics, which has been extremely self defeating. And I think that getting more of the unions to be backing this sort of anti incumbent, anti corporate challengers is a crucial sort of task for the labor and for this labor uptick more generally.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: Word. And party reform is the other piece of it in a systematic way. I mean, that's what both of those things together are always like boiling my blood. When I see labor leaders rightfully, righteously declaiming the Democratic Party's, you know, failures. And I'm like, but bro, like you, those are. You've supported all those people. And anytime anyone tries to systematically, you know, reshape power in the party, you're always on the other side. Like, so, yeah, it's. I think, well, the calls coming from inside the house is the.
[00:35:15] Speaker A: Well, well go ahead in this connection. So let's talk about the UAW in relation to all of this because they're a Big part of the story you're telling. They're the major existing union that seems to under as a result of the rank and file turnover of the leadership with Sean Fain coming to be president seems to be a major part of what happened to let the UAWB doing this worker to worker style of organizing is very much part of what they were able to achieve.
And Sean Fame was militantly opposed to Trump in the election campaign.
So what is going on? How do we understand what is going on now with respect to UAW and the political stuff you were just alluding to relating to Trump?
Do you have any thoughts on that or.
It's a lot of puzzle. It's a very.
[00:36:12] Speaker B: In the interest of time because we're going to wrap up, maybe you can think about this and just sort of comment generally on what, what this particular dilemma means for labor's like national political strategy.
[00:36:27] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean I give the UAW a bit of the benefit of the doubt because although the headlines that people focus on is the, you know, Sean Fain is supporting the tariffs that, you know, Trump is pushing at the same time again, I know because I'm very involved in the supporting the federal workers movement. I know for a fact and that Sean Fan has been very publicly pushing back on the Trump administration for the attacks in higher ed tax on free speech, attacks on federal workers, attacks on, you know, taking away a million workers collective bargaining rights in the federal sector. And so unlike the Teamsters, the UAW has continued to fight the, the Trump administration. It hasn't sort of dropped all criticisms just because it has some agreements. And then you can, I don't know if we have the time to go into all the details about the extent to which the UAW's sort of support for tariffs is, is wise or not. I think that there's, there's a there there to trying to, you know, tariffs can be useful for part of industrial policy. The problem is that Trump's overall policy is just like so destructive and is not targeted and is frankly hurting working class people and is very unpopular. And so the UAW is in sort of a between a rock and a hard place because, you know, it's members want these tariffs. You know, it's not, it's not just like Sean Fain is doing this out of the blue. You know, there's a real contradiction, there's a real contradiction there which is the fact that workers have been left behind by neoliberal capitalism. And so anything that moves or appears to move in another direction is attractive and Trump is smart politically for framing things that way, even if his actual policies won't go in that direction. So leaving aside the uaw, which I think is frankly a little bit damned if they do, damned if they don't, no matter what happens because of the contradictions in that sector, I think that the broader political question for labor right now is defeating Trump. You know, it should be all hands on deck moment for defeating an authoritarian takeover, Trump and Musk, frankly, because it's not even clear who has more power on the day to day in these different operations. And the stakes couldn't be higher because if Musk and Trump can get away with union busting a million federal workers, you know, think about it, think about the stakes. It's crazy to me that there hasn't been more of a, you know, mass militancy of the union leadership. It's just, you know, in response, this is like patco, not just on steroids. This is, this is, this is like the worst nightmare to take away a million workers rights to unionization. If they get away with that and there's not much of an outcry, well then why wouldn't bosses do that in all across the public sector and across the private sector, Every boss wants to be like Elon Musk. If you can just tell your workers, you know, all of a sudden all of your rights are gone. We're going to kick out half of you, make the rest of you work, double the work for the same amount of pay, or worse, you know, in way worse working conditions where you have no rights. Well, every company is going to try to do that and it's going to be like what happened in 1980s under Reagan unless there's a mass pushback. And that's why what the labor movement doing right now is very insufficient because the legal route is necessary. I think it's really good that they're, you know, they're slowing things down through the legal route. But the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court's already taken all sorts of bad decisions. The Supreme Court just yesterday announced it overturned the blockage of the. A lower judge had put a, basically a block on firing these probationary workers. And the Supreme Court just overruled that yesterday. So the idea that we're just gonna win this through the courts is insane. There's no world in which you're gonna be able to defend these federal workers and defend the labor movement just through the courts. And so there has to be combined with a action, mass movement approach that can channel all the anger that the people have you know, American people are angry at Trump right now. It's very unpopular. So this is a huge opening, and it's a huge opening for the labor movement to assert itself as it should be, as the best fighter for all working people, for progress and for democracy. And the labor movement hasn't, frankly done that. Some of the rank and file groups like the Federal Unionist Network have, you know, tried to fill a bit of that vacuum. But it's really a moment, a do or die moment for the labor movement. And I would hope that before it's too late, labor sees that it can't just keep on continuing business as usual. And just like telling members to call their members of Congress is far insufficient given the scope of the attacks coming from above.
[00:40:41] Speaker A: Have you heard serious conversation about, or talk about a general strike approach?
[00:40:48] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm so, so I, there's, there's a lot of talk about the general strike. I frankly am a little bit skeptical about some of this talk because if people are talking about a general strike in 2028. Well, look, honestly, if you can't organize your own members to come out in mass by The Millions on April 5, just this last weekend when everyone else is coming out, I have a hard time imagining you're going to organize a general strike in, in four years. And frankly, four years is too far from now. We need to plan for the next four months. And so I think the level of urgency, I would love there to be a general strike, but to get in that direction, you need to take people where they're at. You need to escalate actions step by step. And unless we can start that process of escalation now, which is not happening, we're never going to get to general strike. So I think there's a bit of a disconnect between this very grandiose, exciting to be sure, very great idea of a general strike and the reality of where most unions are at. So I would like to see more talk about what unions should be doing over the next four weeks, next four months, to get organized, to get millions of workers to understand the stakes of what's going on, to get out into the streets, to join the mass protests when they happen and start doing things like, you know, peaceful civil disobedience, start just getting their co workers organized to be ready. Like these are things that aren't happening right now and they need to be happening.
[00:42:00] Speaker A: Mayday.
[00:42:01] Speaker B: There's a lot to be done.
[00:42:02] Speaker A: Mayday. Let's say, Wait a second. Mayday. I just want anything.
[00:42:07] Speaker C: Sure. Mayday. Yeah, like you know, people are talking about Mayday 2028. Well, 2025.
[00:42:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:15] Speaker B: So yeah, it's funny, the groups that I'm in, we're still talking about what we're going to do on May for May 1st.
[00:42:21] Speaker A: Yeah, it's of course.
[00:42:23] Speaker B: But I, you know, I had heard, actually first heard the idea of a general strike. Floated for 2028, but with a kind of assumption that by, or you know, a Democrat was going to be in the White House. And I liked, or ending a term, whatever it is. But I, and I liked that. I was like, yes, the next time there's a Democratic president, we should be aiming for a Democrat general strike, which is a very different thing than trying to use something in four years to stop fascism when they're, you know, they have a trifecta of federal power.
[00:42:57] Speaker A: Well, so yes, we are at a time of great, of great turmoil, of great threat, and also for mass action that might surprise everybody, including the people who take part in it.
Potentially on the horizon. I'd like to hope so.
And you are in the book Optimistic, Eric, about the worker to worker mode of organizing. I had one thought when I was reading it that made me resonate with what you're saying, which was what happened on April 5 that was largely self organized all across the country, in hundreds and hundreds of places, not in the workplaces. But it seems to me a similar sign that potential for this kind of self determining collective action is here.
And so I wonder whether you have any further, since you wrote the book, further signs of both encouragement and concern before we say thank you for being here.
[00:44:10] Speaker B: Close us out on the hoax.
[00:44:12] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm more optimistic than I've been for the last two years. It's been a really rough period and I think that one of the exciting things about April 5th is hopefully I'll break large numbers of people out of this assumption that nothing can be done and that it's just sort of one day of doom scrolling horrors after another.
And there's a self fulfilling prophecy aspect to this, which is people are like, okay, I'm just going to politically hibernate for four years. Everything is horrible and Trump loves that. There's nothing that helps Trump more than to have progressives feel like nothing can be done. And so I don't think it's true. Nothing can be done. And frankly, I would even flip it around. I think we have a historic opportunity right now to, to not just win the next election, but to defeat maga because the overreach is so crazy. It is They've just overreached so much. You know, not just on the tariffs, which, you know, we're talking about this week, but the idea that they're attacking Social Security, even though Trump campaigned on never touching it. This is crazy. This is like a third rail in politics. You're going to get every, every senior citizen, every family in the country is scared that Trump and Musk are about to destroy one of the things that they depend on for their livelihood. It's not just Social Security, it's Medicaid, it's Medicare. It's just really basic regulations that people have taken for granted. And now that they're going to start feeling the impact of what happens when there's bird flu, and all of a sudden you don't have any researchers researching how to stop bird flu, it's like, this stuff is crazy. What they're doing is so far beyond the payoff even for much of their base, that it creates an opportunity for, for mass scale backlash. Just mass, massive, massive scale backlash. And we started to see what that could look like on April 5th. I think April 5th. If anything, it's just like the tip of the iceberg of what could come, given that Trump shows no signals of sort of like backing down, of reading the room. And so it's incumbent on us. It's going to be a very explosive situation because Trump has done a huge amount of overreach. What he's doing is incredibly unpopular. And so now it becomes a question of organizing that latent sentiment, this latent anger with the Trump administration doing into. Because it's not inevitable.
You do have to organize it. You need to give it a channel and you need to sustain it. And the labor movement, to come back to this, has the opportunity to do that starting in the federal sector. I think federal workers have this sort of the tip of the spear, as it were, because they're facing the worst attacks. But they can also lead the charge, whether it's the question of saving the Postal Service, saving Social Security, just sort of standing up for the economic rights of workers and connecting that to the idea that all working people, whether you're immigrant, whether you're trans, whatever your background is, that we have a shared interest against the billionaires. It's just so obvious. It's the class war is so naked right now. The richest person in the world just stealing the government like you. You don't need to be a Marxist to understand this is like basic contradiction. Just, you just have to look at the world. And so that's an organizing opportunity. Sometimes we say in the labor movement that the boss is the best organizer. I don't believe that the worse things get, the better. Like that's not the way it goes. But it is true that sometimes the boss is the best organizer. And right now I think Trump is organizing potentially a very large number of people into fighting back. This question becomes, can you sustain it? Can you cohere that? Can you give that a political expression? And that is very much up in the air. And I think that the task of sort of leftists and labor organizers is to articulate the path forward, to push for it hard, and to understand that we really can win. It's not just a sort of, sort of a pipe dream. This is something that we could definitively defeat and isolate MAGA because of their overreach, but it's going to take a lot of political organizing at work and beyond.
[00:47:53] Speaker A: So, Eric Blanc, thank you for being with us. And why don't we close with you telling our listeners about your website and things that they can get from that by being in touch with what you're up to.
[00:48:06] Speaker C: Great. Yeah, So a few different plugs. The first is if you want to support the federal workers, which is sort of the bulk of the organizing I've been doing recently, you should go to savepublicservices.com, savepublicservices.com and you can sign up there to find out about local actions in your town in support of federal workers. And you can get involved whether you're a federal worker or not. The second is if you are in a non unionized workplace, you should organize your workplace. The other big project that I'm involved in is called the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, Ewok. It supports any worker in any industry self organize. And so you can go to workerorganizing.org, workerorganizing.org and you can fill out a form and within 72 hours a volunteer experienced organizer will get back to you to help you start organizing your workplace. So you should, if you're not already in union, build a union in your workplace. If you want to salt. I think I mentioned the link, it's bit ly salt now. So you can get a job at Starbucks, Amazon, Auto, places like that, you should do that. It's a strategic place to be. And if you want to follow my work, the best place to do that is on my substack laborpolitics.com, so laborpolitics.com that's where I put up all my writings and then. Yeah, and then my book, you can find it anywhere. Any of the places you normally buy books called we are the Union. And. Yeah, I hope you get it and you know, share it with your co workers.
[00:49:17] Speaker A: Thank you so much. Yes, thank you. This was great. And carry on and hope we stay in touch.
[00:49:24] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. Blessed are the weak Blessed are the poor Blessed those who love their neighbor.
[00:49:36] Speaker A: Blessed are the children Blessed are the.
[00:49:39] Speaker C: Meek Blessed are all those who labor Lift up your eyes lift up your voice Come to the great reunion give us your hand join in our band you are the union Scattered and tossed.
[00:50:15] Speaker A: Battered and lost all of these years.
[00:50:19] Speaker C: Divided each one is precious each plays a part when we are all united Lift up your eyes Lift up, lift up your voice Come to the great reunion Give us your hand.
