Episode 71 – Labor Pains with Tschaff Reisberg

Macro N Cheese – Episode 71
Labor Pains with Tschaff Reisberg

Tschaff Reisberg [intro/music] (00:03):

I was finding that all the stuff that was taught in the textbooks, it wasn’t really applicable to the real world. And this was especially true because the economy crashed twice there and caught all the economists off guard.

Tschaff Reisberg [intro/music] (00:18):

If a whole bunch of people lose their jobs, they stop spending. And if they stop spending, then a whole bunch more people lose their jobs and it just snowballs, but spreads across the whole country. So in the same way a pandemic does. So it’s like a second pandemic; the first one’s your virus and the other one is economic.

Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (00:33):

Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

Steve Grumbine  (01:34):

All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today, you know, I’m talking to a gentlemen who has been a friend of mine for a number of years, who I met at the very first Modern Monetary Theory Conference at UMKC. And he came up to me and just had the biggest smile on his face. He had heard Real Progressives. He had seen the work we had done, and I was just like, wow, I know you, I know you from Facebook.

I know you through Rohan and gang. I know you through this MMT community that was very small at the time, but growing. And he has been just one of those people who always sees the bright side, the optimist side, the approach of gathering more, not gathering less. And so one of the things that I thought was really impressive was in all my anger and all my rage at the establishment and seeing them minimize and cast out Progressives it was my first instinct to cast them out.

But my guest, Tschaff Reisberg, he pointed to me and said, Hey, Steve, we’re just not that big a movement. We can’t afford to let anyone go. And so with that, I thought to myself, I’d like to have Tschaff on. I want to talk to Tschaff. Tschaff is one of the original MMTers. This guy knew about MMT before the financial crash. He knew about MMT during the Occupy Movement. He knew about MMT and has been deeply woven into the fabric of MMT for a number of years.

And so with that, Tschaff Reisberg is a delegate for the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, he’s a flight attendant. And let me just tell you is an all around good guy and he knows MMT probably better than just about anyone I know. So with that, welcome to the show, Tschaff.

Tschaff Reisberg (03:30):

Hey Steve, thank you for having me on it’s a pleasure to be here.

Grumbine  (03:34):

Absolutely man. So I was really excited to bring you on, because right now, during our situation with the COVID-19 pandemic and the shutting down of America impacted just about every single labor union, every single worker. And we’re not just talking about the low end here, although they are decimated by this. We’re also talking about upper middle class. We’re talking about white collar workers, and we’re talking about quite frankly, essential workers in the airline industry, such as yourself are being directly impacted by this. Can you kind of set the stage for what it is like to be in the labor movement in, in the airline industry during this era?

Reisberg (04:24):

Sure. The airlines were hit one of the very first and the hardest hit in the whole economy. And when the crisis hit, I remember it started in China and we were debating at the union. You know, what should our response be? Should we just cancel all the flights to China? And how are we gonna protect the flight attendants? What’s the proper response to this? And we were in such unchartered territory here. We had to do a lot of learning on the spot actually, but it was bad. Quickly, it wasn’t just China.

Then it was, you know, our nation was getting infected and it was Europe and Europe was shutting down then. So in almost no time, we lost 95% of our passengers. It was just like, went from full flights, are making lots of profit. We had all these expectations of growth; we’re hiring new flight attendants. And then in the blink of an eye, our planes are empty and we’re talking about bankruptcy and furloughs and all these other terrible things. And when unions lose workers, that’s losing dues money. So you lose the capacity, our union loses the capacity to do the stuff that it needs to do in the most important time for it to do anything.

Grumbine  (05:31):

So in other words, you’re sitting there fighting for your job. Your people are getting let go. The actual revenue streams for the airlines are completely cut off and simultaneously the very agency, if you will, that would support airline workers has been literally cut off from funds as well, that would enable them to fight back for your behalf.

Reisberg (06:00):

Yeah.

Grumbine  (06:00):

All at the same time.

Reisberg (06:01):

Right. It couldn’t be a worse time to lose capacity at your union. So, you know, thankfully we had been building the capacity to act politically for a long time. So it was time to use all those connections, all the talent that we’ve built up, calling all the favors, we’ve earned with the politicians to protect our jobs. So the cruise industry and the airlines were really, really hard hit. Tourism in general was super hard hit, and it was just impossible.

We’re talking about imminent bankruptcy in a matter of weeks. Like there’s just no way for a corporation to pay all the bills without any revenue just cut off like overnight. So, in the CARES Act, we did something that’s just been completely unprecedented in American history. And we said, we want to protect everybody’s paycheck. And we’re going to just get government grants to the airlines and make sure everybody’s getting a paycheck, but it’s also going to come with conditions.

You can’t furlough, you can’t downsize. You can’t reduce your flying to all the places around the countries [inaudible], keeping the service alive so people can get where they need to go – essential workers. And it also had other just totally unprecedented things like you can’t do stock buybacks. You can’t do dividends. There’s gotta be hard limits on executive compensation. I don’t know if you guys remember, but when AIG got bailed out, it was a huge scandal because the executives just took a pound of flesh for themselves.

Grumbine  (07:29):

Absolutely.

Reisberg (07:30):

So even Progressives at the time and we even got some pushback from them because they thought this is just another corporate bailout that’s going to help executives and shareholders, not workers. And so we had Progressives against this just cause this is so unheard of, but this was a worker first bailout. And thankfully we got it in the CARES Act. So it protected all of our jobs till the end of September.

Grumbine  (07:52):

That’s amazing. So I want to take a step back and normally I’d like to try and touch on the who you are and how you came to this moment. But I thought it was important to bring out the airline aspect of this in the union. But I want to peel back a little bit. I briefly touched on the fact that you were an MMTer before MMT. I mean, you are one of the OGs, as they say. Talk to me about your history with MMT, how it began, how you began to learn Modern Monetary Theory and how it became a part of your life and why you feel it’s so important.

Reisberg (08:28):

I was initially a college dropout. I made it to my junior year with a pre-med background and I just wasn’t loving it. I didn’t want to be just a mediocre doctor, I wanted to be a great doctor, or no doctor. And I was trying to answer the hardest question there is that I think anybody can try to answer is what do you want to do with your life? So junior year I dropped out and moved to Russia. And when I was in Russia, I thought it was just absolutely fascinating to see how a communist country is becoming capitalist.

Then all this stuff that we take for granted in the US they actually have to build that to make capitalism not be just a disaster, not just make very, very rich people and very, very poor people; make it so small businesses can thrive and innovation thrives. So to do this requires a whole bunch of government services and also requires a certain culture. And I didn’t know how any of that worked. I just thought this is just absolutely fascinating.

So after a year in Russia, I went back to the US and started studying economics. So after studying economics, I was finding that all the stuff that was taught in the textbooks, it wasn’t really applicable to the real world. This was especially true because the economy crashed while I was there and caught all the economists off guard. And there was a group that I was paying attention to in Russia, and I started getting interested in economics, called the Post-Keynesian Thought Group, PKT, and it was just a mailing list.

This was like early internet. And I think Randy Wray was on there, Mosler was there, a whole bunch of people. And I happened upon it because I was reading a book called “The Nature of Money” by Geoffrey Ingham. And it was actually way over my head when I started reading it, like it was dense. It was hard to read, just a bunch of jargon I didn’t understand. But I started following up on some of these references and that’s how I figured out about Randy Wray and stuff.

And at the same time, MMT was finally becoming known because they were predicting the housing bubble and they predicted it for the right reasons. So it was a pretty exciting time for MMT, it was kind of their breakthrough moment.

Grumbine  (10:44):

So let me ask you in terms of that, I mean, obviously that’s even pre Mat Forstater. I mean, that’s pre- Stephanie Kelton.

Reisberg (10:53):

Yeah. She was still Stephanie Bell back then; she wrote this great paper called “Can Taxes and Bonds Finance Government Spending.” And that was like one of those seminal papers that I read. And it was not too hard to read and just explains it all in detail because there’s so much writing in economics and you don’t have a compass initially.

You don’t know what you can find that’s trustworthy and what’s just garbage and so much of what’s been written in the last 40 years is just garbage. So thankfully she talked about operational realities that you can just confirm yourself. And another big one was the “Sectorial Balanced Model of Aggregate Demand” by Scott Fullwiler. And that one, it probably took about 10 reads before I got it.

I was having a hard time with it; it was not clicking. And I was reading another book by a physicist, Richard Feynman, and he was talking about how he gets all these great ideas if he goes into the sensory deprivation tank. And he just does his best thinking in there.

Grumbine  (11:51):

Just like Altered States, man, that old William Hurt movie.

Reisberg (11:53):

Yes, yes! Absolutely. And I was getting kind of frustrated. Like it’s not making sense to me. I didn’t understand how savings equals investment. And I go into the sensory deprivation tank and it all started to click. Like it’s finally started getting, I was confused between saving and savings where savings is a stock and saving is a flow. And then MMT finally clicked to a really large degree.

Grumbine  (12:22):

I think it’s worth mentioning for a minute. You know, a lot of people don’t even talk about stocks and flows. And I think this is a really important foundational concept. It plays obviously into the stock book, consistent modeling, but it also plays into understanding the role of the currency user and the currency issuer, which is another foundational principle here. Can you talk a little bit about stocks and flows?

Reisberg (12:51):

Sure. So it’s really easy to get the two flipped around, especially cause I’m kind of dyslexic, but a flow is like a measurement. It’s if you’re an electrical engineer, you’d think of it as watts. So you’re thinking of how much stuff happens between two points of time. That’s a flow. And if you’re talking about a stock, then it’s a quantity, as a fixed quantity. So savings is a fixed quantity and saving is, you know, how much you say saved over between any arbitrary points of time. So stocks get fed by flows and stocks are accumulated flows.

Grumbine  (13:32):

That is fantastic. So with that in mind, the idea of the currency issuer and the currency user model, which is so foundational to understanding MMT in general, makes me wonder as a guy who got to travel and live in Russia. You know, we oftentimes hear about how MMT is pertinent only to the United States and that the United States has got the benefit of the world reserve currency, and then they start breaking out the “well, they’ve got a standing army.”

And then they break out the idea of “well, you know, without the petrodollar,” and so there’s all these like extraneous, I don’t want to say conspiracy, but conspiracy minded thinking that kind of plays into the tales at the bar stool that are so pervasive in our anti-knowledge, which is fueled by 40 years plus, maybe even longer, of macroeconomic malfeasance that has been perpetrated by the industry of macroeconomic education. As a person that lived it in Russia and lived it in the United States, clearly MMT is not a US phenomenon. Are you able to talk a little bit about the role of Russia in MMT and perhaps understanding that global view of currency issuers and currency users?

Reisberg (14:56):

Yeah. It’s actually not necessarily a MMT specific problem because a lot of the pushback we get is from post-Keynesians just comes from not having a theory of exchange rates that is adequately developed. It’s just an area that economics hasn’t really developed, probably sufficiently. It’s just, uh, an area that a lot more knowledge can be built on, but every country that is effectively imposing a tax, you know, they successfully set up their own currency. You can’t run a country with its own currency without taxes and without issuing currency. So then just becomes a question. Okay, yeah. So-called “printing money” is essential.

We always have it like in a negative standpoint, we always put as a negative – printing’s just nothing positive about that. But now you flip the question around and say, how do you run a country without printing currency? Like, how’s that gonna work? So then the question is, you know, how do we spend it in a way that doesn’t tank our exchange rate? And for that, you know, we just basically look at, you know, how do we make it so people want to keep the currency? How do you want to stabilize your economy? And for that, you have to use countercyclical policy to keep the economy humming and stable and predictable, and people trusting your currency.

Grumbine  (16:11):

It’s interesting you say people trusting your currency. I mean, within the domestic US, clearly the ability to leverage or levy a tax, isn’t a matter of trust or faith; at the end of the day, if you don’t pay your taxes, bad things happen.

Reisberg (16:27):

Right.

Grumbine  (16:27):

So, you know, it’s a matter of law to some degree here. And that’s the legal framework that I enjoy so much about MMT, is understanding that while there’s faith, when it goes beyond the borders of the US in terms of, Hey, we can buy whatever in some other country. Okay, great. At the end of the day, if China comes to the US and wants to do business with the US, they do business with the US in US dollars.

Reisberg (16:54):

Right.

Grumbine  (16:55):

And those US dollars are then stashed at the Fed somewhere. And they can choose to save them, as you were saying earlier, the desire to save, or they can go ahead and take them back and exchange them through some sort of a foreign exchange and either take their own currency back or get another currency that they wish to save in.

Reisberg (17:15):

Right.

Grumbine  (17:16):

What is the value, if you will, of the concept of the US dollar being the quote, unquote “global primary,” cause it’s a basket, but a primary reserve currency?

Reisberg (17:28):

That one, I think you better save for one of the academics. We’re entering dangerous territory even by saying trust. I’m like, that’s a red flag. I shouldn’t even say trust, but we’re trusting that China’s not dumping all the reserves on the exchange market. Like, there’s a certain stability here that’s benefiting everybody, and it’s totally predicated on people expecting the currency to maintain value. So it’s a red flag to say trust like in MMT stuff. [inaudible].

Grumbine  (17:56):

It’s okay. So this is funny because in reality, these are the stumbling blocks that I think the average activist has because that’s where a lot of the [inaudible] sound finance people come from with their idea of, well, if we devalue it, we will lose faith in the dollar, blah, blah, blah, and all that good stuff. But it’s pervasive, right? I mean, this is pervasive, but I think though, you know, within stocks and flows and you look at the way that this perpetuates itself in a global environment.

I mean, you’re in a global industry. Your airlines go all around the world. So you’re jumping off in Amsterdam. You’re jumping off in China, you’re jumping off in Australia. You’re staying the night in a hotel, and you’re getting back on the plane and going. A lot of this is about international travel. I mean, you’ve got a lot of international aspects to what it is that you do and to what your industry does and to why what you do is so vital.

But there’s an economic component to that, and I’m interested in understanding with so much riding on getting people back and forth in mission critical ways, how the pandemic itself has impacted global travel, and by extension the global economy.

Reisberg (19:13):

It’s like, you know, Minsky and Keynes, they all explained it – what’s going to happen. And what we’re fearing is that if a whole bunch of people lose their jobs, they stop spending. And if they stop spending, then a whole bunch more people lose their jobs; and it just snowballs into, you know, it spreads across the whole country. So in the same way a pandemic does. So it’s like a second pandemic. The first one’s your virus and the other one is economic.

So what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to stabilize the economy so that we can put all of our effort into defeating the pandemic and restart the economy as quickly as possible. Because from an airline standpoint, once you start furloughing and you don’t keep people qualified on their equipment, you can’t just restart it. It’s gonna take years to get everybody through training again. We’re talking about the airline industry not coming back for many years, even like using the simulators, you know, full speed and getting everybody as fast we can.

It was just never designed to be stopped and restarted. So we have to keep people qualified. We have to keep everything as safe as possible. So we don’t want people spreading the virus when they don’t need to be. So we just want essential workers. We just want people essentially traveling so we can focus all of our energy onto keeping the most vulnerable out of work, keeping ourselves from spreading it to people and restarting, as soon as this thing is over, as soon as the pandemic’s over.

Grumbine  (20:39):

One of the things that was interesting, Pavlina Tcherneva has recently written several papers and has been vocal about the concept of nationalizing payroll.

Reisberg (20:51):

Yeah.

Grumbine  (20:52):

And the ability of taking on the full payroll protection and so forth. And obviously the Payroll Protection Act had some flaws in it that I can outright say, you know, they put a limit of a hundred thousand dollars, and I think that’s to appeal to some sort of weird mindset that anybody that makes over a hundred should be okay.

But in reality, you can make 200,000 and be living a very rough life even with that amount of money in today’s society. It’s not like, I think there’s a little bit of a hyperbolic nature to playing on tropes about money. And in reality, we can afford to keep it all going. And we should not be, in my opinion, politicizing a pandemic and politicizing who gets help and who doesn’t. What are your thoughts on that?

Reisberg (21:36):

Yeah. A pandemic is political. Your public health is always political, but it shouldn’t be partisan. It’s absolutely become partisan. And that’s just a great travesty. And part of that is because people are so damn desperate to make ends meet. This is me, by the way. We got the government to protect our jobs. I am getting a paycheck right now. I’m paying the mortgage. I’m paying my bills. Keeping my daughter fed and putting food on the table.

This is all thanks to the government. Like a lot of what government does that works, it doesn’t get credit. Everything seems like normal. Like from, if you don’t know that this has happening, nobody told you, you just think just the airlines just run down their savings or something. But in fact, I’m living proof of you can avoid suffering if you get the right policy – that unemployment is a public choice. It’s a government’s choice when you’re a currency issuer.

And Pavlina, she pointed out that this is actually like a form of a job guarantee; instead of just issuing unemployment insurance, we are guaranteeing these people’s jobs, because like I said earlier, that if the business takes this money, it can’t furlough people, so you’re guaranteeing some jobs here. And unfortunately we have to go back to government with our hat in hand and we say, you know, please help us.

But not just the airlines. We want all workers to experience the same thing that flight attendants are experiencing right now. So it just makes a hell of a lot of sense. Once you get past the affordability problem, then you start asking, you know, but is it politically a good idea? And it just has all kinds of benefits. Like it ends anti-immigrant sentiment. And a lot of what I do as union rep is I interface with politicians and the Democrats are having a hard time in rural North Carolina. I’m in Charlotte and you go to the countryside and yeah, they’re angry at corporations. They know they’re getting screwed.

They know they’re getting a bad deal, but you got the immigrants coming in and taking all the jobs and pushing down wages. So if you want to end anti-immigrant sentiment, just guarantee everybody a job, it just nips that in the bud, and that’s been a long standing problem. And it ends the employment inflation trade-off for anybody’s who’s familiar. They say if too many people are employed, then businesses are going to drive up wages competing for that really scarce worker. So you get price, wage spirals. So by paying a fixed wage and benefits, don’t have to control inflation by forcing people to be unemployed.

Intermission (24:11):

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Grumbine  (25:00):

What I found interesting is that as a union rep, this stuff that you guys were able to get, wasn’t just handed to you by government’s goodwill. This was an act of organizing.

Reisberg (25:13):

Absolutely.

Grumbine  (25:14):

Let’s talk about the power of labor for a minute. I mean, unions have been decimated. Everything our government has done, everything our political process has done has eliminated the power of unions. And we’re talking about a job guarantee is the ultimate baked in stabilizer, if you will, for the balance of power between labor and capital.

And it provides an out that takes away the capitalist stranglehold on labor. That said, you guys had to organize, get your bill to get your support, to get added into this CARES Act. Talk to me about labor, the power of labor and how this knowledge of Modern Monetary Theory and stuff like that might be a great tool for labor to bring into the fold so that it can be powerful and make demands.

Reisberg (26:05):

Okay, that’s a big subject. I’ll give you the reader’s digest version. As labor you rightly said, has had its ass handed to them for a number of decades. This has been a multi-decade decline in terms of union density. And finally we’ve stopped declining. We’re starting to flex our muscle; and the more we flex our muscle, the more popular labor gets, like organized labor.

And I can tell you a little story of just personally my own experience when I got involved with the union. So after graduating, I got a job as a baggage handler at United, cause it was a great recession. I probably put out a hundred applications and nobody would even see me for an interview. So it’s just applying, applying. I got a temporary part-time job at United airlines as a baggage handler. And they were unionized.

It was my very first time ever being in a union. And I had virtually nothing to do with them. They just took their dues and I never needed them for anything except for this one time, when a plane was coming into the gate and you have to be qualified for all kinds of things you do around the airplane. The FAA mandates it.

And so there’s this thing called wing walking. And if you stand on the side of the airplane as it’s coming into the gate, you hold up your wand and you are there to watch the airplane to make sure it doesn’t hit anything, or if the engine’s on fire, you have to use a signal to tell the person at the front who is marshaling the airplane, that an engine’s on fire, and they can relay it to the pilot. So there’s a whole, like, it’s not really hard, but you do need a bit of training to be qualified for wing walking. And I didn’t have that. I was brand new.

They just taught us how to be in the bag room in the wintertime. And for some reason that I found myself out of the gate and the manager says, Hey, take this wand and bring in this airplane. And I’m like, I don’t really know how to do that; they’ve never qualified me on that. And when you’re new at an airline, you’re on this thing called probation. So for six to nine months, you don’t have any real union protection. They can fire you for whatever reason they want, basically.

And I was in this really scary position where this manager is saying, going wing walk this airplane in. And I’m like, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t think this is right. And he’s getting angry. He’s starting to shout at me. And so I just tried something I’ve never tried before. I was like, I’d like to talk to my union rep then. And the manager stormed off. He found a person at a neighboring gate to wing walk the airplane in.

And I got my shop steward and there’s these little kiosks in front of every gate and where this was Chicago. So it’s pretty cold or hot. And we have all extremes and the manager and the shop steward go in this kiosk. And all I hear is like, fuck, fuck. Just a whole bunch of shouting at each other. And then the manager walks out and he says, all right, you’ve got an easy hour and a late lunch. This never happened. And an easy hour means you, if you stay one minute past your shift ends, you get paid for the whole hour; and late lunch is an extra half hour of pay. So I made an hour and a half pay over that incident. That was my very first union experience.

Grumbine  (29:17):

Not bad.

Reisberg (29:18):

Yeah. I’m like, there’s power, like you can stand up to your boss, like what a novel concept. You can do stuff with safety’s involved. You don’t have to be a coward and just do what they say so you can put food on the table. So it just got my brain like, wow, like, this is fascinating, what just happened here. And I think every worker, they want power. They want to have a say in decisions that affect their lives. But I didn’t know much about unions back then. I didn’t know the history of labor, and they didn’t really teach it in economics.

All I knew was there was a whole bunch of blood involved, and I knew that there was this long decline like you did. And it just got me really curious about what is all this labor stuff about? All right. So fast forward to about three years later. Now I’m a flight attendant and we got a new system for bidding for our schedules called preferential bidding system. And it’s really complicated. It’s hard for most individuals to ever wrap their minds around how to make the system allocate trips in a way that makes the most people happy.

But as you know, an economic problem, so of course my mind is like, this is awesome. This is like so much like, this is right up my alley. And the first version of this was just really garbage. It was making so many people upset. And so I went to the company and I said, hey, here’s what’s wrong with it, and here’s how you fix it. And they said, thank you. Nobody’s ever brought that to our attention. We know that you guys are upset, we’re sorry. We didn’t mean to upset you; let’s do this.

And the company started to fund this project and my own union said, no, no, no. He can’t belong to this. He’s not one of us. He just doesn’t belong here. So the union was successful at kicking me out of this project that I started. And I remember they were also trying to get me fired. They were just so upset and like, it was they’re a nasty group.

And I don’t usually get angry, but I felt angry. I’m paying dues money to these people, and they’re trying to get me fired. Like management called me up and they said, Hey, you’re union wants you fired, but don’t worry if they’re successful, we’ll give you a job in management. It’s like the reverse the way it should be.

Grumbine  (31:28):

Oh my goodness. Yes.

Reisberg (31:29):

And I just felt angry. Like at one point that’s kind of interesting cause you’re, you know, your life isn’t boring anymore. You’ve got some stress involved. Cause I was living a pretty stress free life at that moment. And needed a little bit of stress in your life in order to feel something and not a chronic stress. But I think there’s like a little bit of stress involved when you’re trying to push the boundaries and you take it in little squirts and it just makes life interesting. But I was pissed at the union.

I’m like, what the hell is wrong with our union? I’m trying to make flight attendants happy, and before I even embarked on this project, I should say that before I started all of the reconfiguring, I asked as many flight attendants as I could: “What do you guys want? What do you guys don’t like about this thing? Tell me.” And I put all the popular suggestions in this plan. I researched other airlines. I found out how they do stuff. I came up with this killer system.

And we’re having a union election, and one of the candidates said, Hey, why don’t you go talk to our board of directors at the union, and tell him what you’re experiencing. So I thought, all right, I’m going to go down there, tell them my struggles, and they’re going to go fix this. And I had no political experience before this. And this candidate for president, he won. He became the president. And I go in front of the board of directors. There’s I don’t know about 12 of them. And you had a room full of other union officials. So there’s probably about 200 people in there. And I told them the story.

I’m like, I’m trying to get these changes. This is what the flight attends want. I don’t know what to do because I think the person that is most involved in blocking me is corrupt. And it turns out she was corrupt. She ended up working for management. She just went straight from union to management. She just switched teams like that and was selling flight attendants out. And she was totally incompetent.

Like at first I thought, you know, I can work with you, finally I got some help and no, she was bad news. And I didn’t have anybody to help me, like all the board of directors and the various committees, they universally attacked me that day. And I don’t know if Steve, you ever had this experience, but if you’ve ever been a room full of people attacking you, it’s like surreal. It’s like, this is not your real life.

Grumbine  (33:47):

Let me tell you just in a quick deviation here as a guy who took MMT, obviously the work of others, standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak, but taking that work into areas where people had never been exposed to it within the progressive, activist community and within these political parties, I have screenshots I keep for my own motivation of people who, like wave after wave like that World War Z, where the zombies attack the wall in Jerusalem.

I mean, they just came at me like drone army telling me I was an idiot, open a fricking economics book, you moron. You’re just going to devalue the currency, you idiot. Have you ever heard of Zimbabwe, you moron? And I mean on and on. And a lot of the alternative media outlets out there won’t even have me on, they have other people on because I fought back. I didn’t sit back on my hands and let them just beat me down.

And I took to the podium and I swung back, you know, and I keep swinging back because I feel like the wrong people are the gatekeepers. The wrong people are in position to silence the right people. And I attack and I attack back because it’s not just the quote, unquote “other guy.” Sometimes the enemy is us. Sometimes we in our own movement are the ones purveying the wrong information, blocking the wrong voices, blocking the wrong information.

Reisberg (35:24):

Right.

Grumbine  (35:25):

And sometimes we have to fight within. We have to have an internal struggle, which is that friction you were kind of describing. Sometimes you’ve got to have iron sharpening iron, even in amongst friendlies, even if gets testy. And I’ve been that guy, man. I have been more than willing to create diamonds, you know, with the pressure I put on them. And so I completely appreciate what you’re saying because I still suffer the fallout from fighting back against many people that I would consider allies.

Reisberg (35:55):

Right. This is kind of like the normal progression of things when you’re in the minority and you’re trying to change the status quo, who people are benefiting from. You’re going to face resistance, and so ultimately you have to find ways to create a brand new culture that’s different than the existing one. But emotionally it’s hard on a person like . . . .You are in for a roller coaster, especially if you’re a caring person.

Like I felt that day when I came home from that meeting, like I just let down 20,000 flight attendants, like this was going to make a difference in their life, and they were excited about what work was being done. I didn’t have any opposition from flight attendants, it was the union; and my political maneuvering failed. Like I did everything that I could think that I need to do to be successful.

I tried everything and just didn’t happen. So I was depressed and feeling sorry about myself. And at the same time, I got engaged to a woman, a Japanese woman. And my mom said, here’s some money for your wedding. And this amazing woman knew just how upset I was. And she said, I don’t feel right having a wedding. Let’s use this money to build that software.

Grumbine  (37:15):

Wow.

Reisberg (37:16):

So yeah, I used that money to build the software, it’s pretty expensive. It was [inaudible] for the largest airline in the whole nation and it was to serve all of them.

Grumbine  (37:27):

That is amazing. I just want to say, it’s just absolutely amazing. What an inspiration. Keep going. I just wanted to make sure I made that point.

Reisberg (37:34):

Yeah, that was crazy. I’ve also never written software on my own. I did it for companies in the past, but I’d never been the project manager and everything like the janitor, the you name it and I’ve got to work building the software. And just through competence, I got the respect from a massive number of flight attendants. Like they all downloaded it. I wouldn’t say all. I’d say at least half of them downloaded it and they were using it and they depending on it.

And another thing is, I didn’t charge for it because I thought as soon as I charged for it, then the union’s going to say, Oh, this guy was just a capitalist and that’s the reason we didn’t go with him. And I wanted to use this to get revenge. This was a nerd’s way of getting revenge on the union, but not just like petty revenge, like hit them back. But I want to see change. I want to see the flight attendants to be able to have a say in their own union.

So I’ve been using this as a platform like to tack on labor education, tack on petitions, to tack on my own thoughts on how we can improve our union. And because I got such a large audience, people are exposed to these ideas that they otherwise wouldn’t have been. So as my way of reaching a really large audience, and that was successful at actually changing the way our unions run.

Grumbine  (38:55):

That is amazing. Amazing.

Reisberg (38:58):

Like we went from conflict, there’s a whole lot of internal politics I didn’t go into. There’s a merger with US Airways and American. And it was a really nasty merger. It was kind of like progressives and liberals like blowing at Democrats. Like it was just nasty and we’re at each other’s throats or at all out war and that wasn’t getting us anywhere. So we had to change the way we operated the union in very specific ways.

At one of the MMT conferences, the one that you and I met each other at, there’s a guy named Alex from New York and he was in the union at Yale University. And he was just going on about the benefits of participatory budgeting, where the experts inform the non-experts of what they know. And then the non-experts just the rank and file worker says, okay, with that information, let’s vote on how we’re going to allocate funds at our union. And so a big trick to making things better is to allow the people who are affected by the decision to actually make the decision.

So when you say, you know, this is really a long way to answer your original question, is unions went wrong when they started creating a hierarchy. And then you just have management as decision makers, and you run the same problem that corporations and workers have is you’re creating a structure where workers don’t get to make decisions, and you just have another management and you have problems with management.

So the solution to that is make workers more involved. Stop making them be order takers and tell them what’s going on, and let them decide what direction we should take the union. And that’s a way better way of running the union than just providing a service and nobody’s really involved, Nobody’s really educated, Nobody’s participating. It’s just a disaster. If you have a service based union, but actual democracy is how you rectify a lot of this.

Grumbine  (41:03):

You know, it’s funny you say that because you look at our own political system right now and everything you were saying, I was putting towards the Bernie Sanders movement. I was putting towards progressive change. I was putting towards the structural changes that folks like DSA are trying to advance. And then I look at the actual outcome and I see superdelegates say, yeah, you know, we see all these millions of people supporting Bernie, but you know what we know better than you, and we’re going to hand select this guy named Joe Biden, and forget participatory democracy, forget representative democracy.

We have a small group of elites, and we’re gonna tell you how it is because we’re smarter than you, and this is what has to take place. And it feels gross and it feels horrible, and we hate it and we resent it. And I imagine that that is similar to what you were talking about within the union in terms of making a participatory democracy. You know, you and I, I want to touch on this cause you and I have had great talks behind the scenes. I’m obviously a angry, progressive, white man, unfortunately in some respects, who fits the title of the Bernie bro, that they’ve painted too such great precision to marginalize people like myself.

But to some large degree guys like me, we are seen as, hey you’re a privileged dude, why in the world do you feel like you have a right to be angry? And why do you think you should be heard? And the flip side to that though, is, is that you look around at what happened during this election and you see the very sad gender politics that played out with people falling in line for Elizabeth Warren, as opposed to Bernie Sanders based purely on identity, as opposed to bold vision on policy or anything else.

Reisberg (42:52):

No substance. Right?

Grumbine  (42:54):

Yes. And so it was these lack of substance debates. It created a lot of the hate and anger because you’re saying, Hey, we have these policies that will help your life too; and they’re like, yeah, but Bernie has got the wrong plumbing. Or I don’t like the way Bernie looks at me, or I don’t like his voice or, Oh, you’re just another privileged, white Bernie, bro, whatever. And so it was the shutdown politics of privilege and identity that really stifled that broad based approach that you’re talking about with the elites between the merger and so forth.

And here we are in our own democracy, and one of the things you raised to me was, Hey, Steve, we just don’t have the numbers to win without including folks that maybe we don’t like, and how do we make that coalition and how do we do this? And I think now’s a really good time to kind of talk about that, especially in light of what has happened. What is your take? Give me your ideas in terms of you were pretty despondent when we saw how the Elizabeth Warren faction totally didn’t hear the voices of the poor. They were kind of privileged and told us to eat our peas, and there was a whole back and forth we had about that.

Reisberg (44:05):

Yeah, we spent all this time about snake emojis and we’re trying to talk about healthcare. Like. Come on.

Grumbine  (44:11):

So talk to me a little bit about your political perspective in terms of building broad-based coalitions and what that means. And I know you don’t have all the answers, but I know you have some ideas based on your history as a union leader. And also just as a MMT informed, progressive who wants to see us win.

Reisberg (44:30):

So here’s the kind of cool thing. If you participate, you think you’re going to go into this because you’re going to change the system. Everybody wants revolution, right? And what ends up happening is the more engaged you get, the more it changes you, because you’re going to be interacting with a whole bunch of people that you probably wouldn’t have before.

These Warren people, they might be in their own little bubble and Bernie people might be in their own little bubble. But if you merge these people and get them in the same room and you start talking about stuff that matters to them, they’re going to realize, Oh my God, like, this is not right, what’s happening? Like in the union, initially I thought, okay, we’re just going to fight the company. Like that’s our role in things. But our goal as a union is to do things together that we can’t do as individuals.

Then maybe instead of focusing on where we get our money, we should focus on where our money’s going. And we realized that to be effective, we have to engage in society. We have to be part of civil society and affect local government, national government, state government, you name it. And there’s just all kinds of BS, frankly; you get organized money, like say, you know, land developers; they are talking to the politicians every day. They’re organized, they’re behind a single entity where they figure out what their agenda is. And then they put massive amounts of money behind that.

And just the average Joe has no way to fight that. So when you start hearing their stories, I mean just basic human values, where like, I like this guy, this guy deserves better. He’s getting kicked out of his home without any warning, and he can’t find another place to live quick enough. What are we going to do to help him? It makes you angry. It makes you feel like you needed to do something, and you guys put your heads together, and you think alright, we gotta change this policy.

We gotta, you know, work with this organization that’s already doing this sort of work, and it makes you a more empathetic person. So it actually that’s I think what we need more in society is just more empathy, more understanding of each other’s plights, how things got to be the way that they are. And you’ll find in the labor movement, workers are generally way more conservative than the people that are doing the work at the union.

And not all unions are like this, but the ones that are like really involved a lot with meeting other people and from all sectors of the economy, there is a lot of Progressives there, there are definitely a lot of Progressives there and they love Bernie’s platform because the platform came from them themselves. I had one of Bernie’s senior advisors come to Charlotte before Bernie came down and he said, Hey, we want to meet with all the union leaders. Tell us what you guys are struggling for. What’s your political agenda.

And Bernie is going to do whatever he can to help you guys out. So of course, we got a whole bunch of Bernie supporters at the unions because he’s just like our dream. Instead of battling the, the politicians are coming to us saying, what do you guys want? Let’s see what we can make happen. And I don’t think most of America understands that because they’re not really plugged in at that level.

Grumbine  (47:40):

That’s interesting because as part of the Bernie movement, I obviously felt incredibly empowered, because what I saw was my needs finally being discussed, our needs finally being discussed; hope, change, real hope, real change. And I didn’t see that with the others. It didn’t feel that way. It didn’t feel participatory. It felt like, Hey, you’ll take whatever policy I get; you just have to like me. That’s what I’m here for is for you to like me. And Bernie was saying, Hey, I might not be the greatest guy in the world and that’s okay because it’s not about me. It’s about us.

And so the whole mindset of the entire campaign flew in the face of everything the Democrats typically run. In front of everything that the average American’s used to hearing. For me, it felt like, wow, we finally have a chance, and then it was killed. So as a closing point on this interview, Tschaff, what would you say is the hope going forward for you? What would you tell to our average listener? Hey, here’s why you should hope. And here’s what I would suggest. Paint the road for me.

Reisberg (48:41):

Yeah. We don’t always win. We don’t always win at all. And we’re starting from a pretty low point compared to where we used to be. And sometimes our flames get blown out. And in those times we lean on each other to relight that flame, rekindle that warmth. And when I try to think of what logical reason is there to hope, just look at MMT.

Like when I started maybe 12 years ago or something, there’s just a handful of MMTers. And now they’re having MMT conferences, and they’re packed, and they’re making public policy; they’re shaping the national conversation. That was just dedication, persistence, and adjusted vision that will change what people think is possible. And that’s a really just bold vision that I think a lot of people can buy into.

In terms of how to get there, the only answer I have to that is if organizers keep turning away, keep working at it and lighting each other’s flames and lighting more flames, we are going to move things and get people more plugged in so they’ll see things differently than they do today. And I think that usually people move kind of slowly. There’s not like an overnight epiphany; it’s frustratingly slow a lot of the times.

And what can happen though, is when a sudden shock happens like a pandemic or a global financial crisis, or expect climate change to be next, that can make people jump instantly from being just lukewarm, to being one of the core advocates for a certain set of ideas. So as long as people like you and I keep developing this framework, keep spreading the gospel, we’ll be ready for it when that happens. The reason Obama got so much broad support is because he’s articulate; he could absolutely tell people their own values in his own words. And he was respectful to all.

And that just got so many people excited. And for brief moment, it looked like America was getting past its horrible legacy of racial oppression, that we finally turned the page of progress that made people excited. But what we know from history is that a lot of Progressives found themselves shut out. The movement was stopped after he got elected. And we found ourselves not making improvements to society as quickly as we were expecting, as we’d like to.

The only fix that I can say to that is that if people get involved in the union, people unionize their workplaces and they just start getting involved with grassroots level, that’s going to change them; it’s going to change the intelligence of the voters, that’s going to make people more powerful; that’s going to make people more engaged. It’s going to give people a sense of purpose and it’s going to make people fight for other people they care about to make us a more caring society. So Sarah Nelson, a great union leader, my union president always says, if you utilize the workplace, then the politics are going to follow.

So that holds a ton of promise. And to that end, there’s an act called the Paycheck Recovery Act. And this is MMT inspired, it’s trying to keep everybody as a worker in their job. So what we need right now is for everybody who’s listening to this to contact their house representatives, ask them to support this. Call them and email them. Tweet at them; all forms of communication at the same time, this is how we get policy moved. We do it together. And the whole idea here is we’re going to try to get the economy, not to enter into a great depression. And the only way we can do it is we do it together.

Grumbine  (52:43):

That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for that. And you know, I just want to thank you for taking the time to be with me today. I hope, as you know, you are somebody I consider a friend and that we don’t get to spend a lot of time hanging out and having coffee. I think about you frequently. And it means a lot to me to know that I have a vine to somebody not only as kind and as enlightened as you are, but someone is smart and in the know, because you understand the things I’m saying, the things I bring to you, it’s like you understand, and you can relate to immediately.

And that just means a lot to me. So I want to thank you for taking the time to share your labor story and your hope and your dreams. And the fact that I think that we as a movement shouldn’t give up. That there is hope, and that it’s going to take a “not me, us movement.” And I really appreciate that, Tschaff. Thank you so much.

Reisberg (53:33):

And that respect’s entirely mutual. Thanks for having me on, man.

Grumbine  (53:36):

You better believe it. We’ll talk soon. This is Steve Grumbine and Tschaff Reisberg from Macro N Cheese. Have a great day, everybody. We’re outta here.

Announcer [music] (53:49):

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.