Episode 100 – Flying with Sara Nelson

Macro N Cheese – Episode 100
Flying with Sara Nelson
December 26, 2020

 

[00:00:03.300] – Sara Nelson [intro/music]

I had a very prominent member of the House ask me, this is the most progressive House of Representatives that has ever existed. We’ve passed bills that are the most progressive that have ever been passed in the United States Congress. Why are we not getting credit with the American people? And my answer is, Well, because you can’t put those bills in your wallet.

[00:00:25.330] – Sara Nelson [intro/music]

The truth of the matter is that there are no illegal strikes, there are only unsuccessful strikes. So…

[00:00:32.800] – Steve Grumbine [intro/music]

Ah ha!

[00:01:26.700] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

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

[00:01:34.540] – Steve Grumbine

All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Folks, I’ve been delving into the union side of the world here recently. I know I spend a lot of time in Modern Monetary Theory, and for good purpose. It is what is needed right here, right now. You guys have knowledge of MMT, but you really need to understand organizing and understand the world through labor. We keep talking about needing a Labor Party and needing labor focus. And, so I’m bringing labor to you.

Folks, today I have Sara Nelson. Sara Nelson has served as the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants CWA, AFL-CIO since 2014. She is currently serving her second four-year term. She first became a union member in 1996 when she was hired as a flight attendant at United Airlines. And today she represents nearly 50,000 of aviation’s first responders at 17 airlines. The New York Times called her America’s most powerful flight attendant for her role in helping end the 35-day government shutdown. And InStyle magazine placed her on their 2019 top 50 badass women list. What an intro. Welcome to the show, Sara. Thank you so much for joining me.

[00:02:45.960] – Sara Nelson

Thank you, Steve. I’m really happy to be here.

[00:02:48.390] – Grumbine

Great. You guys have just recently had a major win, which makes the timing of this interview just so powerful. Part of the Covid relief stimulus package was, in fact, the payroll support of 15 billion for the airlines. Tell me about that. Tell me about how that went down.

[00:03:12.450] – Nelson

OK, well, first and foremost, I’m just going to say that I haven’t had a chance really to sleep yet. So forgive me.

[00:03:19.650] – Grumbine

Forgiven. [laughter]

[00:03:22.530] – Nelson

But, you know, this was emergency relief. We should have had a much bigger recovery package. And what I had to do is reach back to March when all of a sudden we had community spread. I mean, in our role as flight attendants, we had been on the front lines of coronavirus from its first days, which is a year ago last December, because we fly to every corner of the earth normally.

And so we were dealing with it in our workplace and, like we would with any other epidemic where we get the most recent information about it, we start with extra efforts on handwashing, enhanced sanitization, and also changing some of our service procedures, having the proper PPE on board. You can do that when it’s contained in a specific market, a specific area.

And we also started gathering information about the disease and interfacing with the airlines and working on sick leave policies that would be more generous, so we wouldn’t have people coming to work who were sick and getting dinged for that in their reliability at work, which can lead to discipline. Anyway, we were working on all the things that we would normally work on that would help transportation stop the spread of communicable disease at transportation’s door.

That’s normally what we would do. And what did we have? We had a government that was denying that the disease existed or doing more to try to have us hate our neighbors. And so there wasn’t the proper response. And before you know it, we had community spread in the United States and everything came crashing down all at once.

So to give you an example, on February 14th, Delta Airlines was celebrating, giving out profit-sharing checks, some of the biggest profit-sharing checks they’d ever given to employees because they never made so much money. United Airlines was announcing opening a huge training facility. All the airlines were planning to hire over  100,000 people this year. American Airlines CEO said the airlines are never going to lose money again. In the previous six years, the airlines had handed out – just the top four airlines alone had handed out 14 billion in stock buybacks to the shareholders.

So that’s where we were. And one month later, demand had dropped down to just three percent. Ninety seven percent down from the year earlier. And it was so bad that – the airlines run on a huge cash business; it’s a 10 percent margin of profit, actually – so very, very quickly, even though they were doing so well, very quickly, they were in a place where they weren’t going to be able to make payroll – a couple of the airlines within a couple of weeks and some of even the best-positioned airlines within several months. So it was really serious.

[00:06:02.370] – Grumbine

Oh, my goodness. Yes.

[00:06:04.050] – Nelson

And nobody had time to take this in. And if you think about it, all of a sudden on, I can’t remember what day of the week it was. But on a Tuesday, people are out partying at bars in San Francisco. And by Thursday, all the bars are closed and they’re being told to stay at home. And people did it. Like you couldn’t even imagine that much change would happen in 24 hours in the United States.

But this happened overnight, and so Congress actually met the moment, even this divided Congress in an election year that hasn’t been able to get anything done. Mitch McConnell on March 21 introduced a bill for a trillion dollars of relief that was structured around giving corporations everything they want, including liability shields. The Democrats stuck together, voted that down.

And 24 hours later, we had a $2.2 trillion dollar deal that included our payroll support program. So just to rewind a little bit as these flights were coming down. We’ve seen crises before in the airline industry. We’re 80 percent organized, but the bankruptcies and mergers, the airlines use that to terminate our pensions, to get us to work a hell of a lot more productivity for way less – 30 to 40 percent cuts in pay.

This was supposed to be the year. We were going back to the table after 9/11 and all of the things that we lost since then. This was supposed to be the year that we were finally going to push forward and get our share of the profits that we helped create at the table. But here we are, 80 percent organized, we’re integrated into everything that we do. Sometimes I take this for granted because we’re at the table in every single issue, safety and everything else with the government and with our airlines.

And we had a great friend in Peter DeFazio, the chairman of the Transportation Infrastructure Committee, who’s been in Congress 40 years. But he is steeped in labor and he knows the industry inside and out. And he was there through that crisis and 9/11, too, and how the airlines took that as a crisis opportunity for them to ratchet down the pay and benefits and the promises of a pension and all of those things.

So I said to him, I said, “Listen, I’ve got a plan. I work with some of the policy people from Elizabeth Warren’s campaign. We’re going to put together a plan that is workers first, truly workers first.” And so it was built from the ground up. Instead of having a list of things that labor wants to jam into a larger bill and say, here’s the labor protections as though that’s a side item. No, we’re going to build this from the ground up. So the airlines were asking for $50 billion to get help from the government to do whatever they needed to do to keep the airlines afloat.

They always will rationalize, well, we’ve got to cut staff because it’s for the long-term benefit of the airline and if we don’t do that… I’ve heard all this shit before. So we’re in the middle of the biggest crisis in over 100 years. And we said, “No, what we’re going to do is make this workers first package. It’s going to be a payroll pass through. So all the money that comes from the government has to only go to paying workers and benefits. The airlines cannot furlough or lay anyone off. They cannot cut hourly rates of pay.

And we’re going to cap the things that are usually really bad about corporate bailouts. So we’re going to put a cap on executive compensation and a ban on stock buybacks and dividends.” And we had a list of other things, too. We had union neutrality. We had seats on board. We had some other things that we didn’t get in the final negotiations. But what Peter DeFazio, chairman of the Transportation Infrastructure Committee, did was he said to the airlines, “I’m not talking to you. I’m not advocating for your relief until you talk to the unions.”

And so we had that kind of power and we had a little negotiations, a very quick negotiations, but a little negotiations outside of the whole legislative process where I said to the airlines, “Listen, the public hates you. You’ve been squeezing them into seats, you’ve been charging all these fees. They can’t stand you. They don’t want to do anything for you. But if we focus this on the workers and on jobs, you might have a shot.” So we actually got them to come to our side.

So now we had labor and the industry working together. As to Congress, it was the last item on the table in March, the very last item on the table. And at 8:00 in the morning after McConnell and Schumer had already announced that Congress had a deal, we were still haggling over getting this payroll support because people like Senator Pat Toomey didn’t want this to be focused on the worker, wanted it to be a corporate giveaway. Right? Got it. We got it. And so that took us through September 30th, those protections.

Nobody was furloughed or laid off. We continued to get paid. We continue to have our health care. We continue to pay our taxes. We continue to pay our rents and spend into the economy. But those protections ran out on September 30th. And because our government didn’t have a plan to contain coronavirus, we were not ready to restart. That wasn’t enough. And so we needed additional relief. And that’s what we started fighting for in July.

We got all the unions together. We got the industry to come to us again and support this because all they had to do now is sign pink slips. They didn’t actually want to ask for any more. They just wanted to not have to be beholden to anyone, but we made them come to our side, we got a letter, huge bipartisan support. Then we were told we had to get GOP senators involved. In 24 hours, we got 16 GOP senators to sign a letter saying that they supported this in July. So we were ready to go.

But because there was no larger relief package, no legislative vehicle to get this done, October 1st came without a relief package and without a continuation of this incredibly successful Workers First Program. And we had 100,000 people who were either furloughed or put on a no-pay status and have been in that place without health care since October 1st for zero reasons at all. If this had gone to the floor of the Senate, it would have had 95 people vote for it way back in August or October, and there was just no way to get it to the floor without a larger relief package.

And flight attendants have been fighting for that because we also know that we needed our Workers First Program, but we need relief for everyone. This doesn’t work. I mean, we can’t survive if our friends and neighbors are not held up too. So there you go. And we fought like hell and we were out protesting at offices. The one point I really want to make here is that people will say, is it politically possible? And if you’re starting with that question you have lost before you started because we make it politically possible.

[00:12:57.860] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:12:58.400] – Nelson

Our politicians don’t tell us what they’re gonna do for us. We tell them what we need them to do for us. And so when people say to me, oh, it’s dead on arrival because of Mitch McConnell. Well, screw that. Mitch McConnell has to respond to his caucus.

[00:13:14.060] – Grumbine

Oh, my God, I love you. [laughs]

[00:13:15.430] – Nelson

Go protest at Senator Tillis’ office and make life a living hell for him so that he goes to McConnell and says, you can’t leave me in this position. That’s how you move shit. And we did that.

[00:13:26.810] – Grumbine

I’m overwhelmed. I’m so overwhelmed because we’re constantly told to shut up, wait in line. It’s not the right time, guys. Now’s not the right time for justice. You see it all over the Twitter sphere. Left Twitter has been going crazy lately. People are frustrated. I look at this and I say the airline industry is a very specific, very nuanced trade. Your people are professionals. The kinds of training that they must be up to date on cannot lapse.

If people are furloughed, those people have got to get recertified. There’s a lot of safety. There’s all kinds of stuff going on there that is different than the rest of the world. However, the rest of the world is sitting there, the “let them eat cake” folk just gave us $600 for some people, based on means-testing at that. While they were able to get somehow or another, the executive lunch added back into the tax break. One lunch could be somebody’s entire $600.

[00:14:25.340] – Nelson

Yeah.

[00:14:26.030] – Grumbine

And it’s just unbelievable how imbalanced society is right now. But at least there is a bit of a blueprint here. You guys were able to fight like mad. You didn’t accept “this is not politically feasible.” You did not accept any of the nay saying. You fought, you pushed, you kicked ass and you got this through. This, in my mind, should be a blueprint for how things get done, because you guys did this in a Trump presidency.

We haven’t even gotten to a Biden Kamala Harris presidency. We are in a Trump presidency. And you were able to get your stuff done. Now, the rest of the people out there, I mean, the Twitter-sphere is letting us know they do not like this package in terms of covid relief for people, for regular families. It is woefully low. I know Rashida Tlaib was pushing for I think it was $2,000 a month.

The ABC Act, the Mint the Coin with Rohan Gray, there was a bunch of them out there, but none of them came close to passing. And now they’re sitting there with $600. And I guess the question is, what kind of strategies can a voting union, if you will, what can we do to agitate, to organize and to push for things like this, for a Green New Deal and for other things? What lessons does the union story that you just told give to a larger country of people ready to organize, ready to fight back?

[00:15:53.240] – Nelson

So there’s a couple of things. First of all, it’s not good enough to just vote for bills that are never going to make it through both houses. OK, so I’m not saying that you can’t consider the politics because you’ve got to move the politics. I had a very prominent member of the House ask me twice in the last year, “Sara, this is the most progressive House of Representatives that has ever existed. We’ve passed bills that are the most progressive that have ever been passed in the United States Congress. Why are we not getting credit with the American people?” And my answer is, “Well, because you can’t put those bills in your wallet.” So . .  .

[00:16:39.410] – Grumbine

I like that!

[00:16:39.410] – Nelson

People need actual results. This is not an intellectual exercise. You can’t just sit up and say, oh, it should be X, and then use the excuse that everybody else stopped it from getting done. There are no participation trophies here. There are only people who are starving in this country who need their representatives to never give up, to get results. You have to get results. So, yeah, we ended up with $600 checks. It was zero when we started. Zero.

[00:17:17.420] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:17:17.940] – Nelson

And now a family of four is going to get $2,400 in this. We have to be very clear. This was not stimulus, this was emergency relief. That’s what we got pushed back to. But we got that done. OK? And so people are going to get a little bit of relief right now. There are people who are literally going to be able to eat because of this, who could not eat before. We have flight attendants who were out.

I know the stories now. They qualified for food stamps. They went to go get their food stamps. You know, the kind of assistance that they got? Sixteen dollars for a month to buy all of their groceries. I’m pretty sure nobody’s eaten less with $16 a month for food. So just as an example. You know, it’s not going to be nutritious meals, that’s for sure. I remember what that was like when I was trying to rub two nickels together and make everything work. I remember how that Top Ramen tasted.

[00:18:14.180] – Grumbine

That’s where I was getting ready to go.

[00:18:16.520] – Nelson

So anyway, there’s that. But also the other thing that’s really important for people to take from the story that I just told that a lot of people will gloss over. Is that because we’re organized and our battle was in the workplace, like we need to hear that. We had a battle with the airlines before this legislative process. We brought them with us. We brought capital to the demands. OK?

So if we are organizing in our workplaces and we are exercising our power through our unions, this is not a self-selecting organization where you’re marching in the streets at night and then you’re going back to work during the day and everything continues and there’s no disruption to capital. This is organizing in the workplace and saying capital is going to be disrupted if you don’t work with us. So bringing our airlines to this political process was what made all the difference.

And that’s only possible if we organize in mass numbers and build that kind of power in the workplace, because that is the only thing that is going to move people is if you actually move capital.

[00:19:34.430] – Grumbine

Joe Burns, when I talked to him, said, I believe it was only six percent of the private sector is unionized. And then I think he said 33 percent of the public sector.

[00:19:45.740] – Nelson

12 percent.

[00:19:46.820] – Grumbine

I keep saying 33. I’m glad you corrected me. It’s a very low number. There’s huge amounts of legislation have been passed to really union bust and block the ability to do some of the most important union activities that allowed labor to have some sort of an equal position in the battles. What is the state of unions in your mind right now and how can we fix that?

[00:20:11.220] – Nelson

Well, I mean, unions have been under total assault, so it’s not a mistake that we’re down to six percent in the private sector of unions. That’s been a persistent campaign against unions and against working people gaining the power to be able to negotiate. So it’s been a persistent attack, starting with Taft Hartley rolling back our rights and making space for right-to-work states, right to work for less, as we say, and rolling back safety protections at work.

I mean, the fact of the matter is that we can have all these whistleblower protections under OSHA and all these OSHA standards. If you don’t have a union to back up the workers in contacting OSHA and making a complaint, forget it, because the corporations are just going to wait you out in the meantime and then you’ve got to fight that out on your own. It’s not going to happen and they know it. So unions require everything to work, first of all, to get the laws that favor workers, but then also to be able to enforce that in the workspace.

So there has been a persistent attack to deny people, regular people, a say in this political process. I think of launching the Delta campaign – flight attendant Delta campaign  – a year ago and doing that from Atlanta airport and doing some social media around that and having a flight attendant reach out to me that night in a private message on Facebook. And she said, “You know, I’ve never thought about joining a union before.

I’ve never even had really a very high opinion about unions or known anything about them. But lately, I’m a single mom and I’ve been coming to work. And I had a couple times when I got sick and then my child got sick and I wasn’t able to come to work. And all of a sudden now my supervisor tells me that my job is on the line. And so every day when I come to work, I’m scared. I’m scared.

I don’t know if this is going to be the day that somebody didn’t like the way I handed them a Coke and they write a nasty letter to the company or I tell them that they’ve got to have their seatbelt on and they don’t like that. And it’s going to be the day that I get fired. And so when I saw you walking in my workspace and you were walking with confidence and you were saying that there’s another way to live, I realized how scared I’ve been and I realized that I can actually regain control of my life and how I feel every single day when I do the job that I love.”

And so she signed up for the union and she signed up to go to a training class the next week to become an organizer. And she told me the week after that that she had registered for the first time to vote.

[00:22:53.340] – Grumbine

Wow.

[00:22:53.340] – Nelson

So when we’re organizing in our unions and we’re actually getting people involved in changing their own lives. They are that much more likely to participate in the public sphere. They’re much more likely to be engaged in the political process and in the decisions that are made that affect their lives every single day because they know that it can make a difference. If you look at the strikes that have happened over the last several years… We’ve had a rebirth of the strike.

And the reason that people are feeling so positively about unions right now is because everything seems to be stuck in the mud. Nothing seems to be moving. You know, you vote and you can’t even tell the difference between the candidates that you’re voting for because it doesn’t seem to change anything. But unions taking a strike for a day, or up to 45 days, suddenly make a huge difference in people’s lives. Huge difference. Life-changing.

Look at the Chicago teachers. Lifted tens of thousands of people out of poverty with that strike. Life-changing. Right? Got nurses in the schools so that parents who are working two and three jobs to survive and don’t understand why their child is having such a hard time at school. And now there’s a nurse to say, you know, your child’s having a hard time hearing and we just need to get them a hearing aid and all of a sudden that child can participate.

And the parents, you know, I mean, can you imagine that? Can you imagine the difference this makes in people’s lives? But those are the results that we can get by organizing. So this is a moment where we have this shared experience coming out of coronavirus. We organize on a shared experience and understand that there is not so much that divides us.

We actually have a very common experience here. And the truth is that it’s very stark. The Trillionaires – there about to be trillionaires, right? The average people who can’t survive on one job. It’s stark and there’s more of us than there are of them. And if we come together and define our issues and define the urgency around it and what we’re willing to do about it, we can win.

[00:25:13.510] – Intermission

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[00:26:02.620] – Grumbine

You just made me think back to when Mitt Romney was running for president, he was walking around his big convention. He was talking to everybody about what the gloriousness of working three jobs were. Like somehow or another that was this really good thing. It was the American way. And it’s absolutely the grossest thing ever. I have a child with special needs, so every day I’m working from home.

I’ve got kids that are going to cyber school. All this is very privileged even now, because there’s a lot of people that don’t have that. And I think to myself, my goodness, they have underfunded special needs care. They’ve underfunded all this stuff. And I watch as his life is directly impacted from this whole lack of power, this lack of spending, if you will, and resources and so forth.

And so much of what you’re talking about, the organizing, the space, getting power and all that stuff, there’s a part of that that has to have an understanding of how to fund these initiatives, because otherwise you’re constrained by a false scarcity idea that prevents us all from dreaming a better dream, from being able to see the possibilities. It stops because of the power of the purse, that lack of funding, that lack of vision that comes from seeing scarce resources.

And I guess the tie in here that I want to bring out of this is that being an MMT guy, Modern Monetary Theory guy for those who don’t know what MMT is. I watch your videos and I notice this very strategic placement of a very good book by a friend of ours, Stephanie Kelton, who is just a brilliant economist. And for those of you who don’t know, it’s The Deficit Myth.

And I’ve noticed that you’ve put that out there. And that, to me tells me a lot about who you are. And I’m watching you fight for workers rights, but you also have an inherent knowledge now of how federal finance works to go with that. Tell me about your MMT experience.

[00:28:08.100] – Nelson

I mean, I am very lucky to know Stephanie Kelton and was introduced first to Stephanie by Andres Bernal, who I met at a Green New Deal town hall that Chris Hayes had scheduled with AOC. And it wasn’t very long that we were all having dinner together, talking about MMT and talking about a jobs guarantee. And then I got to thank Bernie Sanders because Bernie appointed Stephanie and Derrick Hamilton to the Biden Sanders Unity Task Force for the economy.

So we got to actually work on policy together, too. And you’re right, everybody needs to buy The Deficit Myth. It is required reading. But also actually, I would recommend downloading it on Audible because Stephanie reads the book, all the little nuance with her voice with it, and it just makes it so much better.

[00:29:08.980] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:29:09.970] – Nelson

But this is the lie that has had us fighting with each other and believing that we have to carve up a pie in this country. And there’s only so much for so many people. It’s the lie that gets generations fighting against each other and the lie that politicians tell that your parents are going to take everything and there’s going to be nothing left for you.

And so we’ve got to get rid of the promises that we made to the last generation because the next generation is not going to be able to live. When really it’s just about funneling more money into tax cuts for the rich. So none of that really matters. And taxing the rich doesn’t even matter. You don’t have to actually fund the priorities that you set by the federal government by collecting taxes before you actually allocate this money and resources to doing the good that’s going to help.

And that is something that should be abundantly clear through coronavirus, too.  It exposes the deficit myth. I mean, the truth is that Congress, for once, for real people, allocated $2.2 trillion in March and just allocated another $908 billion. If you add in the omnibus, it was a total of $2.4 trillion dollars that Congress allocated last night.

They did not have to stop and take time and collect taxes from people in order to allocate that money. And the deficit that they like to talk about. Like Rand Paul actually was going crazy about MMT on the Senate floor last night. It was a joy to listen to. The deficit that they like to talk about, literally, is a myth because the federal deficit creates a surplus for the people. And the only thing that we have to talk about and be concerned about is inflation.

So we are in no place where we have to be concerned about the economy by investing in people. And of course, we see this very starkly when there’s military spending, when there is tax cuts for the rich. There’s no discussion about the deficit. In 2005, when Bush failed at privatizing Social Security, that is when the attack on defined benefit pensions really took a turn. And that is when we were fighting to try to save our pension at United Airlines.

But when they couldn’t get their hands on that money with Social Security, they said, “Ah, the pension plans. Now there is a place where we can steal from,” and that’s when it all really went downhill with pensions. But it’s just a capitalist game to try to funnel more money and control to a few people at the expense of the rest of us. And we have to call it out.

And it’s just like in any union campaign when you are working in the workplace to try to get a strike vote because you’re at the table in contract bargaining and the company says, oh, they can only pay so much for your contract. And then all of a sudden you take a strike vote and it’s 99 percent and you have a credible strike threat and maybe you even have to strike for a few days and all of a sudden they find this money that they had nowhere before, right?

[00:32:17.560] – Grumbine

Yeah.

[00:32:18.960] – Nelson

And so, yeah, is there a place where you can carry that too far and the company really can’t afford it? Sure, yeah. There’s a limit just like on everything, but it’s not the limit that they said it was. And we called their bluff, and we made them actually give us our fair share. And so that’s what we’re talking about.

[00:32:39.450] – Grumbine

To me, this is a really important intersection that I want to take a few minutes to suss out. I’m almost exclusively MMT and the things that I talk about are typically the federal job guarantee, breaking down the definition of whatever we can dream about, we can fund. We can fund it. And the idea of it being the resources, not the pieces of paper, the digits in a keyboard that are really the issue here. Right?

And you look at something like a Medicare for All and you realize that it’s not the money. Do we have enough doctors? Do we have enough gurneys? Do we have enough hospital beds, whatever? That’s the real resources that are going to drive, quote unquote, “inflation” or “deflation” or whatever. And so the question becomes, when you write these bills, it’s not just enough to put the money at it, we have got to plan for the real resource.

How do we resource this, as AOC says. How do we resource this bill? I’m interested because you’re very right. You look at the crazy profits of many of these capitalists and particularly these executives and the way they frame their business models, stock buybacks and and they’re making out like bandits. The workers, however, are living off of pennies on the dollar of the value they create.

And I don’t want to go too far into Marx here, but there is a little bit of that surplus value concept going on, obviously, that I think is worth noting. How do you take this MMT message and this concept with unions and map out a strategy for bringing the two together to really bring about change for not just the airlines, but for all of us?

[00:34:22.660] – Nelson

Yeah, well, first of all, we have to raise expectations, that’s where it starts. So in 1912, Lawrence textile workers went on strike. And they had a slogan in that strike: they were striking for bread and roses, too. And that’s a metaphor for not only having the money to be able to provide for ourselves to be able to eat, but it’s not just about existing. It’s about living. It’s about having enough respect to be able to share time with your loved ones and live a full life. Right?

And so we had workers going out on strike in 1912 and we’re still grappling with this right now. So it’s about raising expectations among all working people. This concept that Romney was pushing of you should be proud of working two and three jobs. That’s something to be proud of. Well, no, it’s something to kill you. That’s what it’s doing. And people are not giving you time to think and imagine and dream of something better.

So we have to raise expectations across the board and then we have to say, what is it that you want? What’s the thing that will make life better and organize from the ground up and build these unions. And then you bring in the union halls, you get to bring in the expertise to say, let me show you behind the curtain. Let me teach you about how the federal budget works. Let me teach you about the constraints.

Let me teach you about the fact that in your corporation right now, the people that you think that you’re striking against – the CEO – guess what? Wall Street has figured out how to even strip his power from being the decision maker on whether or not you can have a fair share, because Wall Street has said the only way that we’re going to allow your company to exist is if you take half your profits and you give it to Wall Street.

And so these stock buybacks, we have to understand, are actually another way of creating two-tiered and three-tiered employment. Because what’s happening is… I’ll give you an example. Two years ago in the middle of these airlines making billions of dollars and we’re getting ready to go into bargaining, the airlines came back and said, oh, you know, we’ve got to cut costs because our investors are saying we’ve got to cut costs. And we’re like, what are you talking about? You’re making money.

And no, we’ve got to cut costs in order to keep our investors interested. And so – really about cutting costs so they could funnel more of that into stock buybacks. Right? So they cut some of the staffing on the planes. This was not something that was specifically written into our contract, and they were able to do this. And we fought them, but they were meeting the standards that had already been set at nonunion Delta that was able to just do these things without anybody pushing back.

And they’re saying, sorry, we have to compete with our competitors and this is how it is. And so the poor CEO is saying, I would like to be able to give better service to our customers and I would like for our employees to be able to have a better experience at work, but my hands are tied. I have to do this. So we really have to expose the systems and the unchecked capitalism.

If we’re not going to make it all the way to socialism, we got to expose the unchecked capitalism that is creating these situations where you can’t even hold those fully responsible because you’ve got to get through the layers to get to them. And there’s so many layers on the top side that they’re creating, not to mention the two-tiered employment or the contract work where it’s even harder to get to the decision-makers for those workers. Right?

So anyway, we have a lot of work to do, but we’ve got to expose this. But we have to raise those expectations. Have people believe it can be better, then help them understand how they can make it better by organizing in their workplace, joining a union. And then we have to recognize that when you organize in that workplace, you cannot just make it about that workplace. You have to have a labor movement.

[00:38:36.400] – Grumbine

Yes!

[00:38:37.000] – Nelson

It has to be a commitment to understanding the fight of the person next to you. Flight attendants have to understand the fight that the postal workers are in and the GM workers who are striking for the same things that we are complaining about. Right? So there has to be both this organizing in the workplace with the specific demands of the workers there so that it makes sense to them.

But then there also has to be a deep commitment to helping workers understand that this struggle is for all of us. And an injury to one is an injury to all because they will set up these standards that keep us divided and keep us from being able to hold the decision-makers accountable if we’re not understanding what’s going on. So MMT is a huge part of that. I love the tool in my union pocket, now, of MMT because I get to talk about the fact that scarcity is a lie.

[00:39:30.720] – Grumbine

I have an idea here I want to just flush by you. So when the Bernie Sanders campaign was roaring through Nevada, the Culinary Union was against – or food and hospitality – was against Medicare for All. And they were against it because they had negotiated certain rights within their workspace for better health care.

Now, the MMT lens allows everyone, once they understand it, to realize that we can afford a heck of a lot better than anything that they’re putting out there, better than Medicare for All, quite frankly. Forget single-payer. We could actually have health care as right, you know what I mean? And so once you understand that, it takes away some of that need to negotiate it in the workplace. Instead, just make it a human right. A right of citizenship, a right as a human being, whatever you want to call it.

I’m interested in understanding how you see, like citizens’ benefits, citizens’ rights, as a complementary relationship to union work in terms of benefits within a company. Your idea of having these unions say, hey, the postal workers and the airline workers, we all… Injury to one is an injury to all. How can we blend that together with more of a human rights approach so that we’re not competing with the unions bargaining for rights outside of the workplace? So they don’t see that as a threat to them – so that they see it as advancement? How do we make that work?

[00:40:58.890] – Nelson

So the first thing that we have to do is we actually have to recognize that the union members who are defending the health care that they have negotiated for, fought and sacrificed. The Culinary Union, for example, was out on the picket line for six years, in one case, fighting for health care and proper pay. Six years. Every day. Can you imagine that? Like around the clock, every day for six years and finally won.

Gerry Horgan, who was a chief steward with CWA Local 1103, died on the picket line in the Nynex strike in 1989, fighting for health care. So we can’t really take for granted what people hold so dear and understand they fought so hard for. And the narrative that if we go to a Medicare for All that we’re going to take away this right that you bargained so hard for. We have to right up front say “Thank you for fighting for this. Thank you for setting the standard for all of us.

We’re going to make sure that what you fought for, we retain that value and we make it even better.” And if we don’t lead the conversation in that way, they’re not going to hear us. This is about recognizing that when they say, I don’t want to lose my health care. You get to say, “Well, which health care is that? Is that the health care that you negotiated in 1970? Is that the health care that you struck for in 1985?

Is that the health care that you just fought to retain in last year’s contract bargaining and you managed to keep premiums at a space that are still affordable, but costs went up for employees? Which health care plan is that?” And so we have to start to have an honest conversation, but we also have to recognize what people have given to try to create a standard. And that’s what they’ve done. And that’s what unions have done.

That’s what Walter Reuther talked about. He was for health care as a human right, but understood that unions could set the example and negotiate that at the table. And we have lots of examples of this, where unions have led the way in negotiating these standards first in our workplaces. And that leads to law that is in place for everyone. The overtime laws, 40-hour work week, the weekends, the family and medical leave, all of these things started in union contracts.

[00:43:37.350] – Grumbine

Yeah.

[00:43:37.710] – Nelson

And we just didn’t get the job done on health care. We just haven’t finished the job. But it’s really important for people to understand that when you start with, why are you being so selfish in defending your health care when we should be having it for everyone.

[00:43:53.820] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:43:54.990] – Nelson

We’ve got to expand this idea of solidarity and lifting the standards for everyone and understanding that that is a good thing. And that’s where we have to start from. But we have to recognize what these people have done to lead the way for us and recognize their sacrifices and not take that for granted.

You have to recognize, for example, what the United Mine Workers have done in building our labor movement and giving us labor rights and bringing together immigrant workers who had nothing and built a union out of that and a good job with health care and a pension. They set the standard for us. They’re not the enemy. They’re the people that we’re fighting for.

[00:44:37.610] – Grumbine

I love this. It brings me to the next question. That is the federal job guarantee. It’s a key part of what was the Green New Deal and the just transition and so forth. The idea of the job guarantee was to serve as a superior countercyclical automatic stabilizer, number one, but number two, to forever end involuntary unemployment. But it’s also there to set the wage floor. It’s also there to eliminate the stranglehold capital had on labor, keeping people locked into really bad situations.

And it also provided something that I don’t think people talk nearly enough about, and that is we still have very much inequality within the genders. Pay for women is lower than men. Opportunity for women is less than men. And the job guarantee allowed women that had sacrificed their careers to raise children in a patriarchal society. The job guarantee allows them instant mobility.

They don’t have to stay in bad marriages where there’s domestic violence and other things that they felt compelled to stay in. It allows them to get up and start a life fresh and new. I would think that this would be a great complementary program that would support unions and give them a higher floor to fight from. What do you think about the job guarantee in that?

[00:46:05.570] – Nelson

Oh, my goodness, absolutely. I mean, you’ve got to lift the floor to raise the roof. That’s just the truth. And we have to recognize that the minimum wage, jobs guarantee, a jobs guarantee with a minimum standard for living is the way to go. It’s the great equalizer. It creates not only equality, but ultimately equity. And think about this. How is it possible that we are accepting that we live in an economy where at any given time it’s a good thing, that there is five percent unemployment?

We are sentencing people to a life of lost wages, one, but also lost identity. People identify who they are with what they do, very often. And if we’re saying it’s OK that at any given time in our society, five percent of people who want to work, cannot get a job. We are saying that it’s OK to leave people in turmoil like that. It is mean spirited. It’s backwards. And it’s not good for unions.

If you want to talk about then the converse of that, having this automatic stabilizer of a federal jobs guarantee that has a minimum standard for that work, for safety at work, for the pay that you’re going to bring home, for the benefits that you can count on if you’re doing that work. And you’re right that you can pick up and be in that jobs market, whether you took time out to be a mother or a caregiver, you didn’t sacrifice your ability to participate in the economy with your work just because you took this time in your life to care for someone else in our society who needed that care, whether that’s child or elderly or someone who is sick.

These are basic standards. These are the basic tenets of unionism. An injury to one is an injury to all. That we all do better when we all do better. That a rising tide lifts all boats. I mean, all of this. And it raises expectations, like I was talking about before. The very first thing that unions grapple with is actually getting people to believe that they can raise expectations for themselves. Organizers will tell you that is the hardest part of their job is just getting someone to believe that they can expect more.

So I am all in for a jobs guarantee. This is great that we’re talking about this. I want more people talking about this, because the truth of the matter is that I can argue on a policy side for a federal jobs guarantee all I want. If you go out into the public today – out on the street – and you ask somebody, what is a federal jobs guarantee? I promise you they won’t be able to tell you what it is. And in order to demand something, you have to understand what is. And we have to do a lot more talking about it.

[00:48:58.370] – Grumbine

It’s funny, I used to be local CWA 2222. I was a strike captain at Verizon. Actually it was Bell Atlantic at the time. And one of the things that jumped out at me was that when we were on strike, we all had to find work. You only got a very small stipend for strike duty. And how do you pay your bills? As a cable splicer, I was able to work some overtime and pocket some money in preparation, but it wasn’t nearly enough. So all of us had to get part-time jobs.

Some of us were delivering pizzas, some were doing various things. I wonder – and believe me, I’ve never thought of this, so it’s a moment that may come out wrong – I wonder how a federal job guarantee might work during a work stoppage for people. I wonder if they would put a poison pill in there to prevent people from jumping on the job guarantee during strike actions? I wonder what the opportunity there is in terms of, as people try to make some decisions for their lives, whether or not that could be a countervailing force to prevent capital from strong-arming people back to the workforce.

[00:50:04.070] – Nelson

Yeah, for sure. And if we actually all commit to a jobs guarantee too, you also have to support the right to strike because a federal jobs guarantee is about federal jobs. But that doesn’t mean that private industry is going away. So you have to have a way for workers to hold private industry accountable to the federal standards. Right? So you’ve got to have the right to strike. Otherwise, all of this falls apart.

This is not something that’s going to stand up on its own. It’s going to have to require that labor continues to have that powerful seat at the table. And the only way that labor has that seat at the table is to be able to exercise – or at least credibly threaten – our willingness to withhold our labor to stop everything.

[00:50:47.960] – Grumbine

What are some of the barriers to striking? Because obviously laws have been hacking away at labor’s power. What are some of the barriers that maybe people out there might consider organizing and fighting for to change, so that we have that power?

[00:51:03.100] – Nelson

First of all, I just want to make it really clear that there’s a ton of barriers and we could spend all day talking about it.

[00:51:08.820] – Grumbine

I’m sure.

[00:51:09.940] – Nelson

The truth of the matter is that there are no illegal strikes, there are only unsuccessful strikes.

[00:51:16.570] – Grumbine

Ah ha!

[00:51:16.570] – Nelson

And so most of these teacher strikes are, quote unquote, “illegal,” but the teachers generated so much power by being willing to withhold their labor and building community support for the strike, understanding that in many cases they’re bargaining for the common good, they’re bargaining for the good of the public, right? That they generated so much power. For example, in West Virginia, they generated so much power that they didn’t only get a raise for themselves, they got a raise for all public workers across the state.

That’s how much power they generated. And this is from a state that said that they didn’t have any more money to get and they had a governor and a legislature who were totally against unions. Right? So the fact of the matter is that today there are laws in place that say that unions’ coffers can be drained and union leaders can go to jail. In the federal sector, since the air traffic controllers strike – where Ronald Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers and many of those strikers actually went to jail and were indicted – there’s real consequences there.

But we need to continue to fight for the legal right to strike. But the truth is that if we really understood our power, and we clearly understood our demands and the urgency of the moment, and you organize around that and you actually just say no. The strongest thing that labor can do is put our hands in our pockets. And we actually can do that today. So we need to talk about the power that we have and the value that we generate in society and how we can make everything stop.

We have to have people understand that, because if we don’t understand that, we’re never going to change the laws. And it’s a chicken and egg scenario. But we actually have the ability to change this today. And I just have to share this. But this is from 1906, from Mother Jones, who was crisscrossing the country at the time, trying to end child labor. Right? And she said, “The capitalists say there was no need of labor organizing, but the fact that they themselves are continually organizing shows their real beliefs.

The capitalists want the most labor for the least money. The laborers want the most money for the least labor. Workers produce and build the world’s palaces, but they neither use the wealth nor dwell in the palaces. If you would only realize that you hold the solution of the whole problem in your own hands, you could settle the whole question easily. If, for instance, instead of striking in small groups, every industry in America were to fold up. The capitalists would be obliged to yield to any and all demands, for the world could simply not go on.”

She’s describing a general strike, of course, and in order to get to a general strike, we just have to raise awareness in people that the strike is our tactic. As labor solidarity is our power, the strike is the tactic. We’ve got to exercise our right to strike where we can get these results. Have people understand you can get results. When you fight, you can win. And then build on that so that the entire nation, all working people can understand that we could actually take action together on one day and change something like health care for all – like making health care a human right – by striking all at once.

But that’s not going to happen overnight. We have to organize in the workplace. We have to organize around the issues that people care about today. We have to raise expectations. We have to have people fight for those raised expectations and win, so that we build in our consciousness that muscle of power for labor, and understand that our power is in each other. And so that’s what we have to build for so that we can actually move the political agenda. That’s why I don’t really care about all these appointments in the Biden administration. I don’t care.

I don’t care who is elected. I don’t care what the Congress looks like next year. I am interested in building on the win we just had last night because we fought. Was it everything that it should have been? No. Did we fight for the best template that this country has ever seen for working people and that can now be used to fight for other people? Yes. We fought and we won. And so tomorrow we’re going to keep doing the same thing and we’re going to build the kind of power that makes these representatives have to be responsive to us rather than asking what these representatives are going to do for us.

[00:55:56.530] – Grumbine

I absolutely love this interview. Folks, I wanted to start off with this, but I’ll end with this. This is our 100th episode of Macro N Cheese. We have had some of the best guests, some of the most important people, some great ideas and great minds come through here. But what a way to end 2020. Just an awful year on so many levels, but with so much hope, with such a great guest in you, Sara Nelson. Thank you so much for joining us here today.

[00:56:28.490] – Nelson

Thank you, Steve. It’s been a real pleasure. And I’m super excited to be here for your 100th episode.

[00:56:34.220] – Grumbine

All right. We’ll have a wonderful holiday. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and all that good stuff. And I hope you have a great 2021. And I really appreciate the time.  With that, I’m Steve Grumbine, Macro N Cheese, Sara Nelson. Thank you all. See you next year.

[00:56:51.620] – Nelson

Thank you. Solidarity forever.

[00:56:59.500] – End credits

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.