Episode 186 – The Power of Organizing with David Van Deusen

Macro N Cheese – Episode 186
The Power of Organizing with David Van Deusen
August 20, 2022

 

[00:00:03.590] – David Van Deusen [intro/music]

The Democratic Party is not our friend. They get their funding from the same corporate donors, from the same billionaires that the Republican Party does. It’s a shell game.

[00:00:18.750] – David Van Deusen [intro/music]

The most important thing is building that shop floor power, building the ability to have true working alliances with community organizations and regular folks in every corner of the state and the country to push through a different kind of politics, to change what is politically possible. So, we’ll do what we have to do when it comes to electoral politics. But that’s not the focus.

[00:01:35.170] – 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.

[00:01:43.100] – Steve Grumbine

All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s podcast has taken us back into union organizing. I have been so frustrated, as you’ve heard me in various interviews here recently, with our lack of ability to get our agenda out there without allowing people to believe that there’s hope, without finding ways to organize, just trying to find a pathway forward.

And very good friend of the program who we’ve actually interviewed before, Jeff Reisberg, pointed out that there is a gentleman named David Van Deusen from Vermont, the AFL CIO president who has captured this. And he put me onto this Vermont AFL CIO ten point program. And I read it and I said, I’ve got to have this gentleman on. I’m looking for hope. That’s what we’re looking for.

We’re looking for a way to invigorate the masses and those who previously without a voice and maybe even giving rise to people who are not as well to do or well connected, giving them hope as well. Because often people with the most to lose are the ones that have the least amount to say. And so I figured, let’s have this. So without further ado, let me bring on my guest, David Van Deusen. Welcome to the show, sir.

[00:03:01.740] – David Van Deusen

Pleasure to be here with you today.

[00:03:04.270] – Grumbine

The pleasure is all mine. And I won’t lie. I am looking for any grain of hope that I can find and a legitimate strategy that doesn’t go “vote blue.” And I don’t see any hope with just the term “vote blue.” It’s an empty sloganeering that says nothing to what our demands are and what matters to us. It’s just an empty slogan. And that has become code switching for “fall in line, shut up and eat your peas.”

And I think most of us are at a point now with so many issues in society, not just in labor and individual industries and individual workplaces, but globally, universally, across the country having that kind of class struggle unionism, I think, is absolutely paramount to us making any progress, you guys, where the hope lies. You specialize in organizing. What is your Ten Point plan.

[00:04:03.910] – Van Deusen

You’re too kind, but I absolutely agree with you that the so-called “vote blue” approach that’s been happening for 70 years now, give or take, where the self-identified electoral left says, this is what we got to do, and at times says, this is the better of two evils. And other times they say, no, real change is going to come if we only had Democrats in the White House running the Senate, running Congress.

And that’s what we got right now. And what are we seeing? We’re seeing lukewarm action on renewable energy. We’re seeing minor reform around the edges of society that frankly do not have a meaningful impact, one that you will feel for low income and working class people. The Democratic Party is not our friend.

They get their funding from the same corporate donors, from the same billionaires that the Republican Party does. It’s a shell game. Now, there are those within the national leadership of the AFL-CIO, SEIU and other unions that say the Democrats are a friend. And that’s our strategy. But that’s a failure to actually articulate a real strategy, a real approach, an experiment, if you will, to try things new which aren’t so new.

If we look back to the 1930s and we look back to the New Deal and we look back to the time when there was real change in society for the betterment of working people, that did not just happen because Franklin Delano Roosevelt waved a wand and said, let it be; it’s the right thing to do. That happened because the unions were engaged. They were active, they’re pushing.

There were millions of people out on strike at various times, marching in the streets demanding something more. And when the politicians, both Republican and Democrat, became fearful of working people, that’s when they turn towards legislative change, meaningful legislative change, because they feared us and they fear the alternative that could come about if those changes weren’t made.

But those changes did not come about because a national AFL-CIO president or leader of some kind or lobbyist with ties on in suits had lunch at the White House or had coffee or whiskey with the head of the Senate or the Speaker of the House. That’s not how real change happens. And if you doubt that, let’s look at another time when Democrats ran all branches of government under Obama.

You recall something called the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made a much more Democratic and fair way for workers to form a union that went nowhere, that was talked about on the campaign trail and promised, and the unions got behind the Democrats and then nothing happened. And this time it was the PRO Act. Joe Biden campaigned on that. He ran on that.

The Democrats across the country ran on that and won in part with other progressive pieces of legislation. And then when they get in power, where is it? But that’s the thing. There will always be a Joe Manchin and a Sinema to kill the hopes and dreams of any real progressive pieces of legislation. There will always be a foil.

There will always be that out for them to use the rhetoric but really do nothing and therefore still have the corporate dollars, the money from the billionaires roll in to back their campaigns and support their lavish lifestyles. So what do we do? Well, first of all, we don’t put all of our eggs in the basket of the Democratic Party. We don’t make a fetish out of elections when for most Americans, the two choices are poor choices.

Instead, we put our resources, our focus, our energy into organizing. Organizing the shops that are already unionized internally, making them stronger, getting the rank and file engaged and active. And we organize new shops. And if that’s where we put our attention. If that’s where we put our resources and building community connections with other groups that are not labor groups per se but represent the interest of oppressed aspects.

Be it minority folks. Be at Latino. Be it black. Be it women and those that represent community interest. If we make alliances with them as a type of popular front to amplify each other’s demands for real change. That is how we begin to build the power. That is how we begin to create the nucleus of change that the politicians will either follow out of fear or because we have the power to make them move.

So that’s the way that the Vermont AFL-CIO has been approaching these very serious political questions. We don’t have a magic wand. We can’t just snap our fingers and make the changes we need within labor to achieve these goals. But since 2019, the progressive Caucus within our unions called United has overwhelmingly won three elections in a row.

And we are meticulously and very intentionally moving forward our program, which is the Ten Point program for union power, it’s also called the Little Green Book, and seeking to make those foundational changes within labor which will make our ability to grow our power both possible and probable.

[00:09:30.130] – Grumbine

Let’s go through the Ten Point plan first.

[00:09:33.430] – Van Deusen

Okay. Where do you want to start?

[00:09:35.380] – Grumbine

Start with number one. What is this plan? Describe it.

[00:09:40.240] – Van Deusen

Well, look, in 2019 before our September convention, there was the old guard. The Old Guard tended to be older union members. They did their best who was in power within our state labor federation and they did the things that we’ve always done. We endorsed 150 candidates for State House every election, almost all Democrats. We did some political mailings.

We sent a couple of people to be lobbyists in the State House and that’s essentially what we did. And what did that result in? Well, over a period of decades, not only did we consistently fail to move our legislative priorities, even though we would win most of the races where we made endorsements in Democrats, we would fail to move a legislative agenda.

But also our participation from the rank and file became less and less to the point where in 2017, representing 10,000 workers, were 20 or so delegates at the state convention. In a sad reality that was they were able to sit at one table for the banquet dinner after the convention. That is about as near death as you could come.

So as we get closer to the election, our internal election of 2019, myself and a number of leaders from different internationals around the state, including the IBEW, United Academics, the UAW, and many more, realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the approach that organized labor had been taking in Vermont and the country for many years.

And we recognized that if a change in course was not rapidly implemented that we would continue to decline and we would continue to not only not grow our strength, but to have our strength diminished. So we formed a broad coalition of union locals and union leaders and rank and file members through all around the state, and we campaigned around the state.

And a very telling question that came up over and over again in different shops. If I was visiting a shop, I’d say, listen, myself and a slate of candidates are running for office, and we’d like your support, and we’d like you to talk to the president about being a delegate at the convention. The next question would be, what’s the AFL-CIO think about that?

A member of AFSCME or a member of Steel Workers, any given union, and they didn’t even know rank and file members what the AFL-CIO was. If you were to nationally go and do a tour and a poll of the 12.5 million members in the United States, union members who are part of AFL-CIO affiliate unions, and ask them, what is the AFL-CIO? I would venture to say that a sizable portion of them could not answer that question.

That’s how irrelevant the AFL-CIO was becoming in Vermont, and by extension, I would say, in some regards, nationally. So we educated folks. We said, this is the federation of Unions that in theory, can be this real vehicle, this real place where we could create foundational change for working class people to improve their lives and build a political program that reflects your aspirations and your desires.

And this excited people. It seemed like something new. So we worked very hard on crafting what was, at the time, our campaign platform, the Ten Point program. And we used that as an organizing tool, a place, to have a discussion with members all around the state. And that was crafted with input from many different internationals. That wasn’t one person’s project, so to speak.

And after winning that election, we unanimously voted the executive board to make that Ten Point program the platform of the Vermont AFLO-CIO. And since then, since 2019, we’ve been working to implement it. We did a couple of things very quickly from the platform. We removed money from our line items for lobbying, which was ineffective, and we put it into the creation of an organizing program whereby we have a number of on-call organizers, part time organizers, on staff that we can assign to affiliates to help them either with new organizing campaigns or internal organizing of units that are already within their unit.

We have assigned those to a number of different internationals and locals throughout the last several years, including Local 1674, including UFCW and United Academics. So that was a very rapid thing we did. And as a result of that, we also have a number of different organizing campaigns we’re supporting around the state at any given time. And we brought on a new executive director, Liz Medina. She was a rank and file member of the United Auto Workers.

And with her, we made it very clear that this is not a lobbyist-centered position, this is an organizing-centered position. And so we’ve been hosting meetings on “how to organize 101” for nonunion workers, for regular folks that work for a living, that want a union and don’t have one yet. And we’ve been having training both in person and online to train them on how to do that.

We just organized a residential facility in Burlington, Satoria House, as a result of those trainings, and they’re now part of the labor movement. So we are making progress. We’re seeking to make those alliances which the platform also calls for it to become a true social justice oriented labor movement. And we’re working with groups like Migrant Justice to support their efforts to have fair, safe working conditions on the farms for undocumented farm workers.

The list goes on. And I’d be happy to go in any section of our platform. But suffice to say, this is not a one-year project. It’s not a two-year project. This is a lifetime project. But that platform spells out where we feel we need to be as far as forming a more democratic society, a more directly democratic society. One where the social safety net is stronger for working people.

One where you work 40 hours a week, you don’t have to lose sleep at night worrying if you’ve got to have the money to pay the phone bill or the rent. And one where unions are empowered and workers are empowered to form unions in ways that they’re not now. And that is going to be a lifetime project. But now we have the road map, and we have something to work towards and to measure our success or shortcomings by.

[00:16:18.070] – Grumbine

Looking at the program, there’s so much good in here. This program is a staunch supporter of Modern Monetary Theory and Stephanie Kelton, who supported Senator Bernie Sanders as his economic adviser both in 2015-16 and 2019-20. She has been front and center with this. So a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about, you’d stand for a Green New Deal that’s number five on your list, especially to people that listen to this program, the existential climate crisis we’re dealing with.

But also there’s a couple of key factors in the framework of the Green New Deal. One of them was a federal job guarantee that would pay a living wage, federally funded, locally administered. The job guarantee would provide help to unions. So there really are great synergies here and it’s phenomenal to also hear that you guys are training not just the shop floor, but people that are not in unions now that would be interested in learning.

Can you tell me more about that process? And by the way, I know Liz Medina. I’ve done a few panels with her. She’s great people. What is training people to build their own unions look like?

[00:17:33.730] – Van Deusen

Well, Liz Medina, our executive director, is lead on that and she would be the better person to get in the weeds on it. But what we have found is there’s a real interest out there, especially with young people about unions and how to form a union and there isn’t education in the public schools about such things. So we’ve hosted these on the internet.

We’ve hosted them in person at a Local 1369 shop in Montpellier and we’ve had great participation. So in my mind, this is as important, if not more important than the regular stewards trainings that are typically provided by internationals and also by state labor federations. Because even if we have all of our hundreds of union shops in Vermont or the millions across the country, even if we have them all internally organized really well, which is so important, and it’s not the case today, we still won’t have the critical mass of numbers and people to make the kind of foundational change we need to see in society.

To do that, we need to grow the labor movement. I believe in the 1950s we had a high watermark of maybe 35%, something like that, union density in the United States, and now we’re down to around 10%, give or take. I would point out that in Vermont, our union numbers have gone up for the last few years, not down, breaking the trend of most of the United States.

But if we don’t find a way to grow our base, then we’re not going to find a way to grow our power. So these trainings are hugely important. They’ve never been offered before by previous Vermont AFL-CIO administrations. This is a new thing. And I should also point out we’re not forsaking the internal organizing either. That’s massively important too.

And for that, we were pleased to team up with the main AFL-CIO earlier this summer to host a several week long training for union members and union leaders conducted by Jane Mcalevey, the progressive union organizer, about how to identify leaders in shop, how to organize effectively in shops within and without of the grievance procedure.

So we’re doing both of those things at the same time. Now, the national AFL-CIO, of course, has massive resources, and they do have the ability, if they so chose, to send more organizers and more trainers into each state in this country. But the fact is, we spent a large portion of our money on the political process and the lobbying process, even though it again and again and again failed to deliver.

So our advice in Vermont to the labor movement at large is, let’s take that money out of lobby. We’re getting nothing now. We could get nothing for free. We don’t have to spend millions and millions of dollars to get nothing. We could do that easy enough. Let’s take those resources and that money. Let’s send organizers and trainers to every single state in this country, and let’s do this kind of trainings.

Let’s do the type of organizing we need to do on a massive scale, on a national scale, to change the balance of power in the United States of America.

[00:21:25.120] – Intermission

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[00:21:50.970] – Grumbine

You’re talking my language. I absolutely am enthralled with this. And I’m enthralled with bullet point number six, and I just want to read it. If you go to VT.AFLCIO.org, you can find this ten-point plan that we’re talking about, but number six, it says electoral politics; the time of the Vermont AFL-CIO endorsing candidates simply because they are a Democrat is over.

In the last election, 2018, we endorsed a great majority of the Democrats who won, and in return, they failed to hold a single hearing on card check, failed to pass the livable wage, paid family medical leave, and free college tuition bills. Single payer health care was not even manifest as a whisper in the state House last year. In brief, our practice of making broad endorsements and often picking the least bad of two less-than-ideal options has again proven ineffective.

At minimum, the Vermont AFL-CIO will only consider endorsing a candidate if they have a proven record of being a labor champion. Here, we shall require a candidate who seeks our endorsement to sign a pledge whereby they shall support us on our issues as we define them, come hell or high water. Second, the Vermont AFL-CIO shall form a study committee, chaired by our volunteer in politics and composed of members of diverse affiliated unions, who shall be tasked at looking at alternative approaches to electoral politics.

These alternative approaches may include a) implementing a moratorium on packed contributions to political parties and candidates from political parties such that refuse to be proactive on labor issues, b) implementing a moratorium on endorsing candidates for the Vermont House and Senate from any party which refuses to be proactive on labor issues,

1. c) exploring an institutional relationship with the Vermont Progressive Party whereby labor delegates to their Executive board would hold sway over party policy on labor issues, d) exploring institutional relationships with another pro-labor third party, e) exploring the formation of our own political party, f) consider taking a step back from electoral politics and instead putting all of our resources into organizing new shops and thus growing our base political power,
2. g) any combination of the above, or a different approach as may be looked at by this committee. You’re throwing the gauntlet down. This is what every person suffering and struggling in society today looks up, watches television, listens to people doing these performative actions that aren’t really anything more than an opportunity for a selfie and a T-shirt and not getting anywhere.

What you’re saying there, that sounds like what I thought Progressives stood for was making those kind of demands. But I’ve seen nothing but capitulation. It sounds to me like you have a plan in writing how you’re going to do this or try to.

[00:25:09.660] – Van Deusen

It’s more than just a plan. We’ve implemented large parts of that. So within months of United winning our 1st 2019 election, we called for a political summit. We invited rank and file members from all over the state to the old Labor Hall in Barre, Vermont. And our committee reported back its findings after taking a couple of months to look at those questions, both in the platform and after a full day of first hearing from various political perspectives, ranging from the Chair of the Democratic Party in the State to Democratic Socialists of America, the Progressive Party, a range of political views.

Then we had a very serious discussion and long debate about our electoral approach going forward. And what was adopted by the members through a vote and a follow up vote by the Executive board was we implemented the moratorium approach. So what we do now is every biennium we tell the legislators, we tell all three political parties, we have three in Vermont, the Rock Party is a Democratic Socialist Party and they have seats in a caucus in the State House and until recently, the lieutenant governorship and they have the auditorship.

So we implemented a system where we tell the parties, these are our three priorities. Make or break for this biennium you’re either with us or you’re against us. And if your party to a critical mass does not support those priorities, a moratorium will be enacted whereby your candidates for State House will not be endorsed for the next election.

There is a provision in rare cases where two thirds of the Executive board could vote to override that for a very specific labor champion if we need to back him. So in that first biennium, we announced the State House that card check, a better way to enforce worker misclassification on construction sites, and progress on livable wages. Those were our three make or break.

And if they did not, as parties, back those in advance, there would be a moratorium. And we won on the Contractor Building Trades bill that provides a better way to enforce misclassification jobs. We won on progress on the liberal wages. The minimum wage significantly rose through legislation that year. We did not win, they did not advance, card check.

As it turns out, the Democratic Party leadership refused to advance it. They refused to get it out of committee, and the Republican Party would not back it at all. So a moratorium was triggered for those two parties. Meanwhile, the Progressive Party, which at the time had maybe ten seats in the House and Senate, they backed it to the hilt, and they were a minority, so they did not have the muscle to get it through, but they backed it to the hilt.

So come the last general election in 2020—we’re facing a new one now, but in 2020, for the first time ever, the Vermont AFL-CIO voted to endorse the entire Progressive Party slate. And again, those are Democratic Socialists. They come out of when Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington, he formed the Progressive Caucus, and that’s how that party got started.

So never before has labor backed an entire slate in the United States, to my knowledge, from a third party, a leftist third party. And that’s what we did. And we won a good number of those races. We won them. And come a week from Saturday, we’re going to have another convention, and we are going to again propose to our members that we back the entire Progressive Party slate. And what does this mean?

We’re sending the message to the Republicans and Democrats that we’re not playing your lesser-of-evil game. We’re not going to do it. We are going to call you out as the enemy of the working class when you act like the enemy of the working class. And if you want to be in the good graces of working people, if you want to have a relationship with organized labor, if you want the endorsement of the Vermont AFL-CIO as a party, you need to get behind the priorities of working class people in unions.

It’s not rocket science. It shouldn’t be even controversial. We should not be supporting people that don’t support us. But that’s what we see on the national scale every goddamn day. And I’m fed up with it, our members are fed up with it, and I’m sure millions and millions of Americans are also fed up with it. And that’s borne out in the fact of how many people sit elections out.

But let me make one more point. We also should not make a fetish of political parties. We’re happy to support the Progressive Party. We’re happy to have helped them become the strongest party, the largest party with the most city council seats in our largest city of Burlington. We are thrilled about the relationship we’re developing with them and helping them with their elections as they help us with our union issues.

But we should not forget that ultimately we’re not going to build real power. We’re not going to alter the basic construct of society through backing any political party or any candidate. That happens when we organize ourselves. Electoral politics are important. They are real. We can’t pretend they don’t exist. We can’t pretend that they don’t have an impact on people’s lives.

They most certainly do. But in the long run, the most important thing is not picking the right candidate, not supporting the right party. The most important thing is building that shop for power, building that democratic base. And I mean that as a small d. Building the ability to have true working alliances with community organizations and regular folks in every corner of the state and the country to push through a different kind of politics, to change what is politically possible. So we’ll do what we have to do when it comes to electoral politics. But that’s not the focus.

[00:31:28.410] – Grumbine

I strongly appreciate that. I guess the question comes down to this: groups like Extinction Rebellion and DSA and other groups that are outside of the political electoral process but have a large base of membership that has largely synergistic goals, dreams and visions. How do you incorporate them and their efforts into the larger story? How does that come together? There’s a lot of compromise that comes with collaboration, unfortunately. How does that work?

[00:32:09.240] – Van Deusen

Well, when it comes to things outside the labor movement, when it comes to external groups, we want to work with those where we have an overlap of interest. And you brought the Green New Deal before, so I’ll give you an example. We’re part of a coalition called Renew New England and we are a founding affiliate at the Vermont level. Each state in New England has its own structure of sorts, working with groups like Rights and Democracy, the Nulhegan Abanaki Tribe, which is a Native American tribe here recognized by State, 350 Vermont and many other organizations who have an interest in building a Green New Deal.

So what’s our interest in the Green New Deal? Among other things, jobs. We’re talking about jobs and we want to make sure that green jobs, things in the renewable energy sector or retrofitting houses to make them more energy efficient, all of these things. We want to make sure they’re good union jobs, not ones that pay shitty wages with no benefits. So we have a very direct interest in this.

In the past, years ago, I worked with the Iron Workers to make sure we had union jobs building two major wind farms that went up in Vermont. So from that perspective, it’s very clear we have an interest to work towards reinvestment in a green economy. And what does that mean for other groups? They have an interest in the environmental policies they’re pursuing. But here’s the thing.

All of us, I don’t care if you’re a union member working in a steel mill or if you’re an environmental activist trying to preserve a forest, we all have a common interest in our children being able to breathe clean air and drink clean water and having a planet that is livable. So there is common interest there. One of the things that we require for groups we work with and alliances we make is we need them to understand that “just transition” is not just some words on paper, which too often it ends up being in various environmental battles.

That we need to be confident and make sure that the new jobs that are being created are on par with any that over time may be diminished due to the changes in the economic situation and the policies that are adopted by the state or federal government. We need to also make sure that such new pro-environmental programs are not funded regressively by putting the burden on the backs of working people, but instead are funded progressively through taxing the rich, taxing the billionaires and taxing the corporations.

It might be a little convoluted because we’re talking about supporting a Green New Deal, but the Vermont AFL-CIO has actively, successfully fought against a couple of different schemes that have recently come up in Vermont, being pushed by liberal Democrats that would do some marginally good environmental things, but at the cost of putting the price tag on the back of low income working people.

Like putting an extra backdoor taxes on home heating fuel. That sounds great. We want to get to a place where you could heat your house with renewable sources or what have you, but we can’t be having working class families expected to pay $1,500 a month for an oil bill and working class and low income families don’t have the ten grand or whatever it would be needed to change their heating systems.

And we can’t have $80,000 electric cars being subsidized at the expense of massively jacking up gas taxes, which is a regressive tax that charges the carpenter more money to get to work. These regressive taxation schemes are ways to make the rich feel okay about a transition to a more green society planet. But we don’t need the rich to feel good.

In fact, it’s time for them to pony up. They’re the ones that reap the profits, be it the Carnegies or the Rockefellers or the modern versions of those folks. They’re the ones who reap the profits from the degradation of the planet and they’re the ones that need to pay the price for fixing the problems that they cause.

[00:36:13.230] – Grumbine

It’s interesting you say that because when you’re looking at the local and state level, the entire economy is circular within the state and the state is heavily dependent on taxes and investment, municipal bonds, et cetera. The difference at the federal level can’t be more stark, and this is one of the things that this program seeks to get out as well, and that is that the federal government is the one that creates the currency.

It’s not the tax dollar at the federal level because taxes, because of the nature of a fiat currency, are deleted upon receipt. The only new spending is a new spending bill. So at the state and federal level, you see this thing we call the Race to the Bottom and places like Texas and Kansas in particular, that Republican right wing will cut the bottom out of the tax basis, come on down has been used to pluck businesses out and leave rust belts behind.

And this has been terrible for unions. You saw it happen to Detroit, Pittsburgh and Buffalo. We’ve even seen it happen in Harrisburg and many other places around the country. And so one of the things that I was wondering about from a union perspective here is when you guys go forward and you are ensuring union work and making sure things like that just transition are real, the Green New Deal is federally funded, at least in the way it’s supposed to be.

It’s federally funded. And by doing that, it empowers us to have those countervailing things to be brought into your backyard, to give unions the strength they need to fight back. I think it’s just an amazing opportunity there to not destroy the local economy, but while providing the goods and services through federal legislation as well. I know that you’re local, so I want to make sure that I made that point.

[00:38:06.390] – Van Deusen

So look, I agree in general what you’re saying, but let me make one comment first. Sure. On the federal scale, on the national scale, these corporations that create these negative dynamics that produce goods, first of all, it’s the workers that produce the goods.

[00:38:22.230] – Grumbine

Amen.

[00:38:22.710] – Van Deusen

But when they create these negative dynamics, companies are racing somewhere where they’re paying less in taxes. Fuck them. We should be nationalizing those industries. We should be nationalizing those companies. I remember there was a number of GE plants during the height of Covid before the vaccine was created that were shutting down rather than producing ventilators, which there was a massive need for to keep Americans alive.

In that scenario. It is criminal that that’s allowed to happen the first time a corporation tries to do something like that. In my mind that’s when you nationalize that corporation and make them work for the good of the people as opposed to the profit of the shareholders. So that’s one thing. On the state scale, I think that there’s a lot that could be done towards a Green New Deal.

I think that there are lots of policy and taxation changes and things about empowering working class people to form unions to better guarantee that the promises of a New Deal are followed through and not rolled back. But let’s be real. We’ve just experienced two years of the Democrats being fully empowered, and other than Bernie Sanders and a couple of independents, the Republicans aren’t behind a Green New Deal and nor are the Democrats.

There’s a small caucus of folks that say they are. How many actually are, if it ever came to a meaningful vote, not a symbolic vote is an open question. So I don’t have faith that the political system that we have now is going to deliver on things like that. They can’t even deliver on free community college, let alone a Green New Deal.

So rather than live in fantasy, I think that we have to take a step back, and we have to say, okay, what can we do on a regional or state level to achieve significant aspects of those goals? And what do we need to do internally and in alliance with other groups to build the kind of momentum and strength needed to make the politician fear us to the point where things like that become possible?

And that takes a serious, hard look inward, and it takes a lot more than having a pep rally. We need to do the hard work involved. It’s not easy over a period of years to get to the point where these things become possible. But if we bury your head in the sand as we started this interview with and talk about this notion of just vote for the Democrat and things will work out, if we just elect a few more Democrats, that’s not going to get us one step further down the road towards where we need to be.

We need a rethinking of how we approach politics at the state level, community level, and at the national level. And we have to take concrete steps to implement those changes if we ever want to make progress and get to where we need to be.

[00:41:21.690] – Grumbine

In this modern era without really having as many shop floors as they did in the turn of the century 1900. And people frequently point to the Bolshevik Revolution as a successful labor led revolution, but we don’t have any of the Eugene V. Debs world around us anymore. People are dispersed. People are working remotely. There isn’t the same level of manufacturing in the United States. Explain to me what the union of 2022 looks like.

[00:41:55.350] – Van Deusen

Well, look, don’t overstate the remote work aspect of things or the distribution among folks. I mean, we still have countless union shops, not just throughout Vermont, but all over the country, where people are actually there present doing things that need to be done in real life. And we both know that over the last year, there’s been many major strikes that are happening around the country.

So I think much of what took place 100 years ago is still relevant. But you can’t be speaking the language of Eugene Debs per se, or you can’t be just recycling posters from the IWW in 1911 and think that people are going to flock to you. I mean, there’s a reason why the IWW now has several thousand members as opposed to the 100,000 they had 100 years ago.

You can’t step in the same river twice, so I’m giving you that. But what you can do is you can learn from those eras. You could learn from the things that our grandfathers and great grandfathers and great grandmothers did and we could figure out what they did well and we could think about the mistakes that they made along the way.

And one of the mistakes that was made by the labor movement into the 1940s – 1950s was hitching the wagons to the Democratic party. The labor movement prior to that from the Great Depression further was much more fluent in how it approach electoral politics. Different local labor sections would back socialist candidates in different regions such as New York City at different times.

And of course, the Socialist party under Eugene Debs was in some ways an outgrowth or an expression of many IWW leaders like big Bill Haywood for a time. So we saw a period of experimentation and we saw labor militancy go up. And the more labor became more embedded with the establishment, the more it became more comfortable with that which is, as opposed to striving towards that which should be, the weaker the labor movement became.

So the lesson I draw from this is that when you are militant, when you are engaged, when you don’t compromise your political beliefs on a daily strategic basis, that is when members tune in, that is when members start to become engaged and when you democratize the labor movement. Of course, the IWW long time ago was a very democratic union.

And when you ask members for their opinion, when you ask them to vote, when you make it so their opinion matters, then they’re also more apt to own the policies, the politics, the actions of the labor movement as such. And they’re more willing to engage in them with this top down approach. And I’ll give you an example of this.

I came from the national I was the delegates and national AFL-CIO convention earlier this year. There were roughly 500 delegates there who elected all the national officers. Now, if I was to tell you there’s a country somewhere with 12.5 million citizens, and then if I tell you that 500 officials elected their president and if I asked, do you think that country is a democracy? Your answer would be no.

So the fact is we inherited a labor movement which is not as democratic even remotely as it needs to be. And because it doesn’t engage the rank and file, because there is a disconnect between the national leaders and the folks on the shop floor, members aren’t engaged or not to the extent they should be. And that’s one of the major things we’re looking to turn around and working very hard to do successfully here in Vermont.

[00:45:33.570] – Grumbine

Very good. So let’s round this out. I really appreciate everything you’ve said, I guess. Help me as we close this out. Paint a vision for tomorrow, for hope. Give us the parting elevator pitch for getting involved in who to pay attention to as we go forward.

[00:45:53.790] – Van Deusen

Union members and workers across this country need to transform the labor movement. We need to fight like Hell, within, to democratize the labor movement, to make it a rank-and-file-driven labor movement. One that doesn’t just prop up bad Democrats, but rather one that gives true articulation and expression through the hopes, dreams and desires of regular working families.

And we need to let those regular working folks choose the direction we go, choose the priorities we pursue. And we need to make it very clear that the kind of society that we’re aiming for is not one that’s just a little bit better around the edges, but we need to also democratize society as such. We need to find ways to build a more direct participatory democracy on a state scale, on a national scale, et cetera.

We need to make sure we have a social safety net, which means regular people, working people, don’t have to worry about the basics of health care, dental care, rent, education costs. We need to make sure that the fruits of our labor are actually reaped in the working people that create all the wealth in society, all the goods in society, actually get to live in that comfortable, good way that they have earned, that they desire, and frankly, that is owed them.

That’s the future we strive for. And it’s going to take a hell of a lot of fighting between now and then to get there. But goddamn it, we will get there. History is on our side and we will win in the end.

[00:47:26.780] – Grumbine

I love that. What a way to go out. David Van Deusen, how do we find more of your information? Just go check you out at Vermont AFL-CIO? Is there other places we can find more of your stuff?

[00:47:38.070] – Van Deusen

Well, you could come to Vermont, and if you’re ever in a union shop, there’s a good chance you’ll see me stop by. I’m actually in my jeep right now driving around the state, meeting with workers as we speak. So check out the Vermont AFL-CIO’s website on the Internet, and folks should feel free to reach out to us. We’re happy to build solidarity with other labor unions outside our own borders.

[00:48:00.550] – Grumbine

That’s amazing. And with that, my name is Steve Grumbine. This is my guest, David Van Deusen, president of the Vermont AFL CIO. Thrilled to have him. With that, we’re out of here.

[00:48:36.370] – End credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. 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.