Episode 240 – Can Unions Reclaim the Strike? with Joe Burns

Macro N Cheese – Episode 240
Can Unions Reclaim the Strike? with Joe Burns
September 2, 2023

[00:00:00] Joe Burns [Intro/Music]: Most of the labor movement over the last few decades has not done a good job of fighting for broad demands. But they’ve also done a horrible job of fighting for things like bathroom breaks, and on the job what workers need.

In my experience, and I’ve been doing this for over three decades, in virtually every situation I’m in, the workers are generally more willing to take on the company than the union. And one of my little slogans I tell people is, if you don’t think the members are behind you, look ahead, because that’s probably where they are.

[00:01:35] 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] Steven Grumbine: Alright. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is a hero of mine, because I’m looking for people that make things happen and are ready to change the world. And Joe’s book Class Struggle Unionism is a really big deal, to me anyway. It captured my imagination of seeing labor working across corporations, and joining hands with a class consciousness and a solidarity beyond the typical union floor.

I’ve had Joe on a couple times in the past, but let me tell you a little bit about Joe. Joe Burns is a veteran union negotiator and a labor lawyer, with over 25 years experience negotiating labor agreements. He is currently the director of collective bargaining for the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA.

He graduated from the New York University School of Law. Prior to law school, he worked in a public sector hospital and was president of his AFSCME Local. He is the author of Strike Back: Rediscovering Militant Tactics to Fight the Attacks on Public Employee Unions and Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America. And as I said, the other book, Class Struggle Unionism.

All of them ‘must-reads.’

And without further ado, let me bring on my guests. Joe Burns. Welcome back, sir.

[00:03:09] Joe Burns: Hey Steve. Thanks for having me on.

[00:03:12] Grumbine: Absolutely. I’ve been quite discouraged because the political climate is such that it’s basically exposed an underbelly, to a system that appears to be decidedly, anti-labor and anti non-ownership class. And the way that politics seem to unfold, it seems like every time there’s a little bit of room for progress, some other item comes to steal the oxygen out of the room and take our focus away from our shared struggle, in this climate of anti-worker sentiment.

What is going on from your vantage point, since we last spoke, within the labor movement? Because I’ve seen moments where I got excited and thought we had a chance. And then it gets quiet again. And maybe that’s all just the rumblings below the surface that we can’t see, unless we’re in the rooms. But I haven’t been seeing it, and I want you to give me a spark.

Joe, tell me what am I missing?

[00:04:14] Burns: I’m very hopeful. And the reason is, because I’ve been doing labor work for probably about 35 years, and something’s going on right now in this country. And workers are on the move. It’s in fits and starts, and ups and downs, but certainly I have not seen anything like this for three decades. And what’s going on is, we have, across a wide variety of industries, workers either striking or preparing to strike.

So, we have over 300,000 UPS workers under new reform leadership, threatened to strike and brought it up to the brink. And won a contract that was ratified by 86% of the membership. If you’ve been bargaining as long as I have, you know that’s a pretty good number. And it represents the fact that the members saw and knew that they were engaged in a war, and had confidence that the union took the company on.

We have the auto workers, again, under reform leadership because the government had to step in, because three or four of the last union presidents went to jail, having a corruption scandal. ‘One member, one vote’ campaign, a hard fought election. Shawn Fain gets in and guess what? He throws down the gauntlet and tells the big three automakers that business as usual is over. And decades of the company and union cozying up in negotiations, is done with. And puts forward a set of members’ demands. Rather than doing a photo op with the auto executives, he goes out and takes photos and shakes the hands of workers on the shop floor. So we’ve got actors out on strike. We’ve had a lot of teachers, and then a lot of other strikes that we don’t even hear about.

We’ve got Wabtec workers with UE fighting for the broad class militant demands, both for trying to get them to shift over to green locomotives, but also fighting on a very detailed shop floor idea about restoring the right to strike during the term of the contract over grievances. Which is something you don’t really hear about nowadays. So, I think it’s very interesting. Right now I’m working with the American Airlines flight attendants, who are waiting for our strike vote to come in, but it’s pretty electrifying to see the energy and passion that the flight attendants have, having flown through the pandemic. So, I think there’s a lot going on in the labor movement, and I think it’s an interesting time.

We’ve got a lot of challenges, but certainly something I haven’t seen for a long, long time.

[00:07:07] Grumbine: That is amazing. What is equally amazing is the lack of news coverage of these labor movements, that are occurring right in front of our face. Why do you suppose the media isn’t covering this more?

[00:07:24] Burns: The old saying is ‘the media is not close to corporate America, the media IS corporate America.’ So I think that’s one part of it. And that’s why podcasts such as yours, and alternative media is so important, because we have to get the word out on our own. The media does not really cover strikes like they should, and to the extent they do, they always have a slant on it.

So they’ll inflate the numbers and be like, ‘UPS drivers are making $160k’ or whatever, so they consistently devalue it. The flight attendants were able to gain a fair degree of coverage in our labor disputes, because so many people fly and it’s in the public eye. But you take a strike, like let’s say the Wabtec workers in Erie, Pennsylvania, that used to be a GE plant. They may get coverage after the first day or two of the strike, but then it largely disappears.

But at the end of the day, I think the key thing is, and I talk about this a bit in Class Struggle Unionism, the reason why the labor movement is so important and why employers hate it so much, including the corporate media, is because labor plays a very special role in society.

It is why and how we have billionaires, because of the struggle that goes on in the workplace. So even if they don’t cover us, given the fact that workers are the group in society that can bring everything to a halt, we have a lot of power. And for decades, we weren’t exercising it. But now I think, workers are coming back to understanding the key role of the strike, and our power in society.

[00:09:14] Grumbine: Some of the various unions have been fighting for an extra 10 minutes on the bathroom break, as opposed to far-reaching structural changes that would impact the larger effort for labor. Which is, I think, a large part of class struggle unionism. Which is not just thinking about that small myopic thing, but thinking broader and thinking more generally, as a class entity.

For people that haven’t had a chance to listen to our prior discussion, can you help define ‘class struggle unionism? ‘

[00:09:49] Burns: So, I think it’s good to help define it by talking about what it isn’t, as well. And I would go a step further and say that most of the labor movement over the last few decades has not done a good job of fighting for broad demands, but they’ve also done a horrible job of fighting for things like bathroom breaks, and on the job, what workers need.

And part of it is there’s this philosophy called ‘business unionism’, which for the last hundred years and beyond, and to this day, has been the predominant form of unionism. And this form of unionism, sees itself as having a very narrow role. It can be summed up like a ‘fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.’

They see themselves as negotiating with particular employers, trying to make things a little bit better, but don’t really see themselves as having a broader role in society or having a different analysis. In contrast, there’s this philosophy which I subscribe to of ‘class struggle unionism’, which looks at everything a little bit differently. And they see every union fight, every struggle, as part and parcel of a larger fight of workers, against a class of owners in society.

And they see the employment and the workplace as, really, the source of power and privilege in society. And the reason is simple, labor creates all wealth in society. So we can talk about Trump Towers. You can talk about employers building this or building that. Building buildings or autos or whatever. But the reality is, everything of value is created by workers in society, including manual workers, intellectual workers and so forth. But during the course of their work shifts, they produce a lot more value than they get paid for, and that money siphons up to millions, in workplaces across the United States and the globe. That’s why now, we have billionaires. Which is, when you step back and think about it, you think about someone having enough money that they could spend $5,000 a day since 1492, and they wouldn’t run out of $1 billion. And then, they have hundreds of billions of dollars.

It’s an actually insane type of system. So we have the labor movement here, and on one hand we have this business unionism with a very narrow point of view. On the other hand, we have a rich history of class struggle unionism. Where we have a very combative form of unionism that values member democracy. That takes on fighting the boss. That realizes both the importance of these class shop floor struggles, and what it’s like to be a worker in a plant or a workplace. But also, has these broad demands because they see themselves, class struggle unionists, as part of a bigger struggle between workers and owners in society.

That’s a form of unionism which has produced the greatest gains in US labor history, and it’s something we desperately need in the labor movement.

[00:13:03] Grumbine: You brought up that American Airlines and others are looking at potentially going on strike. You got a strike vote coming up. As a union lawyer in general, what does that work look like, Joe? When you’re dealing with people who are union and maybe they have reasons for not wanting to go on strike, but feel a need to go on strike, but they’re not sure about it. And there’s probably some disinformation from the corporation and a lot of heavy lifting on the back end to get, in your case, 26,000 to walk in the same direction.

What does that look like in practice?

[00:13:42] Burns: So, this is actually a good question and it’s actually quite interesting, and it very well may be the subject of my fourth book. Because a lot of the theory on organizing that we’ve been hearing about for the last several decades has been, ‘Workers are generally reluctant to take on their bosses’, ‘We need to hire or train these organizers to go in, and convince the relatively cautious workers, to go take on the company’, ‘We need to be very skilled about it with our organizing, and so forth’, ‘Map out the workplaces’, ‘We need to do these structure tests’, and all this stuff.

But it’s all based on this idea that, basically class struggle is imported into the workplace, and we need the outside union to come in and get workers to fight. But the reality is quite different. In my experience, and I’ve been doing this for over three decades, in virtually every situation I’m in, the workers are generally more willing to take on the company than the union. One of my little slogans I tell people is ‘if you don’t think the members are behind you, look ahead, because that’s probably where they are.’

And they’re waiting for a union leadership that’s willing to actually engage in the fight. And when you do engage in the fight, it’s a very interesting process. It’s really hard to explain. Every time I’ve led up to a strike vote, I always say it’s like something’s in the air. Once workers start paying attention and they start getting involved, they start talking to each other, they start taking it up on their own, and it’s really a process of class consciousness developing.

So, to make it a little bit more concrete, with American Airlines, we push the battle forward. But then at a certain point, just on their own, the CEO posts on Instagram that the company made, I forget how many billions of dollars in profit at the end of the quarter. And all these flight attendants, especially these younger flight attendants, there were 1400 comments just ripping him, and they’re all saying: ‘we’re ready to strike, what are you talking about?, we can’t afford an apartment’ … this and that.

So that’s kinda my direct experience. But if you look around the country and you say: ‘okay, a couple years ago, the production workers went out on strike, and according to this prevalent organizing theory, it would’ve been the union convincing them to go out on strike.’

But that’s not what happened. Workers repeatedly voted down their tentative agreements. They put forward these bold demands, which are the kinds of stuff that you were talking about. And they desperately wanted to take on these employers. So, the strike wave didn’t really come from the union apparatus. It really generated out of the workplace because people wanted to take back control of their schedules.

They wanted to eliminate these ‘two-tier’ schemes, where some workers are paid less than others. The actors and screenwriters are out on strike, but a couple years ago, the stage hands in IATSE, they were fighting about these broad demands as well. They were on the brink of a strike, but it was pushed by the members.

So, back to your first question. That’s what gives me hope. That the working class in this country, I think people have a pretty clear idea about where things are at and what they need, and when they’re presented with a plan that makes sense and participate in it themselves, overwhelmingly, I think they’re down for the fight.

[00:17:19] Grumbine: That’s powerful stuff. I wish that I had that front row seat that you have in this, because I think it takes being able to see some positive movement forward, to get that hope. For me, it’s gotta be evidence-based to some degree, and you have hope for things unseen. But there’s gotta be something that you can see, to be able to provide that forward motion that gives you hope and energy to fight.

Because right now, the politics of the US is just abysmal. So politics is the way forward, should be a non-starter for most people. But if we can get workers to think beyond just a very narrow view of the world, it might be a way of sparking the kindling to get the whole nation moving forward, to stop the insanity that we see so prevalent right now.

What are your thoughts on the role of unions, beyond just their particular structure? How do you see its impact on the overall society?

[00:18:27] Burns: I find that when you’re engaged in the struggle, workers draw the connections. And if you listen to interviews of striking workers, they usually don’t just talk about their struggle, but they talk about their struggle in a broader context of fighting corporate greed… about fighting for full-time work… about their role in society.

So, I think within every labor struggle, is a kernel of a broader transformation of society. So, it’s interesting because Harry Bridges, who was the longtime leader of the longshore workers on the West Coast from the 1930s to the 1960s, when he talked about strike, he said every strike is a mini-revolution. As opposed to these labor pundits today, which is the strike is the ultimate structure test.

Very different ideas. Mini-revolution vs. structure tests. One’s driven by staff, and sort of, the needs of the union. And one’s looking at it from the working class and the workplace. So basically, when you go out on strike, the first day of the strike is actually quite liberatory, because all the workers are exercising their role in making the workplace and society function.

And when you think about it, throughout these strikes, especially a lot of the bitter strikes I helped support in the nineties and so forth, when workers engage in these strikes, they come into conflict with the power system. So when you asked earlier about the corporate media and the role of the government and all of that, when you’re engaged in the strike, I think it really peels off the layers there, and everyone can see who their friends are and who their enemies are. And it tends to help develop a broader consciousness.

Now employers, of course, hate that. So what they try and do is, eliminate strikes through legal rules, which makes it more and more difficult to strike. And I talk about this in my book, Reviving The Strike, a lot. They tend to limit tactics of solidarity. So they try and make each strike, not about a strike between the workers and the employing class, but workers at a particular company, versus that company. And they discourage, or outright penalize or outlaw, these broader efforts of workers joining across industry to strike.

But we also know that when workers are on the move, and normally it happens in fits and starts, there’s, at least in labor upsurges in US history, when millions of workers are out on strike. Just kind of think about what that does, not only for the individual workers, but for society as a whole.

So look at the late 1940s, when you had 400,000 auto workers and steel workers, hundreds of thousands of steel workers and rail workers and production workers, everyone going out on strike at the same time. You got millions of workers engaged in the battle. And think about what sort of transformative effect that has, not just on the workers, but on society as a whole. And on politics, in every sort of fashion.

So, I think that’s why you can play around in politics, and try and get these two corporate parties to move in the direction. But I think if we want real change in society, I think that’s why we cannot underestimate the role of unions and workplace organizing, and being a foundation of fundamental change.

[00:22:05] Grumbine: That’s really good insight, Joe. I just spoke with a psychology professor named Dr. Stephanie Preston, and she wrote a book called The Altruistic Urge, and it was all about what motivates people to take that extraordinary step, or to do something extra. And it talked a little bit about the science of our brains, and the way we process information, and the way we feel empathy and are willing to do bold things.

And one of the things that came out of that was, does a person feel like they’re capable of achieving something? Do they feel they’re skilled enough to do whatever it takes, to make said ‘thing’ happen? The other thing is, they also have to feel some sort of, tie to it. And there was a bunch of ingroup/outgroup discussions that took place. That made me start wondering how much of that alienation, that prevents us from feeling kinship and bonding with one another, through that union struggle, or through class consciousness.

There’s a whole marketing wing of the corporate world that knows how to divide us up, keep us away from making meaningful change. What do you think is the common thread with labor? We work, we get a paycheck, but what do you think is the common uniting thread, that labor needs to feed off of?

[00:23:37] Burns: I think first of all, issues that workers are facing, crosses industries. Amazon workers being surveilled every moment at work and they get fired by email, based on production standards, that they don’t even know what they are, and never talk to a supervisor. You got auto workers who, one of the tragedies of the Auto Workers Union in the last several decades, until they got this new leadership, was that they cozied up to the automakers and basically helped speed up the work.

So, that went from having a little bit of time to breathe on the assembly line, to down to, you’re working 50 plus seconds, every minute. Just constantly in motion, which is exhausting. We see remote workers being surveilled, like their keystrokes and everything. So I think that’s the, work-like piece of it.

But then you also see, in terms of the share of income, what’s happening to workers in this country, in industry after industry. The SAG-AFTRA, the screenwriters and actors who are out on strike. You got new business models that come in, like Netflix and streaming media, whereas actors could rely on royalties for their work. Which is, we talk about it as terms of royalties, but royalties are actually, they created the value. And them getting, on an ongoing basis, a portion of the value that they created. Now employers want to take it away and say that under these new models, they’ll pay them for work they did. But on an ongoing basis, they’ll receive nothing. So when a show, like that legal show that became the number one hit on streaming, the actors on the show are hardly getting any royalties, even though it’s got billions of views.

 So I think, all of these issues are there, for workers to be able to unite across workplaces, because they have the same issues. And then when you tie that in a little bit beyond that, when workers are really allowed to engage in the true struggle, they’ll start bringing forward, bigger and broader demands.

I call ’em ‘broad class demands’, about their role in society. Should work be moving overseas. Should they have more control of the workplace. So I think, embedded in labor struggles, we often think about labor struggles as being, ‘we’re just bargaining over wages or this and that’, and it’s real narrow. But when you think about it, every labor struggle has, inherent in it, the struggle over control and power. And who’s running society. And who’s running the workplace.

And for that reason, it tends to inherently, have this radicalism buried within it. And I think our task as class struggle unionists, is to help uncover and further that. If we’re looking for fundamental change in society.

[00:26:47] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:27:38] Grumbine: Very important stuff there, Joe. Question for you. The Federal Reserve at the moment, and this is very frightening to me, Jerome Powell recently gave a speech where he said that the Fed was not going to slow down its fight against inflation, until they bring it to 2%. And this kind of ridiculous fetish about bringing inflation down to 2%, ultimately could be cured by raising wages. But instead, they want to bring the country into recession, and the words were ‘soften the labor market’. How does a union, when they hear the Federal Reserve Chair say something of this magnitude, and give the clear direction that their intent is to, basically, bring about a recession?

How does a union respond to that?

[00:28:33] Burns: I think part of the problem with the labor movement, for decades and decades, is that we don’t truly have a independent party representing labor’s interests. So when you talk about the Federal Reserve, we’re really talking about a bipartisan effort, the Republicans and Democrats, where monetary policy is set not to benefit workers, but to benefit the 1% or the owners of wealth in society.

One of the preeminent goals they have, is to drive down wages by increasing unemployment and slowing down the economy, meaning they think workers have too much power in society.

So we were talking about the strike wave going on and workers being on the march. Well, why and how that happens, it’s not just because workers have suddenly decided, ‘we need more money’ or ‘we need to fight more.’ What happens is, when the labor market is tighter, workers have more confidence going out on strike. Because, like with the UPS strike, all of a sudden UPS has to hire 300,000 scabs, people who are willing to cross the picket line to replace striking workers. Well, guess what? For what, they were paying $17 an hour, good luck, especially in a rapid period of time.

So I think employers see that going on, and they say, ‘we need to make workers more anxious and scared about losing their jobs, and the way that we do that is to drive the country into a recession, and drive up unemployment and make workers scared.’ So, I think that’s the problem.

I think the solution is, you’re more the expert in this area, far more than me, but I think that in terms of changing it, it’s sort of embedded in the political system, but I think the antidote is, really what I focus on is, let’s develop a militant labor movement, to push things forward. And I think part of what we have to do is, we can’t just focus on collective bargaining and dealing with contracts, we also have to have a broader vision. And at some point, once we build up this militant class struggle union movement, we have to take on the entire political structure. Because otherwise what they do is, they constantly try and undermine collective bargaining through monetary policy, through the court system, through changing the rules on striking and bargaining.

[00:31:18] Grumbine: I had spoken with another academic, who I have developed an incredible amount of respect for, and that is Clara Mattei. She is a socialist scholar. She’s an economist by trade, but she wrote a fantastic book called The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, and she dubbed the term the Trinity of Austerity.

Fiscal Austerity – meaning cutting spending. Monetary austerity – meaning raising interest rates, as they’ve done. And then, the power of the ‘sack’. In other words, weakening labor softening the labor market. And this was coined beginning, really, representing the Bolshevik revolution and the overreaction of capital, being very fearful that labor saw a different way forward.

And instead of just allowing capitalists to run amok, it was targeted towards empowering labor. But we’ve seen since then, how they use that three-pronged attack repeatedly, to keep us weak and ineffective.

Do the unions look at this? Do they have an understanding of those three-pronged attacks? Do they do anything to address them? Is it part of their core vernacular or are they unaware of this? Is this an area of opportunity?

[00:32:49] Burns: In a small group, in terms of policy analysts within the union bureaucracy, I’m sure there’s some people paying attention to it. But on a widespread basis, I don’t think, and part of the problem is, overall, the labor movement has been tied into, and joined at the hip with the Democratic Party for the last 70 years.

And the problem is, both the Democrats and the Republicans are billionaire funded political parties. They don’t truly represent the interests of the working class. Tony Mazzocchi, who is a leader and president of the oil, chemical and atomic workers, and the sponsor and leading force behind OSHA in the seventies, passing that law in Congress.

He said ‘the bosses have two parties, it’s time for workers to have one.’ So I don’t think, until we truly free our minds, that we are going to be in that situation. But I think that there’s an important point here, and I cover this a lot in my book, Reviving The Strike, which came out over a decade ago. Classical union theory didn’t really rely on the labor market to win our gains. And by that I mean, under the rules of the game now, how they want workers to strike is, the worker works at a plant, they withdraw their labor, then that strike gets settled, based on whether the employer is able to find replacement workers, who we, in the labor movement, call ‘scabs’… to come in and take their jobs.

So that would be the test. And that’s why unemployment and all that stuff matters, because are the workers willing to step in and cross the picket line? But that framework doesn’t really work and has not really worked since the early 1900s, because the problem is, once you have national labor markets, and millions and millions of workers available in a potential pool, merely withdrawing your labor doesn’t work, because let’s say nurses go on strike, what do they do? They bring in scab nurses from all over the country.

And can they find replacements for a thousand striking workers? And the answer is yes. Same with pilots, skilled workers, mechanics at Northwest Airlines in 2004 or so. The answer is yes. But when you go back and you look at the classic labor textbooks from the 1960s and 50s, and these weren’t radicals, these were university professors, fairly mainstream, and they would say that stopping production was the key to a strike. And that, they would say a strike is really a siege of the employer.

And that’s why unions, during that period, used mass picketing and plant occupations and solidarity efforts. Like, going out and picketing other employers, so that the employer couldn’t sell their goods. And all of these were based on, fundamentally, a rejection of so-called “free market economics.” And a rejection of this idea that, the success of a strike should depend on whether someone’s willing to take your job. Which is tied into unemployment. So I think part of Labor’s renewal is going back to this notion.

Why were hundreds of thousands and millions of workers able to strike during the Great Depression, when unemployment was through the roof? But it’s because their method of striking was a lot more political, in the sense that, they weren’t just saying, ‘hey employers, can you replace us?’

They were saying, ‘we’re not going to let business continue as usual, until we’re able to reach an agreement.’ So I think part of Labor’s renewal, is breaking with these ideas that have been imposed on us over the years, and going back to a lot more confrontational and political forms of unionism. Where, at the end of the day, unemployment is not going to be the deciding factor in strikes.

[00:37:00] Grumbine: Well Joe, I want to go deeper into the airline industry now, with the strike vote coming. And this pod will be released after that vote has taken place, so we’ll be able to look back and see where we were. Can you tell us a little bit about what is making up the base case for a strike? What is happening in American Airlines that is making this a possibility, at this point?

[00:37:27] Burns: I think if you look back over the last several decades, flight attendants have gone through a series of bankruptcies in the early 2000s. They’ve seen mergers and acquisitions and the consolidation of the industry. And during that process, have been really left behind. We’ve also seen, in the last few years, and you’ll see this either as a member of the flying public or on the media or social media, the job has been extremely difficult.

You see flight attendants flying through the pandemic, having to enforce mask policies, dealing with unruly passengers and so forth. And yet they did it. And just like production workers and other essential workers, who we found out who’s truly essential in society. Who was showing up throughout the heart of the pandemic. And coming out on the other side of it, I think flight attendants and other airline workers, are demanding huge changes.

We help with AFA, which is the union I work for, and APFA and other unions. But really, spurred by Sara Nelson, our international president, we were able to secure pandemic relief. Which was unique throughout the entire industry, in all industries in the United States, as it’s the one portion of the pandemic relief, which mandated that the funds had to go to workers. And that it had to be used to pay the wages and avoid furloughs.

So coming out of that, there’s a lot of pent up demands. And we got workers contract negotiations going on. We got the pilot able to command these massive increases. And I think we’re in a situation where, traditionally, I bargain a lot, and you can make all of the statements you want to make at the bargaining table about why X and Y is, you know, a good idea. And why it’s fair and stuff, but ultimately it comes down to power.

And for working people in this country, one of the best and most effective forms they have to exercise power, is through the strike or the threat of a strike. So I think that’s what we’re seeing here. And we’ve got all the issues you think about are on the table, in terms of pay and benefits and so forth. But also what should the work rules look like? What it’s going to be like when you show up to work? Can management just pull you off of your trip, just because they think that they might have some problems down the road?

So those are all very important issues. And ultimately, the good thing is, I think the membership is ready. I think our slogan is “We Are Ready”, which the acronym is WAR. But folks are ready to fight, and we willing to do what it takes to get a fair contract.

[00:40:25] Grumbine: Amazing. That acronym is going to stick with me now. War. I love that. That is absolutely perfect.

[00:40:34] Burns: I think I can say, I don’t know that it was necessarily intentional. It became apparent as we went along, and so, it’s kind of funny.

[00:40:43] Grumbine: I need to get a hat or something with that. Let people ask me, “what the heck, I thought you were anti-war?” Well, guess it depends, right? With a vote coming up, and we touched on this earlier. The efforts of American Airlines, should they accept the strike vote and should they agree to go on strike? How do you see that impacting other aspects of the airline industry?

Do you foresee other groups of workers picking up the mantle and joining in? Or do you see this being more of a, ‘we’ll, respect the flight attendants and we’ll just not cross the picket line? Or what does that look like in practice? Or what do you hope for that?

[00:41:29] Burns: I think first of all, there’s a good book by a scholar named Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity, which looks at it. What he says is, ‘solidarity doesn’t just exist in the workplace.’ Everyone says, oh, “solidarity”. He says, it’s something that’s built through a process. So what we’ve seen is that when workers fight, other workers fight back as well, because solidarity is contagious.

So Starbucks workers, they win a campaign in Buffalo, New York, and then guess what? All over the country, Starbucks workers, largely on their own, say ‘they can do it, we can do it.’ Teachers go out on strike, the Chicago Teachers Class Struggle Union takes on the establishment, including the democratic politicians and policy makers. And over the next decade, teachers start following in there and engaging in their own series of strikes.

So I think, in every battle, is planted the seeds of future battles. But I think in the airline industry, we haven’t really touched on it, but it also has a heavy political component. Because unlike other workers, like auto workers or UPS workers, airline workers are not able to strike the day the contract expires. We’re under the Railway Labor Act, which has this lengthy process of mediation. And ultimately, Airline workers can only strike after we’ve been released to strike by the National Mediation Board. One of the issues that we’re confronting is, over the last couple decades there’s been a dialling back and changing of the rules administratively, and with a lot of probably behind the scenes interference from the various white houses, so that in the last 20 years they’ve only released two groups of airline workers to strike.

That’s very different from when I started in the late nineties and early two thousands. Workers were regularly being released to go out on strike, and that’s how we got our agreements. So, I think it’s going to be interesting going forward because look at what happened to the railroad workers, who were trying to go on strike for a very simple demand of control over their schedules. And the White House got together with the politicians. They basically told the employer in advance that we’re not going to let the railroad workers strike. Well, what incentive did they have to bargain? So they ended up being in a situation where they imposed this contract upon the workers.

So I think that, behind the scenes, every strike has a political component. And that’s going to be an issue that’s going to come up in the airline industry, is restoring our right to strike. And I think behind the scenes, that’s one of the issues that took place with the UPS bargaining this summer. So you might recall that Sean O’Brien, fiery bombastic leader of the Teamsters, told the Biden administration to ‘stay the hell out of the dispute.’

And he said, where he grew up, if someone has a fight with another kid, or someone else in the neighborhood. If you’re not involved, you stay out of it. He was quite publicly calling out the White House to stay out of the dispute, because privately and publicly, and very publicly, actually, the employer groups were calling on the administration to step in, presumably to do a Taft-Hartley injunction and deny the Teamsters the right to strike.

So, I think as we proceed, all of that becomes in the mix. And I think it’s going to be interesting as things develop. Because part of what we need to do as a labor movement, is vigorously defend our right to strike.

[00:45:17] Grumbine: I know that old habits die hard, but I did see a lot of people within the labor movement, rabidly supporting Joe Biden. Only to have Joe Biden rabidly kick the chair out from under them. It was a real gut punch to me. I thought that these were the things that only people like Ronald Reagan did. Because it’s what we hear all the time.

We always remember Reagan and the air traffic controllers, but to me, it’s the big reveal. I never saw anything that told me Joe Biden wanted to support labor. I saw a man who was willing to go where the bread is buttered, and that is the oligarchs, the big business and support them. This is the gaslighting that guys like me, who focus on the stuff all the time, and see it. And everybody keeps trying to tell me I’m not seeing what I’m seeing.

This is the part that makes me insane, because if you keep thinking the abuser is really your friend, and you keep going back to that same well and doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting different results… it’s insanity. Was Joe Biden pushed to collapse a strike, or do you think Joe Biden simply did what he was always planning to do for the last 40-50 years? His track record saying he’s pro business, pro capital, anti-worker.

[00:46:44] Burns: I think it’s probably a bit complex. I think for the last several decades, the upper echelon of the Democratic Party has been dominated by these neoliberals, who don’t really believe in labor and who share a lot of their ideas, more with the leaders and policymakers and the Republican Party, than they would with workers and unions.

And I think that it’s pretty clear that they feared the railroad strike and the disruption to the economy, and they privileged that over taking a real look at what the needs of the workers are. And I think that a lot of the commentators were off on this, because they assume that the government always intervenes in rail strikes.

But I’ve studied the interventions that have taken place over the decades. And they don’t always intervene, but when they do, it typically was like in 1991 when Congress stepped in and imposed a contract. That wasn’t before the strike, that was after they were already out on strike. So the workers would actually go out and extract all their gains right before the strike deadline, the employer doesn’t know what’s going to happen, and then they go out on strike. And as bad as that was, here we saw something different, where a couple months before the strike deadline, you have the Biden administration officials basically say, we’re not going to let them strike. So what incentive did the employers at that point, have to bargain?

So I think that’s the negative side. But then I think on the flip side of it is, I think there were similar pressures put on during the UPS bargaining. And in that, it appears from the outside, that the administration took more of a hands-off approach. And they didn’t come in and say, we’re not going to let you go out on strike.

And I think that helped the union, pressure the employers to reach a settlement. So I think what I would say is, I think politics is not static, and I think there’s enough pressure from, a sort of emerging, and more assertive labor movement, that can hold these politicians in check. So to the extent that, if Biden had stepped in and intervened and quashed the UPS strike, what would that have done to his re-election prospects?

I think it would’ve been very, very difficult to get reelected. So I think it’s just important to think of these politicians, not just as what do they think and what do they want to do, but what is competing pressures on them? And in that light, I think, we have a bit more power than we have had in recent decades. Because I think, with a very, very unpopular sitting president, his numbers are fairly low as far as I could tell.

[00:49:51] Grumbine: They’re bad.

[00:49:53] Burns: I don’t think he can handle too many missteps in terms of labor, especially after the rail strike.

[00:50:00] Grumbine: No, I agree with that. I want to ask you, how do you see this stuff playing out? Do you feel like the energy is there for a YES vote?

[00:50:10] Burns: Oh yeah, I think it’s pretty clear. And I’ve been doing this quite a while with AFA, Association of Flight Attendants. And we routinely get strike votes. And they routinely come up with the high 90%s voting in favor of a strike. And high level of participation, 90% plus. So, I don’t have any reason to believe that things are going to be any different here. And we have a history of taking on employers.

Right before the pandemic, we took on Hawaiian Airlines, and it was great. Bargaining had stalled out, gone on for years. But the interesting thing was, once we talked to the leadership and we put out a call for the picket, 400 flight attendants showed up to the first picket. Then we got a 99% strike vote, we had monthly pickets, and the flight attendants were very engaged and we won a contract. Which is a whole story in and of itself, right before the pandemic. We got it the day that the islands shut down to travel. It was right when we the deal. So, I think we have a proven formula of being able to take these corporations on. And given the energy and the enthusiasm at American, I’m fully expecting that we’re going to do well here.

I do want to just give a shout out to Jeff Reisberg, who’s our mutual friend. Who’s a American Airlines flight attendant and an activist, and a great guy. He has been very engaged in these efforts as well.

[00:51:43] Grumbine: Absolutely. Yeah Jeff is the reason why I know you. So, thank you so much Jeff, for getting us involved here. Alright,Joe, one final thing. What are your parting words for the people that are considering unions and the state of labor? Your final thoughts?

[00:52:00] Burns: I think that if you’re someone who wants to change society, or someone who has these broad visions about what the world can and should be, I think for a long time, commited activists have gravitated towards labor movements, because it’s a very powerful movement, potentially. And it has the ability to really transform society.

And if you are going to get involved in the labor movement, just orientate yourself to the workers, there’s a lot of things that can pull you in different directions. But at the end of the day, always believe in the members. And if you do, and you help the members get in motion, then great things will happen. Both in your workplace and in society at large.

[00:52:44] Grumbine: Thank you very much. And on that happy note, my name’s Steve Grumbine, and I’m the host of Macro N Cheese. We are a nonprofit. We desperately need your support. Please consider becoming a donor at patreon.com/realprogressives. This podcast is a weekly podcast. Comes out every Saturday morning, 8:00 AM Eastern.

We’re fast approaching our 250th episode. This has been a labor of love. So please, if you find value, feel free to go back through our catalog. Listen to ’em all. You go to our website at Realprogressives.org. With that, Joe, thank you so much for being a wonderful guest. From my guest and myself, this is Macro N Cheese… We Are Outta Here!

[00:53:35] 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.