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Episode 189 – A New Labor with Liz Medina
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Some of the more, um, senior members of the Macro N Cheese team can remember a time when the Democratic Party supported labor and the union movement. Then we came to realize we had it backwards – it’s really the Party expecting support from the unions, who made donations, helped with campaigning, and got out the vote. Followers of this podcast are regularly introduced to guests who bring word of a newly invigorated labor movement – one that is no longer tied to the Democrats’ apron strings.
Steve’s guest is Liz Medina, the Executive Director of the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Her job title does a poor job of telling you what makes her so interesting. She is an artist (check out her Manifesto for Common Art) as well as a podcaster working to build an oral working-class history and culture. She’s a labor organizer with an expansive vision of the need for class struggle unionism and the understanding that unions don’t exist in isolation; they must be connected to community and independent political groups. She speaks of the need to rebuild the relationship between the left and the labor movement, which has been decoupled since the days of the New Left in the 1970s.
“I really do believe that the politics will follow what we do on the ground in our workplaces and in our communities … It is very hard work, but it’s easier when we feel like we are part of a community in doing that. There’s a real interest of our bosses and of capital more broadly in us staying isolated and alone and disconnected and out of community and not having a society at all, frankly. “There is no society,” as Margaret Thatcher would say. We really need that. We need those connections to continue to have strength to keep on going…”
Liz talks about the labor movement in general, past and present, and the Vermont AFL-CIO. She describes the need to turn the movement around and adopt class struggle unionism. “We believe in the rank and file strategy,” she says. “We believe in prioritizing organizing and not being afraid of being militant.” Activists should follow suit.
Liz Medina is the Executive Director of the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Previously, she served as the Goddard College Staff Union Co-Chair, UAW 2322. She received her MFA from Goddard College and an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. She hosts an oral history podcast called En Masse to build working-class history and culture in her spare time. En Masse is part of the Labor Radio Network. Find her art and other content at atlizmedina.com
@LizMedinArt on Twitter
Macro N Cheese – Episode 189
A New Labor with Liz Medina
September 10, 2022
[00:00:03.940] – Liz Medina [intro/music]
There’s an assumption that we enter the workplace and it’s our responsibility to improve our own conditions individually, that if we just work hard, we will be rewarded, and if there are problems, it’s our fault. And I think workers are starting to realize that these workplaces are not treating us like human beings.
[00:00:29.250] – Liz Medina [intro/music]
Ever since the gains that workers made during the New Deal era, the business community has been trying their hardest to claw it all back. They didn’t want to compromise then, and they don’t want to compromise now.
[00:01:35.110] – 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.
[00:01:43.130] – Steve Grumbine
All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is none other than Liz Medina, who is the executive director of the Vermont State Labor Council AFL-CIO. Previously, she served as the Goddard College Staff union co-chair. UAW 2322. She received her MFA from Goddard College and an MA in cultural studies from Goldsmith’s University of London. She hosts an oral history podcast called En Masse to build working class history and culture in her spare time. En Masse is part of the Labor Radio Network. And without further ado, let me bring on my guest. Liz Medina, welcome to the show.
[00:02:28.020] – Liz Medina
Thank you so much for having me.
[00:02:30.430] – Grumbine
It’s absolutely my pleasure. Me and you have been on different panels in the past just as individual actors on various subjects like Medicare. But in this particular case, we’re talking about labor, and this is your sweet spot. And we’ve had people like Joe Burns, Sara Nelson and Jeff Reisberg, Marianne Garneau and recently, David Van Deusen has been on here.
And so we’re really trying to elevate the role of labor in terms of making change. A lot of what I do is talk about Modern Monetary Theory and try to explain to people that the constraints that they have placed on what the realm of possibility is, is a false paradigm. And trying to expand their vision of what is possible and get them militant in exacting what it is that they believe we need as a society, to begin to find their voice, and to not just accept standard narratives.
And that’s what I love about the unions, especially here recently. Unions have had a hard go. Labor has been under assault for my entire life and before that. But you guys are starting to bring about a little bit of energy. Amazon, Starbucks, railroad workers, teachers. There’s a bunch of movement for a change. It’s been a long, long time since we’ve seen that kind of action. What’s the state of union organizing at this point?
[00:04:06.610] – Medina
I think you bring up a really good point and I think the labor movement is especially critical to showing working people, who are the majority of the population, that we don’t have to accept the way things are and we don’t have to continually operate under the lies and ideology of our, frankly, neoliberal capitalist system that we all have to work under.
There’s an assumption that we enter the workplace and it’s our responsibility to improve our own conditions individually, that if we just work hard, we will be rewarded and if there are problems, it’s our fault. And I think workers are starting to realize that, hey, these workplaces are not treating us like human beings. We’re working hard, but we’re not being rewarded.
And, furthermore, we have to use our collective power to change things. These workplaces are autocratic and we need some democracy in these workplaces. And so I think we are seeing a resurgence in labor, as you noted, because there’s just been such a prolonged period of pressure on working people and they, frankly, have had enough.
And what we see, particularly, is interest in labor unions among young working people who have been disproportionately affected by the decline in working conditions in the United States. They did not benefit from the prosperity of the post war period and they are working in an environment with low union density and they’re rediscovering the ways in which workers have advanced themselves in the past.
And we’re seeing these amazing campaigns happening on a national level. We’re seeing some of that in Vermont, too. But we still, of course, have a ways to go. Just looking at in terms of strike activity, historically, in the United States, we are still not at a level of where we used to be. We had some really exciting resurgence, Striketober, November, everything last year.
Those involved tens of thousands of workers who were bravely standing up for themselves and other workers. But that’s still short of the historical highs of hundreds of thousands of workers going on strike. And, of course, the data on this is not perfect and only captures workplaces of a certain size – I believe a thousand or more – but it still indicates that we are going in the right direction, but we need to keep putting our resources and energy where the movement is to keep growing.
[00:06:39.070] – Grumbine
I want to bring something up. It may feel a little sideways, but it’s current and I think that it shows the cause and effect when you see labor diminished. I have witnessed in my lifetime the huge explosion not only in the cost of college education, but also the debt that is piled on the backs of would be workers. They’re already carrying a house payment of mortgage debt and a student loan.
We saw recently that Biden put a few bucks on the debt that appeased quite a few people, but it still left fundamental problems. College universities are still charging through the nose. Most people will still have to take out huge college debt even with them capping the percentage of the payments later on, they’re still in a position where colleges can jack up the prices.
But the real kicker to me, and this is why I bring this up, I see this as a fundamental subsidy for big business, for corporations to, once again, abuse labor and put their training, education and development programs on the people and put the burden on the people. And they’re carrying this huge debt.
They’re trapped. This is almost like they’re an indentured servant with a burden of this student debt. Many people have paid for 20 plus years and they still got more debt now than they did when they started. Is this not a union issue?
[00:08:09.070] – Medina
It absolutely is because so many people are, as you said, burdened with debt and with the wages being so low it’s impossible to ever get out of it. And it does very much feel like a form of indentured servitude in so many ways. And I agree with you that it’s also a problem of businesses putting all the cost for training and development of workforce that they need to be profitable and to run, frankly, on to the workers instead of governments, for instance, investing in their workforce.
Vermont, as a matter of fact, unfortunately, ranks near the bottom in terms of the amount of money invested in higher education. That’s a huge problem. And a lot of states have lagged behind in investments in higher education for years. And some of them are trying to take some steps to correct that but we have a long ways to go. It’s long overdue.
And, also, just looking, historically, there were times in our labor history where labor unions were strong enough to get employers to pay for higher education and additional training. There have been examples of very big unions and big workplaces like UAW in their Lordstown plant in General Motors. They had completely free college education for a time according to some research I’ve done in the 70s.
These schemes, I think, have been prevalent in other big workplaces that can certainly afford it and we just don’t see that anymore. We hardly ever see it. I worked at Apple for four years between 2008 and 2012. It was quite a time to be working in the midst of the financial crisis. And there was, in theory, some kind of tuition reimbursement program but it had to be very specific courses and, of course, the workers had to pay out of pocket and it was a complicated reimbursement process.
I’m not even sure if it was full. It was enough of a barrier that most people, frankly, did not even participate. So, it was something to make the company look good but actually not take responsibility for investing in their workers in terms of paying for them directly to go to college or paying their fair share of taxes so we can fund our institutions of higher education.
[00:10:23.890] – Grumbine
There is no question there is movement. But being that your focus is history and labor history and so much of what you do in your own podcast, En Masse is about an oral history of the labor movement, how do we get here? We’re seeing the resurgence, and that’s where I want to keep most of the focus. But I do want to look at how we got to a place where labor is struggling.
From what I understand from Sara Nelson, most of the opportunities that unions had in terms of strike actions have been made illegal, and her take is there’s no such thing an illegal strike – there’s only an unsuccessful one. So, there’s a lot that transpired to get us to this point.
[00:11:12.850] – Medina
Right. I think there are multiple factors here, and some of which I probably will omit. And Sarah is completely right. There is no such thing as an illegal strike, only unsuccessful ones. And I believe firmly that our constitution’s 13th amendment doesn’t mean anything unless workers are able to withhold their labor. So, constitutionally we have that right.
I think it’s also a human right to be able to withhold our labor. That being said, how did we get to this weakened position? One is the fact that we’ve had labor laws that have become broken over time. Ever since the gains that workers made during the New Deal era, the business community has been trying their hardest to claw it all back.
They didn’t want to compromise then, and they don’t want to compromise now. And it started from as early as the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, also known I think as the Slave Labor Act or something akin to that, because it created all these restrictions around direct action to assert worker rights. It banned solidarity strikes, for instance.
And, again, going back to Sara, we need to do what is right in the moment, and we have a basic fundamental human right and constitutional right to strike. It still creates a chilling effect and atmosphere. And we’ve only seen labor law continually be eroded ever since. The NLRB, being a body that instead of actually trying to protect labor rights, often undermines it with a council that is hostile to labor unions, sometimes appointing business friendly people instead who have an interest in their destruction.
And, so, we seen a rise in the success, I think, of the business community and the Chamber of Commerce over the years and really weakening these. And at the same time, you get unions not being as willing to just break the law where necessary because of the stakes getting a bit higher in terms of taking direct action, such as a solidarity strike – such as a strike period.
And we’re also, I think, just seeing the dismantling of our economy for s decades as well. We’ve seen where our union membership has been particularly historically, strong and decimated by automation and outsourcing. And so our historical manufacturing bases are just not what they used to be numerically.
And, I guess, going back to, again, the role of unions in all this, there’s some really good writing out there about the unions kind of taking this fortress unionism approach where they’re just trying to protect their resources instead of investing them in the struggle. Investing in fighting back, investing in organizing. And I think that really conservative attitude has unfortunately just led to the continued decline in weakening and allowing, frankly, these business interests to continue to win and hurt working people.
[00:14:04.510] – Grumbine
Some of that feedback I’ve received is that leadership has found more similarities with management than with labor. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that just because you’re out on a golf course doesn’t mean you didn’t have a job to do. And his I wouldn’t say shocked me because I was in a union and our leadership being overly close with management.
We talked about it at length and it seems like that’s been a thing for way too long to make progress happen. But we’ve allowed so many big losses to occur that it’s no longer a matter of inconvenience. People are literally dying from a lack of health care, a lack of clean drinking water. I see this as war against labor, war against the American people.
And when we understand the MMT angle which is that the federal government creates the currency, the taxes do not pay for anything. They’re there to maintain the value of the currency and to keep us using it. So, when the federal government says it can’t afford something but then sends billions of dollars abroad to Ukraine and to Israel, most people would find possibly objectionable.
And that when it come time to take care of ‘We the People’, we end up looking on the wrong side of this. How do we get that class struggle unionism? How do we bring that back?
[00:15:32.290] – Medina
That’s a great question and I think we are seeing some success stories there. We’re seeing the development of an independent labor union movement that doesn’t have perhaps as many restrictions that would be placed upon it by some of the bigger unions that have really succumbed to kind of a business unionist attitude.
Though, of course, those unions could be susceptible to that kind of philosophy and way of running things as well over time. We’re seeing reform caucuses happening across the nation and here even in Vermont. So, we see with UAWD, which is United Auto Workers for Democracy – they’ve recently won “one member, one vote,” which means that they can elect their top leadership, which means they can try to hold their leaders accountable and maybe bring them back in line with the membership instead of with management.
And that kind of democratic unionism is also present in the Teamsters and the American Postal Workers Union. And I think these are really great ways of bringing workers together to try to get to more class struggle unionism because it’s engaging these large bases of workers of these huge legacy unions that are working in multiple industries and multiple countries sometimes.
So, I think that’s a really positive step in the right direction. I was on a reform slate for our state labor council. And for us in Vermont in 2019, we ran a reform slate called United and we won handily every single one of the positions up for election. And we looked at the way our labor council is being run and decided we need to turn this around to bring a more class struggle unionism approach to it.
We believe in the rank and file strategy. We believe in prioritizing organizing and not being afraid of being militant. And, so, we really took our very limited resources and redirected them to our priorities. So, for instance, we took the money that we used to dedicate towards the lobbyists to having on call organizers that we could assign to either internal or external organizing campaigns as needed, which also helps bring in a new cohort of young organizers who want to have experience with this work.
And that’s just like a small way we can do it. As a labor council, I think we have an important role to play in coordinating workers who have been fragmented. We don’t really have the industrial unionism that we may have had in the past today. Most unions are what we would call general workers unions and they represent multiple industries.
And so you have a situation where you may not be connected to all of your fellow union members or siblings in the labor movement in your industry through your union alone. You’d have to build those relationships with other workers and other unions as well. And that doesn’t necessarily happen organically and it’s easier to do it on a local and regional basis through a labor council.
So, we try to have those relationships in our own labor council through initiatives like having a rank and file committee, through organizing projects, through educational and opportunities to develop our members in their capacity to lead in their workplaces. So, I think we obviously need to go further. And with Joe Burns, he’s also talking about developing a militant minority that’s able and willing to take action in the workplace.
And I think we need to rebuild the relationship between the left and the labor movement which became decoupled in the time of the New Left in the 70s and beyond. And I think we’re seeing some organic ways in which that’s happening with a lot of young people, for instance, in the Democratic Socialists of America and the Young Democratic Socialists of America taking a real interest in labor.
We’re seeing this especially in Vermont, and it’s very exciting to see. So, we can have people joining the labor movement who have a broader vision for the working class that extends beyond the workplace, which is so important for us to win on that higher level.
[00:19:35.470] – Grumbine
A lot of companies greenwash themselves. They have all these great outreach programs where they go to the food bank or they collect trash and they wear the t-shirt of the company. Really it’s labor going and doing this work with their company’s jersey on. How much cooperation workers can have guilt free with their employers at this point while the employer is driving these kinds of things as opposed to labor driving them.
It sounds good, I guess, in theory to see labor and management getting along if the conditions are right. But as you stated in the beginning, conditions aren’t right. So, is this just them trying to make the new normal and just roll past it like it’s not happening? Just be grateful you’ve got a job? Or is there something more going on here? Is this labor’s hand involved in trying to help out and create this different environment? I’m always confused about that. It never makes sense to me.
[00:20:42.610] – Medina
Right. So, I think what you’re talking about is the way in which corporations are trying to greenwash or social-justice-wash their image and maybe even provide an outlet for their workers’ frustrations. Is that kind of what you were hoping to talk about?
[00:20:59.690] – Grumbine
It’s almost like they’re saying in this very controlled space, we want to attack climate crisis by picking up some trash on the side of the road, but please put our jersey on while you do it. It feels like such a fraud and maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s completely good stuff and we should get behind it. But I’m trying to understand what does an effective labor and management partnership look like in a world where labor has a seat at the table?
[00:21:29.770] – Medina
Absolutely. And I think you’re totally on point when it comes to this kind of symbolic activism on behalf of businesses where they are trying to look good. It’s all about public image and not really addressing the root problems. It reminds me of attempts back in the day of companies to divert their workers’ frustrations through having company unions or little committees where they provide some kind of structure for workers to complain about things but didn’t intend to act on them.
And then you also have this more public facing initiatives where so many nonprofits in Vermont, some of which are really good, but talking about social justice and doing some feel-good projects, but at the same time they may actually not be treating their own workers very well. And then we have progressive companies that do the same – with Starbucks claiming to respect the diversity of their workers and support black lives and trans rights and go around and try to dismantle those workers’ rights the moment they try to organize, which is completely contradictory and hypocritical.
And, so, I think, obviously, what it really would take is to have a union in the workplace. And what a union is – workers coming together in the workplace and asserting their power and their voice and to have a seat at the table to help and be part of decision making. One of the standard things that unions often win in their first contract is a labor management committee, sometimes a safety committee or other kinds of labor management committees or organizations within the workplace.
And they get to sit down with management and talk about the issues and come up with solutions together. It’s not just a top down management to worker environment anymore. It’s bilateral. There’s a discussion, it’s more democratic. And I think a lot of workers really do want to see their workplaces take on these really important environmental and social justice initiatives.
But they want them to be done in a meaningful way and they don’t want them to be done on their backs and if they’re working in the nonprofit world, too, they want to see themselves as being important and treated with dignity as part of that as well. And, so, I think you’re right. It is a matter of workers winning union recognition, or if not winning union recognition of asserting themselves as a union in the workplace to get these businesses to really do the right thing.
And in my own workplace, that can be anything from really helping management – when I used to work at Goddard College – really helping management with diverse hiring practices, divesting from coal, things that do have meaningful impact in the world.
[00:24:58.700] – Intermission
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[00:25:24.610] – Grumbine
As an activist myself, as I talk to others that are similarly wired, how do we get others engaged? How do we, as activists, make that happen? And you see blips and spurts where you’ll see Group A get a bunch of excited people and, for a short period of time, they’ll keep a little bit of energy and in short order it peters out.
And in talking with people, some of our shared friends that were at Labor Notes, they were very excited as they came out of there and they said, listen, unfortunately, this is what we’re going to face. People are hungry, they need jobs, they get exhausted, they need to see hope, and yet hope sometimes ends up turning into establishment gobbledygook.
People start trying to make you feel good about something you inherently know is wrong, but they still try and sell you on the nonsense anyway. And, so, how do we get activists engaged? And this is what pushed me to the union side of things. Marrying the two worlds but there is some significant differences between an activist and an active union member.
Number one, an active union member is typically dealing in their place of work. There may be broader industry based, cross company solidarity. But, for the most part, you’re in a paid environment. It’s not like there’s a union of unpaid people and the activists, many of which are handy, capable, otherwise abled, retired, young, old, any number of things.
We’re not talking about folks that have a lot of money in the bank. And, in fact, you could even say that because of work and because of the way jobs go in this country, people don’t have a lot of spare downtime to invest in things like organizing beyond their union or organizing in their communities. So, we get a lot of burnout in this activist world.
We get a lot of people that come for a minute excited, and then they fizzle out quickly. And I would like to say that’s the exception, but it’s pretty much the rule. There’s so few people that have that non stop, day in, day out fire to keep fighting. Jeff Reisberg said to me, we’ve got to find a way to marry the union movement with the activist movement and build the kind of power that we need both inside and outside, so that we can bring about the kinds of changes that we need both electorally and survivability.
With the climate crisis, there’s very few things that would impact labor more than something like that. Lack of health care, lack of child care. What are your thoughts on how to get people started, get them engaged? What kind of structure needs to be there to help facilitate that kind of long-term engagement?
[00:28:26.950] – Medina
Wow, that’s a really big, powerful question and something I personally struggle with as well. And I’d say, first of all, I think it’s easier to get started if you are part of an organization so you don’t feel like you’re doing this alone. So, you can delegate and divide that work up in a way that’s more sustainable and come up with a better strategy and activities than you would be able to do otherwise.
And, so, look around your local area and take a look at the groups that are active. I, personally, think in Vermont, the DSA and YDSA and our Labor Council and our unions are doing some really great work, and I really encourage that kind of activity. And I would also think about where you want to put your energy, what’s burning you out? So, a lot of people right now, frankly, are burned out on electoral politics.
They’re seeing some successes and even getting more progressive candidates to win. We have the potential to do so much more. Under the Biden administration it’s just not happening, despite immense amount of pressure, and people are just kind of burning out from all that. They’ve invested a lot into it. Myself, I’ve invested a lot in Bernie’s campaign only for him to be totally undermined by the Democratic Party.
And, so, it feels pretty hopeless, in some ways, doing that work. And if that’s how you feel, then maybe try to do a different kind of work. So, whatever is making you feel burnt out, pivot your attention to something that energizes you and excites you. There’s so many roles that we can play in building a strong labor movement, building a working class revolution that can win for working people, that there really is no reason to limit yourself.
If you want to get involved in the labor movement specifically, obviously a great way to get started is forming a union if you don’t have one or learn how to form a union. As a labor council we’re trying to have regular trainings to put the tools out into the community so workers know how to get started with that. But if you don’t have a standard job or whatever your situation is, there’s also potential for mutual aid, ways for you to just go around in your community, ask what people need very simply, and provide for those needs where there is an absence.
The Socialist Feminist Working Group have been doing really great work around crisis pregnancy centers and trying to build some mutual aid there by offering pregnancy tests and feminine products and such that some people would go to those centers for because they can’t afford them themselves. But they would provide them without the shame that those centers often put on people able to become pregnant by trying to get them to not get an abortion or do things like that.
So, I think there’s just a lot of ways to get involved. And as a labor council, we can always use support with social media and there’s just so many projects out there. And I would say in terms of burnout, again, look where to put your energy, maybe it’s time to put it somewhere else. And also it’s okay to step back once in a while.
I had to step back at one point actually from my co-chair position for about a year or so to address some pretty serious health issues. And I just came back once I felt like I had those addressed and I was ready to do it again and had the energy. So, take care of yourself and look at all the ways you can get involved and be part of an organization.
[00:32:03.850] – Grumbine
I like that. Let’s talk about what you do right now. When we talked to David, he talked glowingly about how when they brought you in the need for training and ramping that knowledge transfer up. Talk to me about what you do.
[00:32:20.230] – Medina
Oh my gosh, thank you. Yes. Well, I try really hard to rebuild our base here in Vermont. So, before our 2019 reform slate came in, our labor council staff, one full time staff person and our labor council, on the whole, they were doing the best they could, but they were really making a mistake in prioritizing building relationships with politicians above the members themselves.
And, so, what I try to do is try to rebuild those relationships. I try to visit the workplaces themselves. I try to go to the membership meetings and really listen to workers there and hear about what’s going on for them there and maybe some issues that are bigger than their workplace, such as the issue of nurses across the state not feeling safe in their workplaces.
There’s an increase in violence in a lot of hospitals and also intensification of their work, improper staffing levels. That’s something maybe that would require a cross coalition to work on and we do other projects like that as well. So, I try to go to the work sites. I drive around the state to visit them. Sometimes I just drop by to say hi just to let people know that there are other union members out there beyond their workplace who have their back and that we are there for them when they need us, whether it’s a really difficult grievance or an upcoming contract negotiation that they are going to need some support with, whatever.
We want them to know that they are not alone and that they have a bigger community and more power behind them. So, I spend time doing that and I also spend time trying to help workers without a union organize new unions. And I’m really grateful for the amazing work of the Starbucks campaign for this because I had the chance to talk to one of their organizers, Alex Riccio, and their how to form a Union course that is given through the Institute for Organizing Unions.
And there’s a lot of how to form a Union courses out there. There’s EWOC, which is also great, Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which is a partnership between UE and DSA. But what I really appreciated about this training that came from a Starbucks organizer is that it was really condensed and easy to understand.
Just gave the basic ingredients or steps, if you will, to form a union in a way that was going to be accessible because, like you said earlier, workers barely have time to just live their life and get to their jobs and then rest and be able to come in the next day. So, it really needs to be kind of short and sweet. So, we’ve been doing those trainings virtually and in person we’d like to do more and then we have some wonderful people who have been volunteering with us.
Trey is a wonderful intern that has found our organization last year and he’s putting together a Vermont Workplace Organizing Committee training this October 8th and 9th at the Old Labor Hall. And, so, we’re just trying to get that out there a lot. And, of course, I try to do a lot of other meetings and events, too, to get people involved.
We have a Woman and Gender Equity Network to address, specifically, the ways in which the oppression of women and nonbinary workers in the workplace affects us. Not only the workplace, but also beyond. So, we’re working really hard on abortion rights right now, and getting the Reproductive Liberty Amendment passed, and we, also, try to have educational opportunities as well.
So, this past spring, we joined up with the main AFL-CIO to have an organized for power course, which was put together by renowned labor organizer Jane McAlevey. And we had 40 of our rank and file members go through that, and that was really helpful and powerful for those members, and we try to keep that stuff going.
We’ve cosponsored book events and reading events that are based on labor. So, we just try to have a lot of ways in which our members can get involved and also just going out to them as much as possible. We still do electoral politics to a certain extent, but we’ve severely limited it. We only endorsed eight democrats and also the progressive party slate for the 2022 election cycle because we really did want to spend more of our time building our base, because we believe that’s what actually will help us win, even legislatively, in the long run.
[00:36:44.530] – Grumbine
Yeah, it’s my belief, and I believe that guys like Harvey Kaye and Alan Minsky have written about this 21st century bill of rights that you need some central organizing mantra, something that can bring everybody to the table. You brought out Bernie Sanders and the fact that he did fold nicely into the establishment as opposed to keeping that fire going.
And I think, unfortunately, people don’t understand it. The reason why people got discouraged was because they were ready to fight to the end, and he did not do the thing that they thought that he would do. And I love Bernie. I was a huge supporter of Bernie’s, and he’s done good work. I’m personally determined to make people believe that they can do great things.
Great things are still possible, and that you don’t necessarily need a leader. We the people, the 99%, if we can rally around some core points, not only will we help labor actually begin that unionization process, but also shoot a shot across the bow to not only capital, but to the capitalist class and the folks that are the investor grade scowlers, always scoffing at anything for the people to let them know we’re here.
I would rather people be willing to go down and fight and lose to show how important an issue is, then to continually hold onto a career, hoping that they can nickel and dime their way to the finish line, because the opposition is not nickel and diming. They’re well funded. They’re deeply entrenched. They own the media.
Seeing that a guy like Bernie didn’t ride it out to the end, that probably hurt the labor movement in many ways, simply because people probably got pretty discouraged. A lot of people checked out because of that. But to Bernie’s credit, he made everyone remember something that had long since been forgotten. And I think the most major contribution Bernie Sanders did here for us was allow us to believe once again.
And that’s just a personal anecdote. That’s not necessarily truth. That’s just a feeling. But it’s a feeling I’ve seen a lot of people share that are afraid to be involved again. They’re afraid to believe. Hope allows you to fall down further than you would if you just accepted your plight as impossible. And I think a lot of people have given into that feeling of impossible. Help us believe in possible, Liz. What is possible?
[00:39:31.090] – Medina
Oh, my gosh. We have a world to win, as they say. And I totally hear you. Bernie did a really great service to the movement in so many ways because he really did articulate class power and dynamics. The billionaires and the millionaires, right? He did that very well. And he was willing to buck the party line and push for pro labor legislation when many other democrats were unwilling to because they frankly just not been interested in fighting for the working class anymore.
And, so, I think where there’s hope is that people are seeing the game for what it is and the way that our two party system leads us to a declining status quo and that really, people need to take action themselves instead of just strictly relying on a party or a politician to do it for them. And I think we need to take the agency back as workers and start to understand that our power is in our ability to withhold our labor and to act collectively as workers and use that power in the workplace.
And I think just reading labor history will fill you with so much hope, because you see how often workers in much worse situations who have had to fight so many forms of oppression, racism, classism, poverty, sexism, and so much more and still won at the end of the day. The New Deal was won by the militancy on the ground.
I firmly believe that and because the ruling class was afraid of us going further, it was a compromise and a concession. And I really do believe that the politics will follow what we do on the ground in our workplaces and in our communities. And it’s hard to do that work. It is very hard work, but it’s easier when we feel like we are part of a community in doing that.
And there’s a real interest of our bosses and of capital more broadly in us staying isolated and alone and disconnected and out of community and not having a society at all, frankly. There is no society, as Margaret Thatcher would say. We really need that. We need those connections to continue to have strength to keep on going, to talk about how hard it is to do things, to help us figure out things, to support us when we need to take a step back and maybe step up themselves.
So, I think there’s a lot of hope. I think I just heard recently on the wonderful Working People podcast, an Amazon worker being able to take direct action in their workplace without a union in a different warehouse I believe it is in Kentucky to get rid of this new draconian policy where the workers had to wear these steel toe cap boots that were hurting their feet in the interest of trying to protect the company from injury and liability.
And that policy was rescinded as a result of workers coming together and demanding something. And they won that. And that can happen in so many ways. That happens everywhere across the United States and beyond. I think also just globally looking at the inspiration of other workers, too. Having that international perspective can be really uplifting, too.
The Indian farmers went on strike and they were in a really terrible situation. And Vijay Prashad has talked and written about this at length, if you want to go into detail about it. But, needless to say, workers have been in terrible situations and conditions throughout history, sometimes worse than what we can even imagine in some ways here in the United States.
And they, nonetheless, have found a way to come together as a community, as a class, and overcome and win. And, so, I think retaking the agency and not displacing it in politicians in the party, even though that work is important, but not relying on that and taking that agency back is where we can start and where we can find some real hope because that’s how we can win.
[00:43:30.970] – Grumbine
You brought up a great point and that’s class consciousness, and I think we lack that in particular in the United States where we haven’t had strong labor movement of late and a lot of people grew up in an era where labor wasn’t a thing, not least overtly. The days of the union boss being on the nightly news are over. We haven’t had them in a long time anyway.
And as a person that enjoys reading history and theory, often we look back to Eugene V. Debs and Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution and workers uniting to take the power back. And I think people look for grand gestures and moments in time. And I think in many ways we are left with small actions to try to erode away something.
But the other side is not even asking permission. They’re just take. And so these little incremental efforts, we’re not even recapturing five minutes ago because the other side being so ruthless. You think back to the sewing folks in the 1900s that were at that seamstress place that caught on fire.
[00:44:47.360] – Medina
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
[00:44:48.700] – Grumbine
So many women died. These are things that have happened in this country. And as a result of unions, they were able to fix things. They were able to get better working conditions because workers are society. Throughout history, you’ve seen moments, major moments, where big change has happened. Do you see unions being able to take from history or do we need to create our own history?
Do we need to create a new path forward? Do we look back to Eugene V. Debs or Vladimir Lenin or these other labor leaders and say that’s how we do it? Or is there a path forward that looks different?
[00:45:27.490] – Medina
That’s a really great question and I’m not sure if I have an exact answer for that but I think we need to do a little bit of both. I think we need to look at the lessons of the past and see what worked and then also incorporate the conditions in which we find ourselves, the historical moments and the way capital operates today and take that into account and come up with alternative strategies where needed.
And I think a lot of ways we are returning to those older Eugene V. Deb days, the early 20th century before we had the right to form a union enshrined by the NLRA. Because it’s been so eroded, though, we’re having a bit of a renaissance here in a great general council. So, we kind of are operating in an environment where unions and their activities are treated as illegal.
And, so, I think there’s invaluable lessons to be drawn from history, how they were able to organize, how they were able to withstand long periods of striking, how they were able to overcome the issue of lockouts. The Flint sit-down strike was really innovative in that sense. And, then, today we have additional problems.
We don’t have a path to citizenship, for instance, for a lot of our migrant workers who are doing essential work, puts food on our table and so much more here in the United States. And I really have to acknowledge the brilliance of one of our local organizations, Migrant Justice, who has found a new strategy for organizing workers that protects them from deportation by putting pressure on the supply side.
So, they have a Milk with Dignity campaign and they were able to put pressure on those who have the most power in their supply chain for the dairy supply chain. So, first, Ben and Jerry’s, because they have this progressive image out there so they’re more susceptible to that kind of pressure. And they were able to win such that any of their suppliers for Ben and Jerry’s has to abide by certain labor standards and protections, otherwise they won’t buy.
And they target Ben and Jerry’s because they realized not only the workers themselves could potentially be deported, though some of those workers are US. Citizens as well, but they also realize that the farmers often are stuck in the middle and in a terrible financial situation themselves. So, Ben and Jerry’s really had to be the one to pay and lead that effort and now they’re moving on, trying to get Hannafords to take the same approach.
And, so, I think that’s a really brilliant organizing strategy. And I think with the Starbucks campaign. This kind of let’s try to just organize a franchise shop by shop and let’s try to have a campaign that can go national and viral by just putting the tools on how to organize out there and relying on a lot of volunteer and worker organizers.
And they’ve seen a lot of success with that whereas more corporate driven campaigns that have been trying to organize fast food workers really haven’t seen that as much. So, I think we need to try it all. Anything that is strategic and really looks at the power between workers and an employer in the region, we need to do that strategic research and see what’s there and try new things, new tactics accordingly.
But I think it’s always going to be about workers and their ability to withhold labor and their ability to take direct action. So, it’s not always going to be a strike, but there are other ways to take direct action up to withholding their labor and going on strike. So, I think we need to look at it all.
[00:49:00.130] – Grumbine
I appreciate that. So how do we find you and what are you working on and what are your closing thoughts?
[00:49:07.810] – Medina
Yes, you can find me on Twitter. We have an official Vermont AFL-CIO Twitter account, and that is @VT_AFLCIO. And, then, if you want to follow me personally, you can follow me on Twitter @LizMedinArt. So, it’s Liz Medina with RT at the end. And you can always reach out to me about the Labor Council at my email address for the Labor Council, which is a really long acronym. So, I apologize.
It is vslcaflcio@gmail.com. And right now we’re working on doing some more how to form a Union trainings at Goddard College, which is where I used to work and I’m excited to see that they are focusing on class and labor and they have a pretty nontraditional student body of first generation and working families there.
And we’re going to have a Vermont Workplace Organizing Committee training coming up in October at the Old Socialist Labor Hall on the 8th and 9th. And we are also going to be trying to put a lot of information out there on the Reproductive Liberty Amendment and getting that through and so much more. So, just check us out. You can also go to our website vt.aflcio.org.
[00:50:31.090] – Grumbine
Very good. I just got to tell you what a pleasure it was to have you on. Really appreciate you tolerating me drone on. This is a subject that I’m really trying to marry with MMT for my own mind and the progressive values that I have and leftist hopes for our work here at Real Progressive, Real Progress in Action and for the podcast Macro N Cheese.
I really appreciate your approach and your thoughts and I want to thank you for joining me today at Macro N Cheese. And with that, my friends. Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. Guest Liz Medina, we’re out of here.
[00:51:30.520] – 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.
Liz Medina is the Executive Director of the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Previously, she served as the Goddard College Staff Union Co-Chair, UAW 2322. She received her MFA from Goddard College and an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. She hosts an oral history podcast called En Masse to build working-class history and culture in her spare time. En Masse is part of the Labor Radio Network.
@LizMedinArt on Twitter
Vermont AFL-CIO Ten Point Program
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Sara Nelson https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-100-flying-with-sara-nelson/
Jeff Reisberg https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-71-labor-pains-with-tschaff-reisberg/
Marianne Garneau https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-133-organizing-for-power-with-marianne-garneau/
David Van Deusen https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-186-the-power-of-organizing-with-david-van-deusen/
Jane F. McAlevey is an American union organizer, author, and political commentator. Since June 2019, McAlevey is a Senior Policy Fellow of the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center. She was also named Strikes correspondent for The Nation magazine.
Striketober was the labor strike wave in October 2021 by workers in the United States in the context of strikes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striketober
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Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) is a grassroots movement of UAW members united in the common goal of creating a more democratic and accountable union.
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Taft Hartley Act: The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as the Taft–Hartley Act, is a United States federal law that restricts the activities and power of labor unions. It was enacted by the 80th United States Congress over the veto of President Harry S. Truman, becoming law on June 23, 1947
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Some of the more, um, senior members of the Macro N Cheese team can remember a time when the Democratic Party supported labor and the union movement. Then we came to realize we had it backwards – it’s really the Party expecting support from the unions, who made donations, helped with campaigning, and got out the vote. Followers of this podcast are regularly introduced to guests who bring word of a newly invigorated labor movement – one that is no longer tied to the Democrats’ apron strings.
Steve’s guest is Liz Medina, the Executive Director of the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Her job title does a poor job of telling you what makes her so interesting. She is an artist (check out her Manifesto for Common Art) as well as a podcaster working to build an oral working-class history and culture. She’s a labor organizer with an expansive vision of the need for class struggle unionism and the understanding that unions don’t exist in isolation; they must be connected to community and independent political groups. She speaks of the need to rebuild the relationship between the left and the labor movement, which has been decoupled since the days of the New Left in the 1970s.
“I really do believe that the politics will follow what we do on the ground in our workplaces and in our communities … It is very hard work, but it’s easier when we feel like we are part of a community in doing that. There’s a real interest of our bosses and of capital more broadly in us staying isolated and alone and disconnected and out of community and not having a society at all, frankly. “There is no society,” as Margaret Thatcher would say. We really need that. We need those connections to continue to have strength to keep on going…”
Liz talks about the labor movement in general, past and present, and the Vermont AFL-CIO. She describes the need to turn the movement around and adopt class struggle unionism. “We believe in the rank and file strategy,” she says. “We believe in prioritizing organizing and not being afraid of being militant.” Activists should follow suit.
Liz Medina is the Executive Director of the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Previously, she served as the Goddard College Staff Union Co-Chair, UAW 2322. She received her MFA from Goddard College and an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. She hosts an oral history podcast called En Masse to build working-class history and culture in her spare time. En Masse is part of the Labor Radio Network. Find her art and other content at atlizmedina.com
@LizMedinArt on Twitter
Macro N Cheese – Episode 189
A New Labor with Liz Medina
September 10, 2022
[00:00:03.940] – Liz Medina [intro/music]
There’s an assumption that we enter the workplace and it’s our responsibility to improve our own conditions individually, that if we just work hard, we will be rewarded, and if there are problems, it’s our fault. And I think workers are starting to realize that these workplaces are not treating us like human beings.
[00:00:29.250] – Liz Medina [intro/music]
Ever since the gains that workers made during the New Deal era, the business community has been trying their hardest to claw it all back. They didn’t want to compromise then, and they don’t want to compromise now.
[00:01:35.110] – 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.
[00:01:43.130] – Steve Grumbine
All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is none other than Liz Medina, who is the executive director of the Vermont State Labor Council AFL-CIO. Previously, she served as the Goddard College Staff union co-chair. UAW 2322. She received her MFA from Goddard College and an MA in cultural studies from Goldsmith’s University of London. She hosts an oral history podcast called En Masse to build working class history and culture in her spare time. En Masse is part of the Labor Radio Network. And without further ado, let me bring on my guest. Liz Medina, welcome to the show.
[00:02:28.020] – Liz Medina
Thank you so much for having me.
[00:02:30.430] – Grumbine
It’s absolutely my pleasure. Me and you have been on different panels in the past just as individual actors on various subjects like Medicare. But in this particular case, we’re talking about labor, and this is your sweet spot. And we’ve had people like Joe Burns, Sara Nelson and Jeff Reisberg, Marianne Garneau and recently, David Van Deusen has been on here.
And so we’re really trying to elevate the role of labor in terms of making change. A lot of what I do is talk about Modern Monetary Theory and try to explain to people that the constraints that they have placed on what the realm of possibility is, is a false paradigm. And trying to expand their vision of what is possible and get them militant in exacting what it is that they believe we need as a society, to begin to find their voice, and to not just accept standard narratives.
And that’s what I love about the unions, especially here recently. Unions have had a hard go. Labor has been under assault for my entire life and before that. But you guys are starting to bring about a little bit of energy. Amazon, Starbucks, railroad workers, teachers. There’s a bunch of movement for a change. It’s been a long, long time since we’ve seen that kind of action. What’s the state of union organizing at this point?
[00:04:06.610] – Medina
I think you bring up a really good point and I think the labor movement is especially critical to showing working people, who are the majority of the population, that we don’t have to accept the way things are and we don’t have to continually operate under the lies and ideology of our, frankly, neoliberal capitalist system that we all have to work under.
There’s an assumption that we enter the workplace and it’s our responsibility to improve our own conditions individually, that if we just work hard, we will be rewarded and if there are problems, it’s our fault. And I think workers are starting to realize that, hey, these workplaces are not treating us like human beings. We’re working hard, but we’re not being rewarded.
And, furthermore, we have to use our collective power to change things. These workplaces are autocratic and we need some democracy in these workplaces. And so I think we are seeing a resurgence in labor, as you noted, because there’s just been such a prolonged period of pressure on working people and they, frankly, have had enough.
And what we see, particularly, is interest in labor unions among young working people who have been disproportionately affected by the decline in working conditions in the United States. They did not benefit from the prosperity of the post war period and they are working in an environment with low union density and they’re rediscovering the ways in which workers have advanced themselves in the past.
And we’re seeing these amazing campaigns happening on a national level. We’re seeing some of that in Vermont, too. But we still, of course, have a ways to go. Just looking at in terms of strike activity, historically, in the United States, we are still not at a level of where we used to be. We had some really exciting resurgence, Striketober, November, everything last year.
Those involved tens of thousands of workers who were bravely standing up for themselves and other workers. But that’s still short of the historical highs of hundreds of thousands of workers going on strike. And, of course, the data on this is not perfect and only captures workplaces of a certain size – I believe a thousand or more – but it still indicates that we are going in the right direction, but we need to keep putting our resources and energy where the movement is to keep growing.
[00:06:39.070] – Grumbine
I want to bring something up. It may feel a little sideways, but it’s current and I think that it shows the cause and effect when you see labor diminished. I have witnessed in my lifetime the huge explosion not only in the cost of college education, but also the debt that is piled on the backs of would be workers. They’re already carrying a house payment of mortgage debt and a student loan.
We saw recently that Biden put a few bucks on the debt that appeased quite a few people, but it still left fundamental problems. College universities are still charging through the nose. Most people will still have to take out huge college debt even with them capping the percentage of the payments later on, they’re still in a position where colleges can jack up the prices.
But the real kicker to me, and this is why I bring this up, I see this as a fundamental subsidy for big business, for corporations to, once again, abuse labor and put their training, education and development programs on the people and put the burden on the people. And they’re carrying this huge debt.
They’re trapped. This is almost like they’re an indentured servant with a burden of this student debt. Many people have paid for 20 plus years and they still got more debt now than they did when they started. Is this not a union issue?
[00:08:09.070] – Medina
It absolutely is because so many people are, as you said, burdened with debt and with the wages being so low it’s impossible to ever get out of it. And it does very much feel like a form of indentured servitude in so many ways. And I agree with you that it’s also a problem of businesses putting all the cost for training and development of workforce that they need to be profitable and to run, frankly, on to the workers instead of governments, for instance, investing in their workforce.
Vermont, as a matter of fact, unfortunately, ranks near the bottom in terms of the amount of money invested in higher education. That’s a huge problem. And a lot of states have lagged behind in investments in higher education for years. And some of them are trying to take some steps to correct that but we have a long ways to go. It’s long overdue.
And, also, just looking, historically, there were times in our labor history where labor unions were strong enough to get employers to pay for higher education and additional training. There have been examples of very big unions and big workplaces like UAW in their Lordstown plant in General Motors. They had completely free college education for a time according to some research I’ve done in the 70s.
These schemes, I think, have been prevalent in other big workplaces that can certainly afford it and we just don’t see that anymore. We hardly ever see it. I worked at Apple for four years between 2008 and 2012. It was quite a time to be working in the midst of the financial crisis. And there was, in theory, some kind of tuition reimbursement program but it had to be very specific courses and, of course, the workers had to pay out of pocket and it was a complicated reimbursement process.
I’m not even sure if it was full. It was enough of a barrier that most people, frankly, did not even participate. So, it was something to make the company look good but actually not take responsibility for investing in their workers in terms of paying for them directly to go to college or paying their fair share of taxes so we can fund our institutions of higher education.
[00:10:23.890] – Grumbine
There is no question there is movement. But being that your focus is history and labor history and so much of what you do in your own podcast, En Masse is about an oral history of the labor movement, how do we get here? We’re seeing the resurgence, and that’s where I want to keep most of the focus. But I do want to look at how we got to a place where labor is struggling.
From what I understand from Sara Nelson, most of the opportunities that unions had in terms of strike actions have been made illegal, and her take is there’s no such thing an illegal strike – there’s only an unsuccessful one. So, there’s a lot that transpired to get us to this point.
[00:11:12.850] – Medina
Right. I think there are multiple factors here, and some of which I probably will omit. And Sarah is completely right. There is no such thing as an illegal strike, only unsuccessful ones. And I believe firmly that our constitution’s 13th amendment doesn’t mean anything unless workers are able to withhold their labor. So, constitutionally we have that right.
I think it’s also a human right to be able to withhold our labor. That being said, how did we get to this weakened position? One is the fact that we’ve had labor laws that have become broken over time. Ever since the gains that workers made during the New Deal era, the business community has been trying their hardest to claw it all back.
They didn’t want to compromise then, and they don’t want to compromise now. And it started from as early as the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, also known I think as the Slave Labor Act or something akin to that, because it created all these restrictions around direct action to assert worker rights. It banned solidarity strikes, for instance.
And, again, going back to Sara, we need to do what is right in the moment, and we have a basic fundamental human right and constitutional right to strike. It still creates a chilling effect and atmosphere. And we’ve only seen labor law continually be eroded ever since. The NLRB, being a body that instead of actually trying to protect labor rights, often undermines it with a council that is hostile to labor unions, sometimes appointing business friendly people instead who have an interest in their destruction.
And, so, we seen a rise in the success, I think, of the business community and the Chamber of Commerce over the years and really weakening these. And at the same time, you get unions not being as willing to just break the law where necessary because of the stakes getting a bit higher in terms of taking direct action, such as a solidarity strike – such as a strike period.
And we’re also, I think, just seeing the dismantling of our economy for s decades as well. We’ve seen where our union membership has been particularly historically, strong and decimated by automation and outsourcing. And so our historical manufacturing bases are just not what they used to be numerically.
And, I guess, going back to, again, the role of unions in all this, there’s some really good writing out there about the unions kind of taking this fortress unionism approach where they’re just trying to protect their resources instead of investing them in the struggle. Investing in fighting back, investing in organizing. And I think that really conservative attitude has unfortunately just led to the continued decline in weakening and allowing, frankly, these business interests to continue to win and hurt working people.
[00:14:04.510] – Grumbine
Some of that feedback I’ve received is that leadership has found more similarities with management than with labor. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that just because you’re out on a golf course doesn’t mean you didn’t have a job to do. And his I wouldn’t say shocked me because I was in a union and our leadership being overly close with management.
We talked about it at length and it seems like that’s been a thing for way too long to make progress happen. But we’ve allowed so many big losses to occur that it’s no longer a matter of inconvenience. People are literally dying from a lack of health care, a lack of clean drinking water. I see this as war against labor, war against the American people.
And when we understand the MMT angle which is that the federal government creates the currency, the taxes do not pay for anything. They’re there to maintain the value of the currency and to keep us using it. So, when the federal government says it can’t afford something but then sends billions of dollars abroad to Ukraine and to Israel, most people would find possibly objectionable.
And that when it come time to take care of ‘We the People’, we end up looking on the wrong side of this. How do we get that class struggle unionism? How do we bring that back?
[00:15:32.290] – Medina
That’s a great question and I think we are seeing some success stories there. We’re seeing the development of an independent labor union movement that doesn’t have perhaps as many restrictions that would be placed upon it by some of the bigger unions that have really succumbed to kind of a business unionist attitude.
Though, of course, those unions could be susceptible to that kind of philosophy and way of running things as well over time. We’re seeing reform caucuses happening across the nation and here even in Vermont. So, we see with UAWD, which is United Auto Workers for Democracy – they’ve recently won “one member, one vote,” which means that they can elect their top leadership, which means they can try to hold their leaders accountable and maybe bring them back in line with the membership instead of with management.
And that kind of democratic unionism is also present in the Teamsters and the American Postal Workers Union. And I think these are really great ways of bringing workers together to try to get to more class struggle unionism because it’s engaging these large bases of workers of these huge legacy unions that are working in multiple industries and multiple countries sometimes.
So, I think that’s a really positive step in the right direction. I was on a reform slate for our state labor council. And for us in Vermont in 2019, we ran a reform slate called United and we won handily every single one of the positions up for election. And we looked at the way our labor council is being run and decided we need to turn this around to bring a more class struggle unionism approach to it.
We believe in the rank and file strategy. We believe in prioritizing organizing and not being afraid of being militant. And, so, we really took our very limited resources and redirected them to our priorities. So, for instance, we took the money that we used to dedicate towards the lobbyists to having on call organizers that we could assign to either internal or external organizing campaigns as needed, which also helps bring in a new cohort of young organizers who want to have experience with this work.
And that’s just like a small way we can do it. As a labor council, I think we have an important role to play in coordinating workers who have been fragmented. We don’t really have the industrial unionism that we may have had in the past today. Most unions are what we would call general workers unions and they represent multiple industries.
And so you have a situation where you may not be connected to all of your fellow union members or siblings in the labor movement in your industry through your union alone. You’d have to build those relationships with other workers and other unions as well. And that doesn’t necessarily happen organically and it’s easier to do it on a local and regional basis through a labor council.
So, we try to have those relationships in our own labor council through initiatives like having a rank and file committee, through organizing projects, through educational and opportunities to develop our members in their capacity to lead in their workplaces. So, I think we obviously need to go further. And with Joe Burns, he’s also talking about developing a militant minority that’s able and willing to take action in the workplace.
And I think we need to rebuild the relationship between the left and the labor movement which became decoupled in the time of the New Left in the 70s and beyond. And I think we’re seeing some organic ways in which that’s happening with a lot of young people, for instance, in the Democratic Socialists of America and the Young Democratic Socialists of America taking a real interest in labor.
We’re seeing this especially in Vermont, and it’s very exciting to see. So, we can have people joining the labor movement who have a broader vision for the working class that extends beyond the workplace, which is so important for us to win on that higher level.
[00:19:35.470] – Grumbine
A lot of companies greenwash themselves. They have all these great outreach programs where they go to the food bank or they collect trash and they wear the t-shirt of the company. Really it’s labor going and doing this work with their company’s jersey on. How much cooperation workers can have guilt free with their employers at this point while the employer is driving these kinds of things as opposed to labor driving them.
It sounds good, I guess, in theory to see labor and management getting along if the conditions are right. But as you stated in the beginning, conditions aren’t right. So, is this just them trying to make the new normal and just roll past it like it’s not happening? Just be grateful you’ve got a job? Or is there something more going on here? Is this labor’s hand involved in trying to help out and create this different environment? I’m always confused about that. It never makes sense to me.
[00:20:42.610] – Medina
Right. So, I think what you’re talking about is the way in which corporations are trying to greenwash or social-justice-wash their image and maybe even provide an outlet for their workers’ frustrations. Is that kind of what you were hoping to talk about?
[00:20:59.690] – Grumbine
It’s almost like they’re saying in this very controlled space, we want to attack climate crisis by picking up some trash on the side of the road, but please put our jersey on while you do it. It feels like such a fraud and maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s completely good stuff and we should get behind it. But I’m trying to understand what does an effective labor and management partnership look like in a world where labor has a seat at the table?
[00:21:29.770] – Medina
Absolutely. And I think you’re totally on point when it comes to this kind of symbolic activism on behalf of businesses where they are trying to look good. It’s all about public image and not really addressing the root problems. It reminds me of attempts back in the day of companies to divert their workers’ frustrations through having company unions or little committees where they provide some kind of structure for workers to complain about things but didn’t intend to act on them.
And then you also have this more public facing initiatives where so many nonprofits in Vermont, some of which are really good, but talking about social justice and doing some feel-good projects, but at the same time they may actually not be treating their own workers very well. And then we have progressive companies that do the same – with Starbucks claiming to respect the diversity of their workers and support black lives and trans rights and go around and try to dismantle those workers’ rights the moment they try to organize, which is completely contradictory and hypocritical.
And, so, I think, obviously, what it really would take is to have a union in the workplace. And what a union is – workers coming together in the workplace and asserting their power and their voice and to have a seat at the table to help and be part of decision making. One of the standard things that unions often win in their first contract is a labor management committee, sometimes a safety committee or other kinds of labor management committees or organizations within the workplace.
And they get to sit down with management and talk about the issues and come up with solutions together. It’s not just a top down management to worker environment anymore. It’s bilateral. There’s a discussion, it’s more democratic. And I think a lot of workers really do want to see their workplaces take on these really important environmental and social justice initiatives.
But they want them to be done in a meaningful way and they don’t want them to be done on their backs and if they’re working in the nonprofit world, too, they want to see themselves as being important and treated with dignity as part of that as well. And, so, I think you’re right. It is a matter of workers winning union recognition, or if not winning union recognition of asserting themselves as a union in the workplace to get these businesses to really do the right thing.
And in my own workplace, that can be anything from really helping management – when I used to work at Goddard College – really helping management with diverse hiring practices, divesting from coal, things that do have meaningful impact in the world.
[00:24:58.700] – Intermission
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[00:25:24.610] – Grumbine
As an activist myself, as I talk to others that are similarly wired, how do we get others engaged? How do we, as activists, make that happen? And you see blips and spurts where you’ll see Group A get a bunch of excited people and, for a short period of time, they’ll keep a little bit of energy and in short order it peters out.
And in talking with people, some of our shared friends that were at Labor Notes, they were very excited as they came out of there and they said, listen, unfortunately, this is what we’re going to face. People are hungry, they need jobs, they get exhausted, they need to see hope, and yet hope sometimes ends up turning into establishment gobbledygook.
People start trying to make you feel good about something you inherently know is wrong, but they still try and sell you on the nonsense anyway. And, so, how do we get activists engaged? And this is what pushed me to the union side of things. Marrying the two worlds but there is some significant differences between an activist and an active union member.
Number one, an active union member is typically dealing in their place of work. There may be broader industry based, cross company solidarity. But, for the most part, you’re in a paid environment. It’s not like there’s a union of unpaid people and the activists, many of which are handy, capable, otherwise abled, retired, young, old, any number of things.
We’re not talking about folks that have a lot of money in the bank. And, in fact, you could even say that because of work and because of the way jobs go in this country, people don’t have a lot of spare downtime to invest in things like organizing beyond their union or organizing in their communities. So, we get a lot of burnout in this activist world.
We get a lot of people that come for a minute excited, and then they fizzle out quickly. And I would like to say that’s the exception, but it’s pretty much the rule. There’s so few people that have that non stop, day in, day out fire to keep fighting. Jeff Reisberg said to me, we’ve got to find a way to marry the union movement with the activist movement and build the kind of power that we need both inside and outside, so that we can bring about the kinds of changes that we need both electorally and survivability.
With the climate crisis, there’s very few things that would impact labor more than something like that. Lack of health care, lack of child care. What are your thoughts on how to get people started, get them engaged? What kind of structure needs to be there to help facilitate that kind of long-term engagement?
[00:28:26.950] – Medina
Wow, that’s a really big, powerful question and something I personally struggle with as well. And I’d say, first of all, I think it’s easier to get started if you are part of an organization so you don’t feel like you’re doing this alone. So, you can delegate and divide that work up in a way that’s more sustainable and come up with a better strategy and activities than you would be able to do otherwise.
And, so, look around your local area and take a look at the groups that are active. I, personally, think in Vermont, the DSA and YDSA and our Labor Council and our unions are doing some really great work, and I really encourage that kind of activity. And I would also think about where you want to put your energy, what’s burning you out? So, a lot of people right now, frankly, are burned out on electoral politics.
They’re seeing some successes and even getting more progressive candidates to win. We have the potential to do so much more. Under the Biden administration it’s just not happening, despite immense amount of pressure, and people are just kind of burning out from all that. They’ve invested a lot into it. Myself, I’ve invested a lot in Bernie’s campaign only for him to be totally undermined by the Democratic Party.
And, so, it feels pretty hopeless, in some ways, doing that work. And if that’s how you feel, then maybe try to do a different kind of work. So, whatever is making you feel burnt out, pivot your attention to something that energizes you and excites you. There’s so many roles that we can play in building a strong labor movement, building a working class revolution that can win for working people, that there really is no reason to limit yourself.
If you want to get involved in the labor movement specifically, obviously a great way to get started is forming a union if you don’t have one or learn how to form a union. As a labor council we’re trying to have regular trainings to put the tools out into the community so workers know how to get started with that. But if you don’t have a standard job or whatever your situation is, there’s also potential for mutual aid, ways for you to just go around in your community, ask what people need very simply, and provide for those needs where there is an absence.
The Socialist Feminist Working Group have been doing really great work around crisis pregnancy centers and trying to build some mutual aid there by offering pregnancy tests and feminine products and such that some people would go to those centers for because they can’t afford them themselves. But they would provide them without the shame that those centers often put on people able to become pregnant by trying to get them to not get an abortion or do things like that.
So, I think there’s just a lot of ways to get involved. And as a labor council, we can always use support with social media and there’s just so many projects out there. And I would say in terms of burnout, again, look where to put your energy, maybe it’s time to put it somewhere else. And also it’s okay to step back once in a while.
I had to step back at one point actually from my co-chair position for about a year or so to address some pretty serious health issues. And I just came back once I felt like I had those addressed and I was ready to do it again and had the energy. So, take care of yourself and look at all the ways you can get involved and be part of an organization.
[00:32:03.850] – Grumbine
I like that. Let’s talk about what you do right now. When we talked to David, he talked glowingly about how when they brought you in the need for training and ramping that knowledge transfer up. Talk to me about what you do.
[00:32:20.230] – Medina
Oh my gosh, thank you. Yes. Well, I try really hard to rebuild our base here in Vermont. So, before our 2019 reform slate came in, our labor council staff, one full time staff person and our labor council, on the whole, they were doing the best they could, but they were really making a mistake in prioritizing building relationships with politicians above the members themselves.
And, so, what I try to do is try to rebuild those relationships. I try to visit the workplaces themselves. I try to go to the membership meetings and really listen to workers there and hear about what’s going on for them there and maybe some issues that are bigger than their workplace, such as the issue of nurses across the state not feeling safe in their workplaces.
There’s an increase in violence in a lot of hospitals and also intensification of their work, improper staffing levels. That’s something maybe that would require a cross coalition to work on and we do other projects like that as well. So, I try to go to the work sites. I drive around the state to visit them. Sometimes I just drop by to say hi just to let people know that there are other union members out there beyond their workplace who have their back and that we are there for them when they need us, whether it’s a really difficult grievance or an upcoming contract negotiation that they are going to need some support with, whatever.
We want them to know that they are not alone and that they have a bigger community and more power behind them. So, I spend time doing that and I also spend time trying to help workers without a union organize new unions. And I’m really grateful for the amazing work of the Starbucks campaign for this because I had the chance to talk to one of their organizers, Alex Riccio, and their how to form a Union course that is given through the Institute for Organizing Unions.
And there’s a lot of how to form a Union courses out there. There’s EWOC, which is also great, Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which is a partnership between UE and DSA. But what I really appreciated about this training that came from a Starbucks organizer is that it was really condensed and easy to understand.
Just gave the basic ingredients or steps, if you will, to form a union in a way that was going to be accessible because, like you said earlier, workers barely have time to just live their life and get to their jobs and then rest and be able to come in the next day. So, it really needs to be kind of short and sweet. So, we’ve been doing those trainings virtually and in person we’d like to do more and then we have some wonderful people who have been volunteering with us.
Trey is a wonderful intern that has found our organization last year and he’s putting together a Vermont Workplace Organizing Committee training this October 8th and 9th at the Old Labor Hall. And, so, we’re just trying to get that out there a lot. And, of course, I try to do a lot of other meetings and events, too, to get people involved.
We have a Woman and Gender Equity Network to address, specifically, the ways in which the oppression of women and nonbinary workers in the workplace affects us. Not only the workplace, but also beyond. So, we’re working really hard on abortion rights right now, and getting the Reproductive Liberty Amendment passed, and we, also, try to have educational opportunities as well.
So, this past spring, we joined up with the main AFL-CIO to have an organized for power course, which was put together by renowned labor organizer Jane McAlevey. And we had 40 of our rank and file members go through that, and that was really helpful and powerful for those members, and we try to keep that stuff going.
We’ve cosponsored book events and reading events that are based on labor. So, we just try to have a lot of ways in which our members can get involved and also just going out to them as much as possible. We still do electoral politics to a certain extent, but we’ve severely limited it. We only endorsed eight democrats and also the progressive party slate for the 2022 election cycle because we really did want to spend more of our time building our base, because we believe that’s what actually will help us win, even legislatively, in the long run.
[00:36:44.530] – Grumbine
Yeah, it’s my belief, and I believe that guys like Harvey Kaye and Alan Minsky have written about this 21st century bill of rights that you need some central organizing mantra, something that can bring everybody to the table. You brought out Bernie Sanders and the fact that he did fold nicely into the establishment as opposed to keeping that fire going.
And I think, unfortunately, people don’t understand it. The reason why people got discouraged was because they were ready to fight to the end, and he did not do the thing that they thought that he would do. And I love Bernie. I was a huge supporter of Bernie’s, and he’s done good work. I’m personally determined to make people believe that they can do great things.
Great things are still possible, and that you don’t necessarily need a leader. We the people, the 99%, if we can rally around some core points, not only will we help labor actually begin that unionization process, but also shoot a shot across the bow to not only capital, but to the capitalist class and the folks that are the investor grade scowlers, always scoffing at anything for the people to let them know we’re here.
I would rather people be willing to go down and fight and lose to show how important an issue is, then to continually hold onto a career, hoping that they can nickel and dime their way to the finish line, because the opposition is not nickel and diming. They’re well funded. They’re deeply entrenched. They own the media.
Seeing that a guy like Bernie didn’t ride it out to the end, that probably hurt the labor movement in many ways, simply because people probably got pretty discouraged. A lot of people checked out because of that. But to Bernie’s credit, he made everyone remember something that had long since been forgotten. And I think the most major contribution Bernie Sanders did here for us was allow us to believe once again.
And that’s just a personal anecdote. That’s not necessarily truth. That’s just a feeling. But it’s a feeling I’ve seen a lot of people share that are afraid to be involved again. They’re afraid to believe. Hope allows you to fall down further than you would if you just accepted your plight as impossible. And I think a lot of people have given into that feeling of impossible. Help us believe in possible, Liz. What is possible?
[00:39:31.090] – Medina
Oh, my gosh. We have a world to win, as they say. And I totally hear you. Bernie did a really great service to the movement in so many ways because he really did articulate class power and dynamics. The billionaires and the millionaires, right? He did that very well. And he was willing to buck the party line and push for pro labor legislation when many other democrats were unwilling to because they frankly just not been interested in fighting for the working class anymore.
And, so, I think where there’s hope is that people are seeing the game for what it is and the way that our two party system leads us to a declining status quo and that really, people need to take action themselves instead of just strictly relying on a party or a politician to do it for them. And I think we need to take the agency back as workers and start to understand that our power is in our ability to withhold our labor and to act collectively as workers and use that power in the workplace.
And I think just reading labor history will fill you with so much hope, because you see how often workers in much worse situations who have had to fight so many forms of oppression, racism, classism, poverty, sexism, and so much more and still won at the end of the day. The New Deal was won by the militancy on the ground.
I firmly believe that and because the ruling class was afraid of us going further, it was a compromise and a concession. And I really do believe that the politics will follow what we do on the ground in our workplaces and in our communities. And it’s hard to do that work. It is very hard work, but it’s easier when we feel like we are part of a community in doing that.
And there’s a real interest of our bosses and of capital more broadly in us staying isolated and alone and disconnected and out of community and not having a society at all, frankly. There is no society, as Margaret Thatcher would say. We really need that. We need those connections to continue to have strength to keep on going, to talk about how hard it is to do things, to help us figure out things, to support us when we need to take a step back and maybe step up themselves.
So, I think there’s a lot of hope. I think I just heard recently on the wonderful Working People podcast, an Amazon worker being able to take direct action in their workplace without a union in a different warehouse I believe it is in Kentucky to get rid of this new draconian policy where the workers had to wear these steel toe cap boots that were hurting their feet in the interest of trying to protect the company from injury and liability.
And that policy was rescinded as a result of workers coming together and demanding something. And they won that. And that can happen in so many ways. That happens everywhere across the United States and beyond. I think also just globally looking at the inspiration of other workers, too. Having that international perspective can be really uplifting, too.
The Indian farmers went on strike and they were in a really terrible situation. And Vijay Prashad has talked and written about this at length, if you want to go into detail about it. But, needless to say, workers have been in terrible situations and conditions throughout history, sometimes worse than what we can even imagine in some ways here in the United States.
And they, nonetheless, have found a way to come together as a community, as a class, and overcome and win. And, so, I think retaking the agency and not displacing it in politicians in the party, even though that work is important, but not relying on that and taking that agency back is where we can start and where we can find some real hope because that’s how we can win.
[00:43:30.970] – Grumbine
You brought up a great point and that’s class consciousness, and I think we lack that in particular in the United States where we haven’t had strong labor movement of late and a lot of people grew up in an era where labor wasn’t a thing, not least overtly. The days of the union boss being on the nightly news are over. We haven’t had them in a long time anyway.
And as a person that enjoys reading history and theory, often we look back to Eugene V. Debs and Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution and workers uniting to take the power back. And I think people look for grand gestures and moments in time. And I think in many ways we are left with small actions to try to erode away something.
But the other side is not even asking permission. They’re just take. And so these little incremental efforts, we’re not even recapturing five minutes ago because the other side being so ruthless. You think back to the sewing folks in the 1900s that were at that seamstress place that caught on fire.
[00:44:47.360] – Medina
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
[00:44:48.700] – Grumbine
So many women died. These are things that have happened in this country. And as a result of unions, they were able to fix things. They were able to get better working conditions because workers are society. Throughout history, you’ve seen moments, major moments, where big change has happened. Do you see unions being able to take from history or do we need to create our own history?
Do we need to create a new path forward? Do we look back to Eugene V. Debs or Vladimir Lenin or these other labor leaders and say that’s how we do it? Or is there a path forward that looks different?
[00:45:27.490] – Medina
That’s a really great question and I’m not sure if I have an exact answer for that but I think we need to do a little bit of both. I think we need to look at the lessons of the past and see what worked and then also incorporate the conditions in which we find ourselves, the historical moments and the way capital operates today and take that into account and come up with alternative strategies where needed.
And I think a lot of ways we are returning to those older Eugene V. Deb days, the early 20th century before we had the right to form a union enshrined by the NLRA. Because it’s been so eroded, though, we’re having a bit of a renaissance here in a great general council. So, we kind of are operating in an environment where unions and their activities are treated as illegal.
And, so, I think there’s invaluable lessons to be drawn from history, how they were able to organize, how they were able to withstand long periods of striking, how they were able to overcome the issue of lockouts. The Flint sit-down strike was really innovative in that sense. And, then, today we have additional problems.
We don’t have a path to citizenship, for instance, for a lot of our migrant workers who are doing essential work, puts food on our table and so much more here in the United States. And I really have to acknowledge the brilliance of one of our local organizations, Migrant Justice, who has found a new strategy for organizing workers that protects them from deportation by putting pressure on the supply side.
So, they have a Milk with Dignity campaign and they were able to put pressure on those who have the most power in their supply chain for the dairy supply chain. So, first, Ben and Jerry’s, because they have this progressive image out there so they’re more susceptible to that kind of pressure. And they were able to win such that any of their suppliers for Ben and Jerry’s has to abide by certain labor standards and protections, otherwise they won’t buy.
And they target Ben and Jerry’s because they realized not only the workers themselves could potentially be deported, though some of those workers are US. Citizens as well, but they also realize that the farmers often are stuck in the middle and in a terrible financial situation themselves. So, Ben and Jerry’s really had to be the one to pay and lead that effort and now they’re moving on, trying to get Hannafords to take the same approach.
And, so, I think that’s a really brilliant organizing strategy. And I think with the Starbucks campaign. This kind of let’s try to just organize a franchise shop by shop and let’s try to have a campaign that can go national and viral by just putting the tools on how to organize out there and relying on a lot of volunteer and worker organizers.
And they’ve seen a lot of success with that whereas more corporate driven campaigns that have been trying to organize fast food workers really haven’t seen that as much. So, I think we need to try it all. Anything that is strategic and really looks at the power between workers and an employer in the region, we need to do that strategic research and see what’s there and try new things, new tactics accordingly.
But I think it’s always going to be about workers and their ability to withhold labor and their ability to take direct action. So, it’s not always going to be a strike, but there are other ways to take direct action up to withholding their labor and going on strike. So, I think we need to look at it all.
[00:49:00.130] – Grumbine
I appreciate that. So how do we find you and what are you working on and what are your closing thoughts?
[00:49:07.810] – Medina
Yes, you can find me on Twitter. We have an official Vermont AFL-CIO Twitter account, and that is @VT_AFLCIO. And, then, if you want to follow me personally, you can follow me on Twitter @LizMedinArt. So, it’s Liz Medina with RT at the end. And you can always reach out to me about the Labor Council at my email address for the Labor Council, which is a really long acronym. So, I apologize.
It is vslcaflcio@gmail.com. And right now we’re working on doing some more how to form a Union trainings at Goddard College, which is where I used to work and I’m excited to see that they are focusing on class and labor and they have a pretty nontraditional student body of first generation and working families there.
And we’re going to have a Vermont Workplace Organizing Committee training coming up in October at the Old Socialist Labor Hall on the 8th and 9th. And we are also going to be trying to put a lot of information out there on the Reproductive Liberty Amendment and getting that through and so much more. So, just check us out. You can also go to our website vt.aflcio.org.
[00:50:31.090] – Grumbine
Very good. I just got to tell you what a pleasure it was to have you on. Really appreciate you tolerating me drone on. This is a subject that I’m really trying to marry with MMT for my own mind and the progressive values that I have and leftist hopes for our work here at Real Progressive, Real Progress in Action and for the podcast Macro N Cheese.
I really appreciate your approach and your thoughts and I want to thank you for joining me today at Macro N Cheese. And with that, my friends. Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. Guest Liz Medina, we’re out of here.
[00:51:30.520] – 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.
Liz Medina is the Executive Director of the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Previously, she served as the Goddard College Staff Union Co-Chair, UAW 2322. She received her MFA from Goddard College and an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. She hosts an oral history podcast called En Masse to build working-class history and culture in her spare time. En Masse is part of the Labor Radio Network.
@LizMedinArt on Twitter
Vermont AFL-CIO Ten Point Program
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Taft Hartley Act: The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as the Taft–Hartley Act, is a United States federal law that restricts the activities and power of labor unions. It was enacted by the 80th United States Congress over the veto of President Harry S. Truman, becoming law on June 23, 1947