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Episode 258 – Wall Street’s War on Workers with Les Leopold
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Before the 1980s, mass layoffs were often tied to economic recessions. Today, they are shrewd corporate strategy. Modern mass layoffs are connected to leveraged buyouts or stock buybacks. Steve’s guest, Les Leopold, explains how the process works and how it came to be through the maneuverings of Wall Street and the two political parties.
Les is the author of Wall Street’s War on Workers. He and Steve talk about the very real impact on people’s lives, from the coal miners of Mingo County, West Virginia, to Steve’s personal struggles after Verizon’s 2009 lay-offs. They discuss organizing, the value of a job guarantee, and intersectionality within a class analysis.
Les Leopold is executive director of the Labor Institute, which he cofounded in 1976. He has written several books on the finance sector’s looting of America. His upcoming book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, is being published by Chelsea Green Publishing. Follow his substack: https://substack.com/@lesleopold1
@les_leopold on Twitter
Macro N Cheese – Episode 258
Wall Street’s War on Workers with Les Leopold
January 6, 2024
[00:00:00] Les Leopold [Intro/Music]: Almost every stock buyback, you’ll find that same company doing a mass layoff to squeeze money to afford to go and do a stock buyback, which is the simplest way to turn capital back over to Wall Street. So Wall Street’s driving these mass layoffs. That’s why I wrote the book.
The public attitude towards unionism is more positive now than at any time since the early 1960s, when it peaked at around 70% or 75%, which means the potential for organizing all these victims of mass layoffs is there.
[00:01:34] 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.
[00:01:42] Steven Grumbine: Alright, This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. My guest today is Les Leopold. He is the author of Wall Street‘s War On Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What To Do About It.
If you’ve been following this podcast for any length of time- we’re approaching our 260th episode here, we’ve been nonstop for five years- you’ve heard my story. I was a victim of the great financial crisis. I worked 17 years at Verizon, and all of a sudden, they hit the signal, the signals went out to Wall Street, Wall Street gave its response, and business- the lagging indicator- said, ‘let’s lay some people off.’ And Verizon, in one fell swoop, laid off 10,000 people.
And my life has never been the same since. I had to make excuses for why I couldn’t pay my bills and why I was in this bad place. I had to hear people talk about… ‘Me’ making better choices. I had to hear all kinds of typical conservative nonsense that people just say, because it’s Pavlovian… ‘why didn’t you make better choices?’
Well, Les has written a fantastic book. This book, I think, for many of you who have been deeply impacted by this very cruel economy, will probably take some umbrage.
And with that, I want to bring on my guest, Les Leopold. Welcome to the show, sir.
[00:03:07] Les Leopold: Thank you very much for having me. And thank you for your kind words.
[00:03:11] Steven Grumbine: Absolutely. I wish this wasn’t near and dear. This is very close to me. My whole life has been radically transformed, in the worst possible way. The student loans kicking back in- I have $130,000 in student loans- all for a career that vanished in 2009. And I’ve had to be a contractor ever since.
Getting back into the game- so to speak- as an older worker, has been a challenge. And I do have a nice job- thank you- I’m glad I have it. But it is a contract job, and contract jobs are decidedly less secure. And as we experienced during the great financial crisis and many others… First to get let go. And people don’t realize the repercussions of that. And there is an enemy, and it is in Wall Street.
And with that, let’s talk about your book book. Explain what is this book about? Tell us the story of Wall Street’s war on workers.
[00:04:10] Les Leopold: It’s really about mass layoffs. About what you went through, and what we estimate 30 million people have gone through since 1996. You add in their families who were impacted, you’re approaching 100 million people. And, by the way, so far this year- well, the year’s almost over- we’re talking about a quarter of a million people, just in the high tech sector alone, that have gone through mass layoffs.
This is not normal, if you look at the broader scope of economic history in the United States. This is something that really began- most seriously- from the 1980s onward. Before that, yes, there were mass layoffs, though it usually was directly tied to recessions. And corporate leaders before 1980, basically, were embarrassed about mass layoffs. They felt it was a sign of their own failure, to have to lay people off.
Now it’s a sign of how shrewd and smart and tough you are, to be able to squeeze your company through mass layoffs, and then use that money- and this is where Wall Street comes in.
Two features of Wall Street make this dire situation. One, are leveraged buyouts. And what that means is, Wall Street comes in- private equity or hedge fund or whomever- buys up a company, with using an enormous amount of debt, and then places that debt on to the company that was purchased. Then that company has to service a huge debt. And the first thing they do is start laying people off. So, mass layoffs are directly connected to leveraged buyouts.
That’s number one. Number two, are stock buybacks. And this is a very strange phenomenon, that was basically illegal before 1982. A stock buyback is when a company goes into the marketplace and buys back its own shares, and then disappears them. This automatically raises the price of all the stocks because now, the same amount of earnings, gets spread over a smaller amount of shares.
Before 1982, this was considered stock manipulation, stock price manipulation. And one of the causes of the Great Depression, the 1929 crash. But then, during the Reagan administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission deregulated it, basically… and stock buybacks have gone wild.
Back then, 2% of corporate profits went to stock buybacks. Today, it’s approaching 70%. 70 cents of every dollar in profit goes to stock buybacks. Well, who gains from stock buybacks? The large Wall Street institutional investors. And to do a stock buyback, inevitably, is connected to a mass layoff.
Almost every stock buyback, you’ll find that same company doing a mass layoff, to squeeze money, to afford to go and do a stock buyback. Which is the simplest way to turn capital back over to Wall Street. So, Wall Street is driving these mass layoffs. That’s why I wrote the book.
[00:07:22] Steven Grumbine: We’re an MMT organization, we talk about Modern Monetary Theory all the time. And we’re out there having debates on Twitter- or X, I guess they call it now. And I’m seeing other MMT folks- who I call ‘investor grade fools.’ They’re these finance tech bros, that you’d like to think we’re fighting for the same cause, but clearly we’re not. Because they’re more than willing to prop up Wall Street and overlook these things, as long as they can have the inside edge on putting a bet down on it.
And to me, I’ve lost so much respect for so many people, because I’ve been on the other end of this… I’ve felt it immensely. And worse, this organization has witnessed more people laid off… just watching people struggle, and the impact it has on their health, their family, everything.
This is the predatory vulture nature that end stage capitalism- this concept of finance capitalism- has done to society. Who are the key culprits that are advancing this? Wall Street’s kind of a nebulous cloud. Who are the folks wearing the demon masks in this case?
[00:08:32] Les Leopold: I’m actually going to start on the other side of the problem…
[00:08:35] Steven Grumbine: Okay.
[00:08:35] Les Leopold: Which is, who allowed this to happen.
[00:08:37] Steven Grumbine: Let’s do it.
[00:08:39] Les Leopold: Basically, coming out of the 1970s- when Reagan got elected- both political parties began a competition to unleash Wall Street and get its campaign contributions. And first, Reagan pushed it forward, and the Democrats went along with his tax cuts, etc., etc. But it was really the deregulation. The failure to enforce, for example, antitrust laws. The failure to stop harmful takeovers. And failure to limit stock buybacks.
When Clinton got in, basically, he did more of it. Because he saw this as a tremendous way to bring money and support into the Democratic Party. So, the deregulatory fight was on.
Who benefited from this? Well, the whole industry grew off it. Hedge funds, private equity companies… there’s hundreds of them, thousands of them. There’s big ones, small ones, but they basically are allowed to exist because of the deregulation that came in from both political parties.
What I want to emphasize was, these were policy choices. These are new things. For example, the Democratic Party, Rostenkowski, during the 1980s suggested that, ‘hey, wait a second, you can’t keep putting all this debt on corporations through these buyouts and then asking for tax deductions, I want to put a limit on that.’
Wall Street went crazy, because they saw the game would be up if they limited, let’s say, the tax free debt that you can put on a company. It’s a deduction once the company has billions of dollars of debt. If they said, ‘okay, anything over $500,000, you’re going to have to pay taxes.’ That would slow down the takeover movement dramatically.
But the Democrats refused to go along with it. Matter of fact, he was hounded, he was blamed for a crash in the stock market, for wanting to put some sensible controls on. The point is, that we allowed this to happen, and now we think it’s just natural. That’s the danger. The conventional wisdom is that mass layoffs are just part of what a modern economy is all about, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
People are basically fatalistic. Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a concerted political effort by the Democrats, for example, to stop a mass layoff? To basically say, ‘no, you’re not going to do that, you’re not going to lay off a thousand people in Morgantown, West Virginia’, because the company- during the middle of the COVID- is going to be moving a pharmaceutical company to India.
Not a word from the Democratic administration to use the Defense Production Act to stop it. Radio silence. And unfortunately, from my perspective, the only person who actually intervened to stop the mass layoff, was Trump- in 2017, with the Carrier Air Conditioning Company in Indiana. Where it was going to move to Mexico, and he basically shamed them into not moving. They got some tax breaks, etc., etc.- which is common all across the country- but 800 of the 1100 people had their jobs saved.
What we need is a movement to stop these plant closings, these mass layoffs. So, we need to inject it into the political system, so it’s discussed. I am certain that the mass of working people across the country would be very thankful to see somebody actually try to save their jobs.
Because, as you’ve mentioned, it’s the most destructive experience you can go through. It turns your life upside down, and it’s very hard to get back into the regular system. You’re absolutely right. Gig economies and contract jobs are replacing full time jobs, and this is a policy decision that could be stopped and turned around.
That’s the point I want to make. That’s why I want to inject mass layoffs into the political arena, so they cannot be ignored. Rather than both parties tripping over themselves to get Wall Street cash, I want them to be tripping over themselves to please working people in order to get votes.
[00:12:52] Steven Grumbine: For me, I have largely given up on the electoral process, having seen the internal barriers, the democracy killers, that are baked into the system at every level. Nobody had ever heard of a ‘parliamentarian’ until this past year. We have more non-democratic moments through this process, than anything I’ve ever experienced.
And the democratic party used to have a stranglehold on labor, it used to own labor. And through a process of neoliberalism, and through this financialization and bending knees to Wall Street, the working class has been splintered into a million shards. Which is capital’s primary directive, to make sure that they can discipline labor. And what better way to do that than to absolutely splinter the working class. And you do that best through identity politics.
One of the challenges that I face- I don’t want to be a class reductionist because there are real legitimate intersectional grievances, that as part of the working class, we need to understand, make up the whole- but I remember Hillary Clinton calling all the workers ‘deplorables’- and I am no fan of Trump’s at all- but I recognize that there is a reason why people weren’t buying what the Democrats were selling.
And as somebody who did originally fight for Bernie Sanders, and watched as the Democratic Party crushed his campaign- and by extension, a huge coalition of independents, semi-conservatives, people that weren’t willing to vote Republican, that weren’t interested in Trump- all of us were one big left independent group of people that were willing to vote and move our feet, donate, because we were struggling and hurting. And when the Democratic Party put the clamps down, the splintering occurred that created the ability for Trump to come out looking better than he should have ever looked.
There was no reason for the Democrats to do this, other than they serve Wall Street now. And they have become elite. And they’ve become a group of people that is so disconnected from the real day to day struggles that they allowed someone like Donald Trump to swoop in.
What are your thoughts on that?
[00:15:22] Les Leopold: Well, let me give you a case study that I think reinforces every point that you made. And I want us to focus on one county in West Virginia, Mingo County. As you know, it has a lot of historical resonance. That Mother Jones was there, the Coal Wars, in the early part of the 20th century, took place there.
The place was an occupied zone, where the federal troops had to come in- in 1919, I believe- and they basically stayed there until the New Deal. This county- small, 27,000 people- but a coal mining county, this county voted for Bill Clinton 69.7% in 1996… 69.7%. In 2020, Joe Biden got 13.9%.
Now, what happened in this county? It’s 97%+ white. So, did identity politics play in? Did these people become deplorables? Did something happen during this period to unleash their racism, sexism, xenophobia? I don’t think so. Even Obama got three times the number of votes that Biden got. So, what happened in that county?
Well, this is an incredible story. In 1996, there were 3,300 coal jobs in this little county. And you can imagine how many ancillary jobs were connected to it. By 2020, there were 350 coal jobs left. 3,000 jobs, in this tiny county, disappeared. What did the Democrats do for this county? Absolutely nothing. No development programs, no New Deal, no jobs program.
[00:17:28] Steven Grumbine: Just transition? Nothing?
[00:17:31] Les Leopold: Yeah, there was a just transition. This is the second part of the story, and this is what blew my mind. A just transition was left to the free market. This is the period of unleashing capital. Now you have cheap labor, cheap land, capital should come in and help redevelop it. That’s what’s supposed to happen. And the Democrats and the Republicans believe in this kind of free market capitalism.
Here’s what happened. Mingo County became the opioid distribution center of the entire Appalachia region, five state area. Two drugstores start competing against each other. This one drugstore put out more opioid prescriptions than virtually any other drugstore in the whole country.
They ranked number 22, when this counts all the drugstores in the big cities, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Houston. Mingo County drugstore ranked 22nd. This is the capitalism that came in. And of course, West Virginia has the highest death rate in the country from opioids. This is what we did, and this is what we left Mingo County to struggle with.
You think they’re going to reward the Democratic Party with their votes? No, they’re going to abandon it, not because they’re racist, sexist, xenophobic. They got screwed economically, along with 30 million other people in this country. If you want to understand why working people have abandoned the Democrats and are wandering around in the wilderness- like the Republicans, some aren’t voting- it’s because they’re so disappointed.
This is part 2 of the story, which is especially true in the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. We did a study that no one’s done before, where we correlated the percentage of mass layoffs in a given county, and what happened to the Democratic vote?
And we found that the rural counties, that were largely white, had the highest percentage of mass layoffs. Because when a plant goes down in a rural county, there’s not much else there, so it takes a big toll. In those counties, the Democratic vote went crashing down. In the counties that had more professionals, and the mass layoff percentage was low, the Democratic vote went up.
And so, this is why someone like Senator Schumer, said in 2016, he says ‘for every one blue collar voter we lose in Pennsylvania, we gain two suburban Republican voters, and that holds true for Michigan and Wisconsin as well.’
So, there’s an incredible correlation between politics and mass layoffs. And some political entity has to speak to it because what you’re going to get, inevitably, is people giving up on democracy. Because they need stable employment. We all need stable employment.
It’s pretty difficult to lead a decent life and not be resentful if you get kicked out of your job and you’re forced to do contract work- gig labor- as you mentioned… you get very resentful. And along comes a strong leader who promises you economic stability, you’re gonna start listening. And that’s the fear I have.
[00:21:09] Steven Grumbine: I’m a socialist. Neither one of Biden or Trump had anything to offer me, so my interests have nothing to do with politics. My interests here have everything to do with the layoffs and the people suffering. And when I think about, in general, what the discourse has been like over the last six years, it’s incredibly disheartening. Because if you tell somebody, ‘these people are struggling, they’re unable to get healthcare, their lives are in complete shambles, they’re carrying massive private debt, they’re struggling, who’s taking care of them?’
The first thing that what I call is a ‘vote blue sycophant’ will say is, “What do you want, Trump?” Well, no, I don’t want Trump. I want to not be worried about getting laid off. I want a federal job guarantee in place, so that I never have to go through this again. And millions of people have gone through this.
And I think instead of addressing the real issue of mass layoffs, to deal with the people that are bitter and suffering as they lose their homes, and all the corruption from Wall Street going in and out of halls of government.
We did a series with Bill Black called The New Untouchables, where we talked about the corruption in Wall Street and the rotating door with the Jamie Dimon’s of the world. And we know the corruption is rife. And the democratic party has always been supposedly for the working class, and yet there is no semblance of that in their actions.
And now you’ve got a bunch of people, like myself, looking outside the electoral system altogether. I’m looking to build parallel systems. They don’t believe in the electoral process in this country. That is not how you solve mass layoffs.
[00:23:01] Les Leopold: Let me give you a little bit of an optimistic spark that I’ve run into. And it starts with exactly what you’re saying. Imagine if a politician was willing to say what you’re saying. How would they do? Well, it turns out, again, in West Virginia, there’s a guy named Zach Shrewsbury who’s running for Senate. he’s a military vet, and he’s just saying absolutely great stuff.
Similarly, there’s a guy named Dan Osborn in Nebraska, who is running for Senate as an independent. And right now, he’s also absolutely smashing corporate America. He sounds just like you. And he’s leading in the polls against a three-term Republican senator. He’s leading because he is finally speaking to this frustration and anger.
The problem with many, many Democrats- not including Bernie and a few others- is they’re trying to please two groups at the same time. They’re thinking, ‘workers have no place else to go but to the Democratic Party, and we can’t be attacking Wall Street, we can’t be pointing the finger at runaway inequality, things like that… it’ll cost us our financial support.’
And so, they sound mealy-mouthed . Instead of fighting a plant closing- Schumer had one in upstate New York, with Siemans, and you’ll love this one- instead of fighting the plant closing, he is trying to get another company to come in and put something in that facility. Meanwhile, all the workers are gone. 500 workers elsewhere. They’re not going to be around when a new plant comes in, they got to eat. And the person who was the president of that corporation, gets invited to the signing ceremony for the infrastructure bill at the White House. It just shows that the Democrats just can’t lay it on the line.
But these two guys- Zach Shrewsbury in West Virginia, he’s running as a Democrat, the other guy Osborne is running as an Independent- but they’re finally trying to say it like it is. And I’m not willing to completely throw in the towel, until we can see whether or not political independence- really, when you come down to it- can speak truth to power and build a constituency. I don’t see a way around it.
Like you, I’ve been worrying about this stuff forever and it gets very discouraging. But I think the potential is there. People are so frustrated by being basically crushed economically or disadvantaged economically. I’m sorry, I understand all the harms that are addressed by identity politics, but you can’t ignore class.
[00:26:37] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a non profit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.
[00:27:39] Steven Grumbine: A class-based analysis is required. And this is where I part ways with some of my friends who have gone into- I don’t want to say MAGA- but they have become, kind of de-facto, part of it. As I think about intersectionality, we can’t have a working class struggle, if one person’s got a boot on their neck and still part of the working class, while others are moving.
And this is where people who are different lose their voice, getting drowned out in class reductionism. I’m a class reductionist at times, because I think without having a class analysis, there’s no point in talking about this, because you will never have the kind of movement that you need to take down this capital problem.
And as a result of the balkanization that has occurred with weaponized neoliberal identity politics, people are not seeing these things as legitimate. They’re easily mocked. And some of it is by closet racists, because we didn’t suddenly become not a racist country. Vestiges of the civil war still live in many places across America.
But we do know, we do have a blueprint of what it’s like to demonize groups, and to be able to create those environments that gave rise to people like Adolf Hitler. By taking away hope, destroying labor and industry, and making those folks feel like there is no other alternative. And we don’t want to see that happen here, do we?
[00:29:16] Les Leopold: No. You’re now digging into the other major piece of the book. Which is, was Hillary Clinton right or wrong about all these deplorables out there?
What makes people nervous about class, is the other common assumption. That working class people are more deplorable than the rest of us. That they’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic…
[00:29:42] Steven Grumbine: Unrefined.
[00:29:43] Les Leopold: Yeah. And one of the things that we did in this book, is we investigated the data that would show whether or not that was true. There are these three very large voter survey projects that are not like your short term poll. We’re talking 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 people, who are answering questions over a long period of time. And there’s three polling operations that do this. And we took a slightly different definition of ‘working class.’
The definition for white working class in this country, that’s used by pollsters and political scientists often, is anybody that doesn’t have a four-year college degree. We thought, is Mark Zuckerberg really part of the white working class because he never finished Harvard? It doesn’t make sense. So we added another feature in the bottom two thirds of the income distribution.
So, you don’t have a college degree, and you’re also in the bottom two thirds of the income distribution, and you’re self identified as white. What are your political attitudes and how have they changed over time? Well, this was a shock to us. Since the mid 1990s, this group- this white working class group- has actually gotten more liberal, not more illiberal, on key issues.
Let me just go over a couple that just blew my mind. Should gay and lesbian couples be legally permitted to adopt children? Used to be 38.2% of the white working class supported that position, now it’s 76%. That’s a huge number.
Here’s another one that you think is absolutely counterintuitive. You think these people would really be opposed to legalizing undocumented workers. They asked that question. Well, about 10, 12 years ago, 32% were for that kind of legalization. Now it’s 61.8%. It’s doubled. These folks are not illiberal.
What’s happening is, because we’re failing to deal with the economic problem of mass layoffs, we’d say, ‘we can’t really fight for you because you’re basically a deplorable.’ You’ve become deplorable because of the economic situation, and that’s on you, that’s not on us.
And I think that’s a lot of what is driving Democratic Party establishment. They don’t trust these people. They think they’re racist, sexist, etc., etc. Well, you know what? We even looked at the most extreme poll questions that dealt with racism, and we compared white working class people to white managers, and there was hardly a difference.
And then we said, ‘well, how many deplorables are there?’ We picked five questions, on race, on gender, on immigration, on homophobia. And we said, ‘how many Americans answer those five questions in a deplorable way?’ And it was about 2% of the white working class. You’re talking about a very, very, very small number of people who are so-called ‘deplorable.’
But yet, it’s very convenient to write off this vast number of people, who you consider uneducated, etc. Actually, we’ve written them off because we’ve taken their jobs away, just like Mingo County. Those people didn’t become more racist, sexist, etc. They lost their jobs and we just did nothing for them.
So, the two messages of the book are: Mass layoffs is the key economic issue that we have to address, and stop blaming the white working class for being racist, sexist, etc., when they’re not all that different from anybody else.
[00:33:41] Steven Grumbine: There is a very real discrimination and prejudice keeping people out of having a full life. And they’re experiencing it with policing and a host of other ways it shows up. However, I identify very much so with an intersectional class analysis. By intersectional, it is placing class at the top, but it’s really not pretending that these key issues don’t exist.
The problem with the Democrats, they ignore the first part, the class part, and they focus purely on identity politics without the economic backing, to support the change that makes everybody whole. And because they’ve allowed this false scarcity narrative to live- this lie that we can’t afford to do great things for our people in our country, this austerity narrative- as a result of that, it has pit people that are not educated in economics, and they think there is no alternative and they are bitter. And they’re ready to fight back.
Now, I’ll give you an example. Donald Trump is taking an even harder line on immigration and building the wall. Because I understand the way monetary systems work and I understand what the power of the federal government used by the right people could be, we could allow people to come in this country and we would not have to sacrifice jobs.
We could have a federal job guarantee in place, to allow people to be healthy, happy, and whole. But we don’t do that.
[00:35:24] Les Leopold: So, here’s the question that I want to pose… Where do we get the power to make the kind of significant change that you are advocating, that I’d be advocating? I think that power has to have a core, and that core has got to be the trade union movement. Which is unfortunately very small.
But you saw a glimmer of hope with Shawn Fain and the United Auto Workers, where he’s come out and said billionaires should not exist. He’s willing to talk macroeconomic politics. He’s willing to look at the big picture and say this isn’t right, they’re ripping us off and he wants to build a movement to change it.
It’s funny when you say intersectionality. I think of the workplace as a really good example of it, because the boss in most cases, almost all cases, does the hiring. Not the union. The hiring is done by management, and you get all kinds of people in there.
And one of the basic principles that really makes a union work, is fairness. People really don’t like discrimination of any kind because it comes back and bites them, and it destroys solidarity. The only way a union can survive is having solidarity. And injury to one is injury to all.
And it’s not just an ideological thing, it’s actually something that people see and feel every day. I think that’s one of the reasons that you see working class support for gay and lesbian women, etc., because there’s more and more of them in the workplace. And you can’t tolerate management discriminating, or even a fellow worker discriminating, against somebody, you got to do something about it. You’ve got to protect that intersectionality, otherwise you don’t have any solidarity.
So, how do you build power? And this is where it becomes difficult, but not impossible. Somehow we have to see an upsurge in successful trade union organizing. Right now, we’re working with Amazonians United to try to provide some education for them, which could help them in their organizing efforts.
And interestingly enough, they’re not asking us to provide nuts and bolts organizing education, they want the big picture economic education.
[00:37:49] Steven Grumbine: Bring me in. I’ll help.
[00:37:51] Les Leopold: Hey, if we get this thing going, there’ll be room for you. We’ll definitely share your stuff with them. But the point is this, you need organization. But the organization also requires an educational framework. And the Labor Institute- where I work, what we try to do is build that educational infrastructure. We train workers themselves to provide economic educational programs throughout the labor movement. Actually, you mentioned Sarah Nelson, one of our flagship programs with Communication Workers of America.
And they have 50 workers, who we’ve trained to be trainers, who conduct eight hour workshops on runaway inequality. Which is what we’ve been talking about, and the union provides release time, pays for them to get out of work to go through these eight hour classes. Basically, a thousand workers a year go through these programs.
That’s what we need throughout the economy. And this is modeled after a movement that’s near and dear to my heart, which is the populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s. Which tried very hard to be a multiracial movement. There were black workers with the populist chapters, and they did their best- even in the South- to fight against the Bourbons who were coming back into power. They waged a war against them.
But the way they did it, is they fielded 6,000 educators back in the 1880s and 1890s, to build their movement. Which was aimed directly at finance capital. Directly. They understood how the game was played. Today we need about 30,000.
[00:39:34] Steven Grumbine: There’s another person that I think you need to talk to. His name is Joe Burns, and he had been the lead negotiator with the Flight Attendants Union, and he wrote a great book. It’s a phenomenal book. We’ve had him on the show. We’ve talked about it at length. It’s called Class Struggle Unionism. In other words, it goes beyond the shop floor.
And you’re seeing a little bit of this now, as unions are timing their contract dates together, to ensure that they can have maximum impact and maximum power.
We need a macro union movement with class struggle at the forefront, and it goes across industries and companies. That’s where the power is going to be, I agree with that .. I just wanted to throw that out there.
[00:40:16] Les Leopold: That’s an excellent point. By the way, the public attitude towards unionism is more positive now than at any time since the early 1960s, when it peaked at around 70%, 75% public approval. Which means, the potential for organizing all these victims of mass layoffs is there. How to help make it happen? My role, education, as is yours. The labor movement needs the PRO Act bill in Congress. I don’t know the Democrats have the courage to pass it, so that they would have a more level playing field for organizing.
We need a breakthrough. The United Auto Workers with Tesla and the transplant groups. Automakers in the United States, especially in the south. We need them to break through somewhere and win some big organizing drives. That would make an enormous difference. I think the UAW Auto Workers Strike really helped encourage people to be more militant in trade unions. And I think if they could win a few organizing drives, it could start a prairie fire.
And I think that’s what we need to get the kind of policies that you’re talking about. That’s the source of your dual power. I think if the trade union movement can grow, you’ll see politicians more like the Osborns and the Shrewsburys. You’ll see more of them pop up, and working class people say, ‘Hey, this is the way to go.’
And it’s a long slog. And it took 40 years for neoliberalism and financialization to really put the screws to us, basically to threaten democracy as a whole. So, it’ll take- I think- quite a long time to undo it. But I think it’s something important to keep in mind.
[00:42:13] Steven Grumbine: I live in Pennsylvania. The calendars are set by the hunting clock. I don’t hunt. These folks, they have their gun rack in their trucks, they have their United States flag hanging off the back of their truck, because that’s the only identity they have. Everything else has been the economy sucks. The things that they thought they would grow into, that their mom and dad had promised them, etc., didn’t happen.
And now they’re angry. They’re bitter. And that’s not to take away anyone else’s struggle. In fact, I hope everybody heard me say, at least 10 times, I believe in all these struggles have to come together to join the working class, not in the absence of those struggles, but together with those struggles to make us stronger, to make that mesh impenetrable.
But with that said, when you demonize folks and you wonder why they suddenly become Trumpers… physician, heal thyself. Look in that mirror. Mirror stares back hard.
[00:43:11] Les Leopold: Look, you’re making some very good points. Actually, it feeds into a question I had to think about the whole time I was working on this book.
Who am I writing for? Who am I trying to influence? I don’t think I’m going to have an impact on MSNBC commentators. I don’t think I’m going to have an impact on the leading Democratic Party pundits. But I think that working people and union activists and their friends, like yourself, will find the book has ammunition that will help them in their work.
I’ve been very fortunate to be able to write books and share them with working people. And I can’t tell you how appreciative they are, and not because I’m some great speaker or anything. After I do a talk, I don’t ask for honorarium or anything, I just ask that they, people who were there, buy books.
People line up to get the book signed, because they’ve never been around anybody that writes and publishes. So, to have their story told in a more official way is very heartening to them. So, I’m trying to write for them. If I got on MSNBC, that would be great. But you know what, I’m perfectly happy to be on shows like this and try to reach activists who are trying to change the world.
I’m not going to convince somebody who believes that the economy is great, and ignores 30 million people that have gone through a mass layoff. There’s no way. And I’m not a star. I’m not Robert Reich. I’m not Paul Krugman. [Thank God, by the way.] Well known, like some of the noted people that you have on your show.
I come from a working class background myself, and I write because I feel, hey, I like doing it. And I feel that it can make a difference in encouraging the people in the labor movement, and their friends, to be bold. And most importantly- and this is where it connects directly with you and what you’re doing- is to have a picture of how the economy is put together. We have found, in our workshops, that people come in completely fragmented .
There’s this issue, and that issue, and this issue, and they’re not connected at all. And as a result, each one of us tries to put the fragments together. And conspiracy theories take hold because it’s easy to put them together. The whole problem in the economy is we got off the gold standard. That puts a lot of pieces together.
So, we come in with an alternative picture about not using neoliberalism as a word, but we try to share what we call a ‘financial strip mining’, how Wall Street has been able to get control of the economy. How political parties have allowed that to happen, and what that means for their own job security, stability.
And by putting the pieces together, we find that folks get sort of an a-ha moment. Like, ‘oh, that makes sense.’ And I think you need that share. All of us who can do that, can do the macro part, that you have in your title. You need to do as much of that as possible. And yes, not all the pieces are going to fit together.
That’s fine. But we’re asking people to have a different common sense version about the struggles they’ve faced.
[00:46:52] Steven Grumbine: I would be remiss if I didn’t bring this up, because this is a core part of what we do here. Modern Monetary Theory is not something to implement. We’ve seen Reagan use it. We’ve seen Clinton use it. We’ve seen Obama use it. We’ve seen Trump use it. We’ve seen Biden use it.
When I say use it, it is a description of how the system works. But we fundamentally don’t understand that. And so, so much of our false scarcity narrative, that allows these keepers of the realm to keep us down, it is based in a lack of understanding of how money works.
And as a result of that, we have found that our role is to be the conduit between the brilliance of these economists and these MMT leaders that understand how everything, from the Federal Reserve through the Treasury, of how the system works to provision the government. And how we’ve been led to believe a lot of things that just ain’t so.
The federal job guarantee is one of the core components of that. And I can think of no greater countervailing measure against capital and against this finance capital, than a job guarantee that prevents the destitution of so many. When you lose your job and you fall behind on your payments, there is predatory Wall Street waiting to reclaim your home and flip it.
Every step through your process, you are seen as a chit in their little game. You’re not even a human being. You’re just a cog in the wheel that allows them to get more and more wealthy. That doesn’t have to be that way. We’re struggling to get this message out to labor. Labor is hell bent on believing it’s their hard earned tax dollar that’s paying for this stuff.
When the government spends money, it spends it into existence.
[00:48:47] Les Leopold: Well, I hope one day you’ll participate in one of these reversing runaway inequality workshops, that these CWA workers are conducting. [Love to.] About three quarters of the way through, it’s all done in small groups, non-lecture method, working through a workbook.
Each table is given a blank sheet of paper that can be pasted up in front of the room. And they’re asked, draw a picture of what your world could look like without runaway inequality. And when this exercise was first introduced to me, I thought, oh, this is going to be so hokey. So, I didn’t like it. But the feminists, the women in the program said, no, you got to try this.
So they tried it. And it just about brings tears to your eyes. People get up and they describe this guaranteed job world that you’re talking about. They describe it, they draw it. They have a picture of it, [Beautiful] of a community that doesn’t spoil the environment. That doesn’t contribute to climate change. That provides educational services to everybody, has jobs for everybody.
It’s an incredible thing. Each table then gets up and shares it with the rest of the room, and people applaud. You get four or five different pictures of what the world would look like, and they’re very similar to what your deepest hopes and desires are. And it leaves us with an incredible positive feeling.
Which is, people want this kind of world. And our job is to give them some of the tools to help them get from here to there. So, when I see that exercise, I get optimistic about the potential is there. You do your job, I’ll do my job, to help spread the education. And yes, it’s a little drop or grain of sand on the beach or something, but it starts to build up.
[00:50:38] Steven Grumbine: It starts somewhere. I’m with you. This was a beautiful conversation. I really appreciate your time. Give you a chance to take us out here.
[00:50:49] Les Leopold: All I can say is I’d really like the listeners to get ahold of Wall Street‘s War on Workers. All the money goes back into our education programs. None of it goes to me.
Please follow me on Substack, Les Leopold at Substack. Where I’ll be doing more and more articles on basically politics and economics, the interface between the two. And I urge you to keep listening to this show, because obviously, you’re doing good things and I feel very, very proud to be part of it.
Thank you so much.
[00:51:24] Steven Grumbine: That meant the world to me. I really appreciate that. We’re a nonprofit 501c3. Actually, I think this will be the first one of 2024, because it comes out on Saturday. So very exciting. But please consider becoming a donor. You can go to our website, realprogressives.org, click donate and become a monthly, you can do a one time donation, or you can go to our Patreon account, which is patreon.com/realprogressives.
We are desperate for your support. And if you’re interested, if you’ve got skills and you think there’s value in what we’re doing, and would be willing to lend those skills to us, please go to our website and volunteer. We need volunteers as well.
Les, this was a true honor and privilege for me. I had never spoken to you before, but now that I know you, I look forward to talking to you again in the future.
[00:52:20] Les Leopold: Same here. Thank you for all you’re doing. We really need it.
[00:52:24] Steven Grumbine: Absolutely. All right, folks. This is Steve Grumbine with my guest, Les Leopold. This is Macro N Cheese. We are out of here.
[00:52:40] 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/real progressives.
“But the reality is everything of value is created by workers in society, including manual workers, intellectual workers, and so forth. During the course of their work shifts, they produce a lot more value than they get paid for, and that money siphons up to millions of workplaces across the United States and the globe. That’s why now we have billionaires, which is when you step back and think about it, you think about someone having enough money that they could spend $5,000 a day since 1492 and they wouldn’t run out of one billion, and then they have hundreds of billions of dollars!”
Joe Burns, Macro N Cheese Episode 240, “Can Unions Reclaim the Strike?”
GUEST BIO
Les Leopold founded and currently directs the Labor Institute, and is the author, among other works, of the award-winning The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi. Les designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment, and economics and helped form an alliance between the United Steel Workers Union and the Sierra Club. He attended Oberlin College and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
https://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/leopold-les-41359/
https://www.commondreams.org/author/les-leopold
https://www.thelaborinstitute.org
Les’s Twitter is @les_leopold and his Substack can be found here: https://substack.com/@lesleopold1
Les’s recent book, and many other titles can be found at the RP Bookshop:
Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do about It by Les Leopold
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Daniel Rostenkowski
was a United States Representative from Chicago, serving for 36 years but his political career ended abruptly in 1994 when he was indicted on corruption charges. He subsequently pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud and was fined and sentenced to 17 months in prison, subsequently pardoned in December 2000 by Bill Clinton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Rostenkowski
Mary G. Harris Jones
was known as Mother Jones from 1897 onwards, was an Irish-born American labor organizer, former schoolteacher, and dressmaker who became a prominent union organizer, community organizer, and activist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Jones
https://www.motherjones.com/about/history/
Charles Ellis “Chuck” Schumer
is a sitting US senator and current senate majority leader.
https://www.schumer.senate.gov/about/biography
Bill Black
is Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, where he teaches White-Collar Crime, Public Finance, Antitrust, Law & Economics. He covers markets and regulation with his speech “Unsound Theories and Policies Produce Epidemics of Fraud and Regulatory and Market Failures.”
https://billmoyers.com/content/william-k-black-on-u-s-financial-fraud/
https://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/profile.html
Jamie Dimon
is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co
https://www.jpmorganchase.com/about/our-leadership/jamie-dimon
Zach Shrewsbury
is a democratic senatorial candidate from West Virginia.
https://www.shrewsburyforsenate.com/meetzach
Dan Osborn
is an independent senatorial candidate from Nebraska.
https://osbornforsenate.com/meet-dan/
Shawn Fain
has served the UAW at every level for over 20 years, primarily for 5 terms as a Skilled Trades Committee person and Shop Chair at Local 1166, and 10 years as an International Rep.
Sara Nelson
is an American union leader who serves as the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants–CWA, AFL–CIO. A United Airlines flight attendant since 1996, she previously served as AFA’s international vice president for a term beginning January 1, 2011. AFA-CWA represents nearly 50,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Nelson_(union_leader)
https://realprogressives.org/?s=Sara+Nelson
Joe Burns
is a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer with over 25 years’ experience negotiating labor agreements. He is currently the Director of Collective Bargaining for the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA. He graduated from the New York University School of Law. Prior to law school he worked in a public sector hospital and was president of his AFSCME Local. He is the author of Strike Back: Rediscovering Militant Tactics to Fight the Attacks on Public Employee Unions; Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America; and Class Struggle Unionism.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/authors/1116-joe-burns
https://againstthecurrent.org/atc220/joe-burns-class-struggle-unionism/
Robert Reich
is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of a number of presidents and served as Secretary of Labor in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich
Paul Krugman
is an American economist.
https://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/
INSTITUTIONS / ORGANIZATIONS
Labor Institute
was founded in 1975 by Les Leopold and develops and conducts education and policy programs for unions, environmental organizations, community groups, and immigrant worker centers on workplace health and safety.
https://www.thelaborinstitute.org
House of Bourbon
is a dynasty that originated in the Kingdom of France. Bourbon kings first ruled France and Navarre in the 16th century, and by the 18th century, members of the Spanish Bourbon dynasty held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma. Today Spain and Luxembourg have monarchs of the House of Bourbon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bourbon
United Auto Workers (UAW)
Amazonians United
https://www.amazoniansunited.org
Federal Reserve
The Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. Founded by an act of Congress in 1913, the Federal Reserve’s primary purpose was to enhance the stability of the American banking system.
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/federal-reserve-history
U.S. Treasury
The United States Department of the Treasury’s stated mission is to maintain a strong economy and create economic and job opportunities by promoting the conditions that enable economic growth and stability at home and abroad, strengthen national security by combating threats and protecting the integrity of the financial system, and manage the U.S. Government’s finances and resources effectively.
EVENTS
2007-09 Economic Crisis
was deep and protracted economic downturn known as “the Great Recession” and was followed by what was, by some measures, a long and unusually slow recovery.
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-recession-and-its-aftermath
Great Depression
Was a worldwide economic downturn, originating in the United States, that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world, sparking fundamental changes in economic institutions, macroeconomic policy, and economic theory.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Depression
Defense Production Act of 1950
is the primary source of presidential authorities to expedite and expand the supply of materials and services from the U.S. industrial base needed to promote the national defense. It has been periodically amended and remains in force today.
https://www.fema.gov/disaster/defense-production-act
Battle of Blair Mountain
was the largest labor uprising in United States history and the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. The conflict occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, as part of the Coal Wars, a series of early-20th-century labor disputes mainly in Appalachia, but some significant related events occurred in Colorado as well. Up to 100 people were killed, and many more arrested. For five days from late August to early September 1921, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers, who were backed by coal mine operators, during the miners’ attempt to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields.The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired, and the United States Army intervened by presidential order and private planes were hired to drop homemade bombs on the miners.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars
American Civil War
was fought between the Union (“the North”) and the Confederacy (“the South”), the latter formed by states that had seceded. The central cause of the war was the dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, which was widely believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction.The war was fought from April, 1861 to May, 1865 and claimed the lives of more than 655,000 combatants, union and confederate, with an additional 130,000 civilians dead but resulted in a Union victory, reuniting the nation, on maps, and the abolishment of slavery. With the 13th amendment to the constitution, along with the 14th and 15th amendments collectively known as the “Reconstruction Amendments”, the Reconstruction Era began postbellum. With the assassination of President Lincoln in April 1965, it is widely argued that Reconstruction was not adequately realized, and tensions remain to this day over the outcome of the war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War
New Deal
was a series of domestic programs initiated and developed the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) between 1933 and 1939, which took action to bring about immediate economic relief as well as reforms in industry, agriculture, finance, waterpower, labour, and housing, vastly increasing the scope of the federal government’s activities.
https://www.britannica.com/event/New-Deal
Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act
is landmark worker empowerment, civil rights and economic stimulus legislation and thought to be the most significant worker empowerment legislation since the Great Depression.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/842
CONCEPTS
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
is a heterodox macroeconomic supposition that asserts that monetarily sovereign countries (such as the U.S., U.K., Japan, and Canada) which spend, tax, and borrow in a fiat currency that they fully control, are not operationally constrained by revenues when it comes to federal government spending.
Put simply, modern monetary theory decrees that such governments do not rely on taxes or borrowing for spending since they can issue as much money as they need and are the monopoly issuers of that currency. Since their budgets aren’t like a regular household’s, their policies should not be shaped by fears of a rising national debt, but rather by price inflation.
https://www.investopedia.com/modern-monetary-theory-mmt-4588060
https://gimms.org.uk/fact-sheets/macroeconomics/
The Modern Money Primer by L. Randall Wray
https://realprogressives.org/mmt-primer/
Gig Labor
Non-standard or gig work consists of income-earning activities outside of standard, long-term employer-employee relationships.
https://www.gigeconomydata.org/basics/what-gig-worker
Class Reductionism
is an epithet used to describe social theories that emphasize the role of the exploitation of labor along the lines of social classes in creating societal inequality, over all other social divisions and forms of oppression, such as racism or sexism. It is also used to describe political policies and strategies that prioritize broad economic reform to the exclusion of addressing issues facing specific minorities. The term is most commonly used in the context of Marxist theory and critiques thereof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_reductionism
https://newrepublic.com/article/154996/myth-class-reductionism
Just Transition
is a principle, a process and a practice. The principle of just transition is that a healthy economy and a clean environment can and should co-exist. The process for achieving this vision should be a fair one that should not cost workers or community residents their health, environment, jobs, or economic assets.
Federal Job Guarantee
The job guarantee is a federal government program to provide a good job to every person who wants one. The government becoming, in effect, the Employer of Last Resort.
The job guarantee is a long-pursued goal of the American progressive tradition. In the 1940s, labor unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) demanded a job guarantee and Franklin D. Roosevelt supported the right to a job in his never realized “Second Bill of Rights”. Later, the 1963 March on Washington demanded a jobs guarantee alongside civil rights, understanding that economic justice was a core component of the fight for racial justice.
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/theory-of-change/what-is-a-federal-jobs-guarantee/
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/05/pavlina-tcherneva-on-mmt-and-the-jobs-guarantee
Federal Job Guarantee Frequently Asked Questions with Pavlina Tcherneva
https://pavlina-tcherneva.net/job-guarantee-faq/
Class Struggle Unionism
Class struggle unionism is the belief that our union struggle exists within a larger struggle between an exploiting billionaire class and the working class which actually produces the goods and services in society. Class struggle unionism looks at the employment transaction as inherently exploitative. While workers create all wealth in society, the outcome of the wage employment transaction is to separate workers from that wealth and create the billionaire class. From that simple proposition flows a powerful and radical form of unionism.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1767-class-struggle-unionism (Book)
Class Consciousness
In Marxist thought, class consciousness is the set of beliefs that a person holds regarding their social class or economic rank in society, the structure of their class, and their class interests. According to Karl Marx, it is an awareness that is key to sparking a revolution that would “create a dictatorship of the proletariat, transforming it from a wage-earning, property-less mass into the ruling class.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_consciousness
Class Warfare
Class conflict (also class struggle, capital-labour conflict) identifies the political tension and economic antagonism that exist among the social classes a society, because of socio-economic competition for resources among the social classes, between the rich and the poor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict
Balkanization
is the division of a place or country into several small political units, often unfriendly to one another. The term comes from the name of the Balkan Peninsula, which was divided into several small nations in the early twentieth century.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/balkanization#
Solidarity
also referred to as solidarism, or Class Solidarity, is an awareness of shared interests, objectives, standards, and sympathies creating a psychological sense of unity of groups or classes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity
PUBLICATIONS FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do about It by Les Leopold
How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away with Siphoning Off America’s Wealth by Les Leopold
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**Every Tuesday evening, Real Progressives hosts a virtual listening party for the current episode of Macro N Cheese. All are invited to join our informal discussion where we share insights on the topic at hand. If someone has questions, we will help find the answers. Get the registration link each week by visiting our events calendar: https://realprogressives.org/rp-events-calendar/
Before the 1980s, mass layoffs were often tied to economic recessions. Today, they are shrewd corporate strategy. Modern mass layoffs are connected to leveraged buyouts or stock buybacks. Steve’s guest, Les Leopold, explains how the process works and how it came to be through the maneuverings of Wall Street and the two political parties.
Les is the author of Wall Street’s War on Workers. He and Steve talk about the very real impact on people’s lives, from the coal miners of Mingo County, West Virginia, to Steve’s personal struggles after Verizon’s 2009 lay-offs. They discuss organizing, the value of a job guarantee, and intersectionality within a class analysis.
Les Leopold is executive director of the Labor Institute, which he cofounded in 1976. He has written several books on the finance sector’s looting of America. His upcoming book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, is being published by Chelsea Green Publishing. Follow his substack: https://substack.com/@lesleopold1
@les_leopold on Twitter
Macro N Cheese – Episode 258
Wall Street’s War on Workers with Les Leopold
January 6, 2024
[00:00:00] Les Leopold [Intro/Music]: Almost every stock buyback, you’ll find that same company doing a mass layoff to squeeze money to afford to go and do a stock buyback, which is the simplest way to turn capital back over to Wall Street. So Wall Street’s driving these mass layoffs. That’s why I wrote the book.
The public attitude towards unionism is more positive now than at any time since the early 1960s, when it peaked at around 70% or 75%, which means the potential for organizing all these victims of mass layoffs is there.
[00:01:34] 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.
[00:01:42] Steven Grumbine: Alright, This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. My guest today is Les Leopold. He is the author of Wall Street‘s War On Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What To Do About It.
If you’ve been following this podcast for any length of time- we’re approaching our 260th episode here, we’ve been nonstop for five years- you’ve heard my story. I was a victim of the great financial crisis. I worked 17 years at Verizon, and all of a sudden, they hit the signal, the signals went out to Wall Street, Wall Street gave its response, and business- the lagging indicator- said, ‘let’s lay some people off.’ And Verizon, in one fell swoop, laid off 10,000 people.
And my life has never been the same since. I had to make excuses for why I couldn’t pay my bills and why I was in this bad place. I had to hear people talk about… ‘Me’ making better choices. I had to hear all kinds of typical conservative nonsense that people just say, because it’s Pavlovian… ‘why didn’t you make better choices?’
Well, Les has written a fantastic book. This book, I think, for many of you who have been deeply impacted by this very cruel economy, will probably take some umbrage.
And with that, I want to bring on my guest, Les Leopold. Welcome to the show, sir.
[00:03:07] Les Leopold: Thank you very much for having me. And thank you for your kind words.
[00:03:11] Steven Grumbine: Absolutely. I wish this wasn’t near and dear. This is very close to me. My whole life has been radically transformed, in the worst possible way. The student loans kicking back in- I have $130,000 in student loans- all for a career that vanished in 2009. And I’ve had to be a contractor ever since.
Getting back into the game- so to speak- as an older worker, has been a challenge. And I do have a nice job- thank you- I’m glad I have it. But it is a contract job, and contract jobs are decidedly less secure. And as we experienced during the great financial crisis and many others… First to get let go. And people don’t realize the repercussions of that. And there is an enemy, and it is in Wall Street.
And with that, let’s talk about your book book. Explain what is this book about? Tell us the story of Wall Street’s war on workers.
[00:04:10] Les Leopold: It’s really about mass layoffs. About what you went through, and what we estimate 30 million people have gone through since 1996. You add in their families who were impacted, you’re approaching 100 million people. And, by the way, so far this year- well, the year’s almost over- we’re talking about a quarter of a million people, just in the high tech sector alone, that have gone through mass layoffs.
This is not normal, if you look at the broader scope of economic history in the United States. This is something that really began- most seriously- from the 1980s onward. Before that, yes, there were mass layoffs, though it usually was directly tied to recessions. And corporate leaders before 1980, basically, were embarrassed about mass layoffs. They felt it was a sign of their own failure, to have to lay people off.
Now it’s a sign of how shrewd and smart and tough you are, to be able to squeeze your company through mass layoffs, and then use that money- and this is where Wall Street comes in.
Two features of Wall Street make this dire situation. One, are leveraged buyouts. And what that means is, Wall Street comes in- private equity or hedge fund or whomever- buys up a company, with using an enormous amount of debt, and then places that debt on to the company that was purchased. Then that company has to service a huge debt. And the first thing they do is start laying people off. So, mass layoffs are directly connected to leveraged buyouts.
That’s number one. Number two, are stock buybacks. And this is a very strange phenomenon, that was basically illegal before 1982. A stock buyback is when a company goes into the marketplace and buys back its own shares, and then disappears them. This automatically raises the price of all the stocks because now, the same amount of earnings, gets spread over a smaller amount of shares.
Before 1982, this was considered stock manipulation, stock price manipulation. And one of the causes of the Great Depression, the 1929 crash. But then, during the Reagan administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission deregulated it, basically… and stock buybacks have gone wild.
Back then, 2% of corporate profits went to stock buybacks. Today, it’s approaching 70%. 70 cents of every dollar in profit goes to stock buybacks. Well, who gains from stock buybacks? The large Wall Street institutional investors. And to do a stock buyback, inevitably, is connected to a mass layoff.
Almost every stock buyback, you’ll find that same company doing a mass layoff, to squeeze money, to afford to go and do a stock buyback. Which is the simplest way to turn capital back over to Wall Street. So, Wall Street is driving these mass layoffs. That’s why I wrote the book.
[00:07:22] Steven Grumbine: We’re an MMT organization, we talk about Modern Monetary Theory all the time. And we’re out there having debates on Twitter- or X, I guess they call it now. And I’m seeing other MMT folks- who I call ‘investor grade fools.’ They’re these finance tech bros, that you’d like to think we’re fighting for the same cause, but clearly we’re not. Because they’re more than willing to prop up Wall Street and overlook these things, as long as they can have the inside edge on putting a bet down on it.
And to me, I’ve lost so much respect for so many people, because I’ve been on the other end of this… I’ve felt it immensely. And worse, this organization has witnessed more people laid off… just watching people struggle, and the impact it has on their health, their family, everything.
This is the predatory vulture nature that end stage capitalism- this concept of finance capitalism- has done to society. Who are the key culprits that are advancing this? Wall Street’s kind of a nebulous cloud. Who are the folks wearing the demon masks in this case?
[00:08:32] Les Leopold: I’m actually going to start on the other side of the problem…
[00:08:35] Steven Grumbine: Okay.
[00:08:35] Les Leopold: Which is, who allowed this to happen.
[00:08:37] Steven Grumbine: Let’s do it.
[00:08:39] Les Leopold: Basically, coming out of the 1970s- when Reagan got elected- both political parties began a competition to unleash Wall Street and get its campaign contributions. And first, Reagan pushed it forward, and the Democrats went along with his tax cuts, etc., etc. But it was really the deregulation. The failure to enforce, for example, antitrust laws. The failure to stop harmful takeovers. And failure to limit stock buybacks.
When Clinton got in, basically, he did more of it. Because he saw this as a tremendous way to bring money and support into the Democratic Party. So, the deregulatory fight was on.
Who benefited from this? Well, the whole industry grew off it. Hedge funds, private equity companies… there’s hundreds of them, thousands of them. There’s big ones, small ones, but they basically are allowed to exist because of the deregulation that came in from both political parties.
What I want to emphasize was, these were policy choices. These are new things. For example, the Democratic Party, Rostenkowski, during the 1980s suggested that, ‘hey, wait a second, you can’t keep putting all this debt on corporations through these buyouts and then asking for tax deductions, I want to put a limit on that.’
Wall Street went crazy, because they saw the game would be up if they limited, let’s say, the tax free debt that you can put on a company. It’s a deduction once the company has billions of dollars of debt. If they said, ‘okay, anything over $500,000, you’re going to have to pay taxes.’ That would slow down the takeover movement dramatically.
But the Democrats refused to go along with it. Matter of fact, he was hounded, he was blamed for a crash in the stock market, for wanting to put some sensible controls on. The point is, that we allowed this to happen, and now we think it’s just natural. That’s the danger. The conventional wisdom is that mass layoffs are just part of what a modern economy is all about, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
People are basically fatalistic. Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a concerted political effort by the Democrats, for example, to stop a mass layoff? To basically say, ‘no, you’re not going to do that, you’re not going to lay off a thousand people in Morgantown, West Virginia’, because the company- during the middle of the COVID- is going to be moving a pharmaceutical company to India.
Not a word from the Democratic administration to use the Defense Production Act to stop it. Radio silence. And unfortunately, from my perspective, the only person who actually intervened to stop the mass layoff, was Trump- in 2017, with the Carrier Air Conditioning Company in Indiana. Where it was going to move to Mexico, and he basically shamed them into not moving. They got some tax breaks, etc., etc.- which is common all across the country- but 800 of the 1100 people had their jobs saved.
What we need is a movement to stop these plant closings, these mass layoffs. So, we need to inject it into the political system, so it’s discussed. I am certain that the mass of working people across the country would be very thankful to see somebody actually try to save their jobs.
Because, as you’ve mentioned, it’s the most destructive experience you can go through. It turns your life upside down, and it’s very hard to get back into the regular system. You’re absolutely right. Gig economies and contract jobs are replacing full time jobs, and this is a policy decision that could be stopped and turned around.
That’s the point I want to make. That’s why I want to inject mass layoffs into the political arena, so they cannot be ignored. Rather than both parties tripping over themselves to get Wall Street cash, I want them to be tripping over themselves to please working people in order to get votes.
[00:12:52] Steven Grumbine: For me, I have largely given up on the electoral process, having seen the internal barriers, the democracy killers, that are baked into the system at every level. Nobody had ever heard of a ‘parliamentarian’ until this past year. We have more non-democratic moments through this process, than anything I’ve ever experienced.
And the democratic party used to have a stranglehold on labor, it used to own labor. And through a process of neoliberalism, and through this financialization and bending knees to Wall Street, the working class has been splintered into a million shards. Which is capital’s primary directive, to make sure that they can discipline labor. And what better way to do that than to absolutely splinter the working class. And you do that best through identity politics.
One of the challenges that I face- I don’t want to be a class reductionist because there are real legitimate intersectional grievances, that as part of the working class, we need to understand, make up the whole- but I remember Hillary Clinton calling all the workers ‘deplorables’- and I am no fan of Trump’s at all- but I recognize that there is a reason why people weren’t buying what the Democrats were selling.
And as somebody who did originally fight for Bernie Sanders, and watched as the Democratic Party crushed his campaign- and by extension, a huge coalition of independents, semi-conservatives, people that weren’t willing to vote Republican, that weren’t interested in Trump- all of us were one big left independent group of people that were willing to vote and move our feet, donate, because we were struggling and hurting. And when the Democratic Party put the clamps down, the splintering occurred that created the ability for Trump to come out looking better than he should have ever looked.
There was no reason for the Democrats to do this, other than they serve Wall Street now. And they have become elite. And they’ve become a group of people that is so disconnected from the real day to day struggles that they allowed someone like Donald Trump to swoop in.
What are your thoughts on that?
[00:15:22] Les Leopold: Well, let me give you a case study that I think reinforces every point that you made. And I want us to focus on one county in West Virginia, Mingo County. As you know, it has a lot of historical resonance. That Mother Jones was there, the Coal Wars, in the early part of the 20th century, took place there.
The place was an occupied zone, where the federal troops had to come in- in 1919, I believe- and they basically stayed there until the New Deal. This county- small, 27,000 people- but a coal mining county, this county voted for Bill Clinton 69.7% in 1996… 69.7%. In 2020, Joe Biden got 13.9%.
Now, what happened in this county? It’s 97%+ white. So, did identity politics play in? Did these people become deplorables? Did something happen during this period to unleash their racism, sexism, xenophobia? I don’t think so. Even Obama got three times the number of votes that Biden got. So, what happened in that county?
Well, this is an incredible story. In 1996, there were 3,300 coal jobs in this little county. And you can imagine how many ancillary jobs were connected to it. By 2020, there were 350 coal jobs left. 3,000 jobs, in this tiny county, disappeared. What did the Democrats do for this county? Absolutely nothing. No development programs, no New Deal, no jobs program.
[00:17:28] Steven Grumbine: Just transition? Nothing?
[00:17:31] Les Leopold: Yeah, there was a just transition. This is the second part of the story, and this is what blew my mind. A just transition was left to the free market. This is the period of unleashing capital. Now you have cheap labor, cheap land, capital should come in and help redevelop it. That’s what’s supposed to happen. And the Democrats and the Republicans believe in this kind of free market capitalism.
Here’s what happened. Mingo County became the opioid distribution center of the entire Appalachia region, five state area. Two drugstores start competing against each other. This one drugstore put out more opioid prescriptions than virtually any other drugstore in the whole country.
They ranked number 22, when this counts all the drugstores in the big cities, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Houston. Mingo County drugstore ranked 22nd. This is the capitalism that came in. And of course, West Virginia has the highest death rate in the country from opioids. This is what we did, and this is what we left Mingo County to struggle with.
You think they’re going to reward the Democratic Party with their votes? No, they’re going to abandon it, not because they’re racist, sexist, xenophobic. They got screwed economically, along with 30 million other people in this country. If you want to understand why working people have abandoned the Democrats and are wandering around in the wilderness- like the Republicans, some aren’t voting- it’s because they’re so disappointed.
This is part 2 of the story, which is especially true in the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. We did a study that no one’s done before, where we correlated the percentage of mass layoffs in a given county, and what happened to the Democratic vote?
And we found that the rural counties, that were largely white, had the highest percentage of mass layoffs. Because when a plant goes down in a rural county, there’s not much else there, so it takes a big toll. In those counties, the Democratic vote went crashing down. In the counties that had more professionals, and the mass layoff percentage was low, the Democratic vote went up.
And so, this is why someone like Senator Schumer, said in 2016, he says ‘for every one blue collar voter we lose in Pennsylvania, we gain two suburban Republican voters, and that holds true for Michigan and Wisconsin as well.’
So, there’s an incredible correlation between politics and mass layoffs. And some political entity has to speak to it because what you’re going to get, inevitably, is people giving up on democracy. Because they need stable employment. We all need stable employment.
It’s pretty difficult to lead a decent life and not be resentful if you get kicked out of your job and you’re forced to do contract work- gig labor- as you mentioned… you get very resentful. And along comes a strong leader who promises you economic stability, you’re gonna start listening. And that’s the fear I have.
[00:21:09] Steven Grumbine: I’m a socialist. Neither one of Biden or Trump had anything to offer me, so my interests have nothing to do with politics. My interests here have everything to do with the layoffs and the people suffering. And when I think about, in general, what the discourse has been like over the last six years, it’s incredibly disheartening. Because if you tell somebody, ‘these people are struggling, they’re unable to get healthcare, their lives are in complete shambles, they’re carrying massive private debt, they’re struggling, who’s taking care of them?’
The first thing that what I call is a ‘vote blue sycophant’ will say is, “What do you want, Trump?” Well, no, I don’t want Trump. I want to not be worried about getting laid off. I want a federal job guarantee in place, so that I never have to go through this again. And millions of people have gone through this.
And I think instead of addressing the real issue of mass layoffs, to deal with the people that are bitter and suffering as they lose their homes, and all the corruption from Wall Street going in and out of halls of government.
We did a series with Bill Black called The New Untouchables, where we talked about the corruption in Wall Street and the rotating door with the Jamie Dimon’s of the world. And we know the corruption is rife. And the democratic party has always been supposedly for the working class, and yet there is no semblance of that in their actions.
And now you’ve got a bunch of people, like myself, looking outside the electoral system altogether. I’m looking to build parallel systems. They don’t believe in the electoral process in this country. That is not how you solve mass layoffs.
[00:23:01] Les Leopold: Let me give you a little bit of an optimistic spark that I’ve run into. And it starts with exactly what you’re saying. Imagine if a politician was willing to say what you’re saying. How would they do? Well, it turns out, again, in West Virginia, there’s a guy named Zach Shrewsbury who’s running for Senate. he’s a military vet, and he’s just saying absolutely great stuff.
Similarly, there’s a guy named Dan Osborn in Nebraska, who is running for Senate as an independent. And right now, he’s also absolutely smashing corporate America. He sounds just like you. And he’s leading in the polls against a three-term Republican senator. He’s leading because he is finally speaking to this frustration and anger.
The problem with many, many Democrats- not including Bernie and a few others- is they’re trying to please two groups at the same time. They’re thinking, ‘workers have no place else to go but to the Democratic Party, and we can’t be attacking Wall Street, we can’t be pointing the finger at runaway inequality, things like that… it’ll cost us our financial support.’
And so, they sound mealy-mouthed . Instead of fighting a plant closing- Schumer had one in upstate New York, with Siemans, and you’ll love this one- instead of fighting the plant closing, he is trying to get another company to come in and put something in that facility. Meanwhile, all the workers are gone. 500 workers elsewhere. They’re not going to be around when a new plant comes in, they got to eat. And the person who was the president of that corporation, gets invited to the signing ceremony for the infrastructure bill at the White House. It just shows that the Democrats just can’t lay it on the line.
But these two guys- Zach Shrewsbury in West Virginia, he’s running as a Democrat, the other guy Osborne is running as an Independent- but they’re finally trying to say it like it is. And I’m not willing to completely throw in the towel, until we can see whether or not political independence- really, when you come down to it- can speak truth to power and build a constituency. I don’t see a way around it.
Like you, I’ve been worrying about this stuff forever and it gets very discouraging. But I think the potential is there. People are so frustrated by being basically crushed economically or disadvantaged economically. I’m sorry, I understand all the harms that are addressed by identity politics, but you can’t ignore class.
[00:26:37] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a non profit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.
[00:27:39] Steven Grumbine: A class-based analysis is required. And this is where I part ways with some of my friends who have gone into- I don’t want to say MAGA- but they have become, kind of de-facto, part of it. As I think about intersectionality, we can’t have a working class struggle, if one person’s got a boot on their neck and still part of the working class, while others are moving.
And this is where people who are different lose their voice, getting drowned out in class reductionism. I’m a class reductionist at times, because I think without having a class analysis, there’s no point in talking about this, because you will never have the kind of movement that you need to take down this capital problem.
And as a result of the balkanization that has occurred with weaponized neoliberal identity politics, people are not seeing these things as legitimate. They’re easily mocked. And some of it is by closet racists, because we didn’t suddenly become not a racist country. Vestiges of the civil war still live in many places across America.
But we do know, we do have a blueprint of what it’s like to demonize groups, and to be able to create those environments that gave rise to people like Adolf Hitler. By taking away hope, destroying labor and industry, and making those folks feel like there is no other alternative. And we don’t want to see that happen here, do we?
[00:29:16] Les Leopold: No. You’re now digging into the other major piece of the book. Which is, was Hillary Clinton right or wrong about all these deplorables out there?
What makes people nervous about class, is the other common assumption. That working class people are more deplorable than the rest of us. That they’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic…
[00:29:42] Steven Grumbine: Unrefined.
[00:29:43] Les Leopold: Yeah. And one of the things that we did in this book, is we investigated the data that would show whether or not that was true. There are these three very large voter survey projects that are not like your short term poll. We’re talking 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 people, who are answering questions over a long period of time. And there’s three polling operations that do this. And we took a slightly different definition of ‘working class.’
The definition for white working class in this country, that’s used by pollsters and political scientists often, is anybody that doesn’t have a four-year college degree. We thought, is Mark Zuckerberg really part of the white working class because he never finished Harvard? It doesn’t make sense. So we added another feature in the bottom two thirds of the income distribution.
So, you don’t have a college degree, and you’re also in the bottom two thirds of the income distribution, and you’re self identified as white. What are your political attitudes and how have they changed over time? Well, this was a shock to us. Since the mid 1990s, this group- this white working class group- has actually gotten more liberal, not more illiberal, on key issues.
Let me just go over a couple that just blew my mind. Should gay and lesbian couples be legally permitted to adopt children? Used to be 38.2% of the white working class supported that position, now it’s 76%. That’s a huge number.
Here’s another one that you think is absolutely counterintuitive. You think these people would really be opposed to legalizing undocumented workers. They asked that question. Well, about 10, 12 years ago, 32% were for that kind of legalization. Now it’s 61.8%. It’s doubled. These folks are not illiberal.
What’s happening is, because we’re failing to deal with the economic problem of mass layoffs, we’d say, ‘we can’t really fight for you because you’re basically a deplorable.’ You’ve become deplorable because of the economic situation, and that’s on you, that’s not on us.
And I think that’s a lot of what is driving Democratic Party establishment. They don’t trust these people. They think they’re racist, sexist, etc., etc. Well, you know what? We even looked at the most extreme poll questions that dealt with racism, and we compared white working class people to white managers, and there was hardly a difference.
And then we said, ‘well, how many deplorables are there?’ We picked five questions, on race, on gender, on immigration, on homophobia. And we said, ‘how many Americans answer those five questions in a deplorable way?’ And it was about 2% of the white working class. You’re talking about a very, very, very small number of people who are so-called ‘deplorable.’
But yet, it’s very convenient to write off this vast number of people, who you consider uneducated, etc. Actually, we’ve written them off because we’ve taken their jobs away, just like Mingo County. Those people didn’t become more racist, sexist, etc. They lost their jobs and we just did nothing for them.
So, the two messages of the book are: Mass layoffs is the key economic issue that we have to address, and stop blaming the white working class for being racist, sexist, etc., when they’re not all that different from anybody else.
[00:33:41] Steven Grumbine: There is a very real discrimination and prejudice keeping people out of having a full life. And they’re experiencing it with policing and a host of other ways it shows up. However, I identify very much so with an intersectional class analysis. By intersectional, it is placing class at the top, but it’s really not pretending that these key issues don’t exist.
The problem with the Democrats, they ignore the first part, the class part, and they focus purely on identity politics without the economic backing, to support the change that makes everybody whole. And because they’ve allowed this false scarcity narrative to live- this lie that we can’t afford to do great things for our people in our country, this austerity narrative- as a result of that, it has pit people that are not educated in economics, and they think there is no alternative and they are bitter. And they’re ready to fight back.
Now, I’ll give you an example. Donald Trump is taking an even harder line on immigration and building the wall. Because I understand the way monetary systems work and I understand what the power of the federal government used by the right people could be, we could allow people to come in this country and we would not have to sacrifice jobs.
We could have a federal job guarantee in place, to allow people to be healthy, happy, and whole. But we don’t do that.
[00:35:24] Les Leopold: So, here’s the question that I want to pose… Where do we get the power to make the kind of significant change that you are advocating, that I’d be advocating? I think that power has to have a core, and that core has got to be the trade union movement. Which is unfortunately very small.
But you saw a glimmer of hope with Shawn Fain and the United Auto Workers, where he’s come out and said billionaires should not exist. He’s willing to talk macroeconomic politics. He’s willing to look at the big picture and say this isn’t right, they’re ripping us off and he wants to build a movement to change it.
It’s funny when you say intersectionality. I think of the workplace as a really good example of it, because the boss in most cases, almost all cases, does the hiring. Not the union. The hiring is done by management, and you get all kinds of people in there.
And one of the basic principles that really makes a union work, is fairness. People really don’t like discrimination of any kind because it comes back and bites them, and it destroys solidarity. The only way a union can survive is having solidarity. And injury to one is injury to all.
And it’s not just an ideological thing, it’s actually something that people see and feel every day. I think that’s one of the reasons that you see working class support for gay and lesbian women, etc., because there’s more and more of them in the workplace. And you can’t tolerate management discriminating, or even a fellow worker discriminating, against somebody, you got to do something about it. You’ve got to protect that intersectionality, otherwise you don’t have any solidarity.
So, how do you build power? And this is where it becomes difficult, but not impossible. Somehow we have to see an upsurge in successful trade union organizing. Right now, we’re working with Amazonians United to try to provide some education for them, which could help them in their organizing efforts.
And interestingly enough, they’re not asking us to provide nuts and bolts organizing education, they want the big picture economic education.
[00:37:49] Steven Grumbine: Bring me in. I’ll help.
[00:37:51] Les Leopold: Hey, if we get this thing going, there’ll be room for you. We’ll definitely share your stuff with them. But the point is this, you need organization. But the organization also requires an educational framework. And the Labor Institute- where I work, what we try to do is build that educational infrastructure. We train workers themselves to provide economic educational programs throughout the labor movement. Actually, you mentioned Sarah Nelson, one of our flagship programs with Communication Workers of America.
And they have 50 workers, who we’ve trained to be trainers, who conduct eight hour workshops on runaway inequality. Which is what we’ve been talking about, and the union provides release time, pays for them to get out of work to go through these eight hour classes. Basically, a thousand workers a year go through these programs.
That’s what we need throughout the economy. And this is modeled after a movement that’s near and dear to my heart, which is the populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s. Which tried very hard to be a multiracial movement. There were black workers with the populist chapters, and they did their best- even in the South- to fight against the Bourbons who were coming back into power. They waged a war against them.
But the way they did it, is they fielded 6,000 educators back in the 1880s and 1890s, to build their movement. Which was aimed directly at finance capital. Directly. They understood how the game was played. Today we need about 30,000.
[00:39:34] Steven Grumbine: There’s another person that I think you need to talk to. His name is Joe Burns, and he had been the lead negotiator with the Flight Attendants Union, and he wrote a great book. It’s a phenomenal book. We’ve had him on the show. We’ve talked about it at length. It’s called Class Struggle Unionism. In other words, it goes beyond the shop floor.
And you’re seeing a little bit of this now, as unions are timing their contract dates together, to ensure that they can have maximum impact and maximum power.
We need a macro union movement with class struggle at the forefront, and it goes across industries and companies. That’s where the power is going to be, I agree with that .. I just wanted to throw that out there.
[00:40:16] Les Leopold: That’s an excellent point. By the way, the public attitude towards unionism is more positive now than at any time since the early 1960s, when it peaked at around 70%, 75% public approval. Which means, the potential for organizing all these victims of mass layoffs is there. How to help make it happen? My role, education, as is yours. The labor movement needs the PRO Act bill in Congress. I don’t know the Democrats have the courage to pass it, so that they would have a more level playing field for organizing.
We need a breakthrough. The United Auto Workers with Tesla and the transplant groups. Automakers in the United States, especially in the south. We need them to break through somewhere and win some big organizing drives. That would make an enormous difference. I think the UAW Auto Workers Strike really helped encourage people to be more militant in trade unions. And I think if they could win a few organizing drives, it could start a prairie fire.
And I think that’s what we need to get the kind of policies that you’re talking about. That’s the source of your dual power. I think if the trade union movement can grow, you’ll see politicians more like the Osborns and the Shrewsburys. You’ll see more of them pop up, and working class people say, ‘Hey, this is the way to go.’
And it’s a long slog. And it took 40 years for neoliberalism and financialization to really put the screws to us, basically to threaten democracy as a whole. So, it’ll take- I think- quite a long time to undo it. But I think it’s something important to keep in mind.
[00:42:13] Steven Grumbine: I live in Pennsylvania. The calendars are set by the hunting clock. I don’t hunt. These folks, they have their gun rack in their trucks, they have their United States flag hanging off the back of their truck, because that’s the only identity they have. Everything else has been the economy sucks. The things that they thought they would grow into, that their mom and dad had promised them, etc., didn’t happen.
And now they’re angry. They’re bitter. And that’s not to take away anyone else’s struggle. In fact, I hope everybody heard me say, at least 10 times, I believe in all these struggles have to come together to join the working class, not in the absence of those struggles, but together with those struggles to make us stronger, to make that mesh impenetrable.
But with that said, when you demonize folks and you wonder why they suddenly become Trumpers… physician, heal thyself. Look in that mirror. Mirror stares back hard.
[00:43:11] Les Leopold: Look, you’re making some very good points. Actually, it feeds into a question I had to think about the whole time I was working on this book.
Who am I writing for? Who am I trying to influence? I don’t think I’m going to have an impact on MSNBC commentators. I don’t think I’m going to have an impact on the leading Democratic Party pundits. But I think that working people and union activists and their friends, like yourself, will find the book has ammunition that will help them in their work.
I’ve been very fortunate to be able to write books and share them with working people. And I can’t tell you how appreciative they are, and not because I’m some great speaker or anything. After I do a talk, I don’t ask for honorarium or anything, I just ask that they, people who were there, buy books.
People line up to get the book signed, because they’ve never been around anybody that writes and publishes. So, to have their story told in a more official way is very heartening to them. So, I’m trying to write for them. If I got on MSNBC, that would be great. But you know what, I’m perfectly happy to be on shows like this and try to reach activists who are trying to change the world.
I’m not going to convince somebody who believes that the economy is great, and ignores 30 million people that have gone through a mass layoff. There’s no way. And I’m not a star. I’m not Robert Reich. I’m not Paul Krugman. [Thank God, by the way.] Well known, like some of the noted people that you have on your show.
I come from a working class background myself, and I write because I feel, hey, I like doing it. And I feel that it can make a difference in encouraging the people in the labor movement, and their friends, to be bold. And most importantly- and this is where it connects directly with you and what you’re doing- is to have a picture of how the economy is put together. We have found, in our workshops, that people come in completely fragmented .
There’s this issue, and that issue, and this issue, and they’re not connected at all. And as a result, each one of us tries to put the fragments together. And conspiracy theories take hold because it’s easy to put them together. The whole problem in the economy is we got off the gold standard. That puts a lot of pieces together.
So, we come in with an alternative picture about not using neoliberalism as a word, but we try to share what we call a ‘financial strip mining’, how Wall Street has been able to get control of the economy. How political parties have allowed that to happen, and what that means for their own job security, stability.
And by putting the pieces together, we find that folks get sort of an a-ha moment. Like, ‘oh, that makes sense.’ And I think you need that share. All of us who can do that, can do the macro part, that you have in your title. You need to do as much of that as possible. And yes, not all the pieces are going to fit together.
That’s fine. But we’re asking people to have a different common sense version about the struggles they’ve faced.
[00:46:52] Steven Grumbine: I would be remiss if I didn’t bring this up, because this is a core part of what we do here. Modern Monetary Theory is not something to implement. We’ve seen Reagan use it. We’ve seen Clinton use it. We’ve seen Obama use it. We’ve seen Trump use it. We’ve seen Biden use it.
When I say use it, it is a description of how the system works. But we fundamentally don’t understand that. And so, so much of our false scarcity narrative, that allows these keepers of the realm to keep us down, it is based in a lack of understanding of how money works.
And as a result of that, we have found that our role is to be the conduit between the brilliance of these economists and these MMT leaders that understand how everything, from the Federal Reserve through the Treasury, of how the system works to provision the government. And how we’ve been led to believe a lot of things that just ain’t so.
The federal job guarantee is one of the core components of that. And I can think of no greater countervailing measure against capital and against this finance capital, than a job guarantee that prevents the destitution of so many. When you lose your job and you fall behind on your payments, there is predatory Wall Street waiting to reclaim your home and flip it.
Every step through your process, you are seen as a chit in their little game. You’re not even a human being. You’re just a cog in the wheel that allows them to get more and more wealthy. That doesn’t have to be that way. We’re struggling to get this message out to labor. Labor is hell bent on believing it’s their hard earned tax dollar that’s paying for this stuff.
When the government spends money, it spends it into existence.
[00:48:47] Les Leopold: Well, I hope one day you’ll participate in one of these reversing runaway inequality workshops, that these CWA workers are conducting. [Love to.] About three quarters of the way through, it’s all done in small groups, non-lecture method, working through a workbook.
Each table is given a blank sheet of paper that can be pasted up in front of the room. And they’re asked, draw a picture of what your world could look like without runaway inequality. And when this exercise was first introduced to me, I thought, oh, this is going to be so hokey. So, I didn’t like it. But the feminists, the women in the program said, no, you got to try this.
So they tried it. And it just about brings tears to your eyes. People get up and they describe this guaranteed job world that you’re talking about. They describe it, they draw it. They have a picture of it, [Beautiful] of a community that doesn’t spoil the environment. That doesn’t contribute to climate change. That provides educational services to everybody, has jobs for everybody.
It’s an incredible thing. Each table then gets up and shares it with the rest of the room, and people applaud. You get four or five different pictures of what the world would look like, and they’re very similar to what your deepest hopes and desires are. And it leaves us with an incredible positive feeling.
Which is, people want this kind of world. And our job is to give them some of the tools to help them get from here to there. So, when I see that exercise, I get optimistic about the potential is there. You do your job, I’ll do my job, to help spread the education. And yes, it’s a little drop or grain of sand on the beach or something, but it starts to build up.
[00:50:38] Steven Grumbine: It starts somewhere. I’m with you. This was a beautiful conversation. I really appreciate your time. Give you a chance to take us out here.
[00:50:49] Les Leopold: All I can say is I’d really like the listeners to get ahold of Wall Street‘s War on Workers. All the money goes back into our education programs. None of it goes to me.
Please follow me on Substack, Les Leopold at Substack. Where I’ll be doing more and more articles on basically politics and economics, the interface between the two. And I urge you to keep listening to this show, because obviously, you’re doing good things and I feel very, very proud to be part of it.
Thank you so much.
[00:51:24] Steven Grumbine: That meant the world to me. I really appreciate that. We’re a nonprofit 501c3. Actually, I think this will be the first one of 2024, because it comes out on Saturday. So very exciting. But please consider becoming a donor. You can go to our website, realprogressives.org, click donate and become a monthly, you can do a one time donation, or you can go to our Patreon account, which is patreon.com/realprogressives.
We are desperate for your support. And if you’re interested, if you’ve got skills and you think there’s value in what we’re doing, and would be willing to lend those skills to us, please go to our website and volunteer. We need volunteers as well.
Les, this was a true honor and privilege for me. I had never spoken to you before, but now that I know you, I look forward to talking to you again in the future.
[00:52:20] Les Leopold: Same here. Thank you for all you’re doing. We really need it.
[00:52:24] Steven Grumbine: Absolutely. All right, folks. This is Steve Grumbine with my guest, Les Leopold. This is Macro N Cheese. We are out of here.
[00:52:40] 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/real progressives.
“But the reality is everything of value is created by workers in society, including manual workers, intellectual workers, and so forth. During the course of their work shifts, they produce a lot more value than they get paid for, and that money siphons up to millions of workplaces across the United States and the globe. That’s why now we have billionaires, which is when you step back and think about it, you think about someone having enough money that they could spend $5,000 a day since 1492 and they wouldn’t run out of one billion, and then they have hundreds of billions of dollars!”
Joe Burns, Macro N Cheese Episode 240, “Can Unions Reclaim the Strike?”
GUEST BIO
Les Leopold founded and currently directs the Labor Institute, and is the author, among other works, of the award-winning The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi. Les designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment, and economics and helped form an alliance between the United Steel Workers Union and the Sierra Club. He attended Oberlin College and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
https://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/leopold-les-41359/
https://www.commondreams.org/author/les-leopold
https://www.thelaborinstitute.org
Les’s Twitter is @les_leopold and his Substack can be found here: https://substack.com/@lesleopold1
Les’s recent book, and many other titles can be found at the RP Bookshop:
Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do about It by Les Leopold
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Daniel Rostenkowski
was a United States Representative from Chicago, serving for 36 years but his political career ended abruptly in 1994 when he was indicted on corruption charges. He subsequently pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud and was fined and sentenced to 17 months in prison, subsequently pardoned in December 2000 by Bill Clinton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Rostenkowski
Mary G. Harris Jones
was known as Mother Jones from 1897 onwards, was an Irish-born American labor organizer, former schoolteacher, and dressmaker who became a prominent union organizer, community organizer, and activist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Jones
https://www.motherjones.com/about/history/
Charles Ellis “Chuck” Schumer
is a sitting US senator and current senate majority leader.
https://www.schumer.senate.gov/about/biography
Bill Black
is Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, where he teaches White-Collar Crime, Public Finance, Antitrust, Law & Economics. He covers markets and regulation with his speech “Unsound Theories and Policies Produce Epidemics of Fraud and Regulatory and Market Failures.”
https://billmoyers.com/content/william-k-black-on-u-s-financial-fraud/
https://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/profile.html
Jamie Dimon
is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co
https://www.jpmorganchase.com/about/our-leadership/jamie-dimon
Zach Shrewsbury
is a democratic senatorial candidate from West Virginia.
https://www.shrewsburyforsenate.com/meetzach
Dan Osborn
is an independent senatorial candidate from Nebraska.
https://osbornforsenate.com/meet-dan/
Shawn Fain
has served the UAW at every level for over 20 years, primarily for 5 terms as a Skilled Trades Committee person and Shop Chair at Local 1166, and 10 years as an International Rep.
Sara Nelson
is an American union leader who serves as the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants–CWA, AFL–CIO. A United Airlines flight attendant since 1996, she previously served as AFA’s international vice president for a term beginning January 1, 2011. AFA-CWA represents nearly 50,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Nelson_(union_leader)
https://realprogressives.org/?s=Sara+Nelson
Joe Burns
is a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer with over 25 years’ experience negotiating labor agreements. He is currently the Director of Collective Bargaining for the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA. He graduated from the New York University School of Law. Prior to law school he worked in a public sector hospital and was president of his AFSCME Local. He is the author of Strike Back: Rediscovering Militant Tactics to Fight the Attacks on Public Employee Unions; Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America; and Class Struggle Unionism.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/authors/1116-joe-burns
https://againstthecurrent.org/atc220/joe-burns-class-struggle-unionism/
Robert Reich
is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of a number of presidents and served as Secretary of Labor in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich
Paul Krugman
is an American economist.
https://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/
INSTITUTIONS / ORGANIZATIONS
Labor Institute
was founded in 1975 by Les Leopold and develops and conducts education and policy programs for unions, environmental organizations, community groups, and immigrant worker centers on workplace health and safety.
https://www.thelaborinstitute.org
House of Bourbon
is a dynasty that originated in the Kingdom of France. Bourbon kings first ruled France and Navarre in the 16th century, and by the 18th century, members of the Spanish Bourbon dynasty held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma. Today Spain and Luxembourg have monarchs of the House of Bourbon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bourbon
United Auto Workers (UAW)
Amazonians United
https://www.amazoniansunited.org
Federal Reserve
The Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. Founded by an act of Congress in 1913, the Federal Reserve’s primary purpose was to enhance the stability of the American banking system.
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/federal-reserve-history
U.S. Treasury
The United States Department of the Treasury’s stated mission is to maintain a strong economy and create economic and job opportunities by promoting the conditions that enable economic growth and stability at home and abroad, strengthen national security by combating threats and protecting the integrity of the financial system, and manage the U.S. Government’s finances and resources effectively.
EVENTS
2007-09 Economic Crisis
was deep and protracted economic downturn known as “the Great Recession” and was followed by what was, by some measures, a long and unusually slow recovery.
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-recession-and-its-aftermath
Great Depression
Was a worldwide economic downturn, originating in the United States, that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world, sparking fundamental changes in economic institutions, macroeconomic policy, and economic theory.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Depression
Defense Production Act of 1950
is the primary source of presidential authorities to expedite and expand the supply of materials and services from the U.S. industrial base needed to promote the national defense. It has been periodically amended and remains in force today.
https://www.fema.gov/disaster/defense-production-act
Battle of Blair Mountain
was the largest labor uprising in United States history and the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. The conflict occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, as part of the Coal Wars, a series of early-20th-century labor disputes mainly in Appalachia, but some significant related events occurred in Colorado as well. Up to 100 people were killed, and many more arrested. For five days from late August to early September 1921, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers, who were backed by coal mine operators, during the miners’ attempt to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields.The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired, and the United States Army intervened by presidential order and private planes were hired to drop homemade bombs on the miners.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars
American Civil War
was fought between the Union (“the North”) and the Confederacy (“the South”), the latter formed by states that had seceded. The central cause of the war was the dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, which was widely believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction.The war was fought from April, 1861 to May, 1865 and claimed the lives of more than 655,000 combatants, union and confederate, with an additional 130,000 civilians dead but resulted in a Union victory, reuniting the nation, on maps, and the abolishment of slavery. With the 13th amendment to the constitution, along with the 14th and 15th amendments collectively known as the “Reconstruction Amendments”, the Reconstruction Era began postbellum. With the assassination of President Lincoln in April 1965, it is widely argued that Reconstruction was not adequately realized, and tensions remain to this day over the outcome of the war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War
New Deal
was a series of domestic programs initiated and developed the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) between 1933 and 1939, which took action to bring about immediate economic relief as well as reforms in industry, agriculture, finance, waterpower, labour, and housing, vastly increasing the scope of the federal government’s activities.
https://www.britannica.com/event/New-Deal
Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act
is landmark worker empowerment, civil rights and economic stimulus legislation and thought to be the most significant worker empowerment legislation since the Great Depression.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/842
CONCEPTS
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
is a heterodox macroeconomic supposition that asserts that monetarily sovereign countries (such as the U.S., U.K., Japan, and Canada) which spend, tax, and borrow in a fiat currency that they fully control, are not operationally constrained by revenues when it comes to federal government spending.
Put simply, modern monetary theory decrees that such governments do not rely on taxes or borrowing for spending since they can issue as much money as they need and are the monopoly issuers of that currency. Since their budgets aren’t like a regular household’s, their policies should not be shaped by fears of a rising national debt, but rather by price inflation.
https://www.investopedia.com/modern-monetary-theory-mmt-4588060
https://gimms.org.uk/fact-sheets/macroeconomics/
The Modern Money Primer by L. Randall Wray
https://realprogressives.org/mmt-primer/
Gig Labor
Non-standard or gig work consists of income-earning activities outside of standard, long-term employer-employee relationships.
https://www.gigeconomydata.org/basics/what-gig-worker
Class Reductionism
is an epithet used to describe social theories that emphasize the role of the exploitation of labor along the lines of social classes in creating societal inequality, over all other social divisions and forms of oppression, such as racism or sexism. It is also used to describe political policies and strategies that prioritize broad economic reform to the exclusion of addressing issues facing specific minorities. The term is most commonly used in the context of Marxist theory and critiques thereof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_reductionism
https://newrepublic.com/article/154996/myth-class-reductionism
Just Transition
is a principle, a process and a practice. The principle of just transition is that a healthy economy and a clean environment can and should co-exist. The process for achieving this vision should be a fair one that should not cost workers or community residents their health, environment, jobs, or economic assets.
Federal Job Guarantee
The job guarantee is a federal government program to provide a good job to every person who wants one. The government becoming, in effect, the Employer of Last Resort.
The job guarantee is a long-pursued goal of the American progressive tradition. In the 1940s, labor unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) demanded a job guarantee and Franklin D. Roosevelt supported the right to a job in his never realized “Second Bill of Rights”. Later, the 1963 March on Washington demanded a jobs guarantee alongside civil rights, understanding that economic justice was a core component of the fight for racial justice.
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/theory-of-change/what-is-a-federal-jobs-guarantee/
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/05/pavlina-tcherneva-on-mmt-and-the-jobs-guarantee
Federal Job Guarantee Frequently Asked Questions with Pavlina Tcherneva
https://pavlina-tcherneva.net/job-guarantee-faq/
Class Struggle Unionism
Class struggle unionism is the belief that our union struggle exists within a larger struggle between an exploiting billionaire class and the working class which actually produces the goods and services in society. Class struggle unionism looks at the employment transaction as inherently exploitative. While workers create all wealth in society, the outcome of the wage employment transaction is to separate workers from that wealth and create the billionaire class. From that simple proposition flows a powerful and radical form of unionism.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1767-class-struggle-unionism (Book)
Class Consciousness
In Marxist thought, class consciousness is the set of beliefs that a person holds regarding their social class or economic rank in society, the structure of their class, and their class interests. According to Karl Marx, it is an awareness that is key to sparking a revolution that would “create a dictatorship of the proletariat, transforming it from a wage-earning, property-less mass into the ruling class.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_consciousness
Class Warfare
Class conflict (also class struggle, capital-labour conflict) identifies the political tension and economic antagonism that exist among the social classes a society, because of socio-economic competition for resources among the social classes, between the rich and the poor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict
Balkanization
is the division of a place or country into several small political units, often unfriendly to one another. The term comes from the name of the Balkan Peninsula, which was divided into several small nations in the early twentieth century.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/balkanization#
Solidarity
also referred to as solidarism, or Class Solidarity, is an awareness of shared interests, objectives, standards, and sympathies creating a psychological sense of unity of groups or classes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity
PUBLICATIONS FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do about It by Les Leopold
How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away with Siphoning Off America’s Wealth by Les Leopold