Episode 280 – MMT Gives Labor Its Wings with Tschäff Reisberg

[00:00:00] Steven Grumbine: All right, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Folks, it’s been a few episodes now that we have been really, I don’t know, hyper focusing on the crossover between movement building and understanding the role of labor in that movement building. Because many of you guys out there are addicted to ledgers.

You guys love tracing the treasury this, the fed that, you wanna know about M1. You wanna know about all these wonky, uh, monetary things when in reality, part of the value of our MMT work is that it’s supposed to enable real actual change by each one to each one, each one reach one, and you got to have power to do these things.

Stephanie Kelton famously says, we just got to source the vote. And I feel that that is somewhat naive in this system in terms of sourcing a vote in a captured oligarch driven system. And we see evidence upon evidence upon evidence upon evidence that we don’t have agency within this system. So, in all my talks with labor leaders and folks, they recognize this. It’s not even controversial. They recognize that in order for us to move forward, we need a strong labor.

And, you know, going back to 1978, there was a great article and I’ll let my guest talk about this some, but back then, UAW had 1. 5 million, million union members capable of taking direct action. Today, that number is somewhere around 300, 000. We’ve talked to David Van Deusen who talks about his revolutionary insurgent style of class struggle unions. We’ve talked with Joe Burns about class struggle unionism and the need to go beyond the corporate union.

We have talked to Sara Nelson who says that there’s no such thing as an illegal strike, there’s only a successful or unsuccessful strike. And at the end of the day, each of these things center around an injury to one is an injury to all. And that concept of unity and solidarity. But lo and behold, when we try to explain this to many of our friends in the MMT community, many of the friends that we work with, they’re perfectly content with just throwing an I voted sticker on their forehead and bouncing around as if they’ve solved world hunger.

They’ve got a green new deal coming any minute now. They have Medicare for All. Oh, if it weren’t for this. Oh, if it weren’t for that. And nevermind the track record and the long history of not getting what we want, not getting anything. In fact, getting kicked in the teeth through genocides and other such things, all being told it’s in the name of saving democracy. Well, I’m focused heavily on bringing a light to shine on the labor movement. And while the labor movement in and of itself is not all that we need, it is as good a kindling, it’s as good a starting point as anything else that we have. Because the political parties, they’re captured. The political parties are private interests being met for oligarchy.

They’re not there to serve we the people. And so until we overcome that, until we find a path forward, all the MMT conversations we have amount to a lot of navel gazing, sadly. I mean, it’s a radicalizing tool. It’s an opportunity for us to show people you could have this, but instead you have austerity. We could do great things, but instead we’re funding genocide.

You could have healthcare and a job guarantee, but instead we’ve got finger wagging and talking about making bad decisions. The capitalist world that we live in has no countermeasure right now without labor. And so with that, labor is struggling mightily too. Labor is dealing with people who are built with rugged individualism and they’re tired and they’re not used to seeing wins. So I’ve asked my friend, Tschaff Reisberg, who has put me in touch, quite frankly, with David Van Deusen, with Sara Nelson, with Joe Burns, and I’ve asked him to come on and talk to me, not only about the state of labor, because the last time we had Tschaff on, we kind of talked about the state of labor, but we’re going to talk a little bit about the history of labor and some of the really key moments that have caused us to not gain progress , and the little glimmers of hope that we have trickled in through horrific news, that we see on the daily basis that just wears our soul away.

So without further ado, let me bring on my guest, Tschaff Reisberg, the secretary of the Charlotte Metrolina Labor Council and member of the association of professional flight attendants and friend of mine. Welcome to the show, sir.

[00:06:06] Tschaff Reisberg: Hello my friend. Thank you for having me on.

[00:06:08] Steven Grumbine: Yeah. Um, you know, pretty gloomy intro, but I mean, I, was waiting for my lie detector to go off and it told me I was not lying. It told me that I was simpatico with my own core beliefs. Tell me what’s up with labor, bro.

[00:06:24] Tschaff Reisberg: My heart was racing actually when I was listening to you make that monologue because to keep that honesty going we are in a very scary moment in our history right now. It could easily get a lot worse than it is, or we could start making progress. And there’s signs of both happening at the same time I’d say.

[00:06:43] Steven Grumbine: You were very kind in sending me an article about a former UAW president who basically recognized in 1978, and this is before Ronald Reagan. Let’s just keep it real. Let’s keep it a hundred here. Right. It was before Ronald Reagan, sold out labor with the air traffic controllers.

So this was on Jimmy Carter’s watch. But in 1978, the head of UAW resigned from a larger body of labor in the name of capitalism basically playing completely unfair and not being willing to place labor on even footing. Talk to me about this particular letter. I think it’s really important.

[00:07:29] Tschaff Reisberg: Yeah, I’m kind of surprised that I discovered this and it wasn’t more talked about. The president of the UAW, his name was Douglas Fraser. In 78, He wrote his resignation letter and he made it an open letter about why he’s leaving this group. And he said, there’s this group of the head of big unions and big business, they’d meet and they try to find any common ground on the political front and see what they can achieve together.

And he said that, uh, the old terms of this, this truce, and this is what it was. It was, there was a unwritten truce between labor and capital that labor would not try to challenge capitalism itself. It wouldn’t try to challenge the capitalists’ control of foreign policy. It wouldn’t try to challenge capital’s control of domestic investment.

And in exchange for this, the unions would get a right to exist and a right to share in the prosperity that comes with productivity gains and technology advancement. that truce was starting to break down. The capitalists saying, this is not advantageous to us anymore. And we’re going to go back into a hot war.

And Douglas Fraser specifically named three things that – or four things that he was trying to advance or labor itself was trying to advance. They wanted national health insurance. They wanted a minimum wage that was, you know, dignified. They wanted social security enhancements and they wanted tax law to confiscate the wealth of the very wealthy individuals.

And they were making zero progress on this whatsoever. And in fact, corporations, were going to start challenging unions’ right to exist altogether. And so he resigned just stating this is our scenario right now, we’re at an impasse and, there’s no point of coming to these meetings anymore.

And we know from history now that he was spot on on everything he said. It was just a bloodbath for labor ever since then. We saw this line of wages and productivity. They were virtually identical between the end of World War 2 and the end of the late seventies, and then they started to diverge and wealth inequality in this country got worse and worse.

The middle class kept having the screws turned in them ever since. And we’ve never made progress in any of those big issues that labor wanted to advance.

[00:09:51] Steven Grumbine: It’s funny because in 72, obviously Richard Nixon removed us from the Bretton Woods accord, which functionally was a world standard, a dollar standard for the world, but based on a gold convertibility of the dollar. And you can see clearly that that understanding the tethering of that fiat currency to a, you know, an external constraint, such as a peg to a metal had a lot of, things that we didn’t consider, or maybe they knew and kept to themselves. But clearly the working class didn’t understand. Clearly the unions didn’t understand. Clearly the voters didn’t understand. But big business clearly did understand. The entirety of the movement of capitalists understood because they began to gain wealth at a level that – and it continues, right?

We’re talking about the hockey stick of wealth inequality beginning. You know, I guess it took a few years, like four or five years, but under Carter and then on steroids under Reagan, we saw wealth inequality go through the roof. We, the people, never were able to, vocalize with conviction the things that Fraser brought up in his resignation.

The four things that he was seeking are things that we all should have been seeking. We all should have known, Hey, gosh, they took away the peg to gold. Now we can afford these things. We can do it without any of the, or we could have done it before anyway, but that signaled a real shift in everything.

It didn’t have to be bad. Right. Obviously, you know, as MMTers, we know that the lens of MMT is apolitical. It only is weaponized once you overlay a value system on it. A socialist is going to lay a very different value system. A unionist may lay a very different value system over that MMT lens.

And a capitalist and a warmonger and a fascist are clearly going to place a different value system over that MMT lens. As you look back at the gains or the loss of gains, if you will, of the labor movement, what do you think is the net effect of that shift to the free-floating fiat currency that was no longer convertible or pegged to a commodity?

[00:12:18] Tschaff Reisberg: If you have an MMT standpoint, you understand that only a floating fiat non-convertible currency is compatible with full employment. It’s good that we gave up on that promise because that promise was imposing unnecessary austerity on the population. And, uh, we could definitely do without that, but here’s the thing, like unions have been in a reflective state because they understand that if they keep on doing business as the status quo, uh, we’re not going to have a labor movement left in this country.

Like we see the union density decreasing year after year. It’s flat now. At least we stopped the hemorrhaging. And, uh, what happens next is, uh, it’s very exciting to find that out. But we had this understanding that, and, and left run unions, by the way, they understood this from the start. Like you read some old union charters and you’ll see that they would be considered like woke today.

So they were just all for equality among workers. We’re not going to discriminate each other based on our race, our religion, our sexual preference, where we’re born. Like, if you’re a worker, we’re going to have your back and vice versa. We’re on the same team. That was, that was the mentality. And because of this peace agreement with capital, all these people that had a critique of capitalism that says the system wants to divide us.

The capitalists would be happy to divide and conquer us. They were purged from the unions. And I kind of understand that decision because you don’t want to fight a war you’re going to lose. But, it’s taken us 50 years since Douglas Fraser resigned to understand that capitalism is not for us. It has never been for us. And to, come to that realization, it’s very much like MMT.

I have Joe Burns to thank for that. Joe Burns has released a book called Class Struggle Unionism. And it was just, it was the right book at the right time. All these people are like, man, what we’re doing today is weak tea. We need something more powerful or you’re going to have to change our status quo because we are going to lose.

And so one thing that those, old lefty unions never understood was money. And I think the labor movement’s gotten so much better when it comes to being anti racist and, all the other things that they want to divide us over, but we have never wrapped our minds around money. And I think those wall street guys that are happy to just burn the planet to make a profit.

Uh, they probably, I’d say most of them do have a general understanding. You’ll see, there’s always money if you want to fund a war, but if it’s to fund healthcare, we’re broke.

[00:14:53] Steven Grumbine: So what do you think it would take to get labor to understand money? I mean, do you think that there is an appetite for this sort of awakening, or do you think that they’re just too bogged down with life as it is? And, and just maybe even a tad bit of that rugged individualism. I mean, cause everywhere I look, I see people, whether they’re just ignorant or whether they’re true believers, but they’re just, they fancy themselves capitalists now.

I can see them hiding the answers on their test paper, not working to help others succeed. All in the name of getting the, uh, valedictorian as opposed to, you know, making sure everybody rises. So what are your thoughts? What do you think prevents that?

[00:15:38] Tschaff Reisberg: Um, that is the biggest question I’ve got personally. I don’t know. I’ve got a way of selling it to union members. And these, these are ones that are already in the labor movement. Because you have the situation where unemployment is used as a tactic of fear in the labor movement, we can’t organize new workplaces because the punishment of unemployment is just so severe.

Everybody’s got their mortgages. They’ve got student debt. They’ve got all this, uh, need for a job and the pain of being unemployed is, substantial. So if you’re trying to organize a factory and the factory boss is saying that we’re going to close our, our factory, if you guys unionize, that’s a powerful weapon against organizing.

And take the example of Starbucks workers. These are people that are not very high up on the economic ladder and Starbucks says we’re going to turn off credit card tipping if you try to organize your workplace. And once they started that tactic, like workplace organizing right there just dropped substantially.

And then on the more distant horizon, you just have what happens if you’re in a bad economy. There’s this kind of idea where we are at a state where things will be like this indefinitely. We don’t have this anxiety that the current situation might not last. It could very well get worse.

In all these situations, a job guarantee would be revolutionary. Because once people are not afraid to unionize once that they’ve got like a decent income option for them, and they can turn off the credit card tipping and everybody will just go work for the job guarantee. So you’re setting the floor of how bad life can be with this thing.

So union members just very naturally understand. Oh my God, that’d be great if we had the job guarantee, like compared to what we’re doing now, like in Charlotte, we’ve got a solidarity fund. If you lose your job because you’re trying to organize, uh, and by the way, this is against the law, but it still happens, uh, we’ll try to basically do a GoFundMe for you.

And, try to take that fear away that the capitalist class will put on you. But a job guarantee that could actually be the thing that will snowball this into actually a much more unionized country. And if labor has more of a voice, uh, then things will start to change a lot quicker.

[00:18:07] Steven Grumbine: You know, I go back to my friend, Clara Mattei, you’ve probably read her book, The Capital Order. And she details in great, excruciating precision about how economists developed austerity as a reaction, uh, an overreaction, a massive overreaction, to what they saw in 1917 with the Bolshevik revolution and the backlash against labor, because labor saw that it didn’t have to be this way and labor started thinking different thoughts.

But, lo and behold, what has been exposed in that moment though, and it probably should have been exposed even before that going back to the start of the nation, especially times around the Mexican American war, where you could see capitalists withholding grain from the people in the community and just letting it sit in a barn while they starved.

We know capital wants control over labor. We know that they want us pliable, malleable, desperate so that we’ll take whatever is given our way. And when they don’t, they offshore and they outsource and they do all sorts of other things to ensure that labor is in precarity. The idea of a job guarantee literally takes away some of, not all, because the job guarantee is the base wage and most of these wages are not minimum wage jobs, you know, they’re above what would be deemed a living wage even.

So it’s not a one for one. I want to be crystal clear for folks, but with that in mind, though, that is literally giving away the power of the capital order and the capital class to withhold or hold over the head of labor, the sack, the power of the sack, one of the, you know, she broke out three different forms of austerity.

There was the, uh, power of the sack, there was the fiscal austerity, and then there was, you know, monetary policy, the interest rates, and ultimately by using the power of layoffs and firing people. That has always been the most coercive force to keep people in line and pliable and quiet and doing as they’re ordered, sir, kind of thing.

Why do you think we would be able to bring a job guarantee to the table and have it make it through given the capture of our institutions in this country by the capital order as it stands? I’m interested because obviously as an MMTer the job guarantee is core MMT. It’s a very, very important thing.

And as labor, to be able to hear them understand, Hey, you know, if you go on strike, we got a job guarantee waiting for you, you know, don’t be afraid.

Right?

[00:20:51] Tschaff Reisberg: I love that.

[00:20:52] Steven Grumbine: So here you go, help me understand how this, like, obviously I understand it, but the feasibility of being able to get it through, we have no agency short of things that are not the norm, short of the struggle, short of these tactics.

[00:21:10] Tschaff Reisberg: Oh, I can’t wait to answer this. This is such an exciting question you asked. Okay.

[00:21:14] Steven Grumbine: Yeah. Go for it, man.

[00:21:16] Tschaff Reisberg: All right. So we know like even historically speaking, our political system is, it’s like gridlocked. We are not able to make any changes for the better. Our fights, the fights my union takes on are ones to just maintain what we’ve got.

And, uh, this also touches on your earlier question, you know, how do we get people to see the bigger picture, including money? Let’s say your podcast, you know, I don’t hear on NPR, I don’t hear on Fox or CNN, any mainstream station, anybody talking about the job guarantee.

So part of that is just getting the truth out there. And that is a service that you are providing. And I’m kind of amazed that like the capitalists even let you put this out there. Because I always thought like pirate radio stations were really cool in college. And, this is like, you don’t even have to be a pirate.

You can do this and not get arrested for now. So, uh, I’m, I’m against single bullet solutions, but that is part of it. What you are doing is a valuable service for humanity. That’s why I support this podcast. I wish everybody else would too, because it is a really a quality product you’re putting out there that is useful for the people that are trying to make the world a better place.

Um, so second of all, there’s a lot of people that you can talk to them until your, your voice is hoarse and it won’t really change them. And what I’m seeing, uh, where I work, which is at American Airlines as a flight attendant, most of the flight attendants were pretty much tuned out to the labor movement, to what their union’s doing.

Like, they just pay their dues. They hope they get a decent wage and a decent contract. And somebody will have their backs if they’re in trouble. But they, they didn’t understand like where the labor movement actually fits in, in the bigger picture. What’s changing that is when we start doing transparent negotiations and we see what our company actually thinks about us and how they actually value us, because we’ll put our proposals out on the webpage, and it’s really insulting what they’re offering us.

And then when we actually show up to the pickets , now you start seeing flight attendants start connecting dots. And it used to be like, going back 20 years ago, uh, you couldn’t say things like “fuck capitalism” or “down with corporate greed.” That has changed and seeing my coworkers march and say “down with corporate greed” together was so cool to see. That is actually progress.

So part of it is actually the fight. And this is where Joe Burns comes out with another just absolutely brilliant observation, which is that showing people is a lot more effective than talking to people. And so his idea was we should revive the strike. Each one of these strikes is like a little revolution.

You show yourself that you’ve actually got power, that your opinion matters, that they’re trying to manipulate your opinion because your opinion matters. And especially when you win, now you got a little taste of your own power and you want more of that. So part of that is you need to have a fighting union.

And so that’s why I’ve directed a lot of my attention, uh, try to change our union from a business union that just tries to cooperate with management to a fighting union. And there’s another union that’s, uh, been doing this. UAW, where UAWW, which is this, uh, democratic caucus responsible for shaking up their own union to make it more democratic.

And they were responsible for getting Sean Fain, their current president. And their current president had a mandate to organize the South, which is something that labor unions have been very wary to do. They thought it was just a lost cause, that the workers are just too brainwashed to ever go for a union.

You’re just gonna be wasting your time and money trying to organize the South. And then they just won huge in Volkswagen. And then they just, uh, more recently they won at Daimler here in North Carolina, where I live. They just got a great contract, major gains. And, they’re doing Mercedes now.

And that’s looking pretty optimistic. Before that they did the big three strike and came up with huge gains. The actors and the writers did their strikes and they all came out ahead in those fights. So we’re seeing a transformation of the character of unions. They have to be more democratic.

They have to actually share like a critique of capitalism, and to be democratic and actually like have that democracy mean something means that the membership actually has to stay informed about what’s the nature of our, of our world we live in. And so education has to be a huge part of that.

[00:25:52] Steven Grumbine: You know, in talking with Joe previously, one of the things that really was, I mean, he, he didn’t really hold back. Was that a lot of union leaders had really grown quite comfortable with their five star dinners and their golf course trips with the business leaders and their cushy, you know, offices in DC, as opposed to actually being with the workers they supposedly represented.

And I think that that snapshot, that vision, if you will, of a corporate union and a corporate union leader lapping up the benefits while simultaneously selling out their constituency just really, holds a lot of people locked into that paradigm and, and they don’t see the value of unions. I’m curious, given that, you know, so much of this is predicated on unions changing and shifting.

And you know, I see, you know, Sean Fain and some others working to line up their contracts to enable the potential even, even the mere threat of a general strike. And yet there’s Sean Fain right away, before it even had to be done, endorsing Genocide Joe Biden. Just to, you know, show that, you know, people that are out there looking and wondering, you know, where these folks are going, it’s it’s hard to put trust in that when you didn’t have trust in the guy to begin with who has shown himself to be a capitalist through and through. How do you convince people that leadership of the unions is really fighting for them?

[00:27:33] Tschaff Reisberg: Part of business unionism was you’re gonna try to cooperate with management. Intuitively it makes sense to us, like, we want our companies to survive, we depend on our companies making profit to put food on our table and we value our job security. So we don’t want to be adversarial with management.

But that is a test we’ve done so many times. And unfortunately it’s not our, our choice. Like capital is going to take as much from us as we can. And we have to fight to defend what we got. We have to fight to make any gains and it’s going to be a fight. There’s no cooperation. This is Douglas Fraser’s resignation letter.

You will not find common ground with these guys. You guys have nothing in common. So unfortunately it just has to be adversarial. And, I think the last 50 years of unionism bares that truth. But there’s also a necessary for every union member when speaking to another union member to bend over backwards to be honest.

I’m talking about an honesty that you only see in like maybe some parts of science and even there they struggle with it. But if you’re going to make an analysis and try to tell that to somebody, you have to tell that person you’re talking to every reason you have to doubt your analysis. You have to say why, what facts shed light on that analysis being wrong. You have to tell exactly how you came to your, your thinking so that they can be in a position to make an educated decision. And, much of what unions do is when they’re getting started is like, uh, it’s like salesmanship. And this is a part that I struggle with personally, because I don’t like sales.

I don’t think that’s, it feels manipulative. It’s like when you go to a car dealership and they’re going to tell you all the great stuff about the car that you want to, that they want you ,to purchase. They don’t tell you the bad stuff. And so they say, Oh yeah, you need to just, uh, you need a, union that will fight for better wages, a pension, better security and all this stuff.

And everybody’s like, yeah, that sounds great. I’m for that. But, that will get you a business union. You also need a union to fight in the class war. And when you’re telling that to people, when they’re not ready to hear it, you sound like a crazy lefty. And I can say it here on this podcast and everybody’s like, yeah, sure, that makes perfect sense.

But when you’re, you’re reaching an audience that isn’t as far down the path of, uh, whatever path this is of self empowerment, of self determination, it just sounds like this is a far left plot and, uh, you’re going to lose them. You’re not going to get them to sign that card.

In fact, they’re going to be hostile to you perhaps. So what’s happening more often than not is when unions have this opportunity to structure themselves to be democratic and to set their goals to be fights that you’re picking that will lead to bigger wins in the future. Because that’s, really the important thing is when you don’t have enough power, you have to be strategic about where you’re going to deploy your resources.

So whatever your, your fight is, part of your analysis of whether you should take it on or not should be, does this lead to greater power in the future? Can we fight bigger fights in the future? Or is, or is this the hamster wheel? And so you create these unions that basically are hamster wheels.

You’re going to negotiate a contract. You’re going to enforce the contract. You’re going to fight all the bullshit the company is going to do in between the contract fights. And that’s not ever going to lead to more power. It’s just going to be spinning your wheels to hold on to what you got. And that is because you missed that opportunity at the start to create a class struggle union.

So now it’s a big fight to change what your leaders do in your union. And that’s, it’s always this rank and file fight. It’s winnable, but it’s slow. It’s time consuming. But I think younger generations are just way more open to it than older ones. So it’s promising.

[00:31:27] Steven Grumbine: You know, I’m watching the encampments across all the universities, across America. And I’m seeing something that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. Closest thing I’ve seen to this might have been as we got tired of the Iraq war, seeing all the protests around, but these are longer standing.

This reminds me very similar of Occupy Wall Street. It has some of those kind of overtones. But from people that are a little older than me are telling me it reminds them of Vietnam. And I watch this and I say, okay, how can unions tap into this or is that taboo because this right here is energy. It’s power, it’s actions, people demanding, it’s people saying divest from this evil thing that you’re doing.

And, you know, BDS is completely founded in the righteous end of an apartheid, you know, ethno fascist state. And I think to myself, how might a union be able to leverage this tactic? Is there a way to build solidarity with them and create even more power? Or is this one of those things like in the movie Braveheart where the nobles saw William Wallace trying to, uh, do all this stuff and they kind of quietly let him get taken away by the Crown.

I mean, like the selling out of labor. There seems like this is an obvious opportunity for class struggle, even though let’s be fair, some of these folks were probably born on the right side of the silver spoon. It’s still incredibly empowering to see people, I mean, they’re putting their life on the line.

These kids are getting beaten up. These teachers are getting knocked to the ground. And I mean, just crushed by a brown shirt rising in these, these fascist pigs, these cops that are not in any way, shape or form protecting and serving. They’re literally the antagonizer. But they’re showing what I consider to be strength, courage, and conviction.

And they’re not sitting there going, well, I’m not going to do this because maybe my job in the future would be, they’re saying this needs to be addressed now. And I’m going to take it on now. And I may not win, but I’d rather die trying than allow them to continue doing this. Is there any opportunity for unions to work with this?

[00:34:18] Tschaff Reisberg: There is. And by the way, those who are putting their bodies on the line like that to fight for somebody else. I think that, first of all, those are, those are my heroes.

[00:34:29] Steven Grumbine: Amen.

[00:34:30] Tschaff Reisberg: There is something that’s so beautiful about union culture that this resonates with, which is to be successful, our power is unity.

And so to be a really strong fighting union, it’s all about solidarity. It’s all about fighting each other’s battles. And that’s probably my favorite part of union culture is standing up for each other. So, you know, when this was just getting started, we were hoping the AFL-CIO would put out a ceasefire resolution, because it was really clear to everybody who’s watching that there’s just gross violations of human rights, international law, even domestic law.

It was completely outside of the bounds of any sort of acceptable conduct by union standards. However, where I live, It’s, uh, it’s a purple state, but there’s a lot of fascist individuals in this state that are for a lot of reasons, very much on the side of Israel is, is in the right here.

And, this is their union too. And so that calculation probably was being made at the highest levels of the labor movement. And the AFL-CIO, they’re saying, well, we just don’t want to uh, piss off the right wingers by taking a stance on this. And, uh, in Charlotte, we did something that’s A, a violation of our labor council’s charter, but also it’s unprecedented for our own history.

We are not allowed to take a resolution on international affairs or even domestic affairs that cover the whole nation. But we’re all so upset by what we’re seeing, like, we’re just seeing these atrocities just streamed every single day to our phones. Uh, there’s just no denying that this is going on and it’s unacceptable.

And so, one of the members from a pretty conservative union, Ironworker, came to our Central Labor Council and he said, I think we should call for immediate ceasefire and return of all the hostages. By the way, the hostages are on both sides. And, um, we discussed it and it was really tense in that room because this is, really uncharted waters.

And if we get punished, if, if the, uh, national throws the axe on us, like we could all lose our positions and have our labor council taken over by them. And after a discussion, we voted and it was unanimous that we needed an immediate ceasefire. And that was new ground for us. We’d never tested those waters before.

And now that we did, and we were scared to, I was definitely scared, but we felt it was right and we did it. And we showed we’re on the same page when it comes to human rights. And that has to be a core value of how unions will ever be strong. We all have to agree. There’s no lesser human beings out there in the world.

We all are all full fledged human beings, all equal to the same rights. And if we don’t all agree on that, we don’t have power. Any disagreement on that just weakens us all. Injury to one is injury to all. And the other thing that that labor movement has that the other movements don’t have is the ability to shut down production.

So we didn’t cause a ceasefire with this resolution. But it does lay the groundwork for more action like that, which could lead to work stoppages because you can protest all day long, until your voice is hoarse and you’re just sick of walking back and forth. But if you don’t have a way to escalate things, they’ll probably ignore you.

So you, you always have to have in your mind, how do we escalate things? And that’s what the labor movement shows. That it has that most movements don’t have. And the other thing that’s really powerful they have is they have the ability to have an organization that’s capable of negotiating on behalf of the membership.

And so, that back and forth that you do in negotiations, a lot of these movements, have not achieved their goal or even worse, they’ve seen their goals demolished and gotten worse because they don’t have that institution that’s capable of A, escalating and B, partaking in negotiations that are legitimate.

And so that’s, I think, where the labor movement has a lot of untapped potential going forward.

[00:38:36] Steven Grumbine: I want to ask you something very specific, and I’m going to probably butcher this, so please read between the lines, do whatever you need to do to answer this. Okay. But, you know, obviously one of the hardest things that I’ve experienced as an individual, not as a union, obviously, but as an individual is that I’ve gone from the right to the left and I have, bypassed my leftward, you know, swing here, my orbit has pulled further left than people who were once to my left.

And, you know, as I continue around that thing, I’m constantly reminded that everybody doesn’t see themselves as labor, even. Everybody doesn’t see themselves as a part of the working class. Everybody doesn’t view the world through a class lens. And so, therefore, you end up with a very, very strange, uh, I’ll use the word proletariat.

You end up with a very strange group of people who don’t see their shared purpose. And ultimately, you know, you’ve got people that will kiss the boot of capital and you’ve got people that will side with capital and you have people that will side with fascism and side with the oppressors, if you will. And it’s not anything new to this country.

It’s certainly not anything new to this time period. Throughout history there’s always been Royalists that sided with the Crown or people that were counter-revolutionaries to the people that rose up to take rights. I’m curious, how do you create a shared solidarity within a union that has very, very disparate people?

[00:40:23] Tschaff Reisberg: That’s a huge struggle. We gotta always take people with where they are. And I think my critique of the left is they can be pretty dismissive of you and pretty unwelcoming if you do not share their politics in every regard. And like you just said, and certainly it’s been my experience, I think the vast majority of us don’t come into all this with a class analysis and our politics over the decades have been evolving and they’re going to continue to evolve and our children’s are going to be different than ours. And if the left is the more tolerant group, uh, they’re really exclusive about who can be part of their club.

And as a result, they don’t have that strength that comes from numbers. And so part of what unions do is we just have to take people with where they are, um, and not beat them over the head over everything that we disagree over. But instead, just because of the interconnectedness of struggles, uh, you get them on something that they care about, like, a better contract, right?

Let’s, let’s talk about something I know a lot about. We’re in a contract fight right now. It’s been five years since American Airlines coughed up a new contract. So we’re living on these wages that haven’t gone up in half a decade. Uh, starting pay is $27,000 before taxes. And we can’t live like that.

That’s, a poverty wage. And the company’s like, well, we’re just happy to keep this going, uh, indefinitely. And part of our problem is as unlike the UAW, we fall under the Railway Labor Act. And the Railway Labor Act says you can only strike if the company and you haven’t, uh, and your union, haven’t come to a deal after a 30 day cooling off period.

And the cooling off period can only be granted by the National Mediation Board. And the National Mediation Board is this political organization that is part of the federal government. And in the past, the Federal Mediation Board has always granted these 30 day cooling off periods. But, they stopped.

There’s been like two in the last decade. And so without a credible threat to strike, the airline has no incentive to cough up a better deal and any notion that you’re paid fairly, you’re paid what you’re worth that, you know, if you’re a good employee, you’ll be rewarded. All these, these notions that were kind of, sort of true, like in the past in American history, they’ve just faded.

And even the best, very, very best pro company employees you got, they hate coming to work because nobody wants to spend their time at work miserable. And that’s what this company has done to even the very best flight attendants that get all the awards.

And then you see, well, why isn’t the national mediation board allowing us to strike? Well, it’s because corporations control the national mediation board. And they’re like, well, all right, fine, let’s change the Railway Labor Act. This thing’s a hundred years old and it’s preventing us from getting the same gains that they had at UAW and SAG AFTRA, Writers Guild. And, you realize to try to change that means we don’t have a single party that represents labor. We have two capitalist parties. And these people that their security came from their affiliation with their political party. It’s very uncomfortable for them. They thought that these guys had their back and they just find out, Oh no, we asked them for their help and they ignored us or they went against us or they they bad mouthed the union.

And just that experience, changes their politics. And so I find just pull them in and get them to do something. Get them to do something, and then we’ll find the connectedness to other stuff. And yeah, let’s offer an education. Let’s say if you are earning a paycheck by trading your time, you are working class.

And if you’re earning your money, I wouldn’t even say earning, if you’re getting your money because you own financial assets, you’re part of the capitalist class. So, these classes have things in common. They’re antagonistic. You don’t have to beat them over the head with Marx, you can help them connect a few dots.

And as long as they’re engaged, they’ll be all right. Put your faith in the members.

[00:44:25] Steven Grumbine: What does it mean when you say, and I think I know, but I think this bears sussing out a little bit. What does it mean to have two capitalist parties? What is that saying? That they cater to the individuals who own industry at the exclusion of the working class? Or is it more a matter of, they just accept that this is the way it is and write laws that further this ends.

I don’t, I think I know what it means, but I just want to hear what your idea of that means.

[00:44:57] Tschaff Reisberg: Well, capitalism itself depends on the state defining property rights, enforcing property rights. What they do after all that, there can be a conflict between what labor wants and what capital owners want. so these parties conflict behind the scenes. A lot of people have this naive belief that if you vote, uh, your politician is going to represent you and it doesn’t work like that whatsoever.

What’s really happening behind the scenes is different parties, different groups of people, are trying to push their lawmakers to make them serve whatever their interests are. So this is not an issue now, I think it should be an issue, but say bankruptcy law. If your corporation goes under, how you are treated as a class is different depending on if you are an owner of the company or if you’re a worker.

And in most cases, uh, if you are an owner, you get priority over whatever assets are left in that company and workers get the crumbs that are left over. That’s a political decision that our government made. And so when I say that the capitalists have two classes, in example over example they are going to serve the interests of capital over those who earn a paycheck for a living.

And that’s, 99 percent of America right there. So, uh, I think it ties into another MMT adjacent traveler, Jamie Galbraith, who wrote a book called The Predator State. And basically the thesis is because labor and capital have nothing in common, he didn’t put it in those terms, but this is my translation.

You’re going to find you are on the opposite sides of every issue. And, uh, your politicians are going to side with the predators over ordinary people. Most of the time. Like they toss us enough that we don’t outright revolt immediately, but they just turn the screws over and over.

Uh, so we’re heading to a future that just can’t sustain this.

[00:47:00] Steven Grumbine: I’m curious, you know, as you were talking about the current state of your own contracts, I mean, obviously there’s been a lot of really, wild stuff going on. We saw strike busting, uh, with the railways based on obscure laws of a hundred years ago. And we’ve seen a host of other things occurring that basically put the kibosh on your ability to strike.

And I think you kind of mentioned a little bit of that earlier. I am curious. What is the state of your particular spaces ability to get a new contract? What are you all looking at?

[00:47:38] Tschaff Reisberg: Well, the old way of doing things was you would do a picket and even though the Railway Labor Act forces us to take a strike vote, then a cooling off period, then there’s possibility of presidential emergency board. There’s all these hoops we got to jump through, but just the picket will freak out the passengers and passengers will start to buy tickets on other airlines. Investors are going to start to flee. And that alone was enough to get the company serious about negotiating a deal. And that stopped happening. And now, we depend on Uncle Sam to let us strike and they’re saying, Nope, we want you to negotiate more.

And, we are trying a new tactic, which is to send a letter to National Mediation Board from, from anybody in the House of Representatives who will actually represent us, to sign on to that letter. And we just did that. We got 184 signatures, I think. This was yesterday or two days ago, and we’re sending that to National Mediation Board because this is ultimately a political organization.

So, I don’t think Democrats at this point are in a very strong position. They can’t look as anti labor at this state of an election year, because labor unions are very popular right now. So, that’s working to our advantage. We’re going to find out probably in the next month or so, it’s probably somewhere, yeah, the next two or three weeks, if we’re going to be allowed to strike or if we’ve got to find another way to escalate things. It’s going to be very interesting what happens.

[00:49:04] Steven Grumbine: Well, good luck with that. Well, I tell you what, we’re coming up on our time. Help me make this the best podcast ever. Take us to what we’re missing. What are some of the things that we maybe didn’t cover that we should have covered? What do you think our listeners need to take away from this podcast?

[00:49:20] Tschaff Reisberg: I think there’s two things that are really critical. And they both, they’re so critical they show up in your, introductions. The first is your old introduction ends with, I want the truth. And so I want everybody to not try to sell their point of view on other people, but instead try to be so incredibly honest. And there’s nobody easier to fool than yourself.

And so there’s a guy named Richard Feynman, a physicist, did all kinds of great work. He wrote a paper called Cargo Cult Science. I suggest everybody give that a read, to understand how we can be more honest with each other, which is a necessity for being strong. And the other thing I want everybody to remember is, um, This is in your introduction again, is I don’t want to, how’s it go?

[00:50:08] Steven Grumbine: “…The tranquilizing effect of gradualism and incrementalism…”

[00:50:13] Tschaff Reisberg: That’s it. So when you’re picking your fights, what you have to have in mind is does this lead to something bigger in the future? Because at this time, we are fighting to maintain what we’ve got. And if we stop fighting, we’re gonna lose. Where we wanna be is fighting to actually make progress.

So when you’re strategizing about What fights are we going to fight? The number one thing you should be thinking about is how will this lead to greater power to win in the future?

[00:50:41] Steven Grumbine: Very, very good, Tschaff. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me. Uh, appreciate the back and forth. Uh, these podcasts are so much better when they can be an exchange of ideas and really appreciate the amount of effort you put into trying to bring a union’s perspective and a real one at that.

Like, we recognize what we may want, but this is where we are. And pumping air in the tires is pretty daggone tough. Uh, it’s been a long time coming and trying to get it reinvigorated and stuff. It’s a really large ice cold glass of water to the face as you try to wonder why things aren’t happening.

And, uh, you realize there’s a lot of work to be done.

[00:51:28] Tschaff Reisberg: There’s a lot of work and a lot of ways people can make a difference. That’s the main thing is everybody just try goodwill towards men and have faith that we will all do what’s right, if enough of us. What a shitty ending that is. Have faith. This is how Sean Fain did it, the UAW in the South Have faith that if the members are given good, accurate information, 99 percent of them will do the right thing.

[00:51:55] Steven Grumbine: There you go. All right, buddy. With that, my name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of Macro N Cheese. My guest, Tschaff Reisberg. On behalf of Real Progressives we thank you all for listening. Please consider becoming a monthly donor at Patreon, Real Progressives, and also you can come to our website, realprogressives dot org. Go to donate. And by all means, there’s no amount too small. We are a 501 c3. So your tax deductible donations are mucho appreciated. And with that, for my friend Tschaff and I, we are out of here.