TRANSFORM with Marianne Williamson
Podcast
Unions Rising: Amazon versus Labor
4
0:00
-1:13:21

Unions Rising: Amazon versus Labor

The miracle of Christian Smalls.
4

I’m sure you’re all aware by now of the earthquake that happened in Staten Island last week. Amazon spent more than $4M to fight off efforts at unionizing at their JFK8 warehouse, but a young man named Christian Smalls and his friends set up a Go Fund Me page, raised $120,000, and despite Amazon’s best efforts got a YES vote for the union.

Yesterday, four times over billionaire Howard Schultz, founder and returned CEO of Starbucks, said “companies are being assaulted by the threat of unionization.” I understand Goliath being upset, but I wouldn’t have expected him to whine.

So what is going on here?

When I was growing up, unions were a huge political factor in the United States. Over the years, partly due to systematic efforts to weaken them and partly due to internal corruption, unions have taken a huge hit. And it hasn’t been good for the workers of America. Everything from collective bargaining power to safety regulations, legitimate wage increases to the most basic issues of human dignity, have been increasingly diminished. Over the last forty years, worsening exploitation of America’s working class has become standard operating procedure for American capitalism.

The pendulum was bound to swing, because people will only take that kind of thing for so long. All over the country, Americans who have been striving for years to reinvigorate the labor movement finally got the good news they’ve been waiting for. In the words of my guest Max Alvarez, “David didn’t just beat Goliath; he kicked his butt.” Employees at Amazon, long known to be working under conditions that have left many people flabbergasted, voted to unionize. And the rest will be history.

There are many moving pieces to this story, and I was fortunate enough to have Real New Network editor-in-chief and labor historian Max Alvarez sit down to talk with me about the history of the labor movement, where things are now, and how this new chapter in its history will affect our country going forward.

Organizer Christian Smalls. Photo by Andrea Renault

Read, listen to and watch Max Alvarez's work at The Real News Network

Follow Max on Twitter: @maximillian_alv

Max's book "The Work of Living" will be released by OR books this June

Marianne:

Welcome everybody. I'm really excited about the program tonight because I get to talk to one of my favorite people. His name is Maxmillian Alvarez, and he is the Editor in Chief of The Real News Network in Baltimore. He is also the author of a book that will be published in June that's called, The Work of Living: Working People Talk about their Lives and the Year the World Broke, which is a collection of interviews with workers conducted during the height of the COVID 19 pandemic. His work has been featured in a range of outlets, including The Nation, In These Times, Boston Review, and the Baffler. Also you can find Max on Twitter @maxmillian_alv. Max Alvarez, thank you so much for being here.

Max Alvarez:

Hey Maryanne, thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here.

Marianne:

Right back at you. Well, you and I were talking before about what a serendipitous moment this is. I wanted to talk to you about the general arc of the labor movement in the United States. One of the things that I so appreciate about you and the work you do is that you are a big picture person. And I think that part of the problems we have in America today is, how many people aren't quite connecting the dots? So you talk very specifically about the plight of working people in the United States, particularly their betrayal by the economic and political structures of our day. But you give a historical context that I know for me always makes them much easier to understand. And I think a historical perspective is very empowering. Now, it just so happens that we are talking after really a moment that I think you'll agree with me will go down in the history books.

And that is the unionization of the Amazon JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island and movement that led by Christian smalls, his having raised what 120, $140,000 on a GoFundMe page, the union busting, I think it's fair to say the absolute union busting efforts of Amazon trying to make that happen swelled up to greater than $4 million, but it happened. And this is a huge, not only in terms of workers at Amazon, but really workers across the country and the whole revitalization, reinvigoration of the labor movement. So I'd love to throw it over to you. I'm someone who remembers a time when I was younger, when the labor movement was a very, very big deal and a very significant factor politically, I remember how all of that was just decimated by certain powers that be. So it's wonderful to see this reinvigoration, but particularly with what's happening now, what lies ahead?

Marianne:

So I want to throw it back over to you. I'd love to hear your take as you see it that you want people to know about the labor movement about what's happening now, and also... What I also very much appreciate about you, you totally see how this fits into the larger political picture in the United States. So go for it Max, tell me what you got.

Max Alvarez:

Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. And I'm honored and humbled and I'll do my best. We'll start where you started, I mean, we have to, first of all, acknowledge and just shout out the incredible historic victory of the Amazon labor union at the JFk8 warehouse in Staten Island. You're right. As I was a historian in a past life and my dissertation advisors made me read just a whole lot of labor history in the US, in Mexico, in Europe. And this is one of those events that will have an entire chapter, I think because of how momentous it is, how momentous it could potentially be, because in a lot of ways, the significance of this will depend on what happens next. I think that's where, like you were saying, we got to look at both the particular circumstances and how it fits into the broader sweep of the labor movement in this country and beyond.

Max Alvarez:

And so I think in terms of what this could mean, it's very hard to say, but when we're looking for historical comparisons, there really isn't anything in recent memory that we can compare this to. And I'll explain to viewers and listeners in a minute why I say that, but you have to... That's not to say that this is unprecedented in American history. In fact, this is, in many ways, how the labor movement was born, the organized labor movement in this country. Because in labor's biggest decade in many ways, which was the 1930s and up until the mid 1940s, we got to remember, this was an incredibly important and contentious period in American history where a great depression had absolutely decimated the country, entire livelihoods were wiped away, entire workforces and crops were failed. This was a very bleak time in this country's history, and working people had already been taking it on the chin for quite some time.

We were still dealing with child labor, we were still dealing with rampant discrimination and racism and all forms of discrimination in and outside of the workplace. We were still dealing with brutal working conditions that broke workers' bodies and a lot of people died on the job. It was not a great time, like in that regard, but in that crucible, the struggle of labor was really revived in a way and really grew in a way that we had never seen up until that point in this country. It didn't all happen at once, it started with incredible victories like these, that themselves started with single conversations between coworkers passing a pamphlet or a leaflet out and talking about it with your coworkers, learning about how you could do something about the conditions that you were working in, the lot that you had in life.

And so when I think about the precedent, in terms of the significance of what this could mean move going forward, I think back to those early years in the 1930s, mainly like... We can talk a little bit about that history if you want in a bit, but in 1933 FDR, passed the or push the National Industrial Recovery Act, which in principle guaranteed union's right to exist. So that was a game changer, but it did not really give the government much teeth to enforce that on the shop floor, bosses floated the law left and right, they still broke strikes, they still surveilled and tortured and even killed workers and organizers. So it really wasn't until, I think it was around 1935, when in fact the first new deal was overturned by the Supreme Court.

And then FDR pushed through the second new deal, which included the National Labor Relations Act, the Wagner Act, that gave unions more teeth, that gave the federal government more enforcement power. And so you saw workers using this and responding to this. And so the reason I bring that up right now is because, it's in that crucible of the 30s where you see examples like what we just saw at Amazon in Staten Island. Because again, like, so... I mentioned the co layers between these two periods in history of what this victory could mean for the rest of the labor movement, but let's look closely at what just happened at JFK. I mean, because this is not just David and Goliath, this is David whooping Goliath's, but when no one gave David a chance, and that's really not underselling it.

Marianne:

Before you go there, I want to dig a little deeper into some very significant things you pointed out, you were talking about the desperation that people felt in the 20s and 30s. And that was of course coming out of the first Gilded Age, people’s despair, people's frustration, people's anger. And I thought it was very interesting that you pointed to a parallel between the anger that people were feeling then at the systemic injustices to the anger that people are feeling now, the feeling of, we're just not going to take it anymore, which of course is a result of the second Gilded Age.

The other thing that was so interesting about what you just said was you were talking about Roosevelt establishing the labor relations board, the National Labor Relations Board. That's exactly what Amazon is reacting to right now by saying that the National Labor Relations Board unfairly was prejudiced on the side of the unionizing forces in this case. So it's so interesting how the very piece of legislation that Roosevelt passed is the one that's at the core of the struggle today. Just wrapping up that parallelism and that reiteration of history, I think that context is important. So having said that, let's go on to what you were saying about what's happening today.

Share

Max Alvarez:

Well, and just a quickly piggyback on that point, I was actually... I tweeted about this because I couldn't sit on the sidelines because as soon as the news broke of the Amazon union victory in Staten Island, you had a whole... The ruling class and it's acolytes are crapping in their pants right now. I mean like-

Marianne:

Well, as you said, it's not just David and Goliath, it's David kicking Goliath's butt, although Goliath has a few more errors in his quiver, and I'm afraid which we need to hear about also, but please go on.

Max Alvarez:

Absolutely. Yeah. So we'll definitely talk about... This is not a moment to sit on our laurels, Amazon is not going to take this quietly. There are a lot of things that they can and most likely will do. And so yeah, we'll talk about that in a bit, but as soon as the news broke about this, the thing that cracked me up is I saw Jim Kramer, our old friend, [crosstalk 00:10:28].

Marianne:

Yeah. Your good friend, Jim Kramer.

Max Alvarez:

He was going nuts. And he was saying like, this is going to be devastating, the union is going to dictate everything.

Marianne:

You can't tell people when to stay late and-

Max Alvarez:

Yeah. It's going to say like, it's going to dictate the hours, it's going to take that power away from the bosses. And the funny thing is, I went back and I found a book about labor history, where you actually had quotes capitalists in the 1930s saying almost verbatim what Jim Kramer was whining about. They were saying, suddenly our ability to dictate everything to our workers, to treat our workers like subhuman widgets, and we would tell them like their hours, their wages, their working conditions, and they wouldn't have a damn thing to say about it, suddenly that was put into question and the ruling class flipped out and that's what's happening now. And that's again, I think a good thing because working people have been treated with such callous disregard, they've been... Their humanity has not been recognized by their employers, let alone their politicians and so on and so forth.

Max Alvarez:

In a lot of ways, I always see the labor movement as human beings collectively asserting their humanity, their dignity, their rights, they are demanding respect, we are demanding respect. And that is what we really saw in the 1930s, that's what we've seen happen this past week at Amazon. Because as you mentioned, so Christian Smalls was fired two years ago after protesting Amazon COVID safety policies. And then Amazon basically made up, it feels very made up, but they essentially said that Christian himself somehow violated some policy and then they fired him. And then we actually found leaked documents through journalists who uncovered them that, Amazon really wanted to go after Chris. They really wanted to paint him as the corrupt face of the unionization effort, that he was not smart or articulate, that he was a grifter. They wanted to paint Chris in these negative lights.

And that really played... That really backfired as the union campaign gains steam. Let's go back to those two years ago, COVID was settling in, the world had been turned upside down, a man at a warehouse where 8,000 workers are, it's a truly massive facility, gets fired and any one of us probably would've just said, "Okay, well I guess I got to go find work somewhere else. It's a pandemic, a lot of people are losing their jobs, so maybe the only thing that I have is to go do gig work or something like that." When a lot of people lost their jobs in those early days of the pandemic, you actually saw companies, especially like Instacart, pushed a hire hundreds of thousands of new people, because they knew that, A, lot of people had lost their jobs, and B, a lot of people wanted to order their food from home. So they very much tried to capitalize on what was happening.

When Christian Smalls was in that position, the odds of eventually doing what the Amazon Labor Union did were a billion to one, it must have seemed, because not only because of those circumstances, but because of all the ways that it's actually very, very hard to unionize your workplace in this country in general, to say nothing of trying to unionize the second largest private employer in the country, and one of the most powerful corporations in the entire world. That's what I mean when I say David kind of taking on Goliath. What happened? From there, I think the following year, the biggest story was Bessemer, the Amazon union campaign in Alabama. I traveled to Bessemer this time last year, or little bit before for, to report on that union drive, where workers were voting on whether or not to unionize with the retail wholesale and department store union.

This was also a massive fulfillment center with thousands and thousands of workers. And it was an international news story. And Chris Smalls himself, along with some other folks from New York, went down to Bessemer. They wanted to learn what was going on there and see if it would translate to their warehouse in Staten Island. We know that, that first union vote was ultimately defeated by quite a large margin, but then the National Labor Relations Board, again, the product of the 1930s and the new deal, determined that Amazon had legally tampered with the election, pointing, specifically, to Amazon installing a United States postal service mailbox right in front of its front doors. That warehouse, I've been there. It's like five or three football fields stacked on top of each other and it's got one main entrance because they want to surveil people. They want people to come through and come out of one spot. T

Max Alvarez:

hey actually give spot checks to people to make sure that they're not stealing any of the merchandise. We know that surveillance is a huge part of what Amazon does, not just on the consumer facing side, but it very much applies that to its workers. And so Amazon actually had the postal service install, this mailbox and encouraged workers to submit their ballots there, where the company could essentially see them. They got another round in an election, which is actually unfolding right now, the union election in Bessemer, the pro-union votes are about a 100 votes down, but there are over 400 ballots that have been challenged that could very much swing the election one way or the other. But essentially you had a one type of unionization campaign there in Bessemer, you had an already established union, the RWDSU, that had field organizers, Mid-South council down there in Birmingham, they had their playbook for how to do this.

The folks there have unionized a lot of important workplaces in the Alabama area. If you go there and talk to them, you'll see records of all their important wins and all the ways that they serve workers, not just at Amazon, but in that entire area. But they had... As an established union, they have a certain sort of way of trying to... When workers approach the RWDSU saying, we want to try to unionize, the union says, okay, let's talk. Let's talk about where workers are, what needs to be done, let's build a campaign, so on and so forth. That was not what Christian Small's, Derek Palmer, all of the folks who ended up being part of this worker organizing committee at Amazon labor union had, they did have folks from other unions, like Seth Goldstein from the OPEU helping out. They had a lot of folks kind of...

Max Alvarez:

They sought out a lot of council from organizers and stuff like that, which was really important, but they really were... This is, again, speaking to just how incredible this victory was, not only were they going up against a company as powerful as Amazon that was paying union busting consultants and using every tool in its toolbox to try to discourage workers from voting for a union, but they were essentially building a union while they were doing it-

.. From the ground up, and they did it. If you read folks like Louis Feliz Leon @labornotes. If you read folks like Lauren Kaori Gurley at VICE, they will detail for you how the workers actually grassroots organize, they formed worker to worker committees, they talked to folks, they posted up at the bus stop outside of that massive warehouse. They spent 12 hours working in the warehouse, and then they spent eight, 10 hours outside trying to organize folks or organizing in the break rooms. It was a real worker led movement. And that actually made it very hard for Amazon to use its typical union busting playbook. This is the last thing I'll say and I'll shut up.

When you were in Bessemer, this is the thing about the union busting consultants is they're paid so much, but they don't actually do very much. They're very lazy at their jobs because they just recycle the same talking points at any unionization effort and in any workplace around the country, they say, oh, the union is a outside third party that's going to get in between you and management. So if you are in Bessemer, if you are talking to union organizers who don't work at the plant, that might seep into your brain, again, it's not true, but they play on that ignorance that we all have when it comes to unions. But in New York, they couldn't say that. They couldn't say the union is an outside third party, they say, "No, it's us." Like there is no other outside union. It's just literally the workers here.

Share TRANSFORM with Marianne Williamson

Max Alvarez:

And then workers started to actually call out the union busters, the managers in the captive audience meetings, they would flu them, they would respond to their talking points, and then eventually they started kicking people out of these meetings because they weren't going the way that they wanted. So in a way, I almost feel like what made Amazon Labor Union an underdog story in that, they really only had the worker organizing committee, they really only had folks that they could organize on the shop floor with some kind of volunteer help from the outside, but they did not have an institutional union infrastructure supporting them, that actually may have been a weak spot for Amazon, because it couldn't tarnish the union the way that it normally is able to. And because the workers and organizers were there, they clearly cared about their fellow workers, and Amazon just kept firing people and punishing people. It just really turned more workers against Amazon and more in favor of the union. So in fact, what many would see as their weakness became their strength.

Marianne:

Well, it's a little bit of you can't use the master's tools to tear down the master's house - they didn't have the master's tools. I would assume that some of what happened at Bessemer had a psychological effect on the people at Staten Island, they saw what happened. I was curious, and you answered it a little bit what makes anybody vote against unionizing in a situation like that? So you said that they tell workers that, if you vote for a union you will have less access to management. What is the argument on behalf of Amazon corporate? What is the argument that they're presenting to workers for as a reason why unionization would be bad for them?

Max Alvarez:

So the first is, it's good cop, bad cop. So the good cop side. Is they try to stress all the ways that your company can take better care of you than a union could. What Amazon in Bessemer would always say is, well, we pay better than anyone else in Bessemer, which in some lights is true. Bessemer, when I was down there, had twice the rate of the national poverty, twice the national poverty rate in Bessemer. Bessemer is a de-industrialized majority black town. The very site that the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer currently sits on, used to be a steel worker's union shop. And like so many other parts of this country, the economic heart of that town was ripped out, de-industrialization had happened. There is a lot of poverty there.

And so a 15-ish dollar an hour warehouse job is going to seem pretty nice. But as the RWDSU and workers at Amazon pointed out, unionized workers in the greater Birmingham area, actually made around $2 more than what Amazon was paying. So that was one way that you could counter that sort of talking point. They would also say like, you have an opportunity for advancement here and you can lock in these great benefits. The fine print there is that, Amazon, as we know, it treats its workers like machines, worse than machines, the machines as people... They said, actually get treated better than the human beings. I guess that's one thing, just a parenthetical, is that, even after the first union defeat in Bessemer, that's not like all the issues that we in the media and that were workers there were raising about the working conditions that Amazon went away. They didn't go away.

Max Alvarez:

I mean, we know all the horror stories of Amazon workers pulling these long hours, doing grueling work, essentially only having enough energy to go home, eat something, fall asleep on their couch, go back the next day to do it again. I had workers tell me, I sit in my car before my shift dreading going in, because I don't know if I can do it anymore, because human bodies break, and Amazon knows that, which is why Amazon... It's part of Amazon's business model to have a high turnover rate. There are actually a lot of Amazon facilities where the turnover rate is 150%. What that means for people watching and listening is that, it's like trying to organize a bathtub where you have a faucet pouring new workers in and a drain with workers coming out. 150% of those workers, on average, are not going to be there within a year, because Amazon pushes people so hard that they don't actually stay at the job long enough to recoup those benefits that Amazon touts. So that's some of the good cop stuff.

The other one, like you mentioned is they say, oh, now without a union, you could come to management if you have an issue, we'll work it out here. And what workers will say is like, well, we can't do that now, you don't listen to us. You tell us to go F ourselves. Then there's the bad cop. There's the scaring people into what a union could mean if they bring it in, because let's be real, I mean union density in this country is at its lowest point ever since the 1930s. The new numbers came out earlier this year, I think in January, we're barely hovering above 10% union density nationally, which is the percentage of workers in the American workforce who are unionized. And this is the result of decades of war on labor. It is also the result of larger forces like de-industrialization, political, economic changes.

There are also ways that unions themselves have been complicit in their own downfall. I think that gets overplayed, but we can't pretend it isn't part of the story. And I think one of the other exciting parts about this moment is that you have more rank and filed democracy from workers who want to revive their unions, want to rebuild power in their unions, want to bring more people into their unions and fix the problems that people know and have heard about with unions. The scaring tactic from the union busters about what a union will mean, when I mentioned the union density part, I mentioned that because most people don't know what it's like to work in a unionized workplace.

Max Alvarez:

The only time I ever worked at a unionized workplace was as a graduate student, because, shout out to GEO at the university of Michigan. But when I was working at restaurants, when I was working in warehouses, in factories, when I was a pizza delivery driver, I was not part of a union. I had no idea what being part of a union was. I had no idea what it meant for someone to have my back at work. And that is ultimately what being in a union means. It's not a bureaucracy, it's not some scary third party, unionizing your workplace means that, you and your coworkers have each other's backs, and that you are not at the beck and call of your boss, that you actually have some power to say, no, you have some power to bargain over working conditions, your wages and so on and so forth.

But a lot of people don't know that. And when you live in a place like Bessemer, that has been economically devastated, the fear of what could happen, because the union busting consultants are always going to say, you could get a contract where you earn more, you could earn the same, or you could earn less, that... Every union buster says this all the time, and workers are clueing into that. They're just like, well, why... That doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense. Why would it... Again, it's playing on that fear of the unknown, and they're to say, oh, like, you have to go through the union for everything, you're not going to be able to talk to us. There are even other horrible example, like I covered a "progressive company" a vegan company called No Evil Foods that we actually got workers who leaked audio from union busting meetings that I ran on my show, Working People.

Max Alvarez:

And then I interviewed some of the workers from No Evil Foods in North Carolina, No Evil Foods busted their union drive as well, but they tried to use progressive talking points to do so. They tried to say, oh, the... Because the workers there wanted to unionize with the UFCW, the United Food and Commercial Workers who represent packing workers. And so since this was a vegan plant, they manufactured plant-based meat. The bosses said, oh, well, you don't want to be affiliated with a union that represents workers in the meat packing industry, because that goes against our values. Or they would say, the union may make you work with a sexual abuser because that person is protected by the union and so on and so forth. So there are a lot of different ways that they try to spin this, but it all really plays on people's ignorance of what having a union in their workplace means.

Marianne:

So Amazon really is at war with the NLRRB on two fronts now, one having to do with the pushback that they received on the Bessemer situation. And secondly, the fact that they're trying to make it about the NLRB, what just happened on Staten Island? Where do you see this going now in terms of Amazon's response to what's happening, where things will go right now? I know that they already received their first letter from the newly formed union they'd like to have a meeting as soon as possible. Don't you wish you could just be a fly on the wall when a letter like that was opened? What do you think they're going to do now, Max?

Max Alvarez:

I do wish I could have been a fly on the wall, because... I mean, again, I love the scrappiness here. And just to pick up on that point by way of answering your question, one thing that made me very uncomfortable after the loss in Bessemer this time last year was, there was a lot of armchair quarterbacking in the wake of the Bessemer defeat. There were a lot of people pointing fingers, there were a lot of people saying, oh, the media over hype this, and we shouldn't have gotten our hopes up, because now those hopes are dashed and everyone is going to get demoralized, or people who had never set foot in Bessemer were pointing the fingers at the RWDSU Mid-South council, who... I mean like in just parenthesis, these people are dedicated organizers. They are dedicated to lifting up their fellow workers to protecting them, going to the [inaudible 00:30:37] for them. Yeah. They lost this election. There are things that they did that they have tried to correct in the-

Max Alvarez:

... Next election, but anyone who is trying to pretend that these folks and the workers at the Amazon warehouse weren't dedicated to what they're doing and didn't have reasons for doing what they're doing is really kidding themselves and needs to take a long, hard look at why they feel the need to armchair quarterback instead of recognizing that we are in a dog fight, we are up against very huge and austere and imposing odds. And we need to encourage creativity, we need to think outside the box, which is exactly what the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island did.

Max Alvarez:

People we're constantly pointing to like, real amazing, impressive storied organizers like Jane MClevy and saying like, well, they didn't follow her script to the letter, they didn't go knocking on doors in the Bessemer election and that's why they failed. Well, one thing that folks in Staten Island have been saying is like, well, we tried that. We tried knocking on doors and it turn people off, so we stop doing it. So there's no one way to make this work. And I think that right now we need to learn as much as we can about how Amazon Labor Union achieve this incredible victory and stop pretending like there is a one size fits all solution to this because there is not. Now, the reason I mentioned that is because there are also... We have not seen all the things that the ruling class is going to throw at us, not by a long shot.

And Amazon like has a lot of other weapons that it can pull out, it could even go nuclear. And when I say nuclear, the nuclear option is to close the plant or close the warehouse.

Now, they legally cannot do that in a retaliation of unionization drive.

Marianne:

Okay.

Max Alvarez:

But the way that corporations get around that all the time is they fabricate some other reason for why it was necessary and as a cost cutting measure, something like that. Louis Feliz Leon and Lauren Gurley actually recently told me on my podcast that, before that JFK8 warehouse was there, the majority of packages that were delivered to New York City were coming from Kentucky. So Amazon has the infrastructure to reroute those packages to other facilities in the area, or even farther away from the area. And if it wants to go nuclear and send a message that we will shut down an 8,000 plus person facility, if you try to unionize, we're kind of all... What are we going to do about that?

Max Alvarez:

I mean, we can go through the legal challenges of the NLRB, but it's going to send a very clear message. Now, one thing that's really important about the New York struggle is that, in that same facility, next to JFK8, there's another facility that is about to vote on whether or not to unionize with the Amazon Labor Union. And this is the State Island LDJ5, it's a much smaller facility, but, at least from what we're hearing, and I think, especially after the victory at JFK, I think workers here, like at this other facility may have a little more pep in their step. So if they unionize as well, that takes away Amazon's bargaining chip because it's not contained to just one warehouse.

Marianne:

Well also-

Max Alvarez:

Oh, go ahead.

Marianne:

Well, I think that surely they know this is such a huge national story. The public would be very, very upset. I mean, if the public sees Amazon respond to this by shutting down the warehouse, they would have a real problem on their hands in terms of public opinion.

Max Alvarez:

I think they would. I think that's... Again, it's still not out of the realm of possibility, but like you said, they would be walking into a world of crap because I think then you'd see more politicians getting involved, you'd see people really calling BS on whatever justification they came to for closing this plant. But it has happened, it does happen. It happened at a dollar general that unionized recently. But the other thing, so if they don't go nuclear, the more common option is they can delay, they can challenge, like you said, they're already trying to basically impune the power of the NLRB in the first place to do what it does. So they're trying to kind of flip over the chess board and find... They're going to thrash, they're going to swing their arms, they're going to try to land whatever punches they can.

Max Alvarez:

But when it comes to negotiate, this is what companies and employers all across the board, not just in places like Amazon do is they delay. I just was down in DC for the real news interviewing non-tenure track faculty at the historic HBCU Howard University. One of the most storied higher ed institutions in the country built after the Civil War. It has an incredible mission, incredible student body, incredible faculty, the non-tenure track faculty had been trying for almost four years to negotiate their first contract with the university administration after they voted to unionize in 2018. And it took non-tenure track faculty saying that they were going to go on strike to get this deal. And that was what finally got the university administration to propose a tentative agreement that the union voted on, but it took almost four years. And so the average contract after unionization vote, takes over a year and some of them gone for two, three, four years. So that's another way is that you can sap that energy by delaying, by demoralizing.

Marianne:

Yeah. I have some questions for you here. First of all, I want to go back a little, because like I said, I remember a time when unions were much bigger factor and I think they will be again now. I think even the companies that you mentioned just now would have a harder time because it's now become a story again, it's hot and sexy again to even be talking about labor unions which it wasn't for a while. What was the main weapon against it that was used to push it to the side? And by the way, when you were talking about labor density and you were saying it's 10% now, at its height, what was it?

Max Alvarez:

I mean at its height, I mean, I would say we were looking at between 30 and 40%.

Marianne:

Mm-hmm. That's, well, I felt when I was growing up. So what years would that have been?

Max Alvarez:

So you had a lot of union density in like the 50s and 60s.

Marianne:

Okay. When did the great attack begin, 70s, 80s?

Max Alvarez:

It is a really interesting question and I will encourage folks to read as much as they can about this, because I think one of the beautiful things about the conversation that we're having here is that, even in Staten Island, and not just there, one of the motivating factors was that people were reading about labor history. You even see organizers with the Amazon Labor Union, they said that one of their main manuals was an organizing manual from the 30s. In that crucible of the 30s, where again, you didn't have the organized institutional labor movement, you had workers who were pissed and who were trying to use whatever openings that were provided by federal policy and so on and so forth to demand that their employers recognize their unions.

Max Alvarez:

So this is where you add things like the Flint and Detroit sit down strikes. People forget, those were people striking to form a union in the one of the most powerful anti-union companies in the country. The auto industry was like the white whale of the labor movement and workers actually occupied plants for days and weeks and even... It was really only when the governor of Michigan refused to call in troops to do what had been done in a lot of other labor struggles, which was shot and kill and maime-

Marianne:

Yeah. Henry Ford.

Max Alvarez:

... Workers. It was only then that the auto companies were like, okay, fine, we'll come to the table, we'll sit down and we'll talk about recognizing your union and meeting your demand. So on and so forth.

Marianne:

This is true, not only in terms of labor, but in terms of so many other struggles for social justice, people need to read American history. There's so much to be learned from history. There is so much to be learned about, number one, this is not the first time this has happened. Number two, don't just look at the times in the past when the problem appeared, look also at the times in the past when the problem solvers appeared and how did they do it. That's true not only in terms of labor, but in terms of so many other things. Really makes me have happy to think of a bunch of millennials sitting there reading a labor pamphlet from the 1930s, because that's exactly the kind of thing that needs to happen. So what was it? Was the Koch brothers. I would think the Powell memo, the whole Koch brothers is that when it all started, this attack on labor, 1970s, 1980s?

Max Alvarez:

I'm channeling my historian advisors would I say was a number of things, because in many ways, the gains that labor made in from 1933, 35 to the mid 40, this was an incredible moment as we've already said. The amount of workers' struggles happening across the country and sectors all across the board was immense. The number of strikes was incredible, the number of unions that were cropping up, the split of the... The creation of the CIO splitting from the AFL, because the AFL was the American Federation of Labor was more focused on craft unionism whereas the CIO unions wanted to unionize the mass industrial workforce, but you had this divide inherent in the labor movement of, we're the specialized workers, we deserve protection more than the unwashed masses who just go into these factories and do like repetitive motions all day. So you had the intense years where labor made a lot of gains. The moment that the economy started to backslide and more right wingers, the [inaudible 00:41:37], Republicans came in, they took aim at labor-

Max Alvarez:

... In the 1940s. And that is where Taft-Hartley comes from. And so Taft-Hartley, I think is almost like the... It's like the poison pill that was put inside the labor movement that has really... To this day, a lot of the things that we're talking about, like why it's so hard to unionize your workplace, why folks in Bessemer have had such a rough time, why Christian Smalls in the Amazon Labor Union were fighting such an uphill battle. A lot of that goes back to Taft-Hartley. Because thing that you see in the 1930s, another reason labor had so much power is because workers could support one another in more robust ways than they are legally allowed to today.

Max Alvarez:

So like the thing that I think is probably the most important tool that the ruling class took away from the labor movement with the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, was, it made it illegal to do sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts. This is something that you saw in those years, in the 1930s and early 40s, where if you had one workplace struggle, where workers were saying, we're going to go on strike, then you saw other workers in around the same area saying, we're going to strike with you, we think this is wrong... Screw it, we're going to launch a general strike. There were general strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo, San Francisco, even before that, there were general strikes in Seattle in like 1919. This was workers collectively saying, we are going to use labor's greatest power, which is withholding our labor from the economy until our demands are met and we're going to do it in concert with one another. This gave workers a lot of power that we do not currently have because Taft-Hartley made that illegal. So I think that-

Marianne:

Tell people basically, what are the basic pillars of Taft-Hartley.

Max Alvarez:

Well, it's a grab bag of awful stuff. Like I said, it wiped away solidarity strikes, secondary strikes and it even... That's not to say that it wrote these things out of history, it just meant that, if you wanted to rely on the national labor relations board to enforce labor law, but you committed one of these offenses, you were on your own.

Max Alvarez:

Same thing with a wildcat strike, a wildcat strike, like many that we saw in the 30s and 40s are strikes that are called by the rank and file, but have not been approved by the union leadership.

And so Taft-Hartley basically said that like, no wildcat strike can get the kind of treatment at and protection that official strike would, but it did more than that. It abolished the closed shop policy where an employer has to hire union workers and it really opened the door for right to work, which has been the bane of-

Marianne:

Devastating.

Max Alvarez:

... Many unions existence in states across the country, which essentially... I'm skating over a lot of this, but right to work has been very devastating, because what it does is it essentially makes it illegal for unions to automatically deduct dues from your paycheck even if you yourself are in a unionized shop and you benefit from the negotiations that the labor union does on your behalf. And so this is essentially a way to gut unions and bleed them dry of the money that they need to be able to represent their fellow workers adequately.

Marianne:

I want to go back a little bit, just give a shout to a great woman in American history, Francis Perkins, a lot of the establishment of the New Deal pro labor forces in the FDR administration was because of Francis Perkins and I think too many people don't know about the great work that she did. When you just started talking about the introduction of neoliberalism, the trade agreements, and so forth, that's why I want to ask you about the relationship between labor and the Democratic party, because the Democratic party prior to that time, given the fact that FDR was a Democrat, the new deal social contract, the Democrats were not only in word, but in action, pretty solidly on this side of labor. With Bill Clinton, that starts to change with the Democratic Leadership Council, the embrace of neoliberalism. Is that where the crack begin to emerge between the Democratic party and labor and where does that stand now?

Max Alvarez:

Yeah. I mean, it's a really sad story. And I feel like this is like... It's very much something that historians are still debating, like where did that start? Why did it happen? Thomas Frank, who founded the Baffler, where I got my start has his thesis in his book, Listen Liberal about how the Democrats, politically, decided that organized labor did not represent the constituency that they felt their future depended on. In the 90s, they really felt that the future was this new professional class of suburban dwelling consultant level, well educated electorate that they put all their chips on. It's a double helix kind of story, because one side of this story is the institutional abandonment of the labor movement as a powerful political force that either party felt they needed to listen to, but you can't just ignore a lion standing outside your door, you have to weaken it, you have to make it like a very hurt animal and that is what happens.

Max Alvarez:

So what we call neoliberalism, in many ways, was the war on labor. It was the disciplining of a labor movement that had gotten too uppity in the decades past. Now, because we had economic justifications for doing that, we had the economic turmoil of the set 70s and 80s that was very much used to point the finger at labor. And to say, it's because the unions are demanding too much that the poor businesses can't keep up with international competition coming from Germany and Japan and so on and so forth.

Marianne:

Even though in Germany they treat them so much better.

Max Alvarez:

Yeah. So neoliberalism was as much a project of smashing organized labor power as it was sort of restructuring the whole political economy in a way that bottomed out the economic conditions upon which the organized labor movement in this country had built itself up. And so that's where you get towns like Flint, unfortunately, and then you also... It's not like all the unionized workforces disappeared because all of the industrial manufacturing left, the other part of that story is this sort of backslide of organized labor. Starting in many ways with the kind of Chrysler bailout, I think that was in 1979. And a reason that is important is because, a lot of the things that the strikes of the past year were ostensibly about.

Max Alvarez:

Kind of go back to that period, when Chrysler was bailed out, when the government stepped in and it said, we're going to keep you afloat, but you have to cut labor costs, you have to institute a two tier employment system so that you can't afford to hire these well paid union workers, you have to create a lower tier of underpaid, under protected workers with fewer benefits. And so then the next half century was basically companies always threatening to have to move or have to close down or have to downsize if the unions or workers, in general, because a lot of workers were non-unionized, if workers in general didn't take less. We were no longer bargaining, we were begging, this is what a lot of organization say.

Marianne:

And you were the enemy of American economic good if you didn't comply.

Max Alvarez:

Yeah. You were painted as yeah, the kind of enemy of-

Marianne:

You were the greedy ones! Instead of people talking about the corporate elite being the greedy ones, it was these people trying to gain more benefits and safety and dignity at work. They were the greedy ones! Yeah…

Max Alvarez:

Yeah. I mean, it's all that stuff put together. The last thing I say about Reagan is, Reagan, when he broke the PATCO strike in 1981, which was a hugely significant moment, what was happening also in the UK with Thatcher going to war with the minors and other unions, it shows you that again, the spear of neoliberalism, the tip of the spear of neoliberalism is the war on labor.

Max Alvarez:

So that's an essential part here, but it wasn't just Reagan, it was a cascading effect. So when all these things started to converge and Reagan declared open season on the labor movement, you started to see a lot more employers, especially in the private sector, say, we're going to do that, if workers want to strike, we're going to fire them all, we're going to replace them all.

Marianne:

Yeah. So the whole thing started with the Republican, but no Democrats stopped it?

Max Alvarez:

Yeah. Democrats gave up.

Marianne:

Well, clearly the [pendelum ] now seems to be swinging back. As you said, you can't overestimate the importance and the excitement that people feel about what just happened at the JFK Amazon warehouse. I think that this will have a cascading effect. I think whether it has to do with what happens in Bessemer now or the other Amazon facilities. And I was going to ask, you've got John Deere, you've got Nabisco, you've got Kellogg, do you see this just really, with tentacles, that just create more enthusiasm, passion, excitement, and success, and for the labor movement nationally now, not just at Amazon?

Max Alvarez:

I do. I always joke now that I'm the editor in chief here at The Real News, the past five years or so have taught me to be exceedingly humble when it comes to making political predictions. None of us thought Trump would be president, none of us expected a pandemic would happen.

Max Alvarez:

There are a lot of things that have happened that again, have made me a little hesitant to say, I know exactly where things are going to go, but what I can say is that, a lot of the anger, a lot of the motivation, a lot of the solidarity, a lot of the feelings that we deserve more, exist well beyond the JFK8 warehouse and this is-

Marianne:

Well, beyond the labor movement.

Max Alvarez:

Very much so. Very, very much so. And this is what I do for a living, is like my main role at The Real News is I interview workers. And I talked to them about their lives, their jobs, their dreams, their struggles. I did a book of interviews with 10 workers at what was then the height of the COVID 19 pandemic. Interview them at Working People, I interview them here at The Real News. I hear from a lot of folks, everyone is different, everyone's conditions and struggles are different, but there are a lot of connecting points. A lot of things that folks are feeling in common, maybe they don't know how common those feelings are, but that's what makes what we do, I think, one essential part of this much larger picture.

Max Alvarez:

We were calling the strikes that happen in 2021, a strike wave, when a lot of folks in labor were saying, well, let's pump the brakes, this isn't necessarily strike wave. Not just because when you compare it to past strike waves, we were still very much on the low end of strikes that were happening. But also there's something... To become a strike wave means that, there's something sort of self perpetuating about it. It's like at a sports game, if you're at a football game and you see a wave, if 20 different people in different parts of the stands lift their hands up, but they're not doing it in [inaudible 00:54:25] that does not a wave make, you have to have the whole arena building off of each other, coordinating and responding to what other people are doing.

Max Alvarez:

That's what I think we're starting to see happen. We're starting to see more folks look at the other struggles that are happening, look at the other victories and learn from the other losses. Because over the past year, I did talk to a lot of striking workers at Kellogg's, at FritoLay, at... Yeah. Like you said, John Deere Columbia University, John Deir desserts plan in California, a lot of folks in different industries went on strike. A lot of them did say, yeah, we were watching Bessemer, we inspired by Bessemer or they... Now folks are saying, we see what's happening at Starbucks and we are floored.

Max Alvarez:

Because Starbucks and Amazon, again, two private corporation powerhouses in this country are now faced with, not just like one shop that's unionizing, but a full on assault. A full on worker, rank and file revolt, because what's happening at Starbucks is exactly what Amazon does not want to have happen at Amazon.

Marianne:

Yeah.

Max Alvarez:

Because if one person succeeds, then boom, what did we see? We saw like a bunch of other stores say like, we're filing for a union election two. You cannot stop the working class when it is rolling. And they know that and that's why they've tried so hard for so long to kill the labor movement, to turn people against unions, to make workers feel like we don't deserve more than what we get.

Marianne:

I think that the system overplayed its hand, it got too... It hasn't been careful. And over the last few years, there has been so much pent up... Really rage, so much pent up frustration and despair. And I think, especially during COVID, it was made so clear that the system, as it now exists, really doesn't care whether people live or die. I think people saw that, the bankruptcy, the moral bankruptcy of the neoliberal system became so obvious that now this, as they say intersectionality, it doesn't even matter if you're coming from the perspective of labor or you're coming from the perspective of environmental justice, you're coming from the perspective of racial or criminal justice, you see it's all the same monstrous holding people down in order to serve a very few, this sort of reversion to an aristocratic paradigm.

Marianne:

The people instinctively know America is not supposed to be about. And all of the ways in which the system said, no, we'll take care of you. It just simply has over the last few years, not only is it not going to take care of you, it is willing to sacrifice your very life to protect itself.

Max Alvarez:

I think that's-

Marianne:

So this is a very exciting time. And I think anytime someone like a Christian Smalls is able to have this success, it does create a wave because people go, well, maybe it could happen here. And not just maybe it could happen here at this warehouse or in this industry where we could unionize, but all across the political spectrum. That maybe we can break free of the systemic shackling of people where economic opportunities are decreased and diminished to such an extent that people feel almost like, what have I got to lose? And this is like such a wonderful thing because people feel that they can use the tools of something that is legal, that is obviously righteous, but is legal, is part of a great tradition in America. And so to see people reinvigorate and rediscover something that was already there as you well know.

Marianne:

And with people like yourself, Max, you come to explain to people, because I think even in the conversation we've had here tonight, you said a lot of things that people within the labor movement already know, but the people outside the labor movement don't know, they know that what happened was a big deal, but they don't necessarily know the history. They don't know what happened in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s, they don't know the struggles and sacrifices like you said. There were corporate bosses who shot at people who were trying and brought out the police against people who were trying to unionize.

Marianne:

Many of our ancestors struggled and sacrificed [inaudible 00:58:45] for us to have the opportunities for unionization that exist today. But they have been so shut down. I'm old enough to remember when none of us were eating grapes because of Caesar Chavez. My brother worked for Caesar Chavez, and that was the last time that I can remember where the popular imagination was so engaged... And Dolores Huerta…. I mean, we were all so excited and this seems like another moment when we're going to all look at what's happening in labor and go, "Wow, you did it, good on you."

Max Alvarez:

Yeah.

Marianne:

Anything else you want to explain to people before we leave?

Max Alvarez:

Yeah. Just to pick up on that and I really appreciate you, I mean, I'm so grateful to come on the show and love everything that you're doing. And thank you for letting me yak on about labor and labor history for so long. I hope that it was useful to folks who are watching-

Marianne:

It is useful.

Max Alvarez:

... But I just to pick up on that point is, yeah, there's something really beautiful about that history because it's our history. Its like when you learn-

Marianne:

That's right. It's American history.

Max Alvarez:

Yeah. It's like when you learn about your ancestors, the people whose lives and struggles in many ways made you who you are, but you didn't know about it-

Marianne:

That's right.

Max Alvarez:

... Yet until you started to learn it. It's already part of us.

Marianne:

Yeah.

Max Alvarez:

We just have been taught to forget it. And that's why I think folks should read books like Kim Kelly's new book, The Untold History of American Labor that has a million great stories like this. And you'll see that, in fact, this is written all throughout our history. And it's still happening now all around us. And we need to take hold of that history as our friend Harvey JK would say, because like I said, it is ours. It is part of our legacy. It is part of what has made this country what it is, it's part of what's made us what it is.

Max Alvarez:

And I think just to piggyback on one thing you said, Maryanne, there is something really important that has happened, I think, in the minds and hearts of a lot of workers over the course of COVID 19. That's not to say that the strikes that we all saw over the past year just happened because of COVID 19. A lot of folks that I talked to at these places where they were on strike, had worked there for decades. So they put up with a lot, they put up with a financial recession, and cutbacks and all that stuff, but it was really this moment that pushed them over the edge. And I think it's important for us to ask, why? This is essentially the question that I ask in the book of interviews that I did, where I speak in depth to workers, not just about what they faced on the job, but about who they are, where they come from, their life story, what it was like for them going through COVID 19 over the first year of the pandemic, because that stuff really matters.

Max Alvarez:

You need to understand the humanity of our neighbors and our fellow coworkers if you're going to try to understand what the labor movement is, and what it can be, and where it can go, because it's not just unions, it's people, it has always been people. One of the things that's been said on my show that is like always stuck with me was said by the great labor organizer for Kooper Caraway in South Dakota. And he told me, he said, "Look, the labor movement didn't start the first time a group of workers sat down in a hall and called themselves the amalgamated brick layers and what have you. He said from the moment one human being had to serve another to survive, the labor movement was born." And the labor movement, in that sense, is always that struggle for human dignity for the sanctity of human life, for the justice that we know is trampled upon when people's lives are treated with such callous disregard for the sake of profit and control and so on and so forth.

Max Alvarez:

That's what I try to do in... The work that I do is remind people just how valuable we are, all of us, and how much we mean to one another, how much you can look outside. Look at the built world, workers build that, people put their hands on that, people made the world that we all currently enjoy and they all had lives and families and back stories. And that is the stuff that we need to reconnect with if we're going to reconnect with one another. If we're going to build that solidarity that we've forgotten because we've been so alienated from each other, we've become so individualistic, we've lost that sense of connectedness to our fellow workers and our fellow human beings. And I think that, the more that we tell these stories, the more that we share our stories openly and vulnerably, the more that we can actually see that, Every Christmas, our family watches, it's wonderful life.

Max Alvarez:

One of the most favored movies in all of like US cinema. The whole point of that movie is to show you that you cannot measure the impact of one person's life. That all of the little interactions you have, all the acts of kindness, all of the things that you do help make the world that you inhabit, even if you don't recognize how big of an imprint that you've had. We have just lived through two years, we have lost over a million people to COVID 19. To say nothing of the people who have been infected and are now no longer themselves, because they're dealing with long term COVID, so on and so forth. People who got kicked out of their homes because eviction moratorium lapse.

Max Alvarez:

This is another thing that Kooper Caraway said to me, is that, "Workers know that you cannot measure that loss." Workers who have lost coworkers, they have not... It's not just someone who's not coming in and clocking in every day, it is a little league coach, It is a fellow parishioner, it is a husband, a wife, a brother, it is a son. It is people who had so much to give this world who are now just gone. And so I think that a lot of workers now having gone through this COVID 19 pandemic, haven't seen that tremendous loss. They have been told both that they were essential, at the same time that it was made very clear that this system valued their labor as essential, but did not value our lives as essential.

Max Alvarez:

And I think we need to reclaim that. We need to say, no, we matter, we're here, we are on this planet, there's more to life than this. And I think that when it comes down to it, that is the heart and soul of the labor movement, is the, again, the struggle to demand more because there's got to be more to this-

Marianne:

Well-

Max Alvarez:

... And people are doing that everywhere all around us. And I think that is what gives me hope.

Marianne:

Over the last few decades, the Americans have been trained to expect too little. And Americans have been told that if you will take little, we will have a better economy that serves everyone. And of course, this goes counter to the evidence, including if you look at European countries, take someplace like Germany, where the economic expansion goes hand in hand with greater rights for unions, the laws that say workers have to be on corporate boards, et cetera. I was at a rally today about canceling the college loan debt. I don't think the average American realizes that in most advanced countries, college is either free or very, very inexpensive. So I think people are waking up. I think people are waking up, first of all, in terms of understanding their own pain and the pain of their loved ones.

Marianne:

They're waking up in terms of recognizing that in other countries, people are actually treated better, and we're the richest. And also people, I do think have an instinctive understanding, that in America, we're supposed to at least try to have this universality of opportunity. We've never totally embodied it, we've never totally manifest it, but there have been times in our history where at least there was a social agreement and consensus that we were supposed to try. And there's been this aberrational chapter for the last 40 years, where the wool has been pulled over people's eyes, this idea that, if you will become a serf, somehow that will be better for everybody. And the system continues to work, but for fewer and fewer people. If you make it into the club in America, it's a very forgiving place too. You can make mistakes, it takes care of you.

Marianne:

The problem in America today is that, not enough people can get into of the club. The whole idea of upward mobility has become almost like a sick joke, because people get shackled in jobs and situations where they, like you said, the man just says, I go to work, then I go to my car... What people have to go through, the lack of dignity, the lack of upward mobility, the lack of opportunity. It's now so blaringly obvious, and it's a good thing that people aren't going to take it anymore. But it's also a wonderful thing that people have the Christian Smalls to lead them, that people have the Max Alvarez’ to lead them. And all of the people, both those we know, and that we don't know, who are working day in and day out, to help us course-correct. America has become like a car that has been careening off the road and our generation has to do what other generations have done. We’re got to put it back on track.

Marianne:

God bless you, Max, I think you're the best. Anything you want to tell people about where they can find you, I've already talked about your Twitter handle. Anything else you want people to know before we let you go?

Max Alvarez:

Yeah. So again, thank you so much for having me on and for the incredible conversation. I guess the two things that I would just say, well, three, one, yeah, please go check out the book, not because of me, but because these are 10 stories from workers that deserve to be heard-

Marianne:

That book will not be published until June, right?

Max Alvarez:

It's coming out in yeah, June from O-Books.

Marianne:

Okay.

Max Alvarez:

If that's the type of work that is meaningful to you, please check out what we're doing here at The Real News Network, because it's not just my interviews workers, we do a lot of incredible and important work on a week to week basis covering the prison industrial complex, the police industrial complex, the battle for voting rights, the fight to stop climate chaos, covering the war in Ukraine. We do a lot of work that lifts up the voices of the people on the front lines of these struggles and fights for a better world. And we try to reach people in a way that engages them as active stakeholders and defenders of this world, because this is ultimately the only world that we've got.

Max Alvarez:

So please support The Real News, and please fight for this world, because that is, I guess, the culminating point of this entire conversation. The labor movement is important in and of itself, because working people deserve dignity, they deserve more than what they get in this country to say nothing of what they get around the world. But also, because the labor movement is one of a number of avenues that we have to building the broad working class solidarity that we need to save this planet from dying to save the ravages of capitalism and corporate greed and political corruption from literally killing the one home that we all have. The newest IPCC report came out and it is bleak. We can't keep picking this down the road, we need to do something, or we are not going to have much of a planet to live in, let alone a future worth living in.

Max Alvarez:

And so why do I focus on the labor movement? Because people actually have to come together, they have to work together, and they have to do... And when they do that, they can do incredible things like unionize, an Amazon warehouse with 8,000 plus workers. If we can build that sort of grassroot solidarity and come together in that way, link arms and actually fight for something worth fighting for, I think that is the only way that we can actually save this planet. And I really, really encourage all of us to do what we can to make that possible.

Marianne:

Well, as my mother would say, from your mouth to God ears. We'll make it happen, I have faith in us. Generations of Americans have done it before, and we're going to do it in our time. God bless you, darling. Thank you very, very much for being with us. Bye-bye.

Max Alvarez:

Thank you, Marianne.

Marianne:

Okay. Everybody. I think you know now why we're so excited to have Max Alvarez talk to us tonight. This is an extraordinary moment, like Max was saying - this chapter, it will be one for the books, this whole extraordinary thing happening at the JFK8 Amazon warehouse in Staten Island…the unionization drive that was led by Christian Smalls. And I'm sure that Christian would be the first person to say that he himself stands on the shoulders of giants. One of whom is Max Alvarez, the people at Bessemer, the people at Nabisco, the people at Kellogg, and of course the people throughout history, who have taken the hits, who have taken the stands, who have made the struggles and the sacrifices.

Marianne:

In this area, as in so many, let's remember that we're going through very little that other generations have not gone through. History works like a spiral, the stories are just reiterated and it's our turn. We have always been, from the very, very beginning of this country, a bit of a struggle that's built into the cake, it's built into our DNA, between people who are seeking to stand on very enlightened principles, that all men are created equal, and that all men are created by God with the inalienable rights of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And forces within every generation who have no interest in seeing that happen, usually because of their own economic interests and who have proven and still do at times that they will take even violent action to make sure that it doesn't.

Marianne:

Those forces have been pushed back before and they're going to be pushed back now, they are being pushed back now. The better angels of America need to step forward, and I believe that they are. This is a week to celebrate, this is not a week to despair. This is a week to celebrate. And I know that I speak for everybody and giving a lot of thanks and a lot of kudos to Christian Smalls. He gave a lot of us hope. So make sure you check out Maxmillian Alvarez, The Real News Network. And if you see a picket line, don't you dare cross it. Thanks so much. See you later.

4 Comments
TRANSFORM with Marianne Williamson
Podcast
People are ready to go deeper, be more truthful, and face challenges that confront us in more meaningful ways. We need to talk about causes and not just symptoms, face some inconvenient truths, and have more than prepackaged conversations among us. One question weaves through The Marianne Williamson Podcast - how did we get to where we are, and how can we change things now?
Listen on
Substack App
RSS Feed