interviews
Labor and the White House
by Dave Weigel
March 31, 2021
This interview with Dave Weigel, national reporter covering politics for the Washington Post, was conducted and condensed by franknews and Payday Report.
DW | The White House's involvement in the Amazon union drive was a big surprise. I mean, we know where it could have originated, the union talked to the White House; they have kind of an open door with Biden that they didn't have with Trump. We know that Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ campaign chairman, and his group, Perfect Union, got involved. So, there was public pressure.
The fact that the White House and the president released that video was a big deal to people. And, he made this decision to get involved very early on in his presidency. It was within his first 50 days. He decided to do what hadn't been done before and give a message in support of the union. It was a very careful message. The new labor secretary, Marty Walsh, when asked specifically about Amazon, responded in more general tones.
But, no matter what happens, if you are in for a penny, you are in for a pound.
A lot of previous presidents, including Barack Obama, said a lot less about these union drives and, in doing so, limited their own exposure. If the drive didn't work, people didn't say that the president supported something that didn't work. The fact that Biden made a statement, early on, when it wasn't clear how this was going to go, is a real political statement of what they thought was important.
frank | How do you think his background plays a role in this?
He's always leaned in really hard and identified with workers in the same way he's tried to identify with different civil rights movements. Joe Biden has always wanted to be seen as the kind of person who is coming from Scranton, who has lived through the sixties, and who wants to jump to the front of the march if there is a struggle happening.
He frames everything in terms of fairness. He's not as natural as other members of the party in talking about this. When Bernie Sanders talks about this, for example, he talks about greed, he names CEOs, he says nobody deserves that much money, he talks about a maximum wage and how there should be no billionaires at all. Biden doesn't go that far. Biden has never gone after Jeff Bezos. He's never gone after individual heads of companies the way that Sanders does. He does this sort of a "Hey man, these guys are under assault, somebody needs to stick up for them."
That is something that he has always wanted to be part of his brand. Even when he was voting for trade deals like NAFTA as a Senator, he was never really comfortable. He had the same ideological mindset as a lot of the Democrats in the eighties and the nineties. He did it because he saw that that was the way things were moving and he voted strategically. But, the stuff that fired him up was when he could side with workers. It is the same thing with the projects he took on under Obama when he was Vice President.
During the Democratic primary, he didn't get the same amount of labor support that Hillary Clinton did, but, Sanders didn't get it either. There wasn't the same sort of a landslide of labor to get in early and say, this is our candidate. Instead, they were demanding more of the candidates.
I would cover presidential primary events with the Teamsters in Cedar Rapids or the Building Trades in DC and you would kind of look to the level of applause as an indicator. The interesting thing is that at those events Sanders would lay out the things he did and what he wanted to pass. Biden would go on at length about non-compete clauses and about wage theft and things like that. It was less, "I have studied all of the papers on this and I've decided this is my policy," and more of "this seems unfair and I'm against this thing."
I think the Democratic Party is increasingly understanding what labor can mean for them strategically.
Republicans have gotten kind of tangled up on labor. They have done better with union households, but they are basically the party of deregulation still. They've never really moved on the labor part of their messaging. That makes it easier for Biden to compete for these workers. When it comes down to it, Republicans want “right-to-work." Josh Hawley, who branded himself as a working-class candidate, for example, supports a national right-to-work.
Biden was very concerned with winning back more union households. Union workers were saying, “Democrats had the presidency for 16 years. What do they do for us?” Biden didn't have all the answers that labor wanted, but he was making a lot of specific promises about how he was going to act. He talked about infrastructure spending and about how he was going to run the NLRB and how he was going to approach employers. It was less than Sanders did, but that's way more than Democrats had done in the past.
I mean, the McCain/Romney era Republicans had no appeal to the sort of voters who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump. Biden only peeled back maybe 10% of them depending on where you're talking about, but it has made life easier for Democrats.
This fight has in large part been framed in the context of continuing a battle for civil rights. Do you see Biden lean into that messaging?
Biden did not really lean to the racial justice aspect or the civil rights legacy aspect of this labor fight. When the congressional delegation here came down a couple of weeks before the vote, they were much more explicit. Someone like Jamal Bowman or Cori Bush is much more comfortable saying that than Biden. That is the thing about Biden. He basically sets boundaries. He says what his position is and backs off and lets the action happen without his constant commentary. It's very different than Trump in that way too. And that's different than the Sanders position. And it's different than what Warren said her position would be as president.
Can you give us context on how or why you started covering this story?
I started covering the Amazon drive because of the president and members of Congress intervening. I mean, labor decided to get involved months before, but the fact that Democrats were getting involved was new. It has been interesting to monitor their investment in this over other Democratic Party causes.
There's a little bit of intervention from the Democrats, but not, I'd say equal to what Amazon is doing. They are not the advertisements on TV. We all know the Democratic party is kind of involved, but it is not the same political project that I've seen in other places.
There are two stories that kind of were happening at the same time; they have merged, but not completely. One is this labor drive, which is smaller than most drives that have succeeded. It is not overwhelming. You don't see labor signs everywhere you go. But, on the other hand, the level of national involvement is kind of new.
Had Biden said nothing, there would have been a story, but it wouldn't involve the White House, it wouldn't involve the Democratic Party, and it might not involve the PRO Act.
And I think that's going to change because of this.
New interview w/ @daveweigel @PaydayReport
— frank news (@FrankNewsUS) April 6, 2021
"The White House's involvement with the Amazon drive was a big surprise ... Previous presidents, Obama comes to mind, said a lot less. The fact that Biden did that early on is a political statement of what they thought was important." pic.twitter.com/MwYlmqE4xQ
That was a big decision Biden made to be a part of this.
Right. And that political story is interesting. The story here is much more independent. A lot of the people who've come in to help canvas are from smaller groups. You have Black Lives Matter and DSA groups from the area, but you don't have the Democratic Party getting involved in a huge way. I think that is something that people will revisit after the vote.
Should the Democratic Party, like most left parties in the world, be very involved with labor? Should they always take the side of labor?
Most social democratic parties are labor parties and they build up from there. Their coalition includes labor unions. In the British Labour Party, for example, labor has a role in electing the leadership. That is not the case here. That's the conversation I think they're going to start having when this votes over. For example, if there are, and the union says there are, hundreds of people around the country calling them saying, "Hey, I have some questions about what I can do at my fulfillment center in my town," that will be a question for Democrats.
And if Amazon wins, do you get spooked? Amazon has been very punchy in their PR. They might say that a bunch of elite Democrats stood with the union and the workers stood with Amazon. That is very comfortable turf for Amazon to be on, and that leaves a big question open for Democrats. If the union succeeds, throw all of that out the window. I think the lesson that everyone would take in that case would be that if it takes less than a three-minute video from the president to get momentum for something like this, then we should keep doing that. As we talk, I don't know the answer to that question. I think that is something that is going to be answered when the votes are in.
interviews
In Conversation with Harvey Michaels
by Harvey Michael
February 28, 2019
Harvey Michaels is an MIT Sloan Lecturer on the emerging Energy and Climate Solution Economy for the Sloan Sustainability Initiative, in collaboration with the International Urban and Regional Studies Program (SPURS). Harvey also directs the Energy Democracy Project in affiliation with MIT’s Climate CoLab, Media Lab, and Energy Initiative, where he served on the faculty team for The Future of the Grid research study.
frank’s goal is to introduce our audience to new themes and nuanced ways of approaching those themes. In looking at some of your work and collaborators, I see a few names we’ve already featured, which is nice! I would love to start by hearing your definition of energy democracy.
There are a few key definitions for energy democracy. The one I really focus on is that there are opportunities wealthy people and companies have, related to energy, that people who are lower income, and have less personal power, don't have. Part of it is to be able to find ways to open the provision of support in the energy field – and that differs by person, differs by circumstance, and where you are in the world. It opens options you would have if you had personal power to people of less power.
To me, that's the overall definition. Having democratic access to the good things some people have related to energy. That differs depending on the environment you're looking at. I see three particular directions for that. One of them is energy access among people who don't otherwise have it, and providing them with light, accoutrements of comfort, and access to television, where currently they may have no grid at all. Which is what you're really seeing with Shazia.
That, to me, is a distributed task to access. The idea of energy democracy is you don't really need to wait for the government to do it for you, and the utilities to do it for you. In some way, you can do it yourself.
Then, you've got the Isaac Baker view, which is prevalent among more developed, but low income areas in the United States. If you really want solar as a low income person, it's hard to get. You tend to pay more for energy than high income people do. There's less opportunity to get involved in the sophisticated energy management opportunities big businesses and wealthy people have. To get paid when they use energy, and get credits for working around utility system peaks to charge up their Teslas at low-cost kilowatt hours. Things like that are less commonly available to low income people. You spoke with Solstice, you spoke with Isaac Baker, so you've heard some of those messages. Essentially, equitable access to solar, but there's also equitable access to other elements of it.
We touched on two of the three. The first one being access in areas that are off-grid. The second one being access to solar and low-cost kilowatt hours, and other benefits by people who are low income but on grid. Then, there's a third one, which is the original use of the term energy democracy, which is that there's some community management of the energy system that's focused on community values, local jobs, and more equitable treatment of people in the community.
Rural neighborhoods in Puerto Rico are now creating their own energy systems, and the National Rural Electrical Cooperative Association, which covers a lot of the United States, has actually composed a system that was built by farmers to serve their local communities. It's supported by a federal program that started during the depression for them to meet their own needs in a way that serves them best.
A lot of the energy democracy initial conversation, which is now about a decade old, began with the Recovery Act during the Stimulus Program, after the 2009 almost depression we had. Where money became available for cities and states to fund local green jobs. One of the objectives of the energy democracy movement was to have this thing done at a local level, that trained and created career paths for people at the local level who needed jobs.
Is there a specific way you approach bringing new people in to this idea?
It's circumstantial – maybe that’s a catch phrase for all of these things. The example which is extremely current, deals with the objective that a lot of cities have, this includes New York and Boston, and many other cities in the United States, to become carbon-free cities.
They are basically saying that you have to stop using natural gas for your hot water, and you have to stop using gasoline for cars.
But consider the implications of it, particularly on low income people in old homes of limited means. To say, "Well, if you want to drive, you're going to have to get an electric car.", and number two, the natural gas line that serves your triple-decker in Boston, is going to, within a few decades, get shut down, creates an equity issue. If you're a wealthy person in the city of Boston, you live in a million dollar condo, and the city of Boston puts those restrictions on you, it's no big deal. If you're someone of limited means in a low income neighborhood of Boston, the Carbon Free Boston plan sounds really scary.
Part of it is finding ways to improve the ability of people of limited means to be able to deal with those coming restrictions. I was involved with lobbying the Carbon Free Boston plan, finding ways to make this work for people, and make it so they have equitable opportunities to switch to electric sources. It is one of the challenges of energy democracy that is very real. They get concerned, and this minority groups, labor unions, public housing authorities...
That's one place where the conversation related to energy democracy is very rich.
In a scenario where you're trying to create equity where it doesn't already exist, how does government, whether that's local, state, or national, need to be involved? Or, how can they be involved in creating that equity?
That's a great question. There are lots of really long answers to that question, so let me give you some of the top thumbnails. One of them is that electric utilities actually collect a lot of money for the purpose of inducing energy efficiency in the customers that they serve. I don't know if you've heard of that before, but the utilities in many states, and this isn't only the obvious candidates, like Massachusetts, California, and New York, but in 32 states, they have programs where utilities are actually charging more for their electricity to collect money, which then they use on energy efficiency programs.
One characteristic of those programs, is a lot of that money goes to suburban single family homes, and to MIT, and industrial companies, and doesn't go to serve the needs of the community, where everybody is paying for these programs on their electric bills. As principle of energy democracy is saying that the community should be strongly engaged in deciding how that money will be spent in their community. If you're in the Codmen Square neighborhood of Boston, which I'm involved with, which are 100 to 120 year old triple-decker framed buildings that didn't have insulation, and generally have two renters and an owner on the three floors of the building – there's nothing in those programs that are really well suited for who they are, and what their building is, and what their financial circumstances are. What they need is extremely different than what a large suburban home in the Boston area may want, which is help with getting a charging device for their Tesla.
They are different worlds, there's no differentiation, and there's no real support. Energy democracy says the first and primary focus of these things should be equity, and providing equitable and necessary support to the people, based on their ability to purchase things.
So, you say, "Well, why does anybody want these things?" The people who live in these triple-deckers in Boston have very large energy bills, particularly heating bills, in relation to their income. In many cases, they may be getting a gas bill that, for a single month in the winter, is $500 or more. Being able to pay those bills is burdensome to them. This creates a crisis. Having something that serves them, first and foremost, ends up being an important thing, that a local management of local values and needs would be able to address.
That's a general area of energy democracy, which is essentially local participation in how programs that are administered on a federal, state-wide, or utility-wide program, serve the needs of a local community.
Another is that energy democracy should mean you can pay less for your electricity the way wealthier people and big businesses pay less for their electricity per unit, per kilowatt hour, than lower income people do. Sometimes there's tiered pricing. As you use more, you pay less per unit. But the bigger reason is that there's special ways to avoid the high costs of electricity, and lower income people don't have access to it.
At MIT, and in a large business, you can regulate when you use electricity, and you pay a lot less if you regulate when you use electricity. At the home level, you don't have those signals, you don't have those opportunities. To give you range on it, almost all the time electricity cost on a time-based measurement is a lot less than what we pay. A few hours of the year, it costs 10 times more than the average price that you pay. If you don't have any way to manage that, you pay a mix of the two, which is a lot, as compared with what a more sophisticated, larger, wealthier organization would be able to do – control when they use their electricity and pay less.
One of the problems with this, is that if you're not able to get access to those low-cost kilowatt hours, electric heat and hot water are very burdensome, and if the case is that you'll eventually have to move to electric heat and hot water, that $500 gas bill will go up, and it's already too high.
The other thing is, we have to move from our gasoline cars to hybrid or electric cars, and one way to make that affordable is to make the electricity less expensive. It's easy with an electrical car, if you have a way to get it properly priced and measured, because there's only a few hours a day and only some days of the year when electricity is really expensive. But people don't know, and they don't have the ability to avoid those hours and charge up during low-cost hours, off-peak hours, which are much cheaper.
The fact that there are communities that don't have the power to have the programs for energy efficiency, and solar energy work for them is a problem.
The Green New Deal is the big push towards addressing climate change right now. Do you feel like they're using the right language to incentivize the elements you’re outlining?
I have some concerns. I love the political energy the Green New Deal is generating. I think I do, so that's a really good thing. One aspect of the Green New Deal is that it mixes in a lot of the Bernie Sanders agenda with climate change. That might be polarizing and pushing large segments of American society away from supporting something, which I think in their hearts they support, which is climate agenda.
One of the things we managed to do, almost in a bipartisan way, is have substantial incentives for solar energy. We have substantial incentives for electric vehicles that were bipartisan. They became state and national laws because they didn't align themselves entirely with a place in the political spectrum.
Right.
To me, I think climate change is a bipartisan, cross-cutting, national issue, and I'll talk to that a little bit more in a minute. But, even if climate change is something that a segment of the US is not going to support by name, support for the things that are related to it, like high efficiency standards for automobiles, incentives for solar energy, tax incentives for solar energy and wind energy, and electric vehicles, are things that are supported broadly by the American public.
My biggest concern with the Green New Deal, is we basically say, "If you're for those things, then you have to also be for things like Medicare for all, free college education." Without making an opinion about those, my concern is that we we're losing climate votes, potentially, by doing that. We're losing support for policies we already have, and need to sustain by doing that. That's my concern.
Some of my students have been involved in the Sunrise Movement, which created the Green New Deal. I love that they're activists. I wasn't allowed to go to the meetings because I'm over 30. They started with their own segments here, and they generated this thing, and it's gotten a remarkable degree of traction. It's all good, in that the conversation is good. My concern, my message to them, when they're willing to listen, is that there actually is consensus around climate change, and it's important to speak in a way that doesn't push anyone away. That's my concern.
Do you think we move towards renewables through the grid? Or do we separate from the grid?
I think they can combine. If you're in a place that doesn't have access to the grid, that's a different thing. The thing that is interesting from an energy democracy standpoint is whether or not we can create technical and business models to allow the micro-grid, mini-grid community based projects to essentially become community utilities that never needs an essential grid. That are working with the neighborhoods by themselves, maybe supported by things like blockchain, and peer to peer systems, so that there can be sharing of my neighborhood with your neighborhood when I have excess power and you need it, I'll sell you some. When you have excess power in your battery and I need it, you'll sell me some. And have a world that works like that, rather than the world that is autocratic, and top-down.
The thing that's interesting is that with new technology that actually can work, and it may be better in a lot of ways: it may be less expensive, it may create more local jobs, it may make it easier for people to deal with shortages when it's a problem that's discussed locally and the decisions are decided about whether or not, when there's a shortage, they're going to keep electricity going to the hospital, or air conditioning at the wealthy person's house.
Those things can then happen locally. A place where there's a real sharp point on that is rural Puerto Rico, now that the system has been destroyed. In rural areas there's a lack of local power, that Puerto Ricans feel generally. They feel like they have no say over their lives to a great extent.
Having this local approach to actually build up grids that work within themselves for the most part, and do some trading at the margins with other grids that are nearby, is a very workable change from the typical system that we have for the grid now.
The real question is, where billions of people in the world are, is the system when they grow up something different than just local renewable business going away and the wire showing up? They may say, "Well, we care a lot that it's solar. We don't really want it to be replaced with these natural gas power plant-centered grid." Those are the kind of decisions they'll make, and I think it's important to recognize that it's not only possible that that will be the case in places where there is no grid now. It's possible that they'll be islanding off of these micro-grids, as examined and discussed within Boston, and New York, where there is plenty of grid service now. Having something which is more autonomously managed and managed locally.
In places where there is an established grid, how do you see it moving forward?
Historically there's been two models. There's been one where there's a large electric utility system, and the city is just some of the customers for that system. And, there have been models where the city actually owns and manages the electric utility system that serves that municipality.
There are thousands of municipal utilities around the United States. As I mentioned, there are these things which are sort of like municipal utilities, called rural electric cooperatives, which serve the needs without being part of a large central utility. What these organizations typically do, is produce some of their own power, but mainly they buy power wholesale, in competitive markets, then manage the local wires, pipes and distribution systems. They're accountable to the people they serve. This is called municipal utilities, but that's always been there. That's been there for a long time, and if you look into municipal utilities, for the most part, they are viewed as doing a better job to their customers than non- municipal utilities.
The thing that is now practical, that was less practical before, is something where there is community involvement without it actually being a community managed utility. One of the examples is communities running the energy efficiency program, or choosing the nuances of the energy efficiency programs that are being offered to the customers in their area.
For example, Eversource, a big utility in a few states up here, was approached by the entirety of Cape Cod. They said, "We want to run our own energy efficiency programs for Cape Cod, so we'd like you to give us the money you collect from the Cape Cod electric rate players, and let us run the programs instead of you. We're going to make programs that are more useful for the people of Cape Cod." That's a big area.
I had a student practicum in environmental policy and planning that designed a program with Eversource's agreement. An actual support to my class, to create a program for the typical student housing in Cambridge, of which there was nothing. Eversource offered nothing to help a typical low level grad student apartment in Cambridge improve energy efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint.
They designed something and Eversource ended up doing a specialized program for Cambridge that was partially managed by the city of Cambridge. Getting this local involvement in things that had been administered at the state or utility level is an important part of doing energy democracy.
How does the US speed this process up? How do we move towards energy democracy quickly to achieve the goals we've set for ourselves as a country?
There's really two major things that need to happen to stop burning fossil fuels, thus putting carbon in the atmosphere. It's not only that, but it's mostly that we burn stuff and that's the reason we have a climate problem. We don't even have to stop burning all of it, but we have to stop burning about 80- 90% of it. We can still use some of it, at least for another 50 years or so, but the issue is how do we use so much less?
It's just the best deal in town. Coal isn't going away because of some politics, coal is going away because you can't dig up coal and burn it, and produce electricity for as little as you can with solar and wind energy. The good news, is that one is just going to happen. We are going to stop using fossil fuels for our electricity. That's taken care of. Secondary though, which is much harder, we have to stop using natural gas and gasoline. That's natural gas for our heat and hot water, gasoline for our cars, and diesel for our buses. Those things are much harder to do, and the economics are more challenging.
How are we going to get from here to there? You can make these things work when you have a very energy efficient building, and when you have access to low-cost electricity, the way wealthier people do. Making it easier for people to make their buildings efficient, and making their electricity cheaper per kilowatt hour.
The real question is whether or not they're going to do this because they want to do it, or there's real good value in doing it, or whether they're going to do it because they have to do it. For a lot of people, they're going to do it because they have to do it. If you're in China and you want to drive a car, it has to be electric. It's not a choice that you have. You could have no car, or you can have an electric car. While we don't do that here, Boston's proposing doing that eventually. To drive inside the city limits of Boston, you need to have an electric car.
In California, they put some pretty major restrictions on people who sell cars, to say they have to be selling a lot of electric cars. There are these things that are happening by force, and then that means, what do you do? There's things in the Carbon Free Boston report which are also part of energy democracy, which is to make MassTransit better, have electric buses, make it easier to ride bikes, do things like that so people don't need cars, and don't need to drive as much. Giving people good options.
This is the one that's kind of news. When you print this, you might not have seen it in a lot of places yet. It's inevitable that the gas lines in a lot of cities are going to go dark. There will be no natural gas in the pipes. This is because as we make some progress towards these goals, and we start using less gas in the pipes, the cost to maintain those pipes with the limited amount of gas flowing through those pipes, is going to be too high. You may have heard some news about gas lines exploding in Northern Massachusetts. The typical amount people pay for natural gas is a large portion sustaining the gas pipes themselves.
Anyone who looks at this realizes it's inevitable that the world’s going to come out and say, you know what, we can't afford to come out and do the replacement that our gas pipe system needs: they've rusted, they're leaky, they're putting dangerous natural gas into people's basements, they're leaking methane into the atmosphere, and they will announce that the gas lines turn off.
The necessity of energy democracy is to create affordable ways that don't raise, and hopefully lower the cost of energy for people of limited means. That can be done by properly applying efficiency, creating new technology, having smart homes so you control when you use your electricity, and pay less that way. Having policies that make it easier for people to do this, having community involvement so the programs that are offered locally make sense for the kinds of people and the kinds of buildings that are in that locality.
Those are the elements of having energy democracy turn into an equitable climate solution.