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
Being Not-Rich with Lauren Schandevel
by Lauren Schandevel
May 15, 2019
This interview with Lauren Schandevel, creator of Being Not-Rich at UM, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Tatti: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Lauren: I am a 4th year public policy student at the University of Michigan. Most of my work has centered around college affordability in particular. About a year ago, I crowdsourced the Being Not-Rich at UM document, which was a great resource for low income students. It was also a place to come together and realize other people were experiencing the same things, and help each other out. That's the thing that launched my career doing housing and food insecurity work on campus. I've met a lot of students on other campuses that are doing similar work. It's been really exciting.
Why did you start the doc?
The document itself is just a Google document with the sharing settings tweaked so that anyone can make suggestions or leave comments. It was crowd sourced in response to an affordability guide that our Central Student Government put out about a year ago that has some pretty tone deaf advice about budgeting – low income students were put off or offended by it. This was a response to that with substantial advice that low income students could use without the stigma or added judgment of having that advice come from an institutional figure.
Initially it was just an outline. I put the introduction in first, setting the tone for what the document would be. And then I had headings – housing, employment, on campus resources, food – people just filled in the information as they came in. Now it's grown to about a hundred pages. Before it was just a couple pages, like a skeleton outline.
What was so tone deaf on an institutional level that prompted you to start this yourself?
I think it's important to start by talking about how students perceive Central Student Government at the University of Michigan. They release reports on their demographic information each year and they're usually wealthier and less racially diverse than the rest of the student body. People already have that perception of them. When they put out the guide, the first 10 pages or so were devoted to budgeting, a lot of the advice was like, “fire your maid”, or, "stop laundry service".
That was the main issue we took with it. It wasn't like we were spending our money frivolously and that's why we were struggling. It's that we don't have a lot of money to begin with, and it's hard to live on the University of Michigan's campus.
Did you send the doc to student government or to anybody on an institutional level?
The university administration knows that it exists and certain departments like the Office of New Student Programs have collaborated with me to turn it into a more institutional thing. I chaired the Central Student Government affordability task force this year and they're going to have an affordability commission permanently from now on. So that's great.
One thing I've noticed is a lot of the time it's students taking the initiative, particularly on our campus. Students are doing most of the housing and food security work. That should not be the case. The university should take responsibility, especially in the instance of housing. They're admitting more students than they have housing for, and it's on them to build housing and make sure students have a place to live when they get to campus.
Food insecurity is the same. We just got a permanent food pantry. But a lot of that was because of student activism over the years. We shouldn't be the ones pushing the university on basic needs, particularly because low income students have a million other things to worry about.
Do you think the work is moving towards that goal?
I think it's moving in that direction, not just here but nationally. The Hope Center in Philadelphia has been at the forefront of these discussions about housing and food insecurity on college campuses. They've published a lot of reports, they hold an annual conference. People are becoming more attuned to these issues and the fact that they exist on college campuses.
How does the wealth gap you're recognizing affect students socially?
I feel like that is part of the conversation that's often ignored. Obviously there are financial barriers to being a low-income student on a college campus. But there's also, like you said, a social aspect. Students arrive on campus and feel alienated from their peers, and don't understand why. A lot of it is because of that socioeconomic disparity – but they don't realize it.
It happens frequently and it's a huge reason why those students end up dropping out – because of a lack of the sense of belonging. I myself have felt that way, and I know a lot of my peers have too. The important thing is letting those students know that it's completely out of their control. It's a structural problem, and any sort of alienation they feel from their peers as a result of those socioeconomic barriers are not because they're not good enough for a university.
How can you can mitigate the social part of the problem?
I think low income and first generation college students need more community building spaces. I know first-gen activism has taken off over the last 10 years. You have offices for first-gen programming and first-gen learning communities, which is really great. The same thing should be done for low-income students on college campus’ so they can talk to each other and share experiences and realize that they're not alone in this college experience. University administrations need to recognize they have low-income students on their campus because it's a very touchy subject for them right now.
Acknowledging that it is a socioeconomic thing is probably the first step. Particularly in America, we don't talk about class. And so when we gravitate towards certain people, we don't know that it's because they share our socioeconomic background. They don't know that diversity also includes socioeconomic diversity. I feel like naming that issue and making it clear that a lot of the decisions we make are the results of our socio economic backgrounds will make it easier for people to see the class disparities in higher education, and it will hopefully empower low income students to advocate for themselves and to feel confident enough to participate in the college experience so that they're meeting different people, people who might be wealthier than themselves.
Do you feel like this perpetuates itself into the post-collegiate professional world?
Yes. It's a combination of financial and cultural factors. Wealthy students coming in have parents who have probably gone to college, that have careers where they can get the students internships or fellowships, and pay for them to do unpaid internships. There's that aspect of it. But then there's also that cultural capital. Those students know what clubs to join, they know where to apply, and they have connections somewhere. That trajectory is already set for them. Whereas low-income students can't afford to do unpaid internships, don't know anyone in the industry, don't know how to navigate the process of applying to those internships, or even that they have to do internships in college.
When do we need to start preparing students for these realities of college campuses?
This is one of the issues I have with college affordability activism – it starts way before students enter college. The K-12 education system is so vastly unequal, that needs to be addressed in addition to how we're setting up low-income students to succeed in college. There's so many low-income students we're not capturing because our education system is so unequal. It's a rare phenomenon to even get low-income students in the door at these elite institutions.
That needs to be addressed. But that’s a combination of segregation and the way public schools are funded. There are a number of legal ways in which rich parents give their kids a leg up in the admissions process.
Does your academic focus cover these issues?
Yes, I try to make that really clear. I am also responsible for creating a minor and social class in equality studies at the university. It basically teaches about how social class influences outcomes and access to opportunity.
That's something I tried to bring into my activism around affordability because affordability is inherently political, and to talk about it you also have to talk about class and race and all that stuff.
Class is a very un-American conversation.
Exactly. People are starting to have that conversation.
Do you find it easy to explain?
Oh, it's so hard. Particularly if you're communicating it to wealthy people, which a lot of the times I'm doing because of the campus. But telling people that their success is the result of the combination of hard work and privilege is really hard, and people get defensive. You have to coddle them a little and say, "You worked really hard in high school, but have you considered that these factors may have helped you get to a place like the University of Michigan?" And then they get it, but sometimes they're still mad because the American dream tells us that if you work hard you can succeed – and it doesn't say anything about class privilege.
What do you think happens to the value of college when the reality of attendance is so tied to privilege? As an employer, what does it really mean to hire someone from Yale, if I have no context for how they got there?
People are still under the impression that if you went to one of these very elite schools, you must be very smart and that's how we maintain the system. But if people start to think that, hey, maybe this is the result of socioeconomic privilege and not necessarily merit, then the only solution to keeping people from losing faith in the education system is to admit students in a truly meritocratic way, which means admitting very smart, high performing low-income students. Hopefully the problem solves itself that way. But if not, then we're going to have this distrust of higher education.