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
From Pew to Poll
by Matthew Soerens
April 1, 2020
This interview with Matthew Soerens, the US Director of Church Mobilization for World Relief, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
frank | Will you tell me about the work you do?
MS | I work for an organization called World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization started in the 1940s. We work in about a dozen countries around the world. Since the 1970s, we’ve also been one of the organizations that partners with the US State Department to resettle refugees. We were founded, and still are a subsidiary of, the National Association of Evangelicals.
In the US context, we’ve particularly focused on serving refugees and other immigrants.
My role is focused on helping churches and other Christian institutions think through issues of immigration through a Christian theological perspective, that's also informed by an understanding of how immigration law and policy work. I am also the national coordinator for the Evangelical Immigration Table, which helps to lead with a bunch of larger national evangelical Christian entities, denominations and other networks.
How has your day to day work changed since Coronavirus?
I think the biggest thing that has changed is that it almost feels a bit tone deaf to reach out to a church and say, “Hey, you want to have a biblical conversation about immigration?” It doesn't relate back to the experience we're all living in the very immediate term. It seems a bit off to most people.
But, there are a lot of people who we would have categorized as vulnerable before this crisis hit, who are probably more vulnerable now. Either because of the economic dynamics or vulnerability to the virus itself. A lot of my work in the last two weeks has been trying to focus on how we call our constituencies of churches and individual Christians – as they take care of themselves and their families, which of course we want to encourage them to do – to not forget that there are people who are even more vulnerable in this context than most of us are. How do we focus there?
Are you looking at health conditions in detention centers holding detained immigrants?
Anyone who can't practice social distancing should be an area of concern. There are a number of those groups; those who sleep at homeless shelters, someone who is incarcerated. But where that most directly affects our work, is people who are in immigrant detention facilities, which look a lot like incarceration.
Most people there have not committed criminal offenses; it's people who have pending civil immigration proceedings in front of them, whether that's an asylum hearing or they've been living unlawfully in the country for 20 years and they're now facing deportation, which might be because they committed a crime and that brought them to the attention of ICE. Often, it's not related to any criminal activity at all. Those individuals are people we've been particularly concerned about, especially to the extent that some of them are older or have underlying health conditions.
What are you recommending detention centers do?
The most obvious thing to do would be to start with those who don't have criminal convictions. In a vast majority of cases there is no reason to think that there is a public safety threat. I'm not saying release them if there is a threat to public safety. But in the vast majority of cases, that's not the case.
It's people who only have civil violations. If they have a criminal violation, the most common charge is unlawful entry. It’s not a violent offense, it is related to their immigration status. Or those who got picked up for minor traffic violations, even a DUI – I'm not condoning driving under the influence of alcohol, but we wouldn't give someone the death penalty for that. And that’s what we are looking at if someone has an underlying health condition. I would argue that the Department of Homeland Security should be paroling those people out.
How do you get DHS to do that? What needs to happen?
They have the authority to do that immediately.
To be fair, I think they are doing so in some cases. Even in the last 24 hours, I've heard of people who've been detained for quite a long time being released. I'm hoping they are coming to that conclusion, or that some of the advocacy is having that effect. But I don't know yet if that's happening across the board, or if this is a more of a localized decision that's happening in a few places.
You also focus on the undocumented population. How do our current circumstances affect them?
That's certainly an area with a population of unique vulnerability. They're uniquely vulnerable before this happens, which means they're going to be uniquely vulnerable in the midst of this crisis. Undocumented immigrants are more likely to lack insurance, which might make them less likely to go get tested and get treatment. Where we've particularly seen undocumented immigrants affected is more in terms of economics because they tend to be disproportionately at the front lines of some of the industries that are most affected in the short term, like restaurants.
I pulled stats from the Pew Research Center that found that 10% of food preparation and serviceworkers are undocumented. In my neighborhood, I can tell you it's a lot higher than that. Maybe that's true at a national level, or maybe it's hard to get good data on people who don't like to answer surveys, like from employers who are violating the law by hiring them. But where I live most restaurants have at least kitchen staff who are mostly immigrants, and a significant share of them are undocumented. Those people are almost all out of work or down to minimal hours. When you are paid on an hourly basis, and you went from working 60 hours a week to working 10 hours a week, you suddenly don't know how to pay rent. I know people who are affected by that directly and it's happening all over the country.
Do you anticipate any federal action putting cash in undocumented workers hands?
Do I anticipate it? Honestly, no. Do I think it would be morally appropriate? Yes.
If somebody is getting paid under the table, I have no idea how, logistically, that could get sorted out. But for people who filed their taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Notification Number, which is this special number that the Internal Revenue Service created decades ago, whether it was originally its purpose or not, it is now basically how undocumented people file their taxes. This is something that most Americans do not know exists; people do not realize we have this alternate way to file your taxes if you are ineligible for a social security number. But we do have that system and there's four and half a million people who filed their taxes in the last year that we have data for, using those numbers.
There are probably 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, many of which are children who probably do not work. So likely, the majority of undocumentted people working are filing their taxes with those ITINS. It would be very easy to give them the same sort of stimulus check that recently passed. I am expecting myself to receive that check. That's really nice. We'll use that, or share it with a family in need. But I know people who could use it a lot more right now. From an economic standpoint, if you want to keep money moving through the economy, you give those stimulus checks to people who are going to spend it the day they get it, instead of people who might save it, or think about their children’s college education for the future. And undocumented folks are usually in that first category.
I should make clear, some of them are also working 60 hours a week right now at grocery stores or in hospitals. They're also on the front lines of the people who are considered essential, and frankly, are at more risk than most other people. In the grocery store I shop at, there's no toilet paper and there's no canned foods, but somehow there is still produce, which means somebody is still picking produce in the fields in California. The vast majority of those people are immigrants, and the majority of those immigrants are undocumented.
Do you see the supply chain being affected at all?
At this point it doesn't seem to be affected. I don’t know agriculture work well enough, but I've seen people working and sometimes they are working closely together. It seems possible to me that could be a place where the disease starts to spread. It tends to be a younger workforce, which could mean that a lot of people get it and not ever have symptoms, which is a whole other problem for the spread. I certainly worry that that could happen and affect the workforce, then maybe Americans would appreciate how important those immigrant workers are.
But for the time being, they're still working and it’s not just undocumented immigrants, but also resettled refugees. A ton of those folks work in food processing. Not picking the crops but putting them in packages and refrigerated warehouses. Those are essential jobs. Those don't pause when a lot of other jobs pause.
Do you think the pandemic will be politicized to push border conversations?
Yeah, I mean, I would be naive having lived through the last several years to not presume that would be the case.
And how do you see that playing out?
Some of the narrative will be: this is a foreign disease and foreign people brought it and we have to watch out for foreigners.
It has already been part of the narrative with people calling this the “Chinese Virus.” Somebody asked me about that and my response was, well do we talk about the Zoom meetings we're all doing as Chinese? Zoom was founded by a Chinese immigrant. Do we talk about the doctor saving people's lives as that Chinese doctor?
We don't usually refer to people based on their places of origin. And if we're doing so only in response to the virus, that's a pretty good clue that we are not being very even handed. As far as we can tell this originated in China, but that doesn't have anything to do with many, many Chinese Americans or other Asian Americans who are being maligned right now as a result of those origins.
I would also say, there are decisions that have been made around, for example, shutting down refugee resettlement or closing borders, which I think might be prudent in terms of a public health response. I worry that pretext might be used to keep borders closed for longer than is medically necessary. And from people who have been trying to restrict refugee resettlement for a long time.
You occupy a pointedly contentious space between the evangelical church and immigration. A recent article in the New York Times connected evangelicals and the political response to Coronavirus.
I read that piece. It basically highlighted a few anecdotal cases of evangelicals who are anti-science and doing things like holding large church services in defiance of science-driven requests to practice social distancing. But the reality is the vast, vast majority of churches have cancelled their Sunday services or moved their services online. To be honest, this sort of piece – which I realize is perhaps all some New York Times readers know about evangelicals – is not that far from President Trump’s infamous claim that Mexican immigrants are bringing drugs and crime and are rapist… “and some,” he assumes, “are good people.” This piece had a similar statement, after highlighting several negative examples: “Not every pastor is behaving recklessly, of course,” but the author doesn’t bother to mention any such pastors by name, nor that they represent the vast majority of churches, nor that many prominent evangelicals like Rick Warren have called it “dumb” and “unbiblical” to continue to hold in-person gatherings.
Whether it’s a Republican presidential candidate talking about Mexican immigrants or a liberal opinion writer focused on evangelicals, it’s usually a bad idea to highlight the worst examples of any group of people without acknowledging how exceptional they are.
When it comes to media coverage of evangelical views on immigration, the real story is more nuanced than is typically assumed. The majority of white evangelicals were opposed to the family separation policy that the Trump administration put into place a few years ago, but the majority of white evangelicals also support a wall. Depending on which poll you look at, most white evangelicals are supportive of Dreamers getting legal status. Yet they're also the religious demographic most likely to say that immigrants present a threat to our customs and values. It's not quite as simple as evangelicals hate immigrants or love immigrants.
My job is to say, actually, I don't care what the polls say on this. If we're evangelicals, our views should be driven by the scriptures. So let's look at what the Bible says.
And the Bible, it turns out, is a very pro-immigrant book, with some nuance as well. There are passages about respecting governing authorities. I'm not condoning any violation of law or saying that doesn't matter. But we think immigration has actually been very good for the United States. It's been very good for the church in the United States. First or second generation immigrants are a very significant part of growth in evangelicalism in the United States. Biblically, we're commanded to welcome the stranger, to quote Jesus's words in Matthew 25, and to love our neighbors. And it's hard to read Jesus's parable of the good Samaritan and not conclude that your neighbor might be someone who is ethnically or even religiously different than you.
Do you find yourself in biblical debates with other evangelicals about immigration?
I would say what is far more common is debates that are not about the Bible at all. I'll come into a conversation with all these Bible verses and they'll say, but they broke the law, but they're criminals, but they're terrorists.
Then we can just point to the facts. Yes, some people committed crimes, but let's look at overall crime rates. Immigrants, whether lawfully present or not, commit crimes at lower rates than native born us citizens, and there is good data on that.
Evangelical churches have largely failed to disciple, which is a Christian word for teach, people in their congregations to think about this topic from a Christian theological perspective. We know that both anecdotally and from surveys where self-described evangelical Christians, say they've never heard about this topic in church. They get silence on the issue, and then they're watching cable news and reading things on the internet.
Right. Have you come to understand the driving motivation for white, American evangelicals, to be the loudest in the room in conservative politics and media?
To me it's a cyclical chicken or the egg problem. The problem is people haven't heard about this. They haven't heard a Christian perspective on immigration rooted in the Bible from their local churches. They haven't heard that perspective because their pastors are either uncomfortable, afraid, or feel ill equipped to address the issue. Part of that is, it's a complicated issue for anyone, very few people in this country actually understand US immigration law. But it's also fear.
If our struggling church, which is already facing some downward economic pressures, loses tithers then we can't sustain our ministry. So the easiest thing to do is just not address this at all. My challenge to those pastors, who I sympathize with very genuinely, is that this issue is too fundamental to the core of who Jesus calls us to be as his followers for us to ignore.
Our work has been effective amongst people who are deeply theologically grounded evangelical Christians. Where we've really not been sure how to engage is this category of nominal evangelicals, who don’t actually go to church. You're not going to reach them by getting pastors to talk about this topic, unless it's Christmas Eve or Easter Sunday, because they don't actually go to church except for on holidays.
People who self-identify in the polls as evangelical, but who aren’t actually affiliated with an evangelical church and don’t actually have distinctly evangelical theological beliefs, are the biggest challenge for us. I mean if you look at the most anti-immigrant voices among prominent evangelicals – and there aren't very many of them – generally don't have institutional affiliations to think about. The ones that represent institutions such as denominations are usually either totally silent on this topic or actually quite supportive. And part of that is they don't represent “white evangelicals.” They represent a whole constituency, many of whom are not white. In many denominations, a quarter of their congregations are immigrants or their children, who are interacting with immigration issues in real time.
USCIS [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] is closed at the moment. There's a pause on asylum courts and hearings. Do you think that has a positive or negative effect upon reopening?
I don't know. I wake up at night thinking about that. There are political forces in the United States that have been very clear about trying to, for example, shut down refugee resettlements, and have largely done so. There have been efforts to not abide by the terms of the trafficking victims protection reauthorization act, which governs how our government deals with unaccompanied children apprehended at the border.
The government is taking the position that these things need to be put on hold right now for public health reasons. There's a good chance that some of these are reasonable decisions, given the very unique global public health crisis we’re facing. I wish I could trust it was solely out of public health concerns, and that our country will go back to abiding by what I believe is an appropriate law as soon as medically appropriate. Obviously we haven't even hit the peak of this crisis medically. But I hope that we resume processing entries into the refugee resettlement program as soon as would be appropriate from a science based perspective.
I'm not gonna say the US should never restrict travel. El Salvador has restricted US citizens from traveling to its country. And that makes a lot of sense. If I was El Salvador, I'd do the same thing right now. I've spent time in Central America and I know that they do not have the hospital infrastructure to deal with the disease on a scale such as it is hitting New York City right now, or China, or Italy.
So I think it may make sense in this very unique moment to restrict some travel and I think it would be fair for that to go both ways if there are legitimate concerns.