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
Success Only Comes After Failure
by Charles Kamasaki
May 21, 2020
This interview with Charles Kamasaki, author of the new book, Immigration Reform: The Corpse That Will Not Die, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Would you introduce yourself and your work?
Charles Kamasaki | I’m Charles Kamasaki. I have a somewhat meaningless title of Senior Cabinet Advisor. "Cabinet" is the term that's used here at UnidosUS for our senior management team. I've been in Washington and at UnidosUS since 1982 – I first came from South Texas to work on public policy. Immigration fell into my lap. For many years I oversaw our public policy division, the early 1990s through the 2000s. I became Executive Vice President in 2005 until 2014, when I transitioned into my current role while writing my book, Immigration Reform: The Corpse That Will Not Die.
What has your work been like in the last six to eight weeks, compared to the decades past?
Well, it's definitely shifted. Given how deeply the crisis is affecting the Latino community which we are representing and serving, it wouldn't have been possible for the work not to have changed. Let me articulate a couple of places where there has been a real convergence of the pandemic and immigration policy.
There is one set of issues around the so-called essential workers who continue to work during the pandemic, which has largely been within the food supply system. Literally from when the crops and livestock are harvested, all the way through to when it's either delivered to us from a restaurant or picked up at a store, Latino immigrants are heavily overrepresented. They continue to be, however, pretty much excluded from a lot of the remedies and responses that Congress has passed so far in response to this crisis.
And then there is another set of issues. There has been enormous job loss. Latinos are, again, overrepresented in becoming unemployed, having hours and wages cut, and losing businesses. And there are long term questions.
Or how does it work when any transactions that used to be done in person now have to be done online, like banking? A lot of our work has been focused on that.
That being said, there are things that are going to happen regardless of the arc of the pandemic recovery. There is going to be an election in November. Traditionally we have been very focused on voter registration and GOTV. There is legislation going to happen, apart from the CARE Act, which we've got to continue to devote resources towards. A lot of our focus has shifted towards the pandemic and it's immediate consequences, but we're trying as best we can to keep an eye on the longer term.
Do you see this as an opportunity to carry the visibility of the Latino community into a policy moment for immigration reform?
I think so, and I think that we may see some of those policy changes may come sooner rather than later. The Heroes Act that is going to pass the House probably today [5/15], has a couple of areas that are kind of interesting.
There are proposed stimulus checks for so-called mixed status families. Depending on how it is defined, there as many as 6 million people lawfully here, including US citizens in households that include at least one undocumented person. All of those households were excluded from the first stimulus checks, because, according to the way the bill was drafted, everybody in the household had to have a work-authorized social security number. There is a provision in the Heroes Act to fix that.
The provision that hasn't gotten a lot of attention so far, although I suspect it will, is giving so-called essential workers an opportunity to earn legal status.
I think there could very well be, in the immediate term, some policy action that deals with intersection of immigration policy and the pandemic.
I also think we are going to have a really interesting conversation about legal immigration. You may have noticed that President Trump issued an executive order to end or suspend all legal immigration. That was widely received as one would have expected based on traditional partisan leanings. I think that conversation probably changes 10 or 12 months out. If, as some economists say, it is going to take us a couple of years to come back economically, and we permit about a million legal immigrants into the country every year, I just can't imagine that we wouldn't have a debate around should we really continue to allow a million people to enter lawfully if a significant number of Americans are still unemployed.
I'm curious about this new debate on legal immigration you mentioned. Could you walk me through a little bit of each side of that debate and how you see that coming out in both upcoming 2020 presidential campaigns?
I think the restrictionist case is pretty simple: There are millions of Americans unemployed who are competing for a scarce number of jobs. It doesn't make any sense to allow a million people a year to enter the country, some of whom may be potential competitors for those jobs. The alternative case would be that these jobs are and will continue to be really tough, difficult jobs. Think about agriculture. Think about food processing where you're on a factory floor slaughtering and processing animals all day. Think about nursing homes. How many of the people who are currently unemployed would be willing to take those jobs? The answer from pro immigrant activists would be, not many.
Right. That makes sense and seems fairly standard. What does policy look like to you in like an ideal scenario?
I don't end my book actually with a policy prescription, although I did have several that I played around with then ultimately rejected. The reason is I think it's less about what I think, and more about what's doable. The best policy possible would include three buckets.
The first is longterm undocumented people who have not been convicted of serious crimes and who don't pose a threat to their communities ought to have an opportunity to legalize their status.
I also think we have to articulate that we are going to be generous with respect to the undocumented people who are here, then we're also going to be pretty firm in terms of enforcement in the future. This may get me in trouble with my more progressive colleagues, but as I write in my book, every nation, by definition, has a sovereign right to control its borders. Of course there are principles, most of which are codified in international law, around how we deal with asylum seekers and how we enforce the laws, which looks very different than what is going on right now. But, the conversation can't be binary.
Further, in respect to the question of legal immigration, I don't think it makes sense for Congress to write a law with a black and white plan on what immigration ought to look like. We are in the midst of a pandemic right now, and the future of work and the nature of the global economy is changing all the time. I don't think it is possible to write a law that specifies exactly how many people are going to be allowed to enter that is going to be relevant and consistent with the national interest five years from now or 10 years from now. I do think there is room for a body of experts to periodically adjust, based on data and economic forecasts and social needs, the number of immigrants who should be let in and in what sectors. If we had a nationwide childcare shortage, which we do, it's frankly a lot cheaper to allow a parent or another relative of a U.S. Citizen to enter in order to take care of their kids than it would be to spend the money to create another and regulate another childcare slot. So I would argue for some sort of independent commission to set levels on legal immigration in a way that responds to economic and social conditions.
Reforms are really hard. And the kind of progressive reforms that I have articulated, are not just once in a generation, they are more like once in a lifetime kind of events.
This has been true of the recent attempts of reform and was true of the last set of reforms that were successful. As you said, much of the debate is so stale, that it requires actors contravening conventional wisdom to succeed, and that's difficult for anyone.