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
Reflections on Portland
by Commissioner Sharon Meieran
August 10, 2020
This interview with The Multnomah County Commissioner Sharon Meieran was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | As an emergency room doctor, community health advocate, and a Counry Commissioner, I am curious how you see your roles intersect at this moment?
Sharon Meieran | That is a particularly complex starting point. To be honest, I've been really trying to sort out that trifecta. It has been extremely difficult as a human to process the confluence of these crises, the different roles that I play, and the identities that I have.
I do really see this moment as the confluence of two separate pandemics. The first obviously being the global pandemic of the Coronavirus. The second is the pandemic, rather the public health crisis, of racism. Those two have come together in shocking ways, and it needs to be addressed in a much more complicated way.
How does it feel to be in Portland right now?
Portland has a long and proud history of peaceful protest and community engagement. This has been a historic moment of self-examination around racial justice across the country and the world. And in Portland, we have been having the necessary conversations on a community engagement level, on a local political level, and on a person to person level. Thousands of people were having these important conversations, by and large peacefully - we were an epicenter of a kind of community engagement and peaceful protest. I believe the Trump administration wanted to quash that, at least that is what it feels like on the ground.
He came in with federal agents, maybe hoping Americans would look the other way after the horrific response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But that is not what happened.
Why Portland? Do you know why it started there?
Well, that's the question everyone has been asking themselves. I don't know the answer, but it feels very political.
It is a place for them to make a stand in some ways.
And as somebody who's elected on a local level, what are you trying to do? What can you do?
It was hard as an elected official to get any information initially about who the federal troops were that were coming in and what the real purpose was. All we can do is try to respond and support our residents and fight back in the ways available to us. For example, our attorney general has filed suit. At a local level, Multnomah County has thought about banning the use of tear gas as the local public health authority. It's still not clear if we can do this, but we're looking at the local ways that we can fight back against the federal government. To be honest, those are limited.
You were personally teargassed recently, right? What was that experience like?
Extremely painful and really unpleasant. It was traumatic. It was scary. There was chaos. I was with a group of women just standing in front of the federal building, and sort of milling about around the area. There was literally nothing happening at the time. Then, a group of what we later learned to be federal troops came out and threw down canisters of tear gas. Initially, I was not affected, I ran down the street, but I came back to see what was happening, and see if I could potentially help in some ways as an ER doctor. I thought that I was at the periphery of the tear gas, but I wasn't. I first started feeling irritation in the eyes and then really in a split second, just searing, severe pain in my eyes, mouth, throat, and face. It was difficult to swallow and it was scary to take a breath.
It seems particularly cruel to use a gas-based weapon in the middle of a respiratory pandemic.
You're exactly right. I could not have said that better.
The indiscriminate use against hundreds, if not thousands of people, many of whom are elderly and who have underlying respiratory conditions, is unconscionable.
As a doctor, how are you understanding the confluence of these two crises and the contradictory prescription for each of them?
It's really challenging. You don't have to be a healthcare provider to know that mass gatherings are places where there can be increased transmission of the Coronavirus. We do things to mitigate the transmission such as masking, and trying to keep physical distance, which is impossible in the kind of protest situation that we're seeing. Being outdoors does help some. I've been to a number of the protests now, and by and large, virtually everyone is wearing a mask and is highly aware and doing their best to distance themselves. It is hard to determine if there has been any additional uptake in transmission from the protests.
But the problem is that, again, it is a confluence really of the two pandemics. We know that the response to COVID should be to mitigate risk. And similarly, when George Floyd was murdered, the appropriate response was outrage and protest. That's an appropriate response to a different public health pandemic, one of structural racism, but we need to respond to both crises at the same time. We need to do whatever we can to mitigate the impact of a protest being a mass gathering.
Do you feel like there is anything missing in the coverage of Portland you're seeing nationally? Is it an accurate assessment of the city right now?
I think that what is being portrayed is very small, maybe a two square block area of downtown Portland, between the hours of 10:00 PM and 3:00 AM.
I think that is lost in the conversation.
Where does Portland go from here?
I honestly don't know. One thing I appreciate has been the effort to bring back the focus to what prompted the protests in the first place. This is now, I think, the 60th day of protest. This is about racial injustice, the violence perpetrated by police against people of color, particularly Black men. This is what we have been protesting for, and that focus I feel was lost somewhat, with the seeming occupation of these federal troops. I believe, led by the Black Lives Matter movement and other Black leaders in the community, that we can bring back the focus to the issues that originally sparked the peaceful protest.
Is there any sign of the federal occupation leaving?
I have not seen any indication of that, which also is very scary. I think that that's part of that challenge of sorting through the confluence of so many elements. For example, if the endpoint for one aspect of protest is federal agents disarming and leaving the city, I don't see that happening any time soon, because I don't think that they feel any incentive to leave. There are so many different goals and purposes mixed in protest right now that we can't rely on any one thing happening to diffuse the larger picture of protest. What we need to do, I believe, is highlight the change that we want to see in the Black Lives Matter movement, and separate that out. Highlight a peaceful way of protesting against the federal occupation in Portland, and separate that and address that. If these issues are dealt with separately, they wouldn't be all conflated into this one giant protest, which I think only serves to divide.
[Shortly after this interview, there was an announcement, without any warning and without engagement of local government, that Governor Brown and the Trump administration had reached an agreement about federal troops leaving. I was as surprised as anyone, and am hopeful this will result in the de-escalation of the violence incited by the presence of the federal officers. I also hope this failure and escalation of violence will prevent the Trump administration from deploying federal agents to other communities. However, I understand federal officers are still present in Portland, and it is difficult to get any specific information on this.]
It certainly ends up distracting from the initial asks. I think part of it is that it is just shocking to see federal troops firing weapons at its own citizens.
It is shocking to be really upfront in that and watch fireworks being thrown at the federal building, hear the fence being torn down, and the plumes of tear gas overtaking all of that – it is all really shocking.
Probably not something you expected to see this year.
There are so many things this year that I just didn't expect to see.
To hear friends of mine say, "Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be staying for the tear gas tonight." Who'd have thought that phrase would be uttered?
It is crazy. It makes me wonder where the bottom is in all of the chaos. And whether that chaos is intentional from the top-down.
It's extremely stressful. Even if on a day to day basis, the vast majority of Portland is very peaceful, and we're not actually living in a war or riot zone, those questions and that stress is pervasive.
Has this stretched your imagination of what's possible on a civic level?
I think one of the benefits of this happening in Portland is the degree of engagement and pushback against the federal government being here. I'm not sure there is a limit to that pushback in this particular region.
Hopefully, there will be a similar level of pushback if this spreads to other cities. Hopefully, the federal occupying force coming in won't be perceived as normal, and instead, people stand up and exercise their voices to say no, not here.