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
As Long as You are Ashamed of Your Debt
by Melissa Byrne
September 18, 2020
This interview with Melissa Byrne, a political and community organizer, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Melissa | I have been doing work around free college and canceling student debt for about ten years now. I don't get paid for it unless I am working on a campaign. It has been a labor of taking something that impacted me on a personal level and channeling that energy into a big issue. As much as it hurt me as a person, I knew that I wasn't alone. There are 46 million Americans that have student loan debt, and our pain wasn't being taken seriously.
I grew up in a single-parent, working-class family. When I started college, I was just told to sign on the dotted line. I couldn't comprehend the degree to which I was signing my life away with all that debt.
A lot of my peers didn't have debt, so I felt a shame attached to it. Even very progressive people would ask me, in a very judgemental tone, "you have how much debt?" But I just didn't have a free choice. This was my only option. This is just what it was.
frank | Yeah. There is a lot of undue shame attached to debt.
Definitely. I had a shift in the way I thought about my debt about 10 years ago. I was working on a campaign, and I had to go with my boss to an early morning meeting where a famous advocate was speaking. There were about 20 of us sitting around a big table. The guest speaker asked people to raise their hand if they had student loan debt. I was the youngest person there, and the only one to raise my hand. And then he asks, "Well, how much debt do you have?" "I'm not telling," I said.
He asked again and I said half the amount, because, let's be real, shame is really hard to overcome. But I left that meeting with this realization that it is not my fault that I have student loan debt. This wasn’t a personal failing, this was a societal failing. And I left feeling like, oh, I'm going to solve this issue. And the person that put me on the spot was Reverend Jesse Jackson.
What are you seeking politically?
I want student loan debt to be cancelled, and I want to move towards working on making college free going forward. It's two problems at once. We need to cancel the $1.7 trillion outstanding in student loan debt, and we have to make sure that there's a path forward so that students are not harmed by student loan debt again.
Ideally, as a country, people should be able to obtain whatever skills they need to be able to do the work that brings them joy and care for their family. Higher education should not be an intergenerational wealth transfer. Poor people and working-class people should not be taxed for their ambition.
It's really bad, but it doesn't have to be this way. We have this burden because Reagan pulled funding out of higher education. We are here because education, a lot of the time, has been used to preserve wealth and power. People with privilege don't want a free market for their kids to compete with, they want to preserve access.
When we say higher education, it doesn't just mean getting a fancy liberal arts degree, it means making sure that community colleges and four-year colleges are set up for good partnerships with building trades. You go in, you get an associate’s degree, and you have a pathway into the carpenter's union or IBW.
You advocate for widespread debt cancellation for everybody rather than a targeted approach. Why?
I think one thing to remember is that nobody who is wealthy takes out debt for school - their wealthy parents pay for it. Consider somebody who had to take out about $300,000 for dental school. Sure they might be making $200,000 a year as a dentist, but $300,000 of debt at a 5% interest rate can hinder them -- it means they can't dedicate one day a week to providing free care. I've talked to dentists in this exact situation. They want to expand their services to the most vulnerable, but when they have $2,000 a month in student loan payments, they need the money coming in.
When you start drawing lines on who's worthy of debt forgiveness, you then get enemies of any change whatsoever. I advocate for canceling all student loan debt because it's both an ideological commitment to the idea that the loan itself is wrong, as well as taking away all the pain points in actually winning this policy battle.
What is the pushback that you hear the most? Do Democrats and Republicans have similar aversions to debt forgiveness?
You have this one strain of people, if you look at the work of Sandy Baum, for example, who are aghast at this idea that a rich person could potentially benefit. They miss the whole point. We don’t say that rich kids can't go to your public high school.
And right now, the federal government subsidizes private colleges in all of these different ways. Harvard receives around $60,000 per year per student in local, state, and federal subsidies. That means the billionaire's kid at Harvard is getting more federal support for their education than someone who goes to UMass, which receives around $12,000 a year in subsidies.
As someone who worked on both Bernie campaigns, why do you think it's important now that people shift over their support to Vice President Biden?
For one thing, it was really great seeing Bernie move from only supporting interest rate reduction in 2016 to full cancellation in 2020. Even in that short four year time period, we were able to really move the marker on this topic.
As of right now with Vice President Biden, he's supporting a couple of different forms of student loan forgiveness. He uses the phrase forgiveness, I use the word cancellation, but it gets us to the same point. I'm trying not to argue over words and focus on the bigger outcomes. We need him to win, so we can do the coalition work and the organizing work we need to do to get it all the way done.
Do you think you can get there with Biden if he is elected?
He is already 80% there. We are starting from a good place. We don't have to convince him of the concept, now it's just negotiating over details.
Are there any state or hyperlocal policies that we should be paying attention to?
New York state has the Excelsior scholars and, of course, because it's Cuomo, it was done in such a convoluted way. But it has proved the concept that people want free college, of course, they do. New Mexico is experimenting with a free college program. New Jersey is doing free community college and has started to look towards some parts of free college.
There hasn't been as much on the cancellation side. Right now, all federal loans paused. They are set to end on January 1st with a cliff. They were originally set to end on September 30th, but I think the Trump administration realized it would be really bad to have people make their first loan payments in the month before the election. I expect borrowers to be fucked if he wins reelection and payments to resume on January 1st.
Do you think, culturally, there is an outsized emphasis placed on higher education as a necessary means of succeeding?
I think the danger is that that can be used as an excuse to not match people to the college that's right for them. Everybody should be able to go into the higher education program that's right for them, without stigma and without being coerced into predatory for-profit programs.
A big part of higher education is the network you get out of it - it's the friends, it's the community, it's the exposure to ideas outside of where you are from. As a society, we need to get back to a place where we value education. We need to understand that it's part of what allows you to be mobile and to live life to the fullest.
But I also don't think higher education should ever be something that is seen as a marker of you being better than somebody else because you have a degree. But that is also a problem with capitalism in general. So those are bigger structural problems that we have to solve as well.