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
The Collectors
by Craig Antico
September 20, 2020
This interview with Craig Antico, founder of RIP Medical Debt, an organization that has abolished over $1 billion in medical debt, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Craig | I've been in the debt collection business for over 30 years. I started in a family business. In the early 2000s, I built a company with Jerry Ashton. We eventually parted ways, but then in 2012 he called me and told me about a nonprofit that had an idea about buying medical debt and abolishing it. We both thought it was the dumbest thing that we had ever heard. Like if we are collecting medical debt, why would you ever forgive it now? After two years of working with the nonprofit, we decided to do that sort of work full time, so we started RIP Medical Debt in 2014.
frank | What was your mindset when you were collecting on medical debt?
We thought that because we were a little bit different than the rest of the collectors -- because we had compassion, because we cared, because we wouldn't collect on debt we didn’t believe was right -- there was nothing wrong with the practice.
When we started to abolish debt, we realized that it really didn't matter how ethical our approach was if half of the people could not afford to pay the debt without significant hardship.
So if I understand correctly, you still operate as a debt buyer. You just discharge the debt instead of collecting it.
Correct. We are a debt buyer -- but a nonprofit debt buyer. We specifically buy the debt that is considered charitable and pay it off. A person qualifies as a charitable class of person, generally, if they are living at two times the poverty level or below. We also take into consideration what we call “hardship.” If the debt of a person equals five percent or more of their income, that qualifies as “hardship.”
What does the debt buying industry look like? Who are the profiteers?
There are hundreds of for-profit debt buyers. They are investors who buy the debt with the expectation of being able to collect two to three times the amount that they paid. And these debt collectors are backed by specialty finance companies.
To buy debt, you go to a creditor who is owed money from consumers, a hospital, or a credit card agency, for example, and bid on a portfolio. As the debt buyer, you value the portfolio and forecast what you might be able to collect.
You do that by asking how hard it is going to be to collect this debt. How hard is it going to be to contact these people? Did they have insurance? You look at their addresses. You look at their bankruptcies. You look at how old these bills are. From there, you get a number. For example, out of this million-dollar portfolio of some number of people, we think we're going to collect $15 million. Then you offer the hospital $5 million.
We operate in the same way because we have to go against other for-profit debt buyers in bidding for the debt.
How are investors able to make more money on the debt than what they pay the hospital for it?
In general, the creditor, the hospital, is selling the debts because it has come up short in collecting and doesn't have the bandwidth to collect. So it's willing to sell for a fraction of the debt's face value and then the new owner, the collection agency, will pursue the full amount to make a profit.
Debt collectors can make high returns on buying medical debt due to their accuracy to forecast collections, and being disciplined in not paying more than the portfolio is worth. They have experience using data to segment accounts to better choose the accounts and individuals to collect from -- those with the ability and willingness to pay.
Do you view debt collection as a necessity or are there other solutions?
I think that too many poor people are placed for collection. I think too many people experiencing hardship are placed for collection. There are things that can be done to stop that from happening, but it would take a seismic shift in the willingness of a hospital to build out their own department to handle that.
Getting these people coverage upfront is really the solution. There's research to show that about a third of all the accounts that are sold to debt collectors qualified for a hospital's charity care policy. So if these people had applied, they would have gotten charity care and they would not have this debt. I have always believed that this policy should be an opt-out policy. People should be placed in charity care automatically, instead of having to fill out an application to opt-in.
Why is it not the other way around?
It's a good question. I don't know why.
I know in some places, the state does not allow them to do what they call presumptive charity care. Presumptive means you didn't have someone apply to it, but you have data that can determine if someone fits a hospital's charity care policy.
At RIP Medical Debt we act as a second safety net. We give hospitals the ability to give us the cases that qualify for charity care so that we can donate them.
So it really comes down to the hospitals, both public and private?
Yes, it does come down to the hospitals. Some of the private hospitals have some of the best charity care policies, but, again, they don't do presumptive charity care.
One telltale sign that the system is out of whack is charity care as a percentage of costs of hospitals is about 1.6% when we know that over 33% of the people qualify for charity care. We can see that they're missing people. If they were right on target, 10% of their expenses would go towards charity care.
What sort of changes do you press for as an organization?
As a charitable organization, we don’t advocate for a specific policy. I do think that the opt-in versus opt-out question might be one of the biggest problems.
There are 12 states that have not adopted Medicaid to cover people who make 138% of the federal poverty level. That's something that should be made uniform across the country. For example, at one and a half times the poverty level, everybody gets Medicaid. Then we would be taking a swath of the poorest people and children and making sure that they're always covered. Medicaid is the best insurance out there, and it comes at no cost to the people.