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
Can't Pay, Won't Pay
by Thomas Gokey
September 30, 2020
This interview with Thomas Gokey, founder of the Debt Collective, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
My name is Thomas Gokey. I, like a lot of people, ruined my financial life by going to school.
After I finished my studies, I started teaching as an adjunct professor. I saw that a lot of my students were taking out significantly more debt than I had to, even though they were only 10 to 15 years younger than I was. On top of that, I saw how little I was paid to teach. If just one of my students paid sticker price for tuition, that would more than cover what I was being paid to teach that class.
Why do students need to be forced into such enormous, life-changing amounts of debt, when the people who are doing the research and instruction weren't getting paid a wage that we could live on? Where does all this money go?
At the time I didn't fully understand what debt was, where it came from, and how it worked. I viewed it as an individual problem that required a clever individual solution. But when Occupy started, the way I thought about debt quickly changed.
In this classic sort of Gandhian nonviolent method, you find the way that you're cooperating with your own exploitation and then organize mass noncooperation.
What sort of noncooperation have you organized through the Debt Collective?
One of the first things we organized was the Rolling Jubilee. I learned that a lot of personal household debt gets bought and sold by investors on a secondary market. When they buy it and sell it to each other for pennies on the dollar, and then they hire a debt collector to hound you for the full amount aggressively. We raised money to buy a lot of debt and destroy it.
As exciting as that was, we knew it wasn't a solution to the larger systems that had forced us into debt to begin with. That's really where the Debt Collective came in, we recognized that we have real power when debtors start to organize and simply refuse to pay a debt that shouldn't exist in the first place.
In 2015, we organized a student debt strike among former students who attended predatory for-profit universities in the United States. In the Higher Education Act, there is one sentence that says if your school violated state law and you wound up in student debt as a result, you have the right to assert a borrower's defense to repayment. Essentially, if your school is a criminal enterprise, your debt should be considered illegitimate and unenforceable.
This law was on the books, but the Obama administration didn't want to enforce the law because they saw it as a zero-sum game between student debtors and taxpayers, and they cared about protecting taxpayers. Now, I’m not an economist, but the economists we talked to did not agree with that view. From an economics standpoint, this isn't about finding the money to pay for it. It's about political will and political power. We have the money, that's not the issue.
We organized students to go on strike to force the Obama administration to start enforcing that law. And even though we've had to fight tooth and nail for every single penny along the way, so far we have over a billion dollars worth of debt discharge as a result of that initial strike. Now, we're organizing a larger strike to get rid of all $1.7 trillion of student debt.
How do you advocate for student debt to be canceled? What legislative mechanisms do you want to see used?
There are existing laws and authorities that can be used to cancel debt, but aren't being used. The Secretary of Education has the authority to cancel all federal student debt.
I don't think that the Democrats are going to embrace these policies out of the goodness of their hearts. This is something we're going to have to win by fighting them tooth and nail every inch along the way.
What role can Congress play?
They also have the power to cancel student debt. Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders have introduced legislation to do just that.
But as part of the Higher Education Act, Congress already gave the Secretary of Education the discretionary power to cancel student debt on their own. The Secretary of Education essentially has a self-destruct button that they could press at any point. It needs to be pressed because, one, the debt shouldn't exist, and, two, debt relief can provide a badly needed economic stimulus as we are entering the first year of a global depression. There are many good reasons to cancel this debt, and there's no good reason not to.
Does the reticence come from those who are profiting off of this system? Who loses if the debt is canceled?
The entire student debt system in the United States has become this predatory for-profit enterprise. There are a lot of profiteers who are latched onto the system as it stands — and it's not just individual students who are being forced into debt, universities themselves are debt-financed to run their standard operations.
If you look at the University of California system as a whole, for example, they finance their operations through bonds, and they pay interest on those bonds. The University of California system pays over a billion dollars in interest alone to Wall Street to fund the University of California, and they have very favorable interest rates because they used their ability to raise tuition as collateral.
To what degree can we say that the University of California is a public university when most of its financing is coming from private sources, including in private tuition? We need to fully fund these public schools all —of these schools have basically been privatized. Betsy DeVos has effectively won, but it wasn't just her, this has been decades in the making, starting with the shifts that Ronald Reagan made. We are at a point where there is no genuine public university left in the United States.
What do you see as the role of debt in our society?
Some debt simply should not exist. Medical debt should not exist, period, and in most wealthy nations, it doesn't exist. We need to fully fund healthcare so that everybody has it. And we save money by doing so; we spend more money on our debt-fueled healthcare system than the rest of the world, and it delivers worse care, worse outcomes, all in the middle of a global pandemic.
Student debt should not exist. Payday loans should not exist. The only reason this debt exists is it makes a small number of people extraordinarily wealthy. We don't live in a democracy, we live in an oligarchy where this small group of people who are profiting off the system has the political power.
Is there such a thing as necessary debt?
If you want to get a little bit more philosophical, at a fundamental level, debt is simply a social bond. It's a promise that we make to each other.
And maybe the answer is I owe you healthcare. If you get sick, or if you get hurt, maybe you shouldn't be forced into bankruptcy. Maybe you shouldn't have to go on GoFundMe to get a surgery. Maybe the debt that we owe is reparations to Black Americans for centuries of exploitation, slavery, and oppression. This is a debt we don't acknowledge and don't pay. This a moral obligation that we have, and we're currently defaulting on it.
Sometimes people get the mistaken impression that the Debt Collective is trying to create some utopian society that doesn't have any debt at all, but really debt is the glue that holds society together. It's a matter of what debts do we honor, what debts are illegitimate and should be eliminated, and which debts should exist but should be renegotiated. How do we make these social bonds productive for everybody? For example, climate change is an existential crisis, and we need to finance a massive shift to decarbonize our economy.
It's less a matter of all debt is bad, and more a matter of which debt shouldn't exist and what debt is fruitful. There are certain bonds that tie us to each other, and in which everyone's better off. A society without these bonds isn't a society — it's just a bunch of isolated people, and that's not a world worth living in either. Someone said that debt is a kind of time machine. It allows you to live in the future today. There is a future worth living in, and it requires creative finance.
How do you see debt tying us to the existing power structure? Top of mind is the student debt system — you graduate with massive amounts of debt, and you feel like you need to get a certain job. What sort of systems do you see this debt ties us to?
Debt has enormous disciplinary power. Part of its power is that it tends to isolate us, it tends to make us feel like we're alone. It turns us into individuals. As individuals, our debts are massive burdens. As individuals, the options for resisting the system as an individual are very limited. As individuals, the power of the state and the power of Wall Street is to control and destroy our lives if we don't cooperate is massive. However, collectively, our debts give us enormous power.
I think the real genius of organizing debtors is that we can flip this power relationship around.
What are some of the biggest misconceptions that you've seen that people hold about debt? And how do you think that affects mobilizing and organizing around debt?
The main thing is the idea that people end up in debt because they made poor choices. People aren't in debt because they live beyond their means, people are forced into debt because we've denied them the means to live. Granted, some individuals make bad choices and wind up in debt as a result, but that's the exception that proves the rule.
If we paid workers a livable, honest wage for the value that they're creating in our economy, most of this debt would disappear. Look at credit card debt, for example. People think, well if you have credit card debt, you must be buying something like flat-screen TVs. But when you look at the data, 42% of people have credit card debt due to buying basic necessities like diapers, utility bills, food, medical bills. A lot of credit card debt is just medical debt that has been paid with a credit card.
Big changes like this have never happened without mass mobilization, without direct action, and without civil disobedience. We want people to be empowered in refusing to pay. We have a manifesto that just came out called, Can't Pay, Won't Pay. In it, we make the case for organizing. We feel like the time for this tactic has come in a global pandemic where millions of people can't pay their rent, can't pay their utility bill, are having their water shut off, can't pay their student loans, and are forced into medical debt for COVID related expenses.
Nothing in our society is going to remain the same as a result of this crisis. Everything is up for renegotiation, so we should negotiate from a position of power. The main thing that I want everybody to ask is: what debts do you owe and to whom? Which debts should be refused? How do we organize together to refuse?