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
A Rich Man's War, A Poor Man's Fight
by Keri Leigh Merritt
March 26, 2021
This interview with Keri Leigh Merritt, the author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South and a historian tackling issues of inequality and poverty in America, was conducted and condensed by franknews and Payday Report.
frank X Payday | One thing that I think is written out of the way we look at the South is that there's a long history of resistance of white southerners.
Right. Whether it is Appalachian foothills or parts of the deep South, many whites were either pro-union or were anti-Confederates. There's always been a lot of class conflict that has driven this divide.
One book that has been instructive for me is the People's History of the Civil War. Matt Cunningham says, what W.E.B. Du Bois says, which is that the largest labor strike in US history was when people walked off the plantation, and the second largest was when the Confederate army deserted.
Yeah — DuBois was completely right, and in our new Civil War documentary, we are centering our story around that thesis. In Masterless Men, I argue that the poor whites and a lot of lower-middling class whites did not join the Confederacy at all in the first few years. They were very much anti-Confederates. They did not want to fight for what they knew was a war to protect the property of really rich people — people who hated them.
Who hated them and also didn't have to fight, right?
Yes, exactly. So they passed The Conscription Act of 1862. Literally within months of that, they passed what was called the 20 Negro Law, which exempts the large slaveholders from fighting the war. They were literally conscripting all the poor whites to go fight.
Then, within one year of conscription, you had such massive waves of poor whites going back home that by 1864, there were less than half, probably closer to about one-third, of the Confederate Army left — because everybody has just gone back home. They end up fighting turf wars in their own home spaces; it's kind of like just open guerrilla warfare throughout a lot of the deep South.
Right.
And one thing I always try to get people to understand about the South, is that when you think about the birth of the police in the South, it occurs just a few years after slavery ends.
That's why immediately you have police instead of the old slave patrols. Entire departments of paid uniformed officers were financed to go around policing the labor contracts that newly emancipated men were often forced into signing. And these contracts basically put them into what some historians refer to as another, lesser form of slavery. I mean, they're basically unfree laborers.
It is important to know that violence and murder and the carceral state have been the keyway that elite white Southerners have kept the South as the poorest region and the deep South as the poorest region within that region.
City Worker Strike March, Atlanta, Georgia, April 18, 1970. Georgia State University Library.
We were talking with Morris Mock, one of the leaders of the 2017 Nissan campaign, earlier this month, and he told us about how people have tried to run him off the road in these campaigns.
There is a lot of harassment. I hope these organizers are going to be able to stay safe because historically that's not been the case.
I always say that up North, we talk about racism, but Northerners don't really address in the way that some Southerners really have gut checked.
Right. I mean, the one area that the 1619 project got push back on, that I do agree with is that there were always whites involved in the movement. Of course, there were not many. I mean, most whites were overwhelmingly white supremacist racists. But there were always whites involved, too from the Anne Bradens and the Howard Zinns to the Bob Zellners and the Lillian Smiths. I've been going back and reading some Lillian Smith stuff and it's very Freudian how she deals with the race question and how it involves sexuality.
I'm actually trying to work on a book right now, that looks as far back as the 1930s, on those white southerners who were speaking out about segregation and putting their lives on the line in order to help the movement. That's something that I think needs to be made important within the movement again. White people need to deal with so much psychologically about our past sins, our own racism, our racist family members and friends, and so on. But, I think it is also important to see examples of white people being involved in the movement. Examples of these white southerners, in particular, can give a lot of people, especially younger white activists, hope and encourage them to get more involved in the movement.
I have reported on and watched several union efforts in the South die. I think what is different about the RWDSU is that they are already coming in as part of the community, as Southerners. They can point up the road from the Amazon facility and say that they've got a union contract up there.
Yeah. I think this time is different as well because they are very much framing it as a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement.
Martin Luther King Jr. & Stokely Carmichael. Bob Fitch Collection — Stanford Archives.
They were really expanding what began as a political fight into a fight for economic and labor rights, which, of course, was precisely when they killed Martin Luther King. That is when he became a real threat to the established order; he was literally killed leading a sanitation worker's strike in Memphis. So that civil rights movement left off just as they had created the Poor People's Campaign, and I think what we are seeing right now is the beginning of a new civil rights movement, one that is inspired by and connected to the Black Lives Matter protests this summer and is picking up where the last labor movement left off.
What role do you see Black women play between the original movement and today?
It's actually a really important aspect of the Civil Rights Movement that is often overlooked. There are actually going to be several good books coming out over the next few years, one from Keisha Blain about Fannie Lou Hamer(!), about several of the women who really organized the civil rights movement in the deep South, largely in Mississippi, but also Alabama. The work was exactly what people like Stacy Abrams are doing right now. They did the grassroots work.
[Barbara Jordan Being Handed a Bouquet of Flowers at the Tuskegee Institute], photograph, September 1976; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth843063/m1/1/?q=alabama: accessed March 26, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Southern University.
Even though they had male figureheads in almost all of these organizations, Black women were the ones who were really making things work at the grassroots level — literally going from town to town, from door to door. They were doing things like radicalizing other women, getting them to run these small groups, and pushing their menfolk to go register to vote.
Of course they really couldn't run for political office back in the sixties, but now they can, so I think we are going to see a lot of deep South political offices being filled by Black women — and I can’t wait!
There's been a lot of like Stacey Abrams imagery that I have noticed. There are these signs leading into the warehouse of Stacey Abrams as Rosie the Riveter with a mask that says RWDSU.
Yeah. I have heard a lot about that. It’s amazing.
@Lfelizleon
Why do you think Terri Sewell is embracing this so much, even as a moderate? Do you think she is worried about being primaried from the left?
Well, in the deep South, really progressive, really leftist candidates do very well. I mean, you see this in mayors of small towns and cities, throughout Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. All of these places have really leftist, progressive, usually Black, mayors.
Anne Feeney said that what union busters do is often manipulative men do in bad relationships. What is your perspective on the role of gender?
Oh absolutely. It's just different kinds of abuse from employers. One thing that is really important in thinking about Southern history is the idea of monopsony. In these rural areas like the ones surrounding Bessemer, there are just not many other really good options for a job elsewhere. In these rural areas, a company like Amazon can come in and say, "Well, we're paying you $15 an hour. That's still more than you're gonna make at Walmart or McDonald's or wherever the few other places where there are other actual employment opportunities." In the Deep South, the historical roots of monopsony are based on the fact that after the Civil War and the end of slavery, power and wealth never really did change hands. You’ve still got such incredibly concentrated wealth in these rural areas. If you look at the genealogies, you can actually trace it. The people that are still really in power in these areas are the descendants of the big slaveholding families.
Another layer, which is the Bethany Morton labor thesis regarding Walmart, is that these corporations often target hiring married women, because they know that their incomes are often secondary incomes in a family. They know that they can hire and fire at will, and they can underpay these women because they are secondary earners.
City Worker Strike March, Atlanta, Georgia, April 18, 1970. Georgia State University Library.
And think about it from a power perspective as well. It's only been really in the last 10 years, honestly, that a woman could be a laborer in a big corporation and not expect to be sexually harassed and sexually assaulted and have no recourse. Especially for laborers who were poor and/or women of color, if you were going to a job and working primarily for men, you could fully expect to be raped or assaulted. These histories about the pervasive sexual violence against women laborers throughout even recent history remain understudied and undersold.
It is disturbing.
This seems like a unique opportunity to reenvision how our world operates. At large, we have been consuming Amazon in a ridiculous way amidst the pandemic and now we have to question where all this is all coming from? How is this all working?
This is absolutely a historical moment. If we do the hard work, this is one of the very few moments, maybe the only moment in most of our lifetimes, where there's actually a chasm where you have the chance to really, really change things.