There Are No Girls on the Internet - From tech workers to Starbucks baristas, workers of the world are uniting

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00:00:43.740 welcome home pro society is a weekly podcast that's part book club part group chat for anyone

00:00:49.960 who thinks pride and prejudice and love island to serve the same level of discourse each week

00:00:54.500 we're connecting the dots between books the internet and pop culture with your favorite

00:00:58.520 writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Listen to Pro Society

00:01:05.220 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:01:28.520 orders only. Other fees and terms apply. When someone won't even acknowledge that you work for

00:01:33.540 them, like they're certainly not going to acknowledge your humanity. If they don't value

00:01:37.360 enough to give you the proper legal paperwork, they do not care how your day is going. And that

00:01:44.180 is the problem. There are no girls on the internet as a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. 1.00

00:01:58.520 I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. 0.97

00:02:05.460 We're in what feels like a little bit of a renaissance when it comes to organized labor and unions.

00:02:10.600 More and more workers, whether they're baristas at Starbucks or journalists, are seeing the power of unions and organizing as a collective.

00:02:18.580 And even though we maybe used to have an idea of a union member as being a white guy working in an auto factory or a steel mill,

00:02:25.300 the face of who we understand as somebody who needs a union is really changing, too.

00:02:30.860 More and more media workers and office tech workers, for instance, are trying to unionize.

00:02:35.780 This shift is something that labor reporter Kim Kelly is really happy to see.

00:02:40.420 I'm Kim Kelly, and I am an independent labor reporter and the author of Fight Like Hell, The Untold History of American Labor.

00:02:47.760 So how did you become someone who cared about labor and telling the story of all of these different fights?

00:02:54.420 So I guess the short answer is I got involved in organizing my workplace. That's kind of a direct pipeline right there, right, to caring about the labor movement, joining it. But this was the longer answer. It was like, well, I'm from a union family, from a very rural, working class, kind of isolated place. And everyone who raised me was a construction worker, a steel worker, a teacher, like everyone was in the union.

00:03:17.080 And it wasn't something that we really talked about that much or really it was, you know, really discussed.

00:03:22.900 It was just part of the job, part of life. Like, oh, yeah, dad's in a union. That's why we have health insurance.

00:03:28.000 That's why he has to go to those meetings sometimes. That's why he's on strike and we can't go to Walmart, you know, things like that.

00:03:33.160 And it wasn't really until I was at Vice or as the heavy metal editor and some colleagues pulled me aside and were like, hey, we want to form a union.

00:03:41.640 And what do you think?

00:03:42.360 And I'm like, hell yeah, let me get involved in that.

00:03:44.900 But I realized that there were even, it was even an option, like that there were unions for people like me.

00:03:49.920 Someone who at that point was writing about death metal on the internet.

00:03:53.000 But it turns out there was.

00:03:54.440 And we joined it. 0.98

00:03:55.660 Kim got more and more involved in unions through organizing around her own union at the media company Vice.

00:04:01.420 And we organized like almost, I think by the time I got laid off in 2019, we'd organized like five or six hundred people in the building.

00:04:10.000 and we'd bargain two different contracts, like we'd gotten raised, we'd improved the workplace.

00:04:14.420 We'd done a ton. We'd accomplished a lot. And I was deeply involved the whole time because

00:04:18.860 being in a union had always kind of appealed to me as an idea, as something that fit into my

00:04:24.600 political views and my worldview. And it just kind of felt nice to join that family tradition.

00:04:29.880 But I didn't really start writing about it with any sort of regularity or depth until after we 0.97

00:04:36.300 unionized and I was already freelancing a lot working advice because they didn't pay us shit

00:04:40.640 until we organized another big endorsement for unionizing a workplace yeah I was freelancing

00:04:46.220 in time and uh really it just kind of happened by not by accident but unexpectedly because I was

00:04:54.700 writing a little bit uh just freelance stuff about the prison industrial complex routine book

00:04:58.920 and I pitched them on a profile of mother jones you know the labor leader I thought oh okay

00:05:03.460 your audience is predominantly like younger women like here is a cool icon we can talk about and my

00:05:09.400 editor said yeah that's a cool idea but I don't think our audience necessarily knows what a union

00:05:14.600 is so why don't you write about that first I was like okay and I wrote a little explainer because

00:05:20.620 at that point I'd kind of learned more about the movement about the history from talking to

00:05:24.100 organizers who work with from reading books on my own from just getting all fired up about union

00:05:28.480 stuff as like a baby organizer and um i wrote that article and it kind of was like mini viral

00:05:35.060 people paying attention because in 2017 people weren't necessarily used to looking to teen vogue

00:05:40.860 for their like anti-capitalist analysis yet they're like what is this and essentially like

00:05:45.880 it that helped me out as a freelancer i was like okay that went well what if you let me do a whole

00:05:51.360 column and they're like yeah okay we'll try it that was like four years ago and really just

00:05:55.920 having that experience organizing and kind of learning on the fly and being a big nerd and

00:06:01.280 loving history books kind of made me feel like I was allowed to write about labor. Like I had a

00:06:05.980 leg to stand on. And once I kind of gave myself that permission, I really just dove in and started

00:06:11.200 writing more and writing more, talking to more people, just kind of fell in love with the idea,

00:06:15.980 right? Because I'd spent my whole life up until then writing about heavy metal,

00:06:18.880 which is still a great love and still a huge part of my life. But I was kind of looking for

00:06:23.020 something new. And the union happened to be there at exactly the right time. And once I realized I

00:06:28.560 was going to more union meetings than heavy metal shows, I thought, okay, maybe it's time to actually

00:06:33.440 try and do this. And here we are. Wow. What, what a trajectory.

00:06:40.200 Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it really, I see a lot of through lines in your work and I,

00:06:46.340 I remember the vice unionization fight. And I heard radio where my podcast is hosted. We just

00:06:54.180 recently unionized, which was a big deal. I guess it's a good question. What do you think of this

00:06:59.980 idea that, I don't know, I often, I think that everybody could benefit from a union. I think

00:07:05.260 the benefits are, unions are for everybody. But I often hear this kind of pushback that like, oh,

00:07:12.020 what does an office media worker need a union for? What do you say to things like that?

00:07:16.340 oh, it makes me so mad because it's just like, and there's always like stupid, like rich white 0.99

00:07:21.960 guys on Twitter that just feel the need to have opinions about, oh, well, grad students don't 1.00

00:07:26.800 need a union. Video game workers don't need a union. Journalists don't need a union. You're

00:07:30.740 not working in a coal mine or in a factory. Okay. Do you have a boss? Does you rely on someone

00:07:37.120 else's decisions to pay your bills? Do you have to go to an office? Do you have coworkers? Are

00:07:41.600 you getting mistreated? Are you getting disrespected? Like, are you going to a job? Do you work for

00:07:47.340 someone? Then you need a union. It is ridiculous to act as though different categories of work or

00:07:53.580 whether you're doing like the white collar, blue collar sort of dichotomy or whatever other

00:07:58.960 artificial division that somebody with an interest in preserving capital likes to lean on. Like it's

00:08:04.540 never been the case that only one type of worker, one demographic of worker is allowed to have a

00:08:11.540 union or is encouraged to have a union or is benefited from having a union like every type

00:08:16.520 of worker can benefit from having a union and that's not even necessarily you don't have to

00:08:22.700 go through the specific process of like filing for an election with nlrb doing all of the kind

00:08:28.720 of bureaucratic red tape bs that a lot of workers are kind of forced to deal with now to form a 0.97

00:08:34.700 union you can just get together with your co-workers and try and make some shit happen

00:08:38.120 like there's no one way to be a union member there's no one way to be a union and they're

00:08:42.920 all valid and important and honestly building collective power with your co-workers is the most

00:08:48.380 effective and empowering thing that you can do because one worker on their own can only do so

00:08:53.780 much but a bunch of us whether it's five or 50 or 500 that's how you move mountains whether you

00:09:01.040 work in an office or you work in a coal mine or you work at amazon or you're a gig worker like

00:09:06.040 someone is trying to screw you over. And the only way you can stop that is by getting together with

00:09:11.960 a bunch of other people who are feeling screwed, screwed over, doing something about it. 0.95

00:09:17.040 Oof. I love how you put that. And that's the thing that I really love about talking about labor 0.94

00:09:24.200 and the collective organizing. And it's something I really see as a value that it's about people

00:09:30.380 banning together, oftentimes against massive, powerful companies like Amazon that have teams

00:09:37.440 of lawyers and PR and all of this. But even with all that institutional power, they're not more

00:09:44.640 powerful than the collective. They're not more powerful than people coming together. Is that

00:09:49.300 something that you see in these union stories as well? Yeah. I mean, Jeff Bezos is the new Jay

00:09:54.320 Gould. We talk about they're in the new Gilded Age, the railroad barons. They controlled the

00:09:58.800 rails. They controlled all the capital. But the workers built those rails and the workers shut

00:10:03.640 them down a whole bunch and struck fear into the hearts of the capitalist class. There's always

00:10:10.020 more of us than there are of them. And I think that's something that workers sometimes forget

00:10:14.420 because we are so disenfranchised and isolated and beaten down. But the people on top never forget

00:10:19.800 that. And that's why they get so frightened and anxious when they see workers organizing,

00:10:24.660 because they know that they're outnumbered

00:10:27.900 and that if a whole bunch of people

00:10:29.420 want to make them do something,

00:10:31.640 you know, we've done it before

00:10:33.180 and we'll do it again.

00:10:35.000 The history of labor in this country

00:10:37.140 is very complicated.

00:10:38.380 There's a lot of wins.

00:10:39.220 There's a lot of losses.

00:10:40.080 There's a lot of struggle and bloodshed

00:10:41.680 and beautiful things and terrible things.

00:10:43.980 But every step forward that we've made

00:10:47.620 as a country has come from workers.

00:10:50.380 It's come from regular working people

00:10:52.180 downing their tools and saying, 1.00

00:10:53.600 all right, I've had enough of this shit. Let's do something. And that is something that has not 1.00

00:10:58.840 gone away. And especially now, I think that's something we're going to keep seeing more of

00:11:02.920 because it's easier for people to be connected to one another. It's easier for people to see

00:11:06.500 other folks taking control, whether you're a Starbucks customer, you buy stuff from Amazon,

00:11:12.180 you go to REI, you have a friend who works as a grad student. Someone in your life is probably

00:11:17.660 part of some kind of organizing effort. And if they're not, you can help them start or you can

00:11:22.360 start your own like the possibilities are endless let's take a quick break

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00:12:26.780 when i was 14 years old i was kidnapped and held captive for nine months i survived and i've spent

00:12:34.600 my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them i'm elizabeth smart

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00:13:18.840 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart

00:13:21.600 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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00:13:27.280 If your bookshelf and your For You page

00:13:29.280 are equally important to your personality,

00:13:31.700 welcome home.

00:13:33.220 This is Prose Society,

00:13:35.460 the weekly podcast that's part book club,

00:13:37.880 part group chat for thought daughters,

00:13:39.640 pop culture obsessives,

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00:14:25.440 See you between the pages.

00:14:32.940 At our back.

00:14:33.860 um this this right here um this is going to be the the catalyst for the revolution

00:14:42.340 that's exactly what this is i just witnessed that back in april amazon warehouse workers

00:14:48.300 on staten island's jfk8 the amazon warehouse with the most employees in the state of new york

00:14:53.220 won a historic bid to form a labor union it's the very first amazon facility in the united states to

00:14:59.040 have a successful union election, which is huge. So we know that workers at JFK 8, the Amazon

00:15:05.320 warehouse in Staten Island, they won a union election and they kind of went against some of

00:15:10.200 the conventional wisdom. You know, they started their own independent organization instead of

00:15:14.920 trying to sort of join an established national union. And I've read some of your writing on this

00:15:19.800 and it sounds like to you, it really just comes down to the workers. Can you tell us more about

00:15:25.140 kind of like what you mean by this yeah so here's the thing like what amazon labor union organizers

00:15:29.720 did was incredible and inspiring and so important and it's also not anything new right the idea of

00:15:38.220 building a union from the ground up of building real human bonds and connections and solidarity

00:15:44.120 forming a community to fight instead of you know following a prescriptive playbook doing what

00:15:49.820 you're supposed to do because that's how it's done that's how it sometimes works like

00:15:55.140 Everyone has to do anything.

00:15:57.040 This is the thing.

00:15:58.840 I mean, that's one of the reasons they're so successful.

00:16:00.900 They kind of threw out that playbook and drew on, whether or not it was intentional,

00:16:05.480 they drew on these kind of historical examples of workers in their possession doing the exact same thing.

00:16:11.820 Because the workers that organized at JFK 8, predominantly younger folks, queer and trans folks,

00:16:17.100 black and brown workers, immigrant workers, multilingual, multigenerational,

00:16:21.100 a vast multiracial, multigender, multi-everything kind of coalition.

00:16:25.140 And that is how workers have won throughout history. And that is not something that you maybe find in every mainstream labor history book, but that is just true. That's just how it is.

00:16:36.880 I mean, one of the parallels that I, as a labor nerd, I like to draw between JFK 8 and history is what Dorothy Lee Bolden was able to do in the 60s in Atlanta.

00:16:50.460 And she was a domestic worker from the age of nine.

00:16:53.540 Like, really, the majority of black women in that city in that time that had a job, they worked in domestic service.

00:17:00.660 And she realized, like, okay, we're not being paid enough. 0.55

00:17:04.420 Our work isn't being treated properly as labor.

00:17:06.500 word being truly like garbage and you know what like there's a lot of us maybe we can do something

00:17:10.580 about this she was actually lived a few doors down from dr martin luther king jr and she was 0.93

00:17:15.640 commiserating with him one day and he told her like dorothy you know you can just do something

00:17:20.160 yourself like if you want to change things if you want to organize things like just do it and she

00:17:25.220 did she organized the national domestic workers union of america which wasn't a recognized like

00:17:31.180 standard labor union it wasn't operating within that framework it was an independent organization

00:17:35.760 and at its peak the membership rolls hit I think 10,000 people so all black women domestic workers

00:17:42.460 in Atlanta and they built power and they built political power they educated one another they

00:17:47.140 shared resources in order to join all you had to show up with was a dollar and a voter registration

00:17:52.120 card showing the intersection between different movements for justice and it's such a cool example

00:17:57.680 because she did it her way and she made a huge difference you can see there's a direct line from

00:18:03.320 George Lee Boulder's organization in the 60s to the current National Domestic Workers Alliance,

00:18:08.720 which, I mean, in Philly a couple of years ago, they managed to pass an incredibly impactful bill

00:18:14.300 that helped get health care for domestic workers in my city. Like, everything builds on the work

00:18:19.680 that someone did before, whether it's in 1960 or 1860. And I'm just excited to see what's going

00:18:26.300 to happen in 50 years when someone younger than me writes a book and interviews Chris Smalls and

00:18:31.460 ask what inspired him, right? Because we're all links in a very long chain. And one link

00:18:38.540 can do something cool, but that whole long chain, that's how we get close to where we need to be.

00:18:45.720 Oof, I have chills. What a description. I used to talk at a lot of union meetings. I love

00:18:50.160 a story. It's historical. It's Amazon versus the people and the people that have spoken.

00:18:56.640 That's Chris Smalls, the president and founder of the Amazon Labor Union.

00:19:00.060 He started working in Amazon warehouses in 2015.

00:19:03.480 During COVID, when everybody, myself included, was ordering a ton of stuff on Amazon,

00:19:08.400 Chris started to speak out about how warehouses were putting workers at risk

00:19:11.840 by failing to meet basic COVID mitigation protocols.

00:19:15.620 So Chris organized a walkout and protest.

00:19:18.400 He was fired that same day for, according to Amazon,

00:19:22.540 failing to meet social distancing protocols.

00:19:25.180 So basically, Amazon was claiming that Chris was the one

00:19:28.660 who was failing to keep Amazon workers safe,

00:19:30.840 not them, which is a little sketchy.

00:19:34.580 So Chris organized.

00:19:36.600 He started the Congress of Essential Workers,

00:19:39.000 which later backed the formation

00:19:40.420 of the Amazon Labor Union.

00:19:42.360 Amazon suits like former Obama administration spokesperson

00:19:45.040 turned Amazon PR and policy chief Jay Carney

00:19:47.840 and David Zablotsky personally smeared Chris

00:19:51.140 in leaked notes.

00:19:52.680 They called him not smart and not articulate.

00:19:55.760 In fact, they thought Chris was so not smart

00:19:58.600 that their plan, according to these reports,

00:20:01.060 was to make Chris the face of the movement

00:20:03.140 because certainly that would tank it.

00:20:06.620 Only it backfired.

00:20:08.560 Chris, it turns out,

00:20:09.460 was an incredibly effective organizer and spokesperson

00:20:11.780 and would go on to usher in

00:20:13.780 the very first unionized Amazon warehouse in history.

00:20:17.200 I mean, so you've just hit on a couple of things

00:20:19.200 that I am fascinated by.

00:20:21.220 One, I do think we have this issue,

00:20:25.040 not just in labor organizing,

00:20:26.740 but in organizing in general,

00:20:27.860 where it's so tempting to have there be one face.

00:20:32.760 Like, this is the person who started this whole thing.

00:20:35.540 When the reality is it's often so many different stories

00:20:38.380 and voices coming together.

00:20:39.680 And I get the inclination to make it about one central figure

00:20:44.280 that, like, that is such a powerful, motivating thing

00:20:47.360 just in our culture, but that sometimes it can obscure

00:20:50.020 what you were just talking about, that it's a lineage.

00:20:52.300 It's about a lot of people coming together

00:20:54.280 and inspiring each other.

00:20:55.780 Yeah, I saw it.

00:20:56.600 It was interesting because Twitter is always going to Twitter, but I saw there was some criticism because people were excited about Chris Smalls, who was the leader of the Amazon Labor Union, who was kind of the spark that started that whole movement when he was fired in 2019 for protesting about COVID safety.

00:21:13.360 Like, you got to hand it to the guy, even like, like, sometimes it is okay to lionize someone when they have done something incredible.

00:21:22.720 And I think it is important for us to have those working class heroes, you know, of course, like no one person does everything. People are flawed. People are complicated. We shouldn't, you know, hero worship is not something that I would recommend, but acknowledging and appreciating someone's skill and someone's importance to a movement, that doesn't take away from the collective effort. That's just kind of giving somebody their flowers and they deserve them. 1.00

00:21:45.940 And I think something that, you know, President Smalls has done in a really wonderful way is making clear, like, the Amazon Labor Union Organizing Committee, like, all of us did this. All of us were in this together. Like, a lot of the other organizers are public, too. Derek Palmer, Angelica, Justine Medina. Like, it was clearly a very collective effort.

00:22:06.060 But, you know, I think it's OK to get excited about having one person, you know, getting a little bit more attention because, I mean, we need more heroes.

00:22:17.360 We need more heroes that look like us and sound like us.

00:22:20.780 And especially the fact that, like, a young, handsome black man with gold teeth and tattoos is like the face of the labor movement in America right now.

00:22:29.600 That is phenomenal.

00:22:31.680 Like, that is going to keep the movement moving.

00:22:33.860 That is going to bring more people in.

00:22:35.300 we do not need more white guys in suits like we got some good ones shout out to them but like

00:22:40.800 the white guys in suits are also a lot of the time the people that have their boots on our neck

00:22:45.680 I think it is very important to recognize who the working class is and what they look like what we

00:22:51.640 look like and sound like and talk like to build those connections to bring more people in and show

00:22:56.680 that there's so much more room in the movement for every other type of person and you know I don't 0.99

00:23:02.480 I don't want to talk too much shit on the white guys in suits. 0.99

00:23:04.560 Some of them are great, but some of them aren't. 0.99

00:23:07.540 And they've had plenty of time to bask in their attention over the years.

00:23:11.680 I think it is perfectly fine to give someone else a shot. 0.95

00:23:15.140 Abso-fucking-lutely.

00:23:16.060 Every single time I see a photo or a video of Chris Smalls in his fitted and his do-rag, 0.94

00:23:21.240 talking to an elected official, I'm like, yes, this is, like, it just feels good to see.

00:23:26.140 It just feels like, and honestly, if I'm being honest, him being, like, his trajectory is what got me fired up about the Amazon fight.

00:23:36.360 I will never forget the way that Amazon suits use this, like, very clearly racially coded language to refer to him and discredit him.

00:23:45.400 He's inarticulate. 0.99

00:23:46.780 He's not smart. 0.97

00:23:47.880 He's not a deep thinker. 0.84

00:23:49.060 And I feel like every black and brown person, every immigrant or anybody connected to one of those communities knew exactly what these Amazon suits were trying to do.

00:23:58.780 And what's so funny is that, A, they were really downplaying the multiracial workers that keep their company running, that, like, they would be nothing without.

00:24:11.040 And I think that they really kind of shot themselves in the foot because in the end, they made Chris, like, this lionized face of their movement, like, kind of in spite of their trying to discredit him.

00:24:24.240 And, boy, they couldn't have picked a more effective spokesperson, right?

00:24:27.400 wrong one for that they were trying to keep like they even said in some of their little leaked

00:24:32.640 internal memos like we're gonna make him the face of this and I remember when they won he tweeted

00:24:36.320 like no thanks like a call that was the worst mistake I ever made it's like it just shows this 0.76

00:24:42.500 massive disconnect between the people in the c-suite doing whatever the fuck it is they do

00:24:46.440 all day and the people actually working and living these communities and trying to build power trying

00:24:51.600 to survive like why wouldn't people respond to a character like Chris like why wouldn't people

00:24:58.080 want to talk to other folks in the organizing community to speak their language and live in

00:25:01.460 their neighborhoods and take the bus with them like why would someone listen to some rich guy

00:25:06.960 in a suit when they could talk to someone that they're used to seeing like out in the neighborhood

00:25:13.480 who like someone who's cousin you know like why but it's it's a it's like a century apart but

00:25:21.040 thinking about the way that the workers and the organizing committee at amazon were able to build

00:25:26.180 power and bridge these kind of artificial divisions it reminds me of this example bear with

00:25:31.380 me again i'm a giant nerd i just wrote a whole book about it but in 1946 the great sugar strike

00:25:36.860 in hawaii and at that time and probably still but especially at that time the sugar game plantations

00:25:43.060 and the islands were owned entirely by white guys who lived in the mainland. And they were worked

00:25:48.740 by native Hawaiians, as well as Chinese, Korean, Puerto Rican, Filipino, Japanese, immigrants,

00:25:56.260 but predominantly Asian workforce from all sorts of different places, lots of different languages.

00:26:00.960 And the bosses had a very explicit policy of treating different workers differently, unequally.

00:26:07.000 So like some workers made more than others. They kept all of the workers in different segregated

00:26:11.940 camps so that Chinese workers and Filipino workers, Korean workers, wouldn't really see

00:26:16.860 one another, wouldn't really talk to one another. And they did that because they wanted to make sure 0.96

00:26:20.920 the workers weren't organized. They wanted to be able to use different groups of workers against

00:26:25.180 one another. As in like earlier strikes, Filipino workers were brought in to act as strike breakers 0.95

00:26:31.020 when Japanese field workers went on strike. There were a lot of instances of that kind of thing

00:26:34.460 happening. And when it came time to strike in 1946, the ILWU in National Longshore Warehouse

00:26:41.660 Workers Union, a really cool radical union, their history is rad, there's time to strike and they

00:26:46.400 realize, okay, we can't let them break us apart like that again. We need to pull people together.

00:26:51.360 And how do we do that? They brought in translators and made sure everybody in every meeting felt

00:26:56.140 heard and understood what was happening. They had different groups of workers cook for one another

00:27:00.600 and share recipes and build community that way.

00:27:03.560 Same thing they did in the parking lot at Staten Island.

00:27:06.240 They brought people together on a human level

00:27:08.600 and showed them, you know, you're all being exploited. 1.00

00:27:11.460 You're all being treated like garbage. 1.00

00:27:13.040 You're all in this together, 1.00

00:27:15.440 whether or not you chose to be.

00:27:16.680 So why not embrace it

00:27:17.980 and try to become more powerful together?

00:27:20.280 And it worked and they won.

00:27:21.880 They won like the first big raise in like 20 years.

00:27:25.860 And that's exactly what I thought about

00:27:28.320 when I heard about, you know,

00:27:29.420 the barbecues and the jollof rice and all of the just the very personal intimate kind of organizing

00:27:35.080 and connecting those happening in the parking lot and in the break room in amazon and jfka like

00:27:39.460 when you connect with people as people and listen to them and hear them that's when magic happens

00:27:46.260 like it sounds so basic but i feel like people in charge don't get that because they don't see us as

00:27:51.920 people yeah that's and i think it really goes back to what you were saying that people coming

00:27:58.800 together, people uniting in the power of community and shared vision and a collective,

00:28:04.820 that's such a powerful force. And it's not surprising to me that the powers that be,

00:28:10.520 whether it's, you know, sugar cane owners or Amazon, it's like, oh, we got to keep these

00:28:15.380 people divided. We got to keep them. We have to really inflame these divisions because when they

00:28:19.920 come together, there's more of them than there are of us. And they are very powerful. And so

00:28:23.660 So just figuring out ways to really rely on those community bonds, I think, is so important and valuable.

00:28:32.160 Yeah, and like unions have screwed that up over the years, too.

00:28:34.920 The labor movement is not, the track record is not great, especially when it comes to like, I mean, even now, right?

00:28:43.000 So earlier, I always think about this example because it makes me so mad.

00:28:46.320 The American Federation of Labor, which was like an earlier organization that later got folded into AFL-CIO, that's a whole thing.

00:28:52.020 But in like the 1800s, 1880s, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, the AFL were big supporters. They're all about it. And that was obviously incredibly xenophobic, racist legislation that kept Chinese workers and other Asian workers out of the country for decades. 0.55

00:29:08.460 and at that point those labor leaders embraced that because they didn't want people to come in

00:29:13.460 and take their members jobs and now that is a familiar refrain that we've seen throughout the

00:29:19.340 centuries like at one point it was women and it was black workers chinese and other uh other asian

00:29:24.960 workers now it's mexican south american central american workers who are being painted with that

00:29:30.400 brush like there's always this reactionary impulse in some corners to say that oh these other people 0.86

00:29:37.260 are coming in and taking everything we built well how the fuck do you think you built in the first

00:29:41.440 place by organizing people and trying to help workers like that kind of mentality has harmed

00:29:48.500 the movement and harmed so many workers over the century like just the thought of seeing a new

00:29:52.980 group of workers coming in who are more vulnerable who are desperate for work who are in a marginalized

00:29:58.380 position and thinking oh no they're going to mess with our our guys our people instead of thinking

00:30:03.520 oh we need to organize them and bring them in so we can help them out and like our union will be

00:30:08.280 stronger as a result the unions who have done that are still around like they are more effective

00:30:14.220 than the ones that were you know exclusionary and i refuse to kind of get with the times and

00:30:20.840 realize that all workers deserve a union and all workers maybe deserve to join your union depending

00:30:25.620 on what you do it's like i think a good example of unions kind of and this isn't necessarily like

00:30:32.340 That type of division, this is more like just workplace division. But I think about the United Auto Workers, who are obviously the storied industrial union. I touched on them in the book, and they've been around forever. They're synonymous with Detroit and the Rust Belt and the automotive industry.

00:30:49.700 and right now out of their 400,000 members a quarter of those 100,000 people they're grad

00:30:57.380 students they work in education they work in colleges and universities in California and

00:31:01.940 across the country like and that is the big shift and that's a great like that is how you evolve

00:31:08.260 that is how you grow and stay relevant like sure an adjunct professor at you know University

00:31:15.340 california has a different experience from someone working in a plant in flint michigan but that

00:31:21.480 doesn't mean that they still don't need those higher wages those better working conditions

00:31:25.980 that protections on the union contract like we're all in this together and the sooner that people 0.99

00:31:30.880 realize that and act and organize around that principle like the sooner we're gonna get shit 0.98

00:31:37.160 done the sooner we'll get free i mean literally it's so simple but people have fucked it up so 0.93

00:31:44.820 much over the years.

00:31:49.720 More after a quick break.

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00:32:46.980 If your bookshelf and your For You page

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00:33:47.080 When I was 14 years old,

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00:34:38.760 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:34:51.580 Let's get right back into it.

00:34:56.640 So this is probably where I should say that I have a pretty complicated personal relationship with Amazon.

00:35:01.500 If you walked into my apartment building on any given day, there's probably a few Amazon boxes shamefully stacked up in the trash.

00:35:09.080 And I honestly don't want to tell you how much I order from them.

00:35:13.180 Let's just say it's a lot.

00:35:15.680 And I'd be willing to bet that I am not alone.

00:35:18.200 It's just the truth that our, myself very much included, individual actions impact what life is like for workers at Amazon warehouses.

00:35:26.120 So what should we do?

00:35:27.380 So to that vein of sort of the sooner we realize we're all in this together, I have to sort of admit something, something that I'm like, it's one of, it's probably, there's probably not many things in my life that I am like more deeply personally ashamed of than my personal relationship to Amazon.

00:35:44.320 I got very hooked on it during the pandemic.

00:35:47.820 And what I really mean is like,

00:35:49.420 I was clearly sort of like relying on it

00:35:51.640 to experience like a short-term serotonin boost 0.99

00:35:55.360 of like new shit at my door 0.99

00:35:56.760 because I was depressed and sad. 0.99

00:35:59.300 Like most people-

00:36:00.460 We have Sephora, I hear you.

00:36:01.620 Oh God, there's a Sephora box right behind you,

00:36:04.800 right behind this laptop that you can't see.

00:36:06.600 So I, yeah.

00:36:09.600 And I think there are probably people out there

00:36:11.740 listening who can relate, you know,

00:36:13.600 do you think that there is a need for all of us to sort of recalibrate around the human cost of

00:36:19.900 companies like Amazon and sort of just like what it means? You know, I've listened to Amazon

00:36:25.180 workers talk about how they're not robots, but I think it can be hard for people, especially people

00:36:29.900 who might kind of have to rely on Amazon for whatever reason. Like maybe they have a disability,

00:36:34.000 maybe they're a new mom and like, you know, it's just like how shit gets done in their household. 0.99

00:36:38.640 I don't know. 0.97

00:36:39.380 I guess I wonder, how can we, is there a way for us to sort of meaningly recalibrate so

00:36:45.660 that people, to sort of feel more attuned with the fact that like, yeah, the reason

00:36:49.540 why I was able to get a new hat in 24 hours is because of a person who brought it here

00:36:55.780 and a person who put it in a box for me.

00:36:57.620 Right.

00:36:57.840 And that's hard.

00:36:58.380 That's one of the great conundrums of modern existence, right?

00:37:01.300 Like the idea of like no ethical consumption under capitalism, I'm probably not even smart

00:37:05.460 enough to discuss all the implications of that, right?

00:37:07.540 And I do think that it's important to recognize that individual people should not necessarily be on the hook for the actions of massive corporations and the failed government that has allowed things to get to this point.

00:37:19.200 I mean, I personally try to avoid Amazon, but like half the time that just means I'm trying to find something on Walmart.com.

00:37:24.680 You know, like it's not, we're kind of, we're stuck in this current reality.

00:37:29.840 I mean, you can do little things like instead of pushing for two day shipping, go for like the later option.

00:37:35.540 you know like if you're able just go to the store like if you are not because a lot of people like 0.97

00:37:41.140 you said are dependent on delivery services because they're disabled they're immunocompromised

00:37:45.080 they have other stressors on their life that means that they need to use these services and

00:37:48.840 I think that is fine like people need to survive and people need to thrive in the ways that they're

00:37:53.540 able to but yeah I think that ditching Amazon would be cool but then if everyone in the nation

00:38:00.640 was like we're gonna boycott Amazon and then did it that would be cool that would have an impact

00:38:05.020 but the u.s government still pays amazon to like use the internet like there's all the

00:38:09.900 their tentacles are so deep into everything we consume and every part of our existence as like

00:38:15.820 beings who use technology that there's only so much that individual consumers can do

00:38:20.940 so i don't know like try to avoid it if you can but like half the time my mother-in-law 1.00

00:38:25.520 sends us crap off amazon anyway like she does not listen to me she's italian 0.76

00:38:30.860 it's a hard question right like i think even what you're talking about now like this step 0.84

00:38:38.400 of realism like i got this because a person brought it to me a person packed it that person

00:38:42.980 might be in pain that person might be having a hard time even just internalizing and understanding

00:38:47.740 that aspect of things will probably impact your consumer habits and it'll probably impact the way

00:38:53.460 you see you know petitions about workers asking for better working conditions or the way that

00:38:58.540 you support union drives like I think the first step that any person can take no matter their

00:39:04.100 situation is to recognize the human cost of this you know these consumption patterns this setup

00:39:10.920 this whole you know capitalist hellscape we're trapped within like and then what you do from

00:39:16.680 there is kind of up to you but I think that putting the onus on individual people to fix

00:39:23.340 all this stuff isn't really fair when we have a government and a social system and a capitalist

00:39:29.500 society to blame you know you can if we all got together and did a boycott that would be cool but

00:39:35.420 i don't know it's it's a hard question really how do you go up against a giant when you're not like

00:39:41.400 because consumers there's probably way that consumers could organize against amazon but

00:39:45.920 i don't know what that would look like with a boycott a strike it's i feel like people i see

00:39:51.140 people talking about oh we get a boycott amazon all the time whenever news comes out of how

00:39:55.300 terrible they are i'm like yeah avoid them if you can but i think we need some kind of greater

00:40:00.560 uh like concentrated strategy if we really wanted to take them down and then what would come after

00:40:05.760 them what are we gonna go after walmart and target like that's cool too but it's it's a big thorny

00:40:11.340 thing and if it comes down to it at the very least don't pick 24-hour shipping yeah that's that's like

00:40:19.600 That's a good, like, practical – if you've got a little bit of a problematic relationship with Amazon, like I do, at least, you know, you can make that experience, if you're going to buy from them, make that experience a little less crappy for some of the workers who are doing the work to bring you your serotonin boost or the, like, life-saving medicine that you need or what have you.

00:40:43.180 Yeah, it comes down to remembering that there are people in those warehouses, and a lot of them are in pain, a lot of them are struggling. Some of them are going to lose their lives because of the way that Amazon operates. And I mean, maybe, I'm not a big electoral guy, but pressuring your elected officials to try and do something about Amazon and corporations like that, that could be an avenue for people too.

00:41:02.980 I feel like there's a lot of different ways to slay a giant or at least, you know, cut a couple pounds of flesh off of them.

00:41:10.060 And hopefully one thing we'll see from the success of the Amazon labor union drive and, you know, hopefully more rumblings that we'll see across the country is that people will realize what's happening and realize the role they play and just maybe reevaluate the way that they interact with that system.

00:41:26.100 And, you know, if they have friends at Amazon, maybe tell them about the union, the union would be a good step, too.

00:41:32.140 Yeah, I like that.

00:41:33.060 I mean, it's so interesting because I was reading the story yesterday, I think it was

00:41:36.520 yesterday, about how the food delivery service Grubhub had this free, they were going to

00:41:42.060 do free lunch for three hours yesterday. 1.00

00:41:45.220 And it basically was a shit show. 0.99

00:41:47.000 All the kitchens were really backed up. 0.99

00:41:48.780 And come to find out, they didn't tell any of the kitchens or the delivery drivers that

00:41:54.120 this was happening.

00:41:54.780 And so part of me was like, are they just so divorced from the idea of like human labor

00:41:59.260 that they didn't even think that they needed to give these people a heads up on what they were

00:42:04.400 doing? It's like, I mean, they don't consider those people employees, even though they clearly

00:42:09.420 work for the country and they don't consider them like equal partners when they're dealing with

00:42:13.320 these independent restaurants. I mean, Grubhub is so shady. I was just reading today, like I live

00:42:17.340 across the corner from like an incredible Indonesian restaurant and they're posting

00:42:21.280 on Instagram, like, please don't order from Grubhub. We didn't ask to be on there. They don't have our

00:42:25.640 prices right like we were trying to get them to take it down like they will do that they'll try

00:42:29.880 and encroach on independent businesses like whole operations just because they think it might get

00:42:35.460 them more of a commission like they don't care about the people they quote-unquote partner with

00:42:39.700 at all whether they're business owners and restaurant workers or the delivery workers like

00:42:44.400 it does come down to that idea that the people that are doing this labor are invisible to the

00:42:51.400 people that are making these decisions that impact their days like oh they'll figure it out

00:42:56.520 oh there's plenty of drivers oh this there's so many ways to justify treating people poorly if

00:43:01.660 you don't have their welfare and their well-being at the top of your mind and that's clearly what

00:43:06.360 happens with these tech companies they don't like the fact that so many people that work for tech

00:43:11.140 companies are resigned in this weird nether realm of gig work instead of just being given a w-2 and

00:43:17.000 clearly acknowledged as the employees they are like when someone won't even acknowledge that

00:43:20.920 you work for them, they're certainly not going to acknowledge your humanity. If they don't value

00:43:25.560 enough to give you the proper legal paperwork, they do not care how your day is going. And that

00:43:32.380 is the problem. It is a problem. I mean, it's so interesting to me how oftentimes tech companies,

00:43:40.520 like when we're talking about organized labor, it's often conversations about tech companies.

00:43:46.140 Do you see technology and labor as linked?

00:43:49.220 Oh, yeah.

00:43:49.740 I'm not a technology guy, and there's definitely reporters who do really good work in that

00:43:54.180 space, especially folks at Motherboard.

00:43:56.200 Shout out to Edward Onwiso and Lauren Gurley.

00:43:59.280 They're really on top of those intersections.

00:44:01.540 I'm kind of a dummy when it comes to tech stuff.

00:44:03.400 But even just in terms of what you see happening, whether it's in the gig work world or the

00:44:08.740 increasing surveillance that companies are able to levy against, you need to organize.

00:44:12.960 You know, Amazon's little banned word list on their internal chat or the whole Big Brother aspect of them being able to monitor everything you do.

00:44:21.100 Like technology and labor have always been connected.

00:44:23.780 I mean, going back to the Industrial Revolution, right?

00:44:25.940 Like that new technology that came in back in the day pulled people out of an uprooted society, pulled people into these factories and these dark satanic mills.

00:44:36.680 Totally kind of reconceived the way people related to labor and wage labor specifically.

00:44:42.020 I mean, one of the things about tech work and like gig work, I keep harping on this gig work, gig economy thing, but I think it is so insidious.

00:44:49.160 And it is such a big issue in labor right now is that that's not necessarily a new thing either.

00:44:54.840 Because when you think about gig work, like someone who is a gig worker, you're giving little assignments and you get a little bit of money for every little piece that you do.

00:45:03.300 You don't have a specific set workday or set hours.

00:45:06.660 You're just kind of picking up whatever scraps come your way and trying to piece together something you can survive on.

00:45:11.260 that is a very old concept going back to like the early 1900s something called piece work

00:45:17.800 garment workers in new york city specifically at that time they would spend all day laboring at

00:45:22.960 the factory and all day i mean like 12 plus hours and poorly ventilated hot or cold locked door just

00:45:29.420 nightmare places they and a lot of them were women a lot of them were children well these folks would

00:45:35.060 go spend all day in the factory and then come home and they would bring home more scraps of fabric or 0.69

00:45:40.080 unfinished projects and work on these pieces and they would get paid by the piece and basically

00:45:46.660 like they they're kind of the predecessors of the folks that are stuck in this predicament right now

00:45:51.260 because they didn't have i mean they had their day job but they were trying to make more money

00:45:55.660 so they're being paid so poorly at their day job by doing these bits and pieces and of course they

00:46:02.300 got shortchanged of course they were you know this isn't like in the era of candlelight so imagine

00:46:07.200 And someone hunched over sewing a shirtwaist at 1 a.m. in the morning before they have to wake up at 5 to go to the factory. 0.69

00:46:14.880 Like, that is not that far removed from what today's delivery drivers and rideshare app drivers and all of the other things that are now being grouped into this sort of amorphous gig work, remote work, just this weird morass of garbage.

00:46:32.060 It happened before.

00:46:34.140 and regulations and labor laws and progress in that space kind of chipped away at that.

00:46:41.920 And right now we're kind of in this weird wild west zone where tech companies can do whatever

00:46:46.000 they want, which seems like maybe somebody in charge to do something about that. But half the

00:46:51.240 people in charge are like friends with the tech people. So it's a little bit of a different world,

00:46:56.500 but some things really haven't changed. Yeah, I definitely see that as well.

00:47:02.920 So I want to talk about the book a little bit.

00:47:05.400 So Fight Like Hell, The Untold History of American Labor.

00:47:10.680 You're really right about the ways that people who have been historically marginalized, like women and black folks and indigenous folks, were the lifeblood of labor and always have been.

00:47:19.580 And like our stories and our voices were always there, even though, you know, I feel like the face of what we think of as someone involved in a union is like a white male.

00:47:29.700 I guess my question is, one, how do we make sure that we're telling a more authentic story of what the face of labor actually looks like?

00:47:38.080 And are there any, do you have a favorite figure or person who you want to get more shine in the history of labor?

00:47:45.580 Yeah, well, okay, I'll get to the second part in a second.

00:47:48.140 But I think, like, one of the most important things to realize and recognize is, like, you know, the subtitle is the untold history.

00:47:55.200 And that's not to say that folks haven't been telling these stories the whole time, right?

00:47:58.640 Like the workers told them in the first place, and then contemporary journalists and chroniclers wrote them down.

00:48:04.140 And then historians and academic researchers and archivists, they dug into the past and pulled out all these pieces and preserved them and analyzed them and, you know, tucked them away somewhere safe.

00:48:13.980 So then like journalists and nerds like me could come in and kind of pull together and synthesize that information and bring it out for other people to see.

00:48:20.500 I think so much of it comes down to people that are in a position to elevate these stories and write about labor, write about history, do it in a way that's accessible and intersectional and inclusive.

00:48:31.020 Like, it's not that hard. Like, literally, you could, like, any labor book you could pick up, like, there are black and brown and indigenous and queer and disabled folks and women and every other gender, like, in those stories, too.

00:48:45.780 It just depends on what you choose to focus on. And I think that is something that people can be more mindful of. And certainly not folks in the academic space who are like very specifically research specific groups or eras, like whether it's like Judy Young, who wrote a book called Unbound Feet of Social History of San Francisco, that was hugely impactful for my research into that area.

00:49:10.440 or Dr. Tara Hunter, who wrote To Enjoy My Freedom, which is about Black women's labor

00:49:14.840 post-reconstruction. Academics have done this work, but it's not necessarily on offer to

00:49:22.640 everyone, right? You can't necessarily walk into a library and pick up their books, though

00:49:27.060 you should be able to. There's a little bit of a gap between what's available to folks

00:49:31.700 in the academic space and what's available to folks that maybe walk by Barnes & Noble

00:49:36.100 on their way home from work and it was really important to me to pull together as much as I

00:49:40.780 could from that history and you know pull from tons and tons of research and different historians

00:49:47.460 and newspapers and magazine articles and interviews and put it together in a way that made it very

00:49:51.980 clear that everyone else has always been here and has done incredible things and I hope that people

00:49:57.540 will read my book and then read the bibliography and follow those breadcrumbs and find some more

00:50:02.600 of those important writings, because this is just the beginning. This is kind of an intro

00:50:06.700 to a lot of these folks. To your second question, one of the people that I was so excited to write

00:50:14.280 about because I thought I knew so much about her, and then it turns out I was wrong, of a woman

00:50:19.500 named Lucy Parsons. And I knew about her just from my involvement in radical space. She's kind

00:50:25.060 of like an anarchist icon. And I had read an earlier biography of her from the 70s. I'd read

00:50:30.240 her own writings. I thought I had a pretty good grip on who she was. But then a historian named

00:50:35.860 Jacqueline Jones put out a book a couple of years ago called A Goddess of Anarchy that was this

00:50:40.680 exhaustively researched biography of Lucy Parsons' life. And it turns out that the common wisdom about

00:50:47.700 her and her life was pretty wrong during her lifetime. And Lucy Parsons, she was kind of a

00:50:55.340 chameleon it was kind of to her she decided to shapeshift a little bit and hide who she was 0.95

00:51:01.360 in order to be more impactful in her work and more easily relatable to the white factory workers she

00:51:06.920 was trying to organize right because she presented herself as a mixed like spanish and indigenous

00:51:12.580 maiden from texas that's what she said she was and she said she was from there and she moved to

00:51:18.260 chicago with her husband albert parsons in the late 1800s and they set up shop and started

00:51:22.960 organizing an anarchist community and the labor community like she was a dressmaker and she

00:51:28.140 organized lady like women garment workers and she she had like a very interesting overlap uh when it

00:51:35.400 comes to like labor and anarchist politics revolutionary politics because at that time a 0.99

00:51:39.280 lot of those folks were the same people like that was a very not incestuous but a very interconnected

00:51:44.460 community like it kind of still is now right like radicals we've always been here we've always been

00:51:49.220 getting up to mischief in the labor movement and elsewhere.

00:51:52.100 But, so yeah, she was,

00:51:54.020 and she was a co-founder of the Industrial Works of the World, IWW.

00:51:57.600 Like she had an impact in the labor community, certainly,

00:52:00.740 and in labor history.

00:52:02.480 But Lucy Parsons was not who she said she was.

00:52:05.560 She was born in Virginia on a plantation.

00:52:08.520 She was a black woman who was born enslaved, 0.96

00:52:10.620 who moved out to Texas following emancipation.

00:52:14.100 And then she kind of built up her own mythology to protect herself.

00:52:17.720 and for other reasons that I don't know what went through her head I haven't met her but

00:52:23.860 she was just this fascinating character and she intersected with so many different pieces of so

00:52:29.160 many different movements but I tried to write about her in a way that showed like how important

00:52:34.260 and interesting and like radical and militant she was but also acknowledged like she was not perfect

00:52:39.220 like even outside of her own identity and you know the way she presented herself like she did

00:52:43.920 she made some pretty gnarly decisions in her life and you can read more about it but it was it was

00:52:50.280 a challenge to write about a figure that I've admired for so long and to kind of address a

00:52:55.460 little bit of the uglier and messy humanity of a person like that but I was really excited to

00:53:01.640 include her because I I feel like she's very well known in radical circles but labor people unless

00:53:06.580 you're like in Chicago and have a specific interest in that point in time you probably

00:53:11.480 don't know that much about Lucy Parsons. So you probably have a pretty negative view of her and

00:53:15.320 the other anarchists. And I was hoping to kind of, I don't know, present a more balanced view

00:53:21.560 of someone who I think is a really important historical figure. That's fascinating. And it

00:53:25.640 really does go back to recognizing humanity and sort of, if you only know Lucy Parsons as this,

00:53:33.020 you know, hero figure, that you miss out on all these other parts of who she was and what made

00:53:40.860 her her and how she showed up in the world and is I don't know isn't it better to have a messy

00:53:45.900 complex honest human person to to you know look to for guidance than a hero than someone who like

00:53:54.080 you know is just isn't isn't all those things right because that just makes it seem like a

00:54:00.000 storybook kind of situation or a fairy tale instead of a flesh and blood person a historical

00:54:04.540 thing that happened and so many of the people in this book are complicated or they've been

00:54:09.780 either people that have been kind of left out or they have been included but not in the fullness

00:54:14.460 of their whole experience like um i i start out the book in one of the earlier chapters talking

00:54:19.760 about the triangle shirtwaist factory fire which i feel like a lot of people know about that that's

00:54:23.380 a big one and clara lemlick one of the organizers uh of the the garment workers union that was kind

00:54:29.880 of in that milieu right like she was part of the uh uprising of the 20 000 in 1909 she that was

00:54:36.580 before the Triangle Factory Fire, but they're connected. Because Clara Lemlich, who is often

00:54:40.900 painted as this just kind of spunky girl who stood up in a meeting and said, we're going to go on 0.99

00:54:45.460 strike. Like she was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who had been organizing for years. She had gotten

00:54:50.940 her ribs broken by the cops on a picket line. Like she was an organizer. She was out there. Like she

00:54:56.900 was not just a spontaneous romantic heroine. Like she was in that struggle. And like the connection

00:55:04.560 with a triangle of Sherwood's factory fire is that the work that Clara Lemlick and other

00:55:09.240 organizers predominantly at that point Eastern European Jewish women and Italian women the work

00:55:14.300 they had done if the owners of that factory had signed on to the agreement that those organizers

00:55:20.100 and that strike forced like most of the other garment factories in that area Manhattan to sign

00:55:25.000 those workers probably wouldn't have burned to death like they were one of the only factories

00:55:29.260 that didn't sign on to these more increased safety accords.

00:55:33.340 So, yeah, I'm going, I guess, a slightly different direction.

00:55:36.480 But it just shows that, like, these human people

00:55:38.660 that are so connected to so many other things happening,

00:55:41.540 like, no one's just a hero.

00:55:44.640 You know, sometimes you're someone who got beat up by the cops

00:55:47.680 and decided, okay, I'm going to keep going.

00:55:49.940 I'm going to force this system to change because it's not fair.

00:55:54.120 Starting with a Starbucks in Buffalo in 2021,

00:55:57.200 Starbucks baristas have been unionizing across the country

00:55:59.640 in states like California and Utah.

00:56:01.700 And a lot of this energy is being sparked by a new generation,

00:56:05.240 younger folks.

00:56:06.380 77% of young adults support unions,

00:56:08.820 according to a September Gallup poll.

00:56:11.040 And I have to say, that feels pretty darn hopeful.

00:56:14.680 We're in this moment where it feels like a lot of big wins for labor.

00:56:18.160 You know, the first Starbucks unionizing, you know, the JFK 8.

00:56:22.500 I'm seeing a lot of interesting chatter about unions

00:56:25.240 on places like TikTok where younger folks hang out like Gen Z. So they're really fired up about

00:56:30.280 unions. Are you hopeful that we're entering this new era of union power? I am always hopeful to

00:56:36.240 the point of almost being a Pollyanna about these things. And I think that is, it's definitely a

00:56:42.480 conscious decision to be hopeful and be optimistic because the labor movement has kind of been in

00:56:48.300 decline since really before I was born and I'm 34. So I guess like the entirety that I have been

00:56:54.800 on this earth the numbers of union density have been falling you know anti-union legislation has

00:57:00.740 been you know cutting us off at the knees there have been all of these factors like manufacturing

00:57:05.560 lord knows what happened there like there have been all these factors kind of pulling the movement

00:57:12.000 out of the movement like kind of putting a damper on things we'll say and you know facts aren't

00:57:19.120 always fun numbers are not always fun especially when you're looking at union density but we are

00:57:23.380 a moment where like you said specifically the younger generation is interested and fired up

00:57:29.120 and paying attention and not only are they paying attention they're doing something they're organizing

00:57:33.780 i mean the starbucks workers and amazon workers like those are younger people like not only are

00:57:39.340 they younger people they're queer and trans and black and brown immigrant workers like workers

00:57:43.300 from these marginalized backgrounds that have always formed the backbone of the labor movement

00:57:47.900 but have not necessarily gotten their due like these are the workers propelling things forward

00:57:52.600 and that is important and significant and even some of the conversation i've seen like on tiktok

00:57:58.740 and other places where maybe a traditional labor union isn't the answer for some specific groups of

00:58:05.160 people that doesn't mean that then thinking about it is inconsequential that doesn't mean they're

00:58:10.060 going to find a different way to organize and find a different way to harness their labor like

00:58:14.120 i got an email from a person actually getting back um about a bunch of independent sellers on

00:58:20.480 Etsy who want to form an independent sellers guild and that isn't it that is very interesting

00:58:26.180 like I need to do a little bit of reading to figure out what to tell them because like that's

00:58:29.800 kind of a whole bunch of small business owners coming together and they want to organize against

00:58:35.040 this bigger company that they are kind of in dialogue with like that is not like that's tricky

00:58:41.140 that's a little complicated but it's very interesting like that is not something that

00:58:45.580 would have happened five years ago or maybe even a couple years ago like all of these new

00:58:49.480 organizing wins and some of the setbacks and some of the losses like that is all working in concert

00:58:54.940 to get people excited and give people an option because I think a lot of folks for a very long

00:59:01.980 time have maybe either felt or been made to feel like the labor movement isn't for them like unions

00:59:07.100 aren't for them like back when I was at Vice when someone asked me if I went to unionize I was like

00:59:11.280 we can do that like we work we're in Williamsburg like there's kombucha in the fridge like really

00:59:18.720 Like my dad's an operating engineer. I can be in the same movement as him. And I could. And so can anyone else. There are a lot of ways to form a union, a lot of ways to organize with your coworkers and build power. And I think this current generation, gosh, it makes me feel so old to say that. I'm like, not old, I promise. But definitely people younger than me are doing really big things. And I don't think that's going to stop.

00:59:42.520 I know that Amazon and Starbucks are going to pull out every stop and use every nefarious legal means and probably extra legal means they can think of to try and slow this wave down and try to stave off union negotiations and put a stop to this.

00:59:58.180 But I don't think you can put that lightning back in the bottle.

01:00:01.420 And I think if the big corporations keep actively trying to bust up these unions and break down these organizer spirits, there are going to be consequences.

01:00:10.260 You can't be a big, quote unquote, progressive company and be a union buster and have anyone take you seriously.

01:00:17.820 I think the tide has turned in a very real way.

01:00:22.000 And I'm sure that there are labor historians and economists who would have a whole bunch of like, you know, like my broader perspective and numbers and like have a lot of things to say about that.

01:00:30.340 But as someone who's just like studied unions a lot and talked to a lot of workers and is very excited about unions in general, like this feels like a very cool time to be alive and be paying attention.

01:00:40.260 And I am so grateful to those younger workers who are kind of pushing the movement in this direction where it's needed to go for so long.

01:00:47.440 I love it.

01:00:48.320 I love a hopeful ending.

01:00:50.620 I'm just, I believe that we will win, even if it's after I'm dead.

01:00:56.940 Kim, where can people keep up with all the amazing work you're up to and get the book?

01:01:01.480 So you can buy the book anywhere. 0.99

01:01:02.980 I mean, fuck Amazon. 0.99

01:01:03.840 If you got it, you can get it on Amazon. 0.99

01:01:05.040 but I always tell people to uh if you can either order from like bookshop or indie bound or like

01:01:11.420 an independent bookstore or get it from the library like the library changed my life I

01:01:16.180 wouldn't be here without it so if a library has it just get it there I don't care I just want you

01:01:20.300 to read it and um I am aggressively online I am on Twitter at Grim Kim and on Instagram is Kim

01:01:27.140 Kelly Writer and I have a Patreon thing I think it's just Kim Kelly and um I'm yeah I'm too old

01:01:32.920 for TikTok and all that. But maybe if I figure it out, hopefully you'll find me on there. But

01:01:36.420 give me a little time. I'm in my 30s, man. I'm falling apart. Awesome. Is there anything that

01:01:42.440 I did not ask that you want to make sure gets included? No, this is incredible. But I guess

01:01:48.200 the last thing I will say is that I wrote this book for workers and for regular people to read

01:01:55.240 on their breaks or on the bus or when they get home from a long day to pick it up and page through it

01:02:00.540 and hopefully find people in the pages that ring true to you.

01:02:04.360 I want people to see themselves in this book

01:02:06.980 and to recognize that they are part of this incredible history

01:02:11.260 and they're part of the future too.

01:02:13.820 Like the labor movement has always belonged to all of us,

01:02:16.380 whether or not the people in power wanted us to recognize that.

01:02:20.220 And the only way we're going to get closer to being free

01:02:22.580 is by working together and recognizing that power

01:02:25.640 and fighting like hell to take what's ours.

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There Are No Girls on the Internet - June 14, 2022

From tech workers to Starbucks baristas, workers of the world are uniting

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