00:02:14.660when someone won't even acknowledge that you work for them like they're certainly not going
00:02:20.600to acknowledge your humanity if they don't value enough to give you the proper legal paperwork
00:02:24.840they do not care how your day is going and that is the problem
00:02:30.280there are no girls on the internet as a production of iheart radio and unbossed creative
00:02:45.460I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.1.00
00:02:50.740We're in what feels like a little bit of a renaissance when it comes to organized labor and unions.
00:02:55.860More and more workers, whether they're baristas at Starbucks or journalists, are seeing the power of unions and organizing as a collective.
00:03:03.820And 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,
00:03:10.560The face of who we understand as somebody who needs a union is really changing, too.
00:03:16.340More and more media workers and office tech workers, for instance, are trying to unionize.
00:03:21.300This shift is something that labor reporter Kim Kelly is really happy to see.
00:03:25.700I'm Kim Kelly, and I am an independent labor reporter and the author of Fight Like Hell, The Untold History of American Labor.
00:03:33.020So how did you become someone who cared about labor and telling the story of all of these different fights?
00:03:39.660So 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 I suppose the longer answer is 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.
00:04:02.340And it wasn't something that we really talked about that much or really it was, you know, really discussed.
00:04:08.440It was just part of the job, part of life. Like, oh, yeah, dad's in a union. That's why we have health insurance.
00:04:13.260That'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.
00:04:18.420And it wasn't really until I was at Vice, where I was the heavy metal editor, and some colleagues pulled me aside and were like, hey, we want to form a union.
00:04:48.800I think by the time I got laid off in 2019,
00:04:51.320we'd organized like five or 600 people in the building
00:04:55.240and we'd bargain two different contracts, like we'd gotten raised, we'd improved the workplace.
00:04:59.660We'd done a ton. We'd accomplished a lot. And I was deeply involved the whole time because
00:05:04.100being in a union had always kind of appealed to me as an idea, as something that fit into my
00:05:09.840political views and my worldview. And it just kind of felt nice to join that family tradition.
00:05:15.120But I didn't really start writing about it with any sort of regularity or depth until
00:05:20.900after we unionized and I was already freelancing a lot working on vice because they didn't pay us0.66
00:05:25.640shit until we organized another big endorsement for unionizing a workplace yeah I was freelancing
00:05:31.460in time and uh really it just kind of happened by not by accident but unexpectedly because I was0.94
00:05:39.940writing a little bit uh just freelance stuff about the prison industrial complex routine book
00:05:44.160and I pitched them on a profile of mother jones you know the labor leader I thought oh okay
00:05:48.700your audience is predominantly like younger women like here is a cool icon we can talk about and my
00:05:54.640editor said yeah that's a cool idea but I don't think our audience necessarily knows what a union
00:05:59.840is so why don't you write about that first I was like okay and I wrote a little explainer because
00:06:05.860at that point I'd kind of learned more about the movement about the history from talking to
00:06:09.340organizers who work with from reading books on my own from just getting all fired up about union
00:06:13.720stuff as like a baby organizer and um i wrote that article and it kind of was like mini viral
00:06:20.320people paying attention because in 2017 people weren't necessarily used to looking to teen vogue
00:06:26.100for their like anti-capitalist analysis yet they're like what is this and essentially like
00:06:31.120it that helped me out as a freelancer i was like okay that went well what if you let me do a whole
00:06:36.600column they're like yeah okay we'll try it that was like four years ago and really just having
00:06:41.940that experience organizing and kind of learning on the fly and being a big nerd and loving history
00:06:47.020books kind of made me feel like I was allowed to write about labor like I had a leg to stand on
00:06:52.140and once I kind of gave myself that permission I really just dove in and started writing more and
00:06:57.140writing more talking more people just kind of fell in love with the idea right because I spent my
00:07:02.000whole life up till then writing about heavy metal which is still a great love and still a huge part
00:07:06.060of my life but I was kind of looking for something new and the union happened to be there at exactly
00:07:11.700the right time. And once I realized I was going to more union meetings than heavy metal shows,
00:07:15.960I thought, okay, maybe it's time to actually try and do this. And here we are.
00:07:23.040Wow. What, what a trajectory. It's so interesting to me. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it really,
00:07:29.160I see a lot of through lines in your work and I, I remember the vice unionization fight and, um,
00:07:36.240I Hurt Radio, where my podcast is hosted, we just recently unionized, which was a big deal.
00:07:43.060I guess it's a good question. What do you think of this idea that, I don't know, I often, I think
00:07:48.300that everybody could benefit from a union. I think the benefits are, unions are for everybody. But I
00:07:53.760often hear this kind of pushback that like, oh, what does an office media worker need a union for?
00:08:00.260What do you say to things like that? Oh, it makes me so mad. Because it's just, and it's always like
00:08:05.520stupid like rich white guys on twitter that just feel the need to have opinions about oh well1.00
00:08:10.660grad students don't need a union video game workers don't need a union journalists don't1.00
00:08:15.380need a union you're not working in a coal mine or in a factory okay do you have a boss it says you
00:08:21.400rely on someone else's decisions to pay your bills do you have to go to an office do you have
00:08:26.020co-workers are you getting mistreated are you getting disrespected like are you going to a job
00:08:31.580Do you work for someone? Then you need a union. It is ridiculous to act as though different categories of work or whether you're doing like the white collar, blue collar sort of dichotomy or whatever other artificial division that somebody with an interest in preserving capital likes to lean on.
00:08:49.260Like it's, it's never been the case that only one type of worker, one demographic of worker is allowed to have a union or is encouraged to have a union or is benefited from having a union. Like every type of worker can benefit from having a union. And that's not even necessarily, you don't have to go through the specific process of like filing for an election with NLRB, doing all of the kind of bureaucratic red tape BS that a lot of workers are kind of forced to deal with now.
00:09:19.260to form a union, you can just get together with your co-workers and try and make some shit happen.
00:09:23.680Like, there's no one way to be a union member. There's no one way to be a union. And they're0.91
00:09:28.180all valid and important. And honestly, building collective power with your co-workers is the most
00:09:33.640effective and empowering thing that you can do, because one worker on their own can only do so
00:09:39.020much. But a bunch of us, whether it's five or 50 or 500, that's how you move mountains.
00:09:45.220whether you work in an office or you work in a coal mine or you work at Amazon or you're a gig
00:09:50.560worker. Like someone is trying to screw you over. And the only way you can stop that is by getting
00:09:56.520together with a bunch of other people who are feeling screwed, screwed over, doing something0.94
00:10:00.720about it. I love how you put that. And that's the thing that I really love about talking about0.79
00:10:09.040labor and the collective organizing. And it's something I really see as a value that it's
00:10:14.900about people banding together, oftentimes against massive, powerful companies like Amazon that have
00:10:21.600teams of lawyers and PR and all of this. But even with all that institutional power,
00:10:28.740they're not more powerful than the collective. They're not more powerful than people coming
00:10:33.900together. Is that something that you see in these union stories as well?
00:10:36.800Yeah. I mean, Jeff Bezos is the new Jay Gould. We talk about they're in the new Gilded Age,
00:10:41.900The railroad barons, like they controlled the rails, they controlled all the capital, but the workers built those rails and the workers shut them down on a whole bunch, then struck fear into the hearts of the capitalist class.
00:10:54.280Like there's always more of us than there are of them.
00:10:57.600And I think that's something that workers sometimes forget because we are so disenfranchised and isolated and beaten down.
00:11:03.060But the people on top never forget that. And that's why they get so frightened and anxious when they see workers organizing, because they know that they're outnumbered. And that if a whole bunch of people want to make them do something, you know, we've done it before and we'll do it again.
00:11:19.440like there's the history of labor in this country is very complicated there's a lot of wins there's
00:11:24.560a lot of losses there's a lot of struggle and bloodshed and beautiful things and terrible
00:11:28.560things but every step forward that we've made as a country has come from workers it's come from0.99
00:11:36.280regular working people downing their tools and saying all right i've had enough of this shit0.91
00:11:40.540let's do something and that is something that has not gone away and especially now i think0.86
00:11:46.040that's something we're going to keep seeing more of because it's easier for people to be connected
00:11:49.920to one another. It's easier for people to see other folks taking control, whether you're,
00:11:54.480you know, a Starbucks customer, you buy stuff from Amazon, you go to REI, you have a friend
00:11:59.300who works as a grad student, like someone in your life is probably part of some kind of organizing
00:12:04.280effort. And if they're not, you can help them start or you can start your own. Like the possibilities
00:13:07.140If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:13:13.460This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters,
00:13:19.900pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
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00:13:59.660Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:15:01.440it really just comes down to the workers. Can you tell us more about kind of like what you mean by
00:15:06.020this? Yeah. So here's the thing, like what Amazon Labor Union organizers did was incredible and
00:15:11.600inspiring and so important. And it's also not anything new, right? The idea of building a
00:15:18.660union from the ground up, of building real human bonds and connections and solidarity, forming a
00:15:24.800community to fight instead of, you know, following a prescriptive playbook, doing what you're
00:15:30.300supposed to do because that's how it's done that's how it sometimes works like everyone has to do
00:15:36.020anything like this is uh this is the thing i mean that's one of the reasons they're so successful
00:15:40.700they kind of threw out that playbook and drew on whether or not it was intentional they drew on
00:15:46.480these kind of historical examples of workers in their position doing the exact same thing
00:15:51.340because the workers that organized at gfka predominantly like younger folks queer and
00:15:56.540trans folks, black and brown workers, immigrant workers, multilingual, multigenerational,
00:16:01.140a vast multiracial, multigender, multi-everything kind of coalition. And that is how workers have
00:16:08.020won throughout history. And that is not something that you maybe find in every mainstream labor
00:16:13.740history book, but that is just true. That's just how it is. I mean, one of the parallels that
00:16:18.840I, as a labor nerd, I like to draw between JFK8 and history is what Dorothy Lee Bolden was able
00:16:28.140to do in the 60s in Atlanta. And she was a domestic worker from the age of nine. Like,
00:16:34.240really, the majority of Black women in women in that city in that time that had a job,1.00
00:16:38.780they worked in domestic service. And she realized, like, okay, we're not being paid enough. Our work0.66
00:16:44.760isn't being treated properly as labor we're being treated like garbage and you know what like there's
00:16:49.400a lot of us maybe we can do something about this she was actually lived a few doors down from dr
00:16:53.440martin luther king jr and she was commiserating with him one day and he told her like dorothy you
00:16:58.680know you can just do something yourself like if you want to change things if you want to organize
00:17:02.720things like just do it and she did she organized the national domestic workers union of america
00:17:08.640which wasn't a recognized like standard labor union it wasn't operating within that framework
00:17:13.920It was an independent organization. And at its peak, the membership rolls hit, I think, 10,000 people. So all black women domestic workers in Atlanta. And they built power and they built political power. They educated one another. They shared resources. In order to join, all you had to show up with was a dollar and a voter registration card showing the intersection between different movements for justice.
00:17:35.640And it's such a cool example because she did it her way and she made a huge difference. You can see there's a direct line from George Lee Boulder's organization in the 60s to the current National Domestic Workers Alliance, which, I mean, in Philly a couple of years ago, they managed to pass an incredibly impactful bill that helped get health care for domestic workers in my city.
00:17:57.140Like, everything builds on the work that someone did before, whether it's in 1960 or 1860. And I'm just excited to see what's going to happen in 50 years when someone younger than me writes a book and interviews Chris Smalls and asks what inspired him, right? Because we're all links in a very long chain. And, you know, one link can do something cool, but that whole long chain, that's how we get close to where we need to be.
00:18:24.520oof i have chills what a description i used to talk at a lot of union meetings i love
00:18:30.200it's historical it's uh it's amazon versus the people the people have spoken that's chris smalls
00:18:37.760the president and founder of the amazon labor union he started working in amazon warehouses
00:18:42.200in 2015 during covid when everybody myself included was ordering a ton of stuff on amazon
00:18:47.860chris started to speak out about how warehouses were putting workers at risk by failing to meet
00:18:52.940basic COVID mitigation protocols. So Chris organized a walkout and protest. He was fired
00:18:59.240that same day for, according to Amazon, failing to meet social distancing protocols. So basically,
00:19:06.340Amazon was claiming that Chris was the one who was failing to keep Amazon workers safe,
00:19:10.640not them, which is a little sketchy. So Chris organized. He started the Congress of Essential
00:19:18.420workers, which later backed the formation of the Amazon Labor Union. Amazon suits like former
00:19:23.640Obama administration spokesperson turned Amazon PR and policy chief Jay Carney and David Zablotsky
00:19:29.200personally smeared Chris in leaked notes. They called him not smart and not articulate. In fact,
00:19:36.360they thought Chris was so not smart that their plan, according to these reports, was to make
00:19:41.620Chris the face of the movement, because certainly that would tank it. Only it backfired.
00:19:48.420Chris, it turns out, was an incredibly effective organizer and spokesperson and would go on to usher in the very first unionized Amazon warehouse in history.
00:19:57.240I mean, it's so you've just hit on a couple of things that I am fascinated by.
00:20:01.160One, I do think we have this this issue, not just in labor organizing, but in organizing in general, where it's so tempting to have there be one face like this is the person who started this whole thing.
00:20:15.520When the reality is it's often so many different stories and voices coming together.
00:20:19.760And I get the inclination to make it about one central figure that, like, that is such a powerful, motivating thing just in our culture.
00:20:28.400But that sometimes it can obscure what you were just talking about, that it's a lineage.
00:20:32.680It's about a lot of people coming together and inspiring each other.
00:20:36.660It was interesting because Twitter is always going to Twitter.
00:20:39.580But 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.
00:20:53.400Like, you got to hand it to the guy. Even like, like, sometimes it is okay to lionize someone when they have done something incredible. And I think it is important for us to have those working class heroes, you know.
00:21:06.420of course like no one person does everything people are flawed people are complicated
00:21:11.840we shouldn't you know hero worship is not something that i would recommend but acknowledging
00:21:16.900and appreciating someone's skill and someone's importance to a movement that doesn't take away
00:21:21.500from the collective effort that's just kind of giving somebody their flowers and they deserve
00:21:25.720them and i think something that you know president smalls has done in a really wonderful way is is
00:21:32.140making clear, like the Amazon Labor Union Organizing Committee, like all of us did this.
00:21:37.700All of us were in this together. Like a lot of the other organizers are public too. Derek Palmer,
00:21:42.240Angelica, and Justine Medina. Like it was clearly a very collective effort, but you know, I think
00:21:48.200it's okay to get excited about having one person, you know, getting a little bit more attention
00:21:53.560because I mean, we need more heroes. We need more heroes that look like us and sound like us.
00:21:59.760and especially the fact that like a young handsome black man with gold teeth and tattoos is like the
00:22:06.720face of the labor movement in america right now that is phenomenal like that is going to keep
00:22:12.840the movement moving that is going to bring more people in we do not need more white guys in suits
00:22:17.500like we got some good ones shout out to them but like the white guys in suits are also a lot of
00:22:23.720the time the people that have their boots on our neck i think it is very important to recognize who
00:22:29.420the working class is and what they look like what we look like and sound like and talk like
00:22:33.460to build those connections to bring more people in and show that there's so much more room in
00:22:38.700the movement for every other type of person and you know i don't i don't want to talk too much0.97
00:22:43.480shit on the white guys and sue some of them are great but some of them are and they've had plenty0.95
00:22:48.700of a time to bask in their attention over the years i think it is perfectly fine to give someone1.00
00:22:53.600else was shot. Abso-fucking-lutely. Every single time I see a photo or a video of Chris Smalls in0.98
00:22:59.720his fitted and his do-rag talking to an elected official, I'm like, yes, this is like, it just0.86
00:23:05.000feels good to see. It just feels like, and honestly, if I'm being honest, him being, like his
00:23:13.360trajectory is what got me fired up about the Amazon fight. I will never forget the way that
00:23:19.160Amazon suits use this like very clearly racially coded language to refer to him and discredit him.
00:23:25.240He's inarticulate. He's not smart. He's not a deep thinker. And I feel like every black and0.98
00:23:31.280brown person, every immigrant or anybody connected to one of those communities knew exactly what
00:23:37.040these Amazon suits were trying to do. And what's so funny is that, A, they were really downplaying
00:23:43.260the multiracial workers that keep their company running,
00:23:48.500that like they would be nothing without.1.00
00:23:51.080And I think that they really kind of shot themselves in the foot
00:23:54.120because in the end, they made Chris like this lionized face
00:23:59.260of their movement, like kind of in spite of their trying to discredit him.
00:24:04.360And boy, they couldn't have picked a more effective spokesperson, right?
00:24:09.340they were trying to keep like they even said in some of their little leaked internal memos like
00:24:13.480we're gonna make him the face of this and i remember when they won he tweeted like you know
00:24:17.260thanks like a call that was the worst mistake i ever made it's like it just shows this massive0.60
00:24:22.960disconnect between the people in the c-suite doing whatever the fuck it is they do all day0.84
00:24:26.880and the people actually working and living these communities and trying to build power trying to
00:24:31.780survive like why wouldn't people respond to a character like chris like why wouldn't people
00:24:38.120want to talk to other folks in the organizing community to speak their language and live in
00:24:41.500their neighborhoods and take the bus with them like why would someone listen to some rich guy
00:24:47.000in a suit when they could talk to someone that they're used to seeing like out in the neighborhood
00:24:53.520who like someone who's cousin you know like why but it's it's like a century apart but thinking
00:25:01.480about the way that the workers and the organizing committee at amazon were able to build power and
00:25:06.960bridge these kind of artificial divisions. It reminds me of this example. Bear with me. Again,
00:25:11.980I'm a giant nerd. I just wrote a whole book about it. But in 1946, the Great Sugar Strike in Hawaii.
00:25:18.200And at that time, and probably still, but especially at that time, the sugar game plantations
00:25:23.120in the islands were owned entirely by white guys who lived in the mainland. And they were worked
00:25:28.780by native Hawaiians, as well as Chinese, Korean, Puerto Rican, Filipino, Japanese, immigrants,
00:25:35.740It's a predominantly Asian workforce from all sorts of different places, lots of different languages.
00:25:41.020And the bosses had a very explicit policy of treating different workers differently, unequally.
00:25:47.440So like some workers made more than others.
00:25:49.220They kept all of the workers in different segregated camps so that Chinese workers and Filipino workers, Korean workers, wouldn't really see one another, wouldn't really talk to one another.
00:25:59.080And they did that because they wanted to make sure the workers weren't organized.
00:26:02.040They wanted to be able to use different groups of workers against one another.0.55
00:26:06.480As in, like, earlier strikes, Filipino workers were brought in to act as strike breakers when Japanese field workers went on strike.
00:26:12.980There were a lot of instances of that kind of thing happening.
00:26:15.720And when it came time to strike in 1946, the ILWU, the National Longshore Warehouse Workers Union, a really cool radical union, their history is rad.
00:26:25.620There was time to strike and they realized, OK, we can't let them break us apart like that again.
00:26:31.240and how do we do that? They brought in translators and made sure everybody in every meeting felt
00:26:36.180heard and understood what was happening. They had different groups of workers cook for one another
00:26:40.640and share recipes and build community that way. Same thing they did in the parking lot at Staten
00:26:45.560Island. They brought people together on a human level and showed them, you know, you're all being
00:26:50.960exploited. You're all being treated like garbage. You're all in this together, whether or not you1.00
00:26:56.080chose to be, so why not embrace it and try to become more powerful together? And it worked,
00:27:00.900And they won. They won like the first big raise in like 20 years. And that's exactly what I thought about when I heard about the barbecues and the jollof rice and all of the just the very personal, intimate kind of organizing and connecting those happening in the parking lot and in the break room in Amazon and JFKA.
00:27:19.000Like, when you connect with people as people and listen to them and hear them, that's when magic happens.
00:27:26.420Like, it sounds so basic, but I feel like people in charge don't get that because they don't see us as people.
00:27:33.840Yeah, that's, and I think it really goes back to what you were saying, that people coming together, people uniting in the power of community and shared vision and a collective, that's such a powerful force.
00:27:46.780And it's not surprising to me that the powers that be, whether it's, you know, sugar cane owners or Amazon, it's like, oh, we got to keep these people divided.
00:27:56.300We got to keep them. We have to really inflame these divisions because when they come together, there's more of them than there are of us.
00:28:02.220And they are very powerful. And so just figuring out ways to really rely on those community bonds, I think, is so important and valuable.
00:28:12.200Yeah, and like unions have screwed that up over the years too. The labor movement is not, the track record is not great, especially when it comes to like, I mean, even now, right? So earlier, I always think about this example because it makes me so mad. The American Federation of Labor, which was like an earlier organization that later got folded into AFL-CIO, that's a whole thing.
00:28:32.060But 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
00:28:48.520and at that point those labor leaders embraced that because they didn't want people to come in
00:28:53.500and take their members jobs and now that is a familiar refrain that we've seen throughout the
00:28:59.400centuries like at one point it was women and it was black workers chinese and other uh other asian
00:29:05.000workers now it's mexican south american central american workers who are being painted with that
00:29:10.440brush like there's always this reactionary impulse in some corners to say that oh these other people0.86
00:29:17.300are coming in and taking everything we built well how the fuck do you think you built in the first
00:29:21.480place by organizing people and trying to help workers like that kind of mentality has harmed
00:29:28.540the movement and harmed so many workers over the century like just the thought of seeing a new
00:29:33.020group of workers coming in who are more vulnerable who are desperate for work who are in a marginalized
00:29:38.420position and thinking oh no they're going to mess with our our guys our people instead of thinking
00:29:43.560oh we need to organize them and bring them in so we can help them out and like our union will be
00:29:48.320stronger as a result the unions who have done that are still around like they are more effective
00:29:54.280than the ones that were you know exclusionary and i refuse to kind of get with the times and
00:30:00.880realize that all workers deserve a union and all workers maybe deserve to join your union depending
00:30:05.660on what you do it's like i think a good example of unions kind of and this isn't necessarily like
00:30:12.380that type of division. This is more like just workplace division. But I think about the United
00:30:16.500Auto Workers, who are obviously the storied industrial union. I touched on them in the book,
00:30:22.920and they've been around forever. They're synonymous with Detroit and the Rust Belt and
00:30:27.560the automotive industry. And right now, out of their 400,000 members, a quarter of those 100,000
00:30:35.840people, they're grad students. They work in education. They work in colleges and universities
00:30:40.960in California and across the country like and that is the big shift and that's a great like
00:30:47.220that is how you evolve that is how you grow and stay relevant like sure an adjunct professor at
00:30:54.060you know University of California has a different experience from someone working in a plant in
00:30:59.600Flint Michigan but that doesn't mean that they still don't need those higher wages those better
00:31:05.360working conditions that protections on the union contract like we're all in this together and the0.98
00:31:10.240The sooner that people realize that and act and organize around that principle, like, the sooner we're going to get shit done.0.97
00:34:02.720So to that vein of sort of the sooner we realize we're all in this together, I have to sort of admit something.
00:34:08.540Something that I'm like, it's probably, there's probably not many things in my life that I'm like more deeply personally ashamed of than my personal relationship to Amazon.
00:34:18.420on. I got very hooked on it during the pandemic. And what I really mean is, like, I was clearly
00:34:24.940sort of, like, relying on it to experience, like, a short-term serotonin boost of, like,0.99
00:34:30.560new shit at my door because I was depressed and sad. Like, most people.0.99
00:40:07.920I mean, it's so interesting because I was reading the story, I think it was yesterday, about how the food delivery service Grubhub had this free, they were going to do free lunch for three hours yesterday.0.99
00:40:21.820All the kitchens were really backed up.0.99
00:40:23.600And come to find out, they didn't tell any of the kitchens or the delivery drivers that this was happening.
00:40:29.520And so part of me was like, are they just so divorced from the idea of, like, human labor that they didn't even think that they needed to give these people a heads up on what they were doing?
00:40:39.720It's like, I mean, they don't consider those people employees, even though they clearly work for the country.
00:40:45.080And they don't consider them, like, equal partners when they're dealing with these independent restaurants.
00:40:50.900I was just reading today, like, I live across the corner from, like, an incredible Indonesian restaurant.
00:40:55.100And they were posting on Instagram, like, please don't order from Grubhub.
00:40:58.160We didn't ask to be on there. They don't have our prices right. Like we were trying to get them to take it down. Like they will do that. They'll try and encroach on independent businesses, like whole operations just because they think it might get them more of a commission.
00:41:11.240Like they don't care about the people they quote unquote partner with at all, whether they're business owners and restaurant workers or the delivery workers.
00:41:19.180Like it does come down to that idea that the people that are doing this labor are invisible to the people that are making these decisions that impact their days.
00:41:32.820Oh, there's so many ways to justify treating people poorly if you don't have their welfare and their well-being at the top of your mind.
00:41:40.300And that's clearly what happens with these tech companies.
00:41:42.700They don't, like, the fact that so many people that work for tech companies are resigned in this weird nether realm of gig work instead of just being given a W-2 and clearly acknowledged as the employees they are.
00:41:53.740Like, when someone won't even acknowledge that you work for them, like, they're certainly not going to acknowledge your humanity.
00:41:59.700If they don't value enough to give you the proper legal paperwork, they do not care how your day is going.
00:42:07.860It is a problem. I mean, it's so interesting to me how oftentimes tech companies, like when we're talking about organized labor, it's often conversations about tech companies. Do you see technology and labor as linked?
00:42:23.720Oh, yeah. I'm not a technology guy. And there's definitely reporters who do really good work in that space, especially folks at Motherboard. Shout out to Edward Onwiso and Lauren Gurley. They're really on top of those intersections. I'm kind of a dummy when it comes to tech stuff.
00:42:38.120But even just in terms of what you see happening, whether it's in like the gig work world or the increasing surveillance that companies are able to levy against, you need to organize this, 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.
00:42:55.680Like technology and labor have always been connected. I mean, going back to the Industrial Revolution, right? 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, totally kind of reconceived the way people related to labor and wage labor specifically.
00:43:16.860I mean, one of the things about tech work and like gig work, I keep harping on this gig
00:43:21.600work, gig economy thing, but I think it is so insidious and it is such a big issue in
00:43:25.240labor right now, is that that's not necessarily a new thing either.
00:43:29.720Because when you think about gig work, like someone who is a gig worker, you're giving
00:43:33.500little assignments and you get a little bit of money for every little piece that you do.
00:43:38.140You don't have a specific set workday or set hours.
00:43:41.500You're just kind of picking up whatever scraps come your way and trying to piece together
00:45:37.780So I want to talk about the book a little bit.
00:45:40.240So Fight Like Hell, The Untold History of American Labor.
00:45:45.520You're really right about the ways that people who have been historically marginalized,
00:45:49.220like women and Black folks and Indigenous folks,
00:45:51.600were the lifeblood of labor and always have been.
00:45:54.500And like our stories and our voices were always there.
00:45:57.440even though, you know, I feel like the face of what we think of as someone involved in a union
00:46:03.100is like a white male. I guess my question is, one, how do we make sure that we're telling a
00:46:09.500more authentic story of what the face of labor actually looks like? And are there any, do you
00:46:14.480have a favorite figure or person who you want to get more shine in the history of labor?
00:46:20.440Yeah, well, okay, I'll get to the second part in a second. But I think like,
00:46:23.740And one of the most important things to realize and recognize is like, you know, the subtitle is the untold history. And that's not to say that folks haven't been telling these stories the whole time, right? Like the workers told them in the first place, and then contemporary journalists and chroniclers wrote them down. 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.
00:46:48.440so then like journalists and nerds like me could come in and kind of pull together and synthesize
00:46:53.180that information and bring it out for other people to see I think so much of it comes down to people
00:46:58.260that are in a position to elevate these stories and write about labor write about history do it
00:47:03.080in a way that's accessible and intersectional and inclusive like it's not that hard like literally
00:47:08.940you could like any labor book you could pick up like there are black and brown and indigenous and
00:47:15.580queer and disabled folks and women and every other gender like in those stories too it just
00:47:21.560depends on what you choose to focus on and I think that is something that people can be more mindful
00:47:27.740of and certainly not folks in the academic space who like very specifically uh research specific
00:47:33.580groups or eras like um whether it's like Judy Young who wrote a book called Unbound Feet of
00:47:39.520social history of san francisco that was hugely impactful for uh my research into that area or
00:47:45.600dr tara hunter who wrote to enjoy my freedom which is about black women's labor post-reconstruction
00:47:50.660like academics have done this work but it means it's not necessarily on offer to everyone right
00:47:58.380like you can't necessarily walk into a library and pick up their books though you should be able
00:48:02.520to it's there's a little bit of a gap between what's available to folks in the academic space
00:48:07.520and what's available to folks that like maybe walk by Barnes and Noble on their way home from work.
00:48:12.520And it was really important to me to pull together as much as I could from that history
00:48:16.780and, you know, pull from tons and tons of research and different historians and newspapers and
00:48:23.380magazine articles and interviews and put it together in a way that made it very clear that
00:48:27.540everyone else has always been here and has done incredible things. And I hope that people will
00:48:32.580read my book, and then read the bibliography and follow those breadcrumbs and find some more of
00:48:37.580those important writings, because this is just the beginning. This is kind of an intro to a lot
00:48:42.260of these folks. To your second question, one of the people that I was so excited to write about
00:48:49.400because I thought I knew so much about her, and then it turns out I was wrong, was a woman named
00:48:54.620Lucy Parsons. I knew about her just from my involvement in radical space. She's kind of
00:48:59.980like an anarchist icon. And I had read an earlier biography of her from the 70s. I'd read her own
00:49:05.420writings. I thought I had a pretty good grip on who she was. But then a historian named Jacqueline
00:49:11.160Jones put out a book a couple of years ago called A Goddess of Anarchy that was this exhaustively
00:49:16.200researched biography of Lucy Parsons' life. And it turns out that the common wisdom about her and
00:49:23.280her life was pretty wrong um during her lifetime and lucy parsons she was kind of a chameleon it
00:49:30.880was kind of to her she decided to shape shift a little bit and hide who she was in order to be
00:49:37.240more impactful in her work and more easily relatable to the white factory workers she0.64
00:49:41.760was trying to organize right because she presented herself as a mixed like spanish and indigenous
00:49:47.460maiden from texas that's what she said she was and she said she was from there and she moved to
00:49:53.080chicago with her husband albert parsons in the late 1800s and they set up shop and started
00:49:57.800organizing an anarchist community and the labor community like she was a dressmaker and she
00:50:02.980organized lady like women garment workers and she she had like a very interesting overlap uh
00:50:09.880when it comes to like labor and anarchist politics revolutionary politics because at that time a lot0.99
00:50:14.220of those folks were the same people like that was a very not incestuous but a very interconnected
00:50:19.300community, like it still is now, right? Like radicals, we've always been here. We've always
00:50:23.880been getting up to mischief in the labor movement and elsewhere. But so yeah, she was, she, and she0.87
00:50:29.540was a co-founder of the Industrial Works of the World, IWW. Like she, she had an impact in the0.97
00:50:34.400labor community, certainly, and in labor history. But Lucy Parsons was not who she said she was.
00:50:40.340She was born in Virginia on a plantation. She was a black woman who was born enslaved,
00:50:45.220who moved out to Texas following emancipation and then she kind of built up her own mythology to
00:50:51.680protect herself and for other reasons that I don't know what went through her head I haven't met her
00:50:58.060but she was just this fascinating character and she intersected with so many different pieces of
00:51:03.840so many different movements but I tried to write about her in a way that showed like how important
00:51:09.100and interesting and radical and militant she was but also acknowledged like she was not perfect
00:51:14.060Like even outside of her own identity and, you know, the way she presented herself, like she did, she made some pretty gnarly decisions in her life and you can read more about it.
00:51:23.600But it was a challenge to write about a figure that I've admired for so long and to kind of address a little bit of the uglier and messy humanity of a person like that.
00:51:35.100But I was really excited to include her because I feel like she's very well known in radical circles.
00:51:40.180But labor people, unless you're like in Chicago and have a specific interest in that point in time, you probably don't know that much about Lucy Parsons.
00:51:48.080So you probably have a pretty negative view of her and the other anarchists.
00:51:51.540And I was hoping to kind of, I don't know, present a more balanced view of someone who I think is a really important historical figure.
00:52:00.120And it really does go back to recognizing humanity and sort of if you only know Lucy Parsons as this, you know, hero figure that you miss out on all these other parts of who she was and what made her her and how she showed up in the world.
00:52:17.380And is, I don't know, isn't it better to have a messy, complex, honest human person to, you know, look to for guidance than a hero, than someone who like, you know, is just isn't, isn't all of those things?
00:52:32.900Right, because that just makes it seem like a storybook kind of situation or a fairytale instead of a flesh and blood person, a historical thing that happened.
00:52:40.560And so many of the people in this book are complicated or they've been either people that have been kind of left out or they have been included, but not in the fullness of their whole experience.
00:52:51.280Like I start out the book in one of the earlier chapters talking about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which I feel like a lot of people know about that.
00:52:58.040that's a big one. And Clara Lemlich, one of the organizers of the Garment Workers Union that was
00:53:04.540kind of in that milieu, right? Like she was part of the uprising of the 20,000 in 1909. That was
00:53:11.420before the Triangle Factory fart, but they're connected. Because Clara Lemlich, who is often
00:53:15.740painted as this just kind of spunky girl who stood up in a meeting and said, we're going to go on0.99
00:53:20.300strike. Like she was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who had been organizing for years. She had gotten
00:53:25.780her ribs broken by the cops on a picket line. She was an organizer. She was out there. She was not
00:53:32.160just a spontaneous romantic heroine. She was in that struggle. And the connection with the
00:53:39.620Triangle of Sherwood's Factory fire is that the work that Clara Lemlick and other organizers,
00:53:44.760predominantly at that point, Eastern European Jewish women and Italian women, the work they
00:53:49.280had done, if the owners of that factory had signed on to the agreement that those organizers and that
00:53:55.280strike forced like most of the other garment factories in that area manhattan design those
00:54:00.500workers probably wouldn't have burned to death like they were one of the only factories that
00:54:04.360didn't sign on to these more uh increased safety accords so that's yeah i'm going i guess a slightly
00:54:10.600different direction but it just shows that like they these human people that are so connected to
00:54:15.180so many other things happening like you're no one's just a hero you know sometimes you're someone
00:54:21.340who got beat up by the cops and decided, okay, I'm going to keep going.
00:54:24.780I'm going to force this system to change because it's not fair.
00:54:28.980Starting with a Starbucks in Buffalo in 2021,
00:54:32.060Starbucks baristas have been unionizing across the country
00:59:38.680If you got it, you can get it on Amazon.0.99
00:59:40.320But I always tell people to, if you can, either order from like Bookshop or IndieBound or like an independent bookstore or get it from the library.