Working Life Podcast

Episode 210:

I am guessing everyone who listens to this show considers himself or herself an environmentalist and cares about the planet. You believe in science—a shocking notion—so you get the climate change emergency. We know we have to do some pretty radical stuff to keep this spaceship habitable for generations to come. Here’s the problem: there isn’t enough real thought by environmentalists and politicians, with numbers to go along with the thinking, how to take care of workers who will be hurt by the closing down of the fossil fuel industry.

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Grasping climate change is serious is not contrary to also being worried to death you won’t be able to pay the bills if your coal mine shuts down, or a refinery stops production or the truck you drive to deliver food to people has to be all electric. Joe Biden has plenty of language in his campaign positions calling for high-paid union jobs in the post-carbon world, and he promises “We’re not going to leave any workers or communities behind”. Yet, too much of his proposals, and most other proposals, are way too vague and missing real numbers.

The Just Transition debate in Europe is both similar to ours and not the same. It’s not the same for some key reasons: unions are stronger but perhaps not as strong as say 20 years ago. Health care is not tied to what job you happen to have—it’s a right not a privilege. And in most nations in Europe there is a component of a national pension plan so you don’t have to pray, like you do here, that the stock market is doing well enough when you retire that your IRA will give you enough money to live on. But, there is still enough vagueness in Europe to cause friction. To dig into this a bit more, I chat with Adrien Thomas, a research scientist at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), who is focused on employment relations and the social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. Adrien recently co-authored an article entitled, “Trade unions and climate change: the jobs-versus-environment dilemma”.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 209:

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Soccer, football, whatever you call it—it’s not my thing at all. Give me baseball every day, 365 days a week. But, what is my thing is making sure workers in every sport aren’t exploited—and that has been a reality for years when it came to the rights of workers who worked on the staging of soccer’s quadrennial World Cup, including the upcoming one in 2022 in Qatar. A worldwide outcry put a brake on some of the worst abuses in Qatar and set the stage for even more workers’ protections for the 2026 World Cup, which will be staged in North America and Mexico. Cathy Feingold, the international affairs director of the AFL-CIO and the deputy president of the International Trade Union Confederation, joins me to outline the campaign already underway to keep the heat on the host countries and the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA).

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High on the list of really bad outcomes in the recent election was the passage of California’s Proposition 22, which tore away rights from millions of so-called “gig” or “digital platform” workers, exempting companies like Uber And Lyft from a whole range of worker protections. This signals a new corporate assault on workers’ rights all across the nation.

Progressives in Europe took notice of what happened in California . And are moving as quickly as possible to make sure the Americanization of poverty of “gig” and digital platform workers is stopped at the shores of the continent. Leïla Chaibi, a French politician who was elected as a Member of the European Parliament in 2019, chats with me about her proposal to the European Parliament to pass legislation to inscribe in law, for every country in the European Union, employment and working conditions for “gig” and “digital platform” workers equal to that of more traditional workers.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 208:

Back in the spring, I had a good chuckle when I found a topic of agreement between the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs, as well as agreement from lots of heads of states, many labor folks and business titans—creating trillions of dollars in grants, not debt, to give to poorer countries needing immediate financial aid right away to contend with the pandemic. I’m circling back to this idea I first explored on the podcast in May, this time in a chat with Isaac Evans-Frantz, director at Action Corps, and Don Wiviott, a farmer advocate based in Iowa.

Fasten your seat belts! The fight to raise taxes on the very wealthy and corporations is heating up, and, perhaps, the best options for victory will come at the state level. To look at the state of play, I chat with one of my favorite very smart people who knows everything about taxes, Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy.

In case my email slipped by yesterday—there is still time to pitch in to our Giving Tuesday fundraiser and become a sponsor of Working Life.

I pay for most of this out of my own pocket. That’s tough these days because I don’t come from a big money background—but I still want to keep giving voice to workers, union organizers, progressive policy wonks, progressive candidates, and grassroots organizations—with intelligent conversation, not rants. Long before they were household names, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman and Beto O’Rourke were on my show talking about their vision for the people.

Thanks!

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 207:

Ideology is in the way of a simple plan to end the pandemic in 30 days. Yes, 30 days: Lock down the country and pay everyone up to an annual wage of $90,000 to stay home. I’m resurrecting the argument I made months ago because the debate about a stimulus is on the agenda again—after Republicans have basically said fuck you to the entire country for months when it comes to aiding the people. My explanation of the plan leads off the episode.

Then, high up on the list of pandemic utter chaos has been the way in which political leaders at the local and state level have mishandled how to safely reopen schools so teachers and kids don’t get sick. To get a sense of the current state of play for teachers, I zero in on Arizona where voters just approved a new tax hike to fund education and, at the same time, the infections are on a steep rise. Joe Thomas, the president of the Arizona Education Association, joins me to talk about the union’s renewed public push to put in place life-saving measures to make sure schools reopen safely.

Lastly, I hope I never get to a day when, rather than be outraged, I just shrug at some mind-boggling, crazy proposal that endangers thousands of workers. Today, I’m incensed. On their way out the door, the grifters in the Trump Administration, having already killed tens of thousands of people by intentionally downplaying the pandemic and botching the response at all levels, now want to sicken even more workers: They are proposing a last-minute rule change to increase line speeds in poultry plants to 175 birds per minute. Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, the co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH.), chats with me about this insane idea to make an already dangerous industry, in which thousands of workers have gotten COVID-19 and scores have died, even more perilous.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 206:

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Three questions post-election are on the menu this week. First, how does Tom Perez, the chair of the DNC, still have a job? Perez has been incompetent for a very long time. He was the choice of the Democratic Party elites back in 2016—a guy who knows zippo about the mechanics of an election. And, voila—the party loses seats in the House, fumbles the chance to take the U.S. Senate, and even worse, fails to take back legislative chambers at the state level. Perez’s failures will echo for years to come.

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Second, Georgia, Georgia, Georgia…these two run-off races will mean the difference between millions of people being able to pay for food or keep their homes, not to mention whether people like Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley and Elizabeth Warren will have real power at the head of important committees or be stuck in the minority for at least two more years and have no chance to fight the Biden Administration over a progressive agenda. So, those two races have to be won by any means necessary.

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Third, I speak with David Lujan, the executive director of the Arizona Center for Economic Progress, about the passage of Proposition 208, which puts in place a 3.5 percent tax on the wealthiest people to fund higher salaries for teachers, school aides, bus drivers and other folks, not to mention higher spending per student which will mean smaller class sizes. The proposition passed by a margin of more than 116,000 votes, a far bigger margin than Biden’s slim margin of victory in the state. The obvious point: people will get behind ideas that confront class warfare, including support higher taxes for things that improve communities.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 205:

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It’s the permanent government—the corporate lobbyists who have friends in both parties. It is at the heart of why we don’t have Medicare for All, why the Pentagon is rolling in dough and why banks and Wall Street rip us off. Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, talks about what the strategy looks like to limit the influence of the corporate elites in a possible Biden Administration.

The pandemic has ripped through the world, killing and sickening millions. But, if you look at the economic hits people have taken, the pandemic has exposed the complete and utter failure of the system in the U.S. to make sure people can hang on. Both Europe and the U.S. had to shut down their economies and both took hits in output—but why has the unemployment rate been so much lower in Europe in the first half of the year than the U.S.? Maria Figueroa, the Director of Labor and Policy Research at the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University, explains how “short time work” made the difference.

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It’s fairly obvious that Trump has the blood of thousands of Americans on his hands for his absolute narcissistic bungling and incompetent handling of the pandemic. Tens of thousands of people, especially front-line workers like nurses, got sick at work because this administration let corporate shills, who don’t care about workers, run the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Which brings me to the Oregon Health and Science University, a massive sprawling operation which in 2019 had $3.2 billion in revenues. OHSU is taking a page from Jeff Bezos when it comes to stiffing nurses who are seeking a fair wage and leaving nurses at great risk by refusing to commit to fully providing for a safe workplace during the pandemic. We get the lowdown from Terri Niles, an ICU Nurse at OHSU and a vice president at the 2,900-member Local 52 of the Oregon Nurses Association.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 204:

The catastrophic failure to shrink global inequality has given COVID-19 the perfect breeding ground: tens of millions of people are at risk of hunger, extreme poverty, sickness and death because, overwhelmingly, most countries do not spend enough on public healthcare, and they have weak social safety nets and poor labor rights.

Now, this is a feature, not a bug, of the supply chain of global capitalism—keep people poor, enslaved and desperate as a way of making huge profits. To be sure, as I discussed in a recent episode, workers in Haiti, one of the poorest countries on the planet, were barely hanging on before the pandemic—now, they’ve been shoved deeper into the hole of economic deprivation.

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But, the U.S. ranks last out of the wealthy G7 countries and trails 17 low-income countries like Liberia when it comes to laws that stop anti-unionism or where there is a livable minimum wage. Paul O’Brien, Oxfam’s Vice President and the author of a forthcoming book, “Power Switch: How We Can Reverse Extreme Inequality”, joins the show to discuss the organization’s new data.

Even though I’m a political junkie, I’ve usually stayed away from too much in-depth electoral politics on the show, mainly to try to use this time to talk about stuff most of my audience is not going to find elsewhere. But since we are just two weeks away from the election, I picked a few thoughts from the vast amount of posts and analysis I’ve been doing in other places for the last year with the bottom line: a landslide is coming (if you want a truly long in-depth analysis you can over to the Working Life website and read it all there).

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 203:

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When Donald Trump and his minions are eviscerated in less than three weeks so the country can survive, I can’t think of a better illustration of the fight still to come for progressives than taxes. Joe Biden’s tax proposals are, well, meek. Every time Joe Biden made a big deal during the TV mud wrestling verbal sparring with Trump that he wouldn’t raise taxes for anyone making under $400,000, I yelled back, “why the hell not?”.

Really, you won’t ask people earning, say, $250,000 a year—a quarter of a million dollars—to pay higher taxes? I dig deep into Biden’s tax ideas with one of my favorite guests, Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy.

While millions of people wait, in desperation, for Congress to pass a new stimulus package, a whole lot of other important stuff is also tossed by the wayside including the $25 billion to shore up the United states Postal Service. Way before the pandemic erupted, I’ve talked on this show about saving the post office, giving it not only a financial boost but expanding what it can do.

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Post offices are everywhere, often literally on Main Streets in towns all across the country. Everyone knows where the post office is. So, why not turn post offices into hubs of financial transactions for people, from pay check cashing, to spots for Postal Service ATMs and, in today’s world, spots to launch mass COVID vaccination efforts? I take up some of these ideas with Max Sawicky, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research who recently wrote “The U.S. Postal Service Is A National Asset: Don’t Trash It”

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 202:

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For a sliver of time, the political world was talking about how Donald Trump cheats on his taxes. Virtually every rich person does what Trump does: they use the tax code to dodge paying their fair share, which costs the country tens of billions of dollars every year.

Rich people move their money around, hide cash in trusts, foundations, hard-to-understand complex partnerships, a web of limited liability companies, and, especially for those who run companies, in overseas operations. And they have an army of accountants and lawyers whose sole job is to hide as much income, use the tax laws as aggressively as possible to confuse the under-resourced IRS staff, and, then, to fight in court to keep every nickel the IRS somehow manages to find.

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All of this is not a huge surprise to David Cay Johnston. David is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote the 2003 book, “Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everybody Else”. Alas, it’s all still true and getting worse—as he tells us today in my in-depth conversation with him.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 201:

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I’ve been thinking a lot about firefighters these days, what with the jaw-dropping video we see virtually every day of these monstrous wild fires scorching millions of acres of forests in California and Oregon. For the record, these fires are absolutely driven by climate change—so what we see today will be a feature every single year, with all the widespread devastation of communities and the loss of human lives and wildlife.

Recently, I was sheltering in my home like tens of thousands of other people because the fires in Oregon created air that was off the charts hazardous. I mean that not as hyperbole—the measurements were too high for your average air quality reading to capture.

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But, damn, if we, regular people just going about our business, can’t venture outside because the air is too dangerous, what do firefighters face? I don’t mean the obvious—the raging fires and flames. I’m talking about the long-term health effects of breathing in smoke and chemicals pouring out from fires that firefighters confront for hours on end with little shelter. Joining me to think about this is Darrell Roberts, a firefighter for 20 years in southern California where he serves as a battalion chief in Chula Vista as well as president of Local 2180 of the International Association of Fire Fighters

-- Jonathan Tasini

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