Working Life Podcast

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Episode 200:

CEOs like to play a three-card monte shell game. They want everyone to focus on their rhetoric about all the supposed wonderful things they do—say, creating a “green” friendly product—and, at the same time, when people aren’t paying attention, they run their company using fear, sexism and racism. That sums up the world of Elon Musk—which we talk about today.

Musk is anti-union and runs an operation that makes workers sick at sky-high rates, as I documented almost more than two years ago on this podcast in Episode 80. And it appears pretty evident he’s a sexist and a racist. He’s facing one federal lawsuit claiming that in 2015 and 2016, at Tesla’s factory in suburban Fremont, CA, black workers were subjected to repeated racial epithets, racist cartoons, and supervisors engaged in, or did little to stop, the racism.

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The same horrific environment is pretty apparent at the company’s plant in Buffalo, NY, a factory that got almost a billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies to open up shop. To understand the ugly nature of what it’s like to work at the Tesla factory in Buffalo, I’m joined by two people. Sonny worked for Tesla until recently but “Sonny” is a pseudonym and we’ve obscured his face in this discussion because he fears retribution from other potential future employers. Linnea Brett is a community organizer with the Clean Air Coalition, which develops grassroots leaders who organize their communities to run and win environmental justice and public health campaigns in Western New York.

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I kick off with a short observation about American Exceptionalism: when it comes to moving away from fossil fuels, we are pretty puny compared to the far-reaching industrial policy pursued by China.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 199:

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What’s a worker’s life worth? To you and me, it’s priceless. Capitalism, though, doesn’t see it that way—a worker’s life is a cost of doing business, a life easily disposable when it comes to making profits. And the corporate world has an accomplice in this immoral scam where workers are disposable: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Smithfield Foods, a massive pork processor making billions of dollars every year, did almost nothing to stop workers from getting the virus at its Sioux Falls, South Dakota plant. In just under three months, more than 1,300 were infected, 43 ended up in the hospital and four workers died. OSHA’s response? A fine of $13,494 as part of a single violation OSHA cited the company for—that’s $3,373.50 for each worker killed or a little over $10 bucks for those infected. Jessica Martinez, executive director of National COSH, joins me to talk about this immoral slap on the wrist that is a “green light” to every company to act cavalierly when it comes to workers’ lives.

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Over the past six months, I’ve brought you the stories of frontline workers and the dangers they face in the pandemic. You’ve heard the stories of poultry workers, teachers, retail workers, subway conductors, and health care workers. Today, I speak with Hipolito Andon, a cleaner and maintenance worker in New York City, who tells us about the risks he faces on the job at one of the premier real estate sites in Manhattan, Rockefeller Plaza.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 198:

The most important political figure in your economic life—to be sure, the boss of a company has got a lot of power—is not the president of the United States, no matter who that is. It’s probably the head of the Federal Reserve Board. We know interest rates are at historic lows and mortgage rates are crazy low because the Fed has intervened to keep the country from collapsing even further into the abyss we are in, an abyss Republicans in Congress don’t seem to care about.

Which is why what the Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced recently is pretty important—the Fed will keep its main attention on employment. Is this just a pandemic-linked shift that will eventually go away and send the Fed back to doing the bidding of the banks and the bond markets? I poke at this topic with my favorite Fed watcher, Dean Baker, senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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It’s hard to think of a sector in the economy that has been hit harder than hospitality and tourism, and specifically, hotels. I mean, ask yourself: unless it was a matter of high urgency would you travel right now and book a hotel and stay somewhere just for fun? Ok, if you say you would, you are more brave and adventurous than I am.

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For most hotel workers, however, the future looks bleak today—paychecks are gone, enhanced unemployment has run out and, soon, health insurance coverage costs will be almost entirely on the workers once union financial support expires. To hear more about the economic struggle of hotel workers, I’m joined by Lourdes Maquera, a housekeeper for the past ten years at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki, Hawaii, and Bryant de Venecia, the communications organizer for UNITE HERE’s Local 5.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 197:

The last name “Hoover” is, if I can use this term, a brand name in conservative circles. Herbert Hoover was the 31st president of the U.S. who served during the Great Depression, taking office in 1929 the year the stock market crashed—an apt historical reference for today perhaps since the economic implosion we are living through is the worst in a century dating back at least to the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s.

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His great-granddaughter Margaret Hoover has kept the Hoover flame alive—both in her attention to Herbert’s legacy and her own work as a conservative commentator. Margaret and I have known each other since the 2016 election cycle. We have vigorous, but respectful, disagreements about actual policy. In the wake of the two parties’ political conventions, Margaret joins me to talk about politics—and she reveals for the first time publicly that she’s voting for Joe Biden (which says as much about Biden’s politics as it does about Margaret, and the battle progressives will face should there be a Biden Administration).

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As I’ve reported numerous times from the COVID-19 frontlines, workers are getting sick and dying from COVID-19. The added twist: they are afraid to speak up, largely because, no surprise, corporations are putting enormous pressure on workers to suck it up, whatever the cost. Jessica Martinez, the co-director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH), joins the show to give the lowdown on the dangers facing workers and the failure of government safety inspectors to make sure hundreds of thousands of stay safe during the pandemic.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 196:

It’s never enough to remind people every single day how many workers are out there on the frontlines risking their lives in the pandemic. I’ve talked about those folks regularly on the show: the transit workers, retail workers, and teachers. And, surely, the workers who put food on our plates are right up there on the list—like the folks that are crammed together in poultry processing plants who are getting sick by the thousands and dying by the hundreds. Alexandre Galimberti, Senior Advocacy and Collaborations Advisor for the US Domestic Program at Oxfam America, talks with me about how the corrupt, greedy poultry industry is exposing workers to horrendous conditions.

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Last week I was driving about town, doing a few errands (while always wearing my mask) when I passed by a bank. There were hundreds of people lined up at the bank, pieces of paper in their hands, with a ton of them crowded together pressed against each other at the door of the bank.

I drove down another block and circled back to the spot. I knew what this scene was instantly: people trying to file paperwork to get a one-time $500 state grant to make up for the enhanced federal unemployment benefits that Republican cut off at the end of July. I talk about this as an example of an immoral society—a place where millions of people can’t pay their bills because of a public health crisis created by leaders who don’t give a damn and exacerbated by leaders who don’t care whether people are going hungry.

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The Florida 3rd Congressional district might have been a relatively obscure seat in the mix of 435 congressional districts—except it’s held by Ted Yoho, the yahoo who called Alexandria Ocasio Cortex a “fucking bitch”, leading to a spectacular takedown of Yoho and misogyny by Ocasio Cortez on the House floor. Thankfully for the country, Yoho is not running for re-election.

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Still, the district is considered a pretty safe Republican district, with an R+9 lean. Trump beat Clinton in the district 56-40 in 2016. But, Adam Christensen, the candidate who just captured the Democratic nomination, joins the show to explain why the district is a good place to test a populist message.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 195:

Voting in America, compared to many other countries, is not easy. That’s always been true. Donald Trump’s relentless effort to undermine the vote in November, in this case by crippling the postal service and trying to make it impossible for ballots to be counted on time, is surely corrupt. But, the undermining of the vote is made easier by a rickety election system that has existed for decades. Miles Rapoport, a former Connecticut Secretary of State and, now, Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at Harvard’s Ash Center, talks to me about the threat to voting this Fall, what we can do and his bigger project to implement a national mandate that everyone must vote as a civic requirement.

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If you wanted to pick a country that has been ravaged for decades by economic, political and physical blows a grimly appropriate choice would be Haiti—a country that is the poorest place to live in the Western Hemisphere. Its people endured decades of autocratic rule under the Duvalier regimes, who looted the country. More recently, the scars of a 7.0 earthquake in 2010 still loom large because a desperately poor country always has less ability to cope with a natural disaster and, then, fully recover. Lauren Stewart, the Solidarity Center’s Regional Director for the Americas, joins me to tell the tale of a campaign by Haitian garment workers to survive the COVID-19 pandemic which has put many out of work.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 194:

Today the show is all about Hollywood. Hollywood, California and Hollywood, Florida. Hollywood, California is in a rumble. For most performers in the entertainment business, residuals are the foundation to making a living—either a solid middle class living or somewhat less than that. Over many decades, residuals have been tied to various things such as repeat showings of a movie in syndication or sales of DVDs. Now, it’s all about streaming.

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For performers this is a huge change and it’s really about a fight to make sure generations of performers, some not born today, will be able to earn a respectable living. How do performers get paid in a streaming world? The performers’ union, SAG-AFTRA, just scored a big streaming deal win for performers—as well as locking in a big #MeToo step forward to protect actors from harassment. I dig into all this with the union’s president Gabrielle Carteris, who has a long career in film as an actor in film, TV and stage (most prominently in Beverly Hills 90210) and as a producer, and Ray Rodriguez, SAG-AFTRA’s Chief Contracts Officer.

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Florida’s 23rd Congressional district is a strongly Democratic district currently represented by the odious Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. In a world of dishonest, morally corrupt, vain and narcissistic politicians, Wasserman Schultz stands out. That’s where Jen Perelman comes in. Jen is challenging Wasserman-Schultz in the Democratic primary which wraps up next week with Election Day after thousands of Floridians have already cast early-voting ballots. Jen’s website is jen2020.com. She joins me from the campaign trail as she was out talking to voters.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 193:

The pandemic has ripped a hole through every state budget in the country to the tune collectively of over $550 billion. That red ink is more than half a trillion dollars in money states won’t have—which translates into millions of people losing their jobs, services being decimated that we all rely on, attacks against people of color who are employed disproportionately in decent-paying government jobs and an economy that won’t recover if aid is not dispatched. Pronto.

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And it doesn’t have to be this way, if ideology wasn’t more important for Republicans, and some Democrats, who should be pouring money into states and closing these big deficits—deficits that, remember, were no fault of management by state leaders. The deficits were caused, essentially, by one person, Donald Trump, who dismissed the pandemic, called it a hoax, made fun of people who tried to sound the alarm about the approaching calamity and, thus, caused the economic crisis that is burying states in mountains of red ink. I talk with about the state budget emergency with Michael Leachman, Vice President for State Fiscal Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

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It’s not a wild guess to say that a very high percentage of the thousands of people who tune into the show are political junkies and probably a big piece of that number consider themselves progressives. So, with the Democratic convention coming up, you’d think I’d do a lot on that, right? Nope: because conventions don’t matter. And, even more so, party platforms don’t matter. And I say all that as a bona fide elected delegate for Bernie Sanders for whom I’ve already cast my virtual ballot for his nomination. My musings about the convention and the progressive movement kick off the show.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 192:

By the time you are tuning into the show, Jeff Bezos, one of the great scars on the economic landscape, will have finished his song-and-dance testimony before Congress, during a hearing that mostly focuses on the massive anti-competitive power of the big tech firms like Amazon and Google. But, long before today, Jeff Bezos has always been the poster child for the CEO who doesn’t give a shit about workers and only cares about a single thing: how to become even richer than he is. The man is a scar on humanity. My observations about Bezos leads off the show.

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Then, Congress passed NAFTA 2.0 earlier this year. I’ll just say right away—the first NAFTA was an abomination, the newer one was just horrendous—and we also have to be clear that, with or without these so-called free trade deals, capitalism marches on and abuses people, as we saw in last week’s episode when I talked about the enslavement of the Uyghurs in China on behalf of the global supply chain of big brands and big companies. A big piece of NAFTA 2.0 was all about improving the lot of workers in Mexico, especially their right to join independent unions. And that ain’t happening. I dig into this with Lori Wallach, the director of Global Trade Watch.

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Florida. When it comes to politics, you need not say much more than “Florida” to get peoples’ temperature up—no pun intended here since it’s also now the center of the COVID pandemic thanks to the state’s completely moronic governor. But, Florida also points up a longer term challenge to be quite conscious of—it has one of the worst state Democratic parties in the country. I talk about the state’s politics with Bob Lynch, a first-time candidate, who is running for the state house partly to be a catalyst for reform of the party’s electoral strategy.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 191:

China’s leaders and wealthy elites are willing partners of global capitalism, opening up its doors, willingly, to Wal-Mart and huge multinational companies so those companies can produce trillions of dollars of stuff using cheap slave labor—in good capitalist style. Since 2017, China has been conducting a steady campaign of mass transfer of more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities into a vast network of ‘re-education camps’ in the far west region of Xinjiang, which Uyghur activists call “east Turkestan”.

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Think of the Japanese internment camps in the U.S. during WWII or apartheid in South Africa—the key difference, is that this is being driven a lot by the thirst of global capitalism for cheap, slave labor. Tens of thousands of Uyghurs are being forced to work in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen. Tomorrow, a worldwide call will be issued by 71 Uyghur rights groups and over 100 civil society organizations and labor unions from around the world demanding that apparel brands and retailers stop using the forced labor. Rahima Mahmut, a Uyghur singer, award-winning translator, and human rights activist who is living in exile in London, and Brian Finnegan, the Global Worker Rights Coordinator in the International Department of the AFL-CIO, join the show to talk about the campaign.

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Some things never change no matter when tax day falls—we pay our taxes, while the rich and big corporations dodge paying their fair share. Amazon paid zero taxes in 2017 and 2018, despite having huge profits and, lo and behold, Amazon is making a big deal out of paying taxes in 2019—a whopping 1.2 percent of its $13 billion in profits.

One of the reasons these very rich people and corporations can scam us is the careful, relentless undermining of the IRS. And Congress has been the willing tool for that anti-IRS campaign, cutting its budgets year after year. What that means is simple: rich people and corporations don’t pay what they should because they know the IRS can’t keep pace with the armies of lawyers hired by rich people and corporations to dodge and avoid taxes. Hundreds of billions of dollars go unpaid and about 70 percent of that “underpayment”—which is a euphemism for dodging—is by the top one percent. A week after Tax Day, Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, talks with me about the IRS and who is not paying taxes (alert: the tax dodger list won’t shock you!)

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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