Working Life Podcast

Episode 180:

It is quite something to hear the elites in Washington—especially Republican members of Congress and the menace in the White House—blather on about wanting to wait to see how well the previous, inadequate fiscal stimulus works before deciding whether to do anything else. That’s while tens of millions of people are in the streets, huge lines of hungry people form every day across the nation and states and cities are on the brink of financial ruin.

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States and cities not only employ collectively millions of people but, my god, their services—from education to just picking up the garbage—are damn essential. And you don’t need a computer to get that with the economy shut down and people sheltering at home, revenue to the states through incomes taxes and other taxes has nosedived. It’s just around the corner, folks: when there are gaps in local budgets, especially at the state level, they are coming after us with cuts pretty quickly to our services, our pensions and our communities.

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I welcome back Meg Wiehe, deputy director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, to wrap our minds around this: Congress should make up any shortfalls states and cities face—and we should use this crisis to also fix the decades-long, deeply crazy, screwed up ideology that skimped on strong government in favor of low taxes for the rich and corporations.

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Then, I circle back to what’s happening with poultry, hog and meat processing workers in a conversation with, Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail Wholesale and Department Stores Union, as we focus mainly about the crazed notion of forcing plants to open up even if COVID-19 is raging through the workplace.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 179:

There is no way to downplay the risks to U.S. frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic—and I’ve dug into that in the past month or so, in our various segments talking about workers in health care, postal service, hog and poultry processing, airlines, rail, and subways. It’s dangerous and frightening—and it’s exponentially more terrifying when you look at the global threat to workers.

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Think about what tens of millions of workers in poorer countries, with far fewer resources, are facing. The images coming out of Africa, Asia and South America showing huge migrations of workers are mind-boggling—how do you even wrap your mind around how to achieve social distancing at bus depots in India, crammed with huge crowds of migrants, who are desperately trying to get home because they have nowhere to go as industries have shut down in the pandemic. Or, consider Haiti, the poorest country in this hemisphere—close your eyes and think of garment workers who pack into tap-taps (those are public minibus transports) to ride to factories that are teeming with people, that on a good day, are dangerous, risky places to work—and, then, arriving at a factory to find that the employer is forcing workers to sign a piece of paper that says if the worker gets sick that worker is legally responsible for their illness. Shawna Bader-Blau, executive director of the Solidarity Center, joins me to paint the global picture.

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And, then, courtesy of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH), it’s the Dirty Dozen of the Corona Pandemic, and a few other dishonorable mentions—companies like Amazon and Tyson Foods who, surprise, put profits over the safety and health of workers, along with big corporate lobbyists who work hard to block paid sick leave. I chat with Peter Dooley, a National COSH leading workplace safety and health expert, about the Dirty Dozen, and we also discuss a model framework for how to make sure workers stay safe in the pandemic.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 178:

Here’s a little riddle: What has 157 million daily delivery points, 35,000 offices and 500,000 workers? It’s your U.S. Postal Service, that would be the service that really is a democratic, small “d”, institution—it’s there for everyone at a reasonable cost, no matter where you live or who you are.

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Putting it mildly, postal workers are frontline workers—and to pile the safety and health dangers on top of everything else, the service is facing a massive budget hole because of the collapse of the economy because, obviously, less commerce means a lot less stuff being sent via the postal service which relies on fees. I go in-depth on what’s happening to postal workers with Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union.

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And Jeff Bezos is up to his usual despicable behavior—the wealthiest human on the planet is piling up more money but at the expense of the safety and health of Amazon’s warehouse workers who are getting sick from COVID-19. Hundreds of Amazon workers stayed away from work yesterday to protest the dangerous conditions. Rachel Belz, an Amazon worker, joins me to discuss the uprising.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 177:

The dinner plates of millions of people are soon going to be an interesting place to focus the mind on the balance between the desire to fill bellies with protein—poultry and pork, mainly—versus the worthiness of peoples’ lives, specifically the lives of the workers who process the chickens and hogs in plants across the country.

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To put it bluntly, workers are getting sick and dying from COVID-19 just so millions of people can chow down some meat product at dinner. And those products may be harder to find because the virus is raging through food processing plants nationwide and fraying the supply chain from factory to plate. To get an on-the-ground report about the epidemic, I’m joined by Randy Hadley, the president of the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union’s Midsouth Council who has been working in the industry for over four decades.

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Since today, April 15th, is normally tax deadline day, it’s a good time to look across the spectrum at how stimulus money—tax money—has been flowing, or should flow, and who should benefit. People and state governments, for example, need a lot more economic support, while CEOs and corporations should go to the end of the line, or, at least, every dollar should invested in a workplace should go towards keeping a worker on the job. And maybe there’s a silver lining down the road—a renewed belief that an effective, activist, well-funded government is a good thing. To unwind all this, I chat with Amy Hanauer, the executive director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 176:

When we come out of the immediate pandemic crisis, then, maybe we can have some accounting of who and what is responsible for the needless deaths of thousands of people—and among the “who” would be, say, politicians who are making themselves look like heroes today—I’ll just say, randomly, New York politicians—even though they sat on their hands in January when the World Health Organization issued a worldwide pandemic warning, which you think might have made those same aggrandizing politicians—say, in New York—think, “gee, maybe I should make sure we are stocked up with the right equipment.”

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But, the bigger inquiry should be about how a part of the crisis comes right from the way we’ve allowed global corporations and elites to set up an economic system using trade deals that profits them a whole lot but leaves everyone else vulnerable to a pandemic, not to mention other quaint class warfare damage. Which is what I talk about today with Lori Wallach, the director of Global Trade Watch.

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And Secretary of State may not be a position that gets a lot of people excited but it’s an important job—most people serving as a state-level Secretary of State have a huge role in redistricting and, certainly, they work to make sure elections run properly. If you match that to someone who really cares about the position, knows a ton about what can be done in the role and also is running to be a secretary of state not just as a stepping stone but because they really want to do the job, then, you’ve got a great combination—or perhaps you’ve gotten to know Jamie McLeod-Skinner who is running for secretary of state in Oregon, and joins me to discuss her campaign.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 175:

The other night I was watching an episode of Season 3 of Ozark and there was a scene in which the mother, played by Laura Linney, walks out of a supermarket with her son, both of them pushing a shopping cart. My head went immediately to, without a thought: I hope they sanitized that bar on the cart where their hands were placed…and then a few seconds later I laughed. That is where our heads are at these days—but, for lots of frontline workers out there, it’s all very real, deadly real, terrifyingly real.

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So, again, this week you are going to hear about those workers—today it’s health care workers and transit workers as I talk with the leaders of two very important unions: Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 180,000 health care workers, and John Samuelsen, the president of the Transport Workers Union, whose members work on the buses, rail and airlines all across the country. Perhaps not coincidentally, both of them are New Yorkers with a real feel for the pandemic bomb hitting that city.

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The workers we are going to hear about—and this is not dramatic exaggeration—are getting sick and dying because of the pandemic, in no small part because of the malfeasance, ignorance and just plain simple “We don’t give a crap about workers” attitude that has meant a lack of equipment to protect folks from the virus.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 174:

When I have snuck out briefly in the past couple of weeks to safely get a few items at the supermarket, I made sure to thank the workers in the aisles and my cashier for being on the job, and I also tell them be safe and careful. They are supremely vulnerable to getting sick.

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Those retail workers, who still have jobs despite many stores having closed down, are forced to show up at work, mainly because they have no choice—their boss hasn’t shut down and the workers need the paycheck because lots of them are like millions of Americans with very little in the way of an emergency cash cushion, and in lots of cases they have zero paid sick leave. Today, I speak with Dave Mertz, vice president and New York City director of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, about what’s happening in the lives of retail workers on the corona frontlines.

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And speaking of bad employers—even without a pandemic Amazon is injuring workers and tossing them away like disposable units. Irene Tung, senior researcher and policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, talks to me about a stunning new study she recently co-authored that looks at Amazon’s injury and turnover rates.

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I wrap up this week’s episode with a conversation with Cori Bush, a single parent, registered nurse, a pastor, an activist, and a community organizer in St Louis Missouri, who is a strong progressive taking on a long-time entrenched incumbent in a Democratic primary in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 173:

Last week I asked everyone to consider the coronavirus pandemic as a pretty clarifying picture of class warfare—who are the people who get hurt most when millions of jobs go away or at best are in limbo because of a nationwide shutdown? It’s working people, minimum wage workers, service workers—almost none of whom have enough cash in reserve to pay bills, unlike the rich who have made their wealth by exploiting workers. Who are the people most vulnerable? It’s the people who either have to still go to work or can’t afford to stay at home because they don’t have mandated paid sick leave or family leave, even in a crisis.

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Today, as so many of you either hunker down or are living in fear, I talk with one of my favorite and regular guests Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, about a menu of steps the country needs to take to mitigate the devastating health and economic hits workers are taking in the pandemic.

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Then, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Democrat from Maryland, joins me to talk about his efforts to protect tens of thousands of federal workers by calling for an expansion of their right to telework during the corona pandemic, as well as his effort with Bernie Sanders to buttress workers’ pensions by ending a multi-billion tax break for CEO retirement plans.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 172:

Pandemics might be one of the single best mass events to shine a light on class warfare, especially in the U.S. Rich people don’t have to worry about getting sick—they can afford extensive care in a country in which millions of working-class people can’t even afford to see a doctor for a run-of-the-mill reason. If a rich person gets sick, well, he can just sit home in his pajamas for as long as needed and never worry about paying next week’s rent, while a fast food worker or other service worker on an hourly wage is forced to go to work, even when sick.

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What the coronavirus has shown, quite sharply and clearly, is that a country without paid sick leave is not only an immoral society but also, on a practical level, a country which denies the most basic benefits that could contain a health threat—which is what I talk about today with Judy Conti, government affairs director for the National Employment Law Project.

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Then, you probably can’t find many people in Congress who are bigger shills for the corporate world than Steny Hoyer—and McKayla Wilkes is aiming to send Hoyer quickly into the world he really aspires to, that of a lobbyist for corporations. I talk with her today about her primary challenge.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 171:

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You may remember me using this before because the idea comes up again and again in the struggle of workers to get some power at work. In his ballad “Pretty Boy Floyd”, Woody Guthrie sang these words:

“Yes, as through this world I've wandered,

I've seen lots of funny men;

Some will rob you with a six-gun,

And some with a fountain pen”

Today that’s real life, and today, I chat with Hugh Baran of the National Employment Law Project about forced arbitration, a mumbo jumbo legal term that basically means millions of workers are giving up their rights to corporations who are stealing billions from workers by using the power of the corporate pen.

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Then, I chat with Tomas Ramos, a progressive running for the 15th Congressional district in New York, a heavily Democratic district where a progressive can win.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini

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