Working Life Podcast

Episode 150:

Teachers are on the ramparts again. This time in Chicago where the members of the Chicago Teachers Union are gearing up for a possible strike if they can’t get a decent contract to improve wages, win a hard cap on class size and increase staffing. To talk more about the struggle for a good contract, I’m joined by Andrea Parker, an English teacher and union vice president, and Robin Blake Boose, a first grade teacher.

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I, then, take a look at what’s up in Ohio: You would think that people there would be ready to revolt, to overthrow the oligarchs and the elites and the corporate raiders who have effectively strip-mined the economy, destroying factory jobs and making sure new jobs don’t have decent wages because those same raiders fight unions tooth and nail. Even though Ohio voted for Trump, the people re-elected incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown, a progressive, clear populist, quite comfortably in 2018. Populism works. I talk with Amy Hanauer, the executive director of Policy Matter Ohio, about the organization’s recent deep dive look at Ohio’s economy.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 149:

A few weeks ago, I talked about the vast pay discrimination against women who work for supermarket chain Fred Meyer: 2/3 of women are paid $3.70 less than men doing essentially the same job. The union representing the workers—UFCW Local 555—is in hard, brass knuckles bargaining with Fred Meyer to end this. But in the meantime, just this past Sunday, because of the company’s recalcitrance, the union has called for a boycott of all Fred Meyer stores. I talk about the gender pay discrimination and the boycott with Jeff Anderson, the secretary treasurer of Local 555.

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Then, there is no difference between the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies of the last century and their corporate cousins, Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or those folks who run Uber: companies just do everything possible to exploit workers, rip them off, take more and more profits made by the hard work of millions of workers and use those profits to make a few people rich. California leaders are trying to reign in some abuse: it just passed a landmark bill that clamps down on the rampant classification of people as independent contractors. I talk about this with Rebecca Smith, the Director of Work Structures with the National Employment Law Center.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 148:

Take your shirt off. Or your pants. Almost certainly those garments and others were made in a faraway country, by people making pennies who work in horrendous conditions. I think we all know that when we are told to think about it—but we don’t think about it on a daily basis. I talk with Sonia Mistry of the Solidarity Center about the squalid, dangerous conditions in Bangladesh faced by garment workers—and a fire that recently made thousands homeless.

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Then, I enter into the land of “anti-deferral accounting”—that just rolls off the lips, right? Well, it might not be the most user-friendly lingo but it could add up to a trillion and a half more dollars to shore up Social Security—coming from the pockets of the richest of the richest. Steve Wamhoff, the director of federal tax policy at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, explains it all.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 147: Once upon a time, if you got a job that lasted a long time, you’d be a permanent worker, maybe after a short probationary period. Not so much anymore with the plague forcing people to take “temp” jobs—the kind of job that is increasing in the past few years, outpacing full-time permanent work, and also spreading a lot more to so-called “blue collar” jobs. I explore this with Laura Padin, senior staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project and author of a new important report called “Lasting Solutions for America’s Temporary Workers”.

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My regular listeners may recall that whenever the topic of a Green New Deal comes up, I gripe about the way in which environmentalists and politicians so easily promise to take care of workers. Don’t worry, people say, there will be a “Just Transition” for workers in the fossil fuel industries, which would mean income support and job retraining.

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But when you dig down into these plans and promises, virtually all of them are done on the cheap—meaning giving those workers income that won’t last for more than a few years and training them for jobs that will pay a lot less. That is especially true when workers move from a good union job to an industry that is non-union, and most of the climate change-related industries are non-union. So, today, you will hear from Cecil Roberts, the president of the United Mine Workers of America, about the future his members are looking at as the country, and the globe, debate climate change.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 146:

Back in the first half of the 20th Century, there was a big vibrant union, the United Electrical Workers, the UE. It had 100,000s of members—until the McCarthy era anti-communist hysteria swept the country, triggering eviscerating attacks against the UE by the government, companies and other labor unions.

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Today, the union is still one of the most progressive unions in the nation. I talk with the union’s president, Peter Knowlton about its recent decision to endorse Bernie Sanders for president and declare strong support for a Green New Deal.

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And a new attack against Social Security has been unleashed—this one by the occupant of the Oval Office who wants to cut the contribution rate for Social Security. It’s a really bad idea, and yet another attempt by the right-wing to destroy one of the most successful domestic programs in the nation’s history. I’m joined by Linda Benesch, the communications director of Social Security Works, to dig into how the Trumpers have the knives out for the crucial lifeline for retired people.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 145:

We are taught as kids to keep your word. If you promised not to do something bad or your promised to do something good, we learned you have to keep your promise otherwise people pretty quickly don’t trust you. Which explains why most people just don’t trust politicians—like politicians who are supposed to be your allies and who promised thousands of people they would get a decent pension and, then, vote to take it away.

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And, so, "see you in court" is the cry we begin with. Stacy Chamberlain, the executive director of AFSCME Council 75, gives the lowdown on a critical lawsuit to challenge a bill--passed by a Democratic super majority and signed by the Democratic governor—that would rob workers of a big slice of their hard-earned pensions.

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And, then, shocker—Wal-Mart is up to some sleazy stuff yet again. Wal-Mart and other big corporations, far from the headlines, relentlessly fight small town and cities over property tax assessments of corporate properties. Our go-to tax expert, Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, goes through the ugly strategy that forces understaffed municipalities to give in to essentially corporate blackmail—pushing more costs of basic services on to average working people.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 144:

Sometimes CEOs and the economic elites do stuff that is so transparently absurd that it sort of makes me laugh. Add to that list the letter, “A statement on the purpose of a corporation”, released this past week by the Business Roundtable, signed by a couple of hundred CEOs, promising to be, well, nice to us—better wages, better treatment, better community efforts, all done with the help of the glorious free market. I could go down that list and point to, one after the other, all the horrendous policies those CEOs make happen—not to mention the huge riches they pay themselves at the expense of shareholders and workers, none of which they offered in the letter to cut back on for the betterment of human kind.

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But, better yet, this week’s episode features two of those hypocritical companies. Wal-Mart arms many people with guns—and teachers are ramping up a campaign to empty Wal-Mart’s shelves of the weapons that could end up being used in mass school shootings. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, is back on the show to talk about the union’s demand that Wal-Mart stop selling guns and cease giving money to politicians who carry the water for the National Rifle Association.

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Boeing, another signer of the bogus Business Roundtable letter that promises to “foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect”, is so respectful of the basic democratic right to organize a union that the company spent millions of dollars and used every dirty trick in the book to crush a union organizing drive by the International Association of Machinists back in 2017 in South Carolina. This week, Boeing was charged with illegally firing six workers who organized a smaller unit—a charge made public, in a delicious irony, the very day of the Business Roundtable. I talk with IAM National Organizing Direct Vinny Addeo to dig into Boeing’s illegal actions.

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I wrap with the story of the sleazy behavior by the University Cincinnati Medical Center (UCMC), which, like Boeing, concocted fraudulent reasons to fire two high-ranking union leaders. Their crime? Winning a much better contract and improving the livelihood of nurses and medical personnel who have been part of the union for almost half a century. That tale comes in my conversation with Bob Cousins, the deputy executive officer of labor relations for the Ohio Nurses Association.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 143: Working on in a hog processing plant is one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet—and it’s about to get a whole lot worse, evoking “The Jungle” of the early 20th Century. In a classic profits-over-people move, a new regulation is about to hit which would eliminate any speed restrictions on how fast hog carcasses come hurtling down the assembly line. As it is about to become law—more than a year after I first talked about the topic in a May 2018 episode—I bring back Debbie Berkowitz, director of the worker safety and health program at the National Employment Law Project, to dig into the attack against these workers.

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Then, you knew it along—hiking the minimum wage does not usher in an apocalypse for businesses, despite the whining and moaning of the CEO class. The opposite is true. With the latest state minimum wage hike at the end of 2018 to $15 an hour in New York State in the books, I talk with Yannet Lathrop, policy analyst with NELP, about a new study she co-authored that looks at the New York City restaurant industry and debunks, yet again, the rhetoric about minimum wage hikes hurting business.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 142: Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a wealth tax in the country is a potential game-changer. It would apply only to households with a net worth of $50 million or more—roughly the wealthiest 75,000 households, or the top 0.1%. those super rich would pay an annual 2% tax on every dollar of net worth above $50 million and a 3% tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion. I dig into the idea of a wealth tax with David Gamage, a professor of law at Indiana University and a tax law expert who has just written the first draft of an article called, “Five Key Research Findings On Wealth Taxation for the Super Rich”.

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Then, I look at a fight for equal pay by women in Nepal who work in the construction industry. For that chat, I welcome to the show Feyzi Ismail who, among her various posts, teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London where she also is a senior fellow in the Department of Developmental Studies.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 141: It’s just basically a good thing when good, new, progressive people run in primaries against incumbents. Even if that incumbent isn’t a horrible human being and has a decent voting record—compared of course to the rest of the politicians out there. Today we get to hear from a darn good candidate, Albert Lee, who’s taking on a long-time incumbent.

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And, guess what? Women are still paid a lot less than men—I take a look at how grocery chain Fred Meyer is ripping off women in a chat with Tom Chamberlain, president of the Oregon AFL-CIO.

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And, lastly, since the Federal Reserve Board is wrapping up its July meeting today and won’t be meeting again until September and is likely to be announcing a cut in interest rates—as I record this the official announcement has not come but the markets have already “priced in” an interest rate cut—I thought it would be useful to re-run the recent deep dive chat about the Fed with Dean Baker, senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. that segment again for those who missed it.

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