Working Life Podcast

Episode 140: I like the ring of The Stop Wall Street Looting Act, don’t you? True, it’s part of the business model of the joint, especially the private equity pirates. The Act is, in fact, aimed squarely at the private equity industry, who have stripped and destroyed hundreds of companies. I’ll talk about the Act with the national expert on the industry, Eileen Appelbaum, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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When you are sitting on your airplane ready to take off, you’ve probably seen those LSG Sky Chefs catering trucks driving up to service your plane with the sumptuous menu of crackers and peanuts. Thousands of those catering workers are low paid, and have to pay for expensive ,mediocre health insurance—and they are preparing for a possible strike to get some justice on the job. I’ll be speaking with one of the workers on today’s program.

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Lastly, you may have heard a minimum wage bill passed the House which would hike the minimum wage to $15 by 2025. Judy Conti, the government affairs director of the National Employment Law Project, chats with me about the bill—and what happens next.

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Episode 139: I have to tip my cap to the conservative, anti-worker right-wing. That whole gang has been far more focused, in a laser-like way, on seizing power in places where it can matter a lot—the local and state political arenas. Progressives, until recently, just didn’t focus enough on state capitols and local races—letting the right wing dominate state legislatures and local city governments. And that’s meant really bad things for workers to the tune of billions of dollars in lost wages—as we will hear today from Laura Huizer, senior staff attorney of the National Employment Law Project, who talks about a report she has co-authored looking at a little wonky, very dangerous, legal thing called “pre-emption”.

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And with the strike by thousands of workers globally against Amazon this past Monday on Amazon Prime day, I remind us what a corporate terrorist the company really is by re-airing two great segments on the topic of Amazon’s tax avoidance strategy. You will hear from Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, and Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association.

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-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 138: Wait, didn’t we just talk last week about the attacks on government workers? Well, a week doesn’t go by when another attack against people, who keep our society working, is launched by this administration—this time it’s the workers at the Environmental Protection Agency. AFGE Local 1236 Bethany Dreyfus joins me to give us the lowdown on the draconian rules imposed just days ago. I can’t add to the descriptions of the daily despicable conditions faced by migrants and refugees at the southern border. Instead, what I wanted to do today is go the root of what brought so many to flee their homes—what made people refugees? It’s economic oppression, corruption, the lack of the rule of law—all blessed, supported, encouraged and funded by the U.S. I look at this in two conversations. First, Vicki Gass, Senior Policy expert for Central America and Mexico for Oxfam, describes why people become refugees. And, then, Gladys Cisneros the Solidarity Center’s country program director in Mexico, digs into whether changes in Mexico’s labor law system, especially the process of enforcement, are significant enough to believe that a new NAFTA treaty wouldn’t simply be a new, continuing blank check for corporations to exploit workers.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 137: If you look hard enough, you can find conspiracies to defraud workers in every corner of the economy—and those conspiracies are usually dressed up as something entirely different. Take the people who work for the VA—there is a conspiracy to crush their union and cut wages, all dressed by in the cloak of “efficiency through privatization”. I talk with American Federation of Government Employees leaders Marilyn Park and Eric Gerken about the Orwellian-named “Mission Act”, which will cripple the VA, hurt the quality of care Vets receive and undermine the union. And in the glittering world of Hollywood, talent agencies are pocketing huge fees as essentially payoffs from studios, in a broad conspiracy that is taking away money from writers of movies, who are the people talent agencies are supposed to be representing. David Goodman, the president of the Writers Guild of America and a long-time, top-tier TV writer, chats with me about the fight that has already seen, in an eye-opening act of solidarity, thousands of writers fire their talent agencies.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 136: It seems so simple—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, which could be a first step, and then on to remittances of money to families around the globe and even installing Postal Service ATMs? You can boil down this down to a simple question: who would you rather give your business to, Citibank or the Post Office? I take up this idea with Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, and Ohio Representative Marcy Kaptur. Then, Catherine Feingold, director of the AFL-CIO’s International Department, is back to dig into a new global treaty to combat violence and harassment at work.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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It’s an action-packed, let’s-catch-the-thieves-in-the-act episode. The Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee just wrapped up its two-day secret June meeting without triggering a new cut in interests rates—and what does that mean? I unravel the state of play at the Fed—and ask the question why shouldn’t we change the basic structure of the Fed—with Dean Baker, Fed-watcher extraordinaire and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Intrigue is also swirling around the renegotiation of NAFTA 2.0 so Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch who knows the entire inside story and state-of-play, is back with all the insight you can’t get from anyone else. I close by noting a sad moment in time—it’s been a whole decade since workers saw a rise in the federal minimum wage, which is stuck at a poverty-level, immoral $7.25. Leo Gertner, a staff attorney with the National Employment Law Center, joins me for a chat about a new report excoriating Congress for failing to raise the minimum wage which would give workers a bit more money in their pockets.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 134: As you may recall from last week’s episode, I was at the California Democratic State Party convention recently. I continue bringing you the speeches of the presidential candidates who spoke—this week it’s Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard and Cory Booker. To give those speeches some context, I chat with Karen Bernal, the outgoing chair of the California state party progressive caucus. We look back at the past few years—and try to be honest about progressive victories and defeats, and the long road ahead to shaking loose the elements of the establishment who stand in the way of progress and a more democratic (small “d”) party.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 133:

I just returned from the great city of San Francisco which hosted the state Democratic Party Convention. And in my audio bag are most of the speeches of the Democratic presidential candidates who gave their pitches to the delegates—California, with a much earlier primary than usual, will potentially have a decisive say about who will be the eventual Democratic nominee. This week, Elizabeth Warren starts off a mini-series of the speeches, which I will bring to you in the coming weeks. Warren gave, in my opinion, the sharpest, most focused, clear policy and philosophical speech of them all.

Then, Tefere Gebre, the executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, joins me for a deep discussion about worker uprisings, the racism of trade and tariffs and internal politics inside the Federation that have targeted him.

And I wrap up with my favorite topic, taxes. Jessica Schieder, a federal tax policy fellow at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, walks us through some new ideas to help moderate- and low-income people.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 132: Murder, violence and robbery—it sounds like a list for a plot of The Wire. But, no, it’s just another standard operating procedure for the free market system—in which people are murdered in Colombia thanks to so-called “free trade”, workers are beat up and sometimes killed at McDonald’s because the company doesn’t care about its workers beyond the bottom line so leaves workers exposed to threats to their lives and, lastly, public sector employees have the money they have saved for retirement, sometimes over many decades, taken from them mainly because some greedy Wall Street lowlifes crashed the economy to make a pile of money no matter the cost to millions of people.

The Violence: Debbie Berkowitz, the Worker Health and Safety Program Director for the National Employment Law Project, chats with me about NELP’s new report looking at the violence faced by McDonald’s workers.

The Robbery: Tom Chamberlain, president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, explains how the Democratic-led Legislature is pushing—disgracefully—to cut public workers’ pensions.

The Murders: Cathy Feingold, the director of the AFL-CIO’s international department who was recently elected as Deputy President of the International Trade Union Confederation, the organization representing 200 million unionized workers worldwide, breaks down the widespread killing of union leaders and other activists in Colombia, despite promises made—promises yours truly never bought—that the so-called “free trade” deal between the U.S. and Colombia would bring about labor rights reforms and protections.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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Episode 131: Here we go again: a slow but steady laying of a groundwork for a war, this time against Iran, assisted by the media’s promotion of lies surrounding Iran, reprising the role it played almost two decades ago hyping up the threats posed by Iraq. I talk in-depth with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies, about the Iran war threat. Then, Sara Nelson, the dynamic president of the Association of Flight Attendants, joins me for a discussion about what her members face and the future of labor.