Democracy dies, first, in the workplace

Max Alvarez: I couldn’t be more grateful to be in conversation with my man, Hamilton Nolan. Hamilton is a role model for so many of us in the labor journalism and labor media world, and I’m just so proud of him and everything that he’s done, and especially this incredible new book that we’re here to talk about today, which is called ​“The Hammer: Power, Inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.”

Everyone is looking at the past eight to 10 years to try to understand what the hell happened in this country that not only led us to elect Donald Trump president the first time, but now a second time with a fully magnified GOP controlling effectively all branches of government. 

I wanted to ask you Hamilton Nolan, what does the last eight to 10 years in this country look like through the lens of labor and through the lives of the working people that you report on for a living? 

Hamilton Nolan: I think you have to go back a little bit farther to really answer that question. And I will go back to the end of World War II, 1950s in America. After World War II in this country, one in three working people in America was a union member…all that prosperity was widely shared because working people in this country had the power to take their share of that wealth, thanks to high levels of unionization.

In the mid 1950s about one in three workers was, today it’s one in 10, and that’s been a slow downward decline for all those years, and particularly beginning in 1980 with the Reagan era. 

There’s a really famous chart that a lot of you have probably seen, and one line is the decline of union density in America. It goes down. The other line is the rise of the wealth held by the top 10% of America, and it goes up. And it’s a perfect mirror image. Those two things are not coincidental. Those two things are one enabled by the other.

I think that it’s just the nature of societies that inequality can only rise for so long before stuff starts to break down. The social contract starts to break down. The political system starts to break down. People stop believing in the American dream, because it becomes increasingly obvious that the American dream is kind of a sham…All those things conspire to form an atmosphere where a guy like Trump can rise up. 

Max, how did you get into labor? 

MA: I started the podcast years ago, when I was still a broke grad student. I say as a joke that I almost started the show as a ruse to get my dad to talk about losing our house and losing everything that I had grown up with, losing the American dream in his mind, because for years it had just eaten our family away. 

The crash was a huge ideological crash for us, because we saw how much the system we believed in and that we believed we could work within to make a good life for ourselves was so nakedly rigged in favor of the very people who had caused millions of families like ours to lose everything. I started doing labor journalism on my podcast because I did not want my father to go to his grave feeling like a failure. And I kept doing the podcast because I saw how much and I knew how much pain you accrue as a human being in such an inhuman system.

HN: I did this series of unemployment stories. And we published this every week for 40 weeks. Hundreds and hundreds of people telling their own stories…just giving people the ability to tell their own stories is such a blessing. Everywhere I go I meet people: somebody who has worked in their union for 20 years, 30 years, been a member, been active, been elected, been a shop steward, whatever it is. And nobody’s ever told that person that was important, that you did that, it was actually important. We’re very lucky, because you get to let people speak, and you also get to tell people that they’re legitimately important in a way that they might have never even heard before.

MA: That’s beautifully and powerfully put. I am reminded of it week in and week out. There’s a hopeful note in that, because that’s a gift that we can all give one another, listening to each other and talking to each other, showing your scars, telling your stories. That’s how workers learn that they’re being paid different rates all the way up to the raw human stuff. That’s what labor journalism is about. It’s not about unions. It’s about people struggling for a better life, a good life

MA: What are the bigger dreams that workers and the movement need to be having right now? 

HN: Today, 10% of workers in America are union members. That’s the last stop before single digits. And there’s no stop after single digits. That’s the last stop on the elevator. We are in a fucking crisis, man. Unions have billions of dollars, and there is a considerable amount of resources in organized labor, even though it’s been weakened for many decades. They need to see it as a crisis. 

The first thing we really need is a sense of urgency among the leaders of the labor movement, and then we need them to open the checkbooks and start from the premise that we need to double the amount of union members in this country. We need to organize the next 10 million people. 

As a labor reporter, you can go all over the country and meet the most inspiring people you ever met in your whole life, in unions, in the labor movement, organizers, local presidents, activists, workers, all these people, brave people, smart people, fighting, dedicating their life to this cause. There’s a bazillion incredibly inspiring stories and incredibly inspiring people inside the labor movement, but the farther up you go, the less inspiring it tends to get. One of the things I write about in my book is, I followed Sara Nelson, who’s a great labor leader, the head of the Association of Flight Attendants. And she’s wrestled with the question of, ​“How to be a leader of this movement?” 

MA: I actually wanted to pose my final question to both you and Sara. I wanted to ask both of you guys what can we take from the first Trump administration to really get our heads and hearts right for the fight ahead, moving into a second Trump administration, but also again, in the in the vein of dreaming bigger, what do we need to correct or expand in this next dark period that we didn’t do in the last administration.

HN: The response to where we’re going is to get more hardcore. I think that the Democratic Party, for example, and the portion of this country that coalesces around the Democratic Party, there’s going to be a big section of those whose impulse is going to be to compromise in this time. The way that strong men like Trump work is, he makes it so pleasing him is the only way to get anything done. There’s a very powerful incentive for people in the world of politics on all sides to start kissing his ass, start licking his boots, start compromising. You see the president of Teamsters taking buddy buddy pictures with him. But all that does empower him more, it’s a downward spiral where you give the strong man more and more power. So I think we have to fight harder. I don’t know if we will, but Sara, what do you think?

Sara Nelson: First of all, I just want to say that I was back here getting emotional because these two men were sharing very personally and very openly about why this shit matters. What I’m going to say, though, is that, of course, we got to organize more. We got to take this on. We got to fight, fight, fight.

When I’m watching the government shutdown and seeing what’s going on there, they’re saying that this is because Trump wants to build his southern border wall for security, for national security, for our country. That was a bunch of bullshit. It was a 50 year campaign by the GOP to try to privatize everything in our country…

It’s all connected, and we’re all connected, and if one person is mistreated, we’re all mistreated. What we have to understand with this next incoming administration, is that we cannot talk about Trump. We need to talk about the people who created, the people who are going to give Trump power like you were talking about, and we need to hold them accountable, every one of them. People think about this stuff in terms of red states and blue states as bullshit. There’s working people everywhere, working people to be organized everywhere, working people to defend everywhere. And that’s how we need to approach this next administration.