VIDEO: Creating an Economy that Empowers Working People

Below is a lightly edited transcript of a panel discussion at our second annual Wallace Symposium, which brings movements together to fight fascism and envision a more equitable future.

Sarah Anderson: I’m Sarah Anderson with the Institute for Policy Studies, and I get to moderate this first panel. 

Like many of you, I’m carrying some bruises from that battle over the big, ugly bill that Scott Wallace just mentioned, and I am so ready to pivot from defense to talking about what we’re for, and I can imagine that many of you slogged through the D.C. heat this morning because you’re also feeling that way. 

So am I right? Who here is ready to talk about what we’re for? Yes! 

To kick us off, we have an all-star panel of economic justice visionaries. We have Saket Soni from Resilience Force. We have Erica Smiley from Jobs and Justice. And we have Faiz Shakir from More Perfect Union. 

And I’m going to start out with Faiz because More Perfect Union has been going around the country, talking to working class Americans and sharing their stories, and you recently won an Emmy for a documentary based in Elliott County, Kentucky, where people voted blue for 144 years straight. And in the documentary, it was interesting that people even talked about how their parents and their grandparents were big fans of the Roosevelt administration. 

And so I looked it up: the year that Henry Wallace ran as FDR, his running mate, in 1940, their ticket carried 76 percent of Elliott County, Kentucky, this poor rural county. By 2024, Donald Trump got 80 percent. He did even better than them. And so, I’m so curious to hear you talk about what you and your teams at More Perfect Union have learned by listening to working class Americans across this country.

Faiz Shakir (01:55): Thanks for the invitation. Thank you, Sarah, for allowing me to pump More Perfect Union. I don’t know how many of you have seen More Perfect Union’s website or any of our content. Raise your hand if not. Well for those you haven’t, welcome. You go on to the YouTube page, youtube.com/moreperfectunion. Simple situation, right? 

Right now, we live in a society where it’s increasingly harder and harder in any media outlet or any political venue to hear the voices of working class people. It’s becoming a greater and greater challenge. 

I personally have witnessed it, you know, sitting alongside Bernie Sanders for now 10 years, as he has gone and run both two presidential campaigns and done public advocacy for a long period of time. And you can sense that he still feels like too much of an iconoclast.

What makes him and what makes this politics so different? It’s the basic notion that as a public servant, your job is to know and understand what is the condition of the American people and to advocate for their improvement. But as we have grown into greater wealth and income disparities, all of us in this room feel the pull, the gravitational pull of it: for a comfortable life, just tell the stories of the wealthy. Just be well connected. 

We’re watching this play out with Zohran once again in New York City — if you are an honest and sincere advocate for the condition of 60-70 percent of people living paycheck to paycheck, trying to improve their lives, you are going to be told by elites, by lobbyists, by PR firms: “it costs too much, you can’t do it.” 

And our job collectively is to address it, I think, by two major things, at least those are the two in my mind. 

One is to be of scale. When you’re at scale, you’re reaching tens of millions of people knowing that they’re on our side. I’ve seen it with my own eyes running with Bernie Sanders on the Fighting Oligarchy rallies being held at 23 stops in 13 states. We’re in Boise, we’re in Salt Lake City, Shreveport, Louisiana, Fort Worth, Texas. Red areas where tens of thousands of people are out there. I know it, deep down, they’re with us, but they don’t see people of integrity willing to fight and understand their lives.

So here comes, you know, what is a small endeavor on my part to try to build a More Perfect Union: tell stories of them, where they see themselves reflected as they should be, as heroes in their own struggle. That is what they are. You work paycheck to paycheck. You’re trying to do essential work to improve people’s lives. You are a hero. You are a nurse, you are a Starbucks barista. You are a garbage collector. I don’t care. You are the best of America. We are seeing this right now — National Park workers, all kinds of people under assault, who are the best of America in their creed, in the integrity, the decency they have to improve lives of others beyond themselves. They don’t see that reflected in politics.

So one of our jobs is to just continually be voices and advocates for their condition and telling their stories, knowing that we’re up against constantly an assault of “you can’t do it, you’re naive, you’re a fool. Don’t advocate for those who are struggling.” 

And the challenge related to scale is then depth. And that’s Sarah’s work here and the value of the Institute for Policy Studies. As I’ve traveled around the country, I’ve seen it from people saying, “I don’t think you have a policy design that you can get anything done. I like you. I trust you. I think you want to do something. I don’t think you can do it.” And our job here is to show them, “I think it is possible. We can create policy designs that will improve your life.” That is what Medicare was. That is what Social Security was. 

But we have to live in a new age. AI is coming. Data centers. By the way, you know this, you live this: data centers. Speedy approvals: must move in through. Pennsylvania: Yes. Get it up and running, permitting process fast. Could you imagine the same thing for affordable housing? Could we live in that world? It is possible. We saw it with COVID, right? We stand up clinics all over the country, put shots in people’s arms. It is possible. It takes a fight and it takes a policy design. 

And so I’m thankful, Sarah, for the work that you’ve done. In my mind, we are building this depth and scale. It is the time to regroup. I was reminded of when Steve Bannon talked about Trump in his four years out of power. He said he was like a lion in winter. He was gathering power to come back and be a lion in the presidency. Such is us. We are lions in winter now and hopefully will come back here in two, four years with the power and the policy design and the scale to conquer. 

Sarah Anderson (06:38): I’m going to turn now to one of the great fighters in our movement, Erica Smiley from Jobs With Justice. And I want to start out by getting your reaction to some quotes from Henry Wallace. The dude was just so prescient — I can’t resist. 

So the setting is 1943. As Vice President Henry Wallace went to Detroit in the aftermath of racial violence that had left 34 people dead. And he spoke to a multiracial, working class crowd of 20,000 people. And this is one of the things he said. He said, “Those who fan the fires of racial clashes for the purpose of making political capital are taking the first step towards fascism.” 

And you want to know what he said was the second step towards fascism? Destroying labor unions. So I want to see what you think about that. And if Henry Wallace was right, that destroying labor unions as a step towards fascism, what should we be doing to support building worker power and what opportunities are you seeing?

Erica Smiley (07:54): Well, yes, it is very prescient. And I want to respond to this question and then I’m going to agitate us a little bit around our framing of things. Because it’s prescient to us; I don’t know that it’s always prescient to some of the people that Faiz is talking about, and that’s something we have to actually grapple with.

And so the first thing I’ll say is there’s a reason that unions have been called schools of democracy. It’s one of the few places where people have to come together across ideology, faith, geographic communities, to potentially align around a shared self-interest against the boss. Or just a shared self-interest with their coworkers. That, in order to win, they have to cross racial lines. They have to cross lots of different boundaries that they wouldn’t normally cross. And they have to have hard fights because we know democracy is messy, and they have to actually get in there. 

And so, the idea of destroying labor unions is critical because one of the things that we like to talk about at Jobs with Justice is that the fight for democracy, if we’re thinking of ourselves almost in a war for democracy and against fascism, some of the most peak battlefields are happening on the on the shop floor and in our economic lives.

Renee Berry from Chattanooga, Tennessee is one of the leaders of the Volkswagen campaign. She said, “they need us to make the cars whoever’s in the White House. We might have lost the citadel, but they still need us to make the cars.” And so when we’re in a society — you know, maybe Wallace above everyone else could have foreseen, but maybe Wagner didn’t when he wrote the National Labor Relations Act, they could not have seen Amazon basically governing at global scale. 

You know, I know we’re at the Institute for Policy Studies. But policy in this moment, if we’re just thinking of policy and traditional government capacity, it’s like me going to the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, trying to pass the Voting Rights Act. You know, it’s just like we have to think of our terrain a little differently. And I think in that context, this idea that the fight for democracy is happening in our economic lives is really prescient. 

The second thing that I want to say is that we don’t necessarily get to shape the fight. So my parents, who still live in North Carolina, in Greensboro, they reached out to me independently in February and they were like, “you can’t go to Target.” 

Now mind you, I think I might have been at Target at the time, right? Like I was getting my Good & Gather snacks, like I’m sorry, no shame to my game. Strawberry popsicles are my shit. Anyway, I was like, “why can’t I go to Target? They’re like, You can’t go to Target. It’s a Target fast. They’re getting rid of DEI, all this kind of stuff.” Okay, it’s like, I wouldn’t have picked this fight. That’s cool. You know, I’m not going to cross the picket line, especially if my parents are organizing it. So I stopped going to Target. 

Eight weeks in, you know, post-Easter, post-Lenten season for those who celebrate Christmas and Easter, the company consistently had foot traffic down for eight weeks in a row, then 12 weeks in a row and on and on. The company is even meeting with boycotters, “what do you need us to do to go away?” Right. It’s not necessarily the fight I would have chosen, but you damn sure believe it’s the fight we have — this could be one of the most powerful consumer boycotts of this modern era for a multinational corporation. We typically tell people not to do it, but it’s actually working.

Now, the leaders know that DEI isn’t necessarily like the fight of our lifetime, but they know that it’s what’s activating people to do something, to take action and to actually organize based on their economic power and their economic relations. 

Which leads to the third point and I’m sorry, I’m a little all over the place, but I wanted to both give respect to Henry Wallace’s quote while also trying to grapple with the moment we’re in now, which is that we stink about talking about stuff. 

First of all, when democracy is working, it’s actually quite dull, right? I mean, it’s like boring. It’s decisionmaking. And that’s good, that’s a good thing. But like, that’s not the excitement of the fight. 

I was actually talking to people at the University of Southern California. They’re like, “we want to insert more labor stuff into the scripts, we can get pickets, Scabby the Rat, etc.” I was like, “yeah, you can do all that too. But, you know, really, if it works, it’s like I’m going to have a baby. Okay, well just go down to your union steward and fill out your form.” They’re like, “that’s not exciting for the script.” I was like, “I’m sorry. I mean, that’s actually what happens when it works, it’s not that exciting.” But it is exciting to be able to make it to your kid’s basketball game. It is exciting to be able to afford eggs. It is exciting to be able to be on that bowling team or whatever, or to not have to work multiple jobs. That is very, very exciting. 

And so when we’re talking about this, and my colleague Sarita Gupta always reminds me that, you know, on the one hand, we like to refer to ourselves at Jobs With Justice not simply as a workers rights organization, but as a democracy organization, as an organization that leans into the economic path towards democracy. When we think of Reconstruction, the Reconstruction Amendments, the first one was a labor amendment to abolish forced labor and end slavery, and then the second one started to deal with citizenship. The third one, suffrage. So we think of ourselves as a democracy organization in the economic and labor lane. 

But Sarita always reminds me, yes, we are for democracy, we’re also for joy. We’re also for everyday people being able to live dignified lives. We like to say “only the best for the working class.” Sometimes we need nice things. We need nice things too. And that’s actually critical in engaging people, whether it’s in Elliott County, in Guilford County where I’m from, and Jasper County, where my father’s people come from, in engaging everyday people to let them know that, yes, we want to build a democracy you can see yourselves in. We want to build a democracy that is full of joy and dignity and respect where you get to actually make decisions — not just in a political context, but in everyday life. And the fact that so many have abandoned that piece, even people who are supposed to be aligned with us. 

And Adam Dean, who’s a professor, he’s fantastic. He wrote a book, Cracking Up? I don’t know what it’s called, forgive me. [Editors Note: It’s Opening Up by Cracking Down: Labor Repression and Trade Liberalization in Democratic Developing Countries.] But he was writing a book about free trade, he didn’t realize that he was writing a book that explained the rise of authoritarianism around the world. He basically was making the point that Henry Wallace made when he said that in order to spread free enterprise, free trade, neoliberalism, the first things they had to do was you go to India, you’ve got to bust up the labor union, you go to Colombia, you got to bust up the labor unions. You’ve got to get rid of them first. 

But [they said] this is for the better good for civilization, for democracy. We told everyday people they had to do this in the name of democracy. We gaslit them by telling them neoliberalism, capitalism, was democracy. And now they think democracy screwed them. So now they’re mad at democracy. Of course they’re going to throw Molotov cocktail at democracy. But we have to remind them that it was not democracy that screwed them, that was something very different. And that in order to win, we have to actually center the institutions that themselves are an everyday practice of democracy. 

Sarah Anderson (15:50): Well, thank you. I’m going to turn to Saket Soni, who I met in 2008 when he marched along with 500 immigrant workers to D.C. to protest the deplorable conditions they were suffering as they were working to rebuild the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

And I know meeting those brave people, we gave them an award, so we got to meet many of them, it really had a big impact on IPS and I know it changed your life. You can read all about it in Saket’s book, The Great Escape. I know people love it when you show their book — a gripping read. And so you kind of had your start focused on protecting immigrant workers and lifting up their standards, and your vision and your work has expanded a lot to something you call Resilience Force. And I wonder if you could explain that and the opportunities there.

Saket Soni (16:51): Sure. The group of workers that Sarah is talking about were brought from India as immigrants to rebuild the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. I stumbled upon an extraordinary crime. They were locked into deplorable conditions in labor camps. They escaped from those labor camps and we marched them up to Washington, D.C. That takes about three weeks in case you want to try it on foot. 

But I want to tell one story that I hope will showcase my skills as an organizer, which was that we marched all the way to Washington D.C., but when we got to D.C., I realized that I actually didn’t have directions to the White House. I had no idea where we were going. So everything else was on schedule except the march through Washington, D.C., where we asked passersby, “where is this place?” They would say, “it’s over there.” You know, also, directions to the White House in politics and geographically are somewhat controversial. So it took a while to get there. 

But when we got there right in front of the White House were, you know, John Cavanagh, Erica Smiley, Sarita Gupta, M.B. Maxwell, and so many others from this community, which is just all to lead up to an incredible shout out to these institutions. But ultimately, institutions are people and people who stick with people, people who stick with a set of values, and I just want to give a huge shout out to IPS for always being there for us, always being a beacon for us. So thank you all. 

You know, I didn’t know it then, but that group of workers was really the first among many, many waves of migrant workers that would rebuild cities after hurricanes, floods, and fires. After Hurricane Katrina, there were a million homes to be rebuilt or repaired in Louisiana, a million more in Mississippi. Just to put that in context, there were about 12 to 13 thousand homes to be repaired in LA after the wildfires. We’re talking about 2 million homes to be repaired. And all of that rebuilding and repairing was done by immigrant workers, itinerant workers or migrant workers from other states. 

And after Hurricane Katrina, which was supposed to have been, this was now 20 years ago, Hurricane Katrina was supposed to have been a thousand year flood. There wasn’t supposed to have been an event like that for the next thousand years. Since Hurricane Katrina, there have been over 300 billion-dollar disasters, disasters that have caused a billion dollars of damage or more. And every time there has been a flood, fire, or hurricane, again, immigrant workers have gathered, driven there, and become the white blood cells of the recovery effort.

So for 20 years, I’ve been embedded sometimes six months of a year with these immigrant workers. They sleep in their cars. They wake up on the floors of Home Depot parking lots. They wash themselves with bottled water, they get on roofs and they repair. And over the last 20 years, this workforce has accrued incredible skill. If you don’t think these are skilled workers, try getting up on your roof the next time it rains and fixing it. 

But they’ve acquired more than just skill. They’ve become incredibly skilled and they’ve acquired a deep sense of vocation, a kind of purpose, a sense of calling. And here’s what I see. And this leads to, you know, some ideas for our progressive community. 

What I see is every time there’s a fire, flood, or hurricane, immigrant workers arrive. When they arrive in Louisiana, in Florida, in other places in Kentucky, you have immigrant workers rebuilding the homes of people who just the week before the hurricane thought of immigrants as the enemy. And suddenly these people are expressing gratitude to immigrants. And we’re using that opening, that little sliver, the doorway to light, that an expression of gratitude actually is. 

And we’re bursting it wide open. We’re putting these immigrants in relationship with the community that they’re rebuilding. We’re creating bonds. We’re transforming those bonds. Sometimes spontaneous, sometimes, you know, we play matchmaker. We’re transforming those bonds into long standing relationships, long friendships, and into the basis of a new civic fabric, into building social cohesion. 

And I think that’s an important piece of our strategy right now as a progressive community. You know, we as activists, as advocates, each of us, we do an incredible job taking responsibility for winning on our issue, winning on racial justice, on labor rights, on unionization, you know, on the expansion of the safety net. So we have these social movements. Sometimes social movements are strong. Sometimes we’re lions in winter, as Faiz said. 

But we have another layer of responsibility as well. Each of our movements must take responsibility for building a much broader social cohesion, for building a cohesive whole that looks like and calls itself America. And that’s the work really, that I’m proudest of our workers doing. I’m so proud of our thousands of workers who get on roofs. 

But equally hard is the task of repairing the social fabric of this nation. And so when they get off those roofs and through interpreters, they have conversations that help them build bonds with the people who are being helped by them. This opens up something profound. You know, as progressives, we all need to build efforts that organize people, no matter what their politics, that organize people into a new sense of the public good. 

I spend six months out of the year, sometimes more eight, nine months out of the year, in disaster zones. And whether I’m in Texas or Kentucky or Louisiana, every time I talk to people after a hurricane or flood has hit, what do they want? They want government money. They want public dollars to help them. They want public housing. They want public dollars to go right into building them a new hospital. Not only that, they want to defend disaster SNAP and disaster unemployment, the parts of the social safety net that are guaranteed after disasters. And again, here’s an extraordinary opening. 

So, you know, we’ve been developing this work over the last, I would say, you know, about 10 years or so. I’m very, very grateful to Representative Pramila Jayapal for really being our champion on this. Again, IPS was the space in which we really figured out a new legislative agenda around resilience. That agenda is its own wonderful, amazing lion in winter. But it’ll be back. 

But I just want to say one last thing, which is, you know, we often talk about connecting movements — the labor movement, the racial justice movement, the climate movement. It’s very important to sit here and connect movements, but equally important is to really to really allow these connections to emerge from the ground. You know, I spent a long time as a labor organizer. I’m a labor organizer who spends most of his time in disaster zones. And there was a time when I was a complete stranger to the climate movement. One more shout out, by the way, is Ellen [Dorsey] is actually one of the people who really, really taught me what the climate movement was. So thank you, Ellen. 

But see, here’s the thing: that person sitting at that kitchen table after we’ve repaired their roof and we’re having lunch with them and they’re thanking us and the whole church has come out because we met him through a church. And then we’re going to build the, you know, the next parishioner’s house. 

Those people aren’t experiencing this as solidarity with the immigrant rights movement. They’re not experiencing it as, you know, building a working class agenda. They’re experiencing it as: we rebuilt their house. That’s it. And it’s all key for that to be it. And actually, that’s much better because I’m not passing out business cards at a funeral. I’m building a long standing deep friendship with that person. There are people’s homes we’ve rebuilt who have been in my life for 20 years. And ultimately, those are the kinds of real relationships we’re going to need across division if we’re going to win.

So that’s our work. And thank you so much again for having us here.

Sarah Anderson (26:57): It’s incredible to think about disaster zones as a place to look for hope of overcoming our divisions. I forgot to mention that we hope to have a few minutes for questions and we’re going to have people who want to ask a question, write them on a card. And so I think people are passing them out. But maybe if you want to raise your hand, if you want to write down a question, we’ll gather them up. 

First, I’m sorry, but I’m going to go back to this awful budget debate for a minute because I had something I wanted to ask Faiz about. 

More Perfect Union did a great video in California’s 22nd District, I think, a place where two thirds of the people are on Medicaid, and yet their representative to Congress voted for a bill that will cut Medicaid more deeply than at any point in our history. And, you know, one thing that’s been just so frustrating about this debate is knowing that it would have been so different if some of the marquee progressive ideas had already been in place, universal public health care being one of them, one of the most obvious ones, perhaps.

And you know, because countries that have adopted it, it quickly becomes completely non-controversial. I mean, you never hear right wing Canadian politicians talking about rolling back public health care in Canada. It’s just considered part of the infrastructure, like roads or something, you know. 

Faiz, you managed Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. Medicare for All was a central part of his platform. Can you see a path towards that in this country? Are we going to join the rest of, you know, industrialized nations any time in our lifetimes?

Faiz Shakir (28:42): God willing? As you were talking, Sarah, there’s many people here who know British history a hell of a lot better than I do. But I’m reminded of Nye [Aneurin] Bevan. 

You know, they come into power in the wake of World War Two. Nye Bevan, of course, health secretary. And he says, the Labor Health Minister says, “I am going to develop the National Health Service by July 4th,” whatever year it was, and for the next five or six months traveled the country, talking to every physician, getting them on board, talking to people, building a movement. He set a date and said this will happen. Guess what happened?

I look at some of the design and the kind of gumption — we’ll call it that for now — of Trump and his team. It’s to break norms with outcomes in mind. They are thinking, everyday, about outcomes. It is chaos of a sort, but it’s the results of an orientation that is disruptive. And my own criticism sometimes of our wonderful center-left is that we tend to move in a technocratic manner, think with our heads and conceive of all of the risks, the concerns of the institutions, the norms, the precedent of human history that has taught us various lessons, and are more averse to the disruptive. 

So if you were to take these two two teams, A versus B, one team owning disruption, the other team maintaining status quo…and here we still are struggling with this question. In the wake of Medicaid cuts, what do we assume a center-left is going to go and tell the American people about healthcare? And I ask you that because I suspect the answer will be: “we will restore the Medicaid [spending].” 

What is that? Right? Just  listen to us talk. We will repeal the effort that they underwent. It’s a fine, rational answer, but if you’re out there struggling and your life wasn’t all that great before Medicaid cuts in the healthcare system, and they come and do this thing and you’re going to go back to them and say, “I’m going to return you to what it was three years ago,” that’s not very compelling.

And we are still missing this sense of a disruption and a boldness in health care. I know for many of us who’ve lived with Bernie and Medicare for All, Obamacare, all of these fights for a long period of time, I get the sense of an exhaustion on the center-left often about this issue because we’ve struggled and toiled for this for a long period of time. And yet, we are going to have single payer in this country, and the single payer will be United Healthcare. That is the track that we are on. 

And you look at anyone looking at the design of the current healthcare infrastructure systems, we are seeing the collapse of Molina Healthcare, Centene, UHG, we’re left with really Cigna is the only health insurer because they only provide employer-sponsored insurance in this country so they can survive, but everything is collapsing. And where are actual people? The toil that we are in is that for the top 20, 30 percent, things are going to be fine. And then the question for us in our policy design is how to urge the center-left to think about constructive solutions after they’ve burned things to the ground. 

What are the solutions for rebuilding rural hospitals in America? And in my mind, like the way I think about this is ownership design. There is a world in which, and I welcome Sarah trying to figure this out together, we are going to go to people and challenge them, I hope, on ownership design. That is economic democracy. Should your rural hospital only exist if a corporation owns it and can profit from it? Is that the only ownership design that we can conceive of? And I hope not. 

You know, you have Zohran talking about municipally owned grocery stores. For anyone who’s lived on a military base, you know, done it for a short period of time — some of my best friends, you know, were in the military. You know what a BX is? Base Exchange — that was federally provided, funded to be provided. Municipally owned grocery stores? That was our federally owned grocery store right there. 

I think we have to challenge ownership design in these ways. It doesn’t all have to be you know — Medicare for All could be an awesome, wonderful solution. But for those who are right now in solutions-oriented mindsets, think employee-owned hospitals, co-ops, municipally funded. If you look around, some of the best hospitals we have in New York City and elsewhere are public hospitals. There’s been a decline in this regard of our ambition. 

And if I were to ask you, say besides Zohran right now, who is thinking about ownership design and constructive solutions and challenging us? I suspect society is ready and willing to welcome these kinds of questions, as long as we have wrestled with how are you going to get it done? Give me a path. I’m thirsty in the desert here. 

And if these guys come along and throw a data center at me for a job, one that only 100 people can benefit from, gives me maybe $18 an hour, I will take it. Two drops of water in the desert. And I think we’re coming to them with whole canteens and buckets if we can convince them and persuade them of policy design. And I would urge all of us to start thinking about ownership models that are not only in health care, but in a whole variety of realms that would inspire a lot of people beyond just status quo — disruption for good. 

Sarah Anderson (34:39): It’s really interesting. I’ve got a budget question for Smiley, too. Sorry to bring us back to that, but I was also thinking during this whole ugly debate how it would have been so different if we had a federal minimum wage that was a living wage and we wouldn’t have so many people having to rely on SNAP, so many working families having to rely on SNAP if people actually made enough money to to cover their costs.

So at Jobs With Justice, I know, you’re doing support for organizing work. I know some of your member groups have been engaged in battles over local minimum wage increases. You’ve also talked, I think, about using taxes to try to pressure companies into paying living wages. Where do you see any opportunities there for dealing with this crazy situation where the minimum wage is a poverty wage?

ES (35:34): Well, I appreciate the framing. I guess I’ll react in a couple of different ways. Firstly, you know, one of the solutions that you’re mentioning, right now we’re playing around with the idea of calling it a Tesla Tax, but it’s it’s kind of like our our original McWalmart fee or big business fee, where we try to find corporations to create funds for workers to control. It’s not just to go into the budget, but to actually have worker-controlled decisionmaking, because again, we’re trying to create containers for people to actually practice democracy and not just have to count on the people you elect to do it for you, bless their hearts. Which leads me again to the containers of struggle in this particular moment.

I mean, there’s plenty of money. This is something that I feel like we also stink at when we’re talking about — I couldn’t agree more with Faiz, like this is not a matter of going backwards. We aren’t trying to restore, because as a Southerner — like I actually had a union president say to me once, right after the first Trump election, “you know, if we could just get back to the way things were in the fifties.” And I was like, “hmm, yeah, not really. Not a really good time. Not really good time for my family.” So I’m totally with that. 

Again, in this context, when we’re thinking about sites of struggle, to get a little bit outside the box from what we’re trying to do, so not just to talk about what we’re going back to, but to also talk about where sites of governance really are.

There’s so much money. There’s so much money, and it’s ours. We created it. And when we tell everyday people that in their communities, whether we’re talking about their public hospital or their stadium for their football team or whatever it is, there is a resonance there that’s actually really important. And so the idea of whether it’s through a Tesla Tax, of creating a fund that workers control, or finding other ways to extract that money from corporations to put it back where it needs to be.

I mean, this is the other strength of unions. The institutions of unions that we have today in the United States is, for better or for worse, an actual model for extracting capital back into the hands of everyday working people, both through living wages, through healthcare, through other benefits and needs that everyday people have. 

And so the idea that we need to actually create more of those structures, to make that a popular idea that people want, they can then decide if it goes into wages or into healthcare or child care or housing or whatever it is, they can make that decision — because that’s democracy. I’m not going to tell them what to put it for.

And I’ll end with this. You know, we are working with a set of workers in the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut area. We joke around: it’s the biggest organization of Amazon workers you’ve never heard about. And that’s by design. Well, we’ll let you know when we’re ready to let you know about it. 

But we went in there thinking, you know, we’re about to go hard on wages. We’re going to go hard on like, you know, this question of being able to live in the city on poverty wages. And they were like, well, actually, you know, that’s great. We want more money, if that’s possible. But really, like we’re stressed out because of the injury rates. We’re dying. This is a job you come in and it’s almost like the military, you’re signing up to be disabled at some point.

And most urgently, one of the things that we ended up having to take on was this question of pregnancy accommodation. Like a lot of people who could carry pregnancies, were experiencing miscarriages because the company wouldn’t accommodate them. Now it’s the law to accommodate pregnant workers. It’s federal law. It’s the law in New York, in the Warehouse Worker Protection Act. If a company like Amazon is not going to obey the law, is that where the fight is? Or do we need to actually figure out governing and setting standards in the place where those companies are already governing, whether it’s a labor market like that or a global supply chain? 

And so I do think whether we’re talking about wages, injury rates, and meeting the needs of everyday people, to actually see the containers of governance a little bit differently because they currently have the citadel. They currently have Congress, we have to accept that. That doesn’t mean that we give it up in the future, but it does mean that we have to think about the landscape of our struggle very differently so that we never end up in the situation again. 

Sarah Anderson (40:11): That’s great. Are there questions? Oh, this one is “what are examples of worker’s access to power with a diminished National Labor Relations Board?” Erica, I think you’ve written quite a bit about non-traditional…

Erica Smiley: I mean, this is a great question because it’s like it if we want to assume that like, is that you? All right, holla back. It’s like did unions exist before the Labor Relations Act? Did it exist before the New Deal? Were workers organizing and doing stuff before then? Heck yeah, they were. 

So our power is not based in the National Labor Relations Act. The National Labor Relations Act is based on the power of workers who organized in order to collectively bargain, to negotiate, to have democracy. And that’s always been the case. And we still have that power. You can’t take that power away  — because they didn’t give it to us. It was ours in the first place. You can legislate, just like I said around Amazon, we can legislate that you should recognize workers all you want and they can say no. The National Labor Relations Board, when it was working under Abruzzo, we said recognize the ALU at JFK8. And they said, no.

But I guarantee you, when you start getting into that company’s pocketbook, because just like Renee said, they still need us to build the things, when you start shutting down the sorting sites and the primary centers where that company can actually move the goods to make the money they want to make, that’s power, then they have to come to the table. That’s how you get them to recognize you. 

Faiz Shakir (42:00): Can I just add on that point? One example of what Smiley is talking about here outside of the realm of labor unions. One of the most inspiring things right now that I’m watching is tenant unions. 

Tenant unions are not filing, you know, NLRB. Right? You are mobilized, you’re mobilizing the people who have the rental units and that pay the rent. We’re a democracy, right? And guess what? In this power dynamic, we have more power to change the conditions. And quite frankly, they are succeeding. A lot of the tenant unions are changing conditions to improve their lot. 

Erica Smiley (42:32): That’s right. They’re organized along the same economic lines, in this case, rents instead of wages. When you withhold the thing that makes the operation work, whether it’s rent at a housing facility or work at a company or a corporation. Right, that’s power. That’s how you win recognition and that’s how you win a seat at the table. And not just a seat at the table, an equal seat at the table, which I want to specify, right, because that’s how we negotiate standards for the better. 

And so when people ask me, for example, how would Amazon workers even negotiate a union contract? Like how would you do that, even under the National Labor Relations Act, if it was all working perfectly?  Would it be like a national agreement? Would it be a global agreement? And I say, I don’t know. Like somebody has got to Frances Perkins their way into figuring out what the institutional setup will look like. But what we’re going to do is ensure that we have the power to have an equal seat at the table. We’re going to make it very uncomfortable for you not to recognize us. 

This is where our movement is going. I’m sorry, I’m very passionate about this…I’m in Saket’s face, Saket is one of my mentors, by the way. But this is where our movements have gotten lazy. We just want to legislate our way out of things.

Well, my ancestors were facing the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, you couldn’t legislate your way out of that. You had to fight your way out of that. You had to fight. Now, there’s no way that they could have known that the Emancipation Proclamation was coming 15 years later, but they had to fight with the imagination that things could be dramatically different. And they did not try to just fight that fight in Congress. They had to fight it, certainly in every state legislature, and they had to fight it in every job site, every agricultural plantation, everywhere where they were, in order to contest for decision-making power to be able to have self-determination over their lives. 

Sarah Anderson (44:27): She wrote a book about this too, if you want to put in a plug, right? 

Erica Smiley (44:34): Yeah, it’s A Future We Need with Sarita Gupta. Yeah, we love the NLRA and maybe we need something better, right? 

SA (44:41): We just have, I think, one minute left. So this is one for Faiz, and then I’ll toss one to Saket as well. How do we convince our congresspeople to support an ownership designed economy? And then maybe for Saket, where would you like us to be in ten years? Briefly in 30 seconds. 

FS (45:06): First I want laboratories. Democracy works best when we’re experimenting. We don’t get stuck in the status quo and we’re fighting in some sense for economic democracy. And we understand this in the political realm. Everybody should have one vote and that super PAC shouldn’t buy elections. 

We understand that in the concept of No Kings, right? That’s the same kind of concept that we want in an economy, one in which there are fighting powers: small business can compete against Meta and Google; if I’m a worker, can I organize my labor and have workplace democracy? These are the kinds of things we’re fighting for. 

So in that context, the ownership design can come from all of those things. Like right now, there are no small, honest, small business coalitions in America, right? We have fake, astroturfed versions, but it’s very hard to find industry-specific things.

Worker-tenants — you know, there are a lot of different models. I am a fan of unions, but there’s also as we know from Europe a lot of other models to talk about how people can gather together to combine and power building. Right now we are kind of in a stasis of people feeling under authoritarian rule in the country in terms of the stagnation of democratic forms of ownership. And I’m hoping that at least from the ground level, there is a desire, but we have to have people pointing to constructive solutions. 

So if you find something, this falls into More Perfect Union’s lap… I would love to know, is anybody in any place doing anything of constructive design? Because I will tell that in a story and that is what I feel is strongly important about More Perfect Union — you can change the consciousness, reach scale, say, “hey, that community over there just canceled medical debt. I think I can do it over here.” All you’re trying to do is unpack, you know, somewhere, somehow, people taking matters into their own hands. 

So please write to me if you ever see any of those at faiz@perfectunion.us anytime, please. 

Sarah Anderson (47:04): As a sense of their reach, I did get an email last week from a relative who is very conservative but had seen me on a More Perfect Union video, and it was one of the few things we’ve been able to connect on. Saket, take it. It’s the one that Liz [Scheltens] did about CEO pay and stock buybacks. 

Saket Soni (47:26): Yeah, there was an IPS worker back there holding up a sign and it said, “you guys are so great, we canceled the next panel. Just stay right where you are.” So we may have more time than we think. 

So I’ll offer I guess these these glimpses into the future that I’m lucky enough to have when I go around the country looking at how people prepare for disaster. It’s actually quite closely aligned with something I didn’t know, which was the ecological politics of Henry Wallace that you described, which is wonderful and extremely inspiring.

So, you know, we know now that disasters are going to be with us. Now, many of you live in the DMV area, I imagine you have intense rains all the time. Those are not newsworthy events. So, you know, we’ve gotten to the point where many people I talked to, they plan for disaster. They just hope their disasters are in the news. That’s where we’ve gotten. Because if it’s in the news, you might get some money to fix your house. Disasters are going to be here. The rains, the hurricanes, the storms, the floods, they’re a new normal in more ways than one. And we need to prepare. 

Meanwhile, the federal government is pulling back on one of the most fundamental jobs of the federal government, which is emergency management and which is funding the repair after disasters. We are going to be entering a few years where FEMA and disaster aid are essentially a scattershot political patronage system. That’s what we’re going to see, which is going to cause untold grief and untold pain. Too much even to count, right? Grief after grief. Somebody told me, somebody told me in Louisiana, “I’m fed up with grief. I’m fed up with grief.”

So that’s where we are, right. And at the same time, in California, in Sonoma, after five years of fires, political officials wanted to move to preparation, not repairing. And we took minimum wage out of work farm workers, re-trained them as resilience workers, codified with partners, you know, and ecologists and scientists, codified indigenous practices into new workforce training, trained this workforce and through an apprenticeship program, put people at work, people who are earning minimum wage now earn $35 an hour doing that work. $35 an hour. We’re bringing that model to L.A. because of the fires. 

We’re in conversations in many of the Western states and in similar conversations around the country. And what I think this can all lead to is that, despite the terrible facts of life in the federal government, in the states we can really shift to a kind of preparation that is a vehicle for building a new workforce, new building blocks of social cohesion and the new muscle that is really a precedent condition for what Faiz is talking about. For people to have a vision of collective ownership, they have to be used to the idea of having a collective — being together. That’s what I think is the brilliance of Smiley and Sarita’s book, because overall, it’s not just about policy. It’s about how unions are laboratories for democracy because it’s how thousands and thousands of people learn to be one body together. Right? And we have to do that as a society. And I think we can do that through an ecological vision of preparing.

Erica Smiley (51:48): And Saket, before you wrap, can you just — because there’s an alternative that’s not great to what you’re saying. Certainly the Trump administration would help clean up so long as they get to buy it afterwards. So say what we’re up against. 

Saket Soni (52:02): Well, the alternative is that every climate disaster is advance for a caravan of developers that flip properties, price people out and redevelop so that, you know, only the wealthy are able to live in enclaves and everyone else commutes as a worker. And that’s really what has happened, city after city. You enter a death spiral where you don’t have enough population to pay for services. The tax base evaporates and you shrink your cities. And that’s the alternative. 

But I don’t want to end with that vision. I want to end with a vision of that dinner I was at, where a family sat at a kitchen table and spoke to a group of Salvadoran workers not about immigration, labor, or anything like that, but about how it was to be home wherever they called home. And I think we can find our way home and scale that idea of home.