61 | Unions Are Cool Again - Episode Transcript
Brooklyn, USA | November 9, 2022

[INTRO]
[MUSIC BED: Drone swells] Khyriel Palmer: You’re listening to the Brooklyn, USA podcast – an occasional audio love letter from Brooklyn to the world.

[CLIP from Billy Moyer’s Why Work?]
Bill Moyers: “What can and should be done today to make work more rewarding and to provide enough work“

Khyriel Palmer: Journalist Bill Moyers posed that question in the 1976 documentary, Why Work. Over 40 years later, the answers are just as relevant today as they were then.

[CLIP from Bill Moyer’s Why Work?]
Worker: “I’ve been working on the railroad 29 years… lousy hours, hard work [indistinguishable]... but, you know, you get used to it … Well, it’s a necessary evil, let’s put it that way… you know, you have to work. Unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth or something… you gotta survive, you got to work.”
Bill Moyers: “What’s a good part about this job?”
Worker: Make a decent living… that’s about it.”

[CLIP from Bill Moyer’s Why Work?]
Worker: I’m a maintenance man [indistinguishable].
Bill Moyers: You like this kind of work?
Worker: Not on a day like today.
Bill Moyers: Generally though?
Worker: Yeah, it’s good work.
Bill Moyers: What’s the most satisfying part of your job?
Worker: When you get a tough one and at the end, everything works out well you feel satisfied. You did a good job.

[CLIP from Bill Moyer’s Why Work?]
Bill Moyers: Why is this a good job?
Worker: Because nobody bothers me. I'm my own boss. Nobody tell me how to work… they know if I do a shirt, it’s gonna come out good. If i can't do it, I tell them that I cant make this shirt clean – the stain it wont come out.

Khyriel Palmer: So basically– most of us have to work if we want to survive. In this season of Brooklyn USA, we ask why is that? And if we have to work, how can we make it not feel so much like work? What can we learn from the past to make the future of work more appealing than the present? And how is Brooklyn finding solidarity and coping under capitalism. For this series, we talk to historians, artists, activists, workers, coworkers, and community members to understand how “what we do” does and doesn’t define us.

Khyriel Palmer: To kick things off, we wanted to get the lay of the land, in terms of how the workplace of today came to be, and what direction it may be heading. So we spoke with Joshua Freeman, author of Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II; and Celeste Headlee, author of Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving.

[FADE OUT MUSIC BED]

Khyriel Palmer: Here’s Celeste…

[HISTORIES OF LABOR IN BROOKLYN & NEW YORK]
[FADE UP MUSIC: Slow, twangy synth]
Celeste Headlee: We lived one way for most of human history, almost all of human history, and then like two or three hundred years ago, we just dumped all of that and changed it. I'm Celeste Headlee. She/her. I am a familiar voice from being on NPR and PBS for more than 20 years and have a popular TED talk and a bunch of books!

Celeste Headlee: I left home and went out on my own at quite a young age. Because of that, you learn to hustle. I was also a very young woman of color in a world that really didn't respect that [laughs] -- me! To a certain extent, there was a constant need to prove yourself. And I can literally remember saying, "I can work anybody else under the table." [MUSIC picks up] I continually found myself overwhelmed. I mean, I was just snapping at my son and the people I cared about. I was getting sick. And so, I wasn't writing a book I was trying to figure out what was wrong with me. So that's when I sort of started doing more research and started peeling back the layers of the onion and trying to really figure out what was the source of this need I felt to constantly be doing something and constantly be proving myself. And eventually I started to realize that... It was us. And then, it wasn't just us, it was our parents, and it wasn't just our parents, it was our grandparents. And then I started going back through history, you know, searching for the head of the Mississippi River. Like I kept searching for the source. And that's how I ended up back at the Industrial Revolution.

Celeste Headlee: Most of human history were either one of two things: we were either hunters and gatherers, or we were hunters of some kind. [MUSIC FADES OUT] You have most people living in small communities up until very, very recently, as in the 20th century. Most humans met over the course of their lives and knew maybe 150 people. If you look at hunter gatherer societies, they devoted a very small amount of time to their survival. [FADE UP MUSIC: Slow synth] Some of the tribes or groups or communities that were gathering their food. They spent maybe an hour a day, maybe a few hours a day at the most. And the rest of the time they did other stuff. They hung out with their families. They did music. They had rich, full lives and not a whole lot of work to do. There wasn't jobs, necessarily. You know, the idea of compensating someone else to do your work, that was not a natural idea because we lived in communities where our survival depended on everyone else's survival. So the first person, the first paycheck, the earliest we found they were paid in beer.

Celeste Headlee: At some point, humans decided that they wanted to start farming. You would think that one of the purposes of farming is because it would save you time, right? Like you don't have to search for berries or all of the other things that you're looking for. But in fact, their workload increased by a lot. One person would grow this and another person would grow that. And this other group was a hunter, so they had skins. And you started to have trade. [FADE OUT MUSIC]

Celeste Headlee: [FADE UP MUSIC: Fast-paced, folky] The Protestants were the largest and most influential group in many Western countries. There was this religious idea that human beings, if left to their own devices, are lazy and sinful and slothful and greedy. Therefore, in order to have a virtuous human being, they needed to be controlled. They needed to be constantly engaged in some kind of worthwhile pursuit. And you start to get this religious idea that the harder you work, the better the person you are. Right? Idle hands are the devil's playground. And so hard work, constant toil came to be associated with the idea of earning your way into heaven. And that's certainly true of any of the peoples that the colonizers found when they went to Africa, to South America, to North America, etc. They were uncivilized. They needed to be controlled. If you let people just walk around doing what they want, they will inevitably start engaging in sinful practices. And so let's put them to work.
Joshua Freeman: My name's Josh Freeman, and I'm a kind of lifelong New Yorker. I am a labor historian. I taught history for many years at the City University of New York. I came of age in the civil rights, Vietnam War era. And, you know, it really made me interested in what were the forces of social change and also what was the dynamics of stasis. In thinking about that question, it sort of drew me into looking at the labor movement, and I was interested in both how that developed and also why it sort of subsided. [FADE UP SONG: “Bella Ciao”]

Joshua Freeman: The American labor movement is almost as old as the United States itself. By the year of the American Revolution, or immediately afterwards, you get the first things that look like what today we'd call unions. And these are associations of workers. These are primarily artisanal workers who are banding together for both fraternal reasons, you know, social reasons, but also to promote what they perceive as their shared interest. And the context for this, you know, is the old artisanal system of production. And it was a whole way of life in which people are trained to become artisans as apprentices, which is a kind of form of unfree labor, but temporary unfree labor in which you are trained to become a skilled worker in a particular craft. But you owe your labor and your allegiance to what was called "the master". After usually a seven year period, that was the great tradition, you know, you became what was called a "journeyman". By the late 1700s or early 1800s, there was a growing sense of separate interests between the masters and the journeyman. So the first unions were organizations of journeymen who were trying to improve their lot with their masters. And it was often about how much they were paid.

Joshua Freeman: From there the movement grew, but in total fits and starts. Every time the economy would turn down, which is a regular feature of American life, that's it. These organizations would just disappear. Because as soon as unemployment rose, you know, people were just too scared to take collective action. So you have cycles of labor organization, but each cycle tends to bring in more groups of workers, more unskilled workers. By the 1820s and thirties, women are now beginning to organize to some extent. It's only really the end of the Civil War that you begin to get more robust organizations that can survive these upturns and downturns. [FADE OUT SONG]

Joshua Freeman: Until really well into the 20th century, most unions had some component of excluding, and sometimes it was very central to their identity. [FADE UP MUSIC: Synth, slowly picking up speed] And that might mean, you know, a union only of white men, but even it might mean, you know, a union only of, you know, people of a particular ethnicity. Some of it has to do with how unions for a lot of us history saw themselves as wielding power, and they thought that they did this by creating a kind of solidarity that would control the labor market. And solidarity is often seen as an outgrowth of a kind of shared identity, a shared ethnicity, a shared gender identity. You know, these unions exist in the broader context of American life, and American life is cross-cut with all kinds of prejudices and discriminatory practices. Many unions exclude women. African-Americans are very often excluded. I mean, to my mind, they're still excluded in some pockets of the labor movement. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the core of the American labor movement, at least in this part of the country, was really what used to be called "old immigrants". This is a phrase we don't use anymore. That meant sort of German and Irish and British immigrants. These immigrant workers were often very prejudiced against other immigrants and supported immigration restriction. I do want to say this: you know, New York is segregated, New York is a segregated city, but there's more intermixing, I think, at work racially and ethnically among working class people than there is among rich people or middle class people. You know, so the experience of difference and diversity -- these things we kind of celebrate today, you know -- that was a worker's experience. I mean, people work in banks, other than their servants, had no interaction with, you know, people not of their own ethnic group. [FADE OUT MUSIC]

[CLIP: The Industrial Revolution]
Narrator: The first sign of the revolution in industry appeared in improvements in metals, steam engines, and textile machines. This we call the Industrial Revolution. [FADE CLIP]

Celeste Headlee: When the Industrial Revolution dawned, there were no laws or limits on a working environment or working hours. They had never needed it. I'm not saying there weren't abuses, there were plenty! But we didn't have regular jobs.

[CLIP: The Industrial Revolution]
Narrator: The first sign of the revolution in industry appeared in improvements in metals, steam engines, and textile machines. This we call the Industrial Revolution. [FADE CLIP]

Celeste Headlee: It's horrific the things that happened to people in some of these early factories. And children very young, kindergarten age, were working in these factories all day and all night. Famously, Charles Dickens worked in an ink bottle factory, and they would switch out where one kid would work until they couldn't stand anymore, they'd go to the bed that they shared with another kid. That kid would get up and work until they couldn't stand and they just keep swapping back and forth.

[FADE UP MUSIC: “Roll The Union On” by John L. Handcox]

Celeste Headlee: People began to look at these children suffering and saying, "probably we shouldn't be doing this to children." [laughs] "Probably we shouldn't have women giving birth on a factory floor." "Probably we shouldn't have older women passing out and dying on a line." And they began to get laws in place to at least limit the age at which you could make a kid work, to limit the number of hours that a kid worked. And so that began to grow. People worldwide began to push for the 8-hour day. Around the globe, people began to say "8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, 8 hours play." Right? That's what we know. It was such a battle. It was sometimes very violent. Bombings, and the police would come in, as they often did, to "quell rioters". But really they were used by the wealthy classes to keep down the working class. Again and again and again you see that, not just in the U.S. and the UK, but all over the world, this pattern that we still see today.

Celeste Headlee: Almost immediately the business owners began to find ways around it, and they did that by convincing us to ourselves choose to work longer. And that's when we start getting the self-made man. That's when you started getting this idea that a wealthy person is a smart person. But the eight hour workday was an incredible global achievement.

[FADE UP SONG: “There Is Power In The Union'' by Utah Phillips] Utah Phillips: The chorus is: there is power, there is power in a band of workin' folks / when we stand hand in hand / that's a power, that's a power that must rule in every land / one industrial union grand… [FADE SONG]

Joshua Freeman: When we think of unions, we tend to think of their role in collective bargaining. But in the New York region, labor always had a broader conception of what's job was. It was always a conception that, you know, we're here to advance the interests, and enrich the lives of working people -- off the job as well as on the job. So you often saw the labor movement very intimately involved in trying to create an expansive kind of social state, I would call it almost. So, you know, what would be the examples of it? A big, cheap mass transit system, a public health system with public hospitals and public clinics. And not just the public health system, labor was absolutely central in the creation of health insurance. My favorite example is housing. They were huge, fierce defender of rent control. They were a big advocate of public housing. And then, and this is really unusual in New York, they went beyond that to say, "let's create our own housing!" And so New York City has something like 40,000 units of housing that were developed as nonprofit cooperative developments by organized labor. You know, even in the arts. So, for example, the sadly diminished now, New York City Opera was created as an alternative to Metropolitan Opera so working people could afford it. When I was a kid, there used to be concerts in what used to be the city college football stadium. And in the summer, the New Jersey Philharmonic would have concerts there, outdoor concerts. The labor movement subsidized the tickets [bangs on table] because they wanted working people to have access to art. They supported Shakespeare in the park for the same reason. So it's a very capacious vision of, you know, what the good life of working people should be and how they should have, you know, sometimes people use this phrase "the right to the city", access to all of the social resources that are there. And what do you need to do that? You need a transit system that you can afford to get there. You need prices for tickets and institutions aimed at ordinary working people. You know, it doesn't sound like a lot, but it's more than most places in the United States ever had. And, you know, we still have a great deal of it. And, you know, we're all lucky to inherit that world. [FADE SONG UP & OUT]

[CLIP: WWII Work Propaganda]: Narrator: As father time fades into the sunset, as the dramatic events of 1942 passed into history, baby 1943 topples into the scene to take on a man-sized job. The job of winning this war. [FADE CLIP]

Celeste Headlee: World War I and World War II came around. Many governments had used spies before, you know, and military intelligence was nothing new. But in the world wars, that's when they really began to dig into mind manipulation and propaganda. People who had worked in propaganda now needed jobs [laughs]. The war was over and they went to the business community and they made a very lucid argument that, "hey, we can do a couple of things for you. We can use behavioral science to manipulate customers to buy products they don't actually need. And we can use the same behavioral science to convince your workers to compete with each other rather than organized labor, and to earn their promotions to earn their raises." And frankly, if you look at some of like the ads from the early 20th century, it's shocking. You would think they were parodies and satires.

[CLIP: WWII Work Propaganda]: All America offers its pattern of life and work to meet the demand for perfection [FADE OUT CLIP]

Celeste Headlee: These posters said things like "Waste, carelessness, mistakes, loafing -- help us stop them before they stop us!" Right? Another one said "The efficient worker is always honored. His merit is recognized by all. Stand out from the crowd." Right? The more you risk your life, the harder you work. The more patriotic you are.

[FADE UP MUSIC: Uncertain, tuned percussion]

Joshua Freeman: After World War II, the United States labor movement reached a peak. About one out of three wage workers carried a union card. But that's even an underestimate, because you own the most powerful corporations. You generally had unionization. Really, by the mid-fifties, you begin to see a very modest decline. But the great acceleration comes in the seventies and eighties. And, you know, this has to do with a lot of things. Some of it has to do in the shifts in the economy, with the decline in manufacturing and mining and other very heavily unionized sectors. But a lot of it also was the growing aggressiveness of business in trying to keep out unions, get rid of the ones that they had, and make sure new ones don't come in, and getting increasing support in the political arena from conservative regimes, you know, most notably Ronald Reagan, but not only. So, you know, you see a huge international drop in unionization rates over the last half century. One economy kind of faded out, and a much more service-oriented economy rose up. Much of its caregiving. Health services and home care, education, and other kinds of services even things like Uber drivers and so forth. These tended to be much lower paid jobs than the kinds of jobs that disappeared. For a lot of reasons, but but the differential also sometimes corresponded to male versus female, white versus nonwhite, which kind of overlaid some of these changes. And a lot of these were jobs that were much more dispersed than some of the old manufacturing jobs. You know, you might have a thousand people in one factory, but when you're talking about home health aides, those thousand people are working in 500 or 800 different households. How do you even find those people? How do you reach them? How do you create a sense of solidarity, shared experience? So these were tremendous challenges that the labor movement has faced, which it's only partially overcome.

Celeste Headlee: By the time we get to the seventies and especially the eighties and nineties -- greed is good and Wall Street and all that other stuff -- it was in our cells that the harder you work, the more money you get, the more money you get, the better person you are. You know, when people ask you how you're doing, you say "busy" because a busier person is a more important person. [END MUSIC] Tech at every step didn't create any of these problems. And that is true now of the computer or the smartphone or any of those things. It didn't create any of them. It didn't create the mindset. It just made it so much easier to play into this addiction. It also brought in this age of surveillance. Corporations and management got really into metrics. You know, sometimes you're talking about things like sales numbers, but a lot of times you're talking about surveilling your employees and getting numbers on who's working, who isn't, etc., and what time they're working, and when they get things done. And yet one more thing I would say that tech did in terms of our mindsets is that we began competing with computers. We began treating our bodies like computers and thinking there was no limit. [FADE UP SONG: "John Henry" by Bill Watkins] There's this folklore tale about John Henry. John Henry worked on the railroad, it's probably based on a real person. He's an African-American worker. There's a famous, famous song about him, and he was supposed to be drilling into the rocks and they brought in a drilling machine. He said, "You're not going to beat me!" And he worked and worked and worked and worked and worked. And he did beat the machine and then died. And that's what's happened with the computer. [FADE OUT SONG]

Celeste Headlee: When the pandemic first began, you know, the people who weren't working from home were worked to the bone. Their lives were put at stake. The people who did work from home took their work laptop from room to room to room. They took it in their bed with them and allowed their work to claim every corner of their house. That, combined with the stress and anxiety of the pandemic writ large and all the political things that were going on -- remember, George Floyd was killed, Donald Trump was our president -- I think everyone just got to the point where they could not do it anymore.

Joshua Freeman: I think the pandemic has had a lot of effect. I mean, some of it is accelerating things that already were happening, but maybe even sparking some new things. For a very brief time, suddenly the society discovered what they called "essential workers", you know, and there was a kind of social validation that was given to workers who often were invisible, socially invisible. And some companies even gave them extra money for a while. And then after six months, the pandemic was still there and the company is going "Eh, enough of this. The hero money disappeared. The workers still were not getting the protective equipment they needed. So I think there was a real sense both of power workers got. I mean, "we're the ones that are keeping this place going!" You know, it's not the Goldman-Sachs executives who were sitting in Connecticut in their basement home office, you know. It's us. And also a sense of anger and frustration that with that, you know, a little pin of recognition that was put on their shirt for a moment, deep changes didn't happen. And I think that coincided with what was already beginning to happen: a sense of frustration among young workers, particularly college educated ones, the ones who went to a little bit of college, maybe. They sort of did what was right. And they ended up in situations which were really far inferior to what they ever envisioned. You know, they end up with student debt and crappy jobs and not much money, you know. And what is this about?

Celeste Headlee: Millennials first started to notice this stuff that was supposedly normal and started pushing back on that. And that's why millennials were labeled by baby boomers as entitled and whiners, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They were just pushing back on some things that needed to be pushed back on. And then Gen Z came in and they went further and they were like, "I think not my friends." They weren't even pushing back. They were just saying, "No, F-you, absolutely f ing not."

[FADE UP SONG: "Pie In The Sky" By Pete Seeger] Joshua Freeman: What we've seen in the last year or so is a lot of this kind of resurfacing in the latter part of the pandemic, in the form of these new organizing drives. A great deal of is is in the retail industry, but a lot of it is in very professional jobs. Museums and digital newsrooms, adjunct professors, you know, so kind of cuts across different kinds of occupations and different levels of the hierarchy, you know. But I think there's a shared sense that this is not good enough. And in a society of ever-growing inequality, we need to do something. As one of my colleagues says, you know, "unions are cool again," particularly among younger people. And this is not just impressionistic polling data also shows this, you know, that the younger you are, the more positive your image of unions will be. New York has been a kind of initiator. The Amazon labor union organizing victory in Staten Island was electric all across the country. I mean, all across the country. If you read reports about efforts of workers at Home Depot, at Lowe's, at Trader Joe's, at Starbucks, they all go, "Well, I saw these guys in Staten Island, these women in Staten Island, and I thought, why can't we do that?" So, you know, it's been kind of a spark, a national spark. I mean, who knows if they're ever going to get the union actually established in Staten Island, but even if they never do, it has had great national impact. [FADE OUT SONG] So it's not so much the established organized labor movement I think that's having national influence, but it's the kind of new nontraditional efforts that are really resonating out of New York to the rest of the country. What will come out of it still remains unclear because, you know, business is very resistant to this. The battle has been joined, but we don't know what the outcome will be yet.

[FADE UP MUSIC: Quick, tuned percussion] Celeste Headlee: So here's the thing. It is inevitable that every single step toward worker empowerment is going to be fought by the business community and fought hard. And that's happening now, but it hasn't happened with the full force and vehemence that I expected. So that's probably coming. Over the past 200 years, the business community and the political community writ large have worked really hard and very successfully to completely disempower -- and I don't just mean like in terms of organizing labor, I mean to bankrupt people who are on the lower end of the scale to make sure that they don't have the resources to be able to survive without a job. I mean, think about what you lose when you go part time. You don't lose half-salary. You lose everything. You lose your health insurance, you lose your retirement, you lose sick pay, you lose absolutely everything. And that is intentional! All of the wage increases went to the management class because if you give money to the people who are actually doing the work, they become more powerful. They have resources. They can survive quitting.

Joshua Freeman: This is a moment of opportunity. You know, the pandemic, the political moment that came out of Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign, the sense of frustration among young people, the tremendous outrage that comes out of the George Floyd murder and the reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, all these things represent enormous opportunity, it seems to me, for a labor to revive and reinvent itself. There's a moment of opportunity, but that window won't be open forever. And, you know, frankly, if the Fed succeeds in pushing the United States into a recession, which is what I think they're trying to do, you know, that window is going to close. I think it will be incredibly frustrating if we don't see a more full-steam embrace -- taking risks, spending money. Just doing more of the same is not going to revive the labor movement. And if we ever have a situation, for example, where we had a real anti-labor mayor or a business, you know, drive against unions in New York, I think unions are going to be shocked at how weak they are.

Celeste Headlee: We have been sold a bill of goods. It came at a really high price and the root of so much of this is our educational system. Why on earth should a politician be involved in curriculum? Of course they shouldn't. And yet they did that from a very early time. And now what we have here is people who not only don't understand the history, the oppressive history, of the United States and other colonized nations, they not only don't understand the history of capitalism, they don't understand their own history as working people and the power that we gave up willingly. [END MUSIC]

Joshua Freeman: It's really hard to say what the future holds. My entire life, I've heard about how automation is going to eliminate human labor, you know, and of course, it changes it and it can even reduce the demand some. But I don't think we're going to see dramatic changes. Most of us are still going to wake up in the morning and schlep off to a job that we don't really want to do to make less money than we really want to get doing things that we don't control. That's the essential work experience, in my opinion, and I don't think that's really going to change all that much. Some of us are lucky. We have a little more control and we get paid a little bit better. But, you know, that's that's our fate in this society. [FADE UP SONG: "Solidarity Forever" by Pete Seeger] Where will the labor movement go? It's really hard to predict. One of the things about social movements is they're kind of mysterious. They sometimes pop up in places you don't expect, in ways you don't envision. Who would have expected Occupy Wall Street? Who would have expected that, you know, at some point, more young Americans thought socialism was a better system than capitalism. I mean, no social scientist would have predicted any of this, you know, five years before it happened. So I -- all I know is it's going to be something that we don't expect.

[SONG CONTINUES]

[CREDITS]
Khyriel Palmer: Brooklyn, USA is produced by me, Khyriel Palmer…
Emily Boghossian: and me Emily Boghossian,
Shirin Barghi: and me Shirin Barghi
Charlie Hoxie: and me, Charlie Hoxie
Mayumi Sato: and me, Mayumi Sato

Khyriel Palmer: …with help this week from Melanie Kruvelis, Ashley Sandberg, and Zakiya Gibbons. This episode contains clips from the 1976 documentary “Why Work?”, directed by Alan Levin and Bill Moyers for WNET. Watch the full documentary online at archive.org.

Khyriel Palmer: You can find links to Dr. Joshua Freeman’s work in our episode show notes. Check out Working-Class New York, Behemoth, and more books by Dr. Freeman at your local library or indie bookstore.

Khyriel Palmer: To hear more from Celeste Headlee, tune into “Debate”, a podcast from Newsweek, and “Women Amplified”, a podcast from the Conferences for Women. To learn more about Celeste Headlee’s latest projects go to www. Celeste Headlee.com.

Khyriel Palmer: If you want to tell us a story, or somehow end up on the podcast, check the show notes for a link to our guide on recording a voice memo on your mobile phone and sending it to us on the internet. And if you like what you hear or think we missed something, comment, like, share and subscribe, and follow at BRIC TV on twitter and instagram, for updates.

Khyriel Palmer: For more information on this and all BRIC Radio podcasts, visit www.bricartsmedia.org/radio.

[END SONG]