It’s been a hot summer in more ways than one. From strikes in Hollywood to United Auto Workers voting in favor of strikes, the push for better working conditions isn’t showing signs of cooling down. It’s been years since we’ve seen this kind of burst of workplace organizing, and it recalls some of the most famous moments of labor history. We couldn’t think of a better voice than our guest this week to help us unpack everything that’s been going on. Alex Press is a staff writer for Jacobin Magazine where she covers labor. Her work has appeared in outlets including the New York Times and the Washington Post, just to name a few. She was a union organizer before becoming a reporter. Press joins WITHpod to discuss what has contributed to this current wave, pandemic induced changes to how people think about labor, shifts in power during this moment and the outlook ahead.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hey, WITHpod listeners. Before we get into today’s episode, I’m excited to share that we are taking WITHpod on the road again, the first time since the pandemic. I’m going to be at the House of Blues on Monday, October 9 in Chicago. I’ll be in Philadelphia, the Fillmore Theater on Monday, October 16. In New York City at the Town Hall on Sunday, November 12. You can buy tickets online at msnbc.com/WITHpodtour.
Join us in person for some fascinating conversations with amazing guests. Tickets are going to go fast, so buy yours today at msnbc.com/WITHpodtour. Can’t wait to see you in the live audience this fall.
One note I should make before we get into this conversation, we’re going to talk about the Writers Guild and actor strike. The group they’re striking against, which is the Alliance of Motion, Picture and Television Producers includes NBC Universal, who, of course, my employer and who produces this podcast. So full disclosure there.
Alex Press: The sort of depressing way to put it is, of course, that when you’re at the bottom, any uptick is, you know, relatively significant because you’re starting at zero. And unfortunately, that is how I often try to put this current moment in perspective. But that isn’t to say that it’s not significant, right? You need what we’re having now if we ever want to get anywhere bigger. And so, I would say, you know, I try not to think of it as far as like getting back to the 60’s or 70’s because I think things will just look different.
Our organizing in the present does look different, you know, whether we’re talking about what issues are kind of central. You know, often discrimination at work is kind of key in a way that it might not have been in the 40’s, things like that. The labor movement might look different, but as far as the power that is wielded by an organized working class, I think we often see laws kind of catch up to worker momentum.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why is This Happening “with me your host, Chris Hayes. I’m speaking to you just a few days after we celebrate Labor Day here in the U.S., which of course is kind of a funny history to that Labor Day, which is, I think if I’m not mistaken, proposed as a kind of like anti-communist way of like celebrating labor, but not on May Day, which is when everyone else in the world celebrates it. Even though, interestingly enough, May Day celebrates labor actions that happened here in the U.S., but then became the rallying cry for left movements and labor movements across the world, then, of course, became the like huge celebration of the Soviet Union and the countries under its fear of influence.
And so, the U.S. couldn’t celebrate that, obviously. So, she made her own Labor Day. And, you know, mostly it’s a cookout day or whatever you do on that day, if you’re lucky enough to have it off. You know, President Biden went and celebrated labor unions and there’s a sort of, you know, lip service given to labor. This Labor Day happens amidst the most intense and ferocious campaigns of labor activism, organizing and militancy that I’ve probably seen in my entire adult life. You’ve got enormously impactful active strikes right now that are the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild.
That, of course, has stopped all TV and movie production in the country for months now. The auto workers of the UAW have taken a strike authorization vote as I speak to you now, and are in the final negotiations with the automakers. UPS came very close to a strike. The Teamsters and UPS came close to a strike, which is the very last moment. There was, of course, nearly a big railroad strike that was overridden by actual legislation from Congress signed by President Biden. There’s strike authorizations happening among airline stewards, if I’m not mistaken, in New Jersey Transit.
We’ve seen increases in union organizing and the amount of unionized workplaces. If you look at a place like Starbucks, the people have been trying to unionize for two decades. You’ve got dozens of stores have unionized against incredible odds. Public opinion favoring labor, the sort of favorable ratings of labor unions is at the highest it’s been in decades. Sixty, 70 percent somewhere around there in the latest polling that we’ve had over the course of decades. Something is really happening in American labor and American labor movement and workplaces more broadly, which, you know, all labor happens outside of the confines of just like institutional unions.
And for me, this is pretty wild because I actually got my start as a labor reporter, basically. I mean, my first job was at a socialist magazine called In These Times of Chicago, which is still going strong and still producing great work, which you should read. And I was covering labor. I was sort of covering labor alongside one of the great labor journalists ever, David Moberg, who sadly passed away a few years ago, who was the labor writer In These Times. Amazing guy, amazing body of work. And basically, the story then was like it was a little like if you were covering some indigenous society in a Polynesian island with a language that was dying.
Like this sort of sense of like inexorable decline, it was year-after-year American union density went down. That was the product of a whole bunch of things from the effects of globalization, the sort of ideology of neoliberalism, the actual changes to labor law that basically conservatives and some Democrats would sort of implement at every turn, attacks on unions from right to work laws and things like that. But the general feeling was like, yeah, we’re sort of turning the page on labor unions. As like, as a society, that’s a kind of old industrial relic, people don’t need unions anymore.
And even inside the labor movement where there were millions of people represented, the question was like, what do we do about this inexorable decline? How do we get our way out of it? There was all sorts of theories and all sorts of vicious intramural fights about leadership and you’re doing it wrong and you’re doing it wrong and you’re doing wrong. And if only we did it right, it would grow. I haven’t covered labor full time in probably 15 or 20 years. So in this respect, what’s been happening the last few years is amazing to me. I mean, sort of shocking.
It’s a completely different set of stories if you’re a labor reporter right now than the sad sort of dirge-like reporting that I was doing, you know, in the years of like 2004 and 2005 about the American labor movement. One labor reporter who I’ve really, really loved to read, and there’s a number of great ones out there, but Alex Press, who is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine, really has carved out a great beat as a labor reporter for Jacobin, has been covering a lot of these movements, a lot of these strikes and back and forth. And I thought this Labor Day, this end of this hot labor summer would be a good opportunity to sit down with Alex and sort of get a read on where things are in the labor movement. So Alex, thanks for joining me.
Alex Press: Thanks so much for having me, Chris.
Chris Hayes: It is a more fun beat now, I feel like, than it was like 20 years ago.
Alex Press: Yeah, I mean, certainly. My timing is very funny in that I happened to start covering labor in about 2016. You know, I was part of starting a graduate student union at a school in Boston, and then fell, stumbled my way into realizing I was a better writer than I was a union organizer. And I kind of very much am a product of this wave, I think. You know, I got very lucky. I went into labor and I thought it would be this continued decline and kind of, you know, a giant fight to get anyone to read it. And things, you know, in those past six years or so that I’ve been doing it have very much been, you know, changing, as you said, though I wouldn’t want to overstate where we are, you know. The unionization rate is still going down in this country. It did last year. It’s at 10.1 percent. So it’s still a slog and certainly the conditions are horrible for most of the working class. But yes, the beat certainly has been quite revived.
Chris Hayes: Let’s stay with this about the general things and then we’ll get into the specific. I have my own theories, but I’m not covering this full time. Again, it’s important to say the absolute levels of unionization in the country are really low compared to where they were in, say, 1965 or 1975. Even most private sector folks are in non-unitized workplaces. There’s states that have laws that outlaw labor dues and make it very hard to organize. Like there’s a million reasons why the actual levels of unionization are nowhere near in the 60’s and 70’s, for instance, of the last century. That said, there just is more activity. There’s more strike activity. There’s more organizing activity. And also more sort of like popular attention. The Amazon warehouse union organizing got a huge amount of attention, it was a huge national story. What is your theory for why that’s happening now?
Alex Press: Yeah. So there are a few factors. I’ll try to make it as coherent as possible. So you know, one, I often point to, you know, the obvious recent history of the pandemic. You know, throughout the pandemic many workers were forced to risk their health and that of their families. They saw their bosses work from home. The lines in the workplace, as far as class, were very clarified. And there were pent-up frustrations, right? A lot of workers, you know, sort of abided by this for a few months or until their new contract cycle was up. And so, we’re now seeing, you know, the product of those frustrations. I often say that people have to realize, you know, the labor movement doesn’t move at the speed of an electoral cycle.
You know, we have three-year, four-year contracts. So you might see those frustrations and they get channeled into, you know, a couple of years down the road. So the pandemic certainly is something that I hear from workers a lot about, you know, as well as not just the risk to their health, but there were a lot of workers who were forced into overtime. There were these incredible frustrations around, you know, devoting one’s life to work, and when it also meant the risk to one’s health and one’s family, you know, it became intolerable. And part of the pandemic story is also this tight labor market that contributed to workers’ willingness to take on risks that otherwise they might not have, right? Workers often will say, I felt like I had nothing left to lose. You know, why not try to get a better job and try to make this job better?
You know, I recently wrote a story about Trader Joe’s United, which is a rare independent union, so not affiliated with an existing union, of Trader Joe’s workers at a number of stores. They’ve won, I think, four union elections at this moment. They’ve lost two, including one in a brutal tie. And their original organizing director, this guy, Tony Falco, said to me, you know, I think it’s a quote that really sums up how people have been feeling. There’s been a break in the mass brainwashing in which we’re all just meant to suffer and work can be exploited.
There’s a moment where you think, maybe not. What we’re doing is not without risk, but I don’t feel scared. I’m feeling and I hope other workers are feeling the empowerment that we’ve yet to see the results of. I feel a sense of it already, and I can find something else if need be. That’s where the lack of fear comes from. Being underpaid, I can get that elsewhere if I have to. And I think there’s a lot there in that quote.
Chris Hayes: That’s great. I mean, what’s interesting about that quote is there’s two aspects to it that are the ones that you just enunciated and which to my mind are the ones I think of, right? The mass psychological and social dislocation of the pandemic. And also I just think the thing of like what am I doing with my life? Life’s too short. What’s precious? What’s valuable? Like I think everyone had opportunities to think about that. Like you said, a lot of people felt like, oh my God, my boss doesn’t care about my health. They don’t care about whether I get sick. They’re making me go to work and do all these things. So there’s that.
And then there’s when he says I could get another job, like it is the tightest labor market of our lives. I mean, and I really do think there’s pretty good evidence that has a big effect. We had post-great recession from 2009 through basically 2017 or ’18, like incredible labor slack, right? I mean, people were underemployed, people were doing side gigs, like the idea that like, screw you, I’ll go get another job was not as present.
Alex Press: Yeah, I mean, it’s undeniable. Of course you can look at sort of the sort of larger quantitative numbers on this, but certainly my job day to day talking to workers who are very much risking getting fired or otherwise retaliated against, they say it all the time, not exactly in Tony’s words, but more or less, right, you know? Do I really need to fear that I can’t get another job like I have at an Amazon warehouse? No, I can. And that is qualitatively a different feeling. It’s sort of this interesting moment that illustrates how a structure can actually lead to this on the ground change. To me, one of the best things a worker said to me on this about the pandemic effect, as far as what am I doing with my life —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Alex Press: — it was actually fairly early on. It was when the workers in IATSE, which is the below the line film entertainment industry union. So like grips, electricians.
Chris Hayes: Crew is how we tend to think of them. Yes.
Alex Press: Yeah. One guy said to me, you know, they almost struck in 2021.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Alex Press: They came very close to striking and it was averted last minute though, you know, none of the issues were addressed so we may see them strike next year when their new contract is up. But one of the workers said to me that, you know, his schedule was something like 14, 16 hour days, you know, just completely inhumane work hours. And he said, you know, I’m single. My relationship fell apart because of my work schedule. How am I ever going to fall in love if I do this job? And you know, it might be corny or sentimental, but that is basically what workers feel right now.
Chris Hayes: No, that’s not corny or sentimental. That’s the most important thing in life.
Alex Press: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, that’s the thing. I remember telling this people as a labor reporter and labor organizers have told me this, and I imagine you’ve heard the same thing, which is like, people don’t strike and join unions over wages. They do it over dignity.
Alex Press: Yes.
Chris Hayes: They do it over autonomy. They do it over something deeper and more like existentially penetrating about I am a person, like I am a human being on this earth.
Alex Press: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And that all that stuff matters, wages, conditions, healthcare, that stuff all really matters. But fundamentally, to take the step that it takes to either organize a union, join a union amidst a brutal fight or go on strike is about something even more elemental than that.
Alex Press: Yes, absolutely. And the last thing I’d say on this, we’ve talked about the pandemic, the labor market conditions. And then the third factor here that I often kind of feel that need to reference, because so many workers, when you trace their stories, they lead back to the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020. So, you know, I thought it was interesting when 2020 campaign fell apart for Bernie Sanders, a lot of sort of commentators were like, the left is in disarray, the United States. You know, they’ve all lost their direction, they don’t know where to go.
And I said, they’ve all become union militants. You know, they’re either becoming union staffers or they’re organizing new unions. These were young volunteers, not even just millennials, but zoomers, you know, that Sanders in that campaign was the first time they’d heard this sort of class language, this idea that union power matters, that you can organize your workplace, that this is sort of a political action that’s integral to broader societal projects. And a lot of workers went and took that advice to heart.
You know, they said, well, if there’s no Sanders campaign, I guess I’m going to organize Starbucks or organize Amazon or reform my union like the UAW. And so, I was often saying, once again, just wait a couple of years and we’re going to see the result of that because these are young people with a lot of energy. And sure enough, that’s exactly part of not everything, but part of what we’re seeing with the uptick.
Chris Hayes: That’s really interesting. I want to sort of ask a question about and this is a little maybe outside of your ambit in terms of what you’re reporting on. But like, you know, there’s sort of formal labor activism, right? So there’s people who are organizing new unions and that’s happened in lots of places including at MSNBC where we have a new union of my producers who have unionized. Lots of places where new unions have been organized. Then there’s existing unions negotiating on contracts. But then there’s the whole world of like workplace struggle that isn’t channeled through organized labor.
Alex Press: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But where I feel like we’ve also seen a lot of militancy, right, like in all sorts of environments. I mean, you know, professional universes like, there’s the first architectural attempt at organizing is happening in architecture firm, but advertising, architecture, traditionally, quote, unquote, “white collar professional jobs,” where there’s been back and forth about like, you know, young associates of law firms being like, it’s crazy to make us work 20 hours a day. I guess how do you conceptualize of like that kind of management labor conflict that’s happening sort of adjacent to the formal mechanisms of the Wagner Act and all that stuff?
Alex Press: Yeah, I mean, white collar workers are not immune from these societal influences. I mean, they may have had, you know, more safety as far as their health. Many of them, though not all of them could work from home. And yet the class lines, again, were clarified. There was this reconsideration of one’s priorities in life. You know, it’s very funny, Shawn Fain, the newly elected UAW president, who I’m sure we’ll talk more about, he’s been pushing for a shorter work week. He’s made this a rallying cry. He’s talking about 32 hour work weeks, you know, four days of work, one day paid off.
And he cited when he was getting criticism for being so audacious or whatever by, you know, people who oppose him on this, he was saying, you know, there was this study done of finance workers at Bear Stearns and they were saying that, I think it was two-thirds of them said they would quit if they were required to go full-time back to the office. And he said, you know, the study, which was, you know, done by McKinsey or something like that, I can’t remember the exact consulting firm, but they said the reason was, you know, one-third or something said that their relationship with their spouses and partners had improved, their relationship with their kids, their neighbors.
You know, this is something that all workers have been experiencing. And then certainly when it comes to architecture or journalism or academia, we’re also seeing the actual undermining of the job conditions. They’re getting far worse. You know, the term we use for it over at Jacobin would be proletarianization. And, you know, it’s real. It means that these jobs are no longer so different than other jobs. And, you know, certainly as a writer, I know that to be the case in journalism.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, let me go to your personal story here and then that’ll be a nice segue to the Writers Guild and actor strike because, you know, that’s a sort of perfect segue into a very militant union that is working in a line of work that is not, you know, serving people in a service industry and not building cars. They’re doing, you know, what we consider, quote, unquote, “knowledge work,” right, creative work, but they’re organized. You were a grad student?
Alex Press: Yes. So, you know, I’d long been involved in activism on the left. I was very involved in sort of the anti-police brutality movement, Occupy Wall Street. And then I went to grad school. You know, I’d been a waitress since the day I was 16 and I realized I was sick of standing up for work. I want a sitting down job. So I got into a PhD program at Northeastern University and then immediately started helping organize a graduate student union, which in fact, if you can believe it, Chris, and maybe you can because you know a bit about this subject, they are just now, I think this month, finally going to vote on whether they’re going to unionize under the NLRB. And so —
Chris Hayes: Oh my gosh.
Alex Press: It has been, I believe, eight years.
Chris Hayes: Eight years?
Alex Press: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Alex Press: I’m very tempted. I wish I could go up to Boston and see the results of this.
Chris Hayes: You should go cover it.
Alex Press: Yes. But anyway, you know, towards that end, you know, it is a funny story and that I had never written anything before and I knew we needed to get in touch with the adjuncts. They were fighting for a first contract at the time and the Northeastern administration was being, you know, very hard on them as far as settling the contract. So, I pitched a story to the nation’s submissions inbox about the first contract fight and they accepted it. It was the first thing I ever wrote. It was for, I think, their student nation vertical or something. They took the piece.
I used it as an excuse to do one-on-ones, as we call it in labor organizing, to sit down with the leading adjuncts who were organizing the union and get to know kind of what we should expect from the administration, our shared employer. That was not entirely about my union organizing plan. You know, we were very early stages, but effectively it became a kind of secret reason I was writing that article. And from there, I just kind of stumbled and tumbled head first into labor journalism. I left the PhD program after a couple years. Jacobin hired me and I’ve been on the labor beat, you know, ever since.
Chris Hayes: What department were you in?
Alex Press: I was in the sociology department.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. That’s what I would have guessed.
Alex Press: Makes sense. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Produces a high quotient of the labor actors.
Alex Press: Right.
Chris Hayes: Let’s talk about the writers and actors —
Alex Press: Sure.
Chris Hayes: — because these are old unions, legendary unions, unions that in many ways, particularly the Writers Guild, I would say have kind of like really created the professionalization. Like the thought that you could have a middle-class job as a writer is solely the product of Writers Guild activism and militancy through the years. But I think there is like this image of, you know, like the people who, quote, unquote, “need unions,” are like people digging ditches or people working on factory shop floor, people doing dangerous work, physical work, or on their feet all day even in an Amazon warehouse.
Like, you sit in front of a laptop, you’re a grad student, you’re a writer. Like, you know, why do you need a union? And maybe you could talk a little bit about like the expansive vision of solidarity or labor activism for the kinds of professions and undertakings like writers or grad students and why you think that’s important.
Alex Press: Yeah, I mean, the first thing I say when people ask about this is, you know, when coal miners first started organizing unions, not just their bosses, but generally more societally, people said they don’t need unions because they have very self-directed work down there. And there were X, Y, and Z reasons that they were actually far more autonomous than other workers who had unions. So this is just a constant among history that you point to specificities about the work and say that’s why you don’t need a union.
But in fact, you know, to give the kind of basic pitch for unions is you want to get stuff in writing before things get worse or before employers change or working conditions or the labor market changes, right? My favorite example of this, though it’s not the writer’s strike, was I was covering, I believe, the Columbia graduate students had a strike a few years ago, and a bunch of construction workers showed up in support of it. They had a rally. And I asked one of the construction workers, hey, you know, why are you here? Plenty of people say grad students don’t need unions.
And he just looked at me completely perplexed and said, every worker needs a union. Like, what are you talking about? It’s not about deprivation or poverty necessarily, though there are grad students and writers dealing with both of those things. It’s really about a say in your working conditions, a democracy of some sorts in the workplace, in the place you spend the majority of your waking life, right? And to your point though, I mean, the Hollywood unions are so fascinating in that it’s a real accomplishment that they have taken the most casino-like, unpredictable, you know, unreliable type of work and made it a- kind of bedrock that you can rely on and have managed to take both very poor members as well as A-list celebrities and turn them all into, not all, but the vast majority of even, you know, the A-listers are proud union members. I think that’s a really remarkable accomplishment and it’s definitely a testament to the WGA in particular, their history here.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. So talk a little bit about what the main issues are. They’re slightly different, I think, for SAG and WGA. So maybe we could focus a little on WGA because I know that turning a little better —
Alex Press: Sure.
Chris Hayes: — and started earlier, but it seems like really fundamental kind of epochal changes happening in the industry. And so, there’s like particularities to that fight, and then there’s also more general situations, and I know you’ve covered this quite a bit. I’ve read your writing on it.
Alex Press: Yeah. So the WGA, you know, started, I believe, May 2. So we’re now in month four of this strike. It’s quite prolonged. Their last one was shorter, which was, you know, 2007, 2008. And, you know, the issues in the WGA are very much kind of a delayed pent up response to massive changes in the industry. First and foremost, of course, is that the streaming model now dominates the industry.
Whereas at that last writer’s strike, what they won was actually protections to have new media, which is what they call the streamers like, you know, Netflix, you know, all the streaming services now. Originally it wasn’t covered by the WGA and that strike in part ensured it would be. And yet it was so new that those protections are fairly, you know, poor, I guess is what you would say —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Alex Press: — particularly around issues like residuals, which are the payments, you know, of a writer or an actor would traditionally get when a show was rerun or syndicated. You know, there’s no such thing on streaming services, right? When you get Netflix, you can watch as many episodes as many times as you want. And that has been a huge cut. It’s been the equivalent of a gigantic concession handed over by the writers and actors. So that’s one of the key things. They want a new form of viewership based residuals. So based on how successful their shows are doing. The other big key issue is AI. That’s something people obviously want to talk about a lot because it’s incredibly dystopian, you know.
Chris Hayes: Well, I think it’s utopian. I’m looking forward to this podcast being hosted by a GPT bot in about four months. I think that’s lovely.
Alex Press: I mean, you asked me to focus on the writers, but I have to say, you know, one piece I wrote about when I was out in L.A. on the picket lines about both the writers and actors, I spoke to this woman who had hosted a Nickelodeon show for a few seasons. And she was talking about, you know, the threat that AI poses for people like her, not just background performers, but you know, the host of a show. She was like, there’s enough footage of me that an AI could be trained on me and I could host shows forever, you know, in the digital warehouse.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Alex Press: And it was terrifying. She’s like, it’ll make me look like I said things I didn’t say. There’s nothing I can do about it. And so, the actors, the performers of all types, I think are really, this is a much more immediate fight.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Alex Press: You know, I think it’s been well reported, you know, that for example, background actors are very worried their likenesses will be scanned and then they’ll never have to be, you know, paid again, right, because the studio or the network can just automate them. Of course, one thing worth pointing out is that with that also comes a huge cut for people like IATSE. You know, you don’t need hair and makeup and costume if you don’t have people.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Alex Press: And so, this is a really existential threat. The WGA though, for its part on AI, is really just interested in regulating this right now, because right now, you know, AI-produced material is not copyrightable. You know, it’s also garbage if you ever look at, you know, what a chat GPT script looks like. I mean, the writers want to make sure they’re not being in the future deployed to punch up AI generated scripts, which again —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Alex Press: — this is very much in the line of the history of particularly the WGA where new technology gets introduced, the studios say, don’t worry about it, that’s never going to be a big deal. The writers try, often succeed in regulating and covering that new media. And then that media ends up, you know, being the future of the industry, whether we’re talking about VHS, DVD, new media. So AI is just once again, the writers guild saying, let’s get ahead of this because we know if it’s up to the employers, these corporate heads of these studios, it’s going to be bad news for us.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: There’s also a fight over the size of the writers’ rooms, right? Like minimums for how many writers make a show in a lot of places that have been sort of whittling down and whittling down and whittling down so that, you know, rather than eight writers writing a show, you’ve got three or two or two and one’s part time and they want to sort of set some standard minimums, right?
Alex Press: Yeah. So the use of mini rooms is a huge problem. It’s something that the streamers in particular have taken as, you know, it was occasionally used in the past, but now Netflix in particular, this is their go-to model. So generally without getting too into the details here, you know, often a mini room means there’s one show runner who’s incredibly overworked, who’s asked to carry the entirety of a season, aided by a handful of very short-term contract, you know, less senior writers.
And this means that, you know, the continuity is a problem, you know, you’re having people constantly entering and leaving a season. There’s very little time for kind of reworking and rewriting scripts. And you know, Chris, I’m sure you know this, television writing is not like journalism. It is very much, you know, a group effort. It’s about —
Chris Hayes: Oh my gosh.
Alex Press: It’s sitting in a room —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I’ve been working on a TV show with my writing partner who’s actually a very, very prominent and active member of the WGA. I mean, we’re on the committee, actually. And he and I’ve been working on this show for years and it’s an unbelievable amount of work and really hard and really difficult work and also very collaborative. And again, like this sounds like champagne problems, like, oh, you have to write too much.
But to me, when I zoom out and think about the writers in particular and the actors as well, and I think the reason I’m distinguishing them is because I think the actors have had a harder time sort of achieving this goal and the writers have, which is you take a business that’s extremely volatile. You now, you’re hot one minute and you’re in every movie and then you’re not the next. You’re a hot writer and then you’re not the next.
You hit it big with a hit that no one saw coming and it makes a lot of money, and then the next three things you do are flops. To regulate out that volatility, that’s sort of been the goal of these unions, right? To produce an environment in which you can go be a working actor or in crews in terms of IATSE or writer. And the nature of the contracts produce a steadiness of work and reliability that you can just build a, quote, unquote, “normal life,” like a normal middle class life. It’s basically my understanding of like the overall goal that they’ve achieved to varying degrees and it’s kind of amazing they have and is now being taken away in many respects.
Alex Press: Yeah, I mean and the one other big thing I would add to that is it also is about the art that’s being produced.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Alex Press: Whether you want to call it a product or whatever, the television shows. You know, I spoke to one writer on the picket line outside of Paramount Studios in California and her name is Rachel Alter. She’s very young. She’s only been in the Guild a couple of years and she’s already written for stars, Marvel Studios, Netflix. She’s been in a lot of mini rooms. And she was talking about how basically she feels like she’s on an assembly line. And she said to me, you know, the art suffers when you are pressed like this, when you’re stressed —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Alex Press: — you know, how are you supposed to write a TV show when you have two other side jobs, right? And you’re not sure if you’ll be there next week. I mean, comedy, variety is a type of show, you know, late night where, you know, at the current moment, in the current contract that, you know, expired this summer, there was no guarantee at all that you would have more than one day of work. So this became a side gig one would do between standup shows.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Alex Press: You know, the quality of the writing is just going to be terrible.
And I would just add here that, you know, I had a very long conversation with Mike Schur on the picket lines in Los Angeles. Mike Schur being, you know, the guy behind “The Good Place,” “Parks and Rec.” He wrote on “The Office.” He’s, you know, about as successful of a contemporary television writer as it gets. He’s also on the negotiating committee for the WGA, which again is smart thinking on the WGA’s part. You want the stars on, you know, included and not arguing against you. And, you know, he went through that. He explained how he had been taught to write long form television. You know, he’d come from “SNL.”
He had no experience when he was hired onto “The Office.” And Greg Daniels, the creator of “The Office,” the adapter of the U.S. version, you know, taught him methodically the process of not just writing at a laptop or something. But, you know, I think to quote Mike here, you know, I think it was really quite telling kind of the explanation. He said that’s 10 percent of what writing is, writing at a computer clickety clack. The other 90 percent is brainstorming and rewriting, realizing a script sucks and throwing it away —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Alex Press: — bringing the script to set, working with the actors and directors.
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Alex Press: Getting to know the set decorators, art decorators, production designers, grips, electricians, figuring out what they do and how they do it, knowing when to delegate, when to take responsibility, getting notes from studios, knowing when to pick your battles. I mean, these are all things that if you want a future generation of writers to be able to produce their own shows like Mike has, they are going to need that leeway to do that work.
Chris Hayes: What’s also interesting about that, it comes back to the person who was like, how am I ever going to fall in love about like all labor struggles ultimately or about like the human soul, which is like, people want to make good work.
Alex Press: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like that is a really important thing to writers, to actors, to people that work in creative enterprises. They don’t want to make schlock. They don’t want to like cut corners and make things worse than they have to be. They have a pride in the thing they make. And this is true of every auto worker I’ve ever talked to who have incredible pride in things they work. It’s true of almost every worker I’ve talked to in the time that I’ve been, you know, a reporter on this stuff, but like that’s also part of it, too. Like, you’re making us make worse work and we want to make better work.
Alex Press: Right. I mean, it might not seem like the stakes are as high as say an auto worker who is being told to, you know, being sped up on the assembly line and now maybe the cars are less safe, but it’s the same problem, right? The product is worse —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Alex Press: — and that is insulting and upsetting to workers and it’s bad for the public.
Chris Hayes: That line I think is just actually really important because I do think there’s a sort of contention sometimes by management that what workers want is they want to be lazy, they want to cut corners. And look, it takes all types. I mean, people have all sorts of levels of ability and effort at the workplace and everyone has experienced that. Everyone has been in workplaces, you know that. You don’t need me to tell you that. But by and large, I’ve always been struck by, and I was struck by this the first time that I got my first job as a cashier at 14 at the Bronx Zoo concession stand and I worked in bakeries.
Is that like, by and large, most people I have worked with in my life have wanted to do good work. Blind cooks at restaurants who like wanted it to be right. They wanted the plate to look right. Like people do as a general rule. I think there’s this conception that like, from the management’s perspective, which is that unless you crack the whip and unless you’re on people, they will do crappy work.
And, you know, again, I think that’s probably true for some people, but by and large, I do think that like, people do care about their work and want it to be good and a lot of these labor fights can end up being about that, about the conditions, the safety, all of that stuff, obviously the things we talk about. But just like, again, that gets to the sense of autonomy, right, like I want to have some sense of autonomy.
Alex Press: Yeah. I mean, I completely agree. It also brings to mind, you know, there was a strike at a massive locomotive train manufacturing plant in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was just concluded. The workers, after I believe 10 weeks, accepted a tentative agreement there. I went out there. It was at Wabtec is what it’s called.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Alex Press: It used to be a gigantic sort of company town originally. And the workers there, you know, there were a number of issues that I don’t have to get into here that led them to strike, including the fact that management was just violating the contract left and right. They had previously had the ability to strike over grievances, which meant that, you know, if management was completely violating the contract, they would just strike.
It didn’t happen a lot, but the ability to do it gave them, again, a lot more power and say in the workplace. But another key issue they’ve been pushing for there that is what came to mind in this conversation is they want to build green locomotives. They sort of have put out several studies, worked with various academics to talk about, you know, the technology is there. They’re pushing for higher EPA standards. They’ve been testifying in Congress over it. And they want Wabtec to sign on to these efforts, right, and sort of push for higher regulations so that Wabtec would not be a, you know, competitive disadvantage or whatever and force them to keep creating these polluting locomotives that, of course, pollute their communities first and foremost.
It’s going to be train workers who are dealing with that pollution. And Wabtec had no interest in working with them, right? This was an obvious case where the workers knew best and wanted their expertise to be respected. And this company had no interest in that, right, and we’re all the poorer for it.
Chris Hayes: That’s a great example. Let’s talk a little bit about this in the transportation industrial space. Before we get to the auto workers, I do want to talk about the Teamsters and UPS. I remember, I think it was the summer of ’97, there was a big Teamsters strike. Am I right about that?
Alex Press: Yes, that’s right. Ron Carey.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that was the year I graduated high school, so for some reason I remember it happening then. The Teamsters has new leadership, right?
Alex Press: Yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: And my understanding of this there was always the Teamsters in the world of labor organizing. The Teamsters were notorious for a whole bunch of reasons. Obviously, Jimmy Hoffa, obviously the legacy of that. There was also this thing called TDU back in the day called Teamsters for Democratic Union. The Teamsters leadership could be wildly authoritarian and top down they did not look kindly on like rival slates competing for positions. There was a whole sort of like fight in the Teamsters over union democracy. There’s been a lot of changes my understanding in that union, and there’s new leadership now that seemed part of the story of the contract standoff they have with UPS.
Alex Press: Yes, I mean to slightly simplify it, the UPS contract is basically the whole story of the new leadership. So Sean O’Brien is the new IBT, International Brotherhood of Teamsters president. He’s a lifelong Boston guy. You know, he’s quite a colorful character. I happened to meet him right after the Celtics lost the finals last summer. It was, you know, bad morning for us to be meeting. And he —
Chris Hayes: You’re a big Celtics fan, right? Isn’t that —
Alex Press: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I know that from social media. Did you grow up in the Boston area?
Alex Press: No, I didn’t. I just got into basketball when I was, you know, around 20 something and I just happen —
Chris Hayes: You chose to be a Boston sports fan.
Alex Press: Oh, no. I shouldn’t have said this. I’m from Pittsburgh. There’s no basketball team.
Chris Hayes: Okay. I won’t give you a hard time.
Alex Press: So, trust me, Chris, I should have known not to go into this with you. Had I reflected, I wouldn’t have done it.
Chris Hayes: No, it’s fine. I’ve enjoyed your Celtics fandom. I like earnest expressions on social media of people’s genuine fandom when it’s ecstasy or agony. I find it very humanizing and relatable.
Alex Press: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So I had that nested away in my head somewhere.
Alex Press: I am truly not welcome to watch basketball with anyone in New York City. And you know what? I understand that. That’s fine. I watch it at home. Now I’m way off track. So, during the last UPS contract fight, you know, when it was being negotiated, again, this is a contract that now covers almost 350,000 workers. It is the largest private sector contract in the United States, massive, you know, and a huge part of the Teamsters membership, you know.
The Teamsters membership, I think at this point is around 1.2 million. So this is a huge portion of their unit.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Alex Press: And during the last contract round, there was the introduction of a new tier of UPS driver. So UPS drivers, you know, sort of famously, it’s one of the last great kind of middle class jobs. You don’t need a higher education. You can get good pension, good benefits, good wage. There’s a reason it’s so sort of prevalent in our culture, right?
It’s sort of one attainable solid job that hasn’t been undone. And this new contract, you know, the last round introduced a sort of lower tier, as we call it, a position where people were doing the same type of work, same type of driving, but with lower wages, worse benefits, worse working conditions. And this was so outrageous to the membership that even as, you know, the Hoffa Jr., so Hoffa’s son, James P. Hoffa, was then the president of the Teamsters, which goes to show how things work.
Chris Hayes: How’d he get that job?
Alex Press: Yeah, exactly.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, amazing. What a coincidence?
Alex Press: Yeah. Wow, amazing. You know, he wanted this contract to be pushed through. I mean, you know, as in several other unions, I’m sure we’ll talk about the UAW, there was a sense because the lack of democracy, sort of corruption. You know, the president of the Teamsters was much closer with the executives he sat across the table from than he was to the people he was, in theory, elected to represent. So he was very interested in getting this contract passed and making UPS happy.
You know, the membership, very heroically, actually organized and the majority that voted, voted against ratifying this contract. They said, we’re not accepting a contract with a new tier. That’s, you know, going to destroy our union, breed resentment, so on and so forth. And Hoffa Jr. invoked a very arcane sort of clause in the Teamsters Constitution that I won’t even try to explain to you, to force the contract over the membership. So, completely undemocratic. They had to accept the contract. That was the beginning of the end for Hoffa Jr. Sean O’Brien, who is now the president, had been on the negotiating committee for that contract fight and his criticism of how it was going got him kicked off.
And shortly after he sort of vowed to run against whoever Hoffa was backing. And, you know, he had been a very loyal lieutenant of the leadership for a long time. So he’s not a TDU guy, as you mentioned, the Teamsters for Democratic Union Reform Caucus that has existed for something like 50 years. He was a Hoffa guy. And because even he defected, you know, he kind of could bring enough people with him, along with allying with the TDU to actually win that election. And so, he ran in large part on vowing to get rid of that tier that was introduced, to get the strongest UPS contract ever gotten, and to strike if necessary to get that.
So that really was the key through line for the past few years. And I would say he’s done it. I mean, there are things that could have been better in that Teamsters contract, but he got rid of that new driver position, the 22-4s. He got very significant raises, including for part-timers, though it’s the part-timers who didn’t get quite as much money as they wanted. And other things like having air conditioning in the trucks, which seems so basic, but it’s something that UPS had never agreed to before.
Chris Hayes: Wow. I mean, yeah. And so in the end, they did get rid of the tier in the contract?
Alex Press: They did. Yep. It’s not there anymore.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: And you just mentioned the UAW because my understanding is there’s a sort of similar story at the UAW, right? Like a change of internal leadership that has maybe changed the posture of negotiation and the willingness to strike.
Alex Press: Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s a really interesting kind of remarkable thing even if it doesn’t get as much attention as say new union organizing drives, the twin reform efforts at the UAW and within the Teamsters. So the UAW, you know, it’s the tale of two Sean’s. UAW’s new president is Shawn Fain. The Teamsters new president is Sean O’Brien. So Shawn Fain was elected in the first direct elections ever held in the UAW, which is shocking.
In the past, they had a delegate system that was completely controlled by the one caucus that existed in the union called the administration caucus, which you know, Walter Ruther himself had helped, you know, create. And it was quite a rigged system. And, you know, the UAW, it might not be as well-known as, you know, sort of the corruption around Hoffa and the early Teamsters, but the UAW corruption scandal was really, you know, shocking and horrifying for the membership. Their dues were going to buying luxury items, to, you know, long vacations in Palm Springs for the leadership.
And it ended with, you know, a federal crackdown that put, I think, a dozen UAW leaders in jail, including several of their former presidents. So this was, you know, to make a long story short, it led to the UAW membership holding a referendum on whether they wanted direct elections. You know, the majority said yes and then when they had that election, there was a reform slate that ran, backed by now the first reform caucus ever in the UAW called Unite All Workers for Democracy, the UAWD.
And they contested, I believe, seven seats in leadership and won all seven of those, including Shawn Fain winning the presidency. So Shawn Fain very much, even more so than Sean O’Brien, actually comes out of the reform movements. He’s a member of UAWD. I’ve seen him, you know, speak to the rank and file members of that caucus, you know, with no sense of authority, no sense that they need to back him on X, Y, and Z. You know, he teared up at this convention I was at in Detroit when he went and spoke with his fellow caucus members, thanking them for their support.
You know, this is actually quite, I think, more significant dynamic than Sean O’Brien who, you know, has an alliance with the reformers or the socialists, but has never, you know, pretended to be one himself. He’s just a militant who wants a strong union. Now, Shawn Fain, I think may be the real deal. And he is very much already kind of like getting out in front. You know, I think a lot of people might have seen on social media him throwing the contract proposals offered by Stellantis and Ford in the garbage can as he live streams his views and updates to the membership on how negotiations are going.
I mean, previous UAW leadership members had no idea what was even being asked for at the table, much less what the negotiations, you know, how it was going. Shawn Fain is holding Facebook Live, you know, sort of meetings to talk to members about the demands and what’s happening. And so I think it’s quite likely we will see a strike. And, you know, whether this very new reform leadership can pull it off, you know, it’s a huge, huge undertaking and they’ve had a few months only to prepare.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Let me just, to put his timestamp, we’re talking the first week of September, September 6, when we’re having this conversation. If anyone’s listening to this later, what’s the strike deadline?
Alex Press: September 14.
Chris Hayes: Okay.
Alex Press: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So if you’re hearing this in the future, people listen to episodes at all different times.
Alex Press: Sure.
Chris Hayes: So that strike, I mean, the point that you just made, I want to sort of just stay here for a second on the Teamsters and the UAW. We talk about, you know, workplace democracy as sort of one of the goals of the labor union that you should have a say in the place you spend a majority of your waking life. You know, labor unions are the institutional route for that. They’re protected under the National Labor Relations Act, the Wagner Act that was passed in the New Deal. It has subsequently been amended and, you know, reduced in its power and effectiveness, both through the Taft-Hartley Act, which was signed over Truman’s veto in the 1950s, which was the first sort of major kind of like backlash to union organizing in the country legislatively after the Wagner Act. But then subsequently through all kinds of things such that the NLRB process is often very broken. You noted the Northeastern process taking eight years.
Alex Press: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: There are a million reasons why it’s very hard to organize a union in this country. The process makes it really an uphill battle. It puts a huge thumb on the scale on the side of management. And the reason that we have such a low union density number compared to OECD countries has a lot to do with that. I mean, those two things are very connected.
All of that said, you know, when you talk about the sort of ossification of the Teamsters leadership, the UAW, you know, there’s this German theorist, Robert Michels, who I read a lot of for my first book, who has a thing called the iron law of oligarchy.
And he’s talking about why is it that all the socialist parties of Germany end up being these totally like vanguardist top down operations where there’s only one caucus that controls all elections, and they’re not actually democratic and they’re not actually participatory. And he basically says the iron law of our oligarchy means in large organizations, you have delegation. The delegation means that some people are doing disproportionate amounts of sort of the work and making the decisions and they kind of ossify and they become this kind of vanguard leadership.
And it’s very hard to maintain participatory democracy in any institution, organization, et cetera. And I’m curious your thoughts on this because it’s broader than unions. I mean, you see this in block clubs, you see it in nonprofits, you see it everywhere, right? Like, how do you maintain the spirit of actual input in democracy in a union in real life day to day so that you don’t end up with a situation in which like, that’s basically just an abstraction?
Alex Press: Yeah. I mean, obviously, if I had a correct answer, that would be a huge deal.
Chris Hayes: Please give me the answer.
Alex Press: I mean, the imperfect, unsatisfying to glib answer is like, this is why. When you start reading about the labor movement or organizing the labor movement, you hear about the rank and file and democracy all the time, because it’s really about sort of are there ways to ensure constant channeling down to the rank and file, you know, sort of the initiative and up from the rank and file into sort of whether it’s demands or, you know, political asks beyond, you know, workplace contract, fights. You know, this is about sort of ensuring that no matter who rises to the top, there’s a sense of discipline from below, right.
So there is, you know, it’s why I mentioned Shawn Fain actually being a member of UAWD. Not that he’s bound by, you know, sort of private, you know, sect or something like that and their decisions, but he is accountable to people who do not have the power, right? There is actual ties. Those people will show up and tell him, he’s making a mistake. They will call him, you know. That’s just one example. So these initiatives that are talked a lot about by say, Labor Notes, which is this left labor publication that has been around for about as long as TDU has been around, it emphasizes the rank and file and militancy, that is a way to counteract this ossification tendency. I would also just note that when it comes to unions, you know, it’s not just this sort of iron law of oligarchy. There’s a really kind of direct correlation.
I don’t want to say causation between when we have decades of concessions and attacks on the labor movement, the disorganization of the labor movement. And then this tendency toward corruption, gangsterism. You know, there’s this sense that as workers are being demobilized as they’re not asking for anything, you know, the leadership, at least with Hoffa, with the old UAW leadership, starts sort of saying, well, at least I can get mine, right? There is no sense of momentum or change or winning going on the offensive. And so, it kind of does devolve into these fiefdoms.
And I think when you look at like organized crimes ties to the labor movement, historically, it was in those moments where labor all of a sudden was encroached up on the defensive, right? And there was this sense that, you know, okay, Hoffa is just hanging out with the executives of these corporations rather than being pushed by a membership that was in motion. And so, I think that’s a really hopeful moment for the present in that we very much are seeing a lot of this initiative come from the rank and file.
These things that we’re talking about, whether it’s the reform movements or the, you know, sort of ambitious contract fights and strikes. Very rarely are they being initiated from the top. It’s not some leader who is pushing for advances, even, you know, as Shawn Fain. No, he very much is being pushed by, I think, what the membership want. And certainly we see that in the most kind of extreme case at, say, Starbucks, where the organizing model there has very much been worker to worker. And it’s unions like SEIU that have kind of caught up with it and helped support it. But there’s no way that kind of organizing could have spread the way it did in this country in the past year and a half or so, unless it was really initiated from the bottom up.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, both in Amazon and Starbucks, I mean, you’ve got real like worker. I mean, other unions have tried to organize these places before and had a very hard time. I guess my question to you is like, to sort of bring it back around to where we started, you know, you got a tight labor market, you got the after effects of COVID. I do think there’s a little bit of similarity. I was thinking about 1940s, the period of sort of ’46 through ’48 and ’50, like in the U.S., which was, you know, you have the iconic Flint strike during that period.
You have this sort of high water market labor militancy, and you’ve got huge social dislocation, right? Like a once in a lifetime dislocation, ordinary life that ends in World War II. Very tight labor market and high inflation. And all three of these things produce huge amounts of labor activism and militancy. For a while we’ve had high inflation, which people are like, shoot, my paycheck is falling behind. Like that can be a real impetus to organize, huge once in a lifetime societal disruption, very tight labor market.
But amidst all that, you noted like union densities still tick down or still (ph). Can you conceive of a way that we would get back to a scenario like the 1960’s or 70’s in the U.S.? Like could you draw a straight line? I mean, I imagine it would require significant labor law reform.
Alex Press: Yeah. I mean, it is the question of labor law reform versus kind of new union, organizing, kind of bottom up stuff that we’re talking about is, you know, a sort of classic chicken and the egg argument that never gets resolved in labor. I do think, you know, the sort of depressing way to put it is, of course, that when you’re at the bottom, any uptick is, you know, relatively significant because you’re starting at zero.
And unfortunately, that is how I often try to put this current moment in perspective. But that isn’t to say that it’s not significant, right? You need what we’re having now if we ever want to get anywhere bigger. And so I would say, you know, I try not to think of it as far as like getting back to the 60’s or 70’s because I think things will just look different. Our organizing in the present does look different, you know, whether we’re talking about what issues are kind of central. You know, often discrimination at work is kind of key in a way that it might not have been in the 40’s, things like that. The labor movement might look different.
But as far as the power that is wielded by an organized working class, I think we often see laws kind of catch up to worker momentum. You know, I was writing a piece today about how there’s been a flurry of efforts to sort of extend unemployment benefits to striking workers in California. Then Fetterman has introduced one federally about getting access to food stamps for strikers. And to me, it’s a very small example, but that doesn’t happen unless hundreds of thousands of workers are on strike and saying, hey, I can’t access food benefits, or I have no unemployment and now I’m being evicted, which is happening to a lot of workers in the entertainment industry right now.
And so, I think we see that dynamic, right? Whether labor law reform comes as workers continue kind of fighting against the odds or the direction is the other way around, I think both those things have to happen. But an underlying kind of thing to, I think, put an exclamation point on all of this is, you know, in your intro, you mentioned that, you know, public opinion is more supportive than ever since the 60’s. As far as for labor unions, there’s been more specific polling around, do you support the writers? There’s been polling around, are you going to support the auto workers against their executives if they strike? Public overwhelmingly supportive.
But that does not translate into new unions, right? We’re seeing some and maybe the unionization rate will go a little bit up. Even if it went up a little, maybe I’ll just get back to what it was two years ago. I mean we need to figure out how to sort of get past the obstacles that very much are enshrined in a labor law regime that tilts everything in favor of the employer. And how you do that, I don’t know. I’m just talking to the people who are throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. And so, you know, I wish I had a better answer than that.
I would just say the one other historical example, when I was thinking about before this interview, you know, I think the post-World War II, ’46 strike wave and sit down strikes and so on is an obvious example, you know, as far as the social dislocation, kind of the experience of a pent up frustrations because there was no strike clauses going on. And then finally workers decided to strike and could kind of catch up.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Alex Press: I think also the late 60’s, early 70’s, maybe it doesn’t get as much attention. You know, there was a wildcat postal workers strike. There are a fair number of new organizing drives in the public sector. And this, again, was in the, you know, huge social upheaval, whether we’re talking about the Black power movement, which very directly was linked to both postal workers strike, as well as kind of, you know, the Black auto workers in Detroit organizing. And also, you know, there’s anti-war fights. There’s Kent State and the shootings.
I think we similarly see something that maybe it’s a smaller scale, maybe it’s less successful thus far, but I certainly have seen people who say hey, you know, I was out in the streets in 2020 protesting police violence and racism. I’m not going to sort of not bring that experience back into my workplace. You know, I’m also going to demand different conditions in my workplace now. And you see a lot of these fights start around, whether it’s racist discrimination by employers, sexism, you know, our lives are not actually compartmentalized in this way.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Alex Press: And if you have the experience of asking for more, whether it’s fighting as a tenant union member or it’s fighting on the street against police brutality, that will have effects in your workplace.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Alex Press: So I think, not that I think, you know, the 68 to 72 or something example is maybe as rich, but I think it is worth thinking about how these things interact, social movements more generally and then the labor movement specifically.
Chris Hayes: Alex Press is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine where she does a phenomenal job covering the labor movement, as you can hear in this discussion. That was extremely edifying and I really appreciate it. Thank you, Alex.
Alex Press: Thank you so much, Chris.
Chris Hayes: All right. I learned a lot there. Thank you, Alex Press, and I hope you enjoyed that as well. Big thanks to her, and you can read her writing at Jacobin magazine. You can get in touch with us on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, using the hashtag WITHpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can follow me on Threads @chrislhayes or on Bluesky where I’m also @chrislhayes. “Why Is This Happening” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?