The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Jacob Morrison:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is not Maximillian Alvarez. It is Jacob Morrison, host of the Valley Labor Report, the largest union talk radio program in the South.

Hamilton Nolan:

And I’m Hamilton Nolan, a labor journalist based in New York City.

Jacob Morrison:

Hamilton and I marched on the boss and took Max’s microphone so we could introduce the special episode about the recent reporting trip we both went on in Las Vegas and wrote about for The Real News Network and how things work.

Hamilton Nolan:

The conference that we went to took place in late hot August in the Las Vegas desert at the beautiful Paris Las Vegas casino underneath a fake Eiffel Tower.

Jacob Morrison:

Here’s the intro to the piece that we wrote together for The Real News.

Hamilton Nolan:

On a plain blue lit stage in a plain event space at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, a gruff man with white hair and a thin goatee is complaining about Las Vegas. How it is too hot, how it is too expensive, and how the hotel’s convention management bureaucracy is driving him nuts. You can’t even move a box from left to right without contacting someone to do that, he barks into the microphone.

Jacob Morrison:

This will become a communal ritual by the end of the week. Without fail, like some sort of morning prayer, the convention begins every day with opening grumblings about the convention itself.

Hamilton Nolan:

We can see why. After all, the organization convening here is supposed to be a strong union representing nearly 20,000 members around the country. Far from all the political bluster about the police being defunded. Six years after the earthshaking George Floyd protests sweat the US and public approval for law enforcement plunged to a generational low. These guys have never been more politically and monetarily supported than they are now.

Jacob Morrison:

But there are only about 50 people here in the room with us. Only 28 delegates, 10 alternates and some wives and family members mixed in. The proceedings are pretty boring and energiless. The attendees are grumpy and the air is thick with middle age resentment.

Hamilton Nolan:

Clearly, the convention organizers and speakers were expecting something much different than this. To be honest, so were we, because it’s 2026, Donald Trump is president again, and this is the 23rd quadrennial convention of the International Union of Police Associations, IUPA, which represents tens of thousands of cops and departments from coast to coast.

Jacob Morrison:

The convention was billed as the premier gathering for law enforcement leadership, an event that you don’t want to miss.

Hamilton Nolan:

But it’s absolutely dead here. Even the speakers and attendees don’t want to be here. In fact, they won’t shut up about it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man, that piece is so fire and anyone listening to this, you guys have to go read what Jacob and Hamilton wrote from Las Vegas and thinking about this police union convention that took place in Las Vegas. And I can’t recommend it highly enough. We’ve linked to it in the show notes for this episode. We’ve linked to the additional writing that Hamilton did on it for how things work. But I’ve been dying to actually get you guys on the podcast to talk about it. Now that the reporting trip is over, the pieces are out. There’s so much that I just want to ask you guys about what it was like to be there, what the vibe was, the conversations that you were having that didn’t make it into these pieces. So we got a lot to talk about here, but I guess by way of setting things up and really setting the stage for folks, how the hell did you guys end up at this convention?

Who the hell invited you two assholes to Ayupa’s quadrennial convention in Las Vegas?

Jacob Morrison:

I guess I’ll answer that since I’m the one who got the invitation and I’m not totally sure why, but my best guess is that I got an invitation because I’m the principal officer of an AFL – CIO Labor Council. I actually got multiple invitations in the mail to my house. So IUPA knows where I live, which potentially is a terrifying prospect, but maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe I made a couple of friends who will protect me in IUPA. So I got invitations in the mail to Las Vegas, to the IUPA convention. And I say I’m not totally sure because I did ask a couple of Labor Council presidents if they also got that invitation and they said no. But I think that’s probably

Maximillian Alvarez:

It. Maybe they looked you up and saw the mustache and were like, “Oh yeah, this guy’s with us.”

Jacob Morrison:

Yes, maybe that was it. So I got an invitation in the mail and I thought it would be really funny to go. And so I started asking around for somebody to give me the money to go and I found Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Enter Max, they left baby.

Jacob Morrison:

My sugar daddy, Maximilian Alvarez. So I was able to go to Vegas. I though it would be very funny. And so I though it would be funny to go, but I also wanted to turn it into sort of a real piece of reporting. And I’ve done some reporting and I’ve done some journalism, but I’m still not super comfortable with that as a label for myself. And Hamilton has been in the space for a lot longer than I have. He’s done a lot of really serious journalism and in this space specifically. And so I thought that it would be made a lot better by having somebody a little bit more experienced to be tag along with me. So I registered with Hamilton as my guest. Nobody asked any questions at the registration phase. And so that’s how we got the invitation. We can maybe talk about when we actually showed up a little bit later, but Hamilton, is there anything else that you would want to add to the how did we end up there?

Hamilton Nolan:

No. As you said, I was just along for the ride on this. Jacob got the invite for some reason still unknown. Max paid the bills and I just tagged along and I had done some reporting on Ayupa, particularly in 2020 when we were trying to get him kicked out of AFLCO and I’ve never in my life been able to get Ayupa to respond to any of my emails or phone calls. So the chance to attend the convention to me was very exciting and I was excited to tag along.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So at any point walking in there, I mean, I don’t know, you guys are two white guys walking in there who maybe probably feel differently than I would walking in there. But at any point did the sort of like high teenager in you kick in and be like, “Oh shit, these guys know who we are. They’re going to come for us” kind of thing?

Hamilton Nolan:

We both look a little bit like cops to be fair. So either one of us could be a cop. Yeah.

Jacob Morrison:

I’ve got the mustache. Hamilton has the build. So together we make a cop.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, one of the reasons that the pitch was so compelling to me, we all thought it was funny, weird, interesting. There was something fateful about that invitation ending up in Jacob’s mailbox, just like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts letter, finding him somehow. And I think we could all sense that, but we didn’t quite know what we were going to find there. But like you guys lay out in that intro, you had very different expectations for the convention than what you found. So talk about that. What were you expecting and why? And then when you got there, what were you seeing and how were you processing it?

Hamilton Nolan:

Well, I will point out, first of all, that Jacob was very concerned about kind of OPSEC while we were doing this, cloak and dagger, are they going to find us out? And when we arrived to register for the convention, we said, “Here we are.” We gave them our names and they were like, “We can’t find you.” So they just typed our name and printed it out and gave us a badge. So there was no security at all. And my initial impressions at least, and you can say yours too, Jacob, but I’ve been to a fair number of union conventions and this was probably the most low energy union convention that I’ve ever been to in my life, which was a surprise to me.

Jacob Morrison:

Yes. On the OPSEC thing, there was a continued sort of incuriousness about who we were at the time. I don’t think anybody ever asked you, Hamilton, what you do for a job, which is crazy.

Hamilton Nolan:

Jacob was trying to workshop his cover story and actually nobody gave a damn at all. Yeah.

Jacob Morrison:

Yeah. I talked to this one guy for literally an hour after the convention proceedings were over for the day, and I just kept asking him questions about his job. It was the local president who said in the piece that they’re affiliated with their labor council, but they don’t really do anything over political differences. I spoke to this guy for an hour. He never was curious about me at all. Who is this guy who’s not in IUPA? I mentioned, I’m not in IUPA and no further questions at all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m sure every woman listening to this is saying, “You mean a man didn’t give a shit about anything you had to say?” It’s like big story of the year there, but I guess that’s kind of what I was getting from the reportage that you guys did for this piece is because some of the big questions you and we and you guys as ambassadors for the labor movement were going in there to ask is like, “Why are these guys in the labor movement and do they feel like they’re part of it?” And then you add on all the other politics of the police state that has been ramping up, especially ever since the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. But before we dig into that, I wanted to just ask a little more about the setting here and the sort of Noir-ish kind of presence in this story.

A, because you guys have to humor me and I promise that I was like, “I won’t turn this piece too much into a fake Hunter S. Thompson piece, but I feel like there’s something genuinely kind of overlapping here with what Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was actually doing and observing at the time in the America that existed back then. And you guys are doing the same in a very different kind of America in a very different Las Vegas where most of that noir has been paved over, blown up and rebuilt and consolidated under a few kind of mega owners of the Strip. So talk a little more about the sort of setting and the proceedings of the convention itself before we dig into the kind of politics of it.

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah. I mean, Fear and Low in Las Vegas, for those of you who haven’t read it, a large scene in the book is them attending a cop convention while high on a lot of powerful drugs. And Jacob refused to take any mescaline despite my trying to peer pressure him. So we didn’t have the drug part, but Vegas is an extremely fucking weird setting as anybody knows who’s been to the Vegas Strip. Paris, Las Vegas has a huge fake hot air balloon out front and a huge fake Eiffel Tower inside. There’s chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. There’s huge oil paintings of Louis XIV on the outside of the ballroom where we were. And then five steps away is a sign leading to the strip club and the next hotel and a cigar bar where middle-aged guys are sexually harassing the waitresses. So that was kind of the setting that we were in.

And ironically, Vegas, of course, the entire Vegas strip is unionized and the Kulinary Union in Las Vegas, one of the most powerful local unions in America. So Vegas is in a very real sense a union town and we were here for union convention and then the guys proceeded to kind of bitch about the fact that the union imposed a bunch of rules in the hotel. So that sort of came full circle for me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Jacob, let me ask, had you ever been to Las Vegas before?

Jacob Morrison:

No. No, I’d never been to Las Vegas.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, country boy. What was it like going into that for the first time?

Jacob Morrison:

It was definitely crazy. Not only grew up sort of out in the county, but also very religious. And so very different vibes. They call it Sin City for a reason, obviously. And there’s an energy in Las Vegas, obviously, all of the gambling, the drinking, the girls and everything like that was just so contrasted with the very sort of dull, except for Rizzo. And I hope that, Hamilton, you’ll be able to talk about Rizzo, but even that was kind of dull a little bit, people kind of got tired of it. But the convention was just like… There was one time when I got up because there was a part of the convention that was clearly not newsworthy. It was very internal stuff and just not very interesting. So I left to go get lunch, I think. And I happened to be in the elevator up to my room with another officer or with an officer, I’m not an officer, with an officer.

And I asked him where he was going. He was like, “I’m going to take a nap. This is terrible.” I was like, “Oh, is this your first convention?” He said, “Yeah, it’s awful. I hate it basically.” I very, very much underestimated, like you talked about the contrast of what we were expecting. I was expecting not a huge convention, 20,000 members is not a very large international union, but I expected at least a hundred delegates and then some alternates and some family. That’s sort of what I was expecting at the least. The sort of mean I was expecting was maybe 200, maybe 250. And so getting there, there’s only 28 people who can vote on… That was crazy to me. So I was way overestimating how many people would be there and I was way underestimating how big Las Vegas is because part of my plan was I’m going to go down after the convention proceedings to the hotel bar and find one of these guys after the proceedings and shoot the shit with them for a few hours and get super drunk.

I really wanted to do that. And as soon as the proceedings was over and people left, they blended into the thousands of people that were there and there was just no finding anybody or connecting after the convention if you do not get their phone number and talk to them and make plans. There were so few people there and it was kind of… I don’t know.

Hamilton Nolan:

Jacob was envisioning a Holiday Inn. And in fact, the Paris Las Vegas has 3,500 rooms.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Well, it’s so wild because I grew up with Las Vegas being a big part of our lives as it was for so many people in the Southwest, particularly Southern California. Because in those sort of post mob town days of Las Vegas in the ’80s and ’90s, they were really trying to and succeeded in rebranding Vegas as the family friendly haven of these massive hotels, these big ridiculously overdone shows and buffets and pools and arcades. It was awesome. I’ve honestly had more fun in Las Vegas with my siblings and cousins in the ’90s when I was a kid than I’ve ever had being there after I was 21 and could drink. I don’t know what that says, but it’s also like I’ve watched Vegas change a lot over the years. A lot, a lot. I’ve seen some of those old hotels get blown up or live television feeds of them getting blown up.

And then you go there after a few years of not going there and all the things you remember are gone or renamed or under a new theme and new ownership. There is something uniquely American that is very intensely expressed in Las Vegas. And again, I feel like that is still the case now in the settings that you guys were in, but I want to talk about the union and what state is IUPA in? What the hell do they do and what were they doing at this convention?

Jacob Morrison:

The state of IUPA, it’s funny, because the turnout was so low, the energy was so low, it felt very familiar to me as the member of a public sector union where we have little… There’s not a whole lot of activity among our members and we don’t have very much power, which was very surprising because of all the reasons that we say in the introduction to the peace, the power of police has basically never been better. The police unions are politically feated and they didn’t even have a congressperson at their convention. I was expecting at least one sort of right-wing congressperson to be there. And the highest ranking official that they got was some deputy assistant under secretary of Homeland Security who is the liaison to local governments. I mean, that was sort of surprising to me. I guess

Maximillian Alvarez:

The state doesn’t need the police when we have a police state.

Jacob Morrison:

That may be part of it or it may be that IUPA, I mentioned this in the piece as well, that because IUPA is such a small union and there are other big police unions like the FOP, the PBA, that maybe this union in particular, and potentially because of its affiliation with the AFL – CIO, I’m not really sure and I wasn’t able to get an interview with Sam Cabral, the international president. I tried multiple times while we were on the trip and wasn’t able to make that happen. He would’ve been the one to answer those questions about sort of national politics within the labor movement and with the administration and with other politicians. And I really hate that I wasn’t able to get that interview, but those are questions that still remain. Is it because the police state doesn’t need the police unions or is it primarily because of the way that IUPA itself as an entity is situated in the political environment and there’s not really much of a need for them when they have the PBA and the FOP to be a liaison to them for law enforcement?

I’m not sure.

Hamilton Nolan:

So yeah, IUPA is a relatively small police union. The Fraternal Order of Police and the Police Benevolent Association are bigger. What makes IUPA interesting is they’re the only police union in the AFL – CIO. So they’re the only pure police union that is formally aligned with what is effectively the labor movement, the AFL – CO, America’s biggest labor federation. So they’re in an interesting political place. I mean, the convention itself, if you say, was this a union convention or a cop convention? It was much more a cop convention. And part of a cop convention, I think this is sort of maybe the symbolic part of all this is like they want to go to Vegas and play golf, man. That’s why people would attend the IUPA convention in Vegas is to go play golf. And part of the reason why Sam Cabral, IUPA’s president, sounded so pissed off every day as he was conducting this convention is I think they had so much busy work to do that he wasn’t able to just let everybody go out and play golf.

But the vendors that showed up next to the convention were like cop stuff, body cams, several of which were stolen from the reception at the last night of the convention, which was funny.

Jacob Morrison:

Yeah, there was a vendor for assault boats, right?

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah. Assault boats.

Jacob Morrison:

Which is correct. The union is not going to be the ones purchasing assault. And so that adds to

Hamilton Nolan:

The – Right. It wasn’t like DSA was there in the vendor section. I mean, it was stuff that cops would want, although they were not allowed to have actual firearms in the hotel. So when they auctioned off a rifle, they just had to have a picture of it and I think to deliver it later on. I

Jacob Morrison:

Tried to get the rifle myself because that would’ve been funny, but unfortunately, my raffle was not picked.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. I mean, you can only commit so far to the bit, I suppose. And insofar as this was still a labor conference and a union convention where stuff was getting done, I want to talk about that, right? I mean, because there’s so many big questions here that we… And by we, I mean people in the broader labor movement, people connected to it, who support it, who have family members in it, who believe in it, and just working people in general who believe that workers banding together and fighting for our needs together is the way forward. And people like us who have questions of what the hell kind of relationship are we supposed to have to the police? There’s so much kind of intensity in those debates online and in person that also seem to contrast so much with the setting you were in, the discussions that were being had, and the mentalities of the people attending this conference.

So talk more about that. Do they see themselves as part of the labor movement? Do they still operate like a union?

Hamilton Nolan:

Well, the most fascinating part of this conference to me was getting to be in the room when a police union is talking to itself, presumably with nobody else in the room, right? There was no obvious press here or anything. So that was actually a very interesting kind of look behind the curtain because of the tone that a lot of the speakers had at the convention. And you saw really the qualities, I guess, that people think about police, but maybe don’t get to see so directly. The defensiveness, the kind of military mindedness, the us against the world thing, the we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys thing. All of that was very much manifested in the speakers that we had, including some of the speakers were so wacky and sort of bizarre and crazy that you start to worry, these are the guys who are talking to the guys with guns.

I mean, that doesn’t make me feel very good. One of the ones that stood out to me crossing over for the union part is there was a guy who spoke from a legal defense fund that serves police unions and all police unions can pay in to tap into the services of this legal defense fund and they will fund legal defense if you, as a police union member, do anything. And he was like, “It could be easy stuff like a dead body in the back of your car or basic stuff like you walk into the jail cell, the guy’s dead, and next thing you know –

Maximillian Alvarez:

Quick question, wasn’t Harvey Keitel from Pulp Fiction doing this?”

Hamilton Nolan:

I mean, to me it sounded awesome. I was like, “I would love to be in a legal defense.” He was like, “Even if you’re here in Las Vegas off duty, if something happens and something goes down and you got to shoot a guy, I mean, we will come to your defense if it was sort of a police action.” So that was pretty interesting to me.

Jacob Morrison:

And absolutely no sort of hemming and hawing about that either. That’s the thing that really kind of stuck out to me about that. And I guess it makes sense because they’re talking to themselves and they don’t feel like they have to justify it, but there really was no attempt to justify why should you as an off-duty cop from Florida be able to shoot and kill somebody in Las Vegas and have a Cadillac legal defense for it? I mean, why should you have that? No attempt to justify that at all and no attempt to reckon with the way that folks who are asking for more police accountability feel about the police and the reason that they would say they don’t have to, even beyond the fact that they felt like they were talking to themselves and so they don’t have to do that. But they cited approval polls from Gallup and stuff about how something like 74% of Americans have some or a great deal of confidence in their local police.

And so they feel like they have sort of won the propaganda war and it’s us actually who are wrong.

Hamilton Nolan:

I was just going to add, if you’ve been to a lot of union conventions or you spent time in union world period, at any union events, there’s usually a lot of talk about solidarity, the basic union buzzwords, and there was almost none of that at this convention. And that really leapt out to me too. I mean, I’ve never been to a union convention or event of any type where almost nobody said solidarity, union, we’re all together, very little of that at all.

Jacob Morrison:

Certainly no attempts to make alliances or highlight alliances that they have with other unions, which do exist, and you can read the piece for more of that locally, but there were no other unions that were speakers there. I mean, at most union conventions, you’ll have other unions speaking. I mean, I think that at the Letter Carriers Convention, Sean O’Brien spoke, at the UAW convention, Sarah Nelson has spoke.That’s a pretty common thing. At the AFL – CIO conventions in Alabama, we have bunch of union speakers. We’ve had people from the UMWA, we’ve had Sarah Nelson, and no other unions at all, not even other cop unions.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and for that reason, there was so much in the figure of Sam Cabral, IUPA president, and the sort of vibe and mentality that he embodied that echoes the steward of Gondor, just really having this sense of we have no friends, we are the thin blue line defending everyone from the darkness that is always ever creeping, but now the darkness is creeping from within our own ranks and we’re the ones holding society together, yada, yada, yada. It feels like so much of that was dripping from the details that you guys gave in this incredible piece, but –

Jacob Morrison:

Can I say something really quick about Cabral? He gave his speech, I think it was either right before or right after he was reelected president of the International, and not a good speaker, which is fine. Lots of people aren’t good speakers, but he was not a good speaker. I don’t think he would say he was a good speaker, but he had some interesting stuff in his backstory that I really would’ve loved to have asked him about. He said that a big reason that he decided to join the union was because of his dad who was in the Meat Cutters Union, which was a union that ultimately became a part of the UFCW, and about how inspired he was by his dad fighting for people that were being bullied, and how he doesn’t like bullies, and how that was such an inspiration to him. And so when he got on with the police force, he wanted to do that for rank and file officers who were being bullied by management.

And I thought that to me was basically the only time that I heard anything from Cabral that sounded like it tracked with my theory or the way that I think of unions. It seemed like there was a real sort of grain of unionism there in Cabral that I found interesting and I would’ve really liked to have talked to him about, because it seems like that sort… Of solidarity with the common every man, like the every man outside of law enforcement has really been buried. And it made me think of Bill Fletcher. I spoke to him for this piece and he talked about how in AFGE, among some of the law enforcement sections, particularly the federal prison guards, he told me, and this wasn’t in the piece, he told me that these guards, literally every single day, they are surrounded by people who would kill them.

They would, a lot of them would kill these guards at the drop of a hat. And doing that and not having a community outside of this law enforcement community to keep you grounded and to make you realize that that is not the rest of the world, the real world does not operate like everybody is out to kill you. If you don’t have a community that can ground you in a reality that’s outside of that, it sort of breaks your brain and it gets kind of boiled alive. And I wonder if something like that sort of happened to Cabral. It was something that I would’ve loved to have asked him about.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and in terms of what you guys were able to ask other attendees and speakers about, like we said, there’s so much here that you guys got the chance to kind of pose to these union members who are part of the only cop union affiliated with the AFL – CIO. And you write beautifully in this piece, and I’m just going to read it, where you guys say, “It is by no means the largest police union in America, but AIUPA has the distinction of being the only police union that is a member of the AFL – CIO. It joined the Labor Federation in 1979, making it a formal but uncomfortable partner to every progressive labor union and every rank and file union member in the AFL – CIO who has ever had to question why they should be affiliated with a union representing the same kind of cops who beat and arrest them, their union siblings, and their neighbors at protests and on picket lines.” So when you guys talked to them about that, what did they have to say?

Hamilton Nolan:

Well, first of all, I’ll say Sam Cabral, all three of us would love to interview you, Sam Cabral, so please reach out to us anytime, open invitation. I, as I mentioned, have covered IUPA a bit, particularly in 2020. Their media relations are kind of interesting to me. They’re very quiet. Absolutely, not only do they not do outreach very much, but they rarely respond to not just me from the left wing magazine, but to almost anybody. If you look them up in Google News, very little news about them apart from the fact that they had to go bankrupt because one of their people got sued for sexual harassment, but that’s a different story. But when you look at what Sam Cabral is on the record having done in the past decade or so, when Ferguson was going on and Michael Brown was killed and Richard Trumpka, who was the head of the AFL – CIO tried to make some positive statements about police reform, Sam Cabral sent a very angry, scathing letter to the AFL – COO, rejecting the idea that there was any racism in policing.

Then fast forward to 2020, George Floyd, once again, the AFL – CO, Richard Trumpka, tries to make some supportive gestures towards Black Lives Matter. And again, Sam Cabral sends an angry, scathing letter saying that the AFL – CO is demonizing police and how dare you do this and how dare you suggest police are racist. And then at this convention, a huge theme of the convention was like the crazies are trying to defund police and putting us all in danger and we’re fighting back and there’s this horrible danger on the horizon in the form of the democratic socialists who are going to defund police once again. And it’s fictional in a sense, but it’s also an interesting kind of look into the mind state. And when you talk about their PR strategy, one thing I learned at this convention, which I did not know before was that IUPA gives an award to journalists almost every year at their conventions.

And they’ve been doing so for decades now. And a lot of them are, it’s sort of like you’re the journalist who wrote great stuff about the cops, an actual award with a plaque and everything. And a lot of them were to, because they had a list of all of them in the brochure. And a lot of them were to sites like lawenforcementnews.com or some of them were to Fox News figures, Greta Van Sustran and stuff like that, who you wouldn’t really be surprised by. But some of them were also to Bob Schaefer from CBS News and people like that who had apparently accepted this award from IUPA. And again, it’s like that bunker mentality of talking to the world that Jacob touched on. It’s like it’s us and our friends and then it’s our enemies. And I think that came through a lot at this convention for me.

Jacob Morrison:

It was funny that this year’s recipient did not come to pick up her prize.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, again, it sounds like hardly anyone came, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised there, but I wanted to save this for the last 10 minutes after all the heavy lifting you guys have done to go there to Vegas, to be there for this convention, to write about it, to go through all the editing, co-publishing, all that. But we got 10 minutes here to sort of address the big question that the feature piece leads with is are cops part of the labor movement or are they an existential threat to it? I mean, I wanted to sort of ask for your guys’ thoughts on that, understanding that there are plenty of people, including people who listen to the show, people that we have interviewed and worked with who are not your typical sort of DSA defund, all cops are bastards kind of people. But as listeners can hear, you guys have been invested in this question, Hamilton, for longer than any of us, but it’s been something that you’ve looked at, seen, talked about, analyzed for many years.

So I wanted to ask where you stood on that question before the convention, if anything from the convention has changed your mind. And I guess having somehow gotten into this sad, decrepit, soulless convention and seeing a bit how the sausage is made, what do you think the rest of us on the outside who never get to see that need to understand about these kinds of cops and this kind of union?

Hamilton Nolan:

Well, I’ll put my cards on the table because I really do have an opinion on this that’s maybe stronger than a typical journalist you might think of. But in 2020 when the George Floyd protests were happening and Black Lives Matter was happening, there was a national movement within the labor movement to kick IUPA out of the AFL – CO. I was active in that. My union, the Writers Guild of America East, which is an AFL – CO member, passed a resolution. So that came from our entire union urging the AFL – CO to kick out IUPA, which the AFL – CO did not. And I also reported on the AFL – CO and IUPA. And what I saw really was the AFL crazily trying to sweep it under the rug, really, really trying to minimize it. Eventually they sort of formed a commission that came out with the report a year later that they totally buried and didn’t publicize.

And that report, in fact, rejected calls to defund police and rejected calls to kick out IUPA. And the same people that put out that report are still running the AFL – CO. So my belief, and it’s a belief that a lot of other people share and have written eloquently about, is that the goals of police unions are fundamentally incompatible with the solidarity that defines the labor movement. My personal belief is police can have unions. They are workers. They work, they have a job. They can, as far as I’m concerned, have collective bargaining and bargain over their wages and working conditions. But that is a different proposition from them being in our labor federation and being a formal part of the labor movement, because being a part of labor movement demands solidarity. Solidarity is a give and take. You give solidarity and you get the benefit of solidarity.

And that is not something that I think police are existentially capable of doing or that we’ve ever seen police do in the history of America. And everybody who says that, “Oh no, no, we need to keep them close and this is going to make them better,” it’s never come true. And I think at some point we have to recognize that. So I would love to see this issue, and thanks for bringing it up, Max, but I’d love to see the issue once again get elevated because the only way the labor movement’s going to make progress on this is for a lot of people to agitate around it and organize around it within your local unions and elevate that up the chain.

Jacob Morrison:

Yeah. When I talked to Bill Fletcher about this, he has basically the same position as Nolan. And I asked him if that position was, does that sort of run counter to what you told me you’ll recall about the federal prison guards, how if these guards, they don’t have a community outside of law enforcement that sort of grounds them in the real world, then they sort of fly off the handle and become crazy. Is that not an argument for maintaining them as part of our labor movement and engaging with them? And he said that the problem with that is that within the Labor Federation, within the AFL – CIO and within unions that have sections of law enforcement, that never actually happens. Potentially he said that maybe that’s an argument to do it actually, but in the real world that hasn’t happened. I mean, like Hamilton talked about, there was this report and they said, “We believe that there would be more good from engaging our police affiliates than isolating them.” And maybe that’s true.

And I think potentially my interviews with leaders of the Memphis Police Association, maybe they speak to the value of that. I have a full hour up on the Valley Labor Report with the vice president of the Memphis Police Association. And long story short, I was able to write some in The Real News and talked about some in my interview about the ways that the Memphis Police Association very much unlike other police associations has stood in solidarity with unions in Memphis, has supported collective bargaining rights, not just for themselves, but for the other city unions, has supported striking workers and not arrested striking workers when they were called on to harass them by the boss and anti-union forces. And so maybe the unique history of Memphis, maybe there’s a path forward there, but you can’t talk about that as a path forward without recognizing that even though that has been talked about in other places within AFGE, within the AFL – CIO, the leaders of these federations show no appetite to actually make that happen.

And the leaders of the police associations by and large show no appetite to allow that to happen to them. I mean, there’s just no appetite at the international level from IUPA and certainly not from the FOP or the PBA for any sort of reform. And I talked to Covington about this, the vice president of the Memphis Police Association, John Covington, about why would you want to be sort of burdened with the responsibility of responding to the homelessness crisis in this country, the mental health crisis in this country, and every societal ill should not be handled by an armed agent of the state is sort of how I feel about it. And he had his response and it was basically like that these things can get dangerous and so basically we need somebody with a gun who can kill somebody if it gets out of hand.

And he actually even pushed back against having social workers in addition to cop teams because he was like, “If we have a social worker there, then that’s another person that I have to protect as the one with the gun.” And I think that is sort of part of his brain being broken and being always in the world of it’s us against them and everybody is out to kill me. And I don’t think that that is actually the world that we live in. Even when we’re talking about the mental health crisis and the homelessness crisis, I think that by and large, most of those people are not going to be violent unless violence is threatened against or put against them. And that’s just not really something that cops seem willing to tolerate.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and at a certain point, you really got to be able to see past the goodness real are perceived of the individual people wearing badges and think about, to borrow Hamilton’s term, the sort of existential basis of this job and the sort of powers of that badge. There are certain built-in structural foundational incentives that are literally pushing those people, good or not, to do the opposite of what everyone else would have to do in that situation. It’s like arguing why business owners all turn into Jeff Bezos want to be power hungry monsters because they’re literally incentivized to. They’re rewarded for being that. And the state apparatus is constantly giving them benefits for doing that. And the same sort of thing applies to cop unions, right? Why would they have solidarity when they are constantly being kind of enabled by the state to get by without it?

My mind always goes to what union workers and retirees in Wisconsin told me about Act 10 in 2011. When Governor Scott Walker and the Republicans during the Great Recession were capitalizing on people’s pain to just go all out against public sector workers and unions, go after their collective bargaining rights, their wages, their ability to even maintain their unions. But of course, there were carve outs for cop unions, firefighters, and deputy sheriffs. And that kind of pattern has been repeated in so many ways around the country. So it does sort of beg the question of why would they show solidarity with us if they are always sort of incentivized not to and rewarded for it?

Hamilton Nolan:

Something that is so relevant to this discussion I think is that this summer, 2026, the AFL – CO’s convention was held in Minneapolis. They purposely held it in Minneapolis in order to celebrate the Minnesota labor movement’s actions in opposition to ICE. So the whole kind of underlying theme of the AFL – CO convention this year was we are celebrating the Minnesota Labor Movement and what they did to resist ICE, particularly in Minneapolis. And at IUPA’s convention, they have speakers up there celebrating the agreements that local unions strike to help out ICE and help them in their deportation campaign. And it comes down to which side are you on? Everybody in the labor movement knows the song, which side are you on? And I would challenge the AFL – CIO to tell me how you reconcile these two points, how you believe you can have a union in your federation that is celebrating and assisting ICE’s deportation campaign at the same time you as a federation are purportedly celebrating our resistance to that thing.

It doesn’t work.

Jacob Morrison:

The International Union of Police Associations was the only affiliate of the AFL – CIO to not attend the quadrennial convention in June in Minneapolis.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our special guests, the incredible labor journalists and real news contributors, Hamilton Nolan and Jacob Morrison. Go follow and support Hamilton Substack, how things work and read his book, The Hammer. Go follow and support Jacob and the Valley Labor Report. My God, we need their work now more than ever. And I cannot stress this enough. Go read their amazing pieces about the IUPA Convention in Las Vegas that we published on the Real News website and that Hamilton published at How Things Work. We’ve linked to both of those in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you guys for caring about this. We do all of this work for you, but we cannot do it without you.

And that goes for us here at Working People in the Real News and also for Hamilton, Jacob, and every other labor journalist that you support. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Battle for Free Speech, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez.

Hamilton Nolan:

I’m Hamilton Nolan.

Jacob Morrison:

I’m Jacob Morrison.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Take care of yourselves.

Jacob Morrison:

Take care of each other.

Hamilton Nolan:

Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Treasure Thoreson:

Tuesday morning, June 16th, I had just woken up. I was in my pajamas. I hear a knock on the door at seven in the morning, and it’s a woman standing there in business clothes with a tactical vest on top that said Homeland Security.

Alec Stewart:

I was in my car backing out of my garage to go to work, coffee in hand. As soon as I backed out of my parking pad, several squads rolled up. A bunch of agents jumped out of the vehicles. I went to just text my aunt, because I have a dog. I assumed I’d be going to jail or something, and that’s when they smashed my window.

Treasure Thoreson:

I see six more agents standing in front of my house. The woman at the door, she just said, “We’re here with a warrant for your arrest for a conspiracy to harm or impede a federal officer.”.

Alec Stewart:

Exposes that while the government was targeting immigrant communities, tearing families apart, abducting children and murdering spokes in the street.

Emmett Doyle:

I had just typed in on my phone the location of the house that we were working on that day. I was boxed in by a vehicle, and so I rolled my window down to ask the guy like, “Hey, what’s the deal? You’re a pretty bad driver. What’s going on?” And then I looked around and I realized that my car had been surrounded. There was a swarm of armed federal officers with HSI on their uniforms.

Alec Stewart:

I do not think it’s a coincidence that over half of us are rank and file union folk. I think that speaks to, again, the working class nature of both the attack by the federal government and the working class predominant response to that attack.

Treasure Thoreson:

We had at least one person from every single site who was plugged into our committee and was able to get information out to their members and arm their building with the knowledge that they needed to face this kind of violence. And people stepped up in really major ways. Everybody did something, whether it was patrols or walking students to and from school, riding in a cab with a kid to and from school, making sure that their parents had rent money. There were some schools in the district that were delivering hundreds of boxes of food every week.

Emmett Doyle:

The unions that did get involved, I think understand what the labor movement is about in a way that some of our other unions have forgotten. An injury to one is an injury to all isn’t just a moral statement. It’s a hard reality of life. And the unions that stood up during Metro search understood that and demonstrated what solidarity means.

Treasure Thoreson:

We got a lot of great information from the Chicago Teachers Union who had been fighting back ice for months at the point when they came here. But we learned a lot from their struggle and were able to adapt that to fit what we were doing here in Minneapolis.

Alec Stewart:

And that was all without coercion, without money exchanging hands. That was just horizontal organizing. And I think how effective that is, how the power of mutual aid and horizontal organizing is evident because of this indictment. This wouldn’t have happened if what thousands of Minnesotans were doing hadn’t worked. I think the success of the January 23rd general strike speaks to that connection of the labor movement and just seeing the numbers and the outpouring of support for such a strike is historic.

Emmett Doyle:

I think that the general strike that happened in Minneapolis terrified the federal government. There were downtown, just hundreds of thousands of workers in the streets marching. And people have to remember this was severe sub-zero. It was a fantastic feeling of power and of joy and of resistance. And unfortunately, the next day that joy and resistance was answered tragically with the brutality of the beating and murder of Valence Preddy. But I think that the general strike was a major turning point in the regime’s logic of violence that they realized they couldn’t defeat the city.

Background music:

Stores are getting thin. There’s passing down that’s going on. Scabs anymore. We’ll put ourselves in union down this year of 34. Can’t you hear the mark? Either sign or behind. See the times get better when we hold that picket line.

Alec Stewart:

The revelation of Operation Puppet Master exposes that while the government was targeting immigrant communities, tearing families apart, abducting children and murdering our neighbors in the street, they were also attempting to disrupt and dismantle one of the facets of Minnesota that makes us so unique. And that is our strong and unified labor movement.

Isaac Sant:

This is not just an attack on me and my friends and our little group. This is an attack on our entire community. They were spying on us from day one. In fact, five days before Operation Metro Surge was declared on November 28th, they began spying on our organizations. These prosecutions were inevitable. Somebody was going to be on trial in there. If it wasn’t us, it was going to be somebody else. It was going to be one of you. We were being prosecuted for doing something that every single person that everybody and their mom in Twin Cities did to resist their federal occupation.

Emmett Doyle:

This case is meant to intimidate the entire community. It’s meant to tie up the time and efforts of many activists. But beyond that, as a conspiracy case, what they’re trying to do is set up a situation where they can expand and expand and expand the conspiracy. They’re trying to use our own solidarity and close-knit community against us through guilt by association.

Treasure Thoreson:

They want us to be separated. They want to separate out the good protestors from the bad protestor. I don’t want folks to feel afraid to stand up for their neighbor and do the right thing.

Alec Stewart:

It was such an obvious threat on what the Twin Cities is all about, which is community connections and helping each other’s neighbors. And the face of fascism, complacency, I think has no place. I think there was just a very justified feeling of standing up.

Emmett Doyle:

The support and solidarity towards us by our community has been overwhelming in just the most amazing way. I

Treasure Thoreson:

Think that they see our ability to bring people together as threatening. However, going after the 15 of us isn’t going to stop anything in Minneapolis or the Twin Cities because this is a place full of great organizers. We can’t let them bully us out of doing the right thing. We need to stand strong in our values and our morals and know that we are protecting our neighbors and that is the right thing to do. They’re afraid of us and that’s why we’re getting this response.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are talking about labor unions, why they are important, why they have always been important for working people, and why they are more important now than ever, and why you should be part of one. In their new book, Fired Up About Unions, veteran labor educator, organizer, and writer Cole Rockharts writes, “We are living in a pivotal moment in labor history. At a time when corporations have more power, profit, and political influence than ever before, workers are leading inspiring union organizing campaigns and taking on bosses to win big. These workers are fighting not just for themselves, but for their communities too. Their struggles reveal that everyday people can unite, change their conditions, and build better workplaces and a better world.” So this is what we’re going to be talking about today, and we’re really basing this conversation on Cole Rockhart’s great new book, which everyone should go read.

You can find it using the links in the show notes for this episode. And I’m really grateful to have Cole Rockarts themselves joining us on the show today. So Cole, welcome. Congratulations on this important book. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about the book and where it came from?

Cole Rockarts:

Absolutely. Thanks, Maximillian. It’s really exciting also to hear someone else read it because it’s just been in the ether for such a long time, so thanks for that. It’s very cool. So Fired Up About Unions, which again, you can get at BTL between the lines in Canada or AK Press in the US or your local library, give it an order there, really examines what unions are, demystifies the myths around unions, that we don’t need them, that they’re outdated, that young workers can’t be organized or different types of workers can’t be organized, and really lays the groundwork of why unions have become so weak in our respective countries in Canada and the US, and talks about why young people can be the antidote to all of the problems facing work and really unions themselves. Unions aren’t perfect, but if we take the view that unions are made up of people and we recognize that our coworkers are just regular people and we all ultimately want the same things, and that’s higher wages, protections at work, health and safety on the job, and better, that’s the great place where we can start to come together and change not only our individual situations, but as I say in the book, our communities and even beyond.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. And we’re going to be talking about how to do that, how to do better, get better, and fight better from the shop floor and beyond. And I’m so grateful with Cole’s help that we’ve pulled together an incredible panel of folks here, union organizers and members from across Canada and the US. And we’re going to dig into all this now, but first I wanted to ask if y’all could introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Hassan Husseini:

My name is Hassan Husseini. My day job is a national negotiator with the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which is the largest federal public sector union in Canada. As such, I’m also unionized member of Unifor Local 2025. Unifor is a merger of a couple of private sector unions in Canada, one of them being the Canadian Auto Workers that split from the American Auto Workers Union back in the 80s. And I am also a member of the National Steering Committee of Labor for Palestine Canada. I’ve been active in social justice and labor movement for 30 plus, maybe more years. Happy to be here. Thank you.

Tina Oh:

Hi folks. My name is Tina Oh. My pronouns are she/her. I’m joining in from Halifax, Nova Scotia here in Eastern Canada. My role is organizing coordinator with Service Employees International Union Local two. We’re the only national SEIU division in Canada, but I also have a role as vice president for Eastern Canada. So the region is all of Atlanta, Canada, Newfoundland, PI, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Really happy to be here.

Alex Raymond:

Hey y’all, I’m Alex Raymond. I am a mental health worker out of Richmond, Virginia, United States, and I am just a regular worker organizer, very new to the labor space, but very fired up to be here.

Cole Rockarts:

My name is Cole Rocker. My pronouns are they/them, and I am a longtime union staffer, although the veteran brand doesn’t sit well when Hassan’s in the room. I’ve been working for labor unions for the past 10 years, and that’s been in Canada and the US. And I’m now a labor educator at a healthcare union in Los Angeles. And I am the author of the forthcoming book, Fired Up About Unions, which is about why young people can change the working world and the labor movement.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. So maybe we need an updated taxonomy. We got veterans here and then we got legends with Hassan. So we got the full spectrum here, baby. And I’m so grateful to have all of you on and to hear all of your perspectives on this important subject. So I want to dive right in and ask y’all, what have unions meant to you over your lifetime? What did you know or not know about unions before being part of one? And I’m asking that as someone who does a labor show now, but knew jack shit about unions for most of my life.

Alex Raymond:

I kind of want to just directly responding to that, that was sort of my experience, that labor organizing in mental health, that’s really not a thing. But over the years that I’ve been in this industry, almost 15 years coming up this November, we just see wages decrease the amount of patients or clients that we are responsible for increase expectations going up while benefits go down. And a lot of us just silently accept that. We get into this line of work because we care and it almost feels like a betrayal to the work that we’re so committed to, to even think that better is possible. But it had always been a discussion. And growing up, my dad, he was an organizer with SEIU in Boston during his residency, and he would always tell me this story when he was laid off for labor organizing, that it was just the proudest moment of his professional life when all of his coworkers came to his shitty Boston apartment and they essentially shut the hospital down.

There was a lot of anxiety about what that would do to patients, but there was a lot of camaraderie and that’s something that’s missing nowadays. We’re struggling to get by and we deserve better. And I think that sort of bubbled up over the last couple of years. And a group of us got together a couple years back and we started organizing from the ground up, literally Googling how to make union. And we came into contact with a lot of people that have a lot of expertise and thank God because we needed all the help we can get. And we went from zero union density to more than zero and growing each and every month. And we formed a union here in Richmond, Virginia with Teamsters Local 322. And now there are unions with United Automotive Workers within our industry as well as National Union of Healthcare Workers and United Food and Commercial Workers.

And we’ve had to learn what all those acronyms mean and what they can mean for people in our field. And it’s been a huge thing. But from my perspective growing up, I’d always thought that was such an important thing to do, but just never really knew how to go about doing it.

Hassan Husseini:

From my experience way back when I first became unionized, and I think it’s still with us today, the thinking about unions is that it’s only about money. It’s only going to put more money in your pocket by increasing your wages from what you had before you were unionized. And to me, the thing that struck me, and I think it’s still with me today and in the organizing campaigns that I was involved in, it is really important for us to recognize and talk to workers about the fact that it’s about increasing your power in the workplace. It is about working class empowerment, and it is about some of the things that Cole just rhymed off with respect to health and safety, with respect to being valued in the workplace, giving your voice on so many different committees, and taking away the power, the exclusive power that bosses have without a union.

So I didn’t know that at the beginning. I came in, I though, okay, my wage will go up a little bit, not knowing that it’s going to give me so much more empowerment both individually and as a collective within the workplace. And that is something that opened my eyes to huge possibilities for that particular workplace I was in, but for the working class generally. And that lesson is still with me up to this point. I think things are getting even worse in terms of capitalist bosses propaganda that we can give you a little bit of a bump in your wages. You don’t have to go to unions because they know that when you unionize, you have more power in the workplace and that’s what scares the shit out of them.

Tina Oh:

Hasan, I’m just going to piggyback off that because I think that last point you just mentioned about how non-union workers are still gaining and benefiting off the winds of union workers is so relevant and I think that’s how I want to answer this question. It’s going to take me a second to get there, but I’ll get there. So my family moved to Edmonton, Alberta when I was two years old. My sister was five and it was just my mom and my dad. There was no other kind of family support systems that my parents had in Canada nor in Edmonton. So that like many non-economic migrants, that meant working traditionally low wage service jobs.

My parents have never worked a union job in their working careers in this country. And one of my dad’s longest held jobs was as a housekeeper and a janitor at the Western Hotel, and that was a non-union job. But the reason why that’s relevant is that that job, even though it was non-union, it was the first job that my dad had that gave us health benefits. It was the job that ended up getting us permanent residency so that we could stay in the country. And the reason why, of course, that connects to unions is because the work of the private sector hotel unions that have raised the industry standards to the point that these non-union hotels cannot recruit workers without offering health benefits, without offering them a pathway to permanent residency. And so I think about that job, especially now that I work for a janitor’s union, SEIU Local two, half of our membership is janitors, private sector contracted out janitors.

And now that I’m in this role and I think back to my childhood and the horrors really that my parents had to face in their working careers, I know absolutely without a doubt in my mind that our lives would’ve been better had my dad had a union at that hotel or any union really. And at the same time, I also can see how our lives still greatly benefited from the wins of the working class that have progressed the labor movement to the point where non-union jobs are still offering health benefits and whatnot. So I just wanted to leave that there.

Cole Rockarts:

I think for me, it’s a bit of a combination of all these things. As my co-podcasters have just said, a union can be the difference between having healthcare or not, having benefits or not. When I was younger, I didn’t realize that my mom was unionized. She was a teacher for many years before she retired, and it wasn’t until I started getting involved in my student movement. And in Canada, the student union system is quite different than in the US, and I think the US should absolutely steal this idea from Canada. But many of our student organizations that fight for lower tuition fees or free tuition or more rights for international students or different campaigns of equity on campuses are unionized. So my first foray into having a union was starting to work at the student union and run all these campaigns as a student organizer.

And so it wasn’t until I started getting involved that I had this conversation with my mom about, “Oh, there’s this union.” And I was told to go to a meeting because there’s free pizza and I wanted free pizza. And she said, “Oh yeah, I’ve been involved in my union. I was a shop steward.” I was like, “What the hell is a shop steward? What does that even mean? And it’s essentially the person that represents the workplace while they’re actually working in there, and you can go to them with questions about your contract or different issues you’re having.” And I said, “What? You were a shop steward?” She was like, “Yeah, I used to carry the book and the book is the contract.” And I said, “I didn’t know that.” She said, “Yeah, I’ve been out on strike. I’ve been on the picket line.” And so it was years later that I realized like, “Oh my God, my parent has been a union member, has fought for these things, and it’s because of her that I have the life that I have.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s always so fascinating to me to hear stories like yours and the stories that folks have shared with me on this show for the past nine seasons. I always tell folks that I am endlessly fascinated in the stories of our fellow workers who take that step to do something, to change their conditions, because I lived most of my life not knowing that that was an option. Like most people in this country, I’m talking about the US here, when I had crappy jobs, whether they were in service or factories, warehouses, retail, I thought I only had two options. If the job sucked, I could either just stay, grin and bear it, or leave and try to find something better. I didn’t know there was a secret third thing you could do and band together with your coworkers and fight back and stay and fight to improve things.

And so to me, anyone who takes that step, especially in a country where working people are so routinely reminded and conditioned to believe that we are powerless, anyone who says otherwise and does otherwise to me is a hero. And not just that, but the way it changes your perspective on things to take that step, to organize, to bring your boss to the bargaining table, that really changes a lot of the ways that you look at the world and yourself and the work that you do. And I wanted to turn that into a question for y’all. You talked about this a bit in the first round, but I wanted to ask if you could go a little deeper and say how it changes your life at work and beyond when you become part of a union or join a union drive. Did it change the way that you guys all look at your own work in life when you did that?

Tina Oh:

For me as a young person that started labor work, I think I was 21 at the time when I first got my union job. And of course, previous to that, I was part of the student union like Cole was. And we’re living in a time where obviously we can talk about all these crises that are happening, global crises to mention that, and union work really helped make the world make more sense, if that makes sense. And I think a lot of young people, and when I reflect back to what I was thinking through when I was 21, and I’m not saying obviously I’ve got it all figured out now, certainly don’t, but I think a lot of young people are probably really confused and puzzled by all these kind of disparate crises when obviously they’re all interconnected. And maybe we could even say that they are interconnected, but it wasn’t really until I really immersed myself and understood how power works and the history of the gains that workers have made to really push the needle to where we are today.

Things really just started to click. And now when a new crisis happens in the world, it’s just less confusing for me. And I think that’s relevant because that feeling of hopelessness I think really gets reined in when you are in a fighting union because that fighting union is then about solutions and it’s about optimism and it’s about hope. And it’s also about, yeah, we might lose, but we’re just going to get back up the next day and fight again. And so that clarity really became clear when I was part of a union drive and helping workers form unions at their workplace. And seeing the transformation happen to them was so transformative for me because I’m seeing it in real time, ordinary people coming together to do extraordinary things.

Alex Raymond:

Yeah. Tina, hearing you say that, especially that piece about hopelessness was something that was deeply more so than I think I’ve even been aware of in my personal experience of work and working up until the idea that there could be something better came up in my working with this organizing that we’ve done recently. Meeting people across the country that are fighting for change and are in the exact same position. We are inexperienced, we are outnumbered, we are dealing with a very effectively organized managerial group that wants nothing more than to see us lose. And then seeing people like Sean and Noah out in Massachusetts, workers out in California coming together, Jane and Colin out in Marilyn, all these different people that I would not have met had not been for this organizing work changed a lot of that hopelessness into a deep sense of optimism that’s going to be really, really hard to lose.

And that I think is the most important way my life has changed since participating in organizing. And I see it at home, at work. We have this current style of people coming in and out of care work and healthcare, and it’s hard on us. We’re job hopping a lot, but it’s really, really hard on the clients that we serve. We work predominantly for little kids and somebody comes in, they build a relationship with you, and then you can’t afford to work the job anymore, you get burned out. And that’s devastating for those young people, and we want to change that. And since we’ve started organizing, we’re seeing turnover rates decrease. These people believe that better is possible and that possibility is brought into existence through our collective action. We alone can’t formulate what a solution might look like, but collectively we’ve found answers and we’ve put them into practice, not just in one location, but in lots of other locations.

And we’re seeing people pick up the banner with us, and it’s just been one of the most inspiring, if not the most profound experiences of my life. And hearing you speak on that just reminds me why I’m part of this fight.

Hassan Husseini:

This is a really good segue because most of you have done the organizing part, which is the hard part to organize workers into unions. My role as a national negotiator is that I come in to work with these newly organized group of workers to get in place a first collective agreement, which is challenging in and of its own, but it’s during the negotiations for a collective agreement. Well, actually it is during the organizing drive that you see their power and a recognition of the power that they have really come into fruition. But it is also a different kind of a very, very rewarding process when you’re working collectively with workers, trying to get a new collective agreement and seeing the bosses push back to put language in collective agreements that gives them more rights, more powers, more protections, more provisions. This is where you see that they are solidifying their power in the workplace and there’s nothing like it because at times when we’re negotiating new terms, and I’ve negotiated terms in the new collective agreement in the university sector, in the gaming industry, right now I have a group of firefighters in an indigenous community in Southwestern Ontario that I just came back from starting negotiations with them.

And you’ll see that their questions is that, “What do you mean we can put language in the collective agreement that is better than the minimum standards?” It’s like, yes, you are organized in order to do that. Minimum standards, you’re protected by it anyway, but your collective agreement, it relies on your power in the workplace, your power in the community, and you’ll see the relationship with their coworkers, their relationship with the boss, their relationship within the community completely changes. It gives them the confidence, it gives them the power, it gives them the power that comes with the fact that when they’re sitting at the bargaining table, no matter what, they’re equals to that boss. And of course, when the boss goes back to the workplace, they try to play games, but you cannot put back, what is that expression, the genie in a bottle or something?

They’ve recognized their power and they’re willing to take that extra steps in order to keep building on it and to demonstrate it in the workplace and outside the workplace. And there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing like it when work is recognized, I want to go Tina’s original point, recognize the power that they have in the workplace and in the community. And I’m privileged, I feel, that I get to work with workers to try to put together collective agreements that give them that extra power.

Cole Rockarts:

Yeah, I’ll just pick up on something Hassan said in his current negotiations about raising the minimum standards. And as organizers and workers, we talk about expectations a lot and great folks have written about raising expectations, so I won’t go into too much of that. But when people realize that not only can they raise the floor at their job, like Alex said, that he could change the mental healthcare industry and the ability for him to have consistency with his clients, with the kids that he’s trying to serve, that’s very mission-driven work. And we see all the time workers in organizing drives, particularly in healthcare, but lots of places, education where they say, “Well, I don’t know if I could do this because I would put the kids or the patients or whoever it is at risk.” But a lot of these campaigns are about connecting, “Well, this would actually make things way more sustainable for the work that I’m trying to do.

This would make me stay. This would help raise my wage so I can provide for my family.” All of these things go back to that question of power. And so when I think about how it changed the way I look at work and life, particularly now coming from Canada and the US, there is an entire industry that is dedicated to crushing workers’ ability to do this. And it has a lot of money behind it. It has a lot of politicians behind it. I mean, the US, we look at right to work states. We look at what is going on in Alberta, Canada right now and the attacks on trying to privatize our healthcare, which is a big no-no in Canada.

We workers, workers historically fought for all these things to get a public healthcare system to get funding. And so I think this’ll go to a little bit about the power that we’re up against, but we also talk about how we don’t have, and it’s because of people crushing unions, we don’t have a lot of money. We don’t have the ability to match dollar for dollar what our bosses are doing, but what we do have is people power. And so I think I was lucky enough to get into it at 20, but since moving here, even in the past few years, I’ve completely changed the way that I see power and what workers are up against as well.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, man. I mean, in the good old US of A, I mean, we have many rights on paper, but not in reality. And I’m constantly telling folks that you have a right to be a part of and form a union and collectively bargain in your workplace in this country. But in this country, that’s basically saying that Frodo Baggins has a right to go into Mordor, right? I mean, the opposition that you’re going to face, the pain that you’re going to be put through, the system that’s going to chew you up and spit you out just for exercising that right is going to take a lot from you and your coworkers, and you need to be prepared for that. And that’s what I wanted to talk about here in this round. Let’s talk about the hard stuff because we’ve seen over the past few years, over the course of me doing this show, I’ve heard it in the stories we’ve reported, this boom in energy around new labor organizing from the Starbucks workers to the Amazon workers, to the independent union movements, to the revivals within the established unions like the UAW, the Teamsters, some of the historic strikes that have happened in Canada in the past five years.

A lot is clearly happening, but at the same time, I think a lot of folks who got swept up in that energy over the past five years have also come to the hard kind of realities of unions aren’t perfect. Labor law is stacked against you. There’s going to be a whole lot of crap that you’re going to have to go through, but it is worth it. And so I want to talk about that with you guys and sort of address head on these real issues that folks have had or will face when trying to organize. So let’s talk about what people are really going to be up against when they try to unionize today in the US or Canada. And if someone’s listening to this, what do they do when their union sucks or union officials break their heart and screw them over?

Hassan Husseini:

You’re right. There are a lot of unions that, to put it in your words, can break your heart. But I always say having a union, even a shitty union is better than not having a union at all. Because even with a shitty union, there are mechanisms that you can do internally within your union in order to challenge those leaderships that are not willing to fight a good fight on your behalf, but collectively on behalf of all the workers and the community. So definitely I think we’re all on the same page or should be on the same page that unions are better than no unions whatsoever. But we also need to recognize that there are a lot of sellout unions or leaderships within unions that are no longer willing to fight a good fight. They’ve become part of the institutionalized capitalist system. They’ve lost the vision and they don’t advance anything more than protecting their careers.

And they have forgotten that unions are, after all, also political organizations of the working class. And they’ve lost that. And that’s where you see some unions or some leadership within unions making decisions that end up harming workers that they’re supposed to represent. But it’s not the end of the world because I always say that what you need to do as workers, the union is yourself. So you organize internally, you organize in order to bring democracy back into your union and your workplace. And you organize to take over, to take back those unions from those careerist elements within the union movement. Those who are willing to and understand and have class consciousness and they are fighting a class war to go back to the classics. This is the reality of it. And they’re not going to advance a lot of workers if they compromise with the employer on some fundamental issues.

And so our work is premised on the fact that we believe in the power of workers, but we also need to be very realistic about what kind of unions we’re dealing with. And also in my work in organizing in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle and Palestinian workers, I’ve realized that the connection between those unions who are taking better positions in solidarity with international workers around the world is very much connected to how much they’re willing to fight for their own members and for the working class in Canada or the US. And those who have sold out when it comes to the class struggle in their own workplaces and communities and in Canada and the US, you find them that they’re not willing to actually be in solidarity internationally. They may pay lip service, but they don’t do anything concretely to honor that global picket line of the Palestinian people.

And as it was before, the people of South Africa that fought against apartheid. So they’re connected. Good fighting working class unions that have clarity of purpose are also clear on the local, on the national and on the international issues. And we have no choice but to continue to fight a good fight internally to make sure that they stay on the straight path or the left path rather.

Tina Oh:

I want to hear from you, Alex.

Alex Raymond:

Yeah, I’m itching to jump in on this one. So what you’re up against, you hear, especially when you’re new to this, “Hey, there’s the NLRB, you have these rights and the NLRB will adjudicate if there’s any unfair action taken against you by your employer.” But my boss, Lindsay Thompson straight up fired me in writing for labor organizing and that’s still in NLRB hell. And we’re expecting a ruling any decade now, probably 2035, 2045, my grandkids will get a decision passed down. So I mean that’s the reality of it. And I’ve got some comrades that have similarly experienced pretty nefarious dealings from their employer because who’s going to stop them? They fire you, you’re kind of done for. And then on the heels of that, my union internally was going through a little bit of drama precisely when I got fired. And that happened to create a really perfect storm that weakened our bargaining unit and set us up for a lot of trouble going into 2026.

But what is the solution? To quote the adage, don’t mourn, organize. And I remind myself that these things, these institutions that exist today were built by the literal blood of people that were massacred and organizing in significantly more difficult conditions today. I lost a job, I got a new job. I wasn’t brutalized in the ways that you encounter in the history book. So not discounting the struggles that people are facing today, it’s just that the solution remains the same, which is you organize. And my union, we organize internally, brought it up to the local president. They got it fixed. He’s out there on the line with us, every opportunity he’s got. And they’ve done an incredible amount to organize with us. And not just Brian Payton with Teamsters Local 322 and a huge chunk of amazing UPS workers, Jennifer Hancock, those folks coming out, making sure that we’re all right and that this group of workers gets represented fairly.

But the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, especially their caucus of rank and file electrical workers, it’s an internal caucus that has come together and shown up for workers in Richmond and across the country in really profound ways. If there’s a worker struggle in town, there’s going to be hard hats there. And I think it’s that kind of ethos that we need to really embrace. One worker’s struggle is my struggle and it’s been really hard. There was an understandable amount of almost desperation when we did everything right and the employer is just able to break every rule and get away with it. But I think it taught us a very valuable lesson, which is that you don’t just win a vote and then you’re all done. You organize not just to win a contract, but then to enforce it and then to be able to have the capacity to show up for other workers because there’s not just one fight and then you’re done.

This is a global fight. The cause of every member of the working class is our cause. So this is the fight of a lifetime, not just for a contract or a vote or some particular grievance. So I think it’s been hard, but we’ve learned a lot of lessons and we’re continuing to learn. And a lot of that is because of the very cool people that are on this panel today. So shout out to y’all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and obviously the fact that we have such an incredible panel of folks from Canada and the US, and Cole, you came from Canada to the US. I was wondering if you could also wrap into this question the differences of the situations and the things that folks are going to face in the US versus Canada while we’re answering this question.

Cole Rockarts:

Absolutely. I think I have two different parts to this answer. The first is that I think in Canada we have a different history when it comes to not only our labor movement, but our political parties. I think in the US, you folks are locked into the two party hell, that is the Democrats and the Republicans. Our system in Canada is multi-party and we had a labor movement that formed a political party that became the new Democratic Party, the NDP. And those were the folks I mentioned earlier that led to Medicare, healthcare being public in this country. And I say that not to give a knighthood to politicians because we know that everything that we’ve won in any country has come from workers pushing for that and pressuring that and always will be, always has been. And so I think that’s one of the big differences.

And obviously in the negotiation realm, when you don’t have to think about Medicare or healthcare being part of the contract and you can instead think about the things in Canada that haven’t gotten into that system like drug care, prescriptions, it changes the negotiation landscape for sure. I think the other big difference is the matter of density. And I mentioned the word density earlier, but that is how many workers percentage-wise are unionized within a given population. So in Canada, that is much, much higher. In the US, it’s brutal and it shows all of the things that have –

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’re below 10% now, I believe. That’s

Cole Rockarts:

Correct. And I’ll just say to your listeners, the Economic Policy Institute put out this amazing report about what would change if union density in the US was higher. And the reality is we would have healthcare. We would have about, give or take, 7,000 extra dollars a year in your pocket. And I don’t know about anyone else on this call, but I think people could use 7,000 plus dollars a year.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And that’s $7,000 a year that you would get in your contract versus the kind of fantastical fake $5,000 that President Trump is promising you if you just believe him and vote the way he wants in the midterms.

Cole Rockarts:

Exactly. And I’ll just say quickly on that, studies have shown that in countries where there are strong labor movements, there are more democracies. Even if we look at the US, we see that in right-to-work states, there are more attacks right now on the voting system than there are in states with higher union density. And so that’s kind of the first part of the answer to my question. But the second part is how is Canada and the US different? They’re not. Workers in Canada and workers in the US coming from both places, they’re not that different. They want the same things. They want higher wages, they want benefits, they want good jobs, and they want clean air and for the AI overlords to not ruin the planet and put a data center in their backyard. And so same as it ever was, workers, no matter the country, if they can get enough power, they can change things and make things better.

Tina Oh:

Everything yes, that Cole just said, a thousand percent. I just want to say genuinely, SEIU, it’s a giant of a union, one of the biggest in the US. And so when I look at my comrades in the US, not just in SEIU, but US unions in general, I really don’t have a problem in saying, I genuinely think it is harder to organize in the US than it is in Canada. And I don’t mean to say that as good or bad, as simple as that. But I think where in Canada workers have made gains like card check, which is a one-step unionization system. All you have to do is sign a union card. There’s no vote. Where there’s successor rights in the three biggest provinces of our country. So Quebec, Ontario, BC, the most populated provinces have successor rates. That means contracted workers when there’s contract flip that the new employer has to hire them on and keep their contract.

Those are two really sizable, genuinely… Those are huge wins, legislative wins that workers have made in this country. And it has, for maybe a less sophisticated word, I think it does actually produce some lazy organizing when I compare it to my comrades in the US who have to strike for recognition or right to work states where the dues aren’t guaranteed. And part of that lazy organizing is it can get dangerous, of course, because we know, just as Cole said, the bosses are the same. The power that they have will absolutely crush us. Our dollars can’t compete. Our legal can’t compete. And so when organizers on the ground, whether it’s a member organizer, worker organizer, staff organizer, is taking these shortcuts, we know we’re going to get hit by those shortcuts down the road because a fight is coming guys. A fight is always coming. And so I think it’s a really important, I think, moment for Canada-based organizers where even though we’ve made those gains like card check-in successor, that we do the right thing, which is to develop and recruit the best leaders we can in our organizations and keep it a fighting organization.

And that means yes, there might be shortcuts, but we’re actually going to do the really rigorous spade work that is required to build a fighting union.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. I thought that was all beautifully and powerfully put, y’all. And it bears mentioning that you could say the same thing about unions here just a little farther back in our history. I mean, the union density in this country at its height was around 30% or a little over. I mean, unions built the middle class, they gave us the weekends. We know all the talking points, but then that middle class gave up on the struggle. They cared more about their middle class existence, their specific contracts. They lost that sense of working class solidarity. And here we are 40, 30 years later with the results. Union density below 10%, wages have been stagnant or declining, cost of living has been going up, power has been shifting to the top away from the bottom. So I think the real takeaway message from Canada to the US to everywhere is don’t get complacent.

The struggle has to continue, and I could genuinely talk to you guys for hours about how to continue that struggle. And I’m so grateful for the conversation that we’ve had, but I know we have to wrap up here. And so I wanted to finish with a big picture question that y’all have touched on in this conversation, but for folks who are listening to this right now and saying, “Yeah, that all sounds great, but why should I care about unions now in the year of our Lord 2026 when the world is on fire and everything sucks and these oligarch nut jobs are taking over everything and destroying the planet?” So what would you say to folks in closing who are still in that head space?

Alex Raymond:

Yeah, what I would say is why you should care about a union now is because things have already gotten to a point where we’re feeling the everyday economic ramifications of those decisions. And whatever inertia is kind of keeping us moving in this direction, if we can overcome that, if we can come together, we can identify any solutions that need to be found and start putting them into practice so that we can build a future that we want to be part of. And I know that sounds like fanciful language, but every small step in the right direction is also a step we’re not taking in the wrong direction. And it feels difficult. It feels impossible. It feels exhausting when you think about it individual terms, but you’re not alone. People like me don’t know a ton. I’m sitting on a panel today with Hassan, Cole, Tina, and you, Max, and there’s a lot of expertise out there and you’re not alone.

So nothing weaker than the feeble strength of one. We got this together.

Hassan Husseini:

Very briefly, I think that for all the reasons that you spoke about Maximilian, it’s for all these reasons, because the world is run by not oligarchs, it’s for the reason that they’re destroying the planet, the reason that we have Trump in the White House and Mark Carney in Ottawa that are governing on behalf of banks and corporations and the super rich. It’s for all these reasons that we need unions if for nothing else to equalize things, to make sure that they fight for working people on the shop floor, but also they continue to fight for better society, for all the working class. And also they continue to make sure that international solidarity is not just a performative thing, but a real element of the work of unions. And without unions and without organizing and without that kind of mass democratic organizations that we value so much, that we will fall back even more.

And so from that perspective and because of that, unions are a lot more critical today than in my opinion, they were 50 years ago or 60 or 70 years ago. And we finish on the adage again that an injury to one is an injury to all. So this is not about individual protection, it’s about a collective work, a collective organizing and collective protection and collective empowerment.

Tina Oh:

I think a good union organizer knows how to answer any question with the answer being union. And so to me, it’s why should people care about unions? Well, it’s less about why people should care about unions, more about do you want a better life for you and your family and your loved ones? If so, the only answer is union. And I believe that. We just talked about the trickle down effects of increasing union density is that we live in a better society. There’s healthcare improvements, education improvements, life expectancy, I’m sure. And so I think that question that Cole talked about, workers in US, Canada, across any border, they want a better life for themselves and their families. I don’t know a single ordinary working person that doesn’t. And the answer to that question is going to be union.

Cole Rockarts:

Couldn’t agree more. I think the answer is unions. If we look at the world being on fire, what’s going to protect workers that are going out in increasingly record-breaking heat working outside if they’re postal worker, construction laborer, what is going to do that? Is the boss going to say, “Oh, I’m recognizing it’s a bit hot and unsafe out there. This doesn’t need to get built today. This work doesn’t need to get done.” No, bosses are going to continue to try and extract as much as they can. So that’s one example. If we look at this mass global movement in many countries, unionized dock workers have stopped the ports and refused to unload Israeli cargo.

The struggle of the anti-war movement, the struggle for basic protections of not dying on the job, and yes, the individual and materialistic thing of wanting more money in your bank account so you can pay your rent, so you can buy food, so you can get the basic necessities, all comes from having a strong resourced infrastructure. And the only thing that working people have in this country right now is a union. And so that would be my answer. Why should you care about unions now? It is literally the only thing that working people have on our side. And that’s not big you union, that’s you and your coworkers coming together to push for more and to fight the boss and to hopefully win.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Hassan Husseini of the Public Service Alliance of Canada and Labor for Palestine Canada, Tina Oh of SEIU Local two in Halifax, Canada, Alex Raymond of Teamsters Local 322 in Virginia, and Cole Rockhart’s veteran labor educator and organizer and author of the excellent new book, Fired Up About Unions, which everyone should go read. And you can learn more about the book using the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network.

We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing weekly at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories of people on the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and The Marc Steiner Show, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really, really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are speaking with union nurses who are speaking out against big tech and big brother, sneaking more of their tentacles into our healthcare system and into our lives. They and their union, National Nurses United, participated in a National Day of Action on August 27th, which brought together hundreds of registered nurses, patients, and community allies in cities around the country to demand that hospitals and elected officials cut all ties with artificial intelligence giant Palantir. As a press release from NNU lays out, “The nurses who are members of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union of registered nurses, stop traffic in an act of civil disobedience in eight cities, Palo Alto, California, Los Angeles, California, Chicago, Illinois, Washington DC, Portland, Maine, Asheville, North Carolina, Austin, Texas, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

Union nurses cannot be silent when our most vulnerable people, babies and children are being detained by federal immigration agents,” said NNU President Jamie Brown. “While our patients and neighbors are living in fear of immigration raids enabled by Palantir, our hospitals are facing huge cuts and our patients are facing mounting healthcare costs because of H.R.1. Nurses aren’t just saying no to Palantir, but we’re calling for our public resources to go toward the benefit of working people, not billionaires and their corporations. “The press release continues. From 2009 to 2025, Palantir received $2.5 billion in federal government funding, but this number has grown tremendously in just the past year. Last July, the Department of Defense announced a $10 billion agreement with Palantir to use its technology to share data across federal agencies, enabling unprecedented surveillance power. This followed a $30 million contract awarded to Palantir by the Department of Homeland Security to build an AI-powered system that would identify immigrants for deportation.

In February of 2026, the Department of Homeland Security and Palantir signed a $1 billion contract. In the hospital industry already, Palantir manages more than one fifth of US hospital beds. For nurses, this marks a dangerous threat to their nursing profession, which is seeing a glut of untested and unregulated technology introduced into patient care settings.” All right, so we got a lot to talk about here, and to talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by three guests who are all registered nurses, all members of National Nurses United. Thank you all so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Kiera Arbour, RN:

My name’s Kiera Arbour. I’m a registered nurse from Chicago, Illinois.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

My name’s Kelli Brennan . I’m a registered nurse from Portland, Maine.

Lee Barker, RN:

I’m Lee Barker. I’m a registered nurse in Kansas City, Missouri.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, again, thank you all so much for joining me today. I really, really appreciate having you all three here to talk about this because there’s so much here that I didn’t even know before I saw the day of action and started digging into this. So before we really get into Palantir and all this AI stuff, I want to start at the shop floor worker’s eye level, and I want listeners to get to know more about you all and to have y’all give us more of a lay of the land here. So could you start by telling us more about the jobs that you do, the hospitals that you work at, the kind of patients that you care for? And I guess could we talk a bit about all the non-AI workplace issues that you and your coworkers are already dealing with on a daily basis?

Kiera Arbour, RN:

This is Kira. I am a nurse in the neurosurgical ICU at Stroger Hospital of Cook County. We are one of the largest safety net hospitals in the United States. So I am just finishing up my first year as a nurse. Just graduated from my nurse residency program last week, came to nursing late in life. I took my licensing exam the day after I turned 50. For me, I think the thing that has really been the most challenging part of my first year of practice as a nurse is the patient population that we serve at Stroger Hospital as a safety net hospital in the third largest city in the country is just all of the poverty related, social determinants of health related illnesses. So in the neurosurg ICU, anybody who’s a gunshot wound to the head comes to us, blunt force trauma to the head, two gunshots to the head on the unit last night, one blunt force trauma, and then a whole bunch of people who have had strokes because they live in food deserts, they don’t have access to healthy things to eat or they don’t know how to manage chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure.

And as somebody who grew up pretty privileged and whose parents are heading into their 80s over the next year and a half or so, I see my amount of death play golf every day. They go swimming with their grandkids every day because they grew up middle class, they grew up with money. And then I see people 20 years younger than them who are looking at end of life type of illnesses in our hospital. And it has really kind of overwhelmed me emotionally just because we live in a system that doesn’t do a very good job of allocating resources to folks. And so I’m watching people be very sick and eventually die from very preventable diseases and things that are associated with poverty. Violence is associated with poverty.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

I’m Kelly. I’m at Portland, Maine. Similar to Kara, I also work in neurosurgery, neurotrauma. My background is in stroke. I’ve been a nurse for a little over 17 years from Boston and then I moved to Georgia. I was a director of neurosciences in Georgia, so I was in management, left management to come back to the bedside and be a union nurse and use everything I learned as a manager now for the good of the union. So happy to be here. I’ve been at MaineMed for about five years. I was a member of the original facility bargaining committee when we were organizing for our union. And when I got here, I was coming from Georgia right after COVID and COVID in Georgia was awful, made me realize I needed to go back to New England. So I left the South, came back to New England, wanted to be near family.

So I came to Maine and just wanted to work at the bedside, work my three 12s, get my shifts done and go home and not have twenty four seven responsibility. Now I’m in the union and I have a different kind of twenty four seven responsibility, but I love it. So I started and when I got to the hospital in Maine, I was almost like, well, this is compared to where I came from in Georgia, I was like, “Well, this is pretty nice.What are you guys all upset about?” And started talking to the staff and learning things. And then I shifted my thinking and I was like, “I just came from a really bad situation. Things aren’t that bad up here in Maine, but I know that the way healthcare works, because what I saw in Georgia was consolidation of healthcare systems, lots of financial issues, lots of layoffs and closures and all that kind of stuff.

I didn’t want any of that bad healthcare to come up to this hospital.” So I was like, “You know what? The best thing is to start a union and to lock it in what we have now so that it can’t get taken away because we know the turnover in the C-suite is every five years. These people are not dedicated to the communities. They’re not dedicated to the hospital. They are there for five years just to make a resume, just to go on to the next place.” So I got all in with the union. I’m a charge nurse, I’m a steward, I’m chair of our professional practice committee, and I’m co-president of the Maine State Nurses Association. Yeah, I’m all in. And the things that we’re working on now outside of AI is staffing. There’s this huge misconception or this though process that there’s a nursing shortage.

And we’ve been saying for years there’s not a nursing shortage. There’s a shortage of nurses willing to work in unsafe conditions at the bedside. And that’s why I went into management when I did because the working conditions at the bedside suck and nobody wants to work every weekend. Nobody wants to work every holidays. You can go to management and have your weekends off, have your holidays off, get paid more. So you see the shift of people leaving the bedside because the work is just unmanageable. The working conditions aren’t safe. The patients are sicker, more complex. Our nursing turnover is super high. The years of experience on the floor are low. When I work, there’s a lot of times I’m the most experienced nurse on my unit by 15 years. So it’s a lot of challenges in that, and there’s no focus on nurse retention. They just let one go and then just hire a traveler or temporary staff and we try to make the best of it.

I was at my professional practice committee meeting this morning and it was all about staffing. The hospital has budgets and staffing grids and plans, but they fall through. They don’t hold themselves accountable.

Lee Barker, RN:

Just wanting to build off of what Kelly said, staffing is also an issue at the hospital that I work at research in Kansas City, Missouri. I work specifically in our inpatient psychiatric population. Our staffing grids call for one nurse to every eight patients. That’s already an unsafe ratio and our management likes to push us to one to nine, one to 10. I’ve seen 11 and 12 as well. And like Kelly said, it’s not that there’s a nursing shortage in this country. There’s a shortage of nurses that are willing to work in the unsafe conditions that the hospitals push on us. At research, I mean, we used to have, I think, 800 nurses when we were fully staffed up. Currently we have like 550 and we just can’t. The hospital doesn’t care to retain nurses. Somebody leaves and, oh, we can hire in a new grad and they’ll stay for their two years, get their experience and leave and well, we’ll just hire another new grad.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s like, I hate to make light of all the incredibly serious and important stuff that y’all just laid out, but in 2026, hearing all this, my mind is imagining the Pawn Stars meme of like, “Hey, hospitals, can you fix any of these problems?” And the response is, “No, the best I can do is nothing, and I’m going to add Palantir to your list of things to be worried about now.” So that’s the kind of upside down, topsy-turvy nightmare reality that we’re living in right now, but it is what it is and we got to deal with it.

I’m so grateful to all of you for laying that out for folks because it’s such important context for everyone to understand even though we’re all focused on AI and Palantir right now, let’s not lose sight of the forest from the trees here. There’s so many other systemic issues that are running workers into the ground and screwing over patients and all of us for the benefit of a few. Those sorts of dynamics are already at work in the stories you’ve been hearing on this show about the working conditions for healthcare workers around the country. We’ve been covering it for years, but now we got to worry about ICE coming into hospitals. We got to worry about these truly super villain-esque big tech oligarchs putting their AI into our most sensitive and private systems and information. So let’s talk about this gang, because I need your help unpacking this for myself and for our listeners.

So I want to stay in the world of healthcare right now, and I want to ask if you could sort of lay out for us how is AI in general and Palantir specifically seeping into your workplaces and your work lives?What are nurses seeing here that perhaps the average patient is not?

Lee Barker, RN:

So the hospital that I work at is owned by HCA or the Healthcare Corporation of America, and what HCA has done in their partnering with Palantir is to build an AI scheduler called Timpani. We don’t really know how it works. It’s like a black box. We put our preferred days of working in. Timpani spits out a schedule that’s allegedly balanced, so we have enough nurses working throughout the week. They’re supposed to also balance our level of experience so we don’t have a unit full of new grads and then all of the experienced nurses are working different shifts. These were the promises that we were made. And unfortunately, at the end of the day, Palantir is giving us a shitty product. Aside from all of the moral reasons that Palantir sucks, they can’t even provide us again with the product that meets the promises that they told us, which is that it would take the burden of scheduling off of our managers.

And now our managers in the building don’t have any way to adjust our schedules. So when the AI inevitably screws up, puts out a bad schedule, nobody in the building has any way to fix the schedule unless it’s, I think, within 24 or 48 hours of the shift beginning, which is ridiculous. Part of what Timpani does as well is HCA is using it to push short staffing. Allegedly, our understanding of how Timpani works is that it somehow looks at the average daily census on the unit and decides, “Oh, for 16 patients on this psych unit, we need two nurses every shift.” What Timpani doesn’t see is that that unit can hold up to 24 patients, and frequently we are trying to fill it up to 24. Timpani will schedule only two nurses and management will say, “Well, really, we could admit a couple more patients.

We’ll push you guys up to one nurse can take 10 patients instead of one to eight.” And so they’ll sneak in and just ask us to do more and more with less and less.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

So at MainMed or Maine Health, we have Palantir in our hospitals through their application called Foundry. When we first heard about the potential, we asked the hospital or MaineHealth to let us know what they were using it for. And at first they told us it wasn’t really any of our business. We further pushed, sent letters to the board asking what’s going on, what’s it for? And their response was that they’re using it for insurance denials. So they’re using it. So say a patient comes in and they have pneumonia and the doctor doesn’t write the details of the pneumonia clearly. The insurance company will deny the claim and say that there’s lacking documentation for payments or whatever. So the hospital or MaineHealth’s idea is that Palantir’s AI software will look at these denials and claims and figure out what the letter or what the documentation needs to be in order for the claim to get approved.

So this requires us, Maine Health, sharing information with Palantir of our patient’s information.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m sorry. So was our whole system of already not approving so many prescriptions and surgeries in our American healthcare system, was that all not bad enough that now we need a fucking AI bot denying us as well? I can’t believe that that is actually happening.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

It’s very much crazy. The argument is that the return on investment is already better than projected, so the hospital will be gaining so much money, but they’re claiming that they’re losing money because the insurance company is denying it because the insurance company changes the rules 15,000 times a year. It has no obligation to tell the hospitals, so that’s why they’re getting denied. So instead of holding the insurance companies accountable, now we’re introducing Palantir to help solve it. That’s the solution. It doesn’t make any sense, and it just makes us complicit in this whole thing.

Kiera Arbour, RN:

Thankfully, in Chicago, we don’t have Palantir software anywhere near our patient’s information. Our action was based on the fact that our pension fund has $28 million invested in Palantir. That includes all county employees, not just nurses. So everybody who works for Cook County, which is where Chicago is, including all the people who work at the hospital, the doctors, the administrators, the nurses, the PCTs, the environmental service people, the folks who work in the cafeteria, the people who work in the forest preserves of Cook County, where I like to ride my mountain bike. All these people unknowingly have their pension funds, A, invested in a company that’s heavily aligned with the current administration and could potentially go, if Democrats screw his spine, could go belly up in a couple years. And then B, is doing some pretty nefarious stuff, is collaborating with ICE and making it so.

Kellyann mentioned that the patients are getting sicker and sicker. One of the reasons the patients are getting sicker and sicker is because they know that they have the potential to get arrested if they come seek healthcare. So they delay and defer care and then they come to us and they’re a lot of times near death. I took care of somebody last night who intubated completely unconscious body full of ammonia because their liver had failed and they had deferred care. And I couldn’t get this person’s story because obviously they were intubated and in a coma, but judging from this person’s last name, they very easily could have been somebody who was undocumented. But for us, for me, for the nurses at Cook County, we became nurses because it sounds cheesy, but it is a calling. I walked away from a six-figure career in supply chain and logistics management to come do this with the rest of my life because I felt a calling to do so because in 2020, I was at the George Floyd protest.

I said, “Wow, I’m actually the baddie and I need to get my life right.” And so I was feeling really good about what I was doing every day, taking care of some of the sickest people, the poorest people, the least fortunate people in my community and serving my community. And then I find out the thing that I’m relying on for my retirement is heavily invested in a company that’s collaborating with ICE, that is writing software for the IDF, that is tracking kids home from school in Gaza so that the Israeli Defense Force can send a bomb to this person’s house because there’s a one in two million chance that this kid’s dad is part of Hamas. And so that doesn’t align in any way with my values. And so we felt the need to step up and demand that our pension board divest itself from Palantir, and we were kind of blown off.

So I am looking to put together a run to be part of the pension board in the next few months. So that’s where our involvement with Palantir is.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Well, I want to keep going in the direction that y’all are leading us to. I want to keep zooming out here and take this discussion beyond the world of healthcare, but I think it bears repeating or reminding all of us who and what we’re talking about here. I mean, if you’re still asking yourself or you listen to this and you’re saying, “Well, why is Palantir so bad? Who are they?” They’re telling us who they are. They published a whole batshit manifesto about their evil vision of and for the world. Their CEO, Alex Karp is constantly saying super villain type stuff about the kind of future he imagines with AI. And there’s a piece that we’ll link to in the show notes from The Guardian that is literally titled Palantir Manifesto described as Ramblings of a Super Villain Amid UK Contract Fears. And in that article, here’s a quote that says, “Palantir’s manifesto, which embraces AI state surveillance of citizens along with national service in the USA is either a parody of a Robocop film or a disturbing narcissistic rant from an arrogant organization.” And that was actually from a liberal Democrat MP in the UK.

But read that, read the manifesto. They are telling us who they are and we should believe them. I don’t want this creep carp near my healthcare or my information or any of my government data. I don’t want them near anything having to do with the administration of our society or what remains of it these days. And yet they are getting in there in our government. The data centers that are popping up everywhere. They’re tied up in all of that too. So I wanted to ask y’all to sort of zoom out and keep talking about that bigger picture. And I wanted to ask why you and your union are demanding that not only hospitals, but elected officials cut ties with Palantir. Why is it important for you to speak out against this kind of larger onslaught of big tech and to speak out as union nurses to stop it?

Kiera Arbour, RN:

I would say first of all, we have our own manifesto. It’s called Vision for a Healthy Society, and it’s not super villainy. We want people to live happy, healthy, self-fulfilled, self-actualized lives where they have the resources they need to not just survive day-to-day, but to thrive as human beings in the way that human beings were meant to exist and to flourish, not to be beholden to these giant unelected powers, whether it’s Palantir, whether it’s Anthropic, who was just in the news yesterday because they have their own AI building dossiers on folks like us who are opposed to what they do, and nobody elected these people. They became billionaires because venture capitalists invested money in them, and now they call the shots. They own pretty much both parties. Shout out to Rokana for giving that money back from Palantir, but for the most part, they’re heavily invested in both Democrats and Republicans.

As far as union nurses, because we can’t, because our union has our backs, because they’re going to protect our free speech rights, they’re going to protect our right to go out there and say, “This is wrong. We don’t agree with it.” And they allow me, because they are themselves, my union is itself anti-colonial, anti-imperial. They stand up for these values that I try to model myself, and so I need to stand in solidarity with my working class siblings, and I need to work for the society that I think is going to allow human beings the best chance to live the lives they deserve.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

In Maine, in January, we had operation Catch of the Day, which Maine is one of the whitest states in the country. We have a Somali population. So for us to be targeted with this operation, it was devastating. It affected our community, it affected the hospital, our housekeeping workers, our transporters, our ancillary services, and all staff felt this. You could feel the emotions throughout the hospital as this was going on. About 30% of our housekeeping were calling out because they were afraid. We were picking up food because we had a food bank, but people were afraid to go to the food bank. So our C-suite was storing groceries, so we were bringing our immigrant vulnerable community members to get food. And then one of my coworkers, who’s of the vulnerable community, I offered to give her a ride into work because everything was so escalating. So I picked her up one morning and we were driving to the hospital to go to work, and it was about six o’clock in the morning.

It was dark out. We were driving down the street, and as we were driving, pulled up to what seemed to be ice activity. There was a bunch of unmarked cars, out-of-state license plates, just seemed suspicious. So I couldn’t just drive by. So I pulled into a parking lot across the street and started filming on my phone what these officers were doing, just trying to see if they had anybody, if anybody was in trouble. But I also had my friend in the car, so I didn’t want to draw too much attention, so I didn’t honk my horn. I didn’t get out. I didn’t yell. I just sat there with my phone on recording, and the officers saw me. They flashed their flashlight at me as to say, “Hey, we see you.” And then I saw them heading to their car. So at that point, I decided that this was not a safe situation and we should leave.

So we pulled out of the parking lot, carried on down the street, and realized that they were following us. So got to a red light, and they pulled up in the lane next to me, and I could feel them staring at me through the window. So I rolled my window down because I could see that they were wanting that, and they rolled down their window and they looked at me. It was a male and a female officer, and they said, “Can we help you?” I said, “Yeah.” I said, “You can get the fuck out of Maine.” To which they replied, “Oh, looks like we have another Karen here.” At this point, the light is still red, and I’m like, “Okay, this is going to escalate.” I was worried My friend. And so when the light turned green, they looked at me and they said, “I’m going to arrest three more people today just for you.

Ha ha ha ha ha.” And pulled out in front of me, did a U-turn and carried on down back to where they came from. I don’t think anybody was abducted that morning, but my friend and I continued to drive to work and it was just like I felt so awful. It was traumatizing. And so that right there for me was like, this isn’t okay. And so we went to work and then this was happening across our town and the hospital went through so much to help and support people. They changed where they were picking up employees so that the parking lot was gated so that there couldn’t be agents in there. And they did all these things. And then we find out that they have a contract with Palantir and it’s like, wait a minute, we just went through this in January. We felt the effects of this in the hospital.

So that’s where we all kind of started to get involved. And then fast forward through the summer, we get to July and we have the murder of Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, which is three miles down the street from a Maine health facility. And at this point we are aware about the app called Elite that Palantir is using to target immigrants in our communities. So at this point, we’re concerned that this is really ramping up in our community. And then fast forward to August when our own nurse was abducted by ICE at an airport in Portland. And then to still find out that MaineHealth is still doubling down on their contract and Susan Collins is still holding onto her money, it’s just infuriating. And I think for us up here in Maine, you’re going to see us out and doing everything we can to try to tell the community that Palantir has no place in our hospitals, no place in our community.

And that if patients can’t trust the hospital, if they can’t trust where they’re going is safe, they’re not going to come and get care. And that’s not what we’re here for. Nurses are advocates first. We’re trained to advocate and to speak up when something is wrong and that’s what we’re doing.

Lee Barker, RN:

I mean, exactly. I think the biggest reason that union nurses are speaking out against Palantir is simply because we can. It’s the right thing to do. And like Kelly said, we’re advocates for our patients, we’re advocates for our communities.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, my God, thank you all so much for that. That was really, I think, important, really powerful. And I’m really grateful to y’all again for speaking out the way that you are and letting our listeners know why this is important. And I want to end on that and bring us back to where we started in the beginning where I learned about this Purge Palantir campaign from NNU because of the day of action in August. So I wanted to ask if you could tell folks more about now that we’ve thoroughly covered why we should all be invested in this and horrified that these tyrants and oligarchs and freaks and villains who want to control everything and everyone, why we should not just go quietly into that dark night and why people should stand up and fight back and that we can choose a different path. We don’t have to go down this path.

And that’s what I see all around me and in every kind of story we cover at The Real News. People around the country are pissed, they are fighting back, they are doing so wherever they can, however they can, whether it’s speaking out as union workers in mobilizations or it’s people in deep red, rural areas where there are data centers popping up or people here in quote unquote deep blue cities like Baltimore where data centers are also threatening to pop up. This is kind of forcing us all together and we’re going to need to work together to figure this out. And so in that spirit, I wanted to end by asking y’all if you could tell folks more about what NNU is doing to fight back and what people listening, what your message is to them about why they should get involved and what they could do to get involved.

And if you have any final words about what will happen to all of us if people don’t fight back against this now.

Kiera Arbour, RN:

So I would say that, and probably understanding that the demographic of your podcast are what we like to call fellow travelers. They’re socialist, anarchists, anti-capitalists, what have you. We need to get people off the sidelines. We’ll take care of our own business here in Chicago with this pension fund. What I would suggest that your listeners do is reach out to somebody who they would probably consider a liberal or a conservative and do something simple like, I don’t know, go take them to see the movie American Doctor. I don’t know if you’ve heard about that. It’s the story, it’s a documentary of people trying to go provide aid in Gaza in the midst of a genocide because I really feel like there is a large percentage of the population out there who just doesn’t really understand. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s just that A, they don’t understand what’s happening and B, they don’t know or don’t feel like they have any sort of political agency to change it.

And there are a lot of people who probably identify as neither any sort of political affiliation, and those are the people that we need to reach out to to let them know what’s happening around us. So go see something like American Doctor, which is really going to get you right here. Understand that Palantir and all these big tech companies played a very large part in all the horrible things that you’re going to see in that movie. And then wherever you live, I guarantee you there are people that there’s an anti-war committee. There are mutual aid groups who are going out every day and collecting donations and trying to feed the less fortunate in our community, the people who are undocumented, who are afraid to go to work. There’s so many opportunities to go out there and connect with the people in your community and that’s what’s going to make you feel safe and that’s what’s going to make you feel like you have power over this and that’s what’s going to make you feel like you have agency over this.

And that’s how we defeat this in solidarity together as working class human beings.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

I think it’s going to be really important that people get out and vote in November. I think it’s really going to be, we don’t know what the outcomes of the elections will be, but if they go the way we want them to go, there’s a chance that those results aren’t going to be accepted. So I think we have to prepare and organize and make sure that we’re getting everyone out to vote, making sure people are registered. I think there’s no hesitation on my mind about that we need a huge voter turnout this midterm. And I think if people aren’t involved, be a poll watcher, drive people to the polls, make sure your community members know if they’re registered, how to register, where the voting locations are, and notify your elected officials that you don’t approve of Palantir. Whenever I do stuff lobbying, one things that representatives in Congress or locally or wherever, they say that I don’t hear from my constituents.

No one’s called me to tell me about this. And that really matters. So I think it’s important for people to get out and vote. I think it’s important for people to join an organization, unionize. If you’re not in a union, join one, make one, connect with one because there’s so many resources. And if we’re all doing different things, we need to all do the same thing together at the same time. And we need to sustain organizing, sustain networking, talk to people that you don’t normally talk to. What I love is our candidate for Senate, Troy Jackson, one of his sayings I love is we’re not from the left, we’re not from the right, we’re from the bottom and we’re rising. This is a working class issue. They’re sayings that unions save the middle class, unions built the middle class. We’re going to have to do that again.

And even if you’re not in a union, you’ve got to link up with somebody because it’s going to take all of us to get through this. And nurses are first and foremost humanitarians, right? We’re the trusted profession over and over again. So we know what’s needed in healthcare. And as a nurse for 17 years, I’m so sick and tired of apologizing to my patients and their families on behalf of health insurance executives and hospital CEOs. So everyone get out and do something.

Lee Barker, RN:

Absolutely. Just to echo that, getting out to vote, reaching out to your elected representatives, telling them to purge Palantir. I’m going to put a couple links in the chat also. There’s a purgepalantir.com. You can get on there and find out what’s going on with the Purge Palantir campaign, Actions Near You. The other link I put in there is there’s a letter that people can fill out that will go to HCA specifically telling them to cut ties with Palantir. Anyone can sign that. Anyone can sign that. Anyone can find that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Kelly Brennan, Lee Barker and Kira Arbour, all three registered nurses, all three members of National Nurses United, all participating in NNU’s Purge Palantir campaign. And you can learn more about that campaign in the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Mark Steiner Show and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.