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 taking you to the streets of France, where mass, student-led protests have swept the country for the past month. We’ve gotten so many requests from y’all to cover this, and we’re here to deliver. What you’re about to hear is an edited-down version of a two-hour Zoom webinar that I hosted on Sunday, October 25th. Now, the webinar was co-produced and cosponsored by the Chicago Teachers Union, Haymarket Books, The Real News Network, and the French Union Force Ouvrière, or Workers Force. The goal was to provide a space where we could actually hear and talk directly to a range of rank and file students and union members across France who are on the front lines of this massive protest movement, and to put them in conversation with working folks right here in the United States.

And that’s exactly what we did. And unless they are expressed by organization leaders, all views that are shared in this conversation are those of the speakers alone. Guests were asked to share their own thoughts and speak from their own perspectives, not to speak on behalf of any of the unions or movements that they’re a part of or any of the countries that they’re speaking from. And if you want to stay up to date on the protests in France or you want to know how you can get in touch with the people and orgs on this webinar, then use the links that we provided in the show notes or reach out to us. Okay, that’s enough from me. Let’s get to the good stuff.

Welcome everyone who is here on this call, friends and comrades and fellow workers from France and the United States and beyond. My name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’m the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of the Real News Network in Baltimore. And I am genuinely honored to be here with all of you. And I’m grateful to be part of this vital panel discussion, an international webinar organized and produced in collaboration with the Chicago Teachers Union, Haymarket Books, the Real News Network, and the Confederacion General de Traver. Oh God, I murdered that. The General Confederation of Labor Workers Force in France. Thank you so much. Something monumental is happening in France right now. But all we’re getting here in the United States is corporate and right-wing media propaganda and skewed, selective coverage of the protests that are shutting down the country. Today, we are going to get the real news about what is happening on the ground in France, and we’re going to talk to folks who are on the front lines of the struggle.

Dennis Kosouth:

I want to welcome everybody to this forum. My name is Denis Kosuth. I work as a nurse in Chicago Public Schools and I’m the chair of the Human Rights Committee. As a little bit of background to this forum, in December of 2025, less than a year ago, Force Ouvrière, a union that represents 300,000 workers in France, invited a delegation from the Chicago Teachers Union to their convention in Nages. I’d never been to France before, and FO showed me and my partner incredible hospitality during our short stay, and we made some amazing connections, which is what’s led to today’s forum being organized. So deep thanks to FO and Devan in particular for bringing this idea of a solidarity forum to fruition. We were asked to share experiences at CTU to the FO convention when it came to connecting wider social issues with our bargaining demands, otherwise known as Bargaining for the Common Good.

FO wanted to know how we in Chicago linked together the issues of school fundings with the issues of our government’s war spending, for example, how we linked learning conditions to the attacks in our communities last year with ICE’s “Midway Blitz” on Chicago, where tear gas was being released around many of our schools and students and their families were being torn apart in a racist attempt to drive a wedge between undocumented people and those who have a piece of paper saying they’re allowed here. Because let’s be clear, no one can be illegal on stolen land built with stolen hands. The FO wanted to know how we organize alongside our students, parents, and the wider community to fight for the schools our students deserve. As we all know, there’s no shortage of taxpayer money when it comes to bombing schools in Iran, burning children alive in Gaza, or giving tax breaks to billionaires who are on their way to becoming trillionaires.

Our hosts in France showed us tremendous solidarity during our stay, and now the people of France are showing the world something even more important and amazing. As often happens in history, sometimes the educators become the students, and what the people in France are showing us in the United States is incredible. They’re showing us that we don’t have to accept the status quo; we don’t have to watch our neighbors literally be burned alive from climate change this past summer, as they witnessed in France, and accept that there’s nothing that can be done about it; that we don’t have to see our resources that we as workers create, those resources being used to kill, maim, and starve people in other countries who had nothing to do to deserve it. It’s not just in France, but the youth of Albania, India, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, to say a few, are taking to the streets.

These young people are showing us an immense lesson that we all have to learn. We have an amazing opportunity to learn from our siblings around the world as we are all facing similar conditions, as is obvious by the hundreds of thousands of people that took to the streets in Paris yesterday. Those numbers show that we outnumber those who are harming our communities while enriching themselves. We outnumber them by multiple factors and we can show our power. So thank you all for taking the time to join us today from France and those in the US who wante to learn our lessons. So I’ll be quiet with those opening remarks.

Jackson Potter:

Yeah, thanks a lot, Max, Denis. I’m Jackson Potter, Vice President of Chicago Teachers Union, expressing a tremendous amount of solidarity with our siblings in France leading this fight. We are all experiencing a similar phenomenon, the rise of extremist right wing populism, the neoliberal assault on public education across OECD countries that have really gutted the public sphere. So we’ve got a situation, for example, in the United States where the “Mississippi Miracle” model is being shown as the example we should all follow because they have high literacy scores. What they don’t tell you is they also have the highest infant mortality in the nation. So they want to deny children and their families food assistance, rights to access of healthcare, public education, lower class sizes, better food—all of the things that make a life worth living—in service of reproducing this economic system that keeps many people at the bottom and a minority in power and with all the wealth.

And so I think what France is showing us, Spain, others in this moment, Belgium, is that when we build bigger, broader, deeper movements for the common good where our demands are, “We want it all. We want housing, human rights, we want to feed and fund schools in our countries, not bomb them abroad”—that these are demands that can actually coalesce a majority and we’re seeing it right before our eyes. So really want to hear more from you all and we’ll be listening intently. Thank you for being here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You’re about to hear from a broad range of those folks in a minute, but just to give you a sort of base of what we’re talking about here, in case you have not been getting the basic information about these protests, I want to read from a report that was published today in The Guardian to just give you that base of information and then we’re going to have our guests introduce themselves. So in The Guardian earlier today, they report,

“Hundreds of thousands marched in cities across France on Saturday in largely peaceful protests to support school children’s demands for more teachers and repairs to dilapidated buildings as Emmanuel Macron faces a social and political crisis in his final months as president. The prosecutor’s office in the southern city of Nice said on Sunday that 59 people had been taken into police custody, including 11 suspected of belonging to extreme right groups. They were alleged to have gathered with the intent of committing violence. In Paris, at least 110,000 people marched along the eastern edge of the city, according to government estimates. They supported high schoolers, but also complained of the high cost of living and the government’s heavy policing, saying riot police had been sent to target school protestors over the past month instead of the government offering political solutions. More than 70,000 police were on the streets of French cities with shops boarded up and many museums closed. The government had feared a repeat of last Saturday when despite peaceful protests taking place, France saw one of the most violent days of unrest in years with public buildings burned, hundreds of shops destroyed and looted and at least 2,700 people arrested in cities across the country. The government has been facing a crisis since the start of high school demonstrations in mid-September when children aged between 15 and 18 began protesting against staff shortages at their schools, leaking and crumbling buildings and a lack of chairs in overcrowded classrooms. It grew into the biggest youth movement in years with trade unions, teachers and parents joining. Police investigations are underway after some children and protestors were maimed and injured by explosive police weaponry.”

So that is the, again, just kind of mainstream media account of these protests. It’s one of the least bad ones I could find, but I want to give you all access to the folks who are actually on the front lines of this struggle and can tell you exactly what is happening.

Irina (French Student):

Sorry, I don’t speak English.. (Translation) My name is Irina. I am a high school student in high school in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city of Nantes. I have participated in high school mobilizations since 2023. I participated in blockades, so I have seen the evolution of the situation.

Clément (French Student):

Hello everyone. My name is Clément. I am a student at the University of Nanterre, so near Paris, and I am also a trade unionist at SNF which is a trade union for teachers and staff members in secondary schools and six form colleges.

Léna (French Student):

Hi, I’m Léna. I’m a student in Clermont-Ferrand, which is in the middle of France. I’m a street medic and I’m also a liaison between the high schooler and the students. And I’m trying to help them. I’ve been asked to help the high schooler to assist them in the general assemblies.

Apolline (French Student):

Hi, I’m a French high school student. My name is Apolline. I’m from Clermont-Ferrand, same as Léna. I’ve been active on the blockade since the beginning of the blockade in September, and I’ve seen how the police have been treating us students and minors on those blockades.

Chloé (French Student):

Hi, my name is Chloé. I’m a PhD student in economics at Institut polytechnique de Paris, so Polytechnic Institute of Paris. I’m also a teaching assistant there for two master students, and I’m an activist for la Francois.

Clément Poullet:

Hi, I am Clément Poullet, general secretary of the FNEC FP Force Ouvrière. And I’m going to say a few words how my union see the movement in France. I would like to thank you for this international event. This is very important for us to know that what is happening in France is seen from all over the world. Something important happened yesterday. Refusing to address the demands of young people and workers, President Macron decided to ban demonstrations. He wanted to impose a State of Exception and Terror. Huge crowds responded by taking to the streets in massive, peaceful numbers, young people and workers supported by trade unions. In dozens of cities across France, 800 thousands people demonstrated for freedom and support in their demands. Paris did not burn. The cohesion of the people overcame terror. The revolt unfolding today is a consequence of 10 years of struggle and to which the only response, most of the time, has been the repression. Young people have taken the lead in this movement, and it’s now spreading across Europe—Spain, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and beyond. And workers are beginning to take up the baton because they are facing the same policies, because fuel prices are skyrocketing and wages are no longer enough to get by. This revolt will not stop because the demands must be met and the government is attempting to push a sweeping austerity budget through the national assembly, €54 billion in cuts to public services and social spending. Meanwhile, billions are spent on war. All of this places a big responsibility upon the labor movement. My union has supported high school and university student from the beginning, and we believe that Macron and his government have left us no choice but to prepare for a total strike leading to a shutdown of production and public services by uniting our trade union confederations and standing in solidarity with the students we are preparing for a massive strike beginning on November 5th. Thank you for your attention.

Caitlyn Savado :

I’m not sure if everyone else from France went, but good morning here from America. My name is Caitlyn Savado. I am currently a second year in my undergrad at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. I have been a organizer and a community organizer and abolitionist since I was 13. I’m from the south side of Chicago, and what sparked my organizing was our calls following the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor back in 2020. Since then, my work has focused on restoring restorative justice practices in Chicago public schools, removing police from Chicago public schools, and getting all of the things that all of our communities need. So I’m grateful to be here and have so much solidarity in my heart for all of us and all of you all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, there’s so much history here that is not visible to so many people. Cait, I’ve talked to Chicago Teachers Union members on our podcast, working people many times about the overcrowded schools, the crumbling school infrastructure, especially in poor black and brown parts of Chicago. So I know that the issues that are so central to the CTU are very much connected to what students and this whole movement in France is fighting for. But also to our friends and comrades in France, I know that in the grand French tradition, you guys know how to shut shit down. And I remember interviewing students and teachers and workers during the general strike of 2019, 2020, during the pension strikes of 2023. And so I say that to let the audience know that what we’re seeing now did not come from nowhere. And we are seeing it spread in Gen Z protests from Bangladesh to Nepal, the cockroach movement in India.

Something is really happening here. And so I wanted to ask again, starting with our guests from France, if you could just in taking maybe two to three minutes each, tell us what is happening there. Where did this come from? What does it look like on the ground? What are you seeing that we’re not seeing?

Karine (French Teacher):

I’m just going to focus on the demands, properly speaking, the students’ demands that Clement talked about. And they will sound very familiar to you, Chicago, because they are the basics of education. So more teachers, but just like Clemon said, Macron government keeps cutting teaching positions 4,000 last year, another 1,500 next year. And I’ll give you a concrete example. When school resumed last September after the summer break, I met with my 35 new students, the equivalent of your soft more students in America, in the American school system. And I gave them the list of their teachers, but that went quite quick because no Spanish teacher and some of them study Spanish and the major, no physics and chemistry teacher, no technology teacher. So more teachers, yeah, that’s demand number one. Well, actually, I’m not sure if it’s demand number one or number two or number three, but that’s one demand they have and that we have as teachers.

So there is a connection. We connect our fights. Another demand is you talked about the class sizes, 35, sometimes 36, and among them are students with disabilities who do not have any proper learning conditions and one-on-one aid despite their status. An example, September 2025, if I’m not mistaken, official numbers were 50,000 special needs students with no proper aid in the class, being crowded in classes of 45, 46 students. Two years ago, I had an autistic student who would hurt his head on the desk.

I felt like I needed to protect him obviously, but I also needed to protect the other students of my class. So that’s demand number two class sizes. Demand number three, you said decent buildings to study with dignity rather than with rats, as you might have been seen. You might have seen on the news in schools of various mostly old roofs collapsing, elevators not working, no soap, no toilet paper in the toilet, buildings that are way too old to face global warming issues. Here in France, we had our first episode of the heat wave back in May and some schools just shut down, just closed, just like if students could feel better at home, but we know that’s not the case either. So no fans to cool down the classes, nothing for them to feel good at school. Too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter.

I guess it’s the same for you in the US in school, in American schools, not enough desks, not enough chairs, having to ask our colleagues, coworkers next door whether they can help or not. There is another demand, a very important one, which is is our university admission platform.

The students are very angry about continuous assessment, weighing heavily in the back rate and the opacity of. Our students keep checking their phone, obsessed with their grades. So this platform basically is a tool of social sorting that left thousands and thousands of graduates without any solution after an exam, except conscription, unfortunately, except conscription because that’s one choice they have. You have to tick little squares and if you end up with nothing, you can tick this square and go to war.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus. That’s bleak, man.

Karine (French Teacher):

Yeah. Last but not least, our students are also opposing, just like I said, the growing militarization of schools through official texts and legislations that require teaching on defense issues. How am I supposed to teach about defense issues? That’s not my job. I’m an English teacher. I’m just a teacher and we’re not at war, so what do you want me to do that? And the students, even when they’re 15, 16, 17, 18, they’re perfectly aware that billions of euros are going to the march to war and not to public services, just like Clemon said, and like schools and hospitals. So they are saying no to the war budgets currently under discussion.

Léna (French Student):

So first and foremost, I would like to express my regrets at the absence here of anyone from the [inaudible] which are the overseas region of France, because they are the ones who started the movements and their condition are far much worse than those of us metropolitans. So it’s something I think we should all remember that they started and that their condition are really, really hard. And it’s a shame they cannot speak here. So as I said before, I spend a lot of time with the high schoolers in Palm Film, and I’ve been able to discuss lots about what the demons are, ranging from too much pressure to having to live in a dorm with windows that cannot close in winter. I’ve heard and seen a lot of what they are feeling and one they feel multiple is anger. Anger are all the adults that have never or have stopped listening to them, to us, because what I’ve high school students have access all, especially college students.

We are already in a precarious situation and the government has only made matters worse by raising tuition, by leaving students with no choice but to live in unsanitary crouse housing and fitting to provide enough funding to renovate universities. To give you a few examples in Claremont, in 2023, the Florida storm, it’s us and the roof of Jane High School blew off. And now in 2026, there’s still no actual roof.

In my university, we have to go to class with throw blankets because there’s no insulation, but we don’t have the rights to take them to our midterms or we cannot have any codes for our midterms and it’s in December or January, so we’re basically freezing while taking our exam. So that’s cool. And I would just like to point out that I’m talking as someone privileged enough to be able to live with my parents. And even if I left, I would have a bit of financial help. So I’m not concerned about what I’m going to say, but I’ve seen friends live in housing and I seen them pay 300 euros for a small room with no real locks and sometimes no fridge. I’ve heard horror stories about watches in apartment that I’ve never been treated or inspected or even in Claremont about a girl that was held captive and raped by her downstairs neighbor in a cruise housings with thousands of people around her.

The government is responsible for all the violence inflicted on young people. That is the very reason for the high schoolers movement. We seek only to make a united voice heard. The voice has been heard by some and has brought about a convergence of struggle, but it has also been suppressed by the police and thus by the states. Even in Clamo, which isn’t a big city, I, as a street medic, I had to treat many high school students, many children. I had parents express fear that the children would be protesting for their rights. So they came to stand in front of the high schools to act as human chill. I saw teacher and elected official. And today that’s the main focus of the French media and government, political exploitation, not the demands, not the children named by the police, but the control of high school students by the far left, except that I spoke with the high schooler and I can assure you that they don’t need to be manipulated by anyone to organize a blockade.

They all have their own political opinion, but the movements belongs to themselves. I’ve heard them express their anger even at unions because sometimes even students, I’m speaking about all unions because sometimes they take a lot of space and they speak a lot for the students, but students have their own way of thinking. And in we have a lot of problems with that, especially with because sometimes they talk a lot to say nothing and they try to explain to the high schooler what they are living, which is not fair because they know exactly what the condition they live in are. They’re very, very well informed about what the Germans are. And is the far left politically collecting the movements? Possibly, but that doesn’t mean that blockades are being manipulated by them or even by or the Muslim brotherhood. Absolutely not. All governments actually is sliding towards terrorism, but the people will not stand for it and will continue to fight against injustice and for the rights [of] immigrants [and] everyone.

Irina (French Student):

(Translation) As I have said, I am in a high school from a poor neighborhood of the city of Nantes. So I have been doing blockades since 2023. And what I see is that since then there have been blockades, but the places where it was strong, where the police came was always in the high school from the poorest neighborhoods. Since six o’clock in the morning, there were already dozens of police trucks in front of the schools. Even if the blockades had not already started, what is generalized today is what What’s happening already in the poorest neighborhoods. Right now it is also happening in the city centers. So it’s something that is very shocking for the high schoolers of those neighborhoods.

So a camarade was speaking a little before of what’s happening in Green, in Guadalupe. But actually what is happening in the metropolitan France, we don’t know what is happening. Everything is silenced since… Yeah. So what is happening there does not appear in the media. Regarding the working conditions we have in my school, we don’t have any social worker in my high school. It’s been eight years. In my high school, we also have only all-time nurse. She’s also explaining that her management teacher and management in her curriculum is something that is very heavy, that is in the final diploma. It amounts a lot.

This management teacher is sick. She has been sick for years. She is never replaced. Every time she has a sick leave, the teachings don’t occur. And this year she said clearly my health will not allow me to go until the end of the year. So I have to do the curriculum very fast so that you have the master you can have for your exam. So they are pushing on the teachers to get beyond what their health allows them to. And also the students, they are over exercising us. And in any case, they’re asking us to have good results. They ask us to resist in a system which is just crumbling.

Right here in France, high school students don’t have the right to strike. They don’t have the right to vote. So their only possibility is to make things change is to blockade the schools and to go to demonstrations to shout their demands. But what they are faced with, there are so many injustices, so many problems. There is a difference between school students from poor neighborhoods and students from city centers. There is a difference between the public schools and the private ones. So this is quite normal that the younger rises among the high schoolers. What the government sends to them, it’s the police, the police which has a big role in everything. They maintain them in… Sorry. So those are the first violence that they are faced with, but they’re not the only violence. They’re faced with institutions violences. For instance, her curriculum, her high school, she didn’t have the choice of all that.

She has been sent one hour away from home. They chose her curriculum for her. They chose everything for her. This is the first violence which is not condemned in French media. They have taken 1,600 professor positions. Everything, all that is not condemned in the media. What they condemned is that some trash bins are burnt.

Maximillian Alvarez:

They do that here, too.

Irina (French Student):

(Translation) So let’s finish with something easy. Today, us, the Gen Z, the high schoolers, the students, we are allied with the workers, with our teachers, with everyone who wants to be an actor in this struggle and fester with Macron’s policies. Today we are not going to cave as long as they don’t give us the 10 billions we need.

Clément (French Student):

Yeah. So I want to intervene on what I’ve been seeing on these school blockades. I am a university student, but also a trade unionist in a union for teachers and staff members in the secondary schools and six former colleges. And I would like to make a point on the violence I’ve been seeing on these different school blockades. So for the past few weeks, I mean more than 7,000 student arrests have been made age between 14 and 18 year olds. It had already been reported that more than 170 students have been seriously injured by the police. As of a few examples, we have one secondary school student who lost the use of his right eye following a direct hit from a rubber bullet. Another suffered a double fracture to the jaw and the loss of his teeth after being hit by a rubber bullet from less than three meters away.

We had a video of a plain clothes officer arresting a secondary school student near a river before holding his head underwater for several tens of seconds. There have been cases of strangulation during arrests, for example, involving a 14-year-old girl who could no longer breathe after being put in a headlock. The violence is not limited to secondary school pupils, but it escalates when they’re left alone to face the police. And whether they’re teachers, parents, trade unionists or elected representatives, everyone has been subjected to the police violence. So I went as a trade unionist to various school blockades with other members from my trade unions to form a safety coordinate between the police and the students alongside teachers and parents. We were teargassed on numerous occasions. We were targeted with rubber bullets and faced police charges. At one point, the police positioned the sniper on a rooftop with a rubber bullet launcher who was aiming at us with his finger on the trigger in a flat line trajectory shot position, which is normally prohibited.

The roads were not blocked by the police, so there was a constant risk of students being hit by cars. And during tear gas attacks, crowd movements gave way to scenes of chaos, all in all law and order enforced in a brutal bloodthirsty manner. We had the back, an anti-crime brigade with its origins in repression in the French colonies and now notorious for its violence in working class neighborhoods, areas also known as police testing grounds that turned up at the perimeter on the school blockades with balaclavas and no way to identify them, provoking police violence between school pupils and police. We also witnessed the presence of the Bravem, a unit of ultra violent police officers who conducted manhunts on motorbikes, batons in hand, crisscrossing the narrow alleyways and knocking over students. I have to say that this unit had been disbanded following the murder of a student Manikosekin in 1986, but was subsequently reinstated by the French president Emmanuel Macron, notably during the yellow vest protest and the pension reform protest in 2023.

Apolline (French Student):

So first I wanted to talk about what Léna said. I know it’s a bit ago, sorry. The roof of [inaudible], which is the high school I’m going to, it blew off three years ago. It’s the roof above the boarding parts of the school. So currently the boarding students in the dormitories, they have molds, they have cracked walls, they have water in the walls. It smells really bad. It smells like rots basically. And the administration is telling them, “Oh yes, we have a project going on to repair it,” but it’s been three years. The state of the school, to explain why it’s not being changed as fast, the school was built at the end of the 1800s and they can’t repair it as easily. So we have large cracks in our walls with plants growing out of the walls.

We don’t have enough toilets, even though we have toilet paper. We don’t have menstrual hygiene products. Well, we have them, but they’re hidden somewhere in the school. It’s really difficult to get by because it’s really old and it’s really in a bad shape. Another thing too, what Clément was saying with the union building, that was a really good thing for us students as we are not being protected much. They help a lot, but yesterday we had a big protest, all over France, and there were less breakage of things and stealing because the army was involved and the police were much more violent. In [French] someone lost part of their fingers and was violently burned on the back of their hands due to… I don’t know how it say. It burns you and multiple people got burned, but that’s the worst of them.

Maximillian Alvarez:

The flash bang grenades?

Apolline (French Student):

Yeah, basically. And before those protests, there was a bit of an unspoken agreement between the police forces and the unions that if the unions were there to keep calm during the protests, the police wouldn’t act. And that unspoken thing has been broken. Now they gas. Last Saturday, we were supposed to protest at two on the big class in Piermoferon. Even before two, the police were already gassing us and just without problem. And people who had never been to protest and who arrived at this time, they were like, “But you can’t even protest because they’re already gassing you. You can’t march, you can do anything.” And another thing that you said about people being assaulted while they’re arrested, we also have cases of sexual assault while people are being arrested, like some policemen, they have batons to hit. They put that near someone’s ass. So yeah.

Léna (French Student):

Just to say also about this, they are also the cases of policemen calling people “sluts” and also touching. And I’m talking about underage high schoolers. I’m talking about children getting touched in their private places by cops while they’re getting arrested. And I think it’s important to just say that. Sorry.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, that’s horrifying and infuriating. And again, I’m so angry hearing this, but I’m so appreciative that you all are informing us of this because it’s important for people to know this. And I have so many more questions, but I know we don’t have so much more time. So I did want to ask if we had other guests from France who do want to hop in and share your story and what you’re seeing. And then let’s bring in our CTU folks to respond to what you’re hearing and what you think we here in the US can learn from our comrades in France and what we can do to support them.

Chloé (French Student):

Yeah, sure. I agree with most of what has been said, but I’m going to add maybe a few numbers. The demands of the high schoolers and the students are really coming from the fact that our education system is really under strain. The public funding per university student has fallen by 20% since Macron has been elected. There are more than 10,000 teaching posts that were eliminated and so many hours that are not being towed because professors are not replaced. It’s like millions of hours lost every year for all students. And what is really striking when you go on high school blockade is that these students really know what they’re fighting for. We hear a lot on medias that when you’re 16, you just don’t know, you don’t understand politics, you don’t know what you want, you should not speak. But these students really have very current arguments.

They have precise demand. They know exactly why they’re locating their school. They have science clearly against the government, against the government’s budget, against the far right. They show support for Palestinian people. They’re really aware of all the struggles. They really want to end Pako Soup. When you go to college students, they want to put an end to Mon Mesta, which is exactly the same, mostly similar to to go to fine graduate curriculum. What I want to add is that mostly what we see is a lot of beans burning, but when you go on the ground, students, they know that burning beans work. We work against their cause. They are mostly peaceful. It’s very festive. There’s music, chants, there’s solidarity. It’s really far from what we see in the cows we see.

They’re really peaceful. They just want to be heard. I just want to add, I think it’s been said already, but what really works is when there are adults, there are teachers, there are parents, they’re on the ground to protect the students from the police. They form chains, human chains in front of the students to protect them. Has asked all the officials, all the activists to step in whenever they could. Their elected mayor who now has been on a lot of social medias because he went on the ground, protected students, protected students also doing protests by protecting them directly physically from the police. And so what the students need seems to be support to be heard, to go on the ground, speak with them, hear their demand and protect them from the police.

Devan (French Teacher):

Maybe just a word of explanation on what is Paco Soup. In the French tradition, which is very different from the US one, there is a diploma at the end of high school. We call the baccalaureate. And when you have this baccalaureate, you were entitled to go to the university in the curriculum you choose. This right has been destroyed in 2016 leading to 2018 Pacosup, which is the electronic platform through which the students are selected and some are just left with no possibility of going to higher education. And Monmaster is the same thing between the bachelor and the master in France. When you had the bachelor, you had the right to go to a master, but now this is not the case any longer.

Clément Poullet:

As I have said, Macron is determinated to continue his policy. At all costs, he needs to push through a war budget, a budget of austerity, but yet at the same time, he’s facing a historic, powerful and determinated movement mobilization. The demonstration will continue. The blockades will continue. Many are saying the government must respond or else it must go. But the elections are still six months away. That is a long time. Workers and some trade unionists have begun to join the students, only just Pegan, but in the face of the government’s strategy, the government’s strategy of attrition, waiting for the movement to run out of steam, what can be done? We have reached a point where our trade unions have a responsibility to commit all their activists in workplaces, in public administrations, to bring things to a standstill while striving for the broadest possibly unity. Success is not guaranteed, but we have no other choice because only a total strike can turn the tide.

Clément (French Student):

I’m just going to hop in for a few seconds just to talk about what’s also happening in the universities in France. So after what happened with the high school and what is happening with the high school student movement, there has been also mass mobilization different universities in France. At its peak, more than 90% of the universities in France were blocked by their students. So in my university in Montair, we also organized blockades, not only in support of the student movement, but also for problems we are facing ourselves at the university, but there are quite in common with the problems called out by the student movement. For example, a shortage in university places, buildings that have deteriorated over time and the lack of funds given to universities by the government budgets. We organized different general assemblies where we voted to send out delegations to high school blockades around the university and also delegations to different workplaces to call the workers to strike with us.

We also organized different autonomous courses on security during protests, the rise of the far right in France, the history of revolutionary movements, and also courses that were held by striking teachers for high schoolers who must pass the national exams at the end of the year.

Irina (French Student):

(Translation) We need not forget that there is a racist dimension in all that in the media, in what the medias, the politics say about what’s happening. As I already told you, I began speaking by high schools from the poor neighborhoods. All that is broken, all the bad behaviors for the state right now is assimilated to the people coming from immigration. You know that in your country, Trump is saying that the problem in France is because of the immigration, because of the Islam. The reality is that in every movement in France, the people who are pointed are the people from the poorest neighborhoods, are the people from different races, and they are called the savages, they’re taken as a representant of the unrest, of the breakages. All that is racist.

All this media, all what the media say, this is pressure from the politicians from the extreme right, but also from the right, also from the center is nurturing this hatred against the Muslims, against the people from different races. This has led to attacks, to terrorist attacks, racist attacks. We have had a few days ago an attack in Trump and the assailant explained that he wanted to avenge the shop owners who had been the subject of the looting last week and that he wanted to kill Black people, Muslims, Arabs. This is that, this has an impact on our lives, and this is why the presidential elections in 2027 are an issue of life and death for us, for us high schoolers from poor high schools, but actually for all minorities in France.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and there, again, are so many parallels to what we see here in the United States. There are crumbling schools all over this country. There are schools closing, there are hospitals closing. We too are a society crumbling under the weight of decades of rampant pillage by the capitalist class, and that has been squeezing more from working people and giving more to a handful of billionaires and oligarchs and the power hoarders and wealth hoarders of our society. And we’re seeing the effects of that all over the place. It’s in our crumbling infrastructure. It’s in our schools falling apart. It’s in our children’s health getting worse because they’re living near toxic polluting facilities or drinking polluted water. These are the kind of signs of a society in decline at the same time that we’re seeing more wealth generated and spent on war and private industry than ever.

And so I wanted to round things out by asking for our friends and comrades from Chicago and the Chicago Teachers Union and looking at all of this from the side of the United States, even if we’re experiencing a lot of what our French friends and panelists have been saying, we’re not shutting down the country and protesting the way that they are. And so why not? Or do we have to do something different? Is there something we can do to build solidarity across working class struggles around the world, not just in France, but in other parts of the planet?

Caitlyn Savado :

Yeah, I can go ahead and hop in. As I shared before, I was a high school student of Chicago Public Schools in one of the buildings that they intended on shutting down in one of the buildings that also seen the same kind of conditions that you all saw. I will speak to my experience as a Chicago public school student, but I think it’s more important to establish this understanding that the sovereign nations of the world are in a state of empire backsliding, and it’s masquerading itself as a power that is expanding, as a power that is establishing its domination. We’re seeing that in this mass production of weapons. We’re seeing this in this mass production of ideology, making sure that there are no connections between those of us who are in the United States and our comrades across the globe, whether it be in Iran or France or Belgium or Spain or Brazil, wherever it is in the world.

And so I think just to speak on the establishment and to speak towards what conclusions it’s drawing through media, what conclusions it’s drawing through your all’s demonstrations and what is communicating to the rest of the world, first is this notion that Gen Z is not only not hold the integrity to be able to challenge these powers, but it’s trying to establish this generational disconnection between us and our teachers, us and those who come before us, and it is causing this lack of support. It’s causing division and not only how we see things, but how we communicate to each other within our own communities. I mentioned I’m currently a student at the University of Southern California, and kudos to you all for all of your work in your universities because what we’re seeing in American universities is the complete opposite. People are not only totally complicit, but not even aware of what’s happening in our world.

Again, that is the efforts of this empire trying to disconnect us Americans from our understanding that we are a part of this global community. We do have responsibility and obligation to people who are halfway across the world. We do have obligation to ourselves who are too victims of this empire building. What we’ve seen in the last five years across the world, and I think your guys’ experiences all speak to it, is this new face of teacher and student solidarity. It’s an understanding that we are all growing and a comprehension that we are all holding, that it is us who are those who understand the weight of what’s happening, who understand and hold the actual weight of what it feels to be responsible for democracy, the actual weight of what it feels to be responsible for educating the next generation. And so what we are seeing across class, across race, we too are seeing with students and teachers, and I think the targets of the conditions of students’ learning conditions and teachers’ working conditions from the states and from the governments is they’re not only kind of revealing of why they’re targeting us, but they’re Kind of revealing that we are essential and important to what is to happen next in our countries and without teachers, without students, to challenge the empires—and I know that the notion here in America is typically that so many Americans are caught up in the work to be able to live. And I think where we are currently is in a space where we should be understanding that the work, the labor that we are engaging in and that we are producing is directly connected to the struggles of those of our siblings who are halfway across the world. It is directly connected at this—our taxpayer paying money is directly connected to bombs in Iran, bombs in Gaza. Our efforts towards democracy, all of these different things are directly connected and tied to struggles across the world. And so it is really, really, really important just for Americans to understand that our day-to-day practices, whether you are going to work, whether you are going to school, it almost exists this kind of linear hypocrisy.

I know I feel it myself all the time, even just understanding that I have access to drinking water, I have access to food, the choice to be able to think about what foods I want to eat in a day. All of these things are very small components of our everyday lives that we’ve been kind of structured and conditioned to be blind to, but they are now the exact components of our lives that separate us from the rest of the world: people not having access to water, people not having access to the ability to protest, to go to a protest and to know that the state that is there to protect you is not going to protect you, which we already know. But to engage in these different processes as an American is completely different than to engage in if you are a citizen of a different country in the world.

Dennis Kosouth:

It is worth remembering that the history of this country, just like the history around the world, anything that’s decent that has been won was because regular people rose up and made it happen. It wasn’t because it was handed down by someone we elected. It wasn’t because we asked nicely. It wasn’t because we wrote petitions and they were heard by the people who run our society. The international system of prioritizing profits over people is what causes the conditions that they’re experiencing in France to be felt here in the United States. And it’s an international system that wants to put the needs of the 1% over the needs of the 99%. And those connections are made for us. And that’s I think what drives these protests happening not just in France, but are happening across Europe and India and other countries as well. And will come back to here at some point.

We don’t have to go back that far in this own country’s history to look at the occupations that took place in universities like Columbia University where they renamed one of the main halls after Hin Rajab, a young Palestinian girl who was murdered by the state of Israel. Those connections are made for us when we see tear gas in the front of schools in Chicago where they attempt to divide us saying that the problem is somehow immigrants coming here to flee conditions that this country actually produced to seek a better life. And yet somehow they’re the ones who are taking resources when the fact is it’s the billionaire class that is taking the resources that we create as workers in this country and redirecting them towards war and away from the needs of regular people. Their power is the domination of the state. Elections are being bought and sold by the billionaire class.

Right here in Chicago, we’re undergoing a school board election where a billionaire Michael Sachs is spending all kinds of wealth that he has towards stopping the candidate that would actually be supportive of the needs of students in this city. We see the actions of the police in France. The same thing happened here in this country in the uprising in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, where they attempted to shut down the protest movement using their power of the state. So I’ll just finish my own comments by saying it’s our numbers. We create the wealth in this society. We are the vast majority of people in this society in every country around the world. It’s up to us to organize ourselves to fight back and take what we created and build a world that’s worth living in.

Apolline (French Student):

There are things happening in France called [French] which means when you get arrested in the next 24 to 48 hour, I’m not sure, you get judged. And the minister of justice, Gerald Darmano, he’s been telling the magistrates we have no control over, to be extremely strict and harsh. And so some of the sentences have been to not be allowed to demonstrate or to lose the right to vote for three years. There is no separations of power in how this is happening. So that’s why I wanted to add it because I feel like it’s quite important. And to respond to your question about the 5th of November, one of the things that we’ve been telling other French people who come to protest because they’re sick or they’re mothers and they can’t come is don’t buy anything. Don’t consume anything, really just don’t buy. And that pass the message even though it’s not as good.

Léna (French Student):

So to support us, yes, we encourage to stop buying and stop participating in any way in the economics of your country for a day. We also encourage strikes, just not going to work on those days. But also a good way to help is to, if you can afford it, the streets medic, which I am part of, are in dire needs of fundings because we see more and more people hurt and it’s expensive. I am a student. I don’t have any money and I have to have a lot of stuff on me so that I can help people. And so if you can donate, there’s a lot of pages you just have to look around to donate to the streets medics of each cities. If you can afford it, it’s amazing. And then to help us just talk about it, talk about what you’ve learned today, talk about the reality of things, stop listening to mainstream media.

We have a lot of independent media in France and we have a lot of them that speaks the truth, which one of the concerning things in France right now is how all the mainstream media have stopped telling the truth and have only been there to film and talk about violence of the protestors. One of example that was trending at some point was a guy filming journalists that were all crouched down, like 10 or 15 journalists crouched down filming a bin on fire. And he went saw them and was like, “Oh, you want to interview the bin? Just interview the bin. She probably has so much to say.” And it was kind of fun. So don’t listen to the main media and we have lots of independent media and talk about what you’ve learned.

Clément (French Student):

Yeah. I just wanted to say, I mean, for the fifth one, remember what is being organized in different trade unions is, as Klimo was saying, the general strike. And honestly, the main way for support internationally would be to push this general strike on an international level. And for that, the only way is to organize. So going to organizing general assemblies in your workplace. I mean, I know it’s quite complicated and we’ve had a lot of setbacks in France, but it’s basically going to see the workers talking about the problems because a lot of problems that we are having in France are adamant in different countries in the US, in England, and as we’ve seen in Europe, in Spain, Italy, Germany. And what is happening is people are organizing together. So workers are going to students, students are going to workers, and that’s how we’re pushing through to mobilize ourselves to push for a general strike.

And for the media part, I completely rejoin what Lena has said. Don’t follow mainstream media. There’s a lot of independent media out there on social media in France, to name a few. We’ve got street press. We also have one which is. And so unfortunately, they don’t translate their videos or papers in English, but I mean, you do get a general sense of what they’re trying to push through and they are medias that are on the streets with us and who are not, as Lena said, filming burning bins for no reason.

Devan (French Teacher):

Yes, just a word because as a French teacher unionist, I have had the chance to participate some demonstrations of the CTU striking. And I’ve seen how you know how to organize a strike in the US. I mean, not a school was open in the city. There was this demonstration with demands, with signs, very square. And this is something very impressing for a French teacher because yeah, you know how to strike. I know the situation in the US is very particular. You can strike only at the end of the contract and so on. But what you are building right now, I know the CTU is part of this push towards the 2028 Mayday. It’s something that is a support for us because we see that in the US too, you are able to fight, you are able to define your demand, you are able to work towards topping off this system.

And I think this is a big help.

Chloé (French Student):

A few days ago, the Prime Minister of France has asked all the main telecommunications providers to be prepared to block access to social media such as TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat X as the huge national day of protest was being organized. It has used this previously for Kanaki or New Caledonia. So what we can do together and with you with other countries is to try and create all this alternative channels of communications that would be free from fake news, from censorship and just try and communicate more together on these struggles.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think it is getting late there in France and we should be courteous hosts and let them go and get some rest so they can go back out on the streets and keep kicking ass for the working class. And so I just wanted to thank everyone again for being here, our friends from France, our friends from the CTU, everyone who registered and is watching and sending us questions live. Everyone who is listening to this or watching it later, thank you for caring about this. We all have a role to play here. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something and do something by helping us share this story. Share these stories and these voices from the front lines of struggle. Help us make sure that we fight the corporate media bullshit and propaganda and get the real news out there to the people.

Thank you guys so, so much for being here today. I’m sending all my love and solidarity to all of you from Ithaca, New York. And I will be back home in Baltimore tonight. But solidarity friends, now and always.

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

So we’re here at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffee House in Baltimore, and I am really excited to be sitting with two of the three co-authors of the vital new book, The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World. Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs. Give it up, everyone. Hell yeah. Welcome to Baltimore, guys. So let’s talk about the S word, right? I mean, we’re here. The world’s on fire. Life continues to get harder and scarier year after year for working people everywhere. The masked jackbooted thugs that we were warned about are in our streets, hunting and disappearing our neighbors. Endless war and genocide and profiteering are ripping our world and our people apart. And everything is being run or taken over by these psychopathic, self-serving, greedy, society destroying, profit seeking, oligarchs, end times, fascists, authoritarians and fanatical nut jobs who are all so openly weird and corrupt and evil that it makes your head spin.

I think it’s time we start talking about doing things differently. Don’t you agree? Yeah? So let’s talk about it. Let’s get all the good faith discussions and questions about what socialism is, what it isn’t, and how it can work for us in the real world on the table. And so Ben and Mike, I wanted to start things off this way with the big question. You guys co-wrote this with Bhaskar Sankara, founder of Jacobin Magazine.What is your ideal goal in writing this book together and publishing it now? What would be the ideal definition of success for this book?

Ben Burgis:

Yeah, thank you so much for all that. And I should also say that our third co-author, Bhaskar, would be here tonight, but he has a month old baby at home, so he is on paternity leave from non-New York City events for a couple months at least.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Congrats, Bhaskar.

Ben Burgis:

But I think the way that we would see it is just this. All of those things that you were saying earlier are downstream of the fundamental way that our society is organized, the fundamental relationships and power at the heart of how things are produced in a capitalist society. And to us, the fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism is a question of whether we should have a society where some people can spend all day giving orders because they have money and some people have to spend all day taking orders because they don’t. And right now we’re having this conversation in a small island of a different way of organizing things at a worker-owned bookstore, but right now the fundamental institutions of our economy aren’t set up to support that. That’s not an option for most people that they get to work someplace where they have a democratic say in the way that it would work.

So what we want to think about is how we would have to reorganize our economy on a fundamental institutional level so that everybody can have that experience.

Mike Beggs:

Yeah. And I guess I would add that our brief for this book, what we set out to do was to kind of bracket off the question of how we get there. Strategy is a very important question, absolutely, but it’s also one that holds a lot of your potential model to… Holds it hostage. The short answer to how do we get there from here at the moment quite honestly is I wouldn’t start from here. So we are bracketing off that question. Once you have to start thinking from what is politically realistic right now, it limits what you can say. I mean, where are we starting? I mean, are we starting from current American political reality, Australian reality, reality somewhere else? So we wanted to draw a realistic vision of how a society might work, what is a plausible way that socialism could work that avoids a lot of the problems that people are familiar with.

And the point is not so much to set down a plan that people are going, we expect people to follow in the future and if they don’t, they’re doing it wrong. That’s not the point at all. The point is really to try and be part of a project of building confidence in the present that there actually is a realistic alternative, one that is feasible, one that people can imagine working in, living their daily lives in, one that they think would be a lot better than the way things currently work. And really that sort of confidence in a very different society is I think something that we have lost even on the left. We talk a lot, a lot of us call ourselves socialists, but there really is a lot of sign that a lot of people are not fully confident in articulating exactly what a realistic alternative might look like.

And that’s what we’re trying to do with this book.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, it’s like that real politic of how the fuck do I get through the day in this shitty system, let alone have time to think of what could be is the kind of trapped space that so many of us are in. But the only way out of that is through it together, I think. And so let’s kind of take that in here now, this space, Red Emma’s to sort of… I’m going to take a page from your book, Ben. I’m going to set this up kind of debate style. I want to kind of toss you guys some thoughts, claims, things we’ve all heard about socialism. First, I’m going to give you the softballs. Let’s talk about the straw man claims that are made about socialism. We grew up in America. We all heard these things, but I want to toss them to you guys and see you knock them out of the park.

And then I want us to also talk about the steel man concerns that people who are not Fox News dipshits, people who still have genuine questions about socialism and how it can work in the real world. So with that, I was going to start with kind of just the biggest and most obvious one. Capitalism, this is the straw man. Capitalism is great. Capitalism gives us freedom, individual choice, personal security, and socialism is bad, it’s breadlines, it’s non-individual, no room for the individual. Everything’s dictated to you by the state. Capitalism’s great. Why would I want socialism?

Ben Burgis:

Yeah. I would say that the book is primarily written for people in that second category, the ones who might have some level of understanding about what’s wrong with capitalism but are a bit skeptical that anything else is possible. But we do certainly want to address the first set of concerns too. We do a fair amount of that in the book. And I would just say that obviously when it comes to the kind of democratic rights that we already have, advanced liberal capitalist democracies, freedom of speech, trial by jury, all of that stuff, we like all of that. We want to keep all of that. We are sometimes terrified that the current administration is trying to take away a lot of that. But then the other half of that is what it takes to make those rights meaningful in people’s day-to-day economic lives. If you say, “Hey, legally you can do whatever you want to, but also if you want to eat, you better sign on the dotted line and agree to work for half of the day, half the time that you’re awake most days of the week and only half because of past worker struggles for a boss who is going to have dictatorial power over you at the workplace and you better not piss them off or else you’re going to lose that job and you’ll be in a much worse position,” then that doesn’t sound to me like somebody who has meaningful control over their life.

I think that having meaningful control over your life means that you should have a say in the place that you have to spend the most of your life as an adult. And ultimately also that means that we could all spend less time there anyway because if workers are in charge, when we have productivity gains, when technology advances and we have the choice, okay, do we capture those productivity gains in more stuff or do we want to work fewer hours? Then right now that decision is dictated by this class of private capitalists who aren’t doing the work themselves and it’s a very easy decision for them, right? Produce more stuff, make more money. That’s why the Fair Labor Standards Act in this country set the 40 hour work week in 1938 and has not gone down one minute since then.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Minimum wage ain’t been raised either.

Ben Burgis:

That’s certainly not because technology stopped in 1938. So I think that a society where you can have a say in what happens where you work and where you have to work less and you have more time and more material stability to do whatever the hell you want with the rest of your life sounds like much more meaningful freedom to me.

Mike Beggs:

Yeah. I mean, I would say as we put it in the book that there’s a lot of goals that socialists share with liberals and that we don’t want to give up some of the benefits of the modern complex division of labor. Personal freedom, which as Ben says, is not only partially met under capitalism, but personal freedom’s an important one. Efficiency, we make a case for efficiency as a socialist value in the book, mainly for the reason Ben’s just talking about because efficiency means not just… It’s not about more and more stuff, but about more time free of instrumental labor, but socialists also have extra goals, right? Of course, egalitarianism, care, making sure that everybody is secure and looked after, ecological sustainability. And the difficult task that socialists have that we’re trying to address in this book is making the case that those specifically socialist goals are compatible, can be made compatible with broad, liberal and personal freedom with the efficiency of the modern division of labor.

And that’s a challenge because there’s very good reasons why people think that socialism as it has been attempted in the past has failed on that account. And so we’re trying to make the case that they can be brought together.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I want to pick up on that last point because here comes the sort of steel man concern, right? Some of the greatest crimes in human history were committed by people or regimes that called themselves socialists or that attached that word to their movement. People, regular people, working people, poor people, people who didn’t do anything wrong or mean any harm were hurt in the course of a 20th century in which the word socialism was a big thing. And so for people who come from those family lineages or who are worried about those kinds of things, how do we learn from the past without getting bogged down in it?

Ben Burgis:

Yeah. I think there’s a lot you can learn from the failures of those earlier socialist experiments, both the moral failures that you’re talking about, just the failures to live up to socialist ideals and also just the design failures, the economic dysfunctions that led to the empty grocery store shelves, even managers of state enterprises having to rely on black markets to get the inputs they needed to make their quotas, all of that stuff. I mean, that’s why we wrote the book to try to show that there is a better way of organizing this. I’m sure to the extent that time allows, we’ll get into that, what we think that better way looks like. But I would also just say on the bigger picture question, it’s like, yeah, it is absolutely true that there are all kinds of regimes that did all kinds of things that I find abhorrent that use the socialist label to justify that.

On the other hand, the war in Vietnam was justified by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the name of defending freedom and democracy and the knowledge of the millions of Southeast Asian peasants who were shot or burned alive with napalm or dislocated from their villages doesn’t make me like freedom and democracy any less. It just makes me hate the hypocrites who claim to stand for it more.

Mike Beggs:

Yeah. I mean, I guess I’d emphasize that this is very much a democratic vision of socialism, but also a socialism that has a lot of room for personal freedom. Our model still involves most people having an income… I mean everybody, not most people, but everybody having an income to spend and goods and services and things like that. And not just making trivial consumer choices, but that allows, of course, for all kinds of freedom in terms of lifestyle choice, where you want to live. But it also adds to that freedoms that we do not have under capitalism. Democracy is extended from the political realm to the workplace in particular. And there’s a lot of points in our model where we try and find real points of leverage for effective democratic deliberation all the way through. It’s not something that just happens at the political level. It’s something that happens at multiple points in the system.

Sometimes it’s democracy of workers at a particular workplace. Sometimes it’ll involve the community along with workers, et cetera, et cetera. So I would say that our model is one of liberalism plus, right? It’s a liberalism socialist with all the egalitarianism, security, et cetera, that gives people real freedom in their lives. And that’s really at the center of our model.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. I got another straw man for you. So capitalism and the dynamics of the free market are the most efficient way for society to organize a system of production that meets the needs of all. Why would we want socialism, which is… Sorry, I didn’t finish the question. Why would we want socialism that’s central planning and not adaptive as the market can be?

Ben Burgis:

Yeah. Well, great news for you. The kind of socialism that’s advocated in the book is not one where everything is essentially planned. We would make a distinction between saying, okay, are there certain things about capitalist markets that do make it efficient at doing the things that capitalism is good at? It’s not good at producing material equality. It’s not good at producing stability in people’s lives. It’s not good at empowering most citizens, but it is good and it’s importantly good at things that earlier moderns of socialism were bad at, having full grocery store shelves, all that stuff.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, selling your apples at a farmer’s market is fucking fine. We don’t have to turn that into this monstrosity that we have today.

Ben Burgis:

No, exactly. And we think that there’s nothing magic about the act of buying and selling. So there are the same way that there are some libertarians who think that the least little bit of social democratic interference with the free market, and before you know it, you’re down in the road to Stalin. There are some people who come, as we do, out of the Marxist tradition, who say that the least little bit of buying and selling going on in your society before you know it, you write down the slippery slope to capitalism. And we don’t buy that either. There have been markets, there have been buying and selling in human societies for thousands of years. Capitalism is something much more recent. Capitalism is a society where the majority of the population have to sell their working hours to private owners of the means of production. So we can still have markets, you could still have in sectors of the economy where we think you still need them.

You can still have firms setting prices based on what they think can sell, all of that stuff. But those firms are owned by the workers, they’re internally democratic, and financing can be done through the public sector, through public banks. So people aren’t forced to risk their own personal savings, which obviously for most working people under capitalism is not a rational risk. And the last thing about this before I throw it to Mike is just oftentimes people think of markets and planning as being opposed to each other. We’d say, look, these are just tools you can use. To us, the core of socialism is who runs things. Do working people themselves get to run their own workplaces or do you have the separate class of capitalists do? Everything else is just the engineering details to make that core right. So in terms of those engineering details, yeah, you could have markets, you could have planning.

We think that subcontracting out certain tasks to markets where markets make sense makes the job of planners easier where planning makes sense. If we want a socialist state to worry about things like full employment, it’d be better if they didn’t also have to worry about exactly how many toothbrushes are going to be produced in the next five years like Soviet planners did.

Mike Beggs:

Yeah. We spend a lot of time in the book going through the debates about planning and markets in the 20th century. So the socialist calculation debate, if people are familiar with that, at the mid 20th century, between the Austrian libertarian argument that socialists… You can’t have rational planning of a very complex economy with countless resources, countless squared ways of combining those resources for countless cubed possible products that people have preferences, wants and needs about. And one of the guys that made the strongest reply to that argument, a Polish economist called Oscar Langa in the late 30s, and he kind of argued he was replying to Von Mesas, who people may have heard of, one of the Austrian Libertarians. And Langa said up front, he said in the future socialist republic, we are going to want to erect the statue of von Mesas in front of our planning board because he did us a great service in actually making sure that we took this problem seriously because I think it is a serious problem and it’s obvious the experience of the 20th century is that this is not an easy problem to solve.

Our particular solution is different from Langa’s. It does, like Ben says, involve some market production, some commodity production. It also has a non-commodity sector because we’ve learned not just from the theoretical debate, but also from all kinds of experience in the Eastern block, but also under capitalism and social democracy over the latter half of the 20th century. And though we have a role for markets, I think it’s really important to be clear. I don’t think we’ve said it up front yet, but the means of production, social wealth is entirely held publicly in our model. There is no private accumulation of wealth or private accumulation of control over the means of production. People may have some private savings, but for the most part, because of the retirement system, the housing system, there’s not a huge need to even save in that way. So we see savings as being a pretty minor thing.

So it’s a society with some role for markets, but one where wealth is absolutely publicly owned and democratically managed at every level.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It makes me think of the great Fred Hampton, and I guess to paraphrase Brother Hampton, theory’s great, but theory without tangible examples ain’t shit, right? And it is important to remember that there are examples all around us. We are literally sitting in one right now. Red Emma’s is a worker owned cooperative business and other co-ops in Baltimore exist because of the workers who make all the decisions. Everyone back there is a worker owner, and they have institutions like Bread, which provides loans to other co-ops that can’t get them from a regular bank. And that’s how you see the system set up to prioritize certain businesses and kill ones like this, but organic institutions can grow and create something different. And if we participate in them, we can make it different and stick. But I also want to bring that into a steel man concern here because whether it’s great worker cooperatives like Red Emma’s or in the world of my reporting, like labor unions, these are all essential examples of what you guys are talking about, what we talk about on a day-to-day level when we’re trying to tell people about this stuff.

But you guys know as well as I do, they’re not perfect. I mean, labor unions in this country have a lot of problems with them. Labor union presidents have been thrown in jail for corruption and racketeering and all that stuff. It associates in people’s minds with the same kind of corruption they see in the Polit Bureau and Soviet times and all that stuff. So human systems will always be susceptible to human foibles. And so what do we do about the kind of day-to-day concerns people have over corruption, ways that this is going to be still just a change in title, but still a kind of shitty reality? How do we tussle with that?

Mike Beggs:

Yeah, that’s a really good question, and maybe one we can answer by talking about, since we’re here in a workers’ cooperative, how that actually works in our system and how it involves a whole lot of checks and balances that are designed to deal with that very real problem. And it also relates to another question people ask, which is if workers’ co-ops are so great, if democratic workplaces are so great, there’s nothing stopping people for forming them under capitalism. Why doesn’t that happen more often? The answer to that, I think for the most part is that there’s certain things about capitalist society that makes them difficult, but particularly financial arrangements. It’s very difficult for cooperative arrangements to work because if you don’t have an outside owner, which a cooperative cannot, it’s a collective of its worker members, if you can’t have an outside owner, you can’t have equity financing, and that means you got to get your finances from somewhere.

So what? Is that supposed to come from the individual members? So people, at the same time as they take a job, they have to take a mortgage to bring their finance with them. Alternatively, you have to borrow from a bank, and that’s very risky thing to do because bank loans come with very fixed payments on fixed dates, leaving the business very exposed to those ups and downs, uncertainties of running a business. So in our model, the financial system is not made for capitalist businesses, but specially designed around workers’ cooperatives. And this connects back to your question about corruption, how do we actually stop that kind of thing from happening? Because in this model, like we said before, the capital, the means of production, the wealth of society is publicly owned, right? The businesses are run by their workers, but they are running it in partnership with the public banks who are essentially almost renting, effectively renting part of society’s wealth, part of society’s means of production to that worker’s collective.

And so it’s always going to be done in partnership between those institutions. So that means that the workers who are running the business democratically are kind of custodians for part of social wealth. And so they don’t have complete control as it should be, right? They’re custodians of public wealth. So that’s one of the checks and balances, right? The public is represented in this case through the bank, through the public bank, but also through the need to maintain the confidence of your customers and the need to actually… That’s one of the reasons why we keep some commodity protection there because it gives direct communication, direct back and forth between the humans who are on both sides, the people who are producing, the people who are using. And so in those cooperatives, that’s the checks and balances. The other side of the economy, and I’ll pass back to Ben in a second, that we haven’t talked about yet is we also have a very large non-commodity sector where those checks and balances have to work out differently in the directly state funded sector.

Then you’ve got all kinds of different ways. The checks and balances is still there. It might be that community members are there on the board of your local aged care center or daycare center or whatever. It works differently in different spots, but there’s always those kinds of public oversight, democratic public oversight and freedom of information about everything that’s happening with the finance, with people’s wealth.

Ben Burgis:

Yeah. And to circle and underline that point, just to make sure nobody missed that last part, part of the setup about public banks includes the constitutional mandate for transparency. The books are always open to any member of the public who wants to look. That’s an example of an institutional safeguard. There are several layers of kinds of institutional safeguards that we imagine, but I want to be really clear on this because I think otherwise it’s going to seem evasive to anybody who’s paying attention, that we’re not claiming that corruption will cease to exist, that embezzlement will wither away with the end of capitalism, that nobody’s going to try to find loopholes or commit crimes because people are people and we didn’t want to make it easier for ourselves in writing the book by assuming either that there’s going to be some amazing technological progress that means that we can just have supercomputers plan the economy perfectly or that there’s going to be some sort of amazing cultural or psychological progress to remake human nature.

We are assuming all of the same technological, psychological limitations that we have right now, which means that yeah, you still need systems to police corruption, to curb people trying to take advantage of loopholes to self-enrich. But I think the question is always a comparison that they… Okay, if you’re really worried about corruption, here’s an example of something that would be super corrupt, actually kind of similar to your union example earlier, union presidents who end up in jail and all that stuff. Because in some ways, the basic units of production in our commodity sector would work a lot like unions work now, the same way you could vote in a union contract, you could vote in an operating agreement, which basically is structurally exactly like a union contract, except there’s no separate boss to negotiate with. It’s unilateral. And of course you vote for leadership, for the committee that’s running the place.

So here’s an example of something super corrupt that could happen. Somebody could rig an election for that committee to make sure that they got the spot, even though most people didn’t try to vote for them or somebody could try to do that on behalf of their son or something. Yeah, that would be terrible. Now let me tell you about capitalism where it’s entirely legal for people to continue to be the boss, even though most people who work for them don’t want them to be because they don’t get a vote in the matter and where it’s entirely legal to just leave the The business to your son as property inheritance, the same way that you’d leave your car to them. And that’s not even considered corruption. That’s just the way it’s supposed to work.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s real fucking rich for the most corrupt people in the whole of human history to be saying, “Oh, socialism’s corrupt.” I mean, we know better and we got to call it out when we see it. We have to be each other’s sense of sanity and social responsibility. And it starts by calling out bullshit wherever you see it. Whoever’s saying it, doesn’t matter whose side they’re on, the truth is the truth. Mother Jones famously said, “I will tell the truth wherever I please.” We all got to have a little bit of that moxie right now. And we got to take it as a duty to go and tell the truth wherever we can together so that we crowd out all these fucking liars and all these self-serving fascists and all this AI slop they’re trying to throw into our faces to get us to forget what is right in front of us.

So there is a real social participation element to all this that I really appreciate in your guys’ book because it’s so needed with everything. I think one of the benefits of capitalism, and I can say this as kids who grew up in America post Cold War, it felt like the capitalism had won and it was all right. The future was pretty bright. The pie was going to be big enough for all of us to get some if we worked hard enough. My immigrant family felt like we made sense in that narrative. And boy, oh boy, did capitalism show over the next 25 years that all of that will be consumed under this kind of monstrous cycle of expansion and domination and consolidation, corruption. And now we’ve got what we’ve got here in 2026. So I wanted to end there, bring us back to where we are here.

Because like in the 20th century, when you had the surge of socialism and left thinking, at the same time you had the surge of fascism and far right movements, we are in a very similar moment. It’s not the same. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it’s rhyming pretty hard right now. And so we’re seeing the surge of far right governments, movements, this authoritarian international network that is now targeting the Brazilian elections, yada, yada, yada. But there are examples in parts of the world where that authoritarian message is making a better case to your average working person for why they should support the authoritarians and not listen to the people who call themselves Democrats or liberals or what have you. If it keeps the violence off their streets, if it keeps the normalcy in their day-to-day life, the sad reality is a lot of people will say it’s worth it to me to sacrifice the civil rights of others and lock people away in Bucheles like Salvadorian prisons if I don’t have to worry about gangs walking down the street.

So that is happening at the same time you guys are writing this book. So the stakes couldn’t be fucking higher. So how do we make the case for socialism work in the real world now and win with this message?

Ben Burgis:

Yeah. I mean, I think that ultimately, if everything you were just talking about, when you’re talking about Buchele and Trump and global wave of authoritarianism, if that’s going to be beaten back, it’s going to take obviously a lot of people who come from a lot of different perspectives to come together to do it. But if history is any guide, the people who are going to be the best fighters against all of that stuff are people who are motivated by this north star of a vision of a qualitatively better world because those have always been the best fighters against whatever horrible authoritarian nonsense was going on at any given time for civil rights, for labor unions, for all of that stuff. And I think that right now it’s a problem. It’s not the problem, but it is a problem that right now, even so many people who want to be socialists have lost their confidence in that qualitatively better world.

During the 20th century, a lot of people thought it was being built in the Soviet Union. Even a lot of people who are on the anti-Stalinist left who had their critiques of the Soviet Union still thought that the economic core of that system was functional and it still gave them hope that some sort of socialism was possible. And right now that’s been lost. And so I think that trying to restore confidence in the possibility of something better is important always because we don’t want to be stuck in the system forever, but I think it’s more important than ever in circumstances like the one you’re describing. I mean, I often think, I guess the last thing I’ll say before I throw to Mike to finish us up, but I often think about Manufacturing Consent. That’s a book from several decades ago by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman.

And basically what they’re talking about is the way that the borders of acceptable debate were policed. That in the American corporate media, you had this appearance of thriving debate, but it was happening within painfully narrow parameters. For better or for worse, those parameters have pretty much been blown up lately, that you have people like Nick Fuentes have become like…

He had dinner with the president and you have a DSA guy who’s the mayor of the most important city in the capitalist world. And so it seems to me that we are at a time when better things are possible than they were for most of our lifetimes, but also much worse things are possible. And I would like to bolster people’s confidence that there is a long-term vision of much better.

Mike Beggs:

Yeah. All I would add to that is that even though there’s economics and some theory in the book, but we also tried to paint a vision of a society that would be really broadly appealing beyond the left. We tried to paint a model that most people could imagine themselves living in and enjoying. We built it around the kinds of aspirations that people in general have today. I mean, it’s a model that makes room for all kinds of social experimentation, but it also is one that guarantees people security of livelihood. It guarantees income to people and services to people as they need it, not whether they can pay for it in some way or other. It’s a vision that takes a lot of things that people… It could be communicated as something that takes a lot of people’s frustrations and anxieties in life, especially in the working world and says, “Here are some solutions to them.” They don’t involve you sitting in meetings all day or anything like that.

The way that we have workplace democracy is not something that would involve people in having meetings all the time, but it is something that means you’re not going to have in general a boss that you hate. You’re not going to have a day-to-day existence where you fear being arbitrarily fired or you’re worried about your retirement or anything like that. So I think that the vision that we present is one that is really broadly appealing and could actually be something that is used to reach well beyond the kinds of people who currently think of themselves as on the left.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs everybody. Hell yeah.

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.

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 in Fort Worth, Texas, and we’re talking about a fellow worker named James. As Maven Navarro recently reported in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, “After leaving Oklahoma, James Gardner built a life for himself in Fort Worth. Now he could lose it all. When Gardner walks into doctor’s offices to receive treatment for his terminal liver failure, he has to ask staff to remove all the air fresheners for his skin condition. Gardner has multiple chemical sensitivity, which he says was caused by his time as a concrete specialist working with two-part epoxy resin. The illness causes him to break out anytime he gets around chemicals, air fresheners, perfumes, cleaning supplies, and paint spark allergy flare-ups that can last for 10 days.

Concrete work is known to cause health problems. Cement plants can also cause respiratory or cardiovascular issues according to the Environmental Protection Agency. James Quigg first met Gardner in high school in Oklahoma where he was given the nickname NDN after enduring bullying for being Native American and kids calling him Indian. A few of Gardner’s friends started calling him NDN or Indian, and it stuck. Now, Quig started a GoFundMe to help prevent Gardner from losing his house. As he is unable to work and has faced challenges receiving disability, Gardner was denied disability the first two times he applied for it. It wasn’t until his third application that he was approved because of his internal organs shutting down.” So to talk about all of this, I am truly grateful to have James Indian Gardner himself and James Quigg, who they have given me permission to call them “NDN” and “Quigg,” friends since high school, both here on the show with us today.

Thank you guys so much for being here. It is really, really great to be connecting with y’all. And my God, I wish we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances and I’m so sorry that you’re going through all of this. And NDN, as much as you’re comfortable, I want us to make sure that we focus a good chunk of time today talking about what you’re going through now, where things stand now and what people listening can do to help. But we’ve got 50 minutes here and I really want listeners to get to know you and your lives more, your friendship and all the things that make you, you, not just these horrible people and jobs and systems that have done all this unforgivable damage to you. So NDN, start us off. Tell us the story of you and what brought you to Fort Worth. And then Quigq, hop in and tell us your story and how it intertwines with Indians.

James “NDN” Gardner:

I’ll start with a nickname “NDN” and then I’ll go from there. So as you were saying, back in school, kids were making fun of me and bullying me, and my principal called us into the office in my freshman year, said, “You guys can’t call him an Indian anymore. You’re being racist.” And one of my friends stood and said, “We’re not calling him Indian. We’re calling him letter N, letter D, letter N.” And he says, “Well, I can’t do anything about that.” And it just stuck and I’ve always enjoyed it. A lot of people are like, “He’s not just a Indian, he’s the Indian. There’s only one of them running around.” As far as career goes, I am third generation doing precast concrete with the passion. I’ve always enjoyed doing concrete. I’ve loved it. Being able to take the raw elements of earth and forging it into something that’s going to last and help the world is phenomenal to me.

I relocated down here to Fort Worth to actually do the McKinley Stadium, which is my third stadium to be a part of. Years ago, I was working for a company that dealt with a very strong epoxy resin and only 4% of the people that are exposed directly to it will develop an allergy to it. And with the company, it’s easier for them just to pay you off than it is to change their safety protocols, which shouldn’t be the way, but it’s cheaper for them that way. And over time, my symptoms and my condition got worse and worse and worse because it just doesn’t stop once you’re out of the environment of that specific thing. I remember one time they laid a new asphalt in front of my house here on the road and I broke out for a week because of the adhesive and the tar and the asphalt and I couldn’t avoid it because I was in my own home.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I have so many questions about that specifically because I don’t know if you guys know about it, but on this show specifically, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews with working people who have been exposed to toxic chemicals from work, from industrial disasters near their homes, all this kind of stuff that poor and working people are being exposed to daily. I mean, I was just filming in South Baltimore last night where residents just like you guys, but here in Baltimore are fighting trash incinerators that are blasting toxic chemicals into the lungs of their children. So this is definitely something that we’ve talked a lot about on the show, but I do want to talk about what that looked like for you, Indian, on a day-to-day working level. But before we get there, I want to go deeper into some of the lore here. Take me back to where you guys were in high school where you first met.

Quigg, who was this guy in high school when you met? And NDN, same question about Quigg.

James Quigg:

So Indian is a grade above me. So I came in as a freshman. He was already an established sophomore. He had a cool car. It was painted. He had some lady. Did it have a female on the hood and it had the universe? I mean, you couldn’t miss this car.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You had a low rider?

James “NDN” Gardner:

No, actually, it was a 91 Chevy Cavalier and anytime I’d get bored, we would just re-spray paint it. It was all animal print once. Once it was all hippied out, make love, not war. Even at one point I gave all the kids an art paint pens and we just wrote quotes over the entire car. People would stand there and read it for hours. It was just something to do. So

James Quigg:

You’d see this car. I’d see the car around before I was even in high school. So then you see, oh, this is the cool guy with the cool car. And then he’s always hanging out in the courtyard and he’s always got this group of girls because he’s just very didn’t try very hard, I guess. And honestly, I don’t think we liked each other necessarily in the beginning. It was just he had this girls that I was trying to hang out with, talk to, and he just didn’t really like the new guy, the new skinny white dude that was hanging around.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You got to earn your keep, baby.

James Quigg:

It took a couple years.

James “NDN” Gardner:

He really had to. And most of these girls I’ve been friends with for years, so I was very protective of them because they were my friends. And here’s this scrawny kid coming in trying to ask them all different kinds of things and get involved. I’m like, “Hey, hey, you don’t need to be around here right now.” But eventually he warmed over to me and I warmed over to him.

James Quigg:

Yeah, I was saying hope I was best friends with his cousin for a couple years. Then probably what, sophomore, not sophomore, junior, senior year, we started maybe hanging out a little bit more. You invited me to your house.

James “NDN” Gardner:

I had a house that most people weren’t allowed to. I was very young and I lived on my own, so it was just me and this trailer house at 16 years old. So a lot of parents didn’t even allow their kids over to my place. And they spray painted up too in the walls.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. I mean, to be honest, I don’t think my parents wouldn’t allow that either, but that would be exactly the house we’d all want to go to. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, can I ask how you ended up having your own kind of place when you were 16?

James “NDN” Gardner:

My parents separated and it was a choice of either do I go live with my dad or do I go live with my mom? And I was already working full-time at the time, and I bought a trailer house on state auction and moved into it. And it was just simpler that way. My mother ended up moving back in with me a few years later, but it was just more convenient. So like I said, I already had the income coming in.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What were you doing back then for work?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Back then? Well, my first job was working for the Department of Wildlife through a program called ATEC, which was American Indian Education Training Association. They took Native Americans and put them at federal buildings and gave them summer jobs. So that got me experience. Pretty much I was doing property management, mowing the yard, stuff like that, but I got to do a lot of really cool stuff with them because I was, “Hey, let’s grab him and take him with us to go do this fish survey or let’s go explore the bat caves and do a survey out there.” And so it was very fun as a youth to have that. And then I went straight from that to Home Depot, working at Home Depot as a pro associate.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So paint a picture for me. When you guys were back there in Oklahoma, are we talking kind of small town Oklahoma, medium town, city? Yeah, paint a picture for me.

James “NDN” Gardner:

So Bethany, Oklahoma at that point was the very edge of Oklahoma City. So it’s pretty much small town. I knew all the police officers, they all knew me, not because I was in trouble, just because there wasn’t a lot of us running around. And of course it was the late ’90s, early 2000s, so we were always getting into some sort of trouble as we all did back in that time.

James Quigg:

Oklahoma is a pretty small, big town. I think less than a million people in the whole city, probably less than that now, but I mean it takes what, 10 minutes or less to get down into the heart of Bricktown, downtown Oklahoma City. I mean, it still is small town, but it’s trying to be bigger than it really is.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I come from Southern California, the land of endless lights and sprawl from the beach to the mountains. So everything feels small town to me to some extent. But to be honest, I kind of got a lot of love for the small and medium-sized towns in the country. I don’t think I gave them enough credit when I was younger, but the older I get and go visit more, the more fascinating they are. But I wanted to ask in that vein, we’re talking about Oklahoma. I guess we’re talking in the colonial project of the United States of America, so everything is ironic, but living in a state named Oklahoma and going to a school where you make fun of Native American kids feels so ironic and ridiculous that I don’t even know what to do with myself. But was that normal Indian? I mean, what was the kind of ratio?

Were there a lot of indigenous kids going to school there?

James “NDN” Gardner:

No. No, there wasn’t. In high school, there was maybe five of us altogether. I mean, there’s not a lot of us left. It’s sad to say. I was fortunate enough to run into… I mean, we just kind of all clicked together because, oh yeah, you’re native too. Cool. What tribe? What’s your family line? But the whole reason why we were in Oklahoma City is that my father was one of the Native Americans you hear about in the past being adopted off the res for a very low amount of money. And then he was adopted with four other siblings, all native from different tribes raised by a white man in the city. So yeah, there just wasn’t a lot that made it to the inner city area at that time. They all stayed out near the reservations, near the small towns like Carnegie and Adarko. So being inside the city, yeah, there wasn’t a lot of us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I take it from the origin story of your nickname that it wasn’t a very kind place to Native kids like you?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Oh, no, no, no. I remember once I was 14 walking down the street and the cops pulled me over because they had an APP put out on a Native American with long hair. I just happened to be a Native American with long hair. And they picked me up and took me down to the police station, which was just three blocks from my house. I wasn’t the person they were looking for. The person they were looking for had robbed a gas station and he was in his late 20s and I was 14. We stood out, so you either knew who we were or it’s just the way it was.

James Quigg:

It’s true. And what they only taught us in school about Native American culture is just an annual field trip we take to the Cowboy Hall of Fame and they’d show us the statues and talk about the Trail of Tears.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

But there’s a lot to this story that I identify with in certain ways. I don’t know what that’s like Indian, but I know what it’s like to be a bald, scary looking Mexican dude in America. I’ll take looking like Quigg over looking like us on a normal day if I don’t want to get stopped by the cops. But that’s all the more reason why it just fills my heart when I hear stories of comradery and lifesaving solidarity, even among kids who are standing up for a friend. Tell me more about that, both of you, the stepping in to sort of reclaim the name and to say this is not how we’re going to do things. This guy’s our friend, not our enemy.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Oh yeah. I mean, Quig is my white guy. I always joke with people like, “I got my white guy. He’s right here. I’m safe. I don’t need a card. I got a whole person.” And I mean, he’s always had my back. Once we really connected and I realized that this is somebody that I needed to be part of my life and everything he’s done for me over the years, I can’t live up to. I try.

James Quigg:

I seriously doubt that, brother. I have computer smarts and I can do techie stuff, but this guy is the dude if you need any help. I mean, I’ll go back to last year, we had a leak in my daughter’s bathroom and it was coming down in the guest bathroom and I was like, “I don’t know what the hell to do, man. It’s just coming down.” And he just hopped in his car and he brought all his tools because he’s just that guy. And so he came and he helped me change the drywall. And as he’s doing this and helping me with all the stepping outside because I got to spray some kills on the wood, I mean, he’s getting hives, he’s getting blisters. I’m feeling incredibly guilty and he’s like, “Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get it done.” But he’s just that kind of guy and it’s been like that anytime I’ve needed him.

He’s just always there. And it’s not just me, it’s everybody. He’s helped damn near everybody that we know, either with a place to stay, help fixing their car, mowing a yard. It doesn’t matter. He’s a helper, he’s a doer, and that’s just something I’ve always admired from him.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s genuinely beautiful to hear you guys say that, right? Because first and foremost, I’m thinking just as three men in the country today, we don’t say this enough to each other and we don’t allow ourselves to be that for each other. And so I just wanted to kind of honor the beautiful friendship that you guys have, having each other’s backs for this long is a marvelous thing. And I’ll be honest with all of you listening, Quig reached out to me about Indian’s story and told me about it, and that’s how it got on my radar. So these guys have been together for years and they’re still looking out for each other, and I think the world will be a better place if we all do a little more of that for each other. And Quig, even you telling that story reminds me that we’ve still got so much to talk about here, Indian, about your working life and the conditions and chemicals that you were exposed to that are now collapsing your health and your quality of life.

So that’s normally what we talk about on this show is I talk to workers and I say, “Tell me about your working life.What does it look like on the job?

For people who’ve never worked in this line of work, what does it entail?” Can you kind of take us a little bit on that journey and then tell us about the kind of work hazards that you were exposed to?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Yeah. The company where I was working for made burial vaults and the poncho that they used went on the liners of the burial vaults to seal it to the concrete so it maintain a watertight sealness for 50 to 100 years. That’s what they were concerned about. The people working in there that were alive being exposed to a hazardous chemical to keep somebody that’s going to go in the ground from being exposed to the elements of the ground was more important to them than the people actually doing the job because there was other things that could have been used that was more efficient but cost more money.

And after my initial exposure with this company, I was still passionate about concrete. I still wanted to do concrete, but I had to relearn what companies I could work for, where I could work at, and how I could do it because now I got to change everything. I can’t be around anything that has sold chemicals. I’ve got to be in open environments. And one of the things, I was also a journeyman iron worker because every now and then you get tired of staring at gray when you do concrete long enough. And back to the whole having lung and breathing respiratory issues, as a journeyman iron worker, I was working on the Devon Tower, which is the tallest building in Oklahoma City, and I was going from the ground up a thousand feet every day, and I had developed acute altitude sickness from just working on the outside of the building every day.

But a lot of that was contributed because they did a long biopsy on me to test me for silicosis, which is from concrete dust. And I did have some concrete dust built up in my lungs at the time. And that’s just because not wearing enough protection when you should wear protection because old school concrete guys just get the job done, which I got no problem getting a job done, but it should be done safely, effectively, and efficiently, not the other direction around, efficiently and safety being one of the last concerns. So after no longer working for the company that caused my initial, and I didn’t realize how bad I was going to get over the years, because initially it was just adhesives in general. Then it got where I couldn’t even put a bandaid on without breaking out from the adhesives as I am now.

I actually have to order special medical stuff when I do get a cut so I can seal myself and not have a reaction to it for a long period of time.

James Quigg:

He has to take his own adhesives to the ER when he’s got to go to the ER because of his terminal liver failure, otherwise he’ll break out from that.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Yeah. Even going in for a procedure, they put an EKG machine on me. I’m going to break out from every point where the EKG machine is.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, man.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Even the tape on my fingers or to monitor my heart rate and my breathing will make me break out. So I travel with my own medical stuff now. It

Maximillian Alvarez:

Sounds like hell.

James “NDN” Gardner:

It is. It made me a shut in for quite a while because going to Walmart, going to the grocery store, luckily there’s DoorDash and things like that now where I don’t have to get out and get exposed. But again, like I said, it made me change how I worked in concrete. I went to places that had super structures that worked outside, still making beautiful things with concrete, but eventually the skin allergy, the multiple chemical sensitivity just overtook everything. I did work for a trailer company for a little while working three days a week because they knew my skin issue, they knew my thing. So I would go there whenever they needed something welded or something wired that they couldn’t figure out. But again, now I’m going to this place to work on a trailer and that trailer might’ve had paint in it. It might’ve had construction debris.

I can’t even walk into a Home Depot or a Walmart or Lowe’s. Fast food restaurants get me pretty good too. And as much as I love old people, they’re a little heavy with that perfume.That’s

Maximillian Alvarez:

Putting it mildly, man. And yeah, I’m sure so many of us don’t even realize all the spaces that we walk into where those irritants are, but if you start breaking out in hives the second that you’re exposed to it, you start realizing that actually there are a lot of places you can’t go. And that is just something that I think so many of us don’t have to think about. But when you’re in your position and you have to think about it, it must be just genuinely overwhelming at times.

James “NDN” Gardner:

T-Mobile has their own scent of air freshener. So when you open a T-Mobile store door, it puts a little spray into the air for a sensory thing. I understand how that can be with marketing. Oh, this is what T-Mobile smells like. I’m getting a new phone. And I didn’t know that till they rolled out with that and I went into a T-Mobile and next thing I know I’m being sprayed and now I’m breaking out in hives and I’ve got a leak.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, man. So as we sort of get to the situation that you’re dealing with now, I’ve heard from you a number of things already. We’re talking silicosis, we’re talking exposure to epoxy resin generating a chronic skin sensitivity, right? I mean the altitude sickness that you developed on the job. I guess if you had to sort of sum it up, if you could, what conditions do you have now that came from working in this country, from being exposed to things or repetitive actions to things? I guess I wanted to try to collect all that for listeners and ask what is the kind of sum total of all the crap that you’re dealing with from all the jobs that you’ve worked?

James “NDN” Gardner:

If the MSDS is laid out and has its certain rules and regulations, if the company will abide by the MSDS correctly, I would’ve never been overexposed.

James Quigg:

What’s the MSDS?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Material safety data sheets. It tells you about the hazardous of the chemicals, what you’re supposed to be wearing and be doing to you’re not hurt by it and it doesn’t affect you. And most companies, yeah, we’ve got an MSDS. It’s in a book on the wall over there. You can go look at it if you want to. And then they tell you to go to work. And I was guilty of doing that to people too. I’m like, “Well, yeah, the MSDS is over there, but just put this little mask on.” In reality, they needed a respirator instead of just a dust mask and went on with the day to get the day done. Things have changed a lot now than how bad it used to be when me starting off in the industry of concrete and everything else, because again, it was you’d stand in a cloud of dust grinding and just put on some safety glasses and hold your breath.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and let’s talk about when these health conditions started piling up and to the point that you needed disability checks and then had to navigate this Kafka-esque system that doesn’t work to try to get the aid that you need to live. Tell us more about the kind of crisis that you’re in now and all the people who are supposed to be helping you right now but aren’t.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Yeah. I mean, even going to the social security office to file for disability, I would sit there breaking out because I’m waiting for long periods of time in the line in a room full of people with chemicals on. So it became I have no choice. I have to go do this. I’ve got to go file this paperwork and I filed the paperwork and I wait and I wait and I wait. And then, “Well, we want to send you to this doctor.” Well, I call the doctor’s office. I’m like, “Listen, I can’t just go in there and they don’t abide by those rules.” They’re like, “No, you’ve got to come in, you’ve got to wait, you’ve got to go through this.” Even now, I’ve got some doctors that really help me with my situation and make sure the days that I’m scheduled, that nobody’s wearing perfume and that it’s going to be a nice, clean environment for me.

And then I have other doctors that could care less, but I’ve got to go through them because the social security’s telling me, “Well, you need to go to this guy and get tested for this.” I mean, they just did an allergy test on me, and part of the allergy test, the bonding agent in the allergy test is an adhesive. So I tested positive for everything, even though I told them I’m an adhesive and yeah, it just has to be on my skin for a few minutes to test me for allergies. Well, that’s still an adhesive on my skin for a few minutes. And I ended up having to get an epishot in the middle of the test, which now became an inclisive test.

James Quigg:

And I do want to clarify that Fort Worth Star Telegram’s article, I don’t believe he’s been approved for disability yet.

James “NDN” Gardner:

No. No, I haven’t been approved yet, but since we’ve gotten the articles, they’ve started reaching out to me more instead of me having to wait and call them. So now we’re actually communicating back and forth for the first time, but I’ve been denied twice.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So the situation, as I understand it, please correct me if I’m wrong, is that you now, because of what you’ve been exposed to over the course of your working life, are no longer able to work and you are disabled by those things you were exposed to, but you have received no money from the disability office. Your life is in limbo right now.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Yes, I am in limbo. And the first two times I was denied because they did not recognize multiple chemical sensitivity as a disability until the past five years. And I’ve been dealing with it for 10 years now. So it wasn’t recognized as a disability. Now they’re starting to, “Well, what do we have to do to prove that this is a disability?” And because of my skin always having to fight these battles and me being on experimental drugs, trying to overcome with it, and part of being native is that most drugs aren’t made for a 40-year-old Native American guy. They’re made for a 40-year-old white man who has years and years of antibodies built up in the systems where if I get a flu shot, I’m ending up with walking pneumonia, where if Quigley got a flu shot, he’s just fine the next day because it’s more developed.

So my body started shutting down because of it’s trying to fight all the time, always battling, always battling my skin, always fighting, led to me having internal organ failure. I go in for another surgery on Monday, which will be my 10th surgery this year alone because my body’s just shutting down.

But yeah, I’m just in limbo. But now, so I was able to refile for social security with the internal organ failure and the liver failure and the terminal diagnostics now. So it’s not even really taking the multiple chemical sensitivity into effect with my disability. That’s just added to it now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I guarantee that there are going to be folks that I know who are going to listen to this and they’re going to reach out and they’re going to say, “You’re damn right it’s a disability. They have it. A lot of the residents I was talking about who have been exposed to these chemicals, now they are so hypersensitive to these chemicals and they bioaccumulate and they make them feel worse and their kids are getting sick or staying sick or they haven’t been not sick for years at this point. And it’s just this kind of hell that they’re living through. And I can’t help but think of all the other workers like you who are exposed to this stuff. I mean, in the year 2026, black lung is on the rise in this country. There are men our age dying from coal mining or other forms of silicosis because of the stuff they’re inhaling, the lack of PPE they’re getting, just this whole system of grinding people down to dust and subjecting our bodies to the most toxic conditions just to make a buck.

And it’s so systemic, but it impacts us in so many different ways. And I kind of wanted to just ask you guys about that.What does this all say about the daily realities that working people are going through in this country? And especially if you’re disabled or indigenous or both?

James Quigg:

Well, I’ll say that invisible disabilities are easily ignored. That is one thing that Andy and I both have in common. You look at both of us on a normal day, you don’t see a disability. You don’t see a multiple chemical sensitivity in him. You don’t see type one diabetes in me. So it’s easy, kind of out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people, except for the people that have to deal with it day in, day out when they wake up to when they go to bed.

James “NDN” Gardner:

I feel like in a way I was robbed because I always wanted to provide for my family. I always wanted to work hard and make a living. And because I was working hard and making a living and the companies that I worked for ignored safety protocols, I can no longer do what I want to do for my family and be there for my family the way I should have been allowed to. And a lot of working people, that’s all we want to do is make ends meet, survive and enjoy life and enjoy the little things. And to not be able to do that now because a company wanted to make more money isn’t justified.

James Quigg:

I mean, it’s true. America is built on the backs of people like Indian and a lot of people just use them as stepping stones to get to the future.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that was beautifully and powerfully and put and it’s so depressingly true. I mean, Jesus, we just passed the 25th anniversary of nine eleven and we’re learning about all the things that not just first responders, but people all over New York were exposed to and lied to about for years later. This is unacceptable at every single level and we can’t keep accepting it. We’ve got to do something about it and we got to start by taking care of each other. And I wanted to bring us there for the final turn here because I know I can’t keep you guys for much longer, but I wanted to ask where things currently stand. I mean, you guys already gave us an important update from the Fort Worth Star Telegram that apparently Indian still hasn’t received anything from the disability office and he was denied two times before that anyway until his organs started shutting down.

Then he got some movement, but where does that leave Indian now? Where does that leave your family now? And what are folks doing in response? What can folks listening do to help?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Right. I mean, to back it down, sage up, pray to whoever will listen.

James Quigg:

Yeah. We’re kind of waiting to see what disability says. Hopefully he gets an approval and he’ll get some sort of back money so that he can get caught up with his bills because the bills haven’t stopped. The mortgage hasn’t stopped. They’re still trying to foreclose as far as I know because he’s terminal. They’re trying to get at least the ability for him to stay in his home and not be evicted. But that doesn’t solve a problem. That just pushes it down the road and it leaves it for his kids when Indian’s no longer here to help. But as far as what’s keeping him afloat has been this GoFundMe the last month or so, just from the kindness of strangers. Indian spent his life helping anybody and everybody. That doesn’t mean that those people are in positions to be able to help financially or monetarily in any way.

Indian’s always been that person to support others.

It’s just there’s nobody there maybe outside of myself that’s able to help him in that sense. And so we were sitting around his cousin, my other best friend and his mother on his birthday, what, six weeks ago, something like that, sitting around the kitchen table trying to figure out how do we stop this foreclosure? What can we do? Can we get a loan? Can we try to refinance? Can we refinance his mom’s house? Can I afford to purchase the home on my own? And realistically, none of us, we couldn’t do any of that. So I went home frustrated that we had to do this on his birthday, kind of cried about it a little bit and said, “Fuck it, I’m going to do this. I’m going to make a GoFundMe. I’m going to tell my friend’s story the best that I can and see if people are willing to respond.” Just try to show the world the kind person and generous person he’s always been and hopefully karma will come back tenfold on him.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Indian, I want to give you the last word here and it can really be anything that you want, but I guess if you could know that you’re speaking to fellow workers around the country who listen to this show, who work in industries like this and industries that unlike this, if you could talk to those folks who are working jobs like this now or folks out there who could help, what would you just want to leave them with?

James “NDN” Gardner:

My family’s got a motto. If someone needs help, you help. You don’t ever respect anything in return. Whether it’s an old lady crossing the street, somebody on the side of the road with a flat tire, any situation. Somebody needs you to help them push a car or you notice your neighbor’s grass is too tall and you know he hasn’t been feeling well the last few weeks. Nothing’s going to cost you but time. Time is all we have for each other and let’s enjoy it and spend it and help everybody together. We’re all in this together. This is one world, one life. We’re all part of this. We’re all part of this.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, James Indian Gardner and James Quigg. You can get in touch with them and keep up to date with Indian story by using the links that we’ve included 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 can’t do it without you. So thank you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The 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 across the US and around the world.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out our other 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 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:

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.