How labor unions create worker power (w/ Margaret Levi)
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You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Of the many strange things about being a comedian, one of the biggest is how being paid works. I can perform the exact same jokes and get paid wildly different amounts. Sometimes I go to a conference and I tell my jokes and I get a very lucrative check. Other times I tell those same jokes at a bar and they give me two free seltzers. It's the Wild West out there when it comes to joke prices.

So when I got my first TV writing job, I was really surprised to learn that I was now part of a small but powerful union called the Writers Guild of America. All of a sudden, my work included things like minimum weekly rates, health care contributions, a potential pension down the road and rules about how I could be treated by my bosses. It was honestly shocking to me. The contrast between how much better I was treated all of a sudden, it was night and day.

And also, here's a funny little side note. When I moved to L.A., I talked to one of the labor organizers at the union, and he told me that the zip code that I had moved into has the densest concentration of unionized comedians in the world. So there are people on all sides of me having a similar revelation right now. Being in a union and seeing the power and the benefits, it's really changed how I think about organizing and community power.

Because the only reason that the Writers Guild is strong is because the members are willing to stand together and risk losing out on money and work to protect each other. Whether you are an established TV writer who is already well into their career or someone just starting out like me. So in today's episode, we're going to dive deep into the history, power and promise of labor organizing. It's a topic that has been in the news quite a bit lately, but many people still have kind of an outdated idea of what a union is.

And while garment, steel and auto workers, they still have powerful labor organizations. These days, labor also includes education and health care, as well as baristas, tech workers and yes, even comedy writers like me. But even if your job is not related to a union, you can still learn how to use collective power in our own lives, how to help us understand the common struggle for rights and protections for us all. Today's guest is Stanford political science professor Margaret Levy. Here's a clip from her TED talk.

Martin Luther King exhorted us to enwrap ourselves in a single garment of destiny. I have observed several unions that I've studied build expanded and inclusive communities of fate in which large numbers of others recognize that their destinies are entwined despite differences and distances. This doesn't always happen, but it can and it must.

We need, as employees and citizens, to build solidarity through communities of faith that crosses geographies and differences. But to do that, we need to reimagine labor unions for now. After this quick break, we're going to reimagine what the new age of worker solidarity looks like. So do not go anywhere. You don't want to miss that.

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Find World Gone Wrong in all the regular places you find podcasts. I love you so much. I mean, you could like up the energy a little bit. You could up the energy. I actually don't take notes. That was good. I'm just kidding. You sounded great. So did you. Okay, welcome back.

On today's episode, we are talking labor unions and the power of collective organizing. Hi, I'm Margaret Levy, and I'm professor of political science and senior fellow at the Center for Democracy Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University. You know, obviously, I want to talk to you specifically about unions, but I'm also interested more broadly in how you started getting interested in inequality and solutions to inequality. Sure.

So it really goes back to the 1950s when I was a small child and my mother took my younger sister and I by the hand and we marched in civil rights marches in Baltimore, Maryland, where the inequalities were clear and rampant, racially divided, but also divisions based on religion, on nationality, on class.

So early on, and that was partially my father's influence as well, I became very interested in class and the divisions that that perpetrated. And that led ultimately to an interest in labor unions. How have...

labor movements or organizing played a role in your own life? I have not actually been a member of a union because the two places where I have been a faculty member, unionization has not occurred successfully.

I did try to organize a labor union when I was a teaching fellow as a graduate student. We failed, but boy, we tried. Can I ask a question about that? Because I think that sometimes it's really presented as this kind of binary you win or you lose. But do you feel like you gained something from the attempt to organize you and your college? Oh my God, yes. Absolutely. You know, I'm a political scientist. I study collective action problems. I study power.

And boy, did I learn a lot about how difficult collective action is in part because of the variety of ways in which power can be exercised. And some of them are not with a heavy club, but with a carrot. What did you get out of that, though? Like, I mean, other than the sense of like how hard it can be, what were the victories that you feel like you took away from even a failed attempt at organizing?

There was a personal benefit of feeling much better about myself. I mean, I'd done the right thing. I had tried hard. I'm the kind of person who loves to learn. So just that the learning experience about power and about its variety of forms is

enhanced my own work and research. This is also my own bias, but I feel like we undervalue the importance of just that feeling of solidarity of like, listen, we're all on the same side, even if it doesn't end the fact that I have people who have my back. Yeah. Yeah. So it's the solidarity, which is a remarkable feeling. And I felt that in those civil rights marches and in other things that I've done since I

And I have been in other failed movements like the anti-war movement. But still, that feeling of solidarity is amazing. But the other feeling that's also incredibly important is the feeling of self-respect, the feeling of dignity that you get from engaging in an action because you know it's right and because you know it will help not just you, if it does help you, but will help other people as well. Other people who may not, for a variety of reasons, they have families, they can't

lose their jobs. They can't do something. They may be immigrants who are undocumented. They can't engage in particular actions and put themselves at risk in that way. So there's a feeling of rightness and goodness and self-empowerment by acting on behalf of others that I think should not be underplayed. For those of us who aren't as well-versed in the history of labor unions,

Where did labor unions really come from? - The start of the labor movement goes way, way back, depending on how you count it. But if we think about the contemporary labor movement, it actually probably begins with the Navy and various kinds of mutinies that occurred in the Navy.

including in relatively contemporary times, early 19th century. But the industrial unions and the craft unions are really the beginning of the kind of unionization that I study. The craft unions had their origins in the medieval guilds. They developed uniquely in the 19th century.

in various countries, US, Germany, Britain, countries that were industrializing. They organized first in a way to train people to do the craft and to limit access to that particular occupation as a way both to ensure that the quality was high, but also to ensure that the pay was high.

and that the working conditions were reasonable. So that was a first kind of form of modern industrial unionization were the craft unions, which ranged from cigar makers to construction workers to when electricity came in, electrical workers. The longshore workers or the dock workers who I have studied extensively were originally craft unions. The next stage was the industrial unions or what we call the industrial unions.

which really organized all of the workers in a particular industry. So all of the automobile workers, all of the steel workers, no matter what their particular skill or craft in the factory setting was. And that was a very important form of unionization. And those were very large scale.

And therefore, it led to some of the most militant actions that we think about in the history of unionization. The big steel strikes in Pittsburgh in the turn of the century period and multiple big strikes that occurred, the sit-down strikes in the 1930s in the automobile industry, for example.

There's so much history here and we could do a whole podcast just on the history. But one of the things that I feel like comes up in maybe the pop culture understanding of unions, especially recently, is I hear a lot of people saying, like, if you like the weekend, thank unions. You know, if you like working nine to five, having those be your set hours, thank unions.

Those kind of, I think, are some of the real benefits that unions fought for that regular people have latched onto. Are those representative of the kind of victories that unions have made or are those kind of outliers in a broader struggle? They're very much part of the labor movement. That is the kind of goal that unions had. And it wasn't just for the members. It was for most many unions, many of the unions, particularly the industrial unions, were thinking about societal issues. They were politicized unions, right?

who were trying to, they helped win us social security, they helped win us healthcare. Yes, they did give us the weekend because they worked hard for a working week that had a period of rest attached to it. - So if unions are so good for workers, why is it that union membership has been in decline? - Well, unions come with two disadvantages that have hurt them a lot.

I'll start with the ones that the unions create. So what unions create for themselves has often been high dues that corrupt leadership may take advantage of.

if there is corrupt leadership. So there have been unions which have been very problematic. There have been unions which have been too bureaucratic, that have been corrupt. There have been racist unions, as well as unions that have been committed to racial solidarity, in which I include the Longshore Workers and I include the Teamsters, which have had a long history of commitment to cross, they'll organize anything that moves. So they don't care what color

that person is. So they've been very committed to that. But some unions have not been. You look at the history of the during the war in Vietnam in the U.S., the unions and the left came into conflict after being in solidarity for so long. So there were all kinds of things that the unions did that made them unpopular with some of their members and with much of the public. But

But the biggest problem for unions is the kind of campaigns that have been waged against unions by government and by corporations. Not all governments are anti-union, but an awful lot of governments have been in the history, particularly of the U.S. If you look at union rates in other countries, you'll see even in countries like Britain and Australia, which have very similar kinds of constitutional arrangements and legal arrangements that we do,

The union rate is much higher in places like Sweden. It's very, very high. The legal structure in the U.S. has been very unfriendly to unions. The National Labor Relations Act, which was not superb, but it was good and better and so much an improvement over what preceded it.

it, that's almost 100 years old now. We have not updated our laws in accordance with changes in the union. We now have unions trying to organize and organized in the service sector and the gig sector and all kinds of sectors which aren't covered by the National Labor Relations Act. So the laws have been

against unions, but the corporations and some governments have exercised extraordinary campaigns and put lots of money into fighting unions and creating bad PR for unions and making it hard for unions, engaging often in illegal practices. But it's hard because of the bureaucratic machinery to adjust those things to stop them from engaging in those practices. I certainly feel like in my lifetime, the

public perception of unionization and of the labor movement in general has changed quite a lot. I think that in the last couple of years, it seems like there's a lot more understanding of what a union does, a lot more energy, at least in my world, of people thinking about what a just workplace would look like and thinking about how to achieve that. I wonder, is that just attributable to like

the pandemic and forcing us all to look at society in a big different way? Or is it a force that's existed before the pandemic as well? I think it existed before the pandemic. It has certainly been amplified by the pandemic, if anything, and brought the public's attention to a whole set of workers that they weren't paying any attention to before those we are now calling essential workers.

the irony of how we, for a short period of time, called them essential and then have so rapidly seemed to decide that actually they're not essential if it means we have to treat them as essential. I think that has been a real radicalizing force for a lot of people, myself included. I think that's right. So that's why I said the pandemic amplified that feeling. So I think there was already a recognition that something had to change in the power relations

between the employers and the employees, whoever the employers were defined as, because in the gig economy, as we know, that becomes a very complicated problem. But certainly that there was a power relationship that needed to be corrected and improvements in the quality of work life and work compensation.

So that preceded the pandemic and there were already groups that were trying to rethink, including the labor movement, the traditional union movement itself, trying to rethink its strategies of organizing. Remember there were attempts to reform labor law under Obama, which preceded the pandemic. I mean, all kinds of service employees, healthcare employees have organized in ways that were not, and some of that's been relatively recent. Some of the

The home care workers or mobilization has been relatively recent and quite large scale in terms of numbers. A phrase that I've heard you use in talks and that I know you've used in a bunch of your books is communities of fate.

So not faith, but F-A-T-E. Can you explain to me why you find that to be a really crucial phrase when we're talking about these types of actions and movements? Absolutely. So in a book that I wrote with John Alquist called In the Interest of Others, which really looks at a series of unions that may be in some ways exceptional, but also prove the possibility of this kind of organization.

What we discovered was that the unions that were able to mobilize their members beyond their narrow economic self-interest, which is after all what unions are designed to meet, those that were successful in doing so constructed what we called and now call an expanded community, an inclusive community of faith, not just a community of faith, but an expanded and inclusive community of faith.

that really made people feel that their destiny was linked to those of often distant others who could never reciprocate. They felt like if it could happen to them, it could happen to us. We have to act now in order to prevent those kinds of abuses of human rights, of well-being from continuing.

We're going to take a quick break and we will be right back with more from Margaret about the struggles and limitations of organizing. What does solidarity look like when things do not go according to plan, when things start going wrong? We're going to find out right after this.

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And we are back. Union rates have been in serious decline. And at the same time, an MIT survey revealed that 50% of the non-union workforce would join a union if they were given the chance. So why is that? Where's the mismatch coming from? Here's another clip from Margaret's TED Talk. Because the odds are stacked against them. Many of you have read about the Amazon warehouse workers who failed to win a union representation election in Alabama.

They failed because of concerted employer opposition. Indeed, there are many employers and politicians who are preventing the reform of labor laws passed nearly a century ago in another era and another economy.

So, Margaret, on this show, we're always trying to think about, like, how do you as a regular person, how do you take these big ideas and these amazing theories and actually put them into practice? And I think that something that is very powerful to me about unions is it can so often feel like.

Like the only way that these things could change is if I was the person who owned the company, is if somehow I was the boss, then I could make things fair, then people could be treated well. But what can I do as just a regular person who's working here? Right. I have no power. I sometimes do work as a television writer. And when I do television writing work, I am in the Writers Guild of America. And so instantly I don't have to fight for it. I'm instantly in the union. And I find that I'm treated very differently in that work.

because there's a big union that's quite powerful. And so there's set rates and there's set protections. And then when I go do something like stand up or like host a podcast, I'm kind of on my own. So for someone who isn't already working in an area that's been really heavily unionized, which is most people, how do you start to kind of build that power when it feels like, well, if I say no, they'll just fire me and I can't afford to get fired? I mean, this is always confronted people who are trying to unionize, right?

The big moment in the sit-down strikes in the Ford plants and the General Motors plants in the Detroit area in the 1930s,

was when the Secretary of Labor, Francis Perkins, and the governor of Michigan decided not to call in the National Guard to put down the strike, but rather to tell the National Guard to stand on the side and to intervene if there was actual violence, including by the corporation.

That was a big sea change. I mean, so imagine if you were in a world, which we are a bit in, but not as much as then, where not only did you have to worry about how you were going to actually mobilize others and convince them to be part of it, but where you had the huge machinery of government and the corporate's private armies arrayed against you. Now, luckily, there are now organizations that are there to help. Most of them are available online.

By going on the web, there are things like Unit that tell you how to organize, tell you the rules of the game, will give you advice. So there are organizations out there that can help, including the traditional labor movement. The AFL-CIO still provides assistance to those who are trying to organize. Those resources are, in fact, available. And they're available in other parts of the world as well. What advice do you have for someone who is fighting against that mindset of,

Well, this is bad and unfair and maybe even exploitative. But if I don't do this work, they're going to find someone else and I need this job.

It's tricky. That is tricky, always tricky. And that's where these organizations can help, you know, and publicity can help. So if we look at the cases of the Amazon warehouse workers, for example, or some of the Starbucks people and the kind of retribution that they have been receiving, it's now being somewhat rectified in part because of the publicity.

that so Howard Schultz had to change the processes and policies he was using where the stores that were unionizing weren't going to be treated worse than the stores that were. The workers weren't going to be treated worse than the ones who weren't. It's a campaign and it's an effort and there will be no question about it. Some people will end up losing. They'll be the martyrs to the cause. But the idea is to try to enhance

prevent that martyrdom as much as possible, to provide an environment of support in terms of mobilization of publics who can be supportive, as well as using the laws and finding lawyers who will help to protect those who choose to organize. It is a right. It is, in fact, allowed to organize. Are there things that are very exciting for you when you think about the future of organizing and labor movements?

I think the most exciting organizing things that are going on are less about labor and more around the environment. I mean, I am just...

in awestruck with what young people have been doing in terms of mobilizing other young people in all kinds of efforts to bring public awareness to how important the environmental question is. And I think the unions could learn a lot from those environmental activists in terms of really speaking to where people are and addressing the kinds of questions that you're raising.

So I think there's a learning that could go the other way as well from and often social movements do learn from each other. The labor movement helped the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement taught the women's movement. You know, we learn from each other in social movement world. I love that. I think that's so crucial and important. And, you know, we've talked a little bit about how you can

get attention and publicity and how that can change things and how, you know, strikes are one way, but also visibility and even just having an action that that draws attention can be another way of changing forces and changing situations. Do you think that things have really changed now that so many more people have access to media in the sense that like

You can post a story online and everyone can see it. It doesn't have to go through a newspaper or through some sort of powerful person. Has that changed organizing for better or has that also made it more complicated because it can be buried by misinformation? So how did you get information about unions in the past, particularly when distances felt long and media was not so rapid?

You look at the stories that were written up in the traditional newspapers, which I've done at various times, and they have no relationship to what's actually going on from the perspective that I know as someone who's looked at the archives and the history. People are changing the narrative all the time. What one needs to do in this case, as in any organizing case, is to capture the narrative and to create a narrative.

that appeals to lots of people and that in some ways overwhelms the narrative that is based on misinformation or on anti-union biases or whatever it is.

I'll come back to the Amazon workers and the Starbucks workers because they're some of the most recent and they're in the news these days. They have really been capturing the narrative and that's been critical. So they have really changed the view of what these unions are trying to do, who they represent, who the people are. They're not allowing the corporations to tell the story.

It seems like one of the things that I'm taking away from our conversation is that so many of the things that I believed about the labor movement or about unions are either half-truths or outright not accurate, and that there's so much of the history that is directly relevant to the situations that are arising today, and that I really need to educate myself more about where things have been so that I can see where things could go and how we can push them in the right direction.

How can we see what are the most useful moments in history to look at for the future now or where we are in this current moment? There are so many great books on labor history. In the U.S., Nelson Lichtenstein's State of the Unions, I'll give a call out to that. It's a terrific book. It's not

up to the very moment, but it gives you a sense of the important moments in the history of the American labor movement. And there are a number of equally good books. But the real issue is how do we draw from labor history? When do we draw from labor history? When is it relevant? And I think it's relevant in the following sense. One, it's important for people to recognize what unions have done and what their absence does.

So the fact that unions were once so strong relatively meant that certain kinds of legislation got passed now, not to everybody's taste. I mean, the New Deal legislation is something that there's a whole movement against, and we have governments that represent, I mean, presidents that represent that from Ronald Reagan on, maybe even Nixon on.

That's part of the history is that the unions gave us a lot, but they also gave us a controversial lot. Things that there's at least part of the American public is very resistant to cease in a way that is problematic that the state is providing things that shouldn't or government is providing things that shouldn't be providing. It also comes out of a collectivist tradition, which you seem to be celebrating and I certainly do.

which is the idea that we are a large and expanded and inclusive community of fate in the best of all possible worlds. And that we do have to act together and in solidarity to make things happen. But America is grounded in a very individualist tradition as well.

which sees these kinds of things which bring us into solidarity as problematic because they may in some ways abridge our individual freedom, our individual liberty, particularly when they get institutionalized into a union. So both of those things are part of the history.

Part of the history is what the unions have accomplished. Part of the history is who resisted the unions and why. Part of the history is what happens when the unions decline and what we lose with that decline, which is a whole lot of social protections. And part of the history is who prefers social

that way of having the society organized. What are the experiments? What are new forms of unionization that are developing now? So what's happening in the warehouses and in places like Starbucks and in the gig economy is a whole different kind of organizing that's going on, different ways and different strategies of organizing, different ways of

creating PR around what's happening, different ways of mobilizing resources for those who are attempting to form labor organizations of different kinds and create worker voice and worker power. So I think there are lots of experiments going on, and some of them are beginning to be quite successful, as we've seen. Some

aren't so successful. And that's, you look at the history of unions and that's always the case. The history of anything, the history of government. You know, you try things, they fail, they succeed, they partially succeed, they have to be tweaked. And that's what's happening right now. And I think we have to, you know, one of the things that's also happening is rethinking what teachers unions look like, what police unions look like.

what hospital workers unions look like so that they really are something that are serving not just those who are working there, but also and not but but the general public and those particular kinds of consumers who need to use their services. I just want to add and acknowledge my own bias here, because definitely the idea of unionization is one of the topics that I've changed my mind about the most in my adult life.

One of my first jobs was teaching at a public charter school that was not unionized. And at the time, I felt like that was a non-issue, right? I was pretty bought into the idea that the teacher's union was a union that was protecting the worst employees from being fired. I felt like as an organization, they do not have students' best interests at heart. That was what I felt at the time. And so I would say my opinion was like mostly neutral to negative.

But then the more that I learned about the history of unions, the more that I saw what actually happens in the workplace as a whole, not just on my little individual school, the more that I started to really see the importance of a union. And now I've kind of come all the way around to working in the entertainment industry and being actively involved in a strong, powerful union. And I guess it seems like many people have a somewhat similar experience to that, where

They work and as they work, they're won over by the idea of unionization as they see the difficulty of holding any sort of line on norms or pay or workplace standards alone as an individual, how hard it is to make any sort of change just as one person. So I'm curious, one, to get your reaction to that and two, to know that.

Whether you think the best case scenario would be a world where everyone is unionized. Like, do you want to see 100 percent unionization or does that not really make sense? I don't think it makes sense to be 100 percent unionization. I do think what makes sense is to be 100 percent covered by rules and regulations enforced by law.

that ensure that your work is compensated, that you travel. If you're forced to travel, you are traveling under certain conditions. I think, you know, the unions in some of those, some of the stuff that you were describing, unions are second best to a set of laws and rules and a state of the world that takes those things for granted forever.

for every person who enters the workforce. The unions have been critical to that because they are a power base to make that happen. It's not just about your individual workplace, it's about ensuring that those rules get put in place for everybody. One of the things we haven't discussed is how the diversity of the labor force has changed. When I talk about the industrial unions of the 1930s, it's mostly white men.

It's now black and white men. It's now women. It's now people of multiple backgrounds and with multiple skills and capacities. We have all kinds of ways of protecting that diversity that are in law and all kinds of ways that we don't, as we're seeing in the current legal regime. So part of my advocacy of unions, part of why I would like to see a higher percentage of people in unions is for its political power.

which will translate into economic changes. But we need that political power to actually persuade those who in principle are representing us to take our interest to heart and to ensure that our workers, which includes almost all of us, but not 100%, are in fact given the kind of treatment we deserve as contributing members of this society.

And final question for you. What is something that has helped you to be a better human, whether it is a book, an idea, a movie, a piece of music, a person? It could be anything. What's one thing that's helped you to be a better human? I actually think here I will turn to the labor movement. Being the Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies, which I had the honor to be at the University of Washington, brought me into close contact

with the ILWU, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. What a remarkable set of people. Remarkable set of people. They were the ones who taught me what it really means to build a community of fate and one that is inclusive and encompassing. Just thinking about them brings tears to my eyes. They put their money where their mouth was. Or their mouths where their money was. Both things. They really...

They developed beliefs about how important it was to act in the interest of others, and they acted on those beliefs. Thank you so much, Margaret. It has been such a pleasure to talk to you. I really appreciate you making the time to be on the show. Thank you, Chris. It's my pleasure.

That is our show for today. Thank you so much for listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and a very big thank you to today's guest, Margaret Levy. She has written a bunch of fantastic books and given a ton of in-depth talks about the issues that we touched on today. So you can find a lot more from her online.

From TED, our show is brought to you by Jimmy Gutierrez, Anna Phelan, Rithu Jagannath, Erika Youn, and Julia Dickerson, who care about each other's entwined fates. From Transmitter Media, we're brought to you by Greta Cohn and Fer de Grange, who act in the interest of others. And from PRX, Jocelyn Gonzalez and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve, with whom I truly feel solidarity.

Thanks most of all to you for listening to our show. Please, if you like this episode, share it with a friend, share it with a coworker, send it to your whole workplace and leave us a positive rating or review to help us spread the word. We will be back with more episodes for you next week. Until then, take care.

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