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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. From campus organizing, we turn to labor organizing. Since 2021, thousands of workers at companies like Amazon, Starbucks, and Apple have won union representation elections. That year, public support for labor swelled. The Gallup Poll showed that 71% of respondents approved of labor unions, the highest level since 1959. Some victories were hard fought, and some are still moving on to the equally hard step of contract negotiations.

Others, like a Starbucks challenge to the National Labor Relations Board's reinstatement of fired baristas, are going before the Supreme Court for a hearing today. Yet, the momentum has been building. Just last Friday, the United Auto Workers unionized at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee. It was the first time workers at a foreign-owned auto plant in the South have unionized. It was the world's only non-union VW plant, according to The Guardian, or it is now.

A lot is at stake for the National Labor Relations Board in the upcoming elections. Board members are appointed by the President for five-year terms.

One of the nation's preeminent labor organizers and scholars, Jane McAlevey, has been on the forefront of some of these fights, participating on the picket lines as well as writing several books, basically how-to manuals for how to help unions win the vote and win their bargaining agreements.

Amazon warehouse workers and Los Angeles teachers have followed her approach, as well as people like Naomi Klein, the leading climate activist who told The New Yorker that Jane, "Focus on Winning helped the Movement to Reframe the Climate Crisis as a Power Struggle." In September 2021, Jane McAlevey was diagnosed with a high-risk variety of multiple myeloma.

She has now entered hospice, but true to form, she's still fighting to transform the labor movement, and she joins us now with a message on how labor movements are explicitly and implicitly involved in our political system. Jane, first of all, thank you for all your appearances on our show over a number of years, and welcome back.

Jane McAlevey: Brian, it is always great to be on your show, and I mean that. It's a show I listen to regularly, and it's also one I really enjoy being on, so thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for all of that. Just jumping right in on content. While unionization rates remain low in the nation as a whole, public attention to unionization efforts, like at Amazon and Starbucks, as well as union battles like last summer's UPS fight for better working conditions, have drawn more attention than ever, it seems. We'll get into some challenges. First, are we seeing an upsurge in successful labor organizing that is statistically significant rather than just a few anecdotal headlines?

Jane McAlevey: Well, part two of your question threw me there because on part one, it's definitely yes. I think statistically significant, I think, is one that we're talking about a little bit. I would say that, yes, meaning that there is an upsurge, not massive, but it's definitely happening. I think that's what's the most exciting thing to talk about today, briefly, as an example of the upsurge, is the victory by 4,300 workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the Volkswagen plant.

If you think about the moment we're in, and if you think about the US South, let alone the challenges coming out of the South in terms of the meta-democracy, the United States, the various messes that we're in, whether it's the court cases by Trump, et cetera. The South has always been contested space in this country. We had a civil war over it, and it's still contested space.

There were two previous attempts by workers at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant to try and win a union over the last 10 years. In both of them, the employer beat them, very handily in the first one, and it was slightly closer in the second one. Now, here we are, 2024 in the spring, and you've got an election where the workers beat the employer by 72%. The vote count was 2,628 yes votes to 985. I have to say, as someone who's done this work for 25 years, that's a hell of a showing on the part of the workers.

Everything that the worker organizing committee did to win at that Volkswagen plant is essentially a roadmap for what needs to be happening, not just across the South, but across the whole country right now. This is not a small plant. It's not a workplace with 28 people in it. It's a substantial factory with a hell of a lot of workers in it. You had an employer fighting. They didn't fight quite as hard because the German Union put a tremendous amount of pressure on the company to fight less hard than they normally do in the United States, but this is the first unionized auto plant in the entire US South.

We've got an election coming up by the same team of workers, the same team from the United Auto Workers, on the 17th of May in Alabama at the Mercedes plant. They don't need to pull off a 72% win margin, if they just pull off a victory in Alabama in what's less than a month now, we're going to be talking about pretty revolutionary change, actually, in the South. The Union has named where they're going next. They've named that they're in Honda. They've named that they're essentially going for all the-- what we know as foreign auto transplants who come to the United States.

Why do they come to the United States South, Brian? Because of cheap labor. I'm not sure Americans understand that our labor laws are so intensely anti-union, that the US South has become to European and Asian automakers what Mexico and China have become to a lot of the production facilities that make clothing, electronics, and things like that in the United States. A cheap and compliant, source of compliant, really key. Cheap and compliant source of labor is the US South. Coming out of a long history, we cannot disconnect from slavery straight through to today.

I want to hold up that I think this Chattanooga election is incredibly significant. Now, we know that the challenges are many, and no one on a plant does not statistically change the scenario. If they take the Mercedes plant in a few weeks, it still wouldn't be statistically significant, with my academic hat on, but it would be something that we could really call a surge because it's going to give-- it is already inspiring workers in other auto plants to believe that they can do this.

Why did they take the risk in Chattanooga? They took it because the auto workers won those tremendous contracts last fall. That Chattanooga worker said, "Hey, why do I have to--" In Chattanooga, they have to use their pay time off, things they've earned for vacation or sick time, either one-- As an example, at that plant in Chattanooga, when the plants shut down for mandatory, this is mandatory work that the company orders to clean up the big assembly lines. It happens several times a year. For five weeks a year, it actually happens in the big three auto plants.

Every unionized worker is paid for all five weeks of those mandatory plant closures, as they should be, since the giant factories need to be cleaned up and oiled and whatever you do to them. In the Southern plants, they take it out of the workers' paid time off, which means if they get sick, they have no more sick time for the year because they actually charged them against their sick and vacation time to shut the plant down and clean it. We're talking about not just money, but a quality of life that's really different for those workers.

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you talked about the significance of the organizing and joining the UAW at that Volkswagen plant because I think a lot of our listeners, certainly our listeners in the North, who don't follow Union organizing news and labor news in general, really closely, may think of the auto worker sector as being very unionized because they think of the UAW in Detroit and the legacy of all of that.

As you point out, there are so many auto plants in the South of the United States that have not been unionized. Many of them, transplants, as you say, from foreign automakers coming from other countries for cheaper labor. It's a regional divide in this country that it's amazing that it's persisted this long, but it's really striking.

Jane McAlevey: It is really striking and I do think it-- like I said, I don't think we can separate it from the long history of what the South has represented from slavery on-- In a couple of my books, I do do some statistics that show that, in general, the quality of life for workers in what was the confederacy has always been about twice as low if not two-thirds as low as the quality of life. Whether that's pay, whether that's an example I just gave of being forced to pay for your company to get its own equipment cleaned up, or whether it's what you pay for your healthcare premiums if you're lucky enough to have them. The list goes on.

This is not just pay, this is danger on the job. All the stories we hear about the pork factories, the chicken factories where workers are losing arms and legs, and The New York Times has had these series about children working in all of those plants. Yes, to take a very large Southern plant and to take it overwhelmingly, and to have what's now a majority of auto workers who do not have a union in this country, a majority of auto workers are not in the union.

That's what's been holding back the workers in GM, Ford, and Stellantis as you've got these foreign auto transplants coming into the US, using us as a cheap and compliant source of labor in the former Confederacy. That has really been holding back what the workers in Detroit in the big three can win. The company holds up, well, we only got to pay them $15 down there, what are we paying you $30 for? We're going to flip that on its head. I think Shawn Fain, the leader of United Auto Workers is saying and showing, we're actually going to flip that on its head.

We're going to say, why in God's name are you paying $15 an hour starting pay versus $30 up here in the North? All of them deserve 50. We're not even at the kind of pay, that the equivalency of the pay that a more robust and a more unionized auto sector made back in the 1970s. We are behind the 1970s because of the advent and the growth of a majority non-union auto workforce. You can see that across the board in the US.

It's a very big moment and I think everyone should be keeping an eye on May 17th, which is the vote count day for the Mercedes plant. Then we'd be having a different conversation even than today, because then we're talking about a role, a real surge starting to happen in a part of the country where we know everything is contentious.

Kay Ivey, the governor of Alabama, it was apparently every few days walking the plant right now. They've put up signs all over the Mercedes plant showing Shawn Fain, the president of the auto Workers hugging Joe Biden, and in giant print on posters that they've made that the governor is handing out that say, something like a Northern Union endorsed Joe Biden. Are they really for Alabama?

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Jane McAlevey: This is dirty play. They fired four workers in the last week and a half, in the plant, leaders in the plant. They saw that number, I think the Mercedes employers saw the number of the outsized victory at Chattanooga, and just in the last few days decided, "Oh hell, we got to turn this place into a torture zone.

Brian Lehrer: They're using Joe Biden as a boogeyman thinking that the workers are going to be against Joe Biden, even though he's more the pro-labor candidate than Donald Trump is. To that, a lot is at stake for the National Labor Relations Board in the upcoming election. Board members are appointed by the president to five-year terms. What would you say is at stake from your labor organizer point of view?

Jane McAlevey: I think there's a lot at stake, I think starting with what you just said, Brian, which is there's no-- Look, I have plenty of qualms about things that Biden is and isn't doing, myself as an individual human being, but there is no question from the perspective--

Brian Lehrer: People will say that the-- many people, many workers who voted for Donald Trump have done so because they think he's better for the economy overall. I think it's fair to say as a matter of fact that Biden is more explicitly pro-union in terms of federal government policy toward unions.

Jane McAlevey: A, I agree with that. B, I think if you're a Southern worker who grew up in this country in the last 40 years, you don't even know what union is. If they hear, Trump, this guy from The Apprentice, he's a billionaire, self-made even though we know that that's not true, he's out there pumping the economy. By the way, the economy isn't working for most workers in this country.

One thing that drives me nuts about even our beloved NPR is waking up every morning or listening to Marketplace and have someone tell me the numbers are looking good this week in the economy. I don't know whose economy they're talking about, because it's not the ordinary workers, that's for sure.

When I was doing the interviews in Smithfield in North Carolina, in Tar Heel when the 8,000 workers voted, yes, again against all odds, now that didn't have-- what's the word? It didn't spread, and that's why this auto-election victory has to actually move on. It has to move in to the Mercedes plant.

Let me come back to Smithfield for a minute. When those workers voted for change, I was doing interviews in North Carolina and I would say to workers one after another, "When you started to think about having a union in this world's largest pork-producing facility, what were you hoping for?

They would look at me straight in the face with a very thick Southern accent and say, "Ma'am, I have no idea what a union was. I don't even know what that word was."

If you got Trump down there campaigning on the economy, and then you got this guy Biden campaigning as pro-union what does that mean to someone who doesn't even know what a union is in 2024 in the US South? I think Biden needs to do a hell of a lot more than just talk about being pro-union. He needs to be talking about pro-working class, pro increase in wages, pro healthcare, pro all sorts of things that he is not, I think, yet connecting with workers in the Southern.

Plus if we look at who the Biden voters are, it's the middle class, the upper middle class, and the super-wealthy who are voting for him for their real class interests. At the level of the image of who the Biden voter is, the [unintelligible 00:17:02] image that the media overprojects in terms of who's putting him in office, then you've got racism, you've got the anti-immigrant sentiment being whooped up.

Part of what's so beautiful about a union campaign anywhere, not just in the South, is that, that all goes away. When you have to find common ground with your coworker on, should we be paying for the company when it has to get the big machinery cleaned, or should we get $10 or $15 less an hour than our compatriots in Detroit? They're not having a discussion anymore about Donald Trump. They're having a discussion about bread and butter, and how to take care of their family, and all the rest of the noise goes away.

Brian Lehrer: I want to follow up on that in the presidential election context in a second with the longtime labor organizer strikes columnist for the nation among other things. She's been on this show, I've got the count here 12 times, I think-

Jane McAlevey: My goodness.

Brian Lehrer: -not counting today, lucky 13, Jane McAlevey, 212-433 WNYC 212-433-9692. We will take a few phone calls, but I have this stat from a New York Times Siena poll. This goes back to November so it could have changed since then, but it showed that Biden and Trump were tied at 47% each among union members when asked who they would vote for in 2024.

CNN citing that in January added the union vote is especially important in Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, somewhere between 14% and 15% of employees in these three swing states. Of course, the [unintelligible 00:18:53] swing states are represented by unions. Given your politics and your points of view, how do you understand that half the union members in America backed Donald Trump?

Jane McAlevey: I'm going to start by gently doing a little tough love on my sisters and brothers in the national leadership of the American Labor Movement. Honestly, it's partly internal failure. There is not the political, what we would call mass political education taking place among the rank and file that we once had in this country in our strong unions. I think you are going to see it at the United Auto Workers.

All the unions that I ran, we took a very different approach to doing, what we call, political education, which meant, not secret votes by five elite executive board members sitting somewhere in Washington DC that their union is going to make the following endorsement, but a good union takes broad mass approach. They involve all the workers, they do the work, they sit in rooms together, they compare notes. They actually look at what-- We can compare what he did as President Trump because we had him as president once.

You would be doing slideshows, you would be doing discussions, you'd be having robust meetings where risk-taking, not risk averse, trade union leadership would get off its ass and get out and have really deep conversations with rank and file workers all over the country, especially in those three states.

I do want to say in labor's defense, that the reason why Joe Biden is president is because the trade union movement did, in fact, do the work that led to his extremely on the margins, Joe Biden in the electoral college sense, victory back in 2020. There's no question that unions were the ground troops, often quietly, often not recognized as such, who sent, and by the way, in the '22 midterms as well, who sent massive, who sent thousands upon thousands, [unintelligible 00:21:04] here alone, the hotel workers and the entertainment workers union, particularly in '22, but also in '20, sent tens of thousands of people into Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and Georgia in '22 for Ralph Warnock.

It was extraordinary, you would walk in and just say, "What union are you from? Because the entire ground operation was being run by rank and file union members. That's the good news, that for the workers who do know that a Biden presidency is going to be better for their family than a Trump presidency, they're being put into work, they're being put into motion, they're running phone banks, but most importantly, they're on the ground in these states because the unions have the money to put them there, to knock on the doors and do the old fashioned work that does still win elections in this country.

Then we got some lame, I'm just going to call them lame unions, who are afraid to have the hard conversation with their rank and file members, and they're not doing the work that they need to do. I remember when Scott Walker, and we might've talked about that, I can't believe you said 13, sometime way back, when I wrote, actually, the first article I wrote at the Nation Magazine was when Scott Walker became governor in 2010, and that 2010, that's sweet.

Brian Lehrer: Of Wisconsin, and he went on that crusade against public sector unions.

Jane McAlevey: Yes, and decimated them. In Wisconsin, the victory to Scott Walker was won inside of the union household vote, not meaning union members, but a union household, which means a husband or wife or son or daughter has to come home from a good conversation about politics and about who's really to blame for the pain in their lives.

Then they have to be taught how to carry that conversation to the dinner table and actually have it with every voter in their house. It was mind-blowing to me that it was within the union household vote that we delivered Scott Walker, who then destroyed the public sector, public service unions in the state of Wisconsin.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Yes. Let's get a phone call in here. Here's Ellie in Tomkins Cove, New York. You're on WNYC with Jane McAlevey. Hello, Ellie.

Ellie: Hi, there. I wanted to say that I agree with Jane 100%. I am a local 580 ornamental ironworker in the New York metropolitan area. It's really interesting to hear about the Southern Union organizing. One thing I just wanted to share is that the pamphlets and the messaging that comes from the International Association of Ironworkers and even some of the periodicals I get that have large union voices, such as the local operating engineers, are taking out full-page ads doing comparisons of what a Trump presidency and what a Biden presidency looks like for unions.

It is abysmal. The only choice for a union family, for a union household, for anyone who is pro-union is Democrat. I think people would be surprised that that's the clear messaging we're getting from our unions and then the cognitive dissonance somehow within, like what Jane said, our rank-and-file, but I wanted to share that.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Jane, briefly, anything to add to Ellie and to you?

Jane McAlevey: Ellie, yes. I think it's a good point. The thing I would say is that the messaging is often not great, by the way, because people are scared of their rank-- like leaders are scared to upset their rank-and-file workers half the time, which is crazy to me when we're facing Trump versus Biden.

What wins, what's going to move the hearts and minds of an iron worker or any number of workers is-- operating engineers. I'm trying to think of who you just listed. What's going to move them is one-on-one conversations, not full-page ad in the magazine. What's going to move them is shop by shop, meeting by meeting, shift by shift meetings where people have engaged in real conversations, ask real questions, and really discuss it out. Reading an ad in the--

First of all, it's coming in the Union newspaper. Most people are just throwing it away. Most people throw most of the mail away. Comes in the mail, goes in the garbage. We've known for more than 30 years that the way we win, the way we help persuade workers to understand who's to blame for the pain in their lives is not a mail program. It's not even a phone program.

Brian Lehrer: Right. It's person by person, shop by shop.

Jane McAlevey: It's got to be one-on-one, face-to-face conversations. Yes, exactly.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to run out of time soon. I want to sneak in John in the Bronx, union member who says he thinks he knows why some of his colleagues vote for Trump. John, you're on WNYC. We've got 30 seconds for you. Hi.

John: Wow. All right, quickly. I want to know what to say to my fellow union members. I'm a Local 3 retired, Local 3 electrician for 40 years. I want to know what to say to these closeted or uncloseted Trump supporters who think that they're a better candidate than Joe Biden would be. Why at the union meetings aren't they-- why isn't it they're saying things more proactively, like if you vote for Trump you're wasting your vote and you should--

Brian Lehrer: Why do you think some of your Local 3 brothers and sisters vote for Trump?

John: I guess they feel that he's going to be a president that will clean up the streets and blow their grocery prices and things to that effect.

Brian Lehrer: John, I'm going to leave it there for time. I apologize, but there you go. Support for unions at the policy level is in everything. Jane, I'm going to ask you to limit to 30 seconds on this.

Jane McAlevey: Yes, you got it. First thing is we don't want to say anything to them, John. We want to ask them a lot of questions. Saying and telling doesn't work. Asking and engaging does work. If I met those workers, I would say, "Hey, what are the three most important changes that if they happen in this country tomorrow would really change life for you and your family?"

Once I get the answer to that question, the cost of health care, the cost of Medicare, the cost of eggs, gas. Whatever they say to me, I'm going to draw them into a conversation right on that issue and get them back to how Biden, and not Trump, through a series of questions I'm going to ask and listen, and ask and listen, and then agitate until they come to the conclusion, "Holy mackerel, she's actually right." It's don't tell, don't say, ask, get to the issues, keep it to the issues and you can move people.

Brian Lehrer: John, thank you for your call. I said earlier, you've been on the show. We counted it up today at least 12 times since we first became acquainted in 2016. I will say again to the listeners and those who weren't here at the beginning of the segment, you're public about having been diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 2021. In your public letter, you wrote that the prognosis from the start was bad as the cancer is incurable. In a New Yorker profile of you, it seems like you were basically running between experimental treatments and then parachuting into labor fights. That's the Jane McAlevey I know.

Jane McAlevey: True.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to just take a moment and talk about what the last few years have been like for you?

Jane McAlevey: The last few years have been mostly incredible. I feel like the process that I personally use that worked for me and it wouldn't work for everyone. It can't work for everyone because humans are all different, but I threw myself harder into the work, Brian. It was the second time I fought cancer. The first time was 2009, early-stage ovarian cancer. That's what led me to my first book, Raising Expectations and Raising Hell. I was bored in a hospital bed for a year of treatments when the Sloan Kettering team then said, "You can't move for about a year." That was special.

I wrote a book by accident. Now I have four of them. The other three were by intent but I did the same approach this time. They said this is not going to turn out like your last one. This is not beatable. We don't know how much time you have. It's aggressive. It's going to be bad. I said, "Great, whatever minute you give me is a minute that I'm going to spend working with in the last year and a half very intensely with groups of workers in Connecticut, and then running a training program that's put 40,000 trade unionists through an organizing course across the globe and about 23,000 in the US.

For me, the answer is dive into the work. I created a succession program. I've replaced myself in every single program I run so that when one soldier falls-- That's me. I'm a soldier. I think in a class war my whole life it really is a war. The point about when one soldier falls is the war continues. I'm very excited to have gotten my fourth book out on a much more progressive approach to union negotiations, much more [unintelligible 00:30:38] democratic.

I think it's an essential book for trade unionists to read. I hope Ellie in Tomkins Cove and John in the Bronx get it and everyone they know. For me, it's been about succession and making sure the work continues. I can say with some great delight that I was able, with my employer and a whole team of people, to achieve that. The work is going to continue, even though I will be compost, and hopefully, helping grow some pro-union flowers sometime soon.

Brian Lehrer: Oh. Jane McAlevey, preeminent labor organizer, and those employers she mentioned have included the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a senior policy fellow for research on labor and employment. Also, the Nation Magazine, where she was strikes correspondent and author of those several books. Jane, thanks so much for giving us some of your time today and all your candor and your fervor, and be well.

Jane McAlevey: Love your show. Thanks, Brian. Take care.

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