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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. One thing about this year, 2023, it has already seen some powerful negotiations for unions. In January, you remember that nurses at Mount Sinai and Montefiore ended a successful three-day strike, which among other things, ratified contracts with enforceable nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. Before that, in December, 1,800 part-time faculty members at the New School and the Parsons School of Design ended their 25-day strike, the longest adjunct faculty strike in history, to renegotiate raises at various levels. That's part of a larger trend in the overall resurgence of unionization. In 2022, sectors previously immune to unionization, like Amazon workers in Staten Island, remember that one? Trader Joe's and Starbucks locations around New York State, and retail stores like REI, succeeded in winning NLRB elections.

Let's say you've won your NLRB, National Labor Relations Board, election that establishes your right to unionize. Now what? Joining us to draw on case histories of successful negotiations, to offer blueprints for other unions, is Jane McAlevey, organizer, senior policy fellow at the University of California at Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, The Nation's strikes correspondent. Did you know that The Nation magazine has a strikes correspondent? Yes, it's Jane McAlevey. And co-author now of a new book called Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations.

Hey, Jane, it's always great to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jane McAlevey: Thank you, Brian. It is always great to be here. Happy first day of spring.

Brian Lehrer: And to you too. What did Michael Hill say in the newscast there? 5:24 this afternoon Eastern Time. Can you do a little Unions 101 for everybody to start out? Like you write, "Unions negotiate or renegotiate contracts every few years. For the most part, negotiations between employers and unionized workers are shrouded in secrecy." I don't know. Maybe it's too obvious for an opening question, but can you briefly break down what a typical collective bargaining process in the United States looks like?

Jane McAlevey: Yes, definitely. We should say that the unions that you just described that had major victories are in New York City. The nurses at Montefiore, the folks at New School and Parsons in particular, practice something much closer to what we describe in the book, which is what we call high participation, high power negotiations. Yes, union negotiations aren't something that most people in the United States are familiar with. One, because of a profound attack on unions for 50 years now by the political elite and professional union busters. Very few people have unions, but those who do often don't know what happened during the negotiation, so here's the Collective Bargaining 101.

In the case of forming a union, like the people at JFK8 at Amazon, or the 280, now 300 Starbucks stores, and REI, and Trader Joe's, et cetera, when you first unionize, people think, "Oh, we won. We're going to go to the negotiations table." That's what most people think about when you win a union after a hard-fought fight, generally, in the United States, but no, you actually then have to get to the first contract or the first collective agreement negotiations.

As we've seen in the case of Amazon and Starbucks, the union-busting continues. Neither of those companies, despite thousands of workers voting to unionize in the last year, have yet to sit down and have any meaningful negotiations or any negotiations. I'm going to come back to how do you force the employer class to negotiate, which we could talk about France too when it comes to that topic in a minute and what's happening, which is a vote of no confidence on Macron at the moment.

Sticking to collective bargaining. For those people who have a union, let's say it's long-established like many of the public service unions in New York City; every few years, there's a renegotiation of the collective bargaining agreement, and there's no set date. I mean, some laws say there's a maximum of three years in the public sector. There's some state-based changes for the public sector because that's governed state by state.

The National Labor Relations Act, which Amazon and Starbucks falls under, by the way, the national private sector law, does not dictate when a contract has to be renegotiated. Sometimes you'll see a five-year agreement. I was part of the 48,000-worker strike at the University of California last fall as a senior researcher. Our contract is five years long, and some of the graduate students got a two-year agreement. It's sort of up to workers, through their union, to determine, in most cases in the private sector, the duration of an agreement.

As a negotiator, I can tell you if the agreement is good, we generally want to get a longer contract. If it's not so good, you want a short-term duration to your contract. Most importantly, what you really want is to line up your expirations, the actual duration or the expiration date of your contract. What good negotiators and smart workers are trying to do is make it so that they've lined up the expiration date of their contracts across any given labor market.

If you're the auto workers, that's the entire country in national contracts. They'll be going to negotiations for the first time under, we hope, new leadership soon this year at the Big Three. If you are Starbucks folks, when they do get to the negotiations, when they force Howard Schultz, who, like Macron, is flagrantly violating the concept of democracy, whether it's workplace democracy or civil democracy; when they do get to that table at Starbucks, what you hope they do, and I'm sure they plan to do, is set an expiration date. That's the same date in the same year across all 300, and we hope more, Starbucks stores. Why? So they have some power when they pull up to the negotiations table. Your strike threat is not just about one facility. It's about can you close down an employer because it takes that kind of power to get today's greedy, corporate class to share a penny.

Brian Lehrer: Very intriguing equating Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Macron, the President of France, who, for people who haven't been following those stories, is facing labor unrest over trying to raise the retirement age in France. I'm going to be fascinated in a few minutes to get your take on France and Macron and implications for the United States and elsewhere, but let's stay with your book and let's stay in this country for now because you get into some fascinating case studies in the book. For example, you write about negotiations that you helped lead in 2016 among nurses in Philadelphia, and here you talk about union busters quite a lot. For those who are unfamiliar, who are the modern-day union busters, and what are their tactics?

Jane McAlevey: This is also so not obvious to most Americans when they wonder, "Why don't we have more unions in the United States right now?" The union busters in the case of Philadelphia, that was the Albert Einstein Medical Center negotiations that, yes, I was the lead negotiator on and that case was very typical. The workers voted to unionize in early April of 2016, and the employer- just like at JFK8 here in Staten Island, the employer, even though the workers voted overwhelmingly to form a union, the employer immediately filed what's called legal charges within a seven-day period suing to object to the unionization election, claiming that people like me intimidated every worker who voted yes to vote yes.

Then in addition to that, they also sued, just like in the case of JFK and Bezos and Amazon, they also sued to move the case from the region that we were supposed to be in, I think it was Region 04, into a different region of the National Labor Relations Board because they actually were charging the agents of the National Labor Relations Board in the Philadelphia election were somehow colluding with the nurses who were voting to unionize. This is how preposterous the Howard Schultz's and Jeff Bezos's of the world are, but it's not just them.

This is a hospital, a well-respected hospital in Philadelphia. By the way, the CEO had been up in New York City working at- I can't remember if it's Montefiore, but one of the big hospitals, where he dealt with the union for many years. He went down to Philadelphia, a largely non-union hospital market, and thought, "I'll join the crowd and just try and bust the workers' right to have a union." He went after both of us. They succeeded in moving the hearing, what was called the National Labor Relations Board Administrative Law Judge hearing, out of Philadelphia into Northern New Jersey, so we had to bus a bunch of people up there.

Let me just say in that case, their goal-- They spent $1.1 million, so this one becomes well-documented. I knew we were facing tough union busters. I didn't quite understand that in a report put out by the Economic Policy Institute based on some terrific research that came out in 2019, this was one of the most expensive union-busting cases in America in the last decade. They spent $1.1 million on union busters fighting 1,000 registered nurses who wanted to do what the Montefiore nurses did, which is win safe staffing standards and hang on to their pension. Back to the pension story and the right to retire.

Literally, they could have-- Like Bezos and Schultz have both tried to, and in my last book, the book we talked about once before, an earlier book of mine, I documented the Smithfield case, which is the most famous. The lawyers at Smithfield Foods held up a unionization vote for 16 years in North Carolina by filing one legal charge after another against the workers. That is what happens. They legalize a unionization process to death with professional union-busting law firms who pair up with literally hired gun, professional union busters. These are modern Pinkertons, who come in and--

There's an opening story in the book I hope you get to at some point. It actually outlines me being physically violently attacked by these guys in Nevada in an early negotiation session, also with hospital workers. They're vicious. They don't necessarily carry guns today and shoot people, but everything just shy of that is what a worker in the United States today can expect for trying to actually have the right to collectively bargain a negotiated contract. Now, we won, so we beat them in Philadelphia, but it's hard.

Brian Lehrer: Well, tell us how you won. Because I think you got a lot of people, you certainly got me, curious about how that turned out. They won the election, they won the right to unionize, but then after they unionized, you were just describing how the employer tried to fight the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, PASNAP-

Jane McAlevey: Yes, great union.

Brian Lehrer: -as the union is called, and tried to bog them down even after they won the right to unionize. How did they win? How did the union win? How did the union get past that with these presumably high-paid lawyers fighting to weaken them?

Jane McAlevey: Yes, so high-paid lawyers, but again, by the way, the nurses counted, just before the election, counted 18 combinations of suits and extra security guards in the hospital. In every single unionization example that I have experienced in my life, it is not just union-busting lawyers. It's also literally hired thugs. In the incident I described in the beginning of the book, there were eight security guards who went into an elevator with the top union buster, who also had an international gunrunner on his payroll, who were threatening and intimidating nurses for like the month and a half leading up to the election, and then intimidated me, which didn't work in Nevada either.

What we did was we decided, fine, there's a parallel legal fight that's going to go on, but we cannot wait for that. I have learned this lesson for 25 years as a negotiator and organizer. We are not going to trust and invest in a legal process. We're going to fight like mad to create a crisis until that employer actually gets out of the way and drops the lawsuit.

We actually made a demand. We started a majority petition, what's called a majority petition, among the nurses. The CEO was lying to the Philadelphia media and saying that a majority of nurses didn't want the union, blah, blah, blah, scripted by the union busters. We created what's called a petition. That's a very different petition. This is not like an online petition. It's called the structure test, and it's how we build the worker structure strong enough to be a union buster. This is actually very important terminology, the idea of building an organizational structure strong enough to force the kind of victories that you want.

The structure test was me beginning to teach the nurses there, "Forget the lawyers. They're going to want to do their thing. What you have to do is force a crisis on the CEO until he says uncle." We actually made a demand, which by the way, our side's lawyers thought we were a little bit nuts to do this, but we did it. We wrote a petition demanding-- It's only for the nurses to sign, no one else. It's a unique kind of petition to show a majority of them believed in it. The petition basically said, "We demand our employer, Albert Einstein, drop the legal charges against us, recognize our right as nurses to form a union, and get to the table and start negotiating."

Now, there was huge intimidation going on. You've got the CEO, the day after they filed the charges, which happens within seven days legally, he put a memo out to the entire nursing staff saying, "Well, we filed legal charges and basically, even though you voted to unionize, there will never be a union here because we have filed legal charges and we'll be objecting to it, and we know it was an unfair union election," blah, blah, blah, same crap you hear from Jeff Bezos [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: What do you mean by the union forced a crisis?

Jane McAlevey: Well, in our case it meant, first of all, the nurses signed that majority petition. I just want to say there's a lot of intimidation that goes on, and that's not easy. Just like transparent, big, and open negotiations; at that phase, my job as organizer and chief negotiator is to teach the workers how to win. First, we had to strip the CEO of his lie, and get the media and local clergy and politicians who we immediately appealed to, to create a larger base of people fighting for the right to unionize in Philadelphia, we immediately said, the first thing that has to happen is a majority of you have to sign this demand, and then we have to get it out in the public.

One, the employer class is doing psychological warfare on these workers. That's the job of the union busters. Our job is, first, to show the CEO is lying or the president of the hospital is lying. We do that by saying, actually, here's our signatures. It's a giant poster. I can give it to you for your listeners later, a link to it. It's a gigantic poster with all of their signatures, it was like eight feet by five feet, and in giant print. The nurses deliver that to the CEO, to the media, to the Philadelphia City Council, to every single member of the delegation from the state of Pennsylvania who were in the Philadelphia area, and began to get local ministers, faith leaders, politicians to sign on to call on the CEO to drop the legal charges and support the registered nurses and their demand and their right to get to negotiations table.

The nurses began to create a crisis because people like the Appropriations Chair of the legislature of Pennsylvania went on record and sent a letter to the CEO saying, I'm in receipt of a petition by the nurses saying that basically you're lying, that you're not telling us the truth about what happened in the union election, and in fact, a majority of them do want to unionize and they're asking you to follow the law and drop your legal charges.

We won in the first round, Brian. Let me just say this, we won in the first round of the NLRB, the employer immediately appealed their charges. We won again, the employer is going to appeal the charges. We won after we're going to the third appeal because they can do this. These lawyers, they can appeal, just like Trump can and everyone else, they can appeal forever. We knew they were going to appeal forever. We had to increase the level of organization and mobilization with more power, with the faith community, with politicians, with people who were involved in funding that hospital, Medicaid, Medicare state money goes into every single private sector hospital in this country. They call it the private sector. I think it's a joke. Totally taxpayer-subsidized, that's what Medicare and Medicaid is. We forced it on them. We made it ungovernable. The nurses were on their break time, going up to deliver petitions to the CEO. They were stickering up, they were wearing batons, they were taking their fight to the community.

As we approached the third appeal, this is the key, you're always looking for points of leverage if you're smart because negotiations are about power. The Democratic National Committee happened to be hosting the Philadelphia-- It was happening in the summer of 2016, which was the nominating convention for Hillary Clinton. We took a strike vote, and we said we're going to have a strike for union recognition, unfair labor practices strike. When Hillary Clinton is being nominated, you're going to have thousands of nurses in uniforms picketing in Philadelphia. The political elite flipped out. They said, you cannot have registered nurses literally, basically, picketing, when we're trying to create this image of a Democratic city and a Democratic Party that's in favor of the working class. This can be a tie to Macron, but anyway.

We said-- No, we did it. We actually did it. In the 10-day when we served the strike notice, in that 10 days, the political elite went to the CEO of that hospital and said, you settle this damn fight with these union nurses and you get to the bargaining table, and we hammered out an agreement and they withdrew their legal charges. Rather unprecedented. They actually dropped their legal case against the board and against the workers, and we hammered out a negotiation timeline for expedited negotiations to make them make up for abusing us so badly, and we went into expedited negotiations and the rest is history. They won a contract.

That's how you create a crisis for an employer. You look for every possibility, every piece of leverage, and it starts by making the workers as strong as they can be. That ties into our broader subject of how do workers learn to fight these kinds of fights against union busters spending millions of dollars against them.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, our guest is Jane McAlevey, telling a story there from her new book Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations. Jane McAlevey, an organizer, obviously, and senior policy fellow at the University of California at Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. All these stories you've been telling from the United States and saying that it ties into what's going on with Macron in France. You said Howard Schultz is anti-democracy, is head of Starbucks in a way that Macron is, and you just said the Philadelphia nurses strike that you were talking about relates to Macron.

Let me just fill people in on a little bit of the basics if they don't know. There's a retirement age debate roiling France right now, and it's tapping into increasing labor union activity that The New York Times reported the other day. Among other actions, the General Confederation of Labour said that strikers would shut down an oil refinery in Normandy over the weekend, potentially disrupting fuel deliveries to gas stations, and teachers union said that they would strike next week during an exam period.

This, Jane, is all over Macron and the government's plan to raise the retirement age in France from 62 to 64?

Jane McAlevey: Yes, technically, but I think what it's really about is the willingness of people like Macron and Bezos-- This is a bipartisan attack, by the way, of the political elite who are happy to bail out every bank failure and every banker, and not bail out things like pension funds and workers' right to survive. Yes, what Macron did, and it's fascinating, right now [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: They would say-- By the way, this was our first segment today on the show. The government would say they're bailing out the depositors, but the shareholders who own these banks, if the banks fail, they're taking their losses.

Jane McAlevey: Yes. Let's be super clear about every single-- Whether it's the Federal Reserve who did not give a hoot about what 8%-plus inflation meant to the working class in this country for the last year and a half, and suddenly, when people began to say that the Silicon Valley Bank went down because of interest rates, suddenly we're having a different discussion about interest rates. I mean, you can go right down the line, and you can see how inequality grows. Yet, there is simply no discussion about the disgusting inequality that's been taking place in this country, and Macron is facilitating that.

Right now, there's a vote of no confidence taking place. 63% of the French population is in favor of voting him a vote of no confidence, which would collapse the government. That's what's happening in France. By the way, in this country, over 65% of Americans say they would have a union tomorrow if they could. What is happening is there is no pension crisis in France, and there is no Social Security crisis in the United States. Just to be clear, what there is, is a willingness by the super-rich, who have been rigging the rules for really a long time from the 2008 crisis to the 1999 crisis to on and on.

Mortgage holders did not get bailed out in 2008, the banks did. The student loan discussion. We have outrageous student loan, huge increases in the cost of tuition, and a gigantic debate about whether or not it's fair to forgive a handful of dollars of student loan debt on balance compared to the absurdity of one bank after another, with regulators turning the other way, failing, and then these guys get bailed out. What links Macron to Howard Schultz to Jeff Bezos to union busters is a fundamental abandonment of everyday workers in both countries.

In the debates about Social Security, as a union negotiator, I know a lot about Social Security and I know a lot about simple little-- There is no problem with Social Security, but if you wanted to even put more money and make it more shored up, all you would do is take what's called the cap on income off and make the rich pay their fair share into the Social Security fund in the United States. Like in France, there's very simple technical fixes, and Macron instead is shoving income inequality down the throats of French workers just like the political elite have been doing in the United States. The result is Trump, Marine Le Pen in France, Tony Blair did this, and Bill Clinton did this earlier.

Macron is like a late 1990s leader. He's like 25 years behind Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in England, who sets up Trump, who sets up Boris Johnson, who sets up a populist Right, and Marine Le Pen is super dangerous. The political elite is setting up a problem where people don't understand among workers who to blame. Trump gets up and a bombast about, "I'm going to protect jobs, Democrats," and people are confused like, "Maybe it is global trade." No, it's an abandonment of workers in this country, like it is in France right now, in favor of super-rich people. Macron is a centrist like Bill Clinton was, Jeff Bezos, Howard Schultz. These guys pretend to care about immigrants and people of color and all sorts of things, gay and lesbian issues, and then are just knifing the everyday people in both countries for decades now.

The book, to bring it back a little bit to that, is about how workers who want to win can actually pull up to the table, both in union negotiations against their employers, which is practice, frankly, for how we pull up and force a crisis in this country that allows a resetting of the social contract so that its workers, pension funds, students, housing debtors, who actually get some justice and get bailed out from irresponsible decisions by the political elite, not just bankers in Wall Street.

Brian Lehrer: Let's end on this, Jane, and we've just got about a minute. There is a lesson in your book, which you were just touching on, I think, which is, I think, a good way to end, which is a lesson for social movements in general, not just union organizers, even though that's the tight focus of your book. You write, "Sadly, very few social movements ever build enough power to pull up to serious negotiations, the kind that result in a written, enforceable agreement. Social movements when they do win, often fail to secure good enforcement language."

How do you see the through line from a resurgence in unionization, which is happening in this country, to hopefully bigger social movement success in the future?

Jane McAlevey: That's a great question, Brian, as always. The truth is, every time within the last 100 years when we were ending income inequality in this country, it began with a resurgence of workers forming unions during the last Gilded Age, which is the 1930s and '40s. Now, we're in a new Gilded Age, but in the last Gilded Age, workers formed unions in record numbers, they partnered with the civil rights movement. We bled from a moment of very strong working-class organization. Workers learn to fight really incredible battles when they're forming a union in this country. Then that bleeds into a muscle memory where workers then take that fight, as they did into the civil rights movement, to say, "Hey, wait a minute, we're going to demand societal rights here as well."

How it ties into the story that you were having the speakers beforehand, I think, is that this book is about building the people's army to win a class war. If people don't think that the super-elite have been waging a class war against everyday workers in this country, I don't think people think that. I think most people actually feel it every day, in the economic crisis that everyday people have had forced on them. It is a book, as Ruthie Gilmore, many people who blurbed it said, this is a book for everyone to learn how to build the power required to force the shareholders and the CEOs and the political elite to share back with the people who co-produce the wealth of the country.

Brian Lehrer: With some credit to Brian Lehrer Show producer Amina Srna, who framed that last question that you said that was such a great question. We thank Jane McAlevey, organizer, senior policy fellow at the University of California at Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. She is strikes correspondent for The Nation and co-author now of Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations. Thank you very much for joining us as always.

Jane McAlevey: Thank you.

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