Working Life Podcast

Subscribe to the show today! Support Working Life @ https://www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePo...​ or @ actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 I have discussed a number of times the union organizing campaign at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. So, as the ballot counting is now underway, I thought today we could add two aspects to the conversation, while we await the final results which could take a number of days. First, people don’t really know how the hell the ballot count happens, what’s the process, what does it look like so I thought it would be worth checking that out a bit. And, then, second what happens if the union wins? That second one is a doozy—because the fight just begins even after a union victory: the road to getting a first contract is torturous because a company like Amazon will fight tooth and nail to obstruct, delay and undercut the union at every turn, all in an effort to frustrate workers who want to see tangible results from their vote. We all need to know that, if the union wins, everyone supporting this campaign needs to keep the mobilization going after the final ballot is counted. So, to wrestle with these thoughts, our friend Dave Mertz is back. Dave is a vice president at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Stores Union and he joined me for a chat from Bessemer, Alabama which took place late at night after he finished meeting with the core organizing committee members. So, why is Yemen a place that even a top United Nations official calls “hell on earth.” Consider: Yemen is a country of 30 million people, 81 percent of whom make less than $5.50 a day and are facing a historic deadly famine; a place where, in 2021, 2.3 million children will face malnutrition, and 40 percent of households have poor to borderline access to food; a nation in which 20.5 million people, two thirds of the entire country, are without safe water and almost as many are without adequate health care, leaving millions at the mercy of cholera and, of course, COVID-19. Add to that a vicious war—fueled by U.S. arms and aid to Saudi Arabia—that has displaced millions of people from their homes, making every aspect of what I just recounted even worse. Scott Paul, who is a lead humanitarian policy expert with Oxfam America, lays out the crisis in Yemen, and whether a small ray of hope beckons. -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Subscribe to the show today! Support Working Life @ https://www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePo...​ or @ actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 I’ve spent a lot of time on the crisis facing workers around the world who before the pandemic even hit us faced some pretty dire economic realities. Tomorrow, a high-level group will convene, virtually naturally, to talk about creating an international social fund to assist lower income countries to come out of the year-long pandemic economic shutdown. Cathy Feingold, director of the AFL-CIO’s international affairs department and deputy president of the International Trade Union Confederation, which represents 200 million unionized workers worldwide, gives us the scoop. Rick Larsen has been a useless member of Congress. You can’t find a single initiative that he championed in the 20 years he’s represented the 2nd Congressional District in Washington. His best claim to fame might be that there isn’t a corporate dollar he hasn’t been willing to pocket, from defense contractors to health care companies to big tech companies like Amazon and Google to planet polluters like big oil companies. Jason Call, a longtime progressive activist, is taking on Larsen in the Democratic primary for the seat in 2022. He joins me to talk about the campaign to, as he says, “rein in the undue influence of giant corporations and directly challenge their power.” -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Subscribe to the show today! Support Working Life @ https://www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast or @ actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 It’s those zombie voices again. The ones who rise up from the dead, or from a hidden policy corner, to start the drumbeat of fear about “debt” and “deficits”, all in order to block progress for the people. There is no debt or deficit crisis. We have plenty of money in the richest nation in human history—and we should be spending big right now, especially with interest rates at rock-bottom lows. So, today is your antidote of information to combat the claim of a debt crisis (by the way, I wrote a book about this topic a decade ago—you can download it for free). Shervin Aazami, a progressive activist, is running for the Democratic nomination for the 30th Congressional District in California. He’s challenging a long-time corporate Democrat, Brad Sherman, who, among other horrendous positions, voted for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and opposed the Obama Administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. Shervin joins me for a chat about his campaign. -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Subscribe to Working Life today! Support us @ https://www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast or @ actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Episode 217: It’s all about North Carolina today—the fight for better wages and the campaign to get a progressive person in the U.S. Senate, all of which is connected to my two guests today who represent the theme of the just-marked International Womens Day. The sad outcome of the push to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour tells us two things. First, there is a big house cleaning needed to make way for politicians who actually care about workers. Second, no matter what happens in elections, we need to keep up the street heat to mobilize millions of people to stop the immorality of people working full-time but getting paid poverty wages while billionaires get even richer. First up, then, is Precious Cole. Precious lives in Durham, North Carolina and works at Wendy’s. She has been working minimum wage jobs for half her life and, like millions of other workers, has, year after year, not been able to meet her monthly bills earning what is a poverty wage. Which is one reason Precious has become a key activist and leader in North Carolina Raise Up, the state branch of the national Fight for 15 and a Union network. She chats with me about her life and her activism. Then, you may remember state Senator Erica Smith—she was a progressive who jumped into the 2020 North Carolina race for the U.S. Senate to challenge incumbent Republican Thom Tillis. But, the D.C. insiders shoved her aside, handpicking the most uninspired, dumb-as-a-brick candidate Cal Cunningham who, with piles of corporate and party-directed money, won the primary—and, then, proceeded to crash and burn, handing Tillis his re-election. The 2022 election is a barometer for whether lessons have been learned. As the results of the Florida minimum wage ballot initiative showed—it passed overwhelmingly even as Joe Biden was losing the state—people are saying pretty clearly: give me a policy that puts money in my pocket and isn’t about supporting the rich over regular people, and I’ll vote for it whether you call it “progressive” or “a loaf of bread.” Erica is back for another Senate race, competing for the party primary nod for the seat that is opening up in 2022 with the retirement of Richard Burr. I talk with her about her campaign and the mood in North Carolina. -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 216: Subscribe to Working Life today! Support us @ https://www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast or @ actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 The number that sticks in my mind today, and has since I heard it, is 40 percent. While over half a million people in the U.S. have died of COVID in one year, while millions of people have become sick, while millions of people have lost their jobs, savings and homes, and many people have been forced to wait in long food lines to get enough to feed their families—while all that was happening, the billionaires—the top 0.05 percent in the country, the Waltons, the Jeff Bezos’ of the world—saw their collective wealth go up 40 percent. Which is one good reason to have a wealth tax. This week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal rolled out an “Ultra Millionaire’s Tax”. The tax would only be on the wealthiest 100,000 households in America, or the top 0.05%, who have a net worth of $50 million, and it would raise $3 trillion over a decade. Since, and I’m just spit balling here, I don’t think my audience falls into the over $50 million-net-worth category, I figured it would be safe to engage the always-brilliant Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, in a conversation about the great benefits of a wealth tax. Subscribe to Working Life today! Support us @ https://www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast or @ actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Some good news! Last May, I talked about an effort to raise two trillion dollars for poorer countries to battle the pandemic and the economic collapse. The money, so-called Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), can be created by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) but the Trump Administration blocked the move—even though it comes at no cost to taxpayers here. But, now, there’s movement: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen appears to be in favor of some level of the SDRs, if not the full two trillion now in the newly resurrected bills in the Senate and House. Mark Weisbrot, co-director of CEPR and an expert in international affairs who has been leading the campaign since last year, joins us for an update. I also have a few thoughts about the video Joe Biden made about the rights of workers to have a union. It’s a good thing—but it also shows how narrow the debate is about true union organizing rights. Check it out—and let me know your thoughts! -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 215: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 You aren’t going to be surprised by this news: Big Pharma is killing people. All over the world. And the real kicker here is: after you, the taxpayer, gave billions of dollars to Big Pharma companies to come up with a vaccine for COVID-19, Big Pharma is keeping that vaccine from getting into the hands of millions of people in poorer countries—which will come back to hurt every American as well. Under the World Trade Organization rules, Big PHARMA gets *lengthy* monopoly protections for medicines, tests and the technologies used to produce them. Trump wouldn’t join virtually every other country to grant a waiver for poorer countries to get access to the vaccines so lives could be saved. Next week, Joe Biden has a chance to do the right thing. I discuss this urgent effort with two warriors for progressives: Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who has represented the 9th Congressional district in Illinois for two decades, and Lori Wallach, the director of Global Trade Watch. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 A couple of weeks ago, I did a segment on the military coup in Myanmar and the specific threat faced by union leaders. Opposition to the coup is being led by union leaders who are facing arrest and violence, forcing many to go into hiding. I have new insights on what is happening in Myanmar from Khaing Zar, Treasurer of the Confederation of Trade Unions Myanmar (CTUM) and the President of the Industrial Workers Federation of Myanmar, the manufacturing and garment worker affiliate of the CTUM and the largest garment worker union in Myanmar. -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Right before our eyes, in these very days and at this time of crisis, you can see so clearly this bankrupt system, defended and promoted by greedy CEOs and spineless politicians, but a system people are trying to rebel against and take down. And that’s the picture of two really important fights—the fight to get millions of workers a $15-an-hour minimum wage and the organizing campaign at Amazon. It’s infuriating to keep reading about these so-called Democrats, and, of course, every single Republican, who oppose raising the federal minimum wage to $15-an-hour? How deeply out of touch are these people who oppose giving people a semi-livable wage to try to survive on? So, in service to my listeners, I’ve given you four—just four!—easy talking points to argue for hiking the immorally low minimum wage. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Then, I return to the organizing campaign underway at Amazon’s huge warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. There is never enough conversation about organizing Amazon because of its power and how a victory in this campaign will inspire workers at other Amazon warehouses, not to mention labor as a whole. I am joined by Joshua Brewer, a main organizer of the campaign for the Retail Wholesale & Department Store Workers, for the latest on-the-ground intel. -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 213: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 “Bi-partisanship” is an idea that should make everyone sick to their stomach. When someone is out to kill you, or your nation and community, making a deal for the sake of “bi-partisanship” or, its related political spineless copout “compromise”, makes no sense when the end result is injustice and a worsening of our lives. That’s what I start out with today—a topic I also wrote about in my new newsletter, which you can subscribe to here. Quick, who said just a couple of days ago: “We believe that $15-an-hour is the minimum that anyone in the U.S. should earn for an hour of labor” and, then, demanded that Congress raise the minimum wage to $15-an-hour. If you said Bernie Sanders, wrong! Though of course he does believe this. It was…wait for this…Amazon. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 That’s a direct result of union and community pressure on Amazon. Thousands of workers are trying to get a union at Amazon’s huge warehouse in Bessemer Alabama. The ballots have just been mailed and we get an update on the organizing campaign from a good friend of the show Dave Mertz, vice president at the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union, which is seeking to represent the workers. Since the coup in Myanmar on February 1st, the Myanmar trade union movement is taking a leading role in protest and strike actions against the military and is calling for international solidarity actions. There is a global solidarity day coming up Thursday, February 11th. So, to give everyone an update and what to do to support our sisters and brothers in Myanmar, I’m joined by Brian Finnegan, the Global Worker Rights Coordinator at the International Department of the AFL-CIO. -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 How many of you dealt with that chaos when it came to wrestling with the unemployment insurance system last year? Some of the rhetoric we heard was, “well that chaos was just the pandemic crush overwhelming the system”. Yes, that’s true in a very narrow sense—the system collapsed in many places, meaning people who were desperate to get a check to pay rent or for food had to wait months and months for a first check…and lots of people just gave up. But, here’s the truth, folks—that’s a feature not a bug. So, as enhanced unemployment benefits are about to expire at the end of March but seem likely to be extended in a new stimulus bill, is this chaos going to continue to be as bad as it was a year ago? Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project and a leading national expert on the unemployment insurance system, tells us the status and how we fix the broken system. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Remember during the presidential campaign when Joe Biden promised not to raise taxes for anyone making less than $400,000? I thought, “well, that’s dumb”. Why should someone making say $250,000—which puts them in the one percent—not pay higher taxes? I figured right then that that line-in-the-sand $400K number was a purely stupid political calculation—let’s not piss off the people in the suburbs who voted for Trump who we want to get. Really? Why not try a direct populist argument to reach a whole lot of people who are making under $100,000 and get angry about taxes because they have to pay a heavy load but see people making $250,000 paying a relatively small sum? I talk with Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, about taxing people above $400,000, why other well-off people shouldn’t pay higher taxes as well and, bonus, how Netflix is paying less than one percent taxes on a massive revenue boost (hint: legalized corruption!) Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1

Episode 211: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.” The discerning quick minds among you will know that that’s a snippet of the speech by Michael Douglas’ character, the corporate raider Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 film Wall Street. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Truth is, Jeff Bezos makes Gekko look like a penny ante small-time crook. And the crooks who control government on behalf of big corporations are in the same Bezos league when it comes to the massive shift in wealth that they engineer—and that’s the theme of this week’s show. The one enduring fact of any government is the way in which the real powers—corporate and private wealth—push the levers behind the scenes. It’s the Revolving Door between government and Big Money, a door through which all sorts of manipulators and greedy people pass through from government to corporations to pro-corporate lobbying companies. And the story is mixed, as you will hear from Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, who is back on the show to update the picture of whether, and how deeply, corporate interests are dominating and controlling the Biden Administration. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 During this entire pandemic, which is now approaching a full year of horror and destitution for so many, I’ve pointed out in many of the segments we’ve done on frontline workers that the virus has just exposed the sickness we’ve lived with for decades—a sickness which lets a handful of people become filthy rich at the expense of everyone else. You can see that in the poverty-level minimum wage—which means people labor like slaves to make the likes of the Waltons of Walmart billions of dollars in profits. Or the lack of paid sick leave which is a main reason so many people have gotten sick on the job and, then, died because they could not afford to stay home from work when they got sick. Paul O’Brien, Vice President for Policy and Advocacy at Oxfam America, is back for our annual discussion about global inequality, tied to Oxfam’s new report, “The Inequality Virus”. And the picture is devasting: driven by the economic pandemic-driven collapse, we are witnessing a historic level of inequality across the globe. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 210: I am guessing everyone who listens to this show considers himself or herself an environmentalist and cares about the planet. You believe in science—a shocking notion—so you get the climate change emergency. We know we have to do some pretty radical stuff to keep this spaceship habitable for generations to come. Here’s the problem: there isn’t enough real thought by environmentalists and politicians, with numbers to go along with the thinking, how to take care of workers who will be hurt by the closing down of the fossil fuel industry. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Grasping climate change is serious is not contrary to also being worried to death you won’t be able to pay the bills if your coal mine shuts down, or a refinery stops production or the truck you drive to deliver food to people has to be all electric. Joe Biden has plenty of language in his campaign positions calling for high-paid union jobs in the post-carbon world, and he promises “We’re not going to leave any workers or communities behind”. Yet, too much of his proposals, and most other proposals, are way too vague and missing real numbers. The Just Transition debate in Europe is both similar to ours and not the same. It’s not the same for some key reasons: unions are stronger but perhaps not as strong as say 20 years ago. Health care is not tied to what job you happen to have—it’s a right not a privilege. And in most nations in Europe there is a component of a national pension plan so you don’t have to pray, like you do here, that the stock market is doing well enough when you retire that your IRA will give you enough money to live on. But, there is still enough vagueness in Europe to cause friction. To dig into this a bit more, I chat with Adrien Thomas, a research scientist at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), who is focused on employment relations and the social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. Adrien recently co-authored an article entitled, “Trade unions and climate change: the jobs-versus-environment dilemma”. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 209: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Soccer, football, whatever you call it—it’s not my thing at all. Give me baseball every day, 365 days a week. But, what is my thing is making sure workers in every sport aren’t exploited—and that has been a reality for years when it came to the rights of workers who worked on the staging of soccer’s quadrennial World Cup, including the upcoming one in 2022 in Qatar. A worldwide outcry put a brake on some of the worst abuses in Qatar and set the stage for even more workers’ protections for the 2026 World Cup, which will be staged in North America and Mexico. Cathy Feingold, the international affairs director of the AFL-CIO and the deputy president of the International Trade Union Confederation, joins me to outline the campaign already underway to keep the heat on the host countries and the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 High on the list of really bad outcomes in the recent election was the passage of California’s Proposition 22, which tore away rights from millions of so-called “gig” or “digital platform” workers, exempting companies like Uber And Lyft from a whole range of worker protections. This signals a new corporate assault on workers’ rights all across the nation. Progressives in Europe took notice of what happened in California . And are moving as quickly as possible to make sure the Americanization of poverty of “gig” and digital platform workers is stopped at the shores of the continent. Leïla Chaibi, a French politician who was elected as a Member of the European Parliament in 2019, chats with me about her proposal to the European Parliament to pass legislation to inscribe in law, for every country in the European Union, employment and working conditions for “gig” and “digital platform” workers equal to that of more traditional workers. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 208: Back in the spring, I had a good chuckle when I found a topic of agreement between the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs, as well as agreement from lots of heads of states, many labor folks and business titans—creating trillions of dollars in grants, not debt, to give to poorer countries needing immediate financial aid right away to contend with the pandemic. I’m circling back to this idea I first explored on the podcast in May, this time in a chat with Isaac Evans-Frantz, director at Action Corps, and Don Wiviott, a farmer advocate based in Iowa. Fasten your seat belts! The fight to raise taxes on the very wealthy and corporations is heating up, and, perhaps, the best options for victory will come at the state level. To look at the state of play, I chat with one of my favorite very smart people who knows everything about taxes, Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. In case my email slipped by yesterday—there is still time to pitch in to our Giving Tuesday fundraiser and become a sponsor of Working Life. I pay for most of this out of my own pocket. That’s tough these days because I don’t come from a big money background—but I still want to keep giving voice to workers, union organizers, progressive policy wonks, progressive candidates, and grassroots organizations—with intelligent conversation, not rants. Long before they were household names, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman and Beto O’Rourke were on my show talking about their vision for the people. Thanks! -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 207: Ideology is in the way of a simple plan to end the pandemic in 30 days. Yes, 30 days: Lock down the country and pay everyone up to an annual wage of $90,000 to stay home. I’m resurrecting the argument I made months ago because the debate about a stimulus is on the agenda again—after Republicans have basically said fuck you to the entire country for months when it comes to aiding the people. My explanation of the plan leads off the episode. Then, high up on the list of pandemic utter chaos has been the way in which political leaders at the local and state level have mishandled how to safely reopen schools so teachers and kids don’t get sick. To get a sense of the current state of play for teachers, I zero in on Arizona where voters just approved a new tax hike to fund education and, at the same time, the infections are on a steep rise. Joe Thomas, the president of the Arizona Education Association, joins me to talk about the union’s renewed public push to put in place life-saving measures to make sure schools reopen safely. Lastly, I hope I never get to a day when, rather than be outraged, I just shrug at some mind-boggling, crazy proposal that endangers thousands of workers. Today, I’m incensed. On their way out the door, the grifters in the Trump Administration, having already killed tens of thousands of people by intentionally downplaying the pandemic and botching the response at all levels, now want to sicken even more workers: They are proposing a last-minute rule change to increase line speeds in poultry plants to 175 birds per minute. Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, the co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH.), chats with me about this insane idea to make an already dangerous industry, in which thousands of workers have gotten COVID-19 and scores have died, even more perilous. -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 206: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Three questions post-election are on the menu this week. First, how does Tom Perez, the chair of the DNC, still have a job? Perez has been incompetent for a very long time. He was the choice of the Democratic Party elites back in 2016—a guy who knows zippo about the mechanics of an election. And, voila—the party loses seats in the House, fumbles the chance to take the U.S. Senate, and even worse, fails to take back legislative chambers at the state level. Perez’s failures will echo for years to come. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Second, Georgia, Georgia, Georgia…these two run-off races will mean the difference between millions of people being able to pay for food or keep their homes, not to mention whether people like Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley and Elizabeth Warren will have real power at the head of important committees or be stuck in the minority for at least two more years and have no chance to fight the Biden Administration over a progressive agenda. So, those two races have to be won by any means necessary. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Third, I speak with David Lujan, the executive director of the Arizona Center for Economic Progress, about the passage of Proposition 208, which puts in place a 3.5 percent tax on the wealthiest people to fund higher salaries for teachers, school aides, bus drivers and other folks, not to mention higher spending per student which will mean smaller class sizes. The proposition passed by a margin of more than 116,000 votes, a far bigger margin than Biden’s slim margin of victory in the state. The obvious point: people will get behind ideas that confront class warfare, including support higher taxes for things that improve communities. -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 205: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 It’s the permanent government—the corporate lobbyists who have friends in both parties. It is at the heart of why we don’t have Medicare for All, why the Pentagon is rolling in dough and why banks and Wall Street rip us off. Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, talks about what the strategy looks like to limit the influence of the corporate elites in a possible Biden Administration. The pandemic has ripped through the world, killing and sickening millions. But, if you look at the economic hits people have taken, the pandemic has exposed the complete and utter failure of the system in the U.S. to make sure people can hang on. Both Europe and the U.S. had to shut down their economies and both took hits in output—but why has the unemployment rate been so much lower in Europe in the first half of the year than the U.S.? Maria Figueroa, the Director of Labor and Policy Research at the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University, explains how “short time work” made the difference. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 It’s fairly obvious that Trump has the blood of thousands of Americans on his hands for his absolute narcissistic bungling and incompetent handling of the pandemic. Tens of thousands of people, especially front-line workers like nurses, got sick at work because this administration let corporate shills, who don’t care about workers, run the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Which brings me to the Oregon Health and Science University, a massive sprawling operation which in 2019 had $3.2 billion in revenues. OHSU is taking a page from Jeff Bezos when it comes to stiffing nurses who are seeking a fair wage and leaving nurses at great risk by refusing to commit to fully providing for a safe workplace during the pandemic. We get the lowdown from Terri Niles, an ICU Nurse at OHSU and a vice president at the 2,900-member Local 52 of the Oregon Nurses Association. -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 204: The catastrophic failure to shrink global inequality has given COVID-19 the perfect breeding ground: tens of millions of people are at risk of hunger, extreme poverty, sickness and death because, overwhelmingly, most countries do not spend enough on public healthcare, and they have weak social safety nets and poor labor rights. Now, this is a feature, not a bug, of the supply chain of global capitalism—keep people poor, enslaved and desperate as a way of making huge profits. To be sure, as I discussed in a recent episode, workers in Haiti, one of the poorest countries on the planet, were barely hanging on before the pandemic—now, they’ve been shoved deeper into the hole of economic deprivation. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 But, the U.S. ranks last out of the wealthy G7 countries and trails 17 low-income countries like Liberia when it comes to laws that stop anti-unionism or where there is a livable minimum wage. Paul O’Brien, Oxfam’s Vice President and the author of a forthcoming book, “Power Switch: How We Can Reverse Extreme Inequality”, joins the show to discuss the organization’s new data. Even though I’m a political junkie, I’ve usually stayed away from too much in-depth electoral politics on the show, mainly to try to use this time to talk about stuff most of my audience is not going to find elsewhere. But since we are just two weeks away from the election, I picked a few thoughts from the vast amount of posts and analysis I’ve been doing in other places for the last year with the bottom line: a landslide is coming (if you want a truly long in-depth analysis you can over to the Working Life website and read it all there). -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 203: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 When Donald Trump and his minions are eviscerated in less than three weeks so the country can survive, I can’t think of a better illustration of the fight still to come for progressives than taxes. Joe Biden’s tax proposals are, well, meek. Every time Joe Biden made a big deal during the TV mud wrestling verbal sparring with Trump that he wouldn’t raise taxes for anyone making under $400,000, I yelled back, “why the hell not?”. Really, you won’t ask people earning, say, $250,000 a year—a quarter of a million dollars—to pay higher taxes? I dig deep into Biden’s tax ideas with one of my favorite guests, Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. While millions of people wait, in desperation, for Congress to pass a new stimulus package, a whole lot of other important stuff is also tossed by the wayside including the $25 billion to shore up the United states Postal Service. Way before the pandemic erupted, I’ve talked on this show about saving the post office, giving it not only a financial boost but expanding what it can do. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Post offices are everywhere, often literally on Main Streets in towns all across the country. Everyone knows where the post office is. So, why not turn post offices into hubs of financial transactions for people, from pay check cashing, to spots for Postal Service ATMs and, in today’s world, spots to launch mass COVID vaccination efforts? I take up some of these ideas with Max Sawicky, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research who recently wrote “The U.S. Postal Service Is A National Asset: Don’t Trash It” -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 202: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 For a sliver of time, the political world was talking about how Donald Trump cheats on his taxes. Virtually every rich person does what Trump does: they use the tax code to dodge paying their fair share, which costs the country tens of billions of dollars every year. Rich people move their money around, hide cash in trusts, foundations, hard-to-understand complex partnerships, a web of limited liability companies, and, especially for those who run companies, in overseas operations. And they have an army of accountants and lawyers whose sole job is to hide as much income, use the tax laws as aggressively as possible to confuse the under-resourced IRS staff, and, then, to fight in court to keep every nickel the IRS somehow manages to find. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 All of this is not a huge surprise to David Cay Johnston. David is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote the 2003 book, “Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everybody Else”. Alas, it’s all still true and getting worse—as he tells us today in my in-depth conversation with him. -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 201: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 I’ve been thinking a lot about firefighters these days, what with the jaw-dropping video we see virtually every day of these monstrous wild fires scorching millions of acres of forests in California and Oregon. For the record, these fires are absolutely driven by climate change—so what we see today will be a feature every single year, with all the widespread devastation of communities and the loss of human lives and wildlife. Recently, I was sheltering in my home like tens of thousands of other people because the fires in Oregon created air that was off the charts hazardous. I mean that not as hyperbole—the measurements were too high for your average air quality reading to capture. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 But, damn, if we, regular people just going about our business, can’t venture outside because the air is too dangerous, what do firefighters face? I don’t mean the obvious—the raging fires and flames. I’m talking about the long-term health effects of breathing in smoke and chemicals pouring out from fires that firefighters confront for hours on end with little shelter. Joining me to think about this is Darrell Roberts, a firefighter for 20 years in southern California where he serves as a battalion chief in Chula Vista as well as president of Local 2180 of the International Association of Fire Fighters -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Episode 200: CEOs like to play a three-card monte shell game. They want everyone to focus on their rhetoric about all the supposed wonderful things they do—say, creating a “green” friendly product—and, at the same time, when people aren’t paying attention, they run their company using fear, sexism and racism. That sums up the world of Elon Musk—which we talk about today. Musk is anti-union and runs an operation that makes workers sick at sky-high rates, as I documented almost more than two years ago on this podcast in Episode 80. And it appears pretty evident he’s a sexist and a racist. He’s facing one federal lawsuit claiming that in 2015 and 2016, at Tesla’s factory in suburban Fremont, CA, black workers were subjected to repeated racial epithets, racist cartoons, and supervisors engaged in, or did little to stop, the racism. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 The same horrific environment is pretty apparent at the company’s plant in Buffalo, NY, a factory that got almost a billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies to open up shop. To understand the ugly nature of what it’s like to work at the Tesla factory in Buffalo, I’m joined by two people. Sonny worked for Tesla until recently but “Sonny” is a pseudonym and we’ve obscured his face in this discussion because he fears retribution from other potential future employers. Linnea Brett is a community organizer with the Clean Air Coalition, which develops grassroots leaders who organize their communities to run and win environmental justice and public health campaigns in Western New York. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 I kick off with a short observation about American Exceptionalism: when it comes to moving away from fossil fuels, we are pretty puny compared to the far-reaching industrial policy pursued by China. -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 199: Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 What’s a worker’s life worth? To you and me, it’s priceless. Capitalism, though, doesn’t see it that way—a worker’s life is a cost of doing business, a life easily disposable when it comes to making profits. And the corporate world has an accomplice in this immoral scam where workers are disposable: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Smithfield Foods, a massive pork processor making billions of dollars every year, did almost nothing to stop workers from getting the virus at its Sioux Falls, South Dakota plant. In just under three months, more than 1,300 were infected, 43 ended up in the hospital and four workers died. OSHA’s response? A fine of $13,494 as part of a single violation OSHA cited the company for—that’s $3,373.50 for each worker killed or a little over $10 bucks for those infected. Jessica Martinez, executive director of National COSH, joins me to talk about this immoral slap on the wrist that is a “green light” to every company to act cavalierly when it comes to workers’ lives. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Over the past six months, I’ve brought you the stories of frontline workers and the dangers they face in the pandemic. You’ve heard the stories of poultry workers, teachers, retail workers, subway conductors, and health care workers. Today, I speak with Hipolito Andon, a cleaner and maintenance worker in New York City, who tells us about the risks he faces on the job at one of the premier real estate sites in Manhattan, Rockefeller Plaza. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Episode 198: The most important political figure in your economic life—to be sure, the boss of a company has got a lot of power—is not the president of the United States, no matter who that is. It’s probably the head of the Federal Reserve Board. We know interest rates are at historic lows and mortgage rates are crazy low because the Fed has intervened to keep the country from collapsing even further into the abyss we are in, an abyss Republicans in Congress don’t seem to care about. Which is why what the Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced recently is pretty important—the Fed will keep its main attention on employment. Is this just a pandemic-linked shift that will eventually go away and send the Fed back to doing the bidding of the banks and the bond markets? I poke at this topic with my favorite Fed watcher, Dean Baker, senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 It’s hard to think of a sector in the economy that has been hit harder than hospitality and tourism, and specifically, hotels. I mean, ask yourself: unless it was a matter of high urgency would you travel right now and book a hotel and stay somewhere just for fun? Ok, if you say you would, you are more brave and adventurous than I am. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 For most hotel workers, however, the future looks bleak today—paychecks are gone, enhanced unemployment has run out and, soon, health insurance coverage costs will be almost entirely on the workers once union financial support expires. To hear more about the economic struggle of hotel workers, I’m joined by Lourdes Maquera, a housekeeper for the past ten years at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki, Hawaii, and Bryant de Venecia, the communications organizer for UNITE HERE’s Local 5. -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 197: The last name “Hoover” is, if I can use this term, a brand name in conservative circles. Herbert Hoover was the 31st president of the U.S. who served during the Great Depression, taking office in 1929 the year the stock market crashed—an apt historical reference for today perhaps since the economic implosion we are living through is the worst in a century dating back at least to the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 His great-granddaughter Margaret Hoover has kept the Hoover flame alive—both in her attention to Herbert’s legacy and her own work as a conservative commentator. Margaret and I have known each other since the 2016 election cycle. We have vigorous, but respectful, disagreements about actual policy. In the wake of the two parties’ political conventions, Margaret joins me to talk about politics—and she reveals for the first time publicly that she’s voting for Joe Biden (which says as much about Biden’s politics as it does about Margaret, and the battle progressives will face should there be a Biden Administration). Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 As I’ve reported numerous times from the COVID-19 frontlines, workers are getting sick and dying from COVID-19. The added twist: they are afraid to speak up, largely because, no surprise, corporations are putting enormous pressure on workers to suck it up, whatever the cost. Jessica Martinez, the co-director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH), joins the show to give the lowdown on the dangers facing workers and the failure of government safety inspectors to make sure hundreds of thousands of stay safe during the pandemic. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 196: It’s never enough to remind people every single day how many workers are out there on the frontlines risking their lives in the pandemic. I’ve talked about those folks regularly on the show: the transit workers, retail workers, and teachers. And, surely, the workers who put food on our plates are right up there on the list—like the folks that are crammed together in poultry processing plants who are getting sick by the thousands and dying by the hundreds. Alexandre Galimberti, Senior Advocacy and Collaborations Advisor for the US Domestic Program at Oxfam America, talks with me about how the corrupt, greedy poultry industry is exposing workers to horrendous conditions. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Last week I was driving about town, doing a few errands (while always wearing my mask) when I passed by a bank. There were hundreds of people lined up at the bank, pieces of paper in their hands, with a ton of them crowded together pressed against each other at the door of the bank. I drove down another block and circled back to the spot. I knew what this scene was instantly: people trying to file paperwork to get a one-time $500 state grant to make up for the enhanced federal unemployment benefits that Republican cut off at the end of July. I talk about this as an example of an immoral society—a place where millions of people can’t pay their bills because of a public health crisis created by leaders who don’t give a damn and exacerbated by leaders who don’t care whether people are going hungry. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 The Florida 3rd Congressional district might have been a relatively obscure seat in the mix of 435 congressional districts—except it’s held by Ted Yoho, the yahoo who called Alexandria Ocasio Cortex a “fucking bitch”, leading to a spectacular takedown of Yoho and misogyny by Ocasio Cortez on the House floor. Thankfully for the country, Yoho is not running for re-election. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Still, the district is considered a pretty safe Republican district, with an R+9 lean. Trump beat Clinton in the district 56-40 in 2016. But, Adam Christensen, the candidate who just captured the Democratic nomination, joins the show to explain why the district is a good place to test a populist message. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 195: Voting in America, compared to many other countries, is not easy. That’s always been true. Donald Trump’s relentless effort to undermine the vote in November, in this case by crippling the postal service and trying to make it impossible for ballots to be counted on time, is surely corrupt. But, the undermining of the vote is made easier by a rickety election system that has existed for decades. Miles Rapoport, a former Connecticut Secretary of State and, now, Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at Harvard’s Ash Center, talks to me about the threat to voting this Fall, what we can do and his bigger project to implement a national mandate that everyone must vote as a civic requirement. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 If you wanted to pick a country that has been ravaged for decades by economic, political and physical blows a grimly appropriate choice would be Haiti—a country that is the poorest place to live in the Western Hemisphere. Its people endured decades of autocratic rule under the Duvalier regimes, who looted the country. More recently, the scars of a 7.0 earthquake in 2010 still loom large because a desperately poor country always has less ability to cope with a natural disaster and, then, fully recover. Lauren Stewart, the Solidarity Center’s Regional Director for the Americas, joins me to tell the tale of a campaign by Haitian garment workers to survive the COVID-19 pandemic which has put many out of work. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Episode 194: Today the show is all about Hollywood. Hollywood, California and Hollywood, Florida. Hollywood, California is in a rumble. For most performers in the entertainment business, residuals are the foundation to making a living—either a solid middle class living or somewhat less than that. Over many decades, residuals have been tied to various things such as repeat showings of a movie in syndication or sales of DVDs. Now, it’s all about streaming. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 For performers this is a huge change and it’s really about a fight to make sure generations of performers, some not born today, will be able to earn a respectable living. How do performers get paid in a streaming world? The performers’ union, SAG-AFTRA, just scored a big streaming deal win for performers—as well as locking in a big #MeToo step forward to protect actors from harassment. I dig into all this with the union’s president Gabrielle Carteris, who has a long career in film as an actor in film, TV and stage (most prominently in Beverly Hills 90210) and as a producer, and Ray Rodriguez, SAG-AFTRA’s Chief Contracts Officer. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Florida’s 23rd Congressional district is a strongly Democratic district currently represented by the odious Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. In a world of dishonest, morally corrupt, vain and narcissistic politicians, Wasserman Schultz stands out. That’s where Jen Perelman comes in. Jen is challenging Wasserman-Schultz in the Democratic primary which wraps up next week with Election Day after thousands of Floridians have already cast early-voting ballots. Jen’s website is jen2020.com. She joins me from the campaign trail as she was out talking to voters. -- Jonathan Tasini Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 193: The pandemic has ripped a hole through every state budget in the country to the tune collectively of over $550 billion. That red ink is more than half a trillion dollars in money states won’t have—which translates into millions of people losing their jobs, services being decimated that we all rely on, attacks against people of color who are employed disproportionately in decent-paying government jobs and an economy that won’t recover if aid is not dispatched. Pronto. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 And it doesn’t have to be this way, if ideology wasn’t more important for Republicans, and some Democrats, who should be pouring money into states and closing these big deficits—deficits that, remember, were no fault of management by state leaders. The deficits were caused, essentially, by one person, Donald Trump, who dismissed the pandemic, called it a hoax, made fun of people who tried to sound the alarm about the approaching calamity and, thus, caused the economic crisis that is burying states in mountains of red ink. I talk with about the state budget emergency with Michael Leachman, Vice President for State Fiscal Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 It’s not a wild guess to say that a very high percentage of the thousands of people who tune into the show are political junkies and probably a big piece of that number consider themselves progressives. So, with the Democratic convention coming up, you’d think I’d do a lot on that, right? Nope: because conventions don’t matter. And, even more so, party platforms don’t matter. And I say all that as a bona fide elected delegate for Bernie Sanders for whom I’ve already cast my virtual ballot for his nomination. My musings about the convention and the progressive movement kick off the show. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 192: By the time you are tuning into the show, Jeff Bezos, one of the great scars on the economic landscape, will have finished his song-and-dance testimony before Congress, during a hearing that mostly focuses on the massive anti-competitive power of the big tech firms like Amazon and Google. But, long before today, Jeff Bezos has always been the poster child for the CEO who doesn’t give a shit about workers and only cares about a single thing: how to become even richer than he is. The man is a scar on humanity. My observations about Bezos leads off the show. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Then, Congress passed NAFTA 2.0 earlier this year. I’ll just say right away—the first NAFTA was an abomination, the newer one was just horrendous—and we also have to be clear that, with or without these so-called free trade deals, capitalism marches on and abuses people, as we saw in last week’s episode when I talked about the enslavement of the Uyghurs in China on behalf of the global supply chain of big brands and big companies. A big piece of NAFTA 2.0 was all about improving the lot of workers in Mexico, especially their right to join independent unions. And that ain’t happening. I dig into this with Lori Wallach, the director of Global Trade Watch. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Florida. When it comes to politics, you need not say much more than “Florida” to get peoples’ temperature up—no pun intended here since it’s also now the center of the COVID pandemic thanks to the state’s completely moronic governor. But, Florida also points up a longer term challenge to be quite conscious of—it has one of the worst state Democratic parties in the country. I talk about the state’s politics with Bob Lynch, a first-time candidate, who is running for the state house partly to be a catalyst for reform of the party’s electoral strategy. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Subscribe to the show! -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 191: China’s leaders and wealthy elites are willing partners of global capitalism, opening up its doors, willingly, to Wal-Mart and huge multinational companies so those companies can produce trillions of dollars of stuff using cheap slave labor—in good capitalist style. Since 2017, China has been conducting a steady campaign of mass transfer of more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities into a vast network of ‘re-education camps’ in the far west region of Xinjiang, which Uyghur activists call “east Turkestan”. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Think of the Japanese internment camps in the U.S. during WWII or apartheid in South Africa—the key difference, is that this is being driven a lot by the thirst of global capitalism for cheap, slave labor. Tens of thousands of Uyghurs are being forced to work in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen. Tomorrow, a worldwide call will be issued by 71 Uyghur rights groups and over 100 civil society organizations and labor unions from around the world demanding that apparel brands and retailers stop using the forced labor. Rahima Mahmut, a Uyghur singer, award-winning translator, and human rights activist who is living in exile in London, and Brian Finnegan, the Global Worker Rights Coordinator in the International Department of the AFL-CIO, join the show to talk about the campaign. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Some things never change no matter when tax day falls—we pay our taxes, while the rich and big corporations dodge paying their fair share. Amazon paid zero taxes in 2017 and 2018, despite having huge profits and, lo and behold, Amazon is making a big deal out of paying taxes in 2019—a whopping 1.2 percent of its $13 billion in profits. One of the reasons these very rich people and corporations can scam us is the careful, relentless undermining of the IRS. And Congress has been the willing tool for that anti-IRS campaign, cutting its budgets year after year. What that means is simple: rich people and corporations don’t pay what they should because they know the IRS can’t keep pace with the armies of lawyers hired by rich people and corporations to dodge and avoid taxes. Hundreds of billions of dollars go unpaid and about 70 percent of that “underpayment”—which is a euphemism for dodging—is by the top one percent. A week after Tax Day, Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, talks with me about the IRS and who is not paying taxes (alert: the tax dodger list won’t shock you!) Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Sign up for the show! -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 190: Here is something we can all agree on I think—drug companies are blood-sucking, greedy cheats who cannot be trusted with the health and welfare of tens of millions of people. Am I right? And that’s even more true as we watch the global scramble to be the first company to profit big-time from a vaccine for COVID19. So, I’m going to focus on the Big Pharma corruption today with a friend and investigative reporter, Gerald Posner who is the author of a mind-boggling expose “Pharma: Greed, Lies And the Poisoning of America” Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Looking for the single most important thing you can do between now and the end of July to slow the pandemic? As I mentioned last week in outlining my proposal for a $6.5 trillion stimulus bill, badger everyone you know, and of course your members of Congress, to get behind Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s bill, and a similar bill in the Senate co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders, to pay people up to $90,000 a year until the unemployment rate declines below 7 percent for three straight months. I talk more about the bill (and you can see last week’s episode for the full plan) which would pay people enough money so they can pay bills like rent and food, and allow them to stay home, either because they are sick or simply to allow a community-wide lockdown for a number of weeks until the so-called curve is dramatically going down. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Don’t forget to sign up for The TV Show!: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 189: Let’s go really big! I outline a $6.5 trillion stimulus—more than double what the Democrats in the House passed—because that’s what the people need over the next year: $1.3 trillion in wage guarantees; $715 billion for state and local governments; $600 billion for a “Pandemic Medicare For All”; $1.5 trillion to cancel all student debt; $200 billion for a rent and mortgage freeze…and a lot more. Fight me on the specifics—but let’s expand the debate and the way people think about what is possible, what is needed and what should be done. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Just a few days ago, China imposed a new National Security Law which is aimed at shutting down the mass protests that have consumed Hong Kong for more than a year. In the crosshairs especially are union activists who have been signing up people to dozens of new unions which doesn’t thrill China’s leaders who manage the linchpin for the global corporate supply chain. Cathy Feingold, the director of international affairs for the AFL-CIO and deputy president of the International Trade Union Confederation, joins me with a look at the pressures facing unions in Hong Kong. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 188: Big companies don’t give a second thought to making big profits during the COVID-19 pandemic even if that means thousands of workers—and their families—will get sick and die from the virus. Actually, it’s a feature not a bug, no pun intended—in food processing, all those workers who make sure you get beef or chicken on your plate, are getting sick by the droves, and the only way that happens is because companies, big rich companies, keep dangerous plants operating unsafely because to make things slightly safer would cost them a few bucks. That’s criminal in a normal world. Debbie Berkowitz, director of the worker health and safety program at the National Employment Law Project, joins me to look at the threat to workers—a threat that is growing as the pandemic surges. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 A few days ago, Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to cut the bloated Pentagon bi-partisan budget by a very, very modest 10 percent, with the money saved slotted to underwrite human and social programs in cities and communities where the poverty rate is 25 percent or higher. Ashik Siddique, research analyst at the National Priorities Project, talks with me about where the Pentagon could be cut—and how the slashing could go far, far deeper. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Don’t forget to sign up for The Show!: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Episode 187: Private equity vultures love a great economic crisis. Circling above their wounded corporate prey, they wait until a company is too weak to survive, and, then, swoop in to pick up the pieces at a bargain price—which usually involves cutting thousands of jobs, too. And, now, a new rule will allow private equity firms to put their grubby hands on everyone’s 401(k) plans. Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the nation’s leading expert on the carnage wrought by private equity pirates, exposes the looming attack on our savings in a riveting chat. Then, while millions of people are trying to get a job or an unemployment check, not to mention just stay safe, states are facing what even The Economist magazine calls “The Calamity Ahead”—a brutal shortfall in revenue because of the economic collapse. Politicians of both parties would rather cut peoples’ jobs and cut services rather than raise taxes on the rich and send a large bundle of money to every state. I chat with Jacque Simon, the government affairs director of the American Federation of Government Employees, about the threat to federal and state workers. -- Jonathan Tasini Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 186: I pull back the lens a bit on the Black Lives Matter movement to consider how the uprising is touching the consciousness of workers around the globe, especially in Africa. Chris Johnson, the regional director of Africa for the Solidarity Center, joins me in a conversation about the close relationship between racism and economic oppression, and how African workers are linking the BLM movement to their own economic oppression. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 How would you like to have a governor who saved a man five hours before his state-ordered execution? That’s a choice New Hampshire Democrats will have in the September primary to choose their nominee for governor—he is Andru Volinsky who joins me to talk about his long-time civil rights advocacy, not to mention his work on jobs, climate change and taxes. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Stop the looters! Jail them now…people like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, HCA Healthcare CEO Samuel Hazen and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin—all of whom, as I discuss, are the real big-time looters who are fleecing the country. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 185: The big news—it’s the first regularly scheduled Working Life TV Show!!! View the show now and sign up at: www.youtube.com/WorkingLifeWithJonathanTasini But, all our audio podcast listeners will still be able to hear the show in the long-time format. The unemployment system is in chaos—jammed phone lines, crashing websites. People can’t get the checks they desperately need to pay for simple things like food, utilities and rent. So, I decided to devote the lion’s share of the show to dig into why this happening—and give concrete tips on how to access the system. Do not give up—that’s the message Judy Conti, government affairs director for the National Employment Law Project and I deliver in our conversation (you can see the slides Judy and I are talking about here: https://www.workinglife.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Working-Life-TV-slides.ppt) Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 As hundreds of thousands of people are massing in the streets, we are inundated by a slew of corporate commercials and corporate statements from Amazon, News Corp and even from something called the Hedge Fund Association, all falling over to show enlightenment about racism, even embracing the slogan “Black Lives Matter”. But, as I explain in the show, once people win an unwinding of the militarization of communities and the unwinding of policing as it’s been done for decades, that’s only half the battle because the corporate PR bullshit is trying to hide the depths of how the corporate boot remains firmly on the neck of African Americans, and all Americans, but especially people of color. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Episode 184: In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr gave a speech entitled, “The Other America”, in which he said, “It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job.” This was a theme he repeated time and time again throughout his life because he saw the unbreakable bonds between the twin evils of racism and economic oppression. He made those links right up to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 when he marched in support of striking sanitation workers. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast And if King were alive today, he would link the murder of George Floyd and mass uprisings taking place across the nation with the economic oppression, the scourge of capitalism, that has brutalized people of color for decades. That’s what I talk about today featuring segments with two guests, Janelle Jones and Valerie Wilson, who outlined the realities of economic racism in two past episodes. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast And, alert, alert…The Working Life TV Show goes live TONIGHT on YouTube where we will continue the same conversation from today’s audio episode with a line-up of special, amazing guests! Tune in at 8 p.m. Eastern/5 p.m. Pacific at: www.youtube.com/WorkingLifeWithJonathanTasini We will take audience questions! When you do come by, please do subscribe to the channel! See you then! -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 183: If I say that drug companies are sleazy leeches whose CEOs make millions of dollars while basically killing thousands of people who can’t afford outrageous drug prices, you’d shrug your shoulders and say, “yeah, well, duh.” Drug companies make these huge profits largely because of an absolutely insane system of patents, which you could stop with a change in the law. It’s especially important to get this idea in our heads right now with the rush to create a vaccine for COVID-19, which makes drug companies salivate over the prospect of pocketing huge profits for something that should be ours to own—which is what I talk about with Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Here is a prediction that I’d go to Vegas and bet a huge pile of money on: when it comes to making up big state budget deficits looming in the coming months because of the pandemic-caused economic crisis, and eventually in a year or two when the hand-wringers in Congress consider the pandemic-generated larger federal debt, it isn’t going to be rich people paying, nor corporations. It will be regular people. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Politicians will cut jobs and screw workers, cut pensions and screw retirees and cut school funding and screw children. This is all a consequence of bad tax policy over many decades—and Joe Biden is only making it worse by promising not to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000 a year, which lets plenty of well-off people off the hook. Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, and I chat about Biden’s folly as well as the not entirely surprising hypocrisy of a Wall Street titan, Jamie Dimon. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast I also reflect on the amazing and shocking news that the American Federation of Teachers dug into its own treasury and spent $3 million to buy 500,000 N95s, 50,000 face shields, and more than 1 million surgical masks to make sure its members—thousands of whom are frontline workers—do not get sick and die. Amazing because it shows the greatness of the labor movement. Shocking because it exposes how the country’s political leaders running the show are just deeply dysfunctional and incompetent. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 182: Calling people “gig” workers is a subtle trap. “Gig” can sound anywhere from upbeat to just a mundane description. The truth is the “gig” economy is just another way of exploiting people and it’s a dream for all capitalists to have a pool of workers who can be used and abused at the beckon call of a supply chain or a big tech company, at the lowest cost possible. And not a surprise—lots of gig workers are at great risk during the pandemic. I explore the lives of “gig” workers in a conversation with Bama Athreya, an economic policy fellow at the Open Society Foundation and a veteran social movement activist. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast The pandemic has put domestic workers at risk. Think of it logically: you can be locked down in a home with your client, essentially enslaved, with nowhere to go and no social distancing space. You could easily be trapped in a home, forced to stay inside because of a curfew, without personal protection equipment. Elizabeth Tang, the General Secretary of the International Domestic Workers Federation, joins me from her perch in Hong Kong to talk about the pandemic threats facing domestic workers. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast My rant of the week is simple: we need to nationalize all payrolls. It’s breathtaking how badly the elected leaders of the country are handling the economic fallout of the pandemic, not to mention the medical crisis—it’s a bi-partisan catastrophe, with the worst human in the Senate, the wealthy Mitch McConnell, showing no rush to stop the implosion of millions of peoples’ lives, while Nancy Pelosi refuses to entertain Pramila Jayapal’s fantastic proposal to pay every unemployed person up to $90,000 on an annual basis while the pandemic rages. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 181: Here’s a no brainer observation: It would be hard to find any areas of agreement between the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs. Well, I got one—it turns out that the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs, along with scores of heads of states, labor folks and business titans, are on the same page about one idea which hasn’t gotten a lot of attention—creating $3 trillion in grants for worldwide distribution by the International Monetary Fund to countries needing immediate financial aid to contend with the pandemic. You’ll learn all about this fascinating global tale in my conversation with Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast And speaking of money, Morris Pearl, the chair of Patriotic Millionaires, joins me to explain how we can free up $200 billion for financially-strapped charities by just a little jiggering of the rules for philanthropic foundations who sock away tax break-driven contributions from rich people. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast My rant for this week: to be sure, COVID-19 closed down retail stores lickety-split but the collapse of name brands like J. Crew was already in the cards—Wall Street pirates, especially private equity companies, had been looting big chains for years, piling on huge debt burdens that all but guaranteed scores of retail outlets could not weather an economic crisis. It’s an example of the way in which the pandemic has exposed even further the rotten so-called “free market” economic system. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 180: It is quite something to hear the elites in Washington—especially Republican members of Congress and the menace in the White House—blather on about wanting to wait to see how well the previous, inadequate fiscal stimulus works before deciding whether to do anything else. That’s while tens of millions of people are in the streets, huge lines of hungry people form every day across the nation and states and cities are on the brink of financial ruin. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast States and cities not only employ collectively millions of people but, my god, their services—from education to just picking up the garbage—are damn essential. And you don’t need a computer to get that with the economy shut down and people sheltering at home, revenue to the states through incomes taxes and other taxes has nosedived. It’s just around the corner, folks: when there are gaps in local budgets, especially at the state level, they are coming after us with cuts pretty quickly to our services, our pensions and our communities. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast I welcome back Meg Wiehe, deputy director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, to wrap our minds around this: Congress should make up any shortfalls states and cities face—and we should use this crisis to also fix the decades-long, deeply crazy, screwed up ideology that skimped on strong government in favor of low taxes for the rich and corporations. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Then, I circle back to what’s happening with poultry, hog and meat processing workers in a conversation with, Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail Wholesale and Department Stores Union, as we focus mainly about the crazed notion of forcing plants to open up even if COVID-19 is raging through the workplace. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 179: There is no way to downplay the risks to U.S. frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic—and I’ve dug into that in the past month or so, in our various segments talking about workers in health care, postal service, hog and poultry processing, airlines, rail, and subways. It’s dangerous and frightening—and it’s exponentially more terrifying when you look at the global threat to workers. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Think about what tens of millions of workers in poorer countries, with far fewer resources, are facing. The images coming out of Africa, Asia and South America showing huge migrations of workers are mind-boggling—how do you even wrap your mind around how to achieve social distancing at bus depots in India, crammed with huge crowds of migrants, who are desperately trying to get home because they have nowhere to go as industries have shut down in the pandemic. Or, consider Haiti, the poorest country in this hemisphere—close your eyes and think of garment workers who pack into tap-taps (those are public minibus transports) to ride to factories that are teeming with people, that on a good day, are dangerous, risky places to work—and, then, arriving at a factory to find that the employer is forcing workers to sign a piece of paper that says if the worker gets sick that worker is legally responsible for their illness. Shawna Bader-Blau, executive director of the Solidarity Center, joins me to paint the global picture. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast And, then, courtesy of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH), it’s the Dirty Dozen of the Corona Pandemic, and a few other dishonorable mentions—companies like Amazon and Tyson Foods who, surprise, put profits over the safety and health of workers, along with big corporate lobbyists who work hard to block paid sick leave. I chat with Peter Dooley, a National COSH leading workplace safety and health expert, about the Dirty Dozen, and we also discuss a model framework for how to make sure workers stay safe in the pandemic. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 178: Here’s a little riddle: What has 157 million daily delivery points, 35,000 offices and 500,000 workers? It’s your U.S. Postal Service, that would be the service that really is a democratic, small “d”, institution—it’s there for everyone at a reasonable cost, no matter where you live or who you are. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Putting it mildly, postal workers are frontline workers—and to pile the safety and health dangers on top of everything else, the service is facing a massive budget hole because of the collapse of the economy because, obviously, less commerce means a lot less stuff being sent via the postal service which relies on fees. I go in-depth on what’s happening to postal workers with Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast And Jeff Bezos is up to his usual despicable behavior—the wealthiest human on the planet is piling up more money but at the expense of the safety and health of Amazon’s warehouse workers who are getting sick from COVID-19. Hundreds of Amazon workers stayed away from work yesterday to protest the dangerous conditions. Rachel Belz, an Amazon worker, joins me to discuss the uprising. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 177: The dinner plates of millions of people are soon going to be an interesting place to focus the mind on the balance between the desire to fill bellies with protein—poultry and pork, mainly—versus the worthiness of peoples’ lives, specifically the lives of the workers who process the chickens and hogs in plants across the country. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast To put it bluntly, workers are getting sick and dying from COVID-19 just so millions of people can chow down some meat product at dinner. And those products may be harder to find because the virus is raging through food processing plants nationwide and fraying the supply chain from factory to plate. To get an on-the-ground report about the epidemic, I’m joined by Randy Hadley, the president of the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union’s Midsouth Council who has been working in the industry for over four decades. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Since today, April 15th, is normally tax deadline day, it’s a good time to look across the spectrum at how stimulus money—tax money—has been flowing, or should flow, and who should benefit. People and state governments, for example, need a lot more economic support, while CEOs and corporations should go to the end of the line, or, at least, every dollar should invested in a workplace should go towards keeping a worker on the job. And maybe there’s a silver lining down the road—a renewed belief that an effective, activist, well-funded government is a good thing. To unwind all this, I chat with Amy Hanauer, the executive director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 176: When we come out of the immediate pandemic crisis, then, maybe we can have some accounting of who and what is responsible for the needless deaths of thousands of people—and among the “who” would be, say, politicians who are making themselves look like heroes today—I’ll just say, randomly, New York politicians—even though they sat on their hands in January when the World Health Organization issued a worldwide pandemic warning, which you think might have made those same aggrandizing politicians—say, in New York—think, “gee, maybe I should make sure we are stocked up with the right equipment.” Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast But, the bigger inquiry should be about how a part of the crisis comes right from the way we’ve allowed global corporations and elites to set up an economic system using trade deals that profits them a whole lot but leaves everyone else vulnerable to a pandemic, not to mention other quaint class warfare damage. Which is what I talk about today with Lori Wallach, the director of Global Trade Watch. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast And Secretary of State may not be a position that gets a lot of people excited but it’s an important job—most people serving as a state-level Secretary of State have a huge role in redistricting and, certainly, they work to make sure elections run properly. If you match that to someone who really cares about the position, knows a ton about what can be done in the role and also is running to be a secretary of state not just as a stepping stone but because they really want to do the job, then, you’ve got a great combination—or perhaps you’ve gotten to know Jamie McLeod-Skinner who is running for secretary of state in Oregon, and joins me to discuss her campaign. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 175: The other night I was watching an episode of Season 3 of Ozark and there was a scene in which the mother, played by Laura Linney, walks out of a supermarket with her son, both of them pushing a shopping cart. My head went immediately to, without a thought: I hope they sanitized that bar on the cart where their hands were placed…and then a few seconds later I laughed. That is where our heads are at these days—but, for lots of frontline workers out there, it’s all very real, deadly real, terrifyingly real. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast So, again, this week you are going to hear about those workers—today it’s health care workers and transit workers as I talk with the leaders of two very important unions: Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 180,000 health care workers, and John Samuelsen, the president of the Transport Workers Union, whose members work on the buses, rail and airlines all across the country. Perhaps not coincidentally, both of them are New Yorkers with a real feel for the pandemic bomb hitting that city. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast The workers we are going to hear about—and this is not dramatic exaggeration—are getting sick and dying because of the pandemic, in no small part because of the malfeasance, ignorance and just plain simple “We don’t give a crap about workers” attitude that has meant a lack of equipment to protect folks from the virus. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 174: When I have snuck out briefly in the past couple of weeks to safely get a few items at the supermarket, I made sure to thank the workers in the aisles and my cashier for being on the job, and I also tell them be safe and careful. They are supremely vulnerable to getting sick. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Those retail workers, who still have jobs despite many stores having closed down, are forced to show up at work, mainly because they have no choice—their boss hasn’t shut down and the workers need the paycheck because lots of them are like millions of Americans with very little in the way of an emergency cash cushion, and in lots of cases they have zero paid sick leave. Today, I speak with Dave Mertz, vice president and New York City director of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, about what’s happening in the lives of retail workers on the corona frontlines. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast And speaking of bad employers—even without a pandemic Amazon is injuring workers and tossing them away like disposable units. Irene Tung, senior researcher and policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, talks to me about a stunning new study she recently co-authored that looks at Amazon’s injury and turnover rates. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast I wrap up this week’s episode with a conversation with Cori Bush, a single parent, registered nurse, a pastor, an activist, and a community organizer in St Louis Missouri, who is a strong progressive taking on a long-time entrenched incumbent in a Democratic primary in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 173: Last week I asked everyone to consider the coronavirus pandemic as a pretty clarifying picture of class warfare—who are the people who get hurt most when millions of jobs go away or at best are in limbo because of a nationwide shutdown? It’s working people, minimum wage workers, service workers—almost none of whom have enough cash in reserve to pay bills, unlike the rich who have made their wealth by exploiting workers. Who are the people most vulnerable? It’s the people who either have to still go to work or can’t afford to stay at home because they don’t have mandated paid sick leave or family leave, even in a crisis. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Today, as so many of you either hunker down or are living in fear, I talk with one of my favorite and regular guests Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, about a menu of steps the country needs to take to mitigate the devastating health and economic hits workers are taking in the pandemic. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Then, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Democrat from Maryland, joins me to talk about his efforts to protect tens of thousands of federal workers by calling for an expansion of their right to telework during the corona pandemic, as well as his effort with Bernie Sanders to buttress workers’ pensions by ending a multi-billion tax break for CEO retirement plans. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 172: Pandemics might be one of the single best mass events to shine a light on class warfare, especially in the U.S. Rich people don’t have to worry about getting sick—they can afford extensive care in a country in which millions of working-class people can’t even afford to see a doctor for a run-of-the-mill reason. If a rich person gets sick, well, he can just sit home in his pajamas for as long as needed and never worry about paying next week’s rent, while a fast food worker or other service worker on an hourly wage is forced to go to work, even when sick. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast What the coronavirus has shown, quite sharply and clearly, is that a country without paid sick leave is not only an immoral society but also, on a practical level, a country which denies the most basic benefits that could contain a health threat—which is what I talk about today with Judy Conti, government affairs director for the National Employment Law Project. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Then, you probably can’t find many people in Congress who are bigger shills for the corporate world than Steny Hoyer—and McKayla Wilkes is aiming to send Hoyer quickly into the world he really aspires to, that of a lobbyist for corporations. I talk with her today about her primary challenge. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 171: Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast You may remember me using this before because the idea comes up again and again in the struggle of workers to get some power at work. In his ballad “Pretty Boy Floyd”, Woody Guthrie sang these words: “Yes, as through this world I've wandered, I've seen lots of funny men; Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen” Today that’s real life, and today, I chat with Hugh Baran of the National Employment Law Project about forced arbitration, a mumbo jumbo legal term that basically means millions of workers are giving up their rights to corporations who are stealing billions from workers by using the power of the corporate pen. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Then, I chat with Tomas Ramos, a progressive running for the 15th Congressional district in New York, a heavily Democratic district where a progressive can win. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3

Episode 170: I try to mostly stay away from long monologue and ruminations, leaving the topics to be explored in conversations with my guests. Today, a little change because of the issue—I’m going to dig into a recent important study that shows what is pretty obvious to anyone looking at the numbers—Medicare for All saves money and lives. That’s the conclusion of experts who published their peer-reviewed findings in The Lancet. You will want to catch this one to grab some easy talking points for future debates. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast Which will be a good transition, then, into chats with two progressive candidates running for Congress who both support, among other progressive positions, Medicare for All—Robin Wilt in New York and Chris Armitage in Washington state. Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3