it's a pleasure to be here and just a quick word about myself i've lived in the puget sound since one thousand nine hundred sixty eight when i came up to go to college at the university and then came to seattle in seventy two to go to graduate school at  university of washington in political science so i've been here a long time and knew in a very young age when i was thirteen or fourteen what i wanted to do with my life which was to somehow make some kind of contribution no matter how modest to progressive social change and that really came out of my faith community that i grew up in i'm a lutheran and had the great good fortune of pastors who took  christian scriptures seriously and didn't domesticate it sorry so i mention that because i have a kind of values perspective i come from and for me it comes out of that faith tradition so i had a long time interest in organizing and professionally most of my life has been spent either as a lobbyist which i think can be an honorable profession if you know where the word i thought it was us grant that one of the two when the railroad lobbyists would pursue them over the hotel near the capitol the president would go to the hotel to get away from them and they would come after him so i have had a long interest in this and about six years ago went to work for the united food and commercial workers which is the largest private sector union in the state of washington we have about forty thousand members and they started a community organizing department there  which is unusual for a labor union so in part tonight i'm going to talk about community organizing and talk about organizing more generally but also about labor and ways in which i think labor has to change to be more effective and to be more full participant and that broad movement for progressive social change to begin i want to say some things about wisconsin which of course is recently in our minds and there's been a lot of analysis done already of what happened in wisconsin and why i want to talk about it just briefly in terms of a failure in organizing because certainly citizens united in the large amounts of cash that flowed in had their impacts but there were other things as well and since my topic is about organizing i just wanted to use it as a bit of a test case the wisconsin uprising which it's been called one think was a legitimate way of describing it it was kind of an uprising it was beyond at least initially the conventional forms of political expression originally it was a teaching assistant at the university of wisconsin in public school teachers who were really some of the vanguard in this and one of the teaching assistants a woman named surety schmidt who's in the sociology department said that the uprising broke new ground because it moved beyond the interests of organized labor to address how health care for all voting rights education funding and accessibility housing rights immigration rights and so on so initially it was very broadly based and it attracted a broad cross section of people unfortunately what happened over time is that the issues narrowed and this same person charity schmidt who made the comments i just was referring to early on in the process later said that she realized that even  early on this uprising was being co opted and demobilized and a telling moment for her came early on when the message of collective bargaining in the middle class became dominant she felt that language  language in the capital had consciously included all segments of society so she's talking about the people that took over the capital in that rather radical act and were there day after day after day that in the beginning they were talking about the poor and the elderly immigrants and children and the whole mass of society but as soon as they started focusing on talk about the middle class it began to fuel division and dissipate the energy so  talk of the middle class and saving and protecting the middle class is really current in our political campaigns but i think it's interesting to think about what she's saying here that the middle class begins to exclude a lot of people and a lot of interests or can depending on how it's dealt with so the first point i would make about organizing is that i think affective organizing has to cast a wide net it needs to encompass many issues to show people in part to show people the interconnectedness of all these issues and the same system and systems that lead to the kinds of negative outcomes we see in our social political economic life affect all sorts of people in varying ways but they come from from a similar source so it's important to keep the tent big keep it broad and continue to emphasize the connectedness of all these issues secondly there was so much emphasis on the attack on collective bargaining rights  media coverage of the wisconsin experience but scott walker was attacking much more than that he was talking attacking the whole edifice of government he was going after funding for k twelve education higher education children's programs  poverty programs the elderly on and on he was trying to shrink government to privatized where possible to deregulate there was a whole agenda so it was about much more than just collective bargaining rights and what happened initially is that there was really creative bold out of the box kinds of actions that were going on i mean as you think back it was in many ways taney as i mean it was planning going is this huge outpouring of people over time and matthew matt rothschild who's the editor of progressive magazine some of you may be familiar with it it's based in madison wisconsin he was talking about how the wisconsin uprising just crackled with life and this is a great description he said i would look out my window three blocks from the capitol and see people stream up the street every day for a protest there wasn't just outrage and anger there was jubilation there was creativity there was cleverness there was fun but there was also a hard edge slogans like how do you solve the budget crisis tax tax tax the rich  was no concern about being accused of envy of these people it was very bold and direct but it was creative and it engaged people and he feels that it really captured the imagination of people because they were trying these and conventional approaches they were doing things that were mass protest and then unfortunately people began to domesticate it they began to pull in the oars and so there were actions that could have been taken there was talk of a general strike now obviously there were pragmatic reasons that they weren't even weren't actually going to be able to carry out a general strike but there were other alternatives among them one suggestion was to have a rolling blue flu epidemic in which one workers in one accurate occupation after another call in sick you could have done something like that or working to rule which in labor circles is when you have a contract and there's a minimal standard you have to meet just do what you have to do the minimum this is sometimes used as a way to communicate with employers there's a variety of things that could have been done but instead people drew back so on the one hand you had broad issues that connected people in the beginning they began to pull away from the broader issues it was very creative bold action in the in the beginning they began to pull away from that and lastly where they went was to electoral politics to conventional electoral politics now you may have read that in the exit polling after the recall election on june fifth they found a fairly substantial bloc of voters who were not comfortable with recalling walker because they felt only malfeasance in office was sufficient to recall someone if you have a problem with his policies boot him out of office in two thousand and fourteen there's another regularly scheduled election and i think that's an example of some of the limitations of conventional politics you're playing by the rules set by the powers that be this of course allowed citizens united and all the money to come in because they were playing on their playing field and so what happened ultimately is that the democratic candidate tom garrett moved to the center he wasn't talking about any of the important issues at the end his message was i want to bring wisconsin together let's everybody get along it was very soft it got away from everything that had ignited people in the beginning and just one last thing about wisconsin there was a meeting of we are wisconsin which was the coalition the broad coalition that coordinated the effort to try to recall scott walker and a person who went to a meeting just four or five days before election day said the discussion burbled with talk of volunteers early voting patterns door knocking mailings making three passes at five hundred thirty five thousand phone numbers it means three calls analytics television ad buys voter suppression it was all tactics there was no mention of politics no conversation about labor rights the attack on democracy the strangling of social welfare everything that catalyzed the campaign had been lost that it catalyzed it originally and the point was made that in the sixteen months that this wisconsin experience unfolded they could have been organizing workers and the unemployed building community groups educating the rank and file on social history democratizing union decision making going door to door i particularly like this one going door to door relentlessly and patiently explaining how unions can increase everyone's wages and benefits but all the energy was spent on futile campaigns for democrats who support austerity lite politics or policies excuse me and i find a lot of power in that analysis but that doesn't mean that i think we should abandon electoral politics and say a little more about that later but we have to understand what is achievable and not achievable through that avenue and i think the wisconsin experience is instructive in that regard that when people began to play it more safe more conventionally  bringing in the consultants the people that supposedly have the experience it's when it lost a lot of its energy and it would've taken a lot to recall scott walker but again the issues go very deep and it went beyond scott walker and i think one of the unfortunate things to this point doesn't mean it can't be recaptured but the wisconsin uprising initially spoke to these fundamental issues that cross class and race and the other kinds of divisions in our  society so i know there's going to be a lot of soul searching about this but i viewed it particularly terms my topic tonight from an organizing lens and what was it about the organizing that fell short and i think this article that i'm referring to which comes from a couple writers with truthout do any of you ever look at truthout it's a good online new surface i think they're pretty much right on in terms of the short comings at least in terms of organizing so  part of the reason i wanted to refer to wisconsin besides being topical is that i think it relates to my own labor union and what we've tried to do in organizing so as i said we're the largest private sector union in the state so in our particular pond we're not an unimportant actor and the labor movement how many of you come from a labor background in terms of being in the union or having family or familiarity few people ok more than a few that's good i know when i was a child thirty five percent of the workforce was union now it's about twelve but my local i think has tried to really think deeply about where labor has been misguided where labor has lost opportunities  the areas where labor should have been a more assertive and more engaged and hasn't been and they've tried to our leadership and our membership has tried to reshape how we do labor work organizing politics the whole thing labor unions do some basic things they negotiate contracts which is of course very important to the membership and at the end of the day when you're paying dues to an organisation in a labor union you look at the contracts you have and how beneficial or non beneficial do you think they are so that's important and go shake contracts it's important to enforce contracts we have staff members called union reps some unions call them business representatives their job is to go out to the workplace enforce the contract make sure employers are following the provisions of the contract and so on and for workers that are employed by large institutional employers i think it's fair to say that generally speaking there's a lot of pretty systematic violation of contracts it's just the way things work i think one of the changes in our society with less people connected to the labor movement or having less family or friends connected is they're not as familiar with those kinds of dynamics so it's important to kind to enforce the contract to make sure that it's being followed because it's through the contract that a measure of justice is brought to the workplace and one of the great advantages of being in a union is that you have a voice in the workplace you're not an at will employee if you're an  will employee you can pretty much be released for most reasons unless you can prove some violation of law that you've been discriminated against in some way but with the labor contract you have the protection of a gr procedure you have a voice at work so it's very important electoral politics are important labor unions as you i'm sure are aware get heavily involved there's been a lot of talk about part of the attack from the right on labor is to try to undercut the single biggest source of money and person power which comes from the labor movement in terms of progressive politics so all of those things are important bargaining good contracts enforcing the contracts properly so that workers are treated fairly and their real rights are maintained engaging in the electoral policies politics so ultimately we can shape public policies that are beneficial but our union has decided that the number one issue is organizing organizing new workers and labor after world war two kind of came to an accommodation with corporate america what developed was something called business unionism where it was all about developing a stable relationship with an employer you give a little we give a little we get along everything's ok the adversarial nature of the central adversarial nature of the relationship was lost and i think that's when you can begin to trace labor declining in its importance now when i say adversarial doesn't mean you have to demonize the employer we have to understand we're all human beings but there is a fundamentally adversarial relationship between workers and capital that's what we believe in the labor movement and capital will inevitably tr take advantage of the power differential it enjoys when people ask me why do we need labor unions i say to me it's very basic homo sapiens is a is a species in which there's a power differential if there is one normally that individual more power will try to exploit the individuals less power happens in families all the time women understand that because they've been exploited and dominated by men in many cultures for centuries so it's really about establishing a power more of a power equality so we believe that there is a fundamentally adversarial relationship and we need to never forget that and so just as in wisconsin when people began to become safer and more conventional less bold and aggressive the movement began to dissipate in certain ways i think you can trace this history in the united states when labor began to think they could accommodate and come to sort of  detente with corporations they began to lose that more assertive stance which is was really necessary to make important and significant gains and not only in terms of the workplace but also society in general labor has had a strong history when it's been it's at its best of engaging broad social political economic justice movements and again labor has a mixed history it's also been beset by racism and classism and sexism and a number of other isms but it's also had it's it's good side and often has been there for civil rights and economic justice and a variety of other things so for me to say that our union places organizing as the number one priority that does set us apart from many labor unions who focus more attention on these other things which are kind of management of the normal state of affairs so that's number one secondly we've been very assertive about trying to organize our rank and file membership that ultimately if we're going to be successful in organizing it has to be driven by the rank and file so we have what are called stewards and unions these are the workplace leaders when i joined the union six or join the union staff six years ago we had maybe fifty stewards who are legitimate true stewards we now have over eleven hundred and that's been because because it's been a priority we've worked hard at it and it's a wonderful thing to see people begin to discover their own power particularly if they haven't been used to standing up for themselves and others so we have a very well developed program for developing internal membership leader member leadership we still have elected officers we still h forty thousand members there's a certain bureaucratic nature to organization but we also try to drive it from the bottom up as much as possible which i think is another key to effective organizing it's got to be embraced by the broad deep spectrum of people who are involved why and why having a larger number of student stewards is effective for example in contract fights the employer is ultimately trying to gauge the membership they're looking at the workers ever we have bargaining that goes on sometimes for three months sometimes six months sometimes a year the employer is always trying to take the pulse of the workers what are they willing to fight for what are they willing to settle for if you have strong grassroots membership a member led leadership that sends a powerful message to the employer it also means that you can repeatedly take actions to clearly communicate to the employer that the workers are serious sometimes that may be petitions sometimes it may be mark what we call marching on the boss there's a variety of ways in which people can show that they're determined to be treated fairly and you need to have that grassroots leadership it can't be the staff it can't be the president of the union it's got to be your peers in the workplace because your peers have the greatest authenticity that's another thing about wisconsin some of the authenticity was lost when they got away from the broad based organizing and went to the hands of consultants in the electoral process the other thing about electoral politics we continue to be engaged in it but we had this conundrum like many on the progressive side where you would go to democratic party leaders and say we'd like you to support this policy they would not be very supportive you express your displeasure at that and they say well if you don't like us go talk to republicans as if we have nowhere to go in any of you who have lobbied which i did for a long time you would hear that kind of stuff all the time you may not like us but go talk to republicans and they can be treated better by them so what we've decided to do and some others in this state is to not accept that there was an acronym coined for this don't invest in more excuses we're tired of people telling us in the democratic party yeah we're progressive right right but we can't support you on this for that reason or this reason or whatever so the strategy is really to recruit a dentist and recruit our own candidates to develop develop people this is what happened on the right they started with school boards and things like that we can do the same thing develop leaders who will engage in participate and be public officials when we have an opportunity  there's the option of taking out democratic incumbents are union and others took out a state senator a democratic senator up in snohomish county in two thousand and ten old the party officials did not like that we said when you start acting like democrats then come and talk to us we no longer give money to the party to the state party to the senate or house caucus says the speaker is not happy about that money is power and frank chops done a lot of wonderful things but we have our disagreements as well and you know we continue to work with him but we're not diverting money to his controlled parcel we're giving directly to candidates so there's a variety of things you can do to try to begin over time to change the electoral landscape and so this is something else that we have done that i think is important and others have joined us in that again it's trying to think out of the box you have to you can't be afraid we're going to take some short term pain for acting this way in the electoral process right we're going to take some short term pain but if you're going to get long term gain you've got to be willing to take some short term pain it's just a fact if you're going to make change there's going to be some difficulty along the way the other thing i would say is that we constantly look for ways to connect union and nonunion workers for us a worker is a worker is a work the issues are the same and often nonunion workers end up getting pitted against unionized workers in a variety of ways it's one of the oldest tactics of divide and conquer used by the right so we try to find ways to connect and show the common interest again try to get to that level of what is what are the systemic systemic things that are causing all of this pain and grief in our lives and again sounds like a simple thing but oftentimes unions to their detriment have been too focused on their own folks so the mission statement of our local says that we are our mission is to advance social and economic justice both in the workplace and in the community and by adding the word community it sends a strong message hopefully to others in our in our state but also to our own membership and all of this stuff is aspirational i might add as a cause these are our aspirations we fail constantly at these things but i think it helps us make the right kinds of mistakes and ask the right kinds of questions and i think it's better to make the right kinds of mistakes than answer the wrong kinds this is exactly what i was going to get to next so i didn't ask him to ask that question in so what i was just saying was trying to talk about some fundamental ways in which we're trying to do the work of labor in a different way the other part of it is what work i do community organizing very few labor unions have had community organizers some labor unions do a bit of community organizing but it's usually done by some staff member that has one hundred other things to do and slip in a little bit when they have a chance our union actually created to staff positions so they made a commitment in the budget to fund it and budgets tell you what organizations care about right where you put your money tells you a lot about what the values are and where the priorities are so part of that is that we think of our members as whole people and again some of what i'm saying may seem almost so commonsensical as to why would anyone even have to think about it but believe me in the world of labor not everything that seems common sensical is actually done so for us we think of our members as whole people we know they're not just members of our union they're not just employees of an employer they are members of community they live in communities they're affected by a lot of issues and so we try to work on issues that speak to their entire life so we've worked on affordable housing transportation environmental issues our union was the first union indorse the marriage equality act we worked like crazy on it in the i didn't wasn't trying to get applause line but we pushed hard for it the legislature the campaign that's fighting off the referendum to repeal it is headquartered in our building and that took some courage because we have a forty thousand members everybody from soup to nuts when we do calling this fall urging people to get out and vote and support it we're going to hear an earful from some of our members but it was something i take pride in  our leadership decided this is the right thing to do so we try to speak to a broad range of issues and our members really appreciate it we have an aggressive program for helping people get their earned income tax credit for those that are eligible to get thousands of dollars a year in some cases it's worth more to them in dollars and cents terms and what they get an increase in a contract right so i think this has been appreciated but it's a way to reach out to broader issues we look for people in the community we can collaborate with who have common interests and values and so we have probably thirty five organizations we have ongoing working relationships with faith groups health and human services environmental groups human rights groups immigrant rights groups all kinds of organizations if we can identify people who we think fundamentally are aligned with what we're trying to do in building this broader social progressive movement we will work with them and these relationships are reciprocal as i tell my my supervisor i have spent part of my time working on behalf of others right because if you have a real partnership you got to be there for other people were not in the interest and try to interest of trying to rant allies which sometimes labor has done in the past where you come to a rally to look good if you're there we try to have real relationships and we i would say we believe in something called social unionism which is a term that's used a lot in japan in their labor youth movement but what it really gets at is you have to engage as unions the entire society the entire social order and you have to build relationships  built on mutual respect it's important to be present with people so part of my work is being present with people not asking them for anything being with them understanding what it is they're trying to do and then discover ways to work together and so for me it's a great job right what could be better than engaging a wide diversity of people in the community it reminds me and that human beings i think are more good than bad most people have an impulse to try to to do something that's healthy and constructive and of value they really don't want to hurt themself in most cases and so we try to reach out to this broad cross section of groups and what happens in the end is that you can then build a much more powerful movement and so again community organizing has become a very important part of the life of our union and it speaks to that issue in wisconsin of drawing in the oars and becoming cautious so when we're at our best and as i said this is aspirational we don't always live up to that what i'm saying but one word or our best to go to a local twenty one of the united food and commercial workers union we are an agent in the community that's reaching out that's trying to be creative that isn't afraid of failing that isn't afraid to take on established power and you can take on people weist while still maintaining a relationship and a lot of times if you take them on they actually respect you more so it's a multifaceted kind of thing but it's all based in this fundamental idea that workers need to gain more power in the workplace that's the fundamental thing for us and then we may need to make connections with others in the broader community on issues that affect the general welfare that affect the whole society i just want to finish real quickly by giving you one example of what this looks like and that's our campaign against the wal mart corporation so it probably everybody's heard about wal mart and the united food and commercial workers for twenty five years have been engaged with wal mart in one way or another and what we have done is we developed a coalition called making change at wal mart there's twenty five to thirty organizations involved in the puget sound area it's about making change at wal mart is trying to lead the company to improve their business practices just as one example they have terrible health care coverage for their workers they not only have terrible coverage for their workers they counsel them to use taxpayer funded programs so you all the privilege of paying for wal mart workers health care and they're told to go do that by their employer and this is a company making five hundred billion dollars a year in revenue they have wide ranging effects environmental a lot of things you've probably all read about wal mart over the years so this is a community grassroots based coalition we're kind of the prime facilitator but it's a real coalition and we are taking a variety of actions to try to address wal mart's strategic plan to come in seattle and this this urban area because it's the last part of the country that they haven't gotten into as the urban areas so the exciting thing too about this is that we're organizing wal mart workers people said it was could never be done in any way shape or form it's going to be a long road it's going to be years down the way before we can potentially get them into a union but they've created a workers association where they are taking collective action to stand up for their rights in the workplace it's happening all over the country there's hundreds of wal mart stores where this is happening and it's exciting and the workers are leading the way they are telling the story they are standing up for themselves and wal mart is the all time expert intimidating workers they have a swat team that flies around the country if they hear of any effort to unionize literally it's called a swat team company but the workers are standing up again discovering their own power so i mentioned that in part because if any of you would like to get information about what we're doing in this work i'd be happy to take that down when we're done tonight i think you would find it interesting it's amazing thing to meet these workers and to see the courage they have to stand up for themselves and it's another example of us reaching beyond unionized workers to the nonunion sector and finding common ground and common cause so i've probably take a little bit too much time hope through some ideas out there that will be of interest for you to discuss in the small groups thanks well the first the first thing i would say is that labor's labor unions generally are labor unions is pacific instances with specific employers cannot solve all problems and control everything  some labor contracts have much stronger language about limiting outsourcing but there's also you know we live in a capitalist system and there's a preponderance of momentum in favor of the owners of capital and so like in our in our contracts there are certain management products like in retail industry a big problem is cutting hours of workers if you go into a retail establishment you don't exactly have a lot of people helping your right if they could figure out a way to get you to stock the merchandise and take it off the trucks they would do it believe me so we can't do a lot about something like reducing hours we can do things about how hours are allocated and that it's done fairly and rationally and so on but again in an example related to outsourcing the hotel and restaurant workers union it's called unite here in a number of their contracts they've got strong ally anguage about preventing subcontracting of work or if the if the hotel is sold they have what they call successorship language where you have to retain the union workers there's a huge fight going on down now at the airport we're going to be hearing more about over the next two three years where they're going to be putting up for bid contracts for a lot of the concessions and so on and so we are in a big fight with the port of seattle which likes to say that they're progressive they are not believe me and they take thirty five million a year of your tax money there's a big fight about whether those jobs will remain union or not so individual contract individual contracts in this particular instance there's obviously a history of how that contract is evolving over time i don't know the particular union i don't know exactly what their resources have been to strongly address that issue but again there are limits on what unions can do but there's a lot that they can do and i was trying to make the point earlier that when unions fight for better standards in the workplace better pay better benefits and so on working conditions it does have a spillover effect to nonunion workers  nonunion workers benefit from the sacrifices in the efforts put out by union workers the reverse is true as union density has declined in other words there's been less union workers as a market share in a given market it's had a depressing effect that's why wal mart you know is such a big issue ten percent of i think ten percent of what comes through the port of seattle is wal mart just one employer right and if they come into seattle and they have their workers a lot of them make an eight nine bucks an hour they'll tell you the average wage is twelve dollars an hour it's a lie they simply lie right and they they try to get away with that they will depress wages for the whole retail sector so it's a case by case thing some labor unions are more effective than others you know just to be honest about it some have more  more effective leadership some have a stronger base of workplace leaders that's why we've worked so hard to develop stewards because again at the end of the day the employers looking at those workers and what they're willing to fight for i think your hand when it first well i saw conflicting data on this what was reported initially was thirty seven percent of union members voted for walker and then later there was polling done by peter hart who's a respected pollster and he found that like twenty six percent of union members voted for walker what i will say again labor has a broad cross section of people we have absolutely arch conservatives who are a member of our union and it's interesting what we try to do is focus with them on the issues that are in their self interest as a well as the self interest of their fellow employees and so what often happen is you'll have people  you know they will actually be active union members and fight for good contracts and so forth then they'll turn around the ballot box and vote for somebody who is passing public policies which undermine them so this is an ongoing educational process for  us with our members but we do have a way of intentionally and kind of systematically having communication with members regardless of their political point of view and i think for more conservative members to the extent the union can improve their conditions at work say they get into a grievance situation where they think they've been treated unfairly if the union comes in and helps them resolve that in a way that's to their benefit that can sometimes begin to move people in a little bit different direction on other issues but just because you're an elite union doesn't mean you're of any particular political stripe although for any den of file demographic group to have well over sixty people vote democratic that's pretty significant right because this is a very divided country in seattle we live in a bubble you know let's be honest about it we live in a bubble things that seem obvious to us are not self evident to a lot of other people right i think josh or you're next well i think you know i think cooperatives i'm not an expert on cooperatives i think they obviously have a place a role to play i believe though  again as i said earlier so many of the workers in our society find themselves in work places where they're dealing with a big differential of power and they need some way to organize collectively to try to begin to redress that imbalance of power so i think unions can exist along with cooperatives were never even at the height in one thousand fifty five it was thirty five percent of the workforce that was union that meant sixty five percent was not  but that thirty five percent had an outsized influence on the general social welfare of the country so you know we're pretty eclectic that way i think unions have a very very important role to play in many sectors of our economy and that's why the right is attacking them attacking them so viciously they understand that they understand our power better than a lot of people on the left understand it i think this was next to the person i think it's a both and i like to work in terms of both ends rather than either ors it may seem like tinkering sometimes with contracts but it has a real impact on people's lives and so i think negotiating to contract as we can in workplaces is an important thing to do because it affects people's standard of living it affects the level of stress they face in the workplace and the level of stress in the workplace affects their whole life they can have a wide ranging effects it's also a place where people can begin to understand what it is to collectively organize and work together when i talk about our union focusing on community organizing is an important component and this is something labor needs to do more that's getting to the broader questions labor has skills that it can share with others just as others have skills to share with labor like i said the great thing about my job is i could interact with all these different people who have different perspectives and interests and insights we were talking in our group about the importance of how language has been really controlled for several decades by people of a more conservative persuasion and i believe that ultimately these issues are about values that's what people resonate to most fundamentally upset in the small group i've said it before a lot of people don't vote their self interest the reason polls go back and forth so much you know those independent voters in the middle of this kind of the image of everybody's in a toga thinking great thoughts i'm an independent voter i'm a pragmatist why those people don't know what they think that's why they go back and forth they criticize ideologues for being rigid well at least ideologues that try to systematically think about a coherent point of view right every position has its strengths and weaknesses so i think that speaking to values again people respond to their aspirations and you know this pre question about why do all those white working class voters vote for politicians who systematically attack their interests economically it's because they identify more with those officials they think they're more like them right i think back to the sixty's the whole world seemed like it was coming apart those women were what were they talking about you know where they are unhappy about the black people in the environmentalists who are these people you know man is about and man is about dominion over creation right the elder well in those days it was a gale of racial movement it's become more complicated all of this stuff scared a lot of white americans ok and if you look at the voting the exit polling it's white america that disproportionately supports the forces of the status quo and this is the forces of control and domination and i'm a white person i'm a white male i think i can say that it's people that look like me right and so we've got to find ways to reach out to people that look like me and help them understand you're being exploited by these people but we've got to get to the value level it's got be we have a lot more in common than you think so that's again labor can play a role long with the whole progressive coalition in creating spaces what's the common good caf it's a space right it's a space to talk now we need to learn much more diverse group of people write it be great to to bring some arch conservatives from somewhere let's get him here and talk and find out we're not so bad you know we're not immoral so that's part of what has to happen so it's got to be both both the micro and the macro i would argue more again our union has not insubstantial number of people like that so we have opportunities to have those conversations all the time and i think it gets back to trying to a den of fight areas of commonality you know let's talk about what what do we agree about part of it is just getting to know people that's why i mentioned creating spaces for people to come together i mean the industrial era foundations the soul and ski organizing stuff sound alliance is part of that their whole thing is about relational organizing it's creating spaces for people to come together and it gets tied into narrative to personal history as you begin to talk in certain ways about your personal history you begin to find out oh oh there's some commonality there so it's a slow process but it's got to be very intentional people have to commit to it and that was one of the reasons i was drawing the contrast between our union and again please understand me and not trying to say that we're great but i think we're at least trying to do some of the things that need to be done and what really helps us is engaging this much broader community the key challenges of workers in seattle ok well it depends what sector you're talking about but a lot of workers are facing reduced hours that's a general problem many employers like macy's one of our employers were in contract negotiations there systematically trying to move to a full for two a part time work force so reduced hours which leads to reduced benefits a loss of retirement security only fifteen percent of workers have defined benefit pension plans anymore more and more you know rob mccann is talking about moving new state employees to a four hundred one k ok so i would say reduced hours i would say loss of benefits is a big concern and then i would say the other thing is that so many of the the workers you know it's a difference if it's in a small business but let's say of any size so many of them of move from local and regional companies to national companies and so i would say a lot of workers feel a great disconnect between management and themself they don't feel it used to be the head of q f c the c e o he grew up in the grocery industry worked in the stories you go out to the stories he talked all the employees he knew what it was like to work in a grocery store now you've got guys in suits in cincinnati ohio who treat the workers as units cost and workers feel that then they have these stupid slogans up in the breakroom about we're all one big fricken happy family you know and that just breed cynicism you know they know it's not a family so those are basic issues and there's many others just a minute i think the search in the back you and i'll get to you because i know your hands been up sorry yeah i don't i really can't speak to that i don't know what the exact circumstances were i can tell you that labor law when the way your act was passed in one nine hundred thirty five what it basically said is that organizing collective bargaining is a fundamental right and employers should have nothing to say about it it's up to the workers whether they were going to is if they if they get organized into a union then management can enter into the collective bargaining process and do its darndest to get the best deal from their point of view labor law has progressively become more and more difficult it's very very difficult to organize now there's all kinds of restrictions on what labor unions can do in the old days you could have wildcat strikes and you could have secondary strikes and all kinds of things most of that's been made illegal so one of the challenges in rebuilding the labor movement and i would argue would be a fundamental part of building a more progressive society is making labor law more fair and equitable because that's really of the legal vehicle through which people can come together to try to change their circumstances at work yes or you had your hand you know that's a good suggestion and what it speaks to me about is we try to not make things too personal in the work we do like with employers and so forth we try to talk about systems and i mention this in our small group what every organization every institution has its own internal logic right it drives towards certain things and not toward other things doesn't matter how good a person the are we sometimes will talk to the store managers in grocery stores it's not about you you may be a fabulous human being but you're not making the decisions and how this business is run it's being made in cincinnati ohio and if you don't manage it they'll get somebody who can right now that doesn't mean that variations in personality and basic human goodness can't make a difference in the workplace but there's limits so i think when we talk with people about these issues it's helpful to not try to come across as if i think this other person is the most horrible person in the world most people don't like that what we can talk about is how do these institutions how these organizations operate what is the logical outcome of the way they're set up we need to change those things you know and so that's why i can i have a lot of respect for many conservatives if they're principled and they're thoughtful they bring insights that people on the left don't have about the human condition right but it's important to depersonalize it in that way at the other side the really personal part i think we have to do is try to connect with people at the value level and find our common humanity at the end of the day if we can't find our common humanity we're going to be these little atomistic individual entities and that's only going to lead to destruction so thank you very much it's been a privilege to be with you tonight i appreciate being here that room or the tank well no they wouldn't be here today it was only by the grace of god that no one got killed my son is a power upgrade there and i thank god that he didn't go to work that night because i know he would have been right in this middle however his his friend coworker was there the surveillance operator had just made with jewelry and gotten out of there the power operator i talked to him and he told me he says you know says i don't know why but for some reason that night i changed my route of how i do my surveillance and he says then you know if i would have done it like i normally do it he says i would have been right there when it happened as it was he was right down at the bottom of the steps when it blew the repercussion sent him back that eight to ten feet just pulled him back he still has not regained hearing in one ear that if people don't even know about that deal we didn't even know about it he talked to his manager about it and his manager was the one who's in charge of that night and that kid still ha problems getting time off to go down through h g h for his hearing to be checked i mean it's been a nightmare for him they sent him down well he had his physical and he had a whole body count and chest count which showed him totally off the scales with emory c and ok so they wanted to do a recount on him so of course whenever they do the recount an american thing is perfect the thing is funny but he he is the only individual that i know of physically through his hearing loss that's really you know been the one that was really injured through you know he lost his he corridor or there's a door and from that door you've got force flights the steps to go up to the top floor or the first floor you can enter into the first floor and then go up t and that's where his tank was yeah exploded so would he have been the only one in the building he was the only one that was in the building yes and like i say he went to enter p r f and he didn't he was in the or door that leads to p r f so behind the door and the door was even open no it blew open it blew open and he's walking down this corridor or and the blast knocked him eight did you hear anything about the the the hole that was blown to the roof from heard of the tank i thought could you tell us about that and what actually happens in terms of what was released in the building what types of well gosh stainless steel in about oh it's probably ten feet long bottom of it is to propeller  force of this explosion blew that right through the roof and it was actually piercing through the rough and then it seems like there was a couple of other little