Economic Update
Economic Update- Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC)
On this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor Richard Wolff discusses the modern political history in the United Kingdom as Conservatives protect UK corporations and the rich by employing 'distractions': first Brexit, and now Ukraine. We then turn to the latest worker uprising this time in Washington state, as workers at Boeing strike and demand better wages and benefits, and state government employees who are legally prohibited from striking are demanding better conditions as well by demanding better pay and conditions. We turn to the United Healthcare Corporation's latest profit-driven "pre-payment information" scheme, which disenfranchises people in need. Finally, in an interview with Eric Blanc, a founder of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) we discuss its phenomenal success in helping workers across the economy learn about organizing, and access to labor unions for help with forming unions.
Support from the production of Economic Update comes in part from Democracy at Work. A non-profit 501(c)(3) organization and publisher of books by Richard Wolff, who is a professor of economics emeritus at UMass Amherst and a visiting professor at the New School University, has authored numerous books on the subject of social economics, including Greek thinking Marxism, Understanding Capitalism, and Democracy at Work, a cure for capitalism. Further information is available at democracy@work.info and rdwolf.com. Welcome friends to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Today's program will be going over a number of items. We'll start with a story about the United Kingdom, Britain, things going on there that are really amazing, but are also a foretaste of what's coming here. We'll talk about the state of Washington, where Boeing workers are on strike, but where the state employees and even larger number of workers are heading into tortoise strike. We'll talk about maneuvers by health insurance companies trying to squeeze profits at the expense of people's mental health therapies, an amazing story. And in the second half, we'll be interviewing Eric Blank, one of the founders of the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee, which is doing an extraordinarily important job bringing in the American labor movement back into the kind of social movement it once was and that we badly needed to become again. So let's jump right in. Britain has been reeling in the aftermath of the so-called Great Recession of 2008 and '09. That was the collapse of capitalism globally and in Britain especially. And the conservatives were in charge, so you know for sure, number one, they won't admit it's a problem of capitalism, not a word. Number two, they will make sure to take care of corporations in the rich first and foremost, because that's whose party they are. And number three, they'll find a scapegoat where to direct the anger of the mass of people at the failure of capitalism and at their failure to do anything about it. And they did. They found something called Europe. What they thought they were a part of, they turned against Europe. Britain was to leave Europe. It came to be called Brexit. Back in 2015 and 16, they focused everybody's rage against Europe, as if the problems of the British capitalist system were all somebody else's fault, the Europeans. Well, they broke away. Did that solve their problem? Not a bit. Did it improve their situation? On the contrary, it worsened it. And no one cheerleader on the attack on Brexit, then the conservatives, Boris Johnson, a sad excuse of a politician, if ever there was one. Now he's roaring about helping Ukraine. He wants to spend 500 notice again. He has a foreign issue. This time is not leaving Europe. This time it's the opposite, rushing into a war in Eastern Europe that he wants to spend the money on that he never wants to tax the rich to get. That's the horror of it all. Don't be fooled is my advice to our British brothers and sisters and to Americans, watch out. So angry did the British people become that they voted out the conservatives. But who did they vote in? The liberals, the labor party, trying to clean up the mess that the conservatives left, but they're not really willing to tax corporations or the rich either. So one of the first things they propose is to reduce the subsidy to help people pay for the high cost of energy. And you know why that is the high cost of energy? Because the war in Ukraine shut off cheap energy from Russia. The ironies here are amazing and somewhat pathetic. Washington State has a strike, 33,000 Boeing workers demanding of this rich company that they share some of their wealth with the workers who make it all possible. On September 10, 50,000 state employees took an hour off from lunch to make the point that even though the law says you can't strike, if you're a public employee, and I'm going to say a word about that in a minute, they're letting everybody know they're not happy with what's going on. Because you know why what's happening in this country is like what's happening in England. In England, their empire is gone and the rich and the powerful want to hold on to the wealthy accumulated, even though the empire isn't there to support it. So they're taking it out of their own people, what they used to take out of the Asians, the Africans, the Indians, and all the others that suffered under the British Empire. And here in the United States, as we lose our empire, we're doing the same thing. We're squeezing the middle and the bottom so that the top can hold on, no taxes on the corporations and the rich, to deal with problems their capitalism has brought on us. That's the reality behind why Boeing won't pay its workers, why the state of Washington won't take care of the needs of its public employees. The state of Washington isn't that big. 33,000 Boeing workers, 50,000 state employees. If those all go on strike at the same time, the whole state of Washington shakes. And there's a lesson in that. In the end, this country depends on the workers more than anything else. Think about it. Health insurance companies in America have a new gambit. It's called prepayment information, watch out. When you hear phrases like that, think again, reach for your wallet, someone else is reaching in there. This time, the leadership is taken by the United Healthcare Corporation and it's Optum subsidiary. Here's how it works. You go to a therapist to get mental health counseling for whatever the needs are that bring you to that. But then after you visited before the insurance company pays your therapist, the way it should work, the company demands two things. The therapist has to answer a whole lot of prepayment questions. And so do you. And you're asked difficult questions, personal questions. And if you don't give the answer that the insurance company wants, you might not see the payment made. Your therapist might not get paid and you're going to hear about it. Or you won't get reimbursed and you're going to feel that right away. And you know what's going to happen? A good number of you are not going to be so quick to make your next appointment with the therapist because you're not sure it's going to get paid. It can take time for the questionnaire to get to you and time for you to answer the questionnaire and time for the insurance company to process it all. And that's all time there. Happy to see past because they don't have to pay the money. And that's all it's about. They are trying to make more money by finding people with for whom they can withhold the payment. But at least as important are all of you who will delay, reduce payment. Or think about the therapist who's not getting a nickel extra in payment but for time and energy and effort to fill out all these extra make work, paperwork forms. It's all a gambit, isn't it? Which has one remarkable outcome. Is it information they want? Maybe. Is it information they're going for? Maybe. Is it a fall off in the demand for the services they have to pay for? Wouldn't that be a delicious byproduct? And if you think it's only a byproduct, well then I have that famous bridge to sell you for $1.84 plus tax. What a remarkable story. When we make healthcare a private business and we make giving you the insurance that if something comes up in your life, an illness, an injury, a trauma of one kind or another, we're going to make it difficult for you to access, care, help. We're not going to be a community that helps each other. No, no, no, we're going to be a financial game. I pay you an insurance policy or I allow my employer to give me a little less wages because it gives me an insurance policy that then nickels and dimes me. Come on, we're all the victims of this system. That's why most other industrial countries don't do what we do. They have health insurance provided as a right by every for everyone by the government we share. In France, you go into a public park, it's maintained by the community. And if you have an illness or an injury or you need to see a therapist, that's provided by the government as a matter of your citizenship. Doing good by the whole community. It's a much better way of going. It's a better way of organizing society. We've reached the end of the first half of today's show. Stay with us. I think you'll find the interview with Eric Blank of the Emergency Worker Organizing Committee, well worth watching in the second half. Thank you. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. I am very happy to bring to our microphones and our cameras, Eric Blank. He's a professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey. He writes to sub-stack labor politics. And he has a new book, We Are the Union. How Worker to Worker Organizing is revitalizing labor and winning big. It is scheduled to be published by the University of California Press in February of 2025. Blank helped star and start, sorry, the emergency workplace organizing committee. And that's really why I've brought him to us today because I want him to share with you and me why he did that, what that committee is about, what its objectives are, and what you might do in relationship to it, if you were moved to do so. So let me begin, Eric, by thanking you for joining me today. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Okay, so please, in your own words, as someone who helped start it all, what is the emergency workplace organizing committee and why is it doing what it's doing in the United States right now? Sure, so Ewok, as we like to call it, like this, Star Wars animal, but acronym for short, Ewok was founded at the beginning of the pandemic to do something really simple, which is provide any worker in any industry in the United States support organizing their workplace. And that's something that doesn't currently exist. There was no organization already filling this gap. What you do, if you want support from Ewok is very simple. You go to the website, organizeworkers.org, you fill out a quick form, and we will connect you within 72 hours to a volunteer experienced organizer who's going to help you organize your workplace, right? Because we know that there's millions of people, literally millions of people across the United States who lack power at work, who know things are not as they should be at work, but don't know how to get started changing that, right? And people understand there are these problems, but they don't know how to get started. So what we like to talk about Ewok is that to unionize, it takes 100 steps and will help you through steps one through 50, right? So it's an organization based off of experienced volunteers to help any worker in any industry fight back. And it started, as I mentioned during the pandemic, I was an organizer, a labor organizer for the Bernie campaign, and as the pandemic was beginning, we started getting inundated with requests from workers, you may think about this March 2020, remember that moment, right? People were terrified, like, my boss is making me come in, we have no masks. To give an example, the first workers I ever supported for Ewok were workers that made right a food processing plant in Pennsylvania, right, who are mostly undocumented workers who are getting forced to go into work, even though their co-workers had COVID, right? And they were terrified about bringing back to their families, and we needed to find some sort of ad hoc way to give them support, lawyers, organizing steps, all of that. Okay, out of that project, then grew Ewok. It got support from the United Electrical Workers Union, which is sort of a long-standing left militant union in the country with a very rich history. The Democratic Socialist of America was the biggest socialist organization in the U.S. supported Ewok, helped to get off the ground, and it's blossomed. It started as a very ad hoc thing to provide workers some support in the pandemic, but now it's really become something more ambitious, particularly after 2022, which listeners might remember. That's when Starbucks Workers Union really pops off the Amazon labor union. There's this newfound interest across the United States in unionization. So what began is mostly providing workers support for winning better wage demands, things like protective gear, and transforming under pressure from below into a support network for workers to start unionizing. And so now Ewok, most of what we do is helping workers take the first 50 steps toward unionization. And I'm excited to say that it's been a real success. We've had over 5,000 workers reach out just last year. We had over 600 campaigns. We passed off drives representing over 7,000 workers to unions. And we've done that all with a very, very limited resource base. We've done it because we've depended on volunteers. I'm going to ask you a question I know is in the mind of my audience. And the question could be put either why haven't the unions already been doing this all along, or alternatively, people think aren't the unions doing this all along too in the sense that they are there for workers who want to go in that direction? Could you help us understand why you had to use that word in your beginning of your answer to fill a gap? Why was the gap there? Right. It's a really good question. Unfortunately, a lot of unions in the US today regularly say no to workers who reach out to them. Actually, anecdotally, one of the things we have to do as Ewok is help workers find unions who are willing to take them on. So part of the reason there's a gap is that a lot of unions are reluctant to take on new drives or to provide support for workers because they say they don't have the resources for doing this. So what Ewok does that's different is we will provide organizing support to any worker in any industry. So that's different A because a lot of workers don't know who to reach out to for a union. So we'll help them connect to union, right? So this is not counter post unions, but it's providing a mechanism for workers to first get involved. And unfortunately, a lot of workers don't even know who their union could be, things like this. So there's no sort of entry point for workers to start organizing. And then secondly, as I mentioned, a lot of unions aren't providing these tools openly to workers so they can start self organizing, right? They'll only take on a drive if it meets certain parameters. If they think it's extremely likely to win, if it's in a locale, they're already based out of all of these criteria for which why unions might regularly say no to workers, we don't accept those. We said we're going to give support to any worker in the industry in any part of the country. So that's new. And I think it's part of a more general gap, which is that unfortunately, most labor unions right now are very unambitious about new organizing. Union density, the number of workers, the percentage of workers in the workforce that are part of unions has been declining for decades. Unfortunately, most unions aren't investing in growth, right? Even though, and there's a lot of good resources, even though the actual amount of money unions have in their coffers is at all time high. So 13.4 billion dollars in liquid assets that unions are sitting on, but they're not using that for new organizing. So I think that one of the things that you walk is showing is like, look, since 2020 in particular, there's a new moment. Workers want to unionize. Workers are reaching out to us and we're saying we need to go and find them. We need to give them the tools, right? So, like workers after the pandemic with a tight labor market under good national labor relations board, radicalized oftentimes young workers after Bernie, Black Lives Matter, there's a huge opening for organizing. And we're showing that that can be tapped. And we're hoping that we can provide kind of proof of concept and inspiration for other unions to do the same. Tell me you mentioned to me that you find your work has a unique property of being scalable. Tell us what you mean by that. Sure. So this is a concept that might sound a little technocratic or abstract. All it means scalability is that there's no inherent limit to the scope of a project, right? Whether it's a company or an organization. And what it means in practice is building a mass movement. So I think the world, you know, internally, we'll talk about scalability, but maybe for listeners who are trying to think what this means, this means how do you build, rebuild a mass movement? What does a movement actually entail? And the reason scalability is so crucial. And the reason we talk about it is that the current organizing model of unions is not scalable. It's too expensive to organize the tens of millions of workers that want to join unions. And just as a parentheses, even as early as 2017, there was polls finding that over 60 million workers would vote tomorrow to join a union if they were given the opportunity. That's in 2017 before all of this, you know, labor officers. And yet we aren't finding get ways to meet these workers and oftentimes say no as a labor movement to them reaching out. And so the reason, as I mentioned before, that that's the case is that the current organizing model of most unions is extremely staff intensive. The norm is you need one work, you need one staffer for every hundred workers that you're targeting to unionize. So one staffer for every hundred workers. It normally costs about $3,000 per worker you're trying to bring into the union. And so this model can bring about real benefits to workers. You know, unions are doing a lot of good organizing. I don't want to exaggerate the point. And they oftentimes they're making real change for the workers they involve. But the problem is you just can't organize enough workers with this model because there's literally just not enough money. There's just not enough money and not enough staffers around to organize tens of millions of workers this way. And so what you walk is showing, and I would argue not just Ewok, but also recent unionization efforts like Starbucks Workers United, some of the graduate student worker organizing things we've seen in different industries including auto with the United Auto Workers. What we're seeing is a new model in which unions rely less on staff and more on volunteers. So at Ewok, that means that the person who's going to give you organizing advice when you're reaching out is not going to be a full-time staffer for Ewok. It's going to be oftentimes another worker who we helped lead through a unionization drive, who we helped train, and then based on that experience and based off the extensive training we've given them, then they in turn are going to help you learn how to organize your workplace. And so it's sort of a snowball effect, right, where you're training up workers to be able to do things like providing organizing support, doing social media, researching companies, things that normally in the average union are done by staff, we believe and we think we've shown in practice that workers are capable of doing all of that, right. We need to have confidence in workers and we've seen in practice that when you rely on workers and when you turn to them, they're able to do all sorts of things that we didn't think they were able to do. So I think that's what we mean when we talk about scalability and it's only that type of model of building volunteers that's also going to be able to really turn around to decline the labor movement and in so doing not just combat economic equality but give workers the power to address climate change to stop genocide and Gaza, whatever the issue is, we need a labor movement of millions and millions and millions of workers involved and we don't currently have a path forward with that with the current approaches that are dominant. Well, it's certainly one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on this program because we would like to see such a movement develop, obviously, and it has to rely on masses of people with all of the little moments of initiative that human beings can muster when they need to and you're providing a way for them to actualize all of that, the instinct in it. So what I want to do before we end the interview, I want to ask you a simple question that I mentioned to you and that you mentioned to us before. Let's suppose John or Mary or anybody out there listening or watching this program has thought about having a union at the place where they work, feeling the need for one, feeling the opportunities that might be there, the possibilities of what the workplace could become both for them as individual workers but for the largest society also. What would you advise them? What is it that Ewok makes available to the individual who wants to take some initial steps in this direction? Sure, that's a great question. The first thing I would say is to reiterate just a point I made earlier which is it's signed up online. We just go to OrganizeWorkers.org, fill out the quick form and we will follow up with you within 72 hours. I would say that like do it now before you forget and then what I will say in addition is I'm going to give you some of the sneak peek of some of the tactics we'll walk you through, right? What are some of the basics of organizing a union? Oftentimes it can sound maybe more intimidating than it is. In many ways it's simple. What building a union looks like is really building relationships of trust with your co-workers. How do you do that? Well, one important thing we'd talk about is socializing before you organize. You need to find ways to build the relationships with your co-workers through things like having an afternoon party, having a potluck, building the relationships of trust so you're not just talking at work and then you can have a space where you can vent and you can hear where people actually are feeling. Next, you're going to have to find the issues that are deeply and widely felt. So you personally might be really angry at your work for this or that reason but you need to find the issue that's going to resonate widely that a lot of your co-workers are also up in arms again but also they feel deeply about it's something that they would be willing to unionize, that they would be willing to organize around and take the risk so you need to identify that issue. And crucially, you need to build a team. You can't unionize just on your own. My definition, but this is a mistake sometimes people make. They think they're going to have to do it all on their own. One of the things that will help you do through Ewok is learn how to build a team so you find workers from different parts of the shifts, different parts of wherever you work. So you have a representative organizing committee of workers from all across the workplace who are able because they have the relationships with their co-workers to bring them into the process because oftentimes it's scary. Unionization can be scary. It's true the bosses will throw all sorts of scare tactics at you and so what you need to do is bring into the organizing committee a team of people who have the relationships with co-workers so that through this process of ongoing one-on-one organizing conversations there's a lot of meeting with people one-on-one to talking through all of this you're going to be able to co-hear a super majority of your co-workers to withstand that pressure and build your union. There's a lot more to it but really in some ways it's that simple it's about building relationships it's about having one-on-one conversations and in Ewok we'll provide you the support kind of step-by-step to make sure you get that. Eric you're a very good spokesman listen I talk to many many people in a very short time you have given us a wonderful overview. Let me urge everyone to follow the advice if you're interested in doing this and becoming part of this emerging movement here's a way to do it and to all of you in addition to thanking Eric I want to thank you for joining me and as always I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Support from the production of Economic Update comes in part from Democracy at Work a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization and publisher of books by Richard Wolff who is a professor of economics emeritus at UMass Amherst and a visiting professor at the new school university has authored numerous books on the subject of social economics including Greek thinking Marxism understanding capitalism and democracy at work. A cure for capitalism further information is available at democracy@work.info and rdwoof.com [Music] [Music] [Music] (bell chimes)