From the attempt to broadly freeze federal grants and loans to high-profile firings at the National Labor Relations Board, TRNN Reporter Mel Buer and Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez break down this week’s chaotic directives from the Trump administration and what they will mean for working people and the labor movement. Mel and Max also lay out what we know about the tragic collision of a US Army Black Hawk helicopter and American Airlines regional passenger jet, Trump’s broad attacks on federal workers, including air traffic controllers and members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and how those attacks have been going on long before Trump. Then, from the historic union victory by Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia to Kaiser Healthcare workers on strike in California, we will highlight key labor stories taking place beyond the chaos in Washington, DC. 

Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley

---

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  Welcome to The Real News Network, and welcome back to our weekly livestream.

All right. Week two of the new Trump administration has been a characteristically chaotic one. But make no mistake — While this all feels kind of familiar because we have the last Trump administration to compare it to, from the avalanche of executive orders and the baffling press conferences to the spectacle-filled Senate confirmation hearings, the past two weeks have brought us, undoubtedly, into historically unique and unfamiliar territory.

We can see that just by looking at this graph from Axios comparing the current administration’s pace and number of executive orders to those of past administrations — Including, I might add, the first Trump administration.

As Erin Davis notes, “In his first nine days in office, President Trump unleashed a flurry of executive orders unlike anything in modern presidential history. […] Trump’s reshaping the federal government with a shock-and-awe campaign of unilateral actions that push the limits of presidential power. Only President Biden and President Truman have issued more than 40 executive orders in their first 100 days in office. So far, Trump has signed 38 after less than two weeks.”

And the shock and awe effect is very real, and it’s very intentional. Faced with a barrage of executive orders and administrative shakeups, some that are purely theatrical BS, others that are deadly serious and could trigger full-on constitutional crises, from pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement yet again, to declaring a national emergency at the Southern border, to pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. There’s just too much here to process at once. Our brains and our hearts get overwhelmed and we end up immobilized.

But our goal with these livestreams, and with all of our Real News productions, is to do the exact opposite. That’s why today my Real News teammate Mel Buer and I are going to focus in on a few key stories from this week that have direct implications for workers, our lives and safety, our rights in the workplace, and for the labor movement writ large. Mel and I are going to try to use our skills as reporters with long histories of covering labor, including on our weekly podcast, Working People, to answer your questions and give you the information, perspectives, and analysis that you need so that you can process this, you can get mobilized, and you can be empowered to act.

All right. So Mel, what are we digging into?

Mel Buer:  OK, so we’re starting with three pretty major headlines from this week. The first is going to be last night’s horrific plane crash in DC. It’s the deadliest on US soil in over 20 years, where 64 civilians and three military service members are dead. There’s a lot we don’t know, and new information is coming through at a pretty fast clip. So we’ll lay out what we do know and why that matters.

Then we’re going to get into the most pressing headlines coming out of the White House as it relates to Trump’s executive orders, namely the funding freeze fiasco and what that means for workers here in the US.

And then we’re going to talk about the recent shakeups at the NLRB: General Counsel Abruzzo’s firing and the abrupt termination of the NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, and what that means for the future of labor organizing in this uncertain moment.

When you look at these stories together, they reveal a lot about how this administration sees government workers, contractors, and the working people around the country who depend on their services, how it’s approaching governance, using union busting and antiworker tactics from the private sector, and how explicitly targeting the agencies and precedents that exist to enforce labor law and protect workers’ rights has become a key issue for this administration.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, so let’s dig into the most pressing story that we’re all thinking about right now. Let’s talk about what we know and what we don’t know about this horrific plane crash. We are going live right now at 4:00 PM on Thursday. As I speak, President Donald Trump is holding another press conference, his second today. It’s a live briefing on an FAA debrief. So there’s going to be things said at that briefing that we can’t comment on now, but we will, of course, follow up on this story, and we’re going to try to give you as much of what we know now.

Let’s start with the basics. What do we know, what’s happening? The AP reports the basics here. A midair collision between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines flight that was coming from Kansas killed all 67 people on board the two aircraft. The reasons for this crash, the causes of it, are still under investigation. That is the official word. So we want to temper all of our collective expectations here and allow for the investigatory process to proceed so that we can get more information. Now, of course — We’ll comment on this in a minute — That hasn’t stopped many people in the government from opining and blaming and directing blame at what they perceive to be the causes of this horrific crash. We’re going to talk about those in a second.

So AP continues in their report, which was updated this morning, at least 28 bodies have been pulled from the Potomac River already. Others are still being searched for. The plane that carried 60 passengers and four crew members included a number of children who were training to be in the Olympics in skating one day.

This is a truly, truly tragic and horrific loss, and those families will never be whole again. We send our thoughts and prayers to them and our love and our solidarity, because let’s not forget what really happened here. People lost their lives.

So John Donnelly, the fire chief of the nation’s capital, announced that they are at the point where they’re switching from a rescue operation to a recovery operation. This is very similar to what we experienced here in Baltimore in March of last year, when the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed — And Trump and Republicans tried to blame that on DEI too. We’ll get to that later — But there was a harrowing number of hours where loved ones and community members were hoping against hope that their loved ones who were working on that bridge — These were immigrant construction workers working in the middle of the night who, as we reported here at The Real News Network, received no warning that they were about to meet their deaths [to] a ship that was about to crash into the bridge they were working on. So we were in that same wait-and-see mode too, where hoping to retrieve living people turned into trying to recover deceased people. And as per the official notice, there are no expected survivors. This is a recovery mission, not a search and rescue mission.

As Mel mentioned, this is the deadliest air crash over US airspace since the 9/11 attacks that happened in 2001. Collectively, those attacks killed 2,996 people on the day of the attack. There’s no immediate word, as I said, on the cause of the collision, but officials have said that flight conditions were clear as the jet arrived from Wichita, Kansas, with US and Russian figure skaters and others on board. A quote from American Airlines CEO, Robert Isom, he said, “On final approach into Reagan National, the plane collided with a military aircraft on an otherwise normal approach.”

Now, a top Army aviation official did say that the Black Hawk crew was “very experienced and familiar with the congested flying conditions of Reagan National Airport.” For those who don’t live in and around DC, this is an extremely busy airport in a densely populated part of the city that has been increasing air traffic for years. Mel and I will talk about that more in a minute.

But point being is that, from the American Airlines side, from the military side, there appeared to be no interceding conditions like extreme weather that may have caused this crash that we know of so far. Investigators are going to be analyzing the flight data that they can retrieve from these two flights before making their final assessment.

The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, who was sworn in this week, said that there were “early indicators of what happened”, but he declined to elaborate on those, pending a further investigation.

Now, I’m going to wrap up here in a sec. As I mentioned, President Trump is giving a second press briefing as we speak. He gave another one this morning. I’m sure many of us saw it, or at least saw the headlines [on] it, because in this press conference, where the leader of the country is expected to lead, Trump did what Trump does best and blamed everybody else. Without evidence, Trump blamed the air traffic controllers, he blamed the helicopter pilots, and he explicitly called out Democratic policies at federal agencies. Trump claimed that the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, was “actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under diversity and inclusion hiring initiatives.”

So as usual, the typical boogeyman of DEI being the thing at the root of all of our problems was the thing at the root of Trump’s press conference this morning. And MAGA Republicans have wasted no time reaffirming this line. And we’re going to talk a little more about that as the stream continues.

But those are essentially the basics of what we know and what we don’t right now. This is an unfolding story, but we think it does have a lot to tell us.

So Mel, I want to toss it to you to give us some of the broader context here that maybe people aren’t seeing, and they’re sure as hell not hearing from the White House press briefings right now.

Mel Buer:  Well, I think it’s important to note here that, just like with our railroad reporting that we did in 2022, that oftentimes what we’re looking at is a breakdown of policy among decision makers. We know that the AFA-CWA, and other unions that are involved in the aviation industry have been sounding the alarm about needing to have better staffing conditions at airports across the country. Those conditions have been worsening at least since 2013, so through successive administrations — Including the Trump administration where you had the chance to solve that problem and chose not to.

And especially in this DC airport, Freddie Brewster, Lois Parshley, and David Sirota wrote for Jacobin that “[…] lawmakers brushed off safety warnings amid midflight near-misses and passed an industry-backed measure designed to add additional flight traffic at the same DC airport where [the January 29] disaster unfolded.”

So really, I think the point that I’m trying to make here is that, while the aviation industry is trying to bring more flights into these airports — Which are welcome. We want to be able to reduce the congestion in terms of wait times for flights, having more options as consumers for traveling across this country — That also needs to come with heightened safety measures in terms of better staffing in the air traffic control towers.

Unions in the aviation industry have been really fighting for this for the last number of years. Just like with our railroad reporting, what we learned with the railroads was that lack of staffing and disregard for tried and trusted safety measures leads to accidents. And tragically, this is what happened here. That isn’t to say that folks aren’t fighting for this. That’s the big point that I want to make. And I think that, unfortunately, Trump’s blaming of these various groups really is not, to put it as lightly as possible, not helpful.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And it’s also not helpful, let’s also be clear, falling into the partisan trap of trying to blame Trump for all of this too. Because, as we are trying to show here, and as we show in our work at The Real News, these are longstanding problems that have had bipartisan support for many years. Trump is definitely making these problems worse, but he is not the originator of the problem. You can see that in the question of understaffing.

Now, of course, a number of pundits and politicians have pointed to the fact that, just last week, Donald Trump put a hiring freeze for federal employees, which would include hiring new air traffic controllers at a moment when we’ve been experiencing an extended air traffic controller shortage. We’ll talk a bit more about that in a second. But also, of course, Trump’s firing of high-level officials, even the heads of the TSA, the FAA, and members of the very commissions that are there to ensure air flight safety.

So, of course, the impulse is to look at that and see, well, see, Trump did this last week, and now this week we have a plane crash. It’s a little more complex than that.

As I speak to you now, there is a live update from The New York Times that came out just 10 minutes ago. Sparse on information, but the information reads: “Live update: Control tower staffing was ‘not normal’ during deadly crash, FAA report says. An internal report suggested that the controller on duty the night of the accident was doing a job usually handled by two people.”

And so what we are trying to show y’all is that that situation did not come from nowhere, and it is not a situation that is, sadly, particular to air traffic controllers. This is something that Mel and I hear in the worker interviews that we do in industries around the country, the crisis of deliberate understaffing in critical industries, including those that have a direct bearing on our own public safety.

And like with the railroads Mel mentioned, to refresh your memories, a couple years ago, if we all recall, the US was approaching its first potential railroad strike in 30 years. We had been interviewing railroad workers across the industry: engineers, conductors, signalmen, carmen, dispatchers, all of whom were telling us different versions of the same story, which is that the corporate consolidation, the government deregulation, and the Wall Street takeover of the rail industry had created this process that has built into a crisis over decades, where the railroads have become more profitable than ever by cutting their costs year after year after year.

So what does that mean? It means cutting labor costs, cutting safety costs, making those trains longer, heavier, piled with more dangerous cargo, while having fewer and fewer workers on the trains, and also fewer and fewer workers in the machine shops, checking the track, in the dispatch offices.

The point is that when these layoffs happen, when these corporate restructurings happen, when these policies are implemented in key industries like logistics industries, like aviation, you are not just firing people, you are removing layers of security that are there for a reason. And you’re doing so for the benefit, the short-term benefit of higher profits, while the long-term costs are borne by the workers in those industries, the public that is being hurt by them, and even by the customers who use those industries. Rail shippers are as pissed off as rail workers are right now.

So the point being that Mel and I hear this in education: teacher shortages, more students piled onto fewer teachers leading to worse education outcomes; healthcare: hospital workers who have been burnt out before COVID, even more so since COVID, more patients piled onto fewer nurses leading to declining quality of care, treating patients more like grist for the mill: Get ’em in, get ’em out. This is a system-wide problem. We are seeing the effects across the economy, and we can see it here in this tragic plane crash that has claimed the lives of nearly 70 people.

In fact, this is much like the horrific train accident that occurred in East Palestinian, Ohio, on Feb. 3. The anniversary’s coming up, the two year anniversary of that. And the workers on the railroads warned us that something like that would happen, and then it did — Just like workers in the aviation industry, as Mel mentioned, have been warning us that something like this would happen, and now it has.

But we have been dancing on the lip of this volcano for a long time. We’re just waking up to the reality now. I want to underline this point by quoting from a really great Jacobin article that was published in 2023 by Joseph A. McCartin titled “The US is Facing a Growing Air Safety Crisis. We have Ronald Reagan to Thank for It”. Again, this was not published this week, this was published during the Biden administration. McCartin makes the very clear point that “On March 15, 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) held a ‘safety summit’ in McLean, Virginia, gathering more than 200 ‘safety leaders’ from across American aviation to discuss ‘ways to enhance flight safety.’ What prompted the unusual summit was, by the FAA’s own admission, a ‘string of recent safety incidents, several of which involved airplanes coming too close together during takeoff or landing.’” And McCartin also notes in that same article that “A recent internal study by the inspector general of the US Department of Transportation found that 20 of 26 critical facilities (77% of them) are staffed below the FAA’s 85% threshold.”

So again, don’t get it twisted. What Trump is doing is making the problem worse. It’s pouring gasoline on the fire, but this fire was burning before Trump came into office.

And Mel, as you said, this is something that we’ve had workers in these industries decrying for many, many years. And this is also something that we need to have a long, historical view on. Because as McCartin mentioned in that article, we do have Ronald Reagan to thank for a lot of this.

And I wanted to hover on that point for a second because, as we know, one of President Ronald Reagan’s most infamous acts in his first presidential term was to fire striking air traffic controllers, over [11,000] of them. It was a significant, massive percentage of the existing air traffic controller workforce in 1981. Not only did this unleash a new age of union busting across the private sector and elsewhere, but it also is directly relevant to what we’re talking about here. Because when you fire that many air traffic controllers, as Reagan did, this was 11,000, approximately 70% of the controller workforce at the time, that Reagan fired in 1981 and then tried to replace.

So a point that maybe we don’t think about but that actually connects to the air traffic controller shortage now is that when you, in one year, eliminate 70% of that workforce and then you replace it with new hires in the next two to three, four years, you are creating, essentially, a generational problem where those new hires in the 1980s are retiring in 30 years, and then the process starts again, where suddenly you have a massive aging out of the existing workforce and a dire need to replace those understaffed agencies.

So we are still feeling the staffing ripple effects and the safety impacts that has from Ronald Reagan’s original firing of the air traffic controllers. We have not fixed that problem. And as we’ve said a number of times, air traffic controllers continue to be chronically understaffed, which means all of us who fly are flying at their mercy, and our safety hangs on the overworked shoulders of understaffed air traffic controllers across the country right now. And I don’t know, does that make you feel safe, Mel? It doesn’t make me feel safe.

Mel Buer:  No. I take the train. I already have enough air anxiety.

The reality is, I think, as well when you’re talking about, particularly with the PATCO strike, but in any industry where there is high turnover, there is not really a space for the concentration of expertise. PATCO is a huge example of this where you have career air traffic controllers who have amassed, collectively, hundreds of years of collective experience and how to work this industry and do it safely. And you’re training new hires who may or may not have the same experience, or you’re shuffling folks into these departments. You’re not going to get the same level standard of expertise. We see it in healthcare, we see it in really any industry that has high turnover, from the people who make your coffee drinks all the way up to the engineers who make your planes that you ride on. So this is a huge problem, and we will discuss this a little bit later when we’re talking about what’s going on in the federal government as well.

But that is an important point to make, that what we’re seeing with this lack of staffing is really a lack of expertise. The ability to have internally these checks and balances that create the safety conditions that we rely on in order for us to live our lives without fear of falling out of the sky, literally. So that’s a really important point here.

And again, unions like the AFA-CWA and the machinists who work with Boeing are acutely aware of that and are willing and able to bolster this workforce. But you cannot attract a new generation of smart, capable, hardworking, willing people to buy into this industry and provide their expertise to this industry if you don’t have a competitive job to offer them. And that happens a lot in healthcare as well.

So it’s a top-down problem. It’s not that folks don’t want to do these jobs, it’s really, is this job going to be doable? Am I going to be able to pay my bills? Is my family going to be OK? Am I going to be able to get a pension? Am I going to be able to do this job, to the best of my ability, without working 120 hours a week and get paid nothing, functionally, for it?

And again, these unions are really acutely aware of this issue and are bargaining hard to solve these problems. Unfortunately, in many cases, they’re coming up against an intractable management who cares more about increasing profits for shareholders than actually creating a workplace that is competitive and that is also operating at a higher standard.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s talk a little bit while we’re closing out this section. It does hook into another key subject that we wanted to talk about today, which is Trump and the Trump administration’s all-out attack on federal workers, and the vilification of federal workers as nameless, faceless, useless, even evil bureaucrats of the deep state who need to be chucked out, fired, eliminated, disciplined.

And if we’re not understanding who those people are and what they do, that may sound good, and people are going to cheer on Trump’s policies. But what we’re trying to say here is that we need to have a clear-eyed vision of actually who these people are, what they do, and how it directly impacts our lives. And the point being is that you cannot solve these potentially society-destroying, society-imperiling problems if you are not correctly diagnosing the problem itself.

That is why the attacks on DEI and the harnessing of DEI to create an explanation for all of this is really, really sinister. Because, like I said, they tried to do this when the Baltimore bridge collapsed. They blamed it on DEI here too. When the LA fires, where Mel and I are from, our homes are burning and have been burning for the past two weeks. And while we’re trying to talk to our loved ones and find out if they’re OK, this whole media cycle is blaming the fires and the destruction on DEI and woke Democratic policies. Now this plane crash happens, these people die, and immediately, before their bodies are retrieved from the Potomac River, Donald Trump is out there from the White House press office saying that it was DEI that caused the problem.

I don’t know how it can get any more obvious that this is political snake oil. It is a built-in perennial excuse crafted by the very same corrupt business lobbies and politicians who are endangering our lives for profit so that they can quite literally get away with killing us and then blame it on a fictional boogeyman. We can talk about the issues with DEI — We’ve got plenty of them — But trying to explain tragedies like this through a DEI-only lens is nuts. It’s stupid. It is ignoring the realities that are screaming in our faces and in the workers who are living those realities and who are telling us what the problem is.

There’s something really telling about that because this attack on DEI and this attempt to turn DEI into the catchall explanation is, in fact, capitalists, their own fake solution to the problem that capitalists themselves have created, capitalizing on the pain that they have caused through decades of rampant union busting, layoffs, disciplining of labor, focusing on only maximizing short-term profits for executives and Wall Street shareholders while putting us all at long-term risk by removing necessary safety measures and checks and balances and accountability, the onslaught of deregulation over the course of decades.

The point being is that I want to be very clear and apparent here. I grew up conservative. I’ve said this many times. I’ve been open about it on our show, on this network. And so, I have a living memory of being a Republican and championing other Republicans throughout the ’90s and early aughts who kept saying we need to break the backs of unions. We need to privatize government. We need to unleash the genius of the free market and deregulate as many industries as possible so that the genius of the market can lead us to a better society. I believed in all that stuff. I cheered it on.

And it’s like no one remembers that the same Republicans, Trump himself included, who cheered this on 20 years ago, the same corporations that didn’t want to take ownership over it are now trying to turn around and blame DEI for the things that they got what they wanted. It screwed up society the way that people were saying it was going to. And now the same people who profited from that, the same people who pushed that policy are turning around and trying to create a boogeyman in DEI and wokeism to get off scot-free.

And we are letting them, the corporate criminals, the Wall Street vampires, the corrupt politicians who have put us in this dangerous position, get off scot-free and convince us to blame our neighbors and coworkers and policies like DEI for the problems that they’ve created. That’s absurd.

I want to bring us to the way to fight this is not in a conceptual, policy-only way, but to, again, look at the ground level and understand who and what we’re actually talking about, and where the problems are and where they are not. I think that this horrific tragedy really points us, instructively, to a couple of core truths that are deeply relevant as we watch what the Trump administration is doing right now, using the corporate crafted language of inefficiency and bloat and overstaffing, they’re importing these tactics from the private sector into government. It reveals how that kind of thinking from the private market fundamentally misunderstands what and who the government is.

The evil bureaucrats of the deep state, they are people like the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee that Trump fired last week. They are the overworked air traffic controllers that are making sure that our planes don’t crash while they’re getting no sleep. They are the civil servants throughout the government who are being pushed to voluntarily resign and who are being reclassified under Schedule F so that they become at-will employees who are easier to fire. You may not like the government for many justifiable reasons, but without the people who make it work, nothing works for us.

I want to show how the leaders in labor, folks in labor that Mel was talking about, have actually been telling us this for many years. On The Real News here last week I interviewed the great Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA AFL-CIO. If you recall, Sara Nelson became a household name during the Trump-led GOP-led government shutdown of 2018 and 2019, 6 years ago. It was the longest government shutdown in our country’s history.

And Sara Nelson steps out of the world of organized labor and into the public limelight as this shutdown, which furloughed 300,000 federal workers while keeping 400,000 federal workers working for 35 days without pay. So people like air traffic controllers working all that time while also working second jobs so that they could feed their families. We were at the verge of another horrific tragedy like this back during the government shutdown in 2018, 2019.

But Sara Nelson and the flight attendants were the ones who were making that point, because in DC it was all, oh, this is about Trump’s border wall, this is not about Trump’s border wall. It was the same kind of thing like we’re talking about DEI and wokeism now, but we’re not talking about the actual goddamn problem.

So let’s tee up these clips of Sara Nelson speaking to the public in January of 2019 making that case during the longest government shutdown of US history.

[FIRST CLIP BEGINS]

Sara Nelson:  We are here today because we are concerned about our safety, our security, and our economic stability, our jobs. For years, the right has vilified federal workers as nameless, faceless bureaucrats. But the truth is they’re air traffic controllers, they’re food inspectors, they’re transportation security officers and law enforcement. They’re the people who live and work in our communities, and they are being hurt.

This is about our safety and security, and our jobs, and our entire country’s economic stability. No one will get out of this unscathed if we do not stop this shutdown. Leader McConnell, you can fix this today. If you don’t show the leadership to bring your caucus to a vote to open the government today, then we are calling on the conscientious members of your caucus to do it for you. There is no excuse to continue this. This is not a political game. Open the government today.

[SECOND CLIP BEGINS]

Sara Nelson:  We are calling on the public on Feb. 16, if we are in a day 36 of this shutdown, for everyone to come to the airports. Everyone come to the airports and demand that this Congress work for us and get politics out of our safety and security.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  I would highly recommend that everyone watching this stream, live or after the fact, go watch that full interview that we did with Sara Nelson. Listen to what she says and apply it to the situation that we’re seeing now. Especially those final words, that this is not about an ideological battle between Trump, MAGA and the deep state and wokeism and DEI. This is about a corporate class of tyrants who are destroying the people, jobs, and agencies that our basic safety and needs depend on.

There’s something, I think, really important here about the lessons that unions and labor specifically can teach us about what’s going to happen here, who’s fighting back against this.

Mel, I wanted to toss it to you to give folks a few points about that before we move on to the other stories.

Mel Buer:  Well, it’s like I’ve been saying. Unions across this country, in small shops, in large shops, in regions, all across the country, from a small coffee shop that’s taking on Nestle to the UAW getting plants reopened in Illinois, all of these struggles are tapped into what I think is a really key thing that we as labor reporters pay attention to, which is to say, workers are experts in their own workplace. They know what’s working, what’s not working, because they’re there every day, and they have generally pretty good ideas about how to improve these industries for the people who work in them and for the consumers and the individuals who are touched by these industries.

So when you see these labor struggles where you might, oh, I don’t know, disagree with tactics or find certain things to be a little odious, or you’re not sure why a certain thing is being offered in a contract or in a bargaining session or on a picket line, you might open up a conversation with those workers, if you’re there, and ask them why it’s important. Because ultimately, from the federal government all the way down to the smallest shop in your city, individuals know what’s going on, and their ideas might actually improve our lives.

And that’s really what the AFA-CWA is trying to do, is what the machinists tried to do at Boeing. We’re seeing this play out in successive industries all across this country. Especially now in this new administration that has already styled itself through its actions as being adversarial to the labor movement, it’s important. It’s important for us to pay attention to these things.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Just to underline what Mel just said there, again, as two reporters, co-hosts of Working People who talk to workers about this stuff every single week, if we sound like broken records, it’s because we keep hearing the same thing from all these workers and we’re trying to get people to listen to them.

But that’s a really, really critical point here. If it feels like there’s no solution to these problems in DC right now, that doesn’t mean there’s no one fighting for a real solution. Over 30,000 machinists, as Mel mentioned, went on strike at Boeing late last year. Let’s not forget Boeing’s role in all of this. Let’s not forget the Boeing planes that have been falling out of the sky over the past decades, and the way the same corporate Wall Street brain disease that took once the most vaunted airline manufacturer in the world, had the best reputation for its product in the world, how it went from that to being the laughing stock of the world and the kind of plane no one wants to get on because we’re all terrified that the plane’s going to fall out of the sky.

Who’s fighting for that? And how did that happen? It didn’t happen overnight. But the workers who went on strike at Boeing last year, they’re fighting to have a say in that. They’re fighting to have a say in the corporate policies that have put all of us in danger. Just like the railroad workers were not only fighting for pay for themselves and better time off policies for their families, but they were doing that so that they could actually do their jobs well and safely and not put us in danger when their trains are bombing past our T-ball games.

So there is an inherent connection between what workers in specific industries, unions in specific jobs, are fighting for that we have a vested interest in, and we should really think about that, not only in terms of why we should support those struggles, but what that says about alternative pathways for solutions when it feels like the bipartisan politics in DC are presenting none.

So just wanted to underline that great point that Mel made. We got more to talk about here, but if nothing else, we hope that you take that point away from what we’re saying here.

Mel Buer:  I think a great way to move forward in this conversation is to take a moment here to break down what’s been going on over the last week at the federal level. One of the big things — And it’s been probably the most dominant in headlines over the last five days or so — Is this funding freeze fiasco that’s been going on.

On Monday night, the Trump administration sent out a late night memo essentially freezing all federal grants and not allowing them to be dispersed to the states and organizations that were scheduled to receive them.

Keep this in mind when we’re talking about this, as I’m sure you’ve read about over the last couple of days, but these are funds that Congress has already approved for disbursement to all 50 states. State governments use these funds for a wide variety of items, from SNAP benefits to Pell Grants for students, to research grants, and everything in between, to the tune of trillions of dollars. These grants pay the rent for workers, they keep folks employed, they keep families fed. In the last couple of days, representatives and governors from states all over the country have registered their alarm and outrage at the move, and they began maneuvering to try and kill the order before it had a chance to really be implemented.

But I really do want to underscore something here, as I would like to read a piece from this memo that was sent out and ultimately rescinded as of yesterday, to underscore the breadth of it and also what may have caused some pretty intense confusion.

So this is a quote from the original memo that was sent from the Office of Management and Budget, and it says “Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration [sic] priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again [sic]. The use of Federal [sic] resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve. 

“This memorandum requires Federal agencies to identify and review all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities consistent with the President’s policies and requirements. 

“[…] To implement these orders, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their Federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders. In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Now, here’s the issue with this. This was the issue that many people have pointed out, and that is the subject of many lawsuits as well, is that this is very broad. And I’m taking a little bit of a charitable reading here, but I really shouldn’t. It’s nonsense is what it is. It’s called impoundment. It’s been illegal for many, many years, that the federal government, specifically the executive branch, cannot withhold these funds on the basis of political differences, which is essentially what this is when you include things like woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal.

And understandably, 23 states sued to create a temporary restraining order on this, which was a big piece of news on Tuesday, that there were moves from a variety of different places to try and stop the implementation of this directive and, ultimately, the executive order as it stands.

Why does this matter? This is what running the government like a business looks like. It’s not how you run a government, Max. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s an absolutely ridiculous idea, and I think a lot of people agree.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah. I mean, again, I’m smiling because as a younger me who used to be a full-fledged Republican, loved the idea of running government like a business. And it just baffles me the more that I’ve grown and learned and seen in the world just how dumb I was to believe that that was a right-headed way to look at things.

I’ll touch on that in a second, but let’s step back. When we’re asking why does this matter, there are two key points here that Mel teed up that we really want to drive home. The first reason why this matters is because it is blatantly unconstitutional. But that on its own, sadly, doesn’t mean a whole lot to a lot of people out there today.

So if we just say, oh, it’s against the Constitution, what do we mean when we actually say that? If there’s one thing that every 4 to 5-year-old in this country knows about our country and our national mythology, it’s that America was founded because our ancestors didn’t want to be ruled by kings anymore. They did not. They had spent generations, centuries living under top-down, feudal-style, king-type power structures, and it sucked. It was a bad way to run societies.

And so we came to this new world and created a more democratic system — I say more democratic, not fully democratic. We know there are plenty of reasons in American history for why we were never a full fledged democracy. But the promise of democracy was meant as a direct refutation of the proven evils and inefficiencies of kingly rule. And so that’s why we have the damn system that we have set up, as imperfect as it is. There was a point to it.

So that’s what we mean when we say it’s unconstitutional, is it is violating that basic social contract upon which this whole country is founded, where a president should not have, by definition and by principle, the unilateral authority to govern by shooting [from] the hip through executive orders and totally circumventing the power of the purse that Congress has been democratically endowed with. There is a reason why the House has the power of the purse, why Congress has that power, because it’s meant to be the most beholden to the people, the most representative of the people. And so the people should, in theory, be the ones with that control over how this country spends its money.

And so the president, by definition, by principles, should not have and does not have the authority to just freeze trillions of dollars that have already been appropriated by that democratic, or more democratic, system and just decide that they’re going to halt that, freezing. They’re going to review stuff, and they’re going to determine who gets their funding and who doesn’t. That’s what happens in corporations, that’s what happens in, again, societies run by kings and queens. That’s not what’s supposed to happen in a democratic society, and there’s a reason for that.

So when we say it’s unconstitutional and that matters, there’s a really deep principle at work here that we should not be ruled by the whims and unilateral authority of one person. I think that’s a good thing. Again, otherwise, everything that all of us have ever learned in school about our country and why it’s good is wrong. So there’s that.

But then, there’s also another reason why this matters that Mel mentioned. This just really underlines the stupidity, the inappropriateness of thinking of government like a business, thinking of things like the US Postal Service in the terms of the private market and not thinking about the essential service that a functioning postal service provides to a functioning democracy. That is what the postal service is there to do: to make sure people get their damn mail, not just the people who can afford it. And so if you’re judging things like the US Postal Service by its profit margins or its returns on investment and you’re not including that social investment and that social benefit, that political benefit, then you’re not going to be able to assess the success of that agency or the government writ large.

I wanted to tee up a clip that we had pulled for a previous section, but I think it’s really apt here. It’s a clip from James Goodwin, who is the policy director for the Center of Progressive Reform. Now, I actually spoke with James when I was guest hosting an episode of Laura Flanders’s show — Shout out to the great journalist Laura Flanders and her show, Laura Flanders and Friends.

So Laura and I spoke with James last summer about Project 2025, its authors, its plans. But also one particular aspect of Project 2025, which is Schedule F, which is the order that Trump has already brought back in that recategorizes thousands of federal employees who have certain worker protections that are there for a reason, reclassifies them as at-will employees, the same way that most workers in this country are, you can be fired [snaps fingers] like that, without just cause.

So I asked James what the effect of this was going to be if these federal workers, with their worker protections, were suddenly made at-will employees under this regime, what effect would that have? So let’s play that clip really quick.

[CLIP BEGINS]

James Goodwin:  So what makes the foundation of our administrative state is the people, professional, apolitical experts. This is something we started building in this country in the late 1800s to replace what was known at the time as a spoils system. These jobs were essentially done by friends of the president or people in political power, and that was just a breeding ground for corruption and incompetence. This is what Schedule F would do, is it would return us to this system.

And so under this proposal, we would take all these experts, these tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, attorneys, what have you, we’d fire them. Who they’re getting replaced with is somebody whose only real skill is unquestioning loyalty to the president.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  So we’re not on the campaign trail anymore. This is no longer a what-if situation, this is happening. This is what they’re doing now. Russ Vought, one of the primary authors of Project 2025, is having his hearing right now to be in charge of the Office of Management and Budget so that he can implement the things that he has laid out, and the other authors of Project 2025 have laid out in Project 2025 itself. But we don’t have to get into that. The point being that let’s talk about this now that it’s actually happening instead of is this going to happen or not?

The point to really make here is what James said. Again, you can have all the justifiable problems that you have, that we have with the government as such, with certain government agencies that are not working properly or doing enough to serve the people. We all get that. But when you take the people who are actually making the government work as much as it is and you turn them into an unprotected, easily fireable class of employee who are, again, through this memo that was sent out to over 2 million government employees asking them to voluntarily leave the government while also pushing folks back to work in person, trying to get them to leave, all reclassifying workers under Schedule F so they could be more easily fired. The cumulative effect here is to purge the government of nonideologically-aligned federal workers and restock what’s left of those agencies with Trump-aligned loyalists.

This sounds great when you’re thinking in 21st century terms of running government like a business. But as James rightly points out, we’ve had this before. It’s the whole reason that the civil service exists. Because in the 18th century, we had a system that’s working like how Trump and his administration want it to work now, where appointees were loyalists, friends, family members, and it was a corrupt nightmare, and nothing got done, and people were furious about it. So they spent the 20th century trying to get the government to not be that. Now we’re going back. That perspective’s important. That’s why this also matters.

Mel Buer:  Yeah, agree. I think this makes a… I don’t know. It’s a rising mass of corruption that is just getting larger the farther we get into the Trump administration, they have a very clear policy agenda that they, I think, know that they might not realistically be able to slam through via legislative means, which is why the executive orders are happening in this way. Because they know that many of these bills that they would like to see happen will not get passed. They’ll get stopped. They’ll get sued out of existence. So the best thing they can do is do an executive order.

And this is what’s happened with this particular federal funding freeze memo. The outcry was really big this week. We had governors going on the TV to say, this directly affects my constituents. These people rely on unemployment insurance and SNAP benefits, WIC, and everything else in order to make sure that their families are fed. I’ve been receiving phone calls from panicked constituents for two days. This is not OK. There needs to be some pushback.

What ended up happening is there are multiple lawsuits that have been filed, including one where, I think, 23-plus states filed a lawsuit against this directive. They’re trying to get a judge to grant a temporary restraining order on it. After that lawsuit was filed, the White House rescinded that memo yesterday, and the White House press secretary, Leavitt, took to Twitter to clarify that it was just the memo itself that was rescinded and not the original order to begin to examine which federal funding could be frozen based on the investigations that they want to do into these appropriations. Lawyers took that, quite reasonably, I would say, to mean that the lawsuits they filed were still worth pursuing.

I know there was some confusion on social media yesterday that the memo being rescinded meant that the entire executive order was rescinded, and the press secretary’s clarification on Twitter keyed us into the fact that it was just the memo itself and that they were absolutely planning on continuing to move forward with the directives in the executive orders relating to this.

So lawyers made that case to Rhode Island US District Chief Judge John McConnell yesterday, and they quoted that tweet in their case that, despite rescinding the memo, the plans were still in place to freeze funding at some point in the future, if not in the next week. The judge agreed and allowed that TRO suit to proceed.

So where we’re at with this right now is that the memo has been rescinded. The plaintiffs in this case, for a temporary restraining order, the lawyers representing 23-plus states refiled their suit last night that seeks to prevent any blocking of federal financial obligations now and in the future, and also prohibits any reissues of the now rescinded directive. So the White House can’t, or the Office of Management and Budget, cannot put out another memo under different wording. They can’t wiggle their way around it by directing only some agencies to freeze their funding while this TRO is in effect.

So they’ve submitted this proposal to the judge. The DOJ has 24 hours to respond — Which, as of right before we went live, I don’t think they have responded quite yet — And then the judge will signal that a ruling is likely going to come at some point in the next couple of days.

So if he grants this TRO on this particular thing, that means that, for at least 14 days, there is no federal freezing of the funds. It means that SNAP benefits will be funded. It means that Pell Grants will be paid out. It means that federal Work-Study will still be available to students at universities, and all the way down the list. That TRO proposal also says that, if needed, they can extend that by another 14 days. So what we’re looking at is 14 to 30 days. Presumably it gives additional lawsuits the chance to move forward with this, or the Trump administration can take the L and back away from this policy and rescind this executive order.

I think this, amongst the 38 that have been filed — And I’m sure more that will be signed today and tomorrow and the next day — This seems to be the one that really kicked up a lot of dust and also kicked the opposition into gear a little bit more than what we’ve been seeing over the last two weeks to three months, because it really is confusing and broad, very, very broad, and affects a lot of people. So in terms of that litigation, hopefully it’s successful. We’ll see in the next couple of days.

One thing that I do want to end on with this specific issue is that there’s a lot of information that’s blurring past your [timeline]. We’re getting headlines every other day about some absolutely obscene, harrowing directives coming out of the White House, and they’re coming at this breakneck speed. There is a tracker that you can follow. Just Security publication has a tracker specifically about executive orders that the Trump administration is putting out and any litigation that is trying to challenge those orders in the future, including updates. They have a pretty solid team that’s doing this across the board, not just about the executive orders, but the tracker that they have is specific to that.

And I know that I was looking yesterday on Bluesky trying to find someone who is aggregating all of this, because you can only listen to so many group chats before you start getting stuck and spiraling a little bit because the information is… We will just say that there’s so much of it. So I found this tracker, I went through it, and I think it’s really great. We’ll put a link in our description, we’ll drop it in the chat for you, because if you’re like me and you want to stay informed, but you want to stay informed without doom spiraling and see how folks are actually challenging these things to varying degrees of success, then that’s a good place to start, I think.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And again, please let us know here at The Real News, in the live chat now, reach out to us on social media. Email us. That is our explicit goal too, as I said at the top of this livestream. It’s more important now than ever when it is an explicit tactic of this administration, it is an explicit prerogative of the social media platforms that we use to bombard us with information so that we stay on those platforms waiting for the next bit of information to come. But we’re not actually doing anything with that information except consuming it, fearfully reacting to it, or angrily reacting to it, and then moving on quickly to the next thing. And the more of us who are in that position, the less mobilized we are as a populace.

We here at The Real News believe that people, real people, working people across this country and around the world, are the solution to the problems that we’re experiencing. We are the ones who are going to work together to build the world that works for all of us. We fundamentally believe that you, me, everyone watching this is part of the solution.

We want to provide information, updates, analysis. We want to give you access to the voices you’re not hearing: the workers on the front lines, the people living in these sacrifice zones, the people brutalized by the police, the people brutalized by our broken healthcare system and our war industry that is wreaking death and destruction across the planet. We are trying to bring you in touch with those people, those voices, the movements that are trying to address them, and to get you to feel that you are part of that, and to understand that you can be part of these solutions.

So we want to hear from you if we’re doing a good job of that, and if there’s other kinds of information, other voices, other perspectives that you want us to provide so that you feel more empowered to act and to do something and to be part of the solution here. So please do also reach out to us and share with us any suggestions or recommendations that you’ve got there.

We’ve got about 25 minutes left in this livestream. We also want to hear if this was helpful to you. We are not going to be able to get to some questions from the live chat itself today, but we have been sourcing questions from y’all leading up to this livestream on social media. We have a text service that you can get Real News updates on through text messaging. Folks have been sending us great questions ahead of this livestream through that service, and you can learn more about how to sign up for it in the live chat right now.

So we are going to end in a few minutes. Mel and I will step back a bit and assess based on these questions that we got before the stream began in the final 15 minutes here.

But before we get there, I know, Mel, there is another key story that we’ve both been really concerned about, but you really want to impress upon viewers why this is one of those headlines passing your timeline that you should actually focus on.

Mel Buer:  Yeah, so in the last week or so, there’s been a bit of a… I hesitate to use the word shakeup, but there have been some changes with the NLRB. And what we’ve been seeing is that NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo was fired. Honestly, I think most folks were expecting that. There was a changeover.

What she does is she’s the top adjudicator, prosecutor, investigator for the NLRB. She’s been really good at bringing forth some really important policy changes and also rule changes that really have helped workers organize. She’s been really tough on bosses, and holding corporations like Amazon’s feet to the fire. We kind of expected that to happen. It happened when Biden took over in 2021. There was a shakeup there with the general counselor, if I [remember] correctly. And so we kind of expected that to happen.

What is surprising is that the NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, was also fired. She was appointed in December, I think, appointed and confirmed in December. And she is the first Black woman member of the NLRB. She is also supposed to keep her job through the next couple of years. As it stands, the NLRA and the various policies do not have provisions. These board members are not at-will members. They’re supposed to serve out their term unless there is some sort of malfeasance or a specific event that someone can point to in the administration to fire any member of the board. You can’t do it. So it was very surprising to see Gwynne Wilcox fired at the beginning of this week.

There is a statement here from the AFL-CIO president, Liz Shuler, that I want to read a little bit here that says, “President Trump’s firing of NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the board, is illegal and will have immediate consequences for working people. By leaving only two board members in their posts, the President has effectively shut down the National Labor Relations Board’s operation, leaving the workers it defends on their own in the face of union busting and retaliation. Alongside the firing of NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, these moves will make it easier for bosses to violate the law and trample on workers’ legal rights on the job and fundamental freedom to organize.”

Now this is important, and we’ll talk about this just in a moment, about what exactly the NLRB does on a granular level. But the way that the NLRB essentially operates is that the board is the adjudicators. They make decisions on union elections, they make decisions on investigations into workplaces. They make decisions on unfair labor practice charges that will bring consequences against employers when they treat their workers badly, break the law, retaliate, fire workers for union organizing, any number of things.

In order for the board to operate, there has to be quorum. So of the five members, there has to be at least three appointed working members of the board. Right now there are vacancies, which is also surprising. Normally, in the normal course of things, an incoming president will use those vacancies to shift decision-making. There were two vacancies on the board that would’ve, I think, if you’re talking about the strategy here, would have changed policy at the NLRB by itself.

Now there’s only two members of the board after Gwynne Wilcox has been fired, which means the board doesn’t have quorum. They do not have the authority to make decisions until they have quorum. So any of the things that the board could do to uphold the NLRA, which is to say the enforcement of the law that protects worker rights in this country, can’t happen until a new person is appointed and confirmed or until Wilcox is reinstated, which she has indicated that she will pursue whatever legal avenues that she has to be reinstated to fight this firing, because again, it’s illegal. It’s illegal what Trump did. I’m not trying to create this doom spiral, but this is concerning. It’s very alarming, and it’s important that we underscore that.

I know that there are folks among the labor movement who would love to see the Wild West of labor organizing return. We may actually see that at some point in the future. But at the moment, what we have with the NLRA is workable. It’s not great, but it is workable, and it does keep individuals employed. It keeps individuals from getting hurt on the job. It keeps individuals from being fired for organizing. And if we don’t have an NLRB that can enforce that because it’s been hobbled by this particular thing, it’s not great, Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No. I forget who the quote came from, I think it was a Democratic legislator, but it was like, the message right now is workers are on their own. And functionally that is correct, because the NLRB, insufficient as it is — And we have reported on that too. We’ve reported on how understaffed, underfunded the NLRB is and has been for years. We’ve reported over the years about how the NLRB should be more aggressive in enforcing labor law. Again, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. The NLRB cannot be perfect, but things can be a lot worse without it. We’re capable of having that conversation.

But we need to understand also what that means in real terms. And so I want to tee up a clip here from Mel and my’s podcast, Working People, where I spoke with workers at the National Labor Relations Board, like rank and file workers, labor lawyers, people who are doing the work of the agency and who are also both representatives in the NLRB union.

So this was actually an interview that we did when we were approaching the threshold of a government shutdown in, I think that was September, 2023. Remember, that was the congressional Republicans internal fighting over more spending cuts, border security, no military aid to Ukraine. It was a high-stakes fight between McCarthy and Matt Gaetz. So it was in that period that I spoke with Colton Puckett and Michael Billick, legislative co-chairs of the NLRB union and full-time NLRB workers, about just what it is that they and other NLRB staff do and the role that that work plays in our daily working lives. So let’s listen to that clip right now.

[CLIP BEGINS]

Colton Puckett:  At a high level, the core functions that we do that, I think, most folks that know about our agency know about what we do, and that’s we investigate unfair labor practice charges. So someone believes that their employer or their union has violated the law in some way. They can file a charge with us, and we investigate it and figure out whether or not the charge has merit. That’s a big portion of the work we do, and I’ll talk a little bit more about what that means.

But another big thing that we do is we run union elections, essentially. And so when workers come together, they decide, we want to form a union, we want to join a union, they’ll file a petition with us. There’s a certain process that entails. And then when it comes time to actually hold the election, we in the field go to wherever that election is taking place and we make sure that it’s done, and done in as fair and impartial a way as is possible.

And then the last thing we do, another big thing that is part and parcel with unfair labor practice investigations is we try cases. So if we find that there is merit to one of these unfair labor practice charges that we get, we always will try to settle a case, of course, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. So that means we actually go to trial before an administrative law judge and we litigate the case and we try and prove the violation. And it’s similar to, it’s not exactly like going to federal court, but it’s the same general idea. And so that’s another big portion of the work that we do.

And so that’s the big three things at a very high level. But I think sometimes getting into the day-to-day, some of that can get lost.

As field staff, I think Mike mentioned at the top, we work in offices spread all around the country. We are essentially the front line of the agency for working people all across the country. That means that we interface directly with workers every single day, whether that’s a charging party, we’re trying to help them figure out how to e-file their evidence, for example, or figure out what they need to send to us that might be useful versus what not to, or if we’re just answering questions about where their case is in the process or what certain processes means because a lot of this is legalese, and we don’t expect everybody to know exactly what an unfair labor practice is. That’s a big portion of the work we do.

One of the things that we do, there’s one in every regional office, there’s an information officer on duty every day. You can call your regional office — They might not answer immediately, but leave a voicemail and you will talk to a live person that day, and they will walk you through any questions that you have. If you want to file a charge, they can assist you in preparing the charge and informing you how to do that. And I don’t necessarily know that a lot of other federal agencies have that type of direct person-to-person interaction in that way.

And so that’s a big thing that we do. We talk to folks all the time and then just try and help them understand what it is we do and what it is their rights are.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right. So that’s not nothing. That’s not evil bureaucracy. That’s real shit that real working people depend on. In the final minutes here, Mel and I wanted to drive this point home, because we could be playing clips for the next five hours of real world examples that real world workers have told us on our podcast about when they needed the NLRB to adjudicate an injustice, a violation of their rights, and how important that was to their livelihoods, how important it was to their union drive, how important it was for the labor movement itself. But that’s what we’re trying to get y’all to see is that this is not just conceptual, nameless, faceless bureaucratic stuff. That’s what they do. That’s what folks at the NLRB do.

And just to give one example that was the first field report that I did when I started here at The Real News in the middle of COVID in 2020. Let’s not forget that early in 2021, one of the biggest stories in the country was that workers in Bessemer, Alabama, majority Black, deindustrialized Bessemer, Alabama, with twice the national poverty rate, that they were leading the charge to form the country’s first unionized workforce at an Amazon facility. Now, we know that they ended up being unsuccessful in that union drive, but that drive sparked so many of the other labor struggles that we’ve reported on over the past few years, including [contributing] to the Amazon Labor Union’s successful unionization drive in New York.

And so that’s a real world example. I was there on the ground, Mel was talking to these workers, I’ve talked to these workers, I’ve been in their union hall. They tried to hold a union election, which is their right, that is their democratic right, to vote on whether or not they want a union, even if it is at the second largest private employer in the country and one of the biggest international behemoths in the world. These workers had that right and they exercised it.

And the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Amazon had illegally interfered in that election by placing a US Postal Service mailbox on Amazon property right in front of the employee entrance with the Amazon cameras pointed on it. And so the NLRB said, hey, that’s not a free and fair election. This is intimidation, this is surveillance. You guys have to have another election. They had that enforcement ability to give workers in Bessemer another chance, a fair shot at a union election.

So that’s just one example of a high-stakes ruling that both shows how Amazon is a much bigger behemoth than the NLRB can take on its own. But that ruling really mattered for workers who were really fighting for what they believed in.

Mel, I know you’ve seen tons of others. Are there any few you want to highlight here real quick?

Mel Buer:  Well, I think I want to just, I could name ’em all up top of the bat. We can do Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Strike. It’s a ULP strike. We can do half of the walkouts at Starbucks started with ULPs fired because bargaining wasn’t starting fast enough. We can talk about pretty much, I would say, a sizable chunk of a worker’s ability to withhold their work legally begins with the filing of a ULP.

And the NLRB has to reach a certain place with that, where you are filing this grievance and you say, we have checked our boxes and we’ve filed this ULP that says bargaining is not going well. The company’s bargaining in bad faith, which means they are not actually giving a good faith effort to sit across the table and work through this contract negotiation like we are. They have actively endangered workers, for example, at Starbucks during the LA firestorm. They have enacted policies that are retaliatory. They have held captive audience meetings.

When we are trying to form a union, all of these rulings that the NLRB rules on are designed to free and fairly investigate these complaints and then to actually offer some sort of recourse for workers, whether that means ordering management back to the table and telling ’em to stuff it and get the job done, or whether that means enacting no captive audience meetings in workplaces. Whether that means allowing individuals to be on company grounds to organize off hours, to pull in people and have conversations to work on a union campaign that’s gone public. All of these things are what the NLRB helps us do. And there are dozens, dozens of people, dozens of campaigns that I’ve talked to, that I’ve reported on [just] in the last year where the outcome, in some way or another, depends upon what the NLRB can do for them.

That’s just the place that we’re in. That’s the recourse that we have right now. We have to thread that needle and to use the law, as inadequate as it is, to our benefit, and be able to work within that and use the NLRB as an agency for what it’s there for. Which is to say, often I look at the NLRB’s policies in the last 10 years or so. When we have a board that is really pro-worker focused, a lot of things can happen.

Final example I’ll give is that in 2017, the NLRB was full of pro-business folks that Trump had appointed. During Trump’s administration, and then the subsequent administration after, there was really this watershed moment with graduate student organizing where, during Trump’s administration, there were restraints on which type of graduate students could organize on college campuses. That rule changed in the last five, six years as a result of a more pro-worker NLRB makeup, and there has been an explosion in new organizing on university campuses that we didn’t see before. By some metrics, it is the fastest and most consistent organizing that has happened in this country in the last five years.

So it underscores the importance of what this agency can do for us as workers, and what this agency can do for us as a workers’ movement. And so when it’s hobbled by an administration, as it has been in the Trump administration, things become exponentially more difficult.

My fellow union workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette waited for a year and a half for a decision on the ULP that they filed. They’ve been on strike for over three years at this point, trying to get the company at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to bargain fairly and to stop playing games with their health insurance and their livelihoods. And the NLRB is really the thing that’s driving those consequences so they can get back to the table and get back to work.

So as much as we want to sit here and say that, oh, it’s just another bunch of feckless bureaucrats — No, it has real world implications for how we can organize in the future. And I truly believe that, in terms of movement building in this country, the labor movement is an integral part to that, for all its faults. That institution needs to use the tools that it has at its disposal.

So when an administration — Any administration, because I’m not saying that Democratic administrations in the past haven’t used the NLRB as a cudgel, haven’t deliberately underfunded it and understaffed it because they are also only pro-worker in name, but not really in action. It’s important for us to be able to uphold this institution because it helps us maintain some semblance of control over our workplaces, at least for now. We will see what the next 10, 15 years look like.

As Hamilton Nolan has said, the Democrats squander their chance to really rebuild the labor movement — I agree — And we are now in single digits a little bit in terms of union density, but we’re not cooked by any stretch of the imagination. And if we can pay attention to and internalize the fact that some of these agencies and the work that they do is actually really useful for our movement building, then I think we have a better chance of staving off the worst impulses of this fascist government.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, I think that’s powerfully put, Mel. Just again, a plea to everyone watching: If you’ve been watching our reporting over these past few years or other people’s reporting on the Starbucks union drive, the Amazon union drive, but not just those; healthcare workers going on strike for their patients, teachers and educators going on strike for their students, their communities, manufacturing in the auto industry and beyond. John Deere workers, journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, entertainers at Medieval Times. These struggles of working people where people like you and me have realized that if they band together, exercise their rights, form a union, and work together as a union, that they can actually change their lives, they can change their circumstances, they can even change our society’s circumstances, like the machinists going on strike at Boeing or the railroad workers fighting for rail safety that impacts all of us, like we were talking about earlier in the stream.

All of that is going to be so deeply impacted by a nonfunctional NLRB or an NLRB that is functional but actively hostile to the workers’ side of the struggle and is doing the bidding of the employer class. I don’t know what the stories we report are going to be. I don’t know what the workers we interview are going to say in the coming years if that is the case, but I promise you it’s not going to be what it’s been in the past few years where workers have seen this groundswell, and they’ve wanted to be part of it, and they’ve seen a path to unionization with an NLRB that actually is functional enough to serve the needs of working people trying to exercise their rights. We are not in that territory anymore.

So even if you don’t give a shit about anything in DC — Which I would totally forgive you for — If you give a shit about the labor movement and working people, this is going to impact that, this is going to impact you.

And we don’t know what the ripple effects are going to be to the business class, to the private sector, to all the employers out there who now know that workers are on their own like they did after Reagan fired the PATCO strikers in ’81. We don’t know what the cascading effect is going to be if employers decide to go more on the offensive in squashing unionization efforts, more on the offensive in rolling back workers’ rights, treating workers like shit, knowing that they’re going to have fewer options for recourse through the NLRB. So if nothing else, let’s remind ourselves that that matters. That concerns us, our neighbors, our coworkers.

But also that we, as Mel said, are not cooked here. We are not powerless here. We have a vested interest in the story, and we ourselves are part of the outcome. I say I don’t know how this is going to shape out because I don’t know what you are going to do about it. I don’t know what everyone watching this is going to do about it, but that’s going to determine what the outcome is. And so, again, if anything, we want to leave y’all with that note that this is meant for you, for us to figure out what we do next.

And with that wrapping up the 90 minutes where we’re looking at these key headlines, I wanted to just have 10 minutes of bonus time here so that we could, Mel, take a step back and breathe a bit and address these really great questions that some of our supporters and viewers sent into us that helped us think about how to frame this livestream. In a way we’ve been trying to answer the questions over the past 90 minutes, but I wanted to just toss these out there and get your thoughts — And also what you guys in the live chat think about this.

But one of the key questions that we got from Giovanni R., which was really great, which was, “How much do you estimate this regime will affect what’s left of workers’ benefits and safety standards?” So we started addressing that now, and we’re going to talk about it a little more in a second, but that’s one key question that we’ve been trying to answer here.

Another question that we got from David B., which I think is also really crucial, is David asked, “Will labor only present a front for or a front of resistance and fight back, or is it actually going to push the limits of what we as working class people need and demand? Will labor stop seeing the Democratic Party as the vehicle for that fight back and resistance? Will labor exert itself as if it understands and believes that the laboring class is the sine qua non of production and wealth?” Great question. So much that we could say about there. I want you guys watching to think about that.

And the last question that I wanted to throw up on the screen here, which helped us prepare for this livestream, was from Edward S. And so Edward wrote to us saying, “When will the unions educate their membership about labor history and that the GOP is their foe? It’s atrocious that a huge percent of union members vote for Trump.”

So Mel, I wanted to, now that we’ve gotten through the last 90 minutes, do you feel like there are any other lingering answers to those questions that we didn’t get to, or things that are really sticking in your mind?

Mel Buer:  I think I’ll start with the first one, with Giovanni’s. Maybe we can do a couple of minutes for each one. I think when we talk about how much this regime will affect what’s left of workers’ benefits and safety standards, I think one thing that I’ve learned over the course of my reporting, whether it’s been on OSHA agencies in California, or in the healthcare industry on the West Coast, or the railroad industry in the Midwest, or wherever else, is that oftentimes these agencies can be equipped with the ability to maintain safety standards, to maintain workers’ benefits, and oftentimes there’s no political will to maintain those.

Subsequent administrations may cater to lobbyists, to understaff these agencies, to re-appropriate funds away from these agencies. Just like anything else in the government, you need money to operate. And if you’re being appropriated less and less money each year, that means you’re hiring less and less OSHA inspectors each year. That means there’s less OSHA inspectors to handle the complaints that happen that are called in, and then they start making hard decisions about which ones to investigate and which ones not to — Or it sits on a waiting list, as what happens with the NLRB, where oftentimes, for example, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette complaint was essentially on a waiting list for investigation for over a year because there’s just not enough people who have been tasked with investigating these things.

I think what we’ve been talking about, Max, is there’s a bit of a breakdown in the system itself that perpetuates these problems. Something that happens a lot is that workers see this breakdown in an acute area like the aviation industry, like the agriculture industry, like the healthcare industry, and the fight at their disposal is, for example, I just did reporting in Southern California on the Kaiser health system and mental health professionals who are still on strike after 100 days, who saw these breakdowns in the system that was disproportionately affecting their patients because there weren’t enough people getting hired. And these are critically, acutely mentally ill patients who require regular treatments who aren’t getting that — Illegally so, in the state of California.

And so what they do is they view these as workers’ rights issues, patient issues or workers’ rights issues in the healthcare industry. So what do they have at their disposal? They went on strike. Their contract expired, and they’re not going to get off the picket line until they get one written in stone, in paper, signed by Kaiser, that these conditions will cease being as horrendous as they are because that means that they can take care of their patients better.

So in that sense, subsequent administrations have done something to the effect of deregulating portions of the industry, [and] they create serious problems. The railroad strike happened, almost happened under the Biden administration and was stopped last minute. If you talk to some railroad workers, they aren’t happy about that. They feel like they lost leverage because the Biden administration stepped in at a critical time where he could have said, actually, I don’t have to do this.

So I don’t know, man, I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Obviously we are looking down the barrel of four years, at least, of extreme MAGA GOP policies that have their own ideology. Obviously, they have their own plan, and a lot of us are going to get left out in the cold.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Or the heat. I wanted to jump in on that point too, because when I think about what these conditions are going to be for our fellow workers, current generations and future generations, to answer Giovanni’s question, I guess what we would say is what railroad workers told me and Mel when we first started investigating that story years ago. Every single worker we talked to told us the same thing at the top: What you need to understand is this goes way back.

And so, if anything, that’s an argument for why all y’all out there should stop fucking watching mainstream political news, or even independent news junkie stuff that only focuses on bipartisan politics and follows the news cycle of Washington DC, because it rots your brain and you lose the ability to think like a real, regular person.

Now, when you talk to other real, regular working people, you get a better frame on the problems that we’re experiencing. And so when railroad workers are saying, here’s the problem, now here’s how far back this goes, and that’s how far back our memories go because we’ve experienced it, and that is decidedly different from the political election cycle.

And this is something that we’ve been bringing up on our reporting here over and over again, is that Donald Trump, Biden, these last few election cycles have been characterized by a sort of like, what did the previous administration do that the next administration’s blaming them about and overturning? And why are people voting for Trump? Because they’re mad at Biden and his policies. But really what we are talking about here in the political world is that voters are responding every two to four years to a crisis that’s been building for the last 40, 50, 60 years.

And so the cumulative effects of this death by a thousand deregulatory cuts, that is what we’re trying to get a handle on here, because that is the frame you need to have to understand how conditions have gotten this bad and why, as Mel said, they’re probably going to get worse before they get any better. From the air traffic controller staffing shortage to the industrial pollution of communities in sacrifice zones around the country from East Palestine to South Baltimore.

This stuff starts happening in more and more places year after year when unsexy, uninteresting legislation gets passed through, it’s not really a blip on people’s radars when it happens 15 years ago. And then 15 years later, you end up living next to a lake that you can’t swim in that you’ve swam in your whole life. Public policy bioaccumulates. It accumulates in our bodies, it accumulates in our jobs, it accumulates in our communities. It doesn’t all happen overnight.

I guess that’s the point I’m getting at, is that we are still in the process of experiencing and feeling the full weight of decisions that have already been made, that were made in Trump’s last administration and Biden’s last administration and Obama’s administration — And Reagan’s administration. We are still finding out the repercussions of those decisions that have already been made, and we are laying the groundwork for even more impactful decisions to hurt us well into the future.

And that’s why I jumped in when you said that we’ll be left out in the cold, and I said, or even in the heat, because that’s another storyline that we follow here too. What are workers and workers’ rights and labor unions going to do as the climate crisis continues to spiral out of control, which it sure as hell is going to the more we do this drill, baby, drill, pull out of the Paris Climate Accords while LA is burning, western North Carolina is obliterated by hurricanes. We are barreling in the exact opposite direction.

But what makes me think of that example is that I remember when the Supreme Court overturned Biden’s attempt to require workplaces of over 100 people to have COVID vaccine mandates, or for folks who didn’t want to take the vaccine, that they did regular testing. The Supreme Court said that they rejected that order and it was hailed as a victory for the antivax crowd, for the Trump MAGA crowd.

But what you and I saw, Mel, and what we talked about, because we actually read the ruling, was that the Supreme Court said because COVID-19 is a general condition, that it just exists in the world, no one employer can be responsible for implementing these kinds of policies to address it.

And so what they were doing was laying the groundwork for getting employers off scot-free as the climate gets worse, as people are working in hotter conditions, when they’re dying in the summer heat, or they’re breathing in toxic chemicals. And basically, we have set the stage for employers to not be liable for our deaths when they’re putting us regularly at hazard in our working conditions as the climate crisis worsens. That’s what I’m trying to point to is these decisions are going to have ripple effects for generations.

So there are things we can do now, but we have to have a full, clear sense of the problem. And that’s what we’re going to try to keep taking apart and analyzing piecemeal in these livestreams, in our reports. Like I said at the top of this livestream, our goal is to not get overwhelmed by the news cycle, but to practice focus, to use our journalistic tools to give you the information you need to act and not be immobilized and hopeless. And so that’s what we’re working on doing and doing better here.

We really want to hear from you guys, and let us know if we are doing better, if there are things that you’d like us to see, do, people you’d like us to have on, subjects that you really need help breaking down in our team here, not just our journalists, but our incredible whole team of editors, producers, studio technicians, let us be usable to you. Let us know what you need and we will use our skills to try to help.

But ultimately, you are the solution. You are the one who is going to determine with your neighbors, your coworkers, your fellow working people, what happens in the future, what kind of future we are leaving for our children. And so our job here at The Real News is to make sure you’ve got what you need to make change. And we want to hear from you, and we want you to hold us accountable if we are not following through on that.

And so please let us know what you thought of this livestream, let us know what you’d like us to cover in future livestreams, and please keep sending questions so that we can keep answering them better and more directly. Because we’ve got so much to say on it, but ultimately what matters is that we’re saying what you are looking for and need to hear and not just listening to ourselves talk. That’s the goal here. That’s what we at The Real News are here to do.

We are a team that is here for you, and we’re a strong and mighty team. And Mel, I could not be more honored to be on this team with you guys in the back, our whole studio team: Adam, Cam, Dave, Kayla, Jocelyn, James, looking at the live chat, everybody on this team is here to help, and we are here for you, and we really appreciate your support, and we look forward to seeing y’all next Thursday when we go live again.

But until then, please support our work so that we can keep bringing you important coverage and conversations like this. And more important than ever, take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

Republish This Story

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.