Democracy dies, first, in the workplace: A conversation with Hamilton Nolan and Sara Nelson

Democracy dies, first, in the workplace: A conversation with Hamilton Nolan and Sara Nelson

“I did not start out as a writer interested in organized labor,” Hamilton Nolan writes in The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor; “I started out as a writer interested in why America was so fucked up. Why did we have such gargantuan levels of inequality? Why were thousands of homeless people living in the streets of cities where billionaires frolicked in penthouses? Why was it that certain classes of people worked hard their entire lives and stayed poor, just as their parents had been, and just as their children seemed doomed to be? Even while labor unions had fallen almost completely out of the public mind, it turned out that they were central to all our most fundamental problems.” In this live episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore on Dec. 6, 2024, Max speaks with Nolan about his new book, what the ongoing war on workers’ rights and unions tells us about the “fucked up” society we’re living in, and what lessons labor can teach us now about how to fight and win, even in the darkest of times. Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL–CIO, also makes a special guest appearance in the second half of the episode.

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Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Analysis:

Mic check. Mic check. We’re going to go ahead and get started with tonight’s event. It is always, always, always good to see you at Red Emma’s bookstore Coffeehouse. There are many things you could be doing. The weather cleared up nicely, cold as hell, but it was a beautiful afternoon, so you might’ve been somewhere else. You chose to be here with us in community and in the struggle capitals, and that is never lost upon us. I’m the poet known as analysis. Welcome on behalf of the entire team Hamilton. Nolan is a longtime labor journalist who was written about labor, politics and class war for publications such as Gawker in these Times, the Guardian and More. Speaking of Gawker Media, he helped organize them in 2015. That became the first yes, yes, yes. First online media company to unionize. He’s based in Brooklyn, New York has a publication called How Things Work, and you can find that at his website, hamilton nolan.com, Hamilton nolan.com.

We are joined in conversation this evening by Red Emmas fan. Max Alvarez is the editor in chief of the Real News Network, the host of the podcast, working people, PhD in history and comparative literature from University of Michigan and does so much more, writes for so many things. Speaking of writing, we have one copy. How many copies did I say? One copy of Max’s book, the Work of Living. Where can people talk about their lives and dreams and the year That World ended This right over there. So you should get that along with tonight’s book. We are so glad to get into this labor history. It is very important. I need y’all to give up some real radical roof rays and red ass noise for in conversation with Max Alvarez and presenting the hammer power. I love this subtitle. Listen to this Power inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Y’all make some noise for Hamilton Nolan.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, thank you so much analysis. Thank you once again to the great Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore coffee house and gathering space. This is a really important space for our community, so just wanted as always to thank our hosts and encourage y’all to please support Red Emma’s because we need places like this to plan the next steps, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in the second part of our conversation today. And I couldn’t be more grateful to be in conversation with my man, Hamilton Nolan about that because I often find myself looking to Hamilton for answers or guidance or even just a little dose of strength that I can kind of get to help me get out of bed and keep fighting. Hamilton is a role model for so many of us in the labor journalism and labor media world, and I’m so proud of him and everything that he’s done, especially this incredible new book that we’re here to talk about today, which as analysis said is called The Hammer Power Inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Hamilton, thank you so much for joining me today and Baltimore brother and welcome.

Hamilton Nolan:

Thank you and thank you Red Emmas. This is my first time at Red Emmas and I love everything about this place already, so I’ll definitely be back and thank you all for coming and thank you Max, who by the way, if you all don’t know, is definitely one of the best labor journalists in the United States America, and we are lucky to have him here in Baltimore, so thank you for having me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you, brother. That means the world to me and who boy do we got a lot to talk about, right? I mean, I’m thinking we’re never going to be able to sum up the richness and depth and importance of this book in a 60 minute talk, right? That’s an unfair aim to have in any book talk. So I want to encourage everyone first and foremost to please buy and read this book. If you are finding yourself, like me feeling overwhelmed by anxiety, fear, anger, resentment, all these heavy feelings that you don’t know what to do with, but you are looking for something to do, you were looking for more that you can do to fight back and to keep us from falling further into the abyss. I would highly recommend that you start with this book and you’ll find a lot of hard truths and a lot of warm comfort in it through the stories of our fellow workers, past and present and through Hamilton’s fierce and righteous perspective.

And so Hamilton, I want to by way of introducing the book sort of jump into the moment that we’re in right now because everyone is sort of looking at the past eight to 10 years to try to understand what the hell happened in this country that not only led us to elect Donald Trump president the first time, but now a second time with a fully magnified GOP controlling effectively all branches of government. And there are a lot of different narratives about the last eight to 10 years that cherry pick stories about the working class and their politics, our politics and so on. I wanted to ask you, Hamilton Nolan, what does the last eight to 10 years in this country look like through the lens of labor and through the lives of the working people that you report on for a living?

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah, thank you, man. It’s a great question and obviously one I’ve thought about a lot and you’ve thought about a lot, probably everybody in this room has thought about a lot. I think I’m going to cheat a little bit because I’m going to go back a little bit farther because I think you have to go back a little bit farther to really answer that question. And I will go back to the end of World War II 1950s in America. It’s going to be short though. I’m not going to talk that one, but the context being that after World War II in this country, one in three working people in America was a union member, and what did that produce that produced what is looked back on now as the golden age of America? Ironically, look back on by Republicans in particular, I was like, wow, that’s the time we need to get back to one in three working people in this country was a union member and America was prosperous, but that level of unionization in this country meant that the prosperity that America had was widely shared.

So we had the greatest shared prosperity for a good 20 to 30 year period. It was really a golden age in the history of America. All that prosperity was widely shared because working people in this country had the power to take their share of that wealth thanks to high levels of unionization. And over time the decline of unions in America in the mid 1950s about one in three workers was union member. Today it’s one in 10, and that’s been a slow downward decline for all those years, and particularly beginning in 1980 with the Reagan era. I was born in 1979. So this kind of the story of my lifetime is that we saw this inequality, crisis, economic inequality, crisis in particular start to rise up in America. And of course Reagan’s assault on unions and worker power was a big part of enabling that. And there’s a really famous chart that a lot of you probably seen, and one line is the decline of union density in America.

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It goes down like that. And then the other line is the rise of the wealth held by the top 10% in America and it goes up like that and it’s perfect mirror images, perfect mirror images. So those two things are not coincidental. Those two things are one enabled the other. And so I think to bring it up to today, I think that it’s just the nature of societies that inequality can only rise for so long before stuff starts to break and stuff starts to break down, the social contract starts to break down, the political system starts to break down. People stop believing in the American dream because it becomes increasingly obvious that the American dream is kind of a sham. And I think that is the environment that fostered a guy like Trump who is not only a Republican, but also like a conman and just clearly a scam artist and all the sort of worst qualities come to the fore.

But I remember I covered Trump when he was running in 2016 and 2015, and one thing that always stuck with me from the 2016 election was that in West Virginia, which was one of the highest states in America for voting for Trump in the democratic primary, Bernie won every county in West Virginia. So what is that? That’s people being like, we need something different. We need the most different thing that we can find. And I think that is what’s led us to Trump the hollowness of what neoliberalism produced in this country, the failure of America to share his prosperity, crushing unions crushing working people’s ability to get their fair share of the wealth that this country produces, which is still, by the way, the most wealth any nation in the history of the world has ever produced we’re rich as hell. It’s just that all the money goes to the very top. All those things I think conspire to form atmosphere where a guy like Trump can rise up. And I guess the story of the last election is that in those eight years, the opposition did not rally itself to fix the underlying problems that contributed to Trump getting in the first place. So here we are.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I want to tease that out just a bit more, right? Since it’s, again, this is in the air that we’re breathing right now, it’s everywhere, especially if anyone’s like, I understand why you would maybe not be following the news so closely these days because exhausting. So I do understand that, but it’s all that anyone’s talking about right now. So I do want to sort of ask you if you could also take this and respond to the discussions and debates that are being had right now from mainstream news all the way to independent channels like ours all across social media, Democrats abandoning the working class and reaping what they’ve sown, Republicans having this quote, great realignment and a lot of working people supporting Trump and maga. And you really, I think helped us understand some of the complex reasons that might happen. But I want to ask you if you have, what you feel is missing from those debates right now, especially in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory.

Hamilton Nolan:

I mean, I do think one thing that’s not getting really enunciated enough or made clear enough, especially in the discussion after the election of the sort of alleged working class shift to Republicans, and some of it was real. I mean, there has been a real certain amount of shift of lower income votes to Trump, but one thing that didn’t get brought up, and especially in the ways that the Democrats panic about that, and a democratic political consultant is probably the least equipped person in the world to solve that problem. They’re all millionaires who live in dc. But I mean, what I think didn’t get talked about enough specifically was that the union votes still went to Democrats by the same healthy margin that it had in the past. So actual union members did not shift to Trump, not that Harris was so great or anything, but the actual union vote stayed to the left.

And so I think that, and I’m a broken record maybe, but when we talk about, oh, the working class, how are we going to bring the working class back, raise union density, get more people into unions, and you get people into organizations that actually can do political education, people’s relationship with politics can’t just be seen ads on tv. I mean, that’s not politics. And politics is being in an organization that can help people fight for their own interests, whether it’s electorally, whether it’s in the workplace or anywhere else. Unions are the foundation of that in America. The labor movement is the foundation of that. Even though it’s gotten very weak, it’s still demonstrated even in the last election when working class people shifted to the right union members didn’t. So unions are an essential ingredient to American democracy. And when we talk about the declining in unions, it’s not just a story about economics. It’s not just people aren’t earning enough money anymore. It is a story of the loss of power, the loss of regular people’s ability to exercise power, political power in particular. And so I think that’s something that has not been discussed enough, at least in the mainstream news though I’m sure on real news. Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, we got you baby. And I want to come back to the union question in a second, but I think you make a tremendously important point, right? Given the sort of post World War II context that you gave us in the beginning all the way up till now, and like you said, our lifetimes are effectively the arc of this decline. We are sort of like and bear the living imprints of Neoliberalism’s like rise and fall, and we bear in our family stories and experiences like the effects of a failed ideology, well failed for us. But for the past 40 years, that has been what working people across the board have experienced, and whether they are joining unions or trying to form unions in larger numbers than we’ve seen in a generation in recent years or going on strike, whether they’re burning down police precincts or voting for explicitly anti-establishment politicians like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, that being the linkage that there’s an anti-establishment rage harnessed in there, all of those things are sort of different and even interlocking responses to a crisis that’s been building for our entire lifetimes.

And I think that’s what drives me so nuts about the ways that the media talks about politics and then those of us who consume the media learn to think about politics and it limits the scope of how we can think. George Orwell wrote this a century ago, I’m not saying anything new here, but I think that’s such an important point because if you don’t have that deeper historical context, if you don’t understand that what people are responding to every two to four years, they’re responding to a crisis that’s been building for 40 or 50. And so in fact, what’s more telling about our political situation, not just here in the US but around the world, is that we are in what many analysts are calling an anti incumbent period. Because again, what we just lived through the past three election cycles we haven’t seen in our lifetime where the incumbent party was voted out each time.