Elon Musk’s War on Workers

Hey everyone, this is Leon from Prologue Projects.

On this episode of 5-4,

Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking about the Supreme Court's agenda on labor rights and how the court's decisions in the coming term could play out under a second Trump presidency.

As you'll hear, the National Labor Relations Board, the agency responsible for protecting the rights of American workers, was basically gutted from the inside during Trump's first term.

And over the past year, the NLRB has been attacked by some of the biggest businesses in the country.

It is a nearly 90-year-old independent federal agency whose mission is to protect workers' rights.

But lately, the U.S.

National Labor Relations Board is also working to protect itself.

Companies like Amazon and SpaceX are arguing that the NLRB isn't just wrongly accusing them of labor violations, but that its entire existence is unconstitutional.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have left our nation wandering aimlessly, like me at Trader Joe's, looking for snacks.

I'm Peter.

I'm here with Rhiannon.

Hey.

And Michael.

Hey, I don't find it's hard to find snacks at Trader Joe's.

It's just the snacks you're looking for.

There's snacks everywhere at Trader Joe's, though.

It's not.

It also seems like that wandering is more like Zen wandering, not the wandering that the Supreme Court has put us in.

Don't shit all over my mouth.

This was an excuse to talk about spicy tempura seafood snacks.

They're new at Trader Joe's, I think, and they go crazy.

Some of the best Trader Joe's snacks I've had in years.

Me and my wife, we were there and we had a discussion about like how many it's weird to buy.

Yeah, that's when you know you've got a good snack.

Well, this episode is going to be about why you shouldn't shop at Trader Joe's anymore, Peter.

Oh,

yeah.

Sam.

So buy as many as you can next time you're there.

Yeah.

Because it'll be a blast.

All right.

This week's episode is about what will happen to labor rights under a second Trump administration.

This is the latest in our Decision 2024 coverage.

And the final episode, unless unless and until we need to do an emergency episode because Trump tries to steal the election.

Yeah, or some other, something awful and crazy.

Yeah.

He's going to try.

It's just a question of, well, I guess whether he needs to, unless he wins legitimately, and whether it's like close enough that it's even plausible.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

Right.

I feel like it's going to be late election night and we're going to be texting like, do we have to do an episode right now?

Yeah.

Dreading it already.

I know.

No one talks about that, about the toll on podcasters.

Think about us.

All of this.

I was literally just today, I was looking at the Senate map and I was like, say, Kamala wins.

They don't hold the Senate.

It's just more.

We just keep doing this.

We keep doing this.

We just keep doing this.

The court just keeps going.

It just keeps happening.

And I was like,

I don't know.

I I don't know, can I keep doing this?

I don't know if I can.

I'm losing it, I'm losing it.

I mean, first problem: Michael opening a paragraph by saying, Today, I was just looking at the Senate map, right?

Like, yeah, you just like disentangle a bit mentally from that, Michael.

Yeah, we can start there.

It's good advice, it's good advice.

I need to take it going back to Super Mario World to finish 100% again.

Good luck to our temporary producer on this one.

In this episode, we are going to focus in on the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that enforces labor law in this country, which Republican administrations consistently try to undermine and defang, and which is currently under an attack, spearheaded by Afrikaner demon, Elon Musk.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Elon Musk going to the Supreme Court.

Let's talk labor law.

We've talked a few times on the podcast about the Supreme Court's role in rolling back labor rights, in attacking the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board.

But, you know, maybe historically, let's start with like why we have the NLRB before we get into like why Elon Musk and co are attacking its constitutionality and trying to get the board, the National Labor Relations Board shut down, basically, written out of the federal government.

So the NLRA, let's start there, the National Labor Relations Act.

This is really the foundation of federal labor law.

There were federal labor laws passed, enacted before the NLRA was passed in 1935, but this is really the big one.

This is the foundation of United States labor law.

And before that, there weren't a ton of federal labor laws.

And in fact, like labor laws were sort of dealt with and passed, enacted in the U.S.

in kind of a piecemeal way.

So, you know, the Clayton Act of 1914 protected unions from being legally designated as cartels, and so therefore, like being illegal.

The Keaton-Owen Act of 1916 tried to reduce child labor.

That one we've talked previously was actually struck down by the Supreme Court in Hammer v.

Dagenhart.

The Adamson Act passed also in 1916.

It created the eight-hour workday, but it was only for railroad workers.

So labor law before the National Labor Relations Act, it was like very like sector-based, you know, like focused on like worker area almost.

And actually, that's because of labor movement work before 1935, you know, actions and strikes that were taken up by workers that got those legal wins, got those laws passed.

But again, because it was so piecemeal, labor conditions first, you know, third of the 20th century, still dog shit.

And so the labor movement really rose up in a big way, in an organized way, in a mass way, in the early 1930s and really pushed the federal government to enact the NLRA.

I just want to put some highlights here of these kinds of labor actions.

In May 1934, longshoremen on every port on the West Coast walked out on their jobs.

There was a general strike of 150,000 workers in the Bay Area after two workers were killed by the police.

Teamsters in Minneapolis, this is all the same year, 1934.

Teamsters in Minneapolis shut down the city's transportation of goods for two months.

The National Guard was called in on that one.

10,000 auto workers in 1934 went on strike in Toledo, Ohio.

400,000 textile workers on the East Coast went on strike during the summer of 1934.

This all amounted to massive, massive pressure on the Roosevelt administration to do something about labor conditions and to protect workers' rights.

So what do you get from that?

You get the National Labor Relations Act, the NLRA passed in 1935.

And most of this law is about protecting unions and union organizing, right?

The NLRA protects rights to collective bargaining, protects against employer retaliation for union organizing and participating in collective bargaining.

And then hugely, hugely important, the NLRA protects the the right to strike.

And then the agency that's created by the NLRA, that law created the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB, which is the federal agency that's tasked with enforcing labor laws, all of these labor protections that have been passed by the federal government.

And that's the agency that's under attack here by

Elon Musk and those goons.

Yeah, and just to give you some further sense of what the NLRA does, one of the big protections that it offers is protection against what are called unfair labor practices.

Those include all sorts of like employer management intrusions into employee organizing.

So if you are an employee who wants to talk about your wages or the conditions of the workplace with your colleagues, that is legally protected because of this law.

Yeah.

So that brings us to 1937 and a Supreme Court case called NLRB v.

Jones and Laughlin Steel.

And so Jones and Laughlin Steel fired employees who were union leaders, who had engaged in union organizing in their plant in Alequipa, Pennsylvania.

I don't know if I pronounced that right.

Close enough.

No one knows.

You shouldn't have even, you should have said it with confidence.

So like we said, the NLRB was brand new.

You know, the NLRA was only passed two years prior, and the employees bring a complaint to the NLRB, and the board determined that this was an unfair labor practice, and that Jones and Laughlin Steele had to reinstate the workers, provide them back pay, and put up a public notice about how you can union organize.

You can talk about your working conditions with other workers, et cetera, et cetera.

So the company argued, and the circuit court agreed that this was beyond the power of the NLRB because it was regulating quote-unquote labor relations, not quote unquote interstate commerce, and thus was a power reserved to the states.

I'm just going to read a paragraph about Jones and Laughlin Steel so we can understand the sorts of companies that were saying,

this is an interstate commerce.

This is from the opinion.

It is engaged in the business of manufacturing iron and steel in plants situated in Pittsburgh and nearby Alaquipa, Pennsylvania, and manufactures and distributes a widely diversified line of steel and pig iron, being the fourth largest producer of steel in the United States.

With its subsidiaries 19 in number, it is a completely integrated enterprise.

owning and operating ore, coal, and limestone properties, lake and river transportation facilities, and terminal railroads located at its manufacturing plants.

It owns or controls mines in Michigan and Minnesota and operates four-ore steamships on the Great Lakes used the transportation of ore to its factories.

It owns coal mines in Pennsylvania.

It operates tow boats and steam barges used in carrying coal to its factories.

It owns limestone properties in various places in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

It owns the Montegahela Connecting Railroad, which connects the plants of the Pittsburgh Works and forms an interconnection with the Pennsylvania, New York Central, and Baltimore and Ohio Railroad systems.

It owns the Alakeepa and Southern Railroad Company, which connects the Alakeepa Works with the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie, part of the New York Central system.

Much of its product is shipped to its warehouses in Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Memphis, to the last two places by means of its own barges and transportation equipment.

In Long Island City, New York, and New Orleans, it operates structural steel fabricating shops in connection with the warehousing of semi-finished materials sent from its works.

Approximately 75% of the product that they make in the Alakeepa plant was shipped out of Pennsylvania.

I've counted, I'm not sure if I,

I'm not sure if this is right.

I've counted eight, maybe nine states names here.

So, the question, the legal question here, though, is whether this is interstate commerce.

Right.

And the argument is no, because look, these, the workers, they're all in Pennsylvania.

And it's their Pennsylvania plant.

So this is not interstate commerce.

This is labor relations.

The court does not buy this, but it's a slim victory.

It's five to four.

And this is the same year as the infamous or famous switch in time saves nine.

If you're not familiar with that, it was

the Supreme Court had been striking down lots of New Deal economic regulation five to four.

And in a case called West Coast Hotel Company v.

Parrish, Owen Roberts, who had been on board with striking down all this legislation, switched sides and upheld state minimum wage laws.

Those same five justices in the majority in West Coast Hotel were in the majority in this case.

It was the Chief Justice Hughes, and then some big names that you might know if you know Supreme Court history: Harlan Fisk Stone, Louis Brandeis, Cardozo, and the big switcher, Owen Roberts.

So this is very much of the time where FDR is pressuring the court with threats of expanding it for striking down economic regulation.

And a very narrow majority of the court decides to instead uphold economic regulation and preserve the nine justice total.

Right.

So that's a little history of the NLRB

and the initial challenge to its constitutionality.

Fast forward nearly a century, conservatives still hate this thing.

Yes, nothing has changed.

Their arguments are still as specious as they were back then.

They fucking hate it.

One important thing to remember is that Donald Trump was actually the president once before.

And so we have some very material data points concerning his disposition towards labor and the NLRB.

I'm just going to give you a sampling.

of what the NLRB did under Trump.

The two major outputs of the NLRB are rules.

Like many federal agencies, it hands down rules rules to interpret and enforce federal law.

Then it also hears labor disputes and issues decisions.

So, first, Trump's appointee to be general counsel of the NLRB was a dude named Peter Robb, who systematically refused to fill vacancies within the agency, reduced staff, failed to spend money appropriated by Congress to the point where the nonpartisan government accountability office issued a report indicating that the agency was failing to meet its goals.

Also, Also, early in Trump's term, the Chamber of Commerce, the massive business lobbying group, put out a wish list of the 10 things they wanted the NLRB to do under Trump.

From making it harder to add employees to bargaining units, to mandatory arbitration, to making it easier to fire union employees for what they say, and making it harder for employees to communicate about workplace issues.

The Trump administration delivered for them on all 10 items, every single one.

On top of that, they made it easier to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees.

They proposed a rule to strip collective bargaining rights from student workers.

The list goes on, and this is just at the NLRB, right?

I'm leaving out the Department of Labor regulations that limited overtime and such.

This is just the NLRB, which is really just about unions.

So the Trump administration was just anti-labor, anti-worker across the board, but with a particularly deep hostility toward organized labor.

And the return of that agenda would be bad enough, but the conservative legal movement has bigger plans.

But Peter, I saw him flip burgers at a McDonald's.

Oh, yeah, that was so good.

That threw me for a loop because I was like, oh, I didn't know he cared about workers.

But then I saw him handing out out fries.

I was like, whoa, watching him jiggle that fry cage in the fryer is one of the craziest things I've ever seen.

It was smart to get him to do McDonald's rather than other labor because I bet he is sort of fascinated.

He's like, this is what it's like back here.

I've always wondered.

Well, no, he said something.

I mean, yes, we know like a deep history of like loving McDonald's in this man, but

he says something.

Of course, this is all just like stupid, like made up shit, but he says something like, I always wanted to know what it was like to work at McDonald's when they hand him the apron.

So

yeah, that was the story.

And actually, for that man, probably kind of true.

Yeah,

he wouldn't want to do it, but he was curious about what it's like.

Right, right.

I do want to remind our listeners of what his go-to McDonald's order is.

I just need one second to pull it up because we can't talk about Trump and McDonald's.

It is two Big Macs, two fillet of fishes, and a large chocolate milkshake.

That's his go-to orders.

Disgusting.

2,430 calories.

2,400 calories.

In my house, we like McDonald's.

You know what I mean?

I love McDonald's.

I am not some cosmopolitan snob when it comes to fast food.

I get down with McDonald's.

Absolutely.

Two fish fillets, two Big Macs, and a milkshake.

Filth.

I mean, just

absolute nonsense.

Such nonsense.

And it's not an amount thing.

Look, I can put away some pasta, right?

The fish and the chocolate.

And then you see.

It's the combination, right?

It's the combination here of items.

It's upsetting.

Give me.

A spicy chicken deluxe, okay?

That's all you need.

If I'm hungry, I'll get two.

I love a McNugget.

I love a good McNugget meal.

Of course.

Of course.

Let's keep talking about

the other stuff that we like.

So several large companies have recently had actions brought against them through the NLRB, and they have responded.

to those actions by arguing that the NLRB is functionally unconstitutional.

Yeah, four big companies, probably everybody listening to this has at least seen some headlines about one or more of these companies doing terrible labor practices and being taken in front of the NLRB for complaints about violations of the NLRA.

And then also these companies then taking their cases to court to challenge the NLRB's decisions and now challenge the NLRB existing at all.

These companies, SpaceX, of course, run by the monster Elon Musk.

Amazon, run by the goon Jeff Bezos, Trader Joe's, run by

Shirley

an insane person whose name I don't know.

And Starbucks, that ugly guy that runs Starbucks.

It's these four bad actors.

These four companies have been charged with over the past few years, have been charged in front of the NLRB, of course, with complaints of firing pro-union workers, retaliating against organizing by cutting hours, closing shops, denying benefits being provided to non-union workers, and bargaining with workers in bad faith.

Currently, and I think this was as of March of this year, Amazon had 250 cases, open cases in front of the NLRB.

Starbucks had 741 open or settled cases by that time in front of the NLRB.

Trader Joe's was actively being charged with retaliating against workers for organizing activity and for failing to bargain in good faith.

And then famously, of course, Amazon has denied the right of workers to organize into a union, left and fucking right.

So.

Now, I believe the first of these companies to

make the legal argument and then was joined by the rest of these companies, make the legal argument that the NLRB is unconstitutional, actually, is SpaceX.

And Elon has been talking all over the internet about this bullshit.

And here's what SpaceX is arguing.

Again, joined by Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe's in this legal case.

Their argument in court is that the existence of the NLRB, the NLRB's structure violates the provisions provisions in the Constitution that protect the separation of powers, right?

So SpaceX is saying that the NLRB exercises this sort of like prosecutorial function by enforcing labor laws, but also has a sort of like legislative function by being about like a labor policy.

And then its adjudicatory authority, these are administrative law proceedings where administrative law judges are adjudicating complaints at the NLRB, that this violates the separation of powers, that like no federal agency should be able to prosecute and also legislate and also adjudicate, right?

Judges and the executive branch and the legislative branch, those should all be separate.

Now, They're also arguing that the NLRA, the law that created the NLRB, only allows the NLRB to basically provide or decide that equitable back pay is the remedy for workers who are making complaints and complaints that are found to be true about labor law violations.

To jump in here, the reason that this is so pernicious is because if the only relief that can be awarded in these cases is back pay, it sort of pays to just do unfair labor practices.

You might as well just fire people who are organizing because the worst case scenario is that you just owe them the wages that you would have owed them.

And I also want to add some color.

The original issue that this spawned out of was that several SpaceX employees criticized Elon Musk in an open letter, and then SpaceX just fired them.

Usually it's like you try to organize a union and you get fired, but with SpaceX, it's just like you can't be mean to daddy Elon.

And I will also add, while we're on the topic of Elon Musk, maybe like six or seven years ago, some discrimination cases came out of Tesla that were like the most egregious cases to enter federal courts in years.

Just to give you a little bit of an example, there were supervisors openly using the N-word in Tesla factories, and Tesla defended that case.

They did not settle.

They took it to a judgment, which they lost.

But that's part of Elon's philosophy of fight every case because he truly does not give a shit about the conditions in his workplace.

Yeah, speaking of the stinky billionaires who are so ugly and don't care about the workplaces that they run, Jeff Bezos, let's talk about Amazon.

Amazon jumped on board, of course, with Elon's case challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB.

Amazon has so many complaints in front of the NLRB, something like 250 as of March of this year.

Three administrative law judges at the NLRB had already ruled against Amazon.

A federal court had ordered that Amazon not interfere with workers' organizing rights.

That's where Amazon is at legally.

Yeah.

Starbucks, you know, as Riannon mentioned, has had a lot of, you know, claims against it at the NLRB.

In one particular case, it's being charged with unfair labor practices for interfering with two workers who were union organizing in Philadelphia.

That's the case that they have decided to bring this claim echoing SpaceX, saying the NLRB is unconstitutional.

And I just wanted to read this funny bit from that complaint.

On January 25th, the store manager sent an email to his boss, the district manager, venting about the two employees who were union organizing and stating he was, quote, willing to deal with the backlash that would come with terminating the two of them because it doesn't matter if we terminate now or one year from now, they will still call the NLRB.

That's definitely the email you want in your unfairly good practices lawsuit.

Folks, just make the phone call.

Now,

I don't want to help managers out, but like, just pick up the phone and say the illegal thing.

It's not that hard.

Yeah.

Trader Joe's also getting on this.

Also,

you will never believe this, accused of being union busting.

No way.

Again, just a funny note from that case.

The ALJ, the law, the administrative law judge,

when they first made their motion, was like, I'm certainly not going to be ruling on my own constitutionality anytime soon.

You're going to have to be taking this up with the federal courts, basically.

But they are, and we'll see what the Supreme Court says.

Yeah, one federal judge has already sided with SpaceX on this,

basically saying that they believe that they are likely to win on the merits.

That is now before the Fifth Circuit and will almost certainly make its way to the Supreme Court.

And we already saw in SEC v.

Jarkasy, the Supreme Court is skeptical of these adjudicatory powers for agencies, right?

The idea that these federal agencies are usurping power from other branches, that's very appealing to the conservatives on the Supreme Court.

If this argument wins the day, basically does away with the NLRB as we know it.

It would force union disputes into federal court where judges are less knowledgeable about labor law, cases are less likely to be heard because of caseloads,

take longer, more expensive, just on and on and on.

The net effect is going to be that many unfair labor practices just go completely unpunished, and employers will know it.

Employers will know that they can act much more aggressively vis-a-vis unions.

And the charge here is being led by,

there's no other way to put it, a foreigner, Elon Musk.

Poisoning the blood of our nation.

Yeah.

This

disgusting,

but

I'm trying to, you don't want to bring all of South Africa into it.

Right.

You know what?

It's like a Canadian South African.

I mean, just.

I think the best thing that I've ever seen

posted about Elon Musk, and I think that just like this wraps it up perfectly, is that like you could not believe the perfection of this kind of modern villain, the son of an emerald miner, right?

Inheritor of an emerald mine fortune who wants to colonize Mars, right?

Like this person in his evilness, in the poison of his brain matter, right?

Is the perfect modern villain.

This

represents the worst fucking things about the world.

And he's, it's so important that he's the like almost the opposite of Trump, the sort of like belligerent asshole who

wants your loyalty, but ultimately doesn't care.

Right.

And you have Elon Musk, the pathetic,

just the worm always sucking for your approval, just absolutely, absolutely humiliating himself day to day, crawling in the mud to waiting for you to like him.

Teenage Nazis.

Right.

Online.

Right.

Right.

I mean, well, that's because those are the only people who do like him.

Yeah, who are impressed by him.

Yeah.

Right.

It's so embarrassing for our nation, and we have to get these foreigners out of here.

I mean, I don't mean to do a 180 on this issue, but

I do want to note that he recently said he doesn't just want to colonize Mars.

He wants to turn it into like a debtor's prison, right?

He's like, oh, you can't afford the ticket.

The working guy, man.

You'll just have indentured servitude once you get to Mars.

Right.

Yeah.

That's

the dream.

I will say

anyone who hops on Elon's rocket to Mars deserves what's coming to them i i don't know i only have so much space in my heart you know what i mean like i'm not going to worry about those folks you are making a series of ungodly decisions yeah i agree and you should pay for it right

in a moral sense i can't i can't spend my energy worrying about you if karma means anything it means people who sign up to be Elon Musk's Martian colonizers will have a very bad time.

Yeah, on Mars.

On Mars.

It's like watching a full-grown adult just march off a cliff.

You know what I mean?

It's like,

I don't know what else I can do for you at the end of the day.

So there's a lot going on here.

You know, I think this is one of those cut and dry issues, right?

Similar to sort of reproductive rights, where I don't feel like we need to make the case to any listener that like Democrats are better on labor than Republicans.

But there is a little bit of nuance here.

There's always a little bit of tension between the reality of Trump and the aesthetic of Trump.

And I think you see this disconnect on labor and workplace issues quite a bit.

Like Trump markets himself as a populist, the blue-collar billionaire, right?

But there are very few issues where he has been as explicit as his disdain for unions, right?

He openly hated them as a businessman.

He laughs with Elon Musk about firing striking workers.

He implements anti-union policies when he's in office.

And yet he hasn't really suffered a lot of electoral consequences for it.

Vox recently published a piece titled The Democrats' Pro-Union Strategy Has Been a Bust.

The piece basically argues that despite Joe Biden's like very pro-labor, pro-union policy strategy, union members are only slightly more supportive of his administration than the general public is.

And that support has been consistently declining over the course of a decade.

On top of that, it's starting to manifest in union decision-making.

The Teamsters conducted an internal poll a few months back showing 60% support for Donald Trump among their members.

And after that, the union declined to make an endorsement in this election.

The International Association of Firefighters followed their lead.

I think there's like a tendency here among many people to basically just blame the union members for being idiots, right?

They're voting against their interests.

They're being stupid.

And

I agree fundamentally.

I think that's right.

They are.

And it's especially true of like Teamsters' leadership, right?

Who are abdicating their obligations to their members.

But this is also the natural result of the Democratic Party's decisions over the past half century.

The party very consciously decided to move away from labor as its bigs and then ostracized them further with like free trade deals under Clinton and Obama.

Obama ignored labor's request for a card check bill, which would have made it easier to form unions.

He sidled up to Silicon Valley billionaires.

And by the way, where are they now?

Are they supporting Democrats?

No, they're literally running the Trump campaign.

Yep.

They're all melting down ever since Epstein's Island closed.

Generally speaking,

although Democrats have been better on labor than Republicans, labor is just not the priority for Democrats that it once was.

And the lower it goes down the priority list, the less likely you are to win over union members, right?

That is just a simple fact.

It's just how politics works.

Politics isn't about being like slightly better than the other guy and then scolding voters for not being rational enough, right?

You need to prioritize the things that are salient to voters.

And Democrats haven't done that, right?

Biden has done a solid job, but you can't undo what's now generations of walking away from organized labor in the span of a single term.

We can definitely debate like when this break with labor happened and what initially instigated it, right?

Because a lot of white working class voters started leaving the party during the 60s and 70s in response to civil rights.

And sure, whatever.

That's not really, that's besides the point.

The point is that Democrats went looking for votes elsewhere in a way that has damaged their ability to pitch themselves as an unequivocal pro-union party.

Right.

And that's a that's a that's a problem.

It's a problem with like the big tent, right?

Just inherently, like if your tent is big enough for

labor and the management they're fighting,

you're going to have trouble convincing labor that you're on their side, right?

Like that's legitimately, like that's, they are oppositional, right?

Those are oppositional forces.

And yeah, Biden was better on labor than any Democratic president, I think, is since Johnson, at least, right?

We're talking, you got to go back 50 years, basically.

But that's one guy.

There are a lot of representatives and senators who are who are not super pro-labor, who are very private equity friendly, management friendly, not to mention that it's only four years, right?

Like

building a political constituency or rebuilding a political constituency takes time.

It takes a lot of time and consistency across the party.

Like, there's no reason why labor should trust Kamala Harris as much as they might trust Joe Biden after he's earned it, like legitimately, because

they don't have the record for her, right?

Like, I think she'll be good on labor.

I personally think so.

I think they should trust her.

But I think from a basic political perspective, like, I think it's defensible.

I do.

It's which is unfortunate.

Like, that's.

Yeah, or at least it's sort of understandable in a general sense, in the sense that you will inevitably, in the course of doing politics like this, lose some of those voters.

That's how it happens, right?

This is playing out now on like Gaza stuff, where

you see the same dynamic, right?

Where people are like, well, I don't like what the Democrats are doing on Gaza, right?

This is, that is the most polite way I can describe the sentiment.

And people will be like, well, but the Republicans probably going to be worse, Donald Trump going to be worse.

And that's true.

I think that's probably true.

But it is a fundamental tenet of politics that when you just start pushing people out of your coalition, that you will lose their votes.

This is just how politics works.

Politics is not about giving everyone a worksheet and having them figure out what the most rational choice is for them, right?

People have different things that matter to them, different things that are salient to them.

If you ignore the things that are salient to a certain voter, even if Republicans are not doing well on that either, you will be less likely to win that person's vote.

This is just basic politics, right?

This is how it always works.

It's basic politics, and you see it happening.

I mean, I'm glad you brought up Gaza as like this other analogy that's happening at the same time, but there's also a connection to unions and workers on Gaza exactly, which is that as you continue to ostracize the labor movement, right, workers start to realize that they have, they're not just organizing anymore for better wages.

They're not just organizing anymore for a couple of more fair labor practices at Starbucks and Amazon, right?

They're actually in their masses hold an immense amount of political power, right?

Workers.

Think about how many workers are in the country, right?

And how an organized workforce can exert that power on the federal government, right?

And so you see examples of this where large labor unions have, for example, made statements and taken positions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza from the Biden administration, right?

This is labor organizing outside of everything we're even talking about in this case, organizing for, you know, what we might call in a limited sense, workers' rights, right?

And the continued ostracization of labor from the Democratic Party like only leads to further rifts beyond those sort of just bare workers' rights, right?

They're identifying politically what is a problem with these parties, even if that party 60 years ago was the party that protected their right to organize and create, you know, the auto workers' union, right?

Right.

I just want to say something about just this philosophy Democrats have, right?

Because this is, this was all born as a reaction to Reagan and Reagan's dominance and a general

regulations have gone too far, the workers have gone too far, sentiment in the 80s.

And Democrats were in the wilderness politically in the 80s.

And so they reinvented themselves as this party that doesn't really believe in anything.

And it's just not them.

And whatever the merits of that approach in 1992,

that was fucking over three decades ago.

Like, it's a different world now.

Like, you have to, you got to believe in something.

You got to believe in something.

You got to stand for something.

And that's, that's a major problem with the current Democratic Party.

And I think that is an issue that sounds in many

different policy areas.

Labor being one of them, Gaza being one of them.

Like, but, but it's it's consistent.

It's like this is a major problem for them.

And it makes them look weak and dithering.

And you see this in reproductive rights as well.

This like not standing for something ends up diluting their message and it makes them electorally weaker.

This overarching strategy that was originally about putting elections first has made them electorally weaker.

Yeah, people with all these interests understand that this is just fucking lip service year after year.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And,

you know, fundamentally, there's a hard, there's a difficult issue here for the Democrats, which is

right now,

you can make the argument that one of their most reliable demographics is college-educated voters, right?

The education divide.

30 years ago was the opposite.

Republicans were capturing majorities of college-educated voters.

If you want to be the party of college-educated voters,

it is pretty difficult to be the party of workers at the same time.

A lot of union members don't have college degrees.

On the other hand, what it means is that if you can actually support labor while maintaining your support among college-educated people,

maybe you have a stranglehold on the American electorate.

And that's not an easy line to toe,

but that's sort of the dilemma facing Democrats, right?

Can you do both or not?

And if not, what type of party do you want to be?

Who do you want to represent?

Yeah.

And I do think there are opportunities there, though, right?

Like, I think you see a lot of leftists like sneer at like the quote-unquote PMC, the professional managerial class.

But like Peter and I have both worked in big law firms and can tell you the conditions there suck.

The work hours suck.

The ability to take vacations and personal time sucks.

Like the pay is good.

The office is nice, but there are a lot of things that are shitty about those working conditions, right?

Like there are a lot of office jobs that suck shit.

Like there, right?

There's a whole genre of novels and movies about this.

There are opportunities.

You can make this case about, you know, shared prosperity, more leisure time, better quality of life, and better pay that should resonate across the working spectrum, right?

Yeah.

We're right before an election, so we're talking about electoral politics a lot.

But let's pivot away from the impact on the Democrats and what the Democrats should do.

Organized labor is not just a way for Democrats to win elections, of course.

It's also not just a way for workers to improve working conditions.

It's a source of broad worker power.

Re, you mentioned labor solidarity with Gaza.

That's right.

Labor also has a history of anti-war activism, right?

The UAW famously opposed the Vietnam War.

Eugene V.

Debs went to prison for opposing entry into World War I.

The point of the right-wing project isn't to siphon labor's votes away from Democrats or something.

It's to erode the power of ordinary people.

Unions serve as a point of leverage for workers across a broad array of issues.

They are a point of democratic leverage for your average person.

And conservatism is an anti-democratic movement.

It believes in power being centered in a relatively small group of people.

The Supreme Court has held that extremely wealthy people can spend unlimited amounts of money in elections,

fund powerful organizations while remaining anonymous, can trade favors with politicians, basically.

A powerful labor movement erodes the power of those people and gives it to common workers.

And that's why conservatives want it dead.

That's why they will never side with labor, no matter what, like Josh Hawley says or whatever.

It's bigger than any given election, and it's bigger than the NLRB.

It's about the broad project and who gets to have power.

You know, Republicans do not want to share power.

Like, this is to Peter's point.

They don't want to share power, which is why it was really stupid for the Teamster's head to go speak at the RNC.

Because when the Republicans win, workers lose.

It's just that's just been, it's been the case for 40 plus years, and it's going to continue to be the case going forward because they fucking hate workers.

They hate everyone.

They hate everyone who isn't them.

If and when this case runs up to the Supreme Court, the court is going to frame it as if, you know, like with SEC v.

Jarkasy and cases like that, as if it's about procedural mechanisms and the sort of, you know, constitutional back and forth between the branches.

But it's not.

It's fundamentally not.

This will be and is

about worker power.

It's about who they are likely to side with and who they are not.

This is a court that has spent decades very overtly handing power to wealthy perverts.

And at every opportunity, they will side with those wealthy perverts.

This is, it's the wealthy pervert court.

I've always said that.

It's and

when a case about labor comes up to the Supreme Court, to them, it's not really about labor at all.

It's about wealthy perverts.

What would the wealthy perverts think about this?

Now, you can take all sorts of con law classes and try to figure out where you think the Supreme Court's going to land based on your constitutional law analysis.

You will never be able to gauge it as accurately as using the wealthy pervert test.

What would the wealthy perverts want out of this case?

It's worth mentioning that two Supreme Court justices at least are themselves wealthy perverts.

But we won't say who

for legal reasons.

All right, next week the episode will be dropping on Election Day.

We're not going to do anything serious because

Election Day is a day of terrible anxiety and unease.

We're all hanging on by a thread.

So we're going to try to do something casual like a movie review or whatever.

We'll be talking about something stupid on Election Day for you all.

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