Time to talk to about it. Thank you for the kind words it is great to speak with you. When i think of this book i see three major parts per go after you introduce the situation now, you do a really good job of talking about through stories how workers struggle and how they themselves have built the middle class to a great extent by organizin organizing, striking, bargaininh adversity and to demand policy changes. And then you go through the hard times of what i call the reagan era that i think were still in that companies starting with the president of the United States attacked workers a lot and they are unions and to tell a lot of hopeful stories about the creative and innovative ways workers have been organizing and make policy recommendations. A lot of books like this are criticized because they come up short on the policy recommendations because you have made a quite a few interesting suggestions of what could be done to restore the most powerful workers in this country. So lay out where you see things right now. What is the status of the working people and their ability to shape their lives at work over the last 19 years for people all over the nation is that so many people had no idea what unions do or how they help to bring us the 40 hour work week and pensions and the Bumper Sticker for those who brought us the weekend. I wanted to explain to people unions have achieved a lot in American History but now they are in decline they have been taking it on the chin and as a result things are considerably worse for workers than they were 34 years ago. I think far too few americans realize that the American Worker has it worse than other industrial nations. So more paid maternal leave the only industrial nation that doesnt guarantee all workers paid vacation or European Union workers are guaranteed six weeks and for decades now American Workers have been suffering terrible wage stagnation while the profits have reached record levels so i think a lot of workers feel something is broken and they are very frustrated. In my book i try to explain why things have headed south in many ways. Because it is arguably the weakest it has been just one out of ten are not in a union thats down from one out of three at their peak certainly unions have pulled but the role they play to build the middle class to help giving workers a voice whether a job safety or pensions and they have played a key role to enact medicare and Social Security more generous but in recent years they have been on the defensive and Corporate Power is trumped in many ways so we have to figure out to health and wage stagnation. For example we have it raise the federal minimum wage in over a decade this is the longest time it has not been increased. And i submit and argue because worker power is so weak in congress they cannot persuade them to raise minimum wage and its very hard for americans to live on 7. 25 an hour. One of the keys is to educate leaders about the problems workers have and the strategies to increase power for workers to help create a more prosperous nation for millions of americans and millions of workers. To a certain extent a lot of people dont even realize how few rights they have. One suggestion is to be go away from the Current System in almost all states except montana in which workers could be for a good reason or a bad reason or no reason at all. Basically you have no job security and you suggest going toward a just cause system where workers could be fired if they did something wrong or not just because the boss doesnt like who you are going out with. They could fire you for that literally. Most workers dont think that can happen to them until it doe does. Sometimes i get a phone call for someone from someone out of the blue my boyfriend got fired yesterday because he was two minutes late and the boss was angry about his attitude and was not smiling. Is that illegal . The at will employment means your employer can fire you for any reason or no reason except specifically like a civil right law of discrimination. People realize their jobs are very precarious and uncertain. And to my mind one of the big problems is that americans dont have power they are scared to exercise their voice at work. I write about the mining disaster where those mining workers were killed and they knew about the dangers in the minds but they were so scared to speak up with the dangerous gas filling the mine and it exploded so some people argue we should move from at will to just cause so workers could only be fired for a legitimate reason. Just cause system would certainly make them more willing to speak up with a safety problem or experience Sexual Harassment on the job. The other issue of raising the minimum wage is unbelievable we have gone this long without a raise of the minimum wage. In the house we pass the wage act that would raise the minimum wage at 15 an hour by 2025 gradually over the next five years or so and end the practice to have sub minimum wage for kid workers who are disproportionately women and people of color who are taken advantage of them that would put millions of dollars into poor peoples pockets and i think your point is the power isnt in the politics and the state capital just to get a decent shake in the United States in recent years. One thing that kills me is looking at business lobbyist to complain about big labor and how unions are so powerful so then who is really powerful and big quex i sought in the 2016 Campaign Cycle business gave more than three. 4 billion which is more than as much as unions according to a nonpartisan group. Each year in washington corporations have just under 3 billion on lobbying which is six times as much as unions and that explains a lot of the problems we see in washington. So to me its weird that congress raced through that tax cut for business when corporations or record profits from wall street was at record levels. And how far we can go in. Before we go in a different direction. Absolutely. And i have to frame way so many folks in congress or the senate is doing nothing to raise the minimum wage because they are listening to their corporate donors. I want to talk about these policy ideas but i want to emphasize to our viewers that at least i got so much out of this book from your stories and its a great part of the book the book is telling the stories of the workers today but also throughout American History. So i want to ask you, dont you think a lot of the stories that you tell from 100 years ago really have a lot of relevance to today quex so talk about the uprising of the 20000 and tell us about that story. I thought that had a lot of relevance to the strikers that work with struggles at the workers go through today or the issues they think thats not just about work but immigrant rights and for people of color in society. You read a lot of labor history and a character who fascinated me over the years her name is sarah she was born in the ukraine, jewish, her father is very religious. A lot of peoples kids and relatives had moved to new york. She would write letters for them because she was very literate. She did some work so her family moved to new york from ukraine a very bright young lady hoping to be a doctor someday when she arrives in new york she only spoke yiddish so what did she do . She worked in a sweatshop worker she was appalled that the conditions. 7 00 a. M. Through 7 00 p. M. I go to work before the sun came up. Seven days a week. And the bosses was sexually harass the women maybe they could be in the bathroom for a minute or two sometimes they had to pay five cents week to use Drinking Water and she thought this is appalling so she became an activist. I will not take this. Shes in her early twenties became one of the most prominent garment worker activists and then people started to go on strike there was a long strike at one or two garment factories and they made the decision do we have a general strike of garment workers to try to put maximum pressure on the factories. So they were deciding over these meetings and then say i dont know if we should have a strike are women dedicated enough to their job quex she stood up and said i think its time to call the general im tired of being a poor working woman struggling day after day and the place went bonkers and that began the largest strike to date by limited American History. To this day. They were calling for a 52 hour work week. Not even 40 hours. People think that was handed down by god especially the younger people but as one by the struggle of thousands of workers and their unions admit that uprising led to two months in the dead of winter these women mostly jewish and italian immigrants but after two months i got 56 hours they did not have to pay for needle and thread and then they could join the union to have recognition. One of the few factories that was not joining but then there was a tremendous tragedy where workers died in a fire. Here you have a story of a teenager and a woman in her twenties many were teenagers are very young overwhelmingly women and immigrant. They didnt speak english they spoke italian and yiddish they were despised by high society even though some high Society Women came to their aid and you dont have time to tell all the details but they were be not. Beaten up by goons that were sent in by their employers. So today with these inspiring movements that we should stop mass incarceration and black lives matter and immigrant lives matter that the daca kids say we demand our rights of other undocumented people. And those with the movement of Climate Change when i read your account so how aspiring for young people and activists today who fight for rights of this country. I dont think they say i should look to the Labor Movement for inspiration. One of the themes in the book is solidarity is important with people working collectively to lift themselves up to improve their wages and to help fair treatment of africanamericans with black lives matter but agency is important individuals need to be willing to stick on stick their next out to stand up and demand justice like in the uprising of 20000 thats crazy at what one. One broke 11 of her ribs she didnt even want to tell her parents because she thought they would not let her go speak out. And also there are incidents literally papers like the new york tribune that explained the thugs and the goons would come and beat the jesus out of these young women and the police would come and arrest the women and let the thugs go. They were so onesided. It shows how the establishment and the police and the courts were aligned against workers. Despite that they were able to win the strike. In the book i write about modern day workers who use their agency to fight i write about one worker in kansas city to hold to fulltime fast food jobs leaving for work at 6 00 a. M. And come back at midnight with three daughters he would leave in the morning returned after they went to sleep and he complained he works so hard to make ends meet he doesnt see his daughters most of the week. For a while they were homeless when the hours were cut off and it was crazy someone who was busting his derriere could hardly make ends meet and he became an activist and was a leader of one of the fight for this team and as i explained in the book i was a very first journalist to write about this and when it began seven years ago workers were demanding 15 an hour they said that is super ambitious pie in the sky now seven years later here we are new york california illinois maryland connecticut massachusetts District Of Columbia have all adopted a new minimum wage. So when workers are willing to stand up and individuals can stick their neck out they can achieve big change and a lot of those lessons of todays activists weather climate activist or a black lives matter or me to they learn a lot from the Labor Movement to write how the uprising of the 20000 in michigan when workers really stand up and come together they can achieve historical change. So in my chapter under teacher strikes in oklahoma and arizona and los angeles and chicago. The teachers were tired of being beaten down. You have to do something not just to increase pay but make sure schools get the funding they need, class size does not balloon we have enough money to buy modern textbooks. The teacher strikes have sent a message to the nation how worker power and trade unions help build a fair nation. Talk about strikes as a mechanism because they were very important to build the middle class in this country and they have fallen into disuse. You share information in the book how many strikes there were in the fifties or sixties or seventies and how because of law and weakness in labor they have fallen into nearly complete disuse and talking about when we start to see the teachers and Hotel Workers and the autoworkers at gm, right now my kid is on strike at a graduate employee. So tell us about the strikes in the role of history and how you see that going forward. In the forties through the seventies there were far more strikes than there are today in the seventies there were 300 large strikes per year. And of the previous decade there were only 13. And workers had become intimidated. In the fifties and sixties between the employers and unions as the nations economist and they gave contracts and come the 1980s the United States felt pressure from mobilization with the Japanese Cars with the imports of clothing and tvs and radios. And those put them under pressure to make employers bolder about confronting unions. So shortly after he became president in 1981, air Traffic Controllers went on strike to demand a large increase and a four Day Work Week and for reagan it was a make my day moment paraguay will not put up with this strike even though he was as president of the Screen Actors Guild i think he really try to show he would not let labor push him around he fined 11300 air Traffic Controllers for going on strike legally. And i explained in the book the union mishandled the strike they did not get public support from the fellow unions so they were clobbered and that was a major step back for unions across the nation that discouraged the unions from going on strike and at the same time the crackdown on air Traffic Controllers emboldened Corporate America to get much tougher toward unions. So in the eighties we saw a major decline in strikes but also corporations getting much tougher with Unionization Efforts and that made it much harder to unionize. Thats a big reason the percentage of workers is half in the eighties because the corporations they use so many sophisticated tactics to prevent workers and those who support unions often spy on workers who support unions so if workers vote to form a union so as i said the number of strikes have fallen to the lowest level in more than half a century. But the last year something happened. February 19, 2018 a quiet time for unions it was really the only major thing going on. Three days later there was a volcanic explosion in West Virginia where tens of thousands of teachers wearing red shirts went on strike and to explain how to teachers and english teacher named jay and one named emily got the ball rolling for a huge strike. Without the formal leadership of the union. Yes. West virginia teachers unions cannot bargain collectively with their districts. They have to beg the state legislature to give them raises. It was very conservative legislature cutting corporate taxes for the rich and that created a freeze in the education budget statewide antifreeze on teacher salaries. The governor of West Virginia was the richest man in West Virginia. He said i will give you a raise of 1 percent per year for five years. The teachers were upset because they had the 48th worst pay level of any state. The Health Care Premiums often went up 700 per year so the governors minimum wage of 400 while the Health Premiums go up more than that. So they started a Facebook Page which started slowly but once the governor said we will freeze the rays and the Facebook Page exploded tens of thousands doing it now all of a sudden they have a big movement. People were fed up. Were not going to take it anymore. And that spread across the heat was turning up it was getting worse. They were not getting raises with Healthcare Payments so in texas for the rich they said we wont tolerate this anymore they went on straight one strike at one they want the ability to continue going up so much and they force the governor and state legislature to pay more attention after years of starving the education budget. And teachers followed suit and that would surprise many viewers unions are supposed to be weak. Oklahoma one of the reddest states in the union i have a social studies teacher there was watching tv to see what they were doing and said we could do that here in oklahoma there is a huge strike in oklahoma with doubledigit raises and arizona teachers were on the phone with those who lead the strike in West Virginia and learned lessons there. It was an effort by the teachers and in los angeles and chicago that the government is not spending enough on her schools. We are tired of scarcity the class size is getting bigger kids are falling behind, behind, obsolete textbooks and the teachers went on strike not just to fight for a raises but a Better School system and not just for ourselves but for the community. The recent gm strike that the day the strike began the unions chief negotiator said this strike is not just for us but for all americans. Explained that. You are also concerned abou