Alright, well, good morning everyy. Im gonna call the meeting to order here. My name is Mark Trumbull and im the economy editor of the Christian Science monitor. Uh welcome and especially welcome to our guest. Todays guest is liz shuler of the a. F. L. C. I. O. Shes the president of the Labor Federation and were very glad to have you with us again as another Labor Day Weekend rolls around. Weekend rolls around. A little background, president schuler grew up in a union household. Her father was a power lineman and longtime member of the electrical workers local 125 at Portland General Electric in oregon. Her mother worked in the companys service and design department. Ms. Schuler attended the university of oregon and i might insert my own go ducks here, since that is the alma mater of my fatherinlaw. During college, ms. Schuler worked summers at the electric company. I would say her life since then is testament that there can be a future for people who earn journalism degrees. After graduation, she returned to Portland General Electric to organize workers who were in nonunionized, clerical roles, like her mother. She then went on to lead other organizing efforts for the International Brotherhood of electrical workers in both oregon and california. In 2000 nine she became the first woman to serve as aflcio secretarytreasurer. The federations number two official. And now she stands as the first woman to be elected president of the aflcio in the organizations roughly 6060 year history. Again, welcome. Now, just some brief ground rules. We are on the record here. Please, no live blogging or treating treating. No filing of any kind until the breakfast is over. Once the session and set about 10 00, there is no embargo. We will email a rough transcript from this breakfast all reporters shortly after we conclude. As many of you know, if you would like to ask a question, you can send me a signal and i will call on you in order. Now, president schuler, if you would like to make some brief opening remarks, we would welcome that. The floor is yours. For along time, my predecessor did this breakfast. It was my first or second week as president last year when i attended this breakfast. I was what they call, a deer in headlights. This year we are in a different place. I want to thank you for inviting me back. I want to thank all the working people in the room behind the scenes who are making this breakfast happen as well. This is an incredible moment to be leading the American LeagueAmerican Labor movement. Movement. It is very personal to me. You alluded to my family story. My family story is similar to so many families where it really was Union Membership that created the stability and pathway to a better life for me and my family. My dad grew up in a one room fruit picking shack in hood river, oregon. He and his siblings often went hungry. After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the marine corps and went straight to vietnam. When he came back, he returned to oregon, he found a job as a whole bigger. Back in the days where power pole holes were dug by hand. At Portland General Electric. It was a power linemans apprenticeship that put him on the path to a good union job. That changed everything. In one generation, our family had a roof over our head, enough to eat. Such a different experience from what my father had growing up. That is the power of the union. That is what ibew 125 meant to my family. From my daddy, i learned the value of a union card. My mom also worked at the company. And i worked there. We were both Clerical Workers. We didnt have a union, the power lineman did. That difference was what showed me that in addition to good pay and good benefits, it also meant dignity, respect, having a voice, being heard. That is how i got my start. We started organizing Clerical Workers at the company and it really is about having oneonone hundred stations, which we are hearing so much about these days, the importance of talking to each other facetoface. That is what Union Organizing is. Many of the women i worked with, the Clerical Workers, that is what we did. We started having oneonone conversations about a fair work base. I learned how to organize from my mom. She was one of the fiercest organizers. She got called to the ceos office for a oneonone meeting during that drive. Fast forward to this moment, today, an historic moment for organizing. Millions of people want to join a union and they are organizing unions across industries across the country. There have been historic investments in clean energy, technology, infrastructure, we are coming off this wave of activity in congress that is going to lead to a competitive economy. Sustainable environment and the promise of good quality jobs. Our democracy is at a crossroads. Will be build a more inclusive and responsive democracy . Or will be allowed ourselves to be divided . For each of these opportunities and challenges, there is one response, one constant, unions. Since i was here last, you may remember we had strike tober. Workers everywhere from nabisco to john deere were rising up, using their collective power on the picket lines to ask for more. The momentum has only build from there. For every story you hear about working people organizing and joining together to form unions at amazon or starbucks, there are six or seven or more stories in other industries. Just this summer, over 100 nurses at a hospital in coral gables, florida organized. Rei workers in the bay area won. Painters have organized in shipyards in alaska and louisiana. Aircraft mechanics in north carolina, five hundred 50 researchers at Mount Sinai Medical School have organized a union in new york city. 500 auto workers in michigan, 200 Hotel Workers in austin, texas won an organizing drive. Hundreds more in places you would never expect. Museums, Cultural Workers in los angeles, baltimore, new york, even hundreds of workers in the new industry, the cannabis industry. I always get a snicker when i mention cannabis. I am from morgan, yes i know. They have come together to form unions. This is so unexpected, so surprising and it shows that there is no industry or workplace that a union does not belong. It is every type of job. Working people, the reason they are organizing and numbers are so high is because they are tired of being called essential one minute coming out of the pandemic, then treated as expendable the next. They are tired of working more and getting less in return. While their bosses collect bigger paychecks and buy rockets. They are connecting the dots and realizing that together they have the power to fight back. You dont have to just sit back and take it. Gallup just released their latest polling. You all probably know this, i am in a room with very educated people. But, that poll found that a record high 71 of people in this country support unions. I have to tell you when i am on picket lines or i am talking to organizers, there is an energy and a drive unlike we have seen among working people in a generation. What keeps me going everyday is hearing from them and bringing their voices into these conversations, keeping my finger on the pulse of what working people are thinking and feeling. We need, in this moment, to bring as many people as possible from the margins of the economy to the center. Making sure that women and people of color are helping drive our agenda because they are the future of our workforce. We need to build a Labor Movement that is modern as modern and dynamic as our work laces. The needs of working people are going to be different as work is changing and technology evolves. The Labor Movement has to evolve with it and we have to grow the number of people in unions so that working people are driving the future, not just ceos. That is why growing the Labor Movement is the first goal coming out of our convention we announced the center for transformational organizing. Our baseline goal is to organize one million new workers. We know that growing the number of people in unions is going to create the power balance we need to fix our broken economy. The cto is going to be the place, the center of gravity, where we make those plans for growth together, where we are bringing the power of all of our unions and landing on specific goals. That is where we will get out of our silos and build a movement that is taking on very specific goals together. Particularly in nonunion areas of the economy like gig work, amazon, the Clean Energy Economy. We are also taking that same all in approach on organizing to our political work. I know everyone here is anxious to talk about the election. But, we have been in the business of one, facetoface conversations since our inception. People are recognizing the power of those tactics that really come in this moment where everyone is so polarized and divided, the only way you breakthrough is by talking to each other. It sounds so old it is new. That is the way you breakthrough the noise. When it comes to the midterms, we are not only because we know how to do this, but we are uniquely positioned to make a winning difference because we have this infrastructure that no one else has. We have a network of state aflcios, Central Labor Councils in three zip code in the country. We are taking that network and turning it up to 11, as they say. Working people are reclaiming their power. Everywhere from the workplace to the ballot box. We are organized and we are ready to win. With that, i appreciate the time and look forward to having a conversation. Wonderful. I will start with a question or two and we will open it up. You mentioned the health of our democracy being at stake i wondered, this is a broad question, but what do unions, what can they bring . What can you bring that connects the dots from Economic Health of workers to the Political Health of our country . How do you see that working . As part of that, is there something to do with the fact that the middle class seems to be smaller as a share of the whole society, than it was way back 50 years ago . We would argue thats because Union Density usually tracks the health of the working economy. Your question is timely because you are right. People are angry, frustrated, set up. The economy is broken and that is translating into our politics. We are seeing that frustration manifests itself in the way people respond in elections. We would say that unions are a pillar of a healthy democracy. We see it around the world, unions have always been a bedrock, the foundation of a healthy economy and healthy society. As unions get stronger, our democracy gets stronger. Our fundamental role and responsibility is to educate our members and all working people about how to balance the scales of the economy by coming together collectively. When you come together collectively, you have more power both in your work lay send your ability to influence those decisions made on capitol hill. I think we saw that demonstrated in this last year alone with the investments that have been made in congress. It is because working people demanded it. In the last election, they made it clear what they were looking for. They want more investments in clean energy to grow a stable future and create good jobs. They wanted investments and things Like Health Care my hate safety and health on the job. Coming out of a pandemic, it could not be more important. They are deeply connected, but the Labor Movement is uniquely positioned to reach real working people and actual workplaces across the country. We can be the messengers. We can be a trusted source for information and help people connect the dots between their frustrations and actually how to make the change they desperately want in their politics. Ok. Followup, you mentioned strong polling numbers. Your favorability overall. Yet, theres a lot fewer people in unions than there used to be. Is there something that unions the cells need to do better to make this case that you are making, that it is time to rebuild them . We are always looking in the mirror, trying to be more effective and more relevant to working people and what they need and deserve. Especially as the workplace is changing. We need to be more dynamic, modern and inclusive to reflect the changes happening in the work waste. I also believe that the fundamentals of our labor laws are so broken that that is mostly the root of the issue. Why so many people want to and support unions, yet have trouble joining them. We know that the law of the land, the National Labor relations act encourages unionization. It is a fundamental right in this country to be able to join the union freely. However, that has been chipped away at overtime and has been tilted in favor of corporations who do not want to see people form unions because they perceive it as a threat to their ability to run their business for their bottom line. What we need is to reform our labor laws so that it actually gets back to the spirit of the National Labor relations act and give people the rights they deserve into the voice they deserve in the workplace. Be able to freely join unions so that if you see a partner at starbucks, that they are truly treated as a partner and enable to form a union. Our little legislation we have been backing, the proactive. For a number of years, we talked about it last year. It reforms the law so that it makes the intimidation tactics and the hostile environments that companies create illegal so that employees are not forced to sit and listen to antiunion propaganda against their will. They are not fired for the basic exercising of basic rights. Which we see in campaign after campaign. I am so glad you all are covering starbucks and amazon the way you are because it has shined a light on the tactics that have been happening for decades. The fact that there are unionbusting consultants, hired to harass people and intimidate them. We have seen it time and time again. Labor law reform is the key ingredient here to enable people to join unions without fear. Of course, we are constantly looking for the Labor Movement to be more responsive to the needs of working people as we modernize our economy. Grade. Now we will go to neil. [indiscernible] [indiscernible] it is a bit of a political question. The president is going to the president is going to wisconsin and pennsylvania on monday on labor day for labor related events, something you said about how youre having success in organizing in places that are not traditionally where you would think they would be uh leaves the question of how do you deal with the likelihood that the membership of the unions in some of these places where there are not traditionally unions may not be democrats, they may not be people who would traditionally be biden voters or people who youre going to gotv for democrats in november. How do you deal with the membership that may not look lyrically, there other political positions that may not politically aligned with the Labor Movements goals are at the federal level. Liz well, that is a question that i think speaks to the moment were in in our country where, you know, we have a lot of divergent views and in fact, were pretty polarized as a country. I would say the Labor Movements membership, you know, kind of exit similarly. Kind of tracks similarly. We have members that certainly will disagree with candidates that perhaps have been endorsed at the local level. But those are democratic processes, right . The members on the ground that actually make those decisions they deliberate based on the issues and where candidates stand. And thats the one thing i hope you take away is that we are an issues driven organization. We dont put candidates first, we put workers first and we look through the lens of working people when were identifying the issues that we measure those candidates against and it happens to be that president biden, who is a democrat has been very much a pro union president. So we are proud of the track record that he has had and his administration has had. That translates down at every level, you know, from city council to congress and the added state sentence. Through an issues based lens. So what i would say to a member that perhaps is unhappy that a democrat is endorsed, is to look at whats underneath that look beyond the party label and look at the issues that we are measuring against. And so is that candidates supporting raises in the minimum wage, is that candidates supporting stronger safety and health protections, osha protections, you know, is that candidate actually supportive of collective bargaining and in forming unions, and thats usually where we fall off, right, is that many republicans disagree with the fundamentals of collective bargaining and being in a union. And so how do you support candidates that disagree with your very existence . What we try to do is be very objective and and an issues based approach, and we can talk more about that as we go here, but we are taking a different approach this year and that we are not flying in, you know, from the National Level and basically trying to land on a minute he and community and push a particular brand of political program. Were actually doing the reverse. Its more of a grassroots effort that then influences what we do nationally because its driven around issues and really listening to our members and what are the issues that they care about . At what we think in washington dc not what we think in washington dc they should care about but locally. Im hopeful that that actually enforces you know, the strength of those endorsements because they will be deliberated on based on the issues that are driven locally. Two questions. First i want to follow on. Your account about trying to organize a million new members and thats a pretty big number. According to bls the number is around 15 million. It has gone down in the last few