The Jackpod: Union made
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I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The JackPod, where On Point news analyst Jack Beattie helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in now. Hello there, Jack. Hello, Meghna. Okay, we are at episode 60. What's your headline? Union made. Union. Okay, so tell me more.

Well, we're talking about the Department of Labor, which was made to satisfy the demands, really for a half a century, of labor unions for, quote, a voice in the cabinet. Trump's nominee to be that voice is Lori Chavez de Ramer, a one-term Oregon congresswoman who

who is an anomaly in the Trump cabinet because she does not answer to this characterization by the Financial Times, which calls the cabinet a cabal of narcissists, oddballs, geniuses, and delusionals. She's none of those things. Moreover, important to point out, unlike Kristi Noem, who's been nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security, there is no record

of Chavez de Ramer shooting a puppy. Let's just get that on the record, if we might. And the other anomaly about her is that she's sort of pro-labor. She was one of three GOP co-sponsors of a bill that would protect the right to organize, very important bill for

unions, the PRO Act. We've mentioned that before on this on this podcast. It turned out that in his first year in office, Barack Obama, this act or a version of it, which would essentially catalyze the entire labor movement by making it much so much easier to organize. This bill was in the House, the Democratic House,

And it was thought that a push from the president would get it over the line and make a dramatic difference in the lives of millions of people. But after a meeting with not one, not two, but three Chicago billionaires, Obama did not push the bill and the bill died. I suppose we should give him some credit. It took three billionaires to talk him over. Oh, God.

But Chavez de Rema, she voted for it and she came to hold her post after being, that is, a one-term congresswoman just defeated a month ago. And before that, she was the mayor of Happy Valley, Oregon. And she got her job on the basis of her pro-union stance, but also...

because there was a very powerful, a very big voice boosting her. Greetings, delegates and guests. I'm Sean O'Brien, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. First, I want to thank the hardworking Teamsters and union members here in Milwaukee who play vital roles in the building and operations of this convention.

And I don't care about getting criticized. It's an honor to be the first Teamster in our 121 year history to address the Republican National Convention.

So, Jack, obviously, as he just introduced himself, that was Sean O'Brien of the Teamsters at the Republican National Convention. So an historic moment, as O'Brien himself pointed out there. So is he the big voice that you were talking about that really boosted Chavez de Riemer into the nominee position for secretary of labor?

Indeed. In fact, he graded her nomination this way. He said, Representative Chavez-Duramer, nomination for labor secretary is a huge step toward fulfilling President Trump's promise to make a home for the working class in the GOP tent. And he was seconded in that view by the president of the AFL-CIO, Liv Schiller, who said she's built a strong labor record in Congress and

Elizabeth Warren lent her praise as well. And so it was clear that Sean O'Brien's backing was the key thing. It was he brought down the House at the convention when he when it was just days after Trump had been shot in Pennsylvania. And O'Brien brought down the House when he said that man is one tough SOB. They loved it.

The question is, will her voice be heard in a – well, in a cabinet of billionaires? It's striking that Trump's cabinet, the net worth of his cabinet is $340 billion as opposed to Biden's, which is $118 million.

And the $340 billion does not include the Goldust twins, Musk and Ramaswamy. They would put it up to, you know, $300 or $400 billion more. Yeah, just Musk alone, pretty much. Yes, anyone speaking up for labor in that cabinet will have a hard time making herself heard.

But Jack, can I just jump in here for a second? And please forgive me. Your point about the net worth of Trump's cabinet is very, very well taken. And it's important to note that.

But I think since you had you brought up Sean O'Brien, if if memory serves, Jack, I mean, he was he was bold enough at the RNC to, you know, kind of go after some of the sacred cows of traditional Republicanism. Right. I mean, he was pretty clear in his criticism of corporate America.

Yes, in fact we can hear him. Here he is voicing what would have been a heresy in Mitt Romney's GOP. Companies like Amazon are bigger than most national economies. Amazon is valued over $2 trillion. That makes it the 14th largest economy in the world.

What is sickening is that Amazon has abandoned any national allegiance. Amazon's sole focus is on lining its own pockets. Remember, elites have no party. Elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock price at the expense of the American worker. Jack, go ahead.

Well, let's put it this way. Friends of the working class don't sound like this. Here is Trump playing the tough SOB with Elon Musk.

I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, you want to quit? They go on strike. I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that's OK. You're all gone. You're all gone. So every one of you is gone and you are the greatest. You would be very good. Yeah. So. So, Jack, this is in a sense, this is par for the course for Trump. Right. Saying one thing out of one corner of his mouth, the other thing out of the other corner of his mouth. No one really knows what he believes or thinks until he does something. And

And to that effect, he has brought both Elon Musk to his, in a sense, into his government, trying to, you know, radically cut the size of the federal budget. And to get back to his secretary of labor nominee, he's brought Lori Chavez de Riemer into his next administration. So I still don't quite, it's still hard to see where Trump lands on labor. It is hard to see, although there's some clarity in his own record.

You know, there is his personal history, for example. USA Today in 2016 found that he had been involved in 3,500 lawsuits over 30 years, a large number of these involving workers or companies whom Trump had stiffed.

There were dishwashers in Florida, a plumber, painters, 48 waiters, dozens of bartenders at his resorts and clubs whom he did not pay after their work. And he spoke to spoke to this.

In what you might call elite fashion. He said, let's say they do a job that's not good or they didn't finish or a job that's too late. I'll deduct from their contract. Absolutely. That's what the country should be doing. Spoken like a friend of labor if I've ever heard one.

So that's his personal history. Then there's the history of his first administration. You know, in their write-up of this, the AFL-CIO calls Donald Trump's catastrophic labor track record.

They write, "Donald Trump told us in 2016 he would stand with workers. He lied." They have a list as long as your arm of things that AFL-CIO did not like in his first term, among other things.

They complained that he stacked the National Labor Relations Board with union-busting corporate lawyers. None of them were as prominent or as big a union-busting lawyer as his second appointed Secretary of Labor, Eugene Scalia, son of the Supreme Court Justice.

He's been described as a cunning lawyer, adept at dismantling regulations and weakening employee protections. One statistic about him, in the first six months of the pandemic, OSHA, which is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that looks after the

the well-being of workers on the job, OSHA, which is part of the Labor Department, received more than 10,000 complaints from workers.

And Scalia's Labor Department issued just two citations, 10,000 complaints from workers, two citations. That's the record of Trump won. And it casts into shade his promises about what he would do in his second term. But then again, Jack, I keep going back to the fact that you are a very...

Very appropriately highlighting this pro-labor former congresswoman as Trump's next secretary of labor. So the shadow cast by his first administration, point well taken. But it seems like there are some folks who actually do have higher hopes for Trump, too, if we could call it that.

There are, and one of them is Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, who's a friend of Labor in the terms of Sean O'Brien himself, who praised Hawley at the Republican convention. And Hawley has said Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris because he had the backing of working people. Now his mandate is,

is to pass an agenda that delivers for them. Congressional Republicans need to get over their love affair with corporate America and wake up to who their voters are. That's a ringing endorsement of the promise that Trump's new labor secretary could deliver and the Trump administration could be delivered this opening to Trump's working class supporters.

When you look at it, what are his initiatives that we're apt to see? Well, you know, the first one out of the gate seems to be renewing, re-upping the 2017 tax cut. Now, that was supposed to spur an investment boom. It didn't because two-thirds of corporations used—it was a corporate tax cut mostly—used that money to buy back stock and enrich the CEOs.

And indeed, I think one of the most, perhaps the decisively damning statistic about the 2017 tax cut, which is probably going to be the, renewing it is going to be the first act of Trump's administration apparently.

is that under this law, each Koch brother, there were then two, one has since died, each Koch brother got between $800 billion and $1 billion more in tax relief every year. Every year. So that is the far from worker-friendly tenor of that act.

Moreover, you know, you have to ask yourself, what did Trump's working class voters vote for? Did they vote for remedy? They need remedy. Truckers, let's go back to Teamsters. Truckers' wages adjusted for inflation are half inflation.

of what they were in 1980 when the industry deregulated, we note, under a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter. And now drivers are teaching machines, automatic, you know, self-driving vehicles, how to replace them. That's an emblematic statistic of the difficulty and the need for remedy that workers have. On the other hand,

The Trump campaign was not posited on ideas about growth or prosperity or progress. It was posited to quote the bulwark on the infliction of pain

deporting immigrants who, quote, "poison the blood of the country," retribution against Trump's domestic political enemies, and inflicting tariffs on disfavored countries. The bulwark sums it up: Trump did not promise to improve the lives of his voters. He promised to punish the people his voters wanted to hurt.

So we'll have to see. Is that, you know, at the end of 2017, Trump's first year in office, his approval rating had sunk into the 30s because this tax cut for the rich was so unpopular and because of the chaos of his administration. Will next year be different? Will he, you know, be able to...

do something to hold on to his base? Or will the sequel to Trump 1 follow through in Trump 2, in which we'll have a government of, by, and for?

corporations and the rich. You know, Jack, we'll have to wait and see what the impact of a Lori Chavez de Riemer Labor Department would have on Americans of all stripes, working Americans of all stripes, if she clears Senate confirmation. Because as Labor Secretary, she will have an impact on Americans across the country. So definitely wait and see on that.

But do you mind if I just take a minute to sort of tie together a couple of different threads that you've offered us in different jackpots over the past few weeks? Because it really comes to a head here. You know, you had mentioned that, you know, Josh Hawley was saying, you know, like he could really that President Trump's second administration could really do something for American working people. And that's why they voted for him.

Well, as I remember you pointing out beforehand, like who are the they that Hawley and Trump are actually talking about? I mean, more than more than eight in 10 Trump voters in this election, just like in 2020, were white. Right. We're talking about working class white Americans. So when we talk about American workers, though.

You've defined American workers, I think, by the clearest definition that I've heard, right, which is college educated versus non-college educated, right? And it's that non-college educated block of the majority of American adults who are

Who are America's workers in this context? Well, I was looking up some numbers, right? For black Americans, the percentage of adults age 25 and older who do not have a college degree is around 70%.

OK, the percentage of adults age 25 or older who are white who do not have a college degree is about 59 percent. So I guess my point in without throwing too many numbers is far more black Americans or Hispanic Americans are actually working Americans. Right. Then white Americans and amongst those groups, especially black voters, are.

Kamala Harris still won eight in 10 of their votes. So, you know, you know, everything I'm saying, I was just sort of like sort of reiterating these different threads that you've been offering us over the past few weeks, because I still truly think that that remedy or revenge.

framing that you offered us at the end is really, really important because when we're talking about working Americans as a whole, many of them still did not vote for Donald Trump, right? Indeed. Yep.

And so in that case, it's just like, who does he feel beholden to, if anybody at all, on planet Earth? And would he actually support measures that would strengthen all working Americans? If that meant, you know, increasing benefits or opportunities for black workers or Hispanic workers? I mean, I'm not sure I know the answer to that.

No, and of course, some GOP soothsayers say, well, look, he got more of the black vote, more of the black male working class vote than any Republican in a long, long time. And he certainly got more of the Latino vote than any Republican in a long time. And that this is a new, you know, to sort of encourage this movement

within his own party, he'll have to do something. We don't know. We don't know what will happen there. It is interesting that when he was asked during the campaign about raising... He was at McDonald's. If you remember, he did a day at McDonald's. Yeah. And someone asked him about raising the minimum wage and he just dodged the question. Yeah. Yeah.

Just to add to that, just this week, he was talking about not being able to drop the price of groceries because, quote unquote, it's hard. Even though throughout the campaign, he said, I'm going to make your groceries cheaper. Well, now he's telling the truth and saying, well, that would actually be quite hard. So maybe he can't do it. Anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt you, Jack, by stating the obvious, but go ahead. No, I quite agree with you. We just facilely say...

working class voters and we see it as a multi-racial, multicultural, whereas Trump's voters are dominantly, predominantly white people and among white people, white men and among white men, white non-college men, where he really cleaned up. And the question is,

Were they voting their interest or their resentments? And their resentments, their status resentments, their sense that what it means to be a white man in America today ain't what it used to be. And they want to, you know, make America great again. Mm-hmm.

Well, folks, let's go back to where Jack began this really interesting episode of the Jack Pod. And just to say her name again, Lori Chavez-Durimer is the president-elect's pick to be the next secretary of labor. So...

I mean, when looking at the next Trump administration, do you think that he could actually bring some benefits to American labor, to the American working class or not? And definitely want to know why. What impact do you think the second Trump administration will have on

on American workers. So you know the routine. Go to the On Point VoxPop app, which is hopefully already on your smartphone. If it's not, just go to wherever you get your apps and look for On Point VoxPop and leave us your thoughts there. And I'm really looking forward to hearing what you folks have to say, what jackpotters have to say about this because...

This cuts across the entire country. So, Jack, with that note, we're going to take a quick break and hear what people thought of the last episode of The Jackpot, which was several weeks ago. I'm sorry again. My apologies to everyone for being absent for a couple of weeks. But we'll catch up on your thoughts when we come back. Support for the On Point podcast comes from Indeed.

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OK, Jack, we're back. And in the last episode of The Jackpot, which was some time ago, you talked about that really devastatingly effective ad that the Trump campaign ran against Vice President Harris, the anti-trans ad. And I asked folks why they thought that ad was seemingly so effective. We got many, many responses. And here's a few of them. I think the...

Trump campaign's anti-trans attack ad was so effective because it shined a light on one specific area of their use of creating energy against the other, trans being the other. It was like a perfect storm of conservative or Republican bookie men. You couldn't imagine a more...

stereotypical, like, awful thing for a Republican. The idea of an illegal immigrant in prison who is transgender, who the government is paying for their gender-affirming care. Democratic support for transgender rights is not the reason they lost the presidential election. I think the main reason Trump won is that hate sells.

And the right-wing machinery has mastered the art of selling it. One reason the campaign against anti-trans people was so effective is religion. I see posts over and over again that God made man and women.

Okay, so that was just a small selection of the responses we received. You just heard from Mark Notes in Providence, Rhode Island, Michael Berman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Tom Moy in Middlesex, Vermont, and Leah McDonald in Springfield, Illinois. Jack, some of your thoughts?

Well, I think Michael, his comment is right on. What a perfect storm for Republican propagandists. You know, trans people, quote, illegal immigrants, quote, in custody, receiving from the taxpayer, you know, sex change operations. I mean, it's all the...

All the obsessions, all the fears, all the prejudices rolled into one image. And of course, it was a fecund piece of propaganda. But it's also a potentially very dangerous one because there are so few of these people and so many of them are, where they reach public notice, are young people who are so vulnerable. And there's, you know...

There are the borders of shame and disgrace, but I just think that ad was as disgraceful as anything I've seen in my time in looking at politics, just because this is about kids. Well, we actually had several interesting takes about the Harris campaign or the Democratic Party more broadly and their lack of robust response to that Trump ad.

So here's James Utt from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I think the biggest failure was the huge failure of the Harris campaign to not try in any way to counterpunch or counterattack on those ads, to do nothing at

implies in the minds of the average voter that there really is no counter argument to be made and that the ad in itself was accurate. So that's James in Minneapolis. Here's Ryan McCubbin, who identifies as non-binary and is in McLean, Virginia.

I think a part of the reason that the Trump anti-trans ad was so successful absolutely has to do with the fact that the left won't talk about trans rights in anything but absolute terms.

I think a part of that hesitance does come from fear of an extreme vocal minority, but I think another component that can't be ignored is that any discussion of compromise can quickly sound like asking trans people, who are real children and adults, to give up parts of themselves in order to make others comfortable. Jack, your thoughts? Oh, that's so eloquent. Give up parts of themselves.

As James pointed out, the Democrats didn't reply. Bill Clinton thought they should and urged it on the Harris people. But interviews with Harris campaign managers, they replied.

They say, oh, no, that didn't affect anything. That ad, our data showed that wasn't an effective ad. Well, their data also showed that she was going to win. So their data may be impeached by the strength of their hopes. But this point about giving up a part of themselves –

I quoted Louis Brandeis about what he called the right to be left alone. He said that was the root cause.

really the root passion of the American Revolution where British troops would just come into houses in Boston and search without any warrant or anything else because people were trying to evade the duties on stamps and so on. And that that right to be left alone is a basic human desire. And that's, I think, what trans people are demanding constantly.

Leave us alone. We're not harming anybody. And they are deeply in the American tradition of saying, please leave us alone.

Well, we're going to end this week with our friend Howard Turner. He is the man. I haven't had a chance to say this in a while. He is the man with the view from Elkhart, Indiana. Just because you are non-binary matters not to me. Whether you're transgender matters not to me. You're a person. You deserve respect just like I believe I deserve respect just for being a person. I just don't understand why in the land of the free...

Well, that's not all Howard has to say. And what he also told us, I think, is really, really interesting, Jack, because Howard said that this issue of how effective that anti-trans ad was is an example in his mind of how Democrats have failed to define what they stand for to voters.

But Howard says that's something he thinks President-elect Donald Trump has done very effectively. And he doesn't move away from that, trying to build a big tent or to find voters. It's like, this is what we believe. You believe this, you come vote with us. My advice for the Democratic Party is quite simple. Do the same thing. You have to decide what you stand for. And then after you make that decision, you go out to all forms of media and you sell that vision. Jack, what do you think?

I think that he's on to something. I mean, you know, again and again, interviews with voters showed people liked Trump's uninhibited way, even disinhibited way of speaking.

that he seemed to be not calculating politically about, I don't want to offend this group, I don't want to offend that group. I'm just speaking out of, you know, pure 100% Americanism. Partly it's to do with their coalition. You mentioned how white the Republican Party is indeed. The Democrat Party is not, and it's a diverse coalition, not just Republicans.

but culturally, geographically, and so on. And it's much harder for them to speak with one voice. Did she mention the minimum wage? Sort of in passing, you know, but it wasn't like, because of course that might make some of the donors unhappy, the corporations that were pouring money into the campaign. The size of their coalition makes them unhappy.

vulnerable to the charge of seeming to pander, of each sentence seeming to go through a committee before it reaches the mouth, before it's spoken. Yeah. Do you know what's interesting, Jack? I recently read an article that

I'm embarrassed I can't remember who it was by, but it was by a campaign operative who worked back in the day, in the 90s, on campaigns. And his criticism was that the Democratic Party has become too dependent at the national level on data mavens. OK, because he was saying, like, they are so good at following the data that they forget about the voters. And

And part of the reason why he sees the Harris campaign as having failed is like she wouldn't talk about the minimum wage. You're exactly right. Not just because of the it would draw the chagrin of billionaire donors. But the data apparently told them that in the districts they needed to win, that wasn't a winning message, which is really weird. Right. But but, you know, if you don't question data with common sense, then.

then you end up not talking about the minimum wage. I will go back at some point in time, maybe for next week's podcast, and I will find out specifically who said that because I thought it was really interesting and I want to hear more of your thoughts on that. But with that, Jack, I'm going to leave people wanting for more and wrap up today's podcast. Thank you as always, Jack. Thank you. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The Jack Pod from On Point.