2440 - Organizing & Protecting Workers In The Trump/Musk Era w/ Eric Blanc

Happy Monday! Sam speaks with Eric Blanc, assistant professor of Labor Studies & Employment Relations at Rutgers University, organizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), to discuss his recent book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. First, Sam runs through updates on the disarray among federal workers, the House GOP’s budget shitshow, Trump’s attacks on USAID, NIH, and the FDA, the firing of top military lawyers and JCOS chairmen, SCOTUS, a far-right surge in Germany, and Dan Bongino’s new role with the FBI, before expanding on the absurdity of Elon Musk’s recent request to ALL federal employees to justify their job in five bullet points. Professor Eric Blanc then joins, diving right into the role of the “Red State Revolt” of 2018 in setting the blueprint for the ongoing wave of bottom-up labor organizing that has spread across the US post-pandemic, with non-unionized taking the reigns in southern states where union-organizing was all but dead,  also briefly touching on the historically pro-management role of the US Government, with even Biden’s contextually pro-union NLRB only offering limited support to workers, and why Trump’s sharp cut-off of federal NLRB action still leaves local and regional organizing to continue as is. Stepping back, Professor Blanc unpacks how the post-pandemic union push saw the rise of genuinely new models for worker organizing, looking to efforts like the Starbucks unionizing campaign to emphasize how worker-to-worker organizing, especially when capitalizing on political and social momentum, can completely upend the labor balance of one of the biggest corporations in the US, touching on the difference in risk-assessment between these smaller movements and massive unions, before expanding on why these bottom-up organizing efforts are anything but antithetical to large unions, and offer them an incredible opportunity to capitalize on the growing power of the rank-and-file. After briefly musing on the future of the ongoing labor renaissance in the US, Eric and Sam wrap up with the incredible evolution of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee from a Pandemic-era labor resource to one of the biggest national resources for budding union efforts, why backing our federal workers (and their unions) has to be at the center of the fight against Trump, and what those of us on the outside can do to help.

And in the Fun Half: Sam dives deep into some updates to the HUD video communications under the Trump Administration, listens to a now-former IRS employee’s reflections on the insane management of the Trump/Musk regime, and watches as Sean Hannity and Brian Killmeade tell disabled veterans and federal workers that they’ll just have to take the hit. A West Virginia CSPAN caller unpacks Trump’s immediate impact on raising his insulin prices, the New York Times forgets to do journalism when writing about Pete Hegseth, and Maine Governor Janet Mills goes toe-to-toe with Trump for trans kids in her state, plus, your calls and IMs!

Follow Eric on Twitter here: https://x.com/_ericblanc

Check out Eric's book here: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/we-are-the-union/paper

Find out more about EWOC here: https://workerorganizing.org/

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