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And now our free mobile app or online at c-span.org. | |
| Here's a look at some of our live coverage coming up on Thursday on C-SPAN. | ||
| First, at 4 p.m. Eastern, a workers' rights rally organized by the Metro Washington chapter of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. | ||
| It'll include speeches from a regional AFL-CIO chapter president and other union leaders. | ||
| Then at 6.30 p.m. Eastern, it's a discussion with Federal Reserve Board Member Christopher Waller about the nation's economic outlook. | ||
| This ahead of the Fed September meeting where Fed Chair Jerome Powell has hinted at cutting interest rates. | ||
| It's being hosted by the Economic Club of Miami. | ||
| You can also watch live coverage of these events on the C-SPAN Now app or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| AFL-CIO President Liz Schuler speaks here about the role of unions in today's political and economic climate and stresses the need to fight back against the Trump administration's policies. | ||
| She also highlights Americans' continued trust in unions. | ||
| Good morning, brothers and sisters, union family, and everyone in this country who works for a living. | ||
| I'm Liz Schuler, president of the AFL-CIO. | ||
| We are America's unions, 63, representing nearly 15 million workers across every industry and every type of job. | ||
| If you wake up every morning thinking about how to make it in this economy, how to find a good job, build a career, pay the bills, put food on the table for your family, and live and retire with dignity, we're fighting for you every day. | ||
| This time each year, we come together to remind this country, Labor Day is our day. | ||
| It belongs to all working people. | ||
| It's not about back-to-school specials and mattress sales. | ||
| It's about the people who will show up to work on Monday, long before the doors open, cleaning the floors and stocking the shelves. | ||
| The teachers who will use their day off to put together lesson plans for the new school year. | ||
| The nurses and first responders and restaurant servers and flight attendants and fast food workers who won't get a holiday come Monday morning, who will put on their uniforms for just another day on the job because they know their communities and their families need them. | ||
| Labor Day is about what those workers and what all workers deserve. | ||
| Now, I travel the country a lot and everywhere I go, people ask me, how are workers feeling out there? | ||
| Where do we stand on things? | ||
| So two years ago, we started a new tradition to come together every year for a real and honest talk about the state of our unions. | ||
| This is a moment unlike those past two years because this is a moment unlike any in the history of our labor movement and our country. | ||
| I'm here at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C., what we proudly call the House of Labor, two blocks from the White House. | ||
| And outside this building, there are 2,000 federal troops on the ground, blocking peaceful streets, harassing working people, costing American workers as taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. | ||
| Money that could be expanding health care, funding our schools, or housing those on our streets. | ||
| And it's just one more example of what I've heard from workers again and again these past six months. | ||
| Where is the common sense? | ||
| Where are the lower costs among my groceries, my rent, my medicine? | ||
| Why are my job, my family, my future, my community, the services I count on, suddenly being threatened and ripped away? | ||
| Every year we think about a word that captures the state of the unions at this given moment. | ||
| Strong, rising, whatever it may be. | ||
| This year, there's only one possible answer. | ||
| The state of the unions, the state of working people in this country, is under attack. | ||
| I think if this is a president who really wanted to empower workers, he wouldn't have just stripped 700,000 people of their collective bargaining rights. | ||
| The list of laid-off federal workers continues to grow. | ||
| Administration's sweeping cuts to the federal workforce have dealt an especially hard blow to the nation's veterans. | ||
| As a veteran, honestly, it concerns me on whether or not I'm not going to be able to receive the quality of health care that I've earned. | ||
| My 80-year-old mom has called me crying from worrying about what is happening to the Social Security Administration. | ||
| Both production in force at NIOSH isn't just a staffing cut, it's a direct attack on every single worker in this country. | ||
| Now, imagine every day you come to work, every morning you get up, you dress, and you come to work. | ||
| You don't know if that's going to be your last day at work. | ||
| We've seen greedy CEOs and billionaires before, haven't we? | ||
| What we've never seen is those same CEOs and billionaires being handed full control of our government, our democracy, our lives. | ||
| 13 billionaires in one picture, four of whom now run agencies of our federal government. | ||
| If you've ever met someone who says that the word oligarchy is too confusing or too complicated, well, you can explain it in that one photo. | ||
| This is a government of, by, and for the CEOs and the billionaires. | ||
| But we also need to recognize it's been that way for a long time now. | ||
| Your dollar is not quite your dollar that it was two years ago. | ||
| And I see these working people in there. | ||
| They're struggling. | ||
| I am one of those people that it's going to cost me $1,200 more. | ||
| Everything just keeps going up and up and up, and we need more benefits to keep going. | ||
| He's supposed to have insurance, their cost to go and go up. | ||
| Attacking my financial freedom. | ||
| We are always looking for raises to keep up with the rapidly rising cost of living in New York City. | ||
| More and more people are going to be out on the street because they're not going to be able to afford it. | ||
| All it means is taking more money from us and giving it to corporations. | ||
| Hopefully, going forward, you know, prices do go down in certain areas, but at the end of the day, I still got to go to work, you know, and that's not going to change. | ||
| These struggles, the precarity, the uncertainty people are living with when it comes to their rent, their health care, their fears about AI and the future, it didn't start with Donald Trump. | ||
| It started with a system that has left people behind for a long time now, that has put CEOs over construction workers, billionaires over baristas, that has gutted labor rights over the past 40 years, and not a coincidence, saw income inequality rise to its highest level ever. | ||
| FDR once reminded us: democracies have gone away in other great nations, not because people hated democracy, but because people gave up liberty in the hopes of getting something to eat. | ||
| If we push people to the edge to the point where they can't afford groceries or health insurance or a place to call home, we can't be surprised when they turn against the system they're living in. | ||
| This is the choice working Americans have been given: chaos or the same broken status quo. | ||
| An authoritarian who tells us only he can make things great again, or convincing ourselves everything is already great while black women make 64 cents on the dollar and young people struggle to pay rent, or a CEO makes 7,000 times what his workers make. | ||
| That has led us to this moment. | ||
| We wanted cheaper groceries and we got tanks in our streets. | ||
| We wanted affordable health care. | ||
| We got 16 million Americans who are about to be kicked off their coverage. | ||
| We wanted jobs you could raise a family on, but that's not what we got. | ||
| We got more American workers laid off last month than any month since the start of the pandemic. | ||
| The American people said loud and clear, unions are the one thing we agree on. | ||
| Instead, this administration attacked us and the workers who keep this country going. | ||
| Veterans like Sharnice Mundel, who served this country in the Air Force, came home and kept serving in our government for years to make sure retired post office workers got their benefits until an email came in one night in March at 11 p.m. telling her she was fired along with thousands of others. | ||
| Lumber mill workers like Luis Gomez-Garcia in upstate New York, who did everything he was supposed to do, got a work permit, got a job supporting his family and his two young daughters, until immigration officers showed up at the mill and arrested him without cause and pulled his daughters out of school. | ||
| Federal workers like Derek Copeland in Georgia at the Department of Agriculture, who made sure food was being imported into the country and was safe to eat until one morning in February when he got a letter saying his employment wasn't in the public interest. | ||
| This administration wants us to look at stories like these and say, oh, it's not my job, my livelihood. | ||
| Maybe there will be more for me if someone else loses. | ||
| They want to convince working people that we are each other's enemies, that we need to fight one another to land a good job, to find a home in a safe neighborhood, that only so many of us can live with dignity at the same time. | ||
| We are not each other's enemies. | ||
| We are each other's neighbors, friends, co-workers. | ||
| We are each other's brothers, sisters, and family. | ||
| Whether we work for the public sector or the private sector, whether we are immigrants or fourth generation, whether we are gay, straight, trans, black, white, blue state, red state, we are all suffering under the same broken system. | ||
| It doesn't have to be this way. | ||
| Things can be different if we build real sustained power that shows up every day, not just once every four years. | ||
| Politics alone won't fix what's wrong with this country. | ||
| Not when there are members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who are more worried about their reelection than they are helping working families, who would happily let you get automated out of a job if it meant they got another campaign check from the CEO doing it. | ||
| Republicans aren't going to save us. | ||
| Democrats aren't going to save us. | ||
| Working people are going to save ourselves. | ||
| For the past few months, we've been in the field conducting our annual poll of working people, and we asked workers of every age, political background, sector of the economy, how they feel about their lives right now. | ||
| Who do they trust? | ||
| Who do they believe in? | ||
| And who do they not trust? | ||
| Here's what we heard. | ||
| People have lost faith in every institution in this country. | ||
| Our political parties, our Supreme Court, our religious institutions, corporations, our media. | ||
| Every single one of them is underwater right now in terms of trust. | ||
| Yet nearly two-thirds of this country believes in unions. | ||
| And when you ask the most vulnerable workers in this country, the workers who say, I'm living on the edge, I don't have time for politics because I'm too busy trying to get by. | ||
| I just want someone, somewhere to help me build a better life. | ||
| Those workers still have faith in one single thing. | ||
| 75% of those workers say they believe in unions. | ||
| They believe that joining a union is their best shot to build a better life, a more secure life, a brighter future for themselves and their families. | ||
| They believe because they've seen us deliver again and again. | ||
| When this administration ripped away the collective bargaining rights of one million of our brothers and sisters in the federal workforce, jobs that families and communities count on, we organized. | ||
| We took them to court. | ||
| We rallied outside our elected officials' offices. | ||
| We shaped legislation that politicians from both sides of the aisle rallied around, the Protect America's Workforce Act that would restore those rights. | ||
| We are one step away from passing that legislation. | ||
| And so to every member of Congress watching out there, let's get it done. | ||
| When this administration fired federal workers who have made up our civil service for decades, disproportionately hurting black workers and communities of color, cutting the programs so many working families depend on, telling our educators, don't talk about Harriet Tubman and the Tuskegee Airmen in our schools. | ||
| Our teachers, our civil servants, our members all over this country stood up and said, hell no. | ||
| And when this administration came for immigrant workers, when our brothers and sisters who have contributed to this country, contributed to our communities, were snatched off the streets, disappeared and detained in for-profit prisons without charges or due process, we rallied around them. | ||
| We trained an entire grassroots army of union activists, organizers, and members so we could exercise our constitutional rights and fight for their release and keep them here with their families where they belong. | ||
| That ability to take on power, to create and build power of our own, it's what unions do. | ||
| It's in our blood. | ||
| It's how we won the weekend and paid vacation and the eight-hour workday and Social Security. | ||
| It's why in states with the most unionized workers, all workers make more money and more people have health care and there are greater investments in our schools. | ||
| It's why workers all over this country know it's better in a union. | ||
| And it's why right now, we are the ones to lay out the vision for where this country needs to go. | ||
| To rally people around common sense values we can all agree on. | ||
| To unite working people around the freedom, fairness, and security that we all deserve. | ||
| Now next Monday is not just Labor Day, it's the start of Labor Week. | ||
| Marches and rallies and trainings, hundreds of thousands of working people coming together from this coming weekend to next, kicking off the single biggest year of action from now until next Labor Day in the history of this movement. | ||
| Every single thing working people have won for ourselves in this country's history. | ||
| It's not because we asked those in power. | ||
| It's not because they were handed to us. | ||
| It's because we fought for them relentlessly by organizing and mobilizing and using our collective power. | ||
| The standard at the turn of the 20th century was a 60-hour work week until workers in Chicago refused to bow down to the greed of their bosses. | ||
| Discrimination was the norm until the labor movement and civil rights movements came together and fought for the Civil Rights Act and Fair Labor Standards Act. | ||
| They told immigrants and women workers we had to choose between liberty and getting something to eat. | ||
| Until in 1912 up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers said, we refused to make that choice and the Bread and Roses movement was born. | ||
| That same spirit is alive today now more than ever. | ||
| I see it. | ||
| I see it in working people all over this country. | ||
| In the workers this past year who have fought and won their own union and seized their power. | ||
| Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia, public school educators in Virginia, Wells Fargo branch workers in Florida, EV battery workers in Tennessee, nursing home workers in Alabama, and thousands more. | ||
| Look, there will always, always be people who try to divide us, who tell us we're up against too much money, too much power. | ||
| And they might be right if we go it alone. | ||
| But when we come together, incredible things happen. | ||
| So if you believe in common sense, no matter what political party you belong to, if you're ready to stand up to the CEOs and the billionaires, if you're ready to fight for your sister, your brother beside you, if you're ready to build the kind of country that workers deserve, come join us. | ||
| Happy Labor Day. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN is launching a new series, America's Book Club, which will feature interviews with some of the country's most influential authors at some of the nation's most iconic libraries. | ||
| C-SPAN's John McGardle recently met up with the new host of America's Book Club to talk about the series and what viewers can expect. | ||
| We're joined at the Library of Congress by David Rubenstein, a businessman, a philanthropist, owner of a major league baseball team. | ||
| Why did you want to add host of America's Book Club to your resume? | ||
| Well, reading books has always been important to me. | ||
| As a young boy in Baltimore, my parents were blue-collar workers. | ||
| They really couldn't afford to buy a lot of books. | ||
| So they took me to the local library, and every week I could take out 12 books, and I would take out the 12 books, and I would read them that day, and I had to wait another week before I could take out another 12 books. | ||
| And I always loved reading books, and it was something that inspired me to really move forward in my life by reading. | ||
| And I always thought that if you read, you learn more, and you can become a better person by it. | ||
| So while I can do many things better than I've done, one of the things I'm proud of what I've done is reading a lot and meeting a lot of authors and also trying to read as many books as I can every week. | ||
| I carry a lot of books with me and I'm always trying to read two or three at the same time. | ||
| One of the ways I've learned how to do this is I now have a number of programs where I interview authors. | ||
| So I have to read the book to interview the author. | ||
| I don't like to hear about a book from somebody else. | ||
| I like to read the book myself and then interview the author. | ||
| And I've found these to be really intellectually inspiring kinds of events when you interview an author and they can tell you why they wrote this book and why they enjoyed this or why they enjoyed writing it that way. | ||
| And so to me, it's very enjoyable. | ||
| It's a good way for me to keep my brain fresh by reading books and then interviewing the authors. | ||
| There's a lot of author interview programs out there. | ||
| What's going to be different about America's Book Club? | ||
| Well we're going to interview the greatest authors in our country. | ||
| That's one thing. | ||
| Secondly, we're going to do it from great places like the Library of Congress, which hopefully will inspire people to want to visit these sites as well because the libraries in our country today are very important places where people who can't afford to buy books can go and borrow books. | ||
| And you can do that at many libraries around the country. | ||
| Hopefully people will also want to come to the Library of Congress where you can't really borrow books, but you can see the greatest books that any country's ever accumulated in one place. | ||
| So it's a great site, as are other great libraries that we'll be doing the show from. | ||
| What makes a good author interview? | ||
| An author who is very self, I'd say, introspective. | ||
| An author is willing to be frank. | ||
| If an author is not willing to be frank, that's not good. | ||
| Sometimes authors are very good at writing books and not good about talking about their books. | ||
| So I can learn pretty quickly if somebody really is a good talker as well as a good writer. | ||
| Some authors are really great writers, not great talkers. | ||
| Some authors are great talkers and great writers. | ||
| Doris Kearns-Goodwin is so enthusiastic when she talks about books, you just can't wait to read her books. | ||
| The same was true of David McCullough. | ||
| When you talk to David McCullough, you just couldn't wait to read the books that he's talking about. | ||
| So some authors are great at that, and I hope to bring out some of that when the authors I interview with this program. | ||
| You're going to interview authors that have a lot of bestsellers, Stacey Schiff, Walter Isaacson. | ||
| John Grisham has written more than 50 books. | ||
| How do you figure out which book to focus on or what topic to focus on with that kind of author? | ||
| When you have an author like John Grisham, he's written so many books, you can't do 50 books in one interview, but take the best-known books, and the ones that I'll focus on are the ones that he's probably best known for. | ||
| And authors, we're going to talk about their best-known books, certainly. | ||
| So, Walter Isaacson is a good example. | ||
| He's written a lot of books on geniuses. | ||
| And these are books, all of which I think are great. | ||
| I've interviewed him about them before, but now what I hope to do is kind of bring them all together and interview him about all of his books in one interview about all the geniuses he's written about. | ||
| Where are we right now? | ||
| What's this place? | ||
| We're at the main reading room of the Library of Congress. | ||
| The Library of Congress building that we're at now was built in the late 1800s because the Library of Congress originally was in the library, was in the Congress of the United States. | ||
| When the Library of Congress was set up in 1800, it was really designed to help Congress, and so it was called the Library of Congress. | ||
| And the Library of Congress was in the Capitol building. | ||
| When the British came in 1814, they burned down the Capitol. | ||
| They therefore also burned down the Library of Congress. | ||
| Thomas Jefferson then sold his collection of books to the Library of Congress, and that became the basis for the Library of Congress's collection. | ||
| Unfortunately, that collection was burned apart to some extent as well, but now the library has rebuilt large parts of that, and now the library has the most books and the most materials of any library in the world. | ||
| This is the main reading room where anybody can come in and sit and read and do research. | ||
| So it's as impressive a single room in any library I've seen in the world. | ||
| It's an incredible site. | ||
| On the wall, there's a lot of quotes in the great hall of the Library of Congress. | ||
| One of them is by Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian. | ||
| The quote is, In books lies the soul of the whole past time. | ||
| What does that mean to you? | ||
| Well, in books, when you read books and you learn how to think differently, you learn about the past, you learn about what made an author inspired to write that book. | ||
| So I think people can live past the world in which they are by reading books. | ||
| In other words, today you might be in a certain situation. | ||
| You might not be that happy with your life or you may be very happy with your life, but you can transform what your life is all about by reading either fiction or nonfiction and be inspired to learn more about what other people have done and how other people have grown. | ||
| So I think that one of the most important things people can do is to read. | ||
| You can't read too much, but also increasingly, increasingly, what we're finding is that people read very little compared to what they used to do. | ||
| A new study has come out that showed that people are reading less than they used to. | ||
| And also people, when they read, they think reading an email is reading, it's really not quite the same as reading a book. | ||
| So what I want to do is not inspire people just to read, because you can read emails, you can read memos all the time. | ||
| But when you read a book, you focus your brain. | ||
| It takes hours to get through a book. | ||
| And that's why I think it's important to focus on books. | ||
| I'm not having a show on how to read emails or how to read tweets. | ||
| That's maybe a different skill set. | ||
| I think it's important to read books because it focuses the brain. | ||
| You have to spend hours and hours doing it. | ||
| And I think you become a better person by doing that. | ||
| A lot of great authors ahead on this series, a lot of great places and locations ahead. | ||
| When it's all over, what will you consider success for this series? | ||
| Well, success is getting people to talk about it and say, look, I just saw this author. | ||
| I want to read that author's books, but I also want to read other books by great authors. | ||
| So the success is measured by whether people not only watch the show, but also they're reading more. | ||
| And what I want to do is get people to talk about reading. | ||
| We have at the Library of Congress has a national book festival every year, but there are festivals for books all over the country. | ||
| I want to get more people to go to these festivals, learn about how to meet authors, talk to the authors, get their autographs if you're inclined to do that, but also be inspired to teach your children how to read as well. | ||
| Most children learn more about how to read from their parents than from any other mechanism. | ||
| And so when parents aren't teaching their own children how to read or aren't reading to them, that's not a good sign. | ||
| Encouraging people to learn how to read and also encourage their children to read is important. | ||
| Sadly, in the United States today, roughly 14 percent of American adults are functionally illiterate, which means they can't read past the fourth grade level. | ||
| If you can't read past the fourth grade level, your chance of succeeding in life is very diminished. | ||
| A large percentage of people in federal prisons and juvenile delinquency courts are functionally illiterate. | ||
| I think roughly two-thirds of the people in the federal prison system today are functionally illiterate. | ||
| So, what I want to do is get people at a young age to be inspired to read more, and hopefully, parents will be inspired to teach their children to read. | ||
| The series is America's Book Club. | ||
| The host is David Rubinstein. | ||
| Thanks for your time. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
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This fall, C-SPAN invites you on a powerful journey through the stories that define a nation. | |
| From the halls of our nation's most iconic libraries, comes America's Book Club, a bold, original series where ideas, history, and democracy meet. | ||
| Hosted by renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein, each week features in-depth conversations with the thinkers shaping our national story. | ||
| Among this season's remarkable guests, John Grisham, master storyteller of the American justice system. | ||
| Justice Amy Coney Barrett, exploring the Constitution, the court, and the role of law in American life. |