Tell us all right now what control you have over the USPS tell us!!!!!!!! w/Jacob Morrison
This is a long 27 minute preview of this week's bonus episode. Sign up at http://patreon.com/miniondeathcult in your browser to hear an hour more of bad pro-Elon memes in coworker facebook groups and about crucifying yourself on the altar of cringe to educate fellow union members. TODAY: Jacob Morrison of The Valley Labor Report joins us to talk about Trump stripping collective bargaining from the TSA union. Public Workers: do they deserve to exist? We ask Jacob, a public union member, to justify his existence to us and the audience Why are private sector unions better and more honorable than public unions? Should a government do anything that's good? ALSO: Alex talks about being nice like Dalton in Road House as he unveils his new theory of Talking that you are not going to want to miss. Music: Hail Mary Mallon - Whales 37500 Yens - Microphonie Get a bonus episode every week by signing up at http://patreon.com/miniondeathcult for only $5/month
And conservative humor gone awry is going to fascist-fornia today.
So stay tuned.
We're going to take a few pictures of the desert and how their policies are actually messing it up.
It's not beautiful when you go across that border.
But stay tuned, guys.
We'll show you exactly what it looks like when you're going to get you.
Follow their rebarred in Houston.
Stay tuned.
Okay, I'm Alexander Edward.
And I'm Tony Boswell.
And we are Minion Death Cult.
The world is ending.
Public sector unions are responsible.
And we're documenting it.
What's up, everybody?
Thank you so much for tuning into the show.
Thank you for supporting the show.
We have a very, I think it'll be a very interesting episode today.
We have Jacob from the Valley Labor Report.
Here with us again, previous guest, friend of the show, fellow union member, and public sector union member, I believe.
Thank you, Jacob, for joining us.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on.
And, you know, I just had a really interesting conversation with a union buster the other day on the show live that folks can check out at The Valley Labor Report on YouTube and Facebook and wherever you get your podcasts.
Excellent.
But I had a conversation.
Our guest on the show for this episode was Joe Brock, a legit anti-union consultant.
Motherfucker makes millions of dollars telling people not to join unions.
And he is the former president of a Teamsters local in Philadelphia.
Wow.
And so I sent him an email.
I was like, hey, you want to come on the show and explain to me why you're not evil?
And he was like, that wasn't exactly the email, but it was something like that.
And he was like, bet.
So he did it.
So anyway, I say that to say, He said that public sector unions are actually really good.
It's the private sector ones that are bad.
Wow.
He said that's his shtick.
And actually, what was fascinating...
I'm not anti-union.
I'm anti-private sector unions.
That's fucking crazy.
What a gambit.
It was crazy.
He said unions are good in the public sector, in the building trades.
And where they already exist in the private sector.
He said UPS couldn't run the company without the Teamsters.
It's only private sector, non-building and construction trades people who are newly interested in forming unions.
That's an interesting, like, what do they call that?
They call that like a teleology?
Like, oh, it's all good because it is.
Right.
Well, and it's interesting because that narrow group of potential union members are the only ones that he gets paid to tell not to join a union.
So it's interesting that that's the one area where he just so happens to believe that...
I like that he's still principally...
Pro-union in other areas because I'm not getting paid to give up on those principles.
What a nice position to be in.
Listen, I'm not trying to get rid of unions.
I just don't want any new ones.
Listen, baristas, get out of here.
Pick up a hammer.
He's a liberal union buster.
That's his bit.
He called Sean O 'Brien a scab for not endorsing Kamala Harris.
Amazing.
You know what they call that?
They call that a fucking shitcoat, bro.
That's what they call that.
Well, thank you so much, Jacob, for joining us today.
I did want to have you on for a similar reason.
You're a public sector worker.
Maybe you can tell people what you do.
But also, the bigger question is, should you exist?
As a public sector worker, do you have the right to exist?
I don't know.
There's a lot of people out there saying that you and all your co-workers and other people who process important documents for the government should be trotted out into a town square and sold off to a billionaire at the highest bidder.
We got a beeping going on somewhere?
Yeah.
Okay.
Can we stop it?
It stopped.
Great.
It's hard to tell with a beeping because, you know...
It's not a smoke detector, Alex.
I don't know what you're implying.
I was not going to say that.
Jacob, justify yourself to us and to the listener.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, my position is that I have a right to exist and I have a right to defend my right to exist.
And anybody that disagrees with me, I should be able to, you know, kill their children.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think we need an emergency sales from the Teamsters and from the UAW of 10,000 warheads.
To this nation's public sector unions.
Exactly.
We have to arm AFGE.
That is the solution to our problems.
But no, I mean, seriously, it is fascinating that this guy that we talked to was like, oh no, public sector unions are great, private sector is where you get some issues.
Because typically, as you're kind of alluding to, the opposite is the case.
And if we want to like...
If we want to do the steel man thing, even FDR was opposed to public sector unions because he was like, you're bargaining against the taxpayer.
The people are your employer and so it's bad to collectively bargain against the people.
And it's like...
I mean, not really.
You know, the people are not my supervisor, right?
And so I don't, you know, answer...
Yeah, I think the people would also want you to have lunch breaks and be able to, you know, not piss yourself.
That's the second thing.
Whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no, this is the common...
Is that, you know...
Well, that puts us on the other side.
That puts the public on the other side as the employer, yada, yada, yada.
And then it's therefore not in our interests or whatever.
And I would be more sympathetic to that argument if I had seen postal workers in limousines and county clerks throwing their money around and shit.
I haven't seen any of this supposed Fat cats getting rich off of the...
From what I can tell, the overwhelming majority of public sector workers, whether they're state-level or federal-level, are like working-class people who make $80,000 a year on average,
something like that, to do very important jobs.
And I can't imagine that the private sector would do that I want to make sure that the
person who's doing the service for me...
Can you just focus on the job they're doing for me and not whether they're going to be able to pay their bills or not worry about if they're getting some illness.
Is it going to take them out?
Because I want to be able to rely to go to them and do a good job all the time.
So selfishly, even, it's like you want them to have a good quality of life so they can do the job for you better.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, I mean, it is a really frustrating kind of dynamic that exists because obviously, you know, like...
Like I was saying, it misunderstands the actual power dynamics because the power dynamics in a public sector workplace are basically the same as those that exist in a private sector workplace.
And to the extent they're different, it's largely different because of the advances that public sector unions have made over the years to get to what y 'all were talking about.
I mean, public sector workers have obviously been exploited and have been underpaid for a long time.
And to the extent that that is...
Less true today.
It's not because, you know, managers were just really nice about it.
It's because, typically, you know, they have, public sector workers have organized.
I mean...
And in some places, they still aren't.
You know, I mean, in the state of Alabama, there's not, like, there's the Alabama State Employees Association, but they're basically a non-entity, I mean, even as an advocacy organization.
And Alabama state employees do not have any safety regulations.
Like, OSHA does not cover Alabama's public employees, and the state of Alabama does not have an OSHA equivalent for their public sector employees like so many do.
And there was a story that we talked about on the show recently.
It happened a year ago, and some of the reporting's been coming out, about a Forestry Service person who died because something fell on him, and he was just crushed.
Jesus.
And the family is fighting for...
Like OSHA level protections for public sector employees because they said that like he had only been on the job for like a couple of weeks or something and he hadn't had the proper training to do whatever the work it was that he was doing.
And even after his death, the Forestry Service has not put out like a, or the Forest Department or whatever, has not put out a lessons learned.
Because that's a big thing that this family is fighting for to make sure that this doesn't happen again, right?
And so even to this day, they've not put out a lessons learned.
They've not said this is how we're going to train people in the future.
Because they don't have to.
They're not going to do it if nobody makes them do it.
That's the lesson here for almost for any employer, you know, but especially for the fucking private sector.
No, it's cheaper to not print the pamphlet about how we killed somebody.
Fuck that.
Yeah, we have to pay someone to write that and print that.
That's not going to happen.
Right, right.
Yeah, exactly.
And obviously, people do not see their letter carriers running around in limousines.
And actually, the Washington Post just went through a bunch of data about public sector versus private sector workers.
And one of the interesting things that I found out was that public sector workers, federal workers in particular, actually work more hours than private sector employees.
And they have they work more days in a year, like they take less days off in a year than the average private sector employees.
I always think about federal, like fucking federal workers get everything.
They get all the fucking holidays.
Like, you know, I only get the major ones or whatever, but I guess they don't, what, they don't get, like, vacations and...
Maybe they get fewer paid sick days.
I'm not totally sure exactly why that is.
I think one of the reasons was that there's just less part-time workers in the federal sector.
And so if you work in the federal sector, you are more likely to have a full-time job rather than a part-time job, which you might say, oh, well, that's a difference in kind.
But that still means that you are more likely to be working every day and be working more hours.
But it is an interesting kind of rebuttal to the idea that, oh, well...
You know, the trade-off for working in the public sector is that you just get all this time off and you get all the vacation in the world and you get this great retirement and then the job security is super great.
And, you know, those are, you know, to a certain extent those exist, but, you know, that's interesting facts to push back on that.
Sure, totally.
So, specifically, what I wanted to talk about with this segment in relation to public sector workers is this announcement that Homeland Security is just ending the collective bargaining rights for thousands of TSA employees.
I'm reading here from the AP, the headline.
Yeah, they're just ending collective bargaining.
Can you tell us a little bit about this and just what that means in practice?
Well, you know, obviously the position of the American Federation of Government Employees is that this is illegal.
They do not believe that it's legal to just rip up the collective bargaining agreement for tens of thousands of workers across the country.
There was also, you know...
They were doing it ostensibly because there's so much official time being used.
And that's just not true.
An official time being what the government calls a federal employee doing union work on the clock, which is something that most unions have in their contracts, and federal unions do too.
And all that work is...
It's like doing grievance work.
You know, when I'm writing a grievance or when I'm investigating a grievance, when I'm doing interviews, I'm on official time, just like a union in the private sector has.
When I'm negotiating a contract, you know, that's something that I can use official time for.
And so they were talking about, oh, there's so much official time.
And the AFGE put out a rebuttal to that saying that less than half, Of 1% of all hours worked at the TSA are official time.
And so the idea that there's this rampant use and abuse of official time at the TSA is just totally not true.
And they're saying that it's retaliation against the union.
So it's really scary.
Hamilton Nolan had a good article about it where...
You know, his response was that, I mean, they should strike, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Because if the government can just rip up a contract willy-nilly, then, you know, none of our contracts really mean anything.
And I'm not endorsing that necessarily, but it's something, you know, that has to be something that's like in the air being discussed.
And, you know, the response to that is that, oh, well, that's illegal.
And it's like, well...
This is illegal.
And this has been a long fight that AFGE has had that they finally were able to win under the Biden administration.
And they were able to significantly increase the pay of TSA staffers through collective bargaining and through lobbying in Congress.
And so, you know, it really is just a blatant attack on worker rights, like AFGE said.
It's not going to make it better when you go to the airport.
Right.
Yeah, I know.
There's a meme.
There's been a meme for a while about how cumbersome the TSA, fucking TSA agents, they want to grab your dick and they make you wait in line for two hours or whatever.
And I've actually had to like...
I fly pretty frequently since I moved away from my family and stuff.
So I'll go on a plane once a year, which I didn't used to do before, fly back and visit my family.
And it's never been operated better.
I've never seen the airports function more smoothly and have enough people to do all the work and help you out if you need help.
Tell you what you should do before you even think to ask about it.
Take command of entire crowds and manage lines better, again, than I've seen in multiple years.
And it's just funny because it's like of all the aspects of the Department of Homeland Security.
They're fucking over the people who help people line up, help do crowds in air travel.
Could you think of a more benign piece of the fucking department?
They're not tackling enough tan people because they're helping your grandma navigate the touchscreen check-in process or whatever.
Now, am I wrong in thinking that the reason that they think they can impede this, they are impeding this, is because of 9-11, right?
Like, they can fuck with the TSA because 9-11 happened.
Are they saying it's national security that the union's filing too many grievances?
Is that why they're able to do that?
Because the TSA stops and the security is not there?
Yeah, I think ultimately their posture towards the federal government unions are going to be that we don't have a right to exist generally, but the first wedge in this is the TSA.
I think yes, because some of the arguments that they're using, that there's a national security implication to the work that they're doing, and so therefore they shouldn't have rights, and they should just allow Elon Musk.
to do whatever he wants.
And yeah, I mean, the job that I've had
I've worked at the Corps of Engineers for a long time.
January would have been my eighth year if I hadn't left for a different job.
Still working kind of in the federal government.
Not officially a federal employee anymore, though I'm still a member of my union.
I'm like a contractor temporarily.
But when I was working for the Corps of Engineers, I was a project manager at the Huntsville Center of Excellence.
And so I had projects all over the country.
And so I was flying like all the time, like three or four times a year.
And yeah, I mean, I never had any problems with the TSA.
And actually, at my airport, Huntsville Airport, it's like small.
Everything moves so quickly that I was able to get on my flight, even though I arrived at the airport like...
30 minutes before the flight was supposed to leave.
So, you know, all the love in the world to the people who do all of the airport stuff, including the TSA folks.
I love the idea that, well, it might actually be, I guess, savvy for them to attack.
Because out of the Patriot Act, I think the number one issue that American pigs had with the Patriot Act was having to take their shoes off in the airport.
And that is not to say that I like taking my shoes off the airport.
I think the security theater is nuts.
Uh, but the airport is like a massive infrastructure that does need support and you, and you do, if you only, even if you fly once a year, I still need somebody to fucking point, like spin me around and point me in the right direction and read my ticket for me or whatever.
Like that's, uh, you know, but it is, they're like.
They're like, oh, we heard all you based right-wingers about America first, and we need to stop the forever war on terror, so we're defunding the security guards and porters at your local airport.
Well, as you know, though, the whole thing about the shoes is that...
There's not a lot of things that we can call American culture, but keeping your shoes on inside is one of the few things that they can actually claim.
And so that was an attack basically at Western culture and civilization itself.
Right.
That's true.
I hadn't clocked that, but that's...
Freaking Chinese travel agency, you know?
Yeah.
No, the carpets were spotless, but I had to take my shoes off.
Yeah, I don't know.
It seems like a very shitty situation, and it's going to lead into shittier situations, so we should all, of course, stand with these workers.
Is there anything that we can do to support them in the immediate...
In the immediate wake of this, other than to yell strike at them.
Is there anything else we can do?
So, you know, you should definitely, you know, if you're flying, you know, the next time I fly, I'm going to be telling my TSA agent that he needs to be, you know, he needs to be joining his union.
You know, the union is filing a lawsuit.
We'll see how kind of effective that is.
Hopefully it'll be effective.
I mean, AFGE just won a huge lawsuit in two different arenas now with two federal judges on each coast, one in California and one in Maryland, telling the Trump administration that they have to rehire all of the probationary employees that they fired at like 12 different
federal agencies.
So those rulings came out on Thursday with a deadline to comply of next Thursday.
So, you know, we'll see what happens there.
But I think on the merits of it, there there's a good argument because the the the as far as the lawsuit goes, because Congress.
And so Congress, who has the power of the purse and all these agencies, all of our compensation is locked up in Congress's power of the purse.
Congress is saying, as part of...
their expenditure of funds that the executive department agencies have the authority to agree to collective bargaining agreements.
And if the standard going forward is that each successive administration can just throw away any collective bargaining agreement done under the previous administration, then they
don't mean anything.
Then that law is no longer operative.
Right.
Genuinely, on the merits of the thing, I think that there's a good argument, but the courts are just crazy.
Right. And I think that, you know,
Depending on them is a very scary kind of proposition to be in.
And so the next thing that you can do is there's a group of federal unionists called the Federal Unionist Network or the FUN that are doing really, really great rapid response and mass communications sorts of things.
It is a rank-and-file cross-union caucus sort of informal network.
Nice.
And they just had a mass call last week.
Where even though they're kind of a rank-and-file, like bottom-up sort of thing, they've been able to get lots of federal employee union leaders on this mass call, including my national president, Everett Kelly, the national president of IFPTE, Matt Biggs,
Sean Fain, who is now a federal employee union leader because they just unionized at the National Institute of Health last year and they got a contract.
Fuck you.
And their kind of overarching campaign is to increase the price for destroying the public sector.
Make it harder for Congress and the executive branch to say yes when Elon Musk wants to destroy something and make it easier for them to say no.
If you go to savepublicservices.com and you fill out that form, particularly if you're a federal employee, you should definitely do that.
Put you into their database and they'll send you an alert if there is an event happening near you.
They'll also get you plugged in if you are interested in holding an event.
And particularly, they're envisioning a nationwide rapid response network.
So if 10 employees get fired at your local VA, they want people within the fund to immediately...
Schedule a press conference for like 12 hours later and for the fund to be able to send out a notice to everybody in the area to come out and support these 10 people at the VA or these 20 people at the Social Security Administration or,
you know, 30 people at the commissary or whatever it is.
So if you're a federal employee, go there, savepublicservices.com and mark that you're a federal employee.
And if you're just an ally, you can also go and if you want to support federal workers and be alerted when things are happening near you.
But they're doing really, really great stuff.
I mean, it was an unlisted YouTube
YouTube video that had 6,000 people, almost all federal employees watching live.
it was live right 6,000 people watching contemporaneously so it was a really exciting really exciting kind of thing they started like two years ago and it's it's just really
So that's kind of the answer, I think, is that AFGE is suing.
Hopefully they'll win.
And then the direct action sort of stuff at the local level.
You know, the striking is for most federal employees not going to be the answer.
For one, because it's illegal, but also because it's not strategic, right?
I mean, the Trump administration would love nothing more than to be able to fire a lot of federal workers.
Because they went on strike.
But the TSA agents, they are a different animal, I think, than Social Security workers because if you shut down flights in this country, that's going to have immediate ramifications.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think the same thing for the post office as well.
They have a lot of leverage that a lot of other people don't.
Such a hinge pin of commerce in this country.
Hinge pin?
Hmm.
No, I think I meant to say linchpin, but subconsciously didn't want to say the first word.
Listen to the rest of this conversation with Jacob Morrison of the Valley Labor Report about what we can do as union members to help bring people to class consciousness and recognize these contradictions and possibly organize into something.
That could make a unified front against the powers that be.
And a couple efforts with some pushback, with some very interesting pushback in our Facebook groups.
So check that out at patreon.com slash minion death cult.
