Carl Rosen: How UE Builds Worker Power to Fight Corporate Greed and Defend Democracy
LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL
Episode 10 October 22, 2026
TRANSCRIPT
Egberto Willies: Welcome to Liberty and Justice for All, right here on KPFT Houston 90.1 FM. I’m your co-host, Egberto Willies, alongside my colleague and labor historian, Dr. Michael Merrill. Today, we’re joined by Carl Rosen, former General President of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America.
The UE, known as one of the most unapologetically democratic, rank-and-file, and progressive unions in American history, has spent nearly a century showing what member-run labor power really looks like.
Carl, welcome to Liberty and Justice for All. It’s an honor to have you on the program.
Carl Rosen: Thank you. Glad to be here. I just want to correct that I actually retired within the last year, but I still do quite a bit of work with the union.
Egberto Willies: I think everything supersedes that. Anyway, Michael, why don’t you take it from here?
Michael Merrill: Well, Carl, I too am so happy you’re able to join us today. This is a new effort that I’m undertaking with Egberto and with Les Leopold, who occasionally joins us and whom I believe you know. I’ve worked with Les for decades at the Labor Institute.
Our goal here is to try to do something that I know is near and dear to the UE, at least as I understand it: encouraging a conversation and building momentum toward an independent working-class political association or vehicle in this country, one that can actually give workers a political voice, in the same way unions give workers a voice in the workplace.
I want to talk about that, but I also think our audience may have some misconceptions about what unions are. They’re not as common in the landscape as they used to be, especially since we’re reaching people across the country in rural, suburban, and urban communities.
So, I’d like to spend a little time talking about what unions are, what they do, and why they matter. As Egberto suggested, the UE is an exemplary model for what unions can be. People don’t always understand, in my view, that unions are workplace organizations. I often describe them as the community at work, a community that is frequently invisible but, when organized and unionized, can become visible, vocal, and powerful in the workplace.
I’d like to start with that. Though before we do, maybe the place to begin is with you. What was your personal path to the union, and ultimately to the presidency of the UE? How did you get from where you were as a young man to where you are now?
Carl Rosen: Sure. I’d be happy to talk about all of that. I certainly agree with the direction you’re trying to take this conversation about the important role unions play in building democracy.
I grew up on the southwest side of Chicago in a very working-class neighborhood. My parents were both involved in labor and community organizing, so I grew up surrounded by that work. I was also a young person in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a period when there was an enormous amount of organizing happening across the country: civil rights, women’s rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, and the beginnings of the immigrant rights movement.
I was fortunate enough to attend college, but while I was there, I decided I wanted to contribute to the labor movement, as my parents had done. After graduation, I received some training in electrical work and got jobs first in Philadelphia and later back in Chicago, where I had grown up.
Altogether, I spent about thirteen years working as an industrial electrician. The last ten of those years were at a factory in Chicago represented by the UE. It was a machine stamping plant, and I worked as a maintenance electrician.
That’s different from construction electricians. I wasn’t in the IBEW, which represents workers in the building trades. In fact, although “electrical” is in our name, the United Electrical Workers is not a union specifically for electricians. I happened to be an electrician who belonged to that union.
The union was originally established to organize the massive factories producing electrical equipment, radios, machine parts, and related products during the great wave of CIO organizing in the 1930s. The UE was one of the original CIO unions.
Of course, much of that industry has since disappeared from the United States. We would argue that this was, in part, an outgrowth of the McCarthy era that followed the great organizing wave of the 1930s and 1940s. That period weakened unions to the point where capital was able to move much of the country’s productive capacity overseas, weakening both the labor movement and the power of working people. But the UE persisted through the period.
I worked in a UE-represented shop for ten years and held various positions in my local union. Eventually, I was elected district president in 1994, which was a full-time union position. That role became regional president in 2006, and I served in that capacity until 2019. Those were annual elections, so I was reelected each year. Then, in 2019, I was elected national president of the UE and served for six years until my retirement.
Michael Merrill: Okay, great. Could you also describe how the union has changed? How was the UE you joined as a young man different from the UE you left as president?
Carl Rosen: Sure.
When I joined in 1984, the UE was still primarily a manufacturing union. It had already begun expanding beyond the electrical parts and machine-tool industries that had defined its early years, but manufacturing still made up most of its membership.
While I was serving on the General Executive Board representing District 11 in the early 1990s, and still working full-time in the shop, we had serious discussions about whether we needed to diversify significantly and, if so, who we should organize.
We concluded that we wanted to organize workers interested in building the kind of local unions we believe are most effective: highly democratic, rank-and-file controlled, militant organizations that know which side they’re on. They’re there to fight for workers. They understand that various partnership schemes, which were very popular at the time and continue in some forms today, are largely dead ends for workers.
We need to know where we stand, and we need to be prepared to fight. We call it rank-and-file unionism. Some people call it class-struggle unionism. It’s about understanding your position and leading that struggle.
Based on that outlook, we started organizing workers across a wide variety of sectors. We also saw a number of independent unions, unions that weren’t affiliated with larger national organizations and that were dissatisfied with what those organizations represented. When they found us and realized they could affiliate with the UE, many chose to do so.
We did a lot of organizing, though at the same time we continued experiencing job losses due to plant closings and industries relocating overseas.
Despite that, we managed to hold things together. Then, in just the last few years, we made a significant leap forward through a wave of new organizing efforts, which we can talk about if you’d like.
Michael Merrill: Okay, yes, let’s get to that. I see Egberto has a question, and I also want to mention to the audience that Carl’s dealing with a cold today. If you hear a little gravel in his voice, don’t worry. He assures us he’ll be fine.
Egberto Willies: Here’s the interesting thing. Before we came on, I did a little reading about your union, and I really liked what I learned about its structure. How would you say you’re different from, let’s say, the Teamsters? I think I have an idea, but I’d like the audience to hear it from you.
Carl Rosen: Sure. In a lot of ways, we’re the inverse of the Teamsters.
They have very large, amalgamated locals where there’s often a considerable distance between local officers and workers in the workplace. In the UE, we try to keep as much control as possible at the local and shop-floor level.
Most of our locals consist only of workers from a single workplace dealing with a single employer. Their local officers are people they work alongside every day. In the overwhelming majority of our locals, all officers are full-time employees in the workplace they represent.
So when they negotiate contracts, the issues are very real to them. Whatever they win at the bargaining table applies to them just as much as it applies to everyone else.
At the same time, we practice a great deal of solidarity. Locals work together to take on employers, whether they’re facing the same employer or different ones. Members support one another even when they’re in separate locals.
We’re very proud of our democratic history. It goes back to our roots in the 1930s, as does our tradition of militancy. Many CIO unions shared that approach during that era. It became such a threat to wealthy interests and power structures in this country that the McCarthy era was unleashed against us. We believe it was primarily aimed at destroying militant unions.
There were eleven unions targeted for destruction. Nine were eliminated. The UE was one of only two that survived, along with the West Coast longshore workers’ union, which also has a proud history of democracy, militancy, and independence.
You’ll find similarities on issues such as foreign policy, which has often been a major dividing line. Both unions played important roles in opposing the Vietnam War while much of the broader labor movement supported it for most of the conflict.
The same can be said about immigrant rights. Much of the labor movement had a poor history on that issue until roughly the last twenty years.
So, we take pride in maintaining pro-worker, anti-corporate positions that not all unions have embraced in the same way. Having said that, a lot of the labor movement has moved in our direction over the last several years, largely because circumstances have forced it to.
As labor has become less powerful, corporations and wealthy interests have become more aggressive and more greedy. They’ve pushed working people to the point where the labor movement has had little choice but to fight back.
Egberto Willies: Do you think that because many major unions didn’t follow your more democratic path, and instead adopted structures that were more corporate in nature, that’s one reason union membership became so limited in the private sector?
Carl Rosen: Yes, absolutely.
In fact, we trace it directly back to the major split that took place in the labor movement during the early 1950s, in the middle of the McCarthy era.
The unions that escaped attack from corporate power often did so because they accepted certain limits. There was a combined effort involving corporations, the government, and congressional McCarthy committees that investigated union leaders and, in many cases, contributed to the destruction of militant unions.
Other unions then stepped in to replace them.
The price of going along with the corporate and government agenda at that time was that you wouldn’t challenge it. You would become what was often called a bread-and-butter union, focused primarily on wages in the workplace.
There was a deeper question of how much unions should challenge management’s control over decision-making. Our view is that unions ought to have a say in decisions such as whether a company can move production out of a factory and relocate it to another country. What we call business unionism generally rejects that type of role.
That opened the door to a U.S. foreign policy that we frequently criticized. We argued that workers in this country should be in solidarity with workers in other countries.
Instead, the dominant labor leadership often supported U.S. foreign policy. The AFL-CIO, for example, worked closely with U.S. government initiatives overseas in ways that, in our view, undermined militant unions in other countries and made those countries safer environments for American corporations to invest in and exploit lower-wage labor.
As a result, corporations gained access to workers earning much lower wages, often under poor working conditions and weak environmental protections. The foundation for that system was laid through U.S. foreign policy, which most of the labor movement supported throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
Then Ronald Reagan came along in the 1980s, and corporations essentially no longer needed the labor movement’s cooperation. The labor movement entered a period of intense attack. There were plant closings, concession demands, lockouts, and workers being fired for striking.
By that point, organized labor had become much weaker. Many jobs had already moved overseas, reducing workers’ leverage. At the same time, many unions had purged some of their most militant and democratic leaders. In some cases, what remained were leaders who were willing to go along to get along, and in some instances corruption took root as well.
In my view, all of that contributed to undermining the labor movement as a whole.
Egberto Willies: Wow. Carl, first of all, I hope what you’ve just laid out is part of the legacy you’ve left with those who are replacing you, because I think this is exactly what rank-and-file workers need to hear, especially in a right-to-work state like Texas. So many workers who aren’t part of a union have been taught that unions aren’t good. This is the kind of message they need to hear.
Michael Merrill: A couple of things. First, I want to make sure our focus isn’t on refighting the battles of the past, but on talking about how we can win the battles of the future.
That said, I also think it’s important to note something we should never lose sight of. It’s a remark from a man named Frank Tannenbaum, whom you may or may not know. He was a Wobbly during the Progressive Era. As a high school student, he led demonstrations of unemployed workers demanding relief in New York City, and he was jailed for that activity.
He would actually lead unemployed workers into churches and say, “We’re here. Remember the Beatitudes. Remember to clothe the ragged, feed the hungry, and shelter the homeless. That’s what we’re asking for.”
Eventually, he was arrested for those public demonstrations, but soon afterward he wrote a book on the philosophy of the labor movement. In it, he argued that even conservative unions can have revolutionary effects. Any effort to organize a union at a workplace, especially at the grassroots level, where people begin to see that their voice matters and can work to expand the reach of that voice, is important.
And Egberto, in a couple of weeks we’ll be talking with someone who spent his career in western New York as a member of the Teamsters. So, we’ll be hearing from Teamsters as well.
Part of this whole effort is figuring out how we can all come together to win the battles of the future.
I strongly recommend Tannenbaum, Carl. If you’ve got some time on your hands as a retiree, I can send you a few recommendations. I used to give book recommendations to Tony Mazzocchi, whom I’m sure you knew well, and Tony always read everything I suggested. I’ve made it a habit.
Having said that, I want to focus on another topic. I believe the UE started something called the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a project that provides support to workers who want to organize democratic unions that aren’t afraid to speak up for what people need.
Is that, in fact, a project of the union? How has it gone? Has it been successful? And where have your greatest organizing successes been in recent years?
Carl Rosen: Yes, those are all good questions.
Let me clarify something because your previous comments make me think you may believe I’m criticizing the labor movement to the point where I’d discourage people from organizing. Quite the contrary. People absolutely need to organize.
Some of that organizing needs to happen within unions that aren’t functioning well, in order to make them function better. Fortunately, that’s been happening in a good number of unions, as I was trying to indicate.
Part of the reason is that people bring experiences into the labor movement that shape how they see the world and the kinds of struggles they believe unions should lead. There was a whole generation of people who were radicalized during the great struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of them ended up working in unionized workplaces or organizing new unions. By the late 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s, those people had begun moving into leadership positions.
As a result, you started seeing unions challenge the old “go-along-to-get-along” approach on foreign policy, corporate partnership schemes, and other issues.
And that’s part of the background behind EWOC.
Michael Merrill: EWOC being the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.
Carl Rosen: Right, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.
It grew out of trends that developed after the Great Recession. Basically, anyone who entered the workforce after 2000 has seen their standard of living decline rather than improve, especially compared to what their parents experienced.
That’s a result of corporate greed and the weakness of the labor movement. Without a strong labor movement, corporations can get away with taking more and more from working people.
Then you had the 2008 financial collapse and the decision by the Obama administration to allow Wall Street to manage the recovery. The result was a very slow recovery, with large numbers of people unemployed for extended periods.
By 2020, many people were only just getting back to where they had been twenty years earlier, and then COVID hit. The economy went into free fall again.
Through all those experiences, people learned that neither the government nor corporations were going to solve their problems. They concluded that if they wanted things to improve, they had to organize.
Our union was deeply involved in Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns in both 2016 and 2020. During that period, another important development was taking place: distributed organizing.
Instead of relying on a top-down structure, distributed organizing is built from the bottom up. Workers organize and contact one another directly, while leaders provide information, training, and resources that help people do the work themselves.
That approach requires trust. It means being willing to let people exercise control at the grassroots level. That’s very much how the UE approaches organizing.
We were excited to see those methods take shape during the Bernie campaign, and we adapted many of them to our own organizing work.
As the 2020 campaign came to an end because of COVID and because Senator Sanders was unable to win the nomination, we remained in contact with many of the activists and organizers who had been involved. The Democratic Socialists of America, which had also been heavily involved in the campaign, was part of those conversations.
At the same time, both the UE and the DSA started receiving calls from workers all over the country. They were saying things like, “Our boss is putting us on the front lines with customers and giving us no protection. What do we do? We don’t have a union.”
Out of those conversations, we jointly developed the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. We found labor activists across the country willing to volunteer. They took calls, provided advice, explained legal rights, suggested ways workers could use the media, and encouraged them to act collectively in order to win protections and survive the pandemic.
From there, EWOC evolved into a project that helped workers learn how to organize unions and connected them with labor organizations. Many thousands of people have received training through that effort.
Michael Merrill: Let me interrupt for just a second and also give you a chance to rest your voice.
I want to underscore what you’ve just said. One of the purposes of this show is to encourage people not simply to dwell in dismay or criticism. There’s certainly plenty to complain about and plenty to feel discouraged about.
The real challenge is whether we can find the energy and hope to move forward and actually do something. One thing people can do, if they’re in a nonunion workplace, is try to organize a union. There are people they can reach out to for help. They don’t have to do it alone, and they shouldn’t expect it to happen overnight.
It may take time, but they’ll make meaningful friendships in the process. They’ll discover hope and purpose through that effort. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to have you on the show: to emphasize that there are practical things people can do, and that others are already doing.
With that background, please continue. But I’d also like listeners to hear more about the specific successes the union had during your tenure and the work that’s happening now.
Carl Rosen: Actually, it all ties together.
This distributed organizing model, this idea of trusting workers to organize themselves, was very similar to how organizing happened during the 1930s when the great industrial unions were formed. There was a tremendous amount of self-organization involved.
That became central not only to the success of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which has now trained thousands of workers across the country in the basics of self-organization, but also to the UE’s own organizing efforts.
Most of those trainees have not necessarily succeeded in organizing their particular workplace. However, all of them now possess skills they’ll carry into future workplaces. In that sense, we’re planting the seeds for another great wave of organizing in the United States, something we’ve seen happen several times in our history.
The UE also took lessons from EWOC and combined them with new technologies. People were training one another through Zoom meetings and sharing information through online networks and digital organizing tools.
We used those methods in a major organizing campaign that emerged after COVID among graduate workers at major research universities across the country. These units typically involved three thousand to four thousand workers at a university, and sometimes more at the largest private institutions.
We’re talking about places such as Stanford, MIT, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern, as well as public institutions like the University of Minnesota and the University of New Mexico. Many of these workers either lacked clear legal recognition of their right to organize or were operating in an environment where those rights had shifted depending on whether a Democratic or Republican administration was in power.
After the 2020 election, we entered another period in which a Democratic administration allowed those organizing rights to move forward again, which created significant opportunities for graduate-worker organizing.
Egberto Willies: I want to interrupt for a moment because you just made a statement that confused me a bit. You said that whether graduate workers were legally able to organize depended on the circumstances. As Mike said earlier, we want this program to give people practical information about what they can do moving forward.
What do you mean by whether or not they could organize? I thought everyone was legally able to organize. What am I missing?
Carl Rosen: That’s a fair question.
There are laws, and then there are interpretations of laws. The short version is that the National Labor Relations Board is supposed to act as a referee and determine whether a particular group of workers can form what’s called a bargaining unit. If they demonstrate majority support, the employer is then legally required to recognize the union, bargain with it, and refrain from making unilateral changes without negotiations.
The challenge is that some groups of workers have frequently existed in a gray area regarding whether they qualify as “workers” under the law.
Graduate workers are one example. They’re students, but they’re also employees. Typically, graduate students work part-time at the same university where they’re enrolled. Some serve as teaching assistants, where the work is clearly distinct from their academic studies, even if it’s related to their field. Others work as research assistants, where the research may or may not contribute directly to their academic progress.
In our view, it’s all work. But legally, the question becomes: Are they primarily students, or are they workers? Under the Obama administration, the National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling recognizing that graduate workers are workers and that unions can bargain over their working conditions, though not over academic matters related to their student status.
That decision created other complications, but we’ve worked through them. Then the Trump administration came in, and there was concern that if a new case reached the Labor Board, it would reverse that decision and take away those organizing rights.
As a result, organizing largely froze while Trump’s Labor Board was in charge. Once that board was on its way out, all of this pent-up demand began to emerge from graduate workers. These were generally people in their late twenties and early thirties. They had lived through the Great Recession and watched economic opportunities shrink. They were also seeing major changes in academia.
There was a time when earning a graduate degree often led to a teaching position and potentially a tenure-track career. They watched those opportunities steadily disappear as more corporate management models were imposed on higher education. Combined with technological changes and other pressures, many realized they needed to take action for themselves.
And many concluded that the way to help themselves was by forming a union. Once we got moving, we started winning elections with overwhelming support, often around 95 percent of the vote among thousands of workers. The demand was extraordinary. Over roughly a two-year period, we organized bargaining units covering more than 30,000 workers. It took some time, but not all that long, to negotiate contracts for all of them.
Now we’re beginning negotiations on second contracts for many of those units. It’s been tremendously positive for our union. It’s provided stability and given us a stronger platform from which to continue our work. More importantly, it’s significantly improved conditions for graduate workers.
Michael Merrill: One thing we might talk about briefly, because I know it’s obviously a concern for many of your newer members and therefore for the union itself, is artificial intelligence.
I noticed that the union has been developing AI policies and contract language related to AI. Given how much public conversation is focused on the topic right now, perhaps you could say a few words about the UE’s perspective on AI, how your members view it, and what they’re hoping to accomplish.
Carl Rosen: Sure. We’re involved with AI in a number of different ways. A sizable portion of our membership works at major research universities with large technology and research labs. Many of our members are directly involved in developing AI technologies.
Others work in fields where they’re already being affected by AI. So, this is an issue people are actively trying to understand and navigate. In about ten days, there will actually be a national conference organized by Higher Education Labor United, of which we’re a part, here in Chicago. One of the conference’s primary goals is to explore how AI should be addressed in higher education settings.
In general, where many people are coming down on the issue is that AI can be a very useful tool. But it should be used to improve people’s lives, make work easier, and create new wealth that is broadly shared across society. It should not become something that is hoarded, controlled, and exploited by a small number of corporate interests at the expense of everyone else.
Michael Merrill: Maybe after that conference we can invite some of the participants onto the show so they can talk about what they’ve learned and what recommendations emerge from it.
Egberto Willies: What I’d like to add, Carl, is this.
As someone involved in the labor movement, one of my concerns about AI is that we need to address some of these issues now. I don’t mean we should stop AI development. But I do think we need to establish clear rules before certain assumptions become entrenched.
Right now, a handful of large corporations are collecting enormous amounts of data. They’re learning from workers, from the way employees perform their jobs, and from research produced by countless people. Yet I don’t think we’ve clearly established who actually owns that information.
The companies obviously believe they own the material they’re using. But it seems to me that much of what AI systems learn comes from the work of employees, researchers, writers, and ordinary people. Mike reads a book and writes comments about it. Researchers publish studies. Workers develop expertise through their jobs. Eventually all of that knowledge may become part of an AI model.
Before it becomes permanently accepted that these companies own all of that value, I think it’s imperative that we establish that they don’t. Is that part of the direction you’re talking about? Is that where the labor movement is heading?
Carl Rosen: Absolutely. In fact, we’ve had many conversations with Bernie Sanders and members of his staff about exactly that issue. The argument is that AI companies are making use of information that’s in the public domain and that has been generated not only by workers today, but by generations of workers over many decades. They’re taking that accumulated knowledge and effectively claiming ownership over it.
Egberto Willies: Exactly.
Carl Rosen: And saying they alone should be able to profit from it.
The counterargument is that this knowledge belongs to society. If that’s true, then we need to think seriously about new forms of ownership and governance. One proposal that’s been discussed is some form of public ownership or public control. There are different ways to accomplish that. I’ve heard proposals that would place these companies under partial public ownership, perhaps with government holding a 50 percent stake.
There are different approaches, but the broader point is that we have to reconsider these ownership structures if we’re going to keep this technology under democratic control.
Egberto Willies: And that’s exactly what I think is imperative right now.
A lot of the public discussion we hear is, in my opinion, a distraction. People talk about slowing things down, regulating agents, or worrying about science-fiction scenarios. As a software developer, I think much of that misses the larger question. The really important issue is ownership and control. That’s why I think the conversations you’re having with Bernie Sanders and others are so significant.
We need to address these questions before ownership becomes institutionalized. Once laws and regulations are written in ways that assume these companies own everything, those assumptions become codified, and it becomes much harder to challenge them later.
Michael Merrill: I’d like to put the AI discussion on the shelf for a future program, if I might, because these are important issues and deserve more attention. Let’s bring in some people who can really walk us through the details.
Carl Rosen: That sounds good.
Michael Merrill: Great. What I want to use as an example is this: just as you need policies in collective bargaining to address graduate workers’ conditions and the technologies they’re dealing with, like AI, there are broader lessons here as well.
I have to confess that I’m a little disappointed in Bernie Sanders. And that disappointment goes back to 2016 and even afterward. What I hoped to see emerging from the Sanders movement was a grassroots political movement, not something focused immediately on legislative change in Washington, but something focused on building power from the ground up.
I am reminded of Tony Mazzocchi. Tony helped win occupational safety and health legislation because he built an occupational safety and health movement that couldn’t be ignored. At a certain point, it didn’t matter what members of Congress personally believed.
What mattered was the reality on the ground. If politicians failed to address workplace safety and health, there would be political consequences. In fact, it was Richard Nixon who signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, not because he necessarily believed in it, but because political realities required it.
Changing those grassroots realities seems to me to be one of the most important things we can do right now. When I was reading about EWOC, I found myself imagining something similar in politics. I jokingly called it EPOC, an Emergency Political Organizing Committee, a project that would help people organize politically at the neighborhood, community, state, and national levels through training, discussion, and movement-building.
It would be similar to the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century or the Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. Those movements were driven by ordinary people demanding change and pushing politicians to act, rather than focusing primarily on politicians themselves.
So, I’m curious how you think about that. How do you see a path toward a Labor Party, which I know the UE advocates?
Carl Rosen: Certainly, we’ve got to get a lot more people organized and active around issues. I think both grassroots organizing and electoral politics matter.
But I wouldn’t fault Bernie Sanders for not having fully developed that kind of movement. He’s one person, and he’s actually helped generate a number of important developments during this period. For example, last year he traveled around the country with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, holding rallies in places where the Democratic Party had largely stopped trying to organize working people around a progressive agenda, a progressive populist agenda, a working-class agenda.
His campaigns also helped spawn efforts like EWOC. Likewise, organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America have, unevenly but meaningfully, brought a great many people into political activity who otherwise might never have become involved.
Michael Merrill: Absolutely. I don’t want to criticize Bernie. He’s accomplished an enormous amount, and he’s a remarkable figure. What I want us to think about is something you mentioned earlier. During the great organizing drives of the 1930s, self-organization was critical. Workers lined up to join those movements because they felt ownership of them.
Carl Rosen: That’s true. But it’s also important to remember why they were ready. Throughout the 1920s, there was a very active left wing in this country. There were socialists, communists, and other organizations engaged in political education among working-class people. That educational groundwork helped create the conditions for what emerged in the 1930s.
Michael Merrill: And we also had a massive workers’ education movement. There were dozens of educational programs across the country run by many different institutions. The YWCA was one of the country’s most important worker-education organizations.
Carl Rosen: Exactly. That’s right. And that educational foundation helped make the labor upsurge of the 1930s possible. We need to return to that kind of work.
Today, some groups are trying to do exactly that. One example is Mayday Strong, which has a substantial labor component but also includes many organizations rooted in working-class communities. They help people understand what we’re up against. It’s not only what they view as authoritarian tendencies in the Trump movement or threats to democratic institutions. It’s also what they see as the growing power of a corporate oligarchy that wants society to function primarily for its own benefit.
The argument is that we need a class-based approach to addressing those issues. Many people and organizations are doing that educational work right now, but it’s a long and difficult struggle.
Michael Merrill: Who else comes to mind? You mentioned Mayday Strong. Tell us more.
Carl Rosen: This past May Day, there were literally thousands of protest actions across the country, more than we’ve ever seen on a May Day before. Many of those efforts were connected through networks like Mayday Strong and other pro-democracy organizations.
Michael Merrill: My favorite May Day was actually the immigrant rights mobilization in 2006.
Carl Rosen: Exactly. And these groups work closely with immigrant rights organizations.
Right now, immigrant rights groups face particular challenges when it comes to mass mobilization because many people are understandably trying to avoid drawing attention to themselves. You can’t blame them for that.
But to return to your earlier point, I had the sense that you took a little issue with some of my criticism of parts of the labor movement. The reason I raise that history is because it helps explain why many unions today struggle to challenge the two-party political framework that dominates American politics.
Yet doing exactly that is what we need. Bernie Sanders has shown for decades in Vermont what can be accomplished. And now you have people like Dan Osborn, who came very close to winning as an independent and may very well succeed in the future.
Egberto Willies: I want to jump in here because I think this connects with something I try to accomplish through my own activism.
I sometimes describe our corporatocracy as a kind of virus. Mike may not like that analogy, but there’s a reason I use it. When you identify a virus, you begin to understand what kind of treatment is required. Mike has been describing many of the problems in the system, even if he hasn’t always named the system itself. Once you name it, it becomes easier to recognize what solutions are needed.
One of those solutions, I think, is bringing people together. You mentioned Mayday Strong. I just looked it up and immediately found it compelling. But the broader point is that movements can’t remain isolated from one another. We need to find the places where different movements overlap and support one another. That’s where real power lies.
The corporate elite, the oligarchy, whatever term someone prefers, often benefit when movements remain fragmented. Earlier, Mike talked about what was accomplished in the 1930s, and those achievements were remarkable. But the people with power eventually found ways around many of those gains. The question now is how we solve those problems in the 2020s and beyond.
What are your thoughts on that?
Carl Rosen: I think you’re absolutely right. The forces that halted much of the progress made during the 1930s are still active today.
I live in Chicago. We elected a union leader as mayor, and since the day he took office, powerful economic interests in the city have worked relentlessly to undermine him. Now they’re trying to remove him through the next election cycle because they see him as a threat.
Egberto Willies: I’m glad you brought him up. I met him in Chicago a couple of years ago, and what’s remarkable is the way the media questions him. They repeatedly ask whether he’s anti-business. He always has thoughtful answers, but the fact that he constantly has to defend himself against that narrative is unfortunate. Anyone trying to govern on behalf of ordinary people seems to face that same battle.
Carl Rosen: Exactly. A great deal of money is being spent trying to defeat him because powerful interests view him as a threat. These are difficult struggles. Progress is possible, but we need as many people as possible pushing in the same direction.
One thing I will say is that, in a strange way, Donald Trump has been effective at bringing many different groups together. There’s so much opposition to him among different constituencies and so much concern about what many people view as threats to democratic norms and institutions.
As a result, people who might otherwise be focused on separate issues are increasingly finding common cause. If he attempts some of the actions he has publicly discussed, I think you’ll see very large public responses and significant mobilization. And regardless of one’s political perspective, I think it’s fair to say that when public leaders repeatedly state what they intend to do, people take those statements seriously.
Michael Merrill: Yes, indeed. Can I jump in here, Egberto? First off, if I scan my “wet drive”...
Egberto Willies: Wait, wait, wait. What did you call that?
Michael Merrill: My wet drive. You know, my brain.
Egberto Willies: Okay, I just wanted to make sure I heard that right.
Michael Merrill: First, I’ve seen various May Day activities over the years, and I’m sure Mayday Strong has crossed my radar before, but it didn’t really register with me before.
Second, another goal of this show is to demonstrate that people on the left can disagree. I actually make a point of raising questions that might seem awkward. You called it taking umbrage. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as critical thinking. We need to probe our own weaknesses before others do it for us. That’s why I push back from time to time.
And in that context, because we only have a few minutes left, I’d like to ask another question that’s been on my mind. I’m happy to offer my own answer, but I don’t have nearly the experience or standing that you have. I spend my time reading, teaching, and thinking about these issues.
Egberto Willies: You’re a professor!
Michael Merrill: I am a professor, yes. I do a lot of teaching. But most of my work has actually been in labor education rather than in traditional academic circles. I’ve spent most of my career working with working people. So let me ask: Suppose we win. What’s the first thing we do? What’s the second thing we do? What are the changes we’re actually trying to achieve that would make life tangibly better for people?
Carl Rosen: That’s a good question. If you want to dig further into Mayday Strong, they’ve put forward what they’re calling an “affordability agenda,” which is essentially an anti-austerity platform.
It includes things like Medicare for All, raising wages, increasing the minimum wage, shifting public spending away from tax cuts for the wealthy, and reducing excessive military spending and funding for wars that don’t benefit ordinary people. Instead, those resources should be used to rebuild infrastructure, invest in schools, and meet other social needs.
The goal is to build the economy from the bottom up. Those would certainly be elements of the agenda. Honestly, many of these ideas are things Bernie Sanders has advocated for over many years. He’s not a god, but he has a lot of good ideas.
Michael Merrill: I was only prepared to call him a saint. I wasn’t prepared to call him a god.
Egberto Willies: Did you have anything else before I jump in? I know there’s a lot you want to get out, and we’ve only got about six minutes left.
Michael Merrill: Well, to me, the point is that demands like Medicare for All, full employment, affordable housing, and similar policies are almost as old as the UE itself. These ideas have been around for a very long time. Going back to something Egberto said earlier, we need to think harder, more creatively, and collectively about how we actually win these objectives.
It sometimes feels like we’ve been playing the same game for eighty years. We develop good proposals, then run into the predictable political obstacles standing in the way. It seems to me that we need a different approach.
My own favorite proposal is this: If we ever get a Democratic trifecta in Washington, the first priority shouldn’t necessarily be Medicare for All. That’s important, and Obamacare was certainly an improvement, but why not start by tripling the size of the House of Representatives?
Why not make the House a congress of the people again, instead of the Congress of organized interests? If we did that, we could begin making real political change at the national level.
Carl Rosen: If we’re talking about structural political reforms, the first thing I’d want to do is expand the size of the Supreme Court. It’s filled with people who, in my view, would block almost any meaningful progressive reform.
Michael Merrill: Absolutely. And we could do that without amending the Constitution, just as we could expand the House of Representatives without a constitutional amendment.
Carl Rosen: That’s true. But I’d argue that policy changes have to produce real improvements in living standards for the majority of Americans. That’s where I think Obama fell short. He didn’t ensure that enough people felt meaningful improvements in their lives, and that helped create the conditions that allowed Donald Trump to emerge politically.
More broadly, I think we’re also seeing the failures of the capitalist system itself. The system has evolved into a form of predatory finance capitalism, where wealth keeps being extracted from the broader economy and concentrated in the hands of a very small segment of society.
Egberto Willies: Carl, I’m going to take thirty seconds here because it’s not really our main subject, but I think it’s important. Those of us who identify with the left or the interests of working people need to recognize something. I believe we’re in what might be called “end-state capitalism,” and the system is essentially behaving as it was designed to behave. Until we accept that reality, we’re not going to get very far.
Michael Merrill: For me, one of the most important distinctions is that we shouldn’t confuse capitalism with markets. I would argue that capitalism, historically, has been defined by predatory finance. It’s been predatory finance for centuries. What we need to challenge is predatory finance, not the idea of markets themselves. Markets can be democratic, creative institutions if they’re structured properly.
Egberto Willies: Yes, you’re absolutely right.
Carl Rosen: And we also need to prevent extreme concentrations of wealth. One of the fundamental problems facing democracy in this country is that there are billionaires capable of pouring enormous sums of money into politics. That kind of influence distorts the democratic process.
Michael Merrill: I wouldn’t quite put it that way because I consider myself rich, even though I don’t have much money.
Carl Rosen: Well, it depends on how you’re defining rich. I’m talking about people who can write multimillion-dollar checks to support candidates they like or attack candidates they don’t.
Michael Merrill: Fair enough. I don’t think most people realize just how much money exists at those levels.
Egberto Willies: My dear, wonderful, handsome brothers, we’re running out of time. So, I’d like to ask my brother Carl Rosen to give us about a minute of closing thoughts.
Carl Rosen: It’s been fun. These are exactly the conversations we need to have. I couldn’t agree more with what Mike said earlier about the importance of challenging one another, thinking critically, and working through these issues together. Because, honestly, what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked well enough.
I would argue that part of the reason is that powerful interests have been strong enough to block many of the changes we’ve fought for. But some of the problems have also been self-inflicted. There have been people who chose shortcuts, corruption, or other approaches that ultimately hurt the movement. We have to overcome those challenges on behalf of working people. And the starting point is organizing people from the bottom up.
Thank you for having me.
Michael Merrill: Thank you for being here.
And for me, Egberto, the most important ingredient in organizing is hope. People need to believe that things can get better, that their efforts are not pointless, that they really can raise their wages, eliminate favoritism in the workplace, and change the way the country is governed. People need to believe that society can be run for the benefit of everyone rather than a privileged few. That’s the most important thing.
Carl Rosen: And if I can add one final point: when workers organize in their workplaces and learn how to make those workplaces better, they’re also learning the skills needed to reorganize society and make it work better for them as well.
Michael Merrill: Absolutely.
Egberto Willies: You’ve been listening to Carl Rosen, former General President of the UE, on Liberty and Justice for All.
For Dr. Michael Merrill and myself, Egberto Willies, thank you for tuning in to community-powered KPFT Houston.
Stay informed, keep organizing, and stay engaged.