Episode 11 Transcript Edited

WE NEED TO GET TOGETHER TO MAKE A CHANGE

LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

Episode 11 October 29, 2026

Egberto Willies: Welcome to Liberty and Justice for All on KPFT 90.1 FM. I’m Egberto Willies, alongside my co-host, Dr. Michael Merrill. Today, we’re joined by veteran labor organizer, author, and Labor Notes editor Jenny Brown to dissect the state of the working-class movement, the power of rank-and-file organizing, and where labor goes next.

Welcome, Jenny, to Liberty and Justice for All.

Jenny Brown: Thanks.

Michael Merrill: How are you?

Jenny Brown: Great.

Michael Merrill: Good. Our plan for today was to have a three-part conversation. We would start by letting you introduce yourself to the audience, talk about where you are now, how you got there, and the various paths you followed to get there.

Then I’m particularly interested, because of your past work in a local chapter of the Labor Party in Gainesville, Florida, to talk with you about local-level work there.

The Labor Party never ran candidates. It never really had a national impact. And yet your local group managed to identify with it, make something out of that identity, and last for a decade or so.

And we wanted to talk about that experience because if there is ever going to be a Labor Party, a lot of people are going to have that experience. It’s going to take a while before anything like that has a national or even a statewide presence. What do its supporters do in the meantime?

Then I thought we would end with a few general reflections. I know you’re working right now on a book on the Labor Party and assessing its lessons. Is there anything you can share from this work, lessons from the last Labor Party experience, that those trying to build the next one might consider? And just in general where you see the labor movement going?

So, let’s start with you introducing yourself to the audience

Jenny Brown: That’s fine.

I’m currently an assistant editor at Labor Notes. I’ve worked there since 2010, but there was a break in the middle.

Labor Notes is a magazine and organizing project founded in 1979 in Detroit. It came out of a period when there was a lot of ferment, wildcat strikes, and bottom-up organizing in the labor movement. Labor Notes hoped to pull a lot of people together and started out with the slogan, “Putting the movement back in the labor movement.”

By movement, we mean both motion, as in an organized and fighting labor movement, but also a movement in the sense that it’s for the whole working class. It’s not just one employer, one union, or one sector.

We do a lot of trainings. We do these things we call Troublemaker Schools in various cities. We publish books. We support union democracy reformers. We have a monthly magazine and daily coverage on our website, labornotes.org.

We’re probably best known for our every-other-year conference. The next one is in Chicago in 2028.

Michael Merrill: How long have you been at Labor Notes?

Jenny Brown: I started in 2010, then I took a break, and now I’ve been back for about four years.

Michael Merrill: Okay. So, back us up now to when you became conscious, as it were. Not only when you started to get involved in movement activities, but which movements drew you in?

Jenny Brown: I think the first movement that drew me was trying to stop wars in Central America. This was in the early ‘80s.

In the course of that, I went to Nicaragua with a group called Witness for Peace.

We interviewed a lot of people who had experienced atrocities at the hands of the Contras, whom the U.S. was supporting. We apologized for the stuff that the U.S. was doing to them, and they would say, “Oh, it’s okay. We know what it’s like to live in a dictatorship because of the dictatorship that we overthrew. We know that it’s not your responsibility.”

For us, that was like, “Oh, maybe we don’t live in a democracy. Maybe not a dictatorship. But certainly not a democracy either.”

The other subtext of that experience was that for Nicaraguans, the real problem was in the United States. We really needed to fix what’s going on in the United States, if we’re going to have any democracy or worker solidarity in Nicaragua.

Michael Merrill: Was Witness for Peace mostly a faith-based group?

Jenny Brown: Yes, Witness for Peace is faith-based, and their idea was to put people in areas where the Contras might attack, on the assumption that they wouldn’t attack if there were U.S. citizens there.

Which is kind of unfair, but also the political reality. And so they continuously had delegations. They still do this in Guatemala and other places that are experiencing this kind of thing.

Michael Merrill: What was it that drew you to the group? Was it your faith, or was it something else?

Jenny Brown: It wasn’t religious faith. It was more a humanistic sense of solidarity, I think. That is kind of where I started.

Michael Merrill: And where did you go from there? I mean, you come back from Nicaragua, and the experience has raised for you questions about what’s going on in the US, which you were obviously already questioning. What happened next?

Jenny Brown: Organizers all over the country worked to get the Boland Amendment passed to stop military aid to the Contras.

And then the government—this was the Iran-Contra scandal, which you may remember—the government bypassed that law. And that made me think, okay, there’s really rot in this system. We need to get more democracy in whatever way we can.

And that led to me getting involved in the feminist movement there, which was very active.

Michael Merrill: This is where?

Jenny Brown: In Gainesville, Florida.

There were people who had actually been very influential in founding the women’s liberation movement. In Gainesville, they had come right out of the Southern Civil Rights Movement and into feminism, seeing that as a new front in expanding democracy in the U.S.

I got swept up in some of that.

My labor journey started in the early ‘90s. I was working as a kind of perma-temp for the University of Florida in the acquisitions department of the university press. My position had no health insurance, which was particularly an issue for me.

I was not in the bargaining unit, and the category was supposed to be for positions that lasted under six months, kind of designed for students. But the university was basically using it as a non-union lower tier, violating the contract and undercutting everybody’s conditions.

I knew people who had been in that category for eight years or more. I didn’t want that to happen to me.

Michael Merrill: It’s quite common, actually, in public-sector work across the country.

Jenny Brown: Yeah, but we had a contract that said you could not do that.

My local at the time, an AFSCME local, was really at a low ebb. There were no meetings, there were officers only in name, but we did have the contract, so we thought there was potential to change what was going on.

And of course, if you’re not in the union, your boss could be in a bad mood one day and you just get fired. That happened to an office mate of mine.

Egberto Willies: Florida is right to work, correct?

Jenny Brown: Florida is right to work. So that was one of the problems for the union. Out of a bargaining unit of 5,000 people, maybe only 500 or 600 were actually members of the local.

Then you have a problem where you can barely keep a staff person going. There’s not money for lawyers, that kind of thing.

I knew in theory, and my coworkers knew in theory, that unions were key to changing things. But in our situation, it just seemed like there wasn’t anything happening.

So, I knew about Labor Notes, the magazine because a local library carried it as a publication (there wasn’t the web then), and a couple of coworkers and I went to the Labor Notes conference in 1995. There, we met people from Decatur, Illinois, who were in the middle of this huge fight. It was called the “War Zone” at that time. They worked for a corn processing plant called Staley and had been locked out.

It was coming up on the second anniversary of their struggle, so there was a big mobilization. A couple of coworkers and I went to Decatur to support them and learn about what they were doing there.

These were very good union leaders. They had a lot of support but kind of got hung out to dry by their national union. But it was good organizing. Nobody crossed the picket line. It was really solid.

Michael Merrill: Before we get into that, I want to back up a little and clarify your own educational path. Did you go to college? Did you complete college? Or, did you avoid college and manage to get where you are without it?

Jenny Brown: Yeah, I went to the University of Florida and got fairly mediocre grades. And I got a degree, which I regard as a degree in name only, in political science.

Egberto Willies: Why “in name only”?

Michael Merrill: Well, for one thing, politics isn’t a science!

Egberto Willies: Okay.

Jenny Brown: Yes, first of all, calling it a science is one thing. But another is, they weren’t teaching about movements. They were teaching about what leaders did, what laws were passed. They weren’t teaching the basic fundamentals of how power works, except maybe as a power struggle between leaders. The masses of people, and what people have done to change their conditions, is really not a topic, or at least it wasn’t in the school that I went to.

So, yeah, a degree in name only.

Egberto Willies: I don’t want to derail where Mike is taking us right now. But I want to ask if you think that applies throughout the country, as far as the type of education we get?

Jenny Brown: Yeah, I think so.

Later I went to get a master’s degree at a program at the University of Massachusetts that is run by union folks, and that’s very different. There are some bright spots. But I think in general, if you go to any major university, you’ll get this sort of top-down perspective. It doesn’t teach you that people made change. It teaches you that this president did this and this Supreme Court did that.

Egberto Willies: Teaching as Indoctrination.

Jenny Brown: Yeah.

Michael Merrill: Let’s go back now. It’s 1995. You’re at a Labor Notes conference. You’re meeting people from Decatur and other places. What next?

Jenny Brown: Well, we went to Decatur. We went up to the rally, and I heard Tony Mazzocchi speak. He gave his rap on Labor Party Advocates, and it was very impressive.

They were slowly building. They had so many unions on board, they were looking for more unions to join, and they wanted people to spread the word in their workplaces.

We immediately joined as individuals because we wanted to know what was going on. At that time. The effort was called Labor Party Advocates. It wasn’t the Labor Party yet, but there was the idea that there would be a conference founding the Labor Party the next year.

We went back to Gainesville and knew we wanted to start a chapter. For a while we were just talking about it. Then five of us went to the founding convention in 1996. Again, as individuals, we didn’t have a chapter yet. But a friend of mine who had been involved in the Chicago chapter, Mark Pietrowski, came to Gainesville and we agreed to co-chair the effort.

Then, we really got it going. The rule then was that you recruited 20 new members and got a local union to affiliate, so we did that.

Michael Merrill: I should probably, in the name of full disclosure, say that I probably received your applications at the Labor Party Advocates office, because I was in charge of it. I even asked for Labor Party membership card number 13, just so nobody else would feel burdened with that number!

So yes, all of this is familiar. But what I hope we’re now going to get into is all the things did in Gainesville, which was one of the more impressive local operations.

Jenny Brown: We came back from the founding convention really excited.

The first campaign launched by the Labor Party was the Right to a Job at a Living Wage campaign. The idea was to put that right into the Constitution as the 28th Amendment, essentially guaranteeing full employment by law.

Nobody was talking about this. If you didn’t have a job, it was considered your own fault.

But there had been national legislation at various points in U.S. history. In 1978 there was the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. There was no follow-through. But there was at least an idea that if large numbers of people didn’t have jobs, the government should do something about it.

This was a period when we were seeing massive layoffs, the chain-sawing of jobs basically for stock gains. There was a lot of automation. Whole industries were being offshored, like in the steel industry.

There was a lot of job insecurity, which is kind of relatable today with the specter of AI coming in.

People would go from a pretty good job to a terrible, rock-bottom McJob with no benefits, no say in the workplace.

Even if you did have a decent job, you were affected because you’d be scared to lose it, so you’d put up with a lot that you otherwise wouldn’t.

We did a lot of canvassing for the 28th Amendment, and people were enthusiastic. I remember we mostly tried to do door-to-door organizing, but we also petitioned outside grocery stores. I remember a guy blowing past me, irritated that I was asking him to sign some petition, whatever the hell that petition was. But when he heard what I was talking about, he came back. He said he’d been laid off and was really frustrated in his search for work. He grabbed the pen.

There was a hunger for something. But it was hard to get the concept going. The connection between what we were doing with petitions and gathering people, and actually getting an amendment into the Constitution, was a little too distant. We weren’t big enough or well-resourced enough to make it a national issue, but we tried, and other chapters tried to make it go.

The other thing we did was go around Florida, and around our area in particular, talking to unions about the Labor Party. We’d go out to lunch with a local union president and talk to them. Sometimes we’d get somebody who had more sway in the labor movement to give them a call.

What we encountered, and I think this was true all over the country, was a real hesitancy from unions to get on board. I think this was also a reflection of the labor movement being in a defensive crouch for a long time. We had won a lot of things in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and the 1960s, like healthcare, pensions, and time off. But we hadn’t been able to expand that to everyone the way they did in Europe or Canada.

I remember this Canadian unionist, Elaine Bernard, who had been involved in starting the New Democratic Party in Canada. She was very supportive of the Labor Party and toured around with Tony talking about it. She used to say that unions win things for their members, but if you don’t expand those gains politically for everybody, you basically put a target on your back.

Companies have a huge incentive to bust your union, more so than in places where healthcare, paid leave, and similar benefits are guaranteed by law. The Labor Party was an attempt to break through that festering problem in the U.S. labor movement. But it was also the reason unions tended to be defensive and cautious when it came to joining.

In line with that, at the 1998 convention, the Labor Party launched what we called the Just Health Care Campaign.

This worked considerably better than the 28th Amendment campaign because health insurance is a problem for everyone. Either it was too expensive, or there were co-pays, co-insurance, and constantly invented new fees. Maybe it wasn’t included with your job at all, as in the job I mentioned at the University of Florida. Or if you got sick and lost your job, then you’d lose your insurance and have no care. The quality was going down. There were limits on who you could see, denials of care.

Everyone was encountering some aspect of this, especially union members. I remember a friend who was a local officer in the IBEW, the electricians’ union, saying that at one point their insurance fund had been a selling point for members. But eventually the main thing the union was dealing with was insurance denials and strange medical bills. It was taking up so much staff time dealing with those issues.

In a way, it reduced the union in people’s eyes. People would ask, “What are we doing here?” It made organizing new members harder. And that continues today. At the bargaining table, unions are constantly giving up pay and other benefits just to hold onto their insurance.

We did a lot of protests outside insurance companies. We also held town hall meetings where people spoke out about their insurance problems. At that time, the dominant approach was that we just needed to cover the uninsured, that the uninsured were the problem.

I remember at one town hall we heard from a bunch of people who started out with “good” insurance and were completely devastated financially by the end of their illness. So simply having insurance was not a guarantee of care.

Both the insured and the uninsured had a common interest, as we saw it, in getting private insurance companies out of the system, like many other countries have done, and simply covering everybody. You know, Medicare starting at age zero.

Michael Merrill: There are three points I’m hoping we might be able to touch on.

One has to do with what I would describe as the inner life of your party chapter. For all of those years that you worked together, did its membership ever grow or change? What did you do internally to sustain yourselves?

I would note in this context that I think of faith groups as maintaining their commitments through faith. They’re quite conscious about it, and they meet regularly to reaffirm that faith in the face of whatever temptation the devil might be throwing at them at the moment. I wonder what you all did, if anything, in that regard.

With respect to that, it also sounds from your descriptions that what people responded to was not so much the call for a Labor Party itself as the agenda the party seemed to be calling for. First, the 28th Amendment, and later Just Health Care. These were things people were responsive to. Can you recall any conversations in your outreach to local unions and trade unionists where people also came to understand that broader point?

The way I’ve been putting it to myself recently is that nobody in the labor movement thinks much of company unions. They know a company union is for the benefit of the company. It’s not about a union. And yet we seem to have a lot of trouble thinking about company political parties as being only for the benefit of the company.

Finally, I also don’t want to forget to have you talk about your feminism feeds your labor activism, and your labor activism feeds your feminism. Let’s not lose sight of that.

Egberto Willies: But before you do that, Jenny, and this is for me, Doctor Merrill, because you just mentioned two things that went over my head, and I imagine they would go over our audience’s heads as well.

You spoke about labor unions and company unions. Let’s unpack what you consider the difference between those so that, when Jenny answers, we can actually get a good picture of what we’re talking about.

Michael Merrill: Well, I’m sure Jenny probably has her own elevator speech on company unions, but my elevator speech is that a company union is just that. It’s something the company creates. It’s a fake union. They’ll give you things to talk about that don’t directly challenge management.

Egberto Willies: What are examples of that?

Michael Merrill: Of a company union or of fake things?

Egberto Willies: Yes, a fake company union as you see it.

Michael Merrill: Worker involvement programs. What did they used to call them back in the day? The team concept. They say, “We’re a family here. We’re all in this together. Let’s do this together.” Then they’ll let you decide what color to paint your exit door. It’s fake involvement.

Actually, it started in this country right after the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in Colorado, which was a public relations disaster for the Rockefeller interests.

They hired some public relations people, and they came up with a concept they called welfare capitalism. What welfare capitalism did was create little workplace structures to give people the sense of consultation and voice without the substance or reality of it.

As I speak, the connection between welfare capitalism and our “welfare democracy.” What we call democracy is a company democracy. That was the connection.

Jenny may have other thoughts.

Jenny Brown: I think the parallel you’re making is that we can sniff it out when it’s a union that’s cooperating with the boss, but when its the political parties doing the cooperating, we don’t always see that. The Democratic Party sounds good and says it’s for things, but then they don’t do them. Because if they actually changed anything, their big donors, the big corporations, would not tolerate that.

Like Tony used to say, unions can’t compete on the money. We’re being outspent ten to one. The corporations go up there with a barrel of cash, and that’s the logic of politics. What we need to do is match that with people power. That was the idea behind the Labor Party.

Now I’ll go back to a couple of your points. What did we do to sustain ourselves?

I think the big leap in our membership happened when a couple of Massachusetts Labor Party chapters had been running health care referendums, non-binding referendums at the county level. They were basically asking voters whether they favored the state setting up a system where everyone would be covered for health care. And we thought, well, we can do that in Alachua County.

The county didn’t have a signature-gathering requirement, but we could press the county commission to put it on the ballot. So, we campaigned to get the county commission to do that. And even though it was a shoestring campaign, we got 65 percent of the vote for fully public health care in Florida.

This was just in our county. And it was that presidential election in 2000 when Bush and Gore were basically tied. What was interesting was that people voted for our health care referendum in larger numbers than almost everything else on the ballot except the presidential election. They skipped all the way down to the bottom of the ballot and voted on our referendum.

Michael Merrill: Wow.

Jenny Brown: So that gave us a big boost. Running the campaign itself gave people a sense of purpose because there were deadlines and specific goals we were trying to reach. But the victory also gave people a feeling that, yes, this is something. It gave us a lot of energy for the next few years to keep talking about health care.

The other thing is that early on we figured out the national Labor Party dues were $20, but people were willing to contribute a lot more if they were asked. That’s the thing about fundraising. You’ve got to ask people. We started a Committee of 100, with people giving $20 a month. Some gave even more. We also did other fundraising events and benefits. As a result, we had enough money for a small office, which we shared with another group, and a part-time staffer to keep all the balls in the air.

Michael Merrill: It was a going concern.

Jenny Brown: Yeah, exactly. We also did a lot of door-to-door canvassing in neighborhoods. We’d pick a neighborhood where we had one or two members and canvas that area, inviting people to a house party. This was encouraged by the national party. That was the model. They even sent us piles of materials and postcards to mail out.

Then we’d get people together. Usually, it was somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody. People generally aren’t going to go to someone’s house if they don’t know anyone there. But if it’s your neighbor, and it’s just down the street, that’s different. We’d get people together, talk about health care, and then plug them into the campaign.

Another great thing the Labor Party did nationally, and Mike, I’m sure you were involved in this, though I mostly think of it as a Labor Institute project, was an economics curriculum for workers called Corporate Power and the American Dream. The idea was that workers taught each other about the economic situation they faced. Why are we seeing layoffs? Why are wages going down? What’s going on? College costs were skyrocketing, which was especially important in our town because it was a big college town.

We taught that curriculum several times at the Carpenters Hall. It was six weekly evening meetings. There was one course on general economics, and there was even one focused specifically on health care. They were really good.

So we had an educational element that brought people in and helped them talk knowledgeably about these issues when they were canvassing neighborhoods or talking with people at house parties.

On the labor movement itself, we had a lot of members who belonged to various unions.

Michael Merrill: How many? What was the membership? And can you give us some sense of its ebb and flow over the course of the group’s work?

Jenny Brown: Probably 200 to 300 people. We had a Committee of 100 with 100 people giving $20 a month.

Egberto Willies: That’s in Florida only, or is that nationally?

Jenny Brown: No, no, that was in Gainesville alone. It’s a small town. It was about 100,000 people at the time. It’s like one neighborhood in Brooklyn, right? But we had more reach because people knew us.

We had some members who were even officers in local unions. The labor movement was happy to give us space to meet. We even got the Southeast representative for the Labor Party to come speak at our annual spaghetti dinner for the North Central Florida Central Labor Council, just to talk about the Labor Party.

But they were not that enthusiastic about the idea of us running candidates. We weren’t anywhere near the point where we could run candidates, but the idea of a party immediately brought that concern up for them. We even had people say, “Okay, we’re giving you money, but it’s for the health care thing, right? Not for the party.”

And this was because they couldn’t see any way around, just as we couldn’t, the problem of splitting the working-class vote if we ran somebody for office. Florida at that point was kind of a stalemate between the two dominant parties. Votes were really close, as demonstrated by the Bush-Gore election.

The labor movement in Gainesville really did make a big difference locally, mobilizing people, running phone banks, getting out yard signs. Making things less evil, right? The lesser of two evils really mattered.

We were never really able to solve that structural problem, and that problem still exists, of course. If a working person runs as a working-class independent, unless one of the other parties stands down, there’s going to be a problem of splitting the vote. But if you run in a Democratic primary, then you’re identified as a Democrat.

In the Labor Party, we felt you had to have that independent label so people understood it was something separate and different. We thought, well, we’ll select candidates to run on our line. But it turns out that’s not really legal in the U.S. system. I didn’t fully understand this at the time. I’m sure people in the Labor Party understood it better than I did.

In most places, you can’t simply have a meeting and select candidates for your party. There has to be a primary if you have a ballot line. So even if you secure a ballot line, anybody can run on that ballot line. You don’t really have complete control over it. For that reason, and maybe this is one of the lessons you’re looking for, I think we were kind of wrong to think it could only be done through a ballot line.

In New York City, where I live now, the Democratic Socialists of America have successfully run dozens of people using the Democratic Party ballot line. But the important thing is that they have an independent existence and are, in fact, hated by the leadership of the Democratic Party.

The system is so repressive toward third parties that this approach has actually been more fruitful in terms of getting people with a real working-class agenda into office. And I know in Texas the Communications Workers have been doing some good work selecting union members to run and training them. That’s another fruitful way to go. Again, they’re running in Democratic primaries, but when they get elected, those officials identify more with unions than they do with the Democratic Party, its donors, and the broader political system.

Michael Merrill: One of the notions that’s surfaced more recently is that there are growing numbers of non-competitive districts where, if the Democrats run, it’s just a token appearance. They know they have no chance. Many voters are actually switching their registration to the Republican Party, even though their values haven’t changed, simply because they want to keep the worst Republicans out.

I know that’s happened in my family in Idaho. It’s become a one-party system again, much like the South used to be. I wonder what you make of this notion of running independent working-class candidates on an independent line in these polarized, non-competitive districts. Does that make any sense to you?

Jenny Brown: I think it does, but the math doesn’t really work out if you still have a Democrat on the ballot. They’re only getting 20 or 30 percent, but that’s still 20 or 30 percent that’s going to split the vote. Say you get 30 percent and they get 25 percent. You’re not winning.

Michael Merrill: Well, you might not win, that’s true. But one of the signals you send is that, if you’re running a regular Democrat and a working-class independent, and you actually cut into Republican support, then the Democrats might think, “Maybe we should change our agenda.” Instead of running a regular Democrat, maybe we need to run a different kind of Democrat. The actual tactics depend on the immediate situation and circumstances.

Egberto Willies: I think we have a situation like that happening right now, right? The young lady in... where is it? Montana or North Dakota? One of those states where the Democratic Party is actually asking a Democrat to leave the race for the independent candidate. I can’t remember what state it is.

Jenny Brown: Well, Dan Osborn is running for Senate in Nebraska, where that’s true. The Democratic Party has basically stood down and is not actively running somebody.

I think a lot of this is very specific to where you are and what the situation is, so it’s kind of hard to give a general answer.

I think the basic question is: Do you have a base outside of the Democratic Party? The Democratic Party is made up of a lot of donors, a lot of rich people, a lot of corporate board members, and a lot of consultants who have their own agenda. Do you have a base outside of that, from which you can really stand up to those pressures? Because they’re always going to try to pull you back into that system through money and other forms of influence.

At one point, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was being told that she had to do certain things or the Democratic Party wouldn’t give her money. She responded by saying, “I’m starting my own fundraising operation for the candidates we want.”

Egberto Willies: She didn’t need their money.

Jenny Brown: Exactly. They use all the levers of power they have to pull you back toward the center, and even toward the right, toward a corporate agenda, basically.

Michael Merrill: Just to close that part of the conversation, the impression I get from your narrative is that the union people you spoke to were very nervous about the party aspect but comfortable with the policy aspect.

I wondered whether there were any trade unionists like Tony who saw that we were painting ourselves into a corner. Were there people who recognized that problem?

Jenny Brown: Absolutely. We had a couple of different unions that sponsored the Labor Party. We had members, and even leaders of unions, who were involved. The question for them, and it was a national question, was: How do you switch over to an electoral party without causing the greater evil to come in? We never solved that problem, but I think a lot more people would have gotten on board as we slowly built our base if we had.

Michael Merrill: Any ideas how to solve it now?

Jenny Brown: Well, I think the DSA is providing an example. But again, the reason it’s working, and the reason they’re able to change policy at the state level, is because they have cohesion. The Democratic Socialists of America have a lot of members, and they have cohesion among their elected officials. They have socialists in office who meet together to figure out legislation, and they’re working with community groups, tenant groups, unions, and others to build mass support for these policies.

Egberto Willies: They’re organizing.

Jenny Brown: Yeah, I think so.

Michael Merrill: This raises another question. It still seems to me that DSA’s base is largely among young people and college students, and not as much among workers. I wonder whether that’s something that will change over time, or whether there’s something about DSA and what it stands for that creates an obstacle to reaching the rest of the population outside the college towns and Brooklyn.

Jenny Brown: Well, one thing is that New York may be different from other places, and DSA does vary widely from place to place. But in New York, it’s not true that the membership is just college students. There are plenty of workers involved.

The problem is that union leadership is often very tied to the Democratic Party. When you look at all the unions that endorsed Cuomo, for example, in the mayor’s race, you have to ask why. Cuomo is a former governor and a major political figure, but he was terrible for unions. Yet many unions supported him against Zohran Mamdani, who has much better positions on labor and union issues.

Why were they doing that? Well, they know Zohran is going to do the right thing. They don’t have to support him to get those policies. But if they don’t support Cuomo, he is going to come after them. He’s going to make life difficult for them. He’s a vindictive guy who understands how power works, and they’ve experienced that.

So, from their perspective, there was no percentage in supporting Zohran against Cuomo. They’re going to get what they want from a democratic socialist anyway. That’s basically the democratic socialist brand: support unions.

When you see that, you have to understand it as a power-politics problem. As soon as Zohran won the Democratic primary, unions started to get on board. But during the primary process, only a few organizations, like the Taxi Workers Alliance, UAW Region 9A, which has reform leadership, and AFSCME, co-endorsed him because they were so angry at Cuomo over what he’d done to pensions.

There were very few early endorsements like that. But once Zohran won the primary, labor support became enormous. This is a real problem, but it doesn’t mean union members don’t support Zohran or don’t support democratic socialist policies.

There’s been a huge amount of tenant-union organizing that has successfully changed state law. That work was done through cooperation among DSA legislators, tenant organizers, and community activists, and it was made possible by all of the DSA electoral work. Not least, it was made possible by putting pressure on certain Democratic politicians and threatening challenges to get them moving. Tenant organizing is a solid working-class issue in New York.

Michael Merrill: When I came from Idaho to New York City in 1966, it was a social-democratic town. There was still the influence of that tradition.

Jenny Brown: And it wasn’t all college students.

Michael Merrill: No, no, not at all. And I know it still isn’t. The socialist tradition is broad, deep, and old in New York City and the larger metropolitan region. I also believe that’s true in other parts of the country as well.

But it’s not as broad and deep everywhere. The challenge is figuring out how to expand beyond those strongholds.

On an earlier show, Egberto, we talked about this. The way I would put it is that if you’re going to build an anti-slavery movement, you’re going to have to mobilize racists against slavery. If you wait for the country to stop being racist before opposing slavery, it’s not going to happen.

The challenge is figuring out how to mobilize people who are against socialism to support socialism in effect.

Egberto Willies: Well, you know, it’s interesting because I think Jenny answered that question. When you spoke about what your group did in Gainesville and what you were using as an organizing factor. Remember the person who said, “I’m going to donate to your group, but this isn’t for the Labor Party, right? This is for health care.” You remember that story? I think that’s a template right there.

Michael Merrill: I agree with you, but back to Jenny again. The reason I’m so concerned about the inner life of local party organizations is that the anti-slavery movement was a centuries-long movement. That eventually became a decades-long mass movement.

And in that movement, you suffered more defeats than victories. The question is: How do you sustain a commitment to a change that needs to happen when victories are rare and defeats are common?

Egberto Willies: Always.

Michael Merrill: Jenny, what are your thoughts on that? And what did you learn from your own experience in Gainesville? Obviously, your commitments remain strong and actively expressed. How do you see it, both personally and organizationally?

Jenny Brown: Well, you asked me another question earlier and this one dovetails with it.

You asked how I see feminism and labor interacting. One of the things I learned in the feminist movement was the technique of consciousness-raising, where you talk about your life, compare it with other people’s experiences, and then analyze what’s happening. Why is this happening? Who’s benefiting?

That was also very much the style of the educational projects the Labor Party did. You looked at your own work life and asked, “Why is this happening?” Then you see other people experiencing the same thing and realize, “It’s not my fault. It’s not that I did something wrong. The system is set up this way.”

Once you realize that, you start to think, okay, we need to get together to make a change. We need a lot of people, because that’s where our strength comes from. But you also develop a sense of cohesion with the people you’re learning alongside. You become friends. You become comrades. You get a sense that we’re in this together. I think that really helped build our chapter and helped build the organization.

I remember consciousness-raising discussions about the sacrifices people made to get to college and how difficult it was, especially as tuition kept rising. A friend of mine who grew up poor in Jacksonville talked about how he had to live in a tent in order to attend the University of Florida because he couldn’t afford rent. He was effectively homeless while going to college.

He had never thought, growing up poor, that college would even be an option for him. Because of that, he hadn’t paid much attention in school. When you cut off an option like college from people, you’re really limiting their sense of what’s possible. And of course, the Labor Party’s answer was free higher education.

That was also something Bernie Sanders emphasized: everybody should have that chance, and everybody should grow up knowing that it’s available to them, not believing it’s out of reach.

Michael Merrill: I think college should be seen as a job, and we should pay students.

Jenny Brown: Yes. And that, too, was something Tony Mazzocchi was very good at talking about. My dad was in World War II. When he came back, he was able to get a college degree through the GI Bill. That happened for millions of World War II veterans. Tony also was one of them. He went to trade school and learned to manufacture dentures. There was money for that.

And why was there money for it? Because policymakers were worried they would have a huge number of demobilized soldiers coming home after fighting for democracy, only to face the same unemployment that had existed in the 1930s. And they knew those veterans weren’t going to stand for that. So they invested a tremendous amount of money into helping them transition back to civilian life, and it was extremely successful: the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act.

Michael Merrill: I know we’re getting toward the end.

Egberto Willies: Before you say that, Doc, I want to qualify something you said. You said we should consider going to college a job. I just looked something up on the fly. In Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, they pay you to go to college, I guess.

Jenny Brown: Right, and that’s the kind of thing we could have here. I mean, Bernie was promoting it.

But let me say a couple things about the signs of a mass revival in the labor movement. Because I think this is important. You asked me about that earlier. I think it’s a very good sign that United Auto Workers President Sean Fain and his slate just won reelection overwhelmingly in the Auto Workers.

In my view, that’s a vote for more aggressive contract campaigns like the Stand Up Strike in 2023 at the Big Three automakers where they compared what workers were getting to what the companies were getting and said, “These companies are making all this money, but we’re not getting any of it.” The message was: record profits mean record contracts.

After that, they put a strong effort into organizing the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They won the union election, and then they won a contract. It was the first foreign-owned auto plant in the South, I believe, to be organized into a union.

Now, it’s true that Sean Fain’s re-election wasn’t just about that. The main thing to understand is that the people running against him, Rich Boyer and Margaret Mock, were much more focused on a union that lowered dues and essentially said, “We want to serve the members we already have.” They saw the union more as a service organization than as a movement.

I think that’s the key issue. For the Auto Workers, and really for the labor movement generally, it’s not going to work if you stop organizing. If you don’t organize the non-union plants, like the Volkswagen plant, and follow the jobs that have been spun off into the parts sector, you are basically putting a target on the organized plants. Employers will ratchet down wages and working conditions until your union contract is barely distinguishable from non-union conditions.

That’s what happened in the UAW over the decades when it was led by poor, and in many cases corrupt, leadership. A union can’t exist in a sea of non-union workplaces. What’s true in auto is true throughout the economy.

You reach a tipping point where unions are no longer bringing wages and working conditions up for everybody. Instead, the non-union workplaces are bringing wages and working conditions down for everybody.

Egberto Willies: The point you just made about the difference between Sean Fain and the other candidates is something that really needs to be analyzed another time, because that’s huge.

But I know, Doc, you wanted to ask one last question, and we’ll have about a one-minute answer.

Michael Merrill: To me, the labor movement makes a mistake when it makes wall-to-wall unionism its central, broad focus. We have plenty of proof that unions can exist in a sea of non-union workers. I don’t know what the cutoff point is, but if one-third of the workforce is organized, you’re obviously a lot better off than if six percent is organized. But you don’t need the entire workforce organized to get a good contract. Clearly.

What I would like to see the labor movement do is pay as much attention to defending democracy. When you used that word earlier when talking about the GI Bill, I wanted to jump in. What we need is a grassroots movement that returns democracy to the workplace and to the community in ways that have been stolen from us. To me, the labor movement is not doing enough of that.

Egberto Willies: Doc, I like that ending from you. “Stolen.” That’s the key word.

Could you give us a one-minute closer, please, Jenny?

Jenny Brown: Yeah. I think what the labor movement needs is three things: First, strong, militant, democratic unions that are in motion. We know what that looks like.

Second, new organizing, which in many cases comes out of those strong, militant unions saying, “Our whole reason for existing is the working class, not just our current members.” Our members are going to be undermined if we don’t expand. At the auto workers, if we don’t expand, we’re going to shrink.

And, third, we need a political arm.

All three of those things work together and interact. If you crack down on corporate lawbreaking, that can open the door to more organizing. If you get better leadership in your union, you can win gains, and people will want to join your union. People are ready for that.

One last thing: when the Stand Up Strike happened, the union was in the news every day because it was striking the Big Three automakers. People found a union authorization card somewhere on the UAW website and started sharing the link around non-union auto plants. They got hundreds of people signing up for the UAW without the union even promoting it.

When people see a fighting union, they want to join it.

Egberto Willies: Whenever people are fighting, people want to join the fight.

You’ve been listening to Liberty and Justice for All on KPFT 90.1 FM with Dr. Michael Merrill: Merrill and Egberto Willies. Our thanks to Jenny Brown. Keep organizing. Stand with workers everywhere and stay tuned to community radio.