[NOISE]
>> You just watched Uber drivers and
Lyft drivers celebrating Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh,
who helped pass a bill that would give these drivers,
give these workers something that they desperately needed and deserved,
minimum pay requirements and additional labor protections.
So that's, believe it or not,
far from the only progressive legislation the state legislature was able to pass.
This story is incredible.
You gotta count your wins when you get them.
And for progressives, those wins don't come around so often.
That's not the case in Minnesota today.
So I'm really, really happy to share this story with you.
From sick leave, family leave, to recreational marijuana,
here's a recap of the 2023 legislative session in Minnesota.
We'll start with the Lyft and Uber news.
So, the bill, which is yet to be signed by the governor,
would require rideshare companies to pay their drivers approximately $1.40 for
every mile they drive a passenger,
depending on which part of Minnesota they're operating in.
So that's 0.34 a minute and a minimum of $5 per ride.
The bill also establishes an appeals process for
drivers who feel they were unjustly fired from rideshare apps, and
also mandates additional transparency into how drivers earnings are calculated.
Now, in response to the bill, Uber and
Lyft have both stated that consumers are the people who are gonna get hurt by this,
that the prices will increase as a result of this.
But the thing that I'm actually genuinely concerned about is
whether the governor, Tim Walz will sign this into law.
So far, no word on it.
There's been some hesitation.
So I think the next part of the battle, should he be an obstacle, would be to
pressure him to sign the legislation that the state legislature has signed onto.
And Wos, I want you to jump in on this because when it comes to the gig economy,
it's a lot more difficult for the workers to organize and form a union.
So having the state legislature jump in and actually provide protections,
I think is critical in this case.
>> I mean, I think it's the only way that it could happen.
Uber has been so effective nationwide, including here in our state of California.
Well, I'm not in California right now, but you know what I mean, Ana.
They've done such a good job of squashing any sort of progress in
the direction of treating these guys like actual full time employees, talking about,
no, workers don't want protections and minimum salaries,
they don't want health insurance, they want flexibility.
And how they do that, of course, we talked about this a lot, Ana,
is that they know in order to turn people against something,
they make them think of it as a consumer issue.
When it's like honestly, guys,
our concerns as a consumer of Lyft and Uber, which quite frankly,
it's not food, it's not housing, it's not some consumer
product that is absolutely essential to our lives, honestly.
And if we do have to pay a little bit more because these greedy ass executives
at Uber and Lyft couldn't stand to go back to the shareholder and say, we
might take a little bit of a hit so that the guys who make our company actually go,
the actual product of our company can live pretty decently better lives.
No, that's untenable.
So, yeah, because those people are greedy,
we might pay a little bit more on our rides, that's cool.
But you notice that's exactly how they frame it.
But yeah, it's gonna be on these government officials who actually care
about this to stump for this, cuz Uber and Lyft are gonna put a lot of money behind
propagandizing the public against this thing.
>> Yeah, for sure.
I mean, they'll probably try to do what they did in California,
which is pass a ballot initiative that reverses the progress made here.
So for the voters in Minnesota, just be privy to the damage that they've
caused in the state of California for these rideshare workers.
But let's get back to the good news.
And let me just also let you guys know what the makeup of the state legislature
is in Minnesota.
Democrats do have a majority.
It is a very slim majority.
It's a majority based on one Democratic senator in the state senate.
And so, wow, look at what can get accomplished if you have a slim
majority of Democrats in the state of Minnesota.
Very different from what we experienced with the slim majority Democrats had
in the federal government.
Of course, they love the convenient excuses of the legislative filibuster in
the senate, something that they were willing to do away with specifically to
raise the debt ceiling, but they're not willing to do away with it when it comes
to incredibly important provisions that would materially improve workers lives.
But anyway, let's put that aside for now and get back to the good news.
So there were other pieces of legislation that the state legislature passed,
including more workers rights.
So let's talk a little bit about that.
Last week,
Minnesota lawmakers passed a sweeping labor bill that would do the following.
It would let all full time workers accrue at least 48 hours of sick leave per year.
This would allow workers to accumulate one hour of sick leave for
every 30 hours they work.
The labor bill also bans, and this is so important, non-compete agreements.
We've talked about those agreements on the show before.
Basically, what they do is it locks workers into their jobs,
even if they're working at, let's say, a fast food company like McDonald's.
If they're offered a job at a different restaurant, even if it's within
the same chain that offers better pay or better benefits, these non-compete
clauses prevent them from leaving the job to go work at another restaurant.
And so it's so important for them to do away with this, and luckily,
the state legislature made that decision, they voted on it.
And the labor bill bans non compete agreements along with no poach agreements
and captive audience meetings.
The bill also contains specific provisions for a number of professions,
including giving unionized teachers the ability to negotiate class sizes,
something that teachers have been asking for for a long time.
It also allows for the state board, or to create a state board with
the power to set minimum pay and benefits for nurses in the state.
And this bill also makes general construction contractors liable for
wage theft by their subcontractors.
And so Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, has agreed to sign this bill,
and he is planning on doing so.
So that's good news as well.
Any thoughts on that before we move on Wos?
>> I mean, it's been what?
I wanna say about 60 years of workers rights being just decimated and
destroyed, and this idea that we have to have this culture of corporate
protectionism in our country, we've done it for 60 years.
We've seen what it's wrought, right?
Inequality out the freaking wazoo.
It's record inequality, right?
These policies, these things don't just happen in a vacuum or
just happen randomly.
These are policy decisions, and they have terrible effects for workers.
We know what the deal is when the powers that be have the ability to just crush
workers just out of the goodness of their hearts.
They don't just say, let's pay them a livable wage.
Come on, man, let's give them health care.
Come on, let's make sure they have competitive salaries.
Come on, guys, they need sick leave, they need vacation.
We don't wanna work these guys and to the bone.
Of course not.
We're good oligarchs, we're good caretakers.
We're gonna do this on our own.
Hell no, that doesn't happen.
It's the opposite.
So let's try something different.
Let's envision a different future for the workers of
this country where they're not treated like borderline slaves damn there.
Because again, this is the part that gets on my nerves.
In a country where if you do not work, you are going to wither away and die.
That's it, that's what's going to happen.
So you can't combine that lack of a welfare system with no workers rights,
right, no protection for people who actually wanna go out,
earn a living, contribute to the society.
It can't work that way.
>> I mean, when you consider we're at record employment in the country
as we speak, right, cuz we have record unemployment, and at the same time,
we are seeing more and more people living on the streets without shelter.
We're seeing more and
more people having to charge basic necessities on credit cards.
Consumer debt is at an all time high.
So what's missing here, right, the narrative that you'll hear from
the right is that the country is full of a bunch of bums who don't wanna work and
they just wanna take the government cheese.
But the fact of the matter is a lot of Americans who rely on what we
have left of our decimated social safety net do in fact work.
It's just that the federal government is forced to subsidize
these corporations who do not pay livable wages.
And what I'm really curious to, I'm gonna make a prediction, and
I'm curious to see if my prediction plays out the way I expect.
If Democrats in Minnesota keep this up, and if they look out for
the average person, the average worker in that state,
they're gonna keep winning elections over and over and over again.
Now, there is a possibility that they could get corrupted.
I mean, big money, corporate money could flow into their coffers and
that could change everything.
But if that doesn't happen, and if they keep presenting themselves as actual
warriors for ordinary workers, they're gonna have an easy time getting reelected.
And I think the Democratic Party will be very dominant in the state of Minnesota
for years to come, for election cycles to come.
>> Yeah, but then the Democrats would win.
They don't want that [LAUGH].
They don't like winning.
They don't like results.
They like cow tow into the Joe Liebermans of the world.
>> A few other things I wanted to just quickly mention.
Joe Lieberman's the worst.
But I do wanna also mention they have codified protections for
reproductive rights.
They've codified protections for the LGBTQ community, and
they have paid family leave now, medical leave, which is incredible.
Employees can take 12 weeks for family leave and
12 weeks for medical leave per year.
That's up to 20 weeks total.
>> It's awesome.
>> It's amazing.
>> That's awesome.
>> Amazing.
[LAUGH] I'm just so happy.
I almost don't believe it.
But it's true, and the governor has agreed to sign much of this legislation into law.
The only thing he's hesitating on is the ride sharing legislation.
We'll see how that plays out.
And as always, we will update you as we learn more about what he intends to do.
Voting rights were also expanded.
Just lots of good news coming out of the state of Minnesota.
It's really, really important to savor these wins because it can fuel
progressives to keep fighting.
What did they do in Minnesota?
What did progressives do in Minnesota to make this happen?
How can we replicate it on a national level?
How can we replicate it in other states?
And hopefully in the near future, we'll have an interview with one of the state
legislators to talk about this in more detail