The US labor movement has made massive strides over the past year and
the people are loving it.
In fact if you look at recent polling, it shows that support for
unionization efforts has really increased in America in the recent year.
And this data comes from Gallup and it's their annual work in education survey.
So let's take a look at the first graph which shows you Americans approval
of labor unions dating back to 1936, and so you see some dips right?
Namely a dip in 2010 were only 48% of Americans were in favor or
who were in favor of these unionization efforts.
And then now if you look at 2020 that number shot up to 71%.
So in other words 71% of individuals pulled by Gallup
are supportive of union membership.
Let's go to the next one that shows that the importance
of union membership among members.
This is actually really interesting because they found that two and five union
members say that membership is extremely important, that was kind of surprising.
You would assume that it would be a higher number but
nonetheless 40% say it's extremely important.
You also have 28% who say it's important but not extremely and
only 10% say it's not important at all.
I've got some more numbers for you but Cenk what are your thoughts?
>> So this is a really positive development and
I think that there's a couple of reasons for one is the labor drives
themselves amazon Starbucks, the teacher strikes, etcetera.
And it's showing people, yes, you can,
you actually can take power into your own hands and you can make a difference.
And so those positive stories are leaving a positive impression about unions,
so that's great.
The second part of that,
that people don't quite understand in almost all the stories and
mainly political stories is that the media has so much of an effect in and of itself.
The fact that they're hearing that their strikes and workers standing up for
themselves and then eventually getting better wages and
getting better working conditions, etcetera.
The fact that people are finding out about that makes a huge difference,
and so that shouldn't be underestimated.
And then that's what you're seeing in the numbers here which makes sense.
>> Yeah and look there, when you look at gains labor has made in
this country in the past, it wasn't simply because FDR was a cool guy.
He was like, he's so nice, look, he's actually concerned about workers.
In fact, he said on the record that the reason why he was pursuing the economic
policies he was pursuing with the new deal is that he wanted to save capitalism.
Workers were furious at the way they were treated,
they were furious at the fact that they weren't getting paid living wages,
they weren't working in safe conditions.
And so they organized, unionized, engaged in strikes.
Some of those strikes, by the way, got incredibly violent and
bloody because of the way the authorities had responded to them.
But I bring up that history because it's important to remember it,
it's important to learn from it.
And it's important to understand how it is that we managed to get some
of the policies under the new deal.
Some of the policies that we saw under FDR accomplished, right?
So there's this positive component in that we're seeing the momentum with
Starbucks stores unionizing.
With amazon warehouse doing their own, union drives,
it's putting the idea in people's heads.
And so to see the positive reaction to it is a good thing.
The poll is a positive step, but also the number of people who are honestly
risking their jobs to organize their workplace is inspiring to say the least.
I really think that when it comes to getting things done in government,
there two things right?
There's the electoral politics and workers have been told for decades now that's
the only thing that matters, just vote, Just vote, just vote, just vote.
I think workers have realized showing up and voting just isn't enough.
If all your eggs are in the electoral basket, you're not going to get it done
because we need to find a way to compete with the corporate moneyed interests.
And the only way that you can do that,
the only way workers can have leverage is if they organize and fight back together.
Use that leverage of a giant group of people in the country who are applying
pressure to politicians to actually serve them and represent them.
>> Yes, so my last point is keep going brothers and sisters.
So keep the momentum going because you never know what you start and and
the just getting it in the news is already a win because it encourages others.
And then you build more and more momentum as you get more and
more wages and rights and wins.
So look, this is what Anna talks about all the time,
if we're waiting on the politicians to rescue us, God, help us all.
I mean, you see how corporate democrats are, right?
So the great, the other great upside of this is, this is participatory,
this is you guys taking power back for yourselves, so love it, keep going.