Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compiletion episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's got to be nothing new here for you. But
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions. I did eat a
Speaker 1: whole sleep oreos in front of a seven eleven today
Speaker 1: and was scalded by a ten year old. It was
Speaker 1: for medical reasons. Okay, how am I going to introduce?
Speaker 1: How do we need to start? That's the start, we
Speaker 1: already got it. Okay, yeah, we'll do the oreos yep,
Speaker 1: ten year old children? Okay, I guess yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is where it works. And today everyone, because it's Monday,
Speaker 1: we are starting something that we like to call shitty
Speaker 1: Mas Monday. I don't know as we'll actually let us
Speaker 1: put shitty in the in the in the title. They
Speaker 1: might might we'll get that. That's that's what we're calling it.
Speaker 1: That's what we're calling it on the I can't stop
Speaker 1: us here. It would be funnier if it just had
Speaker 1: like ten seconds of bleep and then it was like
Speaker 1: a mayor's Monday, like I'd said, some truly unfathomable shit. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we've noticed that across America right there are a
Speaker 1: lot of mayors who ran and were elected as liberals, progressives,
Speaker 1: certainly as Democrats, but tend to have governed in a
Speaker 1: particularly shitty and terrible way that doesn't really have any
Speaker 1: material difference from a Republican mayor, but like the way
Speaker 1: that they post on Instagram is a little bit different.
Speaker 1: So I guess that is nice. And we're starting with
Speaker 1: the town I live in, which is San Diego, and
Speaker 1: with the mayor we have, who is Todd Gloria. The
Speaker 1: people might have heard of Todd Gloria, and last year
Speaker 1: we did we did an episode with several people who
Speaker 1: work with an housed people in San Diego, mutual Aid
Speaker 1: workers advocates, and they spoke a lot about Tod Gloria.
Speaker 1: Not in gloing terms, but we spoke about Tod Gloria.
Speaker 1: So we're going to talk about his record on homeless,
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about his life a little bit,
Speaker 1: and then we're going to look at sort of the
Speaker 1: promises he made when he was elected, I guess, and
Speaker 1: the things that he's done, which it will shock you
Speaker 1: to hear, are not the same things. And we're also
Speaker 1: going to talk about his hip hop video. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Bunnily really yeah he did. He did Return of the Mac,
Speaker 1: but hilariously changed it to Todd Gloria is Back. Oh yeah, no.
Speaker 1: If you want to see some problematically sinking, you're going
Speaker 1: to Yeah, ok, brace yourself. Did a local newspaper had
Speaker 1: a headline that called it the cringiest video ever, which
Speaker 1: rare win for local media. Everyone's in a while local
Speaker 1: news does one good thing. Yeah yeah, yeah, occasionally, like
Speaker 1: like like a stopped clock there, yeah exactly. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: all right. So when Todd Gloria talks about his early life,
Speaker 1: he talks about being the son of a maid in
Speaker 1: a gardener, and it's a way I think of distinguishing
Speaker 1: himself from the very few elites who have held power
Speaker 1: in the city for a very long time, people whose
Speaker 1: names are on every building. But his dad's LinkedIn profile
Speaker 1: tell us a little bit of a different story. According
Speaker 1: to his own LinkedIn account, Phil Glorier A sixty four
Speaker 1: has been in the aerospace industry for many years, including
Speaker 1: as a production controller at General Atomics, who people might
Speaker 1: remember as a manufacturers of the Predator and Reaper drones.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so it's a slightly different story, right, It's
Speaker 1: different from maiden a gardener. Prior to working at General Atomics,
Speaker 1: fil Gloria works for fourteen years the supervisor at United
Speaker 1: Technologies and other errors space and technology company. Gloria has
Speaker 1: clarified later that his parents didn't work in those specific fields,
Speaker 1: that the son of a maiden a guidener thing recently,
Speaker 1: but they did when he was born, so he wasn't
Speaker 1: He's not. Yeah, I don't, that's bullshit. Like I could.
Speaker 1: I I could take this argument and argue that, like
Speaker 1: I am the child of like a pancake maker and
Speaker 1: a dishwasher, like this is yeah, yeah, it's like it's
Speaker 1: it's sort of classic like this classic politicians, right, like
Speaker 1: like telling enough of the truth for it not to
Speaker 1: be a lie, but but maybe not telling the whole truth.
Speaker 1: And like I know, like like my folks worked in
Speaker 1: agriculture when I was a kid. They still do, but
Speaker 1: like they also worked very hard you know to like
Speaker 1: provide for me and get a better place in life,
Speaker 1: and I wouldn't want to run them down by denigrating
Speaker 1: the work that they did, but hey, I don't want
Speaker 1: to be a mayor either. Um yeah, it's also like also, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you don't get to do your fucking like
Speaker 1: burnishing working class credentials, and then your dad worked for
Speaker 1: a fucking like like yeah, yeah, none of my parents
Speaker 1: have ever made a Reaper drone, so I guess I
Speaker 1: do have that in my favor. It is an extremely
Speaker 1: San Diego story. In twenty twenty, to San Diego Union
Speaker 1: Tribune wrote he was running. So the San Diego story
Speaker 1: that allowed his mother a hotel maid and his father
Speaker 1: a gardener, to work hard and afford a home doesn't
Speaker 1: end with their generation. That story seemed to admit the
Speaker 1: glaring reality that San Diego is one of the least
Speaker 1: affordable cities in the world right now, and it's housing
Speaker 1: as unaffordable as ever has been, and it's got worse
Speaker 1: since tog Gloria became mayor. So who is tog Gloria.
Speaker 1: He's an enrolled member of the Tlinget hyda Indian tribe
Speaker 1: of Alaska. He was born and raised in San Diego
Speaker 1: and graduated from the University of San Diego with a
Speaker 1: bachelor's degree in history and political science. He began his
Speaker 1: career to San Diego's Health and Human Services Agency, and
Speaker 1: then he worked with Congresswoman's Susan Davis, who became his mentor.
Speaker 1: He was elected to the city Council in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight and two and twelve and served as interim
Speaker 1: mayor from August twenty thirteen to March twenty foty. He
Speaker 1: was also elected to the California State Assembly in twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen and twenty eighteen, and he chose not to seek
Speaker 1: reelection for the Assembly when he launched his campaign for
Speaker 1: mayor in twenty twenty. So he's done the kind of
Speaker 1: the sort of the climb up of offices that you
Speaker 1: see a lot of these folks do, right, And I'm
Speaker 1: sure that he has admissions to run for further office.
Speaker 1: That would be my guests. So in twenty twenty he
Speaker 1: was elected mayor of San Diego. He became our first
Speaker 1: gay mayor, our first mayor of color, our first indigenous mayor.
Speaker 1: So it was a lot of first for us, and
Speaker 1: it is good to have a gay indigenous mayor, right
Speaker 1: like if we're going to have a mayor. You didn't know.
Speaker 1: It's nice to it's a position, it's over to more people.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately he hasn't done a lot else to encourage
Speaker 1: up with social mobility. He made a big push for
Speaker 1: private sector housing building as opposed to subsidize public housing,
Speaker 1: and he promised police reform. In a twenty twenty op
Speaker 1: ed for The Union Tribune, Lauria wrote, we watched in
Speaker 1: horror as George Floyd was killed by four Minneapolis police officers.
Speaker 1: Mister Floyd and other victims of excessive force by law
Speaker 1: enforcement demand that we revisit, reconsider, and reimagine how police
Speaker 1: operate in our community and how we expect them to
Speaker 1: interact with the public. It's time we work together to
Speaker 1: create a more just system of policing. The primary responsibility
Speaker 1: of government is protected people, all people. Many of us
Speaker 1: don't feel safe or protected, particularly our black community, so
Speaker 1: it seems like like a pro at least reform statement, right.
Speaker 1: He went on to say, whether it's our mental health
Speaker 1: crisis or a homelessness crisis, we resort to the same solution.
Speaker 1: Send the police and arrest people. We have to stop
Speaker 1: severely penalizing some people for minor missteps and invest in
Speaker 1: lifting people up from difficult situations. I will need to
Speaker 1: put a pin in that. As we talk about his politics,
Speaker 1: it will shock you to hear that he's done exactly that.
Speaker 1: He also wrote, the rapidly expanding and secretive use of
Speaker 1: digital surveillance of our community members is unconstitutional and it
Speaker 1: should end. Again. Put a pin in that as we
Speaker 1: get back to discussion of the cameras that we're putting
Speaker 1: on street lights in San Diego. So In a PDF
Speaker 1: of his plan to end homelessness, which has been removed
Speaker 1: from his campaign website but were sank represerved by our
Speaker 1: friends at Voice of San Diego, Gloria wrote, no more
Speaker 1: criminalizing the existence of San Diego's poorest and residents. He
Speaker 1: also told right wing news station KUSI that San Diego
Speaker 1: cannot claim to be America's finest city, or even a
Speaker 1: great city where thousands of people live, unsheltered and dying
Speaker 1: on our streets. It's time to stop the band aids,
Speaker 1: the temporary solutions, and bad policy from city hall on
Speaker 1: this issue, he said, As mayor, my administration will prioritize
Speaker 1: ending chronic homelessness. I will focus the city's energy and
Speaker 1: resources on results oriented programs proven to get homeless individuals
Speaker 1: off the street, connected to services, and back on their feet. Now,
Speaker 1: to be fair, while it is tru one, is that
Speaker 1: anything Okay, Like any person who was running from mayor
Speaker 1: is a system out could lying to you about what
Speaker 1: they're going to do. The second thing is, if you
Speaker 1: ever hear someone say the words results oriented, it is
Speaker 1: time to grab like the largest saber you have and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: get to work. Oh yeah, and as we'll discover the
Speaker 1: results that he has oriented towards. Somewhat disappointing for folk.
Speaker 1: I was going to say for all of us hashtag
Speaker 1: for all of us is his campaign slogan. It's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just it's very cringe and I don't know will it.
Speaker 1: It's very sad when we see the impact of this
Speaker 1: for like the least fortune of people in San Diego
Speaker 1: and then like it, it is very funny, but when
Speaker 1: you see how this plays out on the street, So
Speaker 1: it's also very sad. You know what is also very
Speaker 1: funny kind of sad mia the coin So yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a Ronald Reagan silver coins that pay for my
Speaker 1: friends to get hormones so please enjoy these adverts. Thank
Speaker 1: thank you Ally Ronald Reagan for funding HRT. Yeah, thanks
Speaker 1: for Ronnie. All Right, we're back and we're talking about
Speaker 1: Todd Gloria, san Diego's mayor, and we've just before the
Speaker 1: break we talked about like his promises, right, so let's
Speaker 1: see how he did on those promises. I want to
Speaker 1: start with January nine, twenty tw one, told Gloria taken
Speaker 1: office a few days before. If you can cost your
Speaker 1: mind back, then there have been a significant event at
Speaker 1: the Capitol a couple of days before Proud Boys, theo
Speaker 1: Nazis ether assorted Chuds decided to visit San Diego. Three
Speaker 1: days after they visited the capitol, anti fascists assembled shows
Speaker 1: them they weren't welcome, and the police responded by declaring
Speaker 1: the anti Fascis assembly illegal, escorting the Chuds around Pacific
Speaker 1: Beach as they did various crimes, and trying to shoot
Speaker 1: me in the dick with pepper balls. Garrison's just smirking,
Speaker 1: I thought, Gloria, the guy who ran on police reform,
Speaker 1: had this to say. Mayor Gloria spoke candidly about what
Speaker 1: happened at the Capitol and how that's reverberating around the
Speaker 1: country after seeing what happened in Washington on Wednesday. What
Speaker 1: are you doing out on our streets supporting that mess right, racism, fascism,
Speaker 1: anti democracy? Why would you choose to be out there,
Speaker 1: Gloria says, despite his feelings, San Diego supports peaceful protests
Speaker 1: of all kinds. But on Saturday, police say three people
Speaker 1: were arrested and five officers suffered minor injuries. We're asking
Speaker 1: for the public's assistance and helping us identify some of
Speaker 1: those folks, but we were not able to apprehend yesterday
Speaker 1: to make sure that how to account all these are
Speaker 1: people on both sides of the debate, both sides, Yeah,
Speaker 1: both sides. So some of you remember some other people
Speaker 1: have caught out people on both sides the debate. So
Speaker 1: I think the most blatant sort of thing he did
Speaker 1: with regards to the police comes after Derek Shovin the
Speaker 1: copy murdered George Floyd was convicted of murder. I guess
Speaker 1: a few you can probably remember where you were that day.
Speaker 1: I can remember I was, and it was at the
Speaker 1: very least after an entire summer of protest right it
Speaker 1: was like the smallest token instance accountability, but I guess
Speaker 1: at least it was something. And in that moment told Gloria,
Speaker 1: who was looking at that same thing that nearly everyone
Speaker 1: was looking at in this country that day. Right. He
Speaker 1: thought about what he wanted to do, and he decided
Speaker 1: that rather than talking to black organizers who have been
Speaker 1: the street for almost a year and have been peppable
Speaker 1: and tear gassed and mace and never stop demanding justice,
Speaker 1: he was instead going to call the cops and in
Speaker 1: such many such cases, yeah yeah, and checked out the
Speaker 1: video that the verdict wasn't making them sad. What he
Speaker 1: did was took over the entire police like scanner radio
Speaker 1: thing and delivered a message to the cops, which I've
Speaker 1: got audio of here. Collie. This is Mere Todd Gloriam.
Speaker 1: I want to address each and every single one of
Speaker 1: you who nobly serve our great city. Today's verdict is
Speaker 1: just the beginning of building a deeper trust with our community.
Speaker 1: Justice reserved today against someone who does not represent you,
Speaker 1: or US, or our department, or who we are as
Speaker 1: a nation. So I want you to hear from me today.
Speaker 1: I know who you are. You are people who helped
Speaker 1: complete strangers on the worst day in their life. You
Speaker 1: are people who believe in collaboration, in community. You're who
Speaker 1: put your lives on the line every single day to
Speaker 1: protect this city. I and the people of sand are
Speaker 1: grateful for your dedication and your service. With today's decision made,
Speaker 1: there's now time for all of us to come together,
Speaker 1: to heal and to move forward. Please take care of yourself,
Speaker 1: of each other. You know the people of this great city.
Speaker 1: Be safe. Everybody. Has anyone ever said the words to
Speaker 1: move forward and not be like not just be an
Speaker 1: absolute dipshit. It sounds like it was written by an
Speaker 1: ai y. Yeah, if you had a chat GPT for
Speaker 1: a liberal mayor, it wouldn't look hugely different to what
Speaker 1: liberal mayor's statements. Yeah yeah, chat GPT right, liberal mayor
Speaker 1: writing a ponto the cops. Now it's time to heal
Speaker 1: and come together as a community. Yeah, stop you black
Speaker 1: lives mattering. It's it's scary. Yeah. Yeah, it was extremely
Speaker 1: cringe like, especially when you consider how it differs from
Speaker 1: what he was saying just a few months ago. And
Speaker 1: that again, like this was about a man who murdered
Speaker 1: someone and that somebody in it was an STPD who
Speaker 1: killed the person, but somebody in San Diego died in
Speaker 1: similar circumstances with someone doing a carotid restraint on them.
Speaker 1: A few days before this, Gloria also proposed a budget.
Speaker 1: In his budget, he proposed that we cut library hour
Speaker 1: significantly and lay off one hundred and fifty three library employees,
Speaker 1: but give the police nineteen million dollars more than a
Speaker 1: previous year. The previous year, I probably don't have to
Speaker 1: remind people, is a year in which San Diegans had
Speaker 1: turned up in droves at zoom council meetings to urge
Speaker 1: the city to do the exact opposite of this. Let's
Speaker 1: check in on that surveillance claim he made. You remember
Speaker 1: that he said it was unconstitutional, right, So, on the
Speaker 1: second of this year, told Gloria in a shocking vault
Speaker 1: fast tweeted streetlight cameras and license plates readers can be
Speaker 1: helpful public safety tools. You know, just because he thinks
Speaker 1: it's unconstitution or doesn't mean he doesn't think it's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's once again been held back from protecting your people,
Speaker 1: San Diego by that pesky constitution. The city pass strong
Speaker 1: privacy protections last year and now it's time for at
Speaker 1: San Diego PD to use this technology to keep us safe.
Speaker 1: Public meetings to get this done start soon. So yeah,
Speaker 1: these street lights, they were deactivated in twenty twenty, but
Speaker 1: they had previously been introduced and build us a way
Speaker 1: to assess traffic patterns, but in fact, they never assessed
Speaker 1: traffic patterns. Yeah, yeah, this will shock you. They put
Speaker 1: thousands of cameras and microphones on our streets, including one
Speaker 1: outside a planned parenthood facility, you know, for traffic. You know,
Speaker 1: the funniest part about this, this was literally the thing
Speaker 1: about doing traffic science was this was literally Tom Cruise's
Speaker 1: cover story and like one of the early Mission Impossible movies.
Speaker 1: So that's what we have next. Is it fucking scientology
Speaker 1: coming for San Diego. Yeah, it'll it'll shock you to
Speaker 1: hear that we stopped using these for very reasonable people
Speaker 1: had very reasonable concerns in twenty twenty that you know,
Speaker 1: it's not a good idea for the cops to be
Speaker 1: able to see and hear everything that you do, to
Speaker 1: be able to read your license plate and see everywhere
Speaker 1: that you go. Beton wants some back and if people
Speaker 1: actually want to follow the discussion about having them back,
Speaker 1: because every single time, like every single public meeting, there's
Speaker 1: someone and they'll stand up and have a vehement like
Speaker 1: position pro cameras, and then it'll turn out that they
Speaker 1: are like a prosecutor at the DA's office, or in
Speaker 1: one instance, there was a prosecutor in one instance who
Speaker 1: insisted he was there in his personal capacity. But like
Speaker 1: the lieutenant for Sauron is defending the surveillance cameras that
Speaker 1: are being posted around Middle Earth. Curious this, this guy
Speaker 1: whose name is not Big Brother, is here to advocate
Speaker 1: for having cameras in your home. The king of the
Speaker 1: new surveilance for a crash. But he's wearing a a
Speaker 1: fake mustache, so you can't tell who he is. So
Speaker 1: let's look at what he said about stopping criminalizing homelessness, right,
Speaker 1: and this is a big, big issue. In San Diego.
Speaker 1: We have a massive and growing unhouse population because our
Speaker 1: rents are exceptionally high and our waits are not, so
Speaker 1: the number of unhoused people has increased in the Gloria
Speaker 1: so of death on the street, which hit a record
Speaker 1: of five hundred and seventy four in the county last year.
Speaker 1: So that's think it's more than one person dying every
Speaker 1: single day in the streets. Right. He's opened some shelters,
Speaker 1: but some scouters are scheduled to close. The shelter beds
Speaker 1: and traditional transitional housing provided have failed to grow at
Speaker 1: the same rate as the young house population. Let's haven't
Speaker 1: stopped him taking photos and claiming every single one. It's
Speaker 1: a huge step forward. We also continue to build what
Speaker 1: it called congregate shelters, which don't give people privacy, right,
Speaker 1: which don't give them A lot of people might not
Speaker 1: want to go into a congreate shelter, into effectively a dormitory,
Speaker 1: and there are a number of reasons why you might
Speaker 1: not want to do that, and yet that's what we're building.
Speaker 1: There are also some other sort of single lot composity shelters,
Speaker 1: but nowhere near enough. He's been a huge backer of
Speaker 1: something called California's Care Court. Are you guys familiar with
Speaker 1: the care Court at all? No? No, this shit is dystopian.
Speaker 1: This could be a whole episode. Maybe one day it
Speaker 1: will be CARE stands for community assistance, recovery and empowerment,
Speaker 1: which I have a feeling that this is not going
Speaker 1: to be about empowerment. Yeah, when it's empowering someone Garrison,
Speaker 1: but it's not empowered to people we might want to empower.
Speaker 1: What it is in practice, it's a massive expansion of
Speaker 1: force conservatives ship. So I'm going to quote from Human
Speaker 1: Rights Watch here. Human Rights Watch said the plan promotes
Speaker 1: a system of involuntary coerced treatment enforced by an expanded
Speaker 1: judicial infrastructure that will, in practice simply remove unhoused people
Speaker 1: with perceived mental health conditions from the public eye without
Speaker 1: effectively addressing those mental health conditions. Jesus, Yeah, it's pretty bad.
Speaker 1: It's it doesn't provide money for mental health services. It
Speaker 1: takes money that's already existing in the budget and puts
Speaker 1: it across to court mandated treatment. It doesn't provide housing,
Speaker 1: which the multiple studies share that Housing First's approach a
Speaker 1: housing first approach is a way to solve homelessness. Instead,
Speaker 1: it allows for a broad range of people, which include
Speaker 1: family members, first responders including cops and outreach workers, the
Speaker 1: public guardian, service providers, and the director of the county
Speaker 1: Behavioral Health Agency, to refer individuals to the jurisdiction of
Speaker 1: the court to take away their autonomy and liberty. It
Speaker 1: very broadly covers people it describes to having schizophrenia, spectrum
Speaker 1: or other psychotic disorders. Under this system, judges can force
Speaker 1: people into treatment and housing. If they don't comply, they
Speaker 1: can be forced into conservatorship. Now, obviously evidence doesn't support
Speaker 1: the conclusion that involuntary outpatient treatment it's more effective than
Speaker 1: intensive voluntary outpatient treatment, and indeed it does show that
Speaker 1: involuntary coercive treatment is harmful. But it isn't really about
Speaker 1: people with mental health. It's about keeping a house people
Speaker 1: where they can't be seen. And Human Rights Watch claims
Speaker 1: that this violates due process and international human rights conventions.
Speaker 1: And yet the quote Glory and Gavin you some to
Speaker 1: be fair, who I'm sure we'll run for president soon,
Speaker 1: have been cheer leading this and it's I'm surprised it
Speaker 1: hasn't got more press coverage internationally and nationally. Sorry, because
Speaker 1: it's a massive assault on personal freedoms, right, and it's
Speaker 1: extremely easy to effectively say that somebody quote unquote need
Speaker 1: to mental health, help force them into conservatorship. And if
Speaker 1: they're not willing to attend these treatments, so they're not
Speaker 1: able to attend these treatments, so they're not willing to
Speaker 1: go into the housing that they are assigned. Let's say
Speaker 1: that they don't want to live in in congret at housing,
Speaker 1: right or something like that, Or they're in housing with
Speaker 1: someone who they don't feel comfortable or safe with them,
Speaker 1: they could be forced into conservatorship and effectively lose all
Speaker 1: their liberty. Right. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's a new
Speaker 1: and exciting way of criminalizing homelessness effectively. And like I said,
Speaker 1: it doesn't provide housing, it doesn't provide funding for behavioral healthcare.
Speaker 1: It just directs existing funding to court mandated programs. So
Speaker 1: I could pick hundreds of other examples of this tod
Speaker 1: glorious stuff, but I want to pick one more to
Speaker 1: focus on, and it's something that I think it gets
Speaker 1: a little bit like inside politics, grifty stuff, but it
Speaker 1: like it has ruined a good number of careers in
Speaker 1: San Diego politics. And I'm really heavily indebted to that
Speaker 1: plan certain Voice of San Diego for their reporting on this.
Speaker 1: But let's start by talking about public restrooms. So I
Speaker 1: think most of us are going to agree that like
Speaker 1: having a safe place to shit and wash your hands
Speaker 1: is a pretty basic human right, but in San Diego
Speaker 1: it's something that not everyone has so since two thousand four,
Speaker 1: grand jury reports have warned the city's inadequate public restroom
Speaker 1: infrastructure could become a public health threat. That's what happened
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen when a hepatip itis
Speaker 1: a swept through the city, sickening five eighty two people
Speaker 1: and killing twenty. So after the heapet, yeah, it's not
Speaker 1: a thing that like you expect, right and like like
Speaker 1: on the left coast in America's find a city. Most
Speaker 1: Americans will not encounter, thankfully, hepatitis in their lifetime and
Speaker 1: sadly made this isn't our only hepatitis outbreak, so that's great.
Speaker 1: Oh no, And so after the hep A outbreak, the
Speaker 1: city stopped locking restrooms at night, which had done previously,
Speaker 1: but that changed with the COVID pandemic when the facilities
Speaker 1: were temporarily closed and some have since not returned to
Speaker 1: twenty four seventh service. Following this, a twenty twenty one
Speaker 1: Shigella outbreak second at least forty one homeless residents, most
Speaker 1: of whom were staying in Central San Diego, further shed
Speaker 1: light on the city's restroom issues. Much as this was
Speaker 1: dealt with in a great report by Bella Ross in
Speaker 1: the Voice of San Diego, to which Gloria commented, the
Speaker 1: goal here isn't to add as many permanent public restrooms
Speaker 1: as possible. The goal is to help get unsheltered residents
Speaker 1: off the streets and into safe, sanitary shelter and permanent housing.
Speaker 1: Like I don't quite know where he was going for here,
Speaker 1: but not having a place to shit is an everyone issue.
Speaker 1: This isn't just an unhoused issue, right, Like everybody poops,
Speaker 1: and not all of us live in houses and have
Speaker 1: giant offices in city Hall downtown. And so it was
Speaker 1: this bizarre kind of gas lighting approach, like we fundamentally
Speaker 1: have an issue with access to bathrooms and to try
Speaker 1: and like reframe this as another issue where he's also failing.
Speaker 1: Was It's kind of indicative of their response, but also
Speaker 1: very bizarre. Where the city has installed new bathrooms, they're
Speaker 1: often installed by private groups as part of development projects,
Speaker 1: which is great, right, A good old a public private
Speaker 1: partnership has never gone wrong before. So it will shock
Speaker 1: you to hear that these private groups are responsible for
Speaker 1: maintaining and securing these facilities. And this means that they're
Speaker 1: often a lot. So despite literal human shit being all
Speaker 1: over downtown and people are being forced to endure the
Speaker 1: massive a dignity of having nowhere to poop. In December
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, researched by stsu's Project for Sanitation Justice
Speaker 1: found that less than half of the city's permanent restrooms
Speaker 1: could be considered truly open access, and that just two
Speaker 1: permanent facilities were available around the clock, seven days a week.
Speaker 1: Gloria has later acknowledged that city has an issue, but
Speaker 1: he's chosen to blame residents. I just need folks to
Speaker 1: quit acting a fool in these bathrooms. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: not just a homeless population, it's everybody, he said in
Speaker 1: an interview. In February twenty twenty three, nearly five years
Speaker 1: after the last outbreak, San Diego County again began recording
Speaker 1: an uptake and hepatitis say cases, which is great, Right,
Speaker 1: We're back to where we started. Much of this reporting
Speaker 1: was met with absolutely unhinged responses on Twitter from some
Speaker 1: of Glorious staff. They called themselves a todd squad that sucks. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty bad. So not tour responses come from Dave
Speaker 1: Roland who left the old weekly City Beak for a
Speaker 1: job in PR and Rachel Lane, who she's tuggs I
Speaker 1: think ahead of public relations. She spent June of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty posting about black Lives Matter, whilst also doing volunteer
Speaker 1: public relations to work for the cops. Wow, amazing, Yeah
Speaker 1: yeah here public relations. Yeah yeah, yeah, like there there
Speaker 1: there's there's like a there's like a joke on like
Speaker 1: there's this like a sort of pejorative label for the okay,
Speaker 1: so on Chinese Twitter, there's this there's a joke of
Speaker 1: calling people unpaid five cent army, which is like army
Speaker 1: is like or well, the number of sense changes over time.
Speaker 1: But it's like there there used to be a thing
Speaker 1: where like you could get paid by the government to
Speaker 1: get like like to to to like that you get
Speaker 1: paid pro post to like posts. Wow, whatever fucking shit
Speaker 1: the Chinese government wanted to like have posts on. But
Speaker 1: this person's actually literally an unpaid but like actual usually
Speaker 1: literally like volume cheer. Yeah, volunteer public relations for the cops,
Speaker 1: Like what the fuck is this bullshit? Oh yeah, it
Speaker 1: was really a magical public when I sent that PRRA email, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think she framed it as like helping the community
Speaker 1: and the police talk to one another in a difficult time.
Speaker 1: The future is the giant boot stamping on your faces
Speaker 1: when people volunteer to paint the boot. Yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah it is a rainbow boot. Yeah, I mean you
Speaker 1: can you can find their feed. Some of the attacks
Speaker 1: on myself and some of my colleagues are like incredibly
Speaker 1: petty and unprofessional and also quite nerving when you consider
Speaker 1: the huge amounts of taxpair money that are wasted on
Speaker 1: their salaries which pay them to post. And again, this
Speaker 1: is a town where people die because they don't have
Speaker 1: a place to take a shit. But but we're paying
Speaker 1: people to get into Twitter beef. You know. It's it's
Speaker 1: also it's it's also really cool that like the the
Speaker 1: sort of two axes of American politics are you can't
Speaker 1: use the bathroom because you're trans, and you can't use
Speaker 1: the bathroom because you don't own one. And then sometimes
Speaker 1: they just coverage and it's the same yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: locking yeah, that's the hands clasping meme locking trans people
Speaker 1: out of the bathroom. All right, So now we're about
Speaker 1: to get to Todd Squad's finest hour, which is when
Speaker 1: they use city resources and work time to make a
Speaker 1: video of them singing Return of the Mac. Only it
Speaker 1: wasn't Return of the Mac. It was Todd Gloria's back
Speaker 1: and yeah, I'm going to make you all watch it.
Speaker 1: So that was that was? Was he walking through a
Speaker 1: city hall? Yeah? Was the first part him walking to
Speaker 1: a security line at the airport. Yeah, which is funny.
Speaker 1: That's a security line to get into city hall. Yeah, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: have you have you never been to a city hall before?
Speaker 1: Mine didn't have that? Certainly does now Chicago, Yes, it
Speaker 1: certainly has that. Now my local town one didn't. Are
Speaker 1: they are they saying that the mayor lied to the city?
Speaker 1: Is that what they're saying? They Yeah, the previous math
Speaker 1: Oh the okay, wasn't he the previous mayor? Only for
Speaker 1: a little bit of time then he he was entering Math. Okay,
Speaker 1: they're blake. Oh my god, I believe you when you said,
Speaker 1: why is on me? One guy? That was like twelve guys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it feels like it's gone on for like forty minutes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if stalin grad there's a point where they come in
Speaker 1: dressed as flavor flav but I think it's here and anyway,
Speaker 1: one of them's wearing a medallion that just says Cocks
Speaker 1: on it. The egg Glory is wearing a medallion here
Speaker 1: we can probably no note, hang on here he is
Speaker 1: again he said, franchise. That's some cops. What is the
Speaker 1: leg of the ground circle? I think their heads touching.
Speaker 1: There's a person with the cocks medallion. Again, this is okay.
Speaker 1: So is one of the worst things that people showed
Speaker 1: up with the chain that it was like an SD
Speaker 1: for San Diego. When it first comes on to screen,
Speaker 1: it really looks like a swassica the Padres logos. That's like, yes,
Speaker 1: now shitty asked to go. The Padres did a different genocide,
Speaker 1: and it should it be a conflict with the other genocide.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing this is like a sports thing or something. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah they are the sports ball team. That's what I
Speaker 1: thought baseball to be specific. M very proud of him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, as you'll have noticed, one of the most
Speaker 1: cringe things that has ever fucking happened. Yeah, it's pretty bad, right,
Speaker 1: like like it's it's it's pretty crushing when like, like
Speaker 1: I have personally known people who have died on our
Speaker 1: streets and also my Merria is making return of the
Speaker 1: Mac videos dressed as Flavor Flavor. So I think we're
Speaker 1: mostly done. I want to talk about one more thing,
Speaker 1: because no review of San Diego politics will be complete
Speaker 1: without a mention of the giant monument to Griff that
Speaker 1: is one on one Ash Street? So what is one
Speaker 1: on one Street? In twenty sixteen, San Diego leased a
Speaker 1: downtown high rise hoping to house city employees. It turned
Speaker 1: out that building was riddled with asbestos. And it turns
Speaker 1: out the city knew it is riddled when it started
Speaker 1: to lease the building. Yeah. Yeah, And then it will
Speaker 1: shock you to know that they deny this at first.
Speaker 1: But in the agreement to lease to own the building,
Speaker 1: it says Bayer acknowledges that the building contained asbestos and
Speaker 1: that SEMPRA has maintained an asbestos monitoring and handling program.
Speaker 1: So eventually, in twenty nineteen they managed to move staff
Speaker 1: in after a renovation that ballooned in cost. In twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: they were forced to evacuate the building because of the asbestos.
Speaker 1: Since then, DA's investigation has been opened into Jason Hughes,
Speaker 1: who publicly represented himself as a volunteer advisor to the city,
Speaker 1: according to Voice of San Diego, but unbeknownst to the city,
Speaker 1: collected nine point four million dollars from Cistero, who owned
Speaker 1: one on one ashtreet. The City Attorney's office alleged but
Speaker 1: could not prove that the city's former top bureaucrat, Chris Michael,
Speaker 1: ordered City Information Technology Star to purge record tied to
Speaker 1: the one on one as Street debarcle last year so
Speaker 1: they can improve that she paid to records. But what
Speaker 1: they do know that she did was pass a confidential
Speaker 1: legal document to Corey Briggs, a candidate for the city attorney.
Speaker 1: NBC reported that the memo included a footnote, which Eliot
Speaker 1: and others later decried as fabricated. In the footnote, they
Speaker 1: claimed that Elliot's office made an effort to shield Gloria
Speaker 1: from an outside probe at the one on one Ash
Speaker 1: Street debarcle. The footnote suggested an interview with Gloria might
Speaker 1: have clarified why the city decided to go forward with
Speaker 1: the Ash Street lease, given Gloria's skepticism about a similar
Speaker 1: past deal. So it's not clear if this If this
Speaker 1: footnote was real or fabricated like then it's alleged it
Speaker 1: was fabricated, which it's bizarre, like this whole sort of weird, corrupt,
Speaker 1: corrupt thing is resigned. It may this may well not
Speaker 1: be true. To be clear, during this time, Dorian Hargrove,
Speaker 1: who was a reporter, obtained some of those records, faced
Speaker 1: legal threat of prosecution from the city attorney and lost
Speaker 1: his job for obtaining those records. So far, the city
Speaker 1: has poured more than sixty million into one oh one Street,
Speaker 1: roughly the same amount of this annual library budget. It's
Speaker 1: only occupied the office space. Yeah, it's great, it's absolutely into.
Speaker 1: This has been occupied for like less than a couple
Speaker 1: of months for the five years since the city acquired it.
Speaker 1: Are they do? Do? Do do? Do we know what
Speaker 1: their ties to like the contractors who are doing the
Speaker 1: renovations are, and that will be an interesting thing. I
Speaker 1: actually don't know that. Yeah, because that that's like that
Speaker 1: that's that's that's like that's the classic Illinois griff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You just keep keep renovating a building, keep getting donations
Speaker 1: from the from the contractors, well or or or the
Speaker 1: contractors are just your friends and so that's okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: keep the money around. Yeah, well they're not doing any
Speaker 1: more contracting on it here because the city agreed to
Speaker 1: buy the building, which needs one hundred and fifteen million
Speaker 1: million dollars in repairs, for eighty six million last year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good stuff. Amazing yep. This week, the UT reported
Speaker 1: at San Diego's top real estate official did not seek
Speaker 1: input from her staff or a view internal files before
Speaker 1: recommending a city buy out the one or one as
Speaker 1: Street lease. They also reported that in a confidential memo
Speaker 1: to the city Auditor's office, anonymous employees wrote, the City
Speaker 1: of San Diego should be aware of the level of
Speaker 1: waste and abuse that is occurring within the Real Estate
Speaker 1: and Airport Management Department, which has led to a toxic, hostile,
Speaker 1: revenue wasting, and unproductive work environment. Which is great. Yep.
Speaker 1: This is a San Diego we wanted hashtag for all
Speaker 1: of us. So this is a lot of inside San
Speaker 1: Diego politics, right. So it's a lot of lists of
Speaker 1: things and promises made and promises broken. But I want
Speaker 1: to come back to the fact that this is a
Speaker 1: guy who ran for Mare on a ticket the push
Speaker 1: compassion and a relative liberal set of policies, and he's
Speaker 1: done the exact opposite in his time in office, he
Speaker 1: ran as a progressive downe very well to differentiate himself
Speaker 1: policy wise from mayor's like Republican Kevin Fulkner. Obviously, we're
Speaker 1: just cracking the lid on some of these policies here.
Speaker 1: He's consistently chosen to suppund it, to fund and support
Speaker 1: the police over the people of the city. He's consistently
Speaker 1: moved to make it harder to live on the streets
Speaker 1: and harder to get off the streets, and he's consistently
Speaker 1: chosen photo opportunities over real of governance for the city.
Speaker 1: His pr people spend hours bashing mutual aid workers like
Speaker 1: Michael who he had a guest on the show on Twitter,
Speaker 1: and wasting taxpayer money doing it. Just this week, he
Speaker 1: welcomed right wing maniac Rishi Sunac, who actually as Prime
Speaker 1: Minister of the UK. Despite the fact that people haven't
Speaker 1: noticed to our city and San Diego State University researchers
Speaker 1: released a report saying negative interactions with police are driving
Speaker 1: black people who are experiencing homelessness away from services and
Speaker 1: housing opportunities. This is what we got from a mayor
Speaker 1: who positioned himself as a progressive and as governed as
Speaker 1: a Rainbow Republican. So yeah, that's I would say. That's
Speaker 1: all I have to say about Todgloria. If you follow
Speaker 1: me on Twitter, you'll know that it's not the case,
Speaker 1: and I will continue to have more to say about Gloria.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's really sad. It's deeply sad. And like
Speaker 1: I said, it's funny. The crnty Mutic music video is funny.
Speaker 1: We'll linked to it in the show notes, but it's
Speaker 1: it's also really deeply troubling that this has real impacts
Speaker 1: for real people who are already down on their luck
Speaker 1: and you know, living on the streets or experiencing you know,
Speaker 1: over aggressive policing. All the things that he said he
Speaker 1: would fix have just got worse. And yeah, it sucks.
Speaker 1: So thanks for listening to me why and about my
Speaker 1: city everyone, And yeah, again, my apologies for traumatizing you
Speaker 1: further with that video. It's fine. Next week. Next week,
Speaker 1: we're well okay. So we would have been doing Chicago's
Speaker 1: own version of this exact same person, which is Lloyd Lightfoot,
Speaker 1: except to the surprise of absolutely zero people who live
Speaker 1: in Chicago and everyone who doesn't live with Chicago, Lightfoot
Speaker 1: didn't make it out of her fucking primary. So we're
Speaker 1: Insteady Gore be doing Chicago's once in future while not
Speaker 1: once potentially future mayor Paul Vallas, who absolutely sucks ass.
Speaker 1: So stay tuned for that in another week when I
Speaker 1: get a yell about Paul Vallas and inflict some truly
Speaker 1: horrific bullshit on all of you. Very excited to get
Speaker 1: my revenge. All right, well, I would look forward to
Speaker 1: seeing Paul Vallas's hip hop video. Carriston's just sitting there
Speaker 1: background of dying. This is this is, this is worse
Speaker 1: than anything anything the Daily Wire can throw at me.
Speaker 1: Should we just pivot to more come content? Garrisons, Okay,
Speaker 1: this has been naken. Happen year. You can find us.
Speaker 1: It happened here pot on Twitter, Instagram. But we're gonna
Speaker 1: leave before one of us dies. Hello and welcome. It
Speaker 1: could happen here with me Andrew of the YouTube channel
Speaker 1: andrewism and today I'm joined by Miya and care Hello. Hello, Hello, Hello,
Speaker 1: and I want to talk about cities because I very
Speaker 1: recently published a video on Sulapunk City Planet. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know what you're all going to hear this podcast,
Speaker 1: but I did recently publish it, and you can check
Speaker 1: that out of my channel. And I thought i'd share
Speaker 1: a bit about a bit more about one particular historical
Speaker 1: urban planet movement that I talk about in that video,
Speaker 1: and that is Ebanez A. Howard's Garden Cities movement and
Speaker 1: his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Are all familiar with either, No,
Speaker 1: I don't think so. Yeah, so Ebane's a Howard side note,
Speaker 1: by the way, I don't know who looks at a
Speaker 1: child and names them Ebanez Howard. But he presented this
Speaker 1: idea of the garden city concept in eighteen ninety eight
Speaker 1: in a book called Tomorrow, A Peaceful Path through Real Reform.
Speaker 1: Later he republished in nineteen or two under the name
Speaker 1: of Garden Cities or Tomorrow, And take notes in the
Speaker 1: title of the book of the use of reform and
Speaker 1: peaceful path because it does highlight a noticeable lack within
Speaker 1: Howard's vision that will discuss later. He wants to provide
Speaker 1: access to the benefits of both town living and a
Speaker 1: country living. As he describes, a town and country are
Speaker 1: like magnets drawing people to them, you know. So, according
Speaker 1: to him, town offers vibrant society and opportunity and transportation,
Speaker 1: but it lacks the beauty of nature. It has pollution
Speaker 1: and has crowded, it has disease. I mean this is
Speaker 1: Victoria and era cities. He's talking about place what stink.
Speaker 1: In contrast, country and country offers the space and the
Speaker 1: beauty of nature and it's abundance, but it lacks society
Speaker 1: and it can feel isolated and it really spread out.
Speaker 1: So you wanted to create a hybrid of both concepts,
Speaker 1: a third magnet of town country the combined the benefits
Speaker 1: of both. I believe the secret Sorry I have to help.
Speaker 1: I've jump in here and make a secret secret thing. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: thank you, yeah, country, but a secret third thing. We
Speaker 1: fulfilled our we fulfilled our contractual obligations. One joke. All right,
Speaker 1: I'm going to side optical, Andrew, you take it from here. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: a secret third thing. How I would believe that the
Speaker 1: ideal living conditions for people of all economic backgrounds could
Speaker 1: be created by establishing these town country cities with very
Speaker 1: specific parameters run by strong government institutions. In Ebenezer Howard's context, again,
Speaker 1: no offense to the Ebanese as the world, but jeez,
Speaker 1: I can't. I can't let go of those amplications. I
Speaker 1: think I think we need to bring back the name Ebenezer.
Speaker 1: Actually it's it's it's been too long since I've seen
Speaker 1: an infant named Ebenezer, meaning I've never seen one. I
Speaker 1: think I feel like we should see more. Just absolutely absurd.
Speaker 1: All the timing names. What do you what do you
Speaker 1: call the baby? Do you call them ebby or something like?
Speaker 1: How do you call the baby Ebenezer? The baby's name?
Speaker 1: Why would you you call it the baby's name? You
Speaker 1: could call it Niza, you could eventually call it weezak
Speaker 1: horrible nickname is awful? Oh yeah, that is okay. I'm
Speaker 1: here on the amplications. I do never I never want
Speaker 1: to hear that again. Yeah, I digress Howard's writing. I
Speaker 1: just gonna call them Howard Howard's Rights in Journey Industry
Speaker 1: Revolution was in response to well, the industrial Revolution, you know,
Speaker 1: his response to the urban slums, the pollution, the lack
Speaker 1: of access to the countryside, and much of his book
Speaker 1: is dedicated the idea that cities as they existed in
Speaker 1: his time were not sustainable in the long run. By
Speaker 1: the middle of the nineteenth century, over half of Britain's
Speaker 1: population lived in towns, and in nineteen hundred that proportion
Speaker 1: had resuned over three quarters. But English towns and cities
Speaker 1: presented social environmental problems of an unprecedented scale, and much
Speaker 1: of Britain's history in that period could be connected with
Speaker 1: the efforts to ameliorate the frightening conditions that a lot
Speaker 1: of people lived in. When it comes to the design,
Speaker 1: Howard wanted to create these highly structured, carefully laid out
Speaker 1: communities to provide the best conditions possible for every kind
Speaker 1: of person he saw. He wanted to put just like
Speaker 1: large areas of land from aristocratic owners as a setting
Speaker 1: up garden cities that would house up to thirty two
Speaker 1: thousand people in individual homes on six thousand acres. And
Speaker 1: that whole vision of individual homes is I think it
Speaker 1: belies a limitation the imagination there, but it's it's someone
Speaker 1: understandable considering the historical conditions of the time where people
Speaker 1: were living in these overcrowded slums and stuff. And the
Speaker 1: dream was really to have a home of your own
Speaker 1: that you didn't have to crowd out, it didn't be crowded,
Speaker 1: you couldn't have to share with others. But anyway, I
Speaker 1: think a sustainable city should trade the sprawl that single
Speaker 1: family homes generate for more dense development. For the most part.
Speaker 1: That is, but I digress once again. That's not all
Speaker 1: his plan entailed. His garden cities would also include a
Speaker 1: huge public garden with public buildings like a town hall,
Speaker 1: lecture halls, theaters, and a hospital. An enormous arcade called
Speaker 1: the Crystal Palace, not arcade as video game, where residents
Speaker 1: would browse a covered market and enjoy a winter garden,
Speaker 1: neighborhoods with cooperative kitchens and shared gardens, schools, playgrounds and churches, factories, warehouses, farms, workshops,
Speaker 1: and access to a train line. In its ideal form,
Speaker 1: the garden city would become a network of smaller garden
Speaker 1: cities built around the larger central town. The idealized vision
Speaker 1: of the garden city contained very specific utopian elements, like
Speaker 1: small communities planned on a concentric pattern that woul accommodated housing, industry,
Speaker 1: and agriculture, surrounded by green belts that would limit their growth. Now,
Speaker 1: there's a diagram that he did up for his book
Speaker 1: that has been popularized that represents like a sort of
Speaker 1: a concentric circle design, but he didn't believe that that
Speaker 1: necessarily had to be the shape of the garden city.
Speaker 1: He still wanted the city to be adapted to local
Speaker 1: layout somewhat, and these elements of garden city design were
Speaker 1: all into dependent you know. He wanted strong community engagement,
Speaker 1: he wanted community ownership of land. Although he wasn't a socialist,
Speaker 1: mind you. He was a Georgist. Oh god, wait, that
Speaker 1: explains it. That explains so much about all of his politics.
Speaker 1: Of course he was a Georgeist. Yeah, quite an interesting
Speaker 1: crew of characters. He wanted mixed ten years homes and
Speaker 1: homes and types that were generally affordable, you know. To
Speaker 1: go on another digression, I find Georgis Owe to be
Speaker 1: such an interesting fixation of a philosophy. It's like, you know,
Speaker 1: looking all the problems in society, and you know what,
Speaker 1: we need a land tax. That'll salt thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously that's something. All it is to the to the
Speaker 1: that political philosophy, that economic approach. But I just found
Speaker 1: I just find it every time I think about it.
Speaker 1: I find it funny that it was just really like
Speaker 1: the whole movement was basically this one like um tax proposal.
Speaker 1: It's really that was the whole focus of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really funny too because it has one of the
Speaker 1: sort of largest like collapses of any ideology ever. Like
Speaker 1: this is like it was just a very like very
Speaker 1: it was. It was a big It was a big ideology.
Speaker 1: You know. It literally helped to develop the the board
Speaker 1: game Monopoly, you know what. It's like, it was a
Speaker 1: huge thing. This is something I've actually been looking into
Speaker 1: a lot of it. I've been trying to track down
Speaker 1: some of the original like nineteen twenties copies of Monopoly
Speaker 1: that's more based on the second game. Yes, I've been
Speaker 1: trying to find the ones that were like pre pre
Speaker 1: pre Parker Brothers UM, and I've I've I found I
Speaker 1: found a few a few. I found a few like
Speaker 1: two months ago, but before I could order them, it
Speaker 1: was sold to somebody else on eBay. So I've been
Speaker 1: trying to track down another another one in the U
Speaker 1: in the past two months, and it's been a bit
Speaker 1: more challenging, just because I'm kind of a Monopoly freak. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's um. It's really interesting to see how um that
Speaker 1: game was developed and then changed over time, and how
Speaker 1: hasbur was stepped in. Isn't Hasbro Poker Brothers without stepped in?
Speaker 1: And did there do so I'm kind of basically rewrote
Speaker 1: with the history of the board game entirely. Yeah, but anyway,
Speaker 1: elements to the garden city strong community engagement, communitytionship with land,
Speaker 1: mixed tenure homes, homes in type so generally affordable, a
Speaker 1: wide range of local jobs with easy commuting distances of homes,
Speaker 1: well designed homes with gardens combining the best of town
Speaker 1: and country, and green infrastructure that enhances a natural environment
Speaker 1: with strong cultural, recreational and shopping facilities in addition to
Speaker 1: integrated and accessible transportation. It's not all sunshine and roses, though.
Speaker 1: I mean you could look at the sort of the
Speaker 1: cream washing elements of the garden city design, and even
Speaker 1: in the time they were criticized. I mean, they were
Speaker 1: praised for being an alternative to the overcrowed industrial cities,
Speaker 1: but they were also criticized for damage in the economy,
Speaker 1: being destructive to the beauty of nature, and being in convenient.
Speaker 1: You know, they weren't able to be Furthermore, because they
Speaker 1: had this sort of top down design philosophy, they weren't
Speaker 1: able to truly reflect the natural and organic developments of
Speaker 1: a town or a country, you know, so secretly thing
Speaker 1: couldn't do either other things that the original two stuff
Speaker 1: could do. And then of course you have the mustached
Speaker 1: man himself, Marie book Chin, stepping in in the limits
Speaker 1: of the city to evaceorate the idea of the garden City.
Speaker 1: He talks about how howards scheme was basically a system
Speaker 1: of benevolent capitalism that presumed to avoid the extremes of
Speaker 1: communism and individualism, and as a result, his entire book
Speaker 1: was quote permeated by an underlying assumption. So typically British
Speaker 1: that are compromised going to be struck between an intrinsically
Speaker 1: irrational material reality and a moral ideology of high minded
Speaker 1: conciliation microsh Yeah, I feel like the most brutal part
Speaker 1: of that is just the typically British like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean anything learning. Look at really the plan that Howard had,
Speaker 1: you know, the offices and industrial factories and shopping centers
Speaker 1: that he intended to provide the Garden city with. Those
Speaker 1: spaces are battlegrounds of conflicting social interests. You know, there's
Speaker 1: alienated labor, their income differences, their disparities of work, time
Speaker 1: and free time. All that conflict is not addressed just
Speaker 1: because you make a pretty city. You know, there's no
Speaker 1: resolution to the problems created under a capitalist factory office
Speaker 1: or shopping center to just because you have a nice
Speaker 1: transit system and a green belt. I feel like some
Speaker 1: of some of these same problems crop up on some
Speaker 1: of the solar punk stuff online as well. I mean
Speaker 1: we've an attacked him definitely greenwashing throughout the solar punk
Speaker 1: aesthetic and stuff. But yeah, I mean it is it
Speaker 1: is an interesting, an interesting, interesting aspect that keeps propping up,
Speaker 1: and it's just intriguing that it like dates back over
Speaker 1: a hundred years ago, like this same exact thing. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: and funny enough, you know, his garden cities. We even
Speaker 1: fallen short of utopias that were thought of before his time,
Speaker 1: you know, like I'm not even just utopias, but also
Speaker 1: actual historical political experiments that you know, try to address
Speaker 1: various social problems, you know, like unlike the Greek polis,
Speaker 1: which had some basis of face to face democracy, Howard
Speaker 1: just had a central council and a department structure based
Speaker 1: on elections, Unlike in Thomas More's utopia, there's no proposal
Speaker 1: for rotating agricultural and industrial work. Unlike the Paris Commune
Speaker 1: of eighteen seventy one, which was established long before Howard
Speaker 1: wrote his book, he had no sort of incorporation of
Speaker 1: that sort of political experimentation in the garden city development.
Speaker 1: The criticism really is how superficial a lot of Howards
Speaker 1: ideas are, right, Like, there's just a lack of social
Speaker 1: analysis analysis in fear of just design. Yeah, Georgism, Like
Speaker 1: sure it would probably be like better than what we
Speaker 1: have now. Well yeah, but but it by no means
Speaker 1: like fixes all of the systemic issue. It's like Amsterdam, right,
Speaker 1: I would rather have capitalism while riding a bike. But
Speaker 1: Bookchin also talks about how these communities do not encompass
Speaker 1: the full range of possibilities a human experience. Again quote
Speaker 1: because you know Bookchin is Loki a boss. Right, Neighborliness
Speaker 1: is mistaken for organic social intercourse and mutual aid. Well
Speaker 1: manicured parks for the harmonization of humanity with nature, the
Speaker 1: proximity of workplaces for the development of a new meaning
Speaker 1: for work and its integration with play. An eclectic mix
Speaker 1: of ranch houses, slab like apartments, and bachelor type flats
Speaker 1: for spontaneous architectural variety, shopping, marked plazas in a vast
Speaker 1: expanse of lawn for the agora, lecture halls for cultural centers,
Speaker 1: hobby classes for vocational variety, benevolent trusts, so municipal councils
Speaker 1: for self administration. One can add endlessly to this list
Speaker 1: of misplays. Criteria for community that save to off your
Speaker 1: skate rather than clarify the high attainment of the urban tradition. Indeed,
Speaker 1: the appearance of community serves the ideological function of concealing
Speaker 1: the incompleteness of an intimate and shared social life. Again, boom,
Speaker 1: you know, and people are brought together. You know, they
Speaker 1: have all these conveniences in these pleasant trees, but they're
Speaker 1: still culturally impoverished. They're still atomized, they still deal this
Speaker 1: stark reality of capitalism in the spaces that they're they're
Speaker 1: gonna inevitably spend most of their day at work. Like
Speaker 1: it's nice that the city is well designed, but how
Speaker 1: much of it are you going to get to see
Speaker 1: if you still have to go to work for eight
Speaker 1: hours plus a day. I mean, if there anything at
Speaker 1: least you know, the commune will probably be shorter, but
Speaker 1: that's about it. And that's if you get a job
Speaker 1: in the city itself. This is interesting because in some ways,
Speaker 1: the invention of the suburb in the in the years
Speaker 1: after this kind of tried to solve for this issue
Speaker 1: while also just doing it in an incredibly racist way.
Speaker 1: Like you can you can you can see the invention
Speaker 1: of the suburb of trying to create these little nestled
Speaker 1: communities but also getting away from the the the urban center,
Speaker 1: which was seen as this like scary place full of
Speaker 1: people who were non white. So you have like this
Speaker 1: white flight thing that developed this notion of the suburbs,
Speaker 1: which in some ways kind of does this, but in
Speaker 1: a in a much worse way. Actually, it makes it
Speaker 1: makes the idea of the garden city look like a
Speaker 1: much better alternative to what the suburbs did. And it's
Speaker 1: it's just interesting that even the version of this that
Speaker 1: got implemented was just done in a way that it's
Speaker 1: so much more dystopian and depressing. Yeah, I mean, and
Speaker 1: Booked Chin addresses that that comparison to the suburbs as well. Right.
Speaker 1: He says, in the best of cases, the new towns
Speaker 1: differ from suburbs, primarily because job commuting is short and
Speaker 1: most services can be supplied within the community itself. In
Speaker 1: the worst of cases, they are essentially bedroom suburbs of
Speaker 1: the metropolis and add enormously to its congestion during working hours.
Speaker 1: I can't, I can't believe book beat me to the
Speaker 1: punch on this one. I'm devastated. This is the first
Speaker 1: time booktions ever has has ever has ever beaten me.
Speaker 1: This is this is this is really terrible. So but
Speaker 1: despite some of these flaws and criticisms, how it was
Speaker 1: passionate about his idea, all right, I mean he published
Speaker 1: the books. He also organized like he's actually he's not
Speaker 1: sitting on Twitter, right, He's actually doing something about his ideas.
Speaker 1: So he organized this Garden City Association in eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: nine in England to promote the ideas of social justice,
Speaker 1: economic efficiency, beautification, health and well being in the context
Speaker 1: of City Planet. That Garden City Association later became the
Speaker 1: Town and Country Planet Association, which still exists to this day.
Speaker 1: Women played a very active role and continue to play
Speaker 1: very active role in the organization. I mean, as Howard
Speaker 1: says himself in his book, Women's Influences Too often ignored
Speaker 1: here that ladies this guy's are feminist. But when the
Speaker 1: garden city is built as a chokey will be woman's share.
Speaker 1: And the work we found to have been a large one.
Speaker 1: Whomen are among our most active missionaries. And so he's
Speaker 1: doing some Abdullah now that yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's
Speaker 1: liberating life, you know. But yeah, the TCP in the
Speaker 1: Town Country Planet Association has continued to campaign for a
Speaker 1: new generation of garden city is based on modern modern
Speaker 1: Godden City principles. They will cross sector and government influence
Speaker 1: policy and legislation. There is awareness through guidance and training.
Speaker 1: They promote affordable homes and inclusive, healthy and climate resilient places,
Speaker 1: and they try to create texta world barriers, opportunities and
Speaker 1: practical solutions necessary to make new garden cities a reality.
Speaker 1: They also are genuinely interested in empowering people to have
Speaker 1: a real influence over decisions about the environments and to
Speaker 1: secure social justice within in between communities, or at least
Speaker 1: that is what their website says. Outside of the TCPA,
Speaker 1: the idea of godden city definitely sort of rooted itself
Speaker 1: and urban planning and the urban planning tradition and it
Speaker 1: did sort of feed into this rise of green spaces
Speaker 1: within urban landscapes that we now find around the world.
Speaker 1: The concept of the garden city is definitely still revisited today,
Speaker 1: but it's considerably different from the original idea. It's also
Speaker 1: taken the garden city as an inspiration, as an esthetic
Speaker 1: inspiration to create greater integration between urban areas and green spaces.
Speaker 1: In his time though, going back to the late nineteenth
Speaker 1: and early twentieth century, Howard was a successful fundraise again
Speaker 1: he was trying to get things going. In the first
Speaker 1: years of the twentieth century. He built two garden cities,
Speaker 1: Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City, both in Hertfordshire, England,
Speaker 1: and both still exist today. Letchworth was an originally quite successful.
Speaker 1: It was first you know, an ancient parish from like
Speaker 1: the left hanth century and remained a small rural village
Speaker 1: and so the start of twentieth century when the land
Speaker 1: was purchased by a company called First Garden City Limited,
Speaker 1: which was founded by Howard and supporters, and they went
Speaker 1: on to establish the United Kingdom's first roundabout the Solar
Speaker 1: Shot Circus. A lot of urban like park land and
Speaker 1: open spaces, including a green space named after Howard called
Speaker 1: Howard Park. But after Howard's passing, the first Garden City
Speaker 1: Limited was sort of taken over in nineteen sixty and
Speaker 1: the company so it changed how the town was managed.
Speaker 1: The residents of the local council kind of lost, some
Speaker 1: say the original Garden City ideals were reduced, and the
Speaker 1: corporation eventually became for the first the company created a
Speaker 1: corporation transferred ownership to the corporation which is now called
Speaker 1: the lech Withth Goden City Cooperation, and then that cooperation
Speaker 1: was replaced by a charter will body in the nineteen
Speaker 1: nineties called the lech Withth god Cy Heritage Foundation, which
Speaker 1: continues to own and manage the estate to this day.
Speaker 1: Letchworth was a sort of an interesting experiment. The people
Speaker 1: who were founded, who helped to found that town, were
Speaker 1: very much otherworldly as some people would describe them. They
Speaker 1: for example, they had some people describe them as health freaks.
Speaker 1: They actually voted on a band to set against the
Speaker 1: selling of alcohol, a ban on the selling of alcohol
Speaker 1: in public premises. Oh boy, so which is I mean
Speaker 1: for a British village? Right? In the early nineteen hundreds
Speaker 1: to vote against having a pub. Unheard of, right, they
Speaker 1: eventually create a pub. That pub didn't serve any alcohol.
Speaker 1: Bumber bumber, hate to see it. Yeah, but lat truth
Speaker 1: was still like a real pioneer, you know. It's approached
Speaker 1: to blend in. Town country was used in the Australian
Speaker 1: capital Canberra, in hell Rao, in Germany, in Tapanila and Finland,
Speaker 1: and in Messa parks in that field, and of course
Speaker 1: in the other Garden City well win how I had
Speaker 1: arranged for that land to be purchased by a company
Speaker 1: called Second Gardain City Limited, real creative there. And first
Speaker 1: they were gonna call them the City Digs. Well, but
Speaker 1: a couple days later they changed their mind, probably because
Speaker 1: they realized as a dumb name. And then I wasn't
Speaker 1: gonna say anything, but yeah, that's not that's not a
Speaker 1: great name. Yeah. And so the town is laid out
Speaker 1: along these tree line boulevards. It's sort of a new
Speaker 1: George and town center. Um. There's a lot of ass
Speaker 1: out of parks, as to be expected. And the planners
Speaker 1: had intended to create the Guarden City to have like
Speaker 1: one shop called well Wind Stores, which is basically a
Speaker 1: monopoly that all the residents were expected to shop at. Lastly,
Speaker 1: I think I want to bring up one final inspiration.
Speaker 1: I was about to one on whether I would include
Speaker 1: this one or not, but I said, you know what,
Speaker 1: I might be entertaining and I might want to talk
Speaker 1: about it further in the future. A certain character by
Speaker 1: the name of Walt Disney. Oh no, this is Epcot.
Speaker 1: This is this is this is the experiments or prototypical
Speaker 1: city of tomorrow. Yes, this is the Florida Project. Oh no,
Speaker 1: Disney's Epcot was designed in concentric circles with radius. This
Speaker 1: is this is the worst job scare. Oh, but it
Speaker 1: should be noted, or rather it should be expected that,
Speaker 1: unlike Howard, mister Disney envisioned having a lot of personal
Speaker 1: control over the day to day management of life in
Speaker 1: his city. So really, Epcott was only loosely inspired by
Speaker 1: Howard's idea of combining the populace with industry. Um. This
Speaker 1: city would have had a hotel at the center with
Speaker 1: more than thirty stories and a convention center. There would
Speaker 1: be an internationally themed town center. Um. There would be
Speaker 1: a mega mole. There would be themed restaurants, shops, and attractions.
Speaker 1: There would be a monorail, Yeah he was. He was
Speaker 1: a car free community advocate of Disney. Yeah. Like, his
Speaker 1: plan was that nobody would drive in Epcot. Delivery trucks
Speaker 1: and other autobiles and other automobiles that needed to enter
Speaker 1: the city were to be kept underground. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of like a fusion of Ebone's ah what an elon
Speaker 1: musk that sucks? That sucks. Yeah. Also, this city would
Speaker 1: be climb a controlled with a glass roof. Yes, I mean,
Speaker 1: And it's funny because like he couldn't even do this properly,
Speaker 1: Like he couldn't even build this instead instead of got
Speaker 1: turned into like a like a like a bare skeleton
Speaker 1: of what his original plan was because Epcot will failed
Speaker 1: in so in so many ways, the reason being that
Speaker 1: he ended up dying right Yeah. Yes, like even on
Speaker 1: his deathbed he was still sketching up designs for Epcot,
Speaker 1: so he never really got to implement it. Pro life
Speaker 1: Dictator dies anyways. Yeah. Actually, like the actual like living
Speaker 1: communities in in Disney World Florida are are so different
Speaker 1: and in many ways they're they're just like another suburb um,
Speaker 1: except you're in a suburb owned by Disney. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean it's gonna be a peek into what
Speaker 1: life would have been like on the Epcot. Right. Your
Speaker 1: home would have been pre fabricated and modular. Certain materials
Speaker 1: and technologies could be tested as soon as they were beable.
Speaker 1: By the way, why they have nothing against free fab homes,
Speaker 1: I think they could be very useful. Um, But Disney's
Speaker 1: idea was basically, your home is pre fab so that
Speaker 1: any time he wanted to install an update on it,
Speaker 1: he could. It's great, you know, like the entire city
Speaker 1: was basically like a guinea pig for any technologies he
Speaker 1: came up with. Um, And so he wants to really
Speaker 1: retain absolute control of the city, like they wouldn't even
Speaker 1: own anything. Disney alone would own the land so that
Speaker 1: he and his success, says, can make updates and changes
Speaker 1: without ever being snowed down by this pesky thing called
Speaker 1: citizens votes and rights and all that. It's funny because
Speaker 1: this is actually now under attack by Ron de Santis
Speaker 1: in Florida. The sovereignty of Disney may like change a lot,
Speaker 1: and I think already stripped it. Yes, But but but how
Speaker 1: this plays out in actuality as yet to be determined.
Speaker 1: But it is funny that this is actually like this
Speaker 1: is a very very recent thing, Like it's just like
Speaker 1: a week or so. But see what we can see
Speaker 1: here is one of the inevitable transitions as as as
Speaker 1: we saw in British colonial rule in India, which is
Speaker 1: that direct corporate rules always replaced by injurrect corporate rule
Speaker 1: via the state. Yeah for know which, Yeah, it's in
Speaker 1: some ways. We will probably learn that it was better
Speaker 1: to live under Disney than Ron de Santis. But that's
Speaker 1: not saying much. Next time he opens up a disun
Speaker 1: this wild No, no, it's just it's just it's literally
Speaker 1: just like eighteen gipmo exhibitions. Oh lord, I mean Descenter's
Speaker 1: world will just be the United States with descent potential election. True,
Speaker 1: sad but true. But let me tell you a bit
Speaker 1: more about EPCOT. Right, if you were eighteen or older,
Speaker 1: you have to have a job. Also, you don't get
Speaker 1: to retire. Nobody is allowed to retire. You only get
Speaker 1: to stop working if you either die or leave amazing
Speaker 1: one way out. Also, he and reason being, he believed
Speaker 1: this would prevent slums or ghettos from foreman in any
Speaker 1: part of his magical city because I mean, if everyone
Speaker 1: has a job, then nobody will be struggling to pay
Speaker 1: rent or eat. Right. Funnily enough, of course, a lot
Speaker 1: of Disney workers today can't afford to pay rental eat.
Speaker 1: But hey, the theoretically everybody in Epcot would have their
Speaker 1: basic needs met also, though in exchange for that, they
Speaker 1: wouldn't have any privacy because Epcott was also supposed to
Speaker 1: be like a tourist attraction. You know, you look outside,
Speaker 1: you win new, and tourists are like looking inside, you
Speaker 1: win new. That was a thing that was Epcott, thankfuley
Speaker 1: doesn't it wasn't fully implemented. I mean, some people have
Speaker 1: said that Singapore is like a dystopian city state run
Speaker 1: by Disney. But we could talk about that another time.
Speaker 1: That's a basic rundown on garden Cities past, present and future.
Speaker 1: The idea of it, I think was, you know, notable, admirable,
Speaker 1: good effort, but flawed um and because it lacked a
Speaker 1: strong ideological foundation, economic foundation, an analysis that took into
Speaker 1: account the contentions speak within society that uh, you know,
Speaker 1: manifests in the urban landscape. And I think it's a
Speaker 1: clear oneing that for solo punks and for any people
Speaker 1: who are interested in urban planet as a whole. That.
Speaker 1: You know, aesthetics is not everything, design is not everything.
Speaker 1: You know, they asked me some some meat to those, Um,
Speaker 1: let's say some meats underneath that flesh. It's a really
Speaker 1: weird analogy. But yeah, yeah, no, but like yeah, the
Speaker 1: principle of Okay, I'm just gonna I'm gonna, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: abandon the Walter Benjamin thing I was gonna do there,
Speaker 1: but no, try it, keep keep going, keep Benjamin thing
Speaker 1: I have. I haven't. I haven't actually read any of
Speaker 1: his stuff in like five years. But one of Benjamin's
Speaker 1: things was when politics is sort of displaced, you're converted
Speaker 1: into aesthetic, it becomes fascism. So don't do that. In fact,
Speaker 1: have actual politics and not simply reduce your politics to
Speaker 1: an esthetic or to aesthetics, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, true, true.
Speaker 1: All right, Well that's it for me. You can follow
Speaker 1: me on YouTube dot com slash Andrewism, on Twitter at
Speaker 1: and his School of Saying True, and on picture dot
Speaker 1: com slash Andrewism. You can find us at happen here,
Speaker 1: pod or cools on media, on Twitter and Instagram. Um,
Speaker 1: and you can find me tweeting about my desire to
Speaker 1: understand the mechanics of how Disney World operates at Hungry Boutie,
Speaker 1: mostly on Twitter. Yeah, welcome to Dick. It happened here
Speaker 1: the podcast that I am a Wong occasionally hijack talk
Speaker 1: about Asian American stuff, and you know, some some so
Speaker 1: some some pretty interesting Asian American stuff happened, which is that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a sort of massive sweeping cultural victory question
Speaker 1: mark for the Asian American community TM when everything ever
Speaker 1: we're all at once did. Okay, I'm getting conflicting sources
Speaker 1: about exactly the record that I said at the Oscars,
Speaker 1: but it won seven Oscars, did very well. Everyone is
Speaker 1: very happy. Um. Yeah, So I decided that I was
Speaker 1: going to use this to talk about some other stuff
Speaker 1: that is related to it, and with me to talk
Speaker 1: about many things, including sort of the family in patriarchy
Speaker 1: and Asian American culture and media. Is Tiffany Yang, a
Speaker 1: filmmaker from New York. Tiffany Welcome to the show. Hi,
Speaker 1: thanks for having me on, Thanks thanks for being on. Um.
Speaker 1: So we were for trying to figure out how precisely
Speaker 1: we want to sort of start this because you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of sort of angles you can take.
Speaker 1: I think that the thing that I want to start
Speaker 1: with is well, like a okay, everything, every All it
Speaker 1: wants is a very good movie in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: And I think it's sort of it's kind of the
Speaker 1: apotheosis of a structure of Asian American media that I've
Speaker 1: I've talked about before on this show. Um that I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna run through a brief explanation of what
Speaker 1: this is. So something that I, yeah, I've talked about
Speaker 1: a bit before that that I think about a lot
Speaker 1: is the way in which Asian American media has been
Speaker 1: It has a basically a structural form. It has there's
Speaker 1: a very specific story or set of story structures into
Speaker 1: which anything you're trying to tell has to be fit
Speaker 1: and and that that series of things is okay. So
Speaker 1: you have a small business, you have you have a
Speaker 1: bunch of immigrants that come to the US or that
Speaker 1: they are well usually they're already in the US and
Speaker 1: they're trying to run a small business and they're having
Speaker 1: these issues sort of integrating into into sort of like
Speaker 1: a wide American society, and there's some kind of conflict
Speaker 1: in the family, and the TV show or the movie
Speaker 1: is about like resolving this sort of conflict. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think Everything Ever All at Once is like
Speaker 1: the best version of this that we've ever gotten in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. But you know, and something I've
Speaker 1: talked about in a certain New Year's episode is that
Speaker 1: there's something about I guess Asian American like the way
Speaker 1: our sort of political culture works that makes it so
Speaker 1: that this is the only story that we tell. And
Speaker 1: you know, I mean you can look at a lot
Speaker 1: of the sort of like, sorry, I've been rambling for
Speaker 1: a lot, but I want to get this out of
Speaker 1: the way before you go further. But you know, like
Speaker 1: there there's a lot of movies that are like it's
Speaker 1: like you know, shows like Fresh off the Boat, like
Speaker 1: and Fist is also sort of like almost literally this, right, um,
Speaker 1: Like Turning Red is sort of like an emblematic example
Speaker 1: of sort of thing that is exactly this, Like Fresh
Speaker 1: off the Boat is basically this, right. I think part
Speaker 1: of the sort of there's a kind of ideological shell
Speaker 1: game happening here that's about the family. Everything Ever, All
Speaker 1: at Once has a lot of similarities. The Crazy Rich
Speaker 1: Asians in ways that are kind of not immediately apparent.
Speaker 1: I have finally reached the point TM, but which is
Speaker 1: that both everything everywhere all at once in Crazy Rich
Speaker 1: Asians ends in exactly the same way, right, which is
Speaker 1: the the like the the sort of family tension that
Speaker 1: has had been sort of building up and playing out
Speaker 1: throughout the entire movie, like is resolved and everyone sort
Speaker 1: of goes back to being a family. And this is
Speaker 1: interesting specifically for Crazy Rich Asians because in the original,
Speaker 1: like in the book version of this story, the family shatters.
Speaker 1: The plot of that movie is this this Asian American
Speaker 1: girl is dating like this guy who's from Singapore who
Speaker 1: has not told her that he's from like an unbelievably rich,
Speaker 1: like Singaporean family, and the story is about him going
Speaker 1: about them going to Singapore and realizing that this guy
Speaker 1: is unbelievably rich and that his family is just assholes
Speaker 1: who suck And in the book, like the family like
Speaker 1: mistreats both of them really badly, and so they just
Speaker 1: leave and they book it and they cut they cut
Speaker 1: off the rich family. But in the movie they some
Speaker 1: weird thing happens where like the the main character plays
Speaker 1: Ma Jung with the guy's mom and like a miracle
Speaker 1: occurs in the family works out and everything everyone wants.
Speaker 1: How's a very similar sort of thing where like the
Speaker 1: way this movie ends, and I would just say this,
Speaker 1: like I do, I do like this movie a lot,
Speaker 1: but the way that it ends is Evelyn, who is
Speaker 1: Joy's mom, walks up to her and says, you're fat,
Speaker 1: and I don't like that. You gotta tattoo. But also
Speaker 1: the family is good and like we should work it out,
Speaker 1: and then they do, like a baricle occurs, and there's
Speaker 1: this sort of running ideology in this which is that
Speaker 1: like the family is sort of sort of too big
Speaker 1: to fail, like you're you're not allowed to have a
Speaker 1: a movie that's about something that's not about the family,
Speaker 1: or be a movie where you know, like the end
Speaker 1: of it is the people walk away from their family
Speaker 1: because it's hurt them a lot, right. And I will
Speaker 1: also say that sort of Asian American cultural production that
Speaker 1: doesn't center the family, it actually just doesn't get read
Speaker 1: as being Asian American, right, like I think, I um,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've seen this, but like Being
Speaker 1: View has this beautiful documentary called Minding the Gap and
Speaker 1: it's about like his trauma and his like sort of
Speaker 1: youth growing up in a broken home and hanging out
Speaker 1: with skateboarding friends, some of whom are like black, and
Speaker 1: that just never gets talked about as an Asian American film,
Speaker 1: even though it's made by an Asian American filmmaker, and
Speaker 1: his experience as like someone who actually migrated from China
Speaker 1: is such a big part of his story, Like, because
Speaker 1: it's not about the sort of family conflict and reconciliation,
Speaker 1: it actually doesn't get read as an Asian American film
Speaker 1: a lot of the time, which to me is interesting.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I just wanted to second your point that
Speaker 1: like in both of these films, everything everywhere, all at
Speaker 1: once and crazy rich Asians, like nothing actually changes. You know,
Speaker 1: there's the reconciliation within the family, but nothing about the
Speaker 1: family structure changes. Like I think Evelyn her the sort
Speaker 1: of like conciliatory gesture she gives is like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: your mom, and I would always choose to be with
Speaker 1: you in any universe. I forget, like the exact praising
Speaker 1: it's been a while since I yea, it's something like that.
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, I would still want to be
Speaker 1: with you because I'm your mom. And it's like this
Speaker 1: very um the families is its own explanation. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think it points to sort of this is the
Speaker 1: movie that I think hit the exact limit of this
Speaker 1: kind of of this kind of sort of Asian family
Speaker 1: politics because in it in in it's in in the
Speaker 1: sort of like moment where it needs to justify itself,
Speaker 1: it can't. It doesn't have anything. The moment's it's sort
Speaker 1: of it's it's it's it's it's empty of an actual
Speaker 1: like it's it's empty of any sort of like ideological
Speaker 1: message about why this should be redemptive, right, like just
Speaker 1: you know, and and I think this is something that
Speaker 1: like we don't think about enough, which is that like
Speaker 1: like okay, if if if your mother hurts you like
Speaker 1: a lot, right, like them being your mother is not
Speaker 1: a redemptive thing. I mean, this is something I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about a lot in the context of sort of transness,
Speaker 1: and you know, and in the ways that like trans
Speaker 1: people like i mean literally get killed by their families,
Speaker 1: in the ways that they get you know, kicked out
Speaker 1: from their families, and the ways that sort of this
Speaker 1: this this sort of self justification of it's good because
Speaker 1: it is right that like the relationship. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: sort of what you were saying, right, is like it
Speaker 1: justifies itself by just like, well, I am your mother.
Speaker 1: It's like, well that's not an argument, right, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: and it's not enough. Like I think Joyce spunds the
Speaker 1: whole film like fighting to be seen by her mom,
Speaker 1: and in the end, her mom doesn't really give any
Speaker 1: reason why she loves Joy, Like there's nothing like specific
Speaker 1: to Joy herself as a person. It's just like you're
Speaker 1: my daughter, I'm your mother. Of course I love you. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, like why should that be something a
Speaker 1: queer child settles for, like just this very basic baseline
Speaker 1: of acceptance rather than anything that like actually celebrates who
Speaker 1: they are as an individual. Yeah, and that's something that
Speaker 1: I also wanted to talk about with this is like
Speaker 1: and this this is not just like the specific thing.
Speaker 1: You know, we're talking a lot about the specific movie
Speaker 1: because this is like the most recent one that's come out,
Speaker 1: and and we're not sort of saying this to like
Speaker 1: like there is a lot of like good stuff in
Speaker 1: this movie, Like this is the movie like like Joy
Speaker 1: is probably the character who is like closest to me
Speaker 1: who I have ever seen in anything at any point, right,
Speaker 1: and like there was something, you know, sort of incredibly emotional,
Speaker 1: like I cried a lodger in this movie that was
Speaker 1: like incredibly emotional about it, you know, like seeing yourself
Speaker 1: in it, Like yeah, yeah. But there's something about the
Speaker 1: way that Asian Americans, like especially sort of like cysaid
Speaker 1: Asian Americans, think about queerness that that I think is
Speaker 1: is you see in this movie, which is that. Okay,
Speaker 1: so this movie has two queer relationships in it, right
Speaker 1: unless you're going to count like the guy in the Raccoon,
Speaker 1: which it's funny, but I don't know about that one.
Speaker 1: But right, but but you know, the actual like the
Speaker 1: actual two sort of like queer relationships are between Joy
Speaker 1: and her girlfriends and then between Evelyn and the tax lady.
Speaker 1: And there's two things that are interesting about that. One
Speaker 1: is that both of the both of the characters they're
Speaker 1: in relationships with are white and very and this this
Speaker 1: is a visit like something that's very very specifically like
Speaker 1: pointed out about Joy's girlfriends, and you know, you know
Speaker 1: that's the joke is like, well, she's half Mexican, but
Speaker 1: She's played throughout the entire hier thing as like an
Speaker 1: outsider who like doesn't understand what's happening in this sort
Speaker 1: of scenes, like doesn't understand the family dynamic, doesn't doesn't
Speaker 1: understand his knees and you know, and you see this
Speaker 1: again with Okay, so who who have like you know,
Speaker 1: they're able to imagine a world in which, like Evelyn,
Speaker 1: the main character who has like just been homophobic this
Speaker 1: entire movie, is in a queer relationship and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like I good for her. But if you look at
Speaker 1: who it's with, right, it's it's the character in the
Speaker 1: movie who is this tax lady who her thing is
Speaker 1: that she is like like she she she she is
Speaker 1: like the human representation of the sort of white supremacists,
Speaker 1: like capitalist bureaucracy that is, you know, attacking this family
Speaker 1: and is sort of like driving these people into the ground.
Speaker 1: And then she's sort of redeemed by by like love
Speaker 1: and queerness. But there's this way that queerness gets positioned,
Speaker 1: this outside of asianness, by the way that like the
Speaker 1: by the way that the only possible crew relationship that
Speaker 1: they can imagine is with a white person, as you know,
Speaker 1: as someone who's explicitly marked as an outsider, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's a really good point. Like queerness, It
Speaker 1: queerness is like attached to these anxieties over assimilation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: from the perspective of like the older generation like evaln
Speaker 1: and Gong Gong is like the fear of them being
Speaker 1: assimilated too much into this Western culture um, which is
Speaker 1: just a very it's it's very strange to me that
Speaker 1: this is the thing that keeps coming up in like
Speaker 1: Asian American narratives and discourses because obviously like Asian like
Speaker 1: Asian queer cinema in Asia is like such a powerful
Speaker 1: cultural force, and the film makes all these one car
Speaker 1: why references, and I feel like one car Hi has
Speaker 1: made like one of the greatest works the cru cinema
Speaker 1: Happy Together um of like recent decades. And so it's
Speaker 1: just it's so strange, um how Creus is being positioned
Speaker 1: as like an external threat. And I mean, like you know,
Speaker 1: you you could you could take a sort of like
Speaker 1: like the if you if you want to do the
Speaker 1: lib analysis of this, like China has had queer rulers
Speaker 1: like there has there has the West produced one, like
Speaker 1: maybe I possibly at some point maybe but like, you know,
Speaker 1: like it's kind of like it's ideologically frustrating, right, like
Speaker 1: like you know, you can fall back on the like
Speaker 1: we know that, like we have records of where people
Speaker 1: in China for like five thousand fucking years, right, Like
Speaker 1: it's you know, but like I think, I think what's
Speaker 1: really interesting about this is that this is something that's
Speaker 1: seen as so natural that people writing like even like
Speaker 1: like Asian American like writers writing about the film don't
Speaker 1: even notice it, like they just they just sort of
Speaker 1: passively reproduce it. Yeah, And I don't know, I think
Speaker 1: it's like I mean, it's deeply frustrating, like being an
Speaker 1: Asian queer person, because this is something that like, you know,
Speaker 1: the the kinds of right wing nationalism that like are
Speaker 1: like they you know, like there's a different kinds of
Speaker 1: sort of Chinese nationalism, right that will make that will
Speaker 1: make this like explicitly make the same argument that like
Speaker 1: gay people are like a like a sort of like
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess they would have they would have
Speaker 1: said it was borgewab, but now it's a sort of
Speaker 1: like decadent Western like imposition onto the like onto the
Speaker 1: world of Asia. But it's like like no, but then,
Speaker 1: but then, but you know, you you get these like
Speaker 1: sort of like very well credentialed, like progressive like Asian
Speaker 1: American writers who are just either implicitly or almost explicitly
Speaker 1: making exactly the same argument. Yeah. Yes, And it's also
Speaker 1: what the American right wing thing right like they want
Speaker 1: to China as like if you know, China represents this
Speaker 1: like sexual threat of having like the society where everyone
Speaker 1: is in their place, you know, like they imagine that
Speaker 1: these sort of like traditional gender roles are much more
Speaker 1: adhered to in China, which is why it's like we're
Speaker 1: on the decline, like China's rising. So it's yeah, it
Speaker 1: is a very weird idea that nationalists on both sides
Speaker 1: are attached to. And it's disappointing that UM Asian Americans
Speaker 1: who think of themselves as progressive or even radical kind
Speaker 1: of reproduce this unthinkingly. Yeah. I mean one of my
Speaker 1: like recent black Pill moments was I don't know if
Speaker 1: people remember this, um, but there were there, There was
Speaker 1: there was someone on Twitter who very kind of famously
Speaker 1: got like just like obliterated for saying that. I first,
Speaker 1: for saying that like people people shouldn't like canceled. There's
Speaker 1: a scription to the New York Times after they like
Speaker 1: did the whole thing. They did this whole bullshit that
Speaker 1: a few people don't know what the sort of scandal was.
Speaker 1: So the a bunch of people who'd written for The
Speaker 1: New York Times sent them a very very bild letter
Speaker 1: saying like, hey, can you guys like fix some obvious
Speaker 1: like like not even saying fix, like can you report
Speaker 1: on trans issues better here? Or some like glaring short
Speaker 1: of mistakes that you made in New York Times through
Speaker 1: a hissy fit and got really mad at them and
Speaker 1: and you know this, this person's reaction was like, oh,
Speaker 1: well you can't you like don't cancel your subscription, like
Speaker 1: you have to support the news. And it was this
Speaker 1: like sort of moment and she she is one of
Speaker 1: the hosts of like one of the big progressive ation
Speaker 1: American podcasts, and it was like it was just you know,
Speaker 1: for me, it was just really sort of like black
Speaker 1: pilling moment of like, oh, this is like this is
Speaker 1: like what like like you know what like like three three,
Speaker 1: three seventy five a month. It is what these people
Speaker 1: think my life is worth. Like yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I think This kind of ideological stuff is very deeply
Speaker 1: tied into the way that Nasian Americans have been representing
Speaker 1: and thinking about. The family said of recent years, and
Speaker 1: but but, but but before before we go into that,
Speaker 1: do you know when the family is trying to sell
Speaker 1: you it is it is the products and services that
Speaker 1: supported this podcast. We have to take an ad break.
Speaker 1: We will be right, okay, Miah, just out of just
Speaker 1: out of curiosity, since I don't have the pleasure of
Speaker 1: listening to the ads while we're recording, Like what is
Speaker 1: going to play during that? I have no idea, Like,
Speaker 1: it could be anything. I don't know. It could be
Speaker 1: a gold ad, it could be the f While we
Speaker 1: haven't had the FBI tried to do it yet, we've
Speaker 1: had We've had we've had law unfortunate agencies. We've had
Speaker 1: people selling gold Ronald Reagan coins. We've had so I
Speaker 1: don't think I've seen that, like since I was a child.
Speaker 1: I think they used to have like television commercials. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they do it on podcast now. Apparently a thing that
Speaker 1: I discovered when people sent me thelyp so who look
Speaker 1: like maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe they'll do a Thatcher
Speaker 1: one and you two can own the the immortal words.
Speaker 1: There is no such thing as society. There is only
Speaker 1: individuals in the family. Yeah. Wow, well whatever it takes
Speaker 1: to keep the podcast running. Yeah, so all right, something
Speaker 1: I wanted to sort of circle back to is, you know,
Speaker 1: I think one of the one of the sort of
Speaker 1: one of the things about this kind of Asian American media.
Speaker 1: You know, you have this this sort of ambivalence of like, like,
Speaker 1: who what the sort of queer child is supposed to be?
Speaker 1: And you know, like I would say this like it
Speaker 1: is a pretty common experience if you are like a
Speaker 1: queer child of an Asian family that your family does
Speaker 1: fucked up shit. Do you like that's a thing? Um?
Speaker 1: And this is I wanted to ask you about something
Speaker 1: that you've been talking about that I'm sort of interested in,
Speaker 1: which is one of the things that I don't know
Speaker 1: when you trying to talk about this stuff. There's this
Speaker 1: way in which the way we sort of collectively think
Speaker 1: about when I say we this is like I guess
Speaker 1: like a kind of specific Asian American thing, the way
Speaker 1: we think about trauma gets involved very quickly. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I was wondering if you talk about that some more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like there's this there are these sort of
Speaker 1: like unspoken discursive rules where when you talk about trauma
Speaker 1: within an Asian immigrant family, there are like, first of all,
Speaker 1: it's always intergenerational trauma, right Like you can't talk about
Speaker 1: like a queer child experiencing trauma without then like getting
Speaker 1: into the fact that, oh, like the parents have experienced
Speaker 1: traumatic things like through the process of immigration or like war,
Speaker 1: the refugee experience, etcetera, etcetera. And so there's this sort
Speaker 1: of like economy of trauma where some members within the
Speaker 1: family get their trauma treated as more legitimate and others don't.
Speaker 1: I think it's like really common to hear this refrain,
Speaker 1: which is like, oh, um, second generation immigrants are like
Speaker 1: the you know, people like US Asian immigrant children who
Speaker 1: were born in the West can't possibly know that like
Speaker 1: the real trauma that our parents or grandparents went through
Speaker 1: because they were the ones who like fled their countries
Speaker 1: or experienced war firstand or grew up in poverty. But
Speaker 1: then it's also just like when we talk about eight
Speaker 1: intergenerational trauma, um, there's this sort of like obfuscation of
Speaker 1: who is enacting that trauma within the family, right Like
Speaker 1: if the intergenerational trauma exists, like who is passing it down?
Speaker 1: And so I don't I don't know if I'm articulating
Speaker 1: myself well on this, but um, yeah, I guess the
Speaker 1: essential ideas that I think there's this like mechanism which
Speaker 1: kind of um immediately delegitimizes any talk of abuse or
Speaker 1: trauma from the perspective of um Asian youth or from
Speaker 1: the perspective of like the child in the family. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think I think that's a kind of I
Speaker 1: don't know, there's just really baffling, deep unwillingness in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways to think about And I think this
Speaker 1: is a sort of broader like cultural thing too. But
Speaker 1: there's just deep unwillingness to think about the family as
Speaker 1: a side of violence and as a side of sort
Speaker 1: of profound violence. It's like, you know, like it's the
Speaker 1: place where the violence that shapes you comes from in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases. And I mean, like, I know
Speaker 1: a lot of people this has happened to you, has
Speaker 1: happened to me to some extent, And there's this real
Speaker 1: kind of you know, this is what this is what
Speaker 1: I actually really liked about everything everywhere, all at once.
Speaker 1: It's like it like goes into that in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, Like it is a movie for about ninety
Speaker 1: nine tenths of the movie. It is a movie about
Speaker 1: how like the people around like how how the people
Speaker 1: in your family can hurt you repeatedly, and about the
Speaker 1: sort of like the ways that they think about it,
Speaker 1: the way but you know, there's there's but but but
Speaker 1: but but I think this is where this sort of
Speaker 1: perspective thing comes into it where like, yeah, we're I think,
Speaker 1: like we don't really have a language to sort of
Speaker 1: talk about this stuff, and the way the film deals
Speaker 1: with it is sort of like you know, is is
Speaker 1: this kind of like very specific kind of nihilism, which
Speaker 1: is like definitely a thing that you can fall into,
Speaker 1: right like you know, like that like that that is
Speaker 1: definitely a reaction to being traumatized. But it's seen as
Speaker 1: like illegitimate and world destroying I think in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways because it causes you to sort of like
Speaker 1: if if that's your experience of the family, like you're
Speaker 1: going to leave or you're going to or you're only
Speaker 1: going to stay in by force, and so you know,
Speaker 1: the movie sort of rejects it. But but you know
Speaker 1: there's this way that it's very difficult to talk about
Speaker 1: this stuff and about the sort of like long arc
Speaker 1: of how people have thought about the family before us. Right,
Speaker 1: what's an example of what you mean by like how
Speaker 1: people have thought about the family before us? Well, I
Speaker 1: think I think in the Chinese context in particular, there's
Speaker 1: a very there's like there's I mean, if you look
Speaker 1: at what was happening in in the sort of rat
Speaker 1: like in the in the sort of very radical periods
Speaker 1: in Chinese history in the last you know, if you
Speaker 1: like last sort of hundred years, you look at sort
Speaker 1: of what's going on in nineteen twenty five, if you
Speaker 1: look at what happens immediately like after the Chinese Revolution,
Speaker 1: like there is a real period of like questioning, questioning
Speaker 1: patriarchal authority, of questioning like what is the family for?
Speaker 1: Like why why are we doing this? And you know,
Speaker 1: I think I think the answers they came to were
Speaker 1: ultimately unsatisfying, which is that like, well, we need the
Speaker 1: family around because like we we are, our economy does
Speaker 1: not function without uncompensated labor. So the maoists sort of
Speaker 1: like attempt to grapple with this fails. But I don't
Speaker 1: like as as as as with many things that Maoism
Speaker 1: attempt to grappled with, I don't think they were wrong
Speaker 1: to look at it. I think their solutions were all terrible.
Speaker 1: But I think there's this kind of I mean, there's
Speaker 1: this reaction. There's there's a kind of older Asian queer reaction,
Speaker 1: which I think is like kind of deeply suspicious of
Speaker 1: the family, as you know, this thing that has an
Speaker 1: enormous amount of potential to sort of inflict violence on
Speaker 1: you and sort of de stabilize your life and cut
Speaker 1: you off from resources and information. I mean, I was
Speaker 1: struck by someone else making this comment about how like
Speaker 1: in everything everywhere, all at once, you know, they can
Speaker 1: imagine like this sort of infinite um number of universes,
Speaker 1: but in every single one, the family unit remains the same. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, like the social arrangement never changes across all
Speaker 1: of these different universes. Um. Yeah, I thought that was
Speaker 1: a really good point. Um. There's just like the sense
Speaker 1: in which a lot of the recent Asian American culture
Speaker 1: can't imagine the family as like something that can be transformed.
Speaker 1: It just kind of takes it for granted as this
Speaker 1: like static eternal structure which can't be challenged, and people,
Speaker 1: if they find reconciliation or happiness, it needs to be
Speaker 1: somehow within that same arrangement. Yeah, And I think a
Speaker 1: lot of that has to do with like the thing
Speaker 1: that we've decided about elders collectively, which is another one
Speaker 1: of those things that like is like the legitimacy of
Speaker 1: the authority of elders is something that in Chinese revolutionary
Speaker 1: history is something that's very much up for debate, and
Speaker 1: almost everyone who decided to like take up arms against
Speaker 1: the state, like almost all of those people were like,
Speaker 1: this is messed up. And then you know, I think,
Speaker 1: I think partially as a result of how badly sort
Speaker 1: of the Maoist project goes, and then also I think
Speaker 1: as as as a kind of like explicit part of
Speaker 1: state policy, there's this way in which that kind of
Speaker 1: authority gets reinscribed and any sort of questioning of it
Speaker 1: gets gets looked at as like, oh or like a
Speaker 1: return to sort of like Maoist egalitarianism or whatever. Which
Speaker 1: the thing that I see a lot in the ways
Speaker 1: that like not really Asian Americans, but like in the
Speaker 1: in in in in, I don't know, you see this
Speaker 1: in Chinese discourse like a decent amount. I mean, you
Speaker 1: see this in kind of um messed up ways and
Speaker 1: some of the Asian American discourse from people whose families
Speaker 1: never participated directly in the Maose project. You know, they
Speaker 1: might have like a lot of people who immigrated here
Speaker 1: to the u US weren't like they were connected to
Speaker 1: the KMT. They were on the nationalist side. There are
Speaker 1: people who ideologically were never aligned with um any sort
Speaker 1: of socialist project, and you know, Bill Bill, Bill invoke
Speaker 1: things like well, you know, this is exactly what my
Speaker 1: ancestors were fleeing from China. Yeah, and it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: like you guys, like I I have really bad news
Speaker 1: for you about like what the KMT's ideology was, and
Speaker 1: like I feel like this is sort of these are
Speaker 1: like the egg monopoly people, right, Yeah, And but I
Speaker 1: think I think like this has two effects, right, which
Speaker 1: is like, on the one hand, those people like that
Speaker 1: like specific kind of very weird Chinese anti communist is
Speaker 1: sort of incredibly privileged in in the way that like
Speaker 1: that stuff's thought about. But then you know, like there
Speaker 1: are a lot of people who are in like from
Speaker 1: like from China who are in the US, like specifically
Speaker 1: because of the failure of this project. And this is
Speaker 1: something else you talked about in the Atlanta episodes, but
Speaker 1: like several of the people like who were killed in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: like were there because like liberalization drove them to a
Speaker 1: point where like they you know where where they had
Speaker 1: to work to support their families, and you know, and
Speaker 1: and and the the other thing that sort of comes
Speaker 1: hand in hand with liberalization is that that and I
Speaker 1: don't know, this is something that like people really don't
Speaker 1: want to think about, which is that you know, economic
Speaker 1: at somebody said political liberalization in China came hand in
Speaker 1: hand with this massive and transport to the patriarchal project,
Speaker 1: which is the one shot policy just sort of slamming
Speaker 1: down like a hammer of being of the state, just
Speaker 1: being like we're going to just directively like we are
Speaker 1: going to directly control your reproductive autonomy. We are going
Speaker 1: to you know, we are going to force we sterilize people.
Speaker 1: We are going to like would literally just limit the
Speaker 1: amount of kids you can have. We are going to
Speaker 1: make this sort of like giant, I don't know, like
Speaker 1: this enormous state intervention into like social reproduction and the
Speaker 1: people who were the victims of that, Like you don't
Speaker 1: really hear from them much. I mean, like what one
Speaker 1: of the stories I'm still just haunted by is that
Speaker 1: one of the people who died in Atlanta, like her
Speaker 1: family refused to bury her, like refused to take her
Speaker 1: remains to bury her because like their village was like no,
Speaker 1: you you you never married, so you can't be like
Speaker 1: buried in the village. And wow. Yeah, and so you know,
Speaker 1: like her like she had a funeral in the US
Speaker 1: that was attended by no one who knew her because
Speaker 1: none of her friends could roll up because they get
Speaker 1: a rushed by the cops. And you know, there there
Speaker 1: were these like there were these kinds of like transnational
Speaker 1: linkages of like the violence of people's families that just
Speaker 1: disappears from this sort of like narrative of like like
Speaker 1: Asian Americans like is the family is this union basis relation? Right?
Speaker 1: And on that note, did we also want to talk
Speaker 1: about how the sort of like focus on the small
Speaker 1: business slash family or the family as a small business
Speaker 1: obscures some of the class conflicts within the Asian American community,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, these very massage workers you're talking about, I
Speaker 1: remember in the wake of that Atlanta shooting, a lot
Speaker 1: of people started they kind of use the massage workers
Speaker 1: as like an emblem of the Asian American community more
Speaker 1: broadly one in fact, like a lot of the sort
Speaker 1: of like more professional class Asian Americans or like the
Speaker 1: Asian Americans who get platforms in the media. Um, they
Speaker 1: aren't like, they aren't from the same class as like
Speaker 1: the massage workers are. Um, we heard from like a
Speaker 1: lot of small business owners, but those are those are
Speaker 1: the same people who like own massage parlors and hire
Speaker 1: these exploited workers, who like have undocumented status and who
Speaker 1: can thus be like put into much more precarious positions
Speaker 1: than like you know, US citizens and so um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I did you want to talk a bit more about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think I think the small business owners
Speaker 1: are it's a really sort of interesting and powerful character,
Speaker 1: like especially in the US, because it's it's like it's
Speaker 1: possible to be a small business owner to be really
Speaker 1: poor but also not be propertyless. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: that like the like the specificically like the core of
Speaker 1: the American dream is to own property. And you know,
Speaker 1: so here is this class you can point out as
Speaker 1: like oh, well, we're really poor, but you don't actually
Speaker 1: you never have to look at labor relations at all, right,
Speaker 1: and that that like frees you from having to actually
Speaker 1: think about what capitalism is. And and it also lets
Speaker 1: you it lets really like the actual sort of like
Speaker 1: the real sort of Asian American ruling class, right, like
Speaker 1: the actual billionaires, right. And you know there are Asian
Speaker 1: American billionaires. There's there's a good number of them. There's
Speaker 1: also just a bunch of just Asian billionaires. Because there
Speaker 1: is a there's just an Asian ruling class. It lets
Speaker 1: those people, especially in the US, hide behind the image
Speaker 1: of the Citi small business owner, right, and they can
Speaker 1: you know, and they can use it the launder their
Speaker 1: sort of reputation because like it's in the US, like
Speaker 1: being anti small business is like the hardest position you
Speaker 1: can possibly take. It is like like it is you
Speaker 1: you like, I don't I don't know if people remember this. Um,
Speaker 1: a friend of mine, Vicky Osterwall, wrote this book called
Speaker 1: in Defensive Looting. Oh yeah, yeah, great book. Everyone should
Speaker 1: read it. Like they were like sitting US senators were
Speaker 1: like like yelling about the book, like like a huge
Speaker 1: swasp left left got like unbelievably mad about it. Like
Speaker 1: a lot of you will probably also get mad about it.
Speaker 1: But like, like one of the things that always comes
Speaker 1: up with with with looting is like, I you know,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, are you gonna loot small businesses? And
Speaker 1: it's like, well, actually yeah, Like like in so far
Speaker 1: as people looting small businesses, a lot of times it's
Speaker 1: the people who work there and it sucks because working
Speaker 1: for small businesses is fucking terrible and right, yeah, are
Speaker 1: people in the community where those like small businesses are
Speaker 1: and like our discriminatory towards Yeah, And Vicky makes this
Speaker 1: point about this, there's just kind of populism that gets
Speaker 1: invoked where you know, one of the police statements about
Speaker 1: I think it was about ferguson Um was they're talking
Speaker 1: about like they burned down our Walmart and it's like, well,
Speaker 1: what do you mean our Walmart? Like fucking owned the Walmart,
Speaker 1: Like don't get shipped from it, Like everyone who works
Speaker 1: on the walmartt's fucked. Everyone has to buy it from
Speaker 1: the Walmart. But it's it's just really hollow like populism,
Speaker 1: Like it's this thing that like you assemble a community
Speaker 1: based around then around the corporation. And I think that's
Speaker 1: kind of what's been happening with Like I think it's
Speaker 1: the reason why Asian American culture is like like this
Speaker 1: because it's it's this. It's like, you know, there's there's
Speaker 1: this this very hollow like in a lot like like
Speaker 1: multinational like populism has been assembled around like the figure
Speaker 1: of the small business owner, but it's ultimately like it
Speaker 1: doesn't really have ideas other than you should let us
Speaker 1: like you should let us make money without being racist.
Speaker 1: And also the fact like the it has that idea,
Speaker 1: and then it has the idea that the family is
Speaker 1: good because it is and that's kind of it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know why. I think there's there's
Speaker 1: a lot about well, okay, I would say this, like
Speaker 1: the the the day people are okay with looting small
Speaker 1: businesses is the day the US can actually fall, and
Speaker 1: any until before then, like it will it will survive
Speaker 1: because that's always the sort of last defense of capitalism
Speaker 1: is like what about small businesses? And you will you
Speaker 1: will get people who call themselves communists who will be
Speaker 1: like no, no, no, actually these are fine. It's like
Speaker 1: I mmmm mmmmm, Okay, so I wanted to kind of
Speaker 1: pivot back around a bit to talk about elders a
Speaker 1: bit more because I feel like I kind of sidetracked
Speaker 1: us off of that, and I, yeah, I think there's this,
Speaker 1: really I don't know, there's been this kind of like
Speaker 1: rehabilitation of the elder in a way that like was
Speaker 1: something that was deeply questioned in periods where it was
Speaker 1: kind of like it was more obvious and less and
Speaker 1: more socially statable to sort of look at the power
Speaker 1: these people have and how much it can suck. H Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I noticed this picking up during you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of like first state of anti Asian attacks
Speaker 1: during COVID. I think that's when like a lot of
Speaker 1: progressive Asians started invoking the figure of the elder, right,
Speaker 1: like our elders are being attacked, Like an attack on
Speaker 1: our elders is an attack on our community, Like that
Speaker 1: sort of thing um where the elder is kind of
Speaker 1: like used as a sort of emblem of the innocence
Speaker 1: of the Asian American community or what do you like,
Speaker 1: what work do you think the elder is doing there
Speaker 1: in this discourse? Like why does it have to be
Speaker 1: an elder? Like what if you were just saying Asian
Speaker 1: people being attacked, or like what if it was Asian
Speaker 1: youths being attacked? Like what why does it have to
Speaker 1: be the Asian elder? Because I think we were talking
Speaker 1: about this earlier. Empirically it's not exactly true, right, it
Speaker 1: wasn't mostly old people who are victims of these attacks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I mean I think this is one of the
Speaker 1: areas where like the murky, like you know, it's really
Speaker 1: really hard to get good data on cruise being attacked
Speaker 1: because I mean, police reports are obviously incredibly unreliable, right,
Speaker 1: and then you know, like they're self collected data, but
Speaker 1: the self collected data is not all encompassing it, you know,
Speaker 1: it's sort of skewed in its own ways. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think there's this way in which, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, like I think there's almost as way
Speaker 1: in which elder is almost like they're also like like
Speaker 1: personally infantilized by it, where it's like the pick as
Speaker 1: this sort of like like part of like they used
Speaker 1: as a sort of symbol of like people who can't
Speaker 1: defend themselves, which partially isn't true. Like there were actually
Speaker 1: examples of like Asian elders like defending themselves. But but
Speaker 1: it does this kind of like and also like the
Speaker 1: rates of gun purchase purchases one up with it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I know, like just the ncdotally in the Chinese American community,
Speaker 1: I knew so many like like elderly Chinese people who
Speaker 1: are like, I'm going to go out and buy a
Speaker 1: gun though. Yeah, yeah, I think like the way that
Speaker 1: that thing it was invoked has a lot of sort
Speaker 1: of like I don't know, it was it was like
Speaker 1: there was this way in which they like they became framed,
Speaker 1: is like this is sort of like this is the
Speaker 1: apotheosis of like everything that it is to like be
Speaker 1: Asian American h and that like that like the fact
Speaker 1: that that was under attack was this sort of incredible crisis, right,
Speaker 1: And I think like I think there's like that as
Speaker 1: gears a lot about what was happening, which is that
Speaker 1: like if there was one clear trend in the data,
Speaker 1: it was that women were being attacked at like a
Speaker 1: way higher rate than anyone else. And you know, and
Speaker 1: this has been a thing that has sort of continued,
Speaker 1: which is like I don't know, like there's been more
Speaker 1: attacks in the last like few months, right, and it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's been a lot of like young women
Speaker 1: getting like young Asian women getting pushed in front of trains,
Speaker 1: and people have just really stopped caring, like yeah, to
Speaker 1: the extent where like it's it's like literally a meme
Speaker 1: that you can like watch the cycle of like the
Speaker 1: stop API hate like signs coming up and down. Right.
Speaker 1: And I don't know, I think I think the elder
Speaker 1: part of it kind of like it obscured a lot
Speaker 1: of what was actually happening. Yeah. I feel like the
Speaker 1: last incident that really made a splash in the media was, um,
Speaker 1: the murder of Christina Una is that urt I forget
Speaker 1: what her last name is, but um, Christina Una leave
Speaker 1: um getting murdered in Chinatown And this was already a
Speaker 1: year ago. Um, And I haven't really heard anything since,
Speaker 1: Like I see things in the local news. Um that
Speaker 1: where I live in Queens recently had a couple of attacks,
Speaker 1: um just a week ago, I think, but it didn't
Speaker 1: make the national news or anything. Yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: the way that the kind of like hierarchy of victimhood
Speaker 1: I guess affected that like has had I you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure it's the biggest like single reason why
Speaker 1: everyone has sort of stopped caring. But like I like
Speaker 1: I I think the sort of stop api hate like
Speaker 1: that moment kind of only happened because there was this
Speaker 1: sort of backlash against like there's this backlash against Black
Speaker 1: Lives Matter and against the insurrection, and people needed another
Speaker 1: people needed a kind of like ideologically safe like thing,
Speaker 1: like way of demonstrating like how good their politics were
Speaker 1: or whatever. But I think it definitely contributed to sort
Speaker 1: of why like stuff has been abandoned. And I also
Speaker 1: wanted to ask, do you see this, this thing, this
Speaker 1: stixation on elders um is happening at the same time
Speaker 1: that ancestors get invoked a lot in like Asian American literature,
Speaker 1: especially queer literature. Um, I'm thinking of authors like Ocean Wong,
Speaker 1: Like how did ancestors become such a thing? Yeah, really,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I really don't understand how that happens.
Speaker 1: Like a lot of my ancestors fucking sucked. Like I
Speaker 1: don't know, like like I don't know how to sort
Speaker 1: of like I don't know. I have this sort of
Speaker 1: I don't know, I have this sort of weird sense
Speaker 1: of the kind of politics at work here, which is
Speaker 1: like there's a lot of kinds of politics that I
Speaker 1: think can work in for example, in indigenous contexts that
Speaker 1: are very very powerful, that don't really work in the
Speaker 1: Asian American context where like like our ancestors, Like if
Speaker 1: you're a Chinese, right your ancestors did some fucked up shit,
Speaker 1: Like your ancestors did a lot of jedicides, like you
Speaker 1: you like you know, And I think I think that's
Speaker 1: something that's actually at the core of the kind of
Speaker 1: like right wing Chinese nationalism, which is that like right
Speaker 1: when Chinese nationalism is basically about the anger that China
Speaker 1: was like ceased to be able to be an empire
Speaker 1: because like if you look at the sort of colonization process, right,
Speaker 1: like the Qing are this very very expansionist like like
Speaker 1: sort of militarist imperial state, right like they're they're they're
Speaker 1: they're they're like they conquered, like they if they find
Speaker 1: a bunch of wars around Tibet, they conquered shing Jun
Speaker 1: and they do a genocide, They're like immediately they're pushing south.
Speaker 1: They're pushing like they're they're basically pushing like in every
Speaker 1: direction they could possibly push and then they kind of
Speaker 1: like you know, they they hit like a pretty impressive
Speaker 1: territorial boundaries, and then their ability to do imperialism gets
Speaker 1: kind of halted because suddenly there's other imperial powers like
Speaker 1: in the region, and you know, and the sort of
Speaker 1: end of this is like they they lose all these
Speaker 1: wars and you have the start of like you have
Speaker 1: the start of the Century of Humiliation and all of
Speaker 1: the sort of stuff that happens there. But it's like
Speaker 1: the actual thing that they're like the actual thing that
Speaker 1: the Century of Humiliation people are humiliated about. Well, I
Speaker 1: mean the fact that it's called the Center of Humiliation
Speaker 1: and not like I don't know, like the like the
Speaker 1: Century of Death or something, which for people who don't
Speaker 1: know what Century of Humiliation is. Um, So, I think
Speaker 1: it's it's I think that the actuals I think it's
Speaker 1: like eighteen forty nineteen forty. There's this is sort of
Speaker 1: nationalist term around understanding this period in which China is undergoing,
Speaker 1: like you know, it is genuinely like like people in
Speaker 1: China are like suffering enormous imperial violence. Um Like, I
Speaker 1: like unfathomable numbers people die in this period this is
Speaker 1: like the Opium but basically a period from the Opium
Speaker 1: Wars until you know, sort of through the various Japanese
Speaker 1: conquests and then sort of ending essentially with the Revolution.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I don't know, Like, I think it's interesting
Speaker 1: that it's it's understood in the in terms of national humiliation,
Speaker 1: in terms of sort of like the loss of disability
Speaker 1: to do I mean to do imperialism, and instead of
Speaker 1: in sort of terms of like the just unfathomable human
Speaker 1: suffering that one on. And I think this all of
Speaker 1: this sort of comes back to this weird kind of
Speaker 1: intensification of nationalism kind of among everyone in the last
Speaker 1: like especially since twenty twenty. You know, I mean there's
Speaker 1: been there's been like a kind of like explicit like
Speaker 1: Chinese nationalist terms and parts of left. But I think
Speaker 1: I think it's really kind of like hit everyone in
Speaker 1: ways that like hasn't really been examined. There's been this
Speaker 1: kind of difficulty in having a kind of like theoretical
Speaker 1: and cultural language to speak about Asian American nous, partially
Speaker 1: because well because like the you know, I've talked about
Speaker 1: this before, right, but like the term Asian American was
Speaker 1: created by like Third worldists, right, many of who are
Speaker 1: a Maoist someone whom are certain Marxist Lendinness. But like
Speaker 1: that that whole language just died. I mean, like you
Speaker 1: you know, you know you can still find like Boba
Speaker 1: Vankian or whatever, but like the sort of language is
Speaker 1: like understanding yourself was part of the Third World. And
Speaker 1: like you know, like as as like a liberal national
Speaker 1: liberation movement, like that's over. National liberation is basically dead
Speaker 1: as a politics, like and any and anyone who tried
Speaker 1: it after a certain point like just got called sessionists
Speaker 1: and now just get murdered horribly. Um. And like you know,
Speaker 1: and there's there's obviously also the sort of like China, Vietnam,
Speaker 1: Cambodia fighting each other thing that that has this massive
Speaker 1: impact on that kind of politics, and it gets replaced
Speaker 1: with um, this kind of politics that's based that's you know,
Speaker 1: it gets sort of replaced by like the Asian civil
Speaker 1: rights movement stuff. Right, But like there's there's no but
Speaker 1: the things like ASI Rescue is it doesn't have politics,
Speaker 1: like as politics are completely incoherent. Like you have of
Speaker 1: like you literally have these marches where you have like
Speaker 1: old school like camp desk squad guys like marching next
Speaker 1: to maoists, And it's like why you you can because
Speaker 1: it's supposed to be a sort of like panaty logical
Speaker 1: thing and over time, like all the all the ideologies
Speaker 1: they're supposed to compose, it die. And but but that
Speaker 1: meant that like there's there's no like there's no actual
Speaker 1: language to sort of talk about the experience because the
Speaker 1: two sets of vocabularies that like or like wait like
Speaker 1: frames of understanding the struggle or just have both kind
Speaker 1: of like eire basically collapsed or been discredited. And I
Speaker 1: think that leaves this whole and people are trying to
Speaker 1: fill the hole by like adopting other people's politics, But
Speaker 1: like it doesn't work for us. I don't think, Like
Speaker 1: I I don't know, like I like, I think people
Speaker 1: will disagree with me about the potential of of sort
Speaker 1: of ancestor politics and politics of elders, but like, I
Speaker 1: don't think it does that much for us. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think the last thing that I do want to say is,
Speaker 1: you know, if we've reached the limits of a lot
Speaker 1: of the politics that we've been seeing here, Um, what
Speaker 1: what what kinds of politics and what kind you also
Speaker 1: sort of what kind of media do you do? You
Speaker 1: do you see as stuff that we can used to
Speaker 1: go beyond this, because I think there is a lot
Speaker 1: of like like, there are a lot of like people
Speaker 1: creating good like queer stuff, not like yeah, actually I
Speaker 1: think I mentioned this to you. Um. I recently watched
Speaker 1: this film called Return to Soul Um. It's by a
Speaker 1: director called Davy two, and it's about a French Korean adoptee.
Speaker 1: So she was adopted from Korea as a baby, I
Speaker 1: mean yeah, as a baby by French parents and grew
Speaker 1: up in friends and the film is like kind of
Speaker 1: a journey of her going back to Korea and meeting
Speaker 1: her birth family. But it's like, it's not it doesn't
Speaker 1: fall into the same sort of like family natalist politics.
Speaker 1: It's very like deeply questioning of of the family and
Speaker 1: of even like this idea that um, I guess what
Speaker 1: the sort of like wayward queer stray Asian child like
Speaker 1: needs in order to heal from trauma, Like she doesn't
Speaker 1: really have reconciliations with either family, like either her French
Speaker 1: family that she comes from, like they're very much sidelined
Speaker 1: in this film, they just don't play that big of
Speaker 1: a role. And then she and then when she goes
Speaker 1: to Korea, you know, she has these very like awkward
Speaker 1: encounters meeting her birth family because they're like immediately like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, we're so sorry we gave you away. Now
Speaker 1: you're back, you could come live with us. And then
Speaker 1: she's just like hold on, like I don't even know
Speaker 1: if I consider you my family. And so it it
Speaker 1: seemed to me like to really depart from this like
Speaker 1: script that we've become so accustomed to in Asian diasporic
Speaker 1: film in a really interesting way, I thought. And it's
Speaker 1: also a lot about music, Like it's a very moody,
Speaker 1: music driven film. It doesn't feel that identitarian. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: would recommend everyone to watch it everything every all at once.
Speaker 1: Is we have that we have now told the best
Speaker 1: version of that story, and I think we can find
Speaker 1: you know, I would just like like this is this
Speaker 1: is a really broad recommendation, but like, go watch One
Speaker 1: car Way. This is this, Okay, this is the most
Speaker 1: film nerd I'm ever gonna get that doesn't involve I
Speaker 1: am I suddenly blanking in the name of the thing. Sorry,
Speaker 1: Danel The most film nerd I'm ever going to get
Speaker 1: that doesn't involve the Commune de Paris eighteen seventy one
Speaker 1: is go watch one Car? Why like they're there? I
Speaker 1: don't know. I I think I think there is something
Speaker 1: to be gained by looking at you know, I mean
Speaker 1: they're like looking at Hong Kong cinema looking at I
Speaker 1: don't know, I I like good, good Americans have finally
Speaker 1: realized that Korean cinema was really good, which is wonderful. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm glad, I'm glad. We're, you know, getting to the
Speaker 1: place where people realize that it's that like, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of great stuff going on there. But we know
Speaker 1: it is possible for Asians to tell different stories because
Speaker 1: all across the world they already are, right like we
Speaker 1: we are already telling stories that are different and more
Speaker 1: interesting than this. And I think, well then, and I
Speaker 1: must typically saying, like, then everything everywell it wants. But
Speaker 1: then that then then the specific structure that that the
Speaker 1: the Asian American movies fallen too, and yeah, people should
Speaker 1: go discover them because they're great, and yeah, we can
Speaker 1: find new and better kinds of queer joy and yeah, yeah, Tiffany,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining us and being on.
Speaker 1: I don't know why I'm saying us as if there's
Speaker 1: more than me here, but yeah, thank you, thank you
Speaker 1: for being on the show. Yeah anytime. Thank you for
Speaker 1: having me on. And it's been a really stimulating conversation. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this has been naked Happened Here. You can find us
Speaker 1: at Happened Here pod on Twitter and Instagram. You can
Speaker 1: find Coals on Media at Coals on Media. I hope
Speaker 1: it's Cools on Media. I'm actually not one hundred percent suffets.
Speaker 1: I should know this by now. I simply have not learned.
Speaker 1: M Yeah, go go, go, go into the world. B
Speaker 1: gad crime. Welcome Dick had Happened Here The show about
Speaker 1: things following apart and how to put them back together again.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we have a
Speaker 1: really exciting episode. We're gonna be talking to a group
Speaker 1: of workers from the California Nurses Association, which is specifically
Speaker 1: their national Organizing Committee, which is I think better known
Speaker 1: to most people. And then you are a national Nurses
Speaker 1: United and these people are part of a shift of
Speaker 1: workers who was for the first time running a rank
Speaker 1: and file slate for the Council of Presidents, which is
Speaker 1: sort of they're a body that combines the positions of
Speaker 1: vice president president in the Union. They're called Shift Change
Speaker 1: and so, Eric, do you want to introduce yourself? All right?
Speaker 1: My name is Eric Cook. I've been a nurse for
Speaker 1: thirty two years. I currently work in the cardiac telemetry floor.
Speaker 1: And I became a nurse after being a Navy corn
Speaker 1: in the First Gulf War and just continued in healthcare
Speaker 1: from there. I was originally an alvin and then became
Speaker 1: a registered nurse, and I've been on the past three
Speaker 1: negotiating teams for Altabates Summit Hospital and I've seen a
Speaker 1: lot of changes in the attitude and movement of the
Speaker 1: union in the past twelve years. So I'm hoping with
Speaker 1: John and Raina and Mark to make a change for
Speaker 1: our union and our members for the better. Yeah. I'm glad,
Speaker 1: glad you could be here to join us. Thank you. Yeah, Rina,
Speaker 1: do you want to introduce yourself? Hi? There, I'm Rina Lindsay.
Speaker 1: I have been a California nurse for over thirteen years,
Speaker 1: and out of those thirteen years, eight of them I've
Speaker 1: been in Altibate's Medical Center, which was my first union
Speaker 1: as an r N how I And also I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: And also I work in ice you and I've been
Speaker 1: there through been there for about seven years wow. And
Speaker 1: I've worked with Eric a year prior to that. So
Speaker 1: the reason why I became a nurse is a long story,
Speaker 1: but the bridge version is at the beginning, I wanted
Speaker 1: to be a lawyer. So when I went to college
Speaker 1: kind of fight. I was dyslexic, so that kind of
Speaker 1: backed out. And then I also was a teen mom,
Speaker 1: which that's something that a lot of people do not
Speaker 1: know about me. And during that whole process, I wanted
Speaker 1: to find something that I could be an advocate for
Speaker 1: people and also know the political side of it. So
Speaker 1: nursing became the best benefit. One thing I love about
Speaker 1: nursing is you can learn everything about the world to
Speaker 1: know about people without going anywhere, So that was the thrill.
Speaker 1: And then also being an advocate for the patients I
Speaker 1: take care for. In addition to that, you know, knowing
Speaker 1: my peers and knowing that we all have the similar
Speaker 1: struggles when it comes to the systems that we work for.
Speaker 1: Doesn't matter which employer you work for, and so being
Speaker 1: in the union, it gives you that way of a
Speaker 1: contract between you and your employer. And along the way
Speaker 1: there has been some issues which Eric and I and
Speaker 1: John all been experiencing where things do need to change,
Speaker 1: and being part of shift change is part where we
Speaker 1: have to change of leadership and be more transparent between
Speaker 1: the union, the employer, and the people in general. Hell yeah,
Speaker 1: and yeah, John, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah? Sure,
Speaker 1: I'm John Horonymous. I'm a packy recovery nurse at University
Speaker 1: of Chicago. Before that, I was in the medical U
Speaker 1: for six and a half years. And then before that,
Speaker 1: I was like a associate's degree r END working at
Speaker 1: the emergency room at holy Cross Hospital. And I also started,
Speaker 1: which is funny to me, as an LPN, which is
Speaker 1: the same thing as an LVN that Eric did. And
Speaker 1: I was a CNA before that. I decided to become
Speaker 1: a nurse way back in the day when I was
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what I wanted to do after
Speaker 1: dropping out of high school, and I was thinking about
Speaker 1: man and maybe I should become like a history teacher,
Speaker 1: and I was like, Oh, why would I want to
Speaker 1: go back to this place I hate so much? I
Speaker 1: dropped out of it. And I personally got like incredibly
Speaker 1: sick with something called ul sort of kalitis, and I
Speaker 1: got bunch of surgeries done and got some really amazing
Speaker 1: experience being taken care of by nurses, and it became
Speaker 1: really immediately obvious to me, like I also, like Raina,
Speaker 1: wanted to help people. And also I thought that nursing
Speaker 1: was like a way where even like for you know, individuals,
Speaker 1: I could change someone's day just a little bit for
Speaker 1: the better, but also like maybe changed some bigger things.
Speaker 1: And so I thought nursing was just like a really
Speaker 1: great way to do that. Also, it's really fortunate to
Speaker 1: be raised by an amazing nurse. My mom was a
Speaker 1: nurse and she was always like she's like one of
Speaker 1: those people was my hero. And a lot of other
Speaker 1: nurses in my family, both men and women, including someone
Speaker 1: who is like a Kentucky frontier nurses like the first
Speaker 1: group of nurse practitioner nurse midwife back in the like
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties, back in Kentucky. So I got a
Speaker 1: lot of nurses in my family and on this like
Speaker 1: incredibly proud to be like paring on all the stuff
Speaker 1: that they have been doing for all their years as
Speaker 1: like nurses, so and like meeting the folks out in California,
Speaker 1: like Raina and Eric. It just makes me feel so good,
Speaker 1: like we're doing really important stuff in terms of both
Speaker 1: our daily practice of being a nurse, but also like
Speaker 1: that we can have like this bigger impact on how
Speaker 1: things are happening in our profession, in the healthcare industry,
Speaker 1: and just the broader world. Yeah. Yeah, we've we've talked
Speaker 1: like a decent amount on this show now about sort
Speaker 1: of the labor issues that have been facing nurses both
Speaker 1: actually here and in the UK, and I think a
Speaker 1: little bit in a couple of other countries. Yeah, I was.
Speaker 1: I was wondering what were the sort of specific things
Speaker 1: that you all were dealing with, both just in the
Speaker 1: profession and then also in the union that got altogether
Speaker 1: to run this sleep Okay, So one of the things
Speaker 1: that caused us to actually meet, by coincidence was one
Speaker 1: of my co workers, told Doordall, who's a Norwegian nurse
Speaker 1: who's been a nurse here in America for over thirty years.
Speaker 1: She contacted labor notes and you know, realizing something was
Speaker 1: wrong in our union, she started talking with specifically Sarah
Speaker 1: Hughes at labor Notes, and through labor Notes and Sarah,
Speaker 1: we were able to connect with John and Chicago, and
Speaker 1: it was amazing that what we discovered is that our
Speaker 1: problems here in California were mimicking what they've experienced in Chicago,
Speaker 1: and through Sarah finding out from other diverse communities of
Speaker 1: nurses in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, New York, in Minnesota
Speaker 1: that the same things are happening there under our same union.
Speaker 1: And our complaint was through our union, was that we
Speaker 1: felt we were being siloed. And of course, when I
Speaker 1: say siloed, is actually in our negotiations. We had seventeen
Speaker 1: facilities negotiating, but we were told that we were not
Speaker 1: allowed to communicate with each other. I said, it was
Speaker 1: it was forbidden by the federal mediator. Now why this is? Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: I know that was my reaction initially too. There were
Speaker 1: two other negotiators on the team and it was highly
Speaker 1: suspicious because the union wanted to put all new nurses
Speaker 1: onto the negotiating team, and that was a little bit
Speaker 1: of a red flag. There were so many red flags
Speaker 1: through this negotiation. I swear I could almost see Lennon's tomb.
Speaker 1: That's how many red flags there were. It was amazing
Speaker 1: to us is that they said the mediator forbade us
Speaker 1: from talking to each other, because that was part of
Speaker 1: the agreement to have the federal mediator. The three of
Speaker 1: us that had previous experience with negotiating just knew that
Speaker 1: was the wrong thing. And it took over at least
Speaker 1: about seven months before we started breaking through to other
Speaker 1: tables and communicating with them on text and having our
Speaker 1: own zoom conversations with them to convince them that no,
Speaker 1: this is a lie. We are allowed to talk to
Speaker 1: each other. And we end up finding out that we
Speaker 1: were kind of being railroaded into what we considered an
Speaker 1: agreement that was less than satisfactory for the workers, for
Speaker 1: the nurses who have suffered during the pandemic, we could
Speaker 1: have gotten probably one of the greatest contracts that any
Speaker 1: nursing body had ever received. We had the industry by
Speaker 1: the throat. We suffered so much, you know, John, everybody
Speaker 1: throughout the country, all the nurses suffered, everybody's suffered, but
Speaker 1: everybody that was at that bedside during the pandemic. We
Speaker 1: it was a horrific experience. It's great when you take
Speaker 1: care of people and you heal them. Yes, it's that's
Speaker 1: a great thing. But the stress and the you know,
Speaker 1: the unending anxiety that you felt, and then in the
Speaker 1: midst of this, you have a union that short changes
Speaker 1: you at a point when we had so much power,
Speaker 1: And thank Heavens for Sarah to put us into contact
Speaker 1: with all these other nurses to realize that it wasn't
Speaker 1: just the subter division of the California Nurses Association that
Speaker 1: was running things among it was actually it seemed to
Speaker 1: be a perceived playbook plan of what they were doing
Speaker 1: throughout the country. And I think nobody perceives themselves as
Speaker 1: doing evil or anything like that. I think they always
Speaker 1: think that they're doing it for the better interest of everybody.
Speaker 1: But that's what's important about a rank and file movement
Speaker 1: is that every nurse, every person in the union is
Speaker 1: important and deserves a voice. And we don't need to
Speaker 1: be gas lit, we don't need to be mistreated by
Speaker 1: the union that we pay to represent us. We need
Speaker 1: to be marching on the boss. We could have had
Speaker 1: an unending euphoria for nurses with a contract. We could
Speaker 1: have had great staffing, we could have had better pay,
Speaker 1: we could have had everything that we wanted to make
Speaker 1: our work lives to be the best they could be,
Speaker 1: and it seemed our union already had a preplanned agreement
Speaker 1: with the corporation. Now they deny that, but it's kind
Speaker 1: of hard to believe when they had the same agreement
Speaker 1: that they were supposedly negotiating in silos, that they weren't communicating.
Speaker 1: Each table was supposedly negotiating their own, but it was
Speaker 1: the same thing they wanted at every table, and not
Speaker 1: all the tables were equal. It was very sad for us.
Speaker 1: Like I said, this is the third negotiating team. I
Speaker 1: was on the first negotiating team I was on. We
Speaker 1: lasted over two years negotiating, and we went through nine
Speaker 1: strikes and threatened a tenth and until we got an agreement.
Speaker 1: So our hospital, obviously it's Altibates Hospital in Berkeley. Our
Speaker 1: sister hospital Summit Hospital in Oakland, and we have affiliated
Speaker 1: with us is the Herrot Campus, which is the the
Speaker 1: psychiatric facility. And we have struggled so much through this pandemic,
Speaker 1: and it was amazing to us that we came up
Speaker 1: with less than what we should have gotten. I will
Speaker 1: tell you that thanks to Sarah and meeting all these
Speaker 1: other nurses. We were able to come back, and I
Speaker 1: think through fear and intimidation, our union was forced to
Speaker 1: back us and we're able to get economically what we wanted.
Speaker 1: But like the rest of the country is nurse is,
Speaker 1: we wanted better staffing, we needed more more bodies at
Speaker 1: the bedside. We're overworked, we're fatigued. Raina worked in the
Speaker 1: ICU and they had their own COVID unit there. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't think there was enough tums and roll aids
Speaker 1: to go around for all those nurses. The anxiety and um,
Speaker 1: you know, the heart in your throat. And of course
Speaker 1: John himself, I don't want to his personal business, but
Speaker 1: you know his experience. He has long COVID. So we
Speaker 1: we as nurses, have suffered quite a bit and we
Speaker 1: expected a lot more from our union. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: mean even just on a very basic level, like no
Speaker 1: matter what you go through, you have the right for
Speaker 1: your union not to light you. Let's see, this is
Speaker 1: a very elementary sort of that. That's a really elementary thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's really, um, it's really scary how comfortable some
Speaker 1: of the people who are paid their wages out of
Speaker 1: our dues are with lying to us. I think that's
Speaker 1: a thing that like, um, you know, like we're one
Speaker 1: of the things we're specifically fighting for is like transparency
Speaker 1: and accountability, especially for our staff. And you know, when I,
Speaker 1: you know, Eric mentioned that I had had long COVID,
Speaker 1: I'm finally getting I've been to the point where I'm
Speaker 1: like as recovered as I probably ever will be, and
Speaker 1: which is great. You know, being recovered from long COVID
Speaker 1: is so much better than having long COVID. But you know,
Speaker 1: I was always like someone that they came to to
Speaker 1: ask for help with like political sorts of issues inside
Speaker 1: the union, where they would come to me for Medicare
Speaker 1: for all or um, you know, speaking around things like
Speaker 1: ratio was that sort of stuff. Or they would send
Speaker 1: me off to When the Chicago teachers went on strike
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen, I was sent to speak on behalf
Speaker 1: of our union for them, and you know, just doing
Speaker 1: the work of I'm kind of a I'm a bit
Speaker 1: of an agitator. And then COVID hit and it was
Speaker 1: just a really surreal experience. And my area, the hospital
Speaker 1: is one of those places where they basically did everything
Speaker 1: they could to minimize the amount of surgeries we were
Speaker 1: doing initially when the lockdowns were happening for the first
Speaker 1: six months of pandemic, and then but they were moving
Speaker 1: us into because we are all former ICU nurses, so
Speaker 1: I would do my shift a few shifts up in
Speaker 1: the medical U than we made a special clean ICU
Speaker 1: because we were still getting traumas. A University of Chicago
Speaker 1: apparently sees more penetrating gunshot and stab wounds than any
Speaker 1: other hospital in the United States. Thirty percent of traumas
Speaker 1: are are from some sort of violence, which is substantially
Speaker 1: higher than anywhere else in the US. And then I
Speaker 1: got sick, right, and so to me, the union was
Speaker 1: like a thing that was like, man, this is nice
Speaker 1: to have. I had never worked at any union hospital before.
Speaker 1: Getting union raises was like a big step up in
Speaker 1: my life, you know. And it was also like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: our union's progressive, Like I kind of I like most
Speaker 1: of the things that it stands for, and I didn't
Speaker 1: really think of it as someone that needed the union
Speaker 1: right to do. The things that unions really kind of
Speaker 1: like is the bread and butter of unions, which is
Speaker 1: like coming in and like helping you when you need help.
Speaker 1: As an individual worker, and you know, when you're not
Speaker 1: in the middle of like a contract negotiation, and I
Speaker 1: got sick with long COVID and lost. We had negotiated
Speaker 1: this great you know, like COVID six pay policy, and
Speaker 1: management just took that away without like from me, without
Speaker 1: really giving any notice or you know, explaination why. And
Speaker 1: you sit there trying to get like the help that
Speaker 1: you need from your Union's like I'm trying to explain
Speaker 1: why it is that like this is a problem for
Speaker 1: me to our labor rep, who's like our they called
Speaker 1: them business agents, labor reps whatever. There are people who
Speaker 1: basically are paid out of our dues to kind of
Speaker 1: help us in theory like stay organized and be pushing
Speaker 1: management to do, you know, to follow the contract. And
Speaker 1: it got to the point where like my partner who's
Speaker 1: like is like literally screaming at the labor repel. I'm
Speaker 1: on the phone with the labor rep and she's, you know,
Speaker 1: just like what the fuck is your union even doing?
Speaker 1: Like why are they not making sure that you're taking
Speaker 1: care of And it was like this really like come
Speaker 1: to Jesus moment where you're like, oh, yeah, like this
Speaker 1: union ship isn't just like you know, platitudes about like
Speaker 1: we need a ratio bill in Illinois or you know,
Speaker 1: Medicare for all or Bernie Sanders. It's like, oh, this
Speaker 1: shit is actually like about my material well being and
Speaker 1: like my family still hasn't recovered from all that because
Speaker 1: they only you know, after an enormous amount of pressure
Speaker 1: was put on staff, they finally started looking into it,
Speaker 1: um and we got you know, payouts for not just me,
Speaker 1: but for ten other nurses who had had their COVID
Speaker 1: pay like cut, you like, really unjust ways um. And
Speaker 1: it really opened my eyes as to like what a
Speaker 1: union should be doing. Um. And it really opened my
Speaker 1: eyes that maybe there's a problem with how staff interact
Speaker 1: with us as workers, because like there should be um.
Speaker 1: You know, we try and like say, like you know,
Speaker 1: there's a service union service business or service unionism, and
Speaker 1: then there's rank and value unionism. We had this weird
Speaker 1: situation union where they tell us where a rank and
Speaker 1: file democratic union, except the staff kind of treat us like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a business union. So we get told
Speaker 1: one thing, but then we see another thing and like
Speaker 1: not that I think that like, uh, it's you know,
Speaker 1: the whole point of a union, you kind of pull
Speaker 1: together to take care of people who can't necessarily take
Speaker 1: care of themselves in that moment, and like, it just
Speaker 1: took an enormous amount of effort on my family's part
Speaker 1: to like get that moving, and it just seemed incredibly
Speaker 1: It was just very eye opening for me as a
Speaker 1: you know, my experience here in Chicago. No, that that's
Speaker 1: really bleak. I mean that that's another thing that you
Speaker 1: would you know, you would expect a union like to
Speaker 1: just be on top of not not even just a
Speaker 1: sort of oh well, you asked them and they started
Speaker 1: doing it. Like you you would think that, hey, the
Speaker 1: people who got COVID doing this job not getting paid
Speaker 1: what they're to be getting paid would be like a
Speaker 1: priority and not something you have to fight them over.
Speaker 1: That is, Oh, that is incredibly krim. I don't know, well,
Speaker 1: I haven't a story for you. So my first year
Speaker 1: working at out debates. Before that, I was working in
Speaker 1: Swaller hospitals and they gave you certain packages about your benefits.
Speaker 1: So when it was time for me to get my benefits,
Speaker 1: I couldn't get my benefits at all because during that
Speaker 1: time they were doing it at the yearly. So I said,
Speaker 1: is there any way possible at least to get something,
Speaker 1: because mind you, they are paying for my benefits, I'm
Speaker 1: not paying for it anything for it that there should
Speaker 1: be a reason because if I had any medical issues,
Speaker 1: what would happen? And basically the union was very lackluster
Speaker 1: about it. Now, of course I went to the manager,
Speaker 1: went to human resources. Basically they basically told me where
Speaker 1: there's eighteen hundred nurses, and you know what we're going
Speaker 1: to do about this issue, and pretty much it was.
Speaker 1: It's pretty much disappeared about it. There was nothing I
Speaker 1: could do so for that whole year, so I worked
Speaker 1: in January of twenty fifteen, I had to wait till
Speaker 1: the following year to get benefits, to get medical benefits.
Speaker 1: J Now, I got everything else, so let be honest,
Speaker 1: I got everything else, but the medical benefits is important.
Speaker 1: But thank god I don't have any health issues. Thank
Speaker 1: god my daughters didn't have any health issues where we
Speaker 1: didn't require any help and there wasn't in an emergency.
Speaker 1: But when I started noticing there were other nurses or
Speaker 1: teas that were spirits of the same thing, because a
Speaker 1: lot of us got hired within that time, frame. They
Speaker 1: weren't telling us these issues, and we would end up
Speaker 1: getting these things sooner. And it's all about the transparency,
Speaker 1: It's all about our value. And then over the years
Speaker 1: people always complain on these dudes, why are they're not helping?
Speaker 1: Why are not supportive? And when I was actually hired,
Speaker 1: they were quick to give you the paperwork to tell
Speaker 1: you how to pay this all so they could take
Speaker 1: money off your dues. Quicker than what about the history
Speaker 1: about the union? Why is the history is? Why is
Speaker 1: the union important? And what you can do if there's
Speaker 1: a grievemance? There was none of that, And to this
Speaker 1: day it's still the same thing because I precept new
Speaker 1: grads and I tell them about, you know, part of
Speaker 1: the union. What he got, Oh I didn't get a booklet,
Speaker 1: or oh I didn't hear anything about it, but I
Speaker 1: got this paper here so they could take out my dues.
Speaker 1: That's what pisses me off of anything. Is that part
Speaker 1: so so? And then all this stuff dealing with what
Speaker 1: Eric has told you, what we've been doing with the
Speaker 1: strikes and the negotiations. Me personally, we should done negotiates
Speaker 1: it within the first year the pandemic and I think
Speaker 1: we got everything, but they were quick to say, no,
Speaker 1: we're going to get all these facilities all together at
Speaker 1: one and so we can all negotiate. And then the
Speaker 1: gag order happened, the slam of the gag order, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, there is a lot of collusion going on
Speaker 1: and that shit needs to stop. So, I mean, things
Speaker 1: that they don't really tell us, which I think is
Speaker 1: really a thing that we want to resolve, is they
Speaker 1: don't really inform you of what your union rights are.
Speaker 1: You kind of get the initial like here's your wine
Speaker 1: garden rights, which means that you have a right to
Speaker 1: representation whenever you're being disciplined. But aside from that, there's
Speaker 1: very little discussion inside of our union facilities, in particular
Speaker 1: about the kinds of things that we have as like
Speaker 1: union members, what our rights are, what are our rights
Speaker 1: within the union, how the union works. So many of
Speaker 1: my co workers don't like a big part of our
Speaker 1: work is just explore aiming that there's an election happening,
Speaker 1: and so you would hear that an election it happened,
Speaker 1: maybe and you know, you would be like, well, who voted,
Speaker 1: I don't know, like and you'd get these like you know,
Speaker 1: all of the communication from about the election to us
Speaker 1: as the people who are like the you know, the opposition,
Speaker 1: has all been in these very like plane plane envelopes
Speaker 1: that don't look like anything like it could be like
Speaker 1: just an anonymous bill you wouldn't know or junk mail.
Speaker 1: And so like, you know, as a union member, you
Speaker 1: have something called a right to represent representation. So and
Speaker 1: every union, every union employee and elected officer is considered
Speaker 1: a fiduciary, has a fiduciary obligation to look out for
Speaker 1: your financial interests, and if they don't do that, it's
Speaker 1: called a failure to represent our union. In particular, Spends
Speaker 1: had brags internally about never having a They called them
Speaker 1: unfair labor practice. Like if a nurse or any worker
Speaker 1: in any union decides that their union, you know, did
Speaker 1: not represent them in their financial interests, they can file
Speaker 1: something called an unfair labor practice claim for failure to
Speaker 1: represent our union. Is like, they've never had an unfair
Speaker 1: labor practice claim. Stick we foy had one of their
Speaker 1: unfair labor practice claims and somehow it got like withdrawn
Speaker 1: like in this really like sketchy way, and it was
Speaker 1: like just a random one that we picked to to
Speaker 1: see what happened, and so then it got like assigned
Speaker 1: like a special like liaison like afterwards, like they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: we weren't supposed to do that, like when we contacted
Speaker 1: the Department of Labor, We're going to look at that
Speaker 1: again and figure out what's going on with this. And
Speaker 1: it also turns out when we started doing research, which
Speaker 1: I think every union member listening to this should know,
Speaker 1: every union has to file paperwork. They're legal. There's legally
Speaker 1: mandated reporting. So there's things called LM two's and nine
Speaker 1: nineties that you can get from the Office of Labor Management.
Speaker 1: You google them and they'll figure you can search for
Speaker 1: your own union and you get to see the union finances.
Speaker 1: And we found out that there's like forty two million
Speaker 1: dollars that our union chief in the bank account. And
Speaker 1: this goes to there was an article it wasn't Jacobin,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure about, like the financialization of unions and
Speaker 1: for like forty two million dollars, what is that? It's
Speaker 1: like and they you know, unions will practice like, oh,
Speaker 1: we've got a forty two million dollars war chest, but like,
Speaker 1: what are we spending that forty two million dollars on
Speaker 1: is it to like fight arbitrations and constantly be making
Speaker 1: like our like working conditions better and taking fights to
Speaker 1: the bosses. It's like, no, Actually, what they're doing is
Speaker 1: they're spending that money on settling unfair labor practice claims,
Speaker 1: so they don't actually officially stick. So the war chests
Speaker 1: and even against the you know, isn't to go to
Speaker 1: war against our you know, supposed you know, I mean
Speaker 1: to go to war against management. It's to go to
Speaker 1: war against kind of us. When you think about it,
Speaker 1: it's just it's just so wild when you start digging
Speaker 1: into this stuff, it's just crazy. Um, Eric, you want
Speaker 1: to tell them about the Office of Oakland. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: obviously we're in the heart of the empire. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: I live of just a few miles from the CNA
Speaker 1: headquarters and I've been there many times prior to the pandemic, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and I have taken part in lobbying in Washington,
Speaker 1: DC on behalf of the union. You know, nurses from
Speaker 1: all across the country that are in the union go
Speaker 1: to DC and we lobby for uh, you know, not
Speaker 1: only for single payer UH and medicare for all but
Speaker 1: you know, individual bills that will benefit nurses across the country,
Speaker 1: whether they're in the union or not. And you know,
Speaker 1: I'm very familiar with it. I've lobbied in Sacramento, and
Speaker 1: I've bent to the NNU convention in Minnesota. So I've
Speaker 1: met a lot of nurses across our union. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's one of the when you do that, that's about
Speaker 1: the only time you get to reach out and see
Speaker 1: other union members. One of the things I will tell
Speaker 1: you that John and I and the person that's not
Speaker 1: on the call right now is Mark Goodick. He is
Speaker 1: an American citizen now, but he was a Canadian nurse
Speaker 1: before and he is right now working on our campaign
Speaker 1: video to introduce us to a broader audience. And that's
Speaker 1: why he's not on the call tonight. We should be
Speaker 1: intermingling and talking with other nurses across the country. I
Speaker 1: should not be siloed here in Oakland and not knowing
Speaker 1: that what a nurse is doing in Texas. And yeah,
Speaker 1: we need to be part of our pledges that we
Speaker 1: need to join hands across this country. Every nurse needs
Speaker 1: to see. We need to digitalize our contract. We need
Speaker 1: to see University of Chicago's contract digitalized. We need to
Speaker 1: be sharing our contracts so we know what good things
Speaker 1: that maybe they got in Texas, or what good things
Speaker 1: they got at the University of Chicago, or what good
Speaker 1: things we have in our contract. We need to see
Speaker 1: that nurses can say, hey, I want that language. We
Speaker 1: need to be sharing that. I don't know why it's
Speaker 1: not happening or why it's just at the upper tiers
Speaker 1: of union management that they see these things, but we
Speaker 1: need to be joined together. No more siloing nurses. You know,
Speaker 1: altivates the nurses stay in your lane, Kaiser, stay in
Speaker 1: your lane, University of Chicago staying You're like, no, no no, no, no.
Speaker 1: We need to be one fighting body for the betterment
Speaker 1: of nurses. Uh doubt. You know, it's amazing when you
Speaker 1: find out that we have a beautiful building that the
Speaker 1: union purchased in downtown Oakland. Um. You know, they only
Speaker 1: occupy a few floors of it and they rent out
Speaker 1: the rest, and you know what, it is a fabulous
Speaker 1: building and it would be great for it to be
Speaker 1: a headquarters where we're we're not just fighting and lobbying
Speaker 1: for Democratic politicians, but we're actually fighting for nurses at
Speaker 1: the bedside and that's what you know. Our whole mission
Speaker 1: is that we're going to be running for is for
Speaker 1: the council presidents. We need to take the macro focus
Speaker 1: down to what is happening at the bedside for every
Speaker 1: nurse across the country and make the change for the
Speaker 1: better for them. And that's the big difference here. I'm
Speaker 1: all for an activist union and I think and we
Speaker 1: have been the union is active, and you know climate
Speaker 1: change and you know how the environment affects the community.
Speaker 1: These things are important, but it's more important that we
Speaker 1: take care of the nurses at the bedside and offer
Speaker 1: opportunities for those nurses who want to be involved to
Speaker 1: make the community better. We need to have those resources
Speaker 1: available for them. And if we make nurses lives at
Speaker 1: the bedside better, we're going to have more nurses available
Speaker 1: to make the community better. And that's what we need
Speaker 1: to be working on. It is a it is going
Speaker 1: to be a fight. I can't be more more honest
Speaker 1: than to tell you we are David versus Goliath. We
Speaker 1: are four nurses who really have no big national exposure.
Speaker 1: But the most important thing we have is that we're
Speaker 1: bedside nurses and we know what's important for bedside nurses.
Speaker 1: I do want to say, like, there's four of us
Speaker 1: who are running for the for the council presidents, but
Speaker 1: we would not be even talking to you if we
Speaker 1: didn't have like at least one hundred nurses all over
Speaker 1: like the hospitals that we're based in, like doing the
Speaker 1: work of building our campaign. So I do want to
Speaker 1: point out that, like, because like our slate is like
Speaker 1: three white guys and it's Raina, and Raina is like
Speaker 1: and we want to make sure that we're not that
Speaker 1: it's we made a cho The choice that we made
Speaker 1: was not you know, us coming to together as four
Speaker 1: individuals being like we should fix the union by ourselves.
Speaker 1: It was this we keep mentioning labor notes, there's a
Speaker 1: healthcare worker chat with a fair number of nurses in
Speaker 1: our union. And we noticed that there was an election
Speaker 1: coming up. And this is also at the time when
Speaker 1: both altbates was having their issues. And then in Cook
Speaker 1: County we had a particularly traumatic firing of a very
Speaker 1: popular staffer who without any without any input from the
Speaker 1: local nurses or elected local nurse leadership. And we got
Speaker 1: together and we all were like, what are we going
Speaker 1: to do this is crazy, and we had people like
Speaker 1: we are like, well, who would do Like, we have
Speaker 1: this opportunity and if we run as a slate, we
Speaker 1: can do things like get access to we can send
Speaker 1: emails out to other nurses and break down those silos
Speaker 1: connect nurses from across the country. And we're like, well,
Speaker 1: if we don't do anything, we're kind of stuck in
Speaker 1: this kind of like square one. You know, a few
Speaker 1: small hospitals talking to each other, not small, but you know,
Speaker 1: a few hospitals talking to each other, still struggling against
Speaker 1: like these kind of silos that have been constructed for
Speaker 1: us by staff. And we had a vote and there
Speaker 1: was you know, over twenty nurses all together raise their
Speaker 1: hands and where like, we could do this with an
Speaker 1: imperfect group of people that we recognize asn't like the
Speaker 1: fully representative of everyone in the union, but are fully
Speaker 1: committed to democratizing the union, or we could sit and wait.
Speaker 1: And a nurse who had been in the union for
Speaker 1: a very long time and she's now retired, said, if
Speaker 1: you all don't take this chance, you don't know what
Speaker 1: could happen in you know, three years from now union
Speaker 1: could be completely different and so two thirds of everyone
Speaker 1: in that call said it's time to go, and we
Speaker 1: don't care. We would rather that you run and take
Speaker 1: that swing and maybe get big for all of us.
Speaker 1: So a big part of what we're doing is got
Speaker 1: like I've got a meeting with you know, Cook County
Speaker 1: nurses on Thursday, and they're all basically going to come
Speaker 1: to me and tell me all the ship that I
Speaker 1: need to do for them, not the other way around.
Speaker 1: When you're the rank and file leadership, you know, it's
Speaker 1: like taking that pyramid and you invert it, right. The
Speaker 1: people who are matter the most are the regular bedside nurses,
Speaker 1: And all we can do, as like people who step
Speaker 1: up into that role is we take that. We take
Speaker 1: that heat and put ourselves out there so that we
Speaker 1: can enact what our coworkers are asking us for. I
Speaker 1: literally have co workers walking up to me completely unsolicited.
Speaker 1: I'm a very like I'm not walking around telling I
Speaker 1: like I told a few people up front in the beginning,
Speaker 1: because I was like, all right, you're about to see
Speaker 1: my face on some flyers, let me tell you why.
Speaker 1: But I now have coworkers coming to me and they're like, John,
Speaker 1: you've got to tell me what's going on because I
Speaker 1: heard a little bit about it and I need to
Speaker 1: help you. I'm just like, okay, it's very it's like
Speaker 1: it's a little bit like a drug. But I have
Speaker 1: to be careful because like I like, I can't let
Speaker 1: this whole thing like none of this. We all have
Speaker 1: to stay humble as they're doing this. Because all four
Speaker 1: of us, John, all four of us were volunteering to
Speaker 1: help other people to run exactly. We were like, okay,
Speaker 1: we're here, you know, John, are raining on myself, We're
Speaker 1: here to help you. Guys who's running now, I'm going
Speaker 1: to help you. We're gonna help you. And then it's
Speaker 1: like their crickets, you know, and it's like and it
Speaker 1: goes to show exactly what happened. It goes to show
Speaker 1: how impoverished the internal democracy of our union is that
Speaker 1: people who are leaders already did not feel comfortable or
Speaker 1: prepared to take on that kind of leadership role. You know,
Speaker 1: these are nurses who have been in our union for decades,
Speaker 1: who are taking fights to their bosses all the time already,
Speaker 1: and they did not feel that they knew enough about
Speaker 1: the union. Because there's an intentional I believe like obscuring
Speaker 1: of how the union works. And that's like how you
Speaker 1: end up with a situation where people are like, well,
Speaker 1: I guess we're just kicking the door down for all
Speaker 1: these people who we know will be doing it better
Speaker 1: when when we get it situated so that they can
Speaker 1: do it better. It's amazing though, to tell us that
Speaker 1: an America and History class, or you have Civics class,
Speaker 1: you learn about the US government, right, you know how
Speaker 1: it functions, how it runs. But when it comes to
Speaker 1: our union, we were all asking each other. You know,
Speaker 1: we're putting pieces together. Oh wait, I know the council presidents. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: how does this person fit into it? How does the
Speaker 1: board fit into this? Well does the election run? How
Speaker 1: is it done? We had no We had to search
Speaker 1: out the answers. We had to call all sorts of people,
Speaker 1: and we were only getting bits and pieces. There should
Speaker 1: be a clear outline of how you run a democracy
Speaker 1: and a union. I mean, it shouldn't even be that difficult.
Speaker 1: You know, obviously there'd be specific rules for the union,
Speaker 1: but they shouldn't be occluded. They should be you know,
Speaker 1: there shouldn't be occulted from the members. We should clearly
Speaker 1: know how you step forward to be a more of
Speaker 1: a contributing member to the union to run and to
Speaker 1: serve the others in the union. And that was an
Speaker 1: amazing thing that we're finding out amongst each other. It's like, wow,
Speaker 1: how how does our union run? I mean, how why
Speaker 1: is it difficult to find out these things? And I
Speaker 1: mean I don't think it's insurmountable for us. I don't
Speaker 1: think that should disqualify us. I don't think if we
Speaker 1: can step in and do healthcare in a pandemic, we
Speaker 1: can very easily learn how to how the union functions
Speaker 1: and a quick, a quick little tutorial. I don't think
Speaker 1: that's going to be a big deal for us. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty amazing if we're talking about democracy and the union.
Speaker 1: How is it that it takes I mean to find
Speaker 1: the buy laws. We can all tell you it took
Speaker 1: a tremendous amount of effort to find the by laws
Speaker 1: that are runs by hold on, hold on, let me
Speaker 1: tell sorry about the by laws. So we have a
Speaker 1: nurse in Chicago who decided to make a pain of
Speaker 1: themselves about how to get the by laws and then
Speaker 1: instead they went to the union, Like I want to
Speaker 1: see the by laws. I want to see the by
Speaker 1: laws and they were lists like you know, like and
Speaker 1: they give them the runaround, and eventually they gave him.
Speaker 1: He got personally to the liver envelope that was like
Speaker 1: a photocopy of a photocopy of photocopy of the by laws.
Speaker 1: And it's funny because the legally, the by laws are
Speaker 1: all spops to be filed with the federal government. And
Speaker 1: like from our pressure and organizing to figure out how
Speaker 1: our union worked, they had to publish the newest set
Speaker 1: of by laws and on the federal reporting websites. UM.
Speaker 1: I was in Oakland in twenty nineteen for the Global
Speaker 1: Nurse Assembly and there was an after party and it
Speaker 1: was a bunch of staffers and like, you know, some
Speaker 1: nurses and you know, just chit chatting, and I was like, man,
Speaker 1: be really good. I told the story about you know,
Speaker 1: like the you know, the nurse you tried to get
Speaker 1: by finally got a copy of the by laws to
Speaker 1: you know, some of these One of these staffers like, man,
Speaker 1: it'd be really great if we, you know, could figure
Speaker 1: out how are you know, getting hints for other union works,
Speaker 1: and just as like good luck with that, and they
Speaker 1: just disappeared ways I'm not. Yeah, I mean because because
Speaker 1: what we're finding is to add any staff that helped
Speaker 1: nurses learn how the union works find themselves out of
Speaker 1: a job. Like that's what's really that's what really sketches
Speaker 1: everyone out is when like people, I mean, you all
Speaker 1: can tell tell the story about the staffer who like
Speaker 1: got ran afoul. So I will tell you that there
Speaker 1: are a lot of great labor reps, a lot of
Speaker 1: really great people out there. But to tell you that
Speaker 1: they would communicate with us, because obviously I told you
Speaker 1: I've done all these other actions. So I know a
Speaker 1: lot of people and they have my personal number just
Speaker 1: because we would. You know, when we're in other cities,
Speaker 1: you know, you text each other and hey, we're at
Speaker 1: this place, now where do we meet you? Etc. So
Speaker 1: we were getting texts from some labor reps in the
Speaker 1: union saying, you know, you guys need to stand tall.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of us supporting you. We can't
Speaker 1: come out and publicly support you because we'll get fired. What. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: so we were getting these texts from the labor reps
Speaker 1: saying what they're doing to you is wrong, and they
Speaker 1: were you know, we actually got together and we we
Speaker 1: wanted to go out on strike in October, and we
Speaker 1: were getting this runaround from a group of this I
Speaker 1: thought they were it was just an inner cabal. Little
Speaker 1: did I know that it probably extends throughout the you know,
Speaker 1: the organization, but that they were telling us that there
Speaker 1: was no need for a strike, and it seemed they
Speaker 1: were trying to just pressure us into taking a pretty
Speaker 1: low ball contract. And so, uh, we're getting push you know,
Speaker 1: the good labor reps are texting us like stick it,
Speaker 1: stick to it, stick to it. And we actually got
Speaker 1: a postcard campaign and we actually drove up to the
Speaker 1: executive director's house in Sacramento, knocked on our door and
Speaker 1: delivered five hundred some postcards that we organized on our own,
Speaker 1: not with you know, it wasn't a union driven, it
Speaker 1: was just nurses union, nurses driven, and we delivered postcards
Speaker 1: saying we want to go out on strike, and the union,
Speaker 1: of course still fought us on it, but we were
Speaker 1: allowed to go out on strike. And there's a video
Speaker 1: of us confronting the executive director at our strike line
Speaker 1: asking her why we were gagged, why the mediator gagged us,
Speaker 1: and she clearly didn't know what was going on. She said,
Speaker 1: the mediator wouldn't gag you. Why would they gag you?
Speaker 1: So she didn't even know what was going on at
Speaker 1: our table. We then got we were contacted and they
Speaker 1: we were told, oh my god, they're running around like
Speaker 1: chickens with their heads at all because they're petrified that
Speaker 1: they might use their jobs, that they've been exposed to
Speaker 1: what they've been doing to you. And so one of
Speaker 1: the labor reps that used to work for us, she
Speaker 1: used to be at our hospital, and then she moved
Speaker 1: along and she was at Sutter Cilano and her nurses
Speaker 1: were asking, hey, did you see this video of this
Speaker 1: speech Eric made on this you know, at the strike line.
Speaker 1: And it was a speech where I kind of excoriated
Speaker 1: the union about why they would gag us, that that
Speaker 1: wasn't you know, we needed to be united and we
Speaker 1: didn't need a union, you know, working behind our back.
Speaker 1: They needed to stand with us. And so she says, well,
Speaker 1: let's see. So she was looking at the video on
Speaker 1: her union cell phone and with the negotiators, nurse negotiators
Speaker 1: at her hospitals at our Salana who were also in
Speaker 1: negotiations with us, that we weren't supposed to talk to
Speaker 1: because you know, the mediator forbade us. So she's showing
Speaker 1: the video and they thought because she was formerly in
Speaker 1: our hospital, that she was our inside scoop for all
Speaker 1: this information. What I can swear to God and take
Speaker 1: a lie detector test. I had one exchange with her
Speaker 1: during like the twenty one months that we were negotiating,
Speaker 1: and it was at a joint Bargaining Council meeting on
Speaker 1: zoom where they kept the union kept muting us on
Speaker 1: zoom and prevent and preventing us from writing in the
Speaker 1: chat because we were saying we want to go out
Speaker 1: on strike, we want to go out on strike, and
Speaker 1: next thing you know, we would find out we couldn't
Speaker 1: type in the in the chat. So I texted her
Speaker 1: and says, can you see this. I'm trying to write
Speaker 1: in the chat and I'm forbidden from writing in the chat.
Speaker 1: They muted me, they I can't type in and she goes,
Speaker 1: I'm feel for you, buddy, I feel for you. That
Speaker 1: was my only exchange with her that caused her and
Speaker 1: the fact that her nurses asked her to look at
Speaker 1: this video with them, that's what cost her her job.
Speaker 1: She's it was. It was clearly guilt by association and
Speaker 1: the charges were outrageous for her. We had labor reps
Speaker 1: leave because they just felt that it was they couldn't
Speaker 1: live with themselves with what they were doing to the nurses.
Speaker 1: It was incredible for them that they're here to work
Speaker 1: for the nurses, They're here to work for the most
Speaker 1: progressive union in the country, and it was a fraud.
Speaker 1: That's been like a big, like consistent problem is that
Speaker 1: we know that they are busting their own Like the
Speaker 1: staff are supposed to have a union. The staff have
Speaker 1: their own contract, and that's a normal thing inside unions, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, to keep you know, we believe in or
Speaker 1: that every worker who you know, works for wages should
Speaker 1: be in a union. And we have seen time and
Speaker 1: again that like the like the contracts, that they've busted
Speaker 1: their own unions. So like that they've there was a
Speaker 1: slate that was run of nurses in um Our, not
Speaker 1: nurses of the staffers. I think it was in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one where they were like trying to get something
Speaker 1: together to change you know, things inside you know, how
Speaker 1: they relate to their management and and several of those
Speaker 1: uh staffers were basically illegally fired Jesus. So this is
Speaker 1: like I mean, and I know you keep saying Jesus
Speaker 1: a lot, but like there's a reason me, you know me,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be running into this sort of situation if
Speaker 1: it wasn't like so like out of out of this world.
Speaker 1: The stories that we hear, and they're the same. This
Speaker 1: is what's disturbing, is it? And it's because the union
Speaker 1: is baited. Like I was just talking to a lawyer today.
Speaker 1: She was looking over the by laws of our union
Speaker 1: and she's like, this is set up like a local
Speaker 1: like it's one big local union. It's got like a
Speaker 1: tiny little committee of people who are making the decisions
Speaker 1: that effect or we believe that it's mostly the director
Speaker 1: non nurse director staff that make the decisions, but these
Speaker 1: four people kind of rubber stamp them and that they
Speaker 1: make decisions for one hundred and fifty you know, thousands
Speaker 1: some on nurses and it's so centralized. You know, this
Speaker 1: is one of the things describe as like it's almost
Speaker 1: irresponsible because you know, we live in you know, you know,
Speaker 1: crazy times, and all it takes is one wrong election
Speaker 1: or bad decision in Supreme court, and it would literally
Speaker 1: our union could be dissolved with like you know, if
Speaker 1: they just arrested you know, a handful of people and
Speaker 1: uh and froze our bank accounts. And a big part
Speaker 1: of our goal is to help disperse those resources out
Speaker 1: into foster more local leaderships so that any event that
Speaker 1: you know, something you know like that terrible happens like that,
Speaker 1: we're not caught without anything. Because the way it situated
Speaker 1: now is we have this massive concentration of all of
Speaker 1: the decision making and resources in a very small group
Speaker 1: of hands. And most of these people are are not
Speaker 1: have never been nurses, or if they've been nurses they've
Speaker 1: been you know, out of practice for so long that
Speaker 1: they wouldn't know how. I mean, maybe they could put
Speaker 1: band aids on. I don't need to, like, I don't
Speaker 1: want to disparage anybody. You know, A nurse is a nurse.
Speaker 1: I know nurses, you know, you learn it and you
Speaker 1: learn a lot of things. It's really important, great skill,
Speaker 1: but there's something to be in practice. If I you know,
Speaker 1: I can walk back into the medical issue I used
Speaker 1: to work in, you know now it's going on like
Speaker 1: five years and be the same nurse that I was
Speaker 1: when I was at the peak of my practice there.
Speaker 1: And there's a real key thing too, I think we're
Speaker 1: all committed. None of us are doing this because we
Speaker 1: want to be the face of California Nurses Association National
Speaker 1: Nurses United for the next twenty thirty years. We're doing
Speaker 1: this because we feel that there's a real value to
Speaker 1: there being a continual turnover in leadership, new ideas, people
Speaker 1: bringing in new energy. We think that nurses should have
Speaker 1: the opportunity to work release time so that they could
Speaker 1: see how the union works as staffers from the inside
Speaker 1: and then go back to the regular jobs. We're doing
Speaker 1: everything we can to like I like my job. I
Speaker 1: think my job is great. I don't want to leave
Speaker 1: my job. But doing what we can to bring our
Speaker 1: met our mentality as those bedside nurses to the sensibility
Speaker 1: of running the union. Because nursing does give you a
Speaker 1: lot of really powerful tools, as like you have to
Speaker 1: be able to listen to people. We're not listening a
Speaker 1: lot tonight, but you know, we've got to talk and
Speaker 1: get the word out. Being able to kind of see.
Speaker 1: A big thing we see is like, you know, you
Speaker 1: have a lot of people who will tell youths things
Speaker 1: and then they act in a different way. And that's
Speaker 1: a big part of nursing practices, being able to understand
Speaker 1: what people's real deal is. And you know, it's kind
Speaker 1: of that's one of the things where it's real frustrating,
Speaker 1: is like we know when people are lying to us,
Speaker 1: Like I know, we all know when, like the staff
Speaker 1: are lying to us. Nurses do have bullshit detectors, that's
Speaker 1: for sure. You know. I slept through the class in
Speaker 1: nursing school where they teach you how to grow eyes
Speaker 1: in the back of your head. The class slept through
Speaker 1: where they teach you to get a through arm. And
Speaker 1: I really regret sleeping through the class where they teach
Speaker 1: you how nurse mitosis like being able to asexually reproduce
Speaker 1: an extra nurse. But I definitely didn't sleep through the
Speaker 1: class where I can learn where I can see when
Speaker 1: someone is saying one thing and then but it's like
Speaker 1: what they're fucking lying to me? Yeah, And that's a
Speaker 1: that's like a constant theme, and that's one of the
Speaker 1: things that's driving a lot of our organizing is that
Speaker 1: a lot of people are tired of just being lied
Speaker 1: to by people who were paying their paychecks. And it's
Speaker 1: like and it's like they think that we I mean,
Speaker 1: we have staff informants, right, we know people inside staff
Speaker 1: who are allied with us. We know how they talk
Speaker 1: about us when we're not there, they talk about us
Speaker 1: like we can't figure this shit out, And it's like, motherfucker,
Speaker 1: I know how to keep a person alive who like
Speaker 1: who shouldn't be alive, Like I know how to walk
Speaker 1: a family through like you know, multiple family members with
Speaker 1: conflicting opinions through like an end of life discussion, and
Speaker 1: along with a doctor who can't really make up his mind,
Speaker 1: like you don't think it while I've got you know,
Speaker 1: like multiple pressors and like continuous dialysis. You don't think
Speaker 1: I can't figure out like when you are like telling
Speaker 1: us one thing and then another thing's happening. We know
Speaker 1: why they're canceling meetings right now. They don't want us
Speaker 1: talking to each other where we get that, and this
Speaker 1: is kind of like it's it's almost like a feminist
Speaker 1: practice of women talking to each other makes men nervous, right,
Speaker 1: And it's like nurses talking to each other makes management nervous,
Speaker 1: and it sure as hell is making our union nervous.
Speaker 1: We want our union to be encouraging nurses talking to
Speaker 1: each other and not like discouraging it. And anytime someone
Speaker 1: is discouraging people from talking to each other who have
Speaker 1: similar concerns, that is an immediate you know, like Eric
Speaker 1: was saying the red flags, it's like this is the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that like this is. It's like an
Speaker 1: almost an abusive relation. Shift. You know, I would not
Speaker 1: be running if it wasn't this intense of a problem
Speaker 1: this has been. It could happen here. Join us tomorrow
Speaker 1: for part two of the interview, where Shift Change discusses
Speaker 1: more of their vision for what the union could be.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, you can find us on Twitter or Instagram.
Speaker 1: That happened here at pod and you can find cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media the same places at cool Zone Media. We've
Speaker 1: also posted a link in the description to Shift Changes
Speaker 1: go fund Me if you want to help support their campaign.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to it could Happen here. We now continue
Speaker 1: our conversation with the team from shift Change enjoy Outside
Speaker 1: of the obvious the union is doing landlordism for some reason,
Speaker 1: part which is just sort of I can't get over, like, well,
Speaker 1: what do you what do your media forty four dollars.
Speaker 1: The thing you're doing is being a landlord. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it seems like they're you know, like out
Speaker 1: of one side of their mouth saying this is a
Speaker 1: democratic union. In their side of their mouth, they're doing
Speaker 1: political purges. They're like doing everything possible to make sure
Speaker 1: people don't know how to like democratic process works, which
Speaker 1: I think is a pretty like basic precept of democracy
Speaker 1: is that if if, if it's impossible to figure out
Speaker 1: how the system actually works, it's not it's not it's
Speaker 1: not actually a democracy in any real sense. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, and this is the thing you're saying
Speaker 1: is like they seem they seem to be acting like bosses,
Speaker 1: like they're firing people. They get nervous when people start organizing,
Speaker 1: which is not a thing that you would think a
Speaker 1: union would be ecstatic, and it's like, oh, heir, there's
Speaker 1: this one wors like organized themselves. I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: just I mean, there's a there's a there's a mentality
Speaker 1: inside among some people and even among some of the
Speaker 1: nurses that like, you know, when people are causing problem
Speaker 1: or you know, it's the Yeah, it's it's a very
Speaker 1: it's a very perplexing situation to be in, and many
Speaker 1: of us it's taken us years to really figure it out,
Speaker 1: because you don't we all come to work right to
Speaker 1: do our job, you know. I don't come to work
Speaker 1: to like figure out every like little nuanced thing about
Speaker 1: what's going on inside my union. I didn't become a
Speaker 1: union nurse because I wanted to be like a hero
Speaker 1: union member. I did it because it was down the
Speaker 1: street and it was a good job, and like I
Speaker 1: wanted to be a nurse more than anything in the world.
Speaker 1: So you know this, But this is what we do,
Speaker 1: and this is why things like labor notes and learning
Speaker 1: how your union works is really important. We've been self
Speaker 1: educating ourselves. Like it's almost like you have to become
Speaker 1: a jail house lawyer, right, yeah, like a yeah, We've
Speaker 1: been sharing our favorite resources for like how do you
Speaker 1: learn about how union works or what your rights are,
Speaker 1: and like we're basically taking notes for what we're going
Speaker 1: to have to do when we if we get in
Speaker 1: power inside the union to educate all the nurses in
Speaker 1: our union. One of the things a little too, I
Speaker 1: mean every time I talk with people about this, to
Speaker 1: try and give little tips and tricks. Don't leave your
Speaker 1: staff are a loan in at the negotiating table. They'll
Speaker 1: tell you everything's going great, go get go, get some dinner,
Speaker 1: and you come back. And you can't do regressive bargaining.
Speaker 1: You can't unbargain like a thing when someone's been empowered
Speaker 1: to decide something for you. And this is where especially
Speaker 1: new like new units in hot in countries or parts
Speaker 1: of the country without strong union culture are finding that
Speaker 1: they'll step away from the bargaining table and they'll come back,
Speaker 1: and then all these decisions will be made that they
Speaker 1: don't have any You can't go back on it. It's
Speaker 1: like literally no backsies in like in union negotiations. No.
Speaker 1: And so there's no such thing as regressive bargaining. If
Speaker 1: if if I say that I want a you you
Speaker 1: offer a fifty percent increase in fifty cent an hour
Speaker 1: increase for floating to another union unit, I can't turn
Speaker 1: around and you can't offer me forty five cents the
Speaker 1: next go round. You cannot go back if you said
Speaker 1: fifty percent, it has to be you know, more than
Speaker 1: fifty percent on the next offer, or you just say
Speaker 1: that's my final offer, so you know the idea of
Speaker 1: regressive bargaining is I have to tell you it's amazing,
Speaker 1: is that when we negotiate against Sutter in twenty eleven
Speaker 1: through twenty thirteen, we had multiple cases of ulps filed
Speaker 1: for regressive bargaining on their part. They constantly made these
Speaker 1: mistakes which we as nurses and the labor reps caught.
Speaker 1: And now for us, it's so important that we don't
Speaker 1: regressive bargain regressive bargaining on our own members here. We
Speaker 1: need to be moving forward. We should be making quantum
Speaker 1: leaps and bounds as nurses. Well, what we've gone through,
Speaker 1: we're supposedly the most trusted profession in the country. I
Speaker 1: think it's the past twenty years. The only time we
Speaker 1: have not been the most progressive or the most respected
Speaker 1: profession was in two thousand and one, and you can
Speaker 1: obviously guess that it was firemen. It was firemen. But
Speaker 1: it's like twenty five years or so in a row
Speaker 1: we've been the most trusted profession. It's because, you know,
Speaker 1: how can you not trust somebody who's cleaning you up
Speaker 1: when you soiled yourself in the bed, who's holding your
Speaker 1: hand when you're scared. That's why we're the most trusted
Speaker 1: profession and we should be the most respected for what
Speaker 1: we do. It's just amazing that our union can't carry
Speaker 1: us through that. Our union was formed in a revolution
Speaker 1: that we overthrew and kicked out management nurses and formed
Speaker 1: the California Nurses Association, the bargaining part of the organization.
Speaker 1: The association broke away from the management part and we
Speaker 1: toraled her. It all as a wonderful example somebody who
Speaker 1: was part of that revolution. And for about twenty over
Speaker 1: twenty some years, we were a rapidly progressive union. We
Speaker 1: didn't have all the rank and file things that we
Speaker 1: should have had in the union, but it was in
Speaker 1: the right direction for nurses. And we've kind of made
Speaker 1: in the past ten years this U turn and the Association,
Speaker 1: which I think is bad for nurses. We need to
Speaker 1: be going forward and we have new nurses and new
Speaker 1: a new generation that is joining the union and they
Speaker 1: need to be a part of it. And they can't
Speaker 1: look at me and say that that old fogy that's
Speaker 1: been in the union for thirty some years. You know
Speaker 1: that I'll be doing the work for them. They need
Speaker 1: to be active in that union and they need to
Speaker 1: love the idea of solidarity, you know, out of the
Speaker 1: fires of desperation, burn hope and solidarity. It was one
Speaker 1: of the ladies said, I think Sharon Borrow from Australia,
Speaker 1: an Australian labor activists, said that we need to have
Speaker 1: every union member. I don't think every one of them
Speaker 1: has to be rabbit about it, but they should be
Speaker 1: aware that they need to stand tall and support each other,
Speaker 1: and not just even they need to support the non
Speaker 1: union nurses they need to get. We need to get
Speaker 1: more nurses unionized. The problem with unions is there's not
Speaker 1: enough unions out there. There's not enough people in the unions.
Speaker 1: We need to get more nurses unionized and our union
Speaker 1: hasn't been able to do that in quite a while.
Speaker 1: We haven't. We we've been raiding a lot of other unions,
Speaker 1: but we need to get out there, uh and get
Speaker 1: people in the South unionized. We need to get other
Speaker 1: nurses and you know in the Midwest organized that aren't
Speaker 1: unionized yet. We have a bigger vision as bedside nurses,
Speaker 1: and I think that our our national union has I'm
Speaker 1: only as strong as the person next to me. I
Speaker 1: need support. As John said, yeah, we're four people running
Speaker 1: for the Council of Presidents, but behind us, there's there's
Speaker 1: so many nurses supporting us. Nurses are texting me all
Speaker 1: the time, Hey, give me some pliers, give me some buttons.
Speaker 1: I want to pass them out. It's it's important for us.
Speaker 1: I know we're we're at a disadvantage we don't have.
Speaker 1: You know, the people were running against even though it's
Speaker 1: illegal for them to have the union promote them, they're
Speaker 1: obviously going to have that advantage like a city president
Speaker 1: because they're going to be in the National Nurse magazine,
Speaker 1: going around the country, you know, doing the things they
Speaker 1: do as sitting presidents, so they're going to get that
Speaker 1: free publicity. I wish the union presidents went around the
Speaker 1: country because as far as I know, they've never come
Speaker 1: here at Chicaca. Yeah, I think the only time we
Speaker 1: bet to Chicago's when we had that People Power convention
Speaker 1: there and that was my first visit back to Chicago,
Speaker 1: and I think ten years was when I went there.
Speaker 1: And it's amazing. Is it should be our union should rotate,
Speaker 1: rotate where they have their their their conventions. They should
Speaker 1: we should be all around the country. We should be
Speaker 1: going to the south and having conventions so that we
Speaker 1: can attract people. Um. I think it's important we need
Speaker 1: to make inroads. UM. You know, I know a lot
Speaker 1: of it is They're going to say the pandemic, and
Speaker 1: I think the pandemic did hasten this siloing. Um. And
Speaker 1: you know, some of it was a little understandable. But
Speaker 1: even when it was evident that they should have come
Speaker 1: out of the borough, they never did. And they people
Speaker 1: have been saying how tired they are from the pandemic, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't know how they could have been tired. The
Speaker 1: union could have been tired when they were just having
Speaker 1: zoom calls. No, no, I mean the nurses are saying
Speaker 1: that they're tired. Like. But here's what's interesting. This is
Speaker 1: a thing that I'm seeing in real time as we're
Speaker 1: doing this work, is that nurses who have been exhausted
Speaker 1: and some of the most beat down like like nurses
Speaker 1: who are like in the worst situations here in Chicago,
Speaker 1: are tired. But then they hear something interesting is going
Speaker 1: on with the union that is actually something that they
Speaker 1: have a say in, which is very unusual in our union,
Speaker 1: and people get very excited. So I'm having coworkers coming
Speaker 1: up to me who are the least interested in union
Speaker 1: business until maybe it's time for a strike. And you know,
Speaker 1: it's interesting because like when we did our strike organizing
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen, the first strike in Chicago's of nurses
Speaker 1: in like forty years in Chicago. You know, they kept
Speaker 1: it would call these small kind of symbolic actions, and
Speaker 1: they call them stress tests or structure tests for like,
Speaker 1: you know, we're going to do we're going to do
Speaker 1: a press conference and you have like you know, a
Speaker 1: handful of nurses come out for the press conference, yet
Speaker 1: like ten or fifteen nurses to come out, and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: they're all wringing their hands. And then we start started
Speaker 1: calling pickets and then we start blowing past our turnout numbers.
Speaker 1: And then when we did our strike, they were expecting
Speaker 1: eight hundred nurses with twelve fourteen hundred nurses, more nurses
Speaker 1: than ever been in anyone place in our hospital. Like
Speaker 1: it was like a giant party. So it's kind of
Speaker 1: like when people have know that there's something that really
Speaker 1: has like they has a stake in, right, there's an
Speaker 1: infinite amount of energy almost and this election is really
Speaker 1: kind of like we can't make the buttons fast enough
Speaker 1: to give away like they keep people keep coming up
Speaker 1: and they're like, here, give me a handful. I've got
Speaker 1: coworkers and we're doing there's you know, let's get the
Speaker 1: pictures of everyone with their nurse with their with their
Speaker 1: shift change buttons shift change, and you know, we're turning
Speaker 1: that stuff into we're getting ramped up and prepared for
Speaker 1: like our social media like outreach, and this is part
Speaker 1: of it, is like getting people to see like, hey,
Speaker 1: there are people out there who want to do something
Speaker 1: different and that put you like as a as a
Speaker 1: bedside nurse. This is our opportunity to get you into
Speaker 1: the driver's seat of how your union is run, how
Speaker 1: strikes are called, how we negotiate, Like we want to
Speaker 1: have a council of hospitals in contract campaigns. It's just
Speaker 1: nurses from negotiating teams so that they can all so
Speaker 1: we can coordinate and decide when we want to go
Speaker 1: on strike. And it's not someone who's never been a
Speaker 1: nurse making that call for us, Yeah, which seems just
Speaker 1: baffling that you'd have some random person who hasn't been
Speaker 1: a nurse making strike decisions to this I mean the
Speaker 1: fact that it's not also just there seems like there's
Speaker 1: such an enormous gap between the things you would just
Speaker 1: basically fundamentally expect a union to be doing and what's
Speaker 1: actually happening, which has nothing to do with that, And
Speaker 1: it's just the sort of I mean it almost it
Speaker 1: seems like like intentional dubobilization. Well, they want to treat
Speaker 1: us like a spigot, like they want like you can
Speaker 1: turn us on and turn us off. You know. The
Speaker 1: problem is is that people don't respond to that well,
Speaker 1: and you kind of constantly have to be honing your
Speaker 1: practice through defending the contract, which is a big thing
Speaker 1: that like a lot of my coworkers are just constantly
Speaker 1: annoyed that the contract we're not defending. Our chief nurse
Speaker 1: rep is always annoyed that she can only know scrape
Speaker 1: together you know, like four or five people, and you know,
Speaker 1: I do it, and I'm not like I'm really good
Speaker 1: when I'm in the room with you know, I've my
Speaker 1: coworkers think that I do a good job, but you know,
Speaker 1: when it comes down to like doing all of the
Speaker 1: reading and everything to make sure it's done, I need
Speaker 1: you know, It's the thing that I'm always working on
Speaker 1: and trying to get better at m But you know,
Speaker 1: the that is kind of the lifeblood of trade unionism
Speaker 1: is like, if you're going to have a contract, you
Speaker 1: need to in between contract barting campaigns where you can
Speaker 1: go on strike, you need to be constantly probing and
Speaker 1: pushing and finding where the weak spots are and keeping
Speaker 1: people in the practice of like fighting. And if you
Speaker 1: do that and you're really effective at it, you can
Speaker 1: affect some pretty impressive changes in between contracts. When our
Speaker 1: friends was was the labor rep at Cook County, they
Speaker 1: went from having maybe like ten people doing like the
Speaker 1: rep work to over sixty people doing the rep work.
Speaker 1: She partnered with a really phenomenal chief nurse rep who
Speaker 1: had a family Her dad had been president of a
Speaker 1: SEIU local, and they were they had pushed so hard
Speaker 1: that they were able to read to open negotiations for
Speaker 1: attention bonuses, which after you've settled a contract is like
Speaker 1: to open something on economics, like on the order of fifteen,
Speaker 1: fifteen or ten thousand dollars, retention bonuses is a huge deal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the problem was is that that then they fired her
Speaker 1: when she connected us at Cooke County, or the nurses
Speaker 1: at Coo County with nurses at University of Chicago, and
Speaker 1: we started comparing notes with what our staff were like,
Speaker 1: and their chief nurse reps started asking the director of bargaining,
Speaker 1: who's not a nurse and has never been a nurse,
Speaker 1: to say, why is it that we are bringing in
Speaker 1: why is my facility bringing in four million dollars worth
Speaker 1: of dues? And we get like, you know, two hundred
Speaker 1: twenty thousand dollars worth maybe of staff, Like what's the deal?
Speaker 1: And why is it that we don't spend any money
Speaker 1: on arbitration or any of the stuff. They're constantly afraid
Speaker 1: of doing anything. And that's when they fired Natalie. And
Speaker 1: then and now they're down to they're trying to whittle
Speaker 1: those those nurses retention bonus negotiations down to like three
Speaker 1: thousand and four thousand bucks from like fifteen thousands. You know,
Speaker 1: you bring in the right people, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: management has to like hire in like um an entire
Speaker 1: legal extra legal department at cook Anty Health Services. It's
Speaker 1: not it's not that somebody is not a nurse. That
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. Natalie was not a nurse, yet she was
Speaker 1: an outstanding example what a labor rep should be. An organizer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean she you stand with the workers. I just
Speaker 1: I do believe that we need more nurses involved in
Speaker 1: UH in organizing and inside the union. But I have
Speaker 1: no issues with you know, when you have labor reps
Speaker 1: like Natalie, that's that's what you need to keep the
Speaker 1: union thriving. And unfortunately to cut her down when she
Speaker 1: was making inroads to really empower nurses and the union
Speaker 1: was it's just beyond the pale to make that decision.
Speaker 1: Why they made that decision is something that I think
Speaker 1: if we won the presidency, we'd want to find out
Speaker 1: why was that decision made because the big part of
Speaker 1: this is holding the staff accountable is our big thing,
Speaker 1: Like we just need to know right now, there's no
Speaker 1: accountability to So imagine having a job where like if
Speaker 1: you are a nurse, Like if we're speaking to our
Speaker 1: coworkers right now, imagine being a nurse and no one
Speaker 1: ever checking your charting, no one ever checking what a
Speaker 1: patient has to say about the care they got. No
Speaker 1: one asking a doctor like what you did during a shift, right,
Speaker 1: No one checking your like to see if like all
Speaker 1: of your vital signs are actually really reflected in like
Speaker 1: the monitor. That's the situation. Or we're dealing with staff
Speaker 1: right now, no one who's outside of their staff bosses
Speaker 1: at the director level has they're they're only accountable to
Speaker 1: those people, and they are only accountable and they're not
Speaker 1: actually accountable. They just write like they write everything themselves.
Speaker 1: They write their own reports. They get they you know,
Speaker 1: they'll take you know, a nurse will come up with
Speaker 1: a good idea, they'll run it up the flag pool.
Speaker 1: Check out this awesome idea, have, boss. I mean, it
Speaker 1: sounds like a downer I guess is like it all
Speaker 1: sounds very like this is all grim and like depressing.
Speaker 1: But the fact is is that we are at a
Speaker 1: point now where we see what's going on and what
Speaker 1: we need to do. We've been educating ourselves about what
Speaker 1: can be done to change the union because the union
Speaker 1: is a democratic structure, even in like just the shell
Speaker 1: form of it, and as nurses, we've got a lot
Speaker 1: of faith that as nurses we can figure this out
Speaker 1: and come up with a much better, more democratic way
Speaker 1: to run our union. And I think it will fundamentally
Speaker 1: be a much stronger organization. I think That's the fear
Speaker 1: is that somehow we like, you know, some people are like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, you're gonna make it worse. It's like I
Speaker 1: don't know that you could make it worse. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, there's the healthcare industry is changing. I think
Speaker 1: we're seeing this in real time as the healthcare industry
Speaker 1: is changing, and we are seeing to the you know,
Speaker 1: you have hospitals that come up with the most cutting
Speaker 1: edged version of healthcare, like the Universe Chicago, or the
Speaker 1: university systems out in California, or maybe like Stanford that's
Speaker 1: like the very like the top end of like what
Speaker 1: healthcare is, and those hospitals are like basically they might
Speaker 1: as well be gold mines. And then you've got the
Speaker 1: safety net hospitals. And my fear is that the safety
Speaker 1: net hospitals they would like to casualize to uber They
Speaker 1: keep telling us about, oh, they're going to uberize nursing. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, what is it that they're doing to stop
Speaker 1: you know, over half of the nurses being at Cook
Speaker 1: County Health Service from being replaced with agency nurses right now?
Speaker 1: Like how long is that going to go until there's
Speaker 1: like you know, they go from a bargaining unit of
Speaker 1: you know, over fifteen hundred nurses in the union or
Speaker 1: seventeen hundred nurses in the union to like, you know,
Speaker 1: it could theoretically drop down to you know, a handful
Speaker 1: of union nurses. And so they like they it's like
Speaker 1: an unofficial layoff, right, people quit and they institute a
Speaker 1: hiring freeze, and then they don't replace them. They bring
Speaker 1: them in as agency nurses because they would rather in
Speaker 1: these safety net institutions, not pay benefits, not pay pensions.
Speaker 1: You know, our hospital we lost, they took our pension away,
Speaker 1: and the union didn't do anything to fight that back.
Speaker 1: I was in the pension plan for like two years
Speaker 1: and then they're like, guess what, no more pensions and
Speaker 1: the union to do shit about it, and they could
Speaker 1: have done something. I mean, it was like it's because
Speaker 1: the contract language is like, well, you get whatever we
Speaker 1: offer you. And our teamsters in our facility took like
Speaker 1: a very like a hundred two to four hundred dollars
Speaker 1: buyout to get rid of their pensions, and that was
Speaker 1: the end of our pensions for the entire medical center.
Speaker 1: And then our union where our staffers are all bought
Speaker 1: into the Steelworkers pension, right, they have a pension. They're like, well, John,
Speaker 1: maybe you'd have to strike six or eight times, which
Speaker 1: is what they say whenever they don't want to do anything.
Speaker 1: And they certainly aren't telling us about hospitals, like the
Speaker 1: folks that all debates who have struck like ten times
Speaker 1: to get what it takes. And it's just like, you know, striking.
Speaker 1: I think there's this idea that it's scary. I have
Speaker 1: co workers who are telling me, John, just tell me
Speaker 1: when the next strike is. I can't wait for the
Speaker 1: next strike. But we've been through it. We have a
Speaker 1: lot of coworkers who haven't. Half of our nurses are new,
Speaker 1: they've never been through a strike. But you know, you
Speaker 1: build a union through strikes, which is the thing that
Speaker 1: is a little counterintuitive, especially if you do it the
Speaker 1: right way and you're strategic about it. Raina, You've been
Speaker 1: real quiet, like what do you think about all this?
Speaker 1: That's really number one. I'm a lady, and I don't
Speaker 1: interject unless I absolutely have to. So to go back earlier,
Speaker 1: what was said about how unique are Slate is, well,
Speaker 1: it's unique in itself. For one, of course, I kind
Speaker 1: of sit with being a female and minority. But you
Speaker 1: also got to think about the men. Now, there is
Speaker 1: not a lot of men in nursing in general, and
Speaker 1: I think that's what also they need to look at,
Speaker 1: because I heard the criticism about that. But let's flip
Speaker 1: the script on this. I mean we individually, as Eric
Speaker 1: and John did say before, that we were not here
Speaker 1: to be a counsel of present. This lay on every
Speaker 1: who was actually jumping on it to help other people.
Speaker 1: But form you know, I myself and Eric, we've been
Speaker 1: knowing each other for what seven six seven years, yeah,
Speaker 1: something like that. And yeah, and you know, I have
Speaker 1: seen the changes with the union. I feel that the
Speaker 1: union has been really stagnant. I think our dudes should
Speaker 1: be used for community. And now during the pandemic, there
Speaker 1: is a lot of nurses are totally burnt out and
Speaker 1: they're slowing to realize that nursing is not what I thought.
Speaker 1: I did not signed for for this pandemic. I never
Speaker 1: I've been a nurse for thirteen years. I never knew
Speaker 1: that was never thought it was gonna be a pandemic
Speaker 1: like this. So it changed your whole spectrum of what
Speaker 1: nursing stands and also what we should do to preserve it. Now.
Speaker 1: I you know, I look young, but I am a
Speaker 1: grandma about to be a full and so one of
Speaker 1: them are going to be a nurse one day. And
Speaker 1: actually one of them is a ten year old. And
Speaker 1: he told me, he said, you know, looking at all
Speaker 1: my nursing books and looking at you know, all my
Speaker 1: medical stuff, and he's looking at me, he said, you
Speaker 1: know what, I may want to be a nurse now.
Speaker 1: Mind you, two years ago he wanted to be a
Speaker 1: race car driver. So it happened. So it kind of
Speaker 1: inspired me a little bit, like I need to do
Speaker 1: more leadership. I mean, I think I'm a natural leader
Speaker 1: in itself. It's just how to do it, where to
Speaker 1: go And this is just a step for me. I'm
Speaker 1: at that age. You know, I need to look behind me,
Speaker 1: if all the younger nurses my family and what my
Speaker 1: young grandchildren, what they may be. And I want to
Speaker 1: preserve that. And that's a third reason why I'm standing
Speaker 1: to do this. So and my peers, I mean, you work,
Speaker 1: any nurse work eight to twelve hours. The facility that
Speaker 1: you work with is almost a second home to you.
Speaker 1: So you want to stand up with your peers. You know,
Speaker 1: there shouldn't be no divide. We're all standing for an
Speaker 1: employer who has been trying to take benefits away, trying
Speaker 1: to take you know, anything that makes it decent for
Speaker 1: you to just work, and also is wearing and tearing
Speaker 1: on your wellness and your work life balance and just
Speaker 1: your whole mental state. So it's so important to really
Speaker 1: know about your union, about the breakdown of it, about
Speaker 1: the history, about everything. You need to keep your employer
Speaker 1: accountable and also within the union. Just like nurses have
Speaker 1: to be accountable for everything we do, and if we
Speaker 1: get in trouble, of course we're going to be reprimanded.
Speaker 1: The union needs to also go through the same thing
Speaker 1: as we do. It's only fair. So that's pretty much
Speaker 1: it for me. Any other questions you're reading, are you
Speaker 1: have you finished up your copy of Solidary Unionism yet? Arena? Oh,
Speaker 1: you mean the rank and File I am on chapter
Speaker 1: three has been on. It's been interesting and since I
Speaker 1: will be going on vacation, well, I am on vacation
Speaker 1: right now. I'll be leaving tomorrow. I should be finished
Speaker 1: up with that book by then. That's a That's one
Speaker 1: thing that like, I don't want anyone to think just
Speaker 1: because I can speak about the union in a halfway
Speaker 1: intelligible way that I've been studying this for a long time.
Speaker 1: A lot of my knowledge about the union is pretty
Speaker 1: new and recent, and uh, like I got, you know,
Speaker 1: I picked up a copy of Stoughton Lens The Rank
Speaker 1: and File Labor Law for the rank and Filer. There's
Speaker 1: an audiobook of it. It's just a great, like short
Speaker 1: little book about everything you need to know to kind
Speaker 1: of like exercise your rights and try and stay out
Speaker 1: of like trouble. Picked up a copy of you know, uh,
Speaker 1: Jamie Mccayfleery's No Shortcuts. We've been passing around a copy
Speaker 1: of Stoughton Len's Solidary Unionism, and like there's a lot.
Speaker 1: And then we went to Labor Notes and like it's
Speaker 1: funny because our union sent us to Labor Notes. Like
Speaker 1: I've got pictures of me and like other shift change
Speaker 1: people that were taken by staff if we were at
Speaker 1: the Labor Notes conference. The funny thing was that I
Speaker 1: was in the talks about how to build a caucus
Speaker 1: and how to exercise their democratic rights as one of
Speaker 1: the funeral the only nurses in some of those spaces,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, I don't know what they expected
Speaker 1: to happen, but the way they're treating this whole thing,
Speaker 1: every little thing that we've gotten, the fact that we
Speaker 1: can send that we were about to be able to
Speaker 1: send emails out was the thing that we had to
Speaker 1: fight for every step of the way. They gave us
Speaker 1: a set of rules that the rules were the most
Speaker 1: conservative interpretation of our leagual democratic rights that are set
Speaker 1: in federal law. They gave us like the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: like carpenters union interpretation of like those those rights. They
Speaker 1: ignored all the case law that we have to be
Speaker 1: able to communicate with our coworkers through normal union channel,
Speaker 1: like every communication method our union uses to normally communicate
Speaker 1: with us legally we should have access to. Now they're
Speaker 1: trying to throttle that's like all you can only send
Speaker 1: an email communication every fifteen days. It's like you know what,
Speaker 1: like you're doing your little whisper campaign like twenty four hours,
Speaker 1: twenty four seven just by and then you have to
Speaker 1: opt into like to communication about the about the election,
Speaker 1: like they were trying to keep and they're cutting meetings short,
Speaker 1: they're cutting meetings off. They were trying to bury this.
Speaker 1: Now we think that they're they're trying to shift gears
Speaker 1: because they know that this is a lot more serious
Speaker 1: than they thought it was. You know, we're not here
Speaker 1: to you know, turn the union upside like well, maybe
Speaker 1: turn the an upside down is a good way to
Speaker 1: think of it, but in a good productive way, not
Speaker 1: in a you know, turn it upside down and shake it,
Speaker 1: you know, to like, you know, destroy it. We want
Speaker 1: to turn it upside down so that it's the way
Speaker 1: a real union is supposed to be, is it. People
Speaker 1: who are elected into leadership are accountable to the people
Speaker 1: who elect them. And our goal is to you know,
Speaker 1: to make the union like we want to go from
Speaker 1: something like you know, Chicago Teachers Union, which is really
Speaker 1: powerful and famously like democratic. It wasn't always that way.
Speaker 1: It was only focused on very basic stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: before the women in the Chicago Teachers Union took it
Speaker 1: over and changed it for the better. M you know,
Speaker 1: that's our goals. We want our union to be to
Speaker 1: have that internal, vibrant discussion and debate about how the
Speaker 1: union should be working should work because we know that
Speaker 1: as nurses that we've got the skills in the capacity
Speaker 1: to have an impact on the others are said, we
Speaker 1: don't think that people who are paid out of our
Speaker 1: due should ever be afraid when a nurse opens their
Speaker 1: mouth and says I think things could be better or
Speaker 1: I don't like how this is happening. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think I think one more thing I do you kind
Speaker 1: of want to add is that you know, you were
Speaker 1: talking a bit earlier about sort of the risk of stagnation,
Speaker 1: and I mean, I think something that people don't want
Speaker 1: to hear, is it, like, you know, there's been a
Speaker 1: wave of militancy in the last few years, but the
Speaker 1: actual union like the actual unionization rate of the US
Speaker 1: keeps going down. And I think a big part of
Speaker 1: that is, you know, like even even in the periods
Speaker 1: when unions are really strong, they got into these sort
Speaker 1: of bureaucratic patterns where people were busy sort of fighting
Speaker 1: their own internal like like busy fighting their own rank
Speaker 1: and file, and then when the bosses came for them,
Speaker 1: they got destroyed. And I don't know, like it really
Speaker 1: seems like a moment where either unions are going to
Speaker 1: people like you are going to win and you get
Speaker 1: these rank and file movements that are changing what the
Speaker 1: union is to be what it's supposed to be or
Speaker 1: the last remnants of unionism is going to die. And
Speaker 1: that's I don't know, Like I mean, it's depressing, but
Speaker 1: that's like if you if you just look at the
Speaker 1: unionization rich chart, it just keeps going down and down
Speaker 1: and down, and every time it seems like it's hit
Speaker 1: to do low, it's like it finds another way to
Speaker 1: go out, which I guess is kind of a room
Speaker 1: way to look at it. But I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: it is very positive to think about how how there's
Speaker 1: organizing that's difficult. It's hard to get people to do
Speaker 1: some things right. It's difficult to pull people together for
Speaker 1: you know, um certain types of organizing when they don't
Speaker 1: feel like they have a say or a stake in
Speaker 1: what's going on. But I will say that like it
Speaker 1: has been, it is always eye opening when I watch
Speaker 1: my co workers pull together in this thing, and I
Speaker 1: think that there's that common experience at work and especially
Speaker 1: care workers right now, it is like that is driving
Speaker 1: us to do different things. There's a reason why we're
Speaker 1: having a rank and file movement in our union now
Speaker 1: and things aren't just continue like continuing to stagnate I
Speaker 1: think that people recognize that their union has to be
Speaker 1: fighting for them. I think that's a big thing. People
Speaker 1: want the union to fight, not to just kind of
Speaker 1: like sit there and you know, you know, people get
Speaker 1: really frustrated when they feel like their dues are being
Speaker 1: taken and they're not seeing that immediate benefit. The immediate
Speaker 1: benefit only comes when we pull together and we fight back.
Speaker 1: So I think that I totally see what you're saying.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of that comes down to people
Speaker 1: who get into these positions. And this is why we
Speaker 1: believe in the principle of like rotation and like and
Speaker 1: churning over the leadership as much as possible. Is that
Speaker 1: I think when you stay and no one should be
Speaker 1: in the position of organize yourself out of a job.
Speaker 1: Right if you're doing you're if you're being effective, you're
Speaker 1: organizing yourself out of a job. And I have organized
Speaker 1: out of myself out of some jobs. And right now
Speaker 1: I've organized myself out of telling people that there's a
Speaker 1: movement and that we've got to participate in it. And
Speaker 1: now I'm moving on to other things because I have
Speaker 1: like a whole crew of people in my hospital who
Speaker 1: are doing that organizing work without me having to do it.
Speaker 1: So I think that there's like it's can be little
Speaker 1: depressing when you look at like the raw numbers, but
Speaker 1: I think that a lot of that is Like it's
Speaker 1: like if you if your union is clearly not great
Speaker 1: and people kind of complain about it, then yeah, no
Speaker 1: one's going to want to join it. Like if your
Speaker 1: union thinks it's more important to be a landlord or
Speaker 1: you know, stash forty two million dollars in the bank,
Speaker 1: then it is to invest that money in actually building
Speaker 1: organizational expertise or you know, building, And I see the unorganized,
Speaker 1: like Eric was saying, in places or like right to
Speaker 1: work states, which we've won. We have won contracts in
Speaker 1: right right to work states. But you have to be looking.
Speaker 1: You have to be constantly pushing for it. And if
Speaker 1: you can't just take a little win here there and
Speaker 1: then be excited because you just got another union to
Speaker 1: affiliate you like our union does. Like we need to
Speaker 1: be working on actually bringing more and more workers into
Speaker 1: our union and if we don't do that, it will die.
Speaker 1: But um, I think that there's a spirit in the
Speaker 1: you know that you know when you come to a
Speaker 1: place to work, with coworkers and you face common enemy
Speaker 1: and common problems, common conditions. You do see what it
Speaker 1: can look like when people decide to do something on
Speaker 1: their own. You know, to get back to MIA's point
Speaker 1: about declining unionism in this country. In order to, you know,
Speaker 1: to change this decline in unionism, we need to change
Speaker 1: who we are as union members. We need to You
Speaker 1: know that I'm not a big doctor phil fan, but
Speaker 1: he used to say that thing all the time. Well,
Speaker 1: how's that working for you? Unions need to take a
Speaker 1: look at themselves and say how, how how is this
Speaker 1: working for you? We are declining. Why do we continue
Speaker 1: to do the same thing we're doing over and over again.
Speaker 1: We need to change who we are. For example, as
Speaker 1: a nurse, a nurse needs to know when they stand
Speaker 1: up and speak out that when they stand up they
Speaker 1: won't be standing alone, that there'll be somebody around them,
Speaker 1: that other nurses are going to be there right behind them,
Speaker 1: backing them up. And that goes for any trade. You know,
Speaker 1: we we can't progress as workers without struggle, and there
Speaker 1: will be struggle. We need to march forward. We need
Speaker 1: to be able to say everybody that can be any
Speaker 1: union should be any union, and we need to expand
Speaker 1: ourselves as nurses. I mean, I don't want to harp
Speaker 1: on it, but this pandemic was devastating for us, and
Speaker 1: I obviously no nurses worked remotely. I should say no
Speaker 1: bedside nurse worked remotely. I know many of our nurse
Speaker 1: managers worked remotely and checked in on us through you know,
Speaker 1: online things, But for the most part, every nurse, bedside
Speaker 1: nurse was at that bedside. It was not it was
Speaker 1: not pleasant, it was it was something that I'm sure
Speaker 1: many nurses are probably in uh, you know, counseling for
Speaker 1: they were that traumatized by it. Many people had lost
Speaker 1: family members, just like the rest of the public did,
Speaker 1: yet they still had to continue to work. I think
Speaker 1: as a as a union, we need to change who
Speaker 1: we are. And like I said, I don't want to
Speaker 1: point fingers or anything that you know, people that are
Speaker 1: in the union now or the people are running against
Speaker 1: I'm sure they're good people, but we have a different
Speaker 1: idea and we want to bring a change to how
Speaker 1: the union runs. And I think that change will make
Speaker 1: us a stronger and better union and I think will
Speaker 1: be will have happier nurses and wind up with more
Speaker 1: activist nurses who will expand the union. It's going to
Speaker 1: be a word of mouth. You know, one thing. You
Speaker 1: can have the best organization in the world, but the
Speaker 1: things that are the best product, but what really makes
Speaker 1: your product worthwhile is word of mouth campaigns. People have
Speaker 1: to talk about you. People have to say, hey, you
Speaker 1: know that California Nurses Association that and then you they're
Speaker 1: really doing something. I want to be a part of that. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we need to you know, we've been pressing
Speaker 1: on a Medicare for all, single payer and and of
Speaker 1: course ratios for everybody, but we need to start organizing
Speaker 1: more and all those states where those workers suffer. Because
Speaker 1: I can tell you this right now. You know, I'd
Speaker 1: ever talked about it with John. Our hospital is filled
Speaker 1: with nurses from the South and they tell you, oh,
Speaker 1: I came to California for the ratios. They need to
Speaker 1: fight for those ratios back in Alabama and Mississippi and
Speaker 1: all the states they come from. We need to help them,
Speaker 1: you know, bring unions to the South. You know, the
Speaker 1: basic core of right of right to work it was racism.
Speaker 1: The racism is what drove right to work. It was
Speaker 1: the same people that brought you. Segregation is what brought
Speaker 1: you right to work, and uh, you know that's a fact.
Speaker 1: Oh and it's important for us that uh you know,
Speaker 1: we want to be an activist union and I'm not
Speaker 1: opposed to that, but we can do that by unionizing
Speaker 1: these hospitals and making those nurses bedside lives a lot better. Um,
Speaker 1: you know Stouton Lynn. It's funny, is that I always laugh,
Speaker 1: you know, John brings it up. I'm from originally from Canton, Ohio,
Speaker 1: and of course Stoughton Lynn taught I believe it was
Speaker 1: at Youngstown State. He was from. He was He spent
Speaker 1: the last part of his life after his Vietnam War
Speaker 1: activism in Youngstown, in the Youngstown area. And I think
Speaker 1: the last book I read by him was Bob Lee's
Speaker 1: and Zapatistas. You know, he was talking about the It's
Speaker 1: a great book. And not many people know about him.
Speaker 1: I knew about him in Ohio because you know, you
Speaker 1: know social justice work there. Uh you know at Walsh
Speaker 1: at that time it was Walsh College and then Walsh University. Now, uh,
Speaker 1: you know Joe Turma, the professor there, you know, was
Speaker 1: often talk about Stoughton Lynn and that's how I you know,
Speaker 1: started reading a lot of his works. Um, the things
Speaker 1: that he says about rank and file workers is something
Speaker 1: that we need to make part of the national conversation.
Speaker 1: And we need to get that message out. We need
Speaker 1: to to to tone down the big union actions and
Speaker 1: the big union talk and let's just make it a
Speaker 1: nurse's conversation. We always talked about our union about nurses values.
Speaker 1: Nurses valuables. Values are invaluable. Uh. They apply to every
Speaker 1: walk of life, every trade. And I think that's what
Speaker 1: we need to do. And I know that's what Mark
Speaker 1: would say if he was on the call with us.
Speaker 1: I just got a text from him. He's almost finished
Speaker 1: with our video, so he's working hard. I mean, the
Speaker 1: guy took two weeks of his own time. And that's
Speaker 1: another thing. Here we are, we are bedside nurses. He
Speaker 1: had to self teach himself how to make pretty high
Speaker 1: end quality videos. And we're not bought and sold. We
Speaker 1: don't hire anybody to do our work for us. We're
Speaker 1: doing this ourselves. We're bootstrapping it, as you know what
Speaker 1: they call bootstrapping it yourself. Up here. We are bootstrapping
Speaker 1: a campaign and a movement. I don't know if we're
Speaker 1: going to win, we are at least going to make
Speaker 1: a hell of an impression on people. And I hope,
Speaker 1: whether we win or lose, that impression goes far and
Speaker 1: that people listen to what we're saying and demand what
Speaker 1: we're staying for. What we want our union to be.
Speaker 1: We don't want to have an sciu like union. We
Speaker 1: don't want to uh like we're paying for services here.
Speaker 1: We want a union that listens to us and does
Speaker 1: what we want. Um, a nurse shouldn't have to beg
Speaker 1: a labor rep to say no. We said no to
Speaker 1: a last, best and final and our labor rep said no.
Speaker 1: This in our professional opinion, this is a good deal.
Speaker 1: Well guess guess what, Mia, We got ten percent more
Speaker 1: by saying no. And I know that that sounds greedy,
Speaker 1: but in reality, um, you know, we do get paid
Speaker 1: considerably more in California than another place in the country.
Speaker 1: But also, to buy a house in a bad neighborhood
Speaker 1: is a million and a half dollars, So it's so
Speaker 1: it's I have to drive an hour away just get
Speaker 1: to work. It is cheaper where I live right now
Speaker 1: than it is in the Bay Area. I could not
Speaker 1: get a house in the Bay Area at all. And
Speaker 1: we should be incorporating housing demands into our negotiations as well,
Speaker 1: like especially the years gonna be a landlord, Like come on, well, okay,
Speaker 1: how about we you know, the first public housing was
Speaker 1: really cooperative housing built by unions. Like there's no reason why. Um,
Speaker 1: you know these some of these institutions are like incredibly
Speaker 1: wealthy and building. Uh, you know, if we can we
Speaker 1: have the kind of power to bring them to you know,
Speaker 1: a screeching halt. We should be able to like, you know,
Speaker 1: get the kind of things that we need to live
Speaker 1: by in our community, like we should be living where
Speaker 1: our patients are anyway. And it's you know, and it's
Speaker 1: a way of bringing our bringing us ourselves into our
Speaker 1: community so that our community is you know that we're
Speaker 1: part of our community. Um. And you know, I think
Speaker 1: we're I'm just gonna say I'm gonna be waking up
Speaker 1: in six hours so that I can go back to work.
Speaker 1: And we want to make sure that people know a
Speaker 1: couple of key things. So there is an election happening.
Speaker 1: If you are a nurse in a CNA, California Nurses
Speaker 1: Association or National Nurses United and NOC like Hospital, there's
Speaker 1: an election happening. Ballots are being mailed out to you
Speaker 1: on channel tenth. We expect that they're going to start
Speaker 1: arriving a day or two after that. We are the
Speaker 1: shift Change slate, so the four of us are running
Speaker 1: for the Council of Presidents. It's Eric, Raina, John and
Speaker 1: Mark And if you want to find us on social media,
Speaker 1: we just got our Instagram account. We are called shift
Speaker 1: Change and on you. We're on TikTok Now we're going
Speaker 1: to be releasing some video Shift Change and and You,
Speaker 1: And then we're also going to have we've got our
Speaker 1: YouTube and Facebook set up as well. Look for us there.
Speaker 1: And we've got to go fund maybe because we've got
Speaker 1: to buy the materials that we are using to help
Speaker 1: organize with. Thankfully, by the sounds of it, our lawyers
Speaker 1: are going to be working for us for because they
Speaker 1: believe in what we're doing. And these are movement lawyers.
Speaker 1: These are not right wing people who want to fight unions.
Speaker 1: They want unions to be accountable to their workers and
Speaker 1: to be strong fighting unions. And that's our main goal
Speaker 1: is we think that our union could be one of
Speaker 1: the most powerful unions in the country if we organize
Speaker 1: and fight, and we organize by building our relationships on
Speaker 1: trust and solidarity, by constantly working to defend our contract,
Speaker 1: and we think that as we build that energy, we
Speaker 1: can take that to all the other things that we
Speaker 1: think are portness nurses. So we talked about nurses values.
Speaker 1: We know those are actually nurses values and not some
Speaker 1: person who decided that they're going to tag along with
Speaker 1: us and ride on our coat tails to you know,
Speaker 1: whatever political future that they think they have. You know,
Speaker 1: we are you know, this is our union, and we're
Speaker 1: going to make it you know, accountable to us so
Speaker 1: that we can change the world and change our workplace
Speaker 1: and make you know, being a nurse one of those
Speaker 1: kind of jobs that people aspire to and not something
Speaker 1: that they come into for two or three years and
Speaker 1: then leave because it's so terrible. So I don't know
Speaker 1: what else to say. I'm ready for chift change, Rain,
Speaker 1: Are you ready for chift change? Yep? And just like
Speaker 1: Nelson Mandela saying I never lose, I either win or
Speaker 1: I learn. Hell yes, hell yeah, I love this. This
Speaker 1: is the stuff I look for. Thank you so much,
Speaker 1: Thank you, Mia, thank you, thank you all for being on.
Speaker 1: This is great and I really hope you all win
Speaker 1: and if we win, bring us back. Yeah. I was
Speaker 1: about to say, yeah, give us a report back. We'll
Speaker 1: tell you, We'll tell you everything that happened, and maybe
Speaker 1: if we win, we'll have a nice victory party and
Speaker 1: maybe we'll let you come out, you and the rest
Speaker 1: of the It could Happen Here crew, Maybe do some
Speaker 1: live stuff for us, because I think be a kick
Speaker 1: out of that. Every time I hear a nurse say
Speaker 1: that I listened to It could Happen Here, a part
Speaker 1: of me just like does a little snoopy happy dance. Hey.
Speaker 1: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the Universe. It Could
Speaker 1: Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1: zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 1: find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Speaker 1: cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening,