Speaker 1: Yo, I don't have anything that goes with this episode.
Speaker 1: If the beats coming on, I'm just I can't hear you.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna wrap. I'm just gonna wrap. Fucking I'm wrapping. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't say that I'm a dog and I bust
Speaker 1: much loves, but I get legally insane and I've done
Speaker 1: much drugs. No, dude won't see me with a change.
Speaker 1: There's no punch drunk love. Because when I'm not rapping dog,
Speaker 1: I used to run bust um. Then the brothers started servant,
Speaker 1: thought the cash and start turning, started getting determined. I
Speaker 1: tell that I started learning with all the effort I
Speaker 1: am served, thinking that it might just work. Broke my leg.
Speaker 1: They made me off. This fucking stage is right to
Speaker 1: work now that the unemployment they nobody noticed. I can't
Speaker 1: even get my check on times. Motherfucking COVID and these
Speaker 1: kids all in the house. And you know the ship
Speaker 1: is not the dopest. I've passed it off to link
Speaker 1: with Franker. She gonna drop some mo ship workers ship
Speaker 1: the boxes they Slipper and Chipper whenever talking and whipping
Speaker 1: the shock of carts. It's active beer in the walkings
Speaker 1: and tact them with legal cart and to keep our
Speaker 1: king at him for the stock and not financial market solvent.
Speaker 1: They're clocking for fifty fitty bucks in there, the coping
Speaker 1: of like sixty fifty chucks and gets spit on my
Speaker 1: sitting ducks. And they are sick getting fucked. So if
Speaker 1: you ever wanted to honor them, he has not asked
Speaker 1: for all mohammedans. We boy Cotton, Amazon and Target and
Speaker 1: FedEx and Walt Martin and Cicario Hope Foods until the
Speaker 1: fucking boss's bargaining workers won the company. That is in
Speaker 1: any arguments, So argue with them, are you with a alright, alright, alright, alright,
Speaker 1: welcome back. I'm dope nice, I'm lingua franca. We're waiting
Speaker 1: on reparations. Hurr. Yeah. We're here to talk about a
Speaker 1: little bit of politics from the lens of hip hop.
Speaker 1: Hip hop from the lens of politics, and particularly today
Speaker 1: we are talking about the labor movement in America, the
Speaker 1: way it affects black people, the way it affects rappers
Speaker 1: or doesn't uh. And we're gonna have of my good
Speaker 1: friend ironmy o s from Pong, a community organizer, host
Speaker 1: of the YouTube show The Black Athenians and a PhD
Speaker 1: student in philosophy at the University of Georgia here to
Speaker 1: talk to us today about the labor movement's history, it's importance,
Speaker 1: and the promise of a federal job guarantee. And I
Speaker 1: want to start off talking about some shitty jobs that
Speaker 1: we've had, our own personal experiences with the necessity of
Speaker 1: workers coming together to organize for better working conditions and
Speaker 1: better pay, because I've definitely had some jobs are just
Speaker 1: like what the fun So wait before you we get
Speaker 1: into what the jobs have been, what was your first job?
Speaker 1: My first job ever? I was a I worked at Sonic.
Speaker 1: I was one of those people that brought you the
Speaker 1: tray out to your car. I did not wear the
Speaker 1: roller skates, yet I could not keep this movies from
Speaker 1: hitting the parking lot pavement even just standing. No, no,
Speaker 1: I would routinely drop things like on my own two
Speaker 1: feet sands like wheels beneath me. So I never got
Speaker 1: to that level of like skating around. But uh yeah,
Speaker 1: just like sat in the back ate a bunch of
Speaker 1: fried macaroni and cheese nuggets. I was there for like
Speaker 1: a couple of months. Yeah, yeah, I got I got
Speaker 1: sick one time and I couldn't come in and they
Speaker 1: and they fired me and that was it. I was sixteen, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: my first job was I was sixteen as well. I
Speaker 1: wish it was like something like Sonic Goes for the
Speaker 1: State Department. It was that the the US for the
Speaker 1: embassy in Singapore when my father was stationed there. It
Speaker 1: was like a summertime thing. They just had me doing
Speaker 1: like clerk stuff. Okay, that was like my first experience
Speaker 1: in the job market. You know what I was thinking
Speaker 1: when I was looking at the notes for this and
Speaker 1: you were saying that we should talk about like shitty jobs.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be hard for me just because like being
Speaker 1: like sitting down there and like really recollected. I haven't
Speaker 1: had many jobs, just a couple for a long time,
Speaker 1: you know. So we worked on the service and straight
Speaker 1: from yeah, I was always bartending and serving off and on.
Speaker 1: Whenever music was slow, that was what was paying the bills.
Speaker 1: So it's like, you know, that was always my steady
Speaker 1: thing that I had while I was pursuing, you know,
Speaker 1: other creative artistic ventures and ship. But as I was
Speaker 1: touring and releasing music and stuff, that was I must
Speaker 1: have split a ten year span between like two different
Speaker 1: places as a bartender or waiter, and it wasn't shitty
Speaker 1: Like I liked it. I like the people that I
Speaker 1: worked with. For the most part, it was like you know,
Speaker 1: it was. It was a lot of work in very
Speaker 1: high demand. But over the years, the grind of it
Speaker 1: made it shitty. Yeah, you know what I'm saying. So
Speaker 1: it's not like it grinds, it grounds you down, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, and you start getting that, what
Speaker 1: then am I doing with my life type ship? You know? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've worked all kinds of jobs. I was like a
Speaker 1: door attended at the cafeteria in college. Also in college,
Speaker 1: I was in the summertime somewhat of a carney. I
Speaker 1: worked at a ball toss booth at the Asheville Tourist
Speaker 1: Baseball Stadium. So I pretty much just stood in the
Speaker 1: hot sun um with people that drunk, unamused white people
Speaker 1: trying to throw balls at this thing for hours and
Speaker 1: hours as a clown or something. Did not have a
Speaker 1: dress up like a clown. I have this little polo
Speaker 1: I had to wear in like khakis. It was chill.
Speaker 1: I pretty I think they've hired me for the job
Speaker 1: because I looked somewhat like a clown, and my brother like, oh,
Speaker 1: sounds great, she'll be perfect. Um. Yeah, I've always worked
Speaker 1: multiple jobs. Worked in a print shop here, I worked
Speaker 1: as a bouncer at a bar in town. I worked
Speaker 1: as a wedding caterer. Like, I've consistently had multiple jobs
Speaker 1: just to like get it all together rant wise and everything.
Speaker 1: And I'm still work like three or four jobs, like
Speaker 1: and then like this is the first time in my
Speaker 1: life I'm like above like the median income for like
Speaker 1: the area. Like you know, it's still taking you know,
Speaker 1: being on the commission, working on this podcast, freelance music stuff,
Speaker 1: teaching it's teach to the University of Georgia, all this stuff.
Speaker 1: Like I still and I probably, oh, I feel like
Speaker 1: I always will because I have that, like say, on
Speaker 1: your grind mentality of like you have to always hustle,
Speaker 1: you have to have multiple things going on in order
Speaker 1: to like to live. And I just think it's it's
Speaker 1: part of that capitalist mentality of like your worth is
Speaker 1: measured by your productivity. It's the grind of life. It's
Speaker 1: it's the grind of life. Yeah, but I mean it
Speaker 1: doesn't have to be this way? How do we get here?
Speaker 1: The Wagner Act, officially the National Labor Relations Act, established
Speaker 1: the legal right for most workers most workers to organize,
Speaker 1: enjoy labor unions, and bargain collectively with their employers, which
Speaker 1: was a huge deal. You know, finally people could negotiate
Speaker 1: with their employers about health insurance, about pensions, about working
Speaker 1: conditions you know, we don't have we like, we have
Speaker 1: hours that are too long. We you know, work in
Speaker 1: the heat, we work in the snow. We don't like that.
Speaker 1: So people are actually able to like collectively come together
Speaker 1: to say, like, yo, without us, without the people running
Speaker 1: this shop, y'all don't have a paycheck either, So let's
Speaker 1: come together and decide what's going to be best for
Speaker 1: everybody who's actually running this whole place. It was also
Speaker 1: a huge deal that predominantly black workers in the farming
Speaker 1: and domestic sector, like our cultural people the help you know,
Speaker 1: like your your nurses aids, your people, like that your
Speaker 1: housekeepers were accepted from coverage under the Wagner Acts. So
Speaker 1: while people in mainly white professions unionized and collectively bargained
Speaker 1: for better working concisions, pensions, medical insurance, job security, better pay,
Speaker 1: and without this bargaining power, black workers were trapped working
Speaker 1: grueling hours for next to nothing at the whims of
Speaker 1: the season. When it comes to you know, they're determining
Speaker 1: their economic security. In the beginning of labor in this country,
Speaker 1: there was this racial divide which has expected. They always
Speaker 1: want to divide and conquer when it comes to the
Speaker 1: working class. Like, okay, if black and white people come
Speaker 1: together to negotiate, we're but like, if we can make
Speaker 1: it so that, oh, the white the poor whites are
Speaker 1: just a little bit better than the poor blacks, and
Speaker 1: they can like have this reason to be like, oh,
Speaker 1: we're not so bad and none of us actually take
Speaker 1: on the big money interests that are screwing everyone, screwing everyone. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: speaking in big money interests. A number of bills have
Speaker 1: passed since then, notably the Taft Hardly Act in n
Speaker 1: and the land Rum Griffin Act of that we can
Speaker 1: the Wagner Act establishing right to work laws, banning secondary boycotts,
Speaker 1: and limbering the right to pick it. In February nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, during a violent rain storm, to black sanitation
Speaker 1: workers in Memphis, Tennessee, were killed when heavy rain caused
Speaker 1: barrels of heavy garbage to crush them. That sounds like
Speaker 1: a fucking terrible way to die, it really does. It
Speaker 1: sounds like some fucking final destination ship. Their death jump
Speaker 1: started the most important civil rights and labor rights campaign
Speaker 1: in US history. In response, sanitation workers went on strike
Speaker 1: and took to the streets and with signs bearing familiar
Speaker 1: phrase of civil rights struggle, I am a man. They
Speaker 1: went without pay for the duration of the strike and
Speaker 1: faced the wrath of the mayor, Henry Loeb, who had
Speaker 1: declared the strike illegal, and sick racist cops on them
Speaker 1: in mass for sixty five days. Hundreds of black sanitation
Speaker 1: workers demanded safer working condition in fair pay. Martin Luther
Speaker 1: King Jr. Was actually in Memphis supporting that strike when
Speaker 1: they shot him on the balcony. And it's been positive
Speaker 1: that like when he was talking about rights for black people,
Speaker 1: like he was hated and he was feared and the
Speaker 1: FBI was trying to get him to kill himself and
Speaker 1: all that ship. But it was when he started to
Speaker 1: turn his campaign towards okay rights for workers, like labor
Speaker 1: rights for all people, the poor wife as well as
Speaker 1: the black. So that's when they were like, Yo, we
Speaker 1: got to stop this motherfucker. We needed to, yeah, take
Speaker 1: him out because this is getting really really dangerous. One
Speaker 1: of the things when like you go back and actually
Speaker 1: like watch a lot that stuff to read a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff is like how much of the your communist
Speaker 1: attack was used against m Okay specifically because he was,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean working on behalf of like working
Speaker 1: people and stuff like that. But you would think that
Speaker 1: It's almost like at some point they started realizing that
Speaker 1: just simply going at him under like the racial you
Speaker 1: know side of it wasn't going to be enough. That
Speaker 1: they started like throwing it, Oh, he's a communist, he
Speaker 1: wants to say, you know what I mean, he wants
Speaker 1: to bring him Yeah, they had to bring him labor.
Speaker 1: They had to bring in economic policy in order to
Speaker 1: like make him are true threat. Yeah. Yeah. So ultimately
Speaker 1: the sanitation workers were successful, achieving unionization, say if we're
Speaker 1: working conditions, some of them gaining promotions at their jobs,
Speaker 1: and for many Black Americans, unions have ever since been
Speaker 1: a life changing ladders to the middle class. Working unionized
Speaker 1: black women, according to the Economic Policy Institute, or paid
Speaker 1: just nine point nine percent of what their black male
Speaker 1: counterparts make, while non union black women make just of
Speaker 1: their counterparts. Yeah, and this is according to the Economic
Speaker 1: Policy Institute, which also showed in a separate study that
Speaker 1: unions helped raise the wages of women in black and
Speaker 1: Hispanic workers, whose wages have been historically lagging behind those
Speaker 1: of white men. As well. They showed that black union
Speaker 1: workers more likely to have employer provided health insurance and
Speaker 1: roughly more likely to have employers sponsored retirement plans. So
Speaker 1: unions work, and the benefits are even greater. For black
Speaker 1: union workers who haven't completed high school. The study shows
Speaker 1: that they have nineteen point six wage advantage over their
Speaker 1: non union union peers, and are more likely to have
Speaker 1: health insurance and tent more likely to have retirement plan, respectively.
Speaker 1: So if y'all niazeta make it through high school, join
Speaker 1: a union or organizing workplace for real. Even in the
Speaker 1: right to work state like Georgia, I mean, like so
Speaker 1: here in Athens, we have a chapter are a local
Speaker 1: of the Communication Workers of America that represents everyone that
Speaker 1: works at the University of Georgia. I say everyone loosely,
Speaker 1: because in a right to work state, you can't be
Speaker 1: forced to pay dues to a union that is still
Speaker 1: organizing on your behalf, even if you're not a member UM.
Speaker 1: But nonetheless they've been working on stuff like fairer health
Speaker 1: insurance conditions, even down to small things like the fact
Speaker 1: that employees have to pay to park at their place
Speaker 1: of work. It's like forty bucks a month, which like,
Speaker 1: if you're not making ship is a big deal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is. It matters because the University of Georgia
Speaker 1: is the biggest employer and Athens UM, which has a
Speaker 1: nearly it is it is, and it has our town
Speaker 1: has a nearly poverty rate. Of course, they have all
Speaker 1: these statistics on like the students and how well the
Speaker 1: students do, but when it comes to the quality of
Speaker 1: life and other such facts regarding the folks that actually
Speaker 1: work there and keep the campus running, not as easily
Speaker 1: found UM. So there's a lot of discussion of like
Speaker 1: there has to be some sort of connection between the
Speaker 1: fact that the largest employer in Athens is the University
Speaker 1: Georgia and we have one of the highest poverty rates
Speaker 1: in the state and in the country for a city
Speaker 1: of our size, So like, what what is that link?
Speaker 1: What is that link. Is it possibly that they're not
Speaker 1: paying people in I mean that's the argument recently movement
Speaker 1: that grew out of a controversy related to slave graves
Speaker 1: that were desecrated in the in the renovation process of
Speaker 1: one of the academic buildings. They claimed so some of
Speaker 1: the demands made by the group that was raising awareness
Speaker 1: about that issue, it was like living wages for all
Speaker 1: the employees of the University of Georgia. I think of
Speaker 1: whom are like black. Like if you if you look at, um,
Speaker 1: the maintenance workers, the lawn workers, the custodians, like the
Speaker 1: folks working at the bottom. The folks working at the bottom, um,
Speaker 1: So those are the those people are the descendants of
Speaker 1: the slaves that they found under the fucking building when
Speaker 1: they were renovating it, right, you know, if they have
Speaker 1: lived here generationally, and this all getting paid pretty much
Speaker 1: slave wages to maintain the University Georgia, just like slaves
Speaker 1: used to be least to the University of Georgia to
Speaker 1: like maintain their campus and work for the faculty, etcetera.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not an economist or anything like that,
Speaker 1: but if it's the largest employer and they're still afforded.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's something weird about that. I mean, but
Speaker 1: I've definitely heard that like dynamic described when when people
Speaker 1: are talking about like Walmart or something like that, where
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, well, Walmart, um, all of their employer,
Speaker 1: you know, a large percentage of their employees are on food.
Speaker 1: As a result, then the taxpayers ends up paying for
Speaker 1: the employee instead of Walmart giving them a living wage, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly exactly. And it's like if they're keeping people in
Speaker 1: poverty with the wages that they pay, that the onus
Speaker 1: of dealing with that poverty then falls on the local government,
Speaker 1: which I work in, and so then that's our problem.
Speaker 1: And then why that why that is additionally interesting is
Speaker 1: that the University of Georgia owns the land and Athens
Speaker 1: and they don't pay any fucking property tax on it.
Speaker 1: And so not only are they keeping people in poverty
Speaker 1: with the wages, they are also not paying into the
Speaker 1: solutions for poverty through taxes to the local government. So
Speaker 1: it's like doubly on us to racket. It is a racket.
Speaker 1: It's completely racket. I mean, at the end of the
Speaker 1: what the fund is the point of working if you're
Speaker 1: not going to get paid enough to even live, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. I mean, is that part of
Speaker 1: the plan, you know, because because it's obviously not like
Speaker 1: this is just like some coincidental works out. It's warfare,
Speaker 1: it's class warfare. It's like, we hate you that you live,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna make it so you can't live because
Speaker 1: we just despise your existence, gonna make your life as
Speaker 1: hard and uncomfortable as possible. So I'm proud. I'm proud
Speaker 1: member of c w A Local three two oh three,
Speaker 1: you know, organizing for better conditions, better for folks at
Speaker 1: the University of Georgia, because it's been theorized that like
Speaker 1: if they were to raise there is that organizing Is
Speaker 1: that something specific to UM so I think they organized
Speaker 1: for University System of Georgia employees all across Georgia. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But like it's tricky us being a right to work
Speaker 1: state and everything, you know, right to work laws like
Speaker 1: we live under in Georgia have been a rallying point
Speaker 1: for the right wing throughout the twentieth century. Who we
Speaker 1: can work or power and the interests of big business.
Speaker 1: And as I stated, and I will continue to state,
Speaker 1: motherfun class warfare, white supremacy, and rights to work clause
Speaker 1: have gone in hand in hand for a long time.
Speaker 1: In fact, Vance Muse, who is often credited with popularizing
Speaker 1: the term right to work, probably told the Senate Committee
Speaker 1: here in I am a Southerner, and I am for
Speaker 1: a white supprescy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the games made by the
Speaker 1: black labor movement in places like Memphis of Kundor under
Speaker 1: attacked by Donald Trump, who in two thousand and eighteen
Speaker 1: signed a series of executive of orders that stifled the
Speaker 1: ability of federal employees to organize. So, nonetheless, there's been
Speaker 1: renewed interests in labor strikes since the pandemic and racial
Speaker 1: justice uprise and began. It's more and more working class
Speaker 1: folks realize how essentially they are to keep the economy
Speaker 1: running and consider the way that work stoppages and labor
Speaker 1: disruptions can distruct the economy and draw attention to issues
Speaker 1: and important ways that can't be done through mass mobilizations
Speaker 1: like marches protests on their own. In April, Amazon workers
Speaker 1: were reporting crowded spaces required rate of work that does
Speaker 1: not allow for proper sanitizing of workspaces of empty containers
Speaker 1: that are meant to whole sanitizing wipes and workers who
Speaker 1: were testing positive but told by human resources to keep
Speaker 1: it on the down though, and they got fed up,
Speaker 1: so said an Island Amazon fulfillment center worker, Christian Smalls,
Speaker 1: but a group of colleagues from the building during lunch
Speaker 1: hour to call for the building to be temporarily closed
Speaker 1: and for it to be stringently sanitized, as well as
Speaker 1: for workers to be paid during the hiatus. Several had
Speaker 1: become sick and he was pretty immediately fired for standing
Speaker 1: up to them, which is a very real outcome when
Speaker 1: people organized in their workplaces like this. If you're not
Speaker 1: under a contract that permits UM organization, if you're not
Speaker 1: represented by a union, this the thing cantially happen. And
Speaker 1: for example, when we were organizing the strike for Black
Speaker 1: Lives here in Athens, there were some very real concerns
Speaker 1: among some of my fellow organizer. It's about what protections
Speaker 1: would we put in place to make sure striking workers
Speaker 1: UM would not be retaliated against what happens if they
Speaker 1: get fired and they lose their income. Especially during a pandemic,
Speaker 1: there's so many UH people looking for work that they're
Speaker 1: very easily replaced. We all just really regardless ultimately expendable.
Speaker 1: But we have to kind of put this in the
Speaker 1: context of the massive amounts of unemployment that we're having
Speaker 1: this country right now. Unemployment is jumped into the double
Speaker 1: digits since February when it was around I think like
Speaker 1: three and a half percent, with now about three About
Speaker 1: thirty million or so people plucked the unemployment betterments and
Speaker 1: state governments struggling to keep up with all the payments
Speaker 1: given a glutted and overrun unemployment benefits system as well
Speaker 1: as state revenue shortfalls. And on top of that, six
Speaker 1: hundred a week boost unemployment benefits expired on July. So
Speaker 1: between essential workers agitating for better protections to pay and
Speaker 1: those who have been laid off and left out to
Speaker 1: drive by Congress that can't seem to pass or dude benefits,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't surprise me if we see even more people
Speaker 1: in the streets in the coming weeks and months. But
Speaker 1: at a time when we have so many unemployed, it
Speaker 1: puts workers at it in an even more precarious situation,
Speaker 1: it is arguably, and they could be easily replaced by
Speaker 1: the many who are currently unemployed if they rise up
Speaker 1: to demand better from their employers. And so while some
Speaker 1: have responded to underair working conditions and unfair pay by
Speaker 1: taking the streets and demanding them, others have turned to
Speaker 1: wrapping truck as responses to the economic exterity of times
Speaker 1: like the Reagan era. And I bring us up because
Speaker 1: it was really interesting when we were doing research for
Speaker 1: the music portion of our show. You were looking for
Speaker 1: songs that pertained a labor that pertained to the nine
Speaker 1: to five that we could discuss. It was interesting that
Speaker 1: most of the work that is discussed within hip hop
Speaker 1: culture pertains to like street corner work, like night night jobs,
Speaker 1: like you know, running running things. Yeah. But anyway, we'll
Speaker 1: come back to that in a moment. First, we're going
Speaker 1: to bring in our guests. My friend I ro M
Speaker 1: e O s a Frompong, labor activist and hosted the
Speaker 1: YouTube show The Black Athenians. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, Hello, Hello,
Speaker 1: student of philosophy, I do study philosophy at u g
Speaker 1: A Yeah, and general Rabble rouser, host of The Black
Speaker 1: Athenians on YouTube every Friday. I have been known from
Speaker 1: time to time to raise rabble Yeah he does, yes,
Speaker 1: he does yes. So how are you today. I'm doing well.
Speaker 1: I'm doing well. We're gonna talk about freedom and music.
Speaker 1: How's that time? Yeah, that's that's great to me. That's
Speaker 1: all I want to talk about. Yeah, so let's start big.
Speaker 1: We've been talking about, um, the history of labor movement.
Speaker 1: But why why should labor issues matter the black folks
Speaker 1: of the hip hop and post hip hop generations? Well,
Speaker 1: black people work for a living. I don't know. There's
Speaker 1: this great staple singer song when when we get paid
Speaker 1: for the work we've done, like, we work for a living.
Speaker 1: Working people. Everybody in the United States works, but Black
Speaker 1: people have always been working, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: Black experience is a work in person's experience. So to
Speaker 1: pretend that we don't work for a living and we
Speaker 1: don't work hard, whether we're hustling or like working for
Speaker 1: some man, is just a lie. So we need to
Speaker 1: figure out honestly, as black people, we need to know
Speaker 1: what it means to both be free and work, and
Speaker 1: especially be free and work for somebody who's not us, right,
Speaker 1: because we don't get treated like employees in these United States,
Speaker 1: We're still gonna getting treated like slaves. And there's a difference.
Speaker 1: There's a difference. Employees get big cation time, they get weekends,
Speaker 1: they get time off, they can clock out, they get
Speaker 1: sick days, they get they get healthcare of the employed.
Speaker 1: Being an employee isn't a bad thing. We want employees
Speaker 1: in the United States, like we have an advanced economy.
Speaker 1: I want Amazon, I want grocery stores, and all of
Speaker 1: that takes employees. I don't want to be growing my
Speaker 1: own food, like not all the time. I want to
Speaker 1: be able to go to store, buy an avocado, have
Speaker 1: money in my pocket because I work and get a
Speaker 1: paycheck like I want, we need. This is a nation
Speaker 1: of employees in the United States. A small business, according
Speaker 1: to the government, is five hundred employees or a fewer,
Speaker 1: which means most people work for other people. So how
Speaker 1: can you both be free and be an employee at
Speaker 1: the same time, and especially if you're black, how can
Speaker 1: you both be free and an employees because quite white
Speaker 1: employees get plaid. Fine, they got four one kids. I want,
Speaker 1: but I want all of that stuff too, I want,
Speaker 1: I want, I want, I want all too. So the
Speaker 1: idea is that America has made it so hard for
Speaker 1: black people to be employees that we just assumed that
Speaker 1: will I guess we've got to start our own business
Speaker 1: and then right, And I really want to talk about
Speaker 1: that because especially with the hip hops emphasis on being
Speaker 1: an entrepreneur, because the hustle being like I am my own,
Speaker 1: my own, my own boss, because I'm out here on
Speaker 1: the street corner, I'm not here hustling, and so like
Speaker 1: why like where why do you where do you think
Speaker 1: that came from? Well, the problem is being a black
Speaker 1: employee is so bad in the United States. It's just
Speaker 1: taking the shine off of work. I can taking the
Speaker 1: shine off being employed like we go. It's so the
Speaker 1: question is being a slave or um being out there hustling,
Speaker 1: you know, and hustling you you're just a slave to
Speaker 1: the market. It's just another form of slave, another form
Speaker 1: of tunity because if you don't hustle, you don't need
Speaker 1: but you're also eating risk because what you're doing might
Speaker 1: be quasi illegal. So um, black people actually start more
Speaker 1: businesses than our white counterparts. They just go under faster.
Speaker 1: But because we live in a capitalist economy, which means
Speaker 1: that in order to start a business and have it
Speaker 1: actually succeed, you need investment capital, right, and you can't
Speaker 1: we don't have the investment capital. We just don't have
Speaker 1: it like that, and our cousins don't have it like that.
Speaker 1: So um, we start more businesses, but they go wonder
Speaker 1: because we actually don't have a labor floor that one
Speaker 1: can purchase our wares too, that can float us the
Speaker 1: investment capital you need. I see, I spent time in
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley. I did my undergrad out in Berkeley, spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time Silicon Valley. UM, And you gotta understand,
Speaker 1: those guys are funded for their fourth business. That means
Speaker 1: the people who give them money expect them to lose
Speaker 1: three times. So like, do you have thirty k black Man,
Speaker 1: or anybody who's watching this video, do you have thirty
Speaker 1: k to just try something and then lose and then
Speaker 1: go back to that same source since it were I
Speaker 1: guess you'll never believe it. You'll never believe it happened.
Speaker 1: But I tried, real heart, Just give me another thirty
Speaker 1: kye and and I think this time I'll do it again.
Speaker 1: So when you're fine, when you're really serious about getting
Speaker 1: in the business, you need money to lose and to
Speaker 1: try stuff. If it's just well, I got this, you know,
Speaker 1: I saved up about five K and I think I
Speaker 1: could try something. And then when you get wiped out
Speaker 1: because you needed to try and you took a chant
Speaker 1: and it didn't work, it takes you ten years to
Speaker 1: get to scrap up another five k to try it again.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna grow that way. Are you gonna try
Speaker 1: it again even the first time around? Like, if it's
Speaker 1: gonna take you ten years, if it just wiped everything out,
Speaker 1: you can't date because you're too busy saving. So we
Speaker 1: need an employment floor where like you can work, save
Speaker 1: up money, have a steady job, be black on the
Speaker 1: job because a lot of people might think that's the thing, right,
Speaker 1: So a lot of people might not know this, but
Speaker 1: you can be fired for being black and caring about
Speaker 1: black people. I'm sure a lot of people who might
Speaker 1: listen to this podcast might have been fired or having
Speaker 1: a talking to you for standing up for black people.
Speaker 1: Because standing up for black people is day us in
Speaker 1: this private market. So if you so, you have to
Speaker 1: also you have to do the job, but then do
Speaker 1: the job in the way that makes your white boss comfortable.
Speaker 1: And that's an extra whole job. So on top of
Speaker 1: that job. And that's why you know, we die a
Speaker 1: stress because that second job is a lot of job. Um,
Speaker 1: but you have to understand that that is a second
Speaker 1: job that we shouldn't have to do. We should just
Speaker 1: be able to do the first job. Right. So we
Speaker 1: need a world where we can just do the first
Speaker 1: job and not the second job of making white people
Speaker 1: on white white people comfortable. And then that way we
Speaker 1: could sustain the job. And the job needs to be
Speaker 1: paid so much that we could work the job for
Speaker 1: a while, save up and then like do a project, right,
Speaker 1: you know, going a nice vacation'll save up for a business.
Speaker 1: But that means it can't be at like nine dollars
Speaker 1: an hour. You're ten dollars an hour. You're just working
Speaker 1: to work and then you die, You stroke out and
Speaker 1: die and at the end, and that's not freedom, that's
Speaker 1: not self determination. You're still and you can't clock out
Speaker 1: like you got a bad back because it's nine dollar
Speaker 1: an hour. Job is bad for your back. So I
Speaker 1: heard I read this great book by Elizabeth Anderson. She
Speaker 1: wrote a book called Private Government, and in it she
Speaker 1: has a story about Amazon, this Amazon warehouse where uh,
Speaker 1: they had a choice, right, they had a choice to
Speaker 1: either have an HVAC system installed or for heating and
Speaker 1: cooling to keep the workers you know a lot, or
Speaker 1: they could just park um emergency vehicles outside so when
Speaker 1: like now and then and pass out, they could just
Speaker 1: rush them to the hospital. Right, so let me guess,
Speaker 1: let me guess what happened. You can imagine how that happened. Right,
Speaker 1: So they were just like, well, we'll just have emergency
Speaker 1: vehicles outside so like we can just rush them. That's
Speaker 1: not that's not like I'm I don't want to get
Speaker 1: rid of Amazon because I like clicking on things and
Speaker 1: having it delivered. But I need to know that the
Speaker 1: people in Amazon as workers are treated with dignity. So
Speaker 1: I'm not against big businesses. I just don't organize them
Speaker 1: so that they can um come together and negotiate their
Speaker 1: conditions about uh, you know, how much to set the
Speaker 1: HVAC system, Like it doesn't I like sixty eight, but
Speaker 1: I can negotiate up to seventy two. That's fine, but
Speaker 1: this hundred and four and just wait till I pass out.
Speaker 1: Then you get it just a new Negro to come
Speaker 1: take my place. I don't want that. I don't want
Speaker 1: that to be our life. And then the idea that
Speaker 1: well you can just quit that job and get another
Speaker 1: job with the same conditions conditions. That's not that's not
Speaker 1: a success. That's not freedom. Right. So freedom means being
Speaker 1: able to work your job, work, have like some sort
Speaker 1: of say in your working conditions, be able to clock out,
Speaker 1: be able to be stacked in cash as you're working
Speaker 1: to then do something else. If you want to do
Speaker 1: something else, I'll hop to another job. But try a business.
Speaker 1: You've saved up because you don't make nine dollars, you
Speaker 1: can actually save because you make twenty two. Um, you
Speaker 1: saved up. You try something, it fails, you have another
Speaker 1: job to go to. UM, you can fail and try things.
Speaker 1: And that that's that's what self determination looks like. And
Speaker 1: I just want to say real quickly that you have
Speaker 1: to understand that when the Constitution of these United States
Speaker 1: was organized, in mind the founders had when they said, like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we're gonna restrict suffrage to UH to property
Speaker 1: owning white men. That's both racist and sexist. But more importantly,
Speaker 1: in their mind, they had the idea that everyone was
Speaker 1: going to be self employed except for slaves. Everyone was
Speaker 1: going to be self employed employee like employment was seen
Speaker 1: as a season right, you do it when you're young
Speaker 1: for a little bit. Then eventually this is pre industrial Americas,
Speaker 1: the seventeen seventy six industrial the Continent and all. That's
Speaker 1: not until the early eight hundreds, right, So they were
Speaker 1: organizing the United States for a nation of people who
Speaker 1: are self employed. The problem is these United States that
Speaker 1: we currently live in, the workforce works for somebody. So
Speaker 1: we need to understand what freedom looks like in a
Speaker 1: world when most people work for other people. And that's
Speaker 1: why you need labor law. That's why you need, um uh,
Speaker 1: just a sense of freedom. I think you need a
Speaker 1: federal job guarantee. Let's talk about that because I mean,
Speaker 1: we have a culture here within hip hop where like
Speaker 1: people are people are working nine to five, So we're
Speaker 1: gonna derectly we're gonna have to talk to you you. They
Speaker 1: don't want to talk about it in their music, and
Speaker 1: so it's obscured. It seems like everybody's out on the street.
Speaker 1: But it's like, nah, I know you're working over at
Speaker 1: Very Queen when you do the studio. So we're not
Speaker 1: talking about the fact that we're all working. We're all working.
Speaker 1: We're all working, and so we need to shift that culture.
Speaker 1: But I think a federal job guarantee could be a
Speaker 1: huge boon to black Oh yeah, because before that, and
Speaker 1: I wondered if you could tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about that, why, why it works, what it be. So
Speaker 1: a federal job guarantee just understands that you can't be
Speaker 1: free in a market society unless you have one a valued,
Speaker 1: recognized place in the market society, and two you have
Speaker 1: money in your pocket. America's got to drink minimum. Like,
Speaker 1: if you don't have money, you're always you spend half
Speaker 1: your time in these United States trying to get away
Speaker 1: from the bouncer, trying to pretend that you've already have
Speaker 1: two drinks, just taking you're taking up and pretending edit yours.
Speaker 1: So um, you have to understand that America cost money.
Speaker 1: We have loitering laws in Georgia made four black people
Speaker 1: pretty much because America costs money. And if you don't
Speaker 1: have money, you don't belong here, So we need you
Speaker 1: shouldn't exist. There was no place for you here. So
Speaker 1: we need if we're going to have a market society,
Speaker 1: which I think we should, we need a way to
Speaker 1: secure people the means to actually make money and not
Speaker 1: just money so that you know they can live, but money.
Speaker 1: That's so that they can actually determine what they do
Speaker 1: money so that they can have hobbies and make moves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the extra money right. So, um, so this federal job
Speaker 1: guarantee would be a job doing the market infrastructure. Um,
Speaker 1: that's not being that's not being taken care of by
Speaker 1: the private market as it is. For example, right now,
Speaker 1: to get into an elder care facility, some people might
Speaker 1: know at home, it's anywhere between like three eight thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a month. So are you telling me that everyone
Speaker 1: who grows old has access to three and eight thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a month, or it's the case that the only
Speaker 1: people who get to grow old with dignity are people
Speaker 1: with access to three and eight thousand dollars a month.
Speaker 1: So what happened that the black people? That's at us?
Speaker 1: So that's not us, right, So what I'm saying is like,
Speaker 1: you need a federal job guarantee to secure the rights
Speaker 1: and the dignity that's afforded to everybody else for everyone.
Speaker 1: So you're talking about having Okay, let's elder care, yes,
Speaker 1: other care wellness checks because people are growing old alone
Speaker 1: with their house growing around them, like elder care deferred maintenance.
Speaker 1: In the American South, we have a hookworm problem. Hookworms
Speaker 1: hookworms because you know what, it turns out that if
Speaker 1: you're living out and renting a trailer and someone's and
Speaker 1: someone's um spot and the septic system breaks, Yeah, that
Speaker 1: ships coming up. That ship literally is coming up to
Speaker 1: you're playing and ship like and so you pick up
Speaker 1: with hook and the American South has a hookworm problem.
Speaker 1: Is just google it and um and your landlords in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: so they don't care. And so it's twelve thousand, twelve
Speaker 1: K to fix the um septic system. And if you're
Speaker 1: living in a trailer, you might not have access to
Speaker 1: an extra twelve k. Yeah, would you believe you might
Speaker 1: not have access to that extra twelve k to fix
Speaker 1: a sective system. So pretty much people are like walking
Speaker 1: around in their own poop. And this is all over
Speaker 1: the American South. Lead pipes like that's like people just
Speaker 1: talk about leaded water and flint. Now, no, look anyway,
Speaker 1: you see a congregation of black people check the water
Speaker 1: because like, these public services haven't made it to the
Speaker 1: neighborhoods that can't pay the property taxes or for some reason,
Speaker 1: like we just decided not to give them the goods.
Speaker 1: So we need these federal jobs that will rip out
Speaker 1: the pipes, that will fix the septic system, that will
Speaker 1: do all this deferred Maybe we have, like I don't,
Speaker 1: We have about sixty years with a deferred maintenance in
Speaker 1: the American South. And the South is actually a pretty
Speaker 1: great if you give me a cultural and material infrastructure.
Speaker 1: The South is a pretty great place to live because
Speaker 1: the weather is nice. Yeah yeah, but I need a
Speaker 1: cultural and material infrastructure I don't want. I don't want hookworms,
Speaker 1: I don't want leaded water. I don't want to live
Speaker 1: around black people who will also don't have hookworms and
Speaker 1: leaded water. So like I need an infrastructure, and that
Speaker 1: means we need like this work done. So there's work
Speaker 1: to be done, and the federal job untee would provide
Speaker 1: the material and cultural infrastructure, not just material about the
Speaker 1: cultural infrastructure. For example, in order to have this fantastic podcast,
Speaker 1: you can't just be someone with great ideas. You need
Speaker 1: like a studio and an engineer and a distribution network
Speaker 1: and nice microphones and someone to maintain all of the
Speaker 1: information and then and then someone to process this when
Speaker 1: it's all done. Those are all good jobs. Um, and
Speaker 1: those are all good jobs that will actually sustain that
Speaker 1: that makes places livable, that makes places livable. An you
Speaker 1: think of federal jobs are and he comes into play
Speaker 1: with a cultural infrastructure. The only reason we know who
Speaker 1: Arthur Miller is or Orson Wells is if you do
Speaker 1: know who those guys are is because they got their
Speaker 1: start in a w P A theater and writing. Arthur
Speaker 1: Miller is a playwright, wrote Death of a Salesman and
Speaker 1: some other things. Orson Wells its Citizen Kane. You might
Speaker 1: have heard of it. It was in all the papers. Um.
Speaker 1: But they were both w P A Works Progress Administration. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a big government jobs program. And the thirties started
Speaker 1: by uh FDR and the guy started like three point
Speaker 1: five million jobs over the course of two months. And
Speaker 1: that's when they had information technology was was it rotary
Speaker 1: phones and like carving copies? Right, So like we could
Speaker 1: get an infrastructure, a cultural infrastructure, because culture is how
Speaker 1: you learn how to what to do with your freedom. Right.
Speaker 1: Nature teaches you what to do through biology and its think.
Speaker 1: Culture is what teaches you how to manage your freedom,
Speaker 1: how to make choices in a responsible way and in
Speaker 1: a way that actually like supports the people around you
Speaker 1: and treats people like people, because people who are uncultured
Speaker 1: have a hard time treating other people like people. So like,
Speaker 1: culture is what teaches us how to use our freedom responsibly.
Speaker 1: So you need cultural artifacts, not just clean water, but
Speaker 1: also music studio is a community music studio right now
Speaker 1: and Athens is this great space called Newtie Space is
Speaker 1: great if you can pay, but you can only pay
Speaker 1: Newti spaces. I've never actually been there. You have, you's
Speaker 1: been there space. It's got music studios there. Nonprofit. They
Speaker 1: fund uh, they take the money they get from running
Speaker 1: up the space for on equipment and they fund mental
Speaker 1: health care for musicians, um and so. But yeah, you
Speaker 1: need money in order to come in and get the
Speaker 1: rehearsal space, get the recording space. That would be great
Speaker 1: if that would like a library, so like we had,
Speaker 1: it would be like the equivalent of what this great
Speaker 1: nonprofit us. But for people who can't rent space, for
Speaker 1: people who just because who mind doesn't need it, because
Speaker 1: you know what, Apparently people who don't have the resources
Speaker 1: to rent space sometimes have ideas that might need to
Speaker 1: be expressed and could use the space and then to
Speaker 1: rent practice rooms for musicians, because sometimes you don't want
Speaker 1: to rent your practice in your apartment it might be
Speaker 1: a loud so. Um, so the idea is that something
Speaker 1: like new t space shouldn't just be available for people
Speaker 1: who can pay a prohibitive amount of money. And people say, well,
Speaker 1: you're talking about giving these goods away from free, And
Speaker 1: I'm like saying, like, look, man, if we already didn't
Speaker 1: have public libraries, do you know how hard it would be?
Speaker 1: What do you mean? So I got this idea, so like,
Speaker 1: hear me out hear me outright, So if we're gonna
Speaker 1: be in a democracy, we all need to be able
Speaker 1: to like get information. So I think we should like
Speaker 1: have this building and then pay people to call them
Speaker 1: librarians to sit in this building and have like all
Speaker 1: the books so that people can get But then how
Speaker 1: do you make profit? Now? Okay, so wouldn't be for profit.
Speaker 1: It would just be like a cultural infrastructure, but you're
Speaker 1: just giving it away for free. But like, for sustaining
Speaker 1: our democracy in a responsible way, you need people to
Speaker 1: actually get information. And so yeah, so like these ideas
Speaker 1: sound radical, but um, also I'm gonna I'm gonna mention
Speaker 1: one one great book that just came out called They
Speaker 1: Were Her Property, by um professor out in in Berkeley,
Speaker 1: and uh, she was like, look, we have all of
Speaker 1: these histories of you know, postbellum South, like you know,
Speaker 1: early twentieth century South, but they're all the only histories
Speaker 1: we have for women are from like the elite diaries
Speaker 1: of white women. So it's possible we're getting a skewed
Speaker 1: view of the story because all we have is like
Speaker 1: Scarlett O'Hara like. So she went back into the archives
Speaker 1: and went to a w p A project because in
Speaker 1: the thirties one of the cultural products was taking all
Speaker 1: histories from people who used to be slaves or were
Speaker 1: born right and the right at the aftermath of the
Speaker 1: Civil War. So she got all of their domestic help.
Speaker 1: So she had access to the archive, the old archives
Speaker 1: of the domestic help of these women. And it turns
Speaker 1: out that some of these white women were lying about themselves.
Speaker 1: They were they were not the best bosses, and would
Speaker 1: you believe what do you believe? You believe? And they
Speaker 1: didn't mention that in their little diaries, but you talked
Speaker 1: to their domestic help and they told all the stories.
Speaker 1: So she wrote this whole book called they were Her Property,
Speaker 1: because it turns out a lot of these white women
Speaker 1: slaves were were owned by women, so like so they
Speaker 1: talked about it was it was the story of life
Speaker 1: in America from the viewpoint of you know, slaves. And
Speaker 1: the only reason this happened was because of this w P,
Speaker 1: a project that was providing a public cultural infrastructure. That
Speaker 1: book just came out last year. So a project that
Speaker 1: happened in the thirties provided the subject material for us today.
Speaker 1: Like if you're up to me, I think every person
Speaker 1: as soon as they hit seventy years old, you get
Speaker 1: three people. You get a knock on the door with
Speaker 1: a sound gat, a sound person, a videographer, and like
Speaker 1: you know, a mixer. Three people that come to your place,
Speaker 1: and for one hour you get to tell your side,
Speaker 1: every single American. And then it's just putting a digital
Speaker 1: archive stored at the Library of Congress, every single American.
Speaker 1: Because now we just get the side of the people
Speaker 1: who can afford to have their story told. I want
Speaker 1: every person. You earned it because you hit seventy you
Speaker 1: just tell and you just tell them and we just
Speaker 1: walked through the day. All right, tell me about the sixties,
Speaker 1: Tell me about the seventies, tell me about the eighties,
Speaker 1: tell me about the nineties. You just walk through the
Speaker 1: decades and you get an hour, and you I want
Speaker 1: three hours, right, So they come back the next week.
Speaker 1: All right, we just and and we do it exactly
Speaker 1: and that person just gets to tell their side, and
Speaker 1: then it's archived, stored at the Library Congress anybody who wants.
Speaker 1: It's just a part of public archive. That's an interesting idea.
Speaker 1: I think it's a great idea, and we actually have
Speaker 1: the resources to do it, and that would be one
Speaker 1: of the public jobs, being a videographer. So from nine
Speaker 1: to five, you just drive around to old people's houses,
Speaker 1: you set up the microphone, and you get their side.
Speaker 1: So this is actually an interesting take that I had
Speaker 1: not thought of with the Federal Jobs Guarantee before because
Speaker 1: I was thinking about like public utilities and like infrastructure
Speaker 1: that can cultural infrastruct So like these people who are
Speaker 1: currently working at Dairy Queen and who have these videography
Speaker 1: skills but don't have the money and perhaps by the
Speaker 1: equipment and all of that kind of stuff. Now they
Speaker 1: have a job with the federal government going around recording
Speaker 1: the life stories of yes, And I think that's a
Speaker 1: very important job. I think that's a very that's at
Speaker 1: least as important as whatever you're doing at dairy Queen.
Speaker 1: I think that like that archive will actually sustain our
Speaker 1: culture in a way and kind of tell us about
Speaker 1: who we are in a way that maybe we don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and while also giving this guy a good job,
Speaker 1: I want Bernie sand does it. Talking about a federal
Speaker 1: job guarantee at fifteen are very up to me would
Speaker 1: be twenty two. I have reasons for that. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: so up until nineteen seventy three. Um, and I don't
Speaker 1: know why. I mean, there's there's the hypothesis and why
Speaker 1: this is the case. But if wages match productivity from
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three on, we'd be at an hour, right right,
Speaker 1: But at twenty two, I mean, but in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: three the productivity skyrocketed, Well, we just stayed the same.
Speaker 1: So like now we're just making more and just getting paid. Left. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so maybe it workers are not more productive, like
Speaker 1: they get lesser share of the profity. So I would
Speaker 1: have this federal job guarantee be at twenty two doll
Speaker 1: an hour and that would be a job. So you
Speaker 1: do that, you get the skills of like you know,
Speaker 1: going around, you're useful part of the community. You have
Speaker 1: a dignified job, and you had at twenty two dollars
Speaker 1: an hour. You can save, you can you can buy
Speaker 1: your own equipment, your own studio album. Yeah. And if
Speaker 1: it doesn't and if it goes south, it's a job guarantee,
Speaker 1: which means you just go back to the office and
Speaker 1: you get Yeah. So talk to me a little bit
Speaker 1: about the impact that the Federal Jobs Guarantee has on
Speaker 1: the private market. Well, it would be jobs. It would
Speaker 1: be doing jobs at the private market currently isn't doing. Right, So,
Speaker 1: the private market currently isn't providing elder care for people
Speaker 1: who can't pay between three and eight thousand dollars an
Speaker 1: hour a month, three and eight thousand dollars a month, right,
Speaker 1: So the job would be that it would be like
Speaker 1: you're working an elder care facility because apparently poor people
Speaker 1: grow old sometimes too. From time to time, they do age.
Speaker 1: So it would be doing jobs that i wouldn't necessarily
Speaker 1: compete with the market, but would extend market services to
Speaker 1: people who can't afford it because like they can't afford
Speaker 1: what it is on the private market, right, so um yeah,
Speaker 1: and the like I said, wealthy people have the disposable
Speaker 1: income to get their septic system fixed. If you don't,
Speaker 1: then either we have in America where people live in poop,
Speaker 1: or we have a federal job guarantee that includes like
Speaker 1: someone going to your place and ripping out your septic system,
Speaker 1: right Sam, with elther cants and with lead and water.
Speaker 1: Right because right now there was no plan for flint.
Speaker 1: And like I said, it's not just flint. We both
Speaker 1: know it's not just flint. It's not just flint. I think, well,
Speaker 1: we know it's in Baltimore too, It's in Baltimore. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's not just flint. Like everywhere there's leading pipes
Speaker 1: that should be ripped out. But right now, the only
Speaker 1: people who can afford to get their pipes swipp out
Speaker 1: of people who can afford plumbers, right, who had it
Speaker 1: ripped out already you know, gave their child like brain cancer.
Speaker 1: Yeah like wait wait wait wait, So like one of
Speaker 1: the federal job guarantee would be like you know this
Speaker 1: kind of work, right, So what JO is doing back there?
Speaker 1: You'd be producing like podcast for the people. So we
Speaker 1: need to think about what kind of services are already
Speaker 1: available to the Mike Bloomberg's of the world, and think, well,
Speaker 1: maybe they should be available to nanny's. Also childcare, child
Speaker 1: chalthcare needs to be universal and this is a childcare
Speaker 1: and Nathens, Georgia right now. Yeah, you because like people
Speaker 1: like to have kids and they shouldn't have And I think, honestly,
Speaker 1: if you get rid of some of these other impediments,
Speaker 1: like the abortion rate will go down because a lot
Speaker 1: of people have to choose between living in abject poverty
Speaker 1: or having a kid. So suddenly if you have all
Speaker 1: the services you need, is like, I'll have this job,
Speaker 1: you know, raise this childishment when we punished for having
Speaker 1: this job. So if we like, if we make having
Speaker 1: a child be less punishing, you'll, I think you'll see
Speaker 1: the abortion might go down, and I think you'll have
Speaker 1: better parents because like you know, it turns out then
Speaker 1: when your parents twenty two jobs, they fight less. But
Speaker 1: going to vacation to Disneyland every year, that's lots of
Speaker 1: pictures and you can bring back in mouse ears. And
Speaker 1: if you have a twenty two dollar now a job
Speaker 1: that you can clock out of that means you can also,
Speaker 1: like when you're off the job, you can go coach
Speaker 1: your kid's team. Right, So there is a quality of
Speaker 1: infrastructure that I think that we just need to extend
Speaker 1: to everybody. American has a matter of right. Because the Founders,
Speaker 1: and I'll bring this back to the Founders before we
Speaker 1: tied this up, the Founders understood that tyranny because they
Speaker 1: were thinking about the tyranny of King George, the tyranny
Speaker 1: of a foreign parliament. I don't want some foreign body
Speaker 1: telling me what to do, so I want to govern myself.
Speaker 1: But that's not the tyranny most people feel like in
Speaker 1: their in their in their day to day life as Americans,
Speaker 1: right now, we're under the tyranny of our bosses. Like, well,
Speaker 1: that's the same, it's the same kind of tyranny. It's
Speaker 1: just not King George. It's like, what do I have
Speaker 1: to I have to worry about my boss? Like, weren't
Speaker 1: like feeling some sort of way and getting into mood
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden I'm fired. That's another
Speaker 1: kind of tyranny. That definitely is a tyranny. So what
Speaker 1: do you need to get rid of that kind of tyranny?
Speaker 1: Like I said, this book Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson.
Speaker 1: I think it's really good on this score, but we
Speaker 1: need to understand that as a form of tyranny, and
Speaker 1: if we're going to be free and self determining in
Speaker 1: these United States, we need to get rid of the
Speaker 1: tyranny of the boss. That doesn't mean get rid of employers.
Speaker 1: That just means empowering employees and democratizing power, like on
Speaker 1: the job. Well, how do you feel about like cooperative
Speaker 1: development and actually having no bosses? Well, the thing is,
Speaker 1: I actually like I don't mind big companies. I don't
Speaker 1: mind Walmart, I don't mind Amazon, I don't mind Kroger Um.
Speaker 1: I maybe I don't want to be a boss. That
Speaker 1: should be a place for people who don't want to
Speaker 1: be bosses either, and don't want that boy, they just
Speaker 1: want to work them, They just want to work. I
Speaker 1: think there are efficiencies that you get from bigger companies.
Speaker 1: I just don't want the people who work for these
Speaker 1: bigger companies, the black people who work for these bigger companies,
Speaker 1: to be treated like slaves. Right, So I think co
Speaker 1: ops are fun. I don't think they work in a
Speaker 1: modern industrial economy. And like I said, I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't want to get rid of Amazon. I don't want
Speaker 1: to get rid of big grocery stores. I think they're efficient.
Speaker 1: The scale issues that like, for example, I don't want
Speaker 1: small farms necessarily. I don't mind big agriculture. We just
Speaker 1: need sustainable big agriculture. We just need to agriculture that
Speaker 1: doesn't also damage the environment. Right. So, um, we we
Speaker 1: just need to get if we're going to understand that
Speaker 1: we live in a world within our heart media, we
Speaker 1: just need to make sure that everyone has access and
Speaker 1: that the employees of these big companies are treated with
Speaker 1: dignity and they're not punished for for working. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: couple more things before we go. Um, I feel like
Speaker 1: I've heard you say before, and excuse me if I
Speaker 1: get this wrong, but something like, um, the reactionary attention
Speaker 1: that's paid within black culture and within hip hip hop culture,
Speaker 1: in my view, especially um to police brutality and criminal
Speaker 1: despers perform kind of takes away from attention that we
Speaker 1: could be spending on jobs. So why is so, Like,
Speaker 1: how does that happen? First of all, how do we
Speaker 1: get caught up on like reeling in the aftermath of
Speaker 1: police brutality? Incidents is rather than creating sustaining conversation about labor.
Speaker 1: I mean, we have such a confused labor discourse that, um,
Speaker 1: it just kind of gets overwhelmed by the spectacular. I
Speaker 1: mean I was, I was in Los Angeles and two
Speaker 1: were at you know, and at five o'clock, seven o'clock,
Speaker 1: and nine thirty you saw Wadney King just get to
Speaker 1: the ship be out of him. Like I was in
Speaker 1: l A when that, Like, when that happened, um and
Speaker 1: the riots have in nine I think I was maybe
Speaker 1: I thought it was after No, No, you're right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was in the late eighties, still in l A.
Speaker 1: And then I remember when the verdict got kicked out
Speaker 1: in the vertict So anyway, yeah, but anyway, it was
Speaker 1: on it was on television all them. So there's something
Speaker 1: spect occular about that kind of violence. And this is
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why, UM, pret last brutality was
Speaker 1: such an important part of the civil rights movement, Like
Speaker 1: we needed to dramatize the terrorism that black people are
Speaker 1: living under. So the conversation doesn't end there in terms
Speaker 1: of what sorts of violence we're experiencing. No, no, it's
Speaker 1: a terrorism and depression actually of just being a disposable population,
Speaker 1: we are a disposable population. And here's what happens. I
Speaker 1: think Los Angeles is actually a great example of what happens.
Speaker 1: If you just kind of handle the um mass incarceration
Speaker 1: part but don't do the economic part. You end up
Speaker 1: with a blood of black homelessness because they're still kicked
Speaker 1: out of the economy. The silly they might not be
Speaker 1: in jailable, they're not in jail anymore, they're still extra negros.
Speaker 1: We just have superfluous negroes because the private market doesn't
Speaker 1: want In New York, they put him in jail. In
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, maybe they don't put him in jail, but
Speaker 1: they have no other place in the economy for them.
Speaker 1: So that's your your homelessness population. It's black in the nation,
Speaker 1: and I think in l A it's eight A mean,
Speaker 1: California is about eight percent black. But the homeless population,
Speaker 1: I want to say it's like fourty or fiftt so,
Speaker 1: so homelessness United States is black. There was because there
Speaker 1: is no place for us in the productive economy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, if you're going to secure us freedom,
Speaker 1: you need to secure us a place in the productive economy.
Speaker 1: This is what credit Scott King was talking about when
Speaker 1: he was on like after Martin Luther King died and
Speaker 1: he was talking about a federal job guarantee and byod
Speaker 1: Wrestling was talking about one, and Martin Luther King was
Speaker 1: talking about one in his great speech, uh showdown for
Speaker 1: non violence instead of in this Black History Month of
Speaker 1: whenever you guys watch, listen to this instead of reading
Speaker 1: the I have a dream speech, look for showdown for
Speaker 1: non violence. That's where he lays all of this out
Speaker 1: and in the need for a federal job guarantee because
Speaker 1: the homelessness is it's black because there's no place for
Speaker 1: us to actually work to get enough money to sustain
Speaker 1: you know, a house, so like you get a house,
Speaker 1: but then the property taxes get you because you still
Speaker 1: don't have money. So the spectacular nous of of police
Speaker 1: brutality kind of masks the fact that there is no
Speaker 1: place in the economy for us because I know, I
Speaker 1: know a lot of drug dealers and I and they
Speaker 1: don't like the risk. They would rather be working a
Speaker 1: good job, not a job they're not working. They don't
Speaker 1: want to work nine dollars an hour and break their
Speaker 1: back for that, But they would take. They would take
Speaker 1: a federal job guarantee of twenty two dollars an hour
Speaker 1: doing public works rather than sling Kane or whatever. So like,
Speaker 1: I don't, I like a lot of people get into
Speaker 1: that life because there's no other place for us in
Speaker 1: the productive account and productive economy where that's not abjectly degrading. Because,
Speaker 1: like I said, these guys are gonna work for nine
Speaker 1: dollars an hour, but if you give if you offer
Speaker 1: them a twenty two dollar an hour job that's actually
Speaker 1: like providing material or cultural infrastructure, they would much rather
Speaker 1: do that than eat the risk, right, And so we
Speaker 1: were we were debating whether or not the risk of
Speaker 1: slaying Kane or whatever, like if that is a part
Speaker 1: of the appeal. I was like, it was like, exactly
Speaker 1: agree with you that the prospects of being an employee
Speaker 1: and how terrible that is has pushed people into the streets.
Speaker 1: And that's it. That's the only appeal, Like being a
Speaker 1: black employee is so bad that we end up like
Speaker 1: doing these awful things to make ends meet, because it's
Speaker 1: either you work for some man at nine dollars an
Speaker 1: hour who still treat you like garbage and you're still vulnerable,
Speaker 1: and you're still vulnerable because like that white boss comes
Speaker 1: in is in a bad mood and then there you go,
Speaker 1: your job's gone, yeah, or or you you end up
Speaker 1: on the street, like doing what you can on the
Speaker 1: street to make money and there's a little bit more flexibility,
Speaker 1: but you're eating a lot of risk. So like that's
Speaker 1: not white life. Yeah, that's not like there's no uncle
Speaker 1: who's gonna get you on a job, like no, like
Speaker 1: at a good wage. That's like that's white life. But
Speaker 1: the black life, that's just not the case for black life.
Speaker 1: So you end up like taking these incredibly risky like
Speaker 1: positions and then you end up in jail or you
Speaker 1: look like someone you look like someone that might be
Speaker 1: in a risky position because yeas to every black president
Speaker 1: is under that in the private economy, that means that
Speaker 1: you look like the other black people on the street. Right,
Speaker 1: So I think, as I want to say, seven years ago,
Speaker 1: I haven't seen the most recent number. I think ten
Speaker 1: percent of black men between nineteen and thirty nine, those
Speaker 1: are prime working age are in jail. I got this pervision. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's ten percent of nineteen thirty nine. Ten percent. That's
Speaker 1: a chunk. That's like, yeah, that's a lot of people.
Speaker 1: That's so much that it screws up the entire economy.
Speaker 1: We can't get labor statistics. That's so much of like
Speaker 1: the working classmen are in jail. And so the question
Speaker 1: is do you let him out of jail but still
Speaker 1: out of the economy, which means you're on the street
Speaker 1: like homelessness or intensely that's Los Angeles, or do you
Speaker 1: just round them up and put him in a cage,
Speaker 1: because at least in the cage are out of sight
Speaker 1: and out of mind. Right, geographical solution to socio economic problem.
Speaker 1: But and you know, if there was a great the
Speaker 1: movie what you call it, Sorry to Bother, that was
Speaker 1: very well done. He was like, we haven't talked about it,
Speaker 1: Yett in this podcast. Well I'm just thinking that, Like
Speaker 1: there was a one scene one of the characters is like, look,
Speaker 1: it's so stressful trying to keep this house and live
Speaker 1: in Oakland that I don't know, jail doesn't look so bad.
Speaker 1: There are three hots and a cot, but I don't
Speaker 1: like insta bill and like it's very stressful. I like Oakland, California,
Speaker 1: if I grew up in I mean I went to
Speaker 1: college in Berkeley, so like I always a weird and
Speaker 1: I would live around there. But now that I'm in
Speaker 1: Athan Georgia, you know, I moved out and I can't
Speaker 1: really move back. It's not for me, so because like
Speaker 1: I can't afford everything costs and I don't have money,
Speaker 1: so like that's not for me. But the idea that
Speaker 1: it's less stressful in jail, why do not go to
Speaker 1: Yeah that that yeah, exactly, not an extraneous negro outside
Speaker 1: of jail. So it's not like it's not like what
Speaker 1: I'm You're like, well, if you go to jail, you
Speaker 1: can't take care of your family. It's not like I
Speaker 1: can take care of my family anyway. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: what I'm thinking. So like that that I thought that
Speaker 1: was dramatized pretty well and so bother you and it's
Speaker 1: just like it's really a problem. And the way do
Speaker 1: we secure people their dignity and secure them a value
Speaker 1: place in life is to create this infrastructure, a job
Speaker 1: guarantee that says, like, you know what you get out
Speaker 1: of jail. We got to twenty two dollars an hour
Speaker 1: show up and strengthened labor unions and strength of labor
Speaker 1: unions and like these jobs will be unionized, so like yeah,
Speaker 1: you just get to negotiate your working conditions or else
Speaker 1: some some mid level upper manager will look at a
Speaker 1: spreadsheep or higher consultant from McKenzie or whatever to look
Speaker 1: at the spread team and say like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: we can save a little bit of money if we
Speaker 1: just have like medical vehicles outside and didn't get rid
Speaker 1: of the air condition because we're losing a lot of
Speaker 1: money and keeping the warehouse cool. Like like, no, you
Speaker 1: want to be able to negotiate that. You don't want
Speaker 1: that decision to come down top down. But so we
Speaker 1: want black employment in the United States to actually be
Speaker 1: like a dignifying experience because we want to embrace the
Speaker 1: fact of our advanced industrial economy. So we're gonna have employees.
Speaker 1: Let's pay employees, and the interesting ways you could do this, right,
Speaker 1: So we subsidize farmers um with farm subsidies. That's if
Speaker 1: anybody knows anything about American oak culture, the only reason
Speaker 1: we got food is because of farm subsidies. It's right.
Speaker 1: It gets rid of a lot of inefficiencies and just
Speaker 1: we just wouldn't have food um without farm subsidies. So
Speaker 1: we subsidize farmers to either grow or not grow food.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should. We could also subsidize farm workers, right,
Speaker 1: So farm workers get paid twenty dollars an hour, but um,
Speaker 1: the employer, the farmer only pays like you know seven. Right,
Speaker 1: So it's it's a direct subsidy too, is proposing right now?
Speaker 1: I don't not really, But we were so comfortable subsidizing owners.
Speaker 1: Were it's not comfortable with subsidizing workers. Subsidizing workers, all right,
Speaker 1: So you need these many workers to fulfill this farm.
Speaker 1: We want your food. That's great, this is a public
Speaker 1: good that like we're gonna allow you to have as
Speaker 1: a farm. That's good. It's still your farm. But I'm
Speaker 1: gonna need your workers to be paid you know, twenty
Speaker 1: dollars an hour. Well, you don't want to pay twenty
Speaker 1: dolls an hour because they drive you out of business,
Speaker 1: that's fine, you pay seven. We'll get the other third team,
Speaker 1: and we'll tax Bloomberg for it. Right, And people say,
Speaker 1: well that might lead to inflation. First of all, why
Speaker 1: is every time nobody ever talks about inflation when you're
Speaker 1: talking about like me, like wealthy people getting right? Uh? Second,
Speaker 1: all Trump nobody about also talks about the deficit when
Speaker 1: Trump cuts taxes for their wealthy. Right, so Trump is
Speaker 1: ballooning deficits. Yet ballooning deficits, we still don't hit inflation
Speaker 1: targets because like we haven't hit max productivity and you
Speaker 1: know as well as I do, we are under producing
Speaker 1: in the American South. You get the hookworms out and
Speaker 1: the water out and get everybody internet to and like
Speaker 1: I'm I'm in Athens right now, and people like, well
Speaker 1: doesn't everybody have internet? Now you go about six miles
Speaker 1: in any direction, I've minute driving like you're back on
Speaker 1: dial up and you've got like modem shah. So so
Speaker 1: we are like you get those people clean water, you
Speaker 1: get them a cultural infrastructure, some newspapers and internet in
Speaker 1: the internet, and you know, and you know what they have,
Speaker 1: the productivity goes up, right, So right now we can
Speaker 1: like we've been ballooning the deficit, but since we haven't
Speaker 1: maxed out productivity, the costs haven't gone up because of UM,
Speaker 1: supplier diversity and supplier UM. Yeah, supplier diversity is keeping
Speaker 1: brought the prices down, right, So we don't have to
Speaker 1: worry about inflation until we have to worry about inflation,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of There are a ton of indicators,
Speaker 1: and it's not generalized. Inflation is good specific because right now,
Speaker 1: like the press of most things is either staying stead
Speaker 1: you are going light me down, like like microphones, it's
Speaker 1: actually going down, yeah because I'm going yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: But the price of healthcare, college tuition, those are going up.
Speaker 1: But those are that's that inflation is a matter of
Speaker 1: bad politics. That's not like that. Yeah, that's that's not
Speaker 1: more money in people's pocket. That's just bad politics. We
Speaker 1: have bad health care policy. So like healthcare costs of
Speaker 1: going up because like their private industry has taken our
Speaker 1: government so um. So the idea that if you pay
Speaker 1: workers sometimes like if you pay workers, prices of things
Speaker 1: will go up, like assumes that all of the people
Speaker 1: are as productive as they couldn't be, or they wouldn't
Speaker 1: be making new things that will compete with the old
Speaker 1: things that will bring the whole price down for like
Speaker 1: all goods, which is which has attested to happen, it happens.
Speaker 1: And and and if you agree with me listening at home,
Speaker 1: that America's under producing in the South is underproducing, and
Speaker 1: that if you give people clean water and clean air
Speaker 1: and um, you know internet, they will actually be more
Speaker 1: productive than they are right now with their hookworm infest itself.
Speaker 1: Then then like for example, if you actually forgive student
Speaker 1: and just wipe it, wipe it clean, wipe it clean,
Speaker 1: clean the economy, it will people be more productive. People
Speaker 1: will be more Productivey'll be able to start businesses, our
Speaker 1: chances taking like they'll be able to actually produce things
Speaker 1: as opposed to like, well, I was gonna buy this
Speaker 1: this microphone and start a podcast, but I gotta pay
Speaker 1: Sally May like, that's a decision. I was gonna get
Speaker 1: married and then like married, so business. I was gonna
Speaker 1: start a contracting business, but like you know that thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a month to Sally May like, so you wipe
Speaker 1: that away and like that will like take the chain
Speaker 1: off of an entire generation who's under producing right now
Speaker 1: because like they have to all their money goes over
Speaker 1: to like the a half million dollars debt or quarter.
Speaker 1: You know what's your name, Uh, Stacy Abams. That's Stacy Abram.
Speaker 1: I bet her a few times one on one we
Speaker 1: had he like a t She is smart. She's smarter
Speaker 1: though she's as smartest of us. She's the best of us.
Speaker 1: Like Stacy Abams is smart two d K and it's
Speaker 1: not like, well, you know, if she just tried harder
Speaker 1: in school, she went yeah, yeah, yeah, get out of here.
Speaker 1: Well she just tried harder, you know, she would like
Speaker 1: she spent all the money helping out her parents and
Speaker 1: like things the un expensive. So like Stacie Abams, the
Speaker 1: best of us, better than I am is two hundred
Speaker 1: k and debt because like black life kind of sucked
Speaker 1: it in and like and then being if you're related
Speaker 1: to black people, it's expensive. It's not as expensive being black.
Speaker 1: It's expensive being related to black people because like you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you gotta cover cover your friends dead, or maybe
Speaker 1: you got it, like something something happened bailing people out
Speaker 1: of jail. Someone got a heart palpitation, so they went
Speaker 1: to jail. But then they got an ambulance and oh
Speaker 1: they got that ambulance. So now, how much is an
Speaker 1: ambulance bill? At least I want to say it's higher
Speaker 1: than that. So you got people going to uber, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know it's gonna be now now yeah, because
Speaker 1: like that's no way to live. That's the way to live.
Speaker 1: So so the idea that, um, if you take away
Speaker 1: that kind of stress, people won't be more productive is
Speaker 1: ridiculous because it's it's not proven out and coming to
Speaker 1: economics and and so yeah, we pay people, they'll be
Speaker 1: more productive. And anytime there's an inflationary good, we can
Speaker 1: have a policy that takes care of that, just like
Speaker 1: we did with with food. Right, So like we shouldn't
Speaker 1: have to, we shouldn't. This is like the inflation argument,
Speaker 1: a bad argument. We need to pay black people for
Speaker 1: the work they do, because it's not as everyone can't
Speaker 1: be a boss. Because sometimes I want someone else doing
Speaker 1: my childcare, someone else's. I have three kids. I can't
Speaker 1: both have three kids watching them while doing this podcast.
Speaker 1: I need someone else doing that I want and I
Speaker 1: want else And if they're paid very well, that makes
Speaker 1: me happy. Yeah, because they've taken better care of my kids. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But so I wanted to ask you two quick questions.
Speaker 1: We're getting over time. So do you do you need
Speaker 1: to go? No? No, no, go? Okay. So, um, we
Speaker 1: talked a little about the Wagner Act and subsequent tippings
Speaker 1: away at it. We talked about black sputation workers for
Speaker 1: Memphis and do you guys talk about how that started
Speaker 1: with the with the guy who got killed in the
Speaker 1: trash compattor got die What a fucking terrible way to die.
Speaker 1: I found out about that two years I was shocked. Shocked.
Speaker 1: That's how that whole thing got started. They were trying
Speaker 1: to get out of the rain, yeah, in a trash
Speaker 1: compactor that wasn't working right, and as a result of
Speaker 1: the strikes, didn't have to work in the rain anymore.
Speaker 1: So I was wondering, I was any other tidbits from
Speaker 1: black labor history that people ought to know. There's a
Speaker 1: great movie called ten Thousand Black Men Named George. Just
Speaker 1: find it. I got, I got my copy, and I
Speaker 1: like I had to get like a DVD turned out
Speaker 1: the Black Men Named George. It's about a Philip Randolph
Speaker 1: and uh him starting the Pullman workers union, right, and
Speaker 1: just what it actually captured very well. It's like normal
Speaker 1: ray for black people, right, So it's it's it's it
Speaker 1: captures very well about the stresses of actually like organizing
Speaker 1: for worker justice and what that looks like because like
Speaker 1: it's not like we don't want pullman port Pullman where
Speaker 1: the people who got your uggage and all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: And when you're traveling sometimes you want people to get
Speaker 1: your luggage. That's that's great, right, But we also want
Speaker 1: those people to get paid. Right, So it was just
Speaker 1: a ten thousand black men named George. It's a great
Speaker 1: movie and I think it really just dramatizes what it
Speaker 1: is like to go from like not having dignity do
Speaker 1: you work on your workplace to having dignity on your workplace. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they'll be helpful for people watching who are for listen,
Speaker 1: who are listening who have no idea how this works. Right, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm pissed about everything you've said, and I feel you.
Speaker 1: But now what do I do? Well, what does that
Speaker 1: even mean? Well, the funny thing is like shell Samberg
Speaker 1: came out with that book a few years ago, lean In, Right,
Speaker 1: I got so many black people fired. The tried to
Speaker 1: lean in by themselves and then well it wasn't for me.
Speaker 1: You try to negotiate you with your boss one on one,
Speaker 1: it turns out like, well, you're not good fit for
Speaker 1: the company anymore. So like you can't lean in one
Speaker 1: on one. You need to lean in as a group.
Speaker 1: You need to lean in as a group because that's
Speaker 1: why you bounce a power, and that's why you can negotiate,
Speaker 1: because the rule of thumb is unless you could shut
Speaker 1: it down, you don't have negotiating power. So you need
Speaker 1: just enough power to be able to stop the machine.
Speaker 1: You don't need more than that, but you need that.
Speaker 1: So if you get enough people to just be able
Speaker 1: to stop the services, then you have um bargaining power
Speaker 1: to go get it, to go get it. Get it, folks,
Speaker 1: you'll get it. It's been great having you. Where do
Speaker 1: we find your work? All right? So I have a
Speaker 1: podcast I run doing local politics out of Athens. It's
Speaker 1: so just go on YouTube and you put in Funky
Speaker 1: Academic or the Black Athenians. I'll be there. Or you
Speaker 1: can just go to funky academic dot com. Well do
Speaker 1: you got cash at PayPal? How do they send you money?
Speaker 1: Funky academic dot com. You'll find a nice little panel
Speaker 1: on the left side and you could scroll down and
Speaker 1: give me five, fifteen, or fifty dollars a month would
Speaker 1: be great, Or give me a one time huge donation.
Speaker 1: Or you can leave me. Just go ahead and email
Speaker 1: me and leave me in your will. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: could get a piece of that inheritance because you know what,
Speaker 1: given money to me to spread the word would be
Speaker 1: good for America. And maybe your kids have enough, so
Speaker 1: so and like maybe you want your better kids friends,
Speaker 1: so you give you just leave me, just leave me
Speaker 1: your inheritance, that would be nice too. Appreciate you being
Speaker 1: hire man. Thanks thanks so As a Lingua Franco was
Speaker 1: saying earlier, when we were doing like the initial research
Speaker 1: to try to find songs that had labor as the
Speaker 1: topic or were about the topic of working at nine
Speaker 1: to five or that working man's grind, we're having a
Speaker 1: hard time finding it because, Um, for the most part,
Speaker 1: when we searched for it, most of the references to
Speaker 1: working we're either broad or vague concepts of hustle or
Speaker 1: working hard, or I'll put in the work in general
Speaker 1: like ethic. Yeah, it is general, like almost like gatorade
Speaker 1: commercial type ship. You know what I'm saying. Um, whenever
Speaker 1: jobs were reference, it was never in any sort of
Speaker 1: positive sense. So I think that's why, well, yeah, like
Speaker 1: I think that's why it's hard. It was hard for
Speaker 1: us to find like examples of rap songs that were
Speaker 1: for or about working men and women, just because that's
Speaker 1: like a topic that like people literally don't give a
Speaker 1: funk about in hip hop, like people people get it
Speaker 1: into hip hop to not have a regular shop, you know,
Speaker 1: Like people people do rap so that their mother doesn't
Speaker 1: have to work anymore, you know what I mean, so
Speaker 1: that their family and their friends are straight. Yeah, quote
Speaker 1: unquote straight and nobody has to you know. So with that,
Speaker 1: it makes it it makes it kind of expected that
Speaker 1: you wouldn't find a lot of m c s dedicating
Speaker 1: a song topic to their job, right, right, at least
Speaker 1: not in the mainstream sense, um right, because it's aspirational.
Speaker 1: Even if somebody is working at nine to five and
Speaker 1: like on quote unquote on the side of their like
Speaker 1: wrap aspirations. They're not gonna wrap about that. They want
Speaker 1: to wrap about like something that is inspiring to them,
Speaker 1: something that is like where they want to go, who
Speaker 1: they want to be, fashioning themselves as a different kind
Speaker 1: of person in their music, so they don't have to
Speaker 1: deal with they're not too ship And let's be real,
Speaker 1: I mean, like getting a nine to five isn't attractive,
Speaker 1: you know, based on these the weakening of like labor
Speaker 1: unions and stuff like that that we talked about earlier.
Speaker 1: If you have to work fourteen hour days and a
Speaker 1: boiling hot kitchen getting screamed at by your sous chef
Speaker 1: about you know, you gotta flip the burgers quicker or
Speaker 1: whatever if you have to be on the back of
Speaker 1: that sanitation truck in the rain with getting garbage juice
Speaker 1: spilled on you, and like you're only making you know,
Speaker 1: an hour, Like why why, Yeah, it's not anybody's like dream,
Speaker 1: it's not anybody's dream. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean the
Speaker 1: line that epitomizes how I think the j O. B
Speaker 1: Has been like dealt with in hip hop. It's from
Speaker 1: a Eminem song eight Mile Road, was on the eight
Speaker 1: Mile soundtrack, but regular, and it's like it's it's in
Speaker 1: the middle of the song, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of stuff that he says before, but
Speaker 1: it's like the whole song is about you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's eight miles on the eight Miles soundtracks. I'm going
Speaker 1: to battles, grinding them right every day and all that ship.
Speaker 1: So when he gets to that line, it's kind of like, damn, yeah,
Speaker 1: it would suck if you just it would all that hustle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's early as early as Grandmaster Flash and the
Speaker 1: Furious Five on the message they're talking about. Uh, my
Speaker 1: son said, Daddy, I don't want to go to school
Speaker 1: because the teachers are jerky, must think I'm a fool,
Speaker 1: and all the kids smoke reeper, And I think it
Speaker 1: would be cheaper if I just got a job learned
Speaker 1: to be a street streeper. So like already they're talking
Speaker 1: about like school, like you know, I just it's probably
Speaker 1: more lucrative if I just get a job. It's one
Speaker 1: of the few I guess positive reversences to getting a
Speaker 1: job that it's out there. Well, I mean it's positive,
Speaker 1: it's dark, it's um, it's realistic, it's realistic, it's realistic.
Speaker 1: But I mean, do you you know that I kind
Speaker 1: of feel that somehow the Fox school aspect and Funk
Speaker 1: a regular job or connected, Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: an anti establishment push on both sides. Both of these institutions.
Speaker 1: Fun a corporation, UM government job and fuck the public
Speaker 1: school system. All of these ship is run by white people.
Speaker 1: So I don't want to do it. Word. So what
Speaker 1: we got next? Oh? Great, Kanye? Yeah, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about spaceships by Kanye, which I feel like has
Speaker 1: the most one of the most interesting anti labor, not
Speaker 1: anti one of the most interesting commentaries on labor in
Speaker 1: the In in hip Hop, he talks about work in
Speaker 1: this grave ship and I made ship. Wish I could
Speaker 1: buy me a spaceship and fly. And then he says,
Speaker 1: you know, if my manager insults me again, I will
Speaker 1: be assulting him after the manager and I'm going to shorten.
Speaker 1: Let's go back back to the gap. Look at my check.
Speaker 1: Wasn't those scratch So if I stole it wasn't my fault. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Stoll never got caught. Take me to the back and
Speaker 1: pat me asking me about some khakis. But let some
Speaker 1: black people walk in. I bet you they'll show off.
Speaker 1: They're talking black. Oh now they love car. Put them
Speaker 1: all in the front of the stone. So I'm on
Speaker 1: break next to the no smoking sign with a blunting
Speaker 1: them all. So we're talking about literally working at the gap,
Speaker 1: working at the gap and how much that sucks, and
Speaker 1: the manager getting on you and then tokenization dragging you
Speaker 1: out of black people come in the store, So how
Speaker 1: do how do you feel? Like, how do you feel
Speaker 1: about just that string? They're like it sounds like in
Speaker 1: your voice that that hits that hits that hits. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think it's critical for like the very beginnings of
Speaker 1: developing class consciousness. I'm like, yo, like we shouldn't have
Speaker 1: to live like this. We shouldn't have to work under
Speaker 1: these conditions. We don't shouldn't have to like put up
Speaker 1: with this ship from our managers. I should be able
Speaker 1: to smoke weed in them all, like I steal because
Speaker 1: they're not paying me enough. Like this is this is
Speaker 1: the reality. This is the reality we live under right now.
Speaker 1: And so um, it doesn't get into like a critique
Speaker 1: of like labor, you know, to a like technical extent,
Speaker 1: but like it's got the it's got the bait, the blaze,
Speaker 1: the bones, you know, just like oh yeah, don't you
Speaker 1: doesn't resonate with you that like this nine to five suck,
Speaker 1: these managers sucked, these hours, suck this paycheck. I think
Speaker 1: this is kind of almost you know, like indicative of
Speaker 1: like a lot of the examples that we found where
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily that anyone is dedicating the entire song
Speaker 1: or even the entire verse, but it's just like little
Speaker 1: commentaries about jobs and labor and just the condition, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean of working and what that's like that you
Speaker 1: hear throughout rap music and yeah, yeah. The next example
Speaker 1: what I want to talk about was mad City by Kendrick,
Speaker 1: which maybe like probably wouldn't jump out to you as
Speaker 1: like a labor song, but it says my pop said
Speaker 1: it needed a job, but did you already going for
Speaker 1: He ended up leaving back. I got fired because that
Speaker 1: was just fired. My friends stay Robbery the third Saturday
Speaker 1: at Clacton. So it's like, do I hold this job
Speaker 1: down or do I engage in a lista ship that
Speaker 1: like we'll get you pay quicker and harder and also
Speaker 1: to your point, like has that illicit like that dangerous
Speaker 1: bad boy element to it that is appealing arguably to
Speaker 1: people within hip hop. Yeah, I mean because I've you know,
Speaker 1: everybody knows somebody, you know what I'm saying. But it's
Speaker 1: like I've got the family and friends you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, who are doing show who are like yo,
Speaker 1: there's certain aspects of this ship where it's like you
Speaker 1: might as well just get when you weigh out, like
Speaker 1: the risk, like you're you're working like hard, harder than
Speaker 1: you would Yeah, you're working in fast food and if
Speaker 1: you get caught you going to jail for like twenty
Speaker 1: seven of life, So it's like, what am I doing? Right? Um? Uh?
Speaker 1: The next one, this one kind of shifts in a
Speaker 1: bit because this one actually is about working in the
Speaker 1: corporate environment. But that's because it was made for the
Speaker 1: soundtrack of a movie. We're talking about the Cannabis and
Speaker 1: Bismarckie song Shove This j O B. It was on
Speaker 1: the soundtrack to a very funny movie, Office Space. It's
Speaker 1: hard to almost pick out a single line from this one,
Speaker 1: just because that's the whole song is about that. It's
Speaker 1: just about pretty much the plot of Office Space, the
Speaker 1: grind of going the job every day, the repetition being
Speaker 1: in a cubicle, um, not being treated right, not even
Speaker 1: being considered as like a person or a commodity. You're
Speaker 1: just like they're you know what I'm saying, all that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. My favorite session is it is um
Speaker 1: Cannabis says, you wonder why your workload is so enormous
Speaker 1: because the boss just laid off the quarters of the
Speaker 1: whole office. You get depressed and get also stressed by
Speaker 1: what the corporate environment causes. Pretty much the whole song
Speaker 1: is about that. It's so it's a lot more comedic.
Speaker 1: It's not really somber critique of ship, but even that
Speaker 1: makes it effective in the point that it's trying to
Speaker 1: make that it brings levity into it, and that it's funny,
Speaker 1: and the beats really quirky, and you got bis Markey
Speaker 1: on the hook. Take this job, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: like these lines later on the song. You have some occupations.
Speaker 1: It's like slave gigs. The boss is favored and get
Speaker 1: placed in some spacious all the most hated get placed
Speaker 1: in some small s people, well, the most hated get
Speaker 1: placed in some small cubical spaces or get thrown down
Speaker 1: in the base. When get to just Stapler confiscating, that's
Speaker 1: like directly, I love it. No, that's good, that's good ship.
Speaker 1: It's fun. It's hard to find songs that are about
Speaker 1: like picketing, about striking, about coming together. It's where girls,
Speaker 1: because let's be honest, most rappers, like most every day
Speaker 1: or nary rappers on the level of like Mac and
Speaker 1: I have other jobs. They have other jobs, and there's
Speaker 1: very few. I mean, like you might occasionally find a
Speaker 1: song like Spaceships, or find a song like Shove This
Speaker 1: j Ob, or find snippets like from Kendricks Mad City
Speaker 1: where people are like critiquing, like, man, that's what sucks.
Speaker 1: But really do you hear someone actually say like, well,
Speaker 1: let's do something about it. And so, um, well, I'm
Speaker 1: of the Jacobin article that I was going to reference.
Speaker 1: Um it was just talking about how there's a there's
Speaker 1: like a long tradition of strike strikes from going from
Speaker 1: the eight hundreds up till now, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: And it's just it's just like none of them are
Speaker 1: really rap songs. Say, granted, absolutely been around since like,
Speaker 1: but that's a seventy nine. It's not exactly like we've
Speaker 1: been living in a utopia since nineteen seventy nine. But again,
Speaker 1: that's not necessarily a critique on hip hop. That's just
Speaker 1: it's it's where the music is coming from. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. The music is just not coming from
Speaker 1: a point of view that is like, yo, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to work work within an establishment system. And it's also
Speaker 1: I think the case that like white labor unions have
Speaker 1: a much longer history than black ones. To just give
Speaker 1: him the way the Wagner Act work, and so you
Speaker 1: have within white culture more like artistic offerings that rose
Speaker 1: out of the labor movement, whereas our you know what
Speaker 1: was it nine sixty eight where we had the black
Speaker 1: sanitation workers striking like we we gotta catch up, We
Speaker 1: gotta catch up still. And I think also the way
Speaker 1: is that economic austerity during the Reagan era affected black communities.
Speaker 1: It put us behind in terms of engaging in labor
Speaker 1: and and either way that the ship. What did I
Speaker 1: just do? I just hurt my ear m. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know what I just did. Sorry, I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just like here for a second, um, the way that
Speaker 1: labor rights have been chipped away at since then, just
Speaker 1: the combination those factors has put us behind as a
Speaker 1: culture in terms of engaging labor stuff in the music.
Speaker 1: So I think that's another reason why we don't have
Speaker 1: a lot of strike songs. But do you think that
Speaker 1: in two thousand twenty that like a rapper could could
Speaker 1: emerge who is like a like a Bob Dylan of
Speaker 1: rat you know what I mean, just like some sort
Speaker 1: of like champion of the working man, but like become
Speaker 1: like the biggest thing in the world, the biggest thing
Speaker 1: in the world. NA have a mainstream have a mainstream platform. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're gonna end up talking about him a
Speaker 1: lot in this podcast, but I feel like Killer Mike
Speaker 1: is like a working class hero that yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: that champions working class causes and has a pretty big
Speaker 1: mainstream platform. That's a good example. Yeah, that's a really
Speaker 1: good example. And took him a long time to get there.
Speaker 1: So maybe we have some some current talents bubbling under that,
Speaker 1: you know, in the next decade or so, or could
Speaker 1: it blow up and like bring those causes to the fore,
Speaker 1: especially as we have a political revolution in this country.
Speaker 1: But there are some strike songs. One notably a GMAC
Speaker 1: Detroit rapper has the song on Strike where he stands
Speaker 1: in solidarity solidarity with union auto workers striking against general
Speaker 1: mortors who took grievance with the fact that they planted
Speaker 1: and have air conditioning, that they were there so called
Speaker 1: permit temp workers who didn't qualify for full wages or
Speaker 1: benefits and didn't have a clear path to being hired
Speaker 1: full time. And in the video it's set on a
Speaker 1: picket line with a rapper joint striking autoworkers by hoisting
Speaker 1: the picket signs and mugging with them. On the camera.
Speaker 1: Let's listen to a little bit of that. We go,
Speaker 1: so he's better listen. We ain't about to keep working
Speaker 1: under the terms working like, so get I gotta like
Speaker 1: it more now the second again, Yeah, actually, because before
Speaker 1: my my critique of it was I was I was saying,
Speaker 1: I like the verses, but I don't like the hook
Speaker 1: or the beat, and I think that it's so simple
Speaker 1: we're going on strike, and this was just like, this
Speaker 1: wasn't anything that I was even going to mention, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, Like in all honesty, I was
Speaker 1: just like, oh, that's what I thought, But the sentiment
Speaker 1: of it is important. So it's like I've kind of
Speaker 1: let that slide. But just like critiquing it from like
Speaker 1: my rapper nerd side, I've got like critiques in the song,
Speaker 1: and I feel that that affects the effectiveness of the
Speaker 1: message if the song isn't on point. But listening to
Speaker 1: it just now, I mean that beat, it's kind of hot,
Speaker 1: like the simplicity of the rhyme schemes, and like it's
Speaker 1: not super densely like lyrically rhythmically, it doesn't need to be,
Speaker 1: because like it gets the point. Clock cross really clearly
Speaker 1: what their demands are. They're working in plant with no
Speaker 1: air conditioning, these tempts, working like slaves and never get higher.
Speaker 1: Like it's really like it it comes through crystal clear. What.
Speaker 1: I don't care whatever your ship is about. I do
Speaker 1: not like hooks or motherfucker's just say the same thing
Speaker 1: over and over again. Hey, it's not for me. It's
Speaker 1: like it's like it's like a protest. It's like a rally, chap.
Speaker 1: I'm not going on strike. We're going on strike, like
Speaker 1: just filling the spots. It's more easier to say that
Speaker 1: ain't no power like the power of the people, because
Speaker 1: the power of the people don't stop. Like, let's be real,
Speaker 1: if we were going to go to a picket rally,
Speaker 1: a picket line like that ship, catchy, that ship say
Speaker 1: it all day, I feel you. I look, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that it's not catchy. I just think there could
Speaker 1: be more to it. I don't know if there were
Speaker 1: more to it, would it be as mass appealing. That's
Speaker 1: a kind of rapule you like ship that it is
Speaker 1: a little more dense, a little more technical. That's I
Speaker 1: didn't say anything else. Then that's what I like, all right,
Speaker 1: So the next example we wanted to talk about was
Speaker 1: Astbrox Labor, which is almost twenty years old now um
Speaker 1: asad Rock. It's a hip hop recording artist, a producer
Speaker 1: who resides in Portland, Oregon. He was at the forefront
Speaker 1: of a new wave of underground and alternative hip hop
Speaker 1: accent emerged during the ninety nineties and nine In early
Speaker 1: two thousand's Thank You Wikipedia Wow this album Labor Day.
Speaker 1: This is a concept album involving around the life of
Speaker 1: the working class in the United States. He was one
Speaker 1: of the best, some would say one of the best
Speaker 1: albums in hip hop in two thousand one, and rightly
Speaker 1: regarded as one of the most important records of the deaf.
Speaker 1: Jux Era was a indie hip hop label early two
Speaker 1: thousands run by LP and I want to look particularly
Speaker 1: at the song nine to five is Anthem and which
Speaker 1: he has this kind of like spoken wordy outro or
Speaker 1: hook rather um where he says, now we are the
Speaker 1: American working population hate the fact that hate our job.
Speaker 1: So like he's got it's kind of like this manifestoe.
Speaker 1: The the way that the the vocals are layered, it
Speaker 1: sounds like a like a like a like a chance,
Speaker 1: Like there's like many voices coming together to proclaim this,
Speaker 1: like we the American working population hate the nine to
Speaker 1: five day and day out, and we'd rather be supporting
Speaker 1: ourselves by being paid to perfect the past times that
Speaker 1: we have harv but based solely on the fact that
Speaker 1: it makes a smile and it sounds dope, which I've
Speaker 1: always loved. I've always loved that line. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: pretty much is that's that's that's the thing right there,
Speaker 1: that is that is like, that is the hip hop
Speaker 1: relationship with the work I think right there, although you know,
Speaker 1: going back to my last critique, I think that he
Speaker 1: could with that hook could use a little bit of
Speaker 1: the simplicity, Yeah, simplicity of going on a little bit
Speaker 1: to get in the studio. Yeah, we need to link
Speaker 1: these two and they need to make the BA strike
Speaker 1: protest working. Yeah. Yeah. And then he has this interesting
Speaker 1: critique of like of the working class and how they
Speaker 1: get sucked into the prison, the how they get sucked
Speaker 1: into the military industrial complex. In the second verse, he says,
Speaker 1: it's the year the land shark, dry, sand parched down.
Speaker 1: Get these men some water. They're out here being slaughtered,
Speaker 1: and the meaning its war, so you don't have to
Speaker 1: bother so you can sit and soak the idiot box
Speaker 1: trying to funk their dollars. So it's like this relationship
Speaker 1: between the people at the top and the people at
Speaker 1: the bottom, where we have these generals, these politicians, these
Speaker 1: folks that like fucking Raytheon or whatever, that are getting
Speaker 1: all the money for war, and then these working class
Speaker 1: folks that are getting sucked into it so that they
Speaker 1: can send and soak the idiot box and trying to
Speaker 1: sunk their dollars. I was interesting. The whole album though
Speaker 1: in general, like has like the theme of Yeah. One
Speaker 1: quick thing though that I think is so that I
Speaker 1: wanted to mention for heads that maybe didn't notice this
Speaker 1: for the outro samples Dolly's Partners nine to five, Yeah,
Speaker 1: cup of Ambition and yawn, It's runch and my life
Speaker 1: is a medicine anyway. Another thing. I never knew that
Speaker 1: before I looked at it recently. The thing is my mom,
Speaker 1: who is the weirdest thing, like born and raised in Liberia,
Speaker 1: huge country music fan, like like old country, like Conway
Speaker 1: Twitty ship like that, you know what I'm saying, Like
Speaker 1: like she and she got into it while living in
Speaker 1: living Yeah, like so growing up, I've heard the song
Speaker 1: nine to five like a million times. I didn't even notice.
Speaker 1: That's like a perfect sample for the song because she's
Speaker 1: pretty much on the same themes that he is. All Right,
Speaker 1: well that's it for us today. Thank you for listening,
Speaker 1: and please go watch Irony's show, The Black Athenians. It's
Speaker 1: on YouTube live every Friday, I think like four or
Speaker 1: five pm. And yeah, I think we should end this
Speaker 1: the way we end everything. Let's wrap Huh going on strike?
Speaker 1: What what shout out to go on strike? Going on strike?
Speaker 1: Hey st Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going on Yeah. I'm
Speaker 1: representing for my neighbors and all the other people trying
Speaker 1: to get that paper. All the late birth that we
Speaker 1: get to our employeers is really really getting kind of
Speaker 1: motherfucking annoying, and I'm geting kind of over it. I
Speaker 1: need to get a lawyer. I need to bury these
Speaker 1: employers I love in the soil because I'm tired of it.
Speaker 1: I need to get strike it. Other people know that
Speaker 1: we'll be striking lights some light lights and lighting and
Speaker 1: you know what's about to go and hear the huge surprise.
Speaker 1: I need to tell everybody going union noise. You need
Speaker 1: to go and just get up and harp again. Then
Speaker 1: you need to go and make collective bargainness. You could
Speaker 1: get a huge new contracting if they want to let
Speaker 1: you down lay your moll flat because you don't want
Speaker 1: a regular job. Don't want that. We're just screaming at
Speaker 1: the sky like a tom cat, skipping up the sky
Speaker 1: like a tomcat. I'm up the picket line asking where
Speaker 1: my mom's Everybody come here. We're about to be bombast,
Speaker 1: about to have those bomb blast against the employers that
Speaker 1: don't have that contract in my fucking name with the
Speaker 1: pen on the paper. Yet this ship might be so
Speaker 1: we are waiting on reparations. We got one Cosby on
Speaker 1: the beats. He did the beats for this episode to
Speaker 1: check them out. Um see you guys next week. Waiting
Speaker 1: on Reparations as a production of I Heart Radio. Listen
Speaker 1: to Waiting on Reparations on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.