The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich

Hello friends,Welcome back to my Saturday coffee klatch with my colleague Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action — and my former student), where we talk about the highs and lows of the week over morning coffee. I’m off this week but have invited Heather and Michael Lahanas-Calderón (Director of Digital Strategy at Inequality Media Civic Action) to chat in my absence. Michael, a member of Gen Z, leads our work on TikTok. He and the team at IMCA have been using video across social media to break down complex issues and change the frames through which people understand the system, so viewers can see what’s at stake and mobilize towards an inclusive democracy and an economy where the gains are widely shared, including in advance of the midterms.Today they cover:* How young people process information (hint: it involves the internet).* How to fill the knowledge gaps around economics and inequality left by the mass media.* The dirty secret of social media video (most people watch with the sound off!).* What makes a video break through on crowded platforms like Instagram and TikTok.Here are a couple recent videos:* A 10-second TikTok video which uses several “trends” to depict how trickle-down economics is a hoax (the speed of which I find dizzying and Heather says makes her motion sick. Do you agree?!).* A video of CEOs crowing about raising prices on consumers to boost their profit margin; they speak for themselves on the relationship between corporate profiteering and inflation. (The Groundwork Collaborative has built a very useful website for these publicly-available quarterly corporate earnings calls.)Thank you to Deirdre Broderick / Corey Kaup and Joseph Lawson for today’s theme songs, and to all of you for listening.P.S. For those of you who have been asking about written transcripts of these coffee klatches, we will have them for you in the coming weeks. Thank you for your patience. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

The culture wars now ripping through American politics — especially noticeable in these last few weeks before the midterm elections, when Trump is trying to lay the groundwork for an authoritarian takeover — arguably began on May 8, 1970 in New York City. That day happened to be the 25th anniversary of the Allied victory over Germany in World War II. It was also weeks after Richard Nixon expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia. And it was just four days after Ohio National Guardsmen shot dead four students during antiwar protests at Kent State University.I recall it vividly. On May 8, 1970, a riot broke out in New York City.Around noon, near the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street in Lower Manhattan, more than 400 construction workers — steamfitters, ironworkers, plumbers, and other laborers from nearby construction sites like the emerging World Trade Center — attacked around 1,000 student demonstrators (including two of my friends) protesting the Vietnam War and the May 4 Kent State shootings. The workers carried U.S. flags and chanted “USA, All the way” and “America, love it or leave it.” They chased the students through the streets — attacking those who looked like hippies with hard hats and weapons, including tools and steel-toe boots.I heard about it when several friends from New York who were active in the anti-Vietnam War movement phoned me later that day. To characterize them as upset understates their emotions.As David Paul Kuhn reports in The Hardhat Riot, the police did little to stop the mayhem. Some even egged on the thuggery. When a group of hardhats moved menacingly toward a Wall Street plaza, a patrolman shouted: “Give ’em hell, boys. Give ’em one for me!”The workers then stormed a barely-protected City Hall where the mayor’s staff, to the hardhats’ rage, had lowered the flag in honor of the Kent State dead. They pushed their way to the top of the steps and attempted to gain entrance, chanting “Hey, hey, whatcha say? We support the USA!” Fearing the mob would break in, a person from the mayor’s staff raised the flag. It was a small precursor to the attack on the U.S. Capitol more than a half-century later. The workers ripped down the Red Cross flag that was hanging at nearby Trinity Church because they associated the flag with the anti-war protests. They stormed the newly built main Pace University building, smashing lobby windows and beating students and professors with their tools.More than 100 people were wounded. The typical victim was a 22-year-old white male college student, though one in four was female. Seven police officers were also hurt. Most of the injured required hospital treatment. Six people were arrested, but only one construction worker.My friends escaped injury but they were traumatized. I remember them describing the rioting construction workers as a “pack of animals.”The hardhat riot had immediate political consequences. Richard Nixon exploited it for political advantage. It was the first salvo in America’s culture wars. Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman wrote in his diary: “The college demonstrators have overplayed their hands, evidence is the blue-collar group rising up against them, and [the] president can mobilize them.” Patrick Buchanan, then a Nixon aide, wrote in a memo to his boss, saying “blue-collar Americans” are “our people now.” Peter Brennan, then president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, claimed “the unions had nothing to do with” it — although just before the riot, Brennan had held a rally of construction workers to show support for Nixon’s Vietnam policies. Brennan explained that workers were “fed up” with violence and flag desecration by anti-war demonstrators.At Nixon’s invitation, Brennan then led a delegation of 22 union leaders, representing more than 300,000 tradesmen, to the White House. They presented Nixon with several hard hats and a flag pin, after which Nixon praised the “labor leaders and people from Middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism”.After the 1972 election, Nixon appointed Brennan labor secretary. Brennan did not distinguish himself in that position. He strongly opposed affirmative action. He also prevented Labor Department officials from investigating allegations of corruption in the Teamsters Union and of its president, Frank Fitzsimmons, who had helped secure labor support for Nixon’s election. The hardhat riot revealed a deep split in America’s left — in the coalition of workers and progressives that Franklin D. Roosevelt had knitted together in the 1930s, and the wished-for alliance of Blacks, liberals and blue-collar whites in the aftermath of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide 1964 re-election. The riot’s class-based and race-based tensions would worsen over the next half century, as America’s upper-middle class and wealthy began pulling away from white Americans without college degrees. The construction workers who attacked the demonstrators on May 8, 1970, and the police who egged them on, were more likely to have family and friends in Vietnam than the college students who demonstrated. Many were veterans of World War II and Korea. They also lived in the same working-class neighborhoods.They despised the protesters as a bunch of pampered, longhaired, draft-dodging, flag-desecrating snots. They felt abandoned by the middle class and the college-educated, stiffed by the clever kids with draft deferments, forced to bus their kids to Black neighborhoods they didn’t trust and accept Black kids into their schools, and burdened by an economy no longer delivering the possibility of upward mobility. As the journalist Pete Hamill observed at the time, the workingman “feels trapped and, even worse, in a society that purports to be democratic, ignored.”The former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan, writing in 1988 about the future of the GOP, argued that it should have embraced these growing working-class resentments.The Republican moment slipped by, I believe, when the GOP refused to take up the challenge from the left on its chosen battleground: the politics of class, culture, religion, and race.”Three years later, Buchanan openly questioned whether democracy was the best form of government. “The American press is infatuated to the point of intoxication with democracy,” he wrote, comparing the Marine Corps and corporations like IBM to the federal government. “Only the last is run on democratic, not autocratic principles. Yet who would choose the last as the superior institution?”Buchanan sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, 1996, and 2000. He lost, of course. But over the course of the 1990s, his ideas began taking root in the GOP. When I was secretary of labor, I spent much of my time in the Midwest and elsewhere around the country where workers felt abandoned in an economy taken over by Wall Street. I witnessed their anger and resentment. I heard their frustrations. The nation could have responded, but did not. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Sincere question: How are you doing these days? I ask because almost everyone I talk with is feeling overwhelmed. Putin’s war in Ukraine and his threats to use nuclear weapons, Trump and his henchmen’s (and henchwomen’s) ongoing threats to democracy, the upcoming midterm elections, the bizarre economy, the climate crisis and the natural disasters it’s spawning. And much more. It’s impossible to block all this out because we’re inevitably affected by it every day –from the prices we’re paying for gas and food, to neighbors and family members who repeat bonkers things they hear on Fox News, to weather that’s out of whack and sometimes menacing, to getting that new booster shot and making sure your loved ones do, too.  We also feel all this indirectly, through the anxieties and stresses experienced by those we love. They’re not immune to the chaos, either. I like to think that you find my near daily messages helpful. Yes, they’re sometimes alarming or grim, but they’re written from a set of values that I think we share. I hope you receive them as if from a friend who gives you a tad more courage, assurance, and arguments about why those values are so important. In times like these we also need to take care of each other, and of ourselves. It’s about sustenance — feeding our need to laugh and play, savoring the joy of connecting with those we love, dancing to music that literally moves us. A year before my father died, shortly before his 102nd birthday, we took him to the local mall and parked him in his wheelchair just outside a drugstore for just a moment while we bought a few things. When we returned, he was out of his wheelchair, moving his body with perfect rhythm to the sound of Jimmy Dorsey’s 1930s big band, over the mall’s speakers. My father couldn’t speak and could barely see, but he had a broad grin across his face.  I hadn’t even noticed the music. Today, amid all the anxiety and despair, I want to inspire you to hear the music. I guarantee it’s there. Please take some time out to be moved. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

It’s not just the Big Lie. Republicans are telling three other lies they hope will swing the midterms. They involve crime, inflation, and taxes. Here are the GOP’s claims, followed by the facts.1. They claim crime is rising because Democrats have been “soft” on crime.Rubbish. Rising crime rates are due to the proliferation of guns, which Republicans refuse to control.While violent crime rose 28 percent from 2019 to 2020, gun homicides rose 35 percent. States that have weakened gun laws have seen gun crime surge. Clearly, a major driver of the national increase in violence is the easy availability of guns.The violence can’t be explained by any of the Republican talking points about “soft on crime” Democrats.Lack of police funding? No. On average, all cities — whether run by Democrats or Republicans — saw an increase in police funding in 2022.Criminal justice reforms? No. Wherever bail reforms have been implemented, re-arrest rates remain stable. Data shows no connection between the policies of progressive prosecutors and changes in crime rates.In fact, crime is rising faster in Republican, Trump-supporting states. In 2020, per capita murder rates were 40 percent higher in states won by Trump than in those won by Joe Biden.Republican policies have made it easier for people to get and carry guns. Republicans are lying about the real cause of rising crime to protect some of their biggest supporters, big gun manufacturers and the NRA. 2. Republicans claim that inflation is due to Biden’s spending, and wage increases.Baloney. Biden’s spending can’t be causing our current inflation because inflation has broken out everywhere around the world, often at much higher rates than in the US. Besides, heavy spending by the US government began in 2020, before the Biden administration, in order to protect Americans and the economy from the ravages of COVID-19 — and it was necessary.Wages can’t be pushing inflation because wages have been increasing at a slower pace than prices — leaving most workers worse off.  The major cause of the current inflation is the global post-pandemic shortage of all sorts of things, coupled with Putin’s war in Ukraine and China’s lockdowns.The biggest domestic culprit for America’s current inflation is big corporations that are using inflation as an excuse for raising prices above their own cost increases, resulting in the highest profit margins since 1950 — while consumers are paying through the nose.The biggest domestic cause of inflation is corporate power. Republicans are lying about this to protect their big corporate patrons.3. Republicans say Democrats voted to hire an army of IRS agents who will audit and harass the middle class.Wrong. The IRS won’t be going after the middle class. It will be going after ultra-wealthy tax cheats.The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in July, provides funding to begin to get IRS staffing back to what it was before 2010, after which Republicans cut staff by roughly 30 percent, despite increases since then in the number of Americans filing tax returns.The extra staff are needed to prevent high-end tax evasion, which is more difficult to root out (the ultra-wealthy hire squads of accountants and tax attorneys to hide their taxable incomes). It’s estimated that the richest 1 percent are hiding more than 20 percent of their earnings from the IRS.The Treasury Department and the IRS have made it clear that audit rates for households earning $400,000 or under will remain same.Republicans are lying about what the IRS will do with the new funding to protect their ultra-wealthy patrons.None of these three lies is as brazen and damaging as Trump’s Big Lie. But they’re all being used by Republican candidates in these last weeks before the midterms. Know the truth and share it.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Hello friends,Welcome back to my Saturday coffee klatch with my colleague Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action — and my former student), where we talk about the highs and lows of the week over morning coffee. Pull up a chair.Today we cover:— The (potentially last) January 6 committee hearing, and where do things go from here?— The new bad inflation number, and why the Fed’s rate hikes don’t seem to be working (and what Democrats should be saying about inflation).— Alex Jones has to pay almost $1 billion to the families of the victims of Sandy Hook, and what’s the likely effect?— Should we be talking about this time as “post-pandemic?” (Thank god for boosters.)Plus this week’s poll. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Want some good news? With 27 days until Election Day, polling averages suggest Democrats could retain control of the Senate and even gain a few seats there, and are within sight of keeping the House. Last week, the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election forecaster, shifted its forecast in 10 House races, seven of them in favor of Democrats. A day later, analysts at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, an election handicapper based at the University of Virginia, shifted six House seats, four favoring Democrats. "Democratic optimism grows in battle for House," read The Hill’s Mike Lillis' headline Tuesday morning. Lillis goes on to say: “With a month remaining before the midterm elections, House Democrats are in a position where few expected them to be even just a few months ago: competitive.” Meanwhile, the forecasters at FiveThirtyEight, tallying up the available evidence, put the chances that Democrats hold the Senate at seventy-one per cent.But wait. There’s reason to doubt these optimistic numbers. The debacle of 2016 election polls showing Hillary Clinton with a healthy lead, and the 2020 election polls overstating Biden’s lead over Trump, reveal a dirty little secret: Election polls overstate Democratic strength and understate Republican. There are three reasons for this bias:1. Republicans are less likely to respond to election polls. The pandemic understated Republican strength in 2020 because safety-conscious liberals were more likely to be home during lockdowns (and answer telephone calls) while conservatives went out and lived their lives. With lockdowns over, this bias may be over too. But Trump Republicans are less likely to participate in election polls in the first place. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, found that in 2020, white Democrats were 20 percent likelier to respond to Times/Siena polls than white Republicans. Trump voters tend to be less educated, more anti-establishment, and therefore less likely to respond to polls. (In the poll Cohn is undertaking right now, only 0.4 percent of dials have yielded a completed interview.)2. Election polls over-estimate the number of people who will be voting, and non-voters are much more likely to be or lean Democrat than are regular voters. People who rarely or never vote don’t like to admit this to pollsters (they don’t want to be thought of, and don’t want to think of themselves, as non-voters). But because non-voters are far more likely to lean Democrat and tell pollsters they favor a Democratic candidate, poll results exaggerate Democratic strength at the ballot box. 3. People who respond to election pollsters don’t want to admit their preferences for Trump. The vast majority of Trump voters lack a college degree. They believe that pollsters (as educated professionals) will disapprove of their support for Trump, so they don’t admit it. This happened in 2016 and again in 2020. Trump isn’t on the midterm ballot, of course, but many Republican candidates who support him and his Big Lie are on the ballot (in fact, a majority of Republican candidates are election-deniers), so the effect is likely to be the same: understating Republican strength at the ballot box. (According to the Cato Institute’s own polling, 62 percent of Americans say they have political views they’re afraid to share. Many of them, presumably, support Trump and Trump election-deniers.) I don’t mean to discourage you. Quite the opposite. With 27 days to go, many races could go either way. My point is you shouldn’t pay attention to the polls, and not become so confident that you stop phone banking, canvassing, contributing, and doing whatever else you can. Turnout is the critical variable. We must do everything humanly possible to get out the vote. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Twitter and Instagram just removed antisemitic posts from Kanye West and temporarily banned him from their platforms. It’s the latest illustration of … um, what? How good these tech companies are at content moderation? Or how irresponsible they are for “muzzling” controversial views from the extreme right? (Defenders of West, such as Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, are incensed that he’s been banned.) Or how arbitrary these giant megaphones are in making these decisions? (What would Elon Musk do about Kanye West?)Call it the Kayne West paradox: Do the social media giants have a duty to take down noxious content or to post it? And who decides?These corporations are the largest megaphones in world history. They’re contributing to the rise of neofascism in America and around the world, inspiring mentally-disturbed young men to shoot up public schools, and spreading dangerous conspiracy theories that are dividing people into warring camps. They’re also among the richest and most powerful corporations in the world — headed by billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, and soon, very likely, Musk (who has promised to allow Trump back on Twitter). And they’re accountable to no one other than their CEOs (and, theoretically, investors).It’s this combination — huge size, extraordinary power over what’s communicated, and utter lack of accountability — that’s become unsustainable.So what’s going to happen?Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear cases involving Section 230 of Communications Decency Act of 1996, which gives social media platforms protection from liability for what’s posted on them. Plaintiffs in these cases claim that content carried by the companies (YouTube in one case, Twitter in the other) led to the deaths of family members at the hands of terrorists. Even if the Supreme Court decides Section 230 doesn’t protect the companies — thereby pushing them to be more vigilant in moderating their content — the plaintiffs in another upcoming case (NetChoice v. Paxton) argue that the First Amendment bars these companies from being more vigilant. That case hinges on a Texas law that allows Texans and the state’s attorney general to sue the social media giants for unfairly banning or censoring them, based on political ideology. Texas argues that the First Amendment rights of its residents require this. So, do the social media giants have a duty to take down controversial content or to post it? And who decides?It’s an almost impossible quandary, until you realize that these questions arise because of the huge political and social power of these companies, and their lack of accountability. In reality, they aren’t just for-profit companies. Given their size and power, their decisions have enormous consequences for that the public knows and understands — and therefore for democracy. My betting is that the Supreme Court will treat them as common carriers, like railroads or telephone lines. Common carriers can’t engage in unreasonable discrimination in who uses them, must charge just and reasonable prices, and they must provide reasonable care to the public.In a Supreme Court decision last year, plaintiffs claimed that the @realdonaldtrump Twitter account was a public forum run by the president of the United States, and Trump’s blocking of users stifled free speech. The Court dismissed the case as moot, since Trump is no longer president. But in a 12-page concurring opinion, Clarence Thomas gave a hint of what’s to come. He argued that Twitter's ban showed that the real power lay with the large social media platforms themselves, not the government officials on them, and that “the concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties” was unprecedented. Thomas noted that Section 230 gives digital platforms some legal protection related to the content they distribute, but Congress “has not imposed corresponding responsibilities.” He then cited a 1914 Supreme Court ruling that making a private company a common carrier may be justified when “a business, by circumstances and its nature…rise[s] from private to be of public concern,” — leading Thomas to argue that “some digital platforms are sufficiently akin to common carriers … to be regulated in this manner.” He concluded that "[w]e will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms."Other justices have made similar remarks. If the Court decides the social media giants are "common carriers," then responsibility for content moderation would shift from these companies to a government entity like the Federal Communications Commission, which would regulate them similarly to how the Obama-era FCC sought to regulate internet service providers.But is there any reason to trust the government to do a better job of content moderation than the giants do on their own? (I hate to imagine what would happen under a Republican FCC.) So are we locked into the Kanye West paradox — or is there an alternative to the bleak choice between leaving it up to the giant unaccountable firms or to a polarized government to decide? Yes. It’s to address the fundamental problem directly — the monopoly power possessed by the social media companies. The way to do this is apply the antitrust laws, and break them up. My guess is that this is where we’ll end up, eventually. There’s no other reasonable choice. As Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”What do you think? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Within weeks of taking office, Britain’s new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, and her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, proposed a radical new set of economic measures that echoed the trickle-down policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — heavy on tax cuts for the rich and deregulation.Last Monday, after a backlash from investors, economists and members of his own party, Mr. Kwarteng reversed one of the proposals, deciding against abolishing the tax rate of 45 percent on the highest earners. But proposals for other tax cuts worth tens of billions of pounds remain intact, as the government insists it is on the right path.What’s bizarre about this latest episode of trickle-down economics — the abiding faith on the political right that tax cuts and deregulation are good for an economy — is that this gonzo economic theory continues to live on, notwithstanding its repeated failures.Ever since Reagan and Thatcher first tried them, trickle-down policies have exploded budget deficits and widened inequality. At best, they’ve temporarily increased consumer demand (the opposite of what’s needed during the high inflation that Britain, the US, and much of the world are experiencing).Reagan’s tax cuts and deregulation at the start of the 1980s were not responsible for America’s rapid growth through the late 1980s. His exorbitant spending (mostly on national defense) fueled a temporary boom that ended in a fierce recession. Trump’s 2018 tax cut never trickled down.Yet the US never restored the highest marginal tax rates before Reagan. And deregulation — especially of financial markets — continues to endanger the stability of the economy and expose workers, consumers, and the environment to unnecessary risk. The result? From 1989 to 2019, typical working families in the United States saw negligible increases in their real (inflation-adjusted) incomes and wealth.Over the same period, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans became $29 trillion richer. The national debt exploded. And Wall Street’s takeover of the economy continued.Meanwhile, and largely as a result, America has become more bitterly divided along the fissures of class and education. Donald Trump didn’t cause this. He exploited it.The situation in the UK after Thatcher has not been dramatically different. So why is trickle-down economics still with us? What explains the fatal attraction of this repeatedly failed economic theory?The easiest answer is that it satisfies politically powerful moneyed interests who want to rake in even more. Armies of lobbyists in Washington, London, and Brussels continuously demand tax cuts and “regulatory relief” for their wealthy patrons.But why has the public been repeatedly willing to go along with trickle-down economics when nothing ever trickles down? What accounts for the collective amnesia?Part of the answer is that the moneyed interests have also invested a portion of their gains in an intellectual infrastructure of economists and pundits who continue to promote this failed doctrine — along with institutions that house them, such as, in the US, the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and Club for Growth.Consider Stephen Moore, the founder and past president of the Club for Growth and a leading economist at the Heritage Foundation, whose columns appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal and is a frequent guest on Fox News.Moore helped draft and promote Trump’s trickle-down tax. In recent weeks he praised Ms. Truss for her willingness “to challenge the reigning orthodoxy by sharply cutting taxes to boost growth,” calling her package “a gutsy and sound policy decision,” that “will bring jobs, capital and businesses back to the U.K.”Moore and others like him are happy to disregard the history of trickle-down’s abject failures. They simply repeat the same set of promises made decades ago when Reagan and Thatcher set out to convince the public that trickle-down would work splendidly.The public has so much else on its mind, and is so confused by the cacophony, that it doesn’t remember — until immediately after the next trickle-down failure. But perhaps the main reason for the public’s amnesia is that Democrats in the US and Labor in the UK have failed to offer what should be the obvious alternative: A bottom-up economics that invests in the education and health of the public, and the infrastructure connecting them. This is the only true path to higher productivity and widely-shared prosperity. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Hello friends,Welcome back to my Saturday coffee klatch with my colleague Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action — and my former student), where we talk about the highs and lows of the week over morning coffee. Pull up a chair.Today we cover:— Friday’s jobs report, and why the media is getting it wrong.— Billionaire influence over the midterm elections.— Saudi’s stabbing America in the back on oil.— Why we need a monthly report on corporate profits.— Why Heather likes to walk her dog while listening to Chopin and Beyoncé.— My laptop’s keyboard, which is getting worn out (see below). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Gallup reports that a whopping (and record) 72 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 approve of labor unions. That’s especially remarkable given that a bare 3 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 belong to one. Despite the recent victories of Starbucks workers and noteworthy efforts by Amazon warehouse workers, the rate of union membership in America has fallen to its lowest in seventy years: now a bare 6 percent of private-sector employees.Republicans hate unions. Democrats won’t abolish the filibuster, so lack the votes to strengthen unions. (With any luck, that will change in the next Congress.)Yet there’s a direct and unambiguous relationship between the rate of union membership and the share of total income going to the top 10 percent, as this graph makes clear: The fortunes of American unions and workers are starting to look up nonetheless— and that’s mainly because of a person you probably never heard of, in the most important job you probably didn’t know existed.Her name is Jennifer Abruzzo. A year ago she was confirmed on a party-line vote to be general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).The NLRB hears cases, makes rulings, and sets binding precedents about what does and doesn’t constitute a violation of America’s labor laws.Its general counsel is the agency’s chief prosecutor, directing roughly 500 attorneys across the nation in 26 regional offices.Which gives Abruzzo a huge say over how the private sector in America may or may not treat workers.Installing Jennifer Abruzzo as the NLRB’s general counsel may be the single most important initiative the Biden administration has taken for working people so far — and least known. Abruzzo is no newcomer to the agency. She spent 23 of her 58 years as an attorney there, starting as a field attorney in Miami and rising to deputy general counsel during the Obama administration. But she has taken her new job by storm, instructing her 500 attorneys to make it far more costly for employers to illegally fire workers for trying to form unions. It’s about time. American companies have been charged with violating federal law in over 40 percent of all union election campaigns. But until Abruzzo came on the job, the worst that could happen to them was the equivalent of a weak slap on the wrist. Starbucks, for example, has illegally fired dozens of employees for trying to organize a union. Abruzzo has responded with complaints accusing Starbucks of 81 illegal labor practices — including those firings, plus spying on workers and closing stores in retaliation for unionizing. (The Starbucks workers’ union also wants her to file a complaint against the company for giving raises and improved benefits to baristas at non-union stores but not to workers at stores that have already unionized. Hopefully, she will; it’s also blatantly illegal.)Apple has been telling workers at its retail stores that joining a union could result in fewer promotions and inflexible hours. The National Labor Relations Board just issued a complaint against Apple over accusations that it interrogated its retail workers about their union support and prevented pro-labor flyers in a store break room.Rather than give employers such as Starbucks and Apple mere slaps on wrists, Abruzzo is seeking to increase worker power overall, in seven important ways: * Getting workers who have been illegally fired back into their jobs right away, while their organizing campaigns are still ongoing. She is getting courts to compel this (by injunction) by arguing that waiting for the legal process to unfold will be too late. * Getting back pay for these workers that covers financial losses as well as lost wages — including their withdrawals from savings and retirement funds, loans, and credit card fees. And she wants employers to compensate unions for expenses incurred in fighting their illegal behavior.* Making it illegal for employers to require that workers attend “captive audience” meetings to hear management’s case against unionizing. (The union seeking to organize Amazon’s warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, has alleged that Amazon is doing just this.)* Making employers recognize a union once a majority of workers sign cards saying they want one (thereby returning to a 1949 NLRB rule). “We should not be allowing those employers to delay recognition so that they can coerce these workers to think differently or choose differently,” she says. * Making it illegal for employers to misclassify workers as independent contractors — which the Board can remedy by finding that the workers are employees and thus eligible to unionize. (On March 17th, NLRB attorneys filed a complaint against a port trucking company at the Los Angeles harbor for illegally misclassifying drivers. If upheld, the firm will have to compensate the drivers for lost wages and expenses and provide a union access to the drivers for an organizing campaign.)* Allowing graduate students and college athletes to unionize. * Recommitting the NLRB to protect the right of immigrants to organize regardless of their immigration status.Abruzzo can’t make any of this happen by waving a wand. She and her 500 attorneys must first win cases before administrative law judges, and then the NLRB. These cases are underway. With a Democratic majority on the NLRB, there’s a good chance she’ll prevail there. Yet many companies that lose will appeal the NLRB’s decisions to the federal courts. A few of these cases will end up at what’s become a viciously anti-labor Supreme Court.  But it normally takes years for NLRB rulings to reach the highest court, by which time workers may have gained a real voice for the first time decades. As Harold Meyerson has reported, a new generation of 20- and 30-somethings are organizing at warehouses (Amazon Labor Union leader Chris Smalls is 34), at retail and food outlets ranging from REI and Starbucks to Chipotle and Trader Joe’s, and even at nonprofits, museums, state legislatures, and universities.If they succeed, Jennifer Abruzzo will deserve much of the credit. “We are a neutral, independent federal agency, but we have a pro-worker congressional mandate, and I’m going to vigorously protect the right of workers to self-organize, join a union and bargain collectively with representatives of their own choosing.” Abruzzo says. She’s on her way to doing this, folks. More power to her — which means more power for American workers to countervail the immense power of big American corporations.P.S. Thank you for being part of this community. Subscribers to this newsletter are keeping it going. Please consider joining if you haven’t already. We also appreciate you sharing this content with others and adding your thoughts in the comments. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe