Brian Lehrer Weekend: Abortion on the Ballot; A Record-Breaking U.S. Open; Labor Day Deep Dive

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Hi, Brian Lehrer here. Up next, Brian Lehrer Weekend.

Three of our favorite segments from the week packaged together.

For you to listen to on the weekend.

So enjoy.

And I'll see you back on the radio Monday at 10 a.m. on WNYC and WNYC.org.

It's the Brian Lehrer Show.

On WNYC.org.

On WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

So Donald Trump, a Florida voter, says he will vote to uphold the six-week abortion ban in the state.

He said that last Friday, one day after he said he's against the ban.

Here's Trump last Thursday when asked by NBC News about the six-week ban versus a Florida abortion rights referendum that will be on the ballot in November.

I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.

So that wasn't quite an endorsement.

It wasn't quite an endorsement of the abortion rights referendum, right?

But anti-abortion rights groups freaked out that he said he'd be voting that they need more than six weeks.

And the very next day asked if he would vote for the abortion rights measure again.

Trump said this.

So I'll be voting no.

Yeah.

So what just happened here in the context of the presidential race with abortion rights likely to drive so many voters to the polls to vote yes?

Is it time to ask?

What was previously an unthinkable political question.

Could Florida, after so many years as a solidly red state, be back in play as a swing state in this presidential election?

Let's take a closer look at the Florida referendum and the election year politics of the Sunshine State overall now with Grace Panetta, political reporter for the 19th, the news site named after the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave women the right to vote in this country in 1920.

Right.

And Kimberly Leonard, Politico politics reporter in Florida and author of their Florida playbook newsletter.

So, Kimberly and Grace, thanks for coming on.

Welcome to WNYC.

Hello from New York.

Thank you for having me.

And Grace, let me start with you.

Let's take a closer look at the Florida referendum for everybody out there, especially those not in Florida and the election year politics of the Sunshine State.

Can you start by describing those?

The Florida referendum itself, I see it's pegged to the Roe versus Wade standard.

So what does that mean or what's the actual wording?

Sure.

Absolutely.

So this ballot measure, Amendment 4, would guarantee a right to abortion up until the point of fetal viability.

It's similar to the language that we've seen other states use, particularly successful measures that have passed in Michigan and Ohio that guarantee that right to viability.

Obviously, with additional exceptions to the law.

So it's not a threat to the life of the patient.

And so the attack that Republican anti-abortion people often use, that Democrats want abortion rights up until the moment of birth.

Trump in the campaign this year has even said abortion, they want abortion after birth, which, of course, is factually impossible.

But this referendum would nullify that kind of attack that, you know, abortion rights right up until the moment of birth kind of attack.

Yeah.

And, you know, look.

Thinking in the context of what actually happens medically, abortion up until the moment of birth or, as you say, even after birth is just simply not a thing that, you know, does not happen in the way that Republicans describe it to people, you know, who have abortions later in pregnancy often do so because most of the time do so because of fatal fetal abnormalities or a threat to the life of the patient.

So, yeah, exactly.

This amendment would kind of be in line with what the standard was under.

Tell us more about that life of the mother or health of the mother language in the referendum.

Yeah.

So, you know, the like in like in a lot of other states and a lot of other ballot measures, the sort of the way they structure it is to protect, say, you know, you have a right to abortion for any reason up until this point.

And then after that, if there's, you know, the patient's life.

If his life is in danger or in some cases, fetal fetal abnormality, you can have care after that point.

The problem, you know, even under Roe v.

Wade, is that many states had a strict cutoff at a certain week for any reason.

For example, this used to be the case in New York.

So you would have to travel out of state if you were in that situation to yet another state.

And so we've seen more and more states update their language in the law and their ballot measure language to kind of reflect that reality.

Right.

And abortion rights opponents sometimes support life of the mother exceptions, but not.

Health of the mother exceptions, because they say those can be interpreted too broadly.

It can refer to relatively minor health issues.

So it can be used as an elastic clause.

So where does this fall on that scale, would you say?

Yeah, I mean, I would say so on that point, I think what's interesting, what we've seen in Florida and in other states that have passed abortion bans since the fall of Roe v.

Wade is there have been kind of these cases of fatal fetal abnormalities.

Um, where the pregnancy is not viable, but yet the, you know, patient can't decide whether to terminate or not, because for all intents and purposes, there may be still a heartbeat, something like that.

So specifically, the kind of amendment would say that there's no law that should prohibit penalized delay, restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient's health as determined by the patient's health care provider.

So it's putting that responsibility, that onus back on providers and patients.

And enough flexibility, it sounds like that it could be up to the judgment of the provider and the patient.

So Kimberly Leonard, Politico politics reporter in Florida, let me bring you into this.

How's this referendum looking in the polls?

Is it going to pass easily?

Is it going to be close?

What are you seeing?

Well, the first thing to note is that when abortion rights have gone ahead in other states, it's been because they've been supported.

They've had a lower threshold that they've had to meet in Florida.

You have to get 60 percent of votes to be able to get there.

And it does look like we have that in Florida.

One of the things to know about this state is that it tends to elect more conservative elected officials, but then picks really progressive policies when they're put on the ballot.

Everything from a 15 dollar minimum wage to restoring voting rights for people who've been convicted of felonies to, you know, we even have cannabis on the ballot for recreational reasons coming up in November.

And so all of that, that doesn't.

It doesn't appear to pass as well.

So it looks like it's going to be there.

The difficulty, though, is that Governor DeSantis has is raising money to get people to vote against it.

He's going to be advertising against it.

He's going to be talking about it a lot so that, you know, since he hasn't spent the money yet, it's hard to know how that changes the polls.

But as things stand now, it does appear poised for support from Floridians.

Well, over 60 percent, that would be.

And yet refuting the premise that.

You cited in the introduction, which I got from other reporting, you write, Trump isn't in danger of losing Florida in November, underscored by the fact that neither Vice President Kamala Harris nor her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, showed up at a Tuesday reproductive freedom rally in Florida.

Give us your lay of the land on that.

Well, look, I live here in Florida.

There is a lot more energy from the Democratic Party ever since.

Vice President Harris ascended to the top of the ticket.

I've watched her for years talk about reproductive rights.

She was much more comfortable on the issue than President Joe Biden has ever been.

And so they, you know, are energized about that idea.

However, Democrats are starting, you know, from behind.

Essentially, they haven't gotten extra voter registration, even with all the energy.

They haven't raised a lot of money.

And the president.

The vice president isn't campaigning here.

You know where she is campaigning in the seven other states that they consider to be battlegrounds.

So even though a lot of Florida Democrats will say, oh, yeah, the state is in play, the rhetoric is beside the point.

What I look at is the data, the data on voter registration, the spending.

You know, people have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in Florida to win here when it's competitive.

And the fact that that's not happening to me is the biggest data point that that's significant.

Well, Kimberly, you're the Florida reporter, but Grace, you're a political reporter for the 19th.

I wonder if you've looked at this and have any similar or competing conclusions or speculation, because we're talking theoretically about with a 60 percent standard for the referendum to pass a lot of people who would be voted yes on abortion rights and also yes on Trump in order for both of those things or people to prevail.

Yeah, that's absolutely right, Brian.

And in fact, there was a recent USA Today and Suffolk University poll from a few weeks ago that showed, you know, just under 60 percent, 58 percent of respondents say they support the amendment.

Thirty five percent don't.

And a lot of those support supporters of the amendment are also supporting President Trump, which it puts him in kind of an interesting position, I think, as a Florida resident, Florida voter.

And it's really in line with what the results have been in a lot of other states.

These amendments.

Because they're not partisan, they get a lot of their support from Republicans and independents.

And for that reason, there's also kind of like this delicate dance of obviously Democrats want to make abortion a huge issue in races up and down the ballot.

But the backers of these amendments don't want to overtly politicize the amendments.

They want to present them as nonpartisan, crosspartisan amendments that get support from across the political spectrum.

And also women voters that poll showed are really driving support for this amendment, regardless of.

And this is obviously going to be women voters of all demographics are going to be key in a state like Florida.

Listeners, I know some of you are in Florida or others of you have ties to Florida.

Who wants to call in and tell us what you're seeing in terms of the presidential race or the abortion rights referendum or ask either of our guests a question?

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9696.

Call or text for Grace Panetta from the 19th and Kimberly Leonard from Politico, Florida, 212-433-9692.

So Donald Trump, he's a Florida voter because his official address is at Mar-a-Lago.

And the first thing to know is Florida has a six week abortion ban because Trump campaigned in 2016 on appointing Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe.

He kept his.

Promise three such justices.

And of course, they voted as predicted.

And that allowed such a state law to pass.

So even the question in Florida, the fact that reproductive rights at this level are a question in Florida is largely on him.

Right, Kimberly?

Well, he wish it wasn't right.

I think in his mind, the deal was sort of done with the anti-abortion movement when he, you know, gave them Roe v.

Wade on a silver platter.

What's been more difficult for him is having.

To respond to individual states that have restrictive abortion bans, he said a year ago when Governor DeSantis signed the six week ban into law, he said he thought it was a terrible mistake and a terrible thing to do.

And DeSantis attacked him over that.

He said, well, you're not pro-life.

So it's ironic because it's sort of this domino effect, right?

You have Trump appointed the judges who overturn Roe.

Just giving Governor DeSantis the ability.

To then restrict abortion rights in Florida because he wanted to run to the right of Trump in the 20, you know, in the election, in the in the primary.

And so the options that are before Trump, you know, he says he wants more weeks, but that's not what's on the ballot in November.

Right.

What's on the ballot is, you know, the viability standards with exceptions for health reasons as determined by providers or a six week ban that's currently in effect.

Now, if it doesn't pass a legislature in the future, it could come back in and move the limits back or even, you know, make them more strict.

So that's the bind that he's in.

And it's something that Democrats are making him remember at every turn.

And that's why the Harris-Walls campaign had a bus tour that kicked off this week, you know, where they drove by Mar-a-Lago with a bus that was emblazoned with, you know, reproductive freedom.

They're leaning in hard on this.

So while Trump is still.

Kind of waffling and wiggling and, you know, trying to figure out how to message on this, they're going on the offensive and they're they're, you know, fired up about it.

Yeah.

So I'm going to play these two Trump clips again because they're very short and they went by so fast.

And also he took this second position going right into Labor Day weekend, exactly when a politician would typically do something they hope people don't notice.

So let's revisit these clips.

Last Thursday, he said this when asked about.

How he would vote on the referendum.

I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.

So, again, he didn't really say how he would vote on the referendum there, just that he thought six weeks is too restrictive.

Then the next day, last Friday, he clarified regarding the referendum itself like this.

So I'll be voting no.

So, Grace, what happened between those two clips last week?

Well, according to reporting in Politico, there was a fierce.

Twenty four hour coordinated lobbying blitz by a lot of forces in the anti-abortion movement to get Trump to commit to voting no on this amendment, as Kimberly spoke to.

He's had kind of a transactional push and pull relationship with them over the years and in the course of this campaign has really, you know, either disappointed or straight up irked them at a lot of points, including by distancing himself from the abortion restrictions and the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 as it relates to potential.

Federal restrictions on medication abortion.

But on this one, you know, the movement really sees a win here in getting Trump to say on the record, you know, I'm not voting for this amendment and in effect keeping in place that six week ban that he is previously criticized in the primary.

And according to this reporting, they want to go even further and get Trump to pledge to appointing abortion opponents, anti-abortion folks to key positions in his second administration if he does win.

Does Trump say what he's for in theory?

If he says six weeks is too short, but viability, 24 weeks Roe versus Wade standard that's on the ballot there is too much a ban after 12 weeks, 15 weeks.

Does he take a position on that in that way?

Well, he's yeah, he's previously backed or his advisors have spoken to 16 weeks as a limit.

But at the same time, he's just so muddled his stance on it.

And it's, you know, worth noting that 15 weeks.

16 weeks is kind of an arbitrary number that doesn't really have any basis, obviously, in kind of science or medicine.

And at the same time, he's also said, you know, we have to have exceptions.

His typical line when talking about this is you have to follow your heart, but you need to have exceptions.

So he's vaguely backed some restriction in the second trimester.

But at the same time, it's he's not exactly wholeheartedly saying, yes, this is what I believe on this.

It's not an issue.

And of course, there's no 16 week option.

And on the ballot, you're either right for the Roe versus Wade standard or you vote no, which means a six week ban that he claims to be opposed to stays in effect.

Here's a question for you, Kimberly, from a listener who writes and it's just put as a statement.

But but the question is obvious.

Listener writes Harris is outspending Trump on ads in Florida by 50 to one.

Do you see any stat like that?

No, I don't know where that comes from.

That's not true.

Is the Harris campaign outspending Trump at all, to your knowledge?

No, no.

I mean, there had there's barely been any spending in general with this election.

The ones that have stood out the most have actually been there was a lot of spending in Gates's district for during the primary and hyper conservative Congressman Matt Gates from Florida.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And then I would say that there's some ramping up of spending now for the Senate race where Senator Rick Scott.

That is up against Debbie McCarcel Powell, who's a former congresswoman, though the same listener also writes in another text.

Harris has twenty eight offices in Florida compared to Trump's twelve.

She has forty thousand volunteers registered in Florida compared to Trump's twelve hundred.

So, again, I have no idea where the listener is getting those numbers.

But for you as a Florida politics reporter, what can you say about anything, you know, on that topic?

Yeah, it's true that they have had a surge of volunteers.

They have forty one thousand, as of we just reported yesterday, because there's a lot of energy around Vice President Harris's candidacy, you know, and there's been that same surge in other states.

They have built a lot of offices.

You know, they have they have some momentum.

There could be results down ballot.

It's just that they're not they're not acting in Florida as they are acting in other battleground states where they're spending a ton of money.

And the thing to remember, too, is that the people leading Trump's campaign.

Are a lot of Florida operatives.

They have connections here.

He's been courting the grassroots.

The grassroots have also been, you know, doing even though they're not doing the publicized work of, you know, having these big events like they did with the reproductive freedom event this week.

They're quietly on the ground registering, you know, doing the sort of boring stuff all the time, you know.

And I often have to work harder to find out what Republicans are doing.

Then Democrats just because they're not advertising it as much.

And it's paying off for them because they're, you know, they are registering voters and it there are a lot of people who've moved to Florida to tend to lead more Republicans.

So they've benefited from that.

And so but that, you know, that doesn't mean that the ballot amendment won't pass.

It appears poised to pass.

And it doesn't mean that, you know, necessarily that that it won't have narrowed the gap between Trump and his campaign.

I think if Biden had been on the ballot, then it would have probably been a double digit win for Trump in Florida, whereas now it's probably looking more like a single digit win.

Here's Harriet in Manhattan.

I guess that's the northernmost county of Florida.

Harriet, you're on WNYC.

Hello.

Thank you, Brian.

I just have one question.

If Trump is a convicted felon, how is he allowed to vote at all?

And I'll take my answer off the air.

Good question.

If he's a convicted felon in New York, Kimberly, how does that affect his ability to vote or not in Florida?

Yeah, that's actually something Governor DeSantis has been asked about.

So, first of all, yes, because it was in New York, that makes a difference.

But also the state of the case, you know, if it's under appeal.

And Governor DeSantis has also said if there's any kind of issue that he would go ahead and step in and make sure that Trump can vote.

And he did vote in the primary.

We saw a video of him doing that.

But there doesn't appear to be any barrier at this point to him voting just because of his criminal life.

Isn't there a Florida history on this issue?

Correct me if my memory is faulty, but there was a referendum a few years ago that would allow convicted felons to regain their right to vote in Florida after they served their time.

But DeSantis is working to limit that.

Do I have any of that right?

Oh, exactly.

You have a lot of it right.

I mean, it's been kind of a mess for a lot of people who live here who thought that their voting rights were restored.

And then DeSantis tried to have a bunch of them arrested.

I mean, it's been kind of a mess.

But I think this just underscores, too, that Florida, even though they might elect politicians who are more conservative, their voters will also sort of pick these a la carte options that are more progressive, such as restoring voting rights for people who've previously been convicted of felonies.

So DeSantis is against felons having the right to vote unless they're Donald Trump.

I said that.

You don't have to say that.

I do want to ask you about this, though, that you wrote, Kimberly, for the Florida Playbook today, about how Republicans are hammering the message that Vice President Harris is, quote, communist.

Yesterday, former President Trump posted a video on Truth Social where he said Harris, quote, is a communist, has always been a communist, and will always be a communist, unquote.

And that's a message you write that could have an impact on Florida's Latin American voters.

Want to tell us more about that?

One reason I'm curious about that is we may, around the country, traditionally think of the Florida Latino community as being these conservative Cubans who escaped Castro and their dependents.

But it's so much more Latin American diverse than that now, isn't it?

Hugely diverse, yes.

And, I mean, I can tell you that I've covered, you know, I've covered Venezuela so much and what's happening with their fraudulent election there.

Wow.

And how that is affecting voters and how they're watching what President Biden will do and how Vice President Harris will respond to it.

Look, the thing is that there are people on the ground, Democrats, who are concerned that the party hasn't done enough to push back on charges of communism and socialism.

That's not like a cute word that's thrown around down here.

That's a system that people in countries like Venezuela, like Cuba, have fled from in order to come to Florida.

And so there are Democrats, such as Debbie McCarcel-Pell, who's running for Senate, who is very much out front on this, coming out and saying, no, we're against socialism.

We, you know, oppose this and being very vocal about it because they know how salient it's been for Republicans to use that as a weapon in the past.

And so, you know, I don't know how it necessarily plays in other states, but I can tell you in South Florida especially, it is something they're concerned about.

I mean, there are people that would love to vote.

They would like to see Vice President Harris come out and really say something really forceful about Venezuela and really forcefully say, no, I'm not a socialist, no, I'm not a communist, and not just laugh it off.

There have been concerns about, you know, Governor Walz made a comment about one person's socialism is another person's neighborliness.

That is not really of the times down here in South Florida.

And so the sensitivity by which things are discussed in different regions of America, in different pockets, different communities, really matters and could really make a difference.

But it means, you know...

Yeah.

I think that the Republicans are against the human rights violations that are taking place in Venezuela, but they're also against the asylum seekers from there coming here to escape those human rights violations.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, but they know that they can message, you know, on this.

They've done it successfully in the past, you know.

And so finding that balance, I think, for Democrats to be able to show, you know, that they welcome that.

And I spoke to James Harrison about this yesterday.

But just being able to show that...

Leader of the Democratic Committee.

Go ahead.

Yes.

I'm sorry.

To be able to say that he, you know, wants them also to know that they will be more welcoming to diversity and to immigrants.

And so, yeah, it is a delicate balance.

Last thing.

Grace, I see you wrote up for the 19th an interesting Republican endorsement for Harris yesterday, appearing at Duke University in North Carolina.

Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney said this when asked who she would be voting for...

Because we are here in North Carolina, I think...

Patty are you serious?

Yes, I am.

All right.

think it is crucially important for people to recognize not only is what I've just said

about the danger that Trump poses something that should prevent people from voting for

him, but I don't believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates' names, particularly

in swing states. And as a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the

Constitution, I have thought deeply about this. And because of the danger that Donald Trump

poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.

And a lot of cheers from the Duke University crowd. Gracie wrote this up for the 19th.

I think Liz Cheney, at this point, with all

the...

She's already criticized Trump for January 6th and lost her seat over it in a Republican

primary. Does it move the needle anywhere?

You know, it's a good question. Probably not too much, just because the share of Republicans

who voted for Biden in 2020 was pretty small. And I expect that to, again, be the case this

year, just because of how polarized the electorate continues to become. But I think what Cheney

did that was interesting is she was trying to create a permission structure for those

Republicans.

And maybe other high-profile, never-Trump Republicans to not just come out against

Trump, but to also support Harris. What I thought was interesting, what stuck out to

me was her saying, we don't have the luxury of writing candidates in. Other high-profile

Republicans have done that over the past co-election cycles rather than vote for Trump. And so

I think she's saying, hey, this is the way that you, like me, can vote for Kamala Harris.

Grace Bonetta from the 19th, Kimberly Leonard from Politico, Florida. Thank you both so much

for joining us today.

Thank you.

that more people are clamoring to see tennis live, consider this.

While the Times reported on the big crowds,

CNN had a story yesterday about a cocktail being sold at the U.S. Open

that will surpass $10 million in sales before the tournament ends on Sunday.

The Honey Deuce, a mix of vodka, lemonade, and a raspberry liqueur,

plus its signature melon balls, as it's described,

is selling for a whopping $23.

$23, you do get a commemorative cup with it, but $23 for a drink,

yet despite the price tag, 2.2 million of them had already sold

before yesterday's matches began, according to CNN.

So listeners, have you gotten into tennis more recently?

Are you part of this surge in popularity?

If so, tell us what got you into it.

212-433-WNYC, 433-9692.

And joining me now...

And now to talk about this is Matthew Futterman,

senior writer for The Athletic, the sports unit of The New York Times.

Hey, Matthew, welcome back to WNYC.

Oh, thanks for having me, Brian.

Sorry to bring your standards down.

You have an economic historian before me, and now you're coming down to sports.

All our news guests today wanted to make sports analogies, though.

So, you know, maybe you're the crown jewel of this entire show.

So how much is it surging and why is it surging?

Zendaya, that would be my one-word answer.

There was this movie called Challengers that came out earlier this year

with the star Zendaya, who's about as big a star as there is in the world

outside of, you know, Taylor Swift and Beyonce.

And that was a pretty popular movie, and I think she created a tremendous amount of buzz

for a sport that was already on the rise, thanks to a Netflix show,

which, you know, wasn't as popular as...

Other documentaries, but probably did some good work.

And you just have, you know, some of the most famous people in the world,

whether it's, you know, Novak Djokovic or Rafael Nadal or Coco Gauff,

you know, playing a beautiful sport and with a lot of glamour surrounded by it.

And those are all things that New Yorkers like.

You named some tennis players.

You named one entertainment figure.

I'm going to take a call from Ernest in Brooklyn,

who's going to back up the person who, my theory was,

is most responsible for the surge of popularity in tennis in the last decade or two.

Ernest, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Hello.

And my answer is the Williams sisters.

Did they get you into tennis?

Were you not into tennis until you got into the Williams sisters?

I was never into tennis.

Of course, I know about Arthur Ashe.

I know about Arthur Gibson and stuff like that.

But the Williams sisters, similar to when we saw what happened in golf,

I'm a person of colour.

And I must say that since then,

the succession of people of colour in the sport is just absolutely wonderful.

And last night, watching Tiafoe,

reach where he has,

it is just, I'm just looking forward to the next few days.

Ernest, thank you very much.

Well, what about the Williams sisters as a factor?

I don't know if you can quantify it.

I would say Serena, even maybe in her own category.

Yeah, absolutely.

I actually wrote, that was sort of my big kickoff story ahead of the US Open,

was how, I mean, it's probably, I'm 54,

or excuse me, I just had a birthday, I'm 55.

And I would say,

one of the biggest sports transformations in my lifetime

is that the top of American tennis

has really sort of gone from white to black.

And it's been an amazing thing,

especially because what you see in tennis that you don't see in golf,

which, you know, the listener mentioned,

is, you know, the Williams sisters and Tiger Woods came out at about the same time.

Tiger Woods is basically a one-off.

But the Williams sisters, because of somewhat,

because the people, the groundwork that had been laid before her

by Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson and Laurie McNeil and some other solid players,

I mean, those are, the first two are incredible players.

And then there were some solid players after them.

Because of that groundwork, you had the infrastructure there

for them to spawn this whole new generation of players,

Madison Keyes and Sloane Stephens and Coco Gauff and Tiafoe.

Yeah.

I personally have attended the US Open once a year.

In many years, I was there on Sunday for the daytime matches.

And you mentioned Taylor Swift.

I really enjoyed watching the rising American men's star, Taylor Fritz.

Yeah, I mentioned Taylor Fritz.

I mentioned Taylor Swift earlier.

In another context.

Yes, yes, yes.

And he was an underdog, Taylor Fritz, not Taylor Swift.

And on Friday, there will be an All-American semifinal

between Fritz and the more well-known,

fan favorite who the previous caller mentioned, Francis Tiafoe.

Big fun for the US at the US Open,

even though Coco Gauff got eliminated early on on the women's side, right?

Yes.

First all-male American men's semifinal since 2005.

It guarantees that we're looking at the first American in a Grand Slam

in any of the four Grand Slams since 2009.

And, you know, just one more point that you mentioned.

You went there, you know, I go to all the Grand Slams,

and I think one of the most remarkable,

incredible things about the US Open is the crowd really does bear

some resemblance to the city where the tournament exists.

And I don't think that's something you can certainly say

about the French Open in Wimbledon.

Australia is a little different, but, you know,

London is an incredibly diverse city,

but you walk into the gates of the All-England Club,

and, you know, it's just about the whitest place on earth.

Vivica in Elmhurst.

You're on WNYC.

Hi, Vivica, if I'm saying your name right.

Hi.

It's Vivica, but Vivica's fine.

I'm calling because I actually live in Elmhurst,

and I took lessons at the US Open at the Billie Jean King Center all year,

and I tried to see if I could get tickets ahead of time.

They said no, everything has to be at the box office or online.

And I tried to get tickets at Ticketmaster,

and the prices are outrageous.

They're all resale.

None of them are actual box office.

Ticket prices.

And then last Friday, I actually went to the box office to try and get tickets.

Nothing available, only single tickets, and they were $1,200.

Oh, yeah, which are basically resale prices.

I'll give you one tip, and I don't know if this will help you enough,

but one thing that I do, if you go online,

and, you know, when tickets first go on sale,

months before the tournament,

you can get them at the actual box office prices on the website.

And I didn't buy tickets for Arthur Ashe Stadium this year.

You can get cheaper tickets by just buying for Louis Armstrong Stadium

or the Grandstand, and you can still see great matches,

like that Taylor Fritz match that I saw in Armstrong the other day.

But any other tips on tickets?

Because, you know, that brings up a real issue.

Yeah, well, it is a huge issue.

One thing I would also give a tip for is because even the tickets you bought,

Brian, are probably going to be out of reach for a lot of people.

That's right.

The week before the U.S. Open, the qualifying week,

you will see some great tennis, and it's free.

It's called Fan Week.

They were getting about 40,000 or 50,000 people a day in there for Fan Week.

And, you know, you just walk through the gates.

You can buy tickets.

You have to pay for food there, but you can bring your own food if you want.

And you will see players who haven't qualified,

and that means everybody who's outside of, like, the top 100.

And so if you think the 100 best tennis players in the world,

the 101st player is a pretty good player,

and you can sit right up close, right next to them,

and then you can watch the pros practice, too, because they will be there.

And some of them are playing exhibitions as well.

Funny enough, I was on the train going by there.

I wasn't going to the tournament by passing that stop during that week

and was really impressed by the numbers of people on the train

going to the U.S. Open that week.

And yet, they should do something for the heart of tournament play

to help make the audience look more like the city, I would say.

A couple of text messages that came in.

Listener writes,

I started dating someone a year and a half ago.

I had just gotten into tennis, and I started playing with her.

We, in many ways, fell in love on the tennis courts of Queens.

We're just about to move in together and attended the U.S. Open last week.

Our favorite player still in the tournament is rising American star Emma Navarro.

So that's very sweet.

And someone else, unfortunately, week one of the U.S. Open is being oversold

to where it's losing its appeal.

That was the angle of the Times article.

No longer can fans enjoy the side courts play

without attempting.

To manage through the crowds.

Anything from you on that overselling?

We have 20 seconds left in the segment.

Yeah, they do sell a tremendous amount of grounds passes.

And, you know, they keep adding seats.

I think they're going to make some effort there.

But it is sort of, you know, this is, it's a,

people are going to vote with their feet.

Are they going to keep buying the grounds passes and keep coming?

Or are they going to decide?

Uh,

whether it's too much.

So, you know,

if,

if they keep buying tickets and voting with their feet,

that might tell you something about the experience.

Matthew Futterman,

senior writer for The Athletic,

the sports unit of the New York Times.

Thanks again, Matthew.

Thanks for having me.

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The volatile politics of the Middle East will surely consume

much of the next U.S. president's attention.

So is there any hope that one of the candidates

could lead us toward peace and stability?

In the Middle East issues, when we say optimistic,

the bar is really low.

Like we're optimistic that there won't be a huge bar or something like that.

I'm Kai Wright.

And this week, we're taking a foreign policy deep dive on the call.

Our Notes from America pop-up series on the election.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

We'll be right back.

A hundred years of a hundred things.

We are up to thing number 17.

And for this Labor Day,

it's a hundred years of unionization and de-unionization.

We have a great guest for this.

It's Georgetown University professor Joseph McCartan,

an expert on U.S. labor, social and political history.

McCartan's scholarship focuses on the intersection of labor organization,

politics and public policy.

He is the current president of the Labor and Working Class History,

History Association,

a member of the board of the Catholic Labor Network,

a founding member of the board of the Interreligious Network for Worker Solidarity and more.

And he is co-author of the book Labor in America,

a history which must be a hit because it is now in its ninth edition.

And it's kind of a cheat sheet just for transparency.

Many of my questions will be drawn from an article he wrote last year

that kind of condenses a lot of the history in the textbook.

The article is called

U.S. Labor and the Struggle for Democracy.

Professor McCartan, thanks so much for doing this with us.

Happy Labor Day and welcome to WNYC.

Happy Labor Day to you, Brian, and thank you for having me.

So the frame is a hundred years of a hundred things.

But let's do some prehistory first.

You've written that the first U.S. unions coincided almost precisely with the founding of the republic.

And I read that and I thought, really?

We mythologize those days?

As an agrarian era, agricultural, pre-industrial era.

So what kind of unions would there have been in 1776?

Well, unions were already coming into being among workers like shoemakers,

then called cord wainers, among carpenters, among other skilled tradespeople

who tended to be concentrated in the small towns and cities of the American.

And that was the emerging republic at that time.

So skilled workers mostly who did things like barrel making, carpentry, shoemaking.

People involved in the production of shipping, ships, carpenters, and other such workers.

They were among the first to form unions in the United States.

And part of the concept there, which you argue throughout your work,

is that unionization and democratization,

are historically linked.

Can you lay that out for us conceptually a little bit?

Well, I think that's right, Brian.

And I would say that you could think of the U.S. union movement over time

from its inception around the time of the inception of the republic

down to the present day as being in a kind of dialectical relationship

with the democracy of the nation politically.

What workers were fighting for?

Really from those earliest days when they began to organize

the first what would become unions

was a say over the conditions of their work

and being able to have some self-determination over those conditions.

And the demand for a greater say at work

really was in sync with what was happening politically in the country

as

you know,

in the beginning, we're just talking about white men

who were allowed access to the ballot.

And at first it was just propertied white men.

But as white men began to demand access to the ballot

who didn't have property,

they were often part of the union movement of their time.

And so from the beginning,

as people struggled to widen political democracy,

that often resonated with the efforts of working people,

to widen a democratic voice in the workplace.

And I think over the long span of our history,

there's been that interaction where gains in political democracy

have triggered gains in worker voice,

where gains in worker voice have,

you know, in many cases, forwarded political democracy.

But it's also worked the other way as well.

And I think since the 1970s or so,

we've seen the labor movement diminishing in its power,

workers' ability to have a democratic voice in the workplace

was eroded during that time.

And that sort of coincided with an erosion of political democracy,

which has happened with a lot of things.

Yeah, hold that thought because we will get to the 1970s

and the arc from there to today.

But staying on some

prehistory, if we can call it that,

this series, again, is officially a centennial series.

It starts the timeline in the 1920s.

But you referenced the 1820s as the advent of central labor councils.

So what and where were those in 1820s America?

The first one formed in Philadelphia.

And this was the first time that those initial unions,

things like Carpenter's unions,

Shoemakers unions, and others,

started to come together across trades to affiliate with each other.

And what were first called, as you said,

city centrals, city central unions,

that brought together multiple groups of working people

who came to realize, and it was in the 1820s

when this realization really began to set in,

that the lot of a carpenter,

was linked to the lot of a bricklayer,

was linked to how well shoemakers were doing,

and that they needed to support each other in their struggles.

And that was an innovation that began in the United States,

I think, in that period in a really profound way.

Those early city central unions gave birth to the first effort in the 1830s

to try to build a national labor union.

All of that came crashing down with a depression

that broke out in the late 1930s

that led to economic turmoil

and a lot of those early organizations collapsed.

But workers in the 1820s for the first time began to realize

across craft lines that they needed to support each other.

You acknowledged in your first answer

that U.S. labor unions for most of their history,

and certainly in the early days,

were not linked with democratization enough

to take up the abolitionist cause

or the women's suffragist cause,

or you also write about them not opposing Chinese exclusion

when that was a thing,

and we have much more modern examples too

of their white male exclusivity.

What began to change that, and when?

So that change was gradual,

and it began I think even in the early 19th century,

in that period I'm talking about,

when women, and again we're talking here first about white women,

in textile mills in places like Lowell, Massachusetts,

began to form their own organizations.

At first they weren't fully received into the labor movement of their time,

but as women began to organize in those kinds of settings,

there was a growing realization among union people

that women also needed to organize.

Now, in the pre-Civil War years,

the labor movement that emerged emerged of course

in a setting in which slavery existed in the United States,

and the union movement was distorted by that reality

because it was basically a white person's movement

in the pre-Civil War years.

But by the end of the Civil War, with the end of slavery,

and as we moved into the Reconstruction period,

there were the first efforts to try to make the union movement

a biracial movement,

and to make it a movement that included women as well as men.

And by the 1880s,

an organization had emerged called

the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor.

Most people just referred to them as the Knights of Labor.

And they aspired to organize women as well as men,

African Americans as well as whites,

into one organization, skilled and unskilled workers as well,

into that early organization.

But they were still affected by the racism,

which was deeply ingrained in the America of the mid-19th century.

And that was expressed mostly

in their support at that time

for the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from the U.S.

And so the Knights of Labor, as inclusive as they were in some ways,

did believe that the entry of the Chinese

would undermine the conditions of workers in the United States.

And they played a role in lobbying for

and helping to achieve Chinese exclusion,

which happened in the 1880s

and was continued into the 20th century.

So the story of the U.S. labor movement

is a story of America, in a way.

And the way this country over many decades

had to struggle toward the ideal of becoming a multiracial democracy.

It didn't begin that way.

And the labor movement didn't begin that way.

But over time, the labor movement became an engine for change.

And sometimes it was halting.

Sometimes it was backward-looking,

as in the case of the Chinese exclusion.

But overall, the movement emerged and evolved

until the early 20th century.

It started to produce a much more inclusive approach.

Again, it would take a long time.

And over the course of much of the 20th century,

before it fully became a more inclusive entity.

Listeners, if you're just joining us,

we are in our WNYC Centennial Series,

100 Years of 100 Things,

thing number 17 today.

And for this Labor Day,

it's 100 Years of Unionization and Deunionization

with Georgetown University Professor Joseph McCartan,

who also is co-author of the book,

Labor in America, a History.

Moving closer to the actual start of our Centennial period,

meaning closer to the 1920s,

you have President Woodrow Wilson,

taking the U.S. into World War I

under the slogan of making the world safe for democracy.

And usually when we hear about that history,

it's in the context of international relations.

That slogan was aimed at Europe.

But you write that it helped unions build strength at home.

How so?

Oh, absolutely.

Well, the war happened at a crucial moment

in the evolution of the union movement.

For the first time,

the union movement was beginning to produce organizations

that were just dramatically more inclusive.

The leading one in that period

was the Industrial Workers of the World,

the IWW, sometimes called the WAB.

They rejected Chinese exclusion.

They rejected segregation.

They included the Chinese,

African Americans,

and,

and women in their organization.

They were a rival of the dominant labor group of that time,

the American Federation of Labor,

which was predominantly composed of skilled white workers unions,

but which itself started to become more inclusive.

The United Mine Workers, for example,

was part of the AFL.

And the mine workers included African Americans

as well as white workers in one organization.

So the union movement was becoming more inclusive.

The country was becoming more industrial.

Urbanization was accelerating.

And immigration was reaching its height

just before the war broke out.

And the war setting created a kind of cauldron

where a lot of those things came together.

And when Wilson led the country into war

under the banner of

this will be the war to make the world safe for democracy,

workers at that time demanded that

if we're fighting in Europe for democracy,

what about democracy in our workplaces?

And in the first six months of U.S. participation in World War I,

U.S. entered in April 1917,

there were more strikes than had occurred

in any previous such period in American history.

As workers took advantage of the fact that,

you know, the economy was gearing up for war.

There was a labor shortage.

Workers were demanding employers recognize their rights.

And so this massive strike wave arose.

Wilson had to deal with that in a couple of different ways.

One way was not so good.

He authorized or at least, you know,

looked the other way when repression

happened that ultimately undercut

the industrial workers of the world, the IWW.

But he at the same time set up a national war labor board

in an effort to placate workers.

And what that board, which was composed of employers

and union representatives did was it set some basic rules

where workers under the authority of this board would have

for the first time the government trying to enforce their rights

to choose representatives who could negotiate with their employers.

And that was something the government had to do basically

to keep workers loyal to the war effort.

So that they were able to say to workers,

yes, we're fighting this war in Europe to expand democracy,

but we're also interested in ensuring your democratic rights

in your own workplaces here at home.

And so you have union gains being rolled back.

Being rolled back after World War I.

But then the resonance between union building

and democracy seriously expanding in the 1930s and 40s.

And we'll get to the 30s, the Roosevelt era.

We're going to play a clip in a few minutes

of New York Senator Robert F. Wagner from that period

who gave us maybe the landmark piece of pro-union legislation of all time.

We'll get to that.

But take the first part of that first.

What happened after World War I?

And so where were we around the official starting point

of our centennial timeline, 1924?

Right.

So what happened is the war ends at the end of 1918.

Business was horrified, business leaders,

at what had happened in the brief period of U.S. participation in the war.

We're only in the war for about 18 months.

During that period, unionization soared.

The government was protecting workers' rights

to organize in that brief period.

But after the war, business absolutely demanded a rollback

of the War Labor Board.

It was terminated in 1919.

Business people also stirred up a Red Scare after the war

to try to link all labor agitation in the U.S.

to the recent revolution that had broken out in Russia

that had produced the Soviet Union.

That happened in 1917.

And to try to link strikes and labor disturbances in the U.S.

to a worldwide communist plot.

Those things helped to undermine labor as the 1920s began.

And so by 1924, we're talking about a union movement

that had been set back on its heels.

And its long-time leader, Samuel Gompers,

who was the founder of the American Federation of Labor in the 1880s

and led it all through the period we just talked about,

he dies at the end of 1924.

So we're talking about a union movement that in the mid-20s

was back on its heels.

It was dealing with a resurgent anti-unionism among leading employers

like Ford.

Like Ford.

Like General Electric.

Like U.S. Steel.

And absolute adamant opposition to the idea

that business had any obligation to negotiate collectively with their workers.

And so in the mid-20s, that was where labor stood.

The 20s was a period of relative prosperity for many workers.

But what characterized that prosperity was

that the rich got richer a lot faster than anyone else.

And that had the effect of laying the basis

for what would happen in the early 30s,

the Great Depression, the crash of 29, and what followed,

I think grew out of the inequalities

that were becoming more rampant in the 1920s.

So on to the 1930s now.

Did the Great Depression spur unionism?

One might think that in a depression, when jobs were scarce,

that workers would have declining power to negotiate anything.

But was that not the case?

It's a great way of framing the question, Brian,

because previous to the 1930s, all major depressions before that

had basically wiped out labor organizations.

The 1930s was the biggest depression the U.S. had gone through,

yet that didn't happen.

In its first years, though, it certainly seemed like it would happen.

The crash of 29 initiates that by 1932,

the union movement was really in trouble.

And the leading union expert, I would say, of academics at that time,

a guy named George Barnett, actually gave an address in 1932

in which he predicted that by the end of the 19th century,

that by the end of the 1930s,

the labor movement would no longer exist in the United States.

It was on its last legs.

And so the turnaround that happened subsequent to that

was shocking to many people, including a lot of the experts.

A lot of the turnaround came from the political outcome of the 1932 election.

The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to office,

and the inauguration of the New Deal,

set the basis for a transformative moment for workers.

Workers had been, initially in the United States,

I talk to my students about this,

I give them figures like in some cities, like Detroit,

unemployment was up over 50%.

And yet, the first reaction of American workers to depression

was not to flood into the streets and protest.

But, in fact, to sort of, you know, be discouraged.

And to, in some ways, maybe even think that

their own personal loss of a job was a personal failing.

But Roosevelt's election and his promise that government

was going to take action to turn the economy around

had a profound psychological effect.

Because, in effect, he was saying,

it's not your fault that you don't have a job.

The economy is broken, and we need to fix it.

And as he took steps to turn that around,

that energized workers.

One of the first things he did in the first 100 days in 1933

was push through something called the National Industrial Recovery Act

that included a very important provision

that was based on what had happened in World War I.

And it took that idea that,

and during the war, the government said,

you had a right to collectively bargain with your employer.

And it actually, for the first time, put it in law.

In what was called Section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act.

And when the government publicized the existence of this right

for the first time, and engraved in law,

that you could form a union.

And, in fact, the government felt

the formation of the union might actually benefit the economy

because if workers were able to organize and improve their wages,

that would give them more spending power.

And that could propel us forward

instead of the downward spiral.

When Section 7A appeared,

there was suddenly, in textile factories,

and auto factories, and steel mills around the country,

a surge of workers who wanted to form unions.

And none of that could have been expected a few years earlier.

But it had a dramatic and transformative effect on labor.

And it really opened the door for Senator Robert Wagner.

And one thing I'll say about Section 7A

and this early effort

that the New Deal made

to ensure workers' right to organize

is that all that came crashing down

with the Supreme Court decision

in May of 1935

that declared the N.I.R.A.

to be an unconstitutional law.

And it was called the Schechter decision.

And, you know, one thing

I think we can talk about before we're done, hopefully, Brian,

is that over the course of U.S. history,

courts have generally never been

defenders of workers' rights in the United States.

And I think we've seen that very much

to be the case in recent years.

We will definitely get to what you've written

about the Roberts court in that respect.

But let's take a break right now.

And when we continue,

we will get to that 90-year-old archive clip

of the senator from New York,

or one of the two senators from New York at the time,

Robert F. Wagner,

and what may be, you'll tell me,

the most landmark piece of union legislation,

pro-union legislation in American history

known as the Wagner Act.

As we continue with this Labor Day edition

of our WNYC Centennial Series,

100 Years of 100 Things,

it's thing number 17,

100 Years of Unionization and Deunionization.

Stay with us.

I'm Brian Ware on WNYC.

It's the Labor Day edition of our WNYC Centennial Series,

100 Years of 100 Things.

It's thing number 17,

100 Years of Unionization and Deunionization

with Georgetown University labor historian Joseph McCartan.

And so a milestone for unionization came in 1935

when Congress passed

and President Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act.

Here is New York Senator Robert F. Wagner.

speaking about the law that he introduced at that time.

The National Labor Relations Bill I introduced

is not new in principle.

It is based upon the long-cherished American belief

that every worker should be a free man in fact,

as well as in name,

should be free to belong to any kind of union that he likes.

My bill guarantees

this economic freedom in the clearest terms.

So, Professor, can you talk about the Wagner Act

as some kind of turning point?

Oh, it was a huge turning point, Brian.

And, you know, the situation was

after the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA,

that took down with it Section 7A,

and that meant that there was no labor law.

And it was at that point that Robert Wagner

stepped forward and said,

I've got one.

He'd been actually working on this law for some time

because the Section 7A had lots of flaws in it

that he wanted to correct.

And so that's the act that he introduced,

the National Labor Relations Act.

One of the things that it improved upon

over what happened during World War I or Section 7A

was that it banned company unions.

That is, when employers were faced with the fact

that workers were trying to form a union,

what they often did is they sponsored their own union.

They picked who would run it.

They decided what it could negotiate over.

And Wagner said that's no kind of real freedom,

as you hear him talking about there.

Workers need to be free to be fully represented

by their own organizations,

by organizations not dominated by their employers.

And so that's what the act provided for.

It created a board to oversee it

and enforce it,

the National Labor Relations Board.

Roosevelt signs it into law on July 5, 1935.

And it's hard to overstate how important that law was.

It was hugely important.

Among all of the things the New Deal did,

I would rank it near the very top,

if not the most important thing.

The New Deal, of course, created the Social Security Act.

But it also,

passed this important labor law.

And the important thing about the Wagner Act,

I think,

and what made it distinctive among other things

the New Deal did,

is it really altered the power balance in the country.

Because it provided a legal protection

for workers to form their own organizations,

to provide a countervailing force in the country

to the power of big business.

And it forced a reckoning

in the way our politics worked.

And it gave workers a voice

in politics that they had never previously had.

And it gave them power in the workplace

to negotiate over the terms and conditions of their work.

It gave them what, at the time,

workers often referred to as industrial democracy,

which was a complement to,

and a necessary complement to,

political democracy.

So the Wagner Act is hugely, hugely important.

Among the things it did is it produces

a revival within the labor movement

that ultimately ends up splitting the movement.

There were some in the AFL

who were committed to the craft union model

that went back to the 19th century.

There were others in the AFL unions,

especially John Lewis,

who led the mine workers union,

who believed that

that craft model was not appropriate

for the modern industrial factory,

for the auto plant,

for the steel mill.

What we needed were what Lewis

and others called industrial unions.

And so Lewis, once the act is passed,

Lewis says,

okay, AFL brethren,

it's time to really go in to organize workers.

It means we need a new model

because these workers in these settings

like steel mills,

they shouldn't be in 15 different unions.

Let there be one single union.

Let there be one single steel worker union.

The AFL couldn't come to an internal agreement

over that step.

And quite frankly,

some of the leaders of the craft unions

were more concerned about whether

their own influence would be diluted

by the emergence of rival industrial unions.

They opposed this.

Lewis said,

the hell with you all then.

And he and others like Sidney Hillman,

leader of the garment workers at that time,

David Dubinsky,

of the International Lady Garment Workers,

as well as Hillman,

who led the Amalgamated Clothing Workers,

they stormed out of the AFL.

They decided to form their own group

to organize industrial workers.

They called it first,

the Committee on Industrial Organization.

And it evolved into,

within a couple of years,

something called

the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

And they launched new unions

like the United Automobiles,

the United Steelworkers,

the United Electrical Workers.

And within a space of five to six years,

they really transformed industrial America.

They got big companies like General Motors

to sign contracts.

And famously at GM,

they did that by sitting in

and occupying the plants in Flint, Michigan,

beginning in late 1936 and early 1937,

occupying GM's plants

and refusing to leave

until the company recognized

their right to negotiate.

So the Congress of Industrial Organizations,

initial CIO,

you were talking about

the American Federation of Labor, AFL,

as an older group.

So that's what gave us the AFL-CIO

as we refer to it today.

That's right.

It would take 20 years

for those groups to come back together again.

They reunited finally in 1955

to form the AFL-CIO.

But sadly,

for much of the early period

after the split first emerged,

they spent a lot of time fighting each other.

And that probably limited some of the gains

that unions were able to make

in the late 30s and through the 40s.

But finally,

they made peace with each other.

But in the meantime,

both organizations grew quite a bit.

Once the CIO was launched,

the AFL got busy and decided,

well, you know,

they saw these unions forming

that they better start to organize

more effectively, and they did.

And so the movement grew.

Continuing through our timeline,

you have the 1950s

as kind of a high point

for American union power,

at least for those

who the movement represented.

Why the 1950s?

That's right.

Well, a couple of reasons.

One is that the percentage

of U.S. workers in unions

reached its high point then.

By 1953,

about 35% of all

non-farm employees

in the United States

were members of unions.

And union influence

expanded beyond that 35%,

because what union workers

were able to win

from their employers,

many non-union employers

really gave to their own workers

as an incentive to say,

hey, you don't need

to be unionized yourself.

So unions began to transform

the employment structure

in the United States.

They became more powerful.

Collective bargaining helped

to set the trend for workers.

In that period.

And one thing that's also true

about the 1950s,

I think probably a lot

of your listeners,

you know, operate under

the presumption that the 50s

were a decade of consensus.

And I like Ike.

And, you know,

the emergence of a kind of

middle-class consumer society.

And all of that was true

to some extent.

But the 50s were also

the decade in U.S. history

where the union

workers were most willing

and able to stage

effective strikes

to improve their situation.

And they did that repeatedly

all through the 50s.

So collective bargaining

was backed up

by worker collective action.

And that, you know,

we hear a lot of talk these days

about how unions built

the middle class.

Well, that's how they built it.

They built it by expressing solidarity

by, when they needed to,

going on strike.

If you're just joining us,

listeners, we are in our

WNYC Centennial Series,

100 Years of 100 Things.

We're up to number 17

for this Labor Day.

It's 100 Years of Unionization

and De-Unionization

with Georgetown University

Professor Joseph McCartan,

an expert on U.S. labor history

and co-author of the book

Labor in America, A History,

as we move through

the last hundred years.

And really, if you've been with us

from the beginning,

we've been talking about

unionization and de-unionization

from the very beginning

of the United States.

But we're up to the 1960s.

And in the 60s,

you document a divergence

between private sector labor unions,

which clung to their segregated ways,

and the AFL-CIO shamefully

did not support

Martin Luther King's

March on Washington in 1963.

But the American people

and the American Federation

of Teachers did.

And public sector unions

generally became more intertwined

with broader democratization

than the private sector ones.

Why and to what extent

was there that split?

Great question.

So it was a complicated story.

And I'll see if I can summarize it.

What I would say is

coming out of World War II,

the AFL still retained

its craft orientation.

A lot of those unions

still were segregated.

The CIO, I should say,

rejected segregation

and was very much

a proponent of

equal employment opportunity.

And when the AFL and CIO

came together,

there were divisions

within that organization

over how much and to what extent

to support an emerging

civil rights movement.

A. Philip Randolph

had been a leader

of the Brotherhood

of Sleeping Car Reporters,

the largest union

of African Americans.

By the way, it was Randolph

who was the honorary chair

of the March on Washington

in 1963 at which

Martin Luther King

gave his famous speech.

And Randolph had fought

for years within the AFL

and later the AFL-CIO

to get the unions

to fight racism

and to admit African Americans

to their ranks.

He was still waging that fight

as the 60s began.

It was the industrial unions

and the public employee unions

that were the most receptive

to that point of view.

And it was in the 60s

that we began to see the growth

of public sector unionism.

Actually, it was Robert Wagner's son,

Senator Wagner's son,

Mayor Robert Wagner, Jr.,

who in 1957,

as mayor of New York City,

began to collectively bargain

with city employees

for the first time.

And so by the 1960s,

we started to see teachers,

public workers of other kinds,

sanitation workers, for example,

organizing unions.

And they famously went on strike

in Memphis in 1960.

And so the public sector movement

was beginning to grow in the 60s.

That became a leading edge

for the fight to make

the union movement more inclusive

and to commit it more

to civil rights activism.

You're absolutely right

that the AFL-CIO did not endorse

the March on Washington in 1963.

Most of its leaders feared

that the march would produce

some kind of violence.

They were completely wrong,

of course, about that.

But some leading unionists

within the AFL absolutely supported

the march.

Walter Ruther,

the head of the United Automobile Workers,

for example,

was one of those.

And so the union movement

started to experience

what the country was experiencing

as the civil rights struggle emerged.

And the old question,

which side are you on?

Will you be on the side

of civil rights or not?

The union movement ultimately

began to move into an embrace

of the civil rights cause.

And the AFL-CIO actually played

a key role in lobbying

for the passage of the Civil Rights Act

in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act

in 1965.

So it was a little late to the party,

but when it came,

it came with force.

But then, as you write,

in the last third of the 20th century,

union density plunged.

And our touchstone for the 70s

will be 1971,

when you refer to something called

the Powell Memo,

written by future Supreme Court Justice

Lewis Powell,

which helped to spark a counterrevolution,

you say.

What was the Powell Memo,

and what kind of counterrevolution

did it spark?

Well, Lewis Powell

was then,

you know, writing that memo

for the American Chamber of Commerce.

He was a conservative legal mind

based in Virginia,

very much somebody who was defending

that old order

that was starting to change in the 60s.

And he was seeing something develop

that scared him.

A union movement that was now

embracing civil rights.

The emerging feminist movement.

The great transformations

that we associate with the 60s.

He was also alarmed by the consumer movement.

People like Ralph Nader.

And so he wrote a memo

basically to

the, you know,

conservative forces of the country.

We need to prepare for a long struggle

to push back against

this emerging

you know,

coalescence of movements.

And from that point,

I think you can date the beginning

of the long,

long fight

that we've witnessed

over the course of the last half century.

In which the right wing pushed back

to try to really roll back

the New Deal.

So one more break,

and then we'll bring it up to the present

as we continue with this Labor Day edition

of our WNYC Centennial Series,

100 Years of 100 Things.

It's thing number 17,

100 Years of Unionization and Deunionization

with Georgetown University

labor historian Joseph McCartan.

When we come back,

we're going to play one more archival clip

that goes back to 1981.

Some of you may be able to guess

what that is,

and then we'll bring it up to the present.

Stay with us.

Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

It's the Labor Day edition

of our WNYC Centennial Series,

100 Years of 100 Things.

It's thing number 17,

100 Years of Unionization and Deunionization

with Georgetown University

labor historian Joseph McCartan.

Who also has written

a textbook about the history of labor

in the United States

which is now in its ninth printing.

And another landmark moment

as we continue to move

through the decades came in 1981

when there was a strike by

unionized air traffic controllers

which President Ronald Reagan responded to

by firing all of them who walked out

and he literally broke the Union.

President Reagan announcing his response on day one of that strike, August 3rd, 1981.

Let me make one thing plain.

I respect the right of workers in the private sector to strike.

Indeed, as president of my own union, I led the first strike ever called by that union.

I guess I'm maybe the first one to ever hold this office who is a lifetime member of an AFL-CIO union.

But we cannot compare labor management relations in the private sector with government.

Government cannot close down the assembly line.

It has to provide without interruption the protective services which are government's reason for being.

It was in recognition of this that the Congress passed a law

forbidding strikes by government employees against the public safety.

Reagan in 81.

Professor McCartin, that strike was illegal coming in, of course.

It was a safety-related government service, correct?

Absolutely, it was illegal.

So Reagan was within his legal rights to respond in that way.

His response, I would say, was one of the most profoundly important other turning points of labor history.

I think almost at the level of the Wagner Act and its implications.

I've written a book about it called Collision Course.

And, you know, I'm glad you played that part of the clip

where Reagan referred to the fact that he was once a union leader,

once president of the Screen Actors Guild.

And in a way, that situated him rather well to play the role that he played then

because he could claim to, you know, not be anti-union per se,

but to break this particular strike, which the workers did not have a right to engage in.

But.

Which had not been the first time public workers had done something like that.

In 1970, postal workers went on strike across the country in an illegal wildcat strike,

not approved by their unions, but that had big impact at that time.

Nobody was fired over that.

So what Reagan did was much, much more militant than Nixon's response.

In 1970, Reagan's response came on the heels of some big changes

that had been happening over the course of the 70s.

The right wing was gathering strength around the ideas of Lewis Powell and others.

Reagan himself was emerging as a vehicle for the right wing's hopes.

The economy was changing in ways that made unions more vulnerable.

Deindustrialization had begun.

And.

Much of the industrial belt around the Great Lakes.

Steel mills were closing.

Auto plants were downsizing.

And the union movement's strength in the industrial core of the country was diminishing.

At the same time, business was really ready to roll back the gains that labor had made.

And when Reagan had the opportunity to confront the air traffic controllers in 1981,

opponents of labor really saw that as a great opportunity for them.

Well, let me follow up on that and follow up on what he said in the clip,

because we heard Reagan there make a clear distinction between public sector and private sector unions

and reinforce, at least in his language, the private sector one's right to strike.

But you wrote that Reagan's response to the air traffic controllers helped.

Corporate employers become less inhibited about strike breaking, even where striking was legal.

So how did it spill over?

That's right.

So what what happened is Reagan fired those air traffic controllers.

He banned them for life from that work.

Bill Clinton would later bring some of them back.

But when he did that, there was no public outrage about it.

That the labor movement itself was not even united over what its response to this should be.

And business people looked at that and they said, see, Reagan has been tough.

He broke the unions and the union in this case, and he hasn't paid any price for it.

It's time for us to follow suit.

And so you started to see employers in the years after 1981 respond to legal strikes by private sector employees just as militantly.

So that copper miners went on strike.

In Arizona in 1983 against the Phelps Dodge company, Phelps Dodge induced that strike by cutting their wages and forcing them into this confrontation.

And then when the workers walked out, Phelps Dodge said, well, we're we're going to hire replacements now.

And they brought in replacement workers and basically destroyed that union.

The same thing happened in Minnesota.

To me.

Packers at Hormel in 1986, it happened to multiple workers and airlines during these years and private sector employers in this case were recognizing that a moment of opportunity had emerged.

It was possible to break strikes if you just were tough on unions and hired replacement workers.

And they did that to the point that.

Union workers.

And the U.S.

Became frightened about the prospect of even thinking of going on strike, thinking that it would lead to the destruction of their unions.

And so you started to see a dramatic fall off and the willingness of workers to go on strike over the course of the eighties and into the twenty first century.

And that was hugely important.

Yeah, it was hugely important because, like, you know, the.

Percentage of union workers was declining.

Yes.

But even more significant was the fact that even union workers felt like they didn't have the power and leverage they once had.

And once that feeling set in, inequality could surge.

Employers could take more and more profits for themselves without worrying that that this would induce labor unrest.

And further to that, coming into the twenty first century.

Now you focus.

And I know you want to talk about that.

You want to talk about this on the Supreme Court.

And you write that the court under Chief Justice John Roberts far outstrips any court of the last century in its tendency to side with owners over workers.

Can you give a couple of brief top examples of that?

Sure.

Well, it's recent decision in the case of the Starbucks company is one.

And that goes right to the heart of what the New Deal did and what the Wagner Act did and what the National Labor Relations Board did.

So recently the Supreme Court decided in the case of Starbucks workers that.

That the National Labor Relations Board had exceeded its authority by seeking and gaining a preliminary injunction that forced Starbucks to stop firing.

It's baristas who were expressing interest in unionizing.

And.

And this decision ultimately has resulted in an effort to curb the ability of the National Labor Relations Board to preempt employers from doing bad things and to force cases into the court system rather than allowing the Labor Board to do what it had been designed by Wagner to do,

which was intervene and protect workers' rights where needed.

The court also recently ruled in a case in which it has opened the door to unions being penalized for any economic damages that employers suffer as a result of a strike.

And this court has been the most anti-union court, the most anti-worker rights court, I think,

that we've seen in the last decade or so.

And certainly since the 1920s.

And yet you write that today and we hear about it in the news.

We've been talking about it on the show.

There are many signs indicating the labor movement is stirring to life.

We hear about Starbucks and Amazon and UPS and the vote to join a union by Volkswagen workers in Tennessee, rare for the South.

So why now against all those headwinds of Supreme Court power, corporate campaign finance power,

and a lot of conservatives?

And how do you see the future of state governments building on the history that you were describing from the 70s and the 80s?

Great question.

I think a lot of things have come together in the last several years that have set the groundwork for the recent interest in unions that we now find.

And I teach young people and I would say that that interest is especially pronounced among people who are under 30.

And polls show that too.

Union favorability.

Is higher now than it's been at any time since the mid 60s.

Why is that?

I think a number of things.

I think one is that the pandemic has had a big impact on the psychology of workers in our time.

I think in a way that recalls in some ways what happened during the Great Depression.

The pandemic experience affected workers across the board.

And one of the things that it dramatized.

For lots of workers was the persistence and in fact,

even exacerbation of inequalities.

I would take Amazon as an example.

The company set record profits during the pandemic as people increasingly relied on Amazon to buy things so that they could stay home.

Amazon workers felt like those profits came out of their sweat and blood.

And that they were not protected by the company adequately during the pandemic that they certainly didn't enjoy in the fruits of its profitability.

And so you started to see the emergence of union interest at a company like Amazon.

Now they've been fighting that tooth and nail in the years since and that's going to be a long fight ahead there, but it's not just Amazon.

The same thing happened.

That Starbucks and that unionization effort has resulted in more than 300 stores choosing a union in the past couple of years.

And Starbucks is actually negotiating now with Starbucks Workers United on seeing whether they can arrive at some agreement for how to handle the issues that are at issue there.

So I think the pandemic played a big role.

I think inflation.

Inflation has played a large role as well.

Workers are saying our wages aren't keeping up with the rising cost of housing and that's helping to fuel this.

Two things before you go and we run out of time.

One, you teach at a Jesuit University, Georgetown, and I see you're a member of the board of the Catholic Labor Network and a founding board member of the Interreligious Network for Worker Solidarity.

Where does religion come into anything that we've talked about?

And are different U.S. religions or denominations different on these issues?

Like if we think of, you know, white Christian nationalist evangelicals, if we want to call it that, who have a lot of clout these days as generally conservative, does it generalize to their view of unions or labor rights?

Oh, what a wonderful question.

That's a rich and complicated history.

I would say that from the very beginning in the formation of unions in the United States.

That, you know, workers often brought their religious point of views into their organizing.

And many cases were inspired by those point of views to engage in organizing.

The Catholic tradition going back to the 1890s and a papal encyclical called Rerum Novarum has long defended the rights of workers to unionize and bargain collectively.

But Catholicism isn't.

And the Jewish tradition and many of the Protestant churches and among Muslims as well.

There are teachings about justice in the workplace that have been inspiring to workers seeking to organize.

And that's been an ever present factor.

I think a sad thing that has occurred in that period since the 1970s.

That parallels some of the other things.

We've talked about is that religion has to a great extent been co-opted by by conservative forces and by and in some cases anti-union forces.

And I would say frankly, that's true among many Catholics.

There's a large Catholic presence on the current Supreme Court, including Justice Roberts himself.

They don't seem to take Catholic social teaching very seriously.

When it comes to issues like the right of workers to truly have the ability to organize and to bargain collectively.

There's not much indication that that kind of thinking has has impacted those jurists in my view.

But I do think that in the course of social movement struggles in the US, religion has played important roles in the past.

I expect that it will play an important role in the future as well.

So and in a diverse way.

Yes.

So last question in our last few minutes.

We've been through a lot.

We've talked about the past hundred years really the past 250 years for this Labor Day edition of a hundred years of a hundred things thing number 17 a hundred years of unionization and de-unionization.

Is it an impossibly dumb question to ask based on our history and your understanding of it where the pendulum might be a hundred years from now?

Because we like to look forward as well as back in this series or maybe a little less stupid.

What you see is the prime inflection points in the next coming decades be at AI or whatever as tension points.

I think we're at an inflection point right now, Brian.

I think what is happening this year.

What is going to happen in the next few years is going to help determine how things look a hundred years from now.

I would say that AI.

And other technological changes really, you know, or 10 vast changes in the relationship of people to their work.

It's hard to know what the future holds in that regard.

But one thing I think we can say from history is that American workers have often found and have consistently found that whatever changes come they are best met together best met collectively best.

By coming together with other workers who are also affected by those changes and by seeking a democratic voice and and how those changes are negotiated a good place to end listeners coming up Wednesday thing.

Number 18 as we stay on the theme of workers on this Labor Day week a hundred years of employment and unemployment that's coming up on Wednesday for today.

We thank labor historian from Georgetown University Joseph McCartney.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Brian.

Thanks for listening to Brian layer weekend.

We're back on the radio Monday morning at 10 a.m.

In the meantime, follow us on Twitter at Brian layer or facebook.com slash Brian layer WNYC where there's always a conversation 24 7.

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