good evening i'm lucy catherine of in for tom hartman in washington d.c. every friday here on the big picture tom sits down with an individual who has made headlines or help us better understand the major issues over time brought his or her work out tonight we have another look at two of tom's conversations with great minds we begin with richard trumka he's the current president of the a.f.l.-cio and for more than thirty years richard trumka has dedicated himself to labor issues and

protecting the rights of unionized workers here in the united states and with the battles between republican governors and organized labor still waging across the nation comes interview with trump a definitely warrants another look. for tonight's conversations with great minds i'm honored to be joined in the studio by a major political figure here in washington d.c. he's the son of a coal miner who never forgot where he came from and to this day continues to fight for the rights of workers around the world he stood up to both transnational corporations coal coal mining companies and political parties and in doing so has become a major voice in the progressive community carlie's the president of the largest trade union in the united states the a.f.l.-cio and welcome i'm pleased to welcome richard trumka great to have you with us sir thanks for alone i really appreciate it and as

a member of after i think that if else you oh absolutely go right away. and my dad machinist union with his mother with all cia are affiliated with if. there's a number of issues that i'd like to get through with you were were it's just astounds me your understanding or just practical understanding of these issues and that we collectively whether it's the democratic party it's progressives it's the media even in the even in the labor union movement rather frankly haven't been so successful i think in making sure that the average person understands this stuff and start with the with how economies work reagan came along and trickled out you know if you give a lot of money to rich people how do you get us there her hard to hire people you talk about what really drives an economy and how to manage drive stick. a little they start back in one thousand nine hundred six from one thousand nine hundred sixty nine hundred seventy three productivity in this country doubled in sort of

wages in the most interesting thing about that period of time is the people in the bottom two quarts their incomes were rising faster than the people at the top so the income gap was closing and the. middle class was before interesting really during that period of time almost forty percent of the american workers were represented in a union at collective bargaining so the money that we were getting was being distributed evenly and everybody got some of it so the economy could grow from forty six are being seventy three to date productivity's continued but wages have stagnated so back in the seventy's the reagan period of time early eighty's they embarked on a strategy where we would have a low wage high consumption strategy and the only way we could do that is to borrow these or go through credit you've got it now our economy is seventy two percent driven by consumer spending and if consumers don't have money in their pockets the

economy can't grow because you can only paro for so long we know that that will work we know the bubbles don't work because they all busted whether it was the high tech bubble the housing bubble or anything else so we need to get back to the point where wages are raising rising up so that we can actually build an economy that's built strong on wage increases and growing demand rather than have it built on borrowing and a stagnant to man supply demand supply is productivity demand is wages and you know you've got not a balance here over the last thirty years you're on the president's council of economic advisors. why is he not talking like this. well we tried to get him to talk about jobs because i mean the only thing that's on most people's mind right now is the economy and jobs i mean you could talk about all the fruit all around the edge but it's about economy and it's about creating jobs he got on that message

around labor day we should have been on that message year and a half and it's not just and i don't mean this just as like a knock on president obama i mean the democratic party as a whole there's a there's a few actually bernie sanders probably the best candidate to. because he's an event although he caucuses with a town that's what so i think they've had a fairly good program recently to talk about jobs and pushing jobs and saying how they're going to defend job but what we have to do for the american public said here's to politics this creates jobs and here's how this doesn't create jobs and here's why and then let them pick because i think they're going to pick job creation every time today on my radio show the store called in and said she was listening to fox news on the radio station over the newscast atop the hour and these cast they came out and said the democrats the house of representatives today failed to pass legislation that would extend unemployment benefits and of sounds like it was the democrats' failure and they're eroding away to democrats really was

blocked by the republicans absolutely who have these bizarre economic theories i'm wondering your opinion. of whether the republicans are blocking things like unemployment benefits that obviously generate massively stimulate the economy absolutely and generate jobs actually. who are they blocking this because they actually want the economy to continue going to the tank because that's their strategy for two thousand and twelve i mean there was reference to this two years ago when obama first came in you had several very high profile republicans saying we're going to block everything on mcconnell just said that mitch mcconnell just said his number one priority is stopping obama for being reelected if the economy gets better. obama's going to be reelected and i think some of it is about stopping the economy so he doesn't get no i really don't want to embrace that because i really don't want to think that people that we elected are the only one the economy to get back to where it was but i think if you look at it they've said no to every

job program out there and if you look at the unemployment insurance just take that one if we don't do anything by november thirtieth about nine hundred thousand people are going to lose their unemployment. benefits if we don't do anything by the end of the year another two million people will stop getting unemployment insurance that they've paid for by the way still they won't get it anymore and what happens is that we have almost three million people that will stop consuming again our economy is seventy two percent driven by consumer spending if three million people stop consuming because they don't have money then what you're going to see is a real tail down and it tipped us right back in into a recession what we truly bad for everybody absolutely you talk about mention seventy two percent of our economy is consumer spending you've talked in the past about the four drivers and i go on to me let's let's just do this you can want to want to quote here your drivers of the economic a there are there are the economy

our economy is driven by four things but first as i mentioned is consumer spending at seventy two percent the next one is business investment and now you've seen businesses right now of one point eight trillion dollars in profits that they've parked at the federal reserve you get another a billion today or trillion to let the banks that part because they don't see the demand out there there's no aggregate demand they're not spending they're not going to spend it the third driver is net exports and you don't have an export and in four years and as a twenty year naseby import deficit we've had that for fifteen years or better and then the fourth driver is government spending and what we've seen or what we're seeing is the increase in money that we spend in this stimulus package which was absolutely essential for keeping us from going into a depression is now being negated because the states are cutting back on their spending and still the less they spend the less effect the federal money has on the

economy and if we do what the what the republicans say right now cut all the spending go back on the deficit they'll put us into a depression right now that we will get out. for a number of years you're involved with. the o.e.c.d. elation previous. incidents of economic development and i forget the ceiling and what it was to act so it's a trade union advisory council and that's what you're on i'm to president of that right now you were seen right out in europe a really interesting battle going on and it's kind of met at a what we're what is going on in here england is is you know with david cameron the conservative he's literally taking a media axe to the budget is going to be a million people unemployed and that's a lot the country that's paul absolutely in the next six months as a consequence of what he's doing and somehow he thinks that's going to revive the economy when they did that one thousand nine hundred seventeen the last time the

conservative government really took an axe to the british budget it produced basically a mini depression. on the other hand many other european countries are saying no we want to move forward but they're getting they're getting a tax from the hedge fund managers of the currency speculators what in your role they are. to actor and the o.e.c.d. what's your advice to them and how do you see that played out here looking what do you see the relationship that will maybe i should i should set the world stage so that you can understand that right now all the countries believe that there is a stagnant amount of demand world demand and so if germany exports more products well they may increase their economy they're taking it from somebody else one thing we're trying to do is a different strategy to increase world demand rather never really fight for a constant size now the more that they they try to cut back right now

during this period when the the recovery is so fragile the less likely we are to grow out of it the more like louis or the go into a recession slot. depression if everybody did what germany said they should do slash their spending he'd see us pull back because that world demand that is now stagnant will shrink so there will be less world demand more fighting over it but less actual girls to be had so right now we don't have a debt crisis we have a jobs crisis the way to grow out of this is to create jobs worldwide don't think about this for a second this is one thing the average wage in the developing countries right now is fifty cents a day fifty cents if we would increase that from fifty cents a day to a dollar a day we do increase world demand by about forty percent that would mean everybody

export markets for everybody everybody and we could start growing again creating or we could just do it through absolutely to have some again very very kind of nationalistic about you you mentioned that there are three and a half progressives on the deficit commission i'm not going to ask you the half that's good. but how do you know there's one thousand members which add another hundred out of this commission end up with three and a half progresses that's a good question i don't know that i think the administration neither didn't do the background of people or they miscalculated or you could take the cynical point of view and say that they i was that were doing paths that they wanted to go through i don't particularly believe that i have a hard time probably yet when i saw the loss particularly when you come to the first thing they did that commission was they had nine different guidelines that

they were taught but i remember they were deficit reduction commission that was the first one was tax rates tax cuts for the rich and number nine the last one was actually talked about deficit reduction it was sort of stood on its head. and then the stuff they're talking about doing away with a raising the age of social security cutting back on benefits those are literally dead in the water before they ever arrive and they would be terrible for us for the economy the biggest thing about the economy is when we asked them. what effect will all of these cuts have on the economy it's a relative that's what some should see jesus what will happen and they with a straight face say we don't know how we never considered that because all we cared about was deficit reduction what astounds me is that nobody has pointed out to them or these guys are so i don't where of history that after world war two we were one hundred twenty one percent of g.d.p. and our debt over the next six years you know in the early years the eisenhower

administration we paid most of that off and we did none of it through austerity we did all of it by growing our economy right more people working at better wages so that name more taxes the tax collections went up like crazy at a clip and you know just grow our way out of this stuff i'd like to get into a conversation about your roots in the coal mines sure and how you got where you are and let's let's pick that up in just a moment ok still ahead of the big picture with richard trumka. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime. i think. he'd done well.

we never got the says to keep him safe get ready because their freedom. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you don't. charge is a big. fat .

i. walk about there's a nice conversations with great minds speaking with a.f.l.-cio president and major voice for the progressive community richard trumka. tell it tell me about how you got into labor got into the labor movement i saw these two pieces of your bio that . juxtaposed are unusual you started working in the mines in sixty eight and you've got your water green seventy four. there i know there's are some there's a story of. the first thought probably pretty lucky i'm

a third generation coal miner both my grandfathers my dad both his brothers all my uncles most of my cousins were coal miners so i came out of school and you know thought i might have a career in playing football and got hurt never got to realize that career so i went in the mine i went into my in our early and we became in within a year of my fellow miners elected. me as chairman of the safety committee we had a couple of safety disputes i ended up in washington d.c. type until the elected officials in washington d.c. about the dispute. they saw something in me that i cor probably did see myself and so the union actually picked me up and decided that they'd seven school so for a while i worked at that shift in the mine i went to school in the daytime and then i went on what's called a six and six month program where i would work six months in

a mine and go to school six months and then they sent me to law school. got elected i got out a law school went to work straight for the mineworkers and i was involved in a group called nine years for democracy we had a president at that time his name was tony boyle i was very very alarmed at it well yeah he was a tough guy and i well you know prisoners yeah he was very autocratic i mean and staging the murder of a jockey polonsky and his wife and daughter shock was that ok i mean i'm remembering that i decided to order a hit and so anyway we the minder for democracy elected a guy many mccardell miller on a reform slate we democratized the union put it back in the hands of the rank and file i came down to washington and in the legal department at that time i was working on a number of different things and began having philosophical differences with with

the president because he was starting to sway or veer from other principles that we all thought we agreed to i went back to the mine ran for office get elected to the executive board get elected to the president of the mineworkers in eighty two it to write for the age of thirty three and i was president for three terms and then we had the insurgency at the a.f.l.-cio and john sweeney and iran in one thousand nine hundred five and got elected at that time. amy goodman and i can note it. and a.f.l.-cio meeting about eight or nine years ago in chicago i think it was the annual meeting and i don't recall but it was just months after the change to when split it happened and there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth at the time about you know what's the future of labor going to be when you look back at that split. what are your thoughts on the state of labor in the united states really well when you look at the split it

was still tragic that the split occur because even even the the things that they said they wanted to all of them could have been done with all of us together the good news is a split caused us all to look at each other and we changed a lot i mean this is a stronger because we changed a lot now most several of the unions have come back into the if a c.e.o. and so we were in the other ones were working very very closely together so we're probably more united right now that we've been in the long time even before the split and the other thing that i talk you see your readers understand or your listeners understand this is that even when there was a split that split was at the top or it was never at the bottom because eighty five percent of the locals that left eighty five percent of their locals stayed affiliated with the a.f.l. c.i.a.o.

at the local in the state level so there wasn't this big rift that everybody imagine it was at the top not at the bottom well and speaking of the role of organized labor you mentioned. organized labor in the in the forty's spain i mean you know from from before the wagner act in thirty five. we had fairly minimal union representation the united states and up until forty six forty seven when when harry truman vetoed but it had the republicans pushed through over its me to a taft hartly. we were a peak of unionization as over forty percent and then a kind of slowly slid down until reagan overtly declared war. in eighty two eighty one. when when reagan declared war on organized labor there was a lot of talk within the republican party and pretty much of it was right out front i mean like in the pages the wall street journal about defunding the democratic party organized labor was a big funder of the democratic party and this was just pure partisan there were also people who were saying that the average working person had too much money that

the reason why the instability of the cities and seventy's happened and this was something william buckley was very very open about russell kirk wrote a book about a conservative mind reckoned if you keep the reason why was because we had the women's movement the civil rights movement the kids saying no to vietnam things like that was because they felt safe economically safe and that it was important to disempower that middle class economically to provide for a stable society with their vision of a stable america. do you think that even today the republican party is working against organized labor a lot of. partisanship you know as the from the democrats out of ideology what's do you see this year south notice that all of the above look here's what happened we in the late seventy's early eighty's with reagan. this country took a strong two year before that we were working on

a high wage high consumption model push wages up so they could consume and grow the economy reagan put us on a different path the path was a low wage high consumption melody now everybody knows that they can't go one you can't have low wages and high consumption because even if you can borrow for a while it comes to an end but they also were interested in the other thing and he had thatcher and a couple of other margaret thatcher for approving that came to. there was a couple of things that the europeans call it neo liberalism yes well what it means is that you call it radical conservatism yeah they believe that the market is all knowing all self correcting and anything that gets in the way of the market must be eliminated so you eliminate regulations because they're in the way of the market you eliminate labor because they're in the over the way the market so they actively did that now there was a side benefit to them they knew that the workers are by and large the foot troops

of progressive forces and if they can take labor out they help themselves not only economically because we're the last ones on the playing field fighting for the average jane and joe but they also help themselves politically but they weaken us they weaken the progressive forces in the country so there's been a concerted effort from the early eighty's to this very moment they just are now realises that frank let's go on after labor day that's next surprising or oh yeah it was a surprise that he said well they've been going after asking for some time with this whole you know government employees record so much money trying to vilify public employees he had a hedge fund operator making a billion and a half dollars playing a lower tax rate than the average person making thirty five thousand dollars a year so to deflect from that they talk about a government worker who's rages are lower than in the private sector was able to

get a pension in some health care something that everybody everybody in the country should have and they try to say that that's wrong you mean from wrong it's actually the island that we're hinged to because if they take it off of the public employees right now with the weakness in the private sector everybody will lose pensions everybody will lose health care and we can't allow that to happen because this is what we. us keep saying we're the richest nation on the face of the earth at our mo tritch point in time every other developed countries figured out how to do this we can do it. we can do it or do it again you know in a very cynical way you talk about the two ways to grow labor collective bargaining which is what is how we grew labor in the united states really i mean starting the eight hundred eighty s. but really took off of the workers and and. government was the phrase they use

public employment like as is as europe with a large public they have a large number of regulations that mandate highways and that's the to as you grow wages actually. there are two ways you either do it the way they do in your opinion mandating a high minimum wage with a large safety social safety net or you do it the way we try to do it here with collective bargaining or people can make a deal that both of us can live with and both of us came in when with and if we're able to do that more people had collective bargaining the seventy two percent of the economy would have more wages to spin so that the economy could grow which would mean demand would increase which would mean there be more profits which would mean we would all do a little bit better and there'd be more tax collections which means we wouldn't have as big a deficit a little but isn't there or and isn't there a middle ground between the two and we've kind of danced with that you know things like minimum wage here we have you know national health insurance programs things

like this you know to care for everybody. to to what extent do you think that looking forward into the future. that we can drive america or you know push the idea to americans or. awaken americans to getting the both of these things are necessary that we need to you know the people who don't have access to a union but they have to have a decent minimum wage and ten bucks isn't a decent minimum wage out right now you know and and that and that there. it has to be a social safety net through which people go for which in the two minutes or so we have thoughts on how we can well i think it just takes constant talking first i think it's takes courage on the part of our elected leader to start talking the way i democrats want to start talking like democrats again and say look this is who we stand for we stand for an economy that works for everybody it's some of us we have to do it as well how do you do that i saw an interview the other day if the big

corporate me and and a reporter a person who was present themselves a reporter puts a mike in front of a democrat and says you know are you are you seriously planning on raising taxes on those people who create jobs. and it's like they're just throwing the frame out there is if it's as you know and it's pretty wolf because i think the press has stopped analyzing stuff and they've taken the easy way out in a lot of stuff but she do have the corporate media that is these controlled and actually they're not media anymore they're actually entertainment it's an input and we it's an infotainment mercial so that's what they do they take the tax cuts the you know getting the facts out all the tax cuts if you fact the democrats have their way into what we believe people over two hundred fifty thousand dollars will be get an additional tax break that doesn't mean they will get a tax break yeah everybody is going to get the same as everybody else and not ten times higher than everybody else and by the way this is just for those people want

to talk about the theft that the difference between the republican version of the democratic version for people making between two hundred and five hundred thousand dollars by the way that's the ones i consider small business is four hundred nine dollars so they're make it this big for us if you will be able to create jobs is four hundred nine dollars difference and tell me this how many jobs can you create with four hundred nine dollars or one richard trumka thanks so much thanks for having me. let's not forget that we are partners regular.