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 helped us better understand the major issues over time for his or her work now tonight we have another look at two of tom's conversations with great minds we begin with richard trumka he's the person 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 tom interview with trumka 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 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 the circle thanks for the know and i really appreciate it and as a member of after i think i'm. absolutely. right

a lot of. my dad machinists union has another we have to fill it with if. it there's a number of issues that i'd like to get through with you were were it's just astounds me your understanding your 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 will start with the with the holocaust a nice work reagan came along and trickled out you know if you a lot of money rich people how do you get us there are hard to hire people you talk about what really drives an economy and how to me and it drives. a little of a star back in one thousand forty six from from one thousand nine hundred sixty one nine hundred seventy three productivity in this country doubled and so did wages

and 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 born interestingly 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 seventy three to date productivity's continued but wages are stagnant 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 cry and 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 borrow for so long we know that that will work you know the pub will still work because the old bust that 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 so that we can actually build an economy that's built strong on wage increases and growing demand rather than have it built on my rowing and a stagnant demand supply demand supply as productivity command as wages and you know the gotten out of balance here over the last thirty years you're on the president's council of economic advisors. why is he not talking like this but 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. 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 for a labor day we should have been on that message or the ad 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 kind as to. because he's an event caucuses with a down supply 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 jobs but what we have to do for the american public said there's two people six 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 this or called in and said she was listening to fox news on the radio station it was 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 it sounds like it was the democrats' failure and there you know it blame the democrats really was

blocked by the republican 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 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 mcconnell just said to mitch mcconnell just said his number one priority is stopping obama for being reelected if the economy gets better if obama's going to be reelected and i think some of it is about stopping the economy so he doesn't get well 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 thing you can add me 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 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 paid for by the way so they won't get it anymore and what happens 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 and what you're going to see is a real tail down and it tipped us right back and into a recession or which would be bad for everybody writes absolutely you talk about you mentioned seventy two percent of our economy is consumer spending you've talked in the past about the four drivers that i got out of me let's let's just do this you can want to one quote here your drivers of the

a complicated there are there in the economy our economy is driven by forcing the first as i mentioned is consumer spending that's seventy two percent the next twenty is business investment and now you've seen businesses right now at one point eight trillion dollars in profits that they've parked the federal reserve you've got another a billion two trillion to that the banks the 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 a net export of that information and as a twenty year massive 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 increased money that we spend in this stimulus package which was absolutely essential from keeping us from going into a depression is now being that gated 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 what the republicans say right now cut all spending go back on the deficit they'll put us into a depression right now that we will get out of the. for a number of years you're involved with. the o.e.c.d. buildings ation for us. residential economic development yeah and i forgot to see that and it was to act the way see that's there's a trade union advisory council and that's what you're on i'm the president of that right now we're seeing right now in europe a really interesting battle going on and it's kind of met of the what we're going to was going on in here england is is you know with david cameron the conservative he's literally taking a meat axe to the budget is going to be a million people unemployed and that's a lot the country that's poets' a little 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 in 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 the currency speculators what in your role they are. to acar and the o.e.c.d. what's your advice to them and how do you see that played out here what do you see that relationship will maybe i should i should set the world stage so that you can understand it frame it 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 than have very good flight for constant size right now in the war 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 to go into a recession slot. depression if everybody did what germany said they should to slash their spending see us pull back because that world demand that is now stagnant we shrink so there will be less world demand more fighting over it but less actual growth 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 just this one thing the average wage in the developing countries right now is fifty cents a day right fifty cents if we would increase that from fifty cents a day to a dollar a day when you increase world demand by about forty percent that would mean

everybody export markets for everybody everybody we could start growing again creating or we could just do it. 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 asking for the half and that's good. but how did you know there's eighteen members. out of this commission and with three and a half progresses that's a good question i don't know that i think the administration either 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 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 to raising the age of social security cutting back on benefits those are literally get in the water before they ever arrive and they would be terrible for a 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 if they're all the top that's what some choose if usenet will happen and they with a straight face say we don't know 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 aware of history is 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 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 so 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 in the big picture more with richard trumka. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right. i think. one.

we have the government says they're pretty safe getting ready for 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 or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you know some time part is a big. fat . fuck.

welcome back there's a nice conversations with great minds i'm speaking with a.f.l.-cio president and major voice within 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 got your law degree in seventy four were. there i know there's are some there's a story of. a first thought probably pretty lucky i'm

a third generation coal miner and 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 went in the minor early and we became in within a year my fellow miners elect. me as chairman of the safety committee we had a couple of safety disputes i ended up in washington d.c. talkin to the elected officials in washington d.c. about the dispute. they saw something in me that i corps probably did see myself and so the union actually picked me up and decided that they'd send me to school so for a while i worked shifts 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 said we lost. get elected i got out a law school went to work straight for the mineworkers and i was involved in a group called miners for democracy we had a president at that time his name was tony boyle those very very armor atic well yeah he was a tough guy a.o.l. you know prisoners yeah he was very autocratic i mean and staging the murder of a jockey blonsky and his wife and daughter shock was that ok i mean i'm remembering that i decided to order it here so in a way we the minor for democracy elected a guy by name of arnold miller want to reform slate we democratize 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 got elected to the executive board had elected to the president of the mine workers in eighty two at the right board 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 i ran i in one thousand nine hundred five and got elected at that time. amy goodman and i keynoted. and a.f.l.-cio meeting about eight or nine years ago in chicago i think it was the annual meeting 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's would. what are your thoughts on the state of labor in the united states right 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. with all of us together the good news is the split caused us all to look at each other and we changed a lot i mean it's still stronger because we've changed a lot now several of the unions have come back into the a.f.l.-cio 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 a lot of talk you see your readers understand or your listeners understand this is that even when there was a split and that split was at the top 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.e.o. at the local and 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 mention. organized labor in the in the forty's 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 got the republicans pushed through over its veto its half tartly. we were a peak of unionization over forty percent and then it kind of slowly slid down until reagan who virtually declared war for the record 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 sixty's and seventy's happened and this was something william buckley was very very open about her wrote a book about a conservative mind back and if you take the reason why was because that we had the women's movement the civil rights movement the kid saying no to vietnam things like that was because they felt safe economically safe and 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 it's defund the democrats out of ideology what's your do you see this message out notice to all of the above look here's what happened in the we in the late seventy's early eighty's with reagan. this country took a strong fear before that we were working on

a high wage high consumption auto push wages up so they could consume and grow the economy reagan put aside a different path the path was a low wage high consumption military now everybody knows that that can't go on you can't have low wages and high consumption because even if you can borrow for a while it comes through with it but they also were interested in other things and he had thatcher and a couple of other margaret thatcher for approving that came to. it was a couple of things that the europeans call it neo liberalism yes well what it means is that they call it radical conservatism yeah and 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 that 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 every gene in joe but they also help themselves politically that they weaken us they weaken our progressive forces in the country so there's been a concerted effort from the early eighty's to this very moment they just the now rian else that frank lets go one after labor day that's next surprising or yeah it was a surprise that any of us that believe in going after asking for some time with this whole you know government employees reading too much money trying to vilify 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 bad they talk about a government worker whose wages are lower than in the private sector was able to

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

use public employment like as is as europe at large they have a large number of regulations that mandate highways and that's the to as you grow wages that actually. there are two ways you either do it the way they do and you're up a new mandate a high minimum wage with a large safety so to speak and or you do it the way we've tried to do it here with collective bargaining where people can make a deal that both of us can live with and both of us can win with and if we're able to do that if 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 be 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 would never speak and have to salute 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 the idea that 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 or not right now you know and and that and that there. it has to be a social safety net through which people don't fall in the two minutes or so we have thoughts on how we can do well i think it just takes constant talking first i think it's courage on the part of our elected leader to start talking that way democrats ought 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 is what how do you do that i saw an interview the other day it the big corporate

media 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 offensive you know and it's pretty willful because i think the press is analyzing stuff and they've taken the easy way out in a lot of stuff but she do have the corporate media that is is controlled and actually they're not media anymore they're actually entertainment it's an info tamia it's an infotainment mercial so that's what they do they take the tax cuts you know getting the facts out all the tax cuts if you'd fact the democrats have their way and the 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 just proves people want to

talk about the task of the difference between the republican version of the democratic version for people making between two hundred and five hundred thousand dollars right away that's the ones i consider small business here is four hundred nine dollars so they're make of this big saying you will be able to create jobs it's four hundred nine dollars difference and tell me this how many jobs can you create with four hundred nine dollars richard trumka thanks so much for. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime regularly.