‘People Taking Action Inspires Other People’ - CounterSpin interview with Mike Elk on the GM strike

Janine Jackson interviewed Payday Report’s Mike Elk about the GM strike for the October 11, 2019, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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Janine Jackson: As we record the show on October 9, we understand contract talks are resuming between the United Auto Workers and GM. Some 49,000 GM workers have been on strike since September 16, over issues including healthcare, job security and the use of tiered pay scales. You couldn’t say the labor action isn’t being covered, but few reporters are really embedded in the labor movement these days—and it shows.

Mike Elk is the senior labor reporter and founder at Payday Report. He also covers labor and immigration issues for the Guardian and numerous other outlets. He joins us now by phone from Rochester, New York. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Mike Elk.

Mike Elk: Great to be on the show with you, Janine.

JJ: You are now on the road, and you’ve been nonstop on the road, covering this strike for Payday Report. When you lift your head up from reporting, I wonder, and read other outlets, or watch TV about the strike, what impresses you? How does what you read compare with what you see yourself?

ME: Well, what I read isn’t a human story. What I read is a horserace story: Where’s the union at? How many people are getting laid off at suppliers? How is the stock price at GM being hurt? It’s not the story about what is changing inside the people on the picket line, the new sense of power that’s being born among folks. To me, that story is much more interesting. Because, as we know, strikes inspire other strikes; people taking action inspires other people.

And when you go out to the picket lines, you see people from all kinds of different unions out on those picket lines. And in the process, people are being radicalized, people are being changed, and people are given a new sense of hope.

But you’re not seeing that. What you’re seeing in the press alternates between horserace coverage and poverty porn: “Oh, look how poor, look how much people are suffering out on strike” versus “look what’s changing in people.” And to me, that’s the much more interesting story, the human part of it.

JJ: Well, it’s interesting you say that, because I when I look at coverage, I see it sort of collage-y. There’ll be a kind of a human interest story over here, with some soundbites from folks on the line, and then it’s separated from the analysis over here, where we read things about, like, for example, a piece I saw in the Washington Post talking about the “staggering cost of employees’ incredibly good health benefits.”

Washington Post laments the “staggering cost of employees’ incredibly good health benefits” in recent article.

You know, outside of Payday Report, honestly, we don’t often hear, No. 1, workers speaking at length about the conditions that they’re protesting, really explaining them. But then, even more so, you don’t hear workers give their own analysis; you know, not just say, “It’s hard. I have kids,” but explain how workers are pitted against one another in the workplace, but don’t want to be; the way they feel connected in the community, and feel forces trying to divide them. It’s just, as you say, kind of, there are humans over here, and then the real story is over here, and the twain don’t meet.

ME: Yeah, and that’s what we see all the time. And I think a big part of the reason for that is, look, part of the reason I write from the perspective I do is I come out of a union household. My mother was an auto worker, she worked at the Volkswagen plant in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. My father’s a union leader. I grew up around union values. So when I go out to go cover picket lines, it’s not some zoo safari-like experience of, “Oh, I’m going into real America, I’m going to meet some real workers….” These are the kind of people that hang out around my house, and I treat them the way I would treat people I grew up with and still see a lot.

You know, I live pretty close to the neighborhood where I grew up in Pittsburgh. And that’s a much different perspective than most people that are coming out of journalism school, or coming out of high-income backgrounds, where they’re like, “Wow, this is some rare bird in the wild, workers on strike!”

JJ: Yeah, yeah. And I think they bring a prism to it that makes them miss certain things. You’re one of the few people, for example, that I’ve heard even mention that there are African-Americans in the UAW; that doesn’t even come through, really.

ME: That’s one of the things that outrages me the most. Look, African-Americans comprise 10 percent of the workforce overall, but they comprise 19 percent of the auto workforce, and even more in the unionized plants. And there’s a wide variety of lists of reasons for this. In large part, the big auto plants in the Midwest, when they were being built was at the same time that African-Americans were coming up from the South, looking for jobs. So African-Americans have played a huge role in the founding of the auto industry in this country. And not only that, in the 1950s and ’60s, the UAW fought GM to not discriminate in hiring. So you have a workforce in some of these plants in some of these bigger cities that is 30, 40% black in some instances.

JJ: It’s an important angle in the story that if you bring in just your standard labor/management strike glasses, you overlook it.

Well, bigger picture, if I read one more story that blandly cites management’s need for “flexibility,”
when they mean upending people’s lives without giving them a say… So much of this story is about the broader economic transition: What are society’s responsibilities to workers, to communities, when it makes sense to stop mining coal, or making certain kinds of cars? But it’s presented as, well, Michelline Maynard had an op-ed in the Washington Post that says it. She says , “The carmakers would have you think that every American wants a big ol’ SUV or pickup truck. And the union, with its walkout, is saying it wants to keep things the way they are.”  Neither side gets it, is the point, that, you know, times are changing. There’s an insistence on saying that unions and workers want to resist change, rather than that they want a say in how changes are made.

ME: I find that all the time. Some people are saying, well, aren’t these workers opposed to the Green New Deal? And I say, no, they don’t have a problem with the Green New Deal. They just want to build the cars.

JJ: Right. That piece ended by saying, GM may not know what the future holds, but “by walking off the job, the UAW is showing it doesn’t want to help GM find out.” And it’s, again, this idea of labor as fundamentally backward-looking, which seems to go against what you see when you just hold your head up and look around today. There’s a lot of energy, forward-moving energy, in the labor movement.

ME: Yeah, when they talk about flexibility, you know, if General Motors wants more flexibility, they should go to a yoga class. You don’t get that out of treating your workers poorly. You just screw them over. And so many people in the press are willing to just do this kind of, “Oh, let’s split it down the middle,” when there’s no splitting it down the middle when it comes to workers and bosses; they’re the 1% and these are the “everybody else,” right? The majority of people are behind the workers. And yet there’s this false frame of, “Let’s split it down the middle and see how it goes.”

JJ: You talked about strikes inspiring other strikes. That doesn’t disappear, even if the strike doesn’t win everything that it’s trying to. What happens to that energy—the strike’s gone on a very long time—if things come out mixed, or even negative?

ME: I think people learned something; people saw how much support they can get. And not only that, other unions have been mobilizing members to show up to picket lines; people got training on what happens. A mentor of mine once said, “No organizing is ever wasted. People learn things. People make mistakes and they learn from those mistakes. People learn things they did well and they gain confidence in themselves.” So I think, win or lose, this is really changing the framework of the country.

JJ: I’ll ask you, just finally — any thoughts for reporters who—you know, we’re saying there are going to be more and more labor actions like this; there’s hopefully going to be more coverage of it. What do you have to say to reporters who might be starting to cover labor actions today or tomorrow?

ME: Make friends with people in organized labor, just don’t call them up for comment; go out to lunch, go out to their union meetings, go to the barbecues, get to be personal friends with these people. I mean, I’m personal friends with a lot of people I cover in the labor movement. And it helps your perspective to really put yourself in the shoes of what people are doing. And I would say that’s the biggest problem, is most people that cover issues in this country would never sit down to lunch with a blue-collar worker unless they were there to interview them.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mike Elk, senior labor reporter at Payday Report. You can follow their work, and support it, at PaydayReport.com. Mike Elk, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ME: Thanks, Janine.