Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Conversations with progressive activists and organizers on the ground in conservative red states across the United States. We're sharing strategies, tips, and ways to hold hope and motivation in hostile environments.
S102_SethHutchinson
Hi, and welcome to Tenacious Conversations with Red State Progressives. I am your host, Mimi Garcia, and it's so great to have you here with our second episode. So, these last couple of weeks have been really rough, and when this episode airs, I am sure that we'll be talking about a whole new slate of, diabolical schemes from the White House In this episode, we're talking about labor and organizing workers.
And there have been some recent developments that as of the recording of this introduction, February 5th, 2025, um, Trump has been working on gutting the leadership of the National Labor Relations Board, we call it the NLRB .
And the NLRB is an independent federal agency that's in charge of protecting workers rights to organize and form unions, and they really do a lot of important work to investigate labor violations, settle disputes, certify union elections, Trump fired one of the NLRB board members, Gwen A. Wilcox. As well as the general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo. And then within about a day later, fired deputy general counsel, Jessica Rudder.
A little bit of background on the board itself, , it has five members and they are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for five year terms.
Gwen Wilcox was still in her appointed five year term and it's pretty unheard of for anyone to be, fired because the president has the opportunity to name a new NLRB board member pretty much every year as their, terms are, are staggered., uh, every year a new one is sort of coming up. So, there are now only two board members remaining. That is in part because When Biden was trying to appoint members to the board, the Senate kept, , blocking confirmation for those board members. So these three have been sort of the holdouts for the NLRB. It's no big surprise that the Trump administration would want to limit workers abilities to organize.
Now, it's pretty clear to at least constitutional experts that this is probably unconstitutional.
It's not clear what's going to happen next, but we're definitely watching what's happening in that space.
But I am really pleased to be joined by a good friend of mine an organizer named Seth Hutchinson. Seth is the Senior Campaign Lead Organizer with the Communications Workers of America or CWA, and he leads organizing campaigns in what is CWA's District 6 that covers Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas.
CWA has historically been a telephone company union. It started in the 1930s, and it really grew to include workers from a wide variety of sectors, including public employees, so people who work for state government or, um, um, State agencies, airlines, healthcare workers, people in banking, and more recently, folks in tech.
A big part of our conversation actually focused on some recent organizing wins from this summer that CWA had with folks in the video game industry. We talk about developments in the field of labor organizing and also Uh, you can do if you want to form a union at your workplace. He also goes into some of his background on how he got involved in the labor movement and what keeps him motivated in this work after two decades of organizing.
Just a quick note that you might hear some minor audio issues with a vacuum cleaner out in the hallway, , I just appreciate your patience with that.
As always, I'm going to have links to any of the websites and resources that we talk about in this episode in the show notes linked there and also on the podcast webpage. You can find that at thejustcollaborative. com slash tenacious. Thanks so much. And here's my conversation with Seth Hutchinson.
.
Seth: After many decades of decline and stagnation in the labor movement we're seeing just a huge upsurge.
Strategically, CWA, decided to invest in organizing in the tech sector and video game sectors. And there, there's a few reasons for that. Video games in particular, like video games make more money than movies and TV in this country. There are hugely profitable industry. That is very much not union and unlike TV and movies, which are heavily unionized.
And so when you look at like wages in the industry, they're far below what they should be compared to what profits the companies are making. And there's a whole range of issues of people working there, not just pay. And so what it's meant now is there's thousands of video game workers now just in the last Two years who have organized with CWA and and joined our union. And particularly under the Microsoft umbrella, Microsoft is owns Xbox and a bunch of video game companies now. And many of them have organized with CWA recently.
It's pretty astounding. And Microsoft actually has a neutrality agreement with communications workers. Of America that we successfully got them to sign. that has made it very easy for employees under the Microsoft umbrella , video games is just a huge sector of the economy in terms of profits especially. And there's some really big companies that play here.
. Microsoft and Sony are buying up a huge chunk of the market and so it's really there's a monopoly consolidation going on and C.
W. A. has just really positioned itself to be able to help workers in that industry form unions and change the industry as a whole. And so going into to what workers experience on a day to day basis in the industry. There's a huge amount of underpaying high workloads.
Um, they call it crunch whenever they, um, uh, workers have to speed up work and put in like huge amounts of mandatory overtime in order to get a video game out on deadline and, um, uh, It's it's the industry is slowly getting a little bit better about this, particularly because of organizing efforts.
But for a long time, the the cycle was that employees would be expected to go through crunch work 80 hours a week for a few, like maybe a month or two and then get laid off and then get rehired when another crunch season came back. And so it would be this horrible cycle of high workloads and then getting laid off and everybody was very job insecure.
There's a lot of contracting. Going on where employees were brought in on contracts and then just let go, um, suddenly and without warning and no job security at all. And in the middle of all that, many studios had a workplace culture that was frat boy like and Activision Blizzard was the most notorious about that.
Activision Blizzard is what was one of the biggest video game studios standing alone in the United States with about 10, 000 employees around the country. And they were notoriously a toxic culture to work, workplace. And employees there began organizing with CWA a few years back.
And um, at the management, Activision Blizzard was extremely anti union pushed back on any kind of organizing momentum. There was wildcat walkout strikes that workers did. They were really trying to push back on rampant sexual harassment, discrimination that was going on in the workplace, And they were, organizing. Even without the support of a union at first to, to uh, to push back on that. And they asked CWA to get involved and help support those efforts. And we did, and we actually helped several groups of employees within Activision Blizzard to form unions and win union recognition, despite the anti union campaign from Activision Blizzard. And so in the middle of all that organizing that was going on around the country, um, Microsoft expressed interest in buying Activision Blizzard. when Microsoft did that CWA went to Microsoft and said, you know, we, we understand you want to buy Activision Blizzard. if you want CWA support in y'all getting regulatory approval to get this merger done, then this needs to be a good deal for workers.
You need to sign a labor neutrality agreement with CWA saying that you will respect the rights of employees at Activision Blizzard to form a union once you buy the company. And Microsoft signed that agreement. They signed that neutrality deal. And um, so my CWA helped support the merger.
It said it was a good deal. We went to the Biden administration and said, you should approve this merger because it's going to be a good deal for workers in the industry and it's going to raise wages. Um, instead of Instead of lowering them
, you know, even though when you unionize, it can take like up to a year to negotiate or
even longer to negotiate your first Union contract just because that's how long it takes to get it right and get get a good contract.
Um, when you're first starting out, even before you win that first contract, you have the protection Of, what's called status quo, meaning that the employer has to negotiate over changes that they want to make to your workplace, um, they have to negotiate with you as a union over it before they make those changes, and that extends to layoffs, and it extends to changing people's work from
home status. Um, so if the employer suddenly mandates that everybody's got to return to office, go back to the office five days a week, they can't do that without negotiating over it with the union
first. And with the layoff protection the employer has to negotiate over your severance pay, how much notice employees are going to get, whether or not employees have the right to get rehired with the company, if they'll be able to be offered jobs in other parts of the company, how long their benefits will last,
And what we've seen is that so far Microsoft has not implemented layoffs or return to office changes. To any of the union workers in the video game industry under the Microsoft
Seth: umbrella so far.
Mimi: How does one even start a union? Like, say I'm working somewhere. I mean, like, I've worked a lot recently with a lot of, um, nonprofits in the advocacy space that have been organizing, but say I'm working in anything and I feel like we need a union and we want to organize.
What is the first step that people take to do that?
Seth: The steps that they vary depending on what kind of employer at there's always some basic things that you need to do, but every. every workplace, you're going to have to follow a different legal framework for your eventual union, depending on whether you're private sector or public sector.
Those are the biggest distinguishers. And if you're in the nonprofit space, the major difference, you are obviously private sector, but and you got to follow those rules, but there's some differences in the fact that many times nonprofits are, at least on the face. of the organization trying to appear liberal and progressive.
And so there's ways there's possibilities of winning what we call voluntary recognition so that the employer just voluntarily recognizes your union without putting up an anti union fight. And so you want to think through those things first off what kind of employer is this?
But when you get in the nuts and bolts of organizing the very first step is to build your organizing committee. And the organizing committee is gonna be the group of, the coworker of your coworkers in that space who are going to spearhead the organizing effort. They're not just I'm, I support a union, but they're also willing to meet together regularly and get trained on what your rights are on the job, how to talk to coworkers about the union what the steps are being able to answer questions.
Cause the biggest thing that kills an organizing drive is misinformation. And people not having all the facts. And so the organizing committee's job is really to get the facts and answer people's questions out there. Especially if you run into an anti union campaign, because employers win anti union campaigns by they don't have to convince you that like the employer is great and that everything's fantastic and management is perfect.
They just have to convince you that change is scary. And that you don't know what you're getting into and they have to raise questions and doubt. And they do that by spreading misinformation and fear about what change is going to happen. And so the organizing committee is really crucial because they're going to be there.
They're going to be your coworkers that are bolstering up the confidence and trust and faith in what's happening here with the group of employees that are organizing. And so many people think the first step to organizing a union is. I got to go out and talk to all my coworkers and convince them all to join the union right now.
And that's definitely not what you should do in the first step. You should be strategic and talk to people that you just, the people that you trust and the people that you think are the most likely to be pro union at first. Cause you don't know how management's going to react and you don't want them to find out about a union organizing
prematurely, but which,
which means you don't want them to find out before an organizing committee is ready.
Mimi: So, I'm talking to my colleagues. I've got. A few people who are really interested in the union and then do we go, talk to CWA or to some other , union to say help us out in this or what does that look like?
Yeah,
Seth: that's a great question. you can just Google the AFL CIO which is the National Federation of all unions. they have a contact and organizer web page on there and they will share those contacts out with relevant unions in your area.
They break it down geographically and by Industry so that they make sure that you get connected to the right union. If you know what union you should be organizing with, you can definitely reach out directly. CWA for instance we have a lot of nonprofit members. I've worked on many nonprofit campaigns.
And so if you work at a nonprofit, feel free to reach out to CWA. Every union kind of specializes in different sectors to a large extent, if you work at a grocery store, for instance, you should talk to the United Food and Commercial Workers. But yeah, if you don't know which union you should talk to, the AFL CIO is a great place to
Mimi: start.
Mimi: How do you deal with setbacks? How do you work with members and like, when maybe you don't get the union recognized or you're really working hard on a contract and some key things aren't coming in there, like, how do you keep moving through that?
Yeah,
Seth: I guess I'll answer it two ways like personally and how it communicated back out co workers and colleagues and union members. They're like organizing in Texas. There's always setbacks, and I've worked on many campaigns that we lost or we didn't win exactly what we were fighting for.
and
We lost the union election. I've worked on those. And it could be pretty heartbreaking. I had a union drive actually where we had a tie vote. And which under National Labor Relations Board rules is a loss for the union.
And But,
in those situations, you never give up. And you try to explain to folks that has always been a long term fight. And when we fight, we always win, even when we don't win everything that we wanted. In the situation where we lost the election, the employer the pressure from employees.
In that organizing drive and really changed a lot of the policies that had initially motivated folks to begin organizing a union to begin with. And so even though they didn't win their union, they won some changes at the
workplace.
And in TSEU, there were so many fights that we fought that were
really
just trying to hold back the kind of tide of cuts from the state legislature and the governor's office.
On state services and we were trying to, fights all
and we won a lot of those fights and it's always hard to communicate back out that this is a major victory when things
don't change on the ground for employees. But communicating back out that this is, this would have been so much worse and your working conditions would have been so much worse if we
had not fought.
Um, and seeing that as a win can be hard, but I say that it's much harder to, for folks to see a fight as a win when they were engaged in it from the beginning. And so it's always really important for us to make sure we're not viewing our role as fighting on behalf of someone as going out and fighting for them and then coming back and delivering the news of whether we won or not.
we need to have them in the trenches with us every step of the way. So that they see what it takes, what's happening, what the stakes are of fighting or
not fighting. And the more engaged they are, the easier it is going to be to deal with the win or loss afterwards.
Cause they'll have seen it from beginning to end and they'll have had ownership over the
whole process.
Mimi: I'm reading this book um, Hope in the Dark, and the author wrote it after George W.
Bush's re election, and I remember being just like so devastated. I was living in D. C. at the time, and just the whole city was um, you know, there was like a depression for a couple of weeks when you'd go on the metro and everybody was just very sad.
, One of her sort of main theories, and I think, you know, as I've gone on and learned more and more, about how important memory is and how important storytelling is to social movements because there's such a, an interest and a strategy on the opposition's end to say, oh, it's always been like this, it's never gonna get better, or, You know, really diminishing or encouraging despair, essentially.
And so, having that memory of, it could have been so much worse. Like, we managed to hold the line on some of the worst cuts. I think, I've been working in healthcare access for like the last 15 years, and Texas is really known for having terrible policies, not just around sexual and reproductive health care and abortion and contraception and all of that, but just like, you know, we still don't have Medicaid expansion.
We still have like 5 million people uninsured in this state, but it's also like I remember when, a lot of other plans that didn't make it through in the legislature and it's only if you've been through it and involved in it that you can continue to tell those stories of like, no, it actually can be worse, and we've managed to hold the line on this time and time again.
And so we need to like, continue to organize to build strength to make gains. But right now it's absolutely a win when we stop, you know, the worst of it happening.
Yeah. Absolutely. So, tell me about, , what brought you to the labor movement.
Seth: I grew up in a pretty conservative household in Arkansas and we were middle class. I worked a lot of like summer jobs. My first job was as a dishwasher when I was like 15. And there's always this myth of oh, minimum wage jobs or for high school kids or whatever. But, and I was one of those high school kids, but I was also working next to people who were trying to survive and feed their
family on the same minimum wage that I was making. And, they would be.
20s, 30s, 40s, middle aged, older workers, all kinds of folks that I worked side by side with, whether it was at washing dishes in a diner, or I worked at Sears doing some remodeling. I did construction for a bit. I worked in my school cafeteria at my university for two years and I delivered pizzas for Domino's I worked next to people who are trying to support a family. And oftentimes they would work two jobs. Their, spouses would work two jobs as well. they were working extremely hard and not making it. And on top of just that general not getting a living wage I just saw rampant sexual harassment sexual discrimination.
Racial discrimination. And it was just very obvious. And it was one day when I was in at the cafeteria at my university, when a coworker who I'd been working with for years, she's this middle aged woman. Very, she's great. She was grizzled and she was a character. But she she just leaned over just one day she had just had enough.
She was like what we need here, Seth, is a union. And that just like open, open my eyes. It's yeah, that's,
that makes a lot of sense.
and it was at that time that I was taking classes and learning more about, labor history. I'd had a great high school history teacher who primed me pretty well.
He taught really good labor history and civil rights history. He was an American history teacher, but he just fully embraced the idea of that. the history of social movements was also the
history of our country.
and so he taught those very much intertwined. And so that really gave me the background to know that, yeah, like we do need a labor movement.
And we need it particularly in the South where we've historically had a very, tiny labor movement compared to the other countries, but we have a rich history. History ourselves of people actually doing great organizing work in the South. But we just need more of it. And so I decided that at that point that I wanted to become a union organizer in the South. And so I got involved in some left wing political organizing going on in my campus. I actually joined Democratic Socialists of America at the time. I started a young Democratic Socialist chapter at my school, and this was back during the
Iraq war, George W.
Bush, all that.
So we were organizing a lot around stopping the war and anti free trade stuff. And so through that, through DSA, I actually got connected to an organizer at Texas State Employees Union who said I should apply to work for as an organizer in Texas. And it was the only job I applied for coming out of school.
I was like, this is perfect. This is what I want to do. So I'm not going to apply for anything else. Which probably was not a great idea, but it worked out because I got the job. And so I was hired as an apprentice organizer with TSU and I packed my little Saturn and, and drove all my belongings from Arkansas to Austin.
Mimi: you know, I think
Seth: Yep.
Mimi: my time at TSEU and organizing and I had done some community organizing and sort of direct action work in D. C. with workers who had been injured by the disability compensation program. Like, they were injured and then privatized disability compensation, just basically was like, we're going to deny everybody.
Um, and hope that they get lost in this appeals system and not pay for anyone's injuries. And , I got really involved with Um, the local Industrial Areas Foundation group, Washington Interfaith Network, through that. And I remember wanting to be, like, an IAF organizer so bad. I was, like, 22. And they were like, you're too young, kid.
You need to get some life and experience if you're gonna be doing
Seth: Oh.
Mimi: And I was also like, super burned out from living in D. C. And I couldn't afford to stay, really, and um, move back home. to Austin. I grew up here in Austin, and my mom was actually like, you know, 15 years at the health department at the Department of State Health Services.
And saw on Idealist that TSEU was hiring. And I was like uh,have a union? She was like, Oh, been meaning to join. And I was like, you've been working for the state for like,, forty years. Most of my consciousness, lady, what's the deal? Um, And yeah, because someone had told me like, go work for a union for a while, you'll get a ton of experience, you'll kind of learn all the ropes on organizing, and I, I applied and I got hired, and my mom was my second person to sign into the union to get her to join because I was like, was a little too scary to ask her to be my first person. Uh, to join, but I had to like, practice with someone else.
Seth: I just can't believe that the IAF turned you down for an organizing
job.
Mimi: I got,
Seth: That was their
loss, man.
Mimi: it's funny too because I, I got offered a position with them um, to go work at COPS Metro in San Antonio while I was still an organizer at TSEU. And at that point I was actually, I talked to Katie who had been organizing in San Antonio and, you know, we had some real. Deep philosophical conversations about organizing theory and about like, you know, I think IAF is incredible and I think they have like a really rich history and I think that there's a lot of communities in which they work that they have like deep, deep, like community institutional based organizing happening.
And um,idea that what they're driving to comes out of the membership and comes out of the community is not totally accurate. sometimes that
Seth: Hmm.
Mimi: a little bit disingenuous. And one of the things that I really appreciate about sort of the method of organizing at CWA is that it's like we're going to be real upfront about what it is that we're after.
In a way that I Yeah. you know, it's interesting because the institutional based model of community organizing has actually become kind of the backbone of how I approach most of my work. So, when I was at America, Where we were, you know, getting people enrolled in the Obamacare health insurance, and the marketplaces were just opening up, and I was leading the thing here in Texas.
And, you know, all the folks in the leadership at Enroll America were former OFA, Obama for America, organizers or field staff and kind of like, you know, OFA I think sometimes talked in a way that was like they invented community organizing, which of course they didn't. But, you know, it was like a very much like we're going to take this get out the vote sort of political campaign style organizing and just like translate it onto this community issue.
I was like, that might fly in states like. Florida or North Carolina or Ohio where they're used to having, you know, the National Democratic Committee come out here every four years and like, run this kind of campaign and have volunteers and do all of that. But the Dems have been ignoring Texas for a long time and
there
Seth: Yeah.
Mimi: that kind of organizing and like, volunteers don't want to go knock on people's doors and then ask them about their health.
So, yeah,
Seth: Yeah.
Mimi: to Churches, let's talk to, you know, school who see how parents are really struggling. Let's bring these existing institutions that already have deep relationships with people who are going to say, Oh yeah, my family doesn't have health insurance. I need health coverage or, you know, my partner lost their job and we lost our health insurance.
Here's where we need to get help. And it's like, it's not going to come from. this organization that's sort of centralized in D. C. who's gonna tell them what to do, it's gonna come from their community institutions where they already have trust and they already have, a relationship. And it's like, how do we equip those institutions to serve the community needs and then build long term capacity on the ground so that inevitably when Enroll America closes, which we did right after the Trump, administration was put in, um,
Seth: Hmm.
Mimi: that there is like lasting capacity and lasting knowledge in that community, and it isn't dependent on us as an organization.
Seth: I think that's 100 percent right. And that's the thing. I'm perpetually frustrated with the Democratic Party over is that they don't build. They don't have That understanding that you have to build like long term organization within a community. if you want to get closer to winning elections And turning out more voters and having real change, then you can't just fly in six months before an election, set something up and then leave and then expect to do it again in four years and actually move the dial. It's got to be a long term investment in an organization building just
like you're talking about.
Mimi: also gonna take , several cycles before you start to see that
Seth: Right.
Mimi: Like, I think a lot of times, this is my big complaint about a lot of funders who, you know, I, we used to have the Texas Civic Engagement Table here um, and it's another story of, like, funders who kind of follow the next shiny thing.
And that they were invested, or at least played really great lip service to term, on the ground, non partisan community organizing. And having work that's happening between the, the elections. And then, , organizations that came out of that Obama model that came out of other places came into Texas and then the money was like, Oh, wait, that's the new thing or you know, Beto didn't get elected and this place Ted Cruz And so we don't think that things are gonna really work here if we, got to put money
somewhere
Seth: Right.
Mimi: So for a quick, return on investment and that kind of thing and that's just like and that's also one of the things about The sort of right wing movements is that they've been really willing to put in term money for long term base building that, , they're okay with not seeing results on in one cycle. It's a long term operations investment, which we are really lacking, I think, in more progressive funding.
Seth: That's the other, my other complaint about the Democratic Party, the lack of institution building is their focus on the presidential election rather than Investing in, winning school board races in rural
Texas, for instance, in order to build up capacity to eventually win congressional and state legislative seats and flip legislative bodies around the country.
It's just shocking to me, like how much that has been ignored, um,
for decades. if we were really paying attention right now, if people were like really making the long term investment that needs to be made, would, if folks would be putting money into state elections, like state legislative elections, get our state legislature just even more even like we don't even need to have a democratic majority like we just need a little bit more even so that we're ready in after that census to look at redistricting and that's, you know,
Yep.
Mimi: from now.,
Mimi: so like, I feel like there's this really powerful narrative, especially outside of Texas. It's that like, you know, Texas is backwards, the South is backwards, especially working in reproductive health, like all of the abortion bans and now IVF coming under attack and all of this kind of stuff, like it feels um, and then of course like the attacks on gender affirming care and trans children and all of this um, I feel like I spend a lot of time either.
contemplating moving to Minnesota or talking to friends of mine who are on the East Coast or West Coast or in a more you know, purportedly liberal state about like, why are you still there? Why are you in that backwards place? You should get out of there. Um, why do you
Seth: Yeah. it's a good question. And I've, I've had these discussions. I've, had these discussions. with my wife many, many times. Cause I mean, we
have a daughter now and she's three years old and I'm like, do I want to raise her where she doesn't have access to
good health care. And. Like where the schools are constantly under attack, like I believe in the public education system.
I want to put her in those schools, but it's hard when it's like they're just constantly being defund. I mean, They're being defunded now by the legislature. It's a conscientious attack to try to like, prop up
charter schools and You know, Private schools, you know, the list goes on. And so, yeah, we talk about it a lot.
So you're not alone in that. But um, I guess, you know, I'm from Arkansas. My wife, My wife is from San Antonio. And we um, you know, we're from here. Our family's here. community ties
ties people to a place. This is our community. And this is where. We built our lives and so it's really hard to uproot um, particularly, you know, the other part of the equation, of course, is that in the United States, there's very little support for
parents, as you well know.
And so moving to a place where you don't have family and friends and at least like that support network is very scary and daunting. Moving to a place where even if it has more liberal progressive policies, That's not super great, even in the United States where, childcare, no matter what state you live in, is still
enormously expensive.
hardly anywhere has paid family leave and even where they do have it, it's not great.
The other thing is that, if we don't, if we don't fight in Texas the rest of the country could
become Texas.
I've heard some people um, , say like, oh, I can't wait to move to a liberal state where we can actually do real union organizing work or something like that. And I'm like, what are you talking about? The, the real union organizing work is here. the real organizing work is here.
Mimi: Thanks, Seth, for being part of this podcast and for talking to us about labor unions. , as ever you can find any links and references that we've had in this episode in the show notes and , at the website., the just collaborative.com/tenacious. I wanna thank you so much for listening. please share this with, , anyone you think might wanna listen.
Be sure to follow and, , stay tenacious, y'all.
The Tenacious podcast is a project of just collaborative. You can find more@thejustcollaborative.com slash tenacious.