I do sometimes feel like I have labor guests on and it's not intentional. I don't, you know, nobody's doing it on purpose. But there is this like circular kind of conversation we can get into where it's like we can't really do anything because labor isn't big and labor isn't big because why. I don't know. We just have to keep trying harder. And I understand. I'm not saying that things happen overnight. I'm not, you know, a child. I understand how the world works.

Yeah. But it also is true that we are faced with all of these really unique and exigent crises. And people did have some expectations for a shorter time frame when they thought the Bernie movement was going to be more successful. And so how do you balance that? Like how do you say things take time, but also look how

quickly the MAGA movement sprung up or things take time. But we had this moment during the

pandemic where 50 million people lost their health care and nobody seemed to want to exploit

that opportunity to push for more. What is the Naomi Klein? Shock Doctor. It's only shock doctrine for

the right and it's never shocked doctrine for the left. You know what I mean?

I think about the same things. I just, the answer that I came to was the labor movement is the thing.

The labor movement is the permanent institution that we need to build that can then take advantage

of those moments. The labor movement is the institution. And, you know, I write in my book and

other places about I don't want unions to be

adjunct to the Democratic Party, but I want them to focus on organizing workers, you know,

so growing the labor movement is where my alternative path of focus for labor needs to be. So not

being plugged in as an adjunct to the Democratic Party, but instead

focusing on growing themselves. Well, what do you think of like workers strike back in some of these

efforts that do seem to have this relationship with at least local party politics, like with

Sean Mousalant, obviously being a city councilwoman and achieving some significant goals there,

but then now turning that over into a labor organization.

If you're going to build organizations and you're going to build mass movements, you've got to be able to show and prove you've got to have the people.

Shamsawant can say things, and I don't know Shamsawat, but a union has one great thing, which is it has members.

And it can be like, we have 50,000 people here.

And those people carry

political weight and they carry power and they carry labor power and they carry economic power

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