Hidden Costs of $15/hr; Unions vs. Amazon Culture; Exploring ‘The Prison Within’ | The Nation Speaks

[Music] today on the nation speaks democrats aren't giving up on the 15 minimum wage who wins who loses if it's goes through into alabama amazon workers want to unionize the man who wrote the book on amazon explains the real reason jeff bezos is so against it next we go inside sam clinton maximum security prison with a filmmaker and an ex-felon to see the amazing impact of restorative justice and on america q a we ask people across the country what they think about the federal minimum wage and what pandemic related changes they think aren't going to stick around hello and welcome to the nation speaks i'm your host cindy drew care the federal minimum wage hasn't changed in 11 years democrats they want to raise it from 7.25 an hour to 15 dollars an hour by 2025. this was included in the recent house version of the coronavirus relief package and then it was removed by the senate but that doesn't mean the plan is dead and we will persist with the minimum wage if passed the act would not only increase the standard minimum wage it would also give that same wage by 2025 to tipped workers and teenagers who are typically paid at a lower rate so that means that's over a hundred percent increase on a standard minimum wage a 500 percent increase for the tipped wage earners and for youth it's over a 200 percent increase so what would the impact of all of that be it's it's complicated so we invited a few analysts and business owners to help us figure it out joining us now is rachel grezzler a research fellow in economics budget and entitlements at the heritage foundation and kevin barnhill he's the owner of blair meat market in blair nebraska where you have meat processing and you sell all kinds of meat products welcome to you both thank you so we're here to talk about minimum wage and proponents point out that the federal minimum wage hasn't increased since 2009 and so it kind of sounds fair enough that it's time for an increase but i'm wondering rachel from you if this is a potential over correction since the the size and the speed of this increase i mean is is pretty unprecedented well absolutely what we're talking about here is a more than a hundred percent increase in the federal minimum wage something that has never happened before and while the minimum wage hasn't increased for about a decade now we've actually seen a decreasing number of people who are earning the minimum wage about an 85 reduction in the number of people who are earning it so we're still seeing people achieving wage gains even though there is that minimum wage at 725 but we also have the reality that a lot of state and local governments have already increased their own minimum wages and that's really what makes sense here because america is very diverse and 15 in mississippi would be like having a nearly 36 dollar minimum wage in washington dc right right exactly so kevin how about you in nebraska uh what does this wage increase look like to you i know you're so what do you pay your workers now and what's the minimum wage there the minimum wage in nebraska is nine uh and that was established in 2016. i don't think we've had a real increase since then but uh my lowest paid employee is uh at twelve dollars an hour and that's a part-time high school kid that comes in in the afternoons so you know to take that type of role at least in nebraska is exactly what rachel was saying to take that uh part-time low-wage unskilled labor to a 15 minimum shifts the whole scale and creates just an enormous impact on small business so are you saying that you're going to have to increase wages all up the line to match that absolutely uh you know right now there's a there's a spread that's maintained between skilled and unskilled labor and if you move the unskilled up to that 15 an hour uh the guys that i'm currently paying uh 20 plus because costs and everything are going to go up but also because of that spread in that proportional i'm going to have to increase their salaries to 25 or 30. so do you think you're going to have to lay people off or restrict your hiring or how will you manage that so uh oddly enough we are in the middle of an expansion and so what i would start looking at doing is if i had to pay a 15 minimum to the lowest part-time employee that i had is i would first i would eliminate those types of jobs i would force or coerce my current full-time staff to pick up some of that and then we would look hard at automation because at that point the uh the payback the labor payback uh would pay for equipment that i currently have low and no skilled labor working on so it seems like go right ahead jump in there you know companies shifting to automation we've already seen that when fast food restaurants now have kiosks for people to order from because the reality is fifteen dollars per hour translates into over thirty six thousand dollars per year in cost for an employer and most teenagers aren't capable of earning 36 000 right out of the gate you know that represents the bottom rungs on the career ladder something to get your foot in the door to gain some education and experience to be able to earn a higher wage but employers who are looking at this you know their options are limited go to automation reduce those jobs and cut off the jobs that are available for lower skilled workers you know and just shift it up higher or else some companies are really going to have to go out of business because of this right so it sounds like there's gain some places and losses others i think the the congressional budget office in their february 2021 report said there would be about it would raise about 900 000 people out of poverty but we'd lose about 1.4 million jobs small businesses is the engine that drives the american economy i really don't care what other people say it's a small business that employs most people in this country and if guys like me start having to eliminate jobs they may think they're raising people out of poverty but the offset is not going to not going to work out the other thing about this is is okay so my lowest wage is 12 i have to be competitive with other small businesses around me to even get this the part-time guys right so all the a couple of fast food restaurants and i live in rural nebraska a couple of the fast food restaurants they pay 12 right so to so i have to be competitive even though nine is the minimum you can't get labor for nine so to try and force us into 15 now moves that shifts that whole thing and 15 may be the minimum but just to get the labor i need my bottom will then drop to 17 or 18 and that's where it forces me to into that proportion shift on my higher end page guys also so rachel let me ask you a question that's not related to kevin's business but is related to a lot of minimum wage workers in fact the vast majority are in the service industry and food food service industry and they're going to be eliminating or this bill would call for eliminating the tip credit and basically tipped minimum wage being lower than a standard minimum wage can you explain the impact of that yeah so actually a majority of the people who we would measure is making the minimum wage are making less than the minimum wage they're making something that's called the tipped minimum wage and right now that is a minimum of 213 an hour some restaurants might pay more than that but it's not really a sub minimum wage the reality is there is that if you are working in a restaurant as a server and you get that 213 from your boss they're required to bring you up to at least the minimum wage if you don't earn enough to bring you there with the tips the reality is is that most people who are earning the tipped minimum wage actually make closer to 15 already including those tips and they much prefer to have those tips there than do have a structure where restaurants do away with tipping and instead pay the workers whatever the minimum wage is but what we're talking about here for restaurants those business owners is a 600 percent increase in some of their costs going from that two dollars an hour to 15 per hour and we've talked to so many small independent restaurant owners who have said this will simply put them out of business one of them betsy leroy has served the president herself she said i support him but mr president you're going to put me out of business with this because they simply can't take on those new costs you know we like to think or a lot of people that are proponents of this look to big business and they say they've got deep pockets they're making all these profits they can afford this but the reality is is that most of the employers that are paying minimum wages are smaller business owners and they don't have the capacity to do the equivalent of what would be increasing each of our mortgages or our rents each month and so really we're pitting big businesses against small businesses and driving out the little guys you know it's one thing for amazon to advocate for a 15 minimum wage because they've already automated all their low wage jobs out of existence so it won't hurt them it will just drive out their competition yeah and as someone who was in the service industry for a number of years i can say i would much prefer the tips than than a higher hourly wage for sure and it also kind of points out that the realities are just so different in different situations so kevin i know you're in a small town and i guess there's not that much choice you know of labor how does that play out well and that's just it you know as we were speaking uh uh uh the town i live in is a town of 8 000 people and uh and nebraska in general is around that two percent unemployment uh we're fortunate that we're one of the lowest in the country but the reality is is i can't find people uh at any price uh i can uh we're at a we're at a place to where there are more jobs in our town than people that can fill them and so it gets really scary or um disconcerting that labor is my number one cost right now and then to add additional burden on a fairly thin margin business anyway could cause some real issues uh for me and uh and uh eight nine people i employ yeah kevin you bring a good point there because everybody talks about well if the minimum wage won't work then what are the solutions to raising workers wages because we all want people to be able to earn higher incomes out there and the reality is it's a strong economy like you have in nebraska and like the u.s had prior to coven 19. you know between 2016 and 2019 we saw the wages of the lowest 10 percentile of workers increased by about 15 and that was more than the median worker and it was more than the highest income earner and that was because we had that strong economy where employers had to compete for workers and when they had to do that they were willing to invest in them not only through higher wages but also through things like additional education and training that help them out in the long run as well yeah absolutely it's that competitiveness that for the worker you know and that's what i'm talking about is that i have to compete out of a limited pool and so i can't pay minimum wage and expect people to want to work here and then i can't just as you said i can't be just uh the same as the guy next door i've got to offer some incentive whether it be a career path or you know we do a lot of uh training so guys that start out at my lowest unskilled we train them up into the skilled positions and sometimes i'm training for them to go work someplace else uh you know we we only have so many of those slots available but it's something that i can encourage them to hey you know if you work here for two three four years you can go to a major grocery chain or whatever and you'll know more than anybody else in the meat department there so you can start into the management level we also offer uh some benefits right as we have a 401k right we're a small very small employer but that's important to us for the guys that work for us yeah it seems there's a lot of um there's so many particular situations that having a one size fits all you know solution doesn't take into account we're gonna have to wrap up shortly but rachel i want to ask you i know you did um some research into the rising cost of child care and what that would mean yeah so the one thing that people don't look at much is the cost increases that are come up out of this because of course businesses have to raise their prices if they face higher labor costs and child care in particular would be highly impacted by this because you employ a lot of workers to watch children you can't have robots watching them and all the regulations you know dictate the circumstances so really providers are going to pass the entirety of this cost increase on to families and families already struggle both to find child care and to be able to afford it but my analysis i looked across the entire u.s and also at each individual state and i found that a 15 minimum wage would increase child care costs by 21 on average across the u.s and by as much as 43 percent in some states so we're talking about on average an extra twenty seven hundred dollars per year for a family who has two children and so this is going to significantly impact those families and this is going to be in addition to rising food prices and rising costs of other essential things that they have to pay for and if they weren't a minimum wage worker then probably their rate their wage didn't increase too much all right any final words from you kevin before we wrap up no thank you very much all right thank you both thanks so well kevin owns a small business in nebraska our next guest is on the opposite end of the spectrum he's a new york business magnate worth millions with business interests and everything from groceries to real estate to aviation joining us now is john katzmatitis among your many business ventures you own new york city grocery chain grasitis foods and the red apple group which includes about 350 gas stations convenience stores truck stops across new york pennsylvania ohio so you have a lot of workers across several states so i want to ask you what do you think the impact would be on your business of the federal minimum wage going up to 15 and in new york city it's already 15 but not the case elsewhere well the cost of living in new york city is is tremendously high in comparison to other cities and the comparison to other states so 15 an hour in new york city we have learned to deal with it but in other poorer towns of western new york western pennsylvania i think it's going to be phased in over a period of time if it happens and also phased in by if you're 16 years old living with your mother or if you're 25 years old trying to live uh with your uh your own life uh so maybe between under under 18 or under 21 or over 21 it'd be phased in over a period of time it'll be much fairer to the employers and being much fairer to the uh the people working too so how do you think it will impact the industries that you know well uh maybe not your own business but in general over the industries what do you think will be well in a lot of industries a lot of people are yelling and screaming that it's going to put them out of business and they're going to make do with less workers everybody understands that but uh that's why i'm saying uh the the ideal thing is compromise and let's compromise let's make it somewhere between here and there where it doesn't hurt anybody it continues the employees get to get a few dollars more depending on the area they live in and their situation and the employers don't go out of business and it's a good point that you make about the phasing and uh according to age because right now there is a lower wage for younger people but they're going to phase that part out so you think that's a mistake i think that's a tremendous mistake because people that are learning how to work if they're 16 years old and they want to get tried out for a job uh i think employers would like to hire some of those kids teach them and many times you you hear stories well i started as a mail room clerk and i wear worked myself up as chairman well that mailroom clerk may never get a job for ten dollars an hour nine dollars an hour if the company can't afford to keep so how about yourself if you had the opportunity to hire a bunch of 16 year olds and you'd have to pay the same rate as you know your 25 30 40 year olds for an entry-level job what would you do oh well it's not me personally but i think my my personnel directors would tend to hire less people and do you think in your industries there's room for replacing jobs with automation is that a factor for you well amazon is already trying to do checkouts without cashiers depending again on the city you're in if you're in a tough city uh it's not going to happen if you're in a less tough city then it could happen i know mcdonald's is doing it we get cashiers and and uh automation it's a problem it's gonna happen eventually so you want the kids uh 16 years old 17 years old 18 years old to have a chance to learn how to work you don't want him in the streets right excellent okay thank you so much for your time today really appreciate your perspective well thank you so much finally we take a look at seattle as a case study where a substantial raise in the minimum wage happened about five years ago so we're going to see what lessons we can learn from them and joining us now is professor jacob vigdor with the national bureau of economic research welcome professor i know you're in seattle and in 2016 seattle raised its minimum wage from 947 to 13 an hour and you studied the impact of that so what can we learn from the seattle situation what happened at that point sure well the the real simple story of what happened in seattle is wages went up but hours went down so what we did we tracked thousands of workers who had jobs in seattle before 2016. and we just sort of kept track of what happened to them using data on the entire washington state workforce we found that their wages did go up they were earning more per hour but their employers were cutting their hours back they weren't necessarily laying workers off but if you had been working you know 20 hours a week a part-time job you were finding that maybe 18 or 19 hours a week was all you would get now so on that workers took home slightly bigger paychecks but a lot of that extra pay was given right back in the form of reductions in hours so interesting so if hours were reduced were they hiring more workers or how did that work out what we found out and we surveyed business owners and managers and what they told us was they had a variety of different strategies to just try to get by with a little bit less staffing and this could mean that the manager who's earning a salary and not an hourly wage might be doing more it could be the owner of the small business that is doing more tasks that hourly workers might have done before sometimes it means asking your customers to take care of certain tasks you know if you eat at a restaurant sometimes you bust the table and sometimes an employee bus is a table and that's a decision that the owner makes and the more expensive labor gets the more it makes sense for the business owner to say i think i'm going to have my customer do that job so in terms of net impact did it have any significant impact is it something you would recommend if you were back in you know 2016 now i'd say you know what we learned from seattle kind of supported both the the proponents and the opponents of minimum wage increases if someone who advocates for a higher minimum wage is going to tell you that there are a lot of people working for low-wage jobs that are trying to raise families it's tough to make ends meet and this this wage increase will put more money in their pockets and we found evidence to suggest that's really true the opponents of the minimum wage will tell you that one of the things that happens is that if you're a teenager if you're looking for your first job it's going to be harder to find it and we also found evidence of that so it's it's good for the older workers it's not so good for the younger workers and you know whether that's a trade-off that we should be willing to make that's something that that everybody needs to discuss just sort of understanding that that's that's kind of what we're talking about it's it's a trade-off did you see any knock-off effects for example increased prices or anything like that we found some evidence of price increases they were really confined to the restaurant industry so there are low-wage workers all over the economy you find them working in hotels retail you find them working in bowling alleys etc we did a lot of price data collection all over the local economy grocery stores gas stations you name it restaurants were the one place where we found prices went up about 10 interesting and so when it was originally 9 47 and then it went up to 13. did you find when it was lower that there was different that there was you know different prices different wages being offered um you know making some places more competitive than others and did that even out when everyone was offering the same or how did that play out one of the things about the seattle labor market even back in 2015 or earlier it's an expensive place to live and so the number of people in seattle that were earning that 9.47 state minimum wage was pretty small uh so you know one of the things that we found is you know it it did force some businesses to to raise their wages but the the success rate i mean that only about seven out of every thousand businesses closed as a result of raising the minimum wage so 99.3 percent of businesses figured out a way to make things work and sometimes that meant raising prices sometimes that meant cutting back a little bit on on worker hours so that your your payroll didn't go up quite that much so it's really interesting so what's your overall assessment i mean one of the things i was talking about with another guest is that you know the country there's very different circumstances around the country so you've seen uh an urban example here how do you think it might play out uh you know somewhere less urbanized a smaller place a place with a lower cost of living yeah you know what works in seattle does not necessarily work all across the country one local phenomenon we've seen here over the past 10 years we've got tens of thousands of tech workers moving to seattle every year they're paid very high salaries they've got a lot of money to spend so if they go to the coffee shop and they find that their latte costs five bucks instead of four bucks okay they'll just pay the five bucks for a cup of coffee there are some parts of the country where you don't have that kind of cash floating around we have more people on fixed incomes more people working in a lower wage industry and without that surplus cash flowing around the economy it may be a little bit harder for businesses to figure out ways to make the higher wages work very interesting all right well thank you so much for joining us today i really appreciate your insights all right you bet thanks for having me and coming up after the break why does unionizing pose such a threat to amazon but first here's america q a where we hear what regular americans think about raising the federal minimum wage i've never met anyone that disagreed with that no i don't because i'm concerned that it's gonna limit the opportunities for uh job opportunities on the lower end of the scale i think it's nonsense that we're even discussing it i think it should be a thing it's the wrong move it's going to put more people out of work everything else is going up they might as well have that go up too there are different locations that that can adequately pay that amount but for the standard amount of stores and the and the uh the commerce that's going on that the 15 an hour is just it's just way too much i think it's hard for people to live you know on the current minimum wage is extremely low i think you should have it you better believe it no i do not i believe that a lot of places are paying 15 minimum wage and up if that's where you want to work it should not be mandated we desperately need that i hate to see people who are working poor and still struggling to pay their bills with the u.s dollar and the amount that service workers are being paid right now is not adequate enough i like the idea of people on minimum wage being able to survive yes i do support it but to be honest i wonder if because we can have the 15 dollars an hour but the insurance the rent mortgage they go up they see no difference no i don't the market economy will dictate what someone should get i think what the minimum wage is now is not enough by the way of inflation then people are going to have to realize that if we start paying any everybody a minimum of 15 prices are going to go up on a lot of things that you know just daily daily items they should raise it you know for the poor people that are at a disadvantage do it across the board i don't i don't think that's fair to all especially those who've already been working that maybe work their way up to that and i don't know if they're going to bring them up yes for sure it needs it needs to be raised i think it's fine for a place like new york city but it certainly isn't fine for a place like west virginia i'm not really sure because at the end of the day everything will inflate so it'll just end up being exactly the same situation for everyone [Music] about a year ago amazon opened a fulfillment center in bessemer alabama near birmingham soon union organizers began waiting day and night at the factory gates to try to sign up its nearly 6 000 workers they succeeded in getting enough signatures to hold a vote on unionizing mail-in ballots a new measure introduced because of the pandemic are due at the end of the month if it goes through it would be a big deal since amazon has over its 25-year history so far avoided unions joining us now to explain these fascinating dynamics is dr robin gaster he literally wrote the book on amazon called be a myth amazon rising power and the seduction in the age of amazon it came out this month and if you're wondering it is available on amazon we'll come back for that interview in a few minutes and we will just move on for a moment go to our next interview we'll come back to him so on our next topic about 2.1 million people are incarcerated in america 95 percent of them will be released back into their communities and about 75 percent of them will end up back in jail within five years clearly some things probably many things aren't right our next guests take us into a maximum security prison to shed light on one very important question could a different approach to justice create better outcomes joining us now is catherine hervey she's the director producer and writer of the prison within and troy williams he's one of the stars of the film whose story well well we'll hear some more about catherine i just wanted to start by saying congratulations on making a really excellent film i have to say it was extremely touched it was a very moving story and it was just so amazing to get to know these prisoners as people and people you know who are trying so hard to to look inside change themselves really understand what happened and it was all through this you know this process of restorative justice and this particular program at san quentin so could you just just start by explaining what that is for us the film follows a group of men as well as some survivors who are coming in from the outside and who are also facilitators of the program it's called the victim offender education group and it uses restorative justice philosophies to first help the men and then this also happens in women's prisons as well to really connect the dots of their lives that led to their crime and that is really to me the most important part of the film and it's something that's really missing in our criminal justice system because what it causes them to do is to go back and really unpack all of the trauma that has happened in their lives that has led to their crime but more importantly to also take full accountability for their actions right so none of this is used as an excuse it's not okay that people committed violence against other people but that if we don't really start unpacking our lives and unpacking the trauma that occurs to us and that occurs to the men in the film then basically people are just going to come right back out and you know the traumatic cycle starts all over again so the program and the film is about healing it's about restorative justice versus retributive justice and a big component of this is that the facilitators themselves are survivors and then at one point in the film we bring in this other woman dion wilson that we've been following who comes in and sits with the men in circle that we've been following and they heal they heal together it's just so amazing to watch that unfold on camera we'll talk more about that later troy you're one of the stars of the film as i said you spent a number of years in san quentin and the prison system in general can you tell us a bit about your story um how you came to be there what you did but then also how you came to the place where you could heal in the way that catherine was just talking about i participated in the takeover robbery of a computer parts company and as a result of that i ultimately was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole so going into prison i knew that i had to do some things to try to unravel my past i had to ask myself this question how did i like literally go from being an innocent kid who would not step on an ant to being a gun-toting um gang-banging felon willing to put a gun in somebody's head and robbed him like what happened in my life that got me to that point uh and through a lot of soul searching and a lot of reflection and a lot of you know awakening and realization and processing groups you know i i came to understand a lot about myself and what got me there i realized that there were things that got me away from the values that my mother my father my grandparents and my great grandmother tried to instill like in me and because of what was going on in the community you know the world was telling me not to be violent but yet all i saw around me was um all i saw around me were things that led me to believe that i would not live to be a certain age and that the only way for me to avoid was to become a very aggressive individual myself and so one of the things that i did i started gangbanging and when i went to jail my brother was murdered and what i realized from sitting in jail is that here it was my mother had lost one son to the street she was about to lose another son to the prison system and nothing i had actually did protected my brother and nothing that i was going to do was actually going to bring my brother back and that was the initial start of my journey inward is me really starting to take a look at how did i get to this point how did i get so far away from the teachings of my parents that it led me inside of this system um where i was in many ways not expected to ever return wow and i know the kind of programs that you participated in and that the the film is about are pretty rare in prison is that right not a lot of people have these sorts of opportunities oh very much so especially you know um i can't speak for other states and i have been to quite a few different states and all you seem to see in most states is this lockdown lock em up sort of mentality and that is what america in essence has been practicing for the past 40 years and it ha it hasn't worked it doesn't work i mean the harder a person got to me the harder i became it wasn't until somebody um showed some empathy toward me that i learned how to empathize toward others no you talked about the the lockdown and the lack of these programs i just want to play a short clip from the film that that speaks to both of those very powerfully [Music] we have been told that the state punishing people literally harming people to show people that harming people is wrong is the only option for accountability prison is criminogenic prison produces crime it's like completely counterintuitive that we send anyone to a thing that makes it more likely that they're going to commit more crimes and i'm not even talking about places like san quentin where there's actually programming but the vast majority of prisons across this country have nothing have nothing to help people figure out how to turn their lives around so troy can you just quickly tell us those cages that we just saw in that clip what is that i found it a little bit shocking actually to see what life really looks like inside those are where they send human beings out to have recreation um they placed him inside of a cage because the only way that we have been taught or trained or thought of to deal with people considered violent is to put them in a cage and lock them up and pretend that that is going to be the cure-all um to our problem and you know i would love for the audience also to recognize that you know i spent half of my life you know in a cage that was um four feet by ten feet like with two human beings i'm six foot two you know well over 250 pounds and i was put in this cage with another human being um probably equally or bigger than me and we were forced to live um this was our restroom this was our kitchen this is our bathroom this was our our eating area this is our sleeping area and we were forced to live in that um and treated less than human where you know if you saw animals locked in a cage that small people would be in the uproar about it so we have to do better uh with regards to how we are allowing our youth to fall through the cracks and then we are allowing um a society um to to have walk away with this concept that lock them up is a cure-all to all of the problems that we have in this country so catherine yeah i want to ask you i know that you're an attorney and you were teaching inside the prison system as well certainly before you made this film what was that like for you as an outside person coming into that and i guess this you know probably led to why you wanted to make this film yeah thank you for asking that i was going into a men's prison as a volunteer college instructor you know you start going in every week you're developing relationships with these men and i very very very quickly realized that most of the men that i was that i was teaching that i was interacting with they all had life without parole so you know to this day they're still in prison and sentenced to die in prison and what i really started seeing with these men and the way that they interacted with each other the way they interacted with me the way they interacted with themselves was really deep levels of integrity and accountability and uh you know a lot of heart in terms of how they spoke how they acted they really really took responsibility for themselves and then i would go out into the world where um you know theoretically we're supposed to be acting better and i would be disappointed i would be disappointed with the levels of integr integrity accountability and this was this was a really huge disconnect for me this was very very hard for me to reconcile because i felt like why are these men in here considered beyond redemption and they're showing themselves to be of much greater heart and integrity than most people that i meet on the outside world these men and there's women as well need to be out and they need to be leaders in our community teaching us you know how to not recidivate how to stop these cycles of trauma yeah there's a powerful moment in the film where is it sam that he talks about you know passing on the lessons to his own children programs that i learned in here in vogue i sit with my kids them in the visiting room and i teach them it i asked them what they feel and explain to me what happened that day and i try to use the work to have help them guide them that's my my debt to society and it hurts because it took coming to prison for us to wake up it's not prison did it but something clicked it was the aha moment that woke us up and to realize what we did one of the things you know speaking of of that that is mentioned many times in the film that's really impactful is that you know hurt people hurt dionne her husband was a police officer and was killed and then she felt this rage and wanted to you know see the perpetrator murdered literally she fought very hard for the death penalty and then came to realize that she was her hurt was making her want to hurt troy maybe can you speak to that from your own experience it's unfortunate that um i received the title of ex-felon but i never um received the title of crime survivor like most of the guys inside are have at some point themselves been victims of criminal behavior been victims of crime themselves and oftentimes we find ourselves unprotected by forces that are meant to protect us we find ourselves not being protected by the very law enforcement that is supposed to protect us and so um we lash out um we try to find ways to you know protect ourselves and ultimately that leads us to hurting other people um and i identify so much with with dionne is because i mean she was real about it she wasn't going to do anything herself but she had a whole system that was going to back her and support her in that thought frame that i have been hurt and therefore i have to hurt somebody else i have to make sure that the person that hurt me feels my hurt or feels that pain and i want to lash out i want to say this and this is very very important that the men that you see in this film and oftentimes was never shown in other films like we are the creators of this program we are not just the participants of this program we are also the creators and we work alongside with outside people to produce um the results that you see now coming out of prison systems in california um and really all across the country where we have um had the opportunity to step into leadership positions and say no we want to heal we we have a tool set we know that people in the community have a tool set how do we work together in a restorative way to heal our community we have to do it together we we can't do it um individually like like um we need your help and and and advice in turn um our help is needed and we also deserve and need a seat at the table of transformation i'm so glad you raised that because i know since you got out in 2014 that you've been doing exactly that work i learned this i i i don't i can't demonize all of law enforcement no more than i can sanctify all of my homies in in the hood and so what i learned is that people we have to the individuals is what make up the system and we have to come together the people who came into my life and blessed me um whether they were um prison guards whether they were you know outside volunteers or even a lot of the guys on the tier i learned the truth about my history from a black man on a prison chair and so i give credit to all of those people who came in and helped you know me to see things differently about my life so i can relive the and honor the values that my mother father and grandparents tried to teach me very inspiring thank you so much we have to go now but catherine can you tell us where can people see this film yeah right now we can it's out on itunes comcast xfinity vimeo youtube microsoft pretty much all of the video on demand channels you can find the film wonderful right thank you both so much for joining us today i really really appreciate it thank you for having me okay well we've got dr gaster back on the line now to talk about amazon but first here's america q a where we ask americans to tell us what pandemic related changes they think are here to stay i think eventually the new normal will become abnormal didn't it do that after the spanish flu pandemic in 1918 it was followed by the roaring 20s what could be more normal i think that it's just going to exaggerate trends that we've already seen like brick and mortar retail has been declining e-commerce has been expanding probably the work from home situation i think a lot of companies are realizing that they don't need employees in person i think and hope that communicating with loved ones and creative ways you know video chatting it definitely increased for me and my family probably people will be most hesitant to have be around large groups being as comfortable as they were before there's always going to be the little thing in the back of everyone's mind there was a pandemic washing your hands just doing that normal stuff that you should already be taking those steps regardless but probably doing it a lot more it's probably gonna be the six foot distancing all that stuff i think one big change is that business is not going to have to fly their employees across the country and across the world for seminars i think with children as being that it was a disadvantage i think that coming back from that is going to be a struggle online you know teaching a lot more they'll incorporate that a lot more for our family i think realizing that busyness is not a necessity the outcome for the kids in terms of long term is going to be significant we've seen kids in disproportionately in areas where schools are closed probably not a lot of mass gatherings and i think masking probably um the social distancing and the mass squaring i guess people will be more cautious not catching this virus i think you'll be wearing masks there will be some balance of work from home virtual learning has come about we'll see more and more of that i think there will definitely be some adjustments all businesses will have to make but i think everyone seems to be adapting i honestly don't think a lot of the changes that have happened so far like online classes will be permanent because doing that would be bad for colleges [Music] all right we have dr gaster back with us now can we see they're excellent so we're all working um so glad we could make this work because for me this is a very interesting topic um and as i was trying to say it's not just because this is the story of you know union seeks to conquer the giant it's so interesting because of the kind of company that amazon is i just want to read your description of amazon you describe it very provocatively as a brilliant agile cold efficient amoral incredibly innovative secretive scary and seductive um very that's a pretty um amazing description so given this very unique set of qualities can you explain to us why unions are seen as such a threat yeah i think there are uh really two sides to that look america many american businesses have been anti-union and that's sort of for practical purposes if you like it's easier to manage your workforce if you don't have to deal with unions that's pretty clear if you're if you give your workforce an additional voice and expertise that makes it harder to manage them um on the other hand there are things about amazon itself which are uh unique um most big companies um want you to comply they want you to be part of the team but they want you mostly just to follow the rules and amazon is different amazon wants much more commitment it is more of a missionary organization it's not really interested in mercenaries and they are there to serve the customer that is the core of their culture jeff bezos has said it many many times we want to be the most customer-centric uh company on earth and this means that the cultural hold on amazon is very deep and in a certain way unions are not just a sort of practical statement that workers want more rights it's it's a statement that they do not believe in the amazon mission that they or at least that they don't buy into the amazon mission in the way that um amazon wants and amazon needs and amazon has historically been successful in finding people to do that so it's much more personal and i think that needs to be taken into account so um i know that amazon is already paying you know 15 an hour minimum wage which i i think bernie sanders had praised them for doing that when they raise the minimum wage and you know they they have 401ks and you know other benefits but um what kinds of things might the workers be looking for in unionizing i you know especially speaking to some of those adjectives that you threw in there and describing the company well you know the the work in the workforce in the in the warehouse is tremendously demanding it's physically incredibly demanding um anybody who has a chance of going to visit an amazon warehouse should do so it is the future manifest right there and workers have to work so most people there are pickers or stowers they pick up items and or they put them away and there is technology all around them there's technology guiding them to where they need to be where they need to put things what they need to pick up it's very physically demanding work you have to bend and stretch and move quickly and in front of you is a big clock that counts the number of seconds since the last time you did uh that action and on average amazon expects you to do that action every 12 seconds and the clock is there watching you if you fail you get written up and six write-ups and the algorithm will will recommend that you be fired and write-ups could be for arriving late it could be for having too many breaks taking too long to get to a bathroom talking to other employers and employees you know it's a pretty rigidly controlled environment so uh one can imagine that that what especially in cases where management was seen as being unfair for some reason or that the you know the tremendous strains imposed by covert one can imagine that workers would get unhappy and eventually someone would try and start a union and isn't there also sort of a tiered system where they rank everybody in the bottom tier gets fired is that right yeah um amazon won't confirm that but um the evidence is pretty strong there's one deposition from a lawsuit an amazon deposition which showed that amazon released for productivity reasons about 30 percent of its workers at a baltimore warehouse over 13 months and given that you can imagine many many more left during that period because they couldn't handle the workload or for other reasons that there's a tremendous amount of turnover there and that certainly makes it more difficult to to make to create a union right right i would i would expect that so is that the main factor or are there other factors um which account for the fact that amazon's been able to keep unions at bay for 25 years i know jeff bezos got some criticism for that well you know look for a long time they were paying above average wages and that helped they gave healthcare that helped if you last long enough you can invest in their 401k but i don't know how many people do that so on the other hand it's really difficult it's very difficult to unionize in high turnover workforce workplaces you have to get union cards signed to get an election many of those people may have left by the time the election comes around so it's difficult and that um explains possibly why efforts elsewhere have failed amazon also takes its own actions you know if you have a lot of turnover it's fairly easy to turn over the union work union organizers as well and there's a lawsuit pending in staten island about that and more generally the us is not terribly uh labor law is not terribly helpful to the unions you know um unlike some european countries where there is sectoral bargaining or at least company level bargaining to unionize amazon is is going to be like world war one you have to you have to unionize every single facility separately so it's like you know bayonets and mustard gas it's not shock and awe um and i also think that amazon could respond i mean let's say that bessemer unionizes amazon will notice that and it's possible that work will flow elsewhere i mean that you know the auto industry managed to change its supply chains so that detroit wasn't dominant anymore um so you know there are there are other options and and finally let's say they win amazon can come back in a year and ask for another election if it can get 30 of the workers to sign a card so even wins are not permanent it's difficult so you're not optimistic that this uh effort will be successful i guess it will know in about 10 days or so i i bessemer might be successful i i really don't have an opinion i'm not in i'm not on the ground there it's not not close enough we will see more of this definitely we'll see more efforts to unionize because amazon is squeezing everybody um so everybody on the production side is being squeezed so we're going to see more of them i'm just pointing out that it's not like opening a door and it floods in it really isn't like that it's trench warfare and it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of different efforts to to get it done so that's interesting to hear because i was reading articles you know where other plants are watching what's happening in alabama but you know as you explain it's a lot more complicated than that uh i think we we've got to wrap up we're out of time thanks so much for joining us it's uh extremely interesting to speak with you thank you very much and that's all for today's show thank you so much for watching the nation speaks be sure to join us every saturday at 11 a.m to noon eastern and from all of us here have a great week [Music] don't let youtube decide what information you get that's your choice youtube is deleting our videos and cuts you off from a source of honest reporting make sure you don't lose access to ntd's news content and take a quick moment to subscribe to our newsletter so no matter what happens here you'll keep your access to a trustworthy news