Les Leopold, Author, Executive Director of Labor Institute
Saru Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage
Sara Nelson, Int’l President Association of Flight Attendants CWA, AFL-CIO
We would also like to thank our generous sponsors Healthy Housing Foundation and Working Families Power for making this possible.
Christin Deacon, Former Director of New Jersey State Health Benefits
Cynthia Fisher, Founder / Chairman PatientRightsAdvocate.org
Kevin Morra, Co-Founder of Power to the Patient
Cora Opsahl, Director of 32BJ SEIU Health Fund
We would also like to thank our generous sponsors Our Revolution and the Mary Haas Foundation for making this possible.
Dr. Carolyn Mazure, Chair of the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research
We would also like to thank our generous sponsors Our Revolution and the Mary Haas Foundation for making this possible.
Speakers:
We would also like to thank our generous sponsors Our Revolution and the Mary Haas Foundation for making this possible.
Michael Weinstein, President & Co-Founder of Aids Healthcare Foundation
Alex Lee, California Assembly member
Michael Monte, CEO of Champlain Housing Trust
Rob Reynolds, Veteran & veteran’s housing advocate
We would also like to thank our generous sponsors Healthy Housing Foundation and Working Families Power for making this possible.
“Why are working class people apathetic about politics? Because politics is completely dominated by corporations.”
If there is a chicken-or-the-egg question as it regards working class politics in the year 2024 and beyond, some of the boldest labor leaders in the United States have a very unified response: organized workers come first and then—and only then—can the progressive vision of a healthier democracy and more equal nation that meets the material needs of all its people finally come to pass.
“What we have to organize around,” says union leader Sara Nelson, “are the issues that really matter.”
President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA), Nelson argues that what constitutes those specific “issues that really matter” has not changed very much since Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoted his Economic Bill of Rights nearly 80 years ago: a living wage and dignity at work, decent and affordable housing, universal healthcare, quality education for all, retirement security, and a life with recreation and leisure not just toil and labor.
“Stop doing bullshit applause lines and do real work on workers’ rights.” —AFA president Sara Nelson
While the Republican Party remains the chief political obstacle to achieving those goals, says Nelson—currently at the bargaining table representing her members in contract negotiations with several major airlines carriers—the Democrats also have a long way to go. Meanwhile, the corporate interests that pump massive amounts of money into both major parties can only be challenged by a more cohesive and strategically-minded working class.
“Democrats in general,” she says, “need to get back to talking about that Economic Bill of Rights fundamentally across the board. And that is what is going to attract people to the party—not just talking about it, but fighting for it and having actual demands.”
In a series of discussions during and after The Sanders Institute Gathering that took place in Burlington, Vermont on the first weekend of June, Nelson explained how being “pro-labor,” regardless of party affiliation, “has to be more than just not killing labor every single day.”
“It has to be more than that,” she told Common Dreams during a lengthy interview, “and it has to be more than politicians going to a rally and saying the same tired applause lines that they’ve been saying for 80 years—things like: ‘We like labor because you gave us the 8-hour work day.'”
“I promise you, politician,” she continued, “that the vast majority of people in the audience listening to you no longer have an eight hour day. Same with the line about the how it was labor who delivered the weekend. I promise you, the vast majority of people in the audience do not have their weekends off anymore. ‘Oh, labor that gave us sick leave and vacations!’ Same thing again. Stop doing bullshit applause lines and do real work on workers’ rights.”
In Vermont, Nelson explained to attendees at the Sanders Institute event that “the labor movement”—especially in a nation that is 90 percent non-unionized—”is the entire working class, not just people who currently have a union card.”
Saru Jayaraman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and president of the advocacy group One Fair Wage, which she co-founded, explained to those at the Gathering how the approximately 13 million restaurant and food service workers her group represents are on the front lines of a largely non-unionized worker movement focused like a laser on improving the material conditions of individual, families, and the wider working class.
During her earlier organizing with the Restaurant Opportunity Center (ROC) in the decade after Sept. 11, 2001, Jayaraman said that workers wherever she went—”from California, to the Deep South, to the Midwest, and to the Northeast”—would all say the same thing: “It’s my wages, it’s my wages, it’s my wages.”
With a new book, titled “One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America,” and state-level ballot fights for wage increases this election season in Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, Jayaraman says the organizing of workers making less than $15 in real wages is vital within the nation’s “absolute largest” private employer sector, the restaurant and food service industry.
Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and president of One Fair Wage, speaking during the Gathering in Burlington, Vermont on Saturday, June 1, 2024. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
After a show of hands from audience members in Burlington who had at one point worked in a restaurant, Jayaraman reminded them how “one in two Americans has worked in the industry at some point in their lives.”
“It is the largest private sector employer of women. It is the largest private sector of young people,” she said. “It’s the largest private sector employer of immigrants, formerly incarcerated individuals, people of color—pretty much everybody—but it is the absolute lowest-paying employer in the United States of America.”
With the lobbying power of the National Restaurant Association, founded in 1919—”we call it the other NRA,” Jayaraman noted—owners and investors in the food industry have generated massive profits for themselves by paying poverty wages and forcing tipped wages on their employees “for generations.”
What this “other NRA” has been able to achieve over the course of its existence, she said, is ensuring that millions of restaurant workers across the country are forbidden from earning more per hour than the $2.13 that such tipped worked currently receive.
.@SaruJayaraman: We are on the cusp of an incredibly historic moment and we decided it was time to go huge…We are going to raise 3.5 million workers wages because guess what, when minimum wage is on the ballot it never ever fails. Ever. pic.twitter.com/0TKWqmNmLK
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
In her book, Jayaraman writes, “Subminimum wages are subhuman. They are reflection of the value America has placed on the humanity of the people” who work in those sectors.
Those receiving this paltry hourly wage, still the law in 43 U.S. states, she said in Burlington, is “not some niche group. It’s where all of us worked, our kids work. It’s the largest employer in America, and it gets to pay $2 an hour because we’ve let it.”
And the current outrage among restaurant workers isn’t restricted to that. In context of the Covid-19 pandemic that shook the nation and the world in 2020, Jayaraman spoke with fury about the thousands of food industry workers who “died—no, the 12,000 workers who were murdered—because they were forced to go back to work before it was saved into an industry that the CDC named as the most dangerous place for adults to be during the pandemic.”
“They died because they were poor,” she roared. “For those that survived, 60% told us that tips went way down and the women, more than half of women told us harassment went way up. They said, I’m regularly asked, ‘Take off your mask so I can see how cute you are before I decide how much I want to tip you.'” Reports like that from workers, she said, are endless and continue to this day.
“The only way it’s going to work is that we are going to have this huge base, the ability to mobilize them, but it’s got to be a thousand flowers blooming.” —Saru Jayaraman, One Fair Wage
It’s for these reasons and more that tipped workers are fighting for the Raise the Wage Act, a bill which passed the U.S House in 2021 but failed in the U.S. Senate despite support from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other Democrats. After House Democrats lost their House majority in 2022, Sanders reintroduced the bill in the Senate last year, but it has no hope of passing until Republican opposition is vanquished.
Again, Jayaraman pointed to the restaurant industry lobby as the key villain in the workers fight.
“They’re the major opposition in every state,” she said. “They’re the major opposition at the federal level. And there can be no change at the federal level until we defeat the ‘other NRA’ and we are on our way.”
What she sees in her work among non-unionized restaurant workers fighting to destroy sub-minimum wages is that it’s workers that must lead.
“We are not trying to mobilize these hundreds of thousands of people in the same way,” Jayaraman told Common Dreams. “The only way it’s going to work is that we are going to have this huge base, the ability to mobilize them, but it’s got to be a thousand flowers blooming. That is how this moment of worker power has happened.”
It was workers on their own, she explained, who “started walking out of their restaurants and putting up signs saying: ‘We all left. The pay is too low.’ Nobody gave them a sign and trained them how to do that. There was a moment of power where they all collectively felt ‘I’m worth more’ and walked out.”
“There’s no humanity in capitalism, it’s only about extracting as much profit as possible from the entire machinery, which includes human beings.” —Sara Nelson
Like Jayaraman, Nelson spoke about the lessons she learned after seeing corporate bosses willing to sacrifice the safety, and even the lives, of workers at the altar of profit.
Speaking passionately about her career in the airline industry—including close colleagues killed on the hijacked planes used in the 9/11 attacks—Nelson describes the AFA as a union that centers the needs of its members, but also one that recognizes its role in the broader fight for economic equality and the common good.
In the years after 2001, she saw firsthand how the industry exploited the horrific tragedy of 9/11 to undermine worker power while protecting owners and investors through a bankruptcy process.
“For me, that was real people, those were my friends and it was my friends who died too,” she explained to Common Dreams. It was painful, she said, “coming to grips with the fact that there’s no sympathy, there’s no humanity in capitalism, it’s only about extracting as much profit as possible from the entire machinery, which includes human beings.”
While the union fought to protect their pensions during that time, executives were clamoring for unlimited compensation packages, Nelson recounted. It was during those battles, she said, “that I got a firsthand experience in the four D’s of union busting: divide, delay, distract, and demoralize. And I saw workers go through all of those very divisive tactics.”
“So the first question is, why aren’t we winning? And the answer is we don’t have a working class base.” —Les Leopold, Labor Institute
Joining Jayaraman and Nelson on the Sanders Institute panel focused on workers was Les Leopold, executive director of the Labor Institute and author of the new book, “Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It.”
What Nelson, Jayaraman, and Leopold all argued in separate interviews with Common Dreams during and after the Gathering is that organized workers need to be at the center of fighting for their own economic wellbeing. A more unified and coordinated working class is also the key missing ingredient if the broader progressive agenda—from voting rights and democracy protection to the climate fight and economic battles over healthcare and housing—is ever to be won.
“There are all these organizations and we’re fighting all these good fights on all these issues,” Leopold said on the edge of the three-day event, referring to green groups, healthcare advocates, and organizers on a range of social justice issues gathered in Burlington. “So the first question is, why aren’t we winning? And the answer is we don’t have a working class base.”
Without workers in the fight in a deep and organized way, Leopold argued, progressives can’t win—”or can’t win substantially”—and that means new structures are needed to galvanize workers. In his book, Leopold identifies years of mass layoffs, driven in large part by stock buybacks and leveraged buyouts by private equity and other powerful investors, as evidence of the battering workers have taken from their corporate bosses and neoliberal capitalism.
The Labor Institute’s executive director Les Leopold addresses the audience in Burlington, as he called for a ban on compulsory mass layoffs for companies with federal government contracts. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
“As Wall Street has routinized the financial strip-mining of productive enterprises,” Leopold writes in the book, “more than 30 million of us have experienced mass layoffs [over recent decades]. And even more have felt the pain and suffering as our family members lost jobs.”
Despite that, he says, the occurrence of mass layoffs has “become so commonplace, so normalized, so routinized, that for-profit and nonprofit executives alike do not hesitate to slash jobs whenever they feel it necessary.” But with a working class fractured and pummeled from the decades long corporate crusade against unionization, Leopold told Common Dreams in Burlington that he believes a fight against mass layoffs could be a way to help turn the tide.
“Why are working class people apathetic about politics?” asked Leopold. “Because politics is completely dominated by corporations and they’re totally alienated from that. We’ve got to fight the class war around politics. We have got to get working class control over politics.”
“The working class is going to save the working class. It’s never going to be a party.”
Nelson echoed that, saying the policies passed in Congress “are not going to be the policies we need until we extract money from our politics.”
Getting corporate money out of politics, can’t be won in Congress “because we don’t have the politicians in office that can vote it out because money is still controlling it,” Nelson said. “So the only way to get at it, the only way to change our politics is to have workers in a massive way organize their unions and take the money from capital so that they don’t have it to spend in our politics.”
In Leopold’s mind, a worker-centered politics and a “class war” framework is something “we can sell anywhere.” It can work with organized workers already with labor unions like Nelson’s AFA, the United Auto Workers (UAW), and other major trade unions. It can also be the linchpin for workers who are not yet organized within unions, like Jayaraman’s approach with One Fair Wage.
It can work for “Trump people” that have looked to the far-right because they saw Democrats year after year not fighting for their interests, he said, and it can work for “not Trump people,” who are simply looking for allies to stand with them in the demand for better wages, job security, healthcare, housing costs, and more.
(From left) Sanders Institute co-founder Jane O’Meara Sanders, AFA president Sara Nelson, the Labor Institute’s Les Leopold, and Saru Jayaraman of One Fair Wage pose for a picture together at the Gathering in Burlington, Vt. on Saturday, June 1, 2024. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
Offering a concrete example for workers to rally around, Leopold proposed in Vermont—something he has written about extensively in recent months, including for Common Dreams—is the idea of putting a target on mass layoffs and stock buybacks by large employers to help galvanize working-class power.
What he’s calling for is a provision which would prohibit any company that receives a government contract from carrying out a compulsory mass layoff—defined as the termination of 50 jobs or more at one time.
“Think about how easy it is to add one sentence to a federal contract, which says: ‘If you take this contract, no compulsory layoffs, no stock buybacks,” Leopold told Common Dreams. Having calculated the amount of money flowing through such contracts for large corporations at about $700 billion, he admits it’s not clear exactly how many jobs that could save—but it would be a significant number.
“Well, $700 billion worth of no layoffs is a lot of no layoffs,” he said, but even more important is this: “It would be a fight.” And if the Democratic Party was willing to put such a proposal into its 2024 platform it would be a signal that the party was willing to go to bat for working people in ways it has not done in a very long time.
“If they fight for that plank, people will hear them,” said Leopold. “It would show there’s a fight going on in Democratic Party on behalf of the working class. Then labor can rally. Then progressive organizations can rally. But there has to be a fight.”
“You’re going to conduct a mass layoff or spend billions on stock buybacks while there’s layoffs, then you don’t get the federal contract. The federal government has a lot of power with the purse strings that they need to use.”
Last week, Leopold wrote an op-ed calling for President Joe Biden to intervene on behalf John Deere workers facing mass layoffs by the owners of the iconic tractor company. “Come on Joe, go to bat for these workers,” Leopold wrote. “Put the heat on John Deere and show the working class that you’re tougher than Trump when it comes to saving American jobs.”
And Nelson agrees that the onus is on the Democrats to be much bolder than they have been.
“The Democratic Party has to put working peoples central to its platform and put in its platform things like Les Leopold’s idea on mass layoffs,” she told Common Dreams.
“It’s a very simple idea,” Nelson continued, but it’s exactly on the right track. “You’re going to conduct a mass layoff or spend billions on stock buybacks while there’s layoffs, then you don’t get the federal contract. The federal government has a lot of power with the purse strings that they need to use.”
Despite the hopes for big labor’s abilities to get something dramatic accomplished in the coming months and years, both in their own contract fights and building up their own unions, Leopold said they also need to use their size and resources to help build “an organization for unorganized workers.”
Leopold happens to think the mass layoffs could be a vehicle for that, though he admits it’s not been tested and would need a much larger buy-in as a strategy before it could be proven effective. Jayaraman noted in her discussion with Common Dreams that low wages is a more likely issue for the broader working class to organize around.
“If we’re waiting for the law to change, we’re just going to keep waiting until we’re completely extinct.”
Nelson recognized the value of a number of approaches, and said unions and the unorganized workforce must go much further than they’ve gone since Reagan busted the PATCO strike in 1981.
“We have to organize like never before,” she said, noting how large established unions like the UAW have been putting resources and energy into helping non-unionized works in the south, including Tennessee and Alabama, win recognition. “That’s important,” Nelson explained, “but it’s also not enough if we’re really going to do the kind of organizing that can truly put a check on capital and change the political environment.”
When it comes to the Pro Act, or Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would enhance workers rights and that Democrats tried but failed to pass during the first half of Biden’s term, Nelson said it is very much “a chicken and egg situation.” The legislation, she said, “is not going to come before we organize more workers” in order to tilt the political scales that would make passage possible.
“So if we’re waiting for the law to change,” she warned, “we’re just going to keep waiting until we’re completely extinct.”
Referencing an effort by United Auto Worker’s president Shawn Fain to align as many contract fights as possible around May 1, 2028 in an effort to further create broader worker solidarity and increase pressure across various trade and service union sectors and industries, Nelson expressed hope for Leopold’s mass layoff idea and what Fain has proposed.
Both show, she said, “the working class that there is a way to be strategic” and can wake people up to “the power we have in standing together,” whether it be on wages, firings, union card campaigns, or contract fights.
And it may not take as long as May of 2028, Nelson added. “The moment may come to us before then, but talking about and really defining the problems—which we’re doing over and over again—is key, showing that these are not isolated issues,” she said. “The issue with housing, the issue with gun violence, the issue with healthcare, the issue with education and debt—these are not isolated issues. The issue is pure and simple corporate greed, and that’s what we have to organize against.”
“The issue with housing, the issue with gun violence, the issue with healthcare, the issue with education and debt—these are not isolated issues. The issue is pure and simple corporate greed, and that’s what we have to organize against.”
“Solidarity is our power,” Nelson explained during her interview with Common Dreams. “And so the strike is not itself the most powerful weapon here. It is the consciousness of worker power and the threat of the strike that is going to make change in our economy and in people’s lives.”
In a podcast interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders earlier this week, Fain of the UAW spoke along similar lines.
“We have to harness that power” of working class power led by organized labor, Fain said to Sanders.
“Union or not, we have to bring workers together all over, not just in America, but all over the globe,” Fain continued. “We want to see working class people all over this globe come together. The only way we’re going to beat the corporate global fight is by standing together globally and fighting for better standards for everyone and standard wages for everyone. So we lift everyone up everywhere. And to a lot of people, that seems like a pipe dream. I don’t believe it is.”
It was during the panel discussion in Burlington that Nelson looked out at the audience where Sen. Sanders—”our organizer-in-chief,” she called him—was seated and thanked him for the leadership he showed in both 2016 and 2020 while seeking the Democratic nomination for president.
“We want to see working class people all over this globe come together.” —UAW president Shawn Fain
“One of the reasons that unions are one of the most popular ideas in this country is because Bernie Sanders went around this country telling people that the trade union movement is the only way for us to lift up the standards for the working class,” Nelson said. “It is the only way to get back to the issues that we were talking about a hundred years ago and pushing forward on them. It is the only way to build the power that we need to change our politics. It is the only way to give working people agency to feel the democracy is something that they own, not what the capital class does.”
While speaking of Trump—who “lives the very antithesis of what it means to be union”—and his Republican Party with outright contempt as enemies of working people everywhere, Nelson was clear that nobody should think the Democratic Party is riding courageously to the rescue of the tens of millions of workers who toil and sweat to provide themselves and their families a decent life.
“The working class is going to save the working class,” she said. “It’s never going to be a party. We are going to bring politics to us if we do our jobs right. It doesn’t happen the other way around.”
But doing so meant that progressive leaders including Third Act founder Bill McKibben, One Fair Wage president Saru Jayaraman, economist Stephanie Kelton, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would be able to spend three days collaborating on solutions to some of the most pressing issues facing communities across the United States and the globe.
“We are all working so hard in our own areas,” O’Meara Sanders told Common Dreams after the event wrapped up on June 2. “It allowed people to get out of the silos that too often separate the policymakers. So to have elected officials and advocates in so many different areas, having them be able to come together and discuss different things… it bodes well for the future.”
Nancy Altman: All of our issues are interconnected…The only way they can win is to divide us. And the way that we win is some of us lead on some issues, some on other issues, but we support each other on all of these issues. @ssworks pic.twitter.com/dV6PTTlYK8
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 2, 2024
Over three days filled with more than 15 livestreamed panel discussions, film screenings, and other events, participants in the Gathering learned about how advocates in California are working to implement social housing, taking inspiration from countries like Austria and Spain; the labor rights movement’s “25×2” strategy of pushing living wage legislation and ballot measures in dozens of states; and a number of reasons to be optimistic about fighting the climate crisis—even as scientists warn the continued burning of fossil fuels will push global temperatures past 1.5°C of heating in at least one of the next five years.
Climate
Despite experts’ bleak projections, McKibben and Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous welcomed guests on the first night of the conference by offering evidence that electric vehicles and solar panels are rapidly becoming more powerful and more accessible to more U.S. households, providing hope that the world’s largest historic emitter of carbon dioxide is making strides to cut down on planet-heating pollution from transportation and electricity.
“Right now, the sea surface temperature in the Atlantic is two to three degrees higher than we’ve ever seen it before,” said McKibben. “And at the exact same moment that the planet is physically starting to disintegrate precisely the way the scientists 30 years ago told us it would—as if scripted by Hollywood—you’ll also see finally the sudden spike in… the only antidote we have at scale to deal with this: the application of renewable energy around the world.”
“Last summer, just as scientists were telling us that it was the hottest week in the last 125,000 years, that same week was the week that the engineers told us that for the first time, human beings were now installing more than a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels every single day on this planet,” he added. “That’s a nuclear power plant’s worth of solar panels. So we are right at the moment when one or the other of these trends is going to cancel out… the other one. Our job, I think, is to make sure that we figure out how to dramatically accelerate that second trend so that we have some hope of catching up with the physics of climate change before it does in everything that we care about on this planet. So for me, that’s the context of the moment that we’re in.”
That theme—giving guests at the Gathering an unvarnished accounting of the very real crises that face communities while providing a glimpse into campaigners’ ongoing efforts and positive results of their tireless advocacy work, with the crucial help of progressive lawmakers like Sen. Sanders—continued throughout the weekend.
Joseph Geevarghese of Our Revolution, The Hip Hop Caucus’ Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jamie Minden of Zero Hour, and Friends of the Earth U.S. president Erich Pica. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
On the climate front, advocates shared their hopes to seize on the opportunity of Republican plans to extend Trump-era tax cuts if they regain power in the November elections.
Participants on a Saturday panel at the Gathering—including Joseph Geevarghese of Our Revolution, the Hip Hop Caucus’ Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jamie Minden of Zero Hour, and Friends of the Earth U.S. president Erich Pica—argued that ending federal handouts to Big Oil is part of the broader effort to ultimately “kill the fossil fuel industry” that’s cooking the planet while blocking the worker-led demand for a green energy transition.
Too often when covering advocacy work, the corporate media focuses on “the controversy,” O’Meara Sanders told Common Dreams. “What’s the controversy as opposed to what’s the plan?”
The Gathering set out to offer an antidote to that dynamic and many participants—including Dr. Deborah Richter, board president of Vermont Health Care for All—said the effort was a success.
“Sometimes when you’re trying to get some sort of major social change, it can get really, really strenuous and make you sad,” Richter told Common Dreams. “I felt incredibly rejuvenated after this weekend.”
“You tend to get single-focused when you’re working on one issue,” she added. “And I actually really appreciated the updates, the good and the bad on climate change… I came away thinking, I have to learn more about climate change. I’m going to learn more about this. I’m going to learn more about that.”
Healthcare
Richter spoke to attendees about her group’s efforts to bring government-funded healthcare to Vermont, noting that she has spent years advocating to expand Medicare to the entire population while also witnessing her own patients’ struggles with the for-profit system as a primary care doctor and addiction medicine specialist.
Joining Richter for the panel discussion was Dr. Jehan “Gigi” El-Bayoumi, a Georgetown University School of Medicine professor who founded the Rodham Institute, which works to achieve health equity in communities across Washington, D.C.
“Many people think that what determines how long you live and how healthy you are is access to healthcare,” El-Bayoumi told Common Dreams. While crucial, “that only accounts for 20%.” The remaining 80% is other “social determinants of health,” such as whether people live in a neighborhood with access to affordable, nutritious food and clean air or a fenceline community next to a chemical plant or oil refinery, raising their chance of developing respiratory problems or other health issues.
“Health is the air that we breathe. Health is what we eat and where we live,” El-Bayoumi said, noting that the same factors are also “the social determinants of education and the social determinants of employment.”
“If you don’t have those things in place,” the physician continued, “then how are you going to have better health?”
In Burlington, El-Bayoumi spoke about efforts to ensure people of color in Washington, D.C. had access to Covid-19 vaccines when they were first introduced. Working with the Black Coalition Against Covid, she partnered with medical schools at historically Black universities, Black fraternities and sororities, the hip-hop community, and others to hold a mass vaccination event in Ward 8.
“Community needs to be at the table,” she told the audience. “The people that are closest to the problem know the solutions.”
El-Bayoumi stressed to Common Dreams the importance of not only engaging with impacted community members but also following the lead of success stories around the world. While progressives often cite European examples, she pointed to models such as the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease’s Project Axshya, which set up nearly 100 tuberculosis treatment and information kiosks in 40 cities across India.
She also cited models from Egypt, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, where the Friendship Bench project trained elder volunteers without any formal medical credentials to discreetly counsel patients on wooden benches on the grounds of clinics, aiming to address “kufungisisa,” the local word closest to depression.
When it comes to providing healthcare, “we’re all spokes on a wheel,” El-Bayoumi said. “The nurses and the physicians and the custodians… we’re all spokes. We could not function without each other.”
“But then similarly, health, environment, food, political, education—all spokes on a wheel,” she added. “There is not one thing that’s more important.”
Housing
The latest Gathering built on the institute’s April conference on housing justice—an event that brought together leaders in Los Angeles, including the city’s Mayor Karen Bass, California Assemblyman Alex Lee (D-25), and U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).
Lee also attended the Burlington conference, where he spoke on a panel with Michael Monte of Vermont’s Champlain Housing Trust and AIDS Healthcare Foundation president Michael Weinstein, who argued that “housing is not high enough on the progressive agenda.”
“Our job as progressives is to do everything we can every day to make people’s lives materially better, and this is an area that we have to focus on,” Weinstein said, echoing his remarks during the 2018 Gathering, the very first such event hosted by the institute.
In terms of actually getting people into affordable homes, “we could do a lot to make it less bureaucratic,” he said—touching on a topic that dominated a second housing crisis panel.
For that discussion, O’Meara Sanders was joined by Brian McCabe, deputy assistant secretary for policy development at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Nika Soon-Shiong of the Fund for Guaranteed Income (F4GI), which provides “cash transfers that support those who have been locked out of welfare programs and economic systems.”
F4GI is also working on a pilot program to provide a “cash on-ramp” to help people who are participating in the federal Housing Choice Voucher Program, commonly called Section 8, while they search for rental units, Soon-Shiong explained.
.@nikasoonshiong: I founded @fund4gi out of a belief massive wealth redistribution is an urgent necessity…We research government bureaucracies and we join hands with movement leaders across the country to design a safety net that actually lives up to its name. pic.twitter.com/j7Xbdmh9E1
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 2, 2024
She stressed the importance of including community members in the development and implementation of the programs designed to help them, and pushed back against common messages about financial and logical hurdles.
“Part of addressing the root cause of the housing crisis is actually removing that false frame,” she said, “and demonstrating that it’s possible to collaborate, to move quickly, and to design things that are new and actually relatively inexpensive.”
Workers’ Rights
During one of the labor panels, Jayaraman of One Fair Wage spoke about the nationwide fight for better pay and working conditions—and how the movement’s wins had provoked threats to her and her family.
El-Bayoumi said that before Jayaraman’s remarks, she knew a bit about restaurant workers’ fight for higher pay due to experiences living and working in Washington, D.C.—where residents passed ballot measures to raise the minimum wage for tipped employees in 2018 and 2022.
“What did I not know? Always scale,” the physician continued. She was struck by the specifics that the labor leader shared, as well as her perseverance while being attacked for being successful.
“She was so inspiring and invigorating… She was raw. She was real. I’m just a great admirer now, and I learned a lot from her,” El-Bayoumi said. “Her energy was amazing… It was the information, but also her commitment.”
One Fair Wage co-founder and president Saru Jayaraman during a speech at The Gathering. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
During her speech at the Gathering, Jayaraman said the fight being fought by the millions of low-wage workers her group represents, many of whom work two or even three jobs just to stay afloat, are crucial if the progressive movement more broadly wants to win the battles on climate, healthcare justice, and housing.
“It’s not a competition with all of our issues,” Jayaraman said, “because if these folks could work one job instead of two or three, they would have the capacity to work on healthcare and climate change and everything else. I asked them, ‘What would you work on if you could only work one job?’ They’ve said climate. They’ve said public education. They’ve said, ‘I would do so much, but I have time to survive right now. I just have to get from job to job.'”
.@SaruJayaraman: We are on the cusp of an incredibly historic moment and we decided it was time to go huge…We are going to raise 3.5 million workers wages because guess what, when minimum wage is on the ballot it never ever fails. Ever. pic.twitter.com/0TKWqmNmLK
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
So if the question is what’s the problem and what’s the opportunity, Jayaraman said, “The opportunity is this November—we have 3.5 million workers get a raise and then turn around and work on all of the issues everybody else cares about in this room.”
Media & Technology
At a panel on progressive news media, The Nation national affairs correspondent John Nichols spotlighted another labor struggle that has national and global implications, as U.S. newsrooms lose thousands of working journalists to layoffs and budget cuts—frequently stemming from private equity firms purchasing newspapers and then looking to raise revenues at the expense of the reporters whose work the outlets rely on to operate.
“Since 2005, we have lost 45,000 working journalists in this country,” said Nichols. “So we have a collapse of journalism. We have no filling of the void, and the institutions themselves are collapsing. Since 2005, roughly 20 years, we have lost a third of all print and online publications that existed at that time.”
Nichols, who edited Sanders’ book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, and spoke on the senator’s podcast in April about the current crisis in media, was joined by The Lever founder David Sirota and Common Dreams managing editor Jon Queally.
“We are in a period where our media in this country is in such crisis and such collapse and such dysfunction that it is no longer sufficient to sustain democracy itself,” Nichols told the audience.
John Nichols: We are in a period where our media in this country is in such crisis and such collapse and such dysfunction that it is no longer sufficient to sustain democracy itself pic.twitter.com/bwUKQJ6wsj
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
As traditional newsrooms across the country struggle to survive in an industry increasingly dominated by private equity firms and hedge funds, Sirota spoke about starting an online investigative news outlet with the aim of breaking news stories that might otherwise go uncovered by large publications—or that might be reported on briefly, with the stories of the people affected forgotten within a few days.
After a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio, Sirota said, The Lever “broke open a story that looked back at what were the decisions on specific policies that were made to create an environment for a disaster like that to happen, and which politicians took money at the time while they were making those decisions.”
The Leverreported on how Norfolk Southern lobbied lawmakers to repeal a rule requiring widespread use of electronic braking systems, which were meant to help avoid accidents, and how the Trump administration rescinded the rule in 2017 after the rail industry donated more than $6 million to GOP candidates.
“Ultimately, our reporting ended up playing a big role in getting the Senate and the House to introduce major rail safety legislation that had specific provisions in it that dealt with exactly what we were reporting on,” said Sirota. “The New York Times asked us to do a full page op-ed about our reporting… That’s how elevated it became.”
“The reason to do that is not for our own glory,” he added. “It’s ultimately to shape what actually happens moving forward. So our goal is to hold accountable those who are making these decisions with the hope that if they are held accountable, they will be deterred from making such bad decisions in the future.”
In addition to the media, the Gathering featured panels on civil discourse and technology. During the latter discussion, which addressed topics including artificial intelligence and data collection, journalist Sue Halpern pointed out that in Congress, “there’s a tension between… wanting to protect us—theoretically—and commerce.”
She suggested that corporate pressure is blocking bipartisan efforts to pass federal privacy legislation, explaining that “the lobbyists for the Big Tech companies are constantly saying to lawmakers… if you regulate this, if you pull back on this, you will harm the American economy and you will limit innovation. And I have to say that most congresspeople are terrified of being accused of limiting innovation.”
“Congress can’t get it together to make national legislation. And so we see kind of a piecemeal thing going on, at least with privacy,” Halpern said, highlighting laws passed by California, Illinois, and recently, Vermont, that serve as models for other states, in the absence of federal action.
Screenings
Along with panel discussions, the Sanders Institute incorporated film screenings and music into the Gathering to offer attendees another avenue into some of the issues discussed.
Kelton, an economist at Stony Brook University, presented a film spotlighting efforts by her and several colleagues to prompt a “paradigm shift” in Americans’ understanding of the national deficit by introducing the public to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
Directed by Maren Poitras, Finding the Moneyfollows Kelton and economists including Randall Wray as they explain their vision for how the national debt could be viewed not as a burden that American taxpayers must pay back through cuts to government programs, but “as simply a historical record of the number of dollars created by the U.S. federal government currently being held in pockets, as assets, by the rest of us.”
Kelton questioned how the Republican Party can, year after year, name reducing the federal deficit as one of their top priorities when the tax cuts introduced by the GOP under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations have been the primary drivers of the increasing debt ratio in recent years.
“They don’t care about the fiscal or budgetary impacts. They want to pass their agenda. So we get sweeping tax cuts,” Kelton said. “[The Congressional Budget Office] says the tax cuts will add $1.9 trillion to the deficit. Republicans shrug and say, who cares? On the other side of the government deficit lies a financial windfall for somebody else. Every deficit is good for someone. The question is for whom and for what.”
In the film, Kelton argues that as the issuer of U.S. currency, the federal government does not need to “find the money” to spend on public programs, but instead needs only to ensure that real resources like workers and construction supplies are available when it comes to spending. The government can avoid a surge in inflation through policy decisions, the economists in the film argue, but greater deficits in a large country like the U.S. are far more sustainable than Americans have been led to believe.
Along with the Bush and Trump tax cuts, Kelton used the relief packages passed by Congress when the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020. A total of $5 trillion in relief was passed through several laws, raising people’s unemployment benefits and helping small businesses to stay afloat.
“We cut child poverty by roughly 40%, and you can talk on and on about the benefits, because every deficit is good for someone,” Kelton said. “The question is for whom and where does the windfall on the other side of the government deficit go? In March of 2021, it went to the bottom… That’s who it helped. The Republicans did $1.9 trillion with their tax cuts. Where did it go? Eighty-three percent of the benefits went to people in top 1% of the income distribution.”
Now, said Kelton, the deficit should be seen as a way for the government to pass more far-reaching legislation to fight the climate emergency.
The weekend also featured screenings of trailers for filmmaker Josh Fox’s The Welcome Table—which is about the climate emergency causing displacement and is set to be released on HBO—and The Edge of Nature, an evolving documentary project that connects the crises of Covid, climate, and healthcare.
Fox, known for the award-winning anti-fracking film Gasland, brought his banjo—signed by Sen. Sanders—to Burlington to preview a musical performance that accompanies The Edge of Nature, which he is bringing to New York City with a 12-person ensemble from June 14-30.
“I thought that his telling of his own experience with Covid and the healing power of nature is just so true,” El-Bayoumi said of the performance. “I have patients who are just struggling with life, with mental health issues. I will tell them, go outside, take off your shoes, feel the ground under your feet, because nature is healing.”
The Edge of Nature “actually gave me hope… which I think is one of the things that was brought up over and over again at the Sanders Institute Gathering,” she added. “How do you present that, the issues and solutions, if you will. And I thought that he did that very well.”
.@joshfoxfilm — playing a Bernie-signed banjo discussing Long Covid film: I went off to the woods, you know, Thoreau-style…I discovered something in the midst of all of our grief. In the midst of all our trauma, something weird & miraculous was happening. The planet was healing pic.twitter.com/qj12iZK6ed
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 2, 2024
There was also a screening of a video produced by the Power to the Patients campaign, which has worked to educate the public about healthcare transparency requirements through murals painted in cities across the United States. While the auditorium was waiting for that video to start amid technical difficulties, the audience broke out in song, singing “Solidarity Forever.”
“It was so beautiful. And that was an amazing moment to me,” Fox told Common Dreams. “And it said to me, go ahead and sing your song in your presentation, because this is a room where you can sing.”
“My takeaway was, we have our differences, and we definitely have our identities, and we have our priorities, and we have… teachable moments where we have to instruct each other as to how we’re messing up,” he said. “But also, we really need to focus on solidarity.”
Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous, filmmaker Josh Fox, and The Sanders Institute’s Dave Driscoll listen to a presentation during the Gathering in Burlington, Vermont on Saturday, June 1, 2024. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
Fox noted that when he used to introduce Sen. Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign, the filmmaker would say, “All the movements are in this room.”
As he prepared for the NYC performances, Fox said that in the current “moment of division… the more we can come together in physical space—and that’s what we’re offering here with this show, a chance to be in an audience, a chance to be together, a chance to be in reality with each other—the better we can break those boundaries down.”
“My takeaway from the Gathering is, I wish this was happening all the time and at the White House,” he added, “but if it’s not, we can recreate this in our small ways throughout this [election] cycle.”
What’s Next
O’Meara Sanders said the Sanders Institute intends to have one large Gathering each year and will continue to hold smaller events focused on specific issues, as it did in April with housing.
International Gatherings are one possibility, said O’Meara Sanders, expressing hope that some of the policymakers and advocates who shared their aspirations and plans for the United States in Burlington could convene with lawmakers in other countries who have been successful at implementing social housing, far-reaching climate action, and government-funded healthcare.
The institute aims to bring “members of Parliament together with members of Congress, to bring together diplomats from different countries,” said O’Meara Sanders, “to talk about specific issues. Who’s doing it best? How can we learn from them?”
“We’re going to be bringing people together from all the different countries to explore what they’re doing best and how we can do it better together,” she added. “And then what’s the political will necessary to accomplish these things?”
After contracting the virus during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the filmmaker known globally for Gasland—the 2010 Emmy Award-winning documentary that galvanized the movement against hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for fossil fuels—headed to a one-room cabin in the woods of Pennsylvania, armed with his camera.
Beginning June 14, Fox is set to couple the resulting film with a live musical performance, featuring a 12-person ensemble, for three weeks at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City. He started the month at The Sanders Institute Gathering in Burlington, Vermont, previewing a part of the performance solo, with his banjo—signed by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
The banjo and songs of Pete Seeger—whose influence Fox can trace back to the folk legend visiting his elementary school—are just part of the film’s soundtrack. There are also blue jays and coyotes. The rustle of the forest, filled with bears and beavers. The clicks of typewriter keys. Occasional gunshots in the distance. Radio reports about the intertwined public health and economic crises.
“A lot of the film is about these big lessons that we got during that time and that we have decided don’t count anymore. We reduced emissions for the very first time in history enough to meet the goals of [the Paris agreement],” Fox said in an interview with Common Dreams.
Scientists have used the term anthropause “to refer specifically to a considerable global slowing of modern human activities,” as over a dozen experts wrote in June 2020 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Fox said: “That was a moment that we all remember. We healed as a planet. The skies got clearer. The water got better. Bird song increased in complexity.”
The detail about bird songs stayed with Dr. Jehan “Gigi” El-Bayoumi, a professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine who was in the Burlington audience, which included academics, advocates, and policymakers fighting for a better world, focused on issues including climate, inequality, healthcare, and housing.
After the conference, El-Bayoumi was walking outdoors with her mother and spotted a bird. She shared what she learned from Fox’s performance—which she described as “sheer brilliance,” adding that “if there’s anything that’s going to save humanity, it’s the arts.”
Filmmaker Josh Fox performs at The Sanders Institute Gathering in Burlington, Vermont in spring 2024. (Photo: © Will Allen 2024 / via the Sanders Institute)
Another member of the audience was Wendell Potter, a former insurance executive now at the Center for Health and Democracy. Watching the performance, he told Common Dreams, “I just was enthralled.”
Fox also spoke with Potter about suffering from long Covid and struggling to get the care he needed, especially with intermittent health insurance coverage. The filmmaker recalled that “Wendell came in and was just absolutely astounded I have no health insurance right now.”
Potter, who advocates for major healthcare reforms including Medicare for All, said that “what he shared with me is terrifying, but is something that so many people are facing day in and day out.”
While alarmed by Fox’s experiences battling for medical care, Potter “was inspired” by his performance and said, “I think he can play a big role in waking people up.”
Fox said that performing at the Gathering and speaking with people there, including Potter and El-Bayoumi, woke him up—and inspired him to make some additions to the forthcoming performances.
“Every time I do a performance, I learn,” he explained. “And I realized that some of the things that are implicit in the film… meaning I want people and audiences to feel and figure out on their own—at times, I think when we’re doing a performance of it, it needs to be explicit.”
“I made it from the fossil fuel, climate change angle,” Fox said of The Edge of Nature. “Getting to the Sanders Institute was this huge wake-up call. I was like, oh my God, I just made a movie about health.”
Since the conference, he has been working on some new lines for the performance. In terms of healthcare lessons from the pandemic, he hopes to highlight that “the vaccines came and made the whole thing a helluva lot less fatal and a lot less scary (for those of us who are educated and believe in science that is). And the vaccines were free for every American!”
“Of course, because we don’t have Medicare for All in this country, we still have to pay for cancer, and asthma, and heartbreak of psoriasis, and lupus, and Lyme, and diabetes, and glaucoma, and painful corns, and scabies, and rabies, flu, AIDS, and ME/CFS, every other ailment under the sun from Alzheimer’s to ADHD,” he now wants to say. “Medical debt once again being America’s leading cause of bankruptcy, insolvency, and despair.”
He also plans to point out that “hurricane season never used to be a thing in PA. It is now. But this deluge is only the beginning. Our climate system is tipping into uncharted territory. Industrial fossil fuel-based civilization’s emissions are trapping us in the planet’s fever dream.”
“So unless you have a ticket to Jeff Bezos’ floating Floridian totalitarian salad spinner in the sky, then you are gonna be stuck down here, in their greenhouse gas chamber. And the billionaire colonizers will keep dreaming of Mars,” he will warn. “While down here what’s worse than genocide will occur. Omnicide. The murder of all.”
Fox plans to have climate experts and advocates in New York City this month for post-performance discussions.
Like Gasland, he also plans to take The Edge of Nature—which has already won the Best Environmental Film Award at the 2023 Byron Bay International Film Festival in Australia—and its musical performance on tour, so audiences beyond NYC can experience it.
“We’re going to try to have this piece make an impact,” Fox told Common Dreams. “This is obviously an election year. This film was entirely made in Pennsylvania, so we’re hoping to take it throughout PA, maybe New Hampshire, Vermont, New York.”
“Sometimes that’s in a huge arts center,” he said. “And sometimes that’s somebody’s Unitarian church set up and we have 50 people, or it’s somebody’s backyard or somebody’s barn—set up the screen outside on a hillside… Those are some of the most fun. So we don’t make a distinction between what is a legit theater and what is somebody’s barn… it’s all just people.”
Reflecting on the Gasland years, Fox noted that “the reason why we succeeded so many places with the anti-fracking campaign… is because we were talking about public health. Fracking was the scary chemicals across your fenceline that was going to harm your children.”
With future performances, Fox said, “what I would love to see—and it’s such a no-brainer—is the Medicare for All and climate change/Green New Deal movements coming into the same space.”
“And by the way, the Green New Deal is a kind of Medicare for All. Getting rid of the fossil fuel industry is a kind of Medicare for All, because you’re simply eliminating all of those illnesses that it causes,” he said. “It is a great moment to potentially campaign for both… to break out of our silos.”
“We get very siloed in the activist world,” he added. “I get siloed in climate and fracking and environmental space. Others are siloed in Medicare for All. So this film is a chance for us to try to work across those two lines.”