The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are talking about labor unions, why they are important, why they have always been important for working people, and why they are more important now than ever, and why you should be part of one. In their new book, Fired Up About Unions, veteran labor educator, organizer, and writer Cole Rockharts writes, “We are living in a pivotal moment in labor history. At a time when corporations have more power, profit, and political influence than ever before, workers are leading inspiring union organizing campaigns and taking on bosses to win big. These workers are fighting not just for themselves, but for their communities too. Their struggles reveal that everyday people can unite, change their conditions, and build better workplaces and a better world.” So this is what we’re going to be talking about today, and we’re really basing this conversation on Cole Rockhart’s great new book, which everyone should go read.

You can find it using the links in the show notes for this episode. And I’m really grateful to have Cole Rockarts themselves joining us on the show today. So Cole, welcome. Congratulations on this important book. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about the book and where it came from?

Cole Rockarts:

Absolutely. Thanks, Maximillian. It’s really exciting also to hear someone else read it because it’s just been in the ether for such a long time, so thanks for that. It’s very cool. So Fired Up About Unions, which again, you can get at BTL between the lines in Canada or AK Press in the US or your local library, give it an order there, really examines what unions are, demystifies the myths around unions, that we don’t need them, that they’re outdated, that young workers can’t be organized or different types of workers can’t be organized, and really lays the groundwork of why unions have become so weak in our respective countries in Canada and the US, and talks about why young people can be the antidote to all of the problems facing work and really unions themselves. Unions aren’t perfect, but if we take the view that unions are made up of people and we recognize that our coworkers are just regular people and we all ultimately want the same things, and that’s higher wages, protections at work, health and safety on the job, and better, that’s the great place where we can start to come together and change not only our individual situations, but as I say in the book, our communities and even beyond.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. And we’re going to be talking about how to do that, how to do better, get better, and fight better from the shop floor and beyond. And I’m so grateful with Cole’s help that we’ve pulled together an incredible panel of folks here, union organizers and members from across Canada and the US. And we’re going to dig into all this now, but first I wanted to ask if y’all could introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Hassan Husseini:

My name is Hassan Husseini. My day job is a national negotiator with the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which is the largest federal public sector union in Canada. As such, I’m also unionized member of Unifor Local 2025. Unifor is a merger of a couple of private sector unions in Canada, one of them being the Canadian Auto Workers that split from the American Auto Workers Union back in the 80s. And I am also a member of the National Steering Committee of Labor for Palestine Canada. I’ve been active in social justice and labor movement for 30 plus, maybe more years. Happy to be here. Thank you.

Tina Oh:

Hi folks. My name is Tina Oh. My pronouns are she/her. I’m joining in from Halifax, Nova Scotia here in Eastern Canada. My role is organizing coordinator with Service Employees International Union Local two. We’re the only national SEIU division in Canada, but I also have a role as vice president for Eastern Canada. So the region is all of Atlanta, Canada, Newfoundland, PI, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Really happy to be here.

Alex Raymond:

Hey y’all, I’m Alex Raymond. I am a mental health worker out of Richmond, Virginia, United States, and I am just a regular worker organizer, very new to the labor space, but very fired up to be here.

Cole Rockarts:

My name is Cole Rocker. My pronouns are they/them, and I am a longtime union staffer, although the veteran brand doesn’t sit well when Hassan’s in the room. I’ve been working for labor unions for the past 10 years, and that’s been in Canada and the US. And I’m now a labor educator at a healthcare union in Los Angeles. And I am the author of the forthcoming book, Fired Up About Unions, which is about why young people can change the working world and the labor movement.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. So maybe we need an updated taxonomy. We got veterans here and then we got legends with Hassan. So we got the full spectrum here, baby. And I’m so grateful to have all of you on and to hear all of your perspectives on this important subject. So I want to dive right in and ask y’all, what have unions meant to you over your lifetime? What did you know or not know about unions before being part of one? And I’m asking that as someone who does a labor show now, but knew jack shit about unions for most of my life.

Alex Raymond:

I kind of want to just directly responding to that, that was sort of my experience, that labor organizing in mental health, that’s really not a thing. But over the years that I’ve been in this industry, almost 15 years coming up this November, we just see wages decrease the amount of patients or clients that we are responsible for increase expectations going up while benefits go down. And a lot of us just silently accept that. We get into this line of work because we care and it almost feels like a betrayal to the work that we’re so committed to, to even think that better is possible. But it had always been a discussion. And growing up, my dad, he was an organizer with SEIU in Boston during his residency, and he would always tell me this story when he was laid off for labor organizing, that it was just the proudest moment of his professional life when all of his coworkers came to his shitty Boston apartment and they essentially shut the hospital down.

There was a lot of anxiety about what that would do to patients, but there was a lot of camaraderie and that’s something that’s missing nowadays. We’re struggling to get by and we deserve better. And I think that sort of bubbled up over the last couple of years. And a group of us got together a couple years back and we started organizing from the ground up, literally Googling how to make union. And we came into contact with a lot of people that have a lot of expertise and thank God because we needed all the help we can get. And we went from zero union density to more than zero and growing each and every month. And we formed a union here in Richmond, Virginia with Teamsters Local 322. And now there are unions with United Automotive Workers within our industry as well as National Union of Healthcare Workers and United Food and Commercial Workers.

And we’ve had to learn what all those acronyms mean and what they can mean for people in our field. And it’s been a huge thing. But from my perspective growing up, I’d always thought that was such an important thing to do, but just never really knew how to go about doing it.

Hassan Husseini:

From my experience way back when I first became unionized, and I think it’s still with us today, the thinking about unions is that it’s only about money. It’s only going to put more money in your pocket by increasing your wages from what you had before you were unionized. And to me, the thing that struck me, and I think it’s still with me today and in the organizing campaigns that I was involved in, it is really important for us to recognize and talk to workers about the fact that it’s about increasing your power in the workplace. It is about working class empowerment, and it is about some of the things that Cole just rhymed off with respect to health and safety, with respect to being valued in the workplace, giving your voice on so many different committees, and taking away the power, the exclusive power that bosses have without a union.

So I didn’t know that at the beginning. I came in, I though, okay, my wage will go up a little bit, not knowing that it’s going to give me so much more empowerment both individually and as a collective within the workplace. And that is something that opened my eyes to huge possibilities for that particular workplace I was in, but for the working class generally. And that lesson is still with me up to this point. I think things are getting even worse in terms of capitalist bosses propaganda that we can give you a little bit of a bump in your wages. You don’t have to go to unions because they know that when you unionize, you have more power in the workplace and that’s what scares the shit out of them.

Tina Oh:

Hasan, I’m just going to piggyback off that because I think that last point you just mentioned about how non-union workers are still gaining and benefiting off the winds of union workers is so relevant and I think that’s how I want to answer this question. It’s going to take me a second to get there, but I’ll get there. So my family moved to Edmonton, Alberta when I was two years old. My sister was five and it was just my mom and my dad. There was no other kind of family support systems that my parents had in Canada nor in Edmonton. So that like many non-economic migrants, that meant working traditionally low wage service jobs.

My parents have never worked a union job in their working careers in this country. And one of my dad’s longest held jobs was as a housekeeper and a janitor at the Western Hotel, and that was a non-union job. But the reason why that’s relevant is that that job, even though it was non-union, it was the first job that my dad had that gave us health benefits. It was the job that ended up getting us permanent residency so that we could stay in the country. And the reason why, of course, that connects to unions is because the work of the private sector hotel unions that have raised the industry standards to the point that these non-union hotels cannot recruit workers without offering health benefits, without offering them a pathway to permanent residency. And so I think about that job, especially now that I work for a janitor’s union, SEIU Local two, half of our membership is janitors, private sector contracted out janitors.

And now that I’m in this role and I think back to my childhood and the horrors really that my parents had to face in their working careers, I know absolutely without a doubt in my mind that our lives would’ve been better had my dad had a union at that hotel or any union really. And at the same time, I also can see how our lives still greatly benefited from the wins of the working class that have progressed the labor movement to the point where non-union jobs are still offering health benefits and whatnot. So I just wanted to leave that there.

Cole Rockarts:

I think for me, it’s a bit of a combination of all these things. As my co-podcasters have just said, a union can be the difference between having healthcare or not, having benefits or not. When I was younger, I didn’t realize that my mom was unionized. She was a teacher for many years before she retired, and it wasn’t until I started getting involved in my student movement. And in Canada, the student union system is quite different than in the US, and I think the US should absolutely steal this idea from Canada. But many of our student organizations that fight for lower tuition fees or free tuition or more rights for international students or different campaigns of equity on campuses are unionized. So my first foray into having a union was starting to work at the student union and run all these campaigns as a student organizer.

And so it wasn’t until I started getting involved that I had this conversation with my mom about, “Oh, there’s this union.” And I was told to go to a meeting because there’s free pizza and I wanted free pizza. And she said, “Oh yeah, I’ve been involved in my union. I was a shop steward.” I was like, “What the hell is a shop steward? What does that even mean? And it’s essentially the person that represents the workplace while they’re actually working in there, and you can go to them with questions about your contract or different issues you’re having.” And I said, “What? You were a shop steward?” She was like, “Yeah, I used to carry the book and the book is the contract.” And I said, “I didn’t know that.” She said, “Yeah, I’ve been out on strike. I’ve been on the picket line.” And so it was years later that I realized like, “Oh my God, my parent has been a union member, has fought for these things, and it’s because of her that I have the life that I have.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s always so fascinating to me to hear stories like yours and the stories that folks have shared with me on this show for the past nine seasons. I always tell folks that I am endlessly fascinated in the stories of our fellow workers who take that step to do something, to change their conditions, because I lived most of my life not knowing that that was an option. Like most people in this country, I’m talking about the US here, when I had crappy jobs, whether they were in service or factories, warehouses, retail, I thought I only had two options. If the job sucked, I could either just stay, grin and bear it, or leave and try to find something better. I didn’t know there was a secret third thing you could do and band together with your coworkers and fight back and stay and fight to improve things.

And so to me, anyone who takes that step, especially in a country where working people are so routinely reminded and conditioned to believe that we are powerless, anyone who says otherwise and does otherwise to me is a hero. And not just that, but the way it changes your perspective on things to take that step, to organize, to bring your boss to the bargaining table, that really changes a lot of the ways that you look at the world and yourself and the work that you do. And I wanted to turn that into a question for y’all. You talked about this a bit in the first round, but I wanted to ask if you could go a little deeper and say how it changes your life at work and beyond when you become part of a union or join a union drive. Did it change the way that you guys all look at your own work in life when you did that?

Tina Oh:

For me as a young person that started labor work, I think I was 21 at the time when I first got my union job. And of course, previous to that, I was part of the student union like Cole was. And we’re living in a time where obviously we can talk about all these crises that are happening, global crises to mention that, and union work really helped make the world make more sense, if that makes sense. And I think a lot of young people, and when I reflect back to what I was thinking through when I was 21, and I’m not saying obviously I’ve got it all figured out now, certainly don’t, but I think a lot of young people are probably really confused and puzzled by all these kind of disparate crises when obviously they’re all interconnected. And maybe we could even say that they are interconnected, but it wasn’t really until I really immersed myself and understood how power works and the history of the gains that workers have made to really push the needle to where we are today.

Things really just started to click. And now when a new crisis happens in the world, it’s just less confusing for me. And I think that’s relevant because that feeling of hopelessness I think really gets reined in when you are in a fighting union because that fighting union is then about solutions and it’s about optimism and it’s about hope. And it’s also about, yeah, we might lose, but we’re just going to get back up the next day and fight again. And so that clarity really became clear when I was part of a union drive and helping workers form unions at their workplace. And seeing the transformation happen to them was so transformative for me because I’m seeing it in real time, ordinary people coming together to do extraordinary things.

Alex Raymond:

Yeah. Tina, hearing you say that, especially that piece about hopelessness was something that was deeply more so than I think I’ve even been aware of in my personal experience of work and working up until the idea that there could be something better came up in my working with this organizing that we’ve done recently. Meeting people across the country that are fighting for change and are in the exact same position. We are inexperienced, we are outnumbered, we are dealing with a very effectively organized managerial group that wants nothing more than to see us lose. And then seeing people like Sean and Noah out in Massachusetts, workers out in California coming together, Jane and Colin out in Marilyn, all these different people that I would not have met had not been for this organizing work changed a lot of that hopelessness into a deep sense of optimism that’s going to be really, really hard to lose.

And that I think is the most important way my life has changed since participating in organizing. And I see it at home, at work. We have this current style of people coming in and out of care work and healthcare, and it’s hard on us. We’re job hopping a lot, but it’s really, really hard on the clients that we serve. We work predominantly for little kids and somebody comes in, they build a relationship with you, and then you can’t afford to work the job anymore, you get burned out. And that’s devastating for those young people, and we want to change that. And since we’ve started organizing, we’re seeing turnover rates decrease. These people believe that better is possible and that possibility is brought into existence through our collective action. We alone can’t formulate what a solution might look like, but collectively we’ve found answers and we’ve put them into practice, not just in one location, but in lots of other locations.

And we’re seeing people pick up the banner with us, and it’s just been one of the most inspiring, if not the most profound experiences of my life. And hearing you speak on that just reminds me why I’m part of this fight.

Hassan Husseini:

This is a really good segue because most of you have done the organizing part, which is the hard part to organize workers into unions. My role as a national negotiator is that I come in to work with these newly organized group of workers to get in place a first collective agreement, which is challenging in and of its own, but it’s during the negotiations for a collective agreement. Well, actually it is during the organizing drive that you see their power and a recognition of the power that they have really come into fruition. But it is also a different kind of a very, very rewarding process when you’re working collectively with workers, trying to get a new collective agreement and seeing the bosses push back to put language in collective agreements that gives them more rights, more powers, more protections, more provisions. This is where you see that they are solidifying their power in the workplace and there’s nothing like it because at times when we’re negotiating new terms, and I’ve negotiated terms in the new collective agreement in the university sector, in the gaming industry, right now I have a group of firefighters in an indigenous community in Southwestern Ontario that I just came back from starting negotiations with them.

And you’ll see that their questions is that, “What do you mean we can put language in the collective agreement that is better than the minimum standards?” It’s like, yes, you are organized in order to do that. Minimum standards, you’re protected by it anyway, but your collective agreement, it relies on your power in the workplace, your power in the community, and you’ll see the relationship with their coworkers, their relationship with the boss, their relationship within the community completely changes. It gives them the confidence, it gives them the power, it gives them the power that comes with the fact that when they’re sitting at the bargaining table, no matter what, they’re equals to that boss. And of course, when the boss goes back to the workplace, they try to play games, but you cannot put back, what is that expression, the genie in a bottle or something?

They’ve recognized their power and they’re willing to take that extra steps in order to keep building on it and to demonstrate it in the workplace and outside the workplace. And there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing like it when work is recognized, I want to go Tina’s original point, recognize the power that they have in the workplace and in the community. And I’m privileged, I feel, that I get to work with workers to try to put together collective agreements that give them that extra power.

Cole Rockarts:

Yeah, I’ll just pick up on something Hassan said in his current negotiations about raising the minimum standards. And as organizers and workers, we talk about expectations a lot and great folks have written about raising expectations, so I won’t go into too much of that. But when people realize that not only can they raise the floor at their job, like Alex said, that he could change the mental healthcare industry and the ability for him to have consistency with his clients, with the kids that he’s trying to serve, that’s very mission-driven work. And we see all the time workers in organizing drives, particularly in healthcare, but lots of places, education where they say, “Well, I don’t know if I could do this because I would put the kids or the patients or whoever it is at risk.” But a lot of these campaigns are about connecting, “Well, this would actually make things way more sustainable for the work that I’m trying to do.

This would make me stay. This would help raise my wage so I can provide for my family.” All of these things go back to that question of power. And so when I think about how it changed the way I look at work and life, particularly now coming from Canada and the US, there is an entire industry that is dedicated to crushing workers’ ability to do this. And it has a lot of money behind it. It has a lot of politicians behind it. I mean, the US, we look at right to work states. We look at what is going on in Alberta, Canada right now and the attacks on trying to privatize our healthcare, which is a big no-no in Canada.

We workers, workers historically fought for all these things to get a public healthcare system to get funding. And so I think this’ll go to a little bit about the power that we’re up against, but we also talk about how we don’t have, and it’s because of people crushing unions, we don’t have a lot of money. We don’t have the ability to match dollar for dollar what our bosses are doing, but what we do have is people power. And so I think I was lucky enough to get into it at 20, but since moving here, even in the past few years, I’ve completely changed the way that I see power and what workers are up against as well.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, man. I mean, in the good old US of A, I mean, we have many rights on paper, but not in reality. And I’m constantly telling folks that you have a right to be a part of and form a union and collectively bargain in your workplace in this country. But in this country, that’s basically saying that Frodo Baggins has a right to go into Mordor, right? I mean, the opposition that you’re going to face, the pain that you’re going to be put through, the system that’s going to chew you up and spit you out just for exercising that right is going to take a lot from you and your coworkers, and you need to be prepared for that. And that’s what I wanted to talk about here in this round. Let’s talk about the hard stuff because we’ve seen over the past few years, over the course of me doing this show, I’ve heard it in the stories we’ve reported, this boom in energy around new labor organizing from the Starbucks workers to the Amazon workers, to the independent union movements, to the revivals within the established unions like the UAW, the Teamsters, some of the historic strikes that have happened in Canada in the past five years.

A lot is clearly happening, but at the same time, I think a lot of folks who got swept up in that energy over the past five years have also come to the hard kind of realities of unions aren’t perfect. Labor law is stacked against you. There’s going to be a whole lot of crap that you’re going to have to go through, but it is worth it. And so I want to talk about that with you guys and sort of address head on these real issues that folks have had or will face when trying to organize. So let’s talk about what people are really going to be up against when they try to unionize today in the US or Canada. And if someone’s listening to this, what do they do when their union sucks or union officials break their heart and screw them over?

Hassan Husseini:

You’re right. There are a lot of unions that, to put it in your words, can break your heart. But I always say having a union, even a shitty union is better than not having a union at all. Because even with a shitty union, there are mechanisms that you can do internally within your union in order to challenge those leaderships that are not willing to fight a good fight on your behalf, but collectively on behalf of all the workers and the community. So definitely I think we’re all on the same page or should be on the same page that unions are better than no unions whatsoever. But we also need to recognize that there are a lot of sellout unions or leaderships within unions that are no longer willing to fight a good fight. They’ve become part of the institutionalized capitalist system. They’ve lost the vision and they don’t advance anything more than protecting their careers.

And they have forgotten that unions are, after all, also political organizations of the working class. And they’ve lost that. And that’s where you see some unions or some leadership within unions making decisions that end up harming workers that they’re supposed to represent. But it’s not the end of the world because I always say that what you need to do as workers, the union is yourself. So you organize internally, you organize in order to bring democracy back into your union and your workplace. And you organize to take over, to take back those unions from those careerist elements within the union movement. Those who are willing to and understand and have class consciousness and they are fighting a class war to go back to the classics. This is the reality of it. And they’re not going to advance a lot of workers if they compromise with the employer on some fundamental issues.

And so our work is premised on the fact that we believe in the power of workers, but we also need to be very realistic about what kind of unions we’re dealing with. And also in my work in organizing in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle and Palestinian workers, I’ve realized that the connection between those unions who are taking better positions in solidarity with international workers around the world is very much connected to how much they’re willing to fight for their own members and for the working class in Canada or the US. And those who have sold out when it comes to the class struggle in their own workplaces and communities and in Canada and the US, you find them that they’re not willing to actually be in solidarity internationally. They may pay lip service, but they don’t do anything concretely to honor that global picket line of the Palestinian people.

And as it was before, the people of South Africa that fought against apartheid. So they’re connected. Good fighting working class unions that have clarity of purpose are also clear on the local, on the national and on the international issues. And we have no choice but to continue to fight a good fight internally to make sure that they stay on the straight path or the left path rather.

Tina Oh:

I want to hear from you, Alex.

Alex Raymond:

Yeah, I’m itching to jump in on this one. So what you’re up against, you hear, especially when you’re new to this, “Hey, there’s the NLRB, you have these rights and the NLRB will adjudicate if there’s any unfair action taken against you by your employer.” But my boss, Lindsay Thompson straight up fired me in writing for labor organizing and that’s still in NLRB hell. And we’re expecting a ruling any decade now, probably 2035, 2045, my grandkids will get a decision passed down. So I mean that’s the reality of it. And I’ve got some comrades that have similarly experienced pretty nefarious dealings from their employer because who’s going to stop them? They fire you, you’re kind of done for. And then on the heels of that, my union internally was going through a little bit of drama precisely when I got fired. And that happened to create a really perfect storm that weakened our bargaining unit and set us up for a lot of trouble going into 2026.

But what is the solution? To quote the adage, don’t mourn, organize. And I remind myself that these things, these institutions that exist today were built by the literal blood of people that were massacred and organizing in significantly more difficult conditions today. I lost a job, I got a new job. I wasn’t brutalized in the ways that you encounter in the history book. So not discounting the struggles that people are facing today, it’s just that the solution remains the same, which is you organize. And my union, we organize internally, brought it up to the local president. They got it fixed. He’s out there on the line with us, every opportunity he’s got. And they’ve done an incredible amount to organize with us. And not just Brian Payton with Teamsters Local 322 and a huge chunk of amazing UPS workers, Jennifer Hancock, those folks coming out, making sure that we’re all right and that this group of workers gets represented fairly.

But the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, especially their caucus of rank and file electrical workers, it’s an internal caucus that has come together and shown up for workers in Richmond and across the country in really profound ways. If there’s a worker struggle in town, there’s going to be hard hats there. And I think it’s that kind of ethos that we need to really embrace. One worker’s struggle is my struggle and it’s been really hard. There was an understandable amount of almost desperation when we did everything right and the employer is just able to break every rule and get away with it. But I think it taught us a very valuable lesson, which is that you don’t just win a vote and then you’re all done. You organize not just to win a contract, but then to enforce it and then to be able to have the capacity to show up for other workers because there’s not just one fight and then you’re done.

This is a global fight. The cause of every member of the working class is our cause. So this is the fight of a lifetime, not just for a contract or a vote or some particular grievance. So I think it’s been hard, but we’ve learned a lot of lessons and we’re continuing to learn. And a lot of that is because of the very cool people that are on this panel today. So shout out to y’all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and obviously the fact that we have such an incredible panel of folks from Canada and the US, and Cole, you came from Canada to the US. I was wondering if you could also wrap into this question the differences of the situations and the things that folks are going to face in the US versus Canada while we’re answering this question.

Cole Rockarts:

Absolutely. I think I have two different parts to this answer. The first is that I think in Canada we have a different history when it comes to not only our labor movement, but our political parties. I think in the US, you folks are locked into the two party hell, that is the Democrats and the Republicans. Our system in Canada is multi-party and we had a labor movement that formed a political party that became the new Democratic Party, the NDP. And those were the folks I mentioned earlier that led to Medicare, healthcare being public in this country. And I say that not to give a knighthood to politicians because we know that everything that we’ve won in any country has come from workers pushing for that and pressuring that and always will be, always has been. And so I think that’s one of the big differences.

And obviously in the negotiation realm, when you don’t have to think about Medicare or healthcare being part of the contract and you can instead think about the things in Canada that haven’t gotten into that system like drug care, prescriptions, it changes the negotiation landscape for sure. I think the other big difference is the matter of density. And I mentioned the word density earlier, but that is how many workers percentage-wise are unionized within a given population. So in Canada, that is much, much higher. In the US, it’s brutal and it shows all of the things that have –

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’re below 10% now, I believe. That’s

Cole Rockarts:

Correct. And I’ll just say to your listeners, the Economic Policy Institute put out this amazing report about what would change if union density in the US was higher. And the reality is we would have healthcare. We would have about, give or take, 7,000 extra dollars a year in your pocket. And I don’t know about anyone else on this call, but I think people could use 7,000 plus dollars a year.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And that’s $7,000 a year that you would get in your contract versus the kind of fantastical fake $5,000 that President Trump is promising you if you just believe him and vote the way he wants in the midterms.

Cole Rockarts:

Exactly. And I’ll just say quickly on that, studies have shown that in countries where there are strong labor movements, there are more democracies. Even if we look at the US, we see that in right-to-work states, there are more attacks right now on the voting system than there are in states with higher union density. And so that’s kind of the first part of the answer to my question. But the second part is how is Canada and the US different? They’re not. Workers in Canada and workers in the US coming from both places, they’re not that different. They want the same things. They want higher wages, they want benefits, they want good jobs, and they want clean air and for the AI overlords to not ruin the planet and put a data center in their backyard. And so same as it ever was, workers, no matter the country, if they can get enough power, they can change things and make things better.

Tina Oh:

Everything yes, that Cole just said, a thousand percent. I just want to say genuinely, SEIU, it’s a giant of a union, one of the biggest in the US. And so when I look at my comrades in the US, not just in SEIU, but US unions in general, I really don’t have a problem in saying, I genuinely think it is harder to organize in the US than it is in Canada. And I don’t mean to say that as good or bad, as simple as that. But I think where in Canada workers have made gains like card check, which is a one-step unionization system. All you have to do is sign a union card. There’s no vote. Where there’s successor rights in the three biggest provinces of our country. So Quebec, Ontario, BC, the most populated provinces have successor rates. That means contracted workers when there’s contract flip that the new employer has to hire them on and keep their contract.

Those are two really sizable, genuinely… Those are huge wins, legislative wins that workers have made in this country. And it has, for maybe a less sophisticated word, I think it does actually produce some lazy organizing when I compare it to my comrades in the US who have to strike for recognition or right to work states where the dues aren’t guaranteed. And part of that lazy organizing is it can get dangerous, of course, because we know, just as Cole said, the bosses are the same. The power that they have will absolutely crush us. Our dollars can’t compete. Our legal can’t compete. And so when organizers on the ground, whether it’s a member organizer, worker organizer, staff organizer, is taking these shortcuts, we know we’re going to get hit by those shortcuts down the road because a fight is coming guys. A fight is always coming. And so I think it’s a really important, I think, moment for Canada-based organizers where even though we’ve made those gains like card check-in successor, that we do the right thing, which is to develop and recruit the best leaders we can in our organizations and keep it a fighting organization.

And that means yes, there might be shortcuts, but we’re actually going to do the really rigorous spade work that is required to build a fighting union.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. I thought that was all beautifully and powerfully put, y’all. And it bears mentioning that you could say the same thing about unions here just a little farther back in our history. I mean, the union density in this country at its height was around 30% or a little over. I mean, unions built the middle class, they gave us the weekends. We know all the talking points, but then that middle class gave up on the struggle. They cared more about their middle class existence, their specific contracts. They lost that sense of working class solidarity. And here we are 40, 30 years later with the results. Union density below 10%, wages have been stagnant or declining, cost of living has been going up, power has been shifting to the top away from the bottom. So I think the real takeaway message from Canada to the US to everywhere is don’t get complacent.

The struggle has to continue, and I could genuinely talk to you guys for hours about how to continue that struggle. And I’m so grateful for the conversation that we’ve had, but I know we have to wrap up here. And so I wanted to finish with a big picture question that y’all have touched on in this conversation, but for folks who are listening to this right now and saying, “Yeah, that all sounds great, but why should I care about unions now in the year of our Lord 2026 when the world is on fire and everything sucks and these oligarch nut jobs are taking over everything and destroying the planet?” So what would you say to folks in closing who are still in that head space?

Alex Raymond:

Yeah, what I would say is why you should care about a union now is because things have already gotten to a point where we’re feeling the everyday economic ramifications of those decisions. And whatever inertia is kind of keeping us moving in this direction, if we can overcome that, if we can come together, we can identify any solutions that need to be found and start putting them into practice so that we can build a future that we want to be part of. And I know that sounds like fanciful language, but every small step in the right direction is also a step we’re not taking in the wrong direction. And it feels difficult. It feels impossible. It feels exhausting when you think about it individual terms, but you’re not alone. People like me don’t know a ton. I’m sitting on a panel today with Hassan, Cole, Tina, and you, Max, and there’s a lot of expertise out there and you’re not alone.

So nothing weaker than the feeble strength of one. We got this together.

Hassan Husseini:

Very briefly, I think that for all the reasons that you spoke about Maximilian, it’s for all these reasons, because the world is run by not oligarchs, it’s for the reason that they’re destroying the planet, the reason that we have Trump in the White House and Mark Carney in Ottawa that are governing on behalf of banks and corporations and the super rich. It’s for all these reasons that we need unions if for nothing else to equalize things, to make sure that they fight for working people on the shop floor, but also they continue to fight for better society, for all the working class. And also they continue to make sure that international solidarity is not just a performative thing, but a real element of the work of unions. And without unions and without organizing and without that kind of mass democratic organizations that we value so much, that we will fall back even more.

And so from that perspective and because of that, unions are a lot more critical today than in my opinion, they were 50 years ago or 60 or 70 years ago. And we finish on the adage again that an injury to one is an injury to all. So this is not about individual protection, it’s about a collective work, a collective organizing and collective protection and collective empowerment.

Tina Oh:

I think a good union organizer knows how to answer any question with the answer being union. And so to me, it’s why should people care about unions? Well, it’s less about why people should care about unions, more about do you want a better life for you and your family and your loved ones? If so, the only answer is union. And I believe that. We just talked about the trickle down effects of increasing union density is that we live in a better society. There’s healthcare improvements, education improvements, life expectancy, I’m sure. And so I think that question that Cole talked about, workers in US, Canada, across any border, they want a better life for themselves and their families. I don’t know a single ordinary working person that doesn’t. And the answer to that question is going to be union.

Cole Rockarts:

Couldn’t agree more. I think the answer is unions. If we look at the world being on fire, what’s going to protect workers that are going out in increasingly record-breaking heat working outside if they’re postal worker, construction laborer, what is going to do that? Is the boss going to say, “Oh, I’m recognizing it’s a bit hot and unsafe out there. This doesn’t need to get built today. This work doesn’t need to get done.” No, bosses are going to continue to try and extract as much as they can. So that’s one example. If we look at this mass global movement in many countries, unionized dock workers have stopped the ports and refused to unload Israeli cargo.

The struggle of the anti-war movement, the struggle for basic protections of not dying on the job, and yes, the individual and materialistic thing of wanting more money in your bank account so you can pay your rent, so you can buy food, so you can get the basic necessities, all comes from having a strong resourced infrastructure. And the only thing that working people have in this country right now is a union. And so that would be my answer. Why should you care about unions now? It is literally the only thing that working people have on our side. And that’s not big you union, that’s you and your coworkers coming together to push for more and to fight the boss and to hopefully win.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Hassan Husseini of the Public Service Alliance of Canada and Labor for Palestine Canada, Tina Oh of SEIU Local two in Halifax, Canada, Alex Raymond of Teamsters Local 322 in Virginia, and Cole Rockhart’s veteran labor educator and organizer and author of the excellent new book, Fired Up About Unions, which everyone should go read. And you can learn more about the book using the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network.

We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing weekly at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories of people on the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and The Marc Steiner Show, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really, really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are speaking with union nurses who are speaking out against big tech and big brother, sneaking more of their tentacles into our healthcare system and into our lives. They and their union, National Nurses United, participated in a National Day of Action on August 27th, which brought together hundreds of registered nurses, patients, and community allies in cities around the country to demand that hospitals and elected officials cut all ties with artificial intelligence giant Palantir. As a press release from NNU lays out, “The nurses who are members of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union of registered nurses, stop traffic in an act of civil disobedience in eight cities, Palo Alto, California, Los Angeles, California, Chicago, Illinois, Washington DC, Portland, Maine, Asheville, North Carolina, Austin, Texas, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

Union nurses cannot be silent when our most vulnerable people, babies and children are being detained by federal immigration agents,” said NNU President Jamie Brown. “While our patients and neighbors are living in fear of immigration raids enabled by Palantir, our hospitals are facing huge cuts and our patients are facing mounting healthcare costs because of H.R.1. Nurses aren’t just saying no to Palantir, but we’re calling for our public resources to go toward the benefit of working people, not billionaires and their corporations. “The press release continues. From 2009 to 2025, Palantir received $2.5 billion in federal government funding, but this number has grown tremendously in just the past year. Last July, the Department of Defense announced a $10 billion agreement with Palantir to use its technology to share data across federal agencies, enabling unprecedented surveillance power. This followed a $30 million contract awarded to Palantir by the Department of Homeland Security to build an AI-powered system that would identify immigrants for deportation.

In February of 2026, the Department of Homeland Security and Palantir signed a $1 billion contract. In the hospital industry already, Palantir manages more than one fifth of US hospital beds. For nurses, this marks a dangerous threat to their nursing profession, which is seeing a glut of untested and unregulated technology introduced into patient care settings.” All right, so we got a lot to talk about here, and to talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by three guests who are all registered nurses, all members of National Nurses United. Thank you all so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Kiera Arbour, RN:

My name’s Kiera Arbour. I’m a registered nurse from Chicago, Illinois.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

My name’s Kelli Brennan . I’m a registered nurse from Portland, Maine.

Lee Barker, RN:

I’m Lee Barker. I’m a registered nurse in Kansas City, Missouri.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, again, thank you all so much for joining me today. I really, really appreciate having you all three here to talk about this because there’s so much here that I didn’t even know before I saw the day of action and started digging into this. So before we really get into Palantir and all this AI stuff, I want to start at the shop floor worker’s eye level, and I want listeners to get to know more about you all and to have y’all give us more of a lay of the land here. So could you start by telling us more about the jobs that you do, the hospitals that you work at, the kind of patients that you care for? And I guess could we talk a bit about all the non-AI workplace issues that you and your coworkers are already dealing with on a daily basis?

Kiera Arbour, RN:

This is Kira. I am a nurse in the neurosurgical ICU at Stroger Hospital of Cook County. We are one of the largest safety net hospitals in the United States. So I am just finishing up my first year as a nurse. Just graduated from my nurse residency program last week, came to nursing late in life. I took my licensing exam the day after I turned 50. For me, I think the thing that has really been the most challenging part of my first year of practice as a nurse is the patient population that we serve at Stroger Hospital as a safety net hospital in the third largest city in the country is just all of the poverty related, social determinants of health related illnesses. So in the neurosurg ICU, anybody who’s a gunshot wound to the head comes to us, blunt force trauma to the head, two gunshots to the head on the unit last night, one blunt force trauma, and then a whole bunch of people who have had strokes because they live in food deserts, they don’t have access to healthy things to eat or they don’t know how to manage chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure.

And as somebody who grew up pretty privileged and whose parents are heading into their 80s over the next year and a half or so, I see my amount of death play golf every day. They go swimming with their grandkids every day because they grew up middle class, they grew up with money. And then I see people 20 years younger than them who are looking at end of life type of illnesses in our hospital. And it has really kind of overwhelmed me emotionally just because we live in a system that doesn’t do a very good job of allocating resources to folks. And so I’m watching people be very sick and eventually die from very preventable diseases and things that are associated with poverty. Violence is associated with poverty.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

I’m Kelly. I’m at Portland, Maine. Similar to Kara, I also work in neurosurgery, neurotrauma. My background is in stroke. I’ve been a nurse for a little over 17 years from Boston and then I moved to Georgia. I was a director of neurosciences in Georgia, so I was in management, left management to come back to the bedside and be a union nurse and use everything I learned as a manager now for the good of the union. So happy to be here. I’ve been at MaineMed for about five years. I was a member of the original facility bargaining committee when we were organizing for our union. And when I got here, I was coming from Georgia right after COVID and COVID in Georgia was awful, made me realize I needed to go back to New England. So I left the South, came back to New England, wanted to be near family.

So I came to Maine and just wanted to work at the bedside, work my three 12s, get my shifts done and go home and not have twenty four seven responsibility. Now I’m in the union and I have a different kind of twenty four seven responsibility, but I love it. So I started and when I got to the hospital in Maine, I was almost like, well, this is compared to where I came from in Georgia, I was like, “Well, this is pretty nice.What are you guys all upset about?” And started talking to the staff and learning things. And then I shifted my thinking and I was like, “I just came from a really bad situation. Things aren’t that bad up here in Maine, but I know that the way healthcare works, because what I saw in Georgia was consolidation of healthcare systems, lots of financial issues, lots of layoffs and closures and all that kind of stuff.

I didn’t want any of that bad healthcare to come up to this hospital.” So I was like, “You know what? The best thing is to start a union and to lock it in what we have now so that it can’t get taken away because we know the turnover in the C-suite is every five years. These people are not dedicated to the communities. They’re not dedicated to the hospital. They are there for five years just to make a resume, just to go on to the next place.” So I got all in with the union. I’m a charge nurse, I’m a steward, I’m chair of our professional practice committee, and I’m co-president of the Maine State Nurses Association. Yeah, I’m all in. And the things that we’re working on now outside of AI is staffing. There’s this huge misconception or this though process that there’s a nursing shortage.

And we’ve been saying for years there’s not a nursing shortage. There’s a shortage of nurses willing to work in unsafe conditions at the bedside. And that’s why I went into management when I did because the working conditions at the bedside suck and nobody wants to work every weekend. Nobody wants to work every holidays. You can go to management and have your weekends off, have your holidays off, get paid more. So you see the shift of people leaving the bedside because the work is just unmanageable. The working conditions aren’t safe. The patients are sicker, more complex. Our nursing turnover is super high. The years of experience on the floor are low. When I work, there’s a lot of times I’m the most experienced nurse on my unit by 15 years. So it’s a lot of challenges in that, and there’s no focus on nurse retention. They just let one go and then just hire a traveler or temporary staff and we try to make the best of it.

I was at my professional practice committee meeting this morning and it was all about staffing. The hospital has budgets and staffing grids and plans, but they fall through. They don’t hold themselves accountable.

Lee Barker, RN:

Just wanting to build off of what Kelly said, staffing is also an issue at the hospital that I work at research in Kansas City, Missouri. I work specifically in our inpatient psychiatric population. Our staffing grids call for one nurse to every eight patients. That’s already an unsafe ratio and our management likes to push us to one to nine, one to 10. I’ve seen 11 and 12 as well. And like Kelly said, it’s not that there’s a nursing shortage in this country. There’s a shortage of nurses that are willing to work in the unsafe conditions that the hospitals push on us. At research, I mean, we used to have, I think, 800 nurses when we were fully staffed up. Currently we have like 550 and we just can’t. The hospital doesn’t care to retain nurses. Somebody leaves and, oh, we can hire in a new grad and they’ll stay for their two years, get their experience and leave and well, we’ll just hire another new grad.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s like, I hate to make light of all the incredibly serious and important stuff that y’all just laid out, but in 2026, hearing all this, my mind is imagining the Pawn Stars meme of like, “Hey, hospitals, can you fix any of these problems?” And the response is, “No, the best I can do is nothing, and I’m going to add Palantir to your list of things to be worried about now.” So that’s the kind of upside down, topsy-turvy nightmare reality that we’re living in right now, but it is what it is and we got to deal with it.

I’m so grateful to all of you for laying that out for folks because it’s such important context for everyone to understand even though we’re all focused on AI and Palantir right now, let’s not lose sight of the forest from the trees here. There’s so many other systemic issues that are running workers into the ground and screwing over patients and all of us for the benefit of a few. Those sorts of dynamics are already at work in the stories you’ve been hearing on this show about the working conditions for healthcare workers around the country. We’ve been covering it for years, but now we got to worry about ICE coming into hospitals. We got to worry about these truly super villain-esque big tech oligarchs putting their AI into our most sensitive and private systems and information. So let’s talk about this gang, because I need your help unpacking this for myself and for our listeners.

So I want to stay in the world of healthcare right now, and I want to ask if you could sort of lay out for us how is AI in general and Palantir specifically seeping into your workplaces and your work lives?What are nurses seeing here that perhaps the average patient is not?

Lee Barker, RN:

So the hospital that I work at is owned by HCA or the Healthcare Corporation of America, and what HCA has done in their partnering with Palantir is to build an AI scheduler called Timpani. We don’t really know how it works. It’s like a black box. We put our preferred days of working in. Timpani spits out a schedule that’s allegedly balanced, so we have enough nurses working throughout the week. They’re supposed to also balance our level of experience so we don’t have a unit full of new grads and then all of the experienced nurses are working different shifts. These were the promises that we were made. And unfortunately, at the end of the day, Palantir is giving us a shitty product. Aside from all of the moral reasons that Palantir sucks, they can’t even provide us again with the product that meets the promises that they told us, which is that it would take the burden of scheduling off of our managers.

And now our managers in the building don’t have any way to adjust our schedules. So when the AI inevitably screws up, puts out a bad schedule, nobody in the building has any way to fix the schedule unless it’s, I think, within 24 or 48 hours of the shift beginning, which is ridiculous. Part of what Timpani does as well is HCA is using it to push short staffing. Allegedly, our understanding of how Timpani works is that it somehow looks at the average daily census on the unit and decides, “Oh, for 16 patients on this psych unit, we need two nurses every shift.” What Timpani doesn’t see is that that unit can hold up to 24 patients, and frequently we are trying to fill it up to 24. Timpani will schedule only two nurses and management will say, “Well, really, we could admit a couple more patients.

We’ll push you guys up to one nurse can take 10 patients instead of one to eight.” And so they’ll sneak in and just ask us to do more and more with less and less.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

So at MainMed or Maine Health, we have Palantir in our hospitals through their application called Foundry. When we first heard about the potential, we asked the hospital or MaineHealth to let us know what they were using it for. And at first they told us it wasn’t really any of our business. We further pushed, sent letters to the board asking what’s going on, what’s it for? And their response was that they’re using it for insurance denials. So they’re using it. So say a patient comes in and they have pneumonia and the doctor doesn’t write the details of the pneumonia clearly. The insurance company will deny the claim and say that there’s lacking documentation for payments or whatever. So the hospital or MaineHealth’s idea is that Palantir’s AI software will look at these denials and claims and figure out what the letter or what the documentation needs to be in order for the claim to get approved.

So this requires us, Maine Health, sharing information with Palantir of our patient’s information.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m sorry. So was our whole system of already not approving so many prescriptions and surgeries in our American healthcare system, was that all not bad enough that now we need a fucking AI bot denying us as well? I can’t believe that that is actually happening.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

It’s very much crazy. The argument is that the return on investment is already better than projected, so the hospital will be gaining so much money, but they’re claiming that they’re losing money because the insurance company is denying it because the insurance company changes the rules 15,000 times a year. It has no obligation to tell the hospitals, so that’s why they’re getting denied. So instead of holding the insurance companies accountable, now we’re introducing Palantir to help solve it. That’s the solution. It doesn’t make any sense, and it just makes us complicit in this whole thing.

Kiera Arbour, RN:

Thankfully, in Chicago, we don’t have Palantir software anywhere near our patient’s information. Our action was based on the fact that our pension fund has $28 million invested in Palantir. That includes all county employees, not just nurses. So everybody who works for Cook County, which is where Chicago is, including all the people who work at the hospital, the doctors, the administrators, the nurses, the PCTs, the environmental service people, the folks who work in the cafeteria, the people who work in the forest preserves of Cook County, where I like to ride my mountain bike. All these people unknowingly have their pension funds, A, invested in a company that’s heavily aligned with the current administration and could potentially go, if Democrats screw his spine, could go belly up in a couple years. And then B, is doing some pretty nefarious stuff, is collaborating with ICE and making it so.

Kellyann mentioned that the patients are getting sicker and sicker. One of the reasons the patients are getting sicker and sicker is because they know that they have the potential to get arrested if they come seek healthcare. So they delay and defer care and then they come to us and they’re a lot of times near death. I took care of somebody last night who intubated completely unconscious body full of ammonia because their liver had failed and they had deferred care. And I couldn’t get this person’s story because obviously they were intubated and in a coma, but judging from this person’s last name, they very easily could have been somebody who was undocumented. But for us, for me, for the nurses at Cook County, we became nurses because it sounds cheesy, but it is a calling. I walked away from a six-figure career in supply chain and logistics management to come do this with the rest of my life because I felt a calling to do so because in 2020, I was at the George Floyd protest.

I said, “Wow, I’m actually the baddie and I need to get my life right.” And so I was feeling really good about what I was doing every day, taking care of some of the sickest people, the poorest people, the least fortunate people in my community and serving my community. And then I find out the thing that I’m relying on for my retirement is heavily invested in a company that’s collaborating with ICE, that is writing software for the IDF, that is tracking kids home from school in Gaza so that the Israeli Defense Force can send a bomb to this person’s house because there’s a one in two million chance that this kid’s dad is part of Hamas. And so that doesn’t align in any way with my values. And so we felt the need to step up and demand that our pension board divest itself from Palantir, and we were kind of blown off.

So I am looking to put together a run to be part of the pension board in the next few months. So that’s where our involvement with Palantir is.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Well, I want to keep going in the direction that y’all are leading us to. I want to keep zooming out here and take this discussion beyond the world of healthcare, but I think it bears repeating or reminding all of us who and what we’re talking about here. I mean, if you’re still asking yourself or you listen to this and you’re saying, “Well, why is Palantir so bad? Who are they?” They’re telling us who they are. They published a whole batshit manifesto about their evil vision of and for the world. Their CEO, Alex Karp is constantly saying super villain type stuff about the kind of future he imagines with AI. And there’s a piece that we’ll link to in the show notes from The Guardian that is literally titled Palantir Manifesto described as Ramblings of a Super Villain Amid UK Contract Fears. And in that article, here’s a quote that says, “Palantir’s manifesto, which embraces AI state surveillance of citizens along with national service in the USA is either a parody of a Robocop film or a disturbing narcissistic rant from an arrogant organization.” And that was actually from a liberal Democrat MP in the UK.

But read that, read the manifesto. They are telling us who they are and we should believe them. I don’t want this creep carp near my healthcare or my information or any of my government data. I don’t want them near anything having to do with the administration of our society or what remains of it these days. And yet they are getting in there in our government. The data centers that are popping up everywhere. They’re tied up in all of that too. So I wanted to ask y’all to sort of zoom out and keep talking about that bigger picture. And I wanted to ask why you and your union are demanding that not only hospitals, but elected officials cut ties with Palantir. Why is it important for you to speak out against this kind of larger onslaught of big tech and to speak out as union nurses to stop it?

Kiera Arbour, RN:

I would say first of all, we have our own manifesto. It’s called Vision for a Healthy Society, and it’s not super villainy. We want people to live happy, healthy, self-fulfilled, self-actualized lives where they have the resources they need to not just survive day-to-day, but to thrive as human beings in the way that human beings were meant to exist and to flourish, not to be beholden to these giant unelected powers, whether it’s Palantir, whether it’s Anthropic, who was just in the news yesterday because they have their own AI building dossiers on folks like us who are opposed to what they do, and nobody elected these people. They became billionaires because venture capitalists invested money in them, and now they call the shots. They own pretty much both parties. Shout out to Rokana for giving that money back from Palantir, but for the most part, they’re heavily invested in both Democrats and Republicans.

As far as union nurses, because we can’t, because our union has our backs, because they’re going to protect our free speech rights, they’re going to protect our right to go out there and say, “This is wrong. We don’t agree with it.” And they allow me, because they are themselves, my union is itself anti-colonial, anti-imperial. They stand up for these values that I try to model myself, and so I need to stand in solidarity with my working class siblings, and I need to work for the society that I think is going to allow human beings the best chance to live the lives they deserve.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

In Maine, in January, we had operation Catch of the Day, which Maine is one of the whitest states in the country. We have a Somali population. So for us to be targeted with this operation, it was devastating. It affected our community, it affected the hospital, our housekeeping workers, our transporters, our ancillary services, and all staff felt this. You could feel the emotions throughout the hospital as this was going on. About 30% of our housekeeping were calling out because they were afraid. We were picking up food because we had a food bank, but people were afraid to go to the food bank. So our C-suite was storing groceries, so we were bringing our immigrant vulnerable community members to get food. And then one of my coworkers, who’s of the vulnerable community, I offered to give her a ride into work because everything was so escalating. So I picked her up one morning and we were driving to the hospital to go to work, and it was about six o’clock in the morning.

It was dark out. We were driving down the street, and as we were driving, pulled up to what seemed to be ice activity. There was a bunch of unmarked cars, out-of-state license plates, just seemed suspicious. So I couldn’t just drive by. So I pulled into a parking lot across the street and started filming on my phone what these officers were doing, just trying to see if they had anybody, if anybody was in trouble. But I also had my friend in the car, so I didn’t want to draw too much attention, so I didn’t honk my horn. I didn’t get out. I didn’t yell. I just sat there with my phone on recording, and the officers saw me. They flashed their flashlight at me as to say, “Hey, we see you.” And then I saw them heading to their car. So at that point, I decided that this was not a safe situation and we should leave.

So we pulled out of the parking lot, carried on down the street, and realized that they were following us. So got to a red light, and they pulled up in the lane next to me, and I could feel them staring at me through the window. So I rolled my window down because I could see that they were wanting that, and they rolled down their window and they looked at me. It was a male and a female officer, and they said, “Can we help you?” I said, “Yeah.” I said, “You can get the fuck out of Maine.” To which they replied, “Oh, looks like we have another Karen here.” At this point, the light is still red, and I’m like, “Okay, this is going to escalate.” I was worried My friend. And so when the light turned green, they looked at me and they said, “I’m going to arrest three more people today just for you.

Ha ha ha ha ha.” And pulled out in front of me, did a U-turn and carried on down back to where they came from. I don’t think anybody was abducted that morning, but my friend and I continued to drive to work and it was just like I felt so awful. It was traumatizing. And so that right there for me was like, this isn’t okay. And so we went to work and then this was happening across our town and the hospital went through so much to help and support people. They changed where they were picking up employees so that the parking lot was gated so that there couldn’t be agents in there. And they did all these things. And then we find out that they have a contract with Palantir and it’s like, wait a minute, we just went through this in January. We felt the effects of this in the hospital.

So that’s where we all kind of started to get involved. And then fast forward through the summer, we get to July and we have the murder of Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, which is three miles down the street from a Maine health facility. And at this point we are aware about the app called Elite that Palantir is using to target immigrants in our communities. So at this point, we’re concerned that this is really ramping up in our community. And then fast forward to August when our own nurse was abducted by ICE at an airport in Portland. And then to still find out that MaineHealth is still doubling down on their contract and Susan Collins is still holding onto her money, it’s just infuriating. And I think for us up here in Maine, you’re going to see us out and doing everything we can to try to tell the community that Palantir has no place in our hospitals, no place in our community.

And that if patients can’t trust the hospital, if they can’t trust where they’re going is safe, they’re not going to come and get care. And that’s not what we’re here for. Nurses are advocates first. We’re trained to advocate and to speak up when something is wrong and that’s what we’re doing.

Lee Barker, RN:

I mean, exactly. I think the biggest reason that union nurses are speaking out against Palantir is simply because we can. It’s the right thing to do. And like Kelly said, we’re advocates for our patients, we’re advocates for our communities.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, my God, thank you all so much for that. That was really, I think, important, really powerful. And I’m really grateful to y’all again for speaking out the way that you are and letting our listeners know why this is important. And I want to end on that and bring us back to where we started in the beginning where I learned about this Purge Palantir campaign from NNU because of the day of action in August. So I wanted to ask if you could tell folks more about now that we’ve thoroughly covered why we should all be invested in this and horrified that these tyrants and oligarchs and freaks and villains who want to control everything and everyone, why we should not just go quietly into that dark night and why people should stand up and fight back and that we can choose a different path. We don’t have to go down this path.

And that’s what I see all around me and in every kind of story we cover at The Real News. People around the country are pissed, they are fighting back, they are doing so wherever they can, however they can, whether it’s speaking out as union workers in mobilizations or it’s people in deep red, rural areas where there are data centers popping up or people here in quote unquote deep blue cities like Baltimore where data centers are also threatening to pop up. This is kind of forcing us all together and we’re going to need to work together to figure this out. And so in that spirit, I wanted to end by asking y’all if you could tell folks more about what NNU is doing to fight back and what people listening, what your message is to them about why they should get involved and what they could do to get involved.

And if you have any final words about what will happen to all of us if people don’t fight back against this now.

Kiera Arbour, RN:

So I would say that, and probably understanding that the demographic of your podcast are what we like to call fellow travelers. They’re socialist, anarchists, anti-capitalists, what have you. We need to get people off the sidelines. We’ll take care of our own business here in Chicago with this pension fund. What I would suggest that your listeners do is reach out to somebody who they would probably consider a liberal or a conservative and do something simple like, I don’t know, go take them to see the movie American Doctor. I don’t know if you’ve heard about that. It’s the story, it’s a documentary of people trying to go provide aid in Gaza in the midst of a genocide because I really feel like there is a large percentage of the population out there who just doesn’t really understand. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s just that A, they don’t understand what’s happening and B, they don’t know or don’t feel like they have any sort of political agency to change it.

And there are a lot of people who probably identify as neither any sort of political affiliation, and those are the people that we need to reach out to to let them know what’s happening around us. So go see something like American Doctor, which is really going to get you right here. Understand that Palantir and all these big tech companies played a very large part in all the horrible things that you’re going to see in that movie. And then wherever you live, I guarantee you there are people that there’s an anti-war committee. There are mutual aid groups who are going out every day and collecting donations and trying to feed the less fortunate in our community, the people who are undocumented, who are afraid to go to work. There’s so many opportunities to go out there and connect with the people in your community and that’s what’s going to make you feel safe and that’s what’s going to make you feel like you have power over this and that’s what’s going to make you feel like you have agency over this.

And that’s how we defeat this in solidarity together as working class human beings.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

I think it’s going to be really important that people get out and vote in November. I think it’s really going to be, we don’t know what the outcomes of the elections will be, but if they go the way we want them to go, there’s a chance that those results aren’t going to be accepted. So I think we have to prepare and organize and make sure that we’re getting everyone out to vote, making sure people are registered. I think there’s no hesitation on my mind about that we need a huge voter turnout this midterm. And I think if people aren’t involved, be a poll watcher, drive people to the polls, make sure your community members know if they’re registered, how to register, where the voting locations are, and notify your elected officials that you don’t approve of Palantir. Whenever I do stuff lobbying, one things that representatives in Congress or locally or wherever, they say that I don’t hear from my constituents.

No one’s called me to tell me about this. And that really matters. So I think it’s important for people to get out and vote. I think it’s important for people to join an organization, unionize. If you’re not in a union, join one, make one, connect with one because there’s so many resources. And if we’re all doing different things, we need to all do the same thing together at the same time. And we need to sustain organizing, sustain networking, talk to people that you don’t normally talk to. What I love is our candidate for Senate, Troy Jackson, one of his sayings I love is we’re not from the left, we’re not from the right, we’re from the bottom and we’re rising. This is a working class issue. They’re sayings that unions save the middle class, unions built the middle class. We’re going to have to do that again.

And even if you’re not in a union, you’ve got to link up with somebody because it’s going to take all of us to get through this. And nurses are first and foremost humanitarians, right? We’re the trusted profession over and over again. So we know what’s needed in healthcare. And as a nurse for 17 years, I’m so sick and tired of apologizing to my patients and their families on behalf of health insurance executives and hospital CEOs. So everyone get out and do something.

Lee Barker, RN:

Absolutely. Just to echo that, getting out to vote, reaching out to your elected representatives, telling them to purge Palantir. I’m going to put a couple links in the chat also. There’s a purgepalantir.com. You can get on there and find out what’s going on with the Purge Palantir campaign, Actions Near You. The other link I put in there is there’s a letter that people can fill out that will go to HCA specifically telling them to cut ties with Palantir. Anyone can sign that. Anyone can sign that. Anyone can find that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Kelly Brennan, Lee Barker and Kira Arbour, all three registered nurses, all three members of National Nurses United, all participating in NNU’s Purge Palantir campaign. And you can learn more about that campaign in the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Mark Steiner Show and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.