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

Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, well welcome Chicago to this live edition of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership with the Real News Network and in these Times Magazine, let’s give it up for in these times. And we are of course sitting here in the historic in these times building where so many incredible labor reporters have done so much important work, history shaping work over the decades. And I have the honor of sitting next to people who are doing just that now. And I want to ask everyone to give them a big round of applause as I introduce them because for everyone listening, we got here to my right the OG labor journalist, the guy who yells at all of us when we’re being too soft about how hard it is today. Hamilton Nolan, everybody, give it up for Hamilton.
Go get Hamilton’s book, The Hammer. It’s incredible. Speaking of incredible books, Sister Kim Kelly has an incredible book called Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor. You know her, you love her. You’ve read her in Team Vogue. You’ve seen her on More Perfect Union in the Real News Network. Everyone give it up for Kim Kelly. And here at the end of our incredible panel, we have the one, the only Alex Press of Jacobin and so much more. She’s not only an incredible trailblazing writer, labor reporter, analyst of our political moment, but she is also passing legislation and helping to make sure that change happens at all levels. Let’s give it up for the Alex Press.
So my name, as some of you may know, is Max Million Alvarez. And yeah, today for this show we’re going to sort of go in a different direction than we normally do on the show, which if some of y’all are listeners, you know that it can get really heavy. I was listening to some old episodes on the 20 hours of driving I did in the past like 29 hours. Long story, I’ll tell you about it afterwards. But I was going back and revisiting and thinking about what it meant to me, my career, these stories that in these times was one of the first outlets that even responded to an email of mine. And then they partnered with this podcast. And we’re going to say a little more about that at the end where we share with y’all some of our own histories with this incredible magazine.
But before we get there, as Miles said, it’s been a long week, it’s been a long fucking year and it’s only what? June. We’re only halfway through this sort of a pitch. So let’s have some fun over the next hour. Let’s sort of like talk as friends, comrades, fellow movement members, but let’s sort of get to know a bit more about these incredible labor journalists. And I thought like after we go around and just sort of like let people know the signs that they don’t see of you when they just see your byline or your Twitter avatar, then we’re going to have a sort of like game showy type thing where I’m going to toss to these incredible minds like some big topics and we’re going to talk about what we know about these things, what we think about these things and what the hell we do about these things.
So before we get there, I wanted to go around and ask you guys if you could just like talk a bit about how you became a labor journalist and each of your own paths to like sitting on these stools right now.

Hamilton Nolan:
Thank you, Max. First of all, if you all don’t know, Max Alvarez is like the studs circle of today, but with a better radio voice, you know what I’m saying? So I hope you all are subscribers to this man. I became a labor journalist. I had radical parents, but really when I went into journalism, I didn’t have any connection to labor. I was just like, why is America fucked up? I want to figure out why America’s fucked up. And as I wrote about and reported about why America’s fucked up, the roads kept leading back to labor stuff. So if you’re like, why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Eventually you’re like, “Well, workers don’t have any power and how did that happen? And why did all these unions decline blah, blah.” So I kept coming back to labor issues and eventually I turned into a full-time labor reporter because not only did I see how important it was, but then I looked around and I was like, “Why isn’t everybody talking about this?
” And so you kind of feel compelled to keep writing about it.

Kim Kelly:
Very good answer. Yeah. I had a little bit of an … I don’t know if there is an orthodox path towards labor reporting. There’s only like seven of us so I don’t think there’s enough to really get a critical mass going. I ended up as a labor reporter, not by accident, but certainly not really by intent. I don’t know if you can all see me there in the back, but I don’t look like a blazer kind of gal. I wasn’t really set up to be speaking on panels and giving talks and being in polite society. I spent most of my life in the heavy metal world as a music journalist and a roadie and a promoter, everything but having any musical talent. So I was a writer, but I ended up that doing all that landed me at Vice Semi RIP. I’m not really sure what we’re doing there anymore, but I had a very 2014 ass type of job for a while.
I was the heavy metal editor at Vice. I know, can you imagine? I was like interested in politics. I was starting to dabble into political organizing at that time in New York City where I was living, but I wasn’t like full on into it. It just so happened though that a couple of weeks after I got hired on full time, because of course I spent eight months on a contract, couple coworkers pulled me aside and said, “Hey, we’re thinking about unionizing. What do you think about that? ” And I was like, “Oh, thank God.”
Because I’m from a union family, like I’ll steal workers, teachers, construction workers. I knew what a good thing unions were for workers and broke ass people like me, like us, but I never thought I’d get a chance to participate because I was just a writer. I didn’t think there was going to be like a local 666 knocking on my door anytime soon, but the Writers Good of America did show up and we unionized advice by the time I got laid off in 2019 because digital media, I think we had about 500 people across multiple sectors of the company organized and through that process of organizing and learning about labor from people that were doing it, from our union reps, from labor lawyers, from people in the New York City labor world, I started thinking like, “This is pretty cool. Do people know about this? Do people know they can do this?
Maybe I should tell them.” And I started pitching more like get my little toes out there. It was like not just the death metal guy, but like, what if I wrote a little bit about labor here and there, here and there? And in these times it was one of the first places that let me get away with it and now look what they’ve done. They can’t get rid of me. So I kind of fell into it, but I’m glad that I ended up becoming a labor reporter in this way because I got exposed to labor and involved in labor the way that most people do by organizing my workplace and that’s a perspective I try to bring into everything I do.

Alex Press:
Hello. Okay, this is on. Yes, you can hear me? Thank you all for coming, by the way. It’s been a very long weekend for those of you who are at Labor Notes, which I assume is almost everybody in the room. So I know in these times appreciates it, we all appreciate it. Just want to say that. So my brief, I also, yeah, there is no Orthodox route because my joke about labor journalism in America is there’s so few of us who do it full time that we could fit all at a dinner table and we wouldn’t even need a reservation.
So thank God for in these times we’ll come back to that again and again. My path was actually not that dissimilar from Kim’s, though a few twists. I had been a waitress and a barista since the day I turned 16 and I finally got sick of that and decided I wanted a sitting down job as I put it so I knew I was good at school so I went into a graduate program in Boston. I already was very much on the activist left. I was active in the anti-police brutality movement and Occupy Wall Street movement. And of course, so naturally as soon as I landed at Northeastern University, I helped start a grad union there, which I think it took us nine, it took like nine years, but they did eventually join the UAW and get the vote and it was like 95%. It was crazy.
And as part of that, I thought I was being very clever. I thought, okay, so us, it was early, early OC stage, right? There’s like a handful of us still meeting at like a bar and I said, “You know what? Our adjuncts at this university are fighting for a first contract and it’s getting nasty.” They were with SEIU, the administration was not budging, was playing dirty. So I said, “I’ll write an article about this fight,” even though I’d never written an article ever because I thought I’ll get to do one-on-ones with the adjuncts who I have no other reason to contact. And I didn’t realize I could have just contacted them anyway, but I didn’t know. So it was my excuse to ask them, “What are we going to have to expect and what are their ways of fighting dirty and all of this?

Maximillian Alvarez:
“

Alex Press:
And at the time I emailed the Nation Magazine’s kind of submissions email and they said, “Yeah, we’ll publish it. ” And so I wrote the article and in the process I was like, “Huh, kind of interested. This is great.” So I don’t have to just think about my own workplace, but there’s a way to kind of talk to people doing all kinds of fights. And of course through that process, I remember my PhD advisor sitting down and saying, “So I just want to give you a heads up. You’re probably not going to stick around academia because you can’t be writing about your employer in a national magazine and starting a grad union and it’s your first year of grad school.” So sure enough, I ended up leaving and going to Jacobin Magazine after a few years of grad school and I never stopped dragging about the labor movement and I hope I never do.

Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Real quick, before we move on, Hamilton, their answers were better than yours. I need a little more from you. I had to go first. Yeah. Give us a little more of the Hamilton lore.

Hamilton Nolan:
I was working at a place called Gawker, which also RIP to Gawker, which was a once upon a time a popular website and I was writing about labor and stuff and I’d actually wrote a story about why Vice was a shitty place to work and so it was, yeah. And an organizer from the Writers Guild came to me and was like, “Hey, we want to organize Vice and do you have any leads that we could get in contact with advice?” So in the process of that conversation, I was like, “Why don’t you organize us, man? We’re better than Vice. Fuck Vice.” So they were like, “Fine.” So we organized Gawker and we successfully unionized Gawker and it was like the first kind of big online media company to organize followed shortly by Vice and HubPost and tons of other places. I also had the double sided perspective like Kim of you writing about labor on the one hand and then you’re organizing your workplace on the other hand and then we got on the council of our union on the other hand and you’re dealing with politics so you get the whole 360 view.

Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah. Well, and like since this is a live show of working people, I could always just refer people back to the very first episode if you want to know where my path to becoming a labor journalist started. And it tells everything about why I also felt so out of my league talking to actual labor journalists because I didn’t know anything about unions. I didn’t grow up in a union family. I didn’t start out working people to be a union guy or a labor guy or anything like that. I recorded that first episode with my father, Jesus Alvarez, because I didn’t want him to die feeling like a failure after we had lost everything in the Great Recession, including the house I grew up in. 15 years ago, I graduated from the University of Chicago and then was working in warehouses and factories in Southern California because I got spat out into a recession like a lot of you, but I also had a useless degree in Russian literature and a whole lot of debt.
And so that was the main difference between me and the other guys in those warehouses.
So all of that, the labor stuff, the organizing stuff, the history that you can read about in the works of these incredible people, all of that I voraciously learned later in life, but it all started I think in a very similar place to where we all started in … It starts with that sort of like just raw core of human hurt and like the need and want to do something about it in whatever context, whether it’s your coworkers, whether it’s your father, whether it’s like people you grew up with. So that’s just a quick, again, like serious aside to like again, underscore no one else cared about that when in these times cared about that. And I got into labor journalism, I guess, with this podcast. I never felt comfortable calling myself a journalist for a long time, but because I was a writer for the Baffler at the time and I kept debating with other left writers about the working class after Trump won and I was like, “Why is everyone talking about the working class and Sofi people are actually talking to working people and I want to hear what they have to say.” And so that was the simple germ that has led to now eight years of this show.
Okay, serious stuff done. Let’s get to the fun stuff. So that’s again, a little more than like I think a lot of us knew about any of you just from like your online presence and all of that good stuff. But I want us to get catty here for a little bit, but catty productive, but again, it’s been a long week so I want the unvarnished sort of thoughts. I’m going to throw a couple of big topics at this panel and I want to just sort of like, yeah, hear y’all’s take on like, okay, here’s what I know about this thing, here’s what I think about this thing and here’s what I think we should do about this thing. But since Labor Notes just finished and in ode to the great work that they do overlapping with the great work that In These Times does and all of us, let’s start with the labor question and then we’re going to move on to some bigger stuff, but like …

Alex Press:
Not bigger, just

Maximillian Alvarez:
Different.
But like Hamilton, you wrote a great piece last year about how for all the shit that everyone in this room could like point to and say like, Biden wasn’t the most fucking pro- union president ever, you could argue that he absolutely was, that he was everything and more that the organized labor movement has wanted out of like a democratic presidential ally and union membership still fucking declined and like the labor movement continues to sort of shrink at a time when our enemies are growing, right? So I guess I wanted to like use that as the springboard for all of y’all to like talk about where the organized labor movement is and also like, yeah, is it up to this moment? Is it what we thought it was five years ago when Starbucks and ALU were just forming and everyone was coming out of COVID seeing labor as the new hope?
What do you think?

Hamilton Nolan:
I like that you were like, “Let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about union density now. All right. We’re going to really get into it now.” I think that’s fun. No, I mean, look, yeah, this also goes back to the being a labor reporter. T me there’s like a duality of writing about labor, which is like on the one hand, you telling all these incredible stories, right the stories of the people in the labor movement, which are all the most moving human stories of triumph and courage and everything that you’ll find anywhere in America. And then on the other hand, there’s like the big picture is we’re getting our ass kicked constantly and you have to be honest about both those things and there’s always a kind of push and pull and there’s always a, I would say there’s always a bit of a social pressure almost when you’re within the labor movement to be like, “Let’s be positive guys, let’s smile.” But the big story of the labor movement for not just the last five years, but the last 50 years or arguably the last 80 years is decline.
And the most interesting question to me about organized labor in America is like, why are we losing? Why are we losing? Because the first insight, like I said, that got me into this is like, wow, unions are like this skeleton key that solve all these big problems, all the biggest underlying problems in America that fuck up everything else in America. All the little problems that people have come from the way that capitalism operates in America, the way that worker power gets marginalized in America, we’re having an oligarchy now, the way we’re in a 50 year crisis of economic inequality, like all of that is tied to the decline of organized labor power. So what the fuck? Why does union density keep going down every year? And being a labor reporter over the Biden years, you saw the AFL CIO and all the big unions being like, Biden is the greatest labor guy.
And as you said, you know what? He was very good for labor and by the standards of democratic presidents in the 20th century, you could say he was the best president for unions in more than 50 years, I mean since FDR probably. He obviously did a lot of other shitty things. And so the fact that the institutions of organized labor put all their eggs in the basket of like politics, we got to win politics and they got their guy and over the four years of the Biden administration union went down. So like we got to be able to step back and be like, “That shit didn’t work. Let’s reevaluate.” And when I look around at those same institutions in labor, I’m like, “Where’s the reevaluation? Where’s the course correction? Where’s the change? Where’s the huge new investment in organizing, which is what we really need?” Where’s the AFLCO putting a billion dollars into organizing?
Where is that? Where’s the vision from the top? And it’s not there within the labor movement. So again, the closer you get to the grassroots of the labor movement, the more inspiring it is and the closer you get to the top, the less inspiring it is. And unfortunately we’re still in that situation today, I think.

Kim Kelly:
I don’t know how much I had to add. Can I have a different question, Max? Yeah, of course. If we’re going to have fun, I don’t want to follow Hamilton Nolan on union density. He did it. He answered it. We’re good. Unless you want to get in there.

Alex Press:
One more time to think if we want to have an argument or something. Argument. I think we should have an argument.

Maximillian Alvarez:
Get in here. Alex press from the top turnbuckle, baby, get in here.

Alex Press:
Well, no, I’m not going to argue with Hamilton, but I think it’s interesting yet the vision isn’t at the top because it never is, right? That’s not where it happens. And I think we all, and I think many of us in the room also will cringe at this as I said. The question of democratic unions is still a central question to the labor movement, right? Why is it that there are such amazing people at the rank and file and there doesn’t seem to be a way to kind of like cohere lessons we learn from the grassroots and kind of like coordinate this at the top level. This is a bigger question. It’s one that I’m sure everybody in the room attended several panels this weekend about union democracy, but it is actually an important question, right? It’s something that has been kind of so central to the exciting things we talk about, whether it was like the UAWD and Sean Fain and the reformers kind of winning the leadership of UAW through Democratic kind of voting process when we talk about the teamsters and kind of what’s exciting there, much of it comes from pressure at the bottom that has finally kind of been able to cohere and break through and change strategy in the union.
I mean all weekend at labor notes, there are so many big questions now in this moment that we really have to cohere across unions. It just doesn’t just mean that everybody who’s at the AFL CIO, all the kind of top level elected leadership and maybe slightly elected leadership in some of our unions, them getting on board, I think we all, it’s why labor notes is so important. We all also need to figure out that this has always been true that our enemies are united and we unfortunately still often, if not are divided, we aren’t talking to each other enough. We aren’t coordinating strategy enough. And I think the one thing I would just add beyond the very useful kind of sense of like, here’s what the Biden kind of years look like and union density is still falling. The other question is like, I think a thing, my takeaway from this weekend or kind of sense at labor notes is like, this is a very sober moment for all of us because all of us in this room know this that like, hey, this was one strategy that people thought insisted might help and it hasn’t helped us as not my workplace or yours.
And I think just the sense this weekend of like, there’s kind of a defensive posture in the labor movement and in the American working class writ large in American society, whether we’re talking about ICE, whether we’re talking about Trump and kind of actual fascists in power and having their hands on the machinery of the state, I think we’re getting very serious and yet I don’t have what we do about it, about any of this, right? That’s a question classic labor reporter faint where I say, I want to know what you guys have to say, but unfortunately I’m the speaker tonight. But I think like one thing I would look to is like the question of whether we’re talking about new organizing or new kind of like political questions being taken up by rank and file and then move to the strategy of like official strategy of unions.
There’s a lot of talk about how unions have responded to ICE at this Labor Notes conference, particularly I’m thinking of in Minneapolis like SEIU Local 26 did incredible work kind of building organization to fight ICE and that is, it’s unique.
I think a lot of, despite the fact that in fact the strategy often is just like politics from the top of like, let’s elect a Democrat, like politics is now confronting us in ways that maybe for some of us it’s always confronted us in the power of like arrest and policing and violence from the state, but it’s now so inescapable that I think union members are starting to act in quite political ways and in a way that is the threat is so severe, whether we’re talking about ICE or whether we’re talking about other kind of horrible Trump policies and kind of that our unions are, we can start forcing kind of our unions to think politically in ways that go beyond the bounds of like a presidential electoral cycle. I just think that’s incredibly necessary as we lose and we keep losing to kind of like think through like what would politicizing our unions and kind of like continuing to grow rank and file power to kind of meet the moment.
No, I don’t think we’re prepared for the moment. I think we are seeing incredible losses and tragedies, whether it’s union members being deported or working people in general being killed in the streets. But I know that like many of us would like to change that and stop that and I think there’s a lot at this conference that there were incredible people … Again, unfortunately it is the human thing. You see this incredible courage and how do we translate that up across the country? So I just, that is what I’m thinking right now. It’s not an answer, but I think it’s part of an

Maximillian Alvarez:
Answer. No, it’s an excellent answer. I mean, this is all like what we can share from our perspectives, right? Kim, I know you have so much more to offer there.

Kim Kelly:
I have a thing now.

Maximillian Alvarez:
Please.

Kim Kelly:
I just want to see what they had to say. But no, I’m really glad that Alex brought up that point about the politicization as we’re seeing it kind of become a more common thing in our unions. Like this past weekend at Labor Notes, I got honor and pleasure of moderating a panel called Bargaining Beyond Bread and Butter. Yeah, I know. When I got to talk to folks, union leaders, organizers who are organizing around housing for like houseless, homeless, unhoused students in their school districts, which is like, of course that’s a union issue, but we have thought it was a union issue five years ago, 10 years ago. I got to talk to a tech worker who, she at Kickstarter, she and her coworkers, they want a four day work week That’s in the contract. Yeah.
Yeah, right? Incredible. And a bunch of workers from very different industries, like I saw them line up to talk to her after the fact, be like, “Okay, how can we pull this off?” It was like, “Your time is a labor issue.” I was a little biased because I already knew her, but I also got to talk to Maya Ragsdale from Beyond the Bars, this incredible worker center in South Florida that’s led by and works primarily with formerly incarcerated folks and they’re doing tons of really critical organizing in the temp industry, which is incredibly exploitative, poorly paid work that just preys on formerly incarcerated undocumented workers who have a hard time finding jobs elsewhere because they’ve been painted with this scarlet letter that’s bullshit. So just seeing the way that they are thinking about organizing outside of the sort of strictures of, okay, maybe we’re not in the AFL CIO, we don’t have the NLRB stamp of approval.
Those things have only been around for like not that long. I mean, I’m sure we all know about the Union of Southern Surface Workers. Shout out and tell you a big perp, but that is a project that gives me so much hope. And if you’re not familiar, it’s again, a worker led effort. They’re a union, they’re not NLRB certified. They don’t have specific contracts, but they essentially is like a solidarity union as a model that is made up of predominantly like black and brown women in the south who are doing low age work in fast food and retail in these unorganizable industries and they have been going on strike. They have been bullying Waffle House. They’ve been winning. They put out incredible like social media content, which does matter now, just showing other folks like, “Yeah, of course you can do this. You don’t need someone to say, all right, now you’re a union, now you count.
You always counted.” And just the work, the history and the presence of labor that I’m most interested in is the people that have kind of been left out and what they’ve done in spite of that. Some of the organizing I’m most excited about in this country is the work that sex workers are doing because that’s a population of workers that deal that have to deal with so many other layers of bullshit on top of being underpaid and exploited and left out of every major law because their very job is criminalized because we’re in Christian country that cares about what adults do with their bodies. I don’t know, that’s stupid. They’re organizing, they’re unionizing, they’re striking, like they’re making it work and they’re not asking for permission from a system that was not built with them in mind, that was not built to give them power and that still doesn’t really recognize them.
Same with incarcerated workers, same with undocumented workers, workers whose laborers criminalized or stimulatized are just too hard to organize. I remember you mentioned the Starbucks workers and all the energy they brought a couple years ago, baristas were too hard to organize. Everyone’s too hard to organize if you don’t try and you know like talking about all this political stuff, like how much of my money through my union dues has gone to like Democratic dickheads who haven’t done anything for us. I would rather that go to a local worker center or to that organizing campaign or literally anywhere else generally like you said, that hasn’t really done much for us because it’s not meant for us. Organizing from below is the only way we’re going to get anywhere and the only way we have gotten anywhere. I wrote a whole book about it. I know a little bit about this.
Even our major labor laws were never passed with everyone in mind. There’s a reason that domestic workers and agricultural workers are still left out because of racist Southern congressmen who are like, “No, no, you can’t have those lay Overlaws if black people are going to have access to it. That is the story of labor in this country. It has never been for everyone, even though we’ve all always deserved it. I just think it is, not to be like the Pollyanna, but something that gives me hope and I still feel so much energy around in this movement is people who have seen the ways in the current movement, especially the organized movement in its current state, does not serve them and have found ways to either organize within it to make it better for them or just been like, “Fuck this, I’m doing my own thing.” And IWW is still always there.
You can always be a dual Carter. I always have to plug them because people don’t necessarily realize that there’s been a multi-gender, multiracial, militantly anti-capitalist union in this country since 1905 that has always hated cops and it was never upset that some unions thought that we should kick them out. Yeah, Writers Guild East, that was us. But I could go on, but I want to hear what else you want to ask us.

Maximillian Alvarez:
Those were all such phenomenal answers and I wanted to throw one other example that what you were saying, Kim, sparked in my head because yeah, I think that Alex is absolutely right. When it comes to the hopes that maybe we had naively or naively, that the organized labor movement in the United States of America in 2026 was going to stand up as this stalwart force against fascism. If our fucking whole federal government collapsed like a house of cards, I don’t have a whole lot of faith in our institutions here, but I know a lot of unions are doing a lot of good stuff. A lot of union members are doing everything that they can and that’s where we find our hope, like y’all said. And I wanted to just lift up two other examples of that is like I think one of the most important labor stories I reported on last year was not heard of in the beginning because it was just a few tech workers at Microsoft, right?
But they keep disrupting Microsoft’s operations to protest their contracts with Israel and now their contracts with ICE. Google workers are doing it, right? I was there on Microsoft’s campus filming as they set up a Gaza encampment on the center of like the campus in Washington and I was there when the cops beat the shit out of them and demolished shit and they kept coming back. Then they went and occupied the VP’s office. These people can’t be stopped. They’re not in a union. A lot of them have immigration statuses that are at risk, jobs they work their entire lives for that they’re putting on the line and losing for what they believe in. That’s heroic, right? But also like to the reality of like organized labor on its own like any other institution does not have the power to stop what we’re facing right now. I think the more of us who have that sort of Lord of the Rings mentality where it’s like, I don’t need the whole AFL CIO to show up.
I need people who know what we’re fighting for to show up. And so like I was at the Railroad Workers United conference this week, shout out to RWU.
And I was so moved because they had a panel at their conference where they brought a resident of East Palestine, Ohio where that train derailed in 2023 and I’ve been reporting on this podcast talking to residents there who have all been poisoned and it’s a nightmare and to see the railroad workers, not their unions, but this worker group of committed union members from different unions who believe in the same things, that’s so much more powerful than like, I don’t know, an official letterhead from the machinists. I don’t give a shit about that. It’s so much more important. I didn’t mean to put the machinists on blast. I love.
The BLET, I love them all, but like I, again, the higher up you go in the hierarchy, the more I’m like, “Fuck that guy.” But you get the point. But anyway, those types of acts, they can feel small in the moment, but they have like such massive ripple effects and rarely do we get to like sort of see that manifest like we did in Minneapolis where you were. It’s like that was the ripple effect made manifest of people who were probably in this room right now and that was incredible and labor got behind it, but it’s like you don’t need to be in a union to act like one, I guess is like the takeaway from that great panel answer to that. So AI, is it good or bad, Hamilton?

Hamilton Nolan:
I think it’s good. I’m sorry. No, it’s bad. I’m on the AI committee of the Writer’s Guild and we have decided it’s bad. I mean, it’s funny because it’s like one of those things where it’s like whenever they make a new technology like AI or any, you can go back through things before it, crypto and there’s always a period of a couple of years where the people making it are like, “You just don’t understand it. ” You’re like, “This kind of sounds bad.” And they’re like, “No, no, no. It’s very complicated and you don’t understand it. “

Maximillian Alvarez:
Have you watched this YouTube

Hamilton Nolan:
Video on

Maximillian Alvarez:
Bitcoin

Hamilton Nolan:
Yet? Yeah. And crypto turned out to be a piece of shit just like you thought when you first heard about it, you were right and AI, they stole everything. They stole everything we ever wrote and all of you ever wrote and any movies you ever made and everything else and they’re like, “We’re making a machine that can do your job and we’ll take all the money.” And we trained it on everything that you did and you’re like, “It sounds kind of fucked up.” And in fact it is and I think the more- Oh

Maximillian Alvarez:
Wait, it gets better.

Hamilton Nolan:
Wait till we

Maximillian Alvarez:
Tell you about the data centers.

Hamilton Nolan:
So I think the longer that AI, the more penetration that AI is getting throughout society, the more widespread the public sentiment is like, “Oh, it actually is fucked up.” Yes, our instinct was correct and now we’re being forced to use it to work. We’re being forced to use it. It is being pushed out. I mean, the scariest thing to me about AI as it’s playing out economically is that the amount of investment that is being put into AI is so large that I know that they are going to push it on. I mean, they are going to push it so hard because there’s $3 trillion of their money in it. So none of us are going to get out of this unscathed. Even in the best case scenario, this is going to be a brutal, brutal, brutal fight. And one other thing, which I think a lot of us know probably, but I think is worth saying is that the real front line of AI regulation in America is union contracts.
That’s the reality, not even to hype us up, but like the reality is that union contracts probably have more meaningful AI regulation in America than all legislation so far combined. So that’s a little scary, but it’s also, if you’re in a union, I mean, that’s where actual material regulation of AI is happening and that’s an opportunity for all of us.

Kim Kelly:
So AI, do we have any hardcore fans here? Okay. So in the words of our problematic faves, metal core icons, earth crisis, you know what I’m going to say, destroy the machines. That was very niche, but I had to do it.

Speaker 5:
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Kim Kelly:
Salvo. I’ll update it too if you do. Man, I think about this so much because I’m a freelance journalist, right? So a lot of the work that I, and a lot of people like me could have maybe picked up like a quick little summary, a quick little listicle. So like smaller, lower effort pieces of writing, you might get a couple hundred bucks that like, “Have you seen groceries? I need that couple hundred bucks.” That’s going away. AI is doing that. It’s also coming for editor jobs. It’s coming for every conceivable type of job. And I think about like, what is this going to mean for me and for people like me who are trying to tell these stories and trying to keep a foothold in journalism as it gets harder and harder. And I take a little bit of comfort in knowing that even if AI is trained on every single thing I’ve ever written, which good luck if it gets into the early 2000s, like it’s still not going to be able to sit next to someone at a bar and go, “Tell me about what’s going on.
Tell me about what’s going on with your job. How are your kids? How are you feeling? What did your boss say?” That human connection is what makes journalism matter and AI is going to take away big chunks of that, but it can’t take that human connection. Same with making art, making films, working with people face to face. A machine can’t do that. Even those fancy little Japanese ones that serve you drinks at the Boba spot, like they can’t take that away. And I really hope that that means as much to the rest of the world as it means to me and it means to us. Again, shout out in these times for giving us a place to do that, but I think a lot about the early Ludite movement in … Yes. Shout out to General Ludd. My boy Brian Merchant … Well, my boy, Brian Merchant, who was part of the Vice Union of me, he wrote this incredible book called Blood in the Machine and it’s like a really great … It’s so readable.
I’m so mad. It’s so good. But he goes into … And there’s this thought that calling someone a Luddite means like, “Oh, you’re afraid of technology, you’re afraid of change.” No, the Luddites were a labor movement of workers who saw new technology, power looms being introduced into their workplaces. It destroyed the cottage industry of weaving, which is how for generations, centuries, millennia, how skilled workers supported their families. They didn’t have to go into a factory, they didn’t have a boss, they didn’t have to work by the clock or the factory bell. They worked, they created, they sold, they survived. This new technology was introduced against their will without consulting them that killed off their jobs, destroyed the appetite for labor and they saw this happening in front of their eyes and their reaction was to set fire to the power looms. And look, eventually the power looms kind of won because the crown sent in legions of soldiers to crush them and to kill off the leaders of this movement.
They didn’t just go like, “Actually, you’re right.” And I’m not quite sure what I’m recommending, and I’m not quite sure where they keep AI, but I do think resistance is important and crucial and that’s the only way we’re going to get through this. There’s some unions who are being very smart in building and baking in AI protections now before it takes over everything and some unions seem like they’re more interested in kind of like trying to make nice with it. It’s like all like, girl, they’re not going to pick you like they’re coming after all of us. But I think we need to be meaner about it and be like, “No, fuck this. We cannot go through another … We don’t need more power looms. We need more good union

Alex Press:
Jobs.” Any question about technology, and this has been said to some degree by both of the other speakers here is, to me at least, the question of technology is always who controls it, who decides how it’s developed, how it’s deployed, right? To me at least, and I think for many people in the international labor movement’s history, again, the Luddites being one, it’s not that you’re anti-tech, but under capitalism, technology from development stage through deployment stage and its use will always be engineered based on what’s profitable for a specific subset of the population. It’s not going to be for social good. And so for me, it’s always the question of like the issue with any technology is that it’s being developed under a system that has no interest in any of us or very few of us. And that’s certainly the case with AI, right? AI is both totally stealing everybody’s work, not just creative people, like blue collar people as well.
Friends who are Amazon delivery drivers or in the warehouses, much of the reason they’re so incredibly intensely tracked, say delivery drivers for Amazon often are given routes that don’t make sense efficiency wise, but they have to follow it because the point of it really isn’t necessarily that Amazon’s interest isn’t necessarily just them getting the package to the door, but they have immediate access in real time to every driver’s location and information. They’re using that to train AI systems because it’s incredibly gigantic reserve of data. And so this is every type of person whose kind of labor is being stolen. In a way, we all talk about how it’s insane that we post on social media because it’s just free data we’re doing. In fact, everything we’re doing now is we’re like doing that, right? A delivery driver is doing that for a company as well.
Every action we do now is feeding AI. And so I think we, to me, the question is any technology, and this has been true of even AI, there are ways it could be developed or redeveloped that don’t extract resources, that don’t use massive amounts of data, that don’t completely copyright everything, right? Those are incredibly local use, incredibly rare because they’re not profitable. That’s not where billions are being made. And so I think to me, that’s a useful way to think about this. Unfortunately, we’re all going to have to think about this forever now. I hate that we have to talk about AI so much. The one other thing I want to say is, you mentioned data centers and I was really fascinated. There was a panel at Labor Notes this weekend about data centers and union power.This is a real live debate that I’m really curious about what people think in the US labor movement where I think it’s 85% of non-commercial or non-residential real estate being built in the past couple years is for data centers.
So almost every construction job that’s not residential is to build the data center, not every but most. And so that means for the building trades, it’s a massive boom, right? This is saving their unions. This is providing real jobs for all kinds of people. It’s a big problem. I will say that. Yes. Also the protections, I think union members and union contracts like the writers and the actors especially were like kind of the canary in the coal mine three years ago about like how serious this is about to be and we’ve seen that they’ve proven quite correct on that. When we talk about, say, getting provisions about no jobs can be replaced by AI, certain provisions like that absolutely important and some unions have been and members have been pushing and winning on that, especially writers and journalists, but it’s flooding our work and kind of from the top down, our employers are embracing it in academia constantly universities are almost mandating that people use AI.
So there has to be something we are doing beyond our individual union contracts. I think just the timeline, we’re losing on this. The second we get a provision, it’s undercut by a new use of AI. And so whether there are ways to talk about getting just cause at a city or some other level, like we really have to figure out, this is one of those moments where I say like, we all have to do what we’re doing in our unions, but we also actually have to think politically at this point with the speed that this is being deployed and the amount of money on the line for the people who need it to undercut your job. So just some thoughts.

Maximillian Alvarez:
Outstanding thoughts. Give it up for Alex on that one. There’s so many like thought provoking points that y’all all brought up and like I would be remiss, especially given the work that I’ve done on this show beyond just the organized labor movement and I already mentioned the railroad workers and then East Palestine, right? That is the connection. That’s how I went from talking about union workers on the railroads to union workers who were poisoned by a rail disaster and whose union abandoned them in East Palestine. That was the laborers, Chris Albright, his heart grew twice as big after that derailment, lost his job, his union fucking threw him overboard. That’s a working class story as well. That’s just as important, right? I mean, but it’s in that vein that like doing that work and seeing the scale of the toxic devastation and like the whole process of corporations and the government turning more and more of this country into one giant sacrifice zone.
I would just ask for those union members who are going to have those debates that Alex rightly suggested need to be had and I know they are happening, but just something to consider when we’re thinking about just like that tough question of everyone needs a job, they’re good union jobs. They’re providing like good wages and it’s not really any working person’s purview to think beyond I got to provide for me and mine, right? But as someone who does that type of reporting now on sacrifice zones and toxic pollution and all that, and as someone who just drove from Chicago to Baltimore and then Baltimore to Chicago in the last 30 hours, I can’t not see it. I see the toxic husks of industries past peppered throughout this landscape. Have you guys driven into Chicago through Gary, Indiana? Jesus Christ. Again, I was taking pictures as I was flying into Chicago, because again, it’s like once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
And so whether that’s the coal mines that like we don’t hate coal miners, we sent Kim Kelly down to Alabama to talk to like red Trump voting coal miners for a three year long strike and she did the best coverage out of anyone in the country because she cared about them. It’s not about, do we care about these words? Yeah, give it up for Kim on those.
But again, I have also been to West Virginia like hollers and towns where people have cancers from the toxic runoff of those mines. People have black lung in their 30s from those goddamn mines now. Again, like I saw not just the Lordstown plant driving in here, but like a bunch of other smaller shuttered ones and those were jobs too once. Now they’re like either just empty shells of nothing or worse, they’re like super fun sites or they’re buried on top of a bunch of toxic waste or everyone who used to work there has cancer now, right? I mean, we have to also think about that because I’m talking to residents living near these data centers and they’re describing like horrors to me like they’re getting heart palpitations, they’re bleeding from their ears. It sounds like living on a runway of an airport, right? Imagine that twenty four seven, you would go insane, not to mention all the environment, other environmental costs, yada, yada.
So it’s just like it shouldn’t be our job to think about all that, but clearly no one else is taking it into consideration. So if not us, who? Because the people who are making the decisions are the ones plopping those fucking things down in our communities. I don’t care how many jobs they provide and frankly, neither do the people who own them. That’s what we have to remember is like everything to what was said here, but just we have to, it’s on us to think for the future because the people in power don’t think we have one, clearly by their actions. I wanted to like wrap that into our final question because these Sister Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein rightly called this end times fascism, right, like this horrific symbiosis between religious fanatic nut jobs and like Project 2025 gules, but also like this fucking sociopathic world destroying pedophile ring of fucking lunatics and billionaires like Jesus Christ and they’re destroying our planet, they’re going to war and destroying other countries and profiting from it, but they are also going to war on our minds and gobbling up every legacy and social media platform they can and using them to warp our brains and warp our sense of reality and make our jobs impossible.
Yada, yada, yada. You see where I’m going with this, right? So like I wanted to turn that into a spicy question because what do we do about all these fucking oligarchs gobbling up all the media is a topic on its own for another panel.
Yeah. But like if we’re talking about AI and like that’s all happening like the last, really the last five years has exploded. The AI stuff, the Ellison’s like fucking taking over Warner Brothers and like most of TikTok and Dreesen being the primary owner or investor in Substack, Musk buying X. A lot of this is happening in a relatively short amount of time. Bezo’s been the Washington Post, but like they’re gobbling everything up. And so now Barry fucking Weiss like runs everything and the like incredible journalists like Kim are freelancing when they should be getting … Barry Weiss, my God, are you kidding me? Put Kim in charge of CNN for Christ’s sake. I mean, but like so that’s the topic is like, what do we do about this real hostile takeover of ownership and of ideological direction of the media as it is today?

Hamilton Nolan:
Can you repeat the question? Sorry. Yeah, we’re having a good time now. In Times fascism, yes. Well, we’re speaking right now as UFC fights are being held on the White House lawn, it’s an appropriate question and let me, I just want to-

Alex Press:
Did consider broadcasting them

Hamilton Nolan:
Without

Alex Press:
Sound.

Hamilton Nolan:
Having it over our heads would have been appropriate and one thing I’ll say about the importance of In These Times magazine is that I was asked by another publication to go and cover those fights at the White House tonight and I said, “No, I have to be on this panel in these Times magazines.” So this is more important to give maybe a more serious answer, like I’ve been covering Donald Trump since fucking 2015 Iowa caucus, man. My life has been wasted since that time. I’m wasting my life. I was at the event in Iowa in 2015 when there was like still 16 Republican candidates and Donald Trump got on stage and was like, they asked him about John McCain. He was like, “I don’t like John McCain because he got captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” And when he said that, all the beat reporters who were sitting next to me got up and left to file their stories and their stories were Trump is over.
Trump has made this gap and he’s done. That was 2015 and this motherfucker is the most powerful political figure of my lifetime now.
I have been thinking about this for 10 years and unfortunately I think it’s a very, very deep question why the worst guy in America has the most power and I have not really figured out the answer. I think if you think you figured out the answer, you probably haven’t thought about it enough because there’s probably the dark, dark heart of the United States of America lies somewhere in the explanation of Donald Trump. I mean, I think capitalism is probably the short answer, like everything that we are seeing from the UFC fights on the lawn to Donald Trump to East Palestine is the inevitable operations of capitalism playing out according to its own logic without interference in the form of organized worker power or something else. But yeah, it’s fucked up. I don’t know. I have to think 10 more years, man.

Maximillian Alvarez:
But is that you officially not commenting on Barry Weiss? So you are going on the record saying you love Barry Weise.

Hamilton Nolan:
I’m not a fan of Barry Weiss. I believe she’s a subpar journalist. Sorry if there’s a lot of Barry Weiss fans here.

Kim Kelly:
Oh gosh. So talk about fascism. I think about, do you guys remember in 2017 a bunch of us went down to Charlottesville, Virginia because a whole bunch of fucking Nazis were also going down to Charlottesville, Virginia and a bunch of people decided that was not acceptable and a lot of things happened and a lot of the people, the figureheads of what was then called the alt-right, that was supposed to be their big glorious moment. They were ascended. They had Richard Spencer in his little fucking suit. They had like fancy ass publications that would never return any of our calls profiling these motherfuckers and it seemed like a moment where it was like, “Oh, they’re pretty close to power. This is not good.” And then we showed up and they got a couple of us, but the rest of us made it out and those people, those fucking fascists, they started dropping like flies.
Maybe they’re not dead in Shalab, we’ll get there, but we don’t hear that much about Richard Spencer. We don’t hear that much about David Duke. We don’t hear that much about the hundreds of other fucking fascists who showed up to intimidate and terrorize a town in Virginia because anti-fascist researchers and journalists, and sometimes they’re the same guy, doxed them, put their information out there, poured bleach all over them and showed us who they were, what they were and where they worked and fucked up their lives. I don’t care if you think it’s bad to punch a Nazi, like, “I’m not going to argue with you, you’re wrong.” We did that discourse like 10 fucking years ago. You can look at my tattoos and tell me what side I’m on, get real close, but that was a moment for journalism too. The alt right as we knew it, that kind of shribbled and died.
But now those same guys are in charge of us. So we didn’t win that war, but we did show that there is power in reporting in journalism in showing these people for the sniveling, wretched worms that they are. Now perhaps there aren’t as many consequences for being a fucking Nazi because now Steven Miller is in charge of me. Things have shifted in that way, but it is never not going to matter. They’re agreeing with me.
The work that journalists and researchers do and activists do and archivists and historians do is never not going to matter because we always need to know who the enemy is. That’s how we find their weaknesses. That’s how we scare them. It’s how we take them down. That’s how we make their lives, even just a fraction as unpleasant as they make ours.This country’s around for what, 250 years, all of them see minus at the very best. We have very long and fucked up history here, but there have always been nosy people that saw some injustice, saw something horrible, oppressive, disgusting, and we’re like, “I’m going to figure out what’s going on. I’m going to tell some people about that. ” And it has always mattered. It hasn’t always won the war, solved the problem, saved people’s lives, but sometimes it has. And as we stare down this moment of yet another wave of American fascism in this nice building full of people that care about independent journalism or making independent journalism, heck might fund independent journalism.
I do think that we need to keep our eyes on these people and keep leaking stuff, keep exposing stuff, keep embarrassing these motherfuckers, keep showing them how small they are because the only way we’re going to get out of any of this is if we don’t take our fucking eyes off the enemy and as journalists, yes, speak truth to power, find fun, cool stories, do all the fun stuff, but it’s fundamentally about, at least for me, it’s about not letting the bastards grind us down and getting them before they get us and that’s the mission I’m trying to work towards.

Alex Press:
I’m going to try to keep it short because I want to talk to you all off mic and I want you to talk to each other. I think there is somewhat of a … I think a lot of people have forgotten kind of the baseline critique of corporate media, which is that it’s for profit and it’s geared towards an affluent consumer base, not the working class and advertisers also, that’s a big part of it. I’ve never Wanted a mainstream media job. I don’t think it’s surprising that somebody like Barry … She’s very good at what she does, which is sucking up to rich people and flattering them. So congratulations to her. She does excel at that actually. And so I think I want to build independent media. We should criticize and focus on the … It’s incredible that CBS News, for example, had good reporting despite all these constraints.
Great journalists work in mainstream media. They’re now suffering and not able to do their work. I want to build institutions that can reach working class people in America that are not subservient to the ultra rich, whether it’s their funders or their advertisers or that’s their targeted audience. And in these times it’s one of those institutions. So let’s talk about it in these times now.

Kim Kelly:
To be clear, fuck Barry West.

Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, in the spirit of fuck David Ellison, fuck Barry Weiss, fuck Jeff Bezos, fuck these fucking people, support in these times. I don’t want to speak for any of you, but I would not be here without in these times. I mean, one of my first bylines was at In These Times and it meant so much to me to see it online. I mean, I know the history of this place. I was a nobody. They gave me a chance. And I remember it was a piece that I co-authored with a UAW member on strike. This was before the standup strike, this was before COVID. And these times worked with us, me and this union member who wasn’t used to writing for online magazines. That struck me as incredibly special. And again, it’s what led to the organic relationship between in these times partnering with working people.
A lot of the stuff I’ve mentioned tonight, the reporting I’ve done in sacrifice zones with railroad workers, yada, yada, yada, they’re on them these times website. I mean, I would not be here without them and I think our movements would be way worse off without in these times. And so I just wanted to ask everyone here to support the hell out of this place, write for this place, tell your friends about this place because we need independent fearless journalism that takes working people in our struggle seriously now more than ever. Hamilton, what about you?

Hamilton Nolan:
Absolutely agree. I mean,
Look, I worked at Gawker. Gawker was around for about a little over 10 years and then it disappeared. The next place I worked called Splinter, that place around about three years before it disappeared. And these times been around 50 fucking years. Just what it takes to keep a small left-wing magazine around for 50 years is incredible to even contemplate. And the older I get, the more I really appreciate the importance of the institutions that we have in our movements. All of us coming from Labor Notes. I think about, damn, man, Labor Notes is a small, small operation, but the importance of what they put together every two years with this conference, not to mention their great magazine and all that, but it’s really important. I mean, the importance is national and ripples beyond all of us. And in these times is a very small but important institution in American journalism, in the American left, in the labor movement, all of those things.
And all of us up here who are journalists or writers, we’re like polar bears and in these times like the sea ice and like we need to be on that. Otherwise we’re just paddling out there. So let’s support in these times.

Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.

Kim Kelly:
Could not agree more. We’re really lucky to have a publication like this. Honestly, there’s a lot of publications out there. I’ve written for most of them. There’s a reason I’m here instead of home in my bed in Philadelphia after talking to 4700 people the last three days, getting trapped at Gate B5 for 10 hours on the way here. It’s fine. This really is a special place. They do the hard hitting reporting. They do the in- depth analysis. They do all the things you want from a publication and they also let writers like us. They give us space to do what we really want to do. We all have our pet things. Max, he’s a fan of this place called East Palestine. I’m not sure if he’s mentioned it. And if you’ve read anything I’ve written in the past few years, it’s probably been about coal miners because in these times keeps letting me write about this very specific problem.
The black lung that’s killing young people my age, our age, and coal mines in Appalachia. They’re dying the same way my granddad, a steel worker with mesothelioma died. I don’t want anyone to see someone they love struggle the way I just see my grandfather struggle. And in these times, lets me keep writing about even the wonky like MSHA developments. Do you know what that acronym is? It took me a while, but it’s all this like red tape stuff. It’s only interesting to people that care and it’s my job to make you care. And then these times lets me do it. Do you know how hard it is to sell a pitch to any place like, “Hey, I want to write about this politically reviled class of people who are dying from this ugly disease in an area that does not subscribe to your magazine.
Can I have like 500 bucks real quick?” That is not a winning proposition, but when I asked Ari, he’s like, “Okay, what do you want to go to Beckley, West Virginia to go to a hearing about this black land crisis?” Yeah, it’s on the website. He let me go. No one does that. Then these times has let me write about casino workers in Jersey where I’m from who are trying to get smoke out of their workplace. Let me write about nail salon workers. Let me write about incarcerated workers and sex workers and just they let me get away with a lot. So for me personally, I’m asking you help them continue to do that because I have more tattoos to pay for.

Alex Press:
Yeah. So I think this piece is in the current issue that I just wrote something for in these times called The Plains Across the Tarmac, which is based around … Since Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, the latest iteration of it started after October 7th of 2023. I’ve been doing a lot of work both in writing and in organizing as a worker, as a person, as someone who’s implicated in this genocide through the United States government, been very active in the Palestine Solidary Movement. I have been since I was a teenager. I’m also very active in the labor movement and that’s my beat quote unquote. And I’ve been writing about those two movements, trying to help bring them together both in the writing and in the organizing. And so this piece is … I talked to a worker who works at the Oakland Airport. She’s a UPS worker and recently activists from one of the Palestine solidarity organizations in the Bay Area, they found out even the mayor of Oakland didn’t know that cargo bound for Israel that included weapons that were being used to commit genocide were going through a civilian airport, the Oakland airport that was being shipped through that infrastructure.
So these Palestinian activists, many of them Palestinian Americans who were just on their off time doing this research into the supply chain to try to figure out how their community was a part of being implicated. They found out these weapons were being shipped through the Oakland airport. And so I remember being really interested in this report and then I heard from connections through organizing in this movement and in the labor movement. Actually there was a UPS worker at the airport who is extremely pro- Palestine and very active in both of these movements and she wants to talk about this experience of trying to organize against this at the airport. One person, right? When we spoke, we talked about how is she talking to her coworkers about this? What do they think? Isn’t it interesting that it’s the FedEx workers who are moving? It’s FedEx that’s operating, moving these packages.
It’s a non-union shop. What does it look like to talk about like, how does it feel to see weapons bound for war? How does it change a relationship with her own job? She says now every package she sees, she wonders what’s in that. She looks at the planes taking off and thinks like, “Is that one of them?” And I think this is the type of story that nobody is going to run. Nobody cares, right? This is one thing. It’s one person, it’s a small story. I think it’s really interesting to talk about like, what does it actually look like the machinery of war and what does it look like for workers trying to organize against it? I actually tried to place that story several places. Everyone said, “It’s not really a story.” And these times said, “Yeah, let’s run it. That sounds fantastic. That’s great.” And I just want to say that I compare it to a piece that I end up … I wrote it for the Washington Post many years ago.
It was about the UPS contract, not the one, the most recent one that almost led to a strike, but the one before that. So I guess what, six million years ago at this point. And I remember pitching it to the Washington Post and I said, “This is the largest private sector contract in America. 350,000 workers are covered under this contract and their families and it affects so many people. ” And the workers are actually organizing against ratifying this contract. They might actually vote it down, which would be shocking and historic. And they did end up doing that. It got passed anyway undemocratically and led to the ousting of that president and Sean O’Brien becoming the new president. I said, “This is a huge story. I think it’s worth covering in the Washington Post.” I think people in a mainstream place actually should hear about this.
I remember the editor, God bless his heart because he did eventually get, we found a way to get it in. He said, “I’m not sure that my boss is going to understand why this is relevant to our readership. Can you maybe broaden out to talk about tiers in contract, like something to make it more relevant to more people? ” I was like, again, these are over a million people directly affected, but they are not the intended readership of that publication nor the desired readership. I think it’s just like it’s a world of difference to have outlets that understand and actually see the working class as both their readership, their contributors and kind of the community that they’re in a conversation with. And I think that metaphor is very correct that they’re few and far between and the ice is melting. And so I just want to thank in these times so much for continuing to exist.
I know it’s not easy.

Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s give it up for in these times. Let’s give it up our incredible panel, everybody. Alex Press, Kim Kelly, Hamilton Nolan!

Hamilton Nolan:
And Max Alvarez.