The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to season nine of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working people is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and I am speaking to you now from a very different world and a very different country than the one we were in when I first started this show. As we speak, and we’re recording this on January 19th, 2026, the state of Minnesota is under siege by our own federal government and residents, immigrant and US born alike are living in fear. With the deployment of over 3000 federal agents to Minnesota in recent weeks, this is the Trump administration’s largest and most violent so- called immigration enforcement operation yet.

And with President Trump threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota in response to protests over ICE’s terror campaign. The situation on the ground is extremely volatile. On January 7th, an ICE agent shot and killed Minneapolis resident and mother Renee Goode, Sarah Lazar and Amy Stager right in these times. “A few hours later, federal immigration agents tackled and detained a school staff member on Roosevelt High School property during school dismissal and sprayed students and workers with chemical irritants according to witnesses. Action by federal authorities has only escalated since then, and the Department of Homeland Security said on January 11th, it was sending hundreds more federal agents to Minnesota. “At NBC News, Suzanne Gamboa, Shaquille Brewster, and Colin Shealy report that “The officers and agents the Trump administration has unleashed in Minneapolis and nearby communities have turned to stopping US citizens, demanding identification and grilling them about their citizenship.

Residents who have recorded these encounters on video say.” At the Guardian, Rachel Langan and Mon v. Singh report that “Federal agents who have said they are seeking to arrest undocumented immigrants with criminal and dangerous backgrounds have been using escalating aggressive tactics to detain US and tribal citizens as well as legal residents, refugees, and longtime Minnesotans without any criminal record. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Minnesotans who allege racial and ethnic profiling. We are living in a nightmare,” said Kate, a teacher at Minnesota Public Schools. “It’s dystopian, “she said. Approximately 80% of immigrant run businesses in Minneapolis and St. Paul have been closed this week amid the ice crackdown and sales at those businesses have plummeted since late December.” Unions, community organizations, faith leaders and small businesses in Minnesota are calling for a statewide day of no work except emergency services, no school and no shopping to take place this Friday on January 23rd.

Listen, the videos and testimonies coming out of Minnesota these past few weeks have been stunning, horrifying, frankly. I grew up in an America where we truly believed that fascism couldn’t happen here, but it is happening here. The videos and firsthand accounts of armed, masked thugs of the state, raiding workplaces, invading homes, demanding people on the street present their proof of citizenship, ramming cars, attacking bystanders and observers, scanning people’s faces and pulling up their information using shadowy surveillance technology. All of this is truly terrifying, but what is equally terrifying is the fact that there is no guarantee that people outside of Minnesota are actually seeing what’s happening. Information is being suppressed, shadowbanned and under-reported. AI and our billionaire owned social media platforms have royally screwed people’s ability to find good information, let alone trust what they do see on their feeds. The war on the public is happening on the ground simultaneously with a war on the public’s ability to discern the very reality that we’re living in.

And that is why on this podcast and on all of our platforms across the Real News Network, we are doing our best to get around this information blockade and to smuggle and amplify on the ground reports and testimonies from Minnesota. And that is exactly what we’re going to do now with our panel of guests. Doug Williams, Jeanette Corsilius, and Dan Chicoli are all union members and organizers in Minnesota, and they are all speaking here today only on their own behalf, not on behalf of their unions or any organizations that they’re a part of. Doug, Jeanette, Dan, thank you all so much for joining us today on Working People. Please, if you can, lay out for folks what you are seeing, hearing, and experiencing for those of us who are not there right now.

Daniel Troccoli :

Okay. My name is Dan Traccoli. I’m a eighth grade teacher in Minneapolis Public Schools. And I guess I would talk a little bit about how the response by ordinary people in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities in general has been very uplifting. I think you painted a very good picture, Max, of how bleak the moment is and how it just drives hope out of you. And this has actually instilled a lot more hope in a lot of people. There’s something like 10,000 people in the city or more have joined rapid response networks in their neighborhood to try and patrol and dog ice.

It has had a good effect at stymieing ice and making it difficult for them to continue their operations. There’s something, I don’t know if people heard, but there was like a moment of silence for Renee Goode at the Timberwolves game and someone yelled out, “Fuck ice,” and it just exploded. The whole stadium was just cheering. I’ve never heard of that kind of thing before, frankly, even during the Black Lives Matter movement. So it’s very interesting to me. I think it’s clear that the city is almost, definitely a vast majority of people in the Twin Cities are absolutely against this occupation, this surge of ice. In our own union, in my union, MFE, members have been active trying to do something, pull together networks of people in their buildings and around the city in schools to try and help immigrant students and families anticipating something like this happening.

It was organized over a year ago and that network was really important in helping schools respond pretty quickly. There’s a lot of participation now from many, many buildings. I don’t know exact number, but I would imagine it’s somewhere near 90% that most buildings have some sort of patrol system, ability to contact their families who are affected, mutual aid, whether it’s getting people rides to work and back or food or things that they need to do that they just are too scared to leave their house to do. And it’s uneven as most things are typically in organizing, but it’s there, which is like just a new thing for me in my experience of union organizing. I’ve been doing it for a long time. And I would just add one last thing, which is that I think that should really come as no surprise. All this should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following the events in Minneapolis for the last like 10 years-ish that like the George Floyd uprising literally instilled in people in this city a sense of a fight for racial justice.

And I would argue that was carried through in a number of different actions that organizations have done since that time. Our own union went on strike in 2022 for the first time in something like 50 plus years and centering the demands for our ESPs was like a key demand of that strike that elevated it above everything else and made a lot of people see it as like another piece in the fight for racial justice. So it’s not surprising to me that many, tens of thousands of people just come out. Our protests, some of our big days of protests are upwards of 30, 40,000 people. I mean, it’s no joke. And I think that the anticipation is that it will continue.

Douglas Williams:

So Douglas Williams, I am a union organizer living in Minneapolis. This fascist administration can say whatever they want, but we should be very clear about what this is. This never had anything to do with fraud. If we were deporting entire communities of people based on them engaging in fraudulent behavior, there wouldn’t be a single Caucasian left on Turtle Island. So let’s just be real about this. This was never about making the Twin Cities safe. This is a campaign of retribution because they remember the spirit of Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 and how we said that we weren’t going to sit here and watch a nine minute video of a black man being choked to death, crying out for his mother and take that lying down. And so we rose up. And the thing about this administration is they do have long memories. This is a campaign of terror.

This is a campaign of occupation and they see it as a campaign of pacification. But you know what? The thing about organized people is they will defeat organized money and they’re bought and paid for politicians every damn time. And so what have I seen around the Twin Cities? I’ve seen solidarity. I’ve seen people who might have been the type whose political activism extended only to casting a ballot every two to four years. They’ve been out here in these streets defending their neighbors. They’ve been out here protesting and calling for boycotts and shaming businesses that work with ICE. What we have seen here is nothing short of a mass community mobilization against fascism. The only sort of thing that has ever defeated fascism. And what I hope is that other communities around the country take heed from Minneapolis’s determined resistance against this regime. And I hope that they take some lessons, whether you’re a community organizer, whether you’re a unionized worker, whether you are simply somebody that is a concerned citizen, but maybe you don’t quite know what to do.

Maybe you don’t quite know how to get in where you fit in when the storm troopers come to town. I hope that they see our example and they take heart from that and they model what we’ve done here because the Battle of Minneapolis will indeed be won by the working class and that’s what I’ve seen over the past few weeks here.

Janette Corcelius:

Hey all, my name’s Janette Corcelius. Big thanks to Maximilian for inviting me onto the podcast. I’ve been a fan for a very long time. So I live in St. Paul. I’m a union organizer and a community organizer in Minneapolis. I’m also a member of OPEIU Local 12, The Democratic Socialists of America, Twin Cities DSA specifically, and the Remember 1934 Collective. What I’m seeing on the ground is regular, averaged everyday neighbors and citizens alike standing up for not only undocumented immigrants, but all immigrants. But I want to be very clear that this federal attack on Minnesota, they’re not just attacking immigrants. They’re attacking anybody who dares to stand up and observe the atrocities that they’re committing. We’re seeing Native American people who have a special status, whether they have tribal ideas or not, being taken and detained. We’re seeing Black Americans who are descendants of slavery being taken.

We’re seeing white folks who dare to defy white supremacy culture, and we’re seeing trans and non-binary folks being attacked and targeted too. What happened to Renee Nicole Goode was an act of misogyny and homophobia. And a lot of my friends who are standing up to fight have already been taken and thankfully released. But I heard last week that even the people who are being detained and then released, ICE and other federal agents are coming back to detain them again and send them out of the state to Texas where they’re holding people. We’re hearing that people are being detained and held in Texas or being killed, murdered by the state. And if we don’t fight this in Minnesota, it’s going to become a blueprint around the country. And I think people also don’t understand that there are way more agents here than there were in Chicago and Los Angeles, and there’s a smaller population within the Twin Cities alone compared to those two major United States cities.

Everything that’s happening is very scary and distressing, but I find hope in my comrades, in my union, in the labor movement, and in everyday people. When I drive around between the two cities, I see posters and signs and different art builds outside of people’s homes and businesses and apartments, churches, mosques, synagogues, what have you, that are saying things like, “Ice out of Minnesota,” or, “Fuck ice,” or some quirky saying with a play on words around ice. And like Dan was saying, generally, I would say yes, I don’t know the polling numbers, but the majority of people here, if not the super majority, want ice out. Even conservatives that I’ve come across in the last few days who you wouldn’t expect to be on our side are really upset with what’s happening. I do think there is going to be a major backlash nationwide once people realize how bad things are here.

I do appreciate Maximilian that the Real News Network and Working People podcast and in these times are covering this to the extent that they are because unfortunately there are people in other places who do believe the administration’s false narrative about what’s happening and it’s really disheartening to hear and see what people are saying when we’re under attack, we’re under siege. Like I said, this is state violence and we’re all feeling the effects of it. Our cortisol is spiking. People who already have mental illness are suffering even more. And marginalized communities who have already been attacked for decades and centuries and from the beginning of the founding quote unquote of this country and this nation are getting hit harder and harder. And I know a lot of people are referring to the Nazis a lot, but this is also indicative that people are erasing our white supremacist history in this country and the history of chattel slavery and genocide of Native American peoples. ICE and these federal agents are acting like slave patrols and they’re acting like Nazis. So I think Minnesota is a really unique place. I’m not from here originally. Minneapolis has the largest urban Native American population in the country, and I feel like that they’re trying to continue and complete their genocide of Native American people as well, in addition of attacking the immigrant population.

And I’m a daughter of an immigrant. My mother’s a naturalized citizen, so that doesn’t make her any less American, just like I’m not any less American for being the daughter of an immigrant. And we’re more than our labor too. I know a lot of white liberals like to say and focus on that aspect, but we’re more than just that. And I feel really proud to live here and call Minnesota Home and see my neighbors and my union comrades stand up for each other.

Douglas Williams:

And I’ll piggyback off of what Janette said about we want to otherize this sort of behavior like being of foreign import. And maybe this is as American as apple pie, right? This is as American, as that flag that has never stood for me or my rights as a Black American. If you look at things like the end of Apartheid to South Africa, that was a company with something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. When we have a lot of these oppressive regimes come to an end, there is some effort to attempt at explaining how we got to where we got to, who was responsible and things like that. But in typical American exceptional fashion, I suppose, we’ve never had a Truth and Reconciliation commission about slavery, about Jim Crow, about things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. We’ve never had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the wiping out of the Native Americans.

So we essentially have to do this sort of self-education around these sort of class clashes, so to speak, like we’re having right now. But if anybody is listening to this, I strongly, strongly, strongly encourage you to actually sit with the fact that this sort of oppression is baked into American society, policy and government as much as it is an import from somewhere else. If it’s an import from anywhere, it’s an import from Europe where the first oppressors in this country came from. And so I think people need to really sit with that because only by understanding the nature of what we’re facing, can we then know where we are and then devise accurate and effective strategies to end the oppression that we are seeing and facing?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, this is America, this is what America … This is baked into who we are, but it is not all of America, of course, but we are not just one thing.

We are as much that sordid history of oppression, dispossession, genocide, war, imperialism as we are that country of resistance, of working class resistance of civil rights, struggle, of anti-slavery struggle. We are all of those things. And the question right now is which side of us is going to win out in determining the future of this country for ourselves, our children, and everything moving forward. And I wanted to, since this is a show primarily about the lives, dreams, struggles of working class people around the country, I wanted to kind of circle back to that and ask if y’all could say a little bit more about how this is impacting working folks in the Twin Cities and even beyond what you’re hearing from your unions and fellow workers around the state, like how is it just impacting people’s day-to-day lives and ability to go to work and make a living?

And I wanted to ask also if you could say a little bit about how organized labor is responding to this crisis.

Daniel Troccoli :

I’m sure people have heard that Friday, January 23rd is a day that a number of unions have called for the slogan is no work, no school, no shopping. So basically we’re asking people to take the day, don’t go to work, don’t go to school, or just don’t go shopping, or all of the above. And a number of people are calling it a general strike. We’ll see if it gets to that point. But this is quite unprecedented, right? The last time this city even saw a coordinated labor action general strike-ish was obviously in 1934 at the teamster strike. So it’s a big deal and it’s a big deal for the rest of the country. I think how you asked how is this affecting businesses you already talked about and just like the working lives of people, you talked about the 80% of immigrant businesses. One of the unions that’s calling for action on the 23rd has reported something like 30% absentee rate.

The boss and the company is upset about this. They’re not happy about it.

And they’re talking to the union about it. So this is something that like it’s a development that I think maybe the administration didn’t count on, but here we are. I would argue that the workplace action and then ultimately actual official strikes to shut everything down is what is going to be needed to not only kick ice out of the city, because we already know that the administration’s promising even more. They’re going to send even more here, potentially troops. They activated the troops. They haven’t actually set them yet, but they did the first steps to activating troops. So we know that they’re hell bent on sending a message here. And I would just argue that we need to start taking this very seriously that when fascism is on the rise, you cannot, as some of our union leaders are worried about calling for this, you cannot hold back.

You have to intervene early before it gets too late. And I would argue this is that moment that we are experiencing meteoric support in this city and around the country for this thing. And so it’s like, why not move forward on this and then some, like double down and talk about how we’re going to do it again. We’re going to do it again. Because ultimately, I think Douglas is right when he said this is about repression, right? That’s fascist repression, but I’m going to take it a step farther. But I think that this is actually fascist probing our liberal cities for how we will respond to this kind of aggression in anticipation of something much more serious like Trump staying in the White House after his term is over. So we really have to consider when’s the best time to respond? I would argue it’s now when we have all this support.

And I’ll just add a little bit of context for why all these unions came together that like this is a group, the call for this got started out of a group of unions that were trying to organize coordinated negotiations, potentially strike activity in 2024. And that work never led to a strike of multiple unions all at the same time, but it did pave the path for what we’re doing now. So I would argue that like, I mean, this is so important, right? That like the response of people on the ground in Chicago and LA and now here in Minneapolis, it shows that there is resistance to this fascist repression, but ultimately these corporations and whatnot, even the ones that don’t donate to his campaign, they’re not going to push him away. So a strike is not only important for defeating fascism, it’s important for pushing back against capitalism, which is literally how this shit has all started in the first place.

And we need to think about that carefully because climate change means that we don’t have time to sit there and debate it out. We want to fucking clock here people. So we have to move on this shit and soon Sure. I would argue. Or else we might be in a position years from now scratching our heads wondering, damn man, that was the moment and we passed it by. For what? A day’s pay? I don’t think it’s worth it. I’m going to sacrifice a day’s pay for this.

Douglas Williams:

As I’ve been telling anyone who asked me in the Twin Cities right now, our response is as easy as one, two, three. January 23rd, like ICE out of Minnesota, no work, no spending. We are going to show our working class power. Every central labor council in this state has endorsed this day of no work, this day long work stoppage. And when it comes down to it, I fully agree with Dan that they are trying to see whether we will allow ourselves to be brutalized without a response. And we cannot allow the answer to that to be yes. I always say when I am teaching about organizing, that the first job of an organizer is to shut up and listen. But the second job of an organizer is to raise the expectations of workers and to broaden their horizons of what’s possible. Me, Dan, and Jeanette have had quite literally so many conversations about a general strike.

And what they would tell you is that Douglas Williams has been someone that is very skeptical of the idea that we could pull off a general strike anytime in this lifetime, because we don’t even have a Labor Party in this country. To say nothing of these sort of working class organization needed to pull off something like that. Well, I guess I’m sort of like the Grench accept I’m like a month late, where my heart is growing three times. Because what I have seen here has been beyond inspiring, where people are coming together and they are not only saying that this has to stop now, they’re not only saying this is a system that no longer works for us, but they’re doing more than talking. They’re acting. They’re in the streets. They are engaging in new forms of mutual aid that they might not have engaged in in the past.

They’re engaged in high level organizing of their memberships, of their neighbors, of their friends, families, their communities. And I’m not one for sort of counting the chickens before they’ve hatched, but I think that January 23rd, this Friday, we are going to see something in this country that perhaps we haven’t seen since the gray railroad strike of 1877, which is what you could call the closest thing to the last sort of major general strike that we’ve had in this country. And people understand and more understanding every day, not only where we are in history, but also their place in where we are in history right now. And they are choosing not to stay inside, not to stay silent, not just to, “I approve of every strike except the current one. I approve of every human rights movement besides the one that’s happening right now.” They are choosing to push forward in the hopes of crafting a better society.

And at the end of the day, that’s all the social movement is, man. That’s all our labor movement is. It is a collection of imperfect people working to create a more perfect world. And our creation of that world will make its debut, I believe, on January 23rd. And we have to do everything we can to make sure that it goes off as a success on that day and that we keep the momentum going towards something better in the future.

Janette Corcelius:

I feel so inspired and moved and frankly optimistic because of the labor movement and this opportunity to fight and to lead for Minnesota to lead in this moment. I’m getting people from around the country who want to replicate what we’re doing here where they’re at and that feels so good, especially in a time with so much despair. And the labor movement has had a long history in the, well, I mean, the last, let’s say, 50 years of really not doing shit, especially labor leadership, but we’re seeing rank and file and leadership and even non-union people rise up in this moment willing to take that day and not work, not shop, not go to school. I also want to connect that Palestine and the organizing that labor unions have been doing the last few years around the issue about the genocide has geared us up and propelled us to this moment and was honestly quite necessary because many of us knew that the Imperial Boomerang was going to come back around on us.

And I want to be quite frank, while things are very terrible right now, it’s nothing compared to what our government has done to Palestinians and to other countries in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Central and South America, and also what they’ve done in the past to Native American people and Black Americans who are descendants of slavery. So we know that this could get worse, like Dan was saying, climate change is the most pressing issue of our time, and yet it is always on the back burner. So I’m hoping that this day will become bigger than it is. It will become either a week long or a month long, a statewide or regional or nationwide general strike. So I’m seeing it as a structure test. I’m seeing it as a moment to get ready to flex our muscles that haven’t been flexed in a long time, because there are unions that have never went on strike before.

And we know that less than 9% of American workers are in a union right now. So that being said, I know that the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee and DSA and the Organized Labor Movement is working to organize the unorganized and take advantage of this moment. So I hope that every organizer and union member realizes that they have a duty to go around and organize regular people, talk to people they don’t even know, canvas around your neighborhood, different businesses, talk to the workers. There are union members whose unions didn’t officially sign onto this, but I went to their store, their shop, and I said, “Hey, I wanted to know, are you all participating on January 23rd?” And they’re like, “Oh yeah, we are. ” And to the point that actually our owners are shutting things down because of it. So that shows that the militant shop floor organizing is essential and we can’t replace that.

And this is a bottom up movement, even though yes, some nonprofits and NGOs did call for this day of action, Faith in Minnesota, Isaiah and Unitos. Yes, it was coming from there and SEIU Local 26, but the bottom up element has been very critical and crucial to making this successful and impactful. And I’ve been seeing a lot of small businesses who are taking major hits right now that have posted, we’re closing on this day in solidarity. So that’s been really inspiring. And I’m taking note of every single one of these businesses. And before the 23rd and after the 23rd, I’m going to spend my money there and I’m going to tell people the same thing, “Hey, spend your money here instead of here.” I also want to highlight, because I know we’re talking a lot about the labor movement aspect, but strikes, work stoppages and other workplace actions are most effective in my opinion alongside boycotts.

And there are people who are still shopping at Target and Amazon and Starbucks and Caribou. These are some of the businesses that are supporting ICE, that are pushing ice. Spotify is another one. I didn’t mention them, but we need to stop feeding into this system. And I know that we’re doing it in a way with mutual aid, and I know some people on the left are critical of mutual aid because it’s kind of like charity, but we’re starting to build our own economies and our own structures that I think moving forward will be a blueprint for our future. And I just want to end this piece on my part by saying I sure as hell want to see socialism in my lifetime. People say that’s pie in the sky ideal, but I’m feeling inspired and invigorated to know that we might have a nationwide general strike in our lifetime.

And it’s because of awesome people like you all on this call who’ve dedicated your life and will dedicate your entire life to this movement. We just need more people bought in in our project.

Daniel Troccoli :

I just wanted to talk a little bit about the no shopping thing because that’s come up a number of times with some of our labor leaders who are kind of focusing in on that. And I’ll just say, I think it’s important, but I also feel like there’s a little bit of shade going on. I’ll just be honest with you, I’m a single dad. I go shopping at Target, I go shopping at Amazon, not Walmart, but fuck Walmart, but still, I go shopping in these places and sometimes I kind of … It’s just things are threadbare and I’m a teacher, I’m a teacher. So I just think that especially I’m a DSA member, Democratic socialist, and I think this question of how to beat back capitalism is really important in this moment. And to me, I just know straight up, boycotts are notoriously harder to organize than strikes.

It’s just all there is to it. A hundred thousand people buy a thing and only a thousand people make it. You only have to organize a thousand people. So that to me is like much more effective and more to the point that these things that we lament like Amazon, they become like a … I mean, Amazon’s delivery network alone is like an important infrastructure in our society. And I would argue that socialism just says, Hey, we still want this. We just think two things. One, people should be paid well and like have like a decent standard of living and two, we don’t want all the money going to these few people. And I think that’s like the heart of it. And it’s the reason if you ask me why most of these corporate entities, even ones that supported the Democrats in the election, aren’t going to make waves.

No, no. They want to keep pulling those profits in and it’s important for us to do like a one, two, like kill two birds with one stone, if you will. So I think like the build towards calling this an actual strike eventually is really important. And I want to stress that with people who are trying to pull off similar stuff nationwide. It’s like, it’s okay to do what you have to do to get this going through legally through your union, but ultimately we need to be talking to people about the need for something much larger and official, like a general strike.

Douglas Williams:

I think what makes this action on the 23rd sort of more complete and more total, in my opinion, is that you’ve seen on social media and stuff like that previously like, yeah, economic blackout, we going to not shop anywhere for one day. And so being skeptical, even more skeptical of that as I’ve been, I was out with a friend of mine and she was really pushing the whole economic blackout. This was like early 2025 and I said, “Let me ask you a question. Okay, so you’re not going to shop on Amazon that day. What about the next day or the day after that or the week after that? Are you saying that you’re like never going to shop at Amazon or whatever have you, you’re never going to buy anything from these retailers ever again?” “Well, no, I didn’t say that. Okay. So all you’re doing is transferring their generated profit off of your labor and your paycheck from one day to another and where this sort of ups the ante is that yes, we buy things that is a profit generator, but also our work.

The rank and file worker is the only person in our economic food chain, so to speak, that makes a paycheck based on the thing that they produce with their hands, with their tools, with their minds, or what have you. They make money off of the thing that they make. And so getting people to question, well, hey, wait a minute, hold on one second. If I’m the only person that makes money off of that thing that I make, where my boss, my boss’s boss, all the way on up to the CEO where they make money simply off of my time and my labor, why do they make 10, 20, 4,400 times what I make? Why do they get to never miss their kids’ volleyball games? Why do they never get to miss a family reunion? Why do they never have to beg to be let go for a funeral or what have you?

Why do they never get to miss the important moments in their life while I am sitting here slaving away in this workplace to make them money and they’re not turning a single damn wrench, they’re not making a single damn lesson plan. They’re not doing anything to earn that money besides watching me, right? It is time that we start to realize that if any one of us leaves this earth, we are replaceable before our body is cold. We are nothing more than a line item on some CFO spreadsheet. And we have to get together and gather our collective power, not just as individual workers, but as a class to not just bring about an end to this fascist oppression, but to also bring about a new form of economic organization that says, damn it, you matter too. You matter too. Your life, your family, your community, they matter too.

My hope is that one, two, three, January 23rd is the beginning of that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

With the final few minutes that I have y’all, I wanted to sort of ask if we could offer even more concrete steps that folks listening to this can take in their unions, in their own neighborhoods, like lessons from Minnesota about what people can do and like the broad spectrum of things that people can do. We say all the time on this show and at the real news, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something. And we’re seeing in the Twin Cities in particular, people doing something from like making sure that law enforcement is being documented, which is there our constitutional right, people taking food to neighbors who are afraid to leave their houses.

People, as you guys mentioned, driving kids to school whose parents are afraid to leave the house. There’s a lot that people can do in and outside of organized labor. And so, and we have a lot of those people listening to this show. And so I wanted to just ask in a kind of final kind of bullet point way, any sort of key takeaways that you’ve seen or that you want to share with folks listening.

Daniel Troccoli :

That’s a really good question. There’s like a kind of moray, social moray in this country, don’t talk politics. That shit, here I go again. That needs to end. That is only serving the ruling class of people we’re just complaining about. We have to be able to talk to people. And I recognize that that’s a challenging thing to do. And in the DSA, we have actually worked with our national organization to put together toolkits for people to talk to their coworkers. But frankly, you should talk to anyone and everyone. Talk to your family members, your friends, like anyone. You go to school, you’re in a social club where you do curling or … I’m just thinking Minnesota winters, but whatever it is, just go start talking to people about this. I mean, the Egyptian Revolution was mostly organized through soccer clubs. That’s how they kept going through the internet outjust.

Whatever it takes, anything it takes. I’ll just say if you’re in a union, there’s a lot of things you should be doing. First and foremost, get a statement and support. Put that forward to your union and propose it and vote on it and blast it out there locally and nationally to us. So we know because when we see it, it helps give us strength to keep going. I think that unions should consider walking out on that day. Why does it have to be limited to Minnesota? If we all are horrified by this, let’s do something about it, all of us. We can’t leave us in Minneapolis to be the only ones to do this. Clearly they’re targeting us for a variety of reasons. I think it’s because our president’s a professional pedophile and he’s trying to distance himself from that, distract people, but whatever. And then finally, I want to say about that walkout too for unions, in whatever forum.

Oh, in our workplace, we only took an hour for lunch even though we only get 35 minutes and then we took a picture together. Great. Awesome. Way better than nothing. So I just think people should really consider any way they can get involved and support because you’re going to have to do it eventually anyway. It’s coming to you, this whole thing. I mean, they’re rolling out a fascist government and we need to be ready to oppose it. And that means taking steps early on.

Janette Corcelius:

So if you live in the Twin Cities, at 10:00 AM, there’s going to be an airport action at MSP. And then at 2:00 PM, there’s a huge rally in March that’s happening downtown Minneneapolis for everyone who’s participating in the no work, no school, no shopping. For those who live outside of the Twin Cities and nationwide, I echo all of dance sentiments. Start talking to your coworkers, start talking to people at the businesses you frequent and start talking to your neighbors and your family members.

Start showing that you care about their wellbeing, not just economically, but spiritually, holistically, politically, physically. These are really challenging and difficult times. And when we show each other that we’re not isolated and alienated and that we have love and passion for one another, people are more likely to stand up and fight. So I think people who are specifically union members and labor leaders and union organizers have a lot of power to lead and show the way because we’re organized people. And lastly, if you’re a union member and union organizer who can’t make it happen on this tight turnaround on the 23rd, start organizing really quickly. Who knows who cities next after us? We don’t know how long this will last here and we don’t know how many people will sign up to be ICE or different federal agents. We can’t predict the future, but history tells us what could happen next.

Douglas Williams:

Today is the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. So I’m going to read a quote from one of his sermons. “You may be 38 years old as I happen to be, and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause, and you refuse to do it because you are afraid. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized, or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that someone will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house, so you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90, and the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

Right now, right now, we face an existential threat, not just to the labor movement, not just to the working class, but to any and any and every freedom that we hold dear. Right now, your neighbors, your communities, your cities, your state is calling on you to stand up, to resist, to be heard, to fight against this fascist invasion. So what say you? Are you 38, but dead already? I choose to have a bit more faith in my neighbors, in my community. Come out, join us on January 23rd. Let’s live and be alive, and let’s say that this bullshit ends here. We might not be Donald Trump’s waterloo, but we will be his Moscow, and the annals of history are littered with the bodies of tyrants and their armies, thinking that they could come in in the dead of winter and tell us that we are subject to them and their foul laws and their corrupt moral and economic and political systems.

And the history is also filled with a bunch of brave people who stood up and said,” Not here, not now, not ever. Join us January 23rd, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Let’s be the spark that fashions a new society, a better society for all workers.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our guests, Douglas Williams, Janette Corcelius, and Dan Triccoli, all union members and organizers in Minnesota. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here in the next episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network. Where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real news newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Solidarity forever.