waitresses, whatever, being able to go in and be at the bargaining able and feel like they re part of their own representation. why is that important? for a group like restaurant opportunity center, roc, they were really dealing with issues that in the industry the unions had not engaged what they saw as sufficiently. for instance, who gets to wait on tables in the front of the house as to the back of the house is as much a racial and actual politics issue as it is union organizing issue. and they ve engaged that question with a real practical approach of working with employers who they call high-road employers who are willing to make changes in the industry, invest in their own workers, and try to move forward together. so in that sense, collective bargaining wasn t the goal. the goal was really social justice. ed, i want to see if you can help me with a tree top perspective on what s happened to unions. the republican party has had an all-out assault on unions. before the 70s,
we were taught you have to be careful in a capitalist society because there is no bottom to the bottom. that $7.25 worker is actually underbid in the marketplace for wages less than $6, $4 an hour. there are domestic workers that getting a paycheck at all is kind of a gamble. they re not sure they re going to be paid at the end of a given week. so part of the reason why we fight for unions, worker centers and legal protections for workers is that in the market, there is no bottom. that s the whole point. we mitigate market impacts. and new york, of course, a place where still there s a relatively high percentage of work who are are unionized and on the cutting edge. ed ott, thank you so much. i ll be talking more with ed after the show for our web series krystal continues. check that out when we post it later this evening on thecycle.msnbc.com. up next, some of the smartest b-school grads in the country
organizations and worker centers are giving employees some hope and some empowerment. the book new labor in new york details case studies of this new way of organizing and how they could be replicated, potentially on a national level. the author is ed ott, the editor of that book, who also ran the new york city central labor council. ed joins us now. thank you very much. i was a co-editor. co-editor. thank you. one of the big shifts that s happened in the economy that s led to a decline in union membership has been a shift in the type of jobs. manufacturing jobs have dropped off. low-paying service sector jobs have been on the rise. it s traditionally been harder to organize workers in that sector. but you ve seen some models here in new york that seem to be working in a way there. yeah, i mean, the whole economy s been reorganized over the last four decades. the model that worked for
the workers stood up to that, the labor relations board established the fact they have rights, i think the clear message from the workers is we re not going away, we re back this black friday and staying here. this is not a short-term action. this is a long term siege. i think the other thing that they established is that they are not alone. the workers have a lot of support, a lot of friends, the media including the main stream media has begun to pay attention to the needs of these workers in different ways. bloomberg news, fortune, have all said that in fact, walmart could afford to pay more. right. last year that wasn t possible. so i think this is become a movement. this is the economic justice movement of the 21st century and the new civil rights movement. ed, i appreciate you bringing up the media question. colby, you have been with us multiple times when you first were with us you were still a walmart employee. you are now, you know, you have discussed being let go, you be
pressuring the university and the university has turned back toward getting more full timers but it s going to take years and years to dig out of that hole. it s unfair to the faculty but also as you pointed out before, it s very unfair to the students, and from an organizing perspective if you are running around new york city on three different campuses, getting a job you don t have time for anything else. your main goal is to get home to your family and do what else you got to do. that feels like it undermines the other key aspect of what we were meant to be up to in universities, the production of knowledge through research. how can one abresearcher in this context. you can t. if you are teaching five courses and running from campus to campus as ed said you don t have time to do your research, to write, to read, to stay up on the latest scholarship. you are only teaching. what we ve seen this split in higher ed so people like me and you, we get to focus, we have the luxury to fo