>> Good evening and welcome to MetroFocus.

I am Rafael P Raman.

Many economists and analysts and a growing number of ordinary Americans have come to believe that over the last few decades a widening economic divide has decimated the American middle-class and put the American dream out of reach for millions.

But is this an accurate portrayal of the United States as it is today?

According to a powerful new documentary called Americon, The answer is yes, and the conscious efforts of corporate interests.

As the film shows, there are no signs of an American Renaissance , one example of that is right here in New York, where a group of Staten Island workers and former workers unexpectedly defeated Amazon, one of the most powerful and richest companies in the world in an election.

Here's a clip.

>> ♪ ♪ >> Every time we come here we sing pizza pizza pizza.

>> I don't know, chicken nuggets.

>> That's the second thing.

>> Chicken.

>> Your member the handshake -- remember the handshake?

>> Back up.

>> I love my kids more than anything.

For me, I always want to be a strong role model for them, somebody that is always like daddy is going to take care of things.

They may not understand completely what is going on, but they understand that their dad got fired for speaking out against Amazon.

Everything that happened to me is for them.

I want them to grow up in a society where they don't have to struggle as hard as we do.

That is what we need to fight for.

>> Christian smalls helped to organize the walkout by workers at the Center for -- at Staten Island, protesting the response of the coronavirus.

>> They didn't let my people know.

People are still in their working.

>> We are joined by Christian smalls.

An assistant manager, the first to organize a walkout in the United States.

>> Tell us what happened to you after the protest.

>> I was terminated two hours later.

>> Workers unite?

-- workers unite!

Workers unite!

>> Right now we are here, use ago we started this.

We all know what happened in Alabama.

Don't take it as a loss.

We know that Amazon spent $25 million to stop that from unionizing.

Let me say this.

We are beginning our efforts in Staten Island.

>> Joining us now is the executive producer and director of Americonned, the producer and writer, and the cofounder and president of the Amazon labor union which defeated Amazon on Staten Island.

Welcome all of you, it is a pleasure to have you here, welcome back.

Let me start with you Sean and Dave you can break in if you want to also answer.

When I first heard about your film and that Chris was in it, I assumed that it was about the victory of the Amazon union at Staten Island and the Staten Island warehouse workers.

But it is it.

-- is not.

In fact it ends with the union in Staten Island.

Aside from what I said in the introduction, what do you say that the film is about or what was your intention in making this film?

>> I think that the film is about income inequality in America, the fault in class and how wages have been stagnant for the last 45 years.

And there has been an upward redistribution of $50 trillion from the working-class and middle-class up into the 1%.

And, you know, it is not right.

We had the greatest middle-class in the world and we lost that.

We are now number 12 and falling.

So, you know, I think both of us grew up and were able to -- our families were able to ascend to the middle class and that path has to be maintained.

>> It seems like you shot most of the film before the Amazon victory in Staten Island.

The victory that made Chris famous.

So, how did you foresee that he was going to be playing such an important role in the resurgence of the American labor movement?

Did you guys know that most labor veterans and everybody else -- what did you know that most veterans did not know?

>> Do you want to take that, Sean?

>> Either one.

>> When I first met Chris, it was just after his walkout and I could see how tenacious he was and his whole team was.

And this is before they were even thinking about starting a union.

But, you know, they were fighting for the rights of the people that worked under him and we connected and I thought it would be a great idea.

I was not sure when they were going to win, I knew they would never give up.

>> Dave, anything to add?

>> It's been a long process with the film, we basically come up of following Chris and -- it took five years to film.

Because we did not have a great ending to the film because it was kind of a little depressing, but Sean is a very dogged filmmaker and cap crafting and taking out his scalpel to make the film better and he is just like let's keep going and let's keep filming even after the Alabama vote Sean is like let's keep filming, filming and filming and filming and we hit it when Chris knocked it out of the park with Staten Island and I think it gives a great ending to our film where people will walkout feeling inspired instead of feeling disheartened.

>> We will talk in a few moments about what happened with the union, Chris, since the victory, but first, tell us about your involvement in this film.

Why did you decide not only to participate but to have your family participate in it and what do you think is your contribution to the film?

>> Like they said, originally, I thought I was just going to be a small piece to a larger messaging of the film.

And I still consider that to be.

But we did not know, here I am sitting as the president of the Amazon labor union, we did not know that any of this would transpire.

For me, participating and giving people that real-time inside look at what is going on on the ground and into my personal life is -- was an opportunity that was given to me, the media jumped all over me, I lead a walkout and I continued to garner media attention here and there from doing demonstrations, but this film gives people an inside look about what it takes to juggle a family life and also the struggles of defeat, ghetto.

These ups and downs in the film and you connect with real people and I think that resonates with a lot of people, my story.

>> As Dave said, it provided a high note to end the film on, a positive note.

Sean, some of the things that come out clearly in the film is that widening economic divide which is happening in this country.

It is not only tragic and immoral, but that as history shows and as your film kind of shows it can be fatal to society if not reversed.

Can you give us -- you gave us one or two, can you give us more of the facts and figures that you include in the film which show how this divide -- how wide this divide is?

>> Sure.

One in four babies are born at or below the poverty line.

That was below -- before COVID.

The fact that $50 trillion was extracted from the middle and working classes, and in history, any society which is this divided, which is this divided economically, leads to Civil War, a police state or an authoritarian government.

I don't think any of us including the billionaires want to live in a world where that comes to fruition.

And we need to make that turn immediately.

>> How did that happen?

What was the turn in recent American history where that began to occur and what were the forces behind that occurrence?

>> I always consider 1973 sort of a watershed year for all that.

That was the year Nixon started dismantling all of Lyndon B. Johnson's great Society plans and cutting back on those incentives.

When I started this project, I originally started this in 2008 during the subprime clash and -- trash and I watched the war on poverty speech and what he said is that he had that great speech and then over the next eight years even in the Nixon administration poverty dropped from 25% to 11%.

It was a great success.

And then in 1973 you have Milton Friedman and the Chicago school and those guys preaching grade.

-- greed.

Let's get rid of welfare, let's give women and amount which, let's decrease the power of units.

All of that.

That set it in motion and then it went into hyperdrive and -- during Reagan.

You can see what he did with trickle-down economics, all of those guys just took that Chicago school and took it to the umpteenth degree.

And accelerated it.

It's not just Reagan and the Republicans, you look at Clinton.

Clinton and Obama, those guys, when you look at them, they are not that far off from some of the stuff Reagan did.

>> I was going to get to that, let me get to that right now.

If either one of you can chime in and you too, Chris, I have a lot of questions for you in the moment -- in a moment if you don't mind.

Some of us forget that it was Bill Clinton not Ronald Reagan who signed NAFTA, the trade agreement that opened wide the trade borders for Canada and Mexico.

And that it was Clinton with a Republican Congress that granted China permanent normal trade relations, two things according to your film costing millions and millions of good paying jobs for Americans.

How did the probe -- the pro-corporate offensive that started as you guys describe become a bipartisan consensus?

>> I think it was a shift in politics.

We see it today, it's like everything seems to be skewed more to the right.

Even the Democrats started becoming right-center.

And you saw him going back to Clinton, I remember when he was running in 1992 and I was out campaigning for Jerry Brown when I was in college.

And I remember, you know, he made a promise that he would cut welfare and food stamps Bush would not do that.

Looking back on it I'm like George Bush said we need a social safety net and we need to protect the most vulnerable people in our society.

And then we here have the Democratic candidate saying I'm going to cut back on welfare and food stamps.

It was shocking to me and I said things are really shifting here and moving to the right here.

And it's scary.

And I think it's worse now, I am seeing some hope with Biden, he seems to be rolling some of that back and say a lot of the right things which I have been surprised with.

But that is what I have seen happening, it was just like the end of the Bush administration into the Clinton administration and it shifted more to the right because the Democrats were shifting more right-center.

>> Chris, one of the reasons that one of the experts gave S to wind NAFTA was so bad -- as to why NAFTA was so bad was because by then the labor movement had been so badly devastated that they could not shape that bill.

That labor movement is still with us.

Only 6% of the private sector is organized, only 6% of the jobs are unionized, less then under the Hoover administration.

It was in this milieu, this context that you and a couple of your friends decided to unionize one of the most powerful and rich companies in the world.

We know your story, you walked out because they did not have covert protocols and they fired you, but I'm talking about the emotional reason why.

You didn't walk away like 99% of people would have after they fired you.

Why did you say I am fighting these people?

>> Just like history repeats itself, the pandemic was this is the modern-day Great Depression when you think about it, not only did I get fired in the middle of the pandemic, where I had nowhere else to turn to I had a lot of time on my hands and when Amazon tried to smear me, which added more fuel to the fire, that motivated me even more.

I was not going to allow this company to smear me, calling me not smart or inarticulate and they and ironically may make the face of the unit.

I said enough is enough, this is something that corporations play into for years, and when it comes to organizing in general.

The pandemic gave me the opportunity to build this network of power which we now have today, where we have that outside community to support us while we were fighting against the company.

We cannot do it alone, I could not have done it alone.

I would not be here if not for the folks around eight and the community around me, especially the New York area and that is what is going to take to fight back against these companies, is everybody.

I'm hoping once again my journey is going to continue to expire -- inspire.

Christ one of the experts talks about how right ring -- Wayne Republicans tried to inflame the divisions among Americans, and I have been reading some progressive writers argue that some of the -- that the left or elements of the left are also dividing America with extreme versions of the diversity and identity ideology, one progressive writer, maybe you are familiar with him has actually called that ideology the reeling class ideology.

-- ruling class ideology.

We see you and your team of organizers, the date of the victory, and as you see in the film, you made diversity work.

It's a multiracial, multinational group of working class people who one -- won.

Did you make it happen -- how did you make it happen?

>> Where we meet them is at work.

Amazon hires thousands of workers from all over the tri-state area, all five boroughs including New Jersey as well.

And the only way that we were going to make this work is by people.

It wasn't money because we did not have any.

It is not because of resources because we have the bare minimum.

The only thing was earning the trust and building relationships that some of the Amazon principles that island as a supervisor there, but sometimes I use them to organize and I use those tools and same principles to bring people together, whether it was breaking bread and having barbecues or handing out literature and being out there for over 300 days at the bus stop.

I sacrifice time away from my family and my loved ones to do that.

That sacrifice and the fact that I was able to have several conversations, not just one with these workers, that is what ultimately gravitated towards unionizing.

And what you saw on our victory date was the fact that yes, we come from all different backgrounds, we come from all different ideologies, but at the same time, the only enemy will always be our employer, that is why we kept it work-related.

As you heard me say to Lizzie Graham, it is not left or right, it is about workers.

>> We see you talking to a reporter and the reporter asks if they will get low and darting now and you say they cannot get any lower.

You know, as we spoke last time, we were talking about reports which cannot that the initial organizing group, there were divisions among you know and then a recent New York Times article reported that there were some divisions among you and then sadly most recently, your cofounder, your close friend volunteered to step away from the union because he was -- charges of assault were foisted at him which had nothing to do with the union.

Given corporations being what they are, Amazon being what it is.

Have Willie -- will they use any of this against you in negotiations and organizing efforts?

>> Of course.

It is a part of what their tactics are.

Unionbusting, the number one thing is targeting the leadership.

This leadership is black and brown lead, which adds another incentive on why they want to take this down.

Unfortunately we have to deal with these struggles even with organizers.

These are just normal growing pains especially with something that is brand-new, and I argue that every union in this country, every internal organization that you could think of has internal issues.

Unfortunately, we are so public in -- people pay attention to our campaign and the media is thirsty to put these narratives out there.

But I can assure you that my team is resilient, my core is still intact, and as far as our former vice president, he is innocent until proven otherwise and we are going to support him 100% and hopefully the charges will be dropped and we can continue to focus on our contract.

That is the focus.

>> What is to be done, Sean?

Four times sake, we have about three minutes, maybe a little more.

What are the key steps that need to be taken in order to be able to breach this economic divide which has killed the American dream for so many millions of Americans?

?

>> We don't have a lot of time left, we are reaching this tipping point of mass homelessness, people staying basically in the middle class due to massive credit and how do we deal with income inequality, it is very simple.

We raised wages.

If we raise wages all of this goes away and if you are a billionaire or a billionaire family which owns a company, that everyone that works for them is on welfare, because they are unwilling, they certainly could pay the amount of money needed, but they are unwilling to do so.

>> But quickly, if we don't succeed in bridging this gap, what happens then?

>> I think it is going to get worse and it is going to fall in disarray.

One of the cases that got me to thinking about this project 15 years ago was, I am a big student of history and I was thinking about the fall of Rome and people always have this image of Rome felling because of barbarians, coming over the borders and sacking Rome, but no , it was massive income inequality that was the call -- because of the fall of Rome.

95% of the population was living in poverty and 5% was concentrated in the well.

There was no middle class.

It is a start provider that the French Revolution had the same sort of thing.

When you get these widening goals, it is going to come to a head and it is like someone who was in our film was an expression when he wrote this op-ed piece, the pitchforks are coming for us talking about billionaires.

He is not far off.

There is a breaking point.

There's only so much you can do.

When you look at 44% of Americans making $10 and $.25 an hour or under, is unsustainable.

-- that is unsustainable.

Even the fight for $15, that number is so antiquated.

It should be the fight for between five dollars or 30.

-- Fortune five dollars or $30.

We are at a tipping point and people are starting to take it seriously where we should have been looking at this 20 years ago.

But now we are finally starting to take it seriously.

>> You and Sean agree on that.

Less than 30 seconds left, Chris, you were -- the positive note, be the positive note now, are you optimistic about your chances of negotiating a contract with Amazon?

>> 100%, I would not be here if it was not, and I know that the international solidarity that would build among Amazon workers across the world is what is going to help Ray Amazon to the table at the fight is just beginning and we are not going to give up.

>> Thank you so much, thank you for the film, it is very powerful.

I hope a lot of people see it, and thank you for joining us to talk about it.

♪ >> Thinks returning it to MetroFocus.

You can take our award-winning program with you wherever you go with MetroFocus the podcast.

This in and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode.

Or ask your smart speaker to take -- play MetroFocus the podcast.

Also available on MetroFocus.org/radio and on the NPR one app.

♪ MetroFocus is made possible by Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III.

Filomen M. D'Agostino Foundation.

The Peter G. Peterson and Joan Ganz Cooney Fund.

Bernard and Denise Schwartz.

Barbara Hope Zuckerberg.

And by Jody and John Arnhold.

Dr. Robert C. and Tina Sohn foundation.

The Ambrose Monell Foundation.

Estate of Roland Karlen.

The JPB Foundation.