The National Labor Board has uncovered even more evidence of Amazon trying to bust up unions by threatening workers. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: All right. So the national labor board has uncovered an even, even more evidence against Amazon trying to bust up unions. Now you raised this to me and I, I just think you were completely correct. This tells me maybe that we shouldn’t be loaning 10 billion, not loaning giving $10 billion to the folks running Amazon, which is what we’ve done. We, we gave Bezos the government, just what a couple of months ago.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Gave him $10 billion and he, at this point is probably one of the premier union busters in the country. And we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t reward that. I think Bernie Sanders came out and said, this is crazy.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Bernie, Bernie is about the only one who says, you know, wake up people. This is insanity giving this company billions of dollars while they’re spending millions to bust up these unions. And of course, what we’ve found now is, or the labor board found is Amazon is sitting there threatening their employees with wage cuts if they vote to form a union. And of course they’re doing it in their very corporate lawyery kind of way saying, well, we’re gonna have to drop you all down to the state minimum wage here if you vote to form a union, because we gotta keep wages with your union contract, but that’s gonna take a couple years to negotiate fully. So you’re down to, you know, whatever your state’s minimum wage is.
Mike Papantonio: And didn’t they take benefits away?
Farron Cousins: Yep. You get no benefits.
Mike Papantonio: I’m gonna take your insurance. No benefits. No. I mean, so, so here we got a guy that, oh, by the way, everybody’s seeing it, is he positioning himself for a run for president? I mean, that’s kind of the next thing we see out of this, out of Bezos, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It, it feels like it’s happening because he is starting to get more vocal about politics. Whereas he hadn’t necessarily been before. He’s got a huge platform to back him up with the Washington Post. I mean, that’s. That, that used to be look, in the early days of this country, when you owned a newspaper, you could do whatever the hell you wanted.
Mike Papantonio: Not so much anymore.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: Not so much, yeah.
Farron Cousins: Not so much anymore, but it’s still a pretty big power to have behind you.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: And Bezos again, with his constant interjections into politics. He’s following Elon Musk. But Bezos is positioned, he’s got a highly successful company. One that whether you love him or hate him, everybody uses it.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Let’s be honest. And he’s got the name recognition. Biden and Trump are both horrible in the polls. Majority of voters want a third party candidate.
Mike Papantonio: Of course.
Farron Cousins: That lane is open for Bezos and he’s probably worse than both of them put together.
Mike Papantonio: Kinda like, who was the guy the third party that ran the?
Farron Cousins: Perot.
Mike Papantonio: Perot, Ross Perot. Look, the, the average person out there says, well, my God, he’s built a big business. He must be a smart guy. He’s been to space. Let’s make him president of the United States. It could happen.
Farron Cousins: They’d do it. They would do it.
Mike Papantonio: I think that’s where, I think that’s what Bezos is up to. Even though he’s just trashing the possibilities of these workers having any unions at all, and we seem to, it doesn’t bother anybody. Let’s give them $10 billion.
