According to the latest data, Amazon spent $14 million dollars last year to fight labor unions, the largest amount in a single year, according to labor researchers. The anti-union industry is big business, and Amazon is their best customer. 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: According to the latest data, Amazon spent $14 million last year to fight labor unions, the largest amount in a single year, according to labor researchers. The anti-union industry, well, it’s big business, and Amazon is their best customer. I have never seen so many labor cases coming out as I’m seeing right now. Okay. When we started things like, you know, for example Starbucks. Oh my God. I mean, you know, you’ve got that cat showing up in front of Congress committing perjury about his labor. You’ve got all of these social media folks that are supposed to be warm and fuzzy, you know.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Let’s, this is warm and fuzzy media. We don’t do this to our people. We’re different. Right? That we’re not part of the industrial complex in any way. We’re different. I’ll be damned if they’re different. They’re worse.
Farron Cousins: Right. These are the companies who, you know, they’ll put on their rainbow flags when it’s time to do it. Like, oh, look, we’re so inclusive. We love all of you. And then behind the scenes, they are beating the hell out of their workers, making them pee in jars and, you know, go to the bathroom on themselves in the delivery trucks. $14 million Amazon spent, which is a, you know, not even close to anything that touches their profits. They spent $14 million for these anti-labor law firms to go out there and bust up the unions that we’ve seen a big union drive for Amazon. We’ve seen a couple victories now.
Mike Papantonio: Does anybody do as much virtue signaling as the Starbucks and the Amazons and all of these internet startup companies? It’s all virtue.
Farron Cousins: Starbucks is the worst. They’re absolutely the worst on it.
Mike Papantonio: And then you seen, yeah, you look behind the curtain and they’re absolutely the worst. But, you know, Amazon, and as a matter of fact, Starbucks and Amazon even created a new way to deal with it. That is, let’s change the language. We did this story. Let’s change the language to where, you know, we’re warm and fuzzy. Gee whizz, if you engage in this type of union activity, you’re putting little Johnny over here, who’s trying to work his way through college, you’re taking his job away from him. Okay. And it’s disgusting. But they’ve got these lawyers that have taken this to a whole new level. It’s jargon. They’ve focused on jargon. What is it that, what’s people, what are people moved by? And it’s this, part of it is that virtue signaling. Yeah. We’re talking about unions, but we’re doing it for the right reason. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And these lawyers that they hire, they’re trained in how to skirt the labor laws so that they can kind of walk right up to that line of legal versus illegal with their union busting tactics. And it’s something, and by the way, $430 million annually in the United States is what these anti-labor firms pull in.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I saw that number.
Farron Cousins: So, it is a massive business and these lawyers make a ton of money. And as we always talk about, imagine you go through law school, you learn everything you can. You’re like, I’m gonna be a great lawyer. And instead you decide, you know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to make sure that these hundred people at Amazon can’t have healthcare.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: I wanna make sure that instead of $15 an hour, they get paid 10. That’s my dream legal career.
Mike Papantonio: I always talk about that as you know. I talk about it at the seminars I put on. What is it you want for your legacy? I mean, you wanna be a lawyer for these freaks to where you’re saying, yeah, I really had a good day. These people can’t pay their bills now because I was able to keep their benefits down. And you go home and you have dinner with your family and, or the lawyer who prevents when a pharmaceutical kills 10,000 people, who goes home and says, you know, I really had a good day. I won a motion in court to where these people may not be able to recover now. And that’s a big victory for me. Who in the hell thinks like that? But there are tens and tens of thousands of them working for these big silk stocking law firms. It’s disgusting to me.
Farron Cousins: Because they’re pulling in the millions, you know, they’re weeping into their, you know, $5,000 pillows every night and they’re, and they’re sick. These people are so gross.
Mike Papantonio: They have a license to do good. You know, they have a license to clean up the environment, to get bad products off the market, to make Wall Street do what Wall Street’s supposed to do. They have a license to help people, and they choose to take that license and say, I’m gonna work for some corporation that does the horrible things that Amazon does to their workers. And I’m gonna declare victory when I succeed.
