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Stephen Lerner helped lead the Justice for Janitors campaign in 1988 by holding demonstrations, hunger strikes, vigils, blockades, community organizing, and exposing the exploitation of workers.

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Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. Since election night 2016, the streets of the U.S. have rung with resistance. People all over the country have woken up with the conviction that they must do something to fight inequality in all its forms. But many are wondering what it is they can do. In this series, we'll be talking with experienced organizers, troublemakers, and thinkers who have been doing the hard work of fighting for a long time. They'll be sharing their insights on what works, what doesn't, and what has changed, and what is still the same.

Stephen Lerner: My name is Stephen Lerner. I am a fellow at Georgetown’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. I work on the HedgeClippers and bank workers and a number of different campaigns that are all focused on looking up the money tree at who is really running the politics and the economy of the country.

Sarah Jaffe: Let’s start with the bank workers because the bank workers just kicked off a union drive.

SL: The bank workers campaign is really interesting, because what most people don’t realize is banks in most countries in the world are significantly unionized. We have a three-pronged campaign. One has been broadly building worker committees in banks in the United States. One of the first real victories of that is the bank workers campaign, the Committee for Better Banks, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and a whole series of community groups, which we will come back to, were the whistle-blowers on the Wells Fargo scandal, where they were opening fake accounts.

There is an ongoing, growing campaign with workers in all the major US banks, but what we are focusing on now is a bank called Santander, which a Spanish owned bank which is, again, union in most countries in the world and heavily unionized in Brazil and Argentina. In the United States they are primarily a northeastern bank, but they are also a big national subprime auto lender. There is now a global demand on the bank that they agree not to fight the union and be neutral, the same in the United States as they do in other countries. What was really exciting in the kick-off, and sort of unheard of, is an addition to the traditional solidarity actions, letters and pickets, in Argentina and Brazil, workers actually walked off the job and did shutdowns of bank branches and other centers, demanding the bank not interfere with workers’ rights to organize unions in the United States.

What has been fascinating about the campaign both here in the United States and bank workers in other unions, there has always been a dual demand. The traditional demand about how workers should be paid and treated decently, and simultaneously that workers should not be forced to sell predatory products or cheat people as a condition of employment. What we have argued is that bank workers, in the same way in a hospital a nurse is a frontline on quality care, that bank workers can be the frontline on making sure that banks aren’t cheating and robbing people.

That is why the work with Wells Fargo has been so exciting, because literally tens of thousands of workers have signed petitions saying these outrageous sales goals could only be met if they cheated customers. One part is workers as whistle-blowers, workers as a frontline in saying, “What the bank is doing is bad.” Then, “As workers, we don’t want to participate in a scheme where the bank makes money by cheating people.”

SJ: One of the things that is interesting about this is the connection with these international unions that represent bank workers. When we talk about globalization, jobs moving around the world and progressive solutions to Trump’s nationalism, international campaigns like this are a really interesting starting point.

SL: As someone who has done a lot of organizing where we ask unions in other countries to support workers in the United States who organize in global companies, what is unique about the bank workers organizing is the Brazilian bank workers, which I think are the biggest bank workers union in the world and one of the most progressive, have aggressively and wonderfully called on the American labor movement to organize bank workers. It is not just out of solidarity. They cannot maintain the standards they have won in Brazil and around the world if the largest country with the biggest finance industry is non-union.

It is almost hallucinogenic to have workers in so-called developing countries say that their wages and benefits are threatened by the level of non-union staff in the United States. There is this fantastic group led by the Brazilian bank workers and UNI, the global bank worker federation, that is working both to support the campaign and pressure the company, but also, around the globe has lifted up this call which I think is really unusual for unions about workers not being pressured to cheat people as a condition of employment.

There have been meetings all over the world on this and a real commitment to doing concrete stuff to pressure the bank. We are going to be going to the Santander shareholder meeting in Spain. We have done a series of reports that have been exposing Santander’s bad practices, ranging from their role in both the Puerto Rican debt crisis, their role in subprime auto. They just failed their Community Reinvestment Act test and we did a report on that. Again, we are building a campaign not just about what is good for workers, but about workers who will make the company healthier in terms of how it engages with customers and consumers.

Essentially, the Community Reinvestment Act requires, in simplest terms, banks to provide resources to the communities that they are in, to invest in. We did a report first that showed that their lending practices ignored or skipped over poor communities and communities of color. There is a test that is done under the CRA Act to see if you have given enough money or loaned enough money. The bank failed it. The bank also failed the stress test. We think there is a relationship between mistreatment of workers and the underpinnings of the bank being threatened because they are engaged in all sorts of risky practices that may make them a little bit of money in the short run, but then blow up on their face in the long run.

SJ: One of the things that connects a lot of the work you do is mapping where the power and the money comes from for bad policies and bad politicians. Those are policies that are bi-partisan, we should say. In the age of Trump, in particular, talk about the importance of this kind of work and why it is important to know who is funding your politicians.

SL: The HedgeClippers campaign looks at hedge funds and private equity, thus hedge clippers clipping their power. It basically says, “These are the finance capitalists that are driving political and economic inequality.” What we have done is both deep dive reports, exposes, lots of direct action to directly confront them. Our little joke is that we have either been incredibly prescient or Trump picked his entire cabinet by looking at who we have been fighting. Pre-Trump winning, we were saying whether it is Goldman Sachs or Steven Schwarzman from Blackstone, these are the people who are really running the government. Lots of folks are laughing saying we are a conspiracy cult or something. Then, when Tru

The Real Money Powerbehind Trump