Minimum Wage Equal Pay Day

Rep. Mark Pocan breaks down why the minimum wage is failing American workers and what we can do to fix it; The West Virginia teachers won their fight and we shouldn’t be surprised women are leading the way; public sector unions are under attack once again and AFSCME’s Elissa McBride walks us through the latest threat. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

The first day of March marked a sobering anniversary — Minimum Wage Equal Pay Day, the day a minimum wage worker earning $7.25/hour caught up to how much she earned in a single year the last time the federal minimum wage was raised… in 2009. This anniversary comes as Congress is too busy giving tax cuts to billionaires and deregulating Wall Street to give the lowest-paid workers in this country the raise they’ve so long needed and deserved. Rebecca speaks with Congressman Mark Pocan, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who joined workers at the Capitol earlier this week to call on President Trump and Congress to raise the poverty-level minimum wage.

Next a conversation with Elizabeth Catte, author of the recent book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, about why we shouldn’t be surprised to see West Virginia teachers — the “daughters and granddaughters of coal miners” — on the front lines of the fight for fair wages.

And finally, Rebecca sits down with Elissa McBride, secretary-treasurer of AFSCME, to unpack what’s at stake in Janus vs. AFSCME, the Supreme Court case that threatens to gut public sector unions.

This week’s guests:

• Congressman Mark Pocan, Representing Wisconsin’s 2nd District
• Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia
• Elissa McBride, Secretary-Treasurer of AFSCME

For more on this week’s topics:

• Dive into Rachel West’s analysis of Minimum Wage Equal Pay Day and how it’s failing American workers.
• Read more about the history of collective organizing in Appalachia in Elizabeth Catte’s piece in The Nation and her Hillbilly Elegy-rebutting book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia.
• Unions are a path to the middle class and especially so for people of color. Read more about it here.

BONUS EPISODE: Another Mass Shooting, Another Scapegoat

Busting the myths around gun violence and mental illness and exploring the ugly history of mass institutionalization in America.Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

Nearly every time there’s a mass shooting in this country, you can predict what will follow like clockwork. First come the thoughts and prayers. Then comes the scapegoating of “the mentally ill.” Notably absent: any meaningful steps toward commonsense gun violence prevention. The national debate following the tragic mass shooting at a Florida school has unfortunately been no exception, with President Trump even calling for a return to mass institutionalization of people living with mental illness. To bust some of the myths around mental illness and gun violence, Rebecca speaks with Mary Giliberti, the CEO of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Next, to dig into the historical context on these issues, she talks with Ari Ne’eman, founder and past president of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network and a former Obama appointee to the National Council on Disability, who recently authored an article in The American Prospect chronicling America’s ugly history of mass institutionalization and involuntary commitment.

This week’s guests:

• Mary Giliberti, CEO of the National Alliance on Mental Illness
• Ari Ne’eman, founder and past president of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and former Obama appointee to the National Council on DisabilityFor more on this week’s topics:

For more on this week’s topics:

• Trump’s call for mass institutionalization isn’t new. Read Ari Ne’eman’s piece in The American Prospect on the idea’s ugly history in America.
• Learn more about the work Mary Giliberti and NAMI are doing in mental health.

This program aired on March 9th, 2018

Transcript of show:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The first day of March marked a sobering anniversary, minimum wage equal pay day, the day a minimum wage worker earning $7.25 caught up to how much she earned in a single year the last time the federal minimum wage was raised in 2009. This anniversary comes as congress is too busy giving tax cuts to billionaires and deregulating Wall Street to give the lowest paid workers in this country a raise they’ve so long needed and deserved. I speak with Congressman Mark Pocan, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who joined workers at the Capitol earlier this week to call on President Trump and congress to raise the poverty level minimum wage. Next, I talk with Elizabeth Catte, author of the recent book “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia” about why we shouldn’t be surprised to see West Virginia teachers, the daughters and granddaughters of coal miners as she puts it, on the front lines of the fight for fair wages. And finally, I sit down with Elissa McBride, Secretary Treasurer of AFSCME to unpack what’s at stake in Janus v. AFSCME, the Supreme Court case that threatens to gut public sector unions. Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan keep telling us the best way out of poverty is a job, that’s what underpins their obsession with putting so-called work requirements in every program that helps struggling workers and families make ends meet. But their newfound compassion begs the question; what about raising the poverty level minimum wage? With me to discuss this and many other hypocrisy points within this debate is Congressman Mark Pocan, he represents Wisconsin’s 2nd congressional district and he serves as the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Congressman, thank you so much for joining the show.

CONGRESSMAN MARK POCAN: Oh, very glad to be here, thank you.

VALLAS: Well, just to kick things off, we at the Center for American Progress looked into the poverty level minimum wage recently and we were wondering how much has it failed to keep pace with the cost of living over the years that congress and particularly Republicans in Congress have refused to raise since 2009? And we found something really alarming which is that a minimum wage worker today has to work an extra 2 whole months just to earn the same amount of money that she did the last time the minimum wage was raised in 2009. Would love to hear you talk a little bit about what’s going on in congress on the issue of the poverty level minimum wage.

POCAN: Well I mean this congress with Paul Ryan as speaker and Mitch McConnell in the senate and Donald Trump in the White House nothing is going on unfortunately when it comes to minimum wage. Luckily, I think where the Democrats are and especially where the progressive caucus is at we’ve been strongly advocating for a $15 minimum wage bill and I think should there be some changed faces in November I think we have some real ability to move that kind of legislation forward and try to make sure that we’re catching up. You just can’t live on $15,000 a year and one of my favorite questions to raise when I visit high schools in my district is I ask people what percent of people do you think are under 20 who make the minimum wage and people usually give 60%, 70%, all these different numbers. I think last time I saw the number we were down to 10% or 11% of people who make minimum wage are actually 20 years old. This is a lot of people who are working one, two, three of these jobs, often with no benefits just to try to get by and it’s really a below poverty wage, long overdue, we need to make a change.

VALLAS: Part of the analysis that we did and I’m going to give a shout out to the amazing Rachel West who is the economist who did this, she deserves some real kudos for crunching these numbers, but she found that because of congress’s and particularly Republicans in congress inaction to raise the minimum wage, the federal minimum wage, that a full time minimum wage workers loses more than $2300 in purchasing power because the minimum wage hasn’t kept pace over the time it hasn’t been raised. And that’s more than 47 times the average tax cut that the same worker can expect from the tax law that Republicans keep claiming is such a boon for workers.

POCAN: Think about it. If you’re making $15,000 a year, how much that would mean. Ever single dollar will go directly back into the economy to provide a better quality of life for the people who are again, trying to continue to make a better wage but initially to be able to help them. And all of that money, it’s a ripple effect right into the economy, it helps to create other jobs because you’re stimulating the economy and then that helps to grow the economy. It’s not just this you hope that if you give it to the top 1% some will trickle down on the rest of us. Instead this is really making sure everyone has that extra purchasing power and puts it right into the economy. It helps lift other people’s wages, not just those who make the minimum wage and at the end of the day it will greatly improve our economy and the quality of life for everyone.

VALLAS: Now in a lot of ways getting back to work requirements which I mentioned up at the top and that is so core to what President Trump and Speaker Ryan have been pushing when it comes to their vision of assistance in this country. A big part of their attempt to push work requirements in my opinion is about trying to reinforce the narrative that you hear on Fox News about what poverty in this country is, that it’s someone who is lazy who doesn’t want to work who is sitting on the Fox News couch eating Fox News bon bons, that’s sort of the image of the poor person in this country that they want us to take away. Would you talk a little bit about how you view work requirements and whether they’re part of your vision for addressing poverty in this country?

POCAN: Everytime I’ve seen this idea put out there, it’s all about a false narrative or an intentionally false narrative. Either they’re just ignorant of the facts or they’re trying to make others not understand the reality. There’s a lot of reasons why someone may not be getting a job and often we need to invest more in education and in work training and a lot of other issues to give people the skills. But just to say that someone is too lazy is just not the reality that I’ve experienced after spending 25 years in government working on this. I think that you’re right, they’re either trying to put out that false narrative or they just really don’t understand it and you’re just not going to, by forcing someone to take a bad job, they’re not going to be able to get those skills to get a better paying job and support their family. So in a way you’re almost saying those business that are the bad actors, that pay less than everyone else actually will benefit out of this and will continue to be able to pay people poorly under their proposal.

VALLAS: Now, one of the things that President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan certainly never talk about as they are trying to perpetuate this Fox News vision of what poverty in this country is is how many low wage workers need to turn to public programs like Medicaid, like nutrition assistance to make ends meet when wages aren’t enough. One of the things that we’ve actually found in our research over the years at CAP is that if you were to raise the minimum wage even just to $12, not even the $15 that you and others in congress are currently, Democrats in congress are currently championing but if you were to raise the federal minimum wages even to just $12 an hour you would save a staggering $53 billion just in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, which was formerly called food stamps over 10 years. So in a lot of ways if Republicans were serious about shrinking the number of people who need to turn to these programs, wouldn’t they be embracing raising the minimum wage?

POCAN: Right now they’re supporting welfare for these companies that are the bad actors because when a company is paying such a low wage that someone who works for them is still in poverty and has to have assistance, we all subsidize that bad behavior and that lower wage. So exactly, when we have this in place, every other single person out of their paychecks are supporting that bad company or corporation who is paying sub-poverty wages. So you’d think that that would be the issue. So as much as they say they’re against welfare, they’re just again welfare for poor people, they’re fine with welfare for the wealthy which is exactly what happens when we all subsidize those people who are making that sub-poverty wage.

VALLAS: Now Speaker Paul Ryan who in many ways is really at the center of the Republican group of thinkers trying to advance work requirements and other kinds of other cuts to programs that help workers make end meet, he’s not just one of your colleagues in congress, he’s actually one of your neighbors and your district in Wisconsin actually borders on Speaker Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, you guys even actually share one county in common, Rock County in Wisconsin. What is it like sharing a county with Paul Ryan?

POCAN: I’ll tell you, it’s interesting. I like to have examples from Rock County of things, policies they put forward that actually hurt people because I don’t want anyone to think that Paul Ryan actually represents the people of Wisconsin, Paul represents the neoconservative movement and the corporations and the special interests in Washington but he certainly doesn’t represent people in Wisconsin who are basically kindhearted, fair-minded and again the policies that Paul is putting forward are not indicative of conversations that real people in my home state have. So we spend extra time finding those example of what it’s like to be in poverty in Beloit or Janesville or Evansville or any of the communities in Rock County, the county that we split because I think it really drives home that his narrative is not a real narrative based on his constituents it’s based on all of the special interests that he pays attention to.

VALLAS: How is he viewed at home?

POCAN: You know, I’ll tell you, for ten years he never too a position on an issue. So he was a nice guy who came by and that was what they knew of him. And then about 2010 when the Tea Party movement came over and he started moving into more of leadership, then we saw he’s the guy who wants to take away your Social Security and voucher-ize your Medicare and do all these other things and I think people are starting to figure him out. That good guy image that he had because no one knew where he actually stood on issues is really tarnished and he hasn’t had a public town hall in I think it’s close to two years now. And that’s just your basic 101 of your job so he certainly I think has a very different view of how people are looking at him now because this is not the Paul Ryan they elected and saw represent them for a decade.

VALLAS: Now of course one of the things that Paul Ryan was publically pilloried for and he really earned this one was a tweet that he put out basically saying that a dollar fifty per week quote, unquote “raise” that a Pennsylvania school secretary reported getting thanks to the tax law was something that workers should be grateful for. He then subsequently deleted this tweet after he started to get publically pilloried for it but was really slammed for being incredibly out of touch. Would love to hear you talk a little bit about some of the solutions that your district and the county that you share with him are actually seeking. What do people actually want to see when it comes to solutions, to combat poverty and to expand opportunity?

POCAN: There is no question. His district is a district that has experienced a lot of job loss thanks to bad trade policies. Again, an issue that Paul is in direct opposition to I think the people who actually live in his district, I grew up in the biggest city in his district, Kenosha, when I was growing up 14,000 people used to make cars, no one does today. His hometown of Janesville in the district, 7,000 used to make cars, 2,000 used to make autoparts for cars, virtually no one does today, no one makes cars but I think there might be a few people still making some parts. There has been huge job loss and this tax break that in 10 years 83% of the money goes to the top 1%, we don’t have a lot of top 1 percent-ers in Southeast Wisconsin, much less the rest of our state, so again he’s not doing things that are being requested by his constituents, he’s doing it by the people who fund Republican campaigns and several Republicans were honest enough to say that when they passed the bill. But these tax measures are not going to have a very big impact on the quality of the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class who live in his district in Southeastern Wisconsin.

VALLAS: Paul Ryan is currently being challenged by a candidate who is running for his seat, his name is Randy Bryce, I’m sure listeners are familiar with him because his initial campaign ad went viral online, he was given the nickname “Ironstache”, that’s also his twitter handle. He also has been on the show before. Do you think that Randy Bryce has a shot at ousting Paul Ryan?

POCAN: Absolutely. This is the closest of all the congressional districts in Wisconsin, I think it’s a plus four or plus five Republican district and we have seen from across the country, 39 state legislative seats since Donald Trump got elected flipped from Republican to Democrat. There was a special election in Wisconsin, a state senate race which is about a third of the size of a congressional race where Donald Trump won by 17 points and our Democratic state senate candidate won by 10. So we’re seeing this big shifts just like we have around the country in my state of Wisconsin. So this is the first time Paul Ryan has had a real challenge and Randy Bryce is raising money, he’s running a very good ground game. He’s very visible in the district and like I said, Paul Ryan hasn’t done a public town hall for almost 2 years. So there is a real wind blowing right now on the back of Randy Bryce towards this campaign and we’ve yet to see if Paul Ryan will even run. I at first said absolutely, Paul Ryan is going to run but I’m starting to question that. I think that tax bill he did was a gold plated resume to go work for Goldman Sachs or whoever for ten times his congressional salary but if he loses his seat in congress, or he loses the majority while he’s speaker, I’m not sure if that gold plate resume is still going to look like that and he may even decide not to run.

VALLAS: Now Speaker Ryan is not the only member of congress who is seeking to defend his seat and stay in Washington. Everyone has to run again and there are a lot of folks speculating and looking into various crystal balls and cups of tea with leaves in the bottom wondering what happens in November. If the house flips and Democrats are back in charge of the House what is the policy agenda that you want to see Democrats and specifically the progressive caucus champion?

POCAN: Sure, well I thin one of the things you can look at is the Progressive Caucus puts out an annual budget, a people’s budget and I think that shows many of our values that at least relate to the budget. But I think when we talk to real people around the country it’s still an economic agenda that involves things like healthcare costs, whether or not their family has health insurance, the price of pharmaceutical drugs, the fact that we need an economy where people are making a living wage, not just a sub poverty wage where people have benefits with their job, they have the right to collectively bargain and have a voice in their workplace and I think people are just tired of the way Washington operates. Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp and instead what he’s done is really empower every corporate special interest that’s in the city and it’s just the opposite of what he promised and people are really tired of Wall St and they’re tired of the pharmaceutical companies and all these special interests. So I think we can put an agenda out there that really puts people first and I think when November happens, I’ve got the feeling a lot of people are looking for serious change.

VALLAS: Cutting Medicaid and nutrition assistance and housing and all of the other kinds of programs that help workers make ends meet when wages aren’t enough or when they fall on hard times. These are all proposals that are incredibly unpopular with the American people. Polling by CAP and others has found this, 80% of the American don’t want to see Medicaid cut. The numbers are similar across the board and on the flip side, raising the minimum wage is one of the most popular economic ideas out there. That’s true across party lines. That’s true with Republicans, that’s true with Trump voters, do you believe that we’re ever going to see Republicans in congress get to a place where they support raising the minimum wage or is this something Democrats are going to have to do on their own?

POCAN: I’ve been really surprised that it’s such a difficult issue but I think every issue these days is very difficult. Ever since the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, there’s a lot of people here who are in government both at state legislative levels and at the federal level who just don’t believe in government period. So we often and I’ve been doing this now for a quarter of a century, either in local, state, or federal government that you could work with people on the other side of the aisle because at the end of the day no one should live on a poverty wage for a lot of reasons that are both good conservative family values reasons as well as good progressive economic reasons and why you can stimulate the economy. That just doesn’t exist anymore so I think you’re going to have to have a serious change if you want to see some of these reforms happen. I just don’t see it happening with Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell or the current people who are in congress in the senate majority.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Congressman Mark Pocan, he represents Wisconsin’s 2nd congressional district where he is a neighbor of Speaker Paul Ryan and he serves as the chair of the congressional progressive caucus. Congressman Pocan, thank you so much for your leadership on these issues, particularly when it comes to fighting for policies that will help workers be able to make ends meet and thank you for your time and joining the show.

POCAN: Oh, of course, thank you so much for having me.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. In West Virginia, a picket line can feel like a family affair. Schools, like coal mines, are generational employers and in Appalachia, labor struggles seem inherited too. Who is leading one of the most significant grassroots labor movements of our time? Teachers, who are the daughters and granddaughters of coal miners. So writes Elizabeth Catte, historian and author of the book “What Are You Getting Wrong about Appalachia” in The Nation magazine in a piece covering the West Virginia teacher strikes this past week. Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining the show.

ELIZABETH CATTE: Hey, it’s good to talk to you, thanks.

VALLAS: First for folks who maybe have been covering or haven’t been following the West Virginia strikes all that closely, help us understand a little bit of how we got to where we are wherein a deal has finally be struck that ended the long teacher strike that’s been playing out over the course of the past couple of weeks.

CATTE: It’s been an incredibly interesting and tense time in West Virigina as the teachers were off work for nine days and a strike that began in late February and the walkouts and planning for this were planned even further back. At the core of the teachers’ frustrations were a number of issues. One, their pay is horrendous, they’re some of the worst paid teachers in the country and school personal and other state employees are in the same boat. They have enormous issues with the state insurance program so they have skyrocketing premiums because the population of West Virginia and the people in this insurance pool are getting older and with 700 teaching vacancies, there’s not a lot of young people boosting the insurance pool to keep it affordable for everybody so their insurance rates are skyrocketing. They’re not getting cost of living raises to offset the cost of rising costs. And they just reached their breaking point and went on strike and are now in the position where they have won a 5% raise across the board for teachers, school personnel and public employees like first responders. They’ve got guarantees from the legislature that their insurance concerns will at least be addressed by a task force and so they’ve got some relief from these urgent issues that brought them to the point of a strike.

VALLAS: Now, there’s been a lot of coverage of the deal and there’s a lot of excitement about the fact that a deal has been struck, that the strikes have come to an end and that teachers are indeed getting a 5% pay raise. But getting a little bit less attention is the fact that the raise that teachers are going to be getting under this deal will be paid for by cuts elsewhere including it looks like from Medicaid which covers more than one quarter of West Virginia’s population. That’s not the only way in which this deal is not all puppies and rainbows, you mentioned health insurance being a big part of the frustration teachers have been feeling. The deal also didn’t create a permanent fix for something to do with health insurance. Help us understand what the pros and cons are of the resolution.

CATTE: So the pros are obviously the 5 percent raise across the board. When the teachers went into the strike what their objective was in terms of their wages was a 5% raise for teachers and 3% for other service personnel and now we have 5% across the board for everyone and that is tremendous and that is 100% to the solidarity of teachers. The insurance issues are tabled for now but looming as we celebrate this victory is the sense the legislature of West Virginia might try to save face by passing on the cost of the raise and some of the rectifications that need to happen from social services programs by slashing the funding of community college, for example, the general services Medicaid fund, from tourism, I don’t think we’re at the point where we know exactly where that money will come from apart from a general services fund but what a lot of teachers had hoped and what a lot of observers in the region had hoped is that the funding gap would be taken care of by raising taxes on natural gas, corporate taxes which are artificially low in the state of West Virginia. So if the legislature does what it plans to do we might have a situation where other poor people are paying for the cost to make it a little bit easier for West Virginia teachers.

VALLAS: Now a lot of folks may have been surprised to see West Virginia at the center of these recent strikes and in many ways really at the center of today’s labor movement. But as you write in your article in The Nation, West Virginia is home to a rich history of labor organizing. Tell a little bit of that history.

CATTE: Sure so one of the up and comers, the strongest political ally for the teachers that emerged during this moment was the state senator from Logan County which is southern West Virginia named Richard Ojeda and the way that he was framing the strike which was tremendously popular messaging as it turns out was that this is the battle for West Virginia’s heart and soul that had started 100 years ago. And so he’s linking what is happening among public workers today with battles in West Virginia 100 years ago in the southern coal communities in labor struggles like the Matewan massacre, the battle for Blair Mountain or Paint Creek-Cabin Creek, these old, old really infamous moments from organized labor that still circulate in the region and have a specific meaning and again, what I pointed out in The Nation which is so important to understand too is that many of the teachers who are agitating today are the daughters and granddaughters and teaching is a 75% female professions are the daughters and granddaughters of coal miners. So people who walk the picket line not only in the teachers strike that happened in 1990 in West Virginia but some of the other strikes like the Pittston coal strike, some of these other labor struggles. So not only does the sense of urgency feels urgent in the here and now but it also feels inherited from parents and family.

VALLAS: And you mentioned the amazing role that women are playing and really leading the charge here and that’s actually a lot of what you discuss in your article in the nation and really in that theme that you just brought up about this being the daughters and granddaughters of coal miners who are really leading the charge here. What do you see in terms of the next steps coming out of this for the broader labor movement as a whole and in particular do you believe that this kind of women led organizing is likely to have consequence for other professions that are largely populated by women, I’m thinking in particular about child care and domestic work and the service industry as a whole.

CATTE: I mean one of the things that’s been significant to the West Virginia teachers’ strike is that teachers are making the point and one teacher that comes to mind who has spoken a lot in the media, you can find her interviews, Karla Hilliard, teaching today is not the same profession that it was a decade ago, that it was 20 years ago, teachers and schools are almost functioning like a de facto social services program. So especially in places like West Virginia you have students who are experiencing poverty in their homes. Maybe they have families that are impacted by addiction and so teachers are having to function like social workers, schools are taking on a lot of community work that these schools aren’t set up to take care of and so I think that’s a very gendered thing as well. And that’s one of the reasons why teachers felt so passionately about this issue is because they understood that they could not do the best that they could do without improvements to the material conditions that they to enjoy or not enjoy as the case may be. Teachers in West Virginia but in Oklahoma, Kentucky, anywhere, I think represents this narrowing of who we consider, what we consider to be the common good and who we think is valuable and who we choose to support with resources and with solidarity and so I anticipate seeing a lot more support for actions like that as people claw back support for the common good and teachers become emblematic of it and its practical to support what their doing and this movement spread like wildfire.

VALLAS: I spoke a few weeks back on this show with Annelise Orleck, the author of “We Are All Fast Food Workers Now” and one of the themes of that conversation feels so related the West Virginia strikes and ultimately the deal that’s been struck here given that a lot of what we talked about was about the commonality that the struggles that so many workers are facing with each other. We truly are now all fast food workers in a way that is not broadly understood but that is clearly evident in the tremendous and continued growth of the labor movement and the direction that that’s headed, not just in the United States but globally. Part of what has been so notable in West Virginia has been the tremendous solidarity between workers like teachers who are viewed as somewhat professionals with more traditionally blue collar workers like custodians working in the schools which now has led to tremendous success in the form of pay raises not just for teachers for those quote unquote “professionals” but for all state employees.

CATTE: Yeah, it’s fantastic and again when the strike started it was going to be a pay raise of 5% for teachers and 3% for service personnel and teachers dug their heels in and produced that solidarity and got an increase for everybody across the board. I’m in Virginia now but I was in West Virginia last week at the beginning of the strike and it’s really difficult to describe the solidarity that was there. You have businesses in each community supporting the teachers, there was concern that students would go hungry not being able to access nutrition from school breakfast and school lunches while the schools were closed but business were pitching in to do food donations, teachers were pooling their resources to make sure that their students were fed. You had labor unions in California delivering food to the West Virginia capitol in Charleston to give teachers some pizza. There was an enormous fundraising effort that took place behind the scenes to make an informal general strike fund that’s been very successful too. And absolutely there has been enormous solidarity in West Virginia that has really made this strike something special. It’s hard to oversell just how much support teachers and service personnel had on the ground.

VALLAS: Before we started taping one of the things we were talking about was actually how amazing and positive and fantastic so much of the media coverage of the West Virginia teachers strikes has been and in particular in contract with the way that Appalachia is so often covered by the media which is just stereotypes and myths and images of hillbillies in ways that didn’t start with the 2016 election but certainly were on full display with the political press’s obsession and not entirely new found but somewhat with the white working class. You authored a book, as I mentioned, “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia” that looks exactly at this mismatch between the broader public understanding and so often media coverage and what it contributes to in terms of public understand or misunderstanding in this case about the culture and the people in that region of the country. Would love to hear a little bit from you in terms of what you’re seeing in terms of the contrast between the way the media is handling this particular issue in West Virginia and in this region of the country versus how the stories that are usually told about that region look.

CATTE: So one of the things that’s most fascinating to me is that in 2016 we got a narrative of the region and in the presentation of articles but also in the commentary that we the people were engaging with stories about Appalachia was very fearful, people didn’t want what was happening in Appalachia which is what they assumed to be overwhelming support for Donald Trump to leak out beyond the region, the borders of the region. It was a narrative that made people want to react with feelings of containment like oh, we need to push back and trap this toxicity in the region. And now I think spreading like wildfire is the metaphor that people use and they’re so excited for something that started in Appalachia to spread beyond the region. Teachers in Oklahoma, teachers in Kentucky and other states are really looking at West Virginia teachers as role models, as heroes, they’re excited for the movement that started in the region so that’s a fascinating reversal to me. But I think the media is doing lots of things I think it should have done in 2016. It’s engaging with kind of messy and complicated politics. Democrats, progressives are good and conservatives are bad, that’s not the story. People are engaging with that.

We’re looking at a different working class but that is very different than this mythical white man coal miner that got made as the symbolic face of the region. We are talking about different voices, solidarity, action, movement, all these things that are positive. But what we need to temper my own optimism a little bit is to say that the narrative of Appalachia often moves back and forth and a lot of people are looking at this moment, I think, 2018 midterm elections are coming up, they’re going to be very important and so people have scrutinized the strike for signs that a blue wave might hit the midterm elections and that West Virginia or Appalachia or some red states at large might be experiencing a political reckoning. So I would be cautious for those kinds of narratives. I would just wait to see how this plays out. What’s going in West Virginia isn’t a simple political story. There’s Trump supporters, Clinton supporters, I don’t support anybody in this movement and they seem to be aligned with specific goals right now. But we’re not sure that that’s going to be sustainable and we’re not sure if they want it to be sustainable.

VALLAS: Sarah Jaffe who has been on this show before and whom you actually quote in your article in The Nation, she wrote an op-ed in The New York Times looking at West Virginia, quote “Our labor history is not that deeply buried. If workers are pushed hard enough, those ghosts will rise.” And as you put it in your piece, “The people of West Virginia are not afraid of ghosts.” What are you hoping that the American people and that folks who are listening take away from the West Virginia strikes and the resolution and where do you hope things go from here in terms of what the labor movement learns from this success?

CATTE: So in West Virginia and Appalachia at large I think what was most exciting and heartening for me other than the unity and solidarity of the strike was the sense that people in the region of all political stripes might be open to a reckoning. The idea that we have abandoned the common good, that we need to reinvent in the common good, that we’ve let corporations walk all over us for too long, that we’ve lowered their taxes and we’ve tried to open doors for business and have tried to ally too strongly with big business. And it’s not worked out, we’ve slashed taxes and something’s not working. We’re at the point of no return, we need to make new strategies. And I think that if we can see that the way before hasn’t worked then the training point might be to reinvest in the common good, reinvest in teachers, reinvest in the poor, give the poor resources to build themselves up, to not trust that some company or some corporation is going to decide to act benevolent and rescue us with new investment and things of that nature so that’s the moment that I hope begins to pivot. It’s certainly overdue in Appalachia. I think the point that I make in a lot of my writing is that Appalachia isn’t very different really from the rest of the United States. So if we can find a way to bring ourselves together, I talk a lot about we need wealth redistribution. This is not the scary thing where I’m advocating robbing rich people or anything like that but it’s general true that the people on the bottom have increased the wealth of the 1% so we if can reverse that and use our power to stop that flow of wealth from the bottom up then I think that we might have a chance to make real change.

VALLAS: Elizabeth Catte is a public historian, she is author of the book “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia” and her piece in The Nation magazine is titled “West Virginia Teachers are Resurrecting the State’s Rich History of Labor Activism” you can find that at thenation.com. Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining the show and for your work on this.

CATTE: OK, thank you so much.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Last week the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case Janus vs. AFSCME, the latest attack on collective bargaining in the United States. The case would gut public sector unions by removing their ability to collect the funds they need to advocate for their workers. I’m joined by Elissa McBride, secretary treasury of AFSCME to unpack what’s at stake in the case. Elissa, thanks so much for joining the show.

ELISSA MCBRIDE: Very happy to be here.

VALLAS: So just to kick us off, help us understand what is at stake in this case? A lot of it gets kind of wonky talking about union dues and how that all works. Help us understand what’s going on in this case called Janus?

MCBRIDE: Yeah, well the bottom line is that this is a case about the freedom for public service workers to negotiate fairness for themselves and their communities. It really comes down to that. When public service workers like library workers and sanitation workers and social workers, those who make democracy happen in our communities, when public service workers have a voice on the job and the freedom to negotiate, they lift themselves out of poverty and they lift up the communities they serve. And this case is about weakening that freedom and their voice on the job.

VALLAS: So help us understand the technical details here. This all rests on whether workers who are on the job in states that are often called ‘right to work’ but are really heavily anti-union states are obligated to pay dues to a union if they don’t want to be a member. Help us understand how all of that works and why that matters when it comes to collective bargaining.

MCBRIDE: Yes, well this is actually a question that was settled by a Supreme Court case called Abood, we’ve had a 40 year precedent on this matter. It was a unanimous decision in the 1970s by the U.S. Supreme Court and what it said is that if workers choose to form a union in their workplace in the public sector, then the state or city or whoever that they are bargaining with can set up a system where everyone in the bargaining unit contributes to the cost of representing folks and bargaining a contract. No one is required to join a union, even in a situation where there is an agency fee or a fair share fee. But the law said and still says that everyone benefits from collective bargaining. Everyone gets the raises negotiated by the union. Everybody gets health insurance and retirement security. Everybody has representation rights when a union exists in their workplace and therefore everybody should help cover the cost of that representation and negotiation. That’s what at stake here. No one is required to join and this is an issue that the Supreme Court settled 40 years ago but we have an assault on a lot of rights for working folks, for voters, for women right now, from the same group of billionaires and corporation interests. And this case is brought to you by the same gang that’s trying to rig the economy in their favor and this is a piece of their agenda.

VALLAS: Now it’s women’s history month, a lot of folks have been pointing that what’s at stake in this case actually has a tremendous amount to really terrify and should be terrifying to women in particular and actually disproportionately women of color who have the most to lose. Why is that?

MCBRIDE: Yeah, when I am really privileged to serve as the secretary treasurer of our union which is 1.6 million members in the public service and a majority of them are women. And that’s true for the public sector as a whole as well. The majority of public service workers in our country are women and that might not surprise folks given that much of that work is caregiving work. But when you think about, public service jobs, public sector jobs in our country have been a path for women, for women of color, for all people of color to earn living wages, to have a higher quality of life and to have a path into the middle class. In fact if you think about all public sector workers as a pie, the biggest slice of that pie is African-American women. So the public sector is really comprised disproportionately of women and people of color and that means that attacks on public service workers and attacks on public service workers voice on the job are going to effect people of color and women most of all. So if you think about women for a minute, the majority of the public sector, those who have a union on the job in the public sector earn 15% more and we’re not talking about getting rich. These are still low paid jobs compared to a lot of jobs in our country. Caregiving jobs that are undervalued and often underpaid but still having a union allows you to advocate for yourself and for those that public service workers take care of. But they have a 15% wage gap and ¾ of women who have unions in the public sector have health insurance. So these things matter to women more, in a disproportionate way because we have had a leg up through public sector jobs and through public service unions.

VALLAS: If the Supreme Court ultimately does do what a lot of folks are very afraid it is going to do, particularly after hearing the arguments before the Supreme Court which many experts came away from saying oh, it really sounds like the court is going to rule for Janus, meaning ruling against AFSCME and ruling against unions. If that is what ultimately happens, unions will have to fundamentally change the way that they operate and particularly public sector unions. What will that look like and what will the consequences be for collective bargaining more broadly?

MCBRIDE: Yeah, well first I should say that if the Supreme Court decides this case on the legal merits there is no doubt that they will rule against Janus. However we are not going to count on that and we’ve been working hard in our union to really organize internally so that everybody knows what is at stake in this case and who is behind this attack the freedom to negotiate and the public sector. And we’ve been doing that organizing work inside our union for two or three years now and our goal is to build unions that are strong enough that folks will have a voice no matter what the Supreme Court does, no matter what any given politician does with backing from billionaires and corporate interests. And that means organizing collectively, coming together, taking on issues that matter to folks. And oftentimes those issues are things that are really about those that we serve. There are many, many members of our union who are passionate about public service and often times their agenda when they are taking collective action or negotiating with their employer is having adequate equipment to do their jobs effectively as EMTs for example or having enough staffing to provide the quality of healthcare that they feel that those they serve deserve. So these are the kinds of things that matter most to members of our union and other public sector unions.

The teachers in West Virginia were concerned about their own really struggling economic circumstances but they were also concerned about the standards for the students that they serve and the families that they serve. These are all the kinds of things that we’re going to have to continue to fight for, whatever the Supreme Court does.

VALLAS: The conversation around collective bargaining and particularly unions and policies that will have an impact on unions like the one that we’re discussing here are often framed in very partisan terms and particularly in the past few years. As though being pro-union is somehow to be a Democrat and to be anti-union is a Republican thing. But looking at West Virginia in particular, that is a so-called ‘right to work’ state and one that is famously incredibly conservative in many ways, maybe a little bit more purple now than it has been at other points in the state’s history but is a place where we’ve now seen just a total huge and in many ways groundbreaking success when it comes to collective bargaining. What are you views on what the conversation around this case tells us about the state of collective bargaining in this country and do you think that it’s fair to be framing all of this in such partisan terms?

MCBRIDE: Well if you look at the history of this issue in the Supreme Court, I think the answer lies in that reality which is as I said, the precedent that was created 40 years ago was a unanimous decision of a court that was ideologically homogenous. It was a court with a range of political and ideological views but it was unanimous in the case that created the ability for workers in the public sector to negotiate strong unions, to have a voice on the job where everybody paid their fair share for negotiations and for representation. And many of the governors across the country who supported having their own employees be given the opportunity to negotiate a fair return on their work who created collective bargaining rights for employees in their states. Many of the legislators who did that across the country were Republicans. So this is an issue that has always been about fairness and a voice on the job and not about political party and it has become a political issue because of the way the court has become politicized not because of the core of this issue. We at AFSCME, I can speak for our union, we represent membership that really reflects this nation in terms of being diverse, in terms of race and ethnicity, diverse in terms of gender and diverse in terms of political ideology. But what members of our union have in common is that they want to have a voice on the job to lift themselves up but also to advocate on behalf of those they serve.

VALLAS: In a moment like this where the threat comes in the form of a case at the Supreme Court, it is very easy to feel powerless if you’re a person who cares about these issues, cares about workers, is personally invested for oneself, ones’ family, one’s community in fighting for the right to organize and for voice on the job. When we’re facing this kind of a threat because it’s not call your member of congress or show up at necessarily a rally because there is legislation that everyone is focused on. What is it that people can be doing in this moment if they’re listening, if they’re getting angry and they’re saying, man, I want to do something but I just don’t know what it is.

MCBRIDE: I should thank those that did join us on February 24th, we had a workers’ day of action across the country and many of your listeners I’m sure were with us on that day and that was a chance for us to say we have a right to a voice on the job, workers need more freedom to negotiate in this country not less. And one of the people who spoke up here in D.C. at the Supreme Court on the day when the oral arguments occurred just a couple weeks ago was a school bus driver in Washington DC named Cory Upchurch. He’s an example of who we are as a union. He drives our children to school everyday in the city of Washington DC and he has a voice on the job and a seat at the table because he and his coworkers formed a union which requires organizing and having a vote and then working together to negotiate and for him he wants to negotiate so that he’ll have the tools and training and working conditions he needs to serve the people of DC and advocate for kids who can’t necessarily advocate for themselves. And there are a lot of workers like Cory who do not yet have a voice on the job or have a union at work. In fact one of the groups we just recently helped organize here in Washington DC were EMTs who were not direct employees of the city of DC, who worked for a private company but that company gets a lot of its business from the city of DC so those workers wanted to form a union in part to get the equipment they need to do their jobs well and that’s a hard thing to do. It’s difficult to organize a union for the first time, especially if your employer fights back and our labor laws in this country are strong enough to protect workers adequately when they stand up for the first time and organize so one thing that people could do is for one they could thank the Cory Upchurch’s of the world, the people who are serving our community everyday as public service employees and when they do choose to form a union on the job, to take that courageous step of maybe bucking their own employer and standing up for rights, we can support them because it’s a difficult thing to do and it’s always easier if your community is behind you when you take that step. So look around, thank a public service worker who is walking your kids to school or helping you at the library or assisting you in some way at a city agency and offer support to any worker who is trying to come together fellow employees are create a union for a voice on the job.

VALLAS: Elissa McBride is the secretary treasurer of AFSCME, the defendant in the case Janus v. AFSCME, which is just the latest attack but a substantial one and one we all need to be paying attention to on collective bargaining in the United States. Elissa, thank you so much for joining the show and for your work to give workers a voice on the job.

MCBRIDE: Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.

Transcript of bonus episode:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Pretty much anytime there is a mass shooting you can predict what will follow almost like clockwork. First come the thoughts and prayers, then comes the scapegoating of the quote, unquote “mentally ill”, notably absent of course is any action on the part of Republican lawmakers when it comes to common sense gun violence prevention measures. The national debate following the tragic mass school shooting last month in Parkland, Florida was no exception, unfortunately, with President Trump himself taking the scapegoating of people with mental illness to new levels. To bust some of the myths around mental health and gun violence I spoke with two leading expert, Mary Giliberti, the CEO of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, better know as NAMI, and Ari Ne’eman, the founder and past president of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network and a former Obama appointee to that National Council on Disability. First, my conversation with Mary.

Mary thanks so much for joining the show.

MARY GILIBERTI: Thanks so much for having me, Rebecca.

VALLAS: So I mentioned up top that Trump has said something things and isn’t he always saying some things but in this case he has said some things that have really taken the rhetoric when it comes to scapegoating gun violence on people living with mental illness and mental health disabilities to truly new heights. And I want to read one of the quotes from some of what he actually said to governors just a few days ago. He said, “We’re going to have to start talking about mental institutions because a lot of folks in this room closed their mental institutions also.” He’s talking of course to governors, he continues, “You know, in the old days, we had mental institutions, we had a lot of them and you could nab somebody like this because they knew something was off.” Those are some of the words that he has had in the wake of one of the most fatal and most tragic mass school shootings in this country’s history and his remarks hark back to a previous era when people with disabilities and particularly people with mental health disabilities and intellectual disabilities commonly lived in institutions instead of their communities. To help connect some of these dots, would you help tell us the story a little bit of deinstitutionalization and how we got to where we are today as Trump is mentioning in his comments?

GILIBERTI: Thanks Rebecca, before I go there and I will address those comments I do just want to start by as a mental health organization just acknowledging the implications for mental health on the Parkland community and how it is affecting that community, the parents, the teachers, the students and our recognition and sorrow for the pain and suffering that still is continuing there and to note that this pain and suffering continues throughout the nation and that we’ve heard from many of our members about how this is effecting them. People with mental illness and their families and particularly the way it is being talked about which you just got to. So now I’ll address what you were saying about institutionalization and I think that in particularly has been something very difficult for many people with mental illness in their families to hear. As you said, deinstitutionalization took place basically decades ago and part of the reason for that was the really poor conditions that were in those facilities at the time. And the lack of attention to mental health care and quality and the treatment that people were receiving. And when those were closed we were supposed to see resources and services in our communities which we have yet to see. And so as we thinking about what comes next for mental health care in this country we have to think about providing the services and supports in communities that people really need to do well and to get the care that is going to help them moving forward with their lives.

VALLAS: In the case of Parkland in particular there has been a lot of attention paid to the fact that the shooter had been diagnosed with depression and with autism. And that’s got a lot of folks connecting the dots and saying oh look see, here’s somebody who fits the bill of exactly what Trump and many others are pointing to when they paint the picture of the face of these mass shootings and connect them to mental illness. Are people with mental illness or mental health disabilities more likely than other people to commit violent crimes when we actually look at the numbers?

GILIBERTI: Generally and overwhelmingly people with mental illness are not more violent. There are risk factors, a variety of risk factors for violence which include past history of violence, substance use and there is some evidence that untreated psychosis can be a risk factor but that is a very small percentage and most gun violence has nothing to do with mental illness.

VALLAS: And one of the statistics that sometimes gets floated in these kinds of conversations is actually if I’m getting this right is that people with mental illness are actually more likely to be the victims of violent crimes.

GILIBERTI: Yes, that’s true. More likely to be the victims, another factor that we also want to consider as we think about mental health care is that many times there is a risk to a person, suicide is a major concern for people in the mental health community. We want to see people get good services and treatment for depression to reduce the risk of suicide, particularly in youth as we’re talking about youth here. It’s the second leading cause of death for youth, 15–24.

VALLAS: So why do you think that people go so quickly to mental illness in these conversations following national outrage in response to mass shootings?

GILIBERTI: I think often there is the idea that we need to have the conversation about mental health and we do not need to have a conversation about gun violence. Sometimes it’s used, as you say, as a scapegoat and I think it’s important that we have both conversations, we have a conversation about gun violence and we have a conversation about mental health care not because of the tragedy but because of the problem with people not receiving mental health care in America and what comes of that both for youth when they don’t get early intervention and how that effects the rest of their life and throughout the life span.

VALLAS: And so as we have this kind of national conversation which is so incredibly common following these horrible tragic shootings where everyone raises their hand and goes we got to make sure that quote, unquote “the mentally ill” are not able to get guns. What do we end up seeing as the consequence of that kind of a response apart from inaction on the part of lawmakers to actually address the real problems here when it comes to making our communities safer from gun violence?

GILIBERTI: We worry quite a bit about negative attitudes towards mental health conditions. So when you think about the numbers, Rebecca, one in five students in a high school are going to be effected by a mental health condition, one in five in our country and one in seventeen have a serious mental illness. So when we think about that, that’s a lot of people and we want to be sure that people are willing to come forward, willing to get the help that then need early in their condition, just like any other condition, whether it’s diabetes or hearth disease you want to get in early, right? I mean we think about that and we teach people about that for all other kinds of health conditions but we don’t do that for mental health conditions. So we believe that we really need to have that conversation and we need to be educating both students, parents, teachers, really thinking about how do we educate about these conditions and how do we avoid stigmatizing them because that only makes things worse.

VALLAS: A lot of the conversation is framed almost as either or, that the problem is about guns or that the problem is about mental health and mental illness and it’s almost as though the two don’t really find a place where they meet in a productive way. What’s the conversation that you wish we were having in the wake of a shooting like this?

GILIBERTI: Well I think that from again as you’re saying there should be two different conversations that as a country we have. And as we talk about gun violence is one set of conversations and then there is the conversation about what we do about mental health care and I think that that’s a really important conversation to have. What should we be doing when it comes to increasing access to mental health care? And I think from our perspective one of the areas that we think is most important is health care coverage. If you don’t have coverage you’re not going to get access to care and so the conversations that have been had from public policy perspectives on Medicaid, we need to have that program as strong as possible so that the 25% of funding from mental health care that comes from that program can be shored up and frankly in our opinion needs to be increase rather than decreased. And within Medicaid what people often don’t know is there are provisions that prevent paying for inpatient beds so only in the areas of mental health care are there limitations in that area and we really need to lift those limitations because we do need more acute care, more crisis scare to help ep0ople who are in need in addition to have robust community and outreach and crisis services. And so just like we have federally qualified health centers throughout this country that provide care to people in need, we need certified community behavioral health centers. Right now we have very few states involved in a pilot in that but we need that nationwide. We have community based mental health care that’s held to high standards and can really help people.

VALLAS: Now to get a little more of the historical context when it comes to these issues, I spoke with Ari Ne’eman who recently authored an article in The American Prospect that chronicles America’s ugly history of mass institutionalization and involuntary commitment. Let’s take a listen.

And I’m joined by Ari Ne’eman, he is the founder of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, he was an Obama appointee to the National Council on Disability and he’s the author of a forthcoming book that I know I am incredibly excited about. It’s called “The Right to Live in This World: The Untold Story of Disability in America”. Ari, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

ARI NE’EMAN: Thanks so much for having me, Rebecca.

VALLAS: So in the wake of the horrific shooting Florida that has reignited the national conversation around gun violence prevention, scapegoating is the name of the game. People with mental illness are being lifted up by President Trump and so many others including well-intentioned folks as the villains here that we need to be keeping in line. This perhaps most notably emerged in remarks that Trump gave to the nation’s governors wherein he essentially called to rollback the clock on mass institutionalization of people with disabilities and in particularly people with mental illness. What did you hear in those comments and then I’d love to hear from you the broader history that we need to be thinking about as we look at a president who is in many ways really calling for rolling back the clock.

NE’EMAN: So what I think is very clear is we have a Republican party and a president that is unwilling to face down the gun lobby. And with that in mind and needing to act in some way on these horrify and heinous mass shootings, a decision has been made to scapegoat people with mental illness. It’s their go to strategy, we saw it after Sandy Hook, we saw it in some truly terrifying legislation put forward several years ago by the House GOP caucus to roll back HIPAA privacy protections and expand forced treatment and now we’re seeing it again in President Trump’s remarks calling for expanding mental institutions and expanding involuntary commitment. One of the things that’s really unfortunate about this is Trump and others are putting forward this vision of an idealized past when people with mental illness got great treatment in institutions and the only reason these places were shut down in Trump’s eyes and the eyes of others who make this argument was a few overzealous advocates and ill-conceived notions from state legislatures looking to cut costs. The fact of the matter is that’s not true. In fact if we look at the history of institutionalization and involuntary commitment we see a record of horrifying human rights abuses. First, institutionalization, far from being the default way to support people with mental illness and other disabilities from time immemorial is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. People think of mental institutions as something that bowed to the efforts of reformers like Dorothea Dix in the 19th century and while Dix and others did help to establish a number of mental institutions, the large scale growth in institutionalization in the United States really took place in the first half of the 20th century as a result of the eugenics movement which sought to segregate people with disabilities from society. That the bulk of American institutionalization was not done to protect people with disabilities from society, it was done to protect society from disabled people. And that was really rooted in a number often very racist, prejudiced and otherwise horrifying myths around disability. We had a eugenics movement that was ready to blame the feeble minded as people were called in that time for everything from labor unrest to crime to prostitution and it was with this rhetoric that mass institutionalization began in the United States. That’s the history that people are ignoring when they call to bring back the institutions. And we need to make sure that’s front and center in this conversation.

VALLAS: Now at the height of this nation’s history with the mass warehousing which is really what it was of people with disabilities and in particularly people with mental illness and people with mental health disabilities and intellectual disabilities, there were hundreds of thousands of these individuals living in institutions instead of in their communities and with their families. Take us to present day. How did we get to a place where that is no longer the way we treat disability and mental health in this country?

NE’EMAN: So that’s exactly right. In the mid-20th century, 3 in every 1,000 Americans were institutionalized. Typically as a result of what we would today call either intellectual disability in some instances or mental illness and those are two separate categories although in the early 20th, 19th century often a distinction wasn’t made. Generally speaking when people became aware of the conditions in state institutions the conditions that institutionalized persons struggled under, folks were horrified. And we see every 30 to 40 years, we look at the history of institutionalization, some kind of expose where folks stand up and say we need to make these places safe for people, we need to improve conditions and then nothing really happened. We only began to see meaningful progress in the 1960s and 70s when a broad coalition of advocates initially emerging primarily in the intellectual and developmental disability context that started to come about, mental illness some decades later, started to push for making available services in the community. For saying you don’t have to leave your home, leave your neighborhood in order to get the support you need to live independently rather we’re going to bring supports to you. And for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, that worked very well. In fact from 1960 to the present, over 207 state institutions for developmental disabilities were closed, their residents were supported to move into the community, we’ve got a wealth of data and research and well as people’s own experiences and lives showing that in the intellectual and developmental disability context that was deinstitutionalization was a great success. Now, for people with mental illness, deinstitutionalization began to take place around the 70s and 80s. And there was and still is every reason to believe that community living and community supports could be similarly successful for people with mental illness as compared to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The problem emerged because in 1981 the Reagan administration dramatically cut funding to state for mental health services just as people with mental illness were beginning to leave state institutions. The Reagan administration block granted mental health funding to the states, very similar to what the Republican congress attempted to do to Medicaid this past summer. And so what you saw there was that community living supports for people with mental illness weren’t really tried, the funding was pulled out from under people just as folks were getting free from institutions. That’s where this idea in the public mind of deinstitutionalization as a failure comes from. That’s where we do see this legacy of people becoming homeless or ending up in prison, so on and such forth. But it wasn’t that that deinstitutionalization and community-based supports didn’t work for people with mental illness, it’s that it was never meaningfully tried because of the cost cutting measures of the Reagan administration.

VALLAS: Now with the conversation that’s happening nationally right now and that Trump has thrown all kinds of fuel onto and it’s not actually just Trump I should also name the Broward County Sheriff in Florida who in the wake of the shooting proposed expanding the Baker Act, which is the state of Florida’s involuntary commitment law. Involuntary commitment is a huge part of the conversation that’s currently playing out in ways where we see all kinds of folks pushing for making it easier to institutionalize people, even as the Broward County Sheriff has proposed on the basis of social media postings, so now a tweet or a Facebook posting could be what gets you locked up because of the perception that you are a danger to yourself or others. Help us understand how involuntary commitment currently works in this country and what those kinds of proposals would mean, where would they take us?

NE’EMAN: Well let’s start with the Baker Act, Florida’s involuntary commitment statute since you brought it up. In Miami-Dade public schools, the Baker Act is used on school children about 3 times a day, and that’s disproportionately on children with developmental disabilities, often ends up being used as a substituted for school discipline in much the same way that we see schools often call local law enforcement when children misbehave and that often sets youth with disabilities on the school to prison pipeline. We see a very similar use of involuntary commitment statutes for a youth with disabilities. Now if we go back 50, 60 years or so, we saw much broader involuntary commitment statutes that essentially allowed people to be locked up for what was perceived to be their own good. Essentially if the state could determine that they believed you would benefit from institutionalization you could be subject to involuntary commitment. And what we saw as a result of that were some pretty significant abuses.

Not only people with disabilities but people from racial and ethnic minority groups, women, many, many others who for whatever reason found themselves in a situation where they were less likely to be believed than others who had power over them were locked up under these statutes, often for a very significant amount of time. Take the case, we want to go back to the 1860s or so of Elizabeth Packard whose husband, Calvinist minister had her committed because she publicly disagreed with him on church doctrine. It took years to secure her release during which time her husband left the state with her children. Packard went on to become an activist for the rights of institutionalized people and married women. But it took until the 1960s and 70s to begin to change the legal requirements of involuntary commitments to in most states a focus on somebody being a danger to themselves or others. Now we generally see relatively broad agreement that there is a limited role for short term involuntary commitment. Say if somebody is at imminent risk of being a danger to themselves or others. What Trump and the Broward County Sheriff and others are proposing are opening up those statutes to take it back to the olden days when it involuntary commitment was a relatively easy process for families, psychiatrists and courts to impose. That’s a problem.

In the United States we usually recognize that people have a right to refuse medical treatment if they deem that it isn’t a good fit for them. We usually recognize that people should have choices about the kinds of care they do or don’t receive. And particularly within a context where millions of people with mental health conditions are not given access to support for care that they actually want, focusing public policy of forcing involuntary treatment seems profoundly hypocritical. Why would we be spending our time and our energy and attention on forcing people into treatment at the same time that our policymakers are trying to cut Medicaid and take away resources from people who are actively looking for mental health care. It makes no sense.

VALLAS: And is there also a risk with all of this talk of trying to make it easier to lock people up who might be showing signs or evidence of mental illness. Is there a risk that that kind of rhetoric let alone that kind of ramped up policy could actually make it even harder for people living with mental illness to seek treatment for fear of losing their independence?

NE’EMAN: I think that’s absolutely correct and that’s something we’ve seen in other parts of the country. When people are afraid that if they seek out mental health treatment they are going to be subject to involuntary commitment, they’re less likely to seek out mental health treatment. That’s part of why some of the statutes that states have passed that for example require psychiatrists to report their patients if they believe they should not maintain gun ownership often after unintended consequences. We saw one of these in New York recently, very well intentioned, obviously you want someone to be reported if there is an issue with them being a gun owner but because this is specifically oriented around the mental health system, what it actually amounts to is a disincentive for people who prioritize that in their lives to seek out mental health care. So we have to consider that policy often has unintended consequences that are not so easily predicted. It’s not enough to just say, we want to less gun violence and so we’re going to push forward involuntary commitment. First, there is no real reason to believe that the first is going to result in the second but more importantly there is a significant risk that we might disincentivize the very kind of care that the vast majority of people with mental illness are seeking out and often have denied to them.

VALLAS: Sometimes it seems that we only have national conversations about mental health and mental health policy in the wake of mass shootings. Obviously not what I would love to see and I know not what you would like to see. If we were having the right conversation about mental illness, mental health and what the policies are that we should be putting in place to ensure that people are able to access treatment when that is needed, when that’s appropriate, what would that conversation look like and what are the solutions that you would want to see policymakers embracing.

NE’EMAN: Well I think you’re right. We need to separate out the mental health conversation from the gun violence conversation because frankly both of them are not well served by being connected to each other. Mental illness was connected to gun violence largely as a result of efforts by the gun lobby to deflect attention from gun control and that’s not a useful way of talking about mental illness, it’s not a useful way of talking about gun violence, it’s just a problem. Now if we’re talking about mental health policy on it’s own, I would say one of the biggest priorities is expanding Medicaid. People with mental illness have disproportionately benefited from Medicaid expansion because they are less likely to be access Medicaid through Supplemental Security Income, the disability payments program that people with disability who have less [INAUDIBLE] may have access to if they can demonstrate sufficient impairment. People with mental illness are disproportionately likely to be harmed by Medicaid work requirements because they may have trouble proving their disability in order to gain an exemption from them and as a result are going to face significant challenges in entering the workforce when they don’t have access to the supports necessary to do so.

I would also mention the issue of housing. One of the big innovations in mental health treatment has been something called housing first. Namely that people, and you wouldn’t think that this is a revolutionary concept Rebecca but it actually has a pretty significant effect on the conversation. Housing first says that people are more likely to either recover or otherwise improve in the context of their mental illness if they have access to stable housing. And so it offers housing support to low income people with mental illness, often for rental assistance without preconditions like them succeeding in treatment first or work requirements or anything of that nature. We know that this is often more cost effective than what ends up happening when folks are on the streets or there are requirements that people meet certain metrics towards their recovery before they access public assistance. So there is a lot that we can do to improve the mental health policy conversation but in order to accomplish that we need to separate it out from gun violence.

VALLAS: Ari Ne’eman is the founder of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, he’s a former Obama appointee to the National Council on Disability and author of the forthcoming book “The Right To Live In This World: The Untold Story of Disability in America”. To learn more about the history he’s been describing of involuntary commitment and the history of institutionalization of people with disabilities and particularly people with metal illness, mental health disabilities and intellectual disabilities in this country you can find an article he wrote for The American Prospect titled “Another Tragedy, Another Scapegoat”, that’s at prospect.org. Ari, thank you so much for coming back on the show and for your work to shed light on this ugly history.

NE’EMAN: Thanks so much, Rebecca.