How A New Documentary Movie, “Americonned,” Relates To Workers’ Comp

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Intro: Workers Comp Matters, the podcast dedicated to the laws, the landmark cases, and the people that make up the diverse world of workers’ compensation. Here are your hosts, Jud and Alan Pierce.

Judson Pierce: Hello and welcome to another edition of Workers’ Comp Matters. My name is Jud Pierce. We are delighted to have a special guest with us here today, Dave Pederson. Dave is formally of Massachusetts, now of Austin, Texas and you may know him as a producer of the Oscar-winning movie ‘Super Size Me’. He has a new movie out that’s in all the streaming formats for your watching and entertainment pleasure. The title of the movie is ‘Americonned’ and he is here with us today to discuss that movie and what brought him to it and how it relates to the topic that we discuss here on our show Workers’ Compensation. So with that I’d like to welcome you, Dave, to our program and introduce my co-host, Alan Pierce.

Alan Pierce: Hey, Dave, thanks for joining us. I watched your film last night and I was struck by it. I found it very informative and to be frank, quite troubling. The basic premise is income inequality in the United States. Just very quickly, tell us exactly what that means in the context of your film.

Dave Pederson: This is a subject I’ve been following for a while. I really started digging deep into this during the 2008 subprime crisis. And so through that, I started digging through numbers. I start going through grass like Berkeley, the University of Iowa, they were starting to do studies on income inequality from Reagan on, and I had just started noticing, like a stark difference between like the rise of productivity and the lack of rise in wages. It’s almost like twice the amount. I think like productivity went up like 255% since then and wages 115%. So I started seeing numbers like that and also if you noticed, a focus of our film too is we’re starting to show like the resurgence of unions today and seeing the rise of labor. And that was also another stark indicator to me that things were really askew, was when you looked at charts of the decline of union memberships and the decline in wages were going hand in hand, steadily decline. As one went down, wages went down, and then you start seeing that gap in wealth income between the top 10% to the bottom 90%.

I think you might have heard one of the stark figures in our film was, since 1980, $50 trillion of wealth has transferred from the bottom 90% to the top 1% in the United States. Actually, I think it’s the world now. I mean that stat always kills me. It’s like when I look at that, my jaw drops and it’s steadily getting worse. I mean, I think, I don’t know if you’ve been following, but we’ve seen some new stats like the last quarter. I think the richest, the top 45 richest in the world gained another $840 billion in wealth. I mean it’s just so top-heavy now. I mean it can’t last. It can’t last. It’s unhealthy.

Alan Pierce: Yeah. And you talk about the market discrepancy between the very rich and the poor, as well as the shrinking, those very significant shrinking of what’s known as the middle class. I think it was Jesus who might have said, “The poor will always be with you”, but there was another quote in your movie that struck me and I’d like you to expand upon it and that is that the evil part is the belief that when poor people get richer, it will harm the economy. Expand on that. How does that happen?

Dave Pederson: That’s from Nick Hanauer. Nick is a fascinating guy. I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to, he has a great podcast Pitchfork Economics, but Nick is a great guy. He’s a billionaire, first of all. This guy talks the talk and walks the walk because he was one of the guys leading the fight for 15 in Seattle. He’s a great guy. But that, what he’s saying there is, if you don’t pay people — like I think his other line is like, “If you don’t pay people the money who’s going to buy the stuff?” And that’s the problem we’re seeing, as if we’re not seeing any rise in wages. So, that’s all comes down to the myth of the trickle-down economics from Donald Laffer and Reagan bringing in trickle-down economics saying like, “Okay, well if we make rich people really rich, they’re going to create more jobs and that money is going to trickle down” which we have seen a completely is — is a complete falsehood. There’s nothing to back it up.

There’s a reason why I couldn’t get one conservative economist or politician to appear in the film. There’s a reason because they don’t want to talk about these facts. We’ve seen, it’s been a complete failure, trickle-down economics. It’s a total fraud, total fraud.

(00:05:02)

Judson Pierce: What gives me hope from watching the movie is that there are some people who are interviewed and you interviewed many people across the country which is remarkable.

Dave Pederson: Yeah.

Judson Pierce: Tell us a little bit about Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer early in the film and what their influence is in terms of giving some hope?

Dave Pederson: Well I can’t say enough about those two guys. Chris and Derrick are really, really fascinating, just great guys, really smart. They gave me hope through this film. I’ve been filming this. Like I said, I tried to start making this film in 2008, then I tried to make it, to get it out before the 2016 election, couldn’t get it done. People have not taken this topic very seriously, especially in the entertainment industry. It’s sort of a bubble and people don’t see the poverty outside those bubbles.

But with Derrick and Chris, we are filming us and it was a really depressing film. You think it’s depressing now. I mean, at the end, you see we have the victory at the Staten Island union vote, the Amazon facility in Staten Island. And we went down to Alabama to film that election. We have that in the film and we lost that election there. I say “we” because I always feel like I’m part of this, but it was so depressing. I was really depressed and like I have this totally depressing film that’s just going to make people cry and see no hope. So luckily Sean Claffey, my good friend and the director of the film was like, “Let’s just keep filming.” It was going to hurt us because this is a thing we’ve been self-funding, everything, it’s all sweat equity in this project and he was right. We kept filming. He’s like, “Let’s see what happens at Staten Island.”

We kept going, we kept going and then boom, we won in Staten Island and everyone, I was getting text from other filmmaker friends who are like texting me like, “You got the ending of your movie” and I was like so excited. I was like, “Good. I want some people to walk out with some hope and see some hope there.” I think they’re driving it because I like Chris and Derrick because they’re a little — they’re not the conventional union types that they see and they get a lot of backlash for that. People don’t like take them serious, but they’re two very smart guys, like really smart and they connect with young people which I think is key now. I mean you could see it with Republicans now trying to stymie the vote. They want to raise the voting age, things like that. It’s because guys like these are getting out to the young people and saying, “Hey look, unions are a good thing. You should join a union” and you’re starting to see it. When you’re out there, they really connect with the younger union members and possible union members.

So they’re great. They gave me hope because they didn’t quit, they just kept learning. They lost Alabama, they learned their mistakes. They came to Staten Island and they fixed those mistakes and they’re still learning, but yeah, those two are great. They just don’t give up and they’re just two amazing guys.

Alan Pierce: Jud and I were talking pre-taping of the show and we’re talking about how does this topic relate to our general topic here, workers’ compensation. In some ways, very small but meaningful ways I think it does. We deal with people who are the working middle class, lower middle class, for a large degree, the working poor. Those are the ones who are most likely to be injured in physically demanding jobs and we see the inequality of pre-injury wage and post-injury benefit levels. But, we’ve seen that decline over the last 30 years and one of the major reasons for the decline is the shift in political power in the legislators and probably most importantly, the decline of influence of organized labor. And whenever there has been workers’ compensation legislation, either through enhance benefits or to keep benefits from going backwards, it has been organized labor that’s been the principal driving force lobbying-wise and other ways and with less and less people being employed under collective bargaining agreements, it seems that that is one of the major barriers to stop the race to the bottom in our field and kind of turn things around. Do you see some hope that we will see an increase in membership of people that are working under collective bargaining agreements and have the influence of organized labor behind them?

Dave Pederson: Well, we’ve been really following the UPS and Teamsters strike. I think that’s a real bellwether for this is like, depending on how that goes, I feel that that might turn a corner. I like what Sean O’Brien is doing there. He’s not laying down. Watching him testify in Congress, you need that. You need that tough leadership and these guys aren’t going to back down because you guys see it. You guys are in the front line fighting for workers and you’re seeing — I mean it’s overwhelming power and force against them. I mean, we touch on it a lot about the federal society and how the courts have been — I mean they’ve been packed and it’s crazy. Think about our Supreme Court alone. I mean the Republicans have won one popular election since ‘92, but it puts six justices on the Supreme Court. It’s insane. Those guys really keep their eye on the prize of what they want.

(00:10:03)

I just see this, the UPS thing is, I’m hoping this turns good for our side because with that, I think it will raise people’s hopes and then you’ll see UPS, you can see they’re starting to leak into Amazon and get their drivers unionized and all that. So I think it’s sort it will have a ripple effect. So that’s the one I’m really watching closely and we’re seeing strikes everywhere which is great. You’re seeing people are fed up, nurses — everyone is kind of fed up and they’re learning like here in Austin. By the way, I am moving to Portland, Maine August 1, so I’m relocating.

Judson Pierce: Oh great.

Alan Pierce: Keep it weird Portland, they could use it.

Dave Pederson: Oh we will. We will. You could see like here, like I go around to like all these restaurants here and they’re unionizing, like the pizza place down the street. I walked in and there were like unionized and they were so happy. You can actually see the looks on their faces. I was like, “Congratulations” and I left them like a $50 tip. I was like, “Congratulation” and I’m like, “And watch my movie.” And then like the Starbucks I go to which I rarely go to Starbucks, but I do. I only go to the ones that are unionized. And so you’re starting to see that, like you’re just seeing like walkouts like, “Hey, these conditions stink. We’re out of here.” You start to see that like in fast food restaurants and people like — I think people are fed up. I think we’re getting to that point. I know like what you guys do is like — I mean you guys are fighting huge corporations too, just trying to get people what they’re deserved, what they’re deserved under the law and these people will fight to save every dollar. It’s really crazy to me how — it’s just greed now, it’s just plain greed.

Judson Pierce: Well let’s take a quick break from a word from one of our sponsors and we will be right back here with Dave Pederson. We’re going to go into a little bit of the history of what brought us to this moment when we return. So stay tuned.

We’re back. We have Dave Pederson here with us to talk about his movie ‘Americonned’ and before the break, Dave, we were talking about what may have led you to this making of this film, but also what led America to the point that we are. Could you get into both of those topics briefly for us, both what led you to this movie and what led this country to this moment?

Dave Pederson: Yes. Along with our movie, a good plug I can mention is also — you saw from watching movies, we have Kurt Andersen in there who wrote ‘Evil Geniuses’, I highly recommend that book. That book really helped steer us in the later parts of crafting the film because he kind of laid out the blueprint of how we got here a little bit from the early ‘70s on. But for me, it started with — I’d always been a fan of FDR, and for the most part LBJ, he had a lot of faults obviously. But I had started reading the Robert Caro biography on LBJ, which to me is like one of the greatest piece, works ever written. I started like — I said, “You know what? I’m going to pop on and watch his 1965 war on poverty speech”, and it really hit me. I was like, “Wow, what a powerful speech in 1965” and he declared war on poverty and my original title of this film was called ‘Poor’. It was like how the war on poverty became a war against the poor, and then we changed it because the America (ph) — which we will get into later, but I saw his speech and so I started extrapolating numbers and I looked. I’m like, “Okay, what was poverty in 1965?” And like, “Oh it was around 25%”, high number in 1965 and then I looked. I was like, “Okay, what happened after he implemented all these programs in the Great Society?” I looked and by the time Nixon has started dismantling them in like 1973-’72, he started dismantling all these programs, they basically halved poverty to I think around 11 or 12%.

So to me, it was a great success what he was doing. I mean if it wasn’t for Vietnam, like we would look at LBJ in a totally different light. It just struck me. And then I started extrapolating data more (ph). I was like, “Okay, what was the minimum wage in 1965?” I remember looking. It’s like $1.25 an hour. So then I started like crunching the numbers and then I’d started talking to a friend of mine, Barry Ritholtz in the film from Ritholtz Wealth Management who wrote ‘Bailout Nation’ and I was talking. I was like, “Well, Barry. I was just extrapolating these numbers from the 1965 middle wage and like shouldn’t be like $21-$22 an hour now if you did the math?” He’s like, “Yeah, should be like $22 to $24 an hour should be minimum wage now.” And that’s what got me and I was like, “Okay, this is like not right.”

Then I started extrapolating more. So I was like, “Okay, you could look” and you look at now, people are always like giving these young kids like, “Oh well, they can’t afford houses.” Like, “Well they come out of school with a $200,000 debt when back in the ‘60s you could buy a house with $9,000.”

(00:15:03)

You can’t do these things now. You can’t raise a family on minimum wage, you just can’t do it. I mean the other stark number when you look at it is like 44% of our nation and it’s in the film, is the 44% is making $10.25 an hour or under, $10.25 an hour or less. I mean you can’t raise a family; you can’t do anything. It’s like it’s impossible and think about it, the minimum wage hasn’t gone up in 9 years and then when they raised it 9 years ago, it was 25 cents.

Judson Pierce: One of the things that I think is striking in my practice and I’m sure Alan can attest to this, is that the impression that people would rather be on workers’ comp than work. You say in the movie that the people who are poor in this country are workers and that’s the screwed up thing in all of this is that it isn’t people who are just lazy or not willing to work. These are people who are actually working sometimes two, three jobs and still not making ends meet.

Dave Pederson: Yeah. You saw, Jud, in the film. We had like, I think it’s over 70% of citizens receiving financial assistance are working full-time, over 70%. It’s that whole welfare queen myth that Reagan came up with. They just want to sit and make them and it’s false. People want to work. I mean, you’re always going to have people on the edge of society and that happens. That’s just going to happen. But saying that people just want to receive — no, people want to get up and work. They want to like strive because you’re — that’s being stuck on a treadmill in the same way, “Oh, but because get to do nothing?” But they’re not going to get any further. I mean, they can’t strive, but they can’t do it anymore because the good paying jobs just aren’t out there. And now with AI biting into it, it’s going to get worse. I mean, I think we underestimated that in our film because AI is really on hyper drive now.

Judson Pierce: Yeah, in fact, I was going to follow up on that because one of the major points in your film is that the extreme wealth, on both sides, you got George Soros in the left, you got the Koch brothers on the right.

Dave Pederson: Yeah.

Judson Pierce: And the billions of dollars they are actually, and with AI, will even get worse, enable to convince people to vote against your own best interests. Aristotle, several thousand years ago said, “In a democracy, the poor will have more power than the rich because there are more of them and the will of the majority is supreme.” Where has that gone off track?

Dave Pederson: Well you see it. Like I said, it’s sort of the brainwashing of everything. Like unions are evil. Like, how long have they been demonizing unions? Like, “Oh they’re all corrupt this and that.” Like they’ve convinced everyone that they’re like — and I think it was Upton Sinclair like back in the turn of the 20th century. I think he said — did he say like, “Every American thinks they’re like one good decision from being a millionaire”, or something like that and I think that’s the feeling. People like, “Oh, I’m just like one great idea from being Mark Zuckerberg” and it’s like, “No, that’s not how it works.” So they believe this. So they think it’s — pull yourself up by the bootstraps and you’ll get there, but you can’t, you just can’t do it. It’s just not there. So far, a few in between those people, they don’t realize how rare that is. You look at like these kids. You’re coming out, immediately, you’re $200,000 debt coming out of college. I mean I could imagine. Could you imagine coming out of college with that much debt? I mean, these kids, I’m like I’m frightened for them. I feel for them and I just don’t know. I mean you’re already behind the eight ball.

Alan Pierce: Plus, with a degree in philosophy. Yeah.

Dave Pederson: Yeah exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Judson Pierce: And that’s the degree that you really should have, I think to make a better life for yourself is a degree in philosophy.

Dave Pederson: Well going to the AI thing is interesting because we’re like — God I think we really — our number should have been a little about higher about how many jobs are going to be displaced. But the funny thing is no one cared until recently when you’re starting to see — no offense to you guys, but you’re seeing like robot lawyers, AI, like AI taking the job of white-collar jobs and now they’re like, “Oh, well maybe AI isn’t that great of an idea.”

Judson Pierce: Right.

Dave Pederson: Like we thought they were just going to — the guy is going to deliver my burger to me is going to be a robot and that’s fine.

Judson Pierce: Yeah. Senator Schumer yesterday said that he’ll have a bill on the White House desk, not in months, but in weeks. Yeah, I think it’s gotten to Congress because it could be robot congressman soon. So why don’t we take a quick break and we’ll be right back with our special guest Dave Pederson.

Alan Pierce: Welcome back. As we wrap up with our guest, Dave, I want to talk to you about the title of your film ‘Americonned’ and when I saw that, before I really knew much about the movie, much less not having seen the movie, I thought I would be seeing a more overt depiction of how the population of the United States, maybe the poor, the working poor, the lower-middle class have been conned, have been deceived. I didn’t see that explicitly spelled out in your movie. It would seem to be the subplot. So where have we all been conned and how have we been conned?

(00:20:18)

Dave Pederson: Well first of all, going with the overtness of it all is — I didn’t really want like — all right, we’re stuck with a two-party system here. That’s just how it is. I love to just throw all the blame on the Democrats, but I can’t. I mean, I’ve been independent since I graduated college in ’92. I was a Democrat and I’ve campaigned for Jerry Brown in college. I remember like when Clinton took over I was like, “Wow, this guy is like campaigning on cutting welfare just to pull Republican voters” and he did all those things. He could have just reneged on everything and got elected (ph). Like if deciding to do it, not do it like Republicans usually do, I was like, “Why not use that?” But this is guy who created NAFTA.

So none of these guys like — Obama even said it. I’ve said Obama. I’m like, “There’s not much difference between Obama and Reagan.” To me, it’s a thin line between those guys and neoliberals and neoconservatives, thin line. So I didn’t want to cast blame just on one political party. There’s a lot of blame to go around. Hence, the conservatives I think, I would take shoulder a bigger part of it, but they’ve been complicit because look at some of these democratic senators. There’s pile of money, getting tons from lobbyists. So that to me — we couldn’t really take a side. A lot of people want to think, “Oh, you guys are just communist, this and that.” It’s like, “No.” It’s like I made it purposefully poached, things like put pictures of people like Biden and Obama and say they’re part of the problem too. It’s like it’s not just one party.

Alan Pierce: I’m sorry. That’s the other thing that struck me, Dave, is that there were quotes and film clips from I think everybody from LBJ to Nixon to Carter, nothing from Ford. We had some Bush, Clinton and Obama. I don’t believe Trump’s name or his image was in your film at all, was that purposeful?

Dave Pederson: You know, Alan, it’s hard to say. I never asked Sean, the director, that. I’ve never asked because we never had that. Yeah. I can’t really honestly tell you if it was purposeful. It might have been. Sean is really smart and Christopher Seward who was our other co-writer on it, that might have been a purposeful thing, but it’s a good point, Alan. I wish I could answer you on that, but I’m not quite sure. There are clips of him there. There are clips of him like at the White House.

Alan Pierce: Yeah, there was insurrection of a clip, but it seemed to me that the underlying message is, if this doesn’t reverse itself or it’s already started that we are going to get a Trump. We’re going to get an authoritarian or we’re going to get a revolution and I would suspect the people behind the insurrection and the election fraud issue, in a sense, was a revolution. I was expecting maybe the last half of the movie or the end of the movie would bring us up to the current political state with him running again in for ‘24 and the four years that he was in office. I was wondering if this was all just going to be the subliminal message and I was waiting for –.

Dave Pederson: Well, I mean it kind of is. I think it does set off a subliminal message. It does. I think we’re going — like it’s kind of a scary point. I’ve been warning people about this for 20, almost 30 years. I’m like, “We’re heading this way. We’re heading this way” and people just laughed at me. I’m like, it’s becoming more and more, everything shifting to the right more and it keeps going and now it’s like we’re on an express elevator that way. I mean it’s scary. Think about it. Look, I just saw like the Trump poll numbers, like he’s polling in the Republican primaries at 56%. You’re seeing guys, come on saying, “Oh, if he murdered someone on live on TV, I’d still vote for him.” I mean, it’s insane. I mean he’s the ultimate conman. He’s sort of like the embodiment of it all though, isn’t he? It’s like, these guys have lied and cheated and conned their way into saying, “Oh if we keep cutting taxes to the poor.” I mean you saw the segment we have in the film too where we’re showing all the corporations that aren’t paying taxes but are getting rebates.

Judson Pierce: Right.

Dave Pederson: Like those checks were huge. Yeah, $137 million to Amazon. The average billionaire pays a tax rate of 8%, 8%.

Alan Pierce: But on the contrary side, these billionaires will say, “We’re such philanthropists. We give so much money of ours away to charitable causes that it equates to us paying in taxes. What would you say to that argument?

Dave Pederson: It doesn’t. One, that’s so laser focused and it’s like — and one — I think you guys might know this too. A lot of those organizations are so top-heavy. So much of the money is going to salaries, this and that.

(00:25:09)

All right, for example, if you want to level the playing field, if you just took like Walmart and Amazon and told them to pay everyone $25 an hour, that would change things overnight in this country. You know what? It wouldn’t affect their profits in the slightest, maybe a tick, but it’s nothing. It’s just pure greed. I mean, you could change. For example, it was great. I was actually walking in Burlington, Vermont and I was walking by the Burlington Bagel Factory. I was looking at like signs what people are paying and it said, “Starting at $25 in small business.” I’ve been seeing this like the fight for Seattle, the fight for 15 Seattle was a big deal because they were like, “If you pay these people more than $15 an hour, everyone’s going out of business” and know what’s happened in Seattle? The businesses are all thriving because now these workers can afford to live closer to work, they send, there’s less turnover, and they’re spending. Like people forget, poor people don’t hoard money like billionaires. Billionaires are just, they’re money hoarders. You pay people more money, it goes directly back into the economy and everyone rises, like businesses thrive. It’s just pure greed. There’s no way around it, there’s no way other way around to look at that. It’s just pure greed because if you pay people more, that money goes right back into the economy and I think you guys know that. People just don’t realize. It’s really simple. This isn’t hard stuff to figure out.

Alan Pierce: Well as they as they say, Gordon Gekko said, “Greed is good” and as somebody said in your film, the only sole goal of corporation is to make money.

Dave Pederson: This is it.

Alan Pierce: And Milton Friedman.

Dave Pederson: They’re the worst people ever. He’s really kind of the villain of the film, but he’s always been my villain. He’s one of the worst horrible human beings that could ever be conceived and Mitch McConnell. Like, you could just launch them into the sun, it would have been great.

Alan Pierce: Well David, we could talk about this probably for another hour or two.

Judson Pierce: Yeah absolutely.

Dave Pederson: Well I know. I know.

Alan Pierce: I urge our listeners who have an interest in workers’ comp, that means you have an interest in a social safety net, a social insurance and the betterment of society. So even though this is not directly on point, it overlaps sufficiently that this is a movie that you really ought to see. So I want to thank you for sharing a half hour with us and look forward to your next venture.

Dave Pederson: Thank you Alan, Jud, it was great. It was great. Yes, Jennifer says great things about you.

Judson Pierce: She is a terrific leader, the Workers’ Injury Law & Advocacy Group which we’re so active with, and Dave, once again, thanks so much for being on our show.

Alan Pierce: And to those of you who are listening.

Judson Pierce: Yeah.

Alan Pierce: Go out and make it a day that matters. Goodbye.

[Music]

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