Working People
313 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 245 ratingsWorking People: A podcast by, for, and about the working class today (now in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network).
Working People is a podcast about working-class lives in 21st-century America. In every episode, you'll hear interviews with workers from around the country, from all walks of life. We'll talk about their life stories, their jobs, politics, and families, their joys and hopes and frustrations. Overall, Working People aims to share and celebrate the diverse stories of working-class people, to remind ourselves that our stories matter, and to build a sense of shared struggle and solidarity between workers around the country.
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Episodes
Brett Cross, Uzi's Dad
March 05, 2024 12:00 - 1 hour - 186 MBBrett Cross is a small-town kid who grew up in Western Texas, among the oil fields, near Odessa. He worked in the oil fields, worked his way up to doing pipeline work, eventually moving to green energy work. He even became a foreman, working hard to provide for his family. And Brett was at work when he got the call from his wife Nikki that changed their lives forever. It was May 24, 2022, Nikki was at their sons’ school, Robb Elementary, in Uvalde, Texas. “This is not a fucking joke,” she s...
**'The Upsurge' is Dead. Long Live 'The Upsurge'! (w/ Teddy Ostrow)**
March 01, 2024 15:07 - 12 minutes - 28.1 MBThis is an excerpt from our most recent bonus episode featuring Teddy Ostrow. To access the entire conversation, and numerous bonus episodes we have released throughout seven seasons of Working People, please visit our Patreon to unlock this content. The Upsurge was an invaluable show that documented two of the most pivotal labor union struggles in recent years as they were happening: the 2023 Teamsters contract fight at UPS, and the UAW's 2023 stand-up strike at the Big Three automakers...
Why Do Railroad Workers Keep Dying on the Job? (w/ Nick Wurst, Matt Weaver, Mark Burrows, & Ross Grooters)
March 01, 2024 00:38 - 56 minutes - 128 MB"Last Wednesday, a fellow rail worker was gravely injured on the job and lost his life," a Feb 6 email from Railroad Workers United reads. "Our brother Chris Wilson, who worked for Norfolk Southern, was critically injured in its Decatur rail yard Wednesday and died Thursday at Huntsville Hospital." Another email from Feb. 9 reads, "On January 15th, a fellow rail worker was killed on the job in Ohio." Then, on Feb 17, another email: "On February 13th, a fellow rail worker was killed on the jo...
"Shut It Down!": On the Ground at Johns Hopkins Grad Union's Practice Picket
February 21, 2024 07:40 - 36 minutes - 82.4 MBOne year ago, graduate student-workers at Johns Hopkins University overwhelmingly voted to unionize under the banner of Teachers and Researchers United (TRU-UE), which is affiliated with United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers. While workers had much to celebrate with their historic union election victory, bargaining a first contract with the university administration has been another story. On February 20, fed up with what workers say have been disrespectful and insufficient offers fr...
Baltimore's Co-Ops Show There's Another Way to Work (at the Baltimore Museum of Industry)
February 14, 2024 09:22 - 1 hour - 166 MBBaltimore has become what many consider to be ground zero in the emerging “solidarity economy” and the formation of worker-owned, cooperatively run businesses. There’s something important going on here, and there’s a lot that we can all learn from our fellow workers who are in the cooperative space—people who are living, breathing proof that there’s another way to run a business, that there's another way to run our economy, and that there are other ways we can treat work and workers. At a r...
Homegrown Sandwich Shop Workers Hit 100 Days on Strike (w/ Sydney Lankford & Perry)
February 07, 2024 15:24 - 48 minutes - 112 MBWorkers at Homegrown Sustainable Sandwiches in the Seattle area voted overwhelmingly to unionize with UNITE HERE LOCAL 8 in late 2022, and they have been fighting for a first contract ever since. In fact, workers from two Homegrown stores have been on strike since late last fall in protest of the unfair termination of union leader Sydney Lankford, who was fired after speaking up at a union delegation. By the time you hear this, workers at the Redmond Homegrown location will have been on str...
East Palestine—1 Year After the Derailment
January 31, 2024 08:31 - 1 hour - 173 MBFeb. 3, 2024, marks the one-year anniversary of the Norfolk Southern train derailment that changed life forever for the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, and the surrounding area. The derailment of 38 rail cars and the subsequent “controlled release” and burnoff of toxic vinyl chloride was one of the most catastrophic industrial accidents in our country’s history—and a catastrophe of equal or greater proportion could happen again tomorrow, because we have done little to substantively addres...
After Waging the Largest Healthcare Worker Strike in US History, Kaiser Workers Win Big (w/ Meg Niemi & Audrey Cardenas)
December 23, 2023 05:38 - 36 minutes - 83.4 MBFrom October 4-6 of this year, the US experienced the largest healthcare worker strike in our history, when over 75,000 workers with the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions went on a three-day strike against the healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente. Then, on October 13, after warning that more strikes could be coming if a deal wasn’t reached at the bargaining table, healthcare workers scored a major victory and reached a tentative agreement with Kaiser, which the union membership, accounting...
Brazil's Radical Plan to Fight Slave-Like Working Conditions (w/ Marcos, John, & Vitor Filgueiras)
December 11, 2023 09:01 - 1 hour - 223 MBBrazil's Radical Plan to Fight Slave-Like Working Conditions (w/ Marcos, John, & Vitor Filgueiras) In this special international episode, we get the chance to talk to folks in Brazil about the farmworkers who are being trapped in slave-like conditions, and about a truly radical new government program that is trying to break the cycle of enslavement and exploitation. As Vitor Filgueiras, Professor of Economics at the Federal University of Bahia, writes, “Between 1995 and mid-2020, more ...
Chris & Jessica Albright
November 30, 2023 00:07 - 1 hour - 170 MBIt's been nearly 10 months since the derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train and the subsequent “controlled release” and burnoff of toxic vinyl chloride changed life forever for the residents of East Palestine, Ohio. While the media, politicians, and the public have largely moved on, people living in and around East Palestine have been abandoned by Norfolk Southern, by their state and federal governments, and left to rot in the toxic fallout. We cannot forget about them. In Sep...
"This Is McCarthyism All Over Again": Suppressing Unions' Free Speech Rights over Gaza (w/ Allie Goodman, Michael Letwin, & Dany Greene)
November 21, 2023 00:48 - 53 minutes - 123 MBWith each passing day, more Israeli bombs are falling on Gaza, more bodies are being blown apart and buried under the rubble, over a million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes. Over the past month and a half, the world has borne witness to a genocidal military campaign to clear out Gaza once and for all, and every day, every hour, it feels like the chance to stop one of humanity’s most inhumane crimes is slipping through our fingers, and the powers that be have shown no intere...
Stuck in Legal Limbo while Fighting to Hold Amazon Accountable (w/ Matt Littrell)
November 20, 2023 02:21 - 45 minutes - 105 MBBack in August of 2022, we spoke with Matt Littrell, a picker at the Amazon warehouse in Campbellsville, Kentucky, and one of the lead organizers in an effort to unionize Amazon facilities in Kentucky. When we spoke with Matt, Amazon had just fired him in suspected retaliation for his organizing activities, citing "performance" issues. Since then, Matt has been dragged through a Kafka-esque legal process to hold Amazon, the second largest private employer in the US, accountable for violatin...
A Three-Minute Message from Gaza (w/ Mohamed el Saife)
November 11, 2023 21:38 - 8 minutes - 10.9 MBMore than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's retaliatory assault on Gaza in the past month, including thousands of women, children, and elderly, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The real number is likely much higher… we don’t know how many people, dead and alive, are under the rubble right now. But we do know that the bombs continue to fall, every day, at rates unseen in this century. This is an absolute nightmare. For the past month, we have been trying every...
The Teamsters Picket Amazon's BWI5 Warehouse in Baltimore (w/ Deion Anthony Steppes, Cristina Duncan Evans, Taylor Boren, & Mike McGuire)
November 11, 2023 21:36 - 29 minutes - 27.2 MBOn the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 8, members of the Teamsters union led a picket line march outside of Amazon’s BWI5 warehouse in Baltimore. Dozens of other union workers and members of the Baltimore community joined the demonstration, which was an extension of the ongoing Unfair Labor Practice strike by unionized Amazon drivers and dispatchers at the DAX8 delivery station in Palmdale, CA. “In April, the 84 workers in Palmdale organized with the Teamsters, becoming the first union of Amazon...
"Soldiers Are Everywhere, Settlers Are Everywhere, People Are Afraid to Leave Their Homes" (w/ Issa Amro)
November 03, 2023 03:03 - 9 minutes - 21.8 MBEvery day the Palestinian civilian death toll is rising dramatically as Israel continues with its genocidal bombing and ground invasion of Gaza, and as settler and military violence towards Palestinians in the West Bank intensifies. "It's a closure, it's a curfew, in many places in the West Bank," Issa Amro says. "It's not normal life these days. Soldiers are everywhere, settlers are everywhere, people are afraid to leave their homes, they don't go to work, they don't go to school, they don'...
Sherry Cothren (w/ Jeremiah Cothren)
October 25, 2023 05:22 - 1 hour - 200 MBOver the past month, United Auto Workers have continued to ramp up their strike at the Big 3 auto companies, calling workers at more plants to hit the picket line. As Keith Brower Brown recently reported at Labor Notes, “Every Friday for the past four weeks, Big 3 CEOs have waited fearfully for UAW President Shawn Fain to announce which plants will strike next. But without warning on Wednesday [October 11], the union threw a haymaker: within 10 minutes the UAW would be shutting down the vast...
Live Show: Storytelling for Justice—East Palestine (w/ Chris & Jessica Albright)
October 19, 2023 02:56 - 45 minutes - 104 MBThe derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine , Ohio, on Feb. 3 of this year, and the subsequent “controlled release” and burnoff of toxic vinyl chloride, is one of the most catastrophic and devastating industrial accidents in our country’s history, and a catastrophe of equal or greater proportion could literally happen again tomorrow. Why? Because no serious steps have been taken on the industry or the government side to substantively address the issues that led to th...
UNLOCKED BONUS EPISODE - I Was in The House When the House Burned Down (w/ Vincent Bevins)
October 09, 2023 06:54 - 1 hour - 141 MBThe decade from 2010 to 2020 was one that saw more people around the world participating in protests than at any other point in human history. And yet, looking back, the results of so many of these mass protests, the societal changes that followed, were the opposite of what protestors were demanding. In his new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent Vincent Bevins asks: Why? In this special episode, recorded at...
What Happens to the NLRB If the Government Shuts Down? (w/ Michael Bilik & Colton Puckett)
September 28, 2023 05:09 - 1 hour - 146 MBIt is looking increasingly likely that Congressional Republicans will bring the federal government to a shutdown starting this weekend. "U.S. government services would be disrupted and hundreds of thousands of federal workers would be furloughed without pay if Congress fails to provide funding for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1," Reuters reports. "Workers deemed essential would remain on the job, but without pay." Among the many agencies that will be furloughing workers in the event of a sh...
UAW Strike Update: More Auto Plants to Join 'Stand-Up' Strike (TRNN livestream w/ Martha Grevatt & Auston Gore)
September 21, 2023 04:46 - 57 minutes - 79 MBThe United Auto Workers are striking against all of the Big Three automakers at once for the first time in the union’s history. The UAW is employing a novel “stand-up strike” strategy: rather than having over 140,000 auto workers hit the picket line at once, UAW members at three strategically targeted plants were called to strike first last Thursday, and union president Shawn Fain has announced that more plants will be called to strike by the end of this week. What are the key demands auto w...
The UAW Is Ready to Fight (w/ Marcelina Pedraza, Torice Sawyer, & Nick Livick)
September 11, 2023 21:17 - 1 hour - 178 MBAfter the high-stakes contract fight between the Teamsters and UPS, the eyes of labor are now on the contract negotiations currently taking place between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler). The UAW’s master agreement with the Big Three covers around 150,000 autoworkers, and the current contract expires on September 14. If a tentative agreement is not reached by then, the auto industry could be the next to be rocked b...
One Fair Wage (w/ Tabina Gipson)
September 06, 2023 05:42 - 24 minutes - 56.9 MBAt the federal level today, the subminimum wage for tipped workers is still just $2.13 an hour. That is, frankly, a disgrace. "A direct legacy of slavery," the One Fair Wage campaign notes, "the subminimum wage affects a workforce of nearly 5 million tipped workers that is 70 percent women and 43 percent people of color." In this mini-cast, we talk about the fight to end the subminimum wage with Tabina Gipson, a tipped worker in Chicago who's worked in the food industry for over 10 years, a ...
**Labor & the Long Road to Reunification in Korea (w/ Ju-Hyun Park)** PATREON EXCLUSIVE
August 28, 2023 05:35 - 1 hour - 163 MBWithin the past two years, South Korea has seen major labor actions, including a general strike in October of 2021, and major crackdowns on organized labor, including the national intelligence agency raiding the offices of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions in January of this year. In that same time, military and geopolitical tensions in the region have been rapidly intensifying. What is going on? What is the state of organized labor in South Korea, and how have imperialist and capital...
Save WVU (w/ Leslie Wilber, Morgan King, & Jessie Wilkerson)
August 20, 2023 04:31 - 1 hour - 141 MBThe world of higher education has been in shock this past week after West Virginia University President E. Gordon Gee announced plans to dramatically cut academic programs and jobs in the coming year. "West Virginia University, a crucial institution in one of the nation’s most impoverished states, is poised to jettison all of its faculty dedicated to teaching Spanish, French, Chinese and other foreign languages," Nick Anderson reports at The Washington Post. "The state’s largest public univ...
Ana Jakopič
August 11, 2023 01:03 - 1 hour - 199 MBAna Jakopič is a lawyer, organizer, and trade union leader in Slovenia. We talk to Ana about the different kinds of workers she organizes with on a daily basis, the struggles working people across Slovenia are facing, and how connected/disconnected those struggles currently feel to the strikes taking place in Europe and beyond. But we also talk about Ana's life and her winding path into the labor movement; we talk about growing up in the post-Yugoslavian world, and about the impacts the Russ...
Khali Jama
August 05, 2023 10:53 - 1 hour - 198 MB"I've never been an organizer," Khali Jama says, "but I've always fought." As a single mother, a Muslim, and a Somali-American worker living in Minnesota, Jama has always had to fight for the life she, her family, and her fellow workers deserve. And earlier this year, after bringing that fight to the Minnesota state legislature, Khali and her coworkers achieved a major victory. "On May 16," Lisa Kwon reports in PRISM, "Minnesota lawmakers passed the nation’s strongest Amazon warehouse worker...
What—and Who—Caused the Train Derailment in East Palestine? (w/ Jason Cox)
July 30, 2023 00:12 - 48 minutes - 112 MBThe Norfolk Southern train derailment and "controlled release" of toxic vinyl chloride in East Palestine, Ohio, was an avoidable catastrophe. Long before the train cars crashed on Feb. 3 and residents' lives were turned completely upside down, railroad workers had been warning anyone who would listen that the relentless cost-cutting and profit-maximizing practices implemented on the freight rail system by greedy rail executives and their Wall Street shareholders would endanger workers and th...
The Showdown at UPS (w/ Rikki Schreiner & Amber Mathwig)
July 19, 2023 04:04 - 1 hour - 189 MBWe are less than two weeks away from what could be the largest single-employer strike in US history. As of this recording, contract negotiations between United Parcel Services (UPS) and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have reportedly "collapsed"—and the clock is ticking until the current contract expires on July 31. If a deal is not reached and a strike occurs, what will it look like for 340,000 Teamster UPSers to walk off the job? What are the key issues that workers are prepared...
Michael Paul Lindsey II
July 13, 2023 04:49 - 1 hour - 251 MBWhen we hear the term "whistleblower," we tend to think of names like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange—people who have risked their freedom, even their lives, to expose government lies, abuses of power, and state secrets that the public needs to know about. But there are a range of federal statutes designed to protect those who blow the whistle on their employers, too, especially when those employers are breaking the law and/or endangering their workers and th...
Live Show: Organizing on a Mass Scale (w/ Josh Thole & Sarah Beth Ryther)
July 08, 2023 06:46 - 38 minutes - 88.1 MBWe hosted another Working People live show, in collaboration with the Action Builder / Action Network team, on May 8 at the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labour Congress in Montréal. In this panel discussion, Max speaks with Sarah Beth Ryther, employee-organizer with Trader Joe's United in Minneapolis, and Josh Thole, former Major League Baseball player and current Minor League Special Assistant for the MLB Players Association, about what union organizing from the ground up ...
Pride and Labor's Duty to Fight for All (w/ Jessica Gonzalez & Fae Weichsel)
June 28, 2023 04:46 - 1 hour - 161 MBFrom legislative attacks on the rights of trans people, drag performers, and queer people spreading to statehouses around the country like wildfire, to rightwing media relentlessly spewing fascistic anti-LGBTQ+ messages, to far-right groups ramping up their intimidation tactics and violent assaults to force LGBTQ+ people back into the closet, Pride month feels different in 2023. And yet, the rebellious, liberatory spirit of Pride persists, and the struggle for equality, acceptance, and the r...
Sean Orr
June 15, 2023 06:02 - 1 hour - 172 MBThe largest private sector labor contract in the US is set to expire at midnight on July 31; as negotiations continue to play out, we will soon see whether or not the 350,000 Teamsters working for United Parcel Services (UPS) will hit the picket line and wage one of the largest strikes in US history. As Sean Orr, a UPS package-car driver and elected shop steward for Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago, and Elliot Lewis, a UPS package-car driver and alternate shop steward for Teamsters Local 804 i...
2023 Canadian Labour Congress, Part 2 (w/ Nora Loreto, Meg Davis, Larry Rousseau, & Nicholas Marcus Thompson)
June 08, 2023 03:35 - 1 hour - 263 MBFrom May 8-12, the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labour Congress took place in Montréal. Reporting for Working People and The Real News Network, Max attended the convention and spoke with a number of rank-and-file workers, organizers, and union officers about the state of the labor movement in Canada. In Part 2 of our two-part dispatch from the CLC, we talk to: Nora Loreto, writer, editor, organizer, podcaster, co-host of Sandy and Nora Talk Politics with Sandy Hudson, and a...
2023 Canadian Labour Congress, Part 1 (w/ Emily Leedham, Guy Smith, Mary Newman, James Russwurm, & Liz Ha)
June 03, 2023 08:04 - 2 hours - 298 MBFrom May 8-12, the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labour Congress took place in Montréal. Reporting for Working People and The Real News Network, Max attended the convention and spoke with a number of rank-and-file workers, organizers, and union officers about the state of the labor movement in Canada. In Part 1 of our two-part dispatch from the CLC, we talk to: Emily Leedham, the Prairie Reporter for PressProgress and editor of Shift Work, PressProgress' weekly national labo...
Labor Must Join the Fight to Stop Cop City (w/ Kamau Franklin & Mariah Parker)
June 01, 2023 04:42 - 50 minutes - 115 MBThe 2020 protests that took place in the immediate wake of Minneapolis police murdering George Floyd were a historic call for America to reckon with its racist, oppressive system of state-sanctioned police violence. Three years later, rather than a reckoning, that same system, along with the political and business elites propping it up, are giving us "Cop City" (ie, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, the Atlanta Police Foundation’s 85-acre, $90-million police militarization and train...
Live Show: Making Baltimore a Union Town (w/ Rebekah Kirkman, Dever Cunningham, Martin Yepes, Leila Grothe, Andre Elkridge, & Rachel Leeds)
May 26, 2023 23:25 - 1 hour - 234 MBWe hosted a Working People live show at The Real News Network studio in Baltimore on May 18. In this panel discussion, co-hosted by Max and Baltimore writer and editor Rebekah Kirkman, we speak with a diverse panel of worker-organizers from around the city about their respective struggles to unionize their workplaces, what being in a union means to them and their coworkers, and what all of us can do to support one another and grow the labor movement in our town. Panelists include: Dever Cunn...
East Palestine, 100 Days Later (w/ Ashley McCollum, Kayla Miller, & Christina Siceloff)
May 20, 2023 02:40 - 1 hour - 170 MBIt's been over 100 days since the catastrophic derailment of a Norfolk Southern train carrying over 100,000 gallons of toxic materials occurred in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb 3. Since then, residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area in Ohio and Pennsylvania have had their lives turned completely upside down. Entire families have been uprooted from their homes, with many having to live in hotels or wherever they can find shelter, unable to return home out of fear of exposure to che...
Hollywood Writers Strike to Save the Entertainment Industry from Further Corporate Destruction (w/ Sasha Stewart)
May 07, 2023 01:40 - 39 minutes - 90.9 MBHollywood writers represented by the Writers Guild of America, East, and the Writers Guild of America, West, are on strike for the first time since 2007-08. As Alex Press writes in Jacobin, "The WGA (West and East) called the strike just before midnight on May 1, with its leadership unanimously voting for a work stoppage after six weeks of negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) over a new three-year contract that covers some 11,500 film and televisi...
Live Show: Workers in the South Are Rising Up (w/ Chris Daniel, Melanie Barron, & Mo Haskins)
May 06, 2023 05:55 - 1 hour - 172 MBAnnouncement: Our next live show will be on Monday, May 8, from 5-7pm EST at the Canadian Labour Congress’ 30th Constitutional Convention in Montreal! We took Working People on the road and hosted another live show on March 21 in Atlanta, Georgia, in collaboration with the Action Builder / Action Network team. In this panel discussion, Max speaks with local organizers about the specific challenges workers in the South face in their workplaces and in their efforts to organize—and how they a...
May Day Reminds Us That Labor's Fight & the Fight Against Mass Incarceration Are Connected (w/ Mansa Musa)
May 03, 2023 06:37 - 38 minutes - 53.1 MBMax and Jules want to wish everyone out there a happy May Day (ie International Workers Day)! To commemorate this most sacred of holidays, we are sharing with our audience the audio of a special holiday crossover edition of Rattling the Bars, The Real News Network's weekly YouTube show about the violence and victims of the prison-industrial complex—and how we can fight against it. In this episode, Max sits down with Rattling the Bars host Mansa Musa, a former political prisoner who was loc...
Striking UMich Grads Hold the Line While Facing Cops, Docked Pay, and Out-of-Touch Administrators (w/ Alejo Stark)
April 25, 2023 05:16 - 40 minutes - 91.7 MBGraduate student-workers at the University of Michigan are still on strike after hitting the picket line for the second time in three years at the end of March. In the time between the Fall 2020 and Winter 2023 strikes, according to the union, the gap between graduate workers' average pay and the cost of living in Ann Arbor has tripled. Facing a cost-of-living crisis and fighting for a slate of core demands—from a living wage and affordable childcare to better protections for international s...
Kayla Denker
April 20, 2023 07:05 - 1 hour - 238 MBKayla Denker is a military veteran and a trained archaeologist who has worked in the private sector and for the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. She is also a trans woman living in America, and every day she navigates the difficult and increasingly dangerous terrain of living her life as an out trans person—estrangement from unaccepting family, hostile encounters in public, and a growing right-wing political crusade hellbent on scapegoating LGBTQ+ people as the ultimate e...
Bryan Mack
April 15, 2023 06:24 - 1 hour - 168 MBBryan Mack is a second-generation railroad worker from Florence, South Carolina, with a Masters in Music Performance. Both Bryan and his father worked for CSX Transportation, each hiring out at times when there were statistically few Black employees or employees of color working on the railroads. For 17 years, Bryan has worked as a conductor for CSX; in that time, he has seen and experienced firsthand the worsening conditions as the industry has been taken over by greedy executives and upper...
Teamsters in Boston Have a Message for UPS (w/ Thomas Mari, Jane Fallon, Rob Atkinson, JJ Rodriguez, Fred Zuckerman, Julie, & Sean M. O'Brien)
April 08, 2023 00:21 - 38 minutes - 88.2 MBUnder the new leadership team led by General President Sean M. O'Brien, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters are re-introducing themselves to the bosses and to the world as a fighting union, and they are gearing up for their biggest test yet: the impending negotiations of the IBT's contract with United Parcel Service (UPS). With UPS employing over 350,000 Teamster members around the country, theirs is the largest collective bargaining agreement in North America—and the current contract...
University of Michigan Grads Strike for a Living Wage (w/ Alejo Stark)
March 31, 2023 07:09 - 23 minutes - 54.4 MBGraduate student-workers at the University of Michigan are on strike for the second time in three years, officially hitting the picket line this week. Speaking to The Michigan Daily, Amir Fleischmann, chair of the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) Contracts Committee, said, "Grad workers are very frustrated. They’re struggling to pay rent. They’re struggling to afford childcare. They lack access to gender-affirming care. And I think we’re saying enough is enough. The University needs to ...
Teaching in Ron DeSantis's Florida (w/ Philip Belcastro & Brennen Pickett)
March 30, 2023 04:37 - 1 hour - 161 MBThings are getting very dark in Florida, and educators at all levels have found themselves on the frontlines of a reactionary political crusade led by Republican governor Ron DeSantis. "As the new semester began," Florida-based journalist Michael Sainato recently reported, "teachers throughout Florida were faced with new state laws strictly limiting curricula—prompting schools to remove droves of books from their classrooms and libraries for fear of being in violation of the draconian but o...
A "Do or Die" Moment for the Academic Labor Movement (w/ Matt Thomas, Kristina Mensik, Bryan Sacks, & Todd Wolfson)
March 24, 2023 07:41 - 1 hour - 221 MBAt colleges and universities across the country, a heated battle is playing out right now over workers' right to organize and have a say over how the institutions they keep afloat with their labor are run. From graduate student-worker unionization efforts and strikes at Temple University, the University of California, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern University, Northeastern University, the University of Chicago, and Indiana University, to faculty strikes (and near-strikes) a...
Steve Mellon
March 17, 2023 04:05 - 1 hour - 169 MBIn October of last year, over 100 workers represented by five labor unions—including production, distribution, advertising, and accounts receivable staff—walked off the job on an unfair labor practice strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The strike began after the newspaper's management, Block Communications, which is owned by the Block family, cut off health insurance for employees on Oct. 1. As Michael Sainato reports at The Guardian, "The strike is unfolding in a US media industry that ...
The Fight to Pass the Workplace Psychological Safety Act (w/ Misty Orlando, Dr. Jennifer Fraser, & Jerry Carbo)
March 13, 2023 01:00 - 26 minutes - 60.9 MBWhile there are some stronger and broader laws in particular states, there is currently no federal standard defining, let alone outlawing, workplace bullying if the case does not involve harassment or discrimination of a member of a “protected status group” based on their race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or disability. And yet, according to a 2021 survey commissioned by the Workplace Bullying Institute, 30% of adult Americans say they are currently being bullied or have expe...
Live Show: We Need You—Yes, You—to Join the Labor Movement (w/ Chris Smalls, Vince Quiles, Sarah Beth Ryther, Tafadar Sourov, & Riley Fell)
March 09, 2023 05:22 - 1 hour - 220 MBWe hosted another Working People live show on Feb. 22 in New York City, in collaboration with the Action Builder / Action Network team and The People's Forum. In this panel discussion, introduced by Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls, Max speaks with worker-organizers from around the country about why they and their coworkers decided not to quit their jobs but to commit to improving their workplaces, what the day-to-day work of organizing looks like, and how you—yes, you—can get invol...