Working People
319 episodes - English - Latest episode: 14 days ago - ★★★★★ - 249 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
GM Layoffs - Hamtramck/Pontiac
December 06, 2018 23:17 - 2 hours - 175 MB2018: On the Monday after Thanksgiving, General Motors workers in the U.S. and Canada learned of the company's announcement that it would be idling five plants and cutting around 14,000 jobs. In this urgent, multi-episode series, we will be talking to workers at plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Canada. In Part II, we talk to Lilly and Sean, Tier 2 and Tier 3 workers at the GM plant in Hamtramck, and we talk to Beau, a salaried worker at the GM Metal Center in Pontiac, about the announced closur...
GM Layoffs - Lordstown
December 05, 2018 00:41 - 2 hours - 149 MB2018: On the Monday after Thanksgiving, General Motors workers in the U.S. and Canada learned of the company's announcement that it would be idling five plants and cutting around 14,000 jobs. In this urgent, multi-episode series, we will be talking to workers at plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Canada. In Part I, we talk to Rochelle Carlisle, Tommy Wolikow, and Nanette Senters, three GM workers from the iconic GM plant in Lordstown, OH. Additional links/info below... Neal E. Boudette, N...
Em
November 22, 2018 03:21 - 2 hours - 139 MBIn this episode, we talk to Em, an Alaskan native who is now living and working in Jackson, Wyoming. Em is a fellow Millennial, and we talk about some of the funny and awful things that so many people in our generation have in common, like student debt, working multiple crappy jobs at once, and being stressed out from the time we’re in elementary school because we’re told we have to pile on more classes and extracurriculars and whatever to make ourselves stand out. But Em has also had so man...
Kai
November 13, 2018 07:20 - 1 hour - 130 MBIn this episode, we round off our special two-week series on sex work by talking to Kai, a sex worker and DJ in Atlanta, Georgia. Kai is a wonderful, funny person and, in our chat, he shares some really important insights about different kinds of sex work, how sex workers take care of themselves and each other, and about the disastrous real-life implications the SESTA-FOSTA bills have for sex workers. We also talk to Kai about his life story. We talk about having to move from coast to coast ...
BONUS EPISODE #3B - Alex Andrews
November 09, 2018 22:29 - 1 hour - 111 MBIn Part II of our bonus episode in this special Working People series on sex work, we chat to the amazing Alex Andrews, an organizer, former sex worker, and co-founder of SWOP Behind Bars, part of the Sex Workers Outreach Project. SWOP Behind Bars “is a national social justice network dedicated to the fundamental human rights of people who face discrimination from the criminal justice system due to the stigma associated with the sex trade.” We talk to Alex about what led her to get involved ...
BONUS EPISODE #3A - Kaytlin Bailey
November 04, 2018 05:43 - 1 hour - 89.1 MBIn Part I of our two-part bonus episode on sex work, we chat to the wonderful Kaytlin Bailey, comedian, writer, activist, sex worker, and host of The Oldest Profession, a fantastic, funny, and unapologetic podcast about the lives of sex workers throughout history. Ever since she was in elementary school, Kaytlin has spoken her mind and questioned the validity of social norms, and we talk about how that has shaped her politics, her career in comedy, and her entry into sex work. We talk about ...
Ceyenne Doroshow
October 30, 2018 23:50 - 1 hour - 100 MBIn this episode, we begin our special two-week series on sex work by talking to the fabulous Ceyenne Doroshow. No description can really do Ceyenne justice, but she is, among other things, a performer, an activist and organizer, a community-based researcher, and a powerful public figure in the trans and sex workers rights’ movements. She is the author of the book Cooking in Heels, and the Founder and Executive Director of G.L.I.T.S. (Gays & Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society). We talk ...
BONUS EPISODE #2A - Trevor Griffey
October 18, 2018 22:02 - 1 hour - 106 MBIn Part I of our special two-part BONUS EPISODE on labor, class, and higher education, we chat to Trevor Griffey, writer, historian, and Labor Studies lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles and California State University, Dominguez Hills. Trevor breaks down the insidious, decades-long effort to devalue academic labor at the administrative, legislative, and cultural level, and we talk about the resulting crisis academic workers are facing today and what to do about it. ...
John Buckley
October 18, 2018 19:36 - 2 hours - 120 MBIn this episode, we talk to John Buckley, a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Michigan. John is a member of the lecturer’s union at U of M, the Lecturers’ Employee Organization (LEO), and was on the bargaining team throughout the effort to negotiate a better contract with the University in 2017/18. We talk about the precarious situation of so many academic workers and what it tells us about the state of higher education today. We also talk about John’s family history an...
Vickie Shannon Allen
October 09, 2018 06:29 - 2 hours - 143 MBIn this episode, which is a little longer than our typical episodes, we talk to Vickie Shannon Allen, a native Texan and a warehouse worker at an Amazon fulfillment center, where she sustained an injury on the job. Vickie’s struggle with Amazon to get the medical treatment she deserves is ongoing. As we discuss in the interview, it has been hell for her, and we are asking listeners to help us share her story and hold Amazon accountable. We talk with Vickie about her experience working for Am...
BONUS EPISODE - Rob Larson
September 21, 2018 18:42 - 1 hour - 109 MBIn our first BONUS EPISODE of the season, we chat to Rob Larson, writer and professor of economics at Tacoma Community College, and take a deep dive into his new book, Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom. We also talk about Eugene Debs and the “Real America,” Jeff Bezos's twitchy eye, pick-up basketball, and how workers can pull together to fight off and fight back against the depressing, daily realities of our un-free lives in this rigged system. Additional links/info below.....
Sara
September 10, 2018 19:54 - 1 hour - 105 MBIn this episode, we chat with Sara, a DACA recipient and telemarketer in Las Vegas. Sara is not the kind of person you can put labels on—you definitely can’t put her in any one box. And that seems to have been written into her life story from the beginning. We talk about what it was like growing up in Southern California, moving between cities with different demographics, different cultures—cities where she had different types of friend groups and where she explored different parts of hersel...
LaDonna Brave Bull Allard
September 03, 2018 21:25 - 1 hour - 93.5 MBIn this special Labor Day episode, we talk to LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota, and one of the founders of the resistance camps where the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) took place from the spring of 2016 to the winter of 2017. LaDonna is a Native historian who was thrust by history into the role of an activist—her work and bravery have brought hope and courage to people all around the globe. She’s an incredi...
Tom Madden
August 27, 2018 21:31 - 1 hour - 91.1 MBIn this episode, we talk to Tom Madden, a native Missourian, a professional plumber, and member of the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union Local 562. We talk about what it was like for Tom and his brothers to grow up in a strict household, and we also talk about some of his wilder days at high school parties. We talk about Tom’s father, a professional journalist and labor reporter in St. Louis, and about the huge impression it left on Tom to hear his dad talk about unions and take him and his bro...
Angela Prigge
August 20, 2018 21:22 - 1 hour - 98.6 MBIn this episode, we talk to Angela Prigge, who has been a hospitality worker in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, for 18 years. Angela has lived in Hawaii her whole life, and we talk about her love for her home and her deep family roots there. We talk about how Angela’s grandparents moved to Hawaii from the Philippines, how her father and grandfather worked and lived on sugar plantations. We talk about Angela’s memories of the bakery her mom worked at in Kauai, and we talk about how her parent...
Lauren Schandevel
August 13, 2018 21:14 - 1 hour - 95.6 MBIn this episode, we talk to Lauren Schandevel, a low-income student at the University of Michigan who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Warren, Michigan. Lauren is a really remarkable person, and in our interview we chat about what it was like to grow up in her part of Macomb County, which always seems to crop up every election cycle whenever news outlets want to figure out what’s happening in the Rust Belt. We talk about Lauren’s experience moving back and forth between worlds, bet...
Adrienne
August 06, 2018 22:24 - 1 hour - 108 MBIn this episode, we talk to Adrienne, a teacher in Michigan, single mother of three, and a grievance officer in her local union. Adrienne is an incredible person whose devotion to caring for others, and whose ability to juggle multiple full-time jobs at once, is astounding. In our conversation, we talk about many facets of Adrienne's remarkable life, including her time growing up in cooperative housing in Lansing and her lifelong love of books and reading, which have always been a refuge for...
Glynndana Shevlin
August 06, 2018 21:06 - 1 hour - 91.8 MBIn this episode, I have the great pleasure of talking with Glynndana Shevlin, a Disney Resort worker and member of UNITE HERE Local 11. We talk about her life, her time working at Disney, and the struggles she and her co-workers face to make ends meet. Disney workers' wages, like the wages of workers around the country, have stagnated as inflation and the cost of living have exploded. While the Walt Disney Company continues to record yearly profits in the billions, the workers who "make the ...
Jesus Alvarez
August 06, 2018 20:59 - 1 hour - 101 MBIn this inaugural episode of Working People, we talk to Jesus Alvarez: a Mexican immigrant who became a US citizen in 1980; a shy kid who met his wife, Regina, while working at a Sizzler; a life-long Republican voter; a family man; a realtor who, like so many of us, lost just about everything during the Great Recession; a sports-lover with a quirky sense of humor; a devoted father; and an amazing human being who has lived such an interesting, beautiful life. Featured Music (all songs sourc...