Reinventing Solidarity

This episode brings together Joanna Wuest, Brittani Murray, and Jaz Brisack to discuss how queer organizers build community within their workplaces to support civil rights and social justice movements and share strategies for building power to defend workplaces and vulnerable communities, as we witness increased attacks on the rights and safety of LGBTQIA+ people, especially transgender individuals, at the same time as an unprecedented assault on all workers' rights.

New Labor Forum's Micah Uetricht speaks with labor organizer and former Starbucks barista Jaz Brisack about the Starbucks campaign, the practice of salting, and their new book Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World.

Historian Erik Baker talks to New Labor Forum's Micah Uetricht about the sanctified place of the entrepreneur in American history, and why the entrepreneurial work ethic is at the core of how the Right hopes to remake workers and citizens.

Episode 57 - Can Federal Workers Beat DOGE? by CUNY SLU

New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht speaks to the Center for Working-Class Politics's Jared Abbott about Democrats losing working-class voters, why it matters, and the prospects for reversing it.

Understanding what labor must do under a hostile new presidential administration requires reflection on unions' successful political strategies in recent years, the nature of contemporary capitalism, the role of political education in labor, and much more. Bob Master moderates a recent and wide-ranging panel discussion on these issues at CUNY's School of Labor and Urban Studies.

It's been a new day in the United Auto Workers since the election of Shawn Fain as president in 2023, with the union carrying out an aggressive organizing and political program that has established the UAW as a major presence in American life. New Labor Forum's Micah Uetricht spoke to Jonah Furman, a top aide to Fain, about the union's strategy, its various wins and losses among nonunion auto manufacturers in the American South, its relationship to the Democratic Party under President Joe Biden, and the impact of a Donald Trump presidency on the union and labor as a whole.

What does the rise of artificial intelligence mean for workers and organized labor? And just what is AI, anyway? New Labor Forum editor-at-large discusses these questions and more with labor reporter Alex Press and technology reporter and editor Ed Ongweso, Jr.

How free was the imposition of the free trade model in the late-twentieth century? Not very, suggests political scientist Adam Dean's research. The neoliberal trade model that has come to dominate the globe was imposed through repressive measures against the trade unions that opposed it in country after country. Dean talks to New Labor Forum's Micah Uetricht about this history and what it means for the future of trade policy across the globe.

Times change, in society, politics, and economics, but the labor movement rarely does. Which makes the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) a rare bird in US labor. New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht speaks to EWOC organizer Megan Svoboda about the project's origins in the coronavirus pandemic and how it has grown to a major national organization to aid workers in any industry, anywhere in the United States to take collective action and, frequently, to unionize.

Why are unions essential to LGBTQ liberation? Why is union organizing that advocates for all workers essential to uplifting queer workers? And why is queer advocacy so commonsense to many of today's unionized workers? Political scientist Joanna Wuest explores these questions and more in a conversation with New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht for our podcast Reinventing Solidarity.

As innovative new union organizing campaigns have taken off around the country in recent years, Rutgers labor scholar Eric Blanc argues that we can see the emergence of a new organizing model that has the potential to meet the moment. He calls it "worker-to-worker organizing," a concept he explored in his Winter 2024 New Labor Forum article "Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral" and in his forthcoming book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big (University of California Press). New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht spoke to Blanc about the model's constituent parts, the role of young workers' increasingly progressive and pro-labor sentiments in the current moment of labor upsurge, and why worker-to-worker organizing can scale up in a way he says the "staff-intensive" model can't.

At a time of crushing childcare costs in New York City and around the country, the labor-backed Child Care Facilitated Enrollment Project is one bright spot for working-class families. New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht spoke to United Federation of Teachers vice president for Academic High Schools and chair of the New York Union Child Care Coalition Janella Hinds and Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi, representing the 28th assembly district in Queens in the New York state legislature, about the program.

The United Auto Workers achieved a real breakthrough in their 2023 strike against the Big Three automakers. For this episode, our new editor-at-large Micah Uetricht interviews longtime labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein about his piece in the Spring 2024 issue of New Labor Forum assessing the wins in the contract, the corruption scandals and subsequent new union leadership victory that led to the strike, the UAW's prospects for riding this momentum into organizing nonunion automakers like Volkswagen and Tesla, and more.

In the work of creating a more just and sustainable world, which strategies hold the most promise for overcoming the enormous obstacles inherent in 21st century capitalism? A recent book, Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World by Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce, tackles this question head on. Based on interviews with leading activists, the authors draw vital lessons from organizations and movements – including the New Georgia Project, Make the Road, the Fight for 15, Occupy Wall Street, and the Gay Men's Health Crisis – that have achieved substantial victories. Here, we present the book's authors in conversation with MacArthur fellow and United We Dream co-founder Cristina Jimenez.

In this episode we examine the recent threatened strike and massive contract victory of the Teamsters as that union took on UPS, the nation's largest unionized private sector employer. In September 2023, Teamsters President Sean O'Brien spoke about the strike weapon and labor's resurgence at a large public forum hosted by the School of Labor and Urban Studies. Following his talk, he engaged with a panel of prominent labor activists and scholars. We feature highlights from O'Brien's keynote address and his animated exchange with one of those panelists, the labor organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey.

This episode focuses on a discussion of publicly funded and operated health care in the United States. If this might seem a pipe dream with no national precedence in the U.S., the authors of the recent book, Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs, suggest it's not. They describe the current system of VA Healthcare as a model for excellence and equity, worthy of support among public health care activists. Our Veterans, reviewed in the spring 2023 issue of New Labor Forum, offers a broad examination of Veterans Affairs, as well as essential information about the cost, quality, and effectiveness of healthcare provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies faculty member Stephanie Luce speaks with trade unionists Judy Gonzalez and Bob Master about the conditions which make the strike labor's most powerful weapon. Drawing on recent experience with the New York State Nurses Union strike at Montefiore and Mt. Sinai hospitals, Gonzalez details the preparatory work of the union that contributed to victory. And Master describes the manner in which his union, the Communications Workers of America, has over the years successfully drawn on the CWA's long history of militancy.

This episode offers a provocative assessment of independent unionism as a strategy for building worker power in the U.S. In conversation with New Labor Forum Consulting Editor Joshua Freeman, Erik Loomis discusses his spring 2023 article for the journal, titled Independent Unions: The Allure of a Failing Strategy. Chronicling the besieged, ill-fated experimentation with independent unionism since the late 1800s, Loomis elucidates his doubts about the prospects for this strategy against today's corporate behemoths.

This episode tackles the big labor organizing questions of the day: What is the relative strategic importance of organizing workers at the commanding heights of the 21st century economy, like the docks for example, versus organizing workers whose solidarity is strong, yet whose structural power within the economy is weaker, like those at Starbucks? And in a society teetering on the precipice of authoritarianism, what should be the scope and mission of labor organizing today?

In this episode, Adolph Reed, Jr. describes Jim Crow as a result of decades of post-emancipation contention between freed slaves, white farmers and laborers, and the ruling class of white planters and merchants. As an outgrowth of that contestation in various precincts of the South, Jim Crow's rules and applications varied often significantly by locale. In his new book, The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives, Reed describes his own interaction with these shifting, very often treacherous, rules as a way to explore power alignments that shaped Jim Crow and continue to shape its afterlives.

Author Rick Wartzman describes Walmart's decade-long effort at reforms in response to ubiquitous criticism. Low-wage labor was a chief focus of that criticism and of Walmart's self-transformation. Partly as a result, the average Walmart worker now earns an hourly wage just above $17 an hour. While this well exceeds the minimum wage, it still means that the average full-time worker earns just under $32,000 a year. Milkman and Wartzman explore what this and other reforms suggest about the systemic failures of capitalism in the 21st century.

Over the past half-century, labor activists Marilyn Sneiderman and Stephen Lerner have been responsible for spurring major strategic advances in union organizing and movement building. Here, they discuss their recent New Labor Forum article, titled "Making Hope and History Rhyme: A New Worker Movement from the Shell of the Old". Describing the present moment as one of unparalleled peril and opportunity, they draw crucial lessons for the new crop of activists who have emerged in the current wave of strike action and unionization around the country.

A dramatic increase in national consumer debt began in the mid-1980s and currently stands at 16.5 trillion dollars, making it a key feature of capitalism in the 21st century. Average household debt today in the U.S. – mortgages, car loans, student, medical, and credit card debt – now exceeds $96,000 and is therefore greater than the median household income. Andrew Ross discusses debt as a crucial labor and social justice issue and describes the groundbreaking work of the Debt Collective.

Solidarity against the odds is what workers managed to achieve at the JFK8 Amazon Fulfillment Center on Staten Island and at the Elmwood Avenue Starbucks in Buffalo, New York. In this episode, School of Labor and Urban Studies Distinguished Lecturer Heather McGhee gets lead organizers Chris Smalls and Michelle Eisen to recount each of their riveting stories. In captivating detail, they tell a 21st century tale of corporate union resistance, as well as a chronicle of the worker determination and ingenuity that found a way to overcome that resistance.

The fact that current inflation rates are higher than they have been in decades weighs not only on households and businesses, but has also shifted the political landscape. As we head into the 2022 midterms and then the 2024 Presidential elections, understanding the deeper causes of and available remedies to inflation is of paramount importance. In this episode, Samir Sonti and JW Mason offer their insights on questions posed by inflation: If strong demand has contributed to rising prices, what role have constraints on the supply side played? Why have interest rate hikes become the textbook response inflation? What other remedies should be on the table?

Sean Sweeney, Director of SLU's Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, speaks with journalist Laura Flanders about continued botched efforts by countries around the globe to meet the targets set forth in 2015 Paris Agreement. Pointing to worldwide policies that depend upon private investment, he describes why the profit motive has failed to deliver renewable energy at scale, affordably, or with the urgency demanded by the climate crisis. Much more promising, he suggests, is the Global Public Goods approach increasingly advanced by international unions and their allies.

This episode offers a discussion of Andrew Ross' recent book, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing. Ross shares his firsthand account of the burgeoning and largely overlooked housing emergency in our nation's suburban and rural hinterlands. Reporting from Florida's Osceola County, he describes families and people of all ages who cram themselves into dilapidated motels or literally pitch their tents in the woods. Adding to these dire circumstances, the people Ross comes to know find themselves also reckoning with psychological trauma, poverty, and nihilism. This compelling interview also examines the causes of the housing catastrophe and suggests what it will take to end it.

Journalist Laura Flanders speaks with Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta, the authors of The Future We Need, Organizing for a Better Democracy in the 21st Century. The book and this conversation explore the great democratizing power of collective bargaining, with potential applications even beyond the workplace in the yet mostly untried realms of housing, public safety, education, healthcare, and environmental justice, to name just a few. In this moment of national democratic peril and the upsurge in worker organizing, these bold new ideas hold both special urgency and possibility.

Commentators far and wide have been sounding the alarm for American democracy. The question of who can vote and who ends up voting is central to this democratic crisis. In a landscape of defensive battles to protect the right to vote and herculean efforts to turn out the vote, comes a new book: 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting. Written by Miles Rapoport and E.J. Dionne, the book makes an assertive argument that voting should be mandatory in the U.S., as it already is in 26 countries around the world. With SLU's Heather McGhee, author Miles Rapoport discusses the case for requisite voting and its likely implications.

In 2021 the pension assets of U.S. workers stood at 35 trillion dollars and amounted to fully 62 percent of all global pension assets. For almost half a century, this money has fueled the growth of the asset management sector, the likes of BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity Investments to name only a few. New Labor Forum author Benjamin Braun casts a critical eye on the investment practices of collectively bargained Taft-Hartley pension funds which have contributed so significantly to the rise of a bloated financial sector. He also discusses efforts to redirect labor's capital to the benefit of workers and to investment in public goods projects, such as infrastructure and renewable energy.

In this episode, we turn to India's two-millennia-old caste system that has often been compared to our own structures of racial oppression. A recent book, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, provides a sort of memoir of caste viewed through the experiences author Sujatha Gidla's Dalit family. Speaking with New Labor Forum Editor-at-Large Kafui Attoh, Gidla says she drew motivation and courage to write this personal account by witnessing individual and collective acts of resistance of African Americans. A resident of the U.S. since age 26, Gidla completed the writing of the book while working as a New York City train conductor and member of Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union.

Nearly alone among industrialized nations, the U.S. leaves the elderly, the infirm, and their loved ones to fend for themselves in the complex tangle of what passes for a system of elder and long-term care. Our speakers describe the human toll of this for-profit system that is simultaneously unaffordable for those who need care and unsustainable for the low-wage workers who provide it. As social justice visionaries, our speakers also outline bold policy solutions currently being advanced by coalitions that are reimagining elder and long-term care.

Progressive commentators in the U.S. have long debated the primacy of race vs. class in our political and economic life, and therefore its role in organizing strategy. McGhee sees this as a false debate. The stories she tells illustrate the concrete ways in which racism and our deep economic divide go hand in hand. She argues that, at every turn, racism undermines class solidarity and makes it possible in the richest country on earth for so many people lack a living wage, a pension, access to quality healthcare, childcare, and a sustainable environment.

Less than a month into the new mayoralty in the City of New York, we assembled a panel of leading journalists to delineate Eric Adams's vision for the city, especially as it pertains to working people. Only the second black mayor in the city's history, Adams was also the son of a housekeeper, a graduate of the public schools, and for two decades the member of a municipal union. Our host, historian and emeritus faculty member Josh Freeman, asked the assembled reporters whether these facts are likely to impact the administration's approach to municipal labor relations, and more broadly, to governing one of the most deeply unequal cities in the nation.

The poetry of our guest, Gregory Pardlo, is some of the finest, engaged work written in the U.S. today. He brings us the striking air traffic controller, permanently replaced, selling off everything but his house, his young son outside that house speaking to snowflakes. He conjures up the glory and the grace of girls jumping Double Dutch. And he tells of an impoverished old man who asks to hold the hand of a recovering alcoholic so that together they might toss a coin into a fountain and wish for something else. And Pardlo's work helps us imagine what that something else might be.

This episode draws on New Labor Forum's cutting-edge Books and the Arts section edited by Samir Sonti. Here, the book in question is PORN WORK: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, by Heather Berg. Reviewer Whitney Strub discusses with Berg her insights into work and workers in the 12 billion-dollar porn industry. Workers laboring and organizing in this industry, Berg notes, have largely been dismissed and even scorned by organized labor and the Marxist Left. I trust our listeners will find what Berg says revealing about the priorities and predispositions of porn workers, as well as failures of labor and the left to meet the challenges of 21st century capitalism.

Close attention to the qualities of working-class culture is in short supply in this era of ubiquitous distain for the working-class. This measure of respect is one of the chief contributions of Jack Metzgar's new book, Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society. In this episode, Metzgar discusses with New Labor Forum Consulting Editor Joshua Freeman what he views as the distinct values of working-class vs. middle-class cultures. Anyone committed to a resurgent working-class and concerned about the decades-long alienation of segments of the working-class from progressive politics will find Metzgar's observations and arguments of great interest.

Throughout much of U.S. history, anti-trust movements – joined by farmers, laborers, abolitionists, and small businesspeople – were a force to be reckoned with in American politics. Then, in the late 1970s, anti-monopoly fervor subsided and remained dormant for the next 40 years. The tides have now begun to change, with the appointment of leading anti-trust experts in to the Biden administration, and a growing number of labor and grassroots organizers once again taking aim at monopoly power. This history and the present urgency of anti-trust organizing is the subject of episode 22 of Reinventing Solidarity.

This episode airs as COP26, the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference, gets underway in Glasgow, Scotland. Our guest, Roz Foyer, General Secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, notes that this year's Conference takes place during a time of growing awareness of market-driven forces' failure to deliver the scale of energy transition that scientists agree is necessary to sustain life on this planet. She and Sean Sweeney also observe that people across the world have witnessed the necessity of large-scale government action to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Both realities have given rise to worldwide calls for a similar, Global Public Goods approach to climate change. Roz suggests the shape such an approach might take as she discusses on-the-ground challenges in Scotland regarding public transportation, retrofitting, and other sectors crucial to climate change.

Samir Sonti interviews Sandy Jacoby, author of Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank. Jacoby's book and this conversation offer insights into some of the strategic choices organized labor has made since the 1990s in the face of burgeoning corporate power and its own diminished membership rates. With union density in the private sector hovering around 6 percent and a labor law regime that enables employers to resist unionization, many unions have sought other forms of leverage. Those strategies have focused on both legislative reform, Dodd Frank for example, and union pension shareholder activism. In both realms, Jacoby argues, organized labor's tactics have elevated shareholder influence within corporate governance and exacerbated the financialization of the economy.

On September 17th, 2011, approximately a thousand people massed in lower Manhattan at the towering edifices of the “Vatican of capitalism.” This movement, known as Occupy Wall Street, called attention to the obscene inequality and devastation of 21st century capitalism on full display in the wake of the fiscal meltdown. Already by that October, in cities around the world, millions had occupied their own symbolic Wall Streets. Although the encampment in Zuccotti Park was relatively short lived, many have argued that this protest movement changed the language and perhaps the focus of our politics, making “the 99%” part of the lingua franca. On the tenth anniversary of Occupy, this episode offers an assessment of the movement's long-term impact according to four Occupy activists.

In the first episode of the 2021-22 season, Paula Finn holds a conversation with Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce assessing the U.S. labor movement's current strength as relates to union density, or the percentage of workers represented by unions. The basis for their discussion is Milkman's and Luce's recent State of the Unions Report, which compares national union density trends to those in New York State and New York City. This year's study sheds important light on the impact of COVID-19 on employment rates, revealing some surprising, disparate effects of the pandemic nation-wide vs. in New York, on female vs. male workers, and on union members vs. non-union workers.

This episode features a debate regarding the role of race vs. class in efforts to advance a Social Democratic politics. It draws on a panel which was part of a day-long conference held in April 2021 considering Joshua B. Freeman’s landmark book, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. Longtime social justice activist Deepak Bhargava and historian Touré Reed concur that race and class identity is, as Deepak put it, “the axis on which the Social Democratic project will turn.” They part ways, however, on whether organizing that springs from and emphasizes racial oppression can propel a movement to achieve economic justice in the 21st century U.S.

Discussing three important articles from the spring 2021 issue, New Labor Forum columnist Sean Sweeney hosts a conversation with Sinead Mercier and Dominic Brown on the role of publicly owned energy in halting the climate crisis. Mercier offers as a model the Republic of Ireland’s creation in the 1920s of the fantastically successful state owned and operated Electricity Supply Board; Brown describes advancements made in post-Apartheid South Africa to dramatically expand public access to the state-owned energy system, presently curtailed by measures to privatize the country’s utility; and Sweeney asserts the importance of the AMLO government’s efforts to guard the sovereignty of publicly owned energy in Mexico, arguing that this lays a vital foundation for a transition to renewables.

New Labor Forum Books and Arts Editor Samir Sonti hosts a conversation with Gabriel Winant, author of the recent book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. Examining the vast expansion of the health care sector of our economy over the past half-century, Winant traces its development to a combination of factors, including deindustrialization, union decline, an aging population, and a shredded social safety net. It is this historical process, Winant argues, that ushered in a burgeoning low-wage health care workforce disproportionately represented by women and people of color , who have become both essential and disposable, a contradiction made blatantly clear by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Across the political spectrum, there’s a widely held view that the decades-long increase in immigration to the U.S. has put U.S. workers in competition with new immigrants for scarce jobs and has led to depressed wages and working conditions. Ruth Milkman’s important and timely new book, Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat, upends this notion, arguing that it gets cause and effect wrong. Instead, she contends that immigrants have tended to fill jobs already badly degraded, thanks largely to deregulation and de-unionization. In an interview with Samir Sonti, she speaks about the particular industries in which this trend has played out, as well as the political implications of failing to properly understand the role that immigrant workers play in the U.S. economy.

This episode features New Labor Forum columnist Sarah Jaffe in conversation with New Labor Forum Consulting Editor, Ruth Milkman. They discuss Jaffe’s new book, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, which examines a trend among today’s employers to rely, or even insist upon, workers’ emotional dedication to their jobs, the proverbial labor of love. From the school teacher to the non-profit worker and the un-paid intern, Jaffe argues that living up to this expectation exacts a heavy toll.

The past year has been a perfect storm of reckoning with racial violence and white supremacy, assaults on the basic practices of democracy, and a pandemic that yet again laid bare the fundamental inequities of the American economy. This episode features an interview with two exciting social justice leaders who are part of innovative and bold national efforts to address these crises and win campaigns for racial and economic justice. This discussion explores solidarity as it is being advanced and reinvented, particularly by emerging leaders of color.

This episode shines a light on the political and intellectual contributions of Ben Fletcher, one of the most important, yet least well-known African American labor activists of the twentieth century. Peter Cole’s recently re-issued book, Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly, goes a long way toward bringing Fletcher out of the shadows, enabling contemporary activists and scholars to learn from his work to build a militant, multi-racial union among Philadelphia dockworkers during the early 1900s. In his conversation with New Labor Forum Editor-at-Large, Kafui Attoh Peter Cole paints a picture of Ben Fletcher, a man whose contributions he ranks with the likes of Fred Hampton and A. Philip Randolph.

Barely one week into the Biden Administration, CUNY faculty member and New Labor Forum Consulting Editor Joshua Freeman interviews Heidi Shierholz, Senior Economist and Director of Policy at the Economic Policy Institute and Mark Levinson, Chief Economist at the Service Employees International Union. Their discussion examines the marked distinctions – in cause, repercussions, and evolving policy responses – between the current economic crisis and previous fiscal crises.