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We spoke with Amir Fleischmann of the Graduate Employee Organization, a union at the University of Michigan, about their latest strike leveraged to fight the university's reckless reopening plans amid a pandemic. Amir provides a play-by-play of the strike, the events leading up to it and the larger context in which it occurred, and how their union was able to raise expectations and demonstrate the organic links between worker justice and social justice. We discuss the demands of the strike, including demands to disarm and defund campus police, and take a look at the strike's mechanics and how workers were able to make their presence felt even during measures of social distancing as well as the power they were able to build among their own membership and in coalition with campus and community organizations. Laborwave Radio is an independent podcast sustained exclusively through our patrons at patreon.com/laborwave If you enjoy the show, please share our content across social media, like and comment, and join our patreon as either a rank-and-filer, committee member, or strike captain. All patrons receive custom-made gifts from our resident artist including original stickers, illustrated zines, and Laborwave tees. Music by: Damaged Bug- Transmute
Laborwave Radio is celebrating it's three-year anniversary! We've put together a highlight reel from our latest year featuring Jarrod Shanahan, Asad Haider, Boots Riley, Raj Patel, Holly Lewis, Micah Uetricht, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Sarah Jaffe, Natasha Lennard, Liza Featherstone, Bill Fletcher Jr, Andrea Haverkamp, Shannon Ikebe & Tara Phillips, Nick Driedger, and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. We also take a moment to reflect on our history and give a shoutout to all our patreon members! Lots of credit needs to be given to our frequent guest host Andrea Haverkamp for all her work dreaming up this podcast and helping sustain it, thank you comrade for your all-around friendship and radical spirit that gives me hope! Thank you Rank-and-Filers, Committee Members, and Strike Captains that make up our patreon community! You help keep Laborwave running, and we greatly appreciate your contributions. Our patreon community includes: Nicholas Fisher, Jason Sarkozi-Forfinski, Caroline Hunter (my mom!),
Join in on the fun Discord conversations by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave Andrea Haverkamp, president of CGE 6069, joins Laborwave to discuss chapters 5 & 6 of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey; "If We Can Change the White House, We Can Change the Hog House!" Our conversation highlights the importance of connecting our movement histories to fight against the consistent bracketing of social movements as self-contained and insular phenomenons, making the role of staff transparent and accountable for developing the leadership of the rank-and-file, and also pose some hard questions for the IWW asking why is it so prone to the "one-man organizing show" written about in Organizing Work and what prevents its own policies and structures from being consistently implemented? Chapter 5 analyzes the strategies of UFCW's multiple union campaigns at Smithfield Foods, where in their third round after 10+ years they finally won a union through a deep organizing model that brought in community allies under a banner of social justice to win. Chapter 6 examines the "mobilizing model," with promise, of Make the Road New York, an immigrants rights organization with more than 15,000 dues-paying members. McAlevey argues key ingredients for their success include "high-touch" participatory democracy and power over staff afforded by MRNY members. This and more in our penultimate episode of Comrades Read Together: No Shortcuts! Join us in discussion and some reading sessions on our Discord server! You can get in on the fun by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave and joining as a Rank-and-Filer, or Committee Member, or Strike Captain. Once joined, you'll receive an invitation to our Discord where we have a pdf of the book, multiple channels for discussions, and voice channels for periodic reading and chat sessions together! Organizing Work, Beware the One-Man Organizing Show https://organizing.work/2019/07/beware-the-one-man-organizing-show/ Music: Thee Oh Sees- Bloody Water
Join in on the fun conversations by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave Ellen Kress, former president of GTFF 3544 and current AFT-Oregon officer, and Andrea Haverkamp, president of CGE 6069, join Laborwave for a comradely discussion on chapters 3 & 4 of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey. These chapters are full of exercises and advice for rookie organizers, which we discuss in detail, and talks STRIKES!!! We're introduced to another villain of the working class in the form of Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago, and shown the bravery and heroism of teachers that battled him down and won in a massive strike during 2012. These chapters also present us with arguments about the possibility of reforming unions through challenging existing leadership and bargaining for the common good. Join us in discussion and some reading sessions on our Discord server! You can get in on the fun by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave and joining as a Rank-and-Filer, or Committee Member, or Strike Captain. Once joined, you'll receive an invitation to our Discord where we have a pdf of the book, multiple channels for discussions, and voice channels for periodic reading and chat sessions together! Music: Thee Oh Sees- Maria Stacks
Full audio and transcript will be available at laborwaveradio.com/rentstrikes Two part episode on Laborwave, we speak with tenant organizers from Tenants United Corvallis (TUC), a committee of the Mid-Valley IWW, about their efforts to scale up a rent strike in the Mid-Willamette Valley. We follow that segment by speaking with Liza Featherstone, a journalist featured in The Nation and Jacobin, about rent strike activities in New York as well as a broader conversation about relations of power between the tenant and landlord classes. Tenants United Corvallis (TUC) can be reached via their website at midvalleyiww.org Liza Featherstone penned the piece, On Strike- No Rent, for Jacobin which served as the baseline for our conversation. https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/rent-strike-may-coronavirus-new-york-city-nyc-tenants-housing
First time for Laborwave, an audio essay from our show host Alex Riccio originally published by the Institute for Anarchist Studies (anarchiststudies.org). Imagining A Better Utopia: Seizing Spaces of Revolutionary (Re)production "Victories against the boss are transformative for workers. They cultivate a sense of new possibilities and openings previously viewed as impossible. The task, then, is to expand the arenas where victories take place. In this way, what may begin as a victory against landlords and project for cooperative housing contains the potential of enlarging its imaginative capacities to become the pathway where a recognition is made that cooperative houses on colonized lands is insufficient, and nothing less than a global revolution against settler-colonial capitalist heteropatriarchy will do. " Laborwave Radio is a proud sponsor of the Opening Space for the Radical Imagination III Read about the gathering and the current Call for Presenters at oregonimagines.com Essay text available at https://anarchiststudies.org/imagining-a-better-utopia-seizing-spaces-of-revolutionary-reproduction/
Laborwave spoke with Nora Samaran about her recent publication, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture, printed by AK Press. Our conversation ranged from topics of trauma, violence, rape culture, numbness, entitlement, and gaslighting along with care, nurturance, healing, empathy, attachment, and systemic change. Turn This World Inside Out tackles all of these subjects along with dialogues on white supremacy, transphobia, settler colonization, and the power of turning our gifts for healing toward societal change. Get a copy from AK Press at: https://www.akpress.org/turn-this-world-inside-out.html Read Nora Samaran at: https://norasamaran.com/ Nora Samaran is a white settler from a working class immigrant family background. She was a member of the No One is Illegal-Vancouver collective from 2005-2008, and the Media Democracy Day-Vancouver collective from 2008-2010. Her essay ‘The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture’ went viral in February 2016 and has grown into a book, Turn This World Inside Out, out with AK Press in June 2019. She teaches at Douglas College in Coast Salish Territories, also known as Vancouver, British Columbia. Music: Thee Oh Sees- Ship Thee Oh Sees- Minotaur Alex Riccio- Interstitial
We reproduce highlights from interviews in our second season of Laborwave. More episodes from Laborwave will be released in the late summer of 2019. Highlights include clips from our interviews with: Marianne Garneau on the Women's Strike. Garneau explains why it is necessary to have specific targets tied to specific demands within a larger strategic plan in order to be effective in any struggle for working class improvements, and how all of these features are absent from the IWS, so far. Shane Burley on Lessons from the Burgerville Workers Union. In addition to lesson from BVWU's victories we discussed the need to rethink labor organizing under late capitalism, where workers no longer self-identify with particular forms of industry and precarious labor is the norm. BVWU's successes in some ways points to the need to re-embrace as Shane says, "19th century unionism" in the 21st century. Hillary Lazar on Border Politics and Antifascism. Our interview focused on Hillary Lazar's essay, Connecting Our Struggles: Border Politics, Antifascism, and Lessons from the Trials of Ferrero, Sallito, and Graham published in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory (n.30). The piece focuses on the lost history of anarchist editors and supporters of the periodical Man! who were swept up in an anti-immigrant and anti-anarchist political reaction during the early part of the 20th century in the United States. The piece uses this case study to explore connections and continuations of anti-immigrant policies of today and how such policies bolster the repression of political dissent. adrienne maree brown on Pleasure Activism. How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Author and editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls “pleasure activism,” a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism. Her mindset-altering essays are interwoven with conversations and insights from other feminist thinkers, including Audre Lorde, Joan Morgan, Cara Page, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Together they cover a wide array of subjects—from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—building new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own. AK Thompson on Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt. Our clip focuses on his essay discussing leftist critiques of Avatar and how they failed to also use the limitations of the movie and its popularity as opportunities for radical organizing. Bill Fletcher, Jr. on Social Justice Unionism.Fletcher Jr discusses the need for "social justice unionism" in a post-Janus United States. Workers are becoming increasingly atomized in the US, and the state continues to rollback any investments into the reproductive labor that stitches society together. The moment, as Fletcher Jr states, that organized labor can seize for victory is almost over. We might not get another moment. What role do teachers strikes, worker-owned businesses, and housing cooperatives play in seizing this current moment? How do the rank and file push labor leadership to understand that we cannot continue doing "business as usual" despite not being knocked out by Janus right away?
Bill Fletcher Jr is a long-time labor leader and author of multiple books, including Solidarity Divided: The Crisis In Organized Labor And A New Path Toward Social Justice (co-author Dr. Fernando Gapasin) and a new mystery thriller The Man Who Fell From The Sky. In our interview, Fletcher Jr discusses the need for "social justice unionism" in a post-Janus United States. Workers are becoming increasingly atomized in the US, and the state continues to rollback any investments into the reproductive labor that stitches society together. The moment, as Fletcher Jr states, that organized labor can seize for victory is almost over. We might not get another moment. What role do teachers strikes, worker-owned businesses, and housing cooperatives play in seizing this current moment? How do the rank and file push labor leadership to understand that we cannot continue doing "business as usual" despite not being knocked out by Janus right away? We discuss all of these topics and more in this episode of Laborwave. More Info: Bill Fletcher Jr http://billfletcherjr.com/ A Conversation With Bill Fletcher Jr http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/conversation-bill-fletcher/ Women Are Leading The Wave of Strikes in America. Here's Why. ~Tithi Bhattacharya https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/10/women-teachers-strikes-america Contact Laborwave Revolution Radio @ laborwavenews@gmail.com
Míkasì is a local activist and changemaker with the Democratic Socialists of America chapter, Corvallis Trans Support, and the newly formed Tenants United renters union. Andrea Anarchy sat down with her in June to discuss or organizing, her political philosophy and radical vision for our community. We speak in the later half exploring her activist story - her journey over her life through landscapes, ideologies, spirituality and finding an activist home in our local community. She recently announced a local city council race in Ward 4 (South Town) as well - adding another radical action by this local organizer. Check it out in the episode resources! Further resources for this episode: https://www.facebook.com/BentonCountyDSA/ https://www.facebook.com/ourtenantsunion/ https://www.facebook.com/CorvallisTransSupport/ https://corvallistranssupport.wordpress.com/ https://www.facebook.com/KreismanGoodwin2018/ https://kreisman-goodwin2018.com/ LaborWave is an exploration of culture, politics, rebellion, and alternatives to capitalism recorded in Corvallis, Oregon at Oregon State University’s Orange Media Network. We want to hear your ideas, thoughts, and articles! Contact us at corvallislabourwave@gmail.com. Music in order - C by Oh Sees, Adult Acid by Thee Oh Sees, and Palace Doctor by Thee Oh Sees, courtesy of the ever-radical John Dwyer.