Laborwave Radio: Recent Episodes
Laborwave Radio
Laborwave Radio focuses on work and labor organizing from an anti-capitalist perspective. We're a part of the Channel Zero Network and Labor Radio Network.
"Rather than viewing strikes as a last-resort bargaining tactic, the labor movement must embrace them as engines of political transformation."Erik Baker, an American historian, associate editor at The Drift, and a former UAW staff organizer, joins Laborwave to discuss his article for Jewish Currents, Revaluing the Strike. You can read the full article at https://jewishcurrents.org/revaluing-the-strike
Eric Dirnbach joins the show to discuss premajority unionism, where you don't need to wait around to act like a union but can be a union from the start! We also talk about strikes, dues checkoff, fighting corporate giants like Starbucks and Amazon, and more. Check out the article written by Eric Dirnbach and Colette Perold on premajority unionism at https://workerorganizing.org/premajority-unionism/
Back from hiatus with a no holds barred takedown of every popular argument for reviving the power of organizing labor! Marianne Garneau, editor in chief of Organizing Work, joins the discussion to breakdown the debates on organizing the unorganized, the rank and file strategy, and forming new types of contemporary unions.Check out my new article in Organizing Work that dives deeper into the problems with the "militant minority" tendency: https://organizing.work
Matthew Dimick, Professor of Law at the University of Buffalo, joins the show to respond to recent debate over the Wagner Act. Dimick makes clear that rather than trying to posit the Act was a gift to labor that the labor movement should be cautious whenever the state seeks to substitute its powers for unions own self-activity. Our discussion touches on the following articles written by Dimick in Organizing Work and Catalyst Journal. Counterfeit Liberty- https://catalyst-journal.com/2019/07/counterfeit-libertyThe Wagner Act, Cause and Consequences- https://organizing.work/2022/08/the-wagner-act-causes-and-consequences/
Toni Gilpin joins the show to discuss her book, The Long Deep Grudge, which chronicles the epic battles of the Farm Equipment Workers Union (FE) against corporate giant International Harvester.
From the book description, "International Harvester – and the McCormick family that largely controlled it – garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the 20th century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side the militant Farm Equipment Workers union, connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II."
Order the book at https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1383-the-long-deep-grudge
Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com
Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwaveWe have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Second episode in our discussion of the life and thought of William Z. Foster.
On this go around Lucas Carpenter and Tim Shields join the show to do a deep dive over Foster's proposed methods for effective labor organizing. In particular we examine his pamphlets Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry and Strike Strategy.
We also discuss the techniques of pink sheeting, role of popular education in organizing, and competing conceptions of leadership identification and development.
This and more on the latest episode of Laborwave Radio.
Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com
Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwaveWe have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Nick Driedger joins the show to discuss the legacy and ideas of William Z. Foster, former president the Communist Party USA and trade unionist involved in the early IWW and AFL.
We adopt a critical lens discuss Foster's concepts of a "militant minority" and "boring from within" as a strategy for pulling conservative unions to the left. Driedger also explains the reaction and criticism leveled against Foster's ideas when he presented them to the IWW in 1911.
This and more on the latest episode of Laborwave Radio.
Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com
Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwaveWe have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Graham Kovich joins the show to discuss varying media and communications strategies for increasing union power.
Graham is running for the role of Communications Officer for the IWW and explains his viewpoints on the need for internally focused communications that are member-driven, and how and when it's most effective to utilize external communications to meet union needs.
Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com
Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Daisy Pitkin joins the show to discuss her book about labor organizing and solidarity, On The Line.
Daisy Pitkin has spent more than twenty years as a community and union organizer, working first in support of garment workers around the world, and then for U.S. labor unions organizing industrial laundry workers. Her essays have been awarded the Montana Prize, the DISQUIET Literary Prize, the New Millennium Award, and the Monique Wittig Writer’s Scholarship. She grew up in rural Ohio and received an MFA from the University of Arizona. Pitkin lives and writes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she works as an organizer with an offshoot of the union UNITE. Find her at daisypitkin.net.
Joe Burns discusses class struggle unionism on this joint episode between Laborwave Radio and Wobcast of Organizing Work.
Marianne Garneau collaborates on this interview with Joe Burns about his forthcoming book from Haymarket, Class Struggle Unionism.
The current labor movement is dominated, and negatively influenced, by what Burns describes as "labor liberalism." In order to revive a militant union movement, he argues, we need to break free of labor liberalism and return to the aggressive tactics that animate the spirit of class struggle.
To order a copy of the book, visit https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1767-class-struggle-unionism
Check out the articles on Organizing Work and episodes of Wobcast at organizing.work
Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com
Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Michael Beyea Reagan discusses the characteristics of intersectional class struggle and shares insights around movement-building geared toward the task of fighting all forms of oppression.
Get a copy of the book that informs this conversation at https://www.akpress.org/intersectional-class-struggle.html
Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com
Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Liz, host of Rebel Steps podcast, joins the show to discuss a fictional workplace campaign to unionize the hotel workers at the illustrious White Lotus!
Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com
Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Andrea Haverkamp, a labor organizer based in Seattle, joins the show to talk shop about organic leaders, private vs public sector organizing approaches, one-on-one conversations, internal democracy, and more!
Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com
Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Bill Fletcher Jr joins the show and discusses the need for "social justice unionism" in a post-Janus United States. Workers are 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?
Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com
Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Joe Burns, a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer and the author of Strike Back and Reviving the Strike, joins the show to discuss the role militant traditional labor strikes have in revitalizing the labor movement. His forthcoming book is Class Struggle Unionism, from Haymarket Books.
Burns highlights the limitations of labor strategies that prioritize either reforming labor law, electing new labor officials, or seek to "organize our way out of the crisis" by increasing union density. All of these approaches, while they may possess beneficial aspects, fall short of accomplishing the rebirth of a militant labor movement if they are not backed by a wave of traditional labor strikes.
We discuss this and more in our conversation. Get a copy of Reviving the Strike and Strike Back at https://www.igpub.com/reviving-the-strike/ and pre-order a copy of the forthcoming title, Class Struggle Unionism, at https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1767-class-struggle-unionism
Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com
Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Marianne Garneau, publisher of Organizing.Work, joins the show to discuss her article Workplace Struggles Are Political.
Garneau's provides a necessary corrective over common views amongst "socialists" that work and politics are two separate spheres in which struggle takes place. Following the wrongheaded opinion of Lenin, who assessed workers as only capable of rising to a level of "trade union consciousness," these socialists, according to Garneau, "take a surprisingly apolitical view of what goes on in the workplace."
Graham Kovich joins the show to plan an organizing campaign for the servants in Beauty & the Beast!
Graham and I imagine ourselves as two salt shakers, transformed into our alienated selves along with our fellow servants, under the repressive thumb of the "Beast" in a far-away castle in a long ago time.
What pressure do we as servants have to change our circumstances? How can we recruit Belle into an ally in our struggle? And what role does emotional leverage have in orchestrating a servant uprising?
We talk about this as well as the similarities between the conditions faced by these transformed servants with today's hospitality workers, and provide a sketch of an organizing campaign that could likely be imitated in many modern restaurants.
Check out Restaurant Worker News on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/restaurantworkersnews
Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Eric Laursen, author of The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State, joins the show to provide a concrete analysis of the State as opposed to states and compares the modern state to an operating system.
As he explains, the State seeks to be everything. The State absorbs dissent and incorporates it into building a more expansive State. Though humans created the State, it has become nearly autonomous and now shapes our conceptions of ourselves.
How do we break away from the State? What would it look like to replace the State? These challenging questions and more in our conversation with Eric Laursen.
Get a copy of the book at https://www.akpress.org/operating-system.html
Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Eric Dirnbach joins the show to discuss his experience as an advanced organizer with EWOC, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a joint partnership of the DSA and UE. Dirnbach challenges organized labor to train one million workers for unionizing the masses, and we discuss whether popular education models such as EWOC are suited for the task.
Also discussed are the prospects for syndicalism to meet the task of organizing one million workers, and the role mainstream unions can or should have in popular education for organizing workers.
Read the articles written by Dirnbach on EWOC at https://workerorganizing.org/millions-of-workers-want-a-union-ewoc-shows-how-to-help-2382/
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Gabriel Winant, historian and author of The Next Shift, joins the show to discuss the decline of union power in the face of speed-ups and an expanding framework of labor relations.
Our conversation focuses on worker rebellion, the political failure alongside economic gains for organized labor in the postwar era, and the lessons we can learn from the defeat of the New Deal.
He draws attention to the period known as the "great exception," where unions experienced their high-water mark in power and organization, and problematizes some of the common claims about this era. Particularly, Winant shows how the present regime of privatized healthcare was embedded in the struggle over shop floor power in the postwar United States.
Get a copy of Winant's book, The Next Shift, at https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674238091
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Comrades Luke and Tim join the show to discuss the rank and file critique of business unionism put forward by Stan Weir.
Throughout his writings and his life Stan Weir operated by the creed that one should not "let people feel that their job is to sit back and admire somebody else."
Our conversation focuses on Stan Weir's critique of "business unionism," guided by his confidence in the capacity of workers organizing their own independent and radical unions. Weir provides a corrective to the story of the CIO where he highlights how the CIO was formed by rank and file workers and then was pushed into bureaucratic forms by labor officialdom. Weir also challenges the romanticized historiography of union leaders like Walter Reuther and Harry Bridges, pointing to their methods of suppressing rank and file militancy.
From the book jacket, "Blue-collar intellectual and activist, Stan Weir devoted his life to the advocacy of his fellow workers. Singlejack Solidarity offers a rare look at life and social relations as seen from the factory, dockside, and the shop floor."
Get the book at https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/singlejack-solidarity
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
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Re-issue of our conversation with Marianne Garneau discussing her article in Organizing.Work, "You Say You Want a General Strike?"
Garneau takes a critical look at general strikes conducted in Europe and argues they have not had the powerful impacts popularly imagined by US audiences. She then discusses the possibilities of importing the tactic to the United States.
Read the full article at https://organizing.work/2019/08/you-say-you-want-a-general-strike/
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Hamilton Nolan joins the show to elaborate on his article "Get Rid of No Strike Clauses and Stop Begging" written for In These Times.
Nolan argues that the right to strike is the only thing that gives working people power. He identifies the weaknesses of organized labor within a paradigm of collective bargaining where surrendering the right to strike is the norm, and argues that in order to turn the tide of union power in the US it is necessary for rank and file union members to commit to reclaiming the strike and eliminating no strike clauses from their contracts.
Read the article at https://inthesetimes.com/article/no-strike-clause-labor-peace-union-contracts
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
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Veteran labor organizer, Elizabeth Laycak, joins the show to discuss how two new workers employed by Dunder Mifflin Paper Co. in Scranton, PA would initiate a unionization campaign with a strategy to win.
We cover mapping and charting, assessments, identifying leaders (and isolating anti-union workers), along with the importance of secrecy and inoculation throughout the campaign.
Very fun episode and Laborwave Radio is making an open invitation to any of our listeners that wish to discuss the hypothetical union campaign they would conduct at any fictional workplace on television or the big screen! Contact LR at laborwavenews@gmail.com if you've got a pitch!
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
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Ruby and Zama, workers at Amazon and members of Amazonians United, join the show to discuss their methods of shop floor organizing and direct unionism.
They share stories of how AU emerged, initially through breaking bread and resocializing the workplace, to their first direct action demanding access to water in the shop.
We also discussed the dismissal of AU by proponents of business unionism, and offer a critique of conventional labor union practices.
Learn more about AU at https://www.amazoniansunited.org/
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
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Music: Ty Segall- Love Fuzz
Marybeth Seitz-Brown, organizer and former rank-and-file member with the NewsGuild of New York, joins the show to discuss how deep organizing is necessary for building robust union democracy and pushing union members to tackle the biggest issues of the day.
Building off her article, "The Left Needs to Engage Members If We Want to Win Big" in The Forge, Marybeth puts forward grounded advice on how to develop methods for ensuring union democracy is an active practice and organizing approaches workers with the expectation that their politics and activity can change over time.
We discuss why it matters to view democracy as the practice of "governing by obeying," the need to expand the political imagination around what unions can fight for and win, and how deep organizing can build the structures within our unions necessary for accomplishing the above.
Read the article at https://forgeorganizing.org/article/left-needs-engage-members-if-we-want-win-big
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Music: Mika Miko- Turkey Sandwich
Comrades Andrea, Kali, Luke, and Nick join the show to discuss the film Lapsis, from writer/director Noah Hutton. In a parallel present, delivery man Ray Tincelli takes a job in the gig economy. He begins pulling cable to link together the new quantum trading market.
We talk about the film's realistic depiction of working in the gig economy and the power of organizing against it, the tactic of sabotage, and how capitalism is a ponzi scheme that keeps us sick and pits automation against the toiling masses and natural environment.
Thanks to Taylor Hess, film producer for making it possible for us to have this discussion, and director Noah Hutton for allowing us to screen the movie! You can find Lapsis online for rent at vudu.com and Laborwave Radio highly recommends it for you and all your friends.
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
MK Lees, contributor and regular editor of Organizing Work, joins Laborwave Radio to discuss the strategy of "salting" a workplace to boost a union campaign, and the need to refine this practice for optimal impact.
Among topics discussed in this episode is a response to the claim that salting is the best strategy for revitalizing a militant labor movement, and how salting done well abides by understanding that a salt cannot substitute for a committee of rank and file workers.
The article, "Salt: The Flavor, Not the Meal," published in Organizing Work formed the basis of our conversation. Read it at https://organizing.work/2020/06/salt-the-flavor-not-the-meal/
Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
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Tom Wetzel, author of the forthcoming book Overcoming Capitalism from AK Press, joins Laborwave Radio to discuss a syndicalist critique of Kim Moody's rank and file strategy.
Our conversation focuses on arguments made by Wetzel in two pieces for Black Rose Anarchist Federation, The Case for Building New Unions https://blackrosefed.org/the-case-for-building-new-unions-wetzel/; and The Rank and File Strategy: A Syndicalist View https://blackrosefed.org/wetzel-rank-and-file-strategy-syndicalist/
Wetzel points out that Moody's strategy exclusively relies on transforming existing business unions, an unlikely task but also one that overlooks how nearly 90% of workers do not belong to unions and can be organized into independent unions. Rather than reforming business unions and then hoping it expands into more unions, Wetzel maintains our primary focus should be on organizing the non-unionized workers into entirely different types of unions.
This and more in our conversation. Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.
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Comrades Andrea Haverkamp, Nick Fisher, Tim and Joe Clement join Laborwave Radio for another series of Comrades Read!
We dig into the "Rank and File Strategy" a popular 30-page pamphlet written by Kim Moody in 2000 for the publication Solidarity.
We provide a summary of Moody's argument, that socialists are marginal in labor unions and therefore need to create "transitional organizations" to insert radical activity into unions and build toward a larger international socialist organization, and also talk through our points of agreement, departure, and the possible limits of the rank and file strategy.
Comrades challenged the idea that unions need to build toward a "socialist party" apparatus, while others acknowledged Moody's emphasis on focusing where we have current capacity in the working-class and therefore the rank and file strategy gives us a pathway for contemporary conditions.
This and more in the first episode of another mini-series where we'll be discussing the Rank and File Strategy! Read the pamphlet at https://solidarity-us.org/rankandfilestrategy/
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MUSIC: Link Wray- The Bad and the Good
Peter Cole joins the show to discuss the second edition of his book Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly published by PM Press.
The range and scope of this episode expands over the backdrop of early 20th century Philadelphia and recounts the biographical details of Wobbly organizer Ben Fletcher and the tale of IWW Local 8, a powerful dock workers union that practiced anti-racist unionism which Ben Fletcher helped to create. We also discuss the demise of Local 8, brought down by a multitude of historical forces such as WWI and employer counter-offensives as well as fraught internal divisions between the IWW and Communist Party and competition from business unions such as the International Longshoremen's Association.
Get a copy of the book at https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1144
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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Music: Dead Milkmen- Big Lizard Thee Oh Sees- Adult Acid
Laborwave Radio and the One Big Podcast collaborate on this episode discussing the particulars of solidarity unionism in contrast to business unionism.
We dig into the various tenets of solidarity unionism; its emphasis on direct action over contracts, focus on the workplace and industry over legal strategies and electoralism, and the prospects for dual-carding in a shop represented by a business union.
One Big Podcast is the official podcast of the Ypsilanti IWW, listen to the podcast and find out more about the branch at https://www.iwwypsi.org/
Become a Laborwave Radio patron to support this show at patreon.com/laborwave
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Music: Natural Child- Sure Is Nice
Sarah Jaffe, author, labor journalist, and one of the hosts of Belabored Podcast, joins Laborwave Radio to discuss her new book, Work Won't Love You Back published by Bold Type Books.
You’re told that if you “do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” But as Sarah Jaffe shows, “doing what you love” is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.
We discuss the themes of the book, the downsides when punk rock is created by trust fund kids, and what love might look like in a world free of capitalist forms of work.
Get a copy of the book at https://www.boldtypebooks.com/titles/sarah-jaffe/work-wont-love-you-back/9781568589398/
Find more work from Sarah Jaffe at https://sarahljaffe.com/
Become a Laborwave Radio patron to support this show at patreon.com/laborwave
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/labo…io/id1536697871
Music from In The Red Records: Thee Oh Sees- Adult Acid Tyvek- Origin of What
Transcript at laborwaveradio.com/post/_work
Support Laborwave Radio at patreon.com/laborwave
Alex Press, labor reporter and staff writer at Jacobin Magazine, joins the show to discuss Joe Biden's union credentials and what organized labor should and shouldn't expect from a Biden administration. As made clear in this interview- not much without a fight.
We also dig into the details of the PRO Act, the types of unions the working class wants and needs, and how the primary means for workers to win progressive legislation is to form militant unions and engage in class struggle.
This interview follows an article from Alex Press that you can read at https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/joe-biden-labor-unions-afl-cio-kamala-harris
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871
Music from In The Red Records: Fuzz- Rat Race
Sustain Laborwave Radio by becoming a patron at patreon.com/laborwave
Laborwave spoke with workers at No Evil Foods about the company's union busting strategy against a unionization campaign organized by employees. Megan, John, and Max discuss in detail the tactics of No Evil Foods union busting, including a marathon series of captive audience meetings totaling 14 hours, illegal firings, and censorship, and how workers should prepare for aggressive anti-union campaigns conducted by bosses. We also delved into a conversation about "solidarity unionism" and the IWW as a viable alternative to conventional union recognition campaigns.
This episode includes never heard before leaked audio from captive audience meetings owners of No Evil Foods forced their employees to attend!
Despite being a "progressive" company producing vegan meat alternatives and naming their products in socialist language like "comrade cluck," No Evil Foods prioritizes profit over people and demonstrates a no-holds-barred approach to union busting.
Workers have compiled an extensive catalog of information, interviews, and resources for the union busting that took place housed at the website https://www.moevilfoods.com/
Additional resources mentioned in the show: Confessions of a Union Buster by Martin Jay Levitt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-0gxca-VxM
Thanks to John Dwyer and In The Red Records for use of music! Thee Oh Sees- Acid Wash The Spit- Shitty World
Support Laborwave Radio at patreon.com/laborwave
Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese are the editors of The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy published by Pluto Press. Order a copy at https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341484/the-cost-of-free-shipping/
With cutting-edge analysis, this book looks at the many facets of the corporation, including automation, surveillance, tech work, workers' struggle, algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy and much more.
Mentioned in the talk is a panel event with the editors from November, when this episode was recorded, you've missed that discussion but you can watch the video of it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYeH0jLmHFM
Join the fight against Amazon by connecting with Amazonians United at https://www.amazoniansunited.org/ and read an interview with the workers at https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/amazon-manages-us-through-stress/
Learn more about forms of solidarity work from this piece at Jacobin, Amazon Workers Desperately Need an Insurgent Union Campaign https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/amazon-worker-organizing-salting-union-coronavirus
All our content is at laborwaveradio.com
Music: Fresh and Onlys- I'm a Thief
The IWW is 115 years old! In celebration we invited Marianne Garneau & Nick Driedger from Organizing Work to discuss the nuts and bolts of organizing within the IWW and our future as a union.
What accounts for the recent upsurge in IWW organizing campaigns? How do we make more universal for all Wobblies our educational documents and training programs? What, if any, strategic industries should we focus on and should we target smaller workplaces or larger ones to build power? Finally, how much should we branch off from organizing in the workplace to forms of organizing outside of it?
We discuss all of the above questions, as well as the challenges we face in building one big union, including the dominant presence of business unions and increasing precarity of workers in North America.
Transcript forthcoming!
Links: Laborwave Radio patreon patreon.com/laborwave
Organizing Work https://organizing.work
Join the IWW! (but you have to promise to organize your coworkers!) https://iww.org
The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor by Steve Early https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/350-the-civil-wars-in-u-s-labor
Music: Thee Oh Sees- Toe Cutter/Thumb Buster (intro) The Traditional Fools- Get Off Of My Back (outro)
Laborwave Radio presents a podcast mini-series, After The Revolution.
After the Revolution is inspired by the desire to offer more than a diagnosis of what is wrong with today by focusing on what we might be able to bring about instead. Each episode within this series will begin by highlighting the importance of one particular feature of society, then imagining what it might look like after the revolution, and finally offering some ideas on how we get to this revolutionary society.
Our fourth episode is Malls After the Revolution featuring Shawn of Srsly Wrong, a utopian leftist comedy podcast (https://srslywrong.com/).
"We can't just have a perfect mall that works and is static. We can think of a bunch of different things that are the conditions of a good mall that we can try to increase over time, such as making sure that community members have access. We could try to make a static mall, but it's like trying to paint the smell of oranges. Or trying to translate the taste of soup into a song. It does not follow."
Crossposting an interview Laborwave Radio host, Alex Riccio, had with Joseph Orosco of the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures about the #ScholarStrike.
The recent online #ScholarStrike claimed to be a way for higher ed faculty to engage in radical action in support of racial justice and against police violence in the US. In the conversation I argue that the #ScholarStrike missed big opportunities for social change and revealed some misunderstandings that many academics have about power and their own place in systems of oppression. Rather than have digital conferences, higher education workers should build alternative organizations to challenge the power structure of their universities to bring racial justice to the BIPOC staff and community that work at their institutions.
Read the full article at https://www.laborwaveradio.com/post/strikes-are-not-for-spectacle
For more information on the Anarres Project, visit @AnarresProject on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or go to anarresproject.org.
Support our show at patreon.com/laborwave
Join in on the fun Discord conversations by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave
We're reading books, sharing articles, and watching movies via discord with our patreon subscribers.
We've finished No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power by Jane McAlevey! Each chapter has been discussed at length in our series Comrades Read Together, and three veteran labor organizers join us for this final conversation.
Michael Marchmann, staff organizer for GTFF 3544, Sarah Pishioneri, staff organizer for CGE 6069, and Andrea Haverkamp, president of CGE 6069, chat with Laborwave Radio about the difference between "pretend power" and "real power."
Our conversation circles largely around the question of, what Marx famously described, "class in itself" vs. "class for itself." How do we, as leftist organizers, connect disparate movement agents during times of crisis to move from having history enacted upon the working class to the working class enacting history? With the looming pandemic providing pathways towards multiple futures, what are the necessary steps and vision we need to push toward the future we wish to make?
All this and more in our final episode of Comrades Read Together: No Shortcuts!
Music from In The Red Records: Ty Segall- Class War
We spoke with members of the Angry Workers, a political collective, about the insights from their recent PM Press title, "Class Power on Zero Hours."
The Angry Workers spent the last six years working in a London backyard mostly among food and manufacturing workers, and they've chronicled their experiences as well as their efforts to organize alongside these workers in an expansive book. We speak about these experiences as well as the lessons learned from the ground, and the need to develop revolutionary forms of organization internationally.
You can contact the Angry Workers at angryworkersworld@gmail.com or on their Twitter @angryworkers or Facebook @angryworkersworld https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1164
Music on this episode is provided thanks to In The Red Records! Ty Segall & Mikal Cronin- Drop Dead Baby https://intheredrecords.com/collections/the-ty-segall-band/products/ty-segall-mikal-cronin-reverse-shark-attack
Support our show by becoming a patron at patreon.com/laborwave
On Election Night comrades of the show got together to play games, talk politics, and ease election anxiety (as much as that was possible). Here's a short clip of our four-hour hangout where we discussed Emma Goldman's position on women's suffrage and state politics, the Black Rose Anarchist Federation article on Voting or Abstention, and a recent Contrapoints video discussing the subject of voting for the lesser of two evils. Comrades heard here include Andrea, Kali, and Tali.
Laborwave will continue putting videos and hangouts such as these on our YouTube, and you can access all of our content and help sustain our show at patreon.com/laborwave
Links to the articles we discuss: Emma Goldman- Woman Suffrage https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1911/woman-suffrage.htm
Black Rose Anarchist Federation- Vote- Or Don't: On Abstentionism https://blackrosefed.org/vote-or-dont/
Contrapoints- Voting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Vah8sUFgI
David Graeber was an anthropologist, proponent of anarchism, and participant in many movement struggles of the past two decades including the Alter-Globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street. Among his popular authored books includes Debt: The First 5,000 Years, The Utopia of Rules, Bullshit Jobs, and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. He passed on September 2, 2020.
We discuss his ideas and celebrate his memory in this conversation with comrades Tony Vogt, member of the IWW and co-founder of the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, and Shane Capra, an organizer and participant in the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking and member of the IWW.
Our discussion covers topics of leadership and charisma, the tension between play and games, and falling in love with a ghost you cannot capture.
Support Laborwave by becoming a patron at patreon.com/laborwave
Links: Anarres Project for Alternative Futures anarresproject.org
Institute for Advanced Troublemaking https://advancedtroublemaking.wordpress.com
In the Red Records https://intheredrecords.com
Music: King Khan & BBQ Show: Shake Real Low
We discussed the legacy and experiences of Occupy Wall Street with two movement participants Marina Sitrin and Vanessa Zettlers, contributors to the recent title Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the Covid-19 Crisis published by Pluto Press.
Our conversation touched on the ways to recover the real history of OWS and overcome "historical forgetting," the mechanics of OWS through forms of direct democracy such as assemblies and working groups, and the lessons learned from this movement including the need to better anticipate "the fist of the state."
In The Red Records, an independent music label based in Los Angeles, has provided Laborwave permission to use music from their artists on the show! This episode featured the following In The Red artists:
Tyvek- Real Estate and Finance, off their 2016 album "Origin of What" Osees-Don't Blow Your Experiment, from their upcoming album "Panther Rotate" from Castle Face Records.
Links: Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid During Covid-19 Crisis published by Pluto Press https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343167/pandemic-solidarity/
They Can't Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy published by Verso Books https://www.versobooks.com/books/1433-they-can-t-represent-us
Laborwave Radio is an independent podcast fully sustained by our patrons. Become a rank-and-filer, committee member, or strike captain and help support our show at patreon.com/laborwave
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
Joining Laborwave is Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, to discuss his piece on Identity Politics and Elite Capture published by the Boston Review.
"If elite capture boils down to the way power and resources tend to be distributed within groups, and not simply across groups, then it is a fully general problem of politics in a world that distributes power and resources unjustly and unequally. Elites get outsize control over the ideas in circulation about identities by, more or less, the same methods and for the same reasons that they get control over everything else."
We discuss how elite capture is on display in the op-eds of Andrew Yang and calls for better representation within mainstream media, its manifestations in current discourse around "cancel culture," and the prospects for revamped social movements, especially in organized labor, to elevate politics to a level that transcends the capture of elites.
http://bostonreview.net/race/olufemi-o-taiwo-identity-politics-and-elite-capture
Music: Damaged Bug- Sold America
Transcript available at https://www.laborwaveradio.com/post/olufemitaiwo
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
Join the conversations around this book in our Laborwave Discord by becoming any type of patron of the show at patreon.com/laborwave !!!
This is our second episode of Comrades Read Together where we're discussing, chapter by chapter, the book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age.
We follow up our conversation tackling the introduction and chapter 2 with a review of the book by Nick Dreidger, contributing writer to Organizing Work!
Dreidger asks the tough questions about the political horizons achievable under a labor relations framework, and whether it's possible for "business unions" to break out of such constricting frameworks. He also argues that McAlevey's ultimate aims in labor organizing leads us down the path of left electoral politics, where the power that has been built by workers through these deep organizing methods are undercut by the top-down system of politics available within the electoral realm.
We also talked about the IWW approach, why it succeeds and why it fails, and speak about the prospects for independent radical unions.
Read his full review, No Shortcuts, But to Where? at https://organizing.work/2019/12/no-shortcuts-but-to-where/
We're continuing with this series by reading chapters 3-4 and engaging with folks on our Laborwave Discord!
Become a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave
Andrea Haverkamp, President of CGE 6069; Sarah Pishioneri, labor organizer based in Oregon; and Alex Riccio, labor organizer based in Philadelphia; have a comradely discussion about the first two chapters of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey.
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!
We cover the main arguments put forward in the introduction and chapter two concerning theories of power, the difference between advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing strategies, and whole-worker organizing. We also hiss and boo at the villains taken on by McAlevey named Andy Stern, former president of SEIU, and Saul Alinsky, overall weak-sauce organizer pushing a mostly advocacy and mobilizing approach to social change where organizers pretend to be neutral support with no agendas or positions.
This and more in our first Comrades Read Together!
Laborwave Radio speaks with Shannon Ikebe and Tara Phillips, two striking workers at the University of California, on the power of wildcat strikes, importance of deep internal union democracy, and organizing worker insurgencies. They are the authors of the piece, The Grassroots Wildcat Strike for a COLA and the Fight for a Democratic, Militant Union.
Shannon Ikebe is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. They study social democracy and labor movements in Europe.
Tara Phillips is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley where she studies US and Latin American Literature in the twentieth century from a food studies perspective. She is a also an academic worker and rank and file labor organizer at UAW 2865.
Our conversation provides an update on the wildcat strike at the UC system, and largely focuses on the strategies behind the strike and rebuttals to criticisms from certain detractors. Ikebe and Phillips reject the view that a wildcat strike must conform to pseudo-scientific claims about the "physics of strikes," and largely take their inspiration for worker insurgencies from the likes of Rosa Luxemburg and her writings on the "mass strike."
"You can't calculate everything and predict the outcome in advance. You have to experiment and see what's possible for workers. In the process our movement has grown organically and exponentially, and workers expectations have been raised.
The key point is that we now have a movement that formerly we have not had. We have not won a COLA yet, but I don't think it's a defeat as some people may like to call it. I think it's an inconclusive ending for now, but the difference being that we have a movement. Also, the way in which people have a real lived experience of doing a wildcat strike, and the wildcat strike as a repertoire of tactics has become normalized as part of the things we can do. I think that was completely unimaginable in November, 2019."
Other show references:
Maximillian Alvarez, Antifascism and the Left's Fear of Taking Power, Baffler Magazine
Strike University, https://strikeuniversity.org/
Music: Damaged Bug, Lovely Gold
Laborwave Radio and Opening Space for the Radical Imagination present a podcast mini-series, After The Revolution.
After the Revolution is inspired by the desire to offer more than a diagnosis of what is wrong with today by focusing on what we might be able to bring about instead. Each episode within this series will begin by highlighting the importance of considering one particular feature of society, then imagining what it might look like after the revolution, and finally offering some ideas on how we get to this revolutionary society.
Our third episode is Waste After the Revolution featuring Andrea Haverkamp, president of the Coalition of Graduate Employees labor union, a Phd candidate in Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University, and frequent guest host on Laborwave Radio.
"We will, after the revolution, use our current landfills as the new goldmines. We put so much plastic and metals in landfills that will not go away for thousands of years and we can get them back out. We will no longer have our lives dominated by single use items. The rulers are beholden to the cups. The cups are actually not beholden to them. Under consumer capitalism we've created this runaway train and there's no single figure head that we can shut down like we can shut down a factory that will have the effect that we need."
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.
We speak on the emerging demands on the AFL-CIO to sever ties with police unions, which Bill Fletcher Jr cautions could have the consequence of providing the right-wing with scripts to claim police are being victimized by the left, and enable Trumpists to more easily stoke reactionary fires. Fletcher suggests that our focus should be more on police repression, and having a reckoning with our own past within the labor movement that has a complicated record on racial justice.
We also speak on the paradoxical quality of online technologies confining workers to more hours on the job rather than liberation from work, and the need for organized labor to go deeper and further in demanding emancipation.
Two graduate employee unions in Oregon have joined the growing number of union locals to publish statements pressuring the AFL-CIO to disaffiliate with the IUPA (International Union of Police Associations). For transparency, the host of Laborwave Radio was involved and supportive in the process of one of these statements being produced. The statements can be read at this link:
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
Full audio & transcript at laborwaveradio.com/natashalennard
Laborwave speaks with Natasha Lennard, author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-fascist Life from Verso Books and contributing contributing writer at The Intercept. Her work covers politics and power and has appeared in Esquire, The Nation, and the New York Times opinion section.
Lennard discusses non-fascist life during the crisis of capitalism, intensified by a pandemic, and helps analyze this moment in terms of "accidents" and full surrogacy for each other.
Preface: "What would it look like if we were all surrogates for each other in all kinds of different ways. If we ushered ourselves through the world and held each other in our porousness, our wateriness, our undeniable and often conflictual interdependency. So I think this is the moment of undeniable interdependency becoming clear. What would it look like to live well by it?"
May Day Amid A Plague with Sarah Jaffe Full Audio & Transcript at laborwaveradio.com/sarahjaffe [edited for clarity, May 1, 2020]
Laborwave Radio in conversation with Sarah Jaffe, author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, which Robin D.G. Kelley called “The most compelling social and political portrait of our age.” She is a Type Media Center reporting fellow and an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.
She discusses labor organizing and worker militancy amid a plague on this troubled day of celebration, May Day.
Preface “We already know, because of the climate catastrophe that is breathing down on us, that we need to radically reshape the economy and do it quickly. Well now we've seen that we can. It turns out that we can survive on the work of so-called essential workers. I think what we’re seeing is the things that are staying open right now, the things that we need, are jobs doing the work of social reproduction. Nurses are working, and members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are picking tomatoes in Florida working. The people who deliver things to you, the logistics chain, Amazon warehouse workers who have been showing us all how to be militant lately, are working. That is social reproduction work. So much of the rest of the economy doesn't actually need to exist.”
Transcript Forthcoming at laborwaveradio.com/gianpaolo
Laborwave Radio and Opening Space for the Radical Imagination present a podcast mini-series, After The Revolution.
After the Revolution is inspired by the desire to offer more than a diagnosis of what is wrong with today by focusing on what we might be able to bring about instead. Each episode within this series will begin by highlighting the importance of considering one particular feature of society, then imagining what it might look like after the revolution, and finally offering some ideas on how we get to this revolutionary society.
Our second episode is The Political Party After the Revolution featuring Gianpaolo Baiocchi, professor of individualized studies and sociology at NYU and director of the Urban Democracy Lab. He is author of We, The Sovereign which explores the possibilities of bringing about a radical utopia of popular self-rule.
“When we look at the history of political parties in the United States they are pretty consistent with their founding mission of representing political elites. Who do we want this party to be autonomous from and who do we want it to be responsive to? We have to be very clear that it's people's struggles, movements, and unions that we want it to be responsive to and that we want it to be autonomous from elite interests and existing bureaucratic formations within movements and non-profits. Everybody feels like we can't have Trump again, but having this kind of life and death thing continues to lead us to greater and greater compromises all the time. What I like about your question about the party after the revolution is might we have the freedom to rethink our structures of political representation in a way that doesn't feel like if we don't sort it out exactly this minute the world will end or the right-wing will win."
Full audio and transcript available at laborwaveradio.com/micahuetricht
We spoke with Micah Uetricht, managing editor at Jacobin Magazine and co-author of the recent Verso title, Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go From The Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.
"Bernie's campaign, and the campaigns that have followed his, should show that there is also a way to do electoral politics that is actually spurring more class struggle, not tamping it down. Marxism is about both the objective conditions that you face, as well as the subjective efforts you can make to change the world. Good Marxism, in my opinion, always focuses on doing both of those things. What opportunities the objective conditions present to you, but also what you as an individual can do swimming outside the tides of history."
In Bigger than Bernie, activist writers Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht give us an intimate map of this emerging movement to remake American politics top to bottom, profiling the grassroots organizers who are building something bigger, and more ambitious, than the career of any one candidate. As participants themselves, Day and Uetricht provide a serious analysis of the prospects for long-term change, offering a strategy for making “political revolution” more than just a campaign slogan. They provide a road map for how to entrench democratic socialism in the halls of power and in our own lives.
Bigger than Bernie offers unmatched insights into the people behind the most unique campaign in modern American history and a clear-eyed sense of how the movement can sustain itself for the long haul.
Transcript available at laborwaveradio.com/hollylewis
Join our online book club @ laborwaveradio.com!
We speak with Holly Lewis, assistant professor at Texas State University and author of The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection published by Zed Books.
The Politics of Everybody examines the production and maintenance of the terms 'man', 'woman', and 'other' within the current political moment; the contradictions of these categories and the prospects of a Marxist approach to praxis for queer bodies. Few thinkers have attempted to reconcile queer and Marxist analysis. Those who have propose the key contested site to be that of desire/sexual expression. This emphasis on desire, Lewis argues, is symptomatic of the neoliberal project and has led to a continued fascination with the politics of identity. By arguing that Marxist analysis is in fact most beneficial to gender politics within the arena of body production, categorization and exclusion Lewis develops a theory of gender and the sexed body that is wedded to the realities of a capitalist political economy.
Boldly calling for a new, materialist queer theory, Lewis defines a politics of liberation that is both intersectional, transnational, and grounded in lived experience.
Laborwave Radio and Opening Space for the Radical Imagination present a podcast mini-series, After The Revolution.
Full audio and transcript available at laborwaveradio.com/rajpatel
After the Revolution is inspired by the desire to offer more than a diagnosis of what is wrong with today by focusing on what we might be able to bring about instead. Each episode within this series will begin by highlighting the importance of considering one particular feature of society, then imagining what it might look like after the revolution, and finally offering some ideas on how we get to this revolutionary society.
Our first episode is The Dinner Table After the Revolution featuring Raj Patel, writer, activist, and academic who has authored the books Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food Sytem; The Value of Nothing; and The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things with co-author Jason W. Moore.
A special audio reproduction of a live discussion with Boots Riley! Full transcript available at laborwaveradio.com/bootsriley
This event was organized by the Coalition of Graduate Employees (CGE 6069) and King Legacy Advisory Board (KLAB) to celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and CGE's 20th Anniversary as a formally recognized labor union.
Moderated by Andrea Haverkamp, Boots Riley discusses a wide range of topics including the left's move from organizing power at the point of production to a form of political protest as "spectacle," the role of radical and subversive art in modern culture, and the need to move beyond debates over violence and non-violence in our organizing.
Full Transcript Available At: laborwaveradio.com/asadhaider
What is the relationship between race and class, and which should be the primary focus for addressing on the level of political organizing? Questions such as these, argues our guest Asad Haider, miss the mark as they seek to make determinations about the world at the level of conceptual abstractions.
Furthermore, he suggests, such questions slide into a muddled debate between advancing either universalist or particularist demands. The reality, he suggests, is that the abolition of white supremacy and the advancing of class struggle are by necessity universal programs beginning with particular demands.
Asad Haider is an editor of Viewpoint Magazine and author of Mistaken Identity: Anti-Racism and the Struggle Against White Supremacy (Verso, Spring 2018).
Viewpoint Magazine: https://www.viewpointmag.com/author/asad-haider/
Mistaken Identity: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity
Full transcript at laborwaveradio.com/jarrodshanahan
We explore the life and legacy of Noel Ignatiev through conversation with Jarrod Shanahan, a life-long comrade of Noel's and co-editor along with Noel Ignatiev on the journal Hard Crackers.
Noel Ignatiev passed on November 9, 2019 at the age of 78. He was a dedicated antiracist leftist who edited the journals Race Traitor and Hard Crackers and wrote the widely influential book How The Irish Became White. The enduring legacy of Noel Ignatiev's life and thought may best be summed up by the slogan printed on the cover of Race Traitor: "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity."
We discuss with Jarrod Shanahan Noel's theoretical contributions to analyses on whiteness and "white skin privilege" as well as his ideas on how small groups of radicals can change society through instigating "creative provocation," such as practiced by the Abolitionists against chattel slavery in the United States.
Jarrod Shanahan is an activist, educator, and researcher. His writing, which has appeared in outlets including Jacobin, Commune, Vice, and The New Inquiry, can be found at jarrodshanahan.com.
Read Jarrod's full article commemorating the life and legacy of Noel Ignatiev at Commune Mag: https://communemag.com/noel-ignatiev-1940-2019/
Further links: Opening Space for the Radical Imagination III https://www.imaginativespaces.org
Laborwave Radio https://www.labowaveradio.com
Noel Ignatiev Works Referenced:
Black Worker, White Worker http://www.sojournertruth.net/bwww.html
How The Irish Became White https://www.routledge.com/How-the-Irish-Became-White-1st-Edition/Ignatiev/p/book/9780415963091
Race Traitor https://www.routledge.com/Race-Traitor-1st-Edition/Ignatiev-Garvey/p/book/9780415913935
Hard Crackers https://hardcrackers.com/
CUNY Struggle https://cunystruggle.org/
$7K or Strike https://7korstrike.org/
Robin DG Kelley “After Trump” forum http://bostonreview.net/forum/after-trump/robin-d-g-kelley-trump-says-go-back-we-say-fight-back
CLR James and Johnson-Forest tendency For a good introduction into this strain of socialist thought, see The Invading Socialist Society by CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya, https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1947/invading/index.htm
Endnotes https://endnotes.org.uk/about
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/
The Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF 3544) has authorized a strike to begin on November 4, 2019 at the University of Oregon. More than 1,000 workers authorized the strike after 11 months of intense negotiations with university management.
Lola Loustaunau, a graduate employee and member of GTFF, discusses the strategy GTFF has adopted for their collective bargaining efforts, the reasons the strike has been authorized, and the broader experience these negotiations have had on fellow workers and union members.
She also provides personal insights into how public universities are using a post-Janus environment as an opportunity to try to discipline and destroy higher ed unions, and for these reasons along with many others unions need to recommit to a vision of fundamentally transforming society and ending exploitation.
We also had a brief interview with Erin Kanzig, VP of Bargaining for the Coalition of Graduate Employees (CGE 6069) about their current collective bargaining efforts and their goals in bargaining.
More info: GTFF 3544 http://gtff3544.net
CGE 6069 https://cge6069.org/bargaining
In 2018 Oregon voters, particularly teachers and public workers, propelled the Oregon legislature to supermajority Democratic control. But instead of delivering on the promises of protecting union workers and funding public services the Democrats, despite their supermajority in the legislature, have cut public pensions and capitulated to Republicans on a number of bills revealing the extent to which neoliberal ideology dictates the policy-making of Oregon Democrats.
In response, Paige Kreisman has launched a bid for District 42 of the Oregon legislature and openly proclaims herself to be a socialist with a platform to support working-class Oregonians.
She is endorsed by the Portland Democratic Socialists of America, and independents For Progressive Action (Our Revolution, Clackamas County). Paige is the electoral and legislative co-chair for Portland DSA, and a board member for Portland Tenants United. She is a disabled veteran, and the first trans woman to run for the state legislature in Oregon. Paige is calling for an Oregon Green New Deal, campaign finance reform, housing justice, and to defend Oregon's public employees and unions. Learn more about Paige's 100% people powered campaign at Paige2020.com.
Music by Thee Oh Sees. Website at laborwaveradio.com
Calls for a general strike in the United States have become a common phenomenon. Activists and organizers have encouraged general strikes to accomplish goals ranging from climate justice to reproductive justice, and these inspired appeals to massive disruption signal in some respects a desire for fast and dramatic social change.
But what is a general strike and how effective are they in accomplishing social change on a societal scale? And can such strikes be imported into the United States? These questions and more are discussed in our conversation with Marianne Garneau.
Marianne Garneau wrote the recent article for Organizing Work "You Say You Want A General Strike?" which takes a measured assessment on the effectiveness of generals strikes as they occur in Europe.
Marianne Garneau is a labor organizer and editor of Organizing Work, an online platform focused on workplace organizing and strategy.
Read the article at: http://organizing.work/2019/08/you-say-you-want-a-general-strike/
What role have universities in the United States played in the making and continuation of settler-colonialism, white supremacy, and more recently neoliberal capitalism? Have universities been the unwilling victims of the corporatization of higher education, or have they been active agents in their own neoliberal transformation? And how true are common narratives that universities once experienced a golden age of progressive knowledge production and shared governance in a post-WWII United States?
All of these questions and more are discussed in this episode with our guests Eli Meyerhoff and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein. Meyerhoff and Schwartz-Weinstein also open up the conversation to discuss potential alternatives to modern universities in their exploration of abolitionist university studies, inspired by abolitionist movements against slavery and prisons in the US. Abolitionist university studies poses a left-wing critique of universities that traces their lineage to the making of racial capitalism and settler-colonialism in the US, and seeks to move beyond current university configurations toward more liberatory modes of education.
Suggested further reading for this episode include: Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation by Eli Meyerhoff, Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Abbie Boggs, and Nick Mitchell https://abolitionjournal.org/abolitionist-university-studies-an-invitation/
Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World by Eli Meyerhoff https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/beyond-education (get a copy for 30% off using code MN85410- expires December 31, 2019)
Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities by Craig Steven Wilder https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ebony-and-ivy-9781608193837/
Eli Meyerhoff is academic staff at Duke University and author of the recent book, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World published by University of Minnesota Press. He has worked for the Social Movements Lab and participated in two separate unionization efforts to organize graduate student workers at the University of Minnesota.
Zach Schwartz-Weinstein is an adjunct most recently at Bard Prison Initiative. He served on the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) at NYU where he participated in a 7-month strike during 2005-2006. Swartz-Weinstein currently researches food service, maintenance, and clerical workers at US universities and is working on a book about a series of strikes conducted by Yale food service workers in the late 1960s throughout the 1970s.
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?
adrienne maree brown was one of the keynote speakers at Opening Space for the Radical Imagination II, a two-day conference on April 19-20 2019 in the occupied lands of the Kalapuya people.
Her keynote address covered her recent title, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. 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.
For more information on adrienne maree brown visit: adriennemareebrown.net
Also check out more about Opening Space for the Radical Imagination: oregonimagines.com
You can get a copy of Pleasure Activism at https://www.akpress.org/pleasure-activism.html
Music by John Dwyer: Transmute by Damaged Bug Cool Death by Thee Oh Sees
"At their best, premonitions alert us to the unresolved history contained within the smallest of fragments. The distress that such attentiveness yields makes sense; it corresponds to the developmental outcomes demanded by the neurotic course on which we're set. Such outcomes are not inevitable, however, and Premonitions may yet suggest another path."
We spoke with AK Thompson about his recent book, Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt. Our conversation touched on subjects as wide-ranging as Occupy Wall Street and decolonization to prefigurative politics and James Cameron's Avatar.
AK Thompson is a activist, author, and social theorist. A professor of social movements and social change at Ithaca College, his publications include Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research (2006), Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent (2010), Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle (2016), and Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution (2017).
Get a copy of Premonitions at: https://www.akpress.org/premonitions.html
Read a conversation about Premonitions at: http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/having-premonitions-an-interview-with-ak-thompson/
Music by John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees: Can You See Wait, Let's Go The Axis
The International Women's Strike (IWS) is now in its third year of operation, and the feminist thinkers Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser have developed the ideas of IWS in their recent book Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, published by Verso Books. But what is the actual strategy for launching a strike at the level of reproductive labor, as the authors claim is necessary for revitalizing working class struggle?
This question and more animates the conversation we had with Marianne Garneau, editor of Organizing Work and a labor organizer based in New York. In this episode Garneau elaborates her critique of Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto first appearing in the article The Women's Strike, Reconsidered which she wrote for Organizing Work.
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.
Check out the article here: http://organizing.work/2019/03/the-womens-strike-reconsidered/
Be sure to read the excellent articles and features on Organizing Work: https://organizing.work
You can purchase a copy of Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto at https://www.versobooks.com/books/2924-feminism-for-the-99
Songs on this episode by John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees: Peanut Butter Oven Mega-Feast If I Stay Too Long
The Burgerville Workers Union (BVWU) is the first officially recognized fast-food workers union in the United States. They are an affiliate of the Industrial Workers of the World and have embraced militant union organizing strategies to do what traditional labor unions have been unable to accomplish by forming a fast-food workers union.
We spoke with Shane Burley about his recent piece for Think Progress on BVWU and learned more about how these workers were able to succeed in forming their union, how long the fight has been happening, and what challenges lay in front of Burgerville workers.
We also 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.
Shane Burley is a writer and filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Fascism Today: What It Is And How To End It and has had articles printed in Roar Magazine, Think Progress, In These Times, Jacobin, Labor Notes, and more.
Music on this episode from John Dwyer (Thee Oh Sees; Damaged Bug)
Follow Shane Burley on Twitter at twitter.com/shane_burley1
Read his article on BVWU for Think Progress at https://thinkprogress.org/burgerville-oregon-fast-food-labor-union-0253164c533a/
And purchase a copy of Fascism Today at https://www.akpress.org/fascism-today.html
We spoke with writer and activist Hillary Lazar on the connections between border politics and antifascism, applying intersectional frameworks to movement organizing, and pushing beyond "bread & butter" unionism toward liberatory unionism.
Our talk begins with a conversation about Hillary Lazar's recent 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.
In the second half of our conversation we focused on the current labor organizing Hillary has been doing with graduate student workers at the University of Pittsburgh. She explains why applying an intersectional framework to labor organizing, as well as other forms of organizing, is necessary for building toward a liberatory society.
Hillary Lazar is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches about social movements, gender, power and resistance through an anarchist lens. Hillary has been published in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, contributed a chapter to Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach (2018), and has worked on several other book projects. She is a collective member of the Big Idea Bookstore, a content editor for Agency: An Anarchist PR Project, instructor for the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking, and is involved in graduate student worker organizing.
Institute for Anarchist Studies (publisher of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory) www.anarchiststudies.org
Institute for Advanced Trouble-Making https://advancedtroublemaking.wordpress.com/
AK Press www.akpress.org
Agency: An Anarchist PR Project https://www.anarchistagency.com/
Big Idea Bookstore http://thebigideapgh.org/
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