Laborwave Radio

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 a...

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 s...

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 conseque...

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, abo...

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 cap...

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 c...

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...

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...

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 'othe...

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 highl...

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 Ril...

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 questio...

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 w...

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 t...

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 t...

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 whi...

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 accomplish...

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...

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 alo...

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 f...

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...

"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...

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...

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 P...

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 F...