Working People

(We are making this Bonus Episode public to provide a follow-up to Max's latest In These Times article on whether or not the working class and progressive professionals can form a political alliance.) Max and his brother Zak talk about meritocracy, work in the corporate world, and that feeling in your gut that most of what you do is pointless. Subscribe to our Patreon if you want more bonus episod...

Welcome to The Break Room , our new, ongoing series where workers and organizers send in 15-20-minute clips to talk about issues they're facing, actions they're taking, and more! (Think of it as a community message board of sorts). In this installment, Aminah Sheikh, a labor organizer with Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (ETFO), tells us about how she worked with educators in Ontario to...

Happy #TeachersDay! To celebrate National Teacher Appreciation Week, we are putting this special bonus episode on the main feed: Another Alvarez joins the Working People universe! Max and his sister, MacKenna, a middle-school teacher in NYC, talk about the politics of charter schools and the disconnect between their touted CORE VALUES and how they treat their workers and students.    Additional li...

Our Season Three finale: we talk with Adam Ryan, a Target worker in Virginia and liaison for Target Workers Unite , one of the groups that has been organizing the coordinated strike actions planned for May 1st, 2020 . We talk about Adam's life, his path to becoming a leftist and getting involved in labor organizing, and we talk about the conditions that Target employees have been working under eve...

This is a clip from our bonus episode with Ken Klippenstein, DC correspondent for The Nation , about the Covid crisis and the scary powers our government has granted itself to deal with it. Subscribe on Patreon.com/WorkingPeople to listen to the full episode!     Additional links/info below... Ken's author page and Twitter page Ken Klippenstein, The Nation , " An Internal Pandemic Document Shows t...

Part II: The Covid-19 crisis and the current economic crash have broken our world apart. These are the voices of the people living, working, and fighting through it.      Additional links/info below... Change.org petition: Stand with Sprouts Farmers Market Workers: COVID-19 PPE for Workers & Customers Now!   Farmworker clip from UFW member Maria - video   No Rent Michigan Facebook page Connecticut...

The Covid-19 crisis and the current economic crash have broken our world apart. These are the voices of the people living, working, and fighting through it.    Additional links/info below... Clip from We the Unhoused  by Theo Henderson: " All in the Same Boat " Clip from Rustbelt Abolition Radio : " Bruce X Parker " Southern Solidarity — Solidarity for the Unhoused in New Orleans Food Finder websi...

The second installment of the Workers' Book Club is finally here, and it's a doozy! Our friend John Tormey, a track laborer and writer from just outside Boston, interviews working-class Kentucky artist, writer, and radio host Terry Tapp about his latest book from Zero Books, A Serf's Journal: The Story of the United States' Longest Wildcat Strike .   Additional links/info below... Terry's website...

This Monday (March 30) Instacart shoppers around the country will walk off the job to demand hazard pay and basic protections for working during the Covid-19 crisis. In this urgent mini-cast, we bring our friend, gig worker, and organizer Vanessa Bain back on the show to talk about the strike.    Additional links/info below... Working People , Season 3, Episode 6: Vanessa Bain   Gig Workers' Colle...

We're briefly coming back from hiatus to check in with an old friend and offer some thoughts on our breaking world.    Additional links/info below... Tom's Twitter page Gary Rivlin, The Intercept , " A Giant Pile of Money: How Wall Street Drove Public Pensions Into Crisis and Pocketed Billions in Fees " Eric Levitz, NY Mag , " American Capitalism Can No Longer Afford to Let Workers Retire in Digni...

We talk to activist and oral historian Candace Wolf about her self-published book of interviews with workers all over the world, Shifting the Universe , and about working people's birthright to tell their stories.    Additional links/info below... Candace Wolf, Shifting the Universe: Spoken Histories of Work & Resistance     Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusica...

In the newest installment in our ongoing series Working-Class Politics , we talk with Phara Souffrant Forrest, a union nurse, tenant activist, and democratic socialist running for Assembly in New York's 57th District.    Additional links/info below... Phara's website , Facebook page, and Twitter page Theodore Hamm, The Indypendent , " NYC's Next Socialist Wave: DSA Takes Aim at the State Assembly'...

Our election-themed crossover panel collective continues to grow! We're excited to share on the Working People feed the newest installment of these ongoing panel conversations, in which our friends at the Season of the Bitch coven and Lyta Gold and Vanessa A. Bee of Current Affairs share their Super Tuesday thoughts. GET YOUR HOT TAKES WHILE THEY'RE ... UMM ... HOT!    Previous election-themed cro...

In this special compilation episode, we hear testimonies from 10 different freelancers—journalists, artists, musicians, designers, and more—about the pains, joys, needs, and struggles of freelance work today. (This episode is supported by The Economic Hardship Reporting Project )   Additional links/info below... Economic Hardship Reporting Project website and Twitter page IWW Freelance Journalists...

In The Workers' Toolkit we take deep dives into the legal and institutional barriers that prevent workers from building collective power in the United Stated today. In this first installment, we talk with economist Marshall Steinbaum about the history of antitrust law in this country, how it shapes workers' lives, and what we can do about it.    Additional links/info below... Marshall's Twitter pa...

Our second election-themed crossover panel of the season: We team up with Mel from Protean Magazine and Dwight and Shane from Eat the Rich to break down the two billionaires running in the 2020 Democratic primary: Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg. Who are these men? What do we know about their records? What could we expect if they somehow became President? And what does it say about our political sys...

We talk to the one and only Sara Nelson, flight attendant, union activist, and President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, about the labor movement and the AFA-CWA's current campaign to unionize Delta flight attendants.   Additional links/info below... DeltaAFA.org   Sara's Twitter page AFA-CWA website and Twitter page Sara Nelson & Randi Weingarten, The American Prospect , " Why Americ...

We talk to professional yoga teacher Deidra Demens about the path that led her to yoga and about working in the yoga industry in New York City. We also talk about the historic campaign Deidra was involved in to form the nation's first union of yoga teachers at YogaWorks NYC, which is affiliated with the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers   Additional links/info below... De...

By popular demand, we teamed up with Protean Magazine and brought a panel of amazing people together—Ash ( Horror Vanguard ), Mel ( Protean ), Bryan ( Strikewave ), Lyta ( Current Affairs ), and Max ( Working People )—to break down the top presidential candidates from a working-class perspective and share their thoughts on how working people should approach elections.   Additional links/info below...

We're excited to launch our new, ongoing series, Working-Class Politics . In this series, we'll talk with working-class candidates who are running for elected office as well as candidates who are fighting for working-class people. In our first installment, we talk with Nabilah Islam, a millennial Democrat running for Congress in Georgia's 7th District.    Additional links/info below... Nabilah's w...

Part III of our mini-cast series on undocumented workers and the fight to repeal the employers' sanctions provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986)  (in collaboration with the Break the Chains Alliance). We talk to Shirley Lung, Professor of Law at the CUNY Law School, about the passing of IRCA, its immediate and longterm effects, and the American tradition of criminalizing margin...

We needed to take a break this week after all the work we did to put together our special episode on the French general strike, but here is a crossover episode we did with the Left Anchor podcast. Max and his brother Zak joined Alexi and Ryan to talk about our podcast, the 2008 crash, and all the ways finance capital is screwing you over.    Additional links/info below... Left Anchor Twitter page...

In this very special episode, we talk with eight workers from France about the ongoing general strike that began on December 5th.  Please donate to the CGT Solidarity Fund     Additional links/info below... Le Stream Reconductible Twitch Feed and Twitter page  Izquierda Diario/Left Voice , " France Paralyzed by Largest General Strike in Decades " Maxime Quijoux and Guillaume Gourgues, Tribune , "...

We talk with former nail salon worker and organizer Glenda Sefla about the NY Nail Salon Workers Association and their fight to secure #HealthDignityJustice for workers in and beyond the nail salon industry (translation by Leanne Tory-Murphy)   Additional links/info below... NY Nail Salon Workers Association website , Twitter page, and Facebook page Glenda's Twitter page Kim Kelly, Teen Vogue , "...

In this first installment of our new series on unpaid labor,  we chat with Bridget Huff, a stay-at-home mom and political organizer. We talk about Bridget's life and  about the pains, joys, and social pressures of being a stay-at-home parent. We also talk about how political organizations can and should make themselves accessible to folks like Bridget.    Additional links/info below... Bridget's F...