Working People

Every day the Palestinian civilian death toll is rising dramatically as Israel continues with its genocidal bombing and ground invasion of Gaza, and as settler and military violence towards Palestinians in the West Bank intensifies. "It's a closure, it's a curfew, in many places in the West Bank," Issa Amro says. "It's not normal life these days. Soldiers are everywhere, settlers are everywhere, p...

Over the past month, United Auto Workers have continued to ramp up their strike at the Big 3 auto companies, calling workers at more plants to hit the picket line. As Keith Brower Brown recently reported at Labor Notes, "Every Friday for the past four weeks, Big 3 CEOs have waited fearfully for UAW President Shawn Fain to announce which plants will strike next. But without warning on Wednesday [Oc...

The derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine , Ohio, on Feb. 3 of this year, and the subsequent "controlled release" and burnoff of toxic vinyl chloride, is one of the most catastrophic and devastating industrial accidents in our country's history, and a catastrophe of equal or greater proportion could literally happen again tomorrow. Why? Because no serious steps have been...

The decade from 2010 to 2020 was one that saw more people around the world participating in protests than at any other point in human history. And yet, looking back, the results of so many of these mass protests, the societal changes that followed, were the opposite of what protestors were demanding. In his new book,  If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution , award-winning j...

It is looking increasingly likely that Congressional Republicans will bring the federal government to a shutdown starting this weekend. "U.S. government services would be disrupted and hundreds of thousands of federal workers would be furloughed without pay if Congress fails to provide funding for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1," Reuters reports. "Workers deemed essential would remain on the job,...

The United Auto Workers are striking against all of the Big Three automakers at once for the first time in the union's history. The UAW is employing a novel "stand-up strike" strategy: rather than having over 140,000 auto workers hit the picket line at once, UAW members at three strategically targeted plants were called to strike first last Thursday, and union president Shawn Fain has announced th...

After the high-stakes contract fight between the Teamsters and UPS, the eyes of labor are now on the contract negotiations currently taking place between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler). The UAW's master agreement with the Big Three covers around 150,000 autoworkers, and the current contract expires on September 14. If...

At the federal level today, the subminimum wage for tipped workers is still just $2.13 an hour. That is, frankly, a disgrace. "A direct legacy of slavery," the One Fair Wage campaign notes, "the subminimum wage affects a workforce of nearly 5 million tipped workers that is 70 percent women and 43 percent people of color." In this mini-cast, we talk about the fight to end the subminimum wage with T...

Within the past two years, South Korea has seen major labor actions, including a general strike in October of 2021, and major crackdowns on organized labor, including the national intelligence agency raiding the offices of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions in January of this year. In that same time, military and geopolitical tensions in the region have been rapidly intensifying. What is goi...

The world of higher education has been in shock this past week after West Virginia University President E. Gordon Gee announced plans to dramatically cut academic programs and jobs in the coming year. "West Virginia University, a crucial institution in one of the nation's most impoverished states, is poised to jettison all of its faculty dedicated to teaching Spanish, French, Chinese and other for...

Ana Jakopič is a lawyer, organizer, and trade union leader in Slovenia. We talk to Ana about the different kinds of workers she organizes with on a daily basis, the struggles working people across Slovenia are facing, and how connected/disconnected those struggles currently feel to the strikes taking place in Europe and beyond. But we also talk about Ana's life and her winding path into the labor...

"I've never been an organizer," Khali Jama says, "but I've always fought." As a single mother, a Muslim, and a Somali-American worker living in Minnesota, Jama has always had to fight for the life she, her family, and her fellow workers deserve. And earlier this year, after bringing that fight to the Minnesota state legislature, Khali and her coworkers achieved a major victory. "On May 16," Lisa K...

The Norfolk Southern train derailment and "controlled release" of toxic vinyl chloride in East Palestine, Ohio, was an avoidable catastrophe. Long before the train cars crashed on Feb. 3 and residents' lives were turned completely upside down, railroad workers had been warning anyone who would listen that the relentless cost-cutting and profit-maximizing practices implemented on the freight rail s...

We are less than two weeks away from what could be the largest single-employer strike in US history. As of this recording, contract negotiations between United Parcel Services (UPS) and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have reportedly "collapsed"—and the clock is ticking until the current contract expires on July 31. If a deal is not reached and a strike occurs, what will it look like fo...

When we hear the term "whistleblower," we tend to think of names like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange—people who have risked their freedom, even their lives, to expose government lies, abuses of power, and state secrets that the public needs to know about. But there are a range of federal statutes designed to protect those who blow the whistle on their employers, t...

We hosted another  Working People  live show, in collaboration with the Action Builder / Action Network team, on May 8 at the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labour Congress in Montréal. In this panel discussion, Max speaks with Sarah Beth Ryther, employee-organizer with Trader Joe's United in Minneapolis, and Josh Thole, former Major League Baseball player and current Minor League...

From legislative attacks on the rights of trans people, drag performers, and queer people spreading to statehouses around the country like wildfire, to rightwing media relentlessly spewing fascistic anti-LGBTQ+ messages, to far-right groups ramping up their intimidation tactics and violent assaults to force LGBTQ+ people back into the closet, Pride month feels different in 2023. And yet, the rebel...

The largest private sector labor contract in the US is set to expire at midnight on July 31; as negotiations continue to play out, we will soon see whether or not the 350,000 Teamsters working for United Parcel Services (UPS) will hit the picket line and wage one of the largest strikes in US history. As Sean Orr, a UPS package-car driver and elected shop steward for Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago,...

From May 8-12, the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labour Congress took place in Montréal. Reporting for Working People and The Real News Network, Max attended the convention and spoke with a number of rank-and-file workers, organizers, and union officers about the state of the labor movement in Canada. In Part 2 of our two-part dispatch from the CLC, we talk to: Nora Loreto, writer...

From May 8-12, the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labour Congress took place in Montréal. Reporting for Working People and The Real News Network, Max attended the convention and spoke with a number of rank-and-file workers, organizers, and union officers about the state of the labor movement in Canada. In Part 1 of our two-part dispatch from the CLC, we talk to: Emily Leedham, the...

The 2020 protests that took place in the immediate wake of Minneapolis police murdering George Floyd were a historic call for America to reckon with its racist, oppressive system of state-sanctioned police violence. Three years later, rather than a reckoning, that same system, along with the political and business elites propping it up, are giving us "Cop City" (ie, the Atlanta Public Safety Train...

We hosted a  Working People live show at The Real News Network studio in Baltimore on May 18. In this panel discussion, co-hosted by Max and Baltimore writer and editor Rebekah Kirkman, we speak with a diverse panel of worker-organizers from around the city about their respective struggles to unionize their workplaces, what being in a union means to them and their coworkers, and what all of us can...

It's been over 100 days since the catastrophic derailment of a Norfolk Southern train carrying over 100,000 gallons of toxic materials occurred in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb 3. Since then, residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area in Ohio and Pennsylvania have had their lives turned completely upside down. Entire families have been uprooted from their homes, with many having to live i...

Hollywood writers represented by the Writers Guild of America, East, and the Writers Guild of America, West, are on strike for the first time since 2007-08. As Alex Press writes in Jacobin , "The WGA (West and East) called the strike just before midnight on May 1, with its leadership unanimously voting for a work stoppage after six weeks of negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Tele...

Announcement: Our next live show will be on Monday, May 8, from 5-7pm EST at the Canadian Labour Congress' 30th Constitutional Convention in Montreal! We took Working People on the road and hosted another live show on March 21 in Atlanta, Georgia, in collaboration with the Action Builder / Action Network team. In this panel discussion, Max speaks with local organizers about the specific challenges...