Working People

"On the morning of Oct. 1... almost 500 union members from three United Steel Workers (USW) locals at WestRock's Mahrt Mill paper mill in Cottonton, Alabama, voted to reject a second contract offer from the company," Jacob Morrison recently reported for The Real News Network. "The refusal to ratify WestRock's 'last, best, and final' offer came as a result of the company insisting on removing contr...

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"Flight attendants at Delta are currently pushing to form a union at the only major airline in the US where flight attendants are not unionized," journalist and friend of the show Michael Sainato recently wrote in The Guardian . "The aim is to allow the airline's 23,000 flight attendants to vote on whether to unionize with the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA) and will face fierce opp...

It's been 12 years since the catastrophic explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, killing 11 workers and causing the largest marine oil spill in human history. A lot of forgetting can happen in that time. A lot of cultural amnesia and historical distortion has been able to set in over the past 12 years, whether that came in the form of a years-long PR campaign from British Petroleu...

(C/W: bullying, harassment, suicide) This time last year, we introduced listeners to the family of Evan Seyfried, a dedicated Kroger employee in Milford, Ohio, for nearly 20 years, whose beautiful life was tragically cut short after he was targeted and tortured by coworkers and driven to suicide, according to Evan's family. A lot has happened since we published that episode one year ago, and we wa...

On Friday, September 16, the United States could see its first major rail strike and/or rail lockout since the early '90s. Railroad workers have reached the end of their rope after years of enduring dramatic staff cuts that have piled more work onto fewer workers, along with exhausting schedules and draconian attendance policies that have made it impossible to live and reasonably plan their lives....

The rail industry is experiencing a self-induced crisis as a result of decades of cost-cutting, profit-maximizing executive decisions that have driven rail workers and the supply chain into the ground. In an attempt to mediate between the major freight rail companies and unions representing around 115,000 railroad workers, President Biden appointed a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to offer rec...

***This is a Patreon Exclusive episode*** Subscribe to our Patreon:   www.patreon.com/workingpeople Thank you to all the Patreon subscribers for their love, support, and generosity. 

Matt Littrell has worked as a picker at the Amazon warehouse in Campbellsville, Kentucky, for the past year and a half. He's also been one of the lead organizers and the public face of a growing push to unionize Amazon facilities in Kentucky. In retaliation for his organizing, Littrell says that Amazon management has been watching him like a hawk and finding reasons to write him up—and last week,...

"As blistering heat waves swept across the United States this summer, breaking temperature records and placing millions under heat advisories and warnings," Livia Albeck-Ripka writes at The New York Times , "workers... have continued to deliver America's packages for a variety of carriers, often in trucks that have no cooling mechanisms for drivers. Some UPS workers have shared photographs that sh...

Mansa Musa is a radical freedom fighter who was imprisoned in the US for nearly 50 years. Now, at 70 years old, he is the co-host of Rattling the Bars at The Real News Network, a staunch advocate for the rights of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, and a soldier in the struggle to dismantle the prison-industrial complex. We talk to Mansa about his life and about how the labor movement...

As we speak, the major railroad companies and 13 different unions representing over 115,000 railroad workers have reached an impasse in contract negotiations that have been going on for years, and we are now closer to a national rail shutdown than we've been in a generation. President Biden has even appointed an Emergency Presidential Board to try to mediate between the rail unions and the rail ca...

Last week, Lauren Bianchi and Chuck Stark, two teachers at George Washington High School on the Southeast Side of Chicago, were on the verge of losing their jobs. In what Chicago Teachers Union officers suspect was an act of retaliation from Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Chicago Public Schools recommended that Bianchi and Stark be fired for their involvement in the student-, teacher-, and community-led ef...

On June 22 of this year, workers at a Chipotle location in Augusta, Maine, made history by becoming the first store in the US to file for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board. Then, on Tuesday, July 19, Chipotle announced that it would be permanently closing the Augusta location. While spokespeople for the fast-casual dining giant deny that the closure is related to union organ...

Things are getting very dark in this country, and it's likely going to get worse before it gets better. At every turn—as collective society breaks down, as the ruling class continues to rob us blind, as humanity barrels towards climate catastrophe—working people are being encouraged to turn on each other and to see certain groups of their fellow workers as the enemy. From the demonization and incr...

Last month, roughly 40,000 UK rail workers with the National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers (RMT) went on strike for three days, bringing major portions of the British rail system to a halt in a historic show of collective strength. This week, after receiving a contract offer from state-owned Network Rail that union leaders described as "paltry," the RMT announced that workers at N...

The "Labor On The Airwaves" panel attracted an overflow audience at this year's Labor Notes conference in Chicago. A show of hands revealed that about a third of those in attendance already had shows while another third was interested in finding out how to start their own shows, many of whom stopped by the Labor Radio-Podcast Network's booth after the panel. Working People 's Maximillian Alvarez h...

We wish everyone could have been in Chicago for the Labor Notes 2022 conference! But for those who couldn't make it, we convened this comradely panel with some fan-favorite guests of the show—Tevita 'Uhatafe, McKenna Schueler, and Jacob Morrison—to share our thoughts and reflections on the gathering, and to talk about the lessons and strategies we're taking from Labor Notes and applying in our dai...

The Amazon Labor Union victory at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island was historic, but right now, as we speak, Amazon is currently in court trying to throw out the results of that election, and pro-union worker-organizers keep getting fired. One of those workers is Alicia Johnson, who, as Luigi Morris writes, is "a 56-year-old Black immigrant who lives in the deep Bronx and worked at JFK8 as a Pi...

We all know that, even before the horrific, world-changing event of COVID-19, society would fall apart without hospital workers and medical staff. But as we also know, like so many other fields and sectors of work, the medical field is a very stratified one. Even though we as patients may not see it, many of the folks who make hospitals and medical facilities run are overworked, understaffed, unde...

From Dollar General and Dollar Tree to Family Dollar, dollar stores are spreading rapidly throughout Louisiana and across the country, but dollar store workers notoriously have to endure low pay, understaffing, and hazardous working conditions. That's why Step Up Louisiana, "a community based organization committed to building power to win education and economic justice for all," is organizing emp...

We've adjusted our episode publishing schedule to bring y'all an urgent episode about Starbucks' escalating retaliation against pro-union workers and Starbucks Workers United. As Rina Torchinsky writes for NPR, "Starbucks is closing a store in Ithaca, NY, in what Starbucks union organizers are calling an illegal move of retaliation after workers at the location voted to unionize. The coffee giant...

Adjunct faculty and lecturers at Santa Clara University, a private Jesuit university in Silicon Valley, have been working to organize a non-tenure-track faculty union for five years. Along with navigating the particular challenges that come with worker organizing in higher education, theirs is a historic campaign because it is taking place at a religious institution, which the National Labor Relat...

Caliber Public Schools, a group of charter schools in Northern California, states on its website that its mission is "to achieve educational equity by shifting the experiences, expectations and outcomes for students in historically underserved communities. Our strengths-based educational program validates, affirms, respects and supports students, families and staff members to reach their full pote...

If you were following the strikes and labor actions that were happening last year, then you may have noticed that a certain face kept popping up in photos and reports from picket lines all over the country, from the Kelloggs', Nabisco, and John Deere strikes, to the Warrior Met Coal miners caravan to New York City. Who was this mysterious member of the Transport Workers Union making his way to sta...