Laborwave Radio

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...

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 sab...

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 under...

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...

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 inser...

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 unio...

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...

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 acqu...

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...

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 censo...

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 wor...

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 f...

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...

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 opportuni...

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 fi...

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...

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 votin...

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 a...

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 direc...

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...

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 histori...

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 an...

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 r...

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...

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 ser...