Reinventing Solidarity

On September 17th, 2011, approximately a thousand people massed in lower Manhattan at the towering edifices of the “Vatican of capitalism.” This movement, known as Occupy Wall Street, called attention to the obscene inequality and devastation of 21st century capitalism on full display in the wake of the fiscal meltdown. Already by that October, in cities around the world, millions had occupied the...

In the first episode of the 2021-22 season, Paula Finn holds a conversation with Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce assessing the U.S. labor movement’s current strength as relates to union density, or the percentage of workers represented by unions. The basis for their discussion is Milkman’s and Luce’s recent State of the Unions Report, which compares national union density trends to those in New Yo...

This episode features a debate regarding the role of race vs. class in efforts to advance a Social Democratic politics. It draws on a panel which was part of a day-long conference held in April 2021 considering Joshua B. Freeman’s landmark book, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. Longtime social justice activist Deepak Bhargava and historian Touré Reed concur that race and...

Discussing three important articles from the spring 2021 issue, New Labor Forum columnist Sean Sweeney hosts a conversation with Sinead Mercier and Dominic Brown on the role of publicly owned energy in halting the climate crisis. Mercier offers as a model the Republic of Ireland’s creation in the 1920s of the fantastically successful state owned and operated Electricity Supply Board; Brown describ...

New Labor Forum Books and Arts Editor Samir Sonti hosts a conversation with Gabriel Winant, author of the recent book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. Examining the vast expansion of the health care sector of our economy over the past half-century, Winant traces its development to a combination of factors, including deindustrialization, union...

Across the political spectrum, there’s a widely held view that the decades-long increase in immigration to the U.S. has put U.S. workers in competition with new immigrants for scarce jobs and has led to depressed wages and working conditions. Ruth Milkman’s important and timely new book, Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat, upends this notion, arguing that it gets cause and effect wrong. Instead...

This episode features New Labor Forum columnist Sarah Jaffe in conversation with New Labor Forum Consulting Editor, Ruth Milkman. They discuss Jaffe’s new book, "Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone", which examines a trend among today’s employers to rely, or even insist upon, workers’ emotional dedication to their jobs, the proverbial labor o...

The past year has been a perfect storm of reckoning with racial violence and white supremacy, assaults on the basic practices of democracy, and a pandemic that yet again laid bare the fundamental inequities of the American economy. This episode features an interview with two exciting social justice leaders who are part of innovative and bold national efforts to address these crises and win campaig...

This episode shines a light on the political and intellectual contributions of Ben Fletcher, one of the most important, yet least well-known African American labor activists of the twentieth century. Peter Cole’s recently re-issued book, Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly, goes a long way toward bringing Fletcher out of the shadows, enabling contemporary activists and scholars to l...

Barely one week into the Biden Administration, CUNY faculty member and New Labor Forum Consulting Editor Joshua Freeman interviews Heidi Shierholz, Senior Economist and Director of Policy at the Economic Policy Institute and Mark Levinson, Chief Economist at the Service Employees International Union. Their discussion examines the marked distinctions – in cause, repercussions, and evolving policy r...

In this latest episode, Professor Deepak Bhargava speaks to Judith Browne Dianis, Executive Director of the Advancement Project, and Dorian Warren, President of Community Change, about progressive priorities for the first 100 days of the Biden administration. They discuss top legislative priorities and movement organizing strategies necessary to achieve consequential legislation and executive acti...

This episode brings poetry to the crucial task of reinventing solidarity. New Labor Forum Editor Paula Finn hosts a conversation with award winning poet Javier Zamora, who at nine years old left his home in El Salvador and made his way, as an unaccompanied minor, through Guatemala and Mexico and across the Sonoran Desert to reunite with his parents in California. In this interview, Zamora reflects...

As the coronavirus surges across the U.S. during this holiday season, the biblical “no room in the inn” has become “no room in the hospital.” This is especially true in rural regions in the Midwest, South and Southwest, where hospital closings imperil whole communities. Today’s podcast explores one of the factors which has exacerbated this crisis: the speculation in health care networks by private...

From Durban, South Africa, New Labor Forum columnist Sean Sweeney interviews human rights and environmental leader Kumi Naidoo. In 2009, Naidoo became the first African head of Greenpeace, then went on to serve as Secretary General of Amnesty International, from 2018 to 2020. In his interview with Sweeney, Naidoo rebukes successive U.S. administrations for their failure to play a useful role in ha...

This episode benefits from the exciting public programming we do at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. Since the corona virus surged last spring, we’ve been hosting a series of virtual forums on the subject of Covid capitalism. These talks examine what the pandemic has come to reveal about contemporary capitalism, the chronic racial and economic inequality faced by millions of Americans,...

This episode airs on the eve of the 2020 elections, with nearly everything hanging in the balance – from our nation’s ability to withstand the COVID-19 pandemic to our already constricted democracy’s ability to survive the authoritarianism of the Trump Administration. On both questions: the need to strengthen our democracy and overcome the devastation of the coronavirus, labor unions have a major...

Today so many of us live with deep anxiety about the peril of climate change and the fact that so little progress has been made to halt it. This podcast is both a reckoning with and an antidote to such despair. Sean Sweeney discusses with Saket Soni his Resilience Force initiative. In Florida and New Orleans, the Resilience Force has begun to create living-wage jobs for formerly low-wage, precario...

Samir Sonti probes Leo Panitch about the character of the advanced capitalist economies through which the Covid-19 pandemic spread so rapidly. What has the pandemic revealed about the toll of neoliberalism on the poor and working-class, on migrants and people of color? And what about the organizations and parties that claim to protect them: namely organized labor, social democratic parties and our...

In this inaugural episode, David Unger and Kafui Attoh look squarely at the tragedy of police violence against people color, and at the unions that represent and negotiate contracts on behalf of the police. What role has organized labor played in supporting the Black Lives Matter movement? What role should it play? And what’s the rightful relationship of the labor movement to the police and their...