The Labor Notes Podcast

The documentary Partners: How Starbucks Baristas Started a Labor Revolution charts the seemingly improbable course set off by a group of workers in Buffalo, New York, who organized the first Starbucks location in 2021 and helped to grow a highly visible, energetic movement. The film casts Starbucks workers as a symbol of persistence in the face of vicious union-busting, and projects hope for renew...

Listen here to part 3 of our webinar in November with Haymarket Books and The American Prospect, featuring contributors to our Roundtable Series on how unions can defend worker power under Trump 2.0. You can read all the articles in the series here! Hear perspectives from Baltimore Teachers Union President Diamonté Brown, Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jackson Potter, and UAW Region 9A Dire...

Making new year’s resolutions we can actually keep *and* working on rebuilding the labor movement? That’s two birds with one handful of birdseed, as our gentle-hearted editor Al Bradbury would say. What would other Labor Notes staff say? Tune in to hear their voice note resolutions!  And if you too are going into the new year with a fresh sense of resolve and vigor—and maybe more than a few battle...

What do a "Charlie Brown Christmas," "Love Actually," "Little Women" and many of your other holiday faves have in common? We at the Labor Notes pod have played them backwards to decipher their coded organizing messages. 

You can count cards, mute your poker tells, or patiently coax the windfall out of a slot machine that someone just gave up on—but the house always wins, right?  And yet, 200 casino dealers at the Horseshoe Indianapolis Casino in Shelbyville, Indiana, just found a surefire strategy to stack their odds: solidarity. Dealer Tera Arnold joins the pod, along with our editor Al Bradbury, who reported las...

Listen here to part 2 of our webinar last month with Haymarket Books and The American Prospect, featuring contributors to our Roundtable Series on how unions can defend worker power under Trump 2.0. You can read all the articles in the series here! Hear perspectives from Baltimore Teachers Union President Diamonté Brown, Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jackson Potter, and UAW Region 9A Direc...

Mail and parcel delivery workers at Canada Post, who are members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, have been bargaining for two years against an intransigent management whose stonewalling is being supported by the Canadian government.  CUPW members have mounted full on strikes twice in just the past year, and taken several other disruptive actions. Management meanwhile has largely ignored t...

Listen here to part 1 of our webinar this month with Haymarket Books and The American Prospect, featuring contributors to our Roundtable Series on how unions can defend worker power under Trump 2.0. You can read all the articles in the series here! Hear perspectives from Baltimore Teachers Union President Diamonté Brown, Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jackson Potter and UAW Region 9A Direct...

International solidarity more than just a chant. It’s how we will raise conditions for workers across borders without allowing the bosses to play us against each other.  Few things make that more explicit than the story of what auto workers in Mexico have been dealing with—from their employers, from some of their unions, and from U.S. trade policy. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)...

As of Thursday morning, members of Starbucks Workers United were on strike in 65 stores across the U.S., a massive escalation in their fight for a first contract. They are asking customers not to buy coffee at any Starbucks location during their strike. Starbucks baristas have been in bargaining for over a year and half now, after striking regularly to get the company to the bargaining table in Fe...

The current moment in the U.S.—marked by billionaire assaults on the working class, the Trump administration’s authoritarian maneuvers, and widespread voter dissatisfaction with both major political parties—presents new challenges and opportunities for the labor movement.  Rank-and-file members can and are demanding more of their leaders, and unions are being challenged to think about how they sho...

What can horror movies and fiction teach us about fighting back against the real life horrors of our bad bosses? Tune in to our Hallowepisode to hear about the organizing lessons we saw in the 1988 cult classic from John Carpenter, They Live, and Shirley Jackson’s 1959 pillar in the horror genre, The Haunting of Hill House. Plus, a little Stewards Corner with… Nosferatu (2024) Gulp! But don’t worr...

Federal Workers organizing with the Federal Unionists Network have been using the shutdown to organize within their unions, and to push the message that workers should collectively stand firm against cuts to vital programs and executive overreach. Their actions are bringing clarity and organization to the fight at a time when leading Democrats are framing the shutdown as an inconvenience and Donal...

Employer-run safety games are not merely instructional or even “fun.” They’re there to trivialize workplace hazards and to pass the buck onto individual workers for their own safety, instead of listening to workers about how to eliminate the dangers they encounter at work every day.  Labor Notes Organizer Kari Thompson joins pod co-hosts Danielle Smith and Natascha Elena Uhlmann to talk about a St...

Workers at Wells Fargo are organizing the first union at a major U.S. bank—in one of the least-organized industries in the country. Labor Notes Editor Dan DiMaggio, whose story on their organizing efforts is on the cover of our October issue, joins the pod. You can also read his piece, “Wells Fargo Workers Push to Bring A Union to the Banking Industry,” on our website. Subscribe to the Labor Notes...

Announcing the New Labor Notes Resource: May2028.org Are you and your co-workers organizing against attacks on our democratic rights as workers? Are you, like an estimated 250,000 workers so far, committing to heed United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain’s call for a coordinated strike? Are you already planning other ways to be part of a nationwide show of power less than three years from now? Vi...

We're taking a break from the pod this week as our staff meets in person to make plans for the next six months of Labor Notes programming! We'll be back to our regular schedule next week with a new episode on Friday, 10/3. In the meantime, send us voice notes of your organizing questions to podcast@labornotes.org! We can't wait to feature them on a future episode and answer your questions. See you...

Last month, workers at some of the Los Angeles and Santa Monica locations of Sugared + Bronzed, a salon chain offering spray tanning and sugaring hair removal services, voted to unionize with Communications Workers Local 9505. Workers say the job is an arduous balancing act of delivering a comfortable, safe experience providing intimate services to customers, while navigating a breakneck pace of a...

Union members have Weingarten rights, stemming from a Supreme Court ruling in 1975, to ask for a steward at any meeting they believe could lead to discipline. Stewards can do a lot to support members in these meetings, and also organize against patterns of unfair discipline. Labor Notes Organizer Kari Thompson, who leads some of our Stewards’ Workshops, joins the pod.

Air Canada flight attendants, who in August had voted 99.7% to strike, were hit with a back to work order within a day after they walked out last month.  But 10,000 of them defied the order and held the line, highlighting their campaign to get paid for all their uncompensated work when the cabin doors are open. Plus: the Labor Notes Troublemakers School is coming to Toronto in October, and will sp...

Workers at Mauser Packaging Solutions in Chicago, who handle dangerous chemicals with what they’ve said is insufficient safety equipment, have been on strike since June 9. These workers, members of Teamsters Local 705, have been on an unfair labor practice strike after Mauser also illegally surveilled union members who were speaking with their business agent during a break, according to the union....

In their book, Get on the Job and Organize, former Starbucks worker and organizer Jaz Brisack tells the story of the seemingly improbable success of organizing baristas scattered in small stores across the country. A good companion to Brisack’s account is What the Boss Doesn't Want Us to Know: Discovering Power and Winning Campaigns, by Tom Juravich, Olivia Geho, and Andrew Gorry, a book-length ad...

Meeting with management is never fun. And worse, those meetings can become another place the bosses try to push workers around. But we can take control back in the meetings by showing up united and acting like a union. Labor Notes Organizer Joe DeManuelle Hall joins pod co-hosts Danielle Smith and Natascha Elena Uhlmann as they discuss how we can make labor-management committees and other meetings...

Talking to neighbors about the issues they care about can be a lot like organizing coworkers to make your workplace better. The goal is to listen, cultivate relationships and build power as a working class. Tune in to hear pod co-hosts Natascha and Danielle talk about Danielle's experience volunteering on the Zohran campaign and why it's meaningful for workers everywhere.

Francisco Ortiz, president of United Teachers Richmond in California, and Chris Spurlock, a steward in Teamsters Local 135 at Zenith Logistics (a third-party operator for Kroger), shared how their unions organized to coordinate on bargaining and contract expirations. They shared their experiences in a recent Labor Notes online webinar. Hear the main highlights in this episode.