Working People

On the morning of Thursday, June 20, unionized nurses at Ascension St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore held a rally outside the hospital to raise awareness of their efforts to secure a first contract and to show management that they're not backing down from their core demands for safe staffing and an operational model that puts patients and patient care first. "St. Agnes nurses are calling on Ascensio...

"Southern Brazil is facing its worst climate tragedy ever," Latin-America-based journalist Mike Fox wrote from Brazil for the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) in early May. "Unprecedented floods have impacted 1.4 million people and forced more than 160,000 people from their homes... The images are shocking. Downtown Porto Alegre, the capital of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do...

On June 10, in the working-class community of Curtis Bay in South Baltimore, over 50 residents, activists, and supporters from around the city marched through the streets of Curtis Bay to hold CSX Transportation accountable for polluting their community, homes, and bodies with toxic coal dust. Even after an expansive scientific study co-sponsored by the Community of Curtis Bay Association, the Sou...

For the past six years on this show, we've talked to working people from across the United States, from virtually every walk of life, about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles. But today, we're going to talk about what it's like to live and work in a country that has been designated a political enemy of US empire, a country that sits only 90 miles away from the US, a country that American pol...

Nearly two months have passed since the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, and the city is still reeling from the disaster. The bridge collapse immediately rendered the Port of Baltimore inoperable, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs, and billions in wages, business revenue, and state taxes. While channels into the port have begun to open back up slowly, workers on the w...

"South Baltimore is a sacrifice zone," Michael Middleton and Dr. Sacoby Wilson wrote in a guest commentary published in Maryland Matters this February. "The six communities that make up South Baltimore—Cherry Hill, Westport, Mt. Winans, Lakeland, Brooklyn, and Curtis Bay—rank in the top 3% of the state for environmental burden using a Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) screening tool. Cu...

"Vina Colley was Erin Brockovich before Erin Brockovich," Kevin Williams wrote in a 2020  Belt Magazine  article titled, "The Poisonous Legacy of Portsmouth's Gaseous Diffusion Plant." Williams continues, "Colley has become an unlikely citizen-scientist, spending a lifetime researching and documenting PORTS and its sins... Colley was hired as an electrician at the facility in 1980 and worked there...

Gene Bruskin was born to a Jewish working-class family in South Philadelphia and has been a life-long social justice activist, union organizer, poet, and playwright. Since retiring from the labor movement, Gene wrote his first play in 2016, a musical comedy for and about work and workers called  Pray For the Dead: A Musical Tale of Morgues, Moguls and Mutiny . In this mini-cast we talk to Bruskin...

On March 23, 2024, a coalition of around 80 people convened at the East Palestine Country Club at the first gathering called by the newly formed Justice for East Palestine Residents & Workers Coalition. Those in attendance included: East Palestine residents; railroad workers; residents of other "sacrifice zones" in Ohio, Maryland, California, and West Virginia; concerned citizens living near other...

24 hours after Max returned to Baltimore from East Palestine, Ohio, the shipping vessel Dali slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, collapsing it into the Patapsco River. The catastrophic collision and collapse of the bridge claimed the lives of six immigrant, non-union construction workers who were working the night shift at the time, filling potholes on the bridge. In this interview on  The...

This  Saturday, March 23 , unionists and labor leaders, environmental justice groups, community organizers, community members from other "sacrifice zones," and supporters from around the country are coming to East Palestine to join residents as part of the newly formed Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers coalition. The coalition has come together in recent months and mobilized around...

Brett Cross is a small-town kid who grew up in Western Texas, among the oil fields, near Odessa. He worked in the oil fields, worked his way up to doing pipeline work, eventually moving to green energy work. He even became a foreman, working hard to provide for his family. And Brett was at work when he got the call from his wife Nikki that changed their lives forever. It was May 24, 2022,  Nikki w...

This is an excerpt from our most recent bonus episode featuring Teddy Ostrow.  To access the entire conversation, and numerous bonus episodes we have released throughout seven seasons of Working People, please visit our Patreon to unlock this content.  The Upsurge  was an invaluable show that documented two of the most pivotal labor union struggles in recent years as they were happening: the 2023...

"Last Wednesday, a fellow rail worker was gravely injured on the job and lost his life," a Feb 6 email from Railroad Workers United reads. "Our brother Chris Wilson, who worked for Norfolk Southern, was critically injured in its Decatur rail yard Wednesday and died Thursday at Huntsville Hospital." Another email from Feb. 9 reads, "On January 15th, a fellow rail worker was killed on the job in Ohi...

One year ago, graduate student-workers at Johns Hopkins University overwhelmingly voted to unionize under the banner of Teachers and Researchers United (TRU-UE), which is affiliated with United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers. While workers had much to celebrate with their historic union election victory, bargaining a first contract with the university administration has been another story....

Baltimore has become what many consider to be ground zero in the emerging "solidarity economy" and the formation of  worker-owned, cooperatively run businesses. There's something important going on here, and there's a lot that we can all learn from our fellow workers who are in the cooperative space—people who are living, breathing proof that there's another way to run a business, that there's ano...

Workers at Homegrown Sustainable Sandwiches in the Seattle area voted overwhelmingly to unionize with UNITE HERE LOCAL 8 in late 2022, and they have been fighting for a first contract ever since. In fact,  workers from two Homegrown stores have been on strike since late last fall in protest of the unfair termination of union leader Sydney Lankford, who was fired after speaking up at a union delega...

Feb. 3, 2024, marks the one-year anniversary of the Norfolk Southern train derailment that changed life forever for the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, and the surrounding area. The derailment of 38 rail cars and the subsequent "controlled release" and burnoff of toxic vinyl chloride was one of the most catastrophic industrial accidents in our country's history—and a catastrophe of equal or gre...

From October 4-6 of this year, the US experienced the largest healthcare worker strike in our history, when over 75,000 workers with the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions went on a three-day strike against the healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente. Then, on October 13, after warning that more strikes could be coming if a deal wasn't reached at the bargaining table, healthcare workers scored a maj...

Brazil's Radical Plan to Fight Slave-Like Working Conditions (w/ Marcos, John, & Vitor Filgueiras)    In this special international episode, we get the chance to talk to folks in Brazil about the farmworkers who are being trapped in slave-like conditions, and about a truly radical new government program that is trying to break the cycle of enslavement and exploitation. As Vitor Filgueiras, Profess...

It's been nearly 10 months since the derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train and the subsequent "controlled release" and burnoff of toxic vinyl chloride changed life forever for the residents of East Palestine, Ohio. While the media, politicians, and the public have largely moved on, people living in and around East Palestine have been abandoned by Norfolk Southern, by their state and feder...

With each passing day, more Israeli bombs are falling on Gaza, more bodies are being blown apart and buried under the rubble, over a million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes. Over the past month and a half, the world has borne witness to a genocidal military campaign to clear out Gaza once and for all, and every day, every hour, it feels like the chance to stop one of humanity's m...

Back in August of 2022, we spoke with Matt Littrell, a picker at the Amazon warehouse in Campbellsville, Kentucky,  and one of the lead organizers in an effort to unionize Amazon facilities in Kentucky. When we spoke with Matt, Amazon had just fired him in suspected retaliation for his organizing activities, citing "performance" issues. Since then, Matt has been dragged through a Kafka-esque legal...

More than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's retaliatory assault on Gaza in the past month, including thousands of women, children, and elderly, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The real number is likely much higher… we don't know how many people, dead and alive, are under the rubble right now. But we do know that the bombs continue to fall, every day, at rates unseen...

On the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 8, members of the Teamsters union led a picket line march outside of Amazon's BWI5 warehouse in Baltimore. Dozens of other union workers and members of the Baltimore community joined the demonstration, which was an extension of the ongoing Unfair Labor Practice strike by unionized Amazon drivers and dispatchers at the DAX8 delivery station in Palmdale, CA.  "In Ap...