Working People

We kick off Season Six of the show with a very special episode that is dedicated to Evan Seyfried, his family, and his loved ones. As listeners know from our previous conversations with Evan's family members and their supporters in the Justice for Evan coalition, Evan was a loving son, brother, boyfriend, friend, and a dedicated worker. For 19 years, with a virtually spotless record, Evan worked a...

PLEASE SIGN THIS LETTER TO URGE THE TEXAS CAMPAIGN FOR THE ENVIRONMENT TO RECOGNIZE OUR UNION In this urgent and special episode, Jules sits down with Brandon Marks and Chloe Torres for an in-person interview about the struggle Texas Environmental Workers Union members are facing in their workplace. After 5 months of the Texas Campaign for the Environment (TCE) not recognizing their union, members...

Earlier this month Working People hit a new milestone: We recorded our first live episode in front of an audience! Organized by the Action Builder / Action Network team and hosted by Busboys & Poets in Washington, DC, we got to speak with Michelle Valentin Nieves of the Amazon Labor Union and Harry Marino of the Major League Baseball Players Association about the incredible worker organizing victo...

The planet we share, the only home we've ever known, has its limits. Its resources, its ability to sustain all life, are not infinite—and every day we are bearing witness to the disastrous consequences of mortgaging our collective future on the false belief that they are. The path we are on now is untenable, something's going to give. Whether it comes from us or for us, change is coming nonetheles...

As humanity barrels towards climate catastrophe, the need to envision and build more ecologically sustainable societies and economies becomes more pressing with each passing day. However, our collective imagination is often so limited that it becomes impossible to envision societies and economies that aren't organized around the quest for profit and infinite growth. So, what could a "degrowth" eco...

After a 3-year saga of stalled contract negotiations between the country's freight rail carriers and the 12 unions representing over 100,000 railroad workers, "pro-union" President Biden and Congress last week "averted" a national rail shutdown by overriding the democratic will of rail workers and forcing a contract down their throats. So, what happens now? We convene a special all-railroader pane...

This time last year, 10,000 workers and UAW members at John Deere waged a massive strike that became a national news story. This year, workers at another industrial manufacturer are spending Thanksgiving carrying on a strike that has lasted for seven months, but has received significantly less national attention. As Mel Buer reports, "CNH Industrial, a multinational corporation, is an agricultural...

Last month, the world watched with bated breath as Brazilians voted in two rounds of high-stakes elections that pitted far-right president Jair Bolsonaro against former president, leftist hero, and leader of the Workers Party Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. After being elected president in 2018, Bolsonaro and his far-right movement have unleashed a darkness upon Brazil that has had wide-ranging implica...

Call center workers employed by Maximus went on strike at four locations—in Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Virginia—this Tuesday, November 1. Maximus is a federal contractor, and during the open enrollment period workers there handle a non-stop stream of high-stakes calls from people trying to navigate the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Medicaid systems, but they have been pushed to the...

The soul of the labor movement is the fight for democracy in and outside of the workplace—and, from the shop floor to the ballot box, organizers, volunteers, and rank-and-file workers with UNITE HERE are putting everything they have into that fight. Even in the midst of a deadly pandemic that hit the service and hospitality industries especially hard, union members with UNITE HERE hit the pavement...

The wave of grassroots worker organizing is spreading to different industries and businesses around the country, including those that have notoriously resisted any and all unionization efforts in the past. The Home Depot, the single largest home improvement retail company in the US, is one of those businesses, and there is a union drive underway as we speak at a store in Philadelphia. As Johan Fur...

"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...