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just weeks before its warehouse employees vote on joining the UW Newberry comics has escalated its union busting campaign by holding captive audience meetings and firing a longtime employee who supported unionizing From the we rise fighting podcast reports on the UAW strike at strand bookstores and organizing at Newberry comics. Massachusetts attacked the Newton teachers with everything they had in their legal toolbox and came up empty.
And the success of the Newton teachers inspired others to stand up. And this fall teachers on the North shore of Massachusetts in Beverly, Gloucester, and Marblehead all launched illegal strikes of their own. the work stumpage pod careness takes a look back at the 20, 24 year in review The Trailer guy goes, I don't know what they're called, the trailer person says, This summer, Clint Eastwood is in the line of fire. And some heckler in the audience yells, It's about fucking time!
Assassination with Patrick Blanchfield on the dig podcast I was a young kid in the streets. My dad always told me, you got to get yourself a job and you got to find yourself a union job. And so the opportunity came when I saw that they were hiring for casuals in the, um, in the post office in 1992. So I applied, I took a casual job as a casual custodian the fed up podcast. Talk with John Cruz, president of the Brooklyn Staten island, NLC that's letter carriers merged branch 41.
the jobs of the women and the children were to keep the strike breakers, the scabs, from getting off the train. You know, and breaking the strike. So the, their job was if anybody decided to get off the train, They were supposed to make sure they didn't, and in our final segment from the labor exchange author and educator Lee Campbell Hale talks about her book, remembering Ludlow, but forgetting the Columbine the 19 27 28, Colorado coal strike.
I'm Chris Garlock and that's all ahead on this week's edition of the labor radio podcast weekly. Here's the show. Welcome back to another edition of We Rise Fighting Labor podcast, where we bring you today's labor news, history, and analysis from the U. S. and around the world. As always, I'm Rico Rutia, here with my co host, Michael. We also have updates here today. Listeners from United Auto Workers Local 2179. They won their strike at Strand Bookstore. A UAW media release available at UAW.
org states, after months of stalled negotiation and three separate contract extensions, UAW Local 2179. 79 members at the Strand bookstore in Manhattan walked off the job December 7th, marking the first strike at the iconic New York City bookshop since the early 1990s.
And there's been an update that on Monday, December 9th, Strand Workers United reached a tentative agreement With management ending the strike for now, the union asked customers to not cross picket lines by attending any in store events, selling their used books, or making any purchases, either in store or online, and these workers received solid support for their appeals. Even with the store's busiest season underway, the press release continues.
The company has failed to meet worker demands for a living wage. It's becoming impossible to live in New York on what the Strand pays, says Andrew. stando, a visual merchandiser and shop steward at strand. We're just asking for enough to make rent every month. So some of those demands are in the tentative agreement of increased wages and we'll see where developments go from here.
The union supporters can still email management, um, and tell them to respect U. A. W. Members for the latest updates. Follow strand Workers United on instagram. In another battle to the north in Boston, UAW is attempting to unionize at Newberry Comics, and again from uaw.org, OG from Boston Mass.
A press release just weeks before its warehouse employees vote on joining the UW Newberry comics has escalated its union busting campaign by holding captive audience meetings and firing a longtime employee who supported unionizing. Earlier this month, over 75 percent of the 51 workers in the Retailer's Brain Warehouse filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, seeking to unionize with the UAW.
On January 9th, 2025. Workers will officially vote on joining UAW Local 1596, which represents thousands of warehouse manufacturing and service workers in eastern Massachusetts, including at bookstores and movie theaters. The U. A. W. Press release continues. The workers at Newberry Comics are joining workers across the country who are standing up with the U. A. W. To fight back against corporate greed.
The release concludes, the warehouse workers are asking customers and other community members to stand with them and tell Newberry Comics to stop union busting and reinstate their co worker. Thank you everyone for always listening love and solidarity to all take care everyone. Bye Well, and, uh, so yeah, you have probably realized this is the 2024 in review episode of your favorite labor podcast work stoppage. My name is John. I'm Dan.
And I'm Lina, But yeah, it's it's the last show of the year or depending on I guess our assessment is perhaps a lot of you the first show of the year because 2024 which I think for most of us was it would assess is a truly wretched year. Uh, is finally over. And with 2025 looming, we have the opportunity to look back at all the struggles and victories, uh, by workers over the last year.
So for our next theme, let's look back on 2024 and review some of the ways that supposedly democratic governments. So right at the start of the year, in January, teachers in Newton, Massachusetts, faced a crackdown from the state when they launched a strike after negotiations had gone nowhere for months. Fighting for fair wages for paraprofessionals, receiving poverty wages, the teachers in the state's largest school district refused to bow to threats of fines.
The Boston Globe attacked the strike with the editorial board demanding it end and lead columnist Jeff Jacoby calling for all the striking teachers to be fired. Which is like, one, unbelievable journalistic malpractice and two, uh, just looks like, like baby behavior, like little baby child behavior. I mean, considering, yeah, that's basically the same response you see, uh, to any strike from people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. I mean, I'm sensing a theme there.
Yeah. Um, but despite these threats and half a million dollars in fines, the Newton teachers held out for two weeks, the state's longest teacher strike in decades. And by standing strong and not bowing to intimidation, workers won higher raises than the district said were possible. Doubled their paid leave, And secured the hiring of several new social workers. Massachusetts attacked the Newton teachers with everything they had in their legal toolbox and came up empty.
And the success of the Newton teachers inspired others to stand up. And this fall teachers on the North shore of Massachusetts in Beverly, Gloucester, and Marblehead all launched illegal strikes of their own. Demanding fair pay for paraprofessionals and paid parental leave, the three unions racked up over a million dollars in combined fines, but also won gains for the lowest paid workers that school administrators claimed were impossible.
Once again, the press attacked the teachers, but the community rallied behind them. Students and parents side by side with the picketing workers. But unfortunately, uh, that was kind of the most successful fight back that we saw in a lot of these cases. Unfortunately, the assault on workers has been more effective in other cases. Uh, perhaps nowhere has the structural assault on workers in the United States been as advanced or as broad as in Florida.
In 2023, the state passed a one two attack on public unions by first banning automatic dues checkoff and then automatically starting decertification proceedings for any union that falls below 60 percent of members paying dues because again, Florida is of course a right to work state so you can't require members to pay dues even though everyone benefits from the union. 30 bargaining units were decertified in just the first few months of 2024, largely centered on municipal workers.
So janitors, laborers, grounds workers, clerks, accountants, you know, the sorts of people without whom municipal functions cannot occur. And these are folks largely unionized with ask me, uh, with another 50 bargaining units being decertified in the coming months. But, uh, so far, uh, the, the, these, this. Hugely legal attack on the workers and giant exemption for cops, uh, has been able to go forward and well with devastating results.
And once again, as we always say on the show, this is more clear evidence that the law is not some neutral arbiter of justice, but it is in fact the enforcement of class power. That's right. And, and the results of this have been terrible. 63, 000 workers in Florida lost union representation just by August. That's nearly 11 percent of the state's union workforce.
Lower level university faculty have been particularly vulnerable and all eight of the state's adjunct faculty unions have been decertified in the last year. Public workers have mobilized to encourage their co workers to pay dues and keep their union benefits, and teachers unions especially have seen successful efforts. But this has already been a devastating legal attack on workers in Florida. Solidarity, everybody and Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year.
You are listening to the labor radio podcasts weekly from the labor radio podcast network, labor radio network.org. Welcome to the Dig a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. This is my interview with Patrick Blanchfield on assassination. and political violence. I'll leave the intro at that and let our conversation speak for itself. We live in a country.
Where I think it's fair to say that a more standard response to experiencing radical social alienation is to maybe murder your co workers or shoot up a classroom full of children. Either that or if there is a more explicitly political valence, it's a right wing mass shooting. We've seen them at a black church, a supermarket in a black neighborhood, a Walmart with a lot of Mexican American patrons. and a synagogue.
And then, of course, there's the more ordinary, often more private forms of everyday violence against a neighborhood rival, a female romantic partner, every day. I mean, Americans are killing each other all the time. The thing that really jumps out about the UHC assassination on some, some level is that it's very unlike The normal ways that Americans kill each other, how would you characterize these more ordinary forms of varyingly private and public American violence?
And then how would you compare the UHC? Yeah, that's that's sort of like the key question, and it makes us ask these questions like, well, what kind of society are we dealing with? Right? What are its norms? What are you willing to accept about it? What are we taught to, like, imagine as possible versus what are we, like, inculcated to feel is politically impossible or even unimaginable? What are the taboos? Right? And just like, what are the expectations that it gives us? Right?
And what even are the fantasies that we work with? Right? I want to talk about the empirics because I think one thing that I think, you know, is also going on here in this strange conjuncture of both like this category of stuff we call gun violence and this horrible institution that we call healthcare is the convergence of two distinctive and yet intertwined systems of like, well, human disposability, but I would almost argue like human liquidation and liquidation is a term I know people don't
like to apply to Western democracies, but it's something, something we do. It was as I was processing the news about the UHC shooting, right? I, uh, I had this sort of. kind of vertiginous Proustian moment where a whole bunch of things came together for me, right? You may recall, like, so this happened in this part of Midtown, right? 6th Avenue, 53rd, 54th Street.
There's a detail where, uh, Luigi Mangione, the alleged shooter, by the time, just, you know, quote unquote, the shooter, uh, fled through Ziegfeld Alley.
Ziegfeld Alley, some people may be familiar, is so named because of the Ziegfeld Theater, home of the famous Ziegfeld Follies, Barbara Stanwyck danced there, like, imagine this like, I don't know, like, lots of like, ladies in, in, in like, odd things that a million peacocks were killed to make, like, jumping off slides and can canning and stuff, right? It's a huge review, it's a big deal. That was later succeeded by a movie theater, torn down about ten years ago.
In 1993, the summer of 1993, when I was 10 years old, I had the unique experience of going to see the premiere, opening night, of Jurassic Park at the Ziegfeld Theater. The Ziegfeld, people can google an image of this place if they want to see it, right, but like, 1993, this was the last remaining park. picture palace in Manhattan, right? So you couldn't see commercial films on an IMAX. And this was the biggest screen in town.
And the whole thing was, you know, in retrospect, kind of done up like an old West Bordello, lots of like red silk and feathers everywhere. It's an enormous theater. And I'm so amped for the dinosaurs, but first come the previews and the preview that I remember, and again, this is gonna, I'm bringing this home. I promise was for the Wolfgang Peterson. Clint Eastwood, John Malkovich, Rene Russo vehicle called In the Line of Fire.
it is about a presidential session, and this is the, this is the premise of the film, right? Clint Eastwood, who is just eternally aged, I guess, is a Secret Service agent who is still haunted by his failure to take a bullet for JFK at Dealey Plaza. And true to that format, as this trailer is going, again, in the beautiful movie picture palace, this is why I remember this so well, it's coming out the next month in July.
The Trailer guy goes, I don't know what they're called, the trailer person says, This summer, Clint Eastwood is in the line of fire. And some heckler in the audience yells, It's about fucking time! And I just lost it. I'm 10 years old, I didn't get the politics of it. But it was like, Okay, like, on some level, he had, like, maybe he had it coming, or like, at least finally, we're gonna see him get it. And that is the feeling that I'm hearing from so many people.
This, so like, it's about fucking time, sort of element. That kind of, like, expression of, well, at least, somebody who was pot committed to this system, somebody's paying some sort of price, and it's not just me going into medical debt. Right, or whatever it is, it's like, all this free floating malice, it's been personalized now. And it's past due. Patrick Blanchfield. Thank you very much. Always a pleasure What's up? What's going on, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Fed Up.
I'm your host, Ron Speakman. Speakman. our guest today. Is the president of Brooklyn, Staten Island, NALC merged branch 41, and has been advocating for city letter carriers throughout their whole career and continues to do just that.
In fact, they are that damn good when it comes to representing and advocating for their members that their mere name alone sends shivers down the spines of management, which we'll discuss why that is during this So get ready for an unscripted, raw, freestyle, Brooklyn type interview here on FedUp, as we'll get to know both the man and the advocate that my guest is. So without further ado, let's welcome in our guest, Brooklyn, Staten Island, NALC merged branch 41, current president.
And advocate for all Mr. John Cruz, John, welcome to the show, brother. Thank you, my brother. Thank you, man. You, you gave me chills going down my spine. Just the way you introduced this, man. Thank you so much. Yes, sir. You just put the biggest smile on my face right now. I appreciate that, man. I wouldn't say it if it's not true, right? We all say what we mean. We mean what we say. So you keep doing your thing, brother. Thank you, man. I definitely will. Yes, sir.
Definitely. Well, now, John, before we get started here, uh, Uh, as with other recent interviews, tell the people out there a little bit about yourself who don't know who you are and kind of paint the picture as to who John Cruz is basically give us just a rundown as to how and where you grew up and what you did prior to starting your career with the Postal Service and the NALC. Well, my name is John Cruz. Uh, I was born in Brooklyn, New York. Um, Bushwick is the neighborhood.
But then I was raised in East New York. For those who don't know those neighborhoods, those are two real tough neighborhoods. So, I had to fight 90 percent of my life to get through the streets of Bushwick and Brooklyn. Everybody knows how tough those neighborhoods are, especially in the 70s, the 80s, and 90s. My dad is from Puerto Rico. He was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He came to New York. I'm at a young age. My mom was born in Harlem, New York, but she was raised in the Bronx.
My grandparents are from Puerto Rico also, you know, um, I've said it before. I went to school to the 10th grade and I dropped out. I'm a high school dropout. I was, um, I was living the life of a street thug. That's what I was living. I was a kid in the streets. I was, I was doing what I had to do, you know, doing what I had to do to survive. My parents separated when I was younger. My mom, you know, um, she remarried. My dad remarried. But, you know, I was a young kid in the streets.
My dad always told me, you got to get yourself a job and you got to find yourself a union job. My father was a teamster, 40 plus years. And so the opportunity came when I saw that they were hiring for casuals in the, um, in the post office in 1992.
So I applied, I took a casual job as a casual custodian and I worked in the main plant as a casual custodian and then in 93 I became a casual carrier and then from casual carrier went to TE and in 94 I became a PTF and then there goes my career in the United States Postal Service. As a union dues paying member, when did you actually start becoming. Actively involved. What was your first position? Naturally it probably was store, but when did you become that actively involved with the union?
I became actively involved in the union in 2000. Okay. We had a station manager and he was a bully. I mean, when I tell you he was a bully, he was the worst individual. And that, you know, it's sad to call somebody that, but it was just, that's what he was. He just kept being a bully and I don't like bullies. That's one thing I don't like is bullies. And so. He kept poking me for a long time. He made my life impossible.
The last thing that they did, they had me off for removal and I was home for like six months. And then, um, that's when I started just, you know, reading, I started pulling out, you know, the M41, the M39, you know, I, you know, I went to the union, I asked them for copies of that because we didn't have access to computers like we have now.
And, and I'm, I'm going to tell you, I tell you this much, you know, I've always had a struggle as a kid, um, reading, writing, you know, that was just, that wasn't my forte, and I learned to read, I taught myself to read, I taught myself how to do everything that I do now in the union, and my wife, she's a very intelligent woman. She would help me. I would call her when I was writing a grievance, get her help, you know, and, and that's the way I learned.
Until next time, stay safe out there my friends. This is the Labor Exchange on KGNU, Boulder, Denver, and Fort Collins. I'm your host, Robert Lindgren with the Denver Newspaper Guild and Colorado AFL CIO. You can find us online on KGNU's website and your phone number. favorite podcast app by searching for KGNU Labor Exchange. Our guest today is Lee Campbell Hale, author of Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine, the 1927 to 1928 Colorado Coal Strike.
Hi, Lee. Thanks for being on the show. Hi. Thanks for having me. But, you know, going back to the importance of women, the kind of initial, one of the initial, um, uh, points of inquiry you had, you know, what were, what was the importance of, of women to this strike how did women in both the 1927 strike and in Ludlow play a part in, in the strikes? Well, women were key. And so were children.
Um, I think, you know, we talk about women, but sometimes we leave the children out and it was a family affair. The idea, um, of the early strikes was to involve everybody. Because the idea that women and children could protest, they were usually not going to get killed.
Um, if they went out and protested, and it was a, it was effective, uh, method, you know, so if you look at Ludlow, um, the reason, you know, after the workers in 1913 in the southern fields joined the strike, they were evicted from their company housing, and the United Mine Workers set up tent colonies for these, uh, uh, former workers and their families to live in, and the biggest of those Uh, was Ludlow.
Ludlow was put right next to a railroad track, and the idea was that while the men were off, and everybody seemed to have a Winchester 30 30 during that strike, I believe that was the gun of choice. a lot of people, you know, were, a lot of the men were out shooting each other. But the jobs of the women and the children were to keep the strike breakers, the scabs, from getting off the train. You know, and breaking the strike. So if, if any, or, or even, you know, soldiers.
So the, their job was if anybody decided to get off the train, They were supposed to make sure they didn't, you know, with rocks or hurling, uh, whatever objects were at hand or whatever. So they were key parts of the strike. Um, you know, in the long strike, we also have Mother Jones, for heaven's sake, one of the greatest labor leaders of all time, you know? Um, so women were key in the, the wobblies.
One of the things I argue is that that had always been a strong wobbly tradition was to have women, uh, as your speakers and leaders. And. Uh, as part of the strike.
So, When this strike officially began, uh, it, it involved women at every step, you know, as, as the, as the leaders of, of the, uh, picket, the so called pickets at the strikes that were trying, trying to stay open at these constant mass rallies they would have almost every day, you know, to keep people's spirits up, but to also, you know, uh, uh, get new members and to recruit new people.
Well, they always had, they started off every meeting with what they called the rebel girls, which were local high school girls who sang really well, and I suspect they started off with solidarity forever, you know, to get everybody, like church, you know, to get everybody singing. So women speakers, Women organizers, um, so they were key at every step of the way. Lee Campbell Hale, I want to thank you so much for joining the Labor Exchange. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
This has been the Labor Exchange on KGNU, Boulder, Denver, and Fort Collins. I'm your host Robert Lindgren with the Colorado AFL CIO and Denver Newspaper Guild. Our guest today has been Lee Campbell Hale, author of Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine, the 1927 1928 Colorado Coal Strike. This has been the Labor Exchange. And that's a wrap for this week's edition of the labor radio podcast, a weekly.
Roundup of some of the programs aired over the past week on more than 200 labor radio and podcast shows. They're all part of the labor radio podcast network shows that focus on working people's issues and concerns. We've got links to all the network shows, labor radio network.org. You can also find them use the hashtag labor radio pod on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and now blue sky. Don't forget to let us know what you think of the show. Drop us a note [email protected].
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This has been Chris Garlock, stay active and stay tuned to your local labor radio podcast show. We'll see you next week.