This episode brings together Joanna Wuest, Brittani Murray, and Jaz Brisack to discuss how queer organizers build community within their workplaces to support civil rights and social justice movements and share strategies for building power to defend workplaces and vulnerable communities, as we witness increased attacks on the rights and safety of LGBTQIA+ people, especially transgender individuals, at the same time as an unprecedented assault on all workers’ rights.
Jun 09, 2025•55 min
New Labor Forum’s Micah Uetricht speaks with labor organizer and former Starbucks barista Jaz Brisack about the Starbucks campaign, the practice of salting, and their new book Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World.
May 05, 2025•42 min
Historian Erik Baker talks to New Labor Forum's Micah Uetricht about the sanctified place of the entrepreneur in American history, and why the entrepreneurial work ethic is at the core of how the Right hopes to remake workers and citizens.
Apr 09, 2025•48 min
Episode 57 - Can Federal Workers Beat DOGE? by CUNY SLU
Feb 27, 2025•35 min
New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht speaks to the Center for Working-Class Politics's Jared Abbott about Democrats losing working-class voters, why it matters, and the prospects for reversing it.
Feb 10, 2025•50 min
Understanding what labor must do under a hostile new presidential administration requires reflection on unions’ successful political strategies in recent years, the nature of contemporary capitalism, the role of political education in labor, and much more. Bob Master moderates a recent and wide-ranging panel discussion on these issues at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies.
Jan 06, 2025•1 hr 4 min
It's been a new day in the United Auto Workers since the election of Shawn Fain as president in 2023, with the union carrying out an aggressive organizing and political program that has established the UAW as a major presence in American life. New Labor Forum's Micah Uetricht spoke to Jonah Furman, a top aide to Fain, about the union's strategy, its various wins and losses among nonunion auto manufacturers in the American South, its relationship to the Democratic Party under President Joe Biden,...
Dec 06, 2024•1 hr 11 min
What does the rise of artificial intelligence mean for workers and organized labor? And just what is AI, anyway? New Labor Forum editor-at-large discusses these questions and more with labor reporter Alex Press and technology reporter and editor Ed Ongweso, Jr.
Nov 04, 2024•1 hr 15 min
How free was the imposition of the free trade model in the late-twentieth century? Not very, suggests political scientist Adam Dean’s research. The neoliberal trade model that has come to dominate the globe was imposed through repressive measures against the trade unions that opposed it in country after country. Dean talks to New Labor Forum’s Micah Uetricht about this history and what it means for the future of trade policy across the globe.
Oct 04, 2024•1 hr 6 min
Times change, in society, politics, and economics, but the labor movement rarely does. Which makes the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) a rare bird in US labor. New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht speaks to EWOC organizer Megan Svoboda about the project's origins in the coronavirus pandemic and how it has grown to a major national organization to aid workers in any industry, anywhere in the United States to take collective action and, frequently, to unionize.
Aug 30, 2024•41 min
Why are unions essential to LGBTQ liberation? Why is union organizing that advocates for all workers essential to uplifting queer workers? And why is queer advocacy so commonsense to many of today’s unionized workers? Political scientist Joanna Wuest explores these questions and more in a conversation with New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht for our podcast Reinventing Solidarity.
Jun 14, 2024•40 min
As innovative new union organizing campaigns have taken off around the country in recent years, Rutgers labor scholar Eric Blanc argues that we can see the emergence of a new organizing model that has the potential to meet the moment. He calls it "worker-to-worker organizing," a concept he explored in his Winter 2024 New Labor Forum article "Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral" and in his forthcoming book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big ...
May 09, 2024•45 min
At a time of crushing childcare costs in New York City and around the country, the labor-backed Child Care Facilitated Enrollment Project is one bright spot for working-class families. New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht spoke to United Federation of Teachers vice president for Academic High Schools and chair of the New York Union Child Care Coalition Janella Hinds and Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi, representing the 28th assembly district in Queens in the New York state legislature, about...
Apr 02, 2024•30 min
The United Auto Workers achieved a real breakthrough in their 2023 strike against the Big Three automakers. For this episode, our new editor-at-large Micah Uetricht interviews longtime labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein about his piece in the Spring 2024 issue of New Labor Forum assessing the wins in the contract, the corruption scandals and subsequent new union leadership victory that led to the strike, the UAW's prospects for riding this momentum into organizing nonunion automakers like Volks...
Feb 13, 2024•50 min
In the work of creating a more just and sustainable world, which strategies hold the most promise for overcoming the enormous obstacles inherent in 21st century capitalism? A recent book, Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World by Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce, tackles this question head on. Based on interviews with leading activists, the authors draw vital lessons from organizations and movements – including the New Georgia Project, Make the Road, the Fight for 15, Occupy ...
Dec 28, 2023•41 min
In this episode we examine the recent threatened strike and massive contract victory of the Teamsters as that union took on UPS, the nation’s largest unionized private sector employer. In September 2023, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien spoke about the strike weapon and labor’s resurgence at a large public forum hosted by the School of Labor and Urban Studies. Following his talk, he engaged with a panel of prominent labor activists and scholars. We feature highlights from O’Brien’s keynote addre...
Nov 06, 2023•42 min
This episode focuses on a discussion of publicly funded and operated health care in the United States. If this might seem a pipe dream with no national precedence, the authors of the recent book, Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs, suggest it’s not. They describe the current system of VA Healthcare as a model for excellence and equity, worthy of support among public health care activists. Our Veterans, reviewed in the spring 2023 issue of Ne...
Aug 31, 2023•35 min
CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies faculty member Stephanie Luce speaks with trade unionists Judy Gonzalez and Bob Master about the conditions which make the strike labor’s most powerful weapon. Drawing on recent experience with the New York State Nurses Association strike at Montefiore and Mt. Sinai hospitals, Gonzalez details the preparatory work of the union that contributed to victory. And Master describes the manner in which his union, the Communications Workers of America, has over the...
Jun 03, 2023•49 min
This episode offers a provocative assessment of independent unionism as a strategy for building worker power in the U.S. In conversation with New Labor Forum Consulting Editor Joshua Freeman, Erik Loomis discusses his spring 2023 article for the journal, titled Independent Unions: The Allure of a Failing Strategy. Chronicling the besieged, ill-fated experimentation with independent unionism since the late 1800s, Loomis elucidates his doubts about the prospects for this strategy against today’s c...
Apr 28, 2023•39 min
This episode tackles the big labor organizing questions of the day: What is the relative strategic importance of organizing workers at the commanding heights of the 21st century economy, like the docks for example, versus organizing workers whose solidarity is strong, yet whose structural power within the economy is weaker, like those at Starbucks? And in a society teetering on the precipice of authoritarianism, what should be the scope and mission of labor organizing today?
Mar 31, 2023•59 min
In this episode, Adolph Reed, Jr. describes Jim Crow as a result of decades of post-emancipation contention between freed slaves, white farmers and laborers, and the ruling class of white planters and merchants. As an outgrowth of that contestation in various precincts of the South, Jim Crow’s rules and applications varied often significantly by locale. In his new book, The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives, Reed describes his own interaction with these shifting, very often treacherous, rules a...
Mar 03, 2023•37 min
Author Rick Wartzman describes Walmart’s decade-long effort at reforms in response to ubiquitous criticism. Low-wage labor was a chief focus of that criticism and of Walmart’s self-transformation. Partly as a result, the average Walmart worker now earns an hourly wage just above $17 an hour. While this well exceeds the minimum wage, it still means that the average full-time worker earns just under $32,000 a year. Milkman and Wartzman explore what this and other reforms suggest about the systemic...
Feb 03, 2023•40 min
Over the past half-century, labor activists Marilyn Sneiderman and Stephen Lerner have been responsible for spurring major strategic advances in union organizing and movement building. Here, they discuss their recent New Labor Forum article, titled "Making Hope and History Rhyme: A New Worker Movement from the Shell of the Old". Describing the present moment as one of unparalleled peril and opportunity, they draw crucial lessons for the new crop of activists who have emerged in the current wave ...
Jan 06, 2023•49 min
A dramatic increase in national consumer debt began in the mid-1980s and currently stands at 16.5 trillion dollars, making it a key feature of capitalism in the 21st century. Average household debt today in the U.S. – mortgages, car loans, student, medical, and credit card debt – now exceeds $96,000 and is therefore greater than the median household income. Andrew Ross discusses debt as a crucial labor and social justice issue and describes the groundbreaking work of the Debt Collective.
Dec 02, 2022•27 min
Solidarity against the odds is what workers managed to achieve at the JFK8 Amazon Fulfillment Center on Staten Island and at the Elmwood Avenue Starbucks in Buffalo, New York. In this episode, School of Labor and Urban Studies Distinguished Lecturer Heather McGhee gets lead organizers Chris Smalls and Michelle Eisen to recount each of their riveting stories. In captivating detail, they tell a 21st century tale of corporate union resistance, as well as a chronicle of the worker determination and ...
Nov 04, 2022•42 min
The fact that current inflation rates are higher than they have been in decades weighs not only on households and businesses, but has also shifted the political landscape. As we head into the 2022 midterms and then the 2024 Presidential elections, understanding the deeper causes of and available remedies to inflation is of paramount importance. In this episode, Samir Sonti and JW Mason offer their insights on questions posed by inflation: If strong demand has contributed to rising prices, what r...
Oct 02, 2022•38 min
Sean Sweeney, Director of SLU’s Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, speaks with journalist Laura Flanders about continued botched efforts by countries around the globe to meet the targets set forth in 2015 Paris Agreement. Pointing to worldwide policies that depend upon private investment, he describes why the profit motive has failed to deliver renewable energy at scale, affordably, or with the urgency demanded by the climate crisis. Much more promising, he suggests, is the Global Public Goods a...
Sep 05, 2022•28 min
This episode offers a discussion of Andrew Ross’ recent book, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing. Ross shares his firsthand account of the burgeoning and largely overlooked housing emergency in our nation’s suburban and rural hinterlands. Reporting from Florida’s Osceola County, he describes families and people of all ages who cram themselves into dilapidated motels or literally pitch their tents in the woods. Adding to these dire circumstances, the people Ross comes to know find the...
Jun 24, 2022•39 min
Journalist Laura Flanders speaks with Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta, the authors of The Future We Need, Organizing for a Better Democracy in the 21st Century. The book and this conversation explore the great democratizing power of collective bargaining, with potential applications even beyond the workplace in the yet mostly untried realms of housing, public safety, education, healthcare, and environmental justice, to name just a few. In this moment of national democratic peril and the upsurge in...
Jun 10, 2022•43 min
Commentators far and wide have been sounding the alarm for American democracy. The question of who can vote and who ends up voting is central to this democratic crisis. In a landscape of defensive battles to protect the right to vote and herculean efforts to turn out the vote, comes a new book: 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting. Written by Miles Rapoport and E.J. Dionne, the book makes an assertive argument that voting should be mandatory in the U.S., as it already is in 26 countries...
May 06, 2022•36 min
