In 2021 the pension assets of U.S. workers stood at 35 trillion dollars and amounted to fully 62 percent of all global pension assets. For almost half a century, this money has fueled the growth of the asset management sector, the likes of BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity Investments to name only a few. New Labor Forum author Benjamin Braun casts a critical eye on the investment practices of collectively bargained Taft-Hartley pension funds which have contributed so significantly to the rise of...
Apr 30, 2022•39 min
In this episode, we turn to India’s two-millennia-old caste system that has often been compared to our own structures of racial oppression. A recent book, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, provides a sort of memoir of caste viewed through the experiences author Sujatha Gidla’s Dalit family. Speaking with New Labor Forum Editor-at-Large Kafui Attoh, Gidla says she drew motivation and courage to write this personal account by witnessing individual and coll...
Apr 08, 2022•26 min
Nearly alone among industrialized nations, the U.S. leaves the elderly, the infirm, and their loved ones to fend for themselves in the complex tangle of what passes for a system of elder and long-term care. Our speakers describe the human toll of this for-profit system that is simultaneously unaffordable for those who need care and unsustainable for the low-wage workers who provide it. As social justice visionaries, our speakers also outline bold policy solutions currently being advanced by coal...
Mar 03, 2022•38 min
Progressive commentators in the U.S. have long debated the primacy of race vs. class in our political and economic life, and therefore its role in organizing strategy. McGhee sees this as a false debate. The stories she tells illustrate the concrete ways in which racism and our deep economic divide go hand in hand. She argues that, at every turn, racism undermines class solidarity and makes it possible in the richest country on earth for so many people lack a living wage, a pension, access to qu...
Feb 18, 2022•46 min
Less than a month into the new mayoralty in the City of New York, we assembled a panel of leading journalists to delineate Eric Adams’s vision for the city, especially as it pertains to working people. Only the second black mayor in the city’s history, Adams was also the son of a housekeeper, a graduate of the public schools, and for two decades the member of a municipal union. Our host, historian and emeritus faculty member Josh Freeman, asked the assembled reporters whether these facts are lik...
Feb 07, 2022•57 min
The poetry of our guest, Gregory Pardlo, is some of the finest, engaged work written in the U.S. today. He brings us the striking air traffic controller, permanently replaced, selling off everything but his house, his young son outside that house speaking to snowflakes. He conjures up the glory and the grace of girls jumping Double Dutch. And he tells of an impoverished old man who asks to hold the hand of a recovering alcoholic so that together they might toss a coin into a fountain and wish fo...
Jan 14, 2022•37 min
This episode draws on New Labor Forum’s cutting-edge Books and the Arts section edited by Samir Sonti. Here, the book in question is PORN WORK: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, by Heather Berg. Reviewer Whitney Strub discusses with Berg her insights into work and workers in the 12 billion-dollar porn industry. Workers laboring and organizing in this industry, Berg notes, have largely been dismissed and even scorned by organized labor and the Marxist Left. I trust our listeners will find what Ber...
Jan 01, 2022•48 min
Close attention to the qualities of working-class culture is in short supply in this era of ubiquitous distain for the working-class. This measure of respect is one of the chief contributions of Jack Metzgar’s new book, Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society. In this episode, Metzgar discusses with New Labor Forum Consulting Editor Joshua Freeman what he views as the distinct values of working-class vs. middle-class cultures. Anyone committed to a resurgent working-...
Dec 03, 2021•38 min
Throughout much of U.S. history, anti-trust movements – joined by farmers, laborers, abolitionists, and small businesspeople – were a force to be reckoned with in American politics. Then, in the late 1970s, anti-monopoly fervor subsided and remained dormant for the next 40 years. The tides have now begun to change, with the appointment of leading anti-trust experts in to the Biden administration, and a growing number of labor and grassroots organizers once again taking aim at monopoly power. Thi...
Nov 12, 2021•42 min
This episode airs as COP26, the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference, gets underway in Glasgow, Scotland. Our guest, Roz Foyer, General Secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, notes that this year’s Conference takes place during a time of growing awareness of market-driven forces’ failure to deliver the scale of energy transition that scientists agree is necessary to sustain life on this planet. She and Sean Sweeney also observe that people across the world have witnessed the necessity o...
Oct 29, 2021•49 min
Samir Sonti interviews Sandy Jacoby, author of Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank. Jacoby’s book and this conversation offer insights into some of the strategic choices organized labor has made since the 1990s in the face of burgeoning corporate power and its own diminished membership rates. With union density in the private sector hovering around 6 percent and a labor law regime that enables employers to resist unionization, ...
Oct 22, 2021•34 min
On September 17th, 2011, approximately a thousand people massed in lower Manhattan at the towering edifices of the “Vatican of capitalism.” This movement, known as Occupy Wall Street, called attention to the obscene inequality and devastation of 21st century capitalism on full display in the wake of the fiscal meltdown. Already by that October, in cities around the world, millions had occupied their own symbolic Wall Streets. Although the encampment in Zuccotti Park was relatively short lived, m...
Oct 04, 2021•25 min
In the first episode of the 2021-22 season, Paula Finn holds a conversation with Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce assessing the U.S. labor movement’s current strength as relates to union density, or the percentage of workers represented by unions. The basis for their discussion is Milkman’s and Luce’s recent State of the Unions Report, which compares national union density trends to those in New York State and New York City. This year’s study sheds important light on the impact of COVID-19 on emp...
Sep 17, 2021•26 min
This episode features a debate regarding the role of race vs. class in efforts to advance a Social Democratic politics. It draws on a panel which was part of a day-long conference held in April 2021 considering Joshua B. Freeman’s landmark book, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. Longtime social justice activist Deepak Bhargava and historian Touré Reed concur that race and class identity is, as Deepak put it, “the axis on which the Social Democratic project will turn.” Th...
Jun 03, 2021•37 min
Discussing three important articles from the spring 2021 issue, New Labor Forum columnist Sean Sweeney hosts a conversation with Sinead Mercier and Dominic Brown on the role of publicly owned energy in halting the climate crisis. Mercier offers as a model the Republic of Ireland’s creation in the 1920s of the fantastically successful state owned and operated Electricity Supply Board; Brown describes advancements made in post-Apartheid South Africa to dramatically expand public access to the stat...
May 18, 2021•37 min
New Labor Forum Books and Arts Editor Samir Sonti hosts a conversation with Gabriel Winant, author of the recent book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. Examining the vast expansion of the health care sector of our economy over the past half-century, Winant traces its development to a combination of factors, including deindustrialization, union decline, an aging population, and a shredded social safety net. It is this historical process, Winan...
May 03, 2021•30 min
Across the political spectrum, there’s a widely held view that the decades-long increase in immigration to the U.S. has put U.S. workers in competition with new immigrants for scarce jobs and has led to depressed wages and working conditions. Ruth Milkman’s important and timely new book, Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat, upends this notion, arguing that it gets cause and effect wrong. Instead, she contends that immigrants have tended to fill jobs already badly degraded, thanks largely to de...
Apr 16, 2021•28 min
This episode features New Labor Forum columnist Sarah Jaffe in conversation with New Labor Forum Consulting Editor, Ruth Milkman. They discuss Jaffe’s new book, "Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone", which examines a trend among today’s employers to rely, or even insist upon, workers’ emotional dedication to their jobs, the proverbial labor of love. From the school teacher to the non-profit worker and the un-paid intern, Jaffe argues that l...
Apr 05, 2021•32 min
The past year has been a perfect storm of reckoning with racial violence and white supremacy, assaults on the basic practices of democracy, and a pandemic that yet again laid bare the fundamental inequities of the American economy. This episode features an interview with two exciting social justice leaders who are part of innovative and bold national efforts to address these crises and win campaigns for racial and economic justice. This discussion explores solidarity as it is being advanced and ...
Mar 12, 2021•22 min
This episode shines a light on the political and intellectual contributions of Ben Fletcher, one of the most important, yet least well-known African American labor activists of the twentieth century. Peter Cole’s recently re-issued book, Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly, goes a long way toward bringing Fletcher out of the shadows, enabling contemporary activists and scholars to learn from his work to build a militant, multi-racial union among Philadelphia dockworkers during the...
Feb 26, 2021•34 min
Barely one week into the Biden Administration, CUNY faculty member and New Labor Forum Consulting Editor Joshua Freeman interviews Heidi Shierholz, Senior Economist and Director of Policy at the Economic Policy Institute and Mark Levinson, Chief Economist at the Service Employees International Union. Their discussion examines the marked distinctions – in cause, repercussions, and evolving policy responses – between the current economic crisis and previous fiscal crises.
Feb 16, 2021•32 min
In this latest episode, Professor Deepak Bhargava speaks to Judith Browne Dianis, Executive Director of the Advancement Project, and Dorian Warren, President of Community Change, about progressive priorities for the first 100 days of the Biden administration. They discuss top legislative priorities and movement organizing strategies necessary to achieve consequential legislation and executive action.
Jan 30, 2021•33 min
This episode brings poetry to the crucial task of reinventing solidarity. New Labor Forum Editor Paula Finn hosts a conversation with award winning poet Javier Zamora, who at nine years old left his home in El Salvador and made his way, as an unaccompanied minor, through Guatemala and Mexico and across the Sonoran Desert to reunite with his parents in California. In this interview, Zamora reflects on this experience and on the role of poetry in movements for social justice, and reads poems from ...
Jan 08, 2021•31 min
As the coronavirus surges across the U.S. during this holiday season, the biblical “no room in the inn” has become “no room in the hospital.” This is especially true in rural regions in the Midwest, South and Southwest, where hospital closings imperil whole communities. Today’s podcast explores one of the factors which has exacerbated this crisis: the speculation in health care networks by private equity firms. In his fall 2020 column for New Labor Forum and in this episode of Reinventing Solida...
Dec 18, 2020•28 min
From Durban, South Africa, New Labor Forum columnist Sean Sweeney interviews human rights and environmental leader Kumi Naidoo. In 2009, Naidoo became the first African head of Greenpeace, then went on to serve as Secretary General of Amnesty International, from 2018 to 2020. In his interview with Sweeney, Naidoo rebukes successive U.S. administrations for their failure to play a useful role in halting climate change. He also reproaches leaders in the global South who suggest they should be give...
Dec 04, 2020•33 min
This episode benefits from the exciting public programming we do at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. Since the corona virus surged last spring, we’ve been hosting a series of virtual forums on the subject of Covid capitalism. These talks examine what the pandemic has come to reveal about contemporary capitalism, the chronic racial and economic inequality faced by millions of Americans, and the prospects for structural change. A conversation featuring Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal mark...
Nov 14, 2020•26 min
This episode airs on the eve of the 2020 elections, with nearly everything hanging in the balance – from our nation’s ability to withstand the COVID-19 pandemic to our already constricted democracy’s ability to survive the authoritarianism of the Trump Administration. On both questions: the need to strengthen our democracy and overcome the devastation of the coronavirus, labor unions have a major role to play.
Nov 02, 2020•28 min
Today so many of us live with deep anxiety about the peril of climate change and the fact that so little progress has been made to halt it. This podcast is both a reckoning with and an antidote to such despair. Sean Sweeney discusses with Saket Soni his Resilience Force initiative. In Florida and New Orleans, the Resilience Force has begun to create living-wage jobs for formerly low-wage, precarious workers, who carry out restoration and mitigation efforts in response to increasingly frequent an...
Oct 16, 2020•31 min
Samir Sonti probes Leo Panitch about the character of the advanced capitalist economies through which the Covid-19 pandemic spread so rapidly. What has the pandemic revealed about the toll of neoliberalism on the poor and working-class, on migrants and people of color? And what about the organizations and parties that claim to protect them: namely organized labor, social democratic parties and our own Democratic Party?What signs are there that broad-based social struggle may be in the process of...
Sep 29, 2020•30 min
In this inaugural episode, David Unger and Kafui Attoh look squarely at the tragedy of police violence against people color, and at the unions that represent and negotiate contracts on behalf of the police. What role has organized labor played in supporting the Black Lives Matter movement? What role should it play? And what’s the rightful relationship of the labor movement to the police and their unions?
Sep 21, 2020•28 min
