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 Uetr…

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…

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 …

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 subse…

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 ac…

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 Ur…

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 Health…

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 …

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-fate…

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?…

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 lo…

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 …

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 pres…

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 househol…

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 rivetin…

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 …

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 ren…

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 them…

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 housin…

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…

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 …

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 Ne…

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 fo…

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, r…

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 th…

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 te…

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 thi…

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 Cons…

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 a…

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 scien…

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 membe…

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 …

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 compare…

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 Bharg…

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 an…

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…

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, ar…

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’ emotiona…

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 nation…

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,…

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 distinction…

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 ac…

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…

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: …

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. administrat…

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 ec…

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 devastat…

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 creat…

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 …

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 relations…