Oscar-winning director Julia Reichert, interviewed by 9 to 5 founder Karen Nussbaum; the AFL-CIO’s Damon Silvers, on how the Montgomery Ward CEO was busted for unionbusting; Saul Schniderman celebrates May Day and Mother Jones’ birthday. "Mother Mends" by The R.J. Phillips Band. 

Michele Fazio on “The Crime of the Century: Remembering Sacco and Vanzetti 100 Years Later”; Michael Honey on “What Happened to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream of Economic Justice?” Plus Saul Schniderman on Ida Mae Stull, the nation’s first woman coal miner.

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Labor History Today is produced by the Metro Washington Council’s Union City Radio and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University.

On this week’s show, labor historians Dorothy Sue Cobble and Michael Merrill talk with the NoVA Coalition to Repeal Right to Work about how workers engaged in mass uprisings and organizing during previous historical crises. Plus American Prospect Editor at Large Harold Meyerson, on The Return of the Breadline and retired nurse and novelist Tim Sheard visits a New York City hospital during the pandemic.

On this week’s show, organizer and union rep John Barry on “Coronavirus ‘essential workers’ have rights too;” ethnographer Candacy Taylor on "Beauty Shop Culture and the Labor of Hairdressing" and Tales from the Reuther Library podcast host Dan Goldner celebrates Frances Perkins’ birthday.

On this week’s show, Kurt Stand, who – at least until recently – was a bookseller at Busboys and Poets here in Washington, DC, tells us about his last days at work before the COVID-19 shutdown. Carl Goldman reminds us of the day in 1913 when 20,000 striking textile workers and their supporters gathered in front of the house of the socialist mayor of Haldeon, New Jersey, and Jessica Pauszek tells the story of Tough Annie, a woman of means who threw in her lot with working women in London during the struggle for women’s suffrage.

Al Neal’s “Silent streets: Life halts, but not for all workers,” and Joe McCartin on “Class and the Challenge of COVID-19.” Plus Saul Schniderman and John O’Connor remember the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Longtime labor lawyer Jules Bernstein on the 1970 postal strike, AFL-CIO president George Meany on the Watergate scandal, and Pete Seeger on “Casey Jones, the Union Scab.”

Labor historian Joe McCartin on “Neutron Jack” Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, who died last week; Sherry Linkon on class conflict in two recent award-winning movies, Joker and Parasite. Plus music from SongRise, a DC-based women's social justice a cappella group.

Professor Robyn Muncy, co-curator of “Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote,” on the role organized labor played in the lengthy and difficult struggle for women’s rights. Plus Saul Schniderman on the origins of Women’s History Month and “Rise Up: Songs of the Women's Movement," the PBS show celebrating that history.

William P. Jones on “The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South,” plus a letter from Eleanor Roosevelt to AFL-CIO urging the formation of a “Committee on Inquiry Into the Administration of Justice in the Freedom Struggle.” Interviews by Chris Garlock and Alan Wierdak.