Laborwave Radio

Michael Beyea Reagan discusses the characteristics of intersectional class struggle and shares insights around movement-building geared toward the task of fighting all forms of oppression.

Get a copy of the book that informs this conversation at https://www.akpress.org/intersectional-class-struggle.html

Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com

Send comments and questions about labor organizing to [email protected]

Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871

Liz, host of Rebel Steps podcast, joins the show to discuss a fictional workplace campaign to unionize the hotel workers at the illustrious White Lotus!

Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com

Send comments and questions about labor organizing to [email protected]

Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871

Andrea Haverkamp, a labor organizer based in Seattle, joins the show to talk shop about organic leaders, private vs public sector organizing approaches, one-on-one conversations, internal democracy, and more!

Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com

Send comments and questions about labor organizing to [email protected]

Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871

Bill Fletcher Jr joins the show and discusses the need for "social justice unionism" in a post-Janus United States. Workers are increasingly atomized in the US, and the state continues to rollback any investments into the reproductive labor that stitches society together. The moment, as Fletcher Jr states, that organized labor can seize for victory is almost over. We might not get another moment.

What role do teachers strikes, worker-owned businesses, and housing cooperatives play in seizing this current moment? How do the rank and file push labor leadership to understand that we cannot continue doing "business as usual" despite not being knocked out by Janus right away?

Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com

Send comments and questions about labor organizing to [email protected]

Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871

Joe Burns, a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer and the author of Strike Back and Reviving the Strike, joins the show to discuss the role militant traditional labor strikes have in revitalizing the labor movement. His forthcoming book is Class Struggle Unionism, from Haymarket Books.

Burns highlights the limitations of labor strategies that prioritize either reforming labor law, electing new labor officials, or seek to "organize our way out of the crisis" by increasing union density. All of these approaches, while they may possess beneficial aspects, fall short of accomplishing the rebirth of a militant labor movement if they are not backed by a wave of traditional labor strikes.

We discuss this and more in our conversation. Get a copy of Reviving the Strike and Strike Back at https://www.igpub.com/reviving-the-strike/ and pre-order a copy of the forthcoming title, Class Struggle Unionism, at https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1767-class-struggle-unionism

Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com

Send comments and questions about labor organizing to [email protected]

Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871

Marianne Garneau, publisher of Organizing.Work, joins the show to discuss her article Workplace Struggles Are Political.

Garneau's provides a necessary corrective over common views amongst "socialists" that work and politics are two separate spheres in which struggle takes place. Following the wrongheaded opinion of Lenin, who assessed workers as only capable of rising to a level of "trade union consciousness," these socialists, according to Garneau, "take a surprisingly apolitical view of what goes on in the workplace."

Graham Kovich joins the show to plan an organizing campaign for the servants in Beauty & the Beast!

Graham and I imagine ourselves as two salt shakers, transformed into our alienated selves along with our fellow servants, under the repressive thumb of the "Beast" in a far-away castle in a long ago time.

What pressure do we as servants have to change our circumstances? How can we recruit Belle into an ally in our struggle? And what role does emotional leverage have in orchestrating a servant uprising?

We talk about this as well as the similarities between the conditions faced by these transformed servants with today's hospitality workers, and provide a sketch of an organizing campaign that could likely be imitated in many modern restaurants.

Check out Restaurant Worker News on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/restaurantworkersnews

Send comments and questions about labor organizing to [email protected]

Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871

Eric Laursen, author of The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State, joins the show to provide a concrete analysis of the State as opposed to states and compares the modern state to an operating system.

As he explains, the State seeks to be everything. The State absorbs dissent and incorporates it into building a more expansive State. Though humans created the State, it has become nearly autonomous and now shapes our conceptions of ourselves.

How do we break away from the State? What would it look like to replace the State? These challenging questions and more in our conversation with Eric Laursen.

Get a copy of the book at https://www.akpress.org/operating-system.html

Send comments and questions about labor organizing to [email protected]

Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871

Eric Dirnbach joins the show to discuss his experience as an advanced organizer with EWOC, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a joint partnership of the DSA and UE. Dirnbach challenges organized labor to train one million workers for unionizing the masses, and we discuss whether popular education models such as EWOC are suited for the task.

Also discussed are the prospects for syndicalism to meet the task of organizing one million workers, and the role mainstream unions can or should have in popular education for organizing workers.

Read the articles written by Dirnbach on EWOC at https://workerorganizing.org/millions-of-workers-want-a-union-ewoc-shows-how-to-help-2382/

Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871

Gabriel Winant, historian and author of The Next Shift, joins the show to discuss the decline of union power in the face of speed-ups and an expanding framework of labor relations.

Our conversation focuses on worker rebellion, the political failure alongside economic gains for organized labor in the postwar era, and the lessons we can learn from the defeat of the New Deal.

He draws attention to the period known as the "great exception," where unions experienced their high-water mark in power and organization, and problematizes some of the common claims about this era. Particularly, Winant shows how the present regime of privatized healthcare was embedded in the struggle over shop floor power in the postwar United States.

Get a copy of Winant's book, The Next Shift, at https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674238091

Please support Laborwave Radio by subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com/laborwave We have gifts depending on the tier you join, and exclusive access to our archives and Discord server.

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps our content reach new listeners.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871