Reinventing Solidarity

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 reinvented, particularly by emerging leaders of color.

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 early 1900s. In his conversation with New Labor Forum Editor-at-Large, Kafui Attoh Peter Cole paints a picture of Ben Fletcher, a man whose contributions he ranks with the likes of Fred Hampton and A. Philip Randolph.

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.

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.

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 his book Unaccompanied.

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 Solidarity, Max Fraser examines the profiteering by these firms that has contributed to the proliferation of “health care deserts.” He is joined in conversation by Samir Sonti, Books and Arts Editor for New Labor Forum and faculty member at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

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 given a pass on environmental destruction as they seek to increase living standards and develop their economies.

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 marked a high point in these discussions and forms the basis for today’s podcast. Jayapal discusses her trajectory from grassroots organizer to strategic organizing within the halls of Congress to create a moral economy and a democratic and humane society.

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.

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 and severe weather events.