Are you a new steward trying to find your footing and avoid rookie mistakes? Are you a veteran steward trying to grow your stewards’ network and make sure newbies stick around? This episode has advice for new stewards and old stewards alike and anyone else who is looking to build power in their workplace.

Walking through your union halls or scrolling through social media in 2026, you’re probably encountering a stream of anti-immigrant propaganda. These views bleed into the workplace, where pushing back can feel daunting.

But with immigration agents ramping up their assaults at workplaces and on daily commutes, workers are figuring out how to take up this conversation in a way that builds solidarity in their unions.

IBEW Local 11 member Francisco “Paco” Arago and IBEW Local 666 steward Chris Anders join pod co-hosts Danielle Smith and Natascha Elena Uhlmann to share how electricians are having organizing conversations around immigration. Read Natascha’s piece on dispelling anti-immigrant myths in the workplace.

Paco is a member of the Latin American Electrical Workers Alliance or LAEWA, a new caucus formed in 2025, which Natascha and our co-worker Keith Brower Brown have previously reported on. LAEWA is working on revitalizing Latino member organizing in the union. Follow LAEWA on Instagram at @laewa.local11

Chris and Paco are both also members of Caucus of Rank-and-File Electrical Workers, or CREW, which is a new member caucus that launched in September, as our co-worker Keith reported at the time. Follow CREW on Instagram at @rankandfile_crew

We bet that when you’re watching Valentine’s classics like Mamma Mia, Wuthering Heights, or The Princess Bride, you’re thinking not just about yearning, intrigue and some very gloomy hills, but also about collective action, the campaign mountain, and building power from the ground-up!  

More than 75,000 people, including teachers, food service workers, Uber drivers and many others marched through downtown Minneapolis on January 23, where federal agents have staged a military occupation in the Twin Cities since December. 

Thousands of nurses, members of the New York State Nurses Association, are heading toward the third week of their open-ended strike, an uncommon strategy among nurses and a rare show of organized strength and resolve.

They’re defending the safe staffing ratios that nurses have fought hard for and won through prior strikes; they’re fighting for better conditions for patients at underfunded hospitals like Montefiore in the Bronx; they’re demanding better protocols against workplace violence; and they’re fighting to make sure that management won’t just recklessly force the use of A.I. to replace the medical judgement of skilled and experienced human nurses.

Read Labor Notes' coverage this month of the NYSNA strike. 

Follow us on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for labor news updates! 

The documentary Partners: How Starbucks Baristas Started a Labor Revolution charts the seemingly improbable course set off by a group of workers in Buffalo, New York, who organized the first Starbucks location in 2021 and helped to grow a highly visible, energetic movement.

The film casts Starbucks workers as a symbol of persistence in the face of vicious union-busting, and projects hope for renewed militancy among rank-and-file workers everywhere.

Director Chris Sessions and Andy Myers from Working Films join pod co-hosts Danielle Smith and Natascha Elena Uhlmann.

Support Striking Baristas! 

Listen here to part 3 of our webinar in November with Haymarket Books and The American Prospect, featuring contributors to our Roundtable Series on how unions can defend worker power under Trump 2.0. You can read all the articles in the series here!

Hear perspectives from Baltimore Teachers Union President Diamonté Brown, Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jackson Potter, and UAW Region 9A Director Brandon Mancilla.

This webinar was co-moderated by pod co-host Natascha and David Dayen from The American Prospect.

Listen to Part 1 here. 

Listen to Part 2 here. 

Making new year’s resolutions we can actually keep *and* working on rebuilding the labor movement? That’s two birds with one handful of birdseed, as our gentle-hearted editor Al Bradbury would say. What would other Labor Notes staff say? Tune in to hear their voice note resolutions! 

And if you too are going into the new year with a fresh sense of resolve and vigor—and maybe more than a few battle scars—you're not alone, and we want to hear from you! 

Send us your resolutions, organizing questions, and even your holiday movie organizing takes, and we’ll try to tackle them on air! You can record a voice note on your phone or computer and email it to [email protected].

What do a "Charlie Brown Christmas," "Love Actually," "Little Women" and many of your other holiday faves have in common? We at the Labor Notes pod have played them backwards to decipher their coded organizing messages.